Exhibitions
Chardin (Royal Academy, till 29 May)
Out of step
Martin Gaylord
Messieurs, Messieurs, go easy,' thus Jean-Simeon Chardin, according to Diderot, once addressed those passing judg- ment on the Salon in Paris. 'Find the worst painting that's here,' he went on, 'and bear in mind that 2,000 wretches have broken their brushes between their teeth in despair of ever producing anything as good.' Paint- ing, in other words, is an extremely difficult art. Not that any of the works on view in the major Chardin exhibition now at the Royal Academy require any such allowances to be made (except perhaps because of the over- cleaning to which some have been subject- ed). But it is worth bearing in mind, while looking at his work, how Chardin empha- sised the sheer tough, cussed awkwardness of what he was trying to do. It may in fact have been because he found painting so hard that he ended up by being so good at it. He began, it seems, by attempting to be a much more run-of-the- mill kind of French 18th-century painter, a specialist in histories and suave mytholo- gies. At one point he was a follower of Watteau (an artist with whom he continued to have more in common than one might Imagine at first glance). But he couldn't do that sort of thing, he found it too difficult. Even when he had found his own proper path, he continued to find painting agonis- ingly demanding. In his catalogue essay Pierre Rosenberg, director of the Louvre, suggests that Chardin gradually gave up painting genre scenes after 1751 because he no longer had the strength to persevere with these works which caused him infinite pains.
The fluid brilliance of a Fragonard or a Boucher simply wasn't in him — which is why he ended up a more profound artist than either. Chardin's was a different type of temperament, more akin to Cezanne or Lucian Freud, the sort that wins through by endless labour and dogged persistence. It is an approach that invents nothing, that struggles to evoke the presence and truth of the subject — that is, the people and things in front of the artist's eyes.
This perhaps helps to explain why Chardin was so unlike his contemporaries. French 18th-century art tended to eroti- cism and story-telling, often both at the same time as in the many pictures which record an erotic anecdote. Chardin never tells a story, and is completely unrisque. Even his large figure pieces contain no nar- rative. The little 'Girl with Shuttlecock' holds the equipment for a game of bad- minton, but she's not just off to play, she's posing in the studio, lost in thought. 'The Child with a Top' is simply watching his toy, 'The Young Draughtsman' thinking about his drawing. There is not much of an incident in the smaller genre scenes either — 'The Diligent Mother', The Return from Market' — just a vignette of domestic tranquillity, full, as in a Vuillard, of under- stated emotion.
It has taxed recent art historians, as is analysed in an interesting essay by Colin Bailey, to explain Chardin's out-of-step- ness. But it was the anomalous Chardin who in many ways led the way to the future. It was he who introduced the theme which was to become a major element in French art until the days of Matisse: the domestic pleasures of ordinary middle-class existence. His still-lifes look forward to Cezanne and Braque, his interiors to Vuil- The Young Draughtsman, 1737, by Chardin lard and Bonnard. Technically, his beauti- fully substantial impasto with visible brush- strokes looks much more like Manet or Corot than any 18th-century French painter.
Historically, his role was to act as a bridge between the northern interior and still-life painters of the 17th century and his French successors. But in what did his individuality consist? What made him so good that it was not just 2,000 18th-century French wretches who would have broken their brushes between their teeth in despair of producing anything as good, but so would most painters from that day to this?
Virtually all his subjects — the game, the fruit and veg, the figures in interiors were paralleled in Dutch and Flemish painting of the previous century. But Chardin's results are different in feel and mood. The delicacy and grace of Watteau — his first hero — are still there, but instead of existing in a dream world, they are there in real people and real things. Perhaps those art historians who suggest that Chardin was less different his century than might appear at first glance have a point. His paintings of dead game are the least appealing segment of his work — and there are too many of them in this show, in which there is too little of everything else — but the slaughtered ducks and hares have something of the poignance of Wat- teau's 'Gilles'.
While Chardin's figure painting makes everything else produced in 18th-century France, even Watteau and David, look a little stagy, no one else painted a figure as touchingly, delicately graceful than the `Girl with Shuttlecock', nor one as monu- mental. But she is at the same time an indi- vidual person, not a figure of fantasy. As Lucian Freud has pointed out, in compari- son with Chardin's figures, Vermeer's just aren't there. In other words, those juicy lit- tle strokes of paint of Chardin's somehow morph into people — the physical pres- ence, the texture of their clothes and skin — in just the way they do into apples and copper jugs. It's the kind of effect which critics tend to describe as magic, for want of anything much else to say.
For me, Chardin's paintings of people were the revelation of this exhibition, and it is a shame there are not more of them on view. In the introduction to the catalogue Pierre Rosenberg makes a surprisingly out- spoken protest about requests for loans which were 'cruelly rejected, for reasons which are sometimes difficult to compre- hend'. Two still-lifes from the Musee Jacquemart-Andre rankled particularly, but he also registered disappointment that the National Gallery withheld the 'Young Schoolmistress'. It certainly would have done neither them nor the picture any harm to send it 300 yards from Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly (and also the 'House of Cards', which was lent to the Paris ver- sion of the show). They should have been hung with their companions. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the RA have too many pictures to fit into the Sackler Galleries as it is. By chance, I saw both the previous incarna- tions of this show, in Paris and Dusseldorf, and I am bound to record that the London version is the least successful of the three (and Diisseldorf the most). The simple problem is that the Sackler Galleries are too small to take the exhibition, which is consequently tightly hung, and has shed many pictures. But a near-modernist design, on off-white walls, with harsh bluish lighting does not help either, though it does muffle the painful contrasts between over-cleaned and unmolested paintings. (Those who doubt the damage cleaning can do, however, should compare the 'Duck Hanging by One Leg' — once, according to Diderot, one of Chardin's finest works with the wonderfully intact 'Attributes of Civilian and Military Music' nearby).
Despite all cavils, however, this exhibi- tion contains many great pictures by a great painter, and anyone interested in painting will want to see it.
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