Just Your Average Blockbuster
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Works on paper are light-sensitive, and the older they are, the less they are exhibited. Any time that they come out of hiding is cause to take notice, for you may never get a second chance to view a one-of-a-kind work of art.The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show, “Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings From the British Museum,” is a first-rate selection of nearly 100 French drawings from the 16th through the 19th centuries.This is cause not only to take notice but to celebrate.
The beautiful and varied exhibition will not incite the mania caused by the Met’s recent Leonardo or current van Gogh drawing shows, nor should it. It is not as rare or as choice an exhibition. But it is full of stunning works: Watteau, Callot, Poussin, Claude, David, Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Corot, Cezanne, Seurat, Redon. At nearly any other venue, “Clouet to Seurat” would be a blockbuster show. At 82nd and Fifth, it is business as usual.
The British Museum has nearly 50,000 drawings, including one of the most remarkable collections of French drawings (approximately 3,500) outside of France. The first work on view at the Met is Jean Clouet’s “Portrait of a Young Woman” (early 16th century), a line drawing that – with its hints of red chalk in the face – glows, flushing her cheeks with volume.
In the next gallery are works by Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Jacques Callot, including Callot’s “Sheet of Studies With a Horse, After Tempesta” (c. 1616), a full-bodied horse surrounded by calligraphic ink washes of soldiers and horses and riders; and three tiny, intricate battle scenes, awash in smoke and activated by a minutia of fight and fire.
But it is the suite of five drawings by Claude that takes center stage in the gallery. The most arresting is a small, dark, moonlit landscape, “Coast View With Perseus and the Origin of Coral” (1674). A scene from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” executed on blue paper (and a close study for a painting),it is rich with tiny, delicate details. Blue moonlight pours over and through the clouds into the sea, where it is caught in the bowl of its own reflection.The moon’s silvery, crystalline light illuminates in twinkling relief Pegasus’s white wings and haunches, the foliage and rocks of the island, and Perseus washing his hands. Reveling sea nymphs surround the sev ered head of Medusa,whose snakes lick like flames and glow like fire.
Near the Claudes are two magnificent Poussins: “Studies After the Antique: Minerva, a Gladiator Seen From Behind, and Three Sandalled Feet” (c. 1632-5), a relief-like sheet of copies in which a large big toe holds Minerva’s head to the plane; and “The Holy Family With St. Elizabeth, the Infant St. John, and Putti” (c. 1650), a study for the 1650-51 painting of the Holy Family in the Fogg.The latter work – which consists of two drawings of the Holy Family, one going vertically and the other horizontally – is on a letter written to the artist’s patron,Paul Freart de Chantelou. Its calligraphy, which darkens at the center of the letter, creates, or continues into, the vertical architectural pillar that buttresses the scene.
In the next gallery is a selection of five magical trois crayons drawings by Watteau, including studies of a standard bearer and of a landscape (c. 1714-15); studies of a man playing a guitar (c. 1716); studies of a woman raising her apron (c. 1717); and studies of five views of a woman’s head (c. 1716-17), a work in which the head, seemingly moving cinematically from one view to the next, pushes against the cream-colored ground.
Also of special interest is Francois Lemoyne’s pastel “Head of Hebe, Study for the ‘Apotheosis of Hercules'” (c. 1733-36), a tour de force of solid head and rambling flowers completed for the ceiling of the Salon d’Hercule at the Chateau de Versailles; a portrait by Ingres of “Charles Hayard and His Daughter Marguerite” (1815), a line drawing that, like so many of his works, blossoms into heads as soft as ivory; a Delacroix sunset reminiscent of Turner; and a mountainous life-size Courbet self-portrait (1852).
Walking back through the show, passing the drawings by Cezanne, including his beautifully strange mixedmedia work “The Apotheosis of Delacroix” (c. 1875-80), as well as those by Watteau, Ingres, Delacroix, and Claude, I could not help but be aware of how important drawing shows are to our understanding and appreciation of these artists, and of how desperately we are in need of more shows devoted to the works of single masters.
I understand that the British Museum has one of the finest and most extensive collections of drawings by Watteau, as well as nearly 500 drawings by Claude. Either artist would be an excellent place to begin. Please?
Until January 29 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).