BAY WINDOWS December 17, 1998 (Boston)
"Tableaux Vivants" (unedited version)
by John Ruggieri
“Mastery and Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz” @ Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University
Gallery One: “John Jacobsmeyer: Frontier Fever”
Gallery Two: “William James Stillman: The Poetic Landscape, Cambridge, MA 1874” @ Kougeas Gallery
Thankfully, “Mastery and Elegance” comes generously equipped with a free, easy-to-read, and interesting guide that offers significant and juicy details on this exhibition of over 115 drawings that begins its grand tour at Harvard with stops in Toronto, Paris, Edinburgh (Scotland), New York, and Los Angeles. We get an inside view of the politics of art styling in France from about 1600 to 1815, how schools of artists and ideas triumphed over the past due to the fashion of the times and dictates of patrons and kings. Much of this exhibition is about the profound interest early French artists had in studying in Italy and the influence of classical ideas of art-making.
What makes a drawing so revealing and personal is its just-scrawled freshness that reveals the inner life behind the finish of an oil or a mural - or its own final being. In the small Mannerist drawing “Horse Studies and a Groom,” Jacques Callot (1592-1635) depicts the repeated image of a horse in gallop truly studied in fluid, calligraphic, brown-inked line. Ideas of nature’s power are also present in Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s (1686-1755) “Combat of Eagles and Swans.” An eagle, more vicious but similar to our own gentle colonial symbol, seems suspended like a stilled puppet over a rabid symphony of fighting swans and eagles, an all-too-obvious treatment of our very own Congress.
The natural allure of mythology was often illustrated by the French. In “Hercules or Bacchus Making a Request,” Jacques Dumont (1701-1781) pushes red chalk to the level of an engraver’s finely cut line in the foregrounded figures of this joyous composition. This is a masterful patchwork of seas of line and gesture melting into each other. The male traveler, adorned in a revealing toga of animal skin all bunched up by a big ribbon on the side, stops to inquire of a group of charmed natives. The thrust neck of one woman edges the puffy, flowing folds of the gown on the matron to her left who in turn guides the strangely Davey-Crockett-hatted stranger. A stray toddler chases a dog hurling toward the younger, hipper generation enjoying its mini-bacchanalia on the other side of the scene.
The French can be a decidedly proud bunch who like a good extravagant fete on momentous days. Charles-François Hutin (1715-1776) shows the conventions of Rococo style at its confectioner’s best in “The Genius of France Leading the Dauphin Louis to the Temple of Hymen.” Here and there sweet and bubbly flourishes of golden yellow, peach, and pastel blue lighten this otherwise restrained gray, brown wash and black drawing. French reserve shows off in the delicacy of half-drawn shapes that spawn other curvy forms, such as bony angel’s wings. In this wedding scene of the crown prince, slightly flushed skin and the tiny pink feet of cherubs riding a cloud over the gray all signal an intoxicated rising from the earth, while the heavier, raised white gouache treatment on the princely golden shawl keeps the party half-grounded.
In the most provocative image I found, Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard’s (1780-1850) “Anacreon Warming Amor,” an olden Greek lyric poet who wrote mostly about love and wine, Anacreon, sits and holds his “inspiration,” a nude prepubescent Amor, the young god of love, near a tender fire. If you ever had a doubt about pedophilia in ancient Greece, look no further than this washy, gorgeously lit rendering of Amor held in the drapey embrace of the old man. Amor’s chubby leg angles out of the walled embankments of the elder’s inner thighs, as Anacreon intensely looks into the flames and smoke, bearded with his face framed by a ring of just-picked, delectable grapes and leaves studding his gray hair.
A different and more modern myth is ever-present in John Jacobsmeyer’s fanciful and occasionally orgasmic landscapes starring the fetishistic G.I. Joe. There is a pleasant, sweet, and pasty sense of color in these allegorical odes to syrupy landscape and the rituals that Man-as-Man and G.I. Joe-as-Man create and submit to in order to survive. “Final” meaning is elusive here, and it helped me to read the artist’s statement, to chat with him a bit, and to investigate my own projections onto his postmodern tableaux. Some of the less sexy portraits of the Nude Male Adventurer in a Pastoral Setting can be taken in by simply studying the complex plays of keyed-up color and light and mutating form: scumbled clouds, drooping rock formations, the too-rich aqua Bermuda shorts on a bewildered hiker, and the scotch-green shadows of cattle way down yonder. We are caught in a waterless aquarium of apricot-hued sunsets, kitsch-like color schemes, humans being wooden automatics, and Joe as the unsuccessful copycat. There is a sketchiness to his method of painting that is both refreshing for its looseness and, up close, a bit too splotchy and unfinished at times.
In “Birth of Joe,” all roads lead upward, as in the Rococo image of the crown prince’s betrothal. The myth of G.I. Joe’s birth relies on no blush-faced cherubs for its story; instead, poodle-shaped clouds above are squeezed like toothpaste as the universe welcomes its newest Big Bang, our favorite man-doll. Vermillion-haired Joe’s birth may have been a shipwreck on this placid northern lake, his weird saving grace being a large, boldly yellow inner tube on which he floats. He splays his segmented buttocks toward us as a familiar “Field and Stream” image of a freshwater fish does a high jump out of the water just beyond his impervious form. Half-fleshy Joe is entranced by what Jacobsmeyer calls one of the “events” of the painting, a primary-red modernistic form spiraling in the shallows off in the distance. All is pointing up into the gleaming sky, including the pompously vertical marker pointing out of the lake toward an ellipse of transcendental light. In “Frontier Artist,” a boldly shadowed man readies to do one of a long series of his rarefied performance-art treats, setting his head upon a post that he is hammering into a sweet-and-sour green liver of hilltop. The real violence of the hammer is muted by the bright toy-yellow-and-green colors it is colored, just as an anamorphic (elongated) image of George Washington’s famous face cloudily slides by in the blue heavens above, lending a creamy yellow and lavender legitimacy to the staking out of American soil.
“Cyclops” shows Joe in civilian casual laying on an industrial patio, just after being attacked by a heavy set of black high-wire cables downed not by any natural storm (all seems dry) but by an overcultured, hazy atmosphere ruled by a faintly visible CBS eye. Joe is no Schwarzeneger-like action hero here, he too can be overstimulated, even electrocuted. In the smallest painting, “Arcadian Joe,” Joe displays his most heroic and most sexual feat yet, a virtual lay. Dazed and confused, lying back on a dirt mound and removed from the city beyond, he is all helpless notched joints and mechanical parts, as a vixenous real lady gets down to the business of straddling his fiery-pink strap-on dildo. This most human of events is like the head-banging masochism of “Frontier Artist.” He is No-Man here, just a necessary part to the whole of fornication.
In the second gallery, curator Timothy Welsh has brought together historical photogravures of Cambridge from 1874 by William James Stillman.
Copyright © 2007 John Ruggieri. All rights reserved.