ARTS
Confronting a chaotic jumble
Martin Gayford on a fascinating but indigestible exhibition at the Royal Academy
Generally speaking when one goes to an exhibition one sees art winnowed and docketed. The selection of works, still more the selection of significant artists, is the result of endless ant-like activity by dealers, museum people, critics and historians over the years. Superimposed on that there is the final assessment of the exhibition cura- tor. To an extent, 1900: Art at the Cross- roads, the major new show at the Royal Academy (until 3 April), aims to reverse that process. It is, of course, the product of plenty of research and visual editing by the organis- ers, including the American art historian Robert Rosenblum, plus MaryAnne Stevens and Norman Rosenthal for the RA. But their objective, up to a point, has been to reverse all that winnowing and sift- ing, and to confront the spectator with something more like the raw, chaotic jum- ble of the current art scene — of any art scene at the moment when it is happening.
Think of 1900, in terms of art, and what — who — comes to mind? It was a point of junction between old and new, between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and Modernism (due to be born a few years into the new century). Gauguin, Pis- sarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne were still alive, but reaching the end. Picasso and Matisse were just setting out on epic careers. Monet was changing gear before embarking on his ultimate manner. Art Nouveau was all the rage. Art at the Crossroads includes all of those great names who have been so magnified over the last hundred years that they com- pletely fill the view (though at the time they might have escaped notice). But they are put back amongst a crowd of their for- gotten and half-forgotten contemporaries, from all over the place: Finland, Portugal, England and Russia. The aim was to reproduce the melee of diverse approaches and techniques which a visitor to the contemporary art displays at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 would have seen. The curators have not put together a complete facsimi- le — the original was too massive, too muddled and too monstrous, by all accounts, to inflict on paying cus- tomers at Burlington House. This is a carefully selected version of reality. The result is a fascinating exhibi- tion, but an indigestible one. Nor- mally, in a show, one is drawn by some common theme: the work of a single artist, the development of a movement. Here, the viewer is con- stantly faced with violent contrasts of technique, with juxtapositions of the very good and the possibly awful. The effect, though the hanging is enormously better, is a little like the Summer Exhibition, where a similar artistic free-for- all prevails.
In the second room, devoted to paintings of bathers, hangs Degas's 'After the Bath', to take one example, which is just the kind of thing we are used to thinking of as great art, circa 1900. Next to it is a nude by the Salon painter Charles Carolus-Duran which is just the kind of thing well brought- up modernists were taught to regard as rubbishy kitsch. In some ways, though not in the way the paint is put on, they look rather similar, the same sort of setting, same sort of pose.
In the same room Cezanne, Gauguin, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec — the good guys, as we now believe — rub shoulders with the obscure, dubious and, in the case of Paul Chabas's 'Joyous Frolics', the downright winsomely, cloyingly dreadful. This is indeed an interesting exercise repeated in such themed sections as 'The City' and 'Rural Pursuits' (in which a peas- ant girl by Pissarro meets sisters and cousins from around the world). The point Boulevard Montmartre: Foggy Morning; 189Z by Pissarro is well made that the avant-garde — the artists we now remember — shared many preoccupations with their contemporaries. It would probably seem much the same if there were a similar exhibition entitled, say, 1990: Art in a Traffic-Jam. The youthful Damien Hirst and the aged Francis Bacon would turn out to have some interests in common — morality, flesh — but very dif- ferent ways of expressing them. The differences in 1900, too, were mostly about technique, though partly about will- ingness to shock (Toulouse-Lautrec's nude looks as if she's at work in a brothel; Chabas's 'Joyous Frolics' more like a girls' school picnic that has got out of hand). The big divide is between the rough and the smooth. It is still held, I suspect, in some benighted spots, that painting is good in so far as it is neat (leading to the whiskery complaint about modernist art: 'A child of five could do it'). That was certainly a widespread opinion in 1900. But some following the Impressionists — felt that meticulous finish was a trap, not a goal.
So in this exhibition the artists who set the pace for the next century — Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne — stand out from the rest not by their dazzling skill, but by their apparent awkwardness. It is the brusque way the paint is laid on and the unortho- doxy of its colour that distinguish Matisse's `Blue Jug' of c. 1900. The subject matter is conventional.
Part of the intention of Art at the Cross- roads was to put Matisse, Cezanne and co. back in context, not to reduce their tower- ing reputations, which would be impossible. In that it is an interesting success. Another aim was to shake up art history a little, and see whether, as the curator Robert Rosen- blum puts it, there are any worthwhile artists who have fallen between the cracks. There, however, the answer seems to be, not many.
A number of the giants of the Salon sustain their reputations for extreme awfulness. In particular, William-Auguste Bouguereau looks every bit as unspeakably dire as the modernists always said he was. His `Madonna Regina Angelorum' was worth including only as a) an illus- tration of precipitous decline of religious art, b) proof of the point- lessness of skill without truth, origi- nality of ideas and so on (a child of five couldn't do this, to its credit).
It must be admitted that the opening room has the air of one of those provincial museums, stuffed with deservedly forgotten 19th-cen- tury art — though in some cases the resurrected canvases are at least funny. Jamin's 'Brermus and his Loot', for example, with a hairy barbarian contem- plating a clutch of plump, naked classical ladies is a rib-tickler. While Leon Freder- ic's 'The Stream' with its avalanche of naked children — which you face on entry — is preposterous, but grippingly weird.
But there are a few, if not actually forgot- ten at least not terribly well-known, figures who were worth resurrecting. The Italian Giovanni Boldini, a wizard of flashing brush-work comparable to Sargent, scores both with his portrait of Whistler and his view of his own studio, swirling with ghostly lines as if from multiple photographic expo- sures. Several of the Scandinavians look worth further investigation, especially Vil- helm Hammershoi, the Danish master of enigmatic interiors. Again, though not unknown, he could do with an exhibition to himself in this country.
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