A Prodigy of Nature
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Though almost unknown today, Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin was, in his quiet way, a prodigy of nature. Aside from an occasional trip to Versailles, he spent the entirety of his natural life within the confines of the city of Paris, as detailed in “Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780),” an exhibition that opens next week at the Frick Collection. Unkempt, malodorous, and toothless, Saint-Aubin would wander Paris’s streets and haunt its theaters, dance halls, and brothels, recording everything he saw in his sketchbooks. And how he drew! According to his brother’s estimation, Saint-Aubin executed more than 100,000 drawings in his career. According to his friend Greuze, one of the finest painters of the ancien régime, Saint-Aubin “had an almost priapic urge to draw.”
A sampling of his work — around 50 drawings and a number of paintings and etchings — makes up the Frick show, the first major Saint-Aubin retrospective in more than 80 years and the first collaboration between the Frick and the Musée du Louvre.
There is a cliché that crops up whenever contemporary art criticism turns its attention to pre-Modern art: the unconquerable need to assert the relevance of that art by attributing to it a spurious contemporaneity. In the case of Saint-Aubin, however, the cliché might, just once, prove justified.
Saint-Aubin lived 100 years before Baudelaire crowned Manet as “the painter of modern life.” And in the ancien régime, when the mists of traditional practice still filled the air of artists’ studios and salons, the notion of unmediated observation of the here and now, untrammeled, unperfumed, and unpommaded by convention and aristocratic fashion, would have meant little. And yet, with a few reservations, that is what Saint-Aubin gives us in his drawings.
But the case could be made that there is more than a chance similarity between the drawings of Saint-Aubin and the art of the modern age. At the dawn of industrialized society, with the emergence of the bourgeoisie, the traditional, aristocratic societies of Europe were beginning, all but imperceptibly, to display fissures. The bohemian Saint-Aubin lived out his life in one of those cracks.
True, he was not consciously a rebel. He was more than happy, when a commission arose, to turn out works that looked back fondly to the ethereal fetes galantes of Watteau, painting half a century earlier. Furthermore, Saint-Aubin had studied at the École des Beaux Arts and remained on good terms with the art establishment. Indeed, as the drawings at the Frick will show, the preponderance of his activities seem to have occurred in the salons and sales rooms of his day, where he frantically recorded, in pictorial shorthand, every painting, it seems, that he ever saw. These are especially charming in the way they jot down, in the margins of catalogues, the brutalized, schematized forms of such traditional subjects as crucifixions, mythologies, portraits, and still lifes.
And yet despite his comfort with the art establishment of his day, the life of Saint-Aubin, reclusive and gregarious by turns, recalls the demimonde existence in Greenwich Village during the 1950s more than it does the studio practice and the hierarchies of the Parisian art world. What is so unconventional about the man — and, once again, so modern — is that his artistic consequence is a function of scale. There are many pretty works that will be seen at the Frick (and afterward at the Louvre), but what is most impressive about this art is its sheer volume. In his devotion to his artistic mission, Saint-Aubin almost resembles a performance artist, the entirety of whose life adds up to far more than the sum of its individual parts.
That is also to say that the charm of these works surpasses the general level of their artistic achievement. Surely Saint-Aubin was a good draftsman and an accomplished painter when he set his mind to the task at hand. But most often that finish was not the point or purpose of his work. Rather, with little conscious art, he seems to have allowed the drawings to spill, almost unbidden, out of his pen and onto the page. Surely there are felicities of line and coloring, a tasteful wash of mauve, an evocative arabesque, or a roulade of cross-hatchings, that can enliven a page at any moment. But most of the time, the drawings of Saint-Aubin are rough-hewn embryos of works that would never be realized. Their two-point perspective is wobbly and their figures are apt to be conceived as minor storm clouds of lines frantically set down on the page, yielding little in the way of psychological penetration or telling detail.
This is because, in large measure, Saint-Aubin drew to please himself. Indeed, an analogy suggests itself between his drawing style and the prose of his contemporary, Rétif de la Bretonne, perhaps the only writer of the age as omnivorously prolific in his domain as Saint-Aubin was in drawing. In his Nuits de Paris, he indiscriminately sets down everything he has observed the night before and, most important, he does so in a pared-down style that approaches the concision of telegraphy.
These two men were enmeshed in their age and in their city and they positively reveled in both. But their art is not so much a form of communication as an act of talking to oneself. They do not really speak to us, but we can surely overhear them.