Escaping the throne, finding the guillotine
Mark Archer
PAINTING AND SCULPTURE IN FRANCE 1700-1789 by Michael Levey Yale University Press, £44, pp. 318 Ayone who has read Sir Michael Levey's earlier books or who saw the vale- dictory choice of paintings he made upon his retirement as Director of the National Gallery, will recognise the deep humanity which informs his writing about art, closer, perhaps, to the spirit of his Oxford tutori-
als in English with Nevill Coghill during the 1940s than to the dry academicism more prevalent today.
This latest work is a tour-de-force of artis- tic revisionism, rescuing 18th-century French painting and sculpture from the twin criticisms of deadweight neo-classi- cism and lightweight frivolity which have long encumbered it. The final decades of the ancien regime may not have witnessed a Tiepolo, a Goya or a Gainsborough, but the period did produce individual geniuses such as Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard, as well as a host of remarkable talents, all of whom Sir Michael manages to survey without ever seeming to flag in the crisp- ness of his comment or the sharpness of his eye. He is especially good on the sculpture of the period, much of it, like the work of the Coustou or Lemoyne, neglected by writers both in and outside of France.
If there is a single theme to this ambi- tious survey, which eschews catch-all gener- alisations, it is that of an artistic world joyfully re-inhabiting its complex, inconsis- tent, earthbound humanity, in a variety of forms (landscape, portraiture, still life, genre) after decades of stifling Royal abso- Madame de Pompadour' by Francois Boucher lutism had tethered artistic expression to the service of the state. The century's guid- ing literary spirit could be said to be Diderot, in whom, Levey writes, 'there are most typically assembled the contradic- tions, frank impulses, emotions, and ratio- nality that make up the complexity of the age.'
Beginning his survey, Levey writes some of the best pages on Watteau one is likely to read, throwing new light on the drawings and seeing beneath the surface of the fete galante frippery with which Watteau's fol- lowers obscured their mentor, to the 'humanity' at the heart of `Le Pelerinage a Cythere', 'so typical of the century.' Explaining the importance Watteau gives to women 'not as slaves, coquettes or queens, but as man's equal partners', he points, in a typically telling detail, to the woman at the exact middle of the composi- tion, who, heading homeward has turned back momentarily with a smile which min- gles pleasant recollection and regret, 'and whose impulse of turning round is perhaps the subtlest thing in the picture.' The cen- tury ends with the shock-tactics of David's masterpiece, Marat Assasine, 'a shock', Levey says, 'which is the century's shock at humanity betrayed' — or with Houdon's arrogantly simple, classic terracotta mask of Napoleon, the mask of a man 'but one who is master of the world'. How unlike the human vulnerability of Lemoyne's superbly expressive portrait busts earlier in the century, in whose hands 'the fragility of terracotta ... comes to stand for the fragility of human existence'.
The work of Lemoyne and Chardin signi- fied the new mood and taste of the period, in which art was no longer public and cere- monial, but domestic and convivial, a pleas- ant object of study, an enhancement of one's joie de vivre. A resurgence of private patronage, a sense of new found peace fol- lowing the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the growth of popular art criticism beginning with Diderot's reviews, the establishment of an annual Salon which encouraged people to look at art, not as patrons or connoisseurs, but as spectators, going to view pictures as they might a fire- work display or a festive procession — all helped integrate the visual arts more com- pletely into society, into the common cur- rency of life, than anywhere else in Europe. How civilised, and yet how soon was the rational idyll of Diderot and Voltaire, Chardin and Fragonard, to founder in rev- olution and war. There are some haunting reminders here of Sir Michael's Early Renaissance which, after celebrating the achievement of quattrocento humanism, left it suspended, like one of Watteau's idylls, on the brink of its own destruction in a subsequent century marked by political upheaval and general artistic decline, notwithstanding a distinguished smattering of individual geniuses. If all ages get the artists they deserve, then eighteenth-centu- ry France was especially blessed.
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