By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM [The Wall Street Journal] – Some of the works are so familiar we may have forgotten who painted them; others are the ones we instinctively pass over in the inevitable visual triage that accompanies our attempts to see everything in a museum. The Getty’s exhibition is all the more remarkable when we consider that here’s an artist who was working at the same time as Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Renoir and Cézanne—to name just a few of his famous fellow countrymen—yet was creating an oeuvre that appears to be less about painting and more about storytelling and illustration. But the exhibition’s 99 works provide us with a much more nuanced understanding of Gérôme in his varying roles as classicist, historian, ethnographer and even proto-cineaste. We have long understood, and perhaps dismissed, the artist’s taste for the exotic, but it’s also clear from the broad sweep of the show that there’s a consistent undercurrent of eros, irony and humor, suggesting that perhaps Gérôme had an inkling about how later generations might view his work.
Referring to the French classical tradition of Claude and Poussin, as transformed by Ingres, Gérôme’s early works, such as “The Cock Fight” (1846, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), demonstrate the amazing technical facility that is evident throughout his career; but we also see the leave-nothing-to-the-imagination sensibility that tends to make so many of the paintings feel cloying and slight.
An astute understanding of his many painter forebears also permeates the work; he is both historian and art historian. Gérôme’s apparent obsession with precise recording of events and actors, both mythical and historical, led him to study costumes, armor and architecture, even using photography, which was just coming into its own in the mid-19th century, as an aide-mémoire to assure the accuracy what was being depicted.
Continued at The Wall Street Journal
The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was among the most officially honored and financially successful French artists of the second half of the 19th century. His brilliantly painted and often provocative pictures were at the center of heated debates over the present and future of the great French painting tradition. Reproduced using brand new photomechanical processes and dispersed across Europe and America, Gérôme’s images indelibly marked the popular imagination, directly influencing spectacular forms of mass entertainment, from theater to film.
Through most of the 20th century, however, Gérôme’s critical reputation was tarnished by his alleged commercialism and his stubborn opposition to the triumphant avant-garde movements of Impressionism and Postimpressionism. The first comprehensive exhibition of his work in almost 40 years, this exhibition offers the opportunity to reconsider the variety and complexity of Gérôme’s masterful oeuvre.
The exhibition brings together works that span Gérôme’s entire career, from his early “Néo-Grec” paintings with their lighthearted take on classical antiquity, to his wide variety of historical scenes that still impress with their dramatic realism.
Continued at the J. Paul Getty Museum website | The Jean-Leon Gerome
