Met Percent: Week Twenty-two [by Alec Bernstein]

Still Life With . . .

Left: Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, gallery 824.
Top right: Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, Jan Davidsz de Heem, 1640, gallery 964.
Center right: Still Life: Fish, William Merritt Chase, 1908, gallery 774.  
Bottom right: Still Life with an Apple, Alberto Giacometti, 1937, not on view.

Inclined to try an “on-line tour”? Search the Met for “Still life” (https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=Still%20life).  You will find 2,453  results, all relevant, with the exception of the painter Clyfford Still. A few to start:

Fantin-Latour always appealed, even in my anti-academic periods. Which is why it seems amusing that the Paris Academy was not a fan . . . and sad that Fantin-Latour himself loathed his own flowers. The Academy considered still lifes the lowest genre of painting, “even allowing woman to exhibit them”. Fantin-Latour said of his flowers, “Never have I had more ideas about Art in my head, and yet I am forced to do flowers. While painting them—standing before the peonies and roses—I think of Michelangelo. This cannot go on.” But many were captivated: Monet, Manet, Sergeant, Whistler, and over 150 years of collectors.

Part of the Met’s Founding Purchase of 1871, the de Heem is of the vanitas  sub-genre pronkstilleven. (Dutch for “ostentatious still life”), commenting on the “unrelenting lure of earthly pleasures and the sinful nature of humankind.” - MetText. Vanitas  usually has death images combined with luxury items but not these. These are filled with known symbols of opulence: lemon peels, oysters, and Roemer glasses (German crystal for white wine). Some art school should claim the motto “Lux et Vanitas”. Ja, natuurlijk!

Worried that he would be known to future generations only as “a painter of fish”, yet pleased by his success, Chase considered his fish paintings, "an uninteresting subject so inviting and entertaining by means of fine technique that people will be charmed at the way you've done it." His students wrote about his speed: “He went to the fish market, bought the fish, he painted it, and returned the fish before it went bad". Chase said, “It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.”

Giacometti’s mature style evolved through his early struggle with scale. Until 1945, none of his figure sculptures were more than 2.5” high. “Often they became so tiny that with one touch of my knife they disappeared into dust.” His still lifes were no exception — “I was in [father’s] studio drawing some pears on a table, at the normal distance for a still life. And the pears kept getting tiny. I'd begin again, and they'd always go back to exactly the same size. My father got irritated and said, 'But just do them as they are, as you see them!' And he corrected them. I tried to do them as he wanted but I couldn't stop myself. . . . Half an hour later they were exactly the same size to the millimeter as the first ones."

 

Sisters on the Bridge Blues

Left: Nuns at Work, Follower of Alessandro Magnasco, 17th c. Gallery 539 (Jack and Belle Linsky Collection).
Right: Bacchanale,  Alessandro Magnasco, detail, 1720–1730, J. Paul Getty Museum.

When I saw Magnasco’s Nuns at Work, the palette grabbed me: dark monochromes, usually earth-tones with blue accents. His unusual subjects also intrigued: synagogue services, Quaker meetings, grave robbers' gatherings, catastrophes, and interrogations by the Inquisition. One blog added, “His sentiments regarding these subjects are generally unclear”. 

I was thrown back to my “generally unclear” student days, working as a parking lot guard in a Catholic hospital . . . in Baltimore in hard times (my own and city wide). 

“Unit 5, Unit 5, Sisters on the Bridge” . . . Apparently, I was Unit 5. My walkie-talkie instructed me to drive my golf cart to the bridge on level 4 and help the nuns. What exactly their fears were went without saying. I drove 20 feet behind them very slowly as they walked to their cars and followed them safely off the grounds. We never spoke. 

The only color to be seen in all 16 floors of exhaust-covered concrete and nuns’ habits was my blue J&L Parking Co. shirt and hat. The same blues, the same browns Magnasco used.

Years later, a friend sent me a news clipping of my old lot being demolished by explosives. All 16 levels dropped in a pile of rubble. That image fit well with Magnasco’s gothic visions of embattled nuns or grave robbers barricaded in institutional ruins. Would have been perfect for him. 

 

Naturalism (Hybrid and Faux)

The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle, 1885, gallery 684. 
Inset left, detail: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat 1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago. 
Inset right: The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle, 1885, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Both The Organ Rehearsal and Sunday on La Grande Jatte were painted and exhibited between 1884-86 in the same town. They are in opposing camps - Lerolle a naturalist and Seurat an impressionist/pointillist. The woman model with the red flower in her hat may have received two fees for one sitting.

The Swedes purchased a second version of the Lerolle to honor Naturalism - not Impressionism - as the major influence on Swedish art.  

Édouard Manet evolved from the naturalists but became the adopted father of the impressionists. He described his relationship with nature, “. . . And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal.”

Joan of Arc, and detail, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879, gallery 800.

For a time, the Bastien-Lepage seemed to combine attributes of naturalism and impressionism. Naturalists demanded realistic subjects from daily life. Impressionists could admire the loose brush work. Instead, a barrage of criticism followed. Émile Zola felt that Bastien-Lepage had vilified his own work by including the three floating saints and abandoned his previous support. Joris-Karl Huysmans accused the artist of "false naturalism". Gustave Courbet added, “Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one”. 

Decades later, critics remained irked. One argued that the dreamy expression of the model was rendered "only by the aid of hypnotism", which fits, as long as hypnotism is accepted as an activity of daily life.

 

Hands-On

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653, gallery 964.

“Aristotle compares two sets of values: on the one hand, everything that he admired in Homer—gravity, humility, unequalled diction and thought—and, on the other, wealth and worldly honor, as embodied by the gold chain and medallion bearing an image of Aristotle's royal pupil, Alexander the Great.” - MetText

All three characters in the painting appear in Montaigne’s essay, “Of the Most Outstanding Men”. Homer is the best of all, Alexander the Great just under Christ, and Aristotle is there, but with very mixed reviews. Montaigne greatly preferred Socrates the “know-thyself” “master of masters . . . who surpassed even Alexander the Great”.

I remember my favorite Greek professor’s lesson on a particularly difficult use of the men/de (point/counterpoint set) construction in a Socratic speech in Plato. A long phrase is introduced with O’men (on the one hand). At the very end of this tome was only O’de (on the other hand). That meant, “go back and re-read the phrase, reversing each positive with a negative, and each negative with a positive.” Very efficient, but not an easy read. On each end of his desk, he kept a little flag, one with O’men, the other O’de.

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

Anither glorious post. My thanks. The Rembrandt makes me think that Rabbi Aristotle is blessing Homer's head. -- DL

[The Best American Poetry]

Beethoven’s Violin Sonata #9
is a nice way to start the morning
and hard to top
though as I climb into the car
after swimming my twenty-four laps
Mozart’s 40th starts
and I have a virtual date
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
where Alec is lecturing on Seurat,
still life (Fantin-Latour, William Merritt Chase),
and the faux naturalism
of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc (1879)
which I know I’m not supposed to like
but I can’t help myself

-- DL (7/25/20)