There aren’t too many terms that have the
ability to disquiet the bourgeois while enlivening the avant-garde, but
“modern” or “modernism” can do just that.
           To be a modern
painter can imply both a commitment to formal innovation and a challenge to the
status quo. In this way, modernism in art can range from the mid-19th-century
French paintings of Courbet and Manet to the abstract expressions of
mid-20th-century Americans like Pollock and DeKooning. But after the dust
settles (and a century passes), what emerges is the palpable result of a shared
exploration by two halves of the same whole.
           It was in the
19th century that scholars and critics began to theorize about the
interconnectedness of seeing and knowing, and it wasn’t long before French poet
Charles Baudelaire added fuel to the fire by contending that artists and
writers should rid themselves of classical archetypes and instead, “be of their
own time.” He wanted artists to grab hold of the experiences of modern life, to
capture and recreate the mundane — men shoveling coal, women tending cows,
Notre Dame in the morning light.
           Courbet, the de
facto father of realism, was so sure this was the new (and necessary) direction
of painting that he remarked, “show me an angel, and I will paint one!” But the
histories of art conspired to keep the academic separate from the modern. That
is until recently, the beginning of a new millennium.
Modern Masters: From Corot to Kandinsky is a small selection of 49 paintings from the Juntos Actuando Collection.
Founded in the early 1990s by Juan Antonio Pérez Simón, a Mexican telecommunications
executive, Juntos Actuando is a private nonprofit social-service foundation.
The Juntos Actuando Collection, which Simón began in the mid-’70s, consists of
paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and decorative arts from the 15th to
20th centuries. It’s recognized as one of the most important collections of
European art in Mexico.
           All the
significant directions in the art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are
here: the outdoor scenes of the Barbizon painters and early Realists (Corot,
Millet, and Lhermitte), the idealized subjects and polished surfaces of
academic painters and Victorian moralizers (Bouguereau, Gerôme, Moreau, and
Tissot), the opening skirmishes of cubism, non-objectivism, and surrealism
(Picasso, DalÃ, Kandinsky).
           More
importantly, the exhibition showcases one man’s embrace of his past and his
passionate search for ideal beauty — a search rooted in the romance of a
distant time and place. Dupré’s peasant woman hoists a pitchfork, piling hay which
glints and gleams in the waning light of the setting sun while another young
woman, a gleaner, pauses to confront the gaze of the viewer. It’s as classic
and monumental as Bouguereau’s Innocence,
a picture of mother and child.
           The theme of the
virginal young beauty, is, in turn, later echoed in Godward’s Classical Beauty. It’s a credit to
Simón’s aesthetic that this is not just a collection of blue-chip artists
available to the highest bidder. Instead, the collection reflects a consistency
of vision, and is a thoughtful and deliberate attempt to renew the experiences
of his past, whether they be sounds, smells, and colors, or people and places.
           In her catalogue essay, exhibition
curator Roxana Velásquez Martinéz Del Campo writes about the impact of the
childhood move from Spain to Mexico on the young Juan Antonio, on “departing
the land of their ancestors” and about how the “tangible realities of the
fields, skies, and sea of Asturias were gone forever.”
           It’s not hard to make a connection
between memories of “tangible realities” and the painted or drawn tangibility
of gleaners, road menders, and peasants shoveling hay or tying bundles of
branches. The artists known for these types of images — Dupré, Millet,
Lhermitte — immortalized the working-class in ways previously reserved for
the elite. Similarly, Boudin, Corot, and Pissarro depicted nature and rural
life as they saw it, without any illusions. It shouldn’t matter that these
particular artists and their versions of rural reality were French. It’s the
essence of the subject that forges the connection to the collector. (Joaquin
Sorolla, a Spanish painter known for his images of the sea, the human figure,
and nature, is also well-represented.)
           Simón wasn’t just drawn to nostalgia
but to a passionate love of life and beauty. This sensibility, then, accounts
for the juxtaposition of the sentimental and real, the neoclassical and
genteel, with the vibrant or surreal. Of the selections included in this
exhibition, Picasso, Gris, Dali, Magritte, Chagall, and Kandinsky provide sufficient
representation of the “modern” in early 20th-century painting.
While most people
will view this work politely from a distance, try
standing right in front of the paintings and seeing them for what they are:
decorated objects. Viewed up close, the paintings begin to speak a similar
language, the language of marks made with paint, like a repository or graveyard
of unique human inscriptions. It’s like looking at a beautiful manuscript in a
foreign language. All of a sudden, a brushstroke in Corot’s painting,
atmospheric and ephemeral, has a relative in Tissot’s L’esthetique au Louvre, a much more concrete or photo-realistic
picture.
           You can begin to
recognize all the paintings as belonging to the same family — one made by
marks on a surface that look unique but similar and, at the same time, describe
different things.
Modern
Masters: From Corot to Kandinsky is on display at the Memorial Art
Gallery, 500 University Avenue, through
January 4. Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday 12 to 4 p.m.; Thursday 10 a.m. to 9
p.m.; Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday 12 to 5
p.m. Closed Mondays. Admission: $7; college students w/ ID and seniors, $5;
children 6-18, $2. Free to members, children 5 and under. Reduced admission
Thursday, 5 to 9 p.m., $2. Info: 473-7720.
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2003.
