News Intelligence Analysis
From the New York Times
March 24, 2006
Art Review
Ingres at the Louvre: His
Pursuit of a Higher Reality
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
PARIS — Outside the first gallery of the Ingres show here
at the Louvre, his gigantic painting of Jupiter and Thetis from
a distance might almost be mistaken for a copy of itself —
the colors are so lurid and the surface is so smooth. No matter
how familiar Ingres is, like all great artists he suddenly looks
unfamiliar whenever you see him.
The proportions in the picture are wrong, as they always are with him, but in the end they make their own peculiar right. Ingres loved nudes but hated anatomy, as the poet James Fenton once put it. The supplicant Thetis, naked and elastic like a snake, coils herself improbably around Jupiter. She's obscenely erotic. Juno, Jupiter's wife, intrudes stage right and sees what's going on. Like a brooding wrestler, wide as a tank, Jupiter sits enthroned, legs spread, grasping a scepter, one arm draped over a cloud. He stares ahead as Thetis (risen "like a dawn mist from the sea," in Homer's poem) fondles his beard.
Paris is awash in big exhibitions. A survey of art from Los Angeles at the Pompidou Center has inspired several nearby galleries to organize shows of figures like Mike Kelley and John Baldessari. The Douanier Rousseau is feted at the Grand Palais. The longest lines in town are for two other French icons, Bonnard and Ingres. Bonnard's sunny pictures fill the whitewashed rooms of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville with the light and groggy air of high summer in the south of France.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the prince of darkness, is installed in the basement of the Louvre, his supernatural skill and imperious authority, as usual, inducing in a viewer the slightly uneasy sense of not quite being up to the work. At the same time his art is so curiously touching. Beneath the surface, suffocatingly perfect, as Baudelaire said, is pathos.
You find it in his drawings of his first wife, Madeleine Chapelle. Nine of the 10 he did are here. I nearly wept. A young milliner, Madeleine arrived in 1813 in Rome, where Ingres was living after his Prix de Rome, and they married a few months later. The marriage lasted 36 years. He was said to be so inconsolable when she died that his friends thought he wouldn't survive. (Then he remarried, very happily, three years later.) In the early drawings, from 1814, Madeleine smiles slightly; her face is broad, smooth and open. It's all in the eyes, Ingres used to say about portraiture. Hers are warm, beckoning pools.
By 1830, she bears the weight of time and experience. A decade further on and she's mature, dignified and still beautiful, her brow heavy, mouth thin, the expression steady and loving. With Ingres, the most clinical of artists, these slight but precise differences spoke volumes.
Ingres always improved on nature. He called himself a realist. But the real world was never as perfect as he wished. He hated anything ugly to the point that when he passed a beggar with sores, his wife would toss her shawl over his head to shield him from the sight.
"This rare man, so interesting in the sincerity of his despotism," the mid-19th-century critic Théophile Silvestre wrote, "could not live under the hypothesis of a rival." Ingres is even said to have joined the funeral cortege of his enemy, Baron Vivant Denon — "my anti-moi," Ingres called him — following behind Denon's coffin, then peering into the grave. "Good," he said. "And there he'll stay."
The Louvre show is badly hung, crowded and claustrophobic. (What is it about French exhibition designers?) But it's historic anyway, the first complete Ingres retrospective in nearly 40 years. France skipped the Ingres show that was at the Metropolitan Museum several years ago, which focused just on his portraits, in whose shadow the modern portrait tradition, from Degas through Warhol to Chuck Close, has evolved. What the appetite is for his other work, the historical and religious scenes — contraptions like "Jupiter and Thetis," which Ingres regarded as his true legacy — is the question posed by a full-dress survey.
The answer, even for those who love and revere Ingres, is frankly uncomfortable. Done with every bit as much conviction and aplomb as the portraits or the great nudes, his troubadour paintings — small, fussy pictures with subjects drawn from medieval and Renaissance history — look ridiculous today: they're stagy costume dramas, disproportionately refined, like episodes from "Upstairs, Downstairs" written by Nabokov.
The religious works, so arch in their Gothicism, turn Jesus into a marble stiff, hands raised, eyeballs rolled up in his head. Mary, slavishly copied from Raphael, becomes a kind of stone odalisque, cold and bizarrely sensual, conveying not religious conviction but the odd affectation of it. It's art above all about the artist's sleight of hand, from the era of Barnum, who became a star in France at the same time.
"Jupiter and Thetis" at least has kinky sex going for it. But huge machines like "The Martyrdom of St. Symphorian" or "Jesus Among the Doctors" are dull burlesque: crammed with empty gestures, exaggerated musculature and confusing arrangements of figures. It's exactly what critics savaged Ingres for in his day. He was never good at portraying action or comfortable with painting groups of people unless all of them were isolated — as, in a sense, he was — in their own psychic worlds.
But he was hardly the only Romantic painter (only the most gifted and intelligent) who stumbled over the sorts of historical and religious charades regarded as the goal of a serious French artist in the early 19th century. An age dreaming of Ossian and Shakespeare and medieval chroniclers, as the historian Francis Haskell once put it, produced excellent portraiture, small-scale nudes and sketches from direct observation, but with the qualified exception of Delacroix, "so little persuasive fantasy."
Fantasy had, in a sense, run its course. Nobody knew it. Even a figure like Ingres, Jacques-Louis David's star pupil, couldn't outwit the obdurate fact of an exhausted past. There is a lesson in this, of course, including for our time: that what the art world prizes and aspires to at a given moment in retrospect can look clearly spent, while something else, undervalued and on the periphery, turns out to be the actual future.
The future then was the art of real life. Ingres's portraits and nudes speak to modern tastes because they also have an element of abstraction, from which derives their almost narcotic strangeness. It's there in the early portrait of Caroline Rivière with her huge head and minuscule torso and arms so long that, straightened out, they would hang to her knees. It's in "Roger Saving Angelica," Ingres's fairy tale of archaic bondage, with its handcuffed nude straining to glance backward over her head at the hero who, ignoring her in the same way Jupiter does Thetis, blankly skewers the dragon with his lance.
It's in all those sphinxlike odalisques, sinuous caricatures of naked women who somehow come across as both chaste and deeply sordid — not to mention in the portrait drawings, whose casual virtuosity is almost perverse and fetishistic.
In that respect, Ingres had no rival, hypothetical or otherwise. One leaves this exhibition amid a bevy of languorous nudes in the last gallery, and also with the distinct memory of drawings like that of the violinist Pierre Baillot, tousle-haired and true to life, and of the painting of the level-eyed Madame de Senonnes, her back to a mirror, the better to see her bare neck.
And then there's the newspaperman Louis-François Bertin, the greatest portrait of them all, spare to the degree that the opulent Madame de Senonnes is the reverse. The picture leaps across a gulf of time. Hands likes claws clamped to his knees, Bertin emerges as if from a sepia photograph out of a shallow nowhere space, the embodiment of a new bourgeois authority. He strains against his waistcoat, a bulky man upright in his curved mahogany chair, firmly returning our gaze.
Looking at us, and into the future.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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