Quotes of the Day
From the classical masters of Greece and Rome to the Andy Warhols and Lucian Freuds of our age, artists have always sculpted and painted the people who mattered — and some who didn't. Today in Paris, two major exhibitions celebrate portraiture from two important eras: the High Renaissance of the 16th century, and the period from the late 18th to the early 19th century that ranged from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. Both shows feature rarely displayed works from around the world. Both demonstrate, in the same way today's celebrity journalism does, that people are endlessly fascinating.
That fascination is featured in force at Titian: Face to Face with Power, which runs at the Musée du Luxembourg until Jan. 21. A well-established artist to the rich and famous by his 20s, Titian was successful all his life and has never gone out of fashion. He could paint just about anything, from conversion-inducing altarpieces to sensuous nudes, but he is best known for intimate portraits with brilliantly rendered personal details — an ostrich feather, a signet ring, a filigreed sword. His subjects were Kings, Pontiffs, commanders and aristocrats seeking immortality at a time of religious wars and social change — when Columbus had recently landed in America and Copernicus declared the sun to be the center of the cosmos.
A master of light (on the face or glinting off a breastplate) and dark (in the background or in the folds of a cloak), Titian could produce almost impressionist effects. Though enormously productive, he was able to bring a psychological dimension to each of his subjects: the innocence of a 2-year-old child (Clarice Strozzi, dressed in white silks and pearls holding her dog); the dignity of a chevalier ( Francesco Maria della Rovere, who was so busy commanding the army that he sent his armor ahead so the artist could begin without him); and the sensitivity of an artist ( Portrait of a Musician, with his back toward the painter).
Titian's most important subject was Charles V, whom he met in 1530, the year Charles was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor was so taken with the artist that when Titian dropped a brush during a sitting, the ruler himself picked it up. Titian protested, but Charles replied, "Titian is worthy of being served by Caesar." In addition to captivating the state, Titian also wooed the church. In Rome, he encountered the older Michelangelo, who admired the Venetian's style and color but said it was a pity Titian never learned to draw properly. Pope Paul III, an art lover, divided work between the two rivals. He pressed Michelangelo for The Last Judgment, but asked Titian to do his portraits.
The power of portraiture continues, though with a 200-year interruption (sorry, Rembrandt) with Portraits Public, Portraits Private, 1770–1830, Oct. 4 to Jan. 8 at Paris' Galeries Nationale du Grand Palais (then Feb. 3 to April 20 at London's Royal Academy and on to the Guggenheim in New York City). The first room dramatically contrasts a full-length George Washington by Gilbert Stuart with a portrait of George III by Thomas Lawrence. The contrasts continue: Antoine François Callet presents Louis XVI on the eve of the French Revolution, resplendently effete in ermine, velvet and Old Regime wig; while Jacques-Louis David shows a uniformed, hair-combed-forward Napoleon in his well-appointed office working, as the clock and the spent candles testify, until after 4 a.m.
Thus an important theme is set for the rest of this 140-work blockbuster. Between 1790 and 1830, political upheaval and the rise of industrialism put a new emphasis on the individual, both aristocratic and bourgeois. Demand for portraits exploded, and painters and sculptors got rich satisfying this new market.
The democratic spirit infused public portraits with a sense of the private person, as in François Gérard's sumptuous rendering of Napoleon's stepdaughter and sister-in-law, Queen Hortense of Holland, holding the hand of her little son. At the same time pictures of less exalted men and women often took on regal attributes, as in the startling portrait of Mrs. Abington — actress and former prostitute — by Joshua Reynolds. Though her fine silks, elegantly powdered coiffure and cute dog follow contemporary conventions depicting nobles, the fact that she leans on the back of a Chippendale chair and has her thumb seductively touching her lips definitely do not.
Critics during that era were not always enthusiastic about the expansion of portraiture to society's lesser ranks. "What is tedious and sometimes revolting is to find a crowd of busts, portraits of anonymous men … these faces seem to say: I have paid out of pride to be here on the canvas or in marble," one contemporary observer wrote. Clearly, a man behind even his own times.
- ANN MORRISON | Paris
- Two Paris exhibitions show how everybody who was anybody loved to have themselves done in oils