Darkness Visible: “Noir” at the Getty
“Vast Pasture with a Distant Town” (1850s-1860s), by Maxime Lalanne. Los Angeles private collection.
Noir: The Romance of Black in 19th Century French Drawings and Prints
In the middle of the 19th century things got dark, although not necessarily bleak. Charcoal, fabricated black chalk, and conte crayon, among other drawing materials, became readily available, and artists ventured forth to explore their possibilities. Also, as Getty Senior Curator of Drawings Lee Hendrix writes in the superb catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, “during the 1870s and 1880s (Henri) Fantin-Latour would become a major force in fostering a lithographic revival and reestablishing the preeminence of the painter-lithographer.”
Two more things, before we move on or, rather briefly, move back: Charcoal and pastel are floating materials (you can blow them away like dandelions), so what made them more viable was the discovery of a unobtrusive fixative. And also, what was considered an acceptable or at least allowable subject matter encouraged more diversity and experimentation.
“They Spruce Themselves Up” (1799), by Francisco de Goya. Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, California.
Despite this exhibition’s focus on French artists of the latter 19th century, largely 1850 to 1900, the man at the center of the prelude is none other than the Spaniard Francisco Goya, who’d died in 1828, although his etchings from such series as “Los Proverbios” and “Los Caprichos” aren’t sitting still even today. They’re that powerful, and they inspired many of the artists in “Noir.”
Sometimes there’s just one image that can get the ball rolling, and for this show it was Maxime Lalanne’s “Castle Overlooking a River,” which the Getty acquired in 1999. It caught the attention of Lee Hendrix a couple of years back and she mulled over it, just as it had caught my own attention when reproduced in the exquisite Capturing Nature’s Beauty: Three Centuries of French Landscape, a little gem of a book by Édouard Kopp.
“Madame Seurat, the Artist’s Mother” (about 1882-1883), by Georges Seurat. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
While most of the work on view–which numbers just over 70 pieces–comes from the Getty’s own collection, outside lenders from other institutions in California make up a considerable portion of the show. They include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Norton Simon Museum, the Pomona College Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, as well as several private collectors.
The artists themselves include the well known (Delacroix, Géricault, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Redon, Seurat), the moderately well known (Daumier, Fantin-Latour, Bresdin), and the largely forgotten (Lebourg, Bonvin, Milcendeau, Bracquemond). Forgive me if I’ve dropped your favorite/least favorite artist in the wrong category. Two artists that I myself would have liked to have seen included are Eugène Carrière and Gustave Moreau (although we do get one ink-and-watercolor by Victor Hugo).
“Head of a Sleeping Bacchante” (1847), by Gustave Courbet. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Visually, the show is downright impressive, and the gallery walls are deliciously dark: the deepest forest green in one, a brownish-purple for another, a violet running headlong into black for a third. Perhaps I have these all wrong, but the crepuscular shades nicely complement the artwork, especially a piece like Millet’s “The Cat at the Window,” to give one example.
The catalogue itself, edited by Lee Hendrix, is similarly stunning, and the printing is superb. The essays are readable and there’s an illustrated glossary of materials and techniques at the end, which has in mind our need for clarity in understanding the nuances between various tools, paper, and stylistic approaches to both.
“The Cat at the Window” (about 1857-1858), by Jean-François Millet. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
However, the catalogue is primarily about the materials and the techniques than it is about any of the artists. The most comprehensive essay in the book is also the last one, written by Timothy David Mayhew, and titled “Dessin au fusain: Nineteenth-Century French Charcoal Drawing Materials and Techniques.” Fusain is the French word for charcoal, and fusainistes are charcoal draftsmen. Anyway, the essay is thoughtfully composed, but it descends into such detail that the layman may become delirious: “Badger hair is thicker and stronger than sable hair but less stiff than hog bristle.” Okay, I’m thinking, but what am I going to do with this information, and aren’t those 173 footnotes a little excessive?
Throughout, there’s no dearth of factual information. Of Odilon Redon (1840-1916), Lee Hendrix writes: “Redon created charcoal drawings, which he called his noirs, of such material power and richness, and with such compelling oneiric subject matter, that they came to define the essence of black to an extent that remains unequaled.”
That sentence tells us a lot, but it doesn’t tell us much about Redon himself, or what drove him to create his unusual lithographs. My thinking is that the images in the book (and perhaps in the show) lack a dark, seductive context.
Werner Herzog, who routinely doctors his documentaries, once said: “Through invention, through imagination, through fabrication, I become more truthful than the little bureaucrats.” There is, he has stated, the poet’s truth and the accountant’s truth. And “Noir” actually could have used a little more of the former.
“Apparition” (about 1880-1890), by Odilon Redon. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
For example, in J.K. Huysmans’s Against the Grain (A Rebours), first published in 1884, Huysmans also writes about Redon, but he gives his prose a little kick. He describes several of Redon’s pictures on the walls of the flat owned by his protagonist, Duc Jean des Esseintes. “Then there were crayons that went further yet in the horrors of a nightmare dream,” the author says, before moving in for the kill:
“Sometimes even the subjects seemed to be borrowed from the dreams of science, to go back to prehistoric times; a monstrous flora spread over the rocks; everywhere were erratic blocks, glacial mud streams, and amongst them human beings whose ape-like type, –the heavy jaws, the projecting arches of the brows, the receding forehead, the flattened top of the skull, recalled the ancestral head, the head of the earliest quaternary period, when man was still a fruit-eater and speechless, a contemporary of the mammoth, the woolly-haired rhinoceros and the giant bear. These drawings passed all bounds, transgressing in a thousand ways the established laws of pictorial art, utterly fantastic and revolutionary, the work of a mad and morbid genius!”
“The Good Samaritan (1861), by Rodolphe Bresdin. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Anna Bing Arnold.
It’s a bit florid and over-the-top, but it’s also inspired writing, and “Noir,” even under the auspices of the Getty, could have used a little more of that. After all, we should never shine too much light on such dark works, unless it’s to enhance their shadowy and nocturnal mysteries.
Noir: The Romance of Black in Nineteenth Century French Drawings and Prints is on view through May 15 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in the Getty Center at 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Hours, Tuesday through Friday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Free; parking $15 per car. For information about the show and events related to it, call (310) 440-7300 or go to getty.edu. ER