Karma Chameleon

Zelig will always rank up there among my favorite Woody Allen films. Allen’s depiction of a human chameleon mingling with the famous faces of the 1920s beautifully captures the spirit of the time while humorously analyzing the human need for acceptance—the drive to blend in and belong. Like Zelig, John Singer Sargent often adapted the characteristics of artists around him and incorporated their style into his portraits of them. Born January 12, 1856, Sargent lived a nation-less life with his travel-mad parents until moving to Paris in 1874 to study with Carolus-Duran. Carolus-Duran taught Sargent to paint portraits in the style of Diego Velázquez. Upon finishing his studies with Carolus-Duran, Sargent painted his Portrait of Carolus-Duran (above, from 1879), which perfectly illustrates the teacher’s Velazquez-inspired technique. Carolus-Duran not only taught Sargent his style of painting but also how to be a painter. Sargent’s teacher counted Fantin-Latour, Courbet, Manet, and Monet among his many friends, setting an example for Sargent, who would develop a large, international circle of artist comrades that nourished his art. The good karma such associations brought helped make Sargent a diverse, well-rounded visionary who could seemingly paint in any style with true depth and insight.

Sargent first met Claude Monet in 1876, when Sargent was an unknown but promising student. By 1885, Sargent’s rising prominence in the art world helped him get closer to Monet. Although Sargent made his fortune and fame through realistic, if slightly romanticized portraiture, he admired the Impressionists and painted Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood (above, from 1885) in an Impressionist style. The freedom and color of Monet’s Impressionism must have seemed like a great release for Sargent after all the dark backgrounds and fine clothing of his lucrative portrait practice. Monet didn’t care much for Sargent’s portraits in terms of subject matter, although he recognized the genius of Sargent’s technique, but Sargent saw the greatness of Monet and paid great tribute to him by emulating Monet’s style. Lesser, less confident artists might have resented the one-sidedness of their relationship, but Sargent kept true to his pattern and took the best elements of Impressionism and made them his own.

Sargent’s Impressionist journey reminds me of Mozart’s late symphonies written during his travels and named after their place of origin: No. 31 "Paris," No. 32 "Overture in the Italian style," No. 35 "Haffner," No. 36 "Linz," and No. 38 "Prague." At each destination, Mozart took the local folk tunes and styles and did them better than the locals. One of Sargent’s final artistic “destinations” came in the person of Antonio Mancini, whom Sargent humbly called the greatest painter alive. Sargent painted his Portrait of Antonio Mancini (above, from 1898) while trying to find portrait commissions for Mancini in England. Sargent took the gifted, yet mentally ill artist under his wing and, simultaneously, studied Mancini’s thick impasto style closely, employing it marvelously in the portrait of Mancini. Mancini later scratched into his portrait the words, “Mancini thanks/ devotedly Mr. Sargent/ whom is so good/ to this bad painter Mancini/ London.” In that act of profound kindness, Sargent garnered a score of good karma that perhaps contributed to his own charmed life. Sargent returned to his customary lyrical portrait style, but he allowed himself the occasional side trips into Impressionism and impasto, always keeping the people in his life in his heart through his art.

Paying Homage

Today I pay homage to an artist who paid homage to other great artists—Henri Fantin-Latour. Born January 14, 1836, Fantin-Latour knew almost all the great artistic figures of all media of late nineteenth-century France and painted grand group portraits to commemorate that mingling of the minds during that fertile period. At the Musée d'Orsay you can see his Homage to Delacroix (above, from 1864). The late Delacroix appears in the portrait around which all the other artists have gathered. Curly-haired Whistler stands on the left of the portrait while red-headed Manet stands to the right. Fantin-Latour saw those two friends as the heirs to Delacroix’s genius in painting. Fantin-Latour humbly places himself almost behind Whistler, sitting in a plain white shirt and holding his palette—the simple workman amidst the bevy of artists, writers, and poets. But such looks are deceiving, as Fantin-Latour was anything but an also ran in the Parisian artistic circles.

Also at the Musée d'Orsay you can see Fantin-Latour’s A Studio in the Batignolles (Homage to Manet) (above, from 1870). Here, Fantin-Latour more explicitly places his friend Manet upon a pedestal, allowing Manet to sit at the easel as the place of pride, surrounded by fellow Impressionists such as Renoir and Monet. Again, Fantin-Latour places himself in the picture, yet tries to ease back into the shadows as the third face from the right, almost completely hidden by the other artists. Although Fantin-Latour exhibited with the Impressionists and remained close friends with many of them throughout his life, he never became one of them stylistically, choosing instead to paint realistic portraits and a series of fanciful images that would form the basis for Symbolism in France and influence figures such as Odilon Redon.

Music played a huge part in the life of Fantin-Latour. As the Smart Museum of Art’s exhibiton and catalogue Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France demonstrate (my review here), Fantin-Latour especially loved the works of Hector Berlioz and Robert Schumann, but the operas of Richard Wagner truly fired his imagination. The Three Rhine Maidens (above, from 1876) attempts to capture in pastel the power of Wagner’s new kind of musical theater, which swept across all of late nineteenth-century Europe in its bold, all-encompassing approach to art. Although he never stopped painting in the style of the Old Masters, Fantin-Latour always had a keen eye for what the future would hold for art. Sadly, he still finds himself today relegated to the background that he painted himself into, just another face in the creative crowd.

Attention Must Be Paid

Henri Fantin-Latour, A Schumann Piece (Un morceau de Schumann), 1864, Etching on chine appliqué. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, 2006.97.

It’s hard to believe now, but concert goers in the days of Mozart would casually talk over the music, oblivious of the genius in the air all around them. The modern concept of silently experiencing music comes with the age of Beethoven and the Romantics, who elevate music to the status of an art form equal to that of the visual arts. With that change came a revolution in how the visual arts “saw” music, or more accurately, how the visual arts depicted the experience of appreciating music. In the exhibition Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France currently at the Smart Museum of Art, the development of this relationship is examined through works such as Henri Fantin-Latour’s A Schumann Piece (above), which captures a moment in which the musicians perform Robert Schumann’s music as the intimate parlor audience watches them. This dynamic of the performer and listener provides a fertile field for the scholars writing in the exhibition catalogue to work within “the nexus of art history, musicology, history of science, and psychology,” as the introduction states.

Honoré Daumier, Mr. Babinet warned by his concierge of the arrival of the comet (Monsieur Babinet prévenu par sa portière de la visite de la comète), from the series La Comète de 1857 (The Comet of 1857), published in Le Charivari on September 22, 1858, Lithograph on original newsprint. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, 2005.31.3.

Originating in an interdisciplinary course conducted in the Spring of 2007 by the co-curators of the exhibition—Martha Ward and Anne Leonard—Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France approaches the subject from multiple angles using a variety of artists. Honoré Daumier saw the new fascination with viewing, aided by technical innovations such as the telescope (above), and recognized, as Julia Langbein writes in her essay, “that ultimately those who lose themselves in observation make themselves vulnerable to be observed” and, therefore, the subject of caricature. Consequently, as Leonard writes in her essay, this results in “viewers’ self-consciousness about being on display while they behind the ostensible objects of display” in art galleries. The appreciation of art, whether painting or music, suddenly became a subject of interest in itself. Passively listening or looking would never be as “pure” again after such heightened consciousness.

Émile-René Ménard, Homer, c. 1885, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Davidson, 1980.4.

Émile-René Ménard’s Homer (above) neatly encapsulates this controversy over sensory experience. “With eyes cast in different directions, their contrasting demeanors make for an odd combination of vacant starting, languorous sensuality, and plebian profile,” Ward writes in her essay on the painting. “All of these figures could be said, in some sense, to be blind to everything but their inner experience, including the viewer’s presence.” Ménard’s uses the blind poet Homer to symbolize the blindness of the creative artist totally immersed in the creative act, while the figures listening (or not) catalogue the different levels of immersion for those experiencing the creative act of another.

Henri-Michel-Antoine Chapu, Joan of Arc at Domremy, c. 1870–74, Cast bronze. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Gift of the Friends of the Smart Gallery, 1986.12.

Elayne Oliphant examines the religious component of this sensory submission to the power of art. Looking at depictions of Joan of Arc such as Henri-Michel-Antoine Chapu’s Joan of Arc at Domremy (above) and Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices, Oliphant designates Joan as the ultimate audience. “To be absorbed in the task of contemplation,” Oliphant writes, “implies that one has overcome the distractions of the material world and, therefore, is capable of perceiving and understanding God’s words.” Where Joan heard the word of God through her powerful faith, the common patron of the arts can hear the artist’s message, regardless of the medium, through an equal leap of faith in the power of art to communicate. Joan of Arc thus becomes a patron saint for the newly enlightened viewer and listener of the increasingly secular nineteenth century.

Pierre Bonnard, Illustration for Le petit solfège illustré, by Claude Terrasse, Paris: Ancienne Maison Quantin/Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies, 1893, Printed book. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, 2007.106.

The true love of music so many nineteenth-century French artists had greatly helped forge this new connection and exploration between visual art and music. Michael Tymkiw examines how Fantin-Latour’s wide-ranging appreciation of the music of Robert and Clara Schumann, Berlioz, and, above all, Richard Wagner inspired him to illustrate those works, especially those relating to operas or ballets. (A CD accompanying the catalogue contains selections from many of the works Fantin-Latour and the other artists reacted to artistically, allowing for a truly multimedia experience that brings both the art and the music more fully to life. Many kudos to the developers of this catalogue for taking advantage of the available technology to provide this great enhancement.) Odilon Redon later viewed Fantin-Latour’s images as too illustrative, more reductive than truly in the spirit of the music. “My drawings inspire and do not provide definitions,” Redon wrote. “They do not determine anything. Just like music, they place us within an ambiguous world of the indeterminate.” With such striving for indeterminancy, Redon’s art truly aspired to the state of music itself, linking the wordless expressivity of the visual with that of the auditory explicitly. On a different level, Pierre Bonnard explicitly integrated visual art and music in his innovative drawings for a musical instructional book (above) that used amusing figures to illustrate musical notation in hopes of bringing this new way of "seeing" music to the next generation.

I’ve always toyed with the idea of art and music pairings, similar to the way that foodies obsess over wine and food pairings. The idea of walking through the MoMA while listening to John Coltrane, completely immersed in the dual experience and oblivious of everything else, always struck me as something to put on my personal “bucket list.” Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France cuts to the heart of that interaction between the two media and how the whole is so much greater than the individual parts. In many ways, the nineteenth-century was a paradise for such cultural experiences. Although recorded music was not yet in existence, more people played instruments in the home, allowing for a more direct experience with the music. Classical music and the opera held a much more prominent position in the entertainment world than today, when they are both relegated to tiny, niche markets. Even the visual arts have fallen victim to the decline of arts education in America, leaving many museums empty and in financial peril. Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France allows us to look back at that fertile time of true multimedia and, perhaps, regardless of the wonders of surround sound and IMAX theaters, make us conscious of what we’re truly missing.

[Many thanks to the Smart Museum of Art for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France and for the images from the exhibition.]

Decline and Fall

When history painting was en vogue in nineteenth-century France, Thomas Couture ranked among the top tier of the genre. Born December 21, 1815, Couture painted his epic Romans in the Decadence of the Empire (above) in 1847, announcing himself as a force in the Paris Salon. A student of Antoine Jean Gros and Hippolyte Delaroche, Couture absorbed the neo-classicism of Jacques-Louis David (Gros’ teacher) as well as the Romanticism of Eugene Delacroix and Theodore Gericault (friends of Delaroche). Amidst such esteemed company, Couture held his own as the art world around him began to evolve from the days of David to the new age of Manet.

Artists of the next generation, most notably Edouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes sought out Couture as a teacher. Couture’s Female Head (above, from 1857) demonstrates how he began to adopt some of the conventions of the time after history painting began to lose its prized place in the art world. Couture paints a young, modern woman with a confident look in her eye, mirroring the new assertive female of the nineteenth-century yearning for equal rights. Perhaps learning something from his students, Couture tired of the stuffiness of the Salon and went on his own way, teaching and painting free of all constraints.

Sadly, Couture could never fully bridge the generational gap and embrace the new wave led by Manet. His Damocles (above, from 1866) shows a return to the classical themes of his younger days. Couture’s ability to infuse a psychological life to his figures always remained, regardless of his choice of genre. We truly believe that Damocles dreads the infamous sworld perilously hanging above him. In his later days, Couture couldn’t bring himself to appreciate the work of his independent students, especially Manet. Looking at Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker, Couture snapped, “There is only one absinthe drinker, and that’s the man who painted this idiotic picture.” The painter of grand history paintings couldn’t abide the emphasis on the present and the individual artist. When asked to write his autobiography, Couture lamented that "biography is the exaltation of personality—and personality is the scourge of our time." Couture never gave in to the temptation of personality, preferring to slip gently into the shadows of the past.