The Club Med of the Humanists

By ROBERT HUGHES

American museums have so conditioned their public to expect sweeping historical surveys and one-person retrospectives that one forgets how uncommon it is to bump into an exhibition that sets out more modestly to look at ideas about culture. Just such a show is The Pastoral Landscape: The Legacy of Venice and the Modern Vision, organized by the Phillips Collection in Washington and set forth in two parts, one at the Phillips and the other at the National Gallery.

The exhibition is fascinating, but a blockbuster it is not. The pictorial tradition it examines -- broadly, the image of landscape as Arcadia, from Giorgione down the centuries to Bonnard, Matisse and their later modern heirs -- contains some of the most poignant, influential and exquisitely developed paintings in the history of art. Few of them, in these days of terminally fragile objects and impossible insurance costs, could or should be allowed to travel. An exhibition that dealt with this theme at full stretch would have to include Giorgione's Tempest and his (or Titian's) Concert Champetre, Botticelli's Primavera, Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods, plus any amount of Rubenses, Poussins, Annibale Carraccis, Claudes, Watteaus, Turners and Matisses, not to mention Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe and Seurat's Grande Jatte.

That show has never taken place and never will. This one is, so to speak, its Platonic shadow. In the Renaissance-to-rococo section installed at the National Gallery, the spread and mutation of the pastoral after 1500 is shown by reflection, in prints, copies, preliminary drawings and the work of school artists. With a few exceptions, not until we get into modern times (at the Phillips) do we see the stream of pastoral imagery embodied in works that give it the fullest aesthetic definition.

The Phillips is the Frick of Washington, and Duncan Phillips, its founder, had a sensibility light-years removed from the disgusting scrimmage of raw capital that the art market has now become. He was a scholarly aesthete, and one of his firm beliefs (about which he published a book in 1937) was that the Venetian cinquecento was one of the essential sources of modern art: from its prototypes eventually came the measured sense of "luxury, calm and pleasure" that was one of the marks of the School of Paris. The Pastoral Landscape is, among other things, an homage to this idea, and its excellent catalog essays by Robert Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing and David Rosand all bear the theme in mind. Gowing, for instance, believes "the whole pastoral tradition from Bellini to ((Milton)) Avery is simultaneously active in the current understanding of painting."

The pastoral mode is a dream of escape. It rises, in literature, with a resentment of big-city life -- in the Alexandrian period, around 250 B.C.; two centuries later, with Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, it is in full spate; and from then on, Latin literature pullulates with rustic shepherds, flutes, nymphs and country retreats. When the classics were revived by Renaissance scholars (no strangers to urban anxiety themselves), the fantasy of the locus amoenus, the sylvan wilderness as "delightful place," moved to the forefront of the Western imagination. There it still reigns, vastly complicated and mutated by real necessity, in the form of the environmental movement.

Arcadia was the humanist's Club Med. In it, nothing happens. Shepherds and nymphs, young soldiers and scholars, madonnas, saints and animals loll about in a state of pure being, with no future tense. Arcadia has ruins, sometimes quite grand ones -- as in Claude Lorrain's classical revisions of the pastoral landscape, here represented by the Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing, 1641 -- but Roman architecture does not include a stern call to Roman virtue and gravity. Arcadia's weather is always equable, and its views intimate and mellow. Above all, its location is not too far out of town; Giorgione, Titian, Rubens and other pastoralists never fail to include the reassuring sight of a martello tower or a farmhouse in the middle distance.

For most Europeans in the Middle Ages, what lay beyond the city wall had been fairly odious; its image was not Arcadia but Dante's dark wood, a labyrinth of fear and self-loss, full of bears, wolves and demons. The conditions of medieval labor did not, to put it mildly, foster belief in happy flute-playing rustics. The rediscovery of Vergil and Theocritus changed that. First in poetry and then in painting, the glimmering, closed Theocritean landscape where gods and shepherds pursue nymphs and shepherdesses amid the boskage was reconstructed. You know, looking at Dosso Dossi's The Three Ages of Man, about 1520-25, that its vision of harmonies between childhood, vigorous youth and sagacious age in the midst of a deliciously mellow nature is a fiction, but it has still not lost its power to console.

Artists, often quite dissimilar ones, share common sources. The themes of pastoral delight, installed in Venetian art by Giorgione (represented here with one rare, very rubbed drawing) and given monumental form by Titian, spread south and north through the influence of the Giorgionesque engravers Giulio and Domenico Campagnola. Watteau copies one Campagnola landscape; Rubens takes a motif from another, Rembrandt from a third. These hard, wiry- lined little engravings, with their slightly metallic nudes and sudden dark explosions of vegetation, are to the circulation of ideas about landscape what Marcantonio Raimondi's copies after Raphael are to the human figure: veritable talismans of influence.

$ It was often observed -- first about Giorgione, and so on through to the 18th century -- that the pastoral mode was harder to decipher than religious or historical painting. There is not much narrative precision in Watteau's fetes galantes: these little societies of the elect, privileged folk in their shining taffetas are not exactly allegories; they are elaborations of mood, in which every pleat of fabric on a woman's turned back seems to carry its aura of psychological subtlety. And in Giorgione's Tempest, to this day no one really knows what the nude woman, young soldier and lightning flash are doing there.

But this was exactly what gave pastoral its modern quality. Modernism resisted clear narrative. It wanted to evoke mood and sensation. And in its early years at least, it was drawn to the discreet presence, strung along the shores of the Mediterranean, of an elegiac classical past. The figures in Matisse's fauve landscapes at St.-Tropez -- amply represented in this show -- are Arcadians with spots. The pale recumbent nude among the columnar tree trunks in his Nymph in the Forest, 1935-42 or '43, harks directly back to Titian. The flute player in Henri Rousseau's The Happy Quartet, 1902, whose music is joined by the howling of a giant white poodle, is a reprise of innumerable earlier pastorals. Gauguin was partly a reprise of Watteau, each in his own way imagining fugitive pleasure on a distant island, Cythera equaling Tahiti.

It may be that the pastoral mode is on its last legs today, weakened by irony and excess self-consciousness; although a vivid little tablet of color by Howard Hodgkin, In the Public Garden, Naples, 1981-82, argues that it can still be used without a false note. But this show leaves no doubt about how much it mattered to earlier generations of artists or how enduringly grounded in man's desire for consolation it proved to be.