Polite Company

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The New York Sun

The 18th-century French genre of landscape painting known as the fête galante, or “gathering of polite company,” depicts a mix of performance, music, dancing, extravagant costume, and decorous flirtation among men and women in the idyllic French countryside. Winged putti, comedians, and actors often pepper the scenes, and the tiny refined figures are usually dwarfed by the landscape. The settings are charged with romance, eroticism, theatricality, and ambiguity, but it is the silvery silken dress of the figures that electrifies the scenes, as if each character were a bolt of lightning barely contained in fancy dress.

The fête galante, which was inspired by Rubens and Giorgione but invented by Watteau, was a staple of Fragonard, who is the main course of the focused though sumptuous exhibition of approximately 40 drawings, “Fragonard and the French Tradition.” Curated by Jennifer Tonkovich, the show, which includes a couple of Fragonard’s beautiful fête galantes, opens tomorrow at the Morgan Library and Museum, and is drawn mostly from the Morgan’s permanent collection.

New Yorkers are never starved for Fragonard. The artist’s spectacular cycle of four large paintings — “The Progress of Love” (1771–73), or “The Fragonard Room” — is a main attraction at the Frick Collection, and one of the masterpieces of the Rococo. It is probably the pinnacle of Fragonard’s career, though I am partial to the straightforwardness of “The Swing” (1767), a painting in London’s Wallace Collection.Typical of Fragonard’s frivolity and eroticism, it depicts a glowing pink debutante in a long, frilly dress on a rope swing and rising just above her suitor, who sits below her on the ground, star struck.

I would recommend that you go to the Frick and see “The Progress of Love” either before or after you visit the Morgan’s show. It will put the artist’s drawings in a larger context. Fragonard’s energetic handling of materials gave a fever-pitch charge to his images on both paper and canvas. Many of the pictures at the Morgan, like Rubens’s oil sketches, move fluidly between drawing and painting. They also show the range not only of Fragonard’s hand but of the messy transitional period of late 18th-century French art, which did not, as history books often suggest, move like clockwork from Rococo to Neoclassicism and Romanticism.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was born in Grasse in southeast France, and as a child moved to Paris. He studied briefly, and unhappily, with Chardin and then with Boucher and Carle van Loo. He also studied at the Rome Academy and was encouraged by its director Charles-Joseph Natoire to go out into the landscape and draw directly from nature, which he did with artists such as Hubert Robert. Considered the last great painter of the Rococo, Fragonard, as this show brings to light, was influenced by Watteau, Boucher, Tiepolo, Rubens, Ruisdael, and Rembrandt, but he remained a talented individualist who was constantly inventing new ways to make pictures and to deal with changing tastes.

The show, putting Fragonard in context with his mentors, begins with good works by Boucher, van Loo, and Natoire. Throughout the small show there are a range of other works, some rather bland but others strikingly good or spectacular by Robert, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, among others. What the drawings tend to do is to sandwich Fragonard and to give us a sense of what was happening around him.

Prud’hon’s “Cupid Laughs at the Tears He Causes” (1793), a black-and-white chalk drawing on blue paper, is a neoclassical theme fueled by romantic longing. A twisted Cupid leans on his bow, grinning at a sullen woman who droops as if melting. The setting includes a balustrade whose balusters are winged putti and entwined lovers. The scene is both sentimental and melancholic, and it bridges the Rococo with both Neoclassicism and Romanticism. This is countered in the exhibition by David’s “Study for the Execution of the Sons of Brutus” (c. 1789), in which some of the figures look as if they had walked straight off of a Greek vase.

Fragonard, also changing with the times, was active on many fronts. He could be light, fiercely impassioned, or classically entrenched. He could be tight and loose; broad and intricate. His trees, which often stand in for figures, twinkle and quiver, sway demurely, or erupt. His portraits of women recall Watteau at times, Goya or Ingres at others. In the “Six Illustrations to Orlando Furio (The Madness of Orlando)” (1780s), rolling figures, clouds, sky, land, and sea become a palpable bridge between Rubens, Delacroix, and Redon. The tightly yet delicately rendered gouache “Interior of a Park: The Gardens of the Villa d’Este,” one of only two extant gouaches by Fragonard, is dreamy and alive, from the foreground figures to the distant, airy shore across the lake.

One of the best works on view is a fête galante or a study for one, by Fragonard. “Landscape With Flocks and Trees,” in which tiny figures — lovers, a herdsman and grazing livestock, a woman leaning on a fence — are spread across a field, is Dutch in feel. The landscape, worthy in places of Rembrandt and Ruisdael, is rich and brown, airy and brooding, soft and dense. The drawing’s erotic charge is submerged within the landscape, to become the understated force and light of the picture.

More typical of Fragonard, though, is “The Sudden Gust of Wind” (c. 1761–65), a light and erotic drawing in pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk. In it, a woman is bent over a horse and her dress, unfurled by the wind, has been lifted, exposing her backside. Everything, even the sheep and trees, spins as if to catch a glimpse of her exposure.

Fragonard can be elegant, serious, and tender. He can take us to dizzying heights; but often his works, charged with erotic playfulness, seem to err on the side of mistaking erotic peaks for those of spiritual. Carried by the heights of his pictures, we are without grounding. This drawback, I imagine, is also part of his undeniable charm. Fragonard was the last of a breed. And he still rules his own cloud.

Until January 7 (225 Madison Avenue, between 36th and 37th streets, 212-685-0008).


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