Current Exhibitions

Abstract

French art in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century presented so formidable an array of esthetic theories and divergent artistic practices that the serious-minded amateur des arts had to work hard to keep up with its successive phases. Unlike the Red Queen and Alice, even running did not avail to keep him in the same place, for there was no static spot of security in all the shifting terrain. Looking back at this already historic past from the vantage point of today, everything falls so neatly into its appointed place on the map, owing to the intensive charting of even the most minute ramification of esthetic theory, that it seems hardly credible that it was once so difficult a country. Yet “modern art” has been hedged about with theoretical defenses and so interpenetrated with cerebral connotations that many persons still feel their “first, fine rapture” before a modern painting chilled by disturbing revenants of “isms” that must be laid before actual enjoyment is allowable. The various and varied exhibitions of French art now current should, however, dispel this kill-joy attitude completely and restore to us the enchantment of the new, enthralling experience that a real work of art always produces. At the Bignou Gallery the “four pillars of Modern Art” are represented by outstanding works; superb examples that reveal the maturity and plenitude of their accomplishment. There are, also, two canvases by Toulouse-Lautrec, one L'Accroche-Coeur, the figure of a woman seated in a studio and gazing at you with enormous eyes that seem to blaze from under the high forehead with its exaggerated curl (the accroche-coeur or “beau-catcher”) that lends a satiric note to the tragic mask of the face. The figure is so directly presented with such simplification of line and pattern that it would be stark were it not for the subtle modulations of color that give warmth and life to the whole canvas. The blouse that at first glance seems black is really composed of reflections of every note of color in the room, even a glint of the tarnished gold lace ruff at the throat. Not only as draftsman and designer does Lautrec triumph in this painting, but as a recorder of the emotional depths which lie beneath this tense, sad face: it is not a particular mood, a chance emotion that he sets down so compellingly, but the whole, sordid tragedy of this woman's life conditioned by the cruelty, the artificial gaiety, the almost grotesque frustration of the world to which she belonged. The Seurat landscape, Le Port de Gravelines, one of his paintings of the Normandy coast, has a vibrating intensity in its clear, blonde tones, a palpitating shimmer of harmonious color that lends vivacity to the serenity and finality of the design. The sensitive perception of the beauty of formal relations and the sustaining power of their expression were never more marked in Seurat's work than in this canvas. Gauguin's Pont-Aven, painted after his brief sojourn in Martinique, curiously invests the landscape of Brittany with tropical color. There is more solidity of mass, more sense of spatial depth in design in this painting than in his later canvases, the rugged power of the Brittany landscape asserting itself over the richness and intricacy of the color pattern. There is also a still life, Jambon, painted in Martinique, that has remarkable sense of ponderable mass. How anyone could achieve such exquisite nuances of color against the bilious-green wall paper that not only makes up the background but furnishes surprising color accents through the canvas, remains a mystery the more the amazing performance is studied. The large canvas, Baigneuses Tahitiennes, shown at the opening of this gallery, is the full expression of his decorative design. Here the romantic subject, the sensuous delight in physical beauty, the weaving of the eloquent dark forms with brilliant color in large unbroken areas (or sharply patterned as in the gay sarongs) all contribute to a compelling decoration, just departing from naturalism through the slight distortions of form, line and color that subdue detail to design.