March 23, 1937: The collection of French paintings from the Museum collection now installed in the special exhibition galleries at the Brooklyn Museum represents primarily the XIXth and early XXth Centuries. Several XIVth, XVth and XVIth Century paintings remind us of the beginnings of painting in France. A few canvases from the XVIIIth Century suggest at least one source, romantic landscape, which enriched the substance of painting with fresh material. The XVIIth Century is not represented and there is nothing to represent the neo-classic and military subjects that were for a time so nearly dominant. Omitted, the fantastic and artificial court life, the imaginative recreations of Roman scenes and the rush and color of the Napoleonic wars scorn possibly less important than they really were, almost as if they were aberrations and distractions from a more valid direction of painting, which reappears with full strength in the masters of the XIXth and XXth Centuries.
In this collection the thoraos that we still call modern and the variations on those themes are represented by the work of Gauguin, Degas, Toulouse-LaUtrcc, Monot, Guillaumin, Fantin-Latour, Sisley, Manet, and the contemporary or more nearly contemporary work of Dufy, Lhoto, Vlaminck, Andre, Edy-Legrand, Forain, Degas, Villon, Renoir and Signac. Earlier XIXth Century French romanticism is represented by the work of Delacroix, Daubigny, Dupre, Millet, Corot, Courbet, Couture, Diaz, Fromentin, Barye, Boileau, Rafaelli, Boudin, Morisot, Bougoreau, Goricault, and Marilhat.
The study of two female saints by an unknown master of the XVth Century, tho painting of the Three Magi by an unknown master of the XIVth Century, and that of a Martyrdom of Saints by the Maitre de Moulins remind us that it was in Christian religious painting that French painting originated. It is possible to regard later French painting as a departure from this early religious painting, first under the domination of the court, finally in the new freedom of republican life.
Of greatest importance in religious painting were the episodes from Biblical stories and the lives of saints, conveying both an intense emotional interest and the interest of dramatic story, The comparable subject in modern painting is the scene from contemporary life in which some color of the romantic, the dramatic, the strange, the exotic, the glamorous is substituted for the [unclear] feeling which enhanced the appeal of the scene from a Bible story or the life of a saint. Vornot’s two landscapes of shipwreck and in a calmer mood the small seaside landscapes of Boudin represent one subject in which many French painters found this quality of dramatic episode. Barye’s studios of wild animals in landscapes that suggest dangerous adventure are from this point of view a different aspect of the same thing. Fromentin’s sketch of Arab horsemen galloping and Diaz’s miniature of an Arab mother and child remind us that many French painters have sought this romantic interest in the near east and in northern Africa. Edy-Legrand’s two studios of circus people scorn in this relation the search for the exotic and glamorous physically transported into our midst. Dufy’s water color sketch of horse racing has much the same meaning. Forain’s study of the artist and his model, though it has the additional color of poverty and suffering, has still the glamor of the artist’s studio, the vie de Boheme, in which so much painting has found close to its source the romance of strangeness in life, Millet’s study of a shepherd and other rural scenes from his brush serve to remind us that his genius found in the life of the peasantry both a drama and a religious significance that was characteristic at one time of the pictures of lives of saints and of Bible stories.
The formal court portrait was in the first place merely a transference of a familiar manner of painting from a religious to a secular subject. The miniature portrait heads by Fouquet, Clouet and Corneille de Lyon might easily occur in the midst of any religious painting of the day. With all the changes that have taken place in style, French portraiture remains essentially what it was in the beginning, formal and literal. It displays a persistent naive realism, a passion for texture, for the elaboration and detail of accessories, for the merciless expose of personality. The greatest difference between the medieval and the modern portrait is not style hut a shift from the static pose in which the subject appears to be unconscious of any observer to the deliberate consciousness of posing for a portrait and an increased formality of arrangement for this purpose with frank recognition of it.
Landscape, marines, still life, interiors, animals, and views of towns and cities wore all incidental to religious painting, all details which were often elaborated with great interest, as in the upper right hand corner of the Martyrdom by the Maitre de Moulins, where a delightful medieval landscape appears. Modern painting has, of course, taken each of those subjects and presented them independently for their own sakes. All but still life are represented in the current exhibition, but landscape predominates. Glancing over such a large range of work in many moods and by many hands, one is struck by a quality in most of them not very illuminatingly known as the picturesque, It is not a matter of sentimental mood or literary content but chiefly the striking of a balance of forms and color in a scene that seems to bo disorderly, irregular, capricious and haphazard in nature, in which the artist has produced a feeling of order by a precise selection of a point of view, and by a strong emphasis upon related and contrasted forms, related and contrasted colors. Typical is a glimpse of a French village, the street winding and climbing, the houses of different shapes and sizes, built at odd angles, tossing up a confused tumble of roofs, with trees and bushes not planted neatly but growing at random, some fields, paths, hills of irregular shape, an irregular patch of sky viewed through irregular masses of branch and foliage, perhaps some heaps of clouds that may or may not echo the tumble of hill and town. Given variety of color, some strong masses, some spotting of contrasting accents, and you have all the materials for a scene that will be picturesque in the sense of the French landscapist. What the emotional satisfaction of such a scene may be, the artist may definitely suggest by a mood of tranquility or storm, but more often he will leave it to be sought for and found, with an intuitive assurance that there is in such landscape something which appeals to the romantic longings of people in cities, for whom, of course, landscapes are chiefly painted.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1937 - 1939. 01-03_1937, 059-61.
