Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection

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Proving once again that they are the country’s premiere museum-without-walls, the Dahesh makes its treasures available to New Yorkers in one of the most stunning shows I have seen in years.

Housed in the Museum of Biblical Art, Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection features some 30 works from the Dahesh collection, all masterful pictures by leading 19^th Century French academicians.  The exhibition traces the renewed interest in Biblical myths following the expansion of biblical archeology and the advent of photography, which produced travel books with pictures of the Holy Land.

As co-curator Sarah Schaefer of the Dahesh (with Alia Nour) writes in her exhibition notes:  One very important way that artists modernized the representation of biblical subjects was by creating what they considered more historically “authentic” images, stimulated by popular interest in the Holy Land beginning in the late eighteenth century.  As travel and communication to the Middle East became more feasible and desirable, artists explored Egypt, Jerusalem, Hebron, and other significant sites in order to produce more “objective” representations of the Bible.  Some sought to depict biblical monuments in their contemporary form, while others saw the people of the Holy Land as living relics of a distant past.  … For those artists who were unwilling or unable to visit the Holy Land, there were countless travel accounts, prints, and eventually photographs that documented the region.  It was thus possible to create what the public considered a “true” image of the biblical past without having actually seen the sites mentioned.

The show, which opens today, is has many stunning pieces.  Oddly, most of them are not the ‘showcase’ pieces, but, rather, things that are remarkable in-and-of themselves.  More important, this exhibition demonstrates how essential the male nude was to the academic tradition, and how drawing the figure led to virtuosic, finished work. 

Very interesting is Alexandre Cabanel’s (1823-1889) Death of Moses.  But while this picture is quite remarkable, more interesting still is the drawing hung along side of it, which is a graph drawing of the finished painting, blocked out in grids for final painting on the massive canvas.  Cabanel actually changed God’s pose from the test drawing to finished painting, and it is a fascinating insight into the creative process.

Also beautiful is Joseph’s Coat Brought Back to Jacob (1841) by Jules Ambroise Francois Naudin (1817-1876), which is a masterful painting combining both the historic and neoclassic strains of art.  The figures are clearly and cleanly depicted, and the emotion telegraphed beautifully, but it is rather cold in the final analysis.

More captivating is what might be the most interesting piece in the exhibition, The Last judgment, a drawing by Paul Chenavard (1808-1895).  Chenavard was an Enlightenment Era freethinker, so his feelings for religious paintings must always be interpreted.  This massive drawing, which must be about 40x80, will happily reward hours of study.  In many ways a meditation on Michelangelo’s Judgment Day painting on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, Chenavard spins his own take on the Christian cosmos.  Christ is paramount, and, like Michelangelo’s Christ, this is a beardless, curiously human Jesus.  (There is no halo.)  In the lower corner of the picture is a crowned figure entwined with a giant serpent.  Is this Satan?  Or the Archangel Michael?  The figure is ambiguous and multi-faceted.  While speaking with co-curator Alia Nour, she told me that “Chenavard delighted in ambiguity.  Being a humanist, he drew very human figures, and it is left to the educated viewer to interpret the meanings of his cosmos.”

For this viewer, however, the most beautiful picture in this exhibition is Abel’s Offering by Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857-1942), dated 1908.  This picture alone is worth going to this stunning show.  In it, Brendekilde depicts Abel leading a long train of sheep along a sunlit landscape.  On the pyre before him is a sacrifice to God; the sheep watch as he gesticulates towards heaven and the smoke lifts the remains on a fellow lamb towards the heavens.  It is a stunning, pagan note to add to a Biblical exhibition; though created in the early days of the 20^th Century, it is a wonderfully pagan piece of art.  It cuts deep to the heart of a primal paganism, and the composition perhaps borrows something from the painters of the American West, Charles Marion Russell, in particular.

The exhibition was hung and designed with a sure hand by Dean Ebben.  Ebben restored and re-stretched and re-framed the massive Christ and the Children (1894) by Franck Kirchbach (1859-1912), which is a large-scale painting of a type seldom seen today.  It is a wonderful piece of work and a heroic installation.

Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection is the first exhibition under the auspices of the museum’s new Director, Richard P. Townsend, an accomplished art historian and museum professional.  Townsend has previously held curatorial and leadership positions in the Museum of Latin American Art and Price Tower Arts Center.  If the show is an indication of his tenure-to-come, The Museum of Biblical Art has chosen wisely and well.

We here at the Jade Sphinx have had a special relationship with the Dahesh.  Mainly, this is because we share a similar vision: that the artist is the creator of beautiful things, and that art is the celebration of beauty.  It is a position out-of-tune with Modernists and Post-Modernists, but beauty always will win out over time.  Be part of the avant garde and return to the past of Academic portraiture.

The Museum of Biblical Art is at 1865 Broadway at 61^st Street, and admission is free.  For more information, call 212.408.1500.

Joseph's Coat Brought Back to Jacob

The Narrative of Philetas by Rodolfo Amoedo

Today a painting connected with two rather mysterious people – both painter and subject.

Few people remember Rodolfo Amoedo (1857 – 1941), a Brazilian history painter born in Salvador, Bahia.  Today, many of his paintings still hang at the National Museum Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro.  He was something of a prodigy, starting in 1873 as a student of Victor Meirelles.  A short five years later he won the first prize at the Brazilian Academy, which allowed him to travel to Paris, where he lived from 1879 to 1887, studying at the École des Beaux Arts.

Amoedo was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and also worked with Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry. He was a professor and later director of the Brazilian Academy, where he taught Eliseu Visconti, among others.  When the Brazilian monarchy fell in 1889, many of the most traditional masters at the Academy were replaced by the new Republican Government with the last wave of Academic artists, Amoedo among them.  Amoedo continued to teach in the classic Academic style, but changing tastes led to replacing the old guard with masters of a more impressionist bent.  Very soon, the Academic artists were forgotten (as was the case in France and America), short-changed by the Modernist victors of Art History.

Sadly, Amoedo lived to be quite an old man, completely forgotten by the art establishment.  He left behind so little money that his widow had to ask friends to pay for his funeral.

Today’s picture, The Narrative of Philetas, was painted in 1887, a more prosperous time in Amoedo’s life.  It depicts Philetas (or Philitas) of Cos, a poet-scholar who lived during the early Hellenistic period of ancient Greece.  He was associated with Alexandria and was selected to tutor to the heir to the throne of Ptolemaic Egypt. 

Philetas was a frail man, bent and wasted by age; he is often portrayed as an academic so consumed by his studies that he literally wasted away.  As a poet and scholar, his fame continued for centuries; sadly, most of his poetry and scholarship (which included a text defining the meaning of rare literary words) has been lost to the mists of time.  He was a “poet and a scholar,” combining great learning with artistic sensibility and poetic vision.  According to legend, he was one of the driving forces behind the great library of Alexandria, where there stood a stature of him.  Neither statue nor library survive.

Your correspondent finds it poignant that a poet whose works are lost to time is here depicted by the painter who reputation has also suffered the same fate. 

One of the loveliest things about this painting is how Amoedo compares youth and old age, life and death.  The colors, from the leaves scattered about the earth to the moss-covered stones and the overall gray tones of the background, are largely somber except for the vibrant pink flesh tones of the principal figures.  Amoedo also contrasts the beautiful and supple figure of the reclining youth against that of the loosely-fleshed and gnarled old man.  (Amoedo also wisely highlights the body of Philetas with dead white, further accenting the differences between old and young.) 

Notice, too, the blossoms under the torso of the youth and the how the vibrant pink-and-white flowers behind the young people seem to lose their coloration the closer they are to Philetas.  Amoedo also poses the youths on a rock opposite from Philetas, creating a literal chasm between them.

Also striking is the face of Philetas, who is depicted with greater care and attention than that of the young couple – though the young woman is clearly drawn with grace and color, her bland and lovely brow is no match for the real “character” of the picture, the old scholar.

There is a great deal I admire in this picture, starting with how delicately Amoedo drew the old man’s hands and the courage he had in showing an old body in all of its compromised flesh.  Though neither supple nor young, Philetas overwhelms the picture with his presence – there is power in his old flesh.  Amoedo also creates a classic triangle between the reclining boy, the old man and the gray tree to trap our eye and maintain our interest as a viewer. 
 

I find the figure of the woman to be interesting – almost as if it was added as an afterthought.  The figure seems to be too bathed in white, as if Amoedo blocked out a white bit on the finished painting and put her there; also, her feet seem to be added to the stone, rather than obscured by it.  She even skews the triangular frame of boy, man and tree.  I may be wrong – but something to my eye says that she is a latter addition to the composition.

If the picture has a misstep, it would be the brownish tree in the immediate background between Philetas and the woman.  It seems to me a miscalculation on Amoedo’s part – it intrudes on the remote nature of the background, and looks as if he did not trust his own best instincts.  But it is a small flaw in an otherwise beautiful work, not just for the skill of its drawing, but its beautiful and delicate coloration, as well.

Self-Portraits by Émile Friant Part One

If art history is written by the winners, then many great masters were effectively excised from any sane chronicle of art history with the advent of Modernism.  One such talent was Émile Friant (1863-1932), a French naturalist painter born in the small town of Dieuze, about 25 miles northeast of Nancy, in eastern France.  Friant’s father was a locksmith and his mother a dressmaker.  Like many of the artists covered here, Friant was something of a prodigy.  Friant studied under Louis Theodore Devilly (1818-1886) while still a teenager; Devilly was the director of the school of drawing in Nancy and an advocate of realism. 

Friant was only 15 years old when he made his debut at the annual Salon in Nancy in 1878.  His great abilities were readily apparent; he was soon awarded a municipal scholarship for study in Paris. He entered the studio of the famous Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889), but Friant felt constricted by Cabanel’s severe Academic style and returned home.  Friant was better inspired by other Lorraine artists, including Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) and Aimé Morot (1850-1913).  He would go on to enjoy a very successful career and win many honors, including the grand prize at the Paris Salon in 1889, the gold medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor that same year.

Friant eventually became a professor of painting in 1923 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France.  He was later promoted to the position of commander in the Legion of Honor, and made a member of the Institut de France.  Friant died from the results of a fall he suffered in Paris in 1932. 

Friant’s work is interesting as he seems to straddle two distinct epochs.  Though he may have balked at Cabanel’s training, Friant could never fully embrace the movement toward Impressionism.  Like the Impressionists, Friant painted pictures of everyday life – however, he did so without the splotchy tricks most often used by Impressionists.  Art history often calls those caught between the Academy and Modernism “Realists,” but to do so also does discredit to Friant’s masterful feel for color and tone.

Like many artists, Friant painted a series of self-portraits throughout his lifetime.  The portrait that we look at here is of the artist aged 15 or so.  Before looking at the art, let’s take a moment to look at the artist.  Friant at 15 is a very handsome youth indeed; his red hair is thick and bushy, swept over his large brow.  His eyebrows are thin and sculpted, his gaze steady and clear, his mouth well formed with a generous bottom lip.  His chin is square and his nose noble and straight.  In adulthood he would hide his good looks behind a bushy beard.

But it is his expression that is most arresting; or, perhaps it would be better to say his gaze.  This is not the gaze of a young man filled with dreams (or youthful indolence), but, rather the fierce look of a youth ready to grapple with the world.  His brows knit in concentration, his mouth set with determination, the muscles of his face tense as he considers his next move.  If not for the youthfulness of his hair and the smooth texture of his skin, this could easily be the portrait of an experienced soldier, a businessman of affairs, or a seasoned academic. 

Friant paints his own countenance in a classical manner – the realism of his hair, his features, the representation of his eyes and mouth – nothing about the head would be out of place in the most classical, Academic of paintings.  However, Friant’s brushwork becomes loser and less defined once we move away from his head.  His shirt collar and tie are little more than generously painted suggestions, and his coat conveyed with sketchily applied gray, blue and white paint. 

You could say that Friant’s early portrait seems to encompass all of the contradictions of his style and career – a naturalist painter finding a home in a modernist world.  It is an interesting moment in our art history, one that we will look at again tomorrow with a later self-portrait.