Paris Journal: Paul Durand-Ruel

Courbet's “Femme a la vague” (1868)

The Musee du Luxembourg has devoted a show to Paul Durand-Ruel ("Paul Durand-Ruel, The Gamble of the Impresssionists"), the Impressionist impresario who also conformed to Flaubert’s dictum about being “regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” In this case the work was selling and promoting the likes of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cassatt, Morisot, Delacroix, Millet, Courbet, Degas, Cezanne. Ruel conformed to the bourgeois part by being a monarchist and Catholic, having five kids and selling art right out of his house. Cezanne painted Vollard who was also a dealer of his work and the current exhibition begins with portraits of Durand Ruel and his children by Renoir. If a picture speaks a thousand words, then the French have a way of saying things that are suggestive of a thousand pictures. Here is a particularly evocative quote that introduces the exhibition: “Elle invite a s’interroger sur le role d’une figure, celle du marchand, longtemps lassise, dans l’ombre, dans la formation d’un gout et de hierarchies artistiques encore perciptibles aujourd’hui.” The crux is that the exhibition highlights a role, of the merchant, which has been often kept in shadows. It’s a dubious premise since dealers (like Vollard) and collectors (like Leo and Gertrude Stein) have long been a subject of inquiry by critics and art historians. Of course in the contemporary art world the likes of Leo Castelli, Mary Boone and Larry Gagosian have achieved a super star status. While Durand-Ruel is described as a family man there was a little Hugh Hefner in him. His interest in topless beauties is manifest in both Courbet’s “Femme a la vague,” (1865) and Renoir’s “Etude Torse Effet de Soleil” (1875-6) Either that or his business acumen trumped his morality, in his opting for what would plainly sell. Monet’s “Le Jardin de l’artiste" (1877) is an impressionist masterpiece that merits the trip to the exhibition in and of itself. Durand-Ruel eventually started a gallery on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where he positioned himself to deal with wealthy American collectors like the Havemeyers. Baudelaire makes a cameo appearance in Manet’s “La Musique aux Tuileries" (1862) which is another one of the jewels of the exhibit.

Barcelona Journal IV: Picasso

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881 and in l895 arrived in Barcelona, as a young art student. If you’d seen his work for sale on a street corner would you have snapped it up? If it was the painting of his dog Klipper, maybe not, but if you knew anything about art you would have grabbed at two postcard sized paintings exhibited as “Two Rooms” now at the Museum, which contains a collection of 4249 pieces, many from the early stages of his career. The museum was created by Picasso secretary and biographer Jaume Sabartes at Picasso’s request and Picasso contributed many works in the collection. Clearly Picasso was one of the world’s great Picasso collectors in l960, when he first proposed the idea to Sabartes.  Many of the early works on exhibit demonstrate the influence on Picasso of other proto-modernists like Cezanne, Manet and Toulouse Lautrec. But his portraits and set pieces have an authority which demonstrate his immersion in and understanding of the Old Masters,--something which is exemplified by his "Science and Charity,” which was painted in l897 when Picasso was only 15 and which depicts a doctor, nun and infant and attending to a dying woman. The curators quote Picasso himself from his biographer Jaume Sabartes in L’Atelier de Picasso. The subject are the 58 paintings based on Velasquez's “Las Meninas,” (1957) which are also exhibited in the museum. “Suppose one were to make a copy of “Las Meninas” in good faith. If it were me the moment would come when I would say to myself: suppose I moved this figure to the right or a little to the left. If the case arose, I would do it my own way forgetting Velasquez. I would almost certainly be tempted to modify the light or arrange it differently in view of the changed positions of the figures.” Is that ever an understatement! What emerged was a synthetic cubist concerto. It’s a homage in the way some of his portraits of his former mistresses are homages and distortions at the same time.

Paris Journal: Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso...the Stein Family

The Steins, Leo, Gertrude, Sarah and Michael were patrons not investors and in that regard, like their counterparts the lesser known Cone sisters from Baltimore, played an enormous role in the lives of the artists whose careers they cultivated. Cezanne was not a household name when Leo Stein purchased his first Cezanne from Vollard, Cezanne’s famed dealer (whose portrait hangs in the Cezanne and Paris show at the Musee du Luxembourg). Everyone always points to the tremendous connection between Picasso and Gertrude Stein epitomized in Picasso’s iconic portrait of Stein from l906 now hanging in the Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso…the Steins Family at the Grand Palais, but from a cultural point of view it’s significant that an eccentric family of Americans, assimilated Jews of means, fostered the development of the early twentieth century modernism which became the calling card of French culture. The bust of Stein by Jacques Lipchitz from l920 and the portrait by Picabia from l937, which also appear in the show, exemplify Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence as it applies to the plastic arts. The little audio widget given at the Stein show also pointed out the debt the Picasso painting has to Ingres’ Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832) on exhibit in the Morgan Library in New York—which is another way of underlining the fact that this monumentally extensive show devoted to the Stein collection is really also a focal point for numerous historical and esthetic connections past and present. Gertrude had studied with William James at Radcliffe. Leo, who was himself the author of a book called The A-B-C of Aesthetics, had also been part of the circle that included Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry. Fry had offered the notion  of  “pure form,” as a way of understanding Cezanne’s revolutionary esthetic. Whether you go backwards in time towards Renoir who Leo would champion after Alice B. Toklas came to live with Gertrude at the Rue de Fleurus or forward to Gertrude turning her attention to Juan Gris and Picabia, two artists represented by another renowned dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, all roads seem to lead to the Stein family and the central role they played in the history of art, esthetics and thought.

Conventions

“The subconscious mind seemed to be in complete control and I did unpremeditated things which later turned out to be exactly right.” Charles Burchfield, the master watercolorist—whose work is the subject of an exhibition now running at the Whitney—wrote that in 1952. The exhibition includes a 1920 edition of the famed literary magazine The Dial that contains five Burchfields, along with Cezanne’s Claire de Lune and two drawings by Kahlil Gibran. Burchfield’s Winter Twilight (1930) is reminiscent of Hopper—a solitary storefront on a windblown street with silhouettes framed in the window. Clover Fields in June (1947) brings to mind Cezanne. Burchfield comments about another painting of threatening bare-branched trees at the edge of a swamp, which bears resemblance to Charles Addams’s Gothicism, “The mood I aimed at was the anger of God—a Good Friday mood.” In Autumnal Fantasy (1916-1944), nature is depicted as a beautiful bad dream in which the Nuthatch’s cry is visualized. Burchfield’s dire visual affect depicted an uninviting natural world, transformed into beauty by technique. In the beginning of his career, Burchfield painted what he called “conventions”—portraits of emotion, either externalized in nature or as interior states. Whether painting in the realist, surreal or abstract modes, this artistic credo would continue throughout his career.