Constable's realism, Part 1 of 2
John Haber
it is. We've even seen that it's not so much set apart from
abstraction or killed off by photography as given life along with
abstraction from a creative confrontation with photographs. It's
perhaps no accident that realism is often thought of as a
ninetenth-century concept, an arts movement born with Courbet, rather
than an eternal truth in painting.
Of course, the concept of mirroring nature is much older. The fable
of birds pecking at a master's drawing kept resurfacing over and over,
as did play with represented mirrors. However, this was seen as a
tool to other ends: art elevated something else entirely to the
status of the highest genre, a representation of something one can
never see -- from God (religioius painting) to an ideal beyond nature
(say, the story of Giotto showing his greatness just by drawing a
circle) to history painting.
For the first and last time, eighteenth-century doctrine codified the
idea of art as a mirror of nature. It's interesting to see how
Romanticism modified that doctrine, so that Realism and Modernism
together could arise as inheritors and opponents of Romanticism.
The Frick Collection offers a superb occasion for this, bringing
together the museum's own painting of Salisbury Cathedral with John
Constable's final, full-size oil sketch from the Met. It's part of
the collection's splendid recent innovations, a model for how a museum
might be run.
The permanent collection, the best collection of old masters in New
York, has been rehung in recent years. In place of adding placards to
every work as at the Met, it makes handheld audio available to every
visitor entirely free of charge, in five languages. Unlike others
I've seen, these machines aren't guided tours, but rather
random-access audio keyed by number to the works. The result is to
help visitors while maintaining the integrity of the collection and
the mansion. People actually look at the work, instead blocking
access to it while clustering in front of nauseating placards.
The collection has also managed to get a lot of mileage out of limited
resources by small, creative exhibitions. These include drawing
shows, with the Frick taking over much of the role in the city's
cultural life that the Morgan Library used to play. Today a show
opens of 35 drawings by Watteau, plus another 30 from a dozen other
Rococo artists. It should be a good chance to see what Watteau's
breakthrough and influence meant. And there are the smaller shows
that simply share a few works with nearby museums. This past spring
were the two surviving parts of Manet's destroyed Bullfight; coming
this winter is a concentration of all the Velasquez's in New York
City. It should do honor to the man's anniversary, particularly since
the works in the Hispanic Society are rarely seen and there look dark
and dinger even when one does bother to find them. The result overall
is that a museum I used to love as my private enclave is now crowded
on weekends. I guess not every change is unambiguously for the
better.
And now is the pair of Constables. A full-size oil sketch? Really?
What is that doing here? Surely this is the generation that changed
the whole process of painting, from the gradual refinement of a sketch
over time to a series of immediate impressions, as in Turner's rooms
at the Tate. Just how did the painter's whole clice of time change,
not to mention a relationship to nature?
The answer lies in what changed in Constable's pair. I want to look
at how, paradoxically, the changes looks both backward to the old
academic assumptions and ahead to the full-blown Romanticism. In each
conception, why wasn't the previous version good enough to stand on
its own?
Part 2 to come....
John