Arrangement In Black

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
Arrangement In Black: Portrait Of F.R. Leyland
1874
Freer Gallery Of Art, Washington

Oil On Canvas
77 1/8 Inches By 36 3/4 Inches

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Five years after completion of “Arrangement In Black”, Whistler was to portray shipping magnate Frederick Leyland a second time—but without the subject’s authorization for the latter painting—in “The Gold Scab”.

In the intervening years, of course, there had been that little business about The Peacock Room—as well as the fact that Leyland, Whistler’s largest creditor, had been appointed to preside over Whistler’s 1879 bankruptcy proceedings.

Name The Artist

The correct answer is not the expected one.

This is one of my favorite paintings at The Walker Art Center, which has a very, very weak permanent collection, totally at variance with the museum’s somewhat puzzling high reputation.

When Philippe de Montebello retired from the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in 2008, he gave a noted farewell interview in which he harshly criticized American art museums for focusing on extraneous pursuits at the expense of building collections.

Although Montebello did not mention any institutions by name, everyone understood that Montebello was referring to The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the High Museum Of Art in Atlanta, both of which feature constant barrages of highly-publicized and highly-promoted peripheral activities—while lacking permanent collections worth viewing.

Another Exquisite Still Life

Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
Flowers In A Crystal Vase
1882
National Gallery Of Art, Washington

Oil On Canvas
12 7/8 Inches By 9 5/8 Inches

An Exquisite Still Life

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904)
Three Peaches On A Plate
1868
National Gallery Of Art, Washington

Oil On Canvas
7 3/4 Inches By 10 1/8 Inches

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This very small but exquisite still life always rivets the viewer’s attention. I cannot count the number of times I have seen art-lovers hovered, spellbound, around the canvas.

A photographic reproduction cannot begin to reveal the greatness of the painting. I believe it is the artist’s capturing of textures—wood, porcelain, peach fuzz—that grips the viewer’s attention. (Textures are much more amazing in the painting than any photograph can suggest.)

The first time I showed this painting to Joshua, he exclaimed, “That’s the best peach fuzz ever!”

And Josh was right.

To Commemorate The Day

Asher Durand (1796-1886)
The Catskills
1859
The Walters Museum, Baltimore

Oil On Canvas
62 1/2 By 50 1/2 Inches

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“The Catskills” is one of Asher Durand’s most acclaimed works. Durand painted it on commission from William T. Walters, patriarch of Baltimore’s Walters family (in whose namesake museum the painting now hangs).

As a general rule, the Walters family did not collect American art; the family’s passions were Greek and Roman antiquities, Medieval artworks and Old Master paintings.

I was, in consequence, startled when I came face-to-face with this masterpiece at The Walters Museum in March 2009. At the time, “The Catskills” was hung in the long, Louvre-like gallery of European paintings on the top floor of the Walters’s newest of three adjacent buildings. I had not expected to encounter there a prime example of American Transcendental landscape painting. “The Catskills” is the finest Durand painting I have seen (I have never seen “Kindred Spirits”, owned by the Crystal Bridges Museum).

In December 2007, Joshua and I had traveled to Washington to see three important art exhibitions: a J.M.W. Turner exhibition; an Edward Hopper exhibition; and an exhibition of portraits exploring Spain’s connection to The American Revolution.

A fourth important exhibition had been in the city at the time, but Josh and I had skipped it: an exhibition of 57 Durand landscape paintings, the largest such exhibition ever assembled. Josh and I were fools to have missed the Durand exhibition.

My father’s Christmas gift to my mother that year was a trip to Washington to see all four exhibitions—and in January 2008 my parents traveled to Washington to see the exhibitions.

At the Durand exhibition in Washington, “The Catskills” was on prominent display, having been loaned by The Walters.

Musée d'Orsay

The grand central space of Musée d'Orsay, housed in what used to be a train station.

We spent a full day at Musée d'Orsay in January. Alas, many of the museum’s key paintings were not on display, and Joshua missed seeing artworks he had keenly wanted to see (most of all, “The Floor Scrapers”).

A visit to Musée d'Orsay provides a magnificent experience—but the greatest collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings reside in the United States.

American art collectors were the first to recognize the importance of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and bought up Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings left and right when the artworks were brand new, with the paint barely dry.

By the time the French government decided to enter the art market and begin buying Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings for France’s museums, most of the greatest artworks had already left the country and were safely ensconced in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, the French government, entering the art market thirty years too late, still had to contend with American buyers prepared to outbid and out-buy the French government.

Such accounts for the fact that the collection of Musée d'Orsay, large as it is, is disappointing to Americans. The quality of the collection does not match the quality of the building.

(And the quality of the main restaurant of Musée d'Orsay—the restaurant with the giant clock face, and with portal windows overlooking The Seine—had greatly deteriorated between 2004 and 2013.)

Whether By Design Or Happenstance

Max Liebermann (1847-1935)
Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden
1885
Hamburg Kunsthalle

Oil On Canvas
46 5/8 Inches By 38 5/16 Inches

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Liebermann, largely unknown outside Central Europe, was a very great painter. The artist mastered landscape painting, genre scenes and—late in life—portraiture.

Some like to classify Liebermann as an Impressionist, which I believe is an inaccurate characterization. Others like to classify Liebermann as an Early Modernist, another categorization I believe to be inaccurate.

Above all, Liebermann was, I submit, a Realist painter. His work is rooted in 19th-Century German Realist Painting—yet he was clearly influenced by various French schools of the second half of the 19th Century.

Liebermann was also a Wilhelmine painter through and through. Although he despised Wilhelmine politics and considered himself an Internationalist and a Cosmopolite, Liebermann—perhaps unknowingly—captured The Wilhelmine Era to perfection. Whether by design or by happenstance, Liebermann is unmistakably one of the three or four most quintessential Wilhelmine artists.

The irony is that, while The Wilhelmine Era was ongoing, Liebermann was viewed as much too revolutionary, far too French, and entirely out-of-step with the period. Today an opposite view prevails: Liebermann is considered too conservative, too German, and too-closely-tied to the conventions of his time.

During much of his life, Liebermann’s work was appreciated exclusively by connoisseurs. It was only once Alfred Lichtwark, perhaps the greatest art historian of the day, became in the 1890s an ardent advocate of Liebermann’s work that the artist’s reputation grew by leaps and bounds, in Germany and elsewhere.

From the early 1870s until the onset of World War I, Liebermann spent every summer in the Netherlands, working out-of-doors, all day, every day, no matter the weather.

One of Liebermann’s favorite subjects was the wards of the municipal orphanage in Amsterdam, housed in the former Saint Lucy’s Convent (and now home to The Amsterdam Museum).

For over twenty years, from 1876 onward, Liebermann painted dozens and dozens of canvases at the orphanage. “Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden”, from 1885, is one of the most renowned of Liebermann’s Dutch orphan paintings.

“Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden” is a riveting and ravishing work. A reproduction scarcely begins to do justice to the artist’s subtle-but-brilliant color scheme or his complete mastery of natural light.

We must have devoted half an hour, perhaps more, to a study of the painting while we were in Hamburg in 2006. At the time, the painting was hung in a large gallery devoted to nothing but Liebermann paintings—and “Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden” had been placed alongside Liebermann’s most famous work, “The Net-Menders”.

Magnificent as is “The Net-Menders”, I thought “Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden” to be the finer artwork.

A More Successful Use Of A Restricted Color Palette

Tiziano Vecellio (“Titian”) (1490-1576)
Ranuccio Farnese
1542
National Gallery Of Art, Washington

Oil On Canvas
35 5/16 Inches By 29 Inches

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A more successful example of an artist intentionally adopting a very restricted color palette—three colors: rose, white and black—is Titian’s remarkable portrait of Ranuccio Farnese (1530-1565), painted when the sitter was twelve years old. No matter how long one studies the painting, one never believes for a moment that the color scheme is too limited, or that the restricted palette has been deliberately chosen as part of some misguided exercise in “expression”.

In person, the painting is overwhelming: bold yet subtle, brilliant yet restrained, striking yet thought-provoking. Not only is "Ranuccio Farnese" one of Titian’s greatest portraits, it is one of the artist’s greatest paintings in any genre.

The painting is famed for its psychological insight. Titian caught the youth of the boy as well as his adult-like qualities, unexpected in one so young (a precocious child, Ranuccio was to be named a Cardinal at age fifteen). Raised from birth to hold ecclesiastical office, the Farnese boy was handed his first major church assignment at the age of twelve. The occasion precipitated the creation of this great portrait, a commission by the Farnese family, awarded to the greatest artist of the day.

Intimacy And Exquisiteness, Atmosphere And Presentation

Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788)
Portrait Of The President Of Rieux
1741
Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris

Pastel On Paper Mounted On Canvas
46 3/8 Inches By 36 Inches

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Maurice Quentin de La Tour carried the difficult and capricious pastel medium to a point of sheer technical brilliance not reached before or since. His mastery of pastels led not only to imitation but to fears that he would provoke a distaste for oil paint.

Masterpieces From The Norton Simon Museum, a publication of the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena

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In this magnificent portrait, first shown at the Salon of 1742, the artist presented Suzanne-Marie-Henriette de Boulainvilliers (1696-1776) dressed for a ball. The subject was forty-five years of age at the time of the portrait.

“Portrait Of The President Of Rieux” is one of the most significant pastel portraits created by the greatest of all pastellist artists—and among the largest in size. It is among the half-dozen largest portraits by the artist, and among the half-dozen finest portraits by the artist.

Because the portrait was owned by the subject and her descendants from 1741 until 1920, when it was sold to the founders of Musée Cognacq-Jay in the portrait’s one-and-only sale transaction, the portrait remains in its original wood frame, very rare for an artwork almost 300 years old.

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Hundreds of art websites on the worldwide web—including Bridgeman!—attribute “Portrait Of The President Of Rieux” to Georges de La Tour instead of Maurice Quentin de La Tour. Such misattribution is as unfathomable as an inability to distinguish Gustave Charpentier from Marc-Antoine Charpentier.

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“Portrait Of The President Of Rieux” is one of the key masterworks on display at Musée Cognacq-Jay, a museum devoted primarily to 18th-Century French art and housed in an 18th-Century hôtel particulier. At the museum, “Portrait Of The President Of Rieux” hangs in a third-floor salon directly opposite another portrait by the same artist.

I love Musée Cognacq-Jay for its intimacy and its exquisiteness. The museum owns twenty or thirty artworks worth seeing over and over and over, supplemented by another 200 or so artworks not of great importance. One visits Musée Cognacq-Jay for atmosphere and “presentation” as much as for art.

Musée Cognacq-Jay owns Rembrandt’s earliest top-tier masterpiece, “Balaam’s Ass”, painted in 1626.

The Rembrandt was not on display last month. It was off-view for cleaning and restoration.

Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso And Andre Salmon In Paris In 1916

Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and Andre Salmon on December 15, 1916, in a photograph taken by Jean Cocteau outside the Café de la Rotonde in Montparnasse (at the time, Montparnasse was not the fashionable district it is today).

The Terracotta Warriors

Joshua and I have twice visited the Terracotta Warriors Exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute Of Arts.

Over Thanksgiving Weekend, Josh and I took an out-of-town guest to the exhibition.

Nine days before Christmas, we visited the exhibition a second time. On that day, a Sunday afternoon, everyone in my family attended the exhibition, including my niece and nephew—as well as Josh’s sister, staying with us over her school break.

The exhibition no doubt is an important one, but the rewards are historic more than artistic. The Terracotta Warriors were created during the Qin Dynasty (221 B.C. to 206 B.C.), and the artistic quality of the items on display pales when compared to sculpture and artisanal work being produced at the same time in Egypt, Greece and Rome.

My niece and nephew were not too young to enjoy the exhibition. The exhibition engaged them, and held their attentions. We all tried to point out things of particular interest to children in order to make the exhibition fun for them.

The Terracotta Warriors first visited the U.S. in 1985, when the Minneapolis Institute Of Arts presented five of the warriors in a small exhibition. My parents took my brothers and me to that earlier exhibition, and I still remember that day—I was four years old, it was my first visit to MIA, and I was very excited (although somehow I had it in my mind that the warriors were going to be mobile, and put on some sort of live demonstration).

The current exhibition is many times the size of the 1985 exhibition. It is the scale of the current exhibition that most impresses, not the creativity of the individual artists that manufactured the artifacts, most of which are not remarkable—or beautiful—in the least.

In my estimation, ticket prices for the exhibition are too high ($16.00 per head for school-age children seems unreasonable to me, as does $20.00 per head for adults). High prices have not kept the public away; to the contrary, MIA has had to expand significantly its exhibition hours in order to accommodate public demand.

For The New Year

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
1886
Tate Britain, London

Oil On Canvas
69 5/8 Inches By 61 1/2 Inches

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“Have you seen my Flora pass this way?”

“Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.”

The lyrics of a sentimental 19th-Century parlor song provided Sargent with the title of one of his greatest masterworks.

Sargent worked on the canvas for fourteen months, always working at twilight in order to capture the precise light he needed. The painting is a technical marvel, portraying as it does both the natural light of dusk and the artificial light provided by lanterns. Only Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in both versions of his “Bal du moulin de la Galette”, was able to achieve anything comparable in blending natural and artificial light.

“Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” is almost always on display at Tate Britain, a museum notorious for keeping important paintings off-view. The painting is generally hung near or alongside the equally-riveting “Harmony In Grey And Green: Miss Cecily Alexander” by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

It is ironic that the two greatest artists working in late-19th-Century Britain were Americans.

Both “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” and “Miss Cecily Alexander” were intensely criticized by the British art establishment when the paintings were new, largely because the paintings did not comport with the mawkish and colorless style favored by British painters of the period.

In the late 19th Century, British painting was as insufferably provincial as it is today—which is why one never sees Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais or Luke Fildes paintings on museum walls outside the British Isles.

The Bellelli Family

Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
The Bellelli Family
1867
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Oil On Canvas
79 Inches By 100 Inches

The Baillie Family

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)
The Baillie Family
1784
Tate Britain, London

Oil On Canvas
100 5/16 Inches By 90 15/16 Inches

Monks Along The River Arno

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “Monks Along The River Arno”, a photograph taken in Florence in 1935.

A Masterful Exploration Of Line, Plane And Color

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
Un Coin de Bois, Pointoise
1876
Private Collection

Oil On Canvas
26 Inches by 22 7/8 Inches

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This breathtaking canvas rewards hours and hours of study. It is my mother’s favorite Cézanne painting—and mine as well.

The painting, among other things, is a masterful exploration of line and plane—as well as color.

The painting is mysterious, moody, menacing—and totally gripping and completely hypnotic.

The painting is also beautiful beyond description—and beautiful from any distance.

Cézanne began work on the canvas in 1875, in the Paris suburb of Pointoise. He completed the painting the following year.

The painting’s first public appearance was at the Third Impressionist Exhibition, held in 1877 at 6 Rue Le Peletier near the old Opéra-Comique. (The Opéra-Comique was to burn to the ground ten years later during a performance of Ambroise Thomas’s “Mignon”. Cézanne was in the theater the night of the fire, but survived the disaster—unlike 84 persons, who perished that night.)

Cézanne’s painting did not find a buyer at the Third Impressionist Exhibition. After the exhibition had closed, the painting was consigned to Durand-Ruel, who maintained the canvas in the Durand-Ruel inventory for many years until a buyer could be found. (Such was not at all unusual for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artworks. Many such works remained in the Durand-Ruel inventory for decades—Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s legendary “Luncheon Of The Boating Party”, painted in 1881, remained in the Durand-Ruel inventory until 1923, when it was finally sold to Duncan Phillips.)

Cézanne’s painting has always been privately owned; it has never been the property of a public collection or public institution. Since the painting first left the Durand-Ruel inventory more than 110 years ago, there have been only three sale transactions and four owners.

Oddly, each time the painting has changed hands, it has been sold under a different name. The painting has been known—and sold—as: A Corner Of The Woods, Pointoise; Orchard, Cote Saint-Denis, at Pointoise; and Oxen Hill.

The painting was loaned in 2005 to the Museum Of Modern Art in New York for the exhibition, “Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne And Pissarro”, one of the most important exhibitions in recent MOMA history. At the MOMA exhibition, the Cézanne painting was hung next to a Camille Pissarro canvas of the very same scene painted at the very same time. Pissarro’s treatment of the scene was entirely conventional, especially when seen alongside the Cézanne, a work of genius.

When the 2005 MOMA exhibition traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art and Musée d'Orsay, this particular Cézanne did not travel with the exhibition. The painting had been loaned solely for the MOMA showing; another Cézanne painting had to be substituted for the Los Angeles and Paris venues.

Art Distills Sensation

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form—or else it is not art.

Jacques Barzun

From The Dutch Golden Age

Caspar Netscher (1639-1684)
The Lace-Maker
1662
The Wallace Collection, London

Oil On Canvas
13 3/16 Inches By 10 13/16 Inches

Autumn Has Arrived, At Least In Minneapolis

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Brittany Landscape
1888
National Gallery Of Art, Washington

Oil On Canvas
28 Inches By 35 1/4 Inches

Portland Place

The famous 1906 photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn.