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.

Paris Journal I: La Renaissance et le reve

How unoriginal surrealism was! It stole all its ideas from dreams and from earlier works of art. Dali et al were great promoters and the impact of the Surrealists is such that when you are walking through “La Renaissance et le Reve,” the exhibit now running at the Musee du Luxembourg, you keep thinking how that the works of Bosch, El Greco, Bronzino, Durer amongst others exhibited epitomize twentieth century surrealism. One of the loveliest things about the show are its locutions. The same wine may be served in different bottles, but there are nuances that can’t readily be translated. Thus the curators ask “comment representer ce que reve un revuer?” "le reveur peut-il entrer en contact avec le devin?” The show also points to the fact that the image of the sleeping woman is associated with dreaming using Ghilandaio’s "Allegory of the Night,” depicting a naked woman, an hourglass, a lamp being lit and masks to make its point. Then there are the classifications of the show: “Visions de l’au-dela” (Visions of the Beyond), “La vacance de l'ame” (Journey of the Soul), “La Vie est un reve” (footnoting Calderon’s 17th century classic Life is a Dream). In the Visions de l’au-dela category you have El Greco’s “La Reve du Phillip II,” which is almost hieroglyphic in its complexity. But there are lots of royal and biblical dreams including Garofalo’s “Apparition de Sainte Pierre et Sainte Paul a l’emperor Constantine" and dreams of Jacob by Ludovic Cardi’s  and Giorgio Vasari. No exhibit of Renaissance dreaming would be replete without Bosch’s visions of apocalypse or at least one Durer dream (“The Dream of the Doctor “) and the current show even includes a book, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream. Guess what? You can find this one on Amazon!

Paris Journal: Cezanne and Paris

The Cezanne and Paris show at the Musee du Luxembourg is dramatic and simple in many ways. Cezanne was a good friend of Zola’s and was urged to come to Paris by the writer. The show documents the potent influence of Zola’s realism on the nascent imagination of a great master whose work would eventually go beyond realism and even impressionism. When we speak of post-impressionism we can't but think of Cezanne so it’s dramatic to see paintings like  “Les Toits de Paris” (1881-2) with a classic and almost iconic view of the Paris skyline counterposed to a painting  like “L’Eternel Feminin ou Le Veau d’or” (1877) with its break from classic perspective. Hitchcock made cameo appearances in his films and here you can see Cezanne’s bald pate amongst the gallery gazing on the lusty ideal of femininity that the artist portrays. Naturally since it’s a Cezanne show there are plenty of apples and portraits too-- those of  his wife and his famed dealer Vollard, for example. The antimonies of figuration and abstraction are also juxtaposed with those of urbanism and nature. The artistic world of Paris obviously had its allure for Cezanne, but the conclusion one must make on viewing a show explicitly centered on Cezanne’s relation to Paris was that the artist found his real home artistically and spiritually in the rural world of the provinces, in particular Provence.