Art: The Barnes Exhibit
eye WEEKLY
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eye WEEKLY September 22 1994
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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ART ART
THE BARNES EXHIBIT
French paintings from C�anne to Matisse.
Art Gallery of Ontario. 317 Dundas St. W.
Tickets reserved by date and time. To Dec. 31. $15. 872-3333.
UNVARNISHED BARNES
by
OLIVER GIRLING
It is a terrific bunch of paintings. If you want the scoop on the
corporate rah-rah, flim-flam, tittle-tattle, scuttlebutt, dish-raga,
breathless epistle on how Toronto almost didn't get the show (was
chosen, wasn't chosen, was chosen, etc. etc.), analysis of the hype,
accounts of the mahvellous lead-up parties, the sprightly after-tang
of oxblood from Conrad Black's boots, read the dailies. Meanwhile,
I'll be your garden-variety pedagogue; first slide please.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Leaving the Conservatoire, 1877. What a
show like this does is give the local audience some focal distance
from the slides, posters and coffee-table book reproductions by
which we've known this work, or other work by the same artist, all
our lives.
Renoir is an example of an artist who is seriously distorted by
reproduction; the paint in repro looks so much glossier, the effect so
much more saccharine, than it does in real life. (In fact, we've
probably never seen these particular pieces at all: limited authority
to reproduce pictures from the collection was one of the legacies of
the eccentric Dr. Albert Barnes. Usually, I'd have said that this is a
bad thing; but such is the real power of surprise of this collection
that I'm tempted to think other collections might emulate his
example, and try printing their holdings less.)
More than anyone, Renoir could paint muddily, illustrating Ruskin's
definition of painting as a manipulation of colored mud. But he
fleshes it out with light and patina -- flesh is his real obsession.
He's also a painting reporter, making extensive use of photography,
which was, for the first time in his time, readily available as an aid
to artists.
This piece has a snapshot's immediacy, but that's deceptive; it's
composed of strong verticals and simplified, blocky figures. I
connect this work to the nouvelle vauge in French cinema of the
'60s, a passionate documenting of the incidental, throwaway
moment in a social situation.
Formalists don't usually care for Renoir -- the work is resistant to
recuperation to any sort of a purist agenda. Far from it: when toward
the end of his life a patron asked the arthritic artist how he still
managed to paint, he replied, "Madam, I paint with my cock." Some
would say he never used anything else, and they might be right.
His exaggeration, adoration of the zaftig female form is blatantly
out front right through all his career, until, by the end of his life (as
can be seen in Bathers in this collection) she had become almost one
of the elements, solid as sculpture but with the agitation and force
of a gale wind. When Matisse first saw a splatter painting by
Jackson Pollock, he was reminded of Renoir.
Paul C�anne, Boy with Skull, 1896-1898. I focus on this piece
because I've never seen it before, in reproduction or in the flesh. The
subject has been psychologically evacuated -- though he possesses
eyeballs, which most of the Madame C�annes and other sitters in
this collection don't, they're unseeing: he gazes out with sculptural
fixity, a painted sculpture. The psychological interest in the piece
reverts to the interplay of forms: the traditional St. Jerome motif of
skull, lectern and books (though minus the lion beneath his feet),
becomes the student, his books, the white skull, his homely table
and chair, the stage-set drapery in the background, the blue paint on
the wall, floor and clothes opening up light and space. This is a
memento mori, reactivating an age-old pictorial theme.
C�anne was revolutionary; by making paintings that were obviously
"wrong," in which one side of the table in the still-life didn't
connect up with the other side, in which eyeballs were stone but
Mont Sainte-Victoire (his local hiking hill) was alive, he blew out
the notion of painting's objectivity (though it would take all this
century and probably longer for artists to explore the consequences).
Really such a simple idea. Mike Myers in Wayne's World gets it
exactly, standing over his girlfriend and closing one eye: "Camera
one!" he says, and the frame shifts left; "Camera two!" closing the
other eye, and the frame shifts right. Within that phase shift lies
one of the sources of 20th-century art: the unfixable, undefinable,
anxious object. C�anne showed it to us first.
Georges Seurat, Models, 1886-1888. MISSING. The anchor of the
collection, this is one of the greatest pictures ever painted; to see
it you'll have to go to the foundation itself in Merion, Pa. There is in
the AGO lobby, though, a full-scale photo repro, but it's not the
same.
Henri Rousseau, Unpleasant Surprise, 1901. Beginning with the title,
a pictorial laugh-riot.
Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine. Brilliant canvasses by both,
never seen before. (When is someone going to organize a Soutine
retrospective?)
Pablo Picasso, Composition: The Peasants, 1906. Worthy of Maurice
Utrillo's big-eyed urchins. He certainly snuck down to the basement
to grab this one to flog to "the American."
Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1906. What was he smoking? Can you
still get it?
Vincent van Gogh, Joseph-Etienne Roulin, 1886. Fantastic
pornography. Gaze at it and smile.
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