Two’s company, as they say. On Wednesday, the French Cultural Services Office of the French Embassy in the U.S. informed me that Will Barnet, who turned 100 last May and was honored recently by the National Academy Museum with an exhibition, had been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, with the insignia to be conferred on him on Jan. 19.
I let it pass without remark, though I didn’t forget it, until yesterday, when a similar email came announcing that Gary Tinterow, late of the Metropolitan Museum and now director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, has been named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. (That’s a higher grade.) He will receive his insignia on January 23.
I quickly went to the website of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy of the U.S. to see if there’d been anyone else — but, alas, the press part of the website is open only to registered journalists, and I never have (so far).
So we have these two. Established in 1957, according to Wikipedia, these honors may go, according to French government guidelines, to “citizens of France must be at least thirty years old, respect French civil law, and must have, ‘significantly contributed to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance.’ ” But, “Foreign recipients are admitted into the Order, ‘without condition of age.’ “
In any case, both Will and Gary are older than 30.
The press release about Tinterow cites his many exhibitions (related to French culture), including Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch (1999), Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (2003), and Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2010), as well as the award-winning Origins of Impressionism and The Private Collection of Edgar Degas in 1995 and 1997, respectively. Plus his many acquisitions of French art and his collaborations with French institutions.
Barnet was a bigger surprise, to me at least, as his art seems very American to me. But the press release begins with a relevant quote from Barnet:
I remember at the age of 12 sitting on a big rock in front of the Beverly Massachusetts lighthouse that faced the Atlantic Ocean directly across from Paris and dreaming of going to Paris. At time I was reading French novels and learning about French art. By the time I was 14, I had read all five volumes of the French art historian Elie Faure’s “History of Art.’ What kept me alive was that I identified with the masters-they were my guiding light.
Then it cites the French painters, “notably Honoré Daumier, Picasso, Ingres and Cezanne,” who influenced Barnet.
They each get a medal, an eight-point, green-enameled asterisk — gilt for Tinterow, silver for Barnet, and a green ribbon with four vertical white stripes. Tinterow’s also has a little circle in the middle, shown at right.
So now you know.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the French Cultural Services Office