Bordeaux Breakthrough
By BERNARD DENVIR
AT times it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that M. Malraux regards culture in the same way that Clausewitz regarded war, as an exten- sion of foreign policy. It may, of course, be mere coincidence that at the very moment when waves of tentative affection are flowing from the Elysee to the Kremlin, the art gallery of Bordeaux should be witnessing one of the most spectacular demonstrations of cultural co-operation between East and West which has occurred since the honeymoon days of the 'twenties. It consists of an exhibition of 130 masterpieces of French art-ranging from Clouet to Picasso-drawn from the Pushkin Gallery in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad. And its significance is heightened by the fact that after it closes at Bordeaux next week it will move to the Louvre. That the French should want the exhibition to stay as long as possible, and be seen by the greatest number of people does not require analysis in terms of international politics, for its aesthetic impact can only be described as fo'rmid- able-using the word with its Gallic rather than its Anglo-Saxon implications.
Nor can the element of coincidence be treated lightly, for this could be the only possible ex- planation of the strong feminist element which underpins the organisation of the exhibition. The director of the Bordeaux Gallery-who has made it into one of the most outstanding in the French provinces (one remembers the exciting Goya ex- hibition mounted there some years ago)-is Mlle Martin-Mery; the director of the Pushkin Museum is Mme Antanova; the Soviet Minister of Culture, who ultimately made the whole thing possible, is Mme Furtseva; and the admirable catalogue is compiled by Mlles Nemilova and Iserguina.
In the background, though, there is an even more impressive feminine figure. In the long love-hate liaison between East and West one of the dominant figures is the great Catherine,
whose aesthetic appetites were no less enormous than her erotic ones. Counselled by Grimm and Diderot, but acting with a passionate• extrava- gance which must have unnerved those cautious rationalists, she endowed a nation whose visual sensibilities bad till then been fed on nothing more exhilarating than the moribund remnants of Byzantine formalism, with a complete stock of art treasures. From England she bought-at one swoop-the whole of the great collection of paintings which Sir Robert Walpole had acquired as a means of making friends and winning in fluence. This was mainly of Italian works, and there is a certain irony in the fact that the sale of some of its choicer items to Mellon in the 'twenties should have helped the infant Soviet state to weather one of its more dangerous eco- nomic squalls.
From France she bought what must have been one of the greatest collections amassed by a private individual-that of the financier Crozat. And it is from this source that most of the pre- nineteenth-century paintings in the exhibition come. Five Watteaus, works by Boucher, Chardin, Pater and several other artists of great charm whose works are virtually unknown in England. For the most part they reflect that infiltration of the Flemish spirit which gave French painting of the eighteenth century its real distinction, and all show that Crozat, unlike many of his pre- decessors, was more concerned with the art of his own time than with that of the past.
But there are exceptions; iconographically, the great Le Nain Visite a la grand'mere may seem to give sanction to those preoccupations with social realism which exercise the nation -which owns it, but, stylistically, it has echoes of Vermeer in the limpidly handled light, of
Velasquez in the relation of the figures to each other and the atmosphere in which they are placed; of Caravaggio in the superbly assured handling of the dramatis personae. For those with more formal appetites, there are the Claudps, the Poussins and an Ingres. Despite the Napoleonic interlude, however-or perhaps be- cause of it-there are few works to bridge the gap, between the cultural passions of the Im- perial nymphomaniac and those of that genera- tion of cultivated bourgeois expatriates who, like Turgenev. found in Paris the spiritual home for which they craved.
It is impossible to read about the heroic age of modern art-from Impressionism to Cubism -without at some point or another coming across the name of a Russian Maecenas or im- presario-men such as Morosoff and Stchoukine -on whose collections the wealth of the Pushkin Museum largely depends.
And it is almost equally difficult to avoid regretting that the signs of their discernment should for so long have been virtually. inacces- sible to anyone living west of the Vistula. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that without a knowledge of those works by the Impressionists and their successors which are in Russian col- lections any account of the modern movement in European art can only be partial.
It is true that at Bordeaux one can only see a selection of them, but how revealing it is. Of the works of our own century-some thirty belonging to the 1900-16 period-Picasso is most heavily represented with seven; yet there are nearly fifty others in Russia. Even these seven, however, are' valuable, not only because they help in assessing his status and analysing his evolution, but even more so because they imper- ceptibly alter the relevance and meaning of those works with which we are more familiar. The Demoiselles d'Avignon, accepted as one of the pivots of modern visual sensibility, assumes a different aspect when related to 'Pushkin's Reine lsabeau of 1909, a more classic, more restrained version of that analysis of form and its subse- quent reconstruction which in the New York painting has assumed a kind of Orphic frenzy.
For those less concerned with the exegesis of modern art, these paintings from Russia present an orgy of .mere visual delight. MagnifiCent Renoirs, including the Tonnelle du Moulin de la Galette and the superb portrait of Jeanne Samay, works by Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Pissarro, and for those who favour comparisons Cdzanne's L'homme a la pipe, to set beside its progeny, Picasso's portrait of Vollard, in which analytical
cubism is purged of any of the hesitancies or mannerisms which occasionally weaken it. Nobody would suggest that this important and stimulating exhibition took place because most of those concerned with organising it were women. But it is interesting that the nearest which Britain can provide as the equivalent of Mme Furtseva is Miss Jenny Lee. Perhaps another feminine conspiracy may provide England ■%ith an exhibition of long-exiled masterpieces.
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