Gleaners, Nuns and Goosegirls

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Brooklyn, a survey of the resurrected French realists , thou shall die," the metaphysical poet John Donne once ex claimed in a transport of religious feeling, and one proof that he was right lies in the history of taste. In recent years, artists' reputations once thought to be buried for ever have been summoned to their resurrection by art-historical revisionism and the demands of the art market. Brandish ing their wormy palettes, these venerable shades mock the belief in linear progress that was once a byword of modernism. If anyone in 1960 had dared suggest that dozens of moldering eminences from the salons and academies of preimpressionist France, forgotten men like Jean-Pierre Alexandre Antigna, Frangois Bonvin, Joseph Bail or Alphonse Legros, would some day be in the museums again and become the subject of excited scholarly debate, he would have been thought not merely perverse but plain mad.

Their work, after all, was precisely what the founders of modern art -- Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Matisse " -- had set themselves against: | pompier realism, with its gleaners, nuns and goosegirls, its moralizing illusionism, heavy sentiment and lentil-soup colors. It was "photo graphic" -- a single word, damnation enough. But in 1 98 1 taste in such matters has not merely shifted, it has come full circle. The exhibition now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830-1900," would not even have been attempted by an American museum 15 years ago; the subject was too grossly out of sync with opinion. It was mandatory, for instance, to see an artist like Manet--with his dandyism and blague, his risky spontaneity and breadth of touch--as a father of later modernist painting. The fact that he also had deep affinities with "retrograde" realists of his own time, and was a 19th century rather than a "proto-20th century" artist, was sometimes played down.

A few of the 73 artists in the show, like Manet himself, or Gustave Courbet or Jean Frangois Millet, have secure reputations as masters. Almost all the rest, whose paintings have been exhumed and whose biographies have been researched with indefatigable diligence by the show's curator, Art Historian Gabriel P. Weisberg of the Cleveland Museum of Art (where the show originated last November), are minor figures. But that is not the show's point. Rather, what Weisberg and his colleagues have tried to do is re-complicate our view of the 19th century and fill in some of the details of its cultural background. In this they have succeeded very well, though at tiresome length. The pleasures of social discovery and iconographic recognition lie thick on the ground here, but they do not make up for the aesthetic tedium of most of the work on view.

Realism, from its outset, was a didactic art, created in the still extant belief that painting was one of the prime channels of social discourse.

"Neither a style nor a school," Weisberg sums it up, "it was a way of perceiving the ordinary and the commonplace that elevated it to a position of importance."

What raised the banal to art was, among other things, social commitment. Few of the realist painters were actually the children of workers, but many of them responded to an inescapable subject matter: the making of the French working class, from city coal heaver to country peasant, in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1870.

Art for man: this, wrote the--I radical critic Theophile Thore, "should be one of the primary democratic goals of young artists: Man does not exist in the arts of the past, in the arts of yesterday; and he still has to be invented." By this, Thore (like the artists he spoke for) meant man as political creature, man seen in his manifest social relations--not the decorative peasants of Boucher or the squalid, undifferentiated social lump the French bourgeois imagined the proletariat to be. The task of realism was therefore to record, in Weisberg's phrase, "human needs and social symptoms" --contemporary life, arts, tensions, suffering and all.

Sometimes the impact of the canvases is blunted by time or convention, as are some of the passages in Dickens that made our great-grandparents weep. A painting like Antigna's The Fire, 1850, looks stilted to us now, with its Raphaelesque pyramidal composition, its marmoreal smoothness, its "classicizing" of disaster. Yet to endow the sight of a wretched working family about to be burned for a landlord's greed with the scale and treatment of official history painting (it is about nine feet square) was in itself a political statement and, to its audience 130 years ago, a very moving one.

There were, of course, many degrees of intensity under the wide shadow of realism. Painters of rural life, like Jules Breton, idealized rather more than their urban counterparts. There was a lengthy tradition of peasant decor in French art, and artists tended to see the country as a happy escape from the grinding realities of the city--the great exception being Millet, with his unfaltering sense of the earth and its rigors, and the stupors it enforced on those who worked it. One may doubt whether the women's work of gleaning after harvest was normally as dignified and arcadian as Breton suggested in The Gleaners, 1854.

The conspectus of styles, manners and approaches in the show is somewhat muffled by the lack of key paintings by fundamental masters of realism like Courbet or Honore Daumier. Moreover, there is no way of drawing a hard-and-fast line between the realist enterprise and that of the impressionists. Although artists like Degas and Manet are represented, and although there are some exquisite paintings by figures on the edge of the impressionist group--like Henri Fantin-Latour, whose portrait of his two sisters embroidering and reading is one of the most affecting icons of intimacy in all 19th century art--one wishes the connections between the two had been made somewhat more explicit, even at the risk of covering familiar ground again.

Nevertheless, this show is a real feat of scholarship, and nobody can come out of it without some sharply revised opinions on both the origins of modern art and the nature of 19th century French painting as a whole. Afterward, however, one should go and look at some Monets --to rinse the eyes. --By Robert Hughes

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