Word: chardin
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...show of 99 works by the French artist Jean-Simeon Chardin, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, falls just 21 years after the last Chardin retrospective in America--which took place at the Cleveland Museum of Art and didn't reach Manhattan. Does the new show add much to our knowledge of Chardin? In a sense no, because not many fresh facts about him have surfaced in the past two decades. But in the sense that really matters, yes, and yes again. Any extended contact with Chardin is invigorating and marvelous...
...show's otherwise excellent catalog frets a bit. Why, it wonders, should there be another Chardin show so close on the heels of the first? Well, the answer is that in human life--if not in that of a museum or a reputation--20 years is a long time. A generation of art lovers (maybe two) has come into being since 1979. All those interested kids who don't know Chardin, who have never seen him at full stretch! And, it might have added, what about the rest of us, for whom 20 years is far too long between full...
...question, Chardin was one of the greatest artists who ever picked up a brush--and all the greater for painting without the attributes of greatness. Eighteenth century France was a fine incubator for pictorial grandeur, as in the history pieces of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Its sexual rhetoric--think of Boucher's pink and frothy shepherdesses--was peerless. Since the reign of Louis XIV, whose minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had striven to connect the visual arts to the very essence of French gloire, every kind of official discourse had flourished in French painting and sculpture, as it did in the arts...
...Chardin became that man. There was nothing extraordinary about his career except the beauty of the works it produced. His field of social vision was narrow. But by painting what he knew, neither more nor less, he became the standard-bearer of visual truth to a generation of French intellectuals, the Encyclopedists, led by the philosopher Denis Diderot. To them, Chardin's refusal of the highfalutin theme seemed exemplary. He showed that a jar of apricots on a table could be just as important and freighted with meaning as a battle scene in an epic of Alexander, the impregnation...
...pleasure. Thus, Phillips had a fascinated respect for Picasso's anxiety but no great paintings by him, whereas Braque was wholly another matter. Braque's lucid and calm balance drew the American like a magnet, as a demonstration of the unbroken tradition of classical painting that ran forward from Chardin--tradition being, in Phillips' words, "the heritage of qualities which deserve not only to endure but to develop...