Museums: Moreau — Orsay — Longchamp

Nelson, I have some­thing for you!

Short explan­a­tion for every­one else: Around the time I first went to Madrid – early 2015 –, I had recog­nised a prob­lem regard­ing museum vis­its. I would be cap­tiv­ated by a few pic­tures that I’d talk about for hours, and then I’d for­get them. On that par­tic­u­lar trip I thus star­ted to make notes, and ever since when return­ing from an exhib­i­tion I’d have scribbled down typ­ic­ally between two and ten highlights.

Here now the har­vest from my short sojourn in France in the first half of July. Last time the Louvre jeal­ously deman­ded all avail­able time for itself, this time I let it be and ven­tured into the Musées d’Orsay and Moreau instead. The lat­ter con­cerns itself with the sym­bol­ist Gustave Moreau. I went there with a worsen­ing head­ache and could­n’t fully appre­ci­ate the twenty St. Sebastians and thirty Salomes – there are, how­ever, out­stand­ing spe­ci­mens. The hanging is so that every square cen­ti­metre of Moreau’s apart­ment is covered by paint­ings and draw­ings, the amount alone is over­whelm­ing. I’m cer­tain to not have dis­covered every single worth­while bit, per­haps not even a major­ity, but sure took my time for the draw­ing cab­in­ets. You can flip through a great lot of hinged frames at the side­lines of the former grand atelier, prob­ably there are between 500 and 1000 sheets with­in and they are a tre­mend­ous treas­ure if you want to research aca­dem­ic draw­ing. The unusu­al thing isn’t that they exist, but that they are so eas­ily accessible.

Musée d’Orsay

A few days later, this estab­lish­ment yiel­ded an unusu­ally large num­ber of high­lights. They’ll give you a good idea of how my list is usu­ally devel­op­ing: There are some curi­os­it­ies, some paint­ings that are only inter­est­ing because of some par­tic­u­lar quirk that war­rants fur­ther research, some great mas­ter­pieces that reduce you to tears when stand­ing in front of them – and some very obvi­ous jew­els of the col­lec­tion might be miss­ing. For example, there’s no van Gogh here. In cyc­lists“ jar­gon this is a Mona Lisa: Something that’s draw­ing all the annoy­ing vis­it­ors to one room in the museum (or, in a more meta­phor­ic­al sense, any oth­er build­ing, or city or region), leav­ing a bit more space to breathe in rest of the premises. There are just too many tour­ists in the van Gogh rooms to grasp more than a fleet­ing glance before being pushed aside by a British school class, run over by retired Chinese and shoved down the stair­case by a volu­min­ous American rear side. To see the Mona Lisas it’s neces­sary to be there pre­cisely at open­ing time and even then it’s still a race.

Alexander Harrison. Solitude, 1883. 

Amaury-Duval: Madame de Loynes, 1862. This lady truly earned her stand­ing: Born out of wed­lock into a large and poor fam­ily in Reims she climbed the lad­der of soci­ety thanks to her looks, charme and intel­li­gence. Eventually she became one of the lead­ing salon­nières of Paris dur­ing the second Empire, cour­tes­ane of, amongst oth­ers, prince Napoléon (the emper­or’s cous­in and, after the son, second in line to the throne). 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: In Bed, 1892. 

Gustave Guillaumet: The Sahara, 1867. Orientalism was en vogue then and many paint­ers left bizarre exhib­its of kitsch and off-kil­ter ste­reo­typ­ing behind. Sometimes less can be more: as here. 

Gustave Caillebotte: Parquet Planers, 1875. A recur­ring nar­rat­ive in the Musée d’Orsay is the offence that aca­dem­ic paint­ers took at the new ideas com­ing up after 1850. The well-known new cham­pi­on is a styl­ist­ic mat­ter, impres­sion­ism. More inter­est­ing to me is a them­at­ic con­flict. This paint­ing was lam­basted for its depic­tion of what could­n’t even pass as a genre piece: Mere crafts­men per­form­ing a very mundane task. And it’s big! and real­ist­ic! and cre­ated with plenty of patience over a long peri­od of time! What a scandal. 

Edouard Detaille: The Dream, 1888. One of these almost com­ic­ally pathos-laden Romantic works one would­n’t be sur­prised to see in the Sukiennice. In the case of France the most fer­tile peri­od for these genres has been after the defeat of 1871 against Germany. Military glory was not exactly in arm’s reach (the last war lost, new ones being avoided), so the dreams were con­fined to the arts. 

Henri Regnault: Execution without tri­al under the Moorish kings of Granada, 1870. Another example of ori­ent­al­ism, quite the oppos­ite of Guillaumet’s desert and yet com­pel­ling. It’s the hit of the room, even the most unin­ter­ested vis­it­or stops in front of it. This is what academism, which I don’t mean to dis­par­age in gen­er­al, can be cap­able of: Every detail of the com­pos­i­tion has been decided on with pur­pose. This, too, is a huge can­vas, so stand­ing in front of it you are right in the pos­i­tion of the fallen head, look­ing up at your impos­ing exe­cu­tion­er. Few is left of Regnault: Aged 27 he fell in the French-German war a year after fin­ish­ing this picture. 

Charles Degeorge: Aristotle’s Youth, 1875. Photo by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa‑2.0‑fr. Astonishing is the atten­tion to detail: Every little space has some­thing to look at, while there is nev­er the impres­sion the sculp­ture would be over­wrought. It’s worth googling for dif­fer­ent angles! 

William Bouguereau: Dante and Virgil, 1850. A blatantly exag­ger­ated arrange­ment that made me real­ise sim­il­ar coup­lings are fairly recur­ring in Dalí’s work, for example, the Premonition of Civil War with Baked Beans.

Jean Delville: The School of Plato, 1898. The effect is so arti­fi­cial that it almost seems as if you’re look­ing at two lay­ers in dif­fer­ent dis­tances: The warm-ish fig­ures in front of an “under­wa­ter” land­scape tell you everything about col­our and tem­per­at­ure con­trast you ever wanted to ask. 

Jean-François Millet: The Angelus Prayer, 1859. As infin­itely repro­duced as the angels of Rafael’s Sistine Madonna. Dalí was obsessed with it: He was cer­tain that the paint­ing depic­ted not a pray­er, but the funer­al of the couple’s child. Eventually the museum relen­ted and had it x‑rayed over at the Louvre’s lav. Some accounts would have you believe that they found an over­painted coffin, child-size – in fact there is an over­painted shape, but hardly a clearly dis­tin­guish­able one. 

Pierre Bonnard: Woman reclin­ing on a bed, or: L’Indolente, 1899. 

Odilon Redon: Closed Eyes, 1890. 

Nikolaï Gay: Calvary, 1892. Even the most sick­en­ingly repeated top­ics can occa­sion­ally be done in an ori­gin­al manner! 

Léon Frédéric: The Workman’s Ages, 1897. This was the most dis­turb­ing thing: In Belgium there once lived a paint­er who’s basic­ally shar­ing my name! More research has to be done on that man. Of course I had to include some paint­ing of his – I went for this, which super­fi­cially reminded me a great lot of Werner Tübke’s trip­tychs on the History of the German Workers“ Movement that I had seen this May. 

Jean-Paul Laurens: The Excommunication of Robert the Pious, 1875. Every once in a while there’s a crav­ing for some grand his­tor­icist rag. Robert had mar­ried his second-degree cous­in Berthe of Burgundy. The Pope objec­ted on grounds of con­san­guin­ity (a pre­tense for more pro­found polit­ic­al reas­ons), first asked Robert nicely to get rid of Berthe and then, not being gran­ted that wish, excom­mu­nic­ated him. While after the offi­cial sep­ar­a­tion the ban was lif­ted, the couple stayed togeth­er in spite of Robert’s next, church-approved mar­riage a few years later. The paint­ing, I think, does a great job at pick­ing an uncom­mon moment for its depic­tion: The after­wards. the dam­age done. Symbolism (the extin­guished candle etc.) aside, there’s one irrel­ev­ant detail I love: The smudges on the wall above the sit­ting pillows. 

Henri-Camille Danger: Scourge, 1901. If real­ism had been an rar­ity in 1850, this might have been such in 1901. I would­n’t rate it as a mas­ter­work, but surely as an eye­c­atch­er. Great fun must Danger (what a name!) have had with the archi­tec­ture: Filling in one tiny folly after anoth­er, each one ever more ana­chron­ist­ic in rela­tion to the oth­ers. Is it too over­loaded? Quite, but in a still enter­tain­ing way. 

Ornans lay very close to our route from Besançon to Pontarlier, we did, how­ever, not ven­ture there. This paint­ing is one of those in this museums I con­sider the really grand works. The scene: A funer­al in Courbet’s rur­al homet­own. Revolutionary at the time for the pro­por­tion between a very pro­fane sub­ject and its tre­mend­ous size – 3 m x 7 m. It was Courbet’s first grand format and pro­voked a grand scan­dal right away. All rules, today for­got­ten but then well-codi­fied, of academism had been wil­fully broken. The mass of mourn­ers is so little ideal­ised that people took them for cari­ca­tures (Gustave Moreau’s pic­tures, painted dec­ades later, are very con­ser­vat­ive in this aspect and show noth­ing but per­fect Greek pro­files). No traces of pathos could be found: Even the grief inher­ent in the scene seems to be quite eph­em­er­al. The crafts­men will get back to work after the buri­al, the women need to take care of the kids, priest and choir­boys do their busi­ness and no more. Look at these char­ac­ters: People don their finest dresses, but it’s a vil­lage, the fine­ness of these dresses is quite lim­ited. No fig­ure is high­lighted, none seems to have a spe­cial sig­ni­fic­ance – anoth­er clas­sic­al way that Courbet chose to not tread on. This is one of the ancest­ors of a grand old real­ist­ic branch in paint­ing. I would right away sug­gest a close rela­tion­ship to Grützke’s Members of Parliament more than a hun­dred years later.

Are you miss­ing the impres­sion­ists for whom the museum is so fam­ous? Dommage: Regardless of how big that space was, the Mona Lisa effect was still markedly present. But moreover I did so much research on the paint­ing tech­niques down­stairs, rep­res­en­ted in this sample here, that the com­pletely dif­fer­ent impres­sion­ism would have thrown me com­pletely off the track: I simply did­n’t pay that much atten­tion. All this is for anoth­er vis­it. Likewise what all the research has been for is for anoth­er post, set to come up much soon­er than the next trip to Paris. Stay tuned!

Marseille

A few kilo­metres fur­ther south there’s more sun and few­er paint­ings. The Musée de Beaux-Arts, housed in one wing of the pur­pose-built Palais Longchamp, has a smal­ler col­lec­tion than some Northern towns a tenth the size of Marseille – all is cent­ral­ised in France, art included, and that’s why you can spend day after day without ever leav­ing Orsay and Louvre (both of which could, as hin­ted at, eas­ily be split into sev­er­al still coher­ent institutions).

Hence I’m set to include my high­lights from there, exactly because they are so few and thus far more rep­res­ent­at­ive of a typ­ic­al visit.

Michel Serre: View of Marseille’s town hall dur­ing the Plague of 1720, painted 1721. Marseille is con­sidered the portal through which the Plague entered Western Europe and it was affected by it often and early and late. This is one of two sim­il­ar paint­ings by Serre – the oth­er shows an aven­ue sim­il­arly littered with crowds and corpses. Artistically this is as fas­cin­at­ing as Serre is fam­ous. From the hobby his­tor­i­an’s point of view it’s most inter­est­ing to see the atti­tudes towards the plague. As tempt­ing as it is to ima­gine a city truly rav­aged, with empty streets, eer­ie silence etc., in spite of the scourge life has always had to go on: Someone has to bury the dead, to go eat­ing and drink­ing, to feed and to water, to organ­ise and to watch and to rule, to ride around mer­rily and fight off the peas­ants that haven’t paid their due to the reap­er yet (lower right centre). Waiting till it’s over was­n’t an option, nor would it be now. 

Henry d’Arles: Leda and the Swan, 18^th cen­tury. Something that many paint­ers of Leda + Swan neg­lect: Swans are mean, spite­ful creatures, regard­less of wheth­er they want to rape you or are just look­ing for gen­er­ic trouble. 

Camille Corot: View from Riva, some time in the 19^th cen­tury. Seemingly only black and white and yet so rich. Corot meets Friedrich? 

As a bonus, have one of Moreau’s takes on Leda. This swan is not a fuck­ing joker, he means ser­i­ous busi­ness and if you don’t stay away it’s all your fault.