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October 24, 2006
TT: The enemy of the good
Last Monday I paid a visit to the press view of Americans in Paris, 1860-1900, which opens today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's a comfy, crowd-pleasing blockbuster exhibition that contains such familiar show-stoppers as Sargent's Madame X and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, Eakins' The Cello Player, and Cassatt's The Tea, surrounded by a sea of competent canvases by turn-of-the-century American painters who went to Paris in their youth and learned their lessons well, sometimes quite wonderfully so.Were "Americans in Paris" the only large-scale show currently on view at the Met, I have no doubt that it would be jammed with delighted viewers. But it happens that the museum is also playing host to From Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, a resplendent compendium of nearly two hundred paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by Bonnard, Cézanne, Degas, Derain, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Vlaminck, and Vuillard that passed at one time or another through the hands of the legendary French art dealer. After strolling through "Americans in Paris," I slipped down the hall to take a peek at "From Cézanne to Picasso." The Met is closed to the public on Mondays, so I had the show pretty much to myself. I found it absurdly excessive--no one can possibly take in that much great art--but staggering all the same.
Returning to "Americans in Paris" after spending a half-hour wandering through "From Cézanne to Picasso" is a sobering experience. I yield to no one in my admiration for American art, and the best paintings on display in "Americans in Paris" really are exceptional. Yet how many of the thirty-seven American artists represented in the show managed to say something truly individual? Sargent and Eakins, yes--they were definitely their own men--but Whistler now seems etiolated and Cassatt sentimental when compared to the Frenchmen from whom they drew their inspiration.
Look at "Back in the United States," the last gallery in "Americans in Paris," in which we see how some of the American painters who visited Paris dealt with native subjects after they returned to the United States. Three of their paintings, John Twachtman's Brook in Winter, Childe Hassam's Allies Day, May 1917, and Maurice Prendergast's Central Park, seem to me to pass the test of individuality. The rest reminded me of a story that Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, used to tell on himself. It seems that Levant spent a lot of time traveling with George Gershwin on passenger trains. One evening he griped to Gershwin that he always got stuck with the upper berth. According to Levant, who wasn't above embroidering an anecdote, Gershwin supposedly replied, "Upper berth and lower berth--that's the difference between talent and genius."
* * *
Visitors to "From Cézanne to Picasso" can view a two-minute clip from a silent French newsreel that shows Ambroise Vollard chatting with his friend and client Auguste Renoir, after which Renoir is briefly seen at work on an unidentified painting. This was in 1919, by which time arthritis had turned Renoir's hands into shrunken, twisted claws. It's jolting to watch him slash his brush against the canvas brusquely, almost angrily, then glare at the camera with the fiery eyes of an exhausted master determined to work to the very end.
Why the Met hasn't posted this astonishing peep into the past on its Web site is beyond me, but should it ever be made available in streaming video, I'll hasten to add it to the blogroll.
Posted October 24, 2006 12:00 PM
