Cornelia Presenting Her Children, the Gracchi, as Her Treasures, by Angelica Kauffman, 1785

Another notable depiction of motherhood by Angelica Kauffman (1741 – 1807), one of two women who belonged to the Royal Academy at its inception.  The next female members would join 115 years later.

Ever the neoclassicist, Kaffman once again goes to the ancient world with Cornelia Presenting Her Children, the Gracchi, as Her Treasures, painted in 1785.  This large-scale painting illuminates the importance of motherhood on the course of history.  Cornelia Africana, the daughter of the general Scipio Africanus, was a Roman matron who exemplified the virtues of modesty, chastity, and honor. Her family was part of Roman high society, and she was an important social figure.  She is remembered by history as the mother of two sons with an enduring political legacy. Her sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who are often referred to as the Gracchi, were politicians in the 2nd century BC. They attempted to pass land reform and other progressive measures to ease the hardships of the lower classes, effectively attempting to make the Roman Republic more democratic. Both were assassinated during their tenures as tribunes by their peers in the patrician class for their liberal sentiments.

In this picture, Cornelia is talking with another society matron who is showing off her jewels.  Cornelia, however, shows jewels of quite another type:  her two sons, the Gracchi.  These are her greatest treasures; indeed, Cornelia was an important behind-the-scenes player in their eventual political ascendancy.

This is a subtly colored work, filled with deeply felt sentiment.  Neoclassical work can often feel cold or lacking in emotional vitality, but here is a picture filled with simple humanity.  Perhaps the most priceless element of the picture is the expression on the face of the anonymous matron.  You mean, these pearls aren’t better, she seems to ask.

Fortunately, Kauffman had the artistic virtuosity to realize such a subtle emotional moment.  Look at the expressions on Cornelia, as well as those of her children – they look alike.  Not only that, but Cornelia uses nearly the same expression with her hand used in another picture, Self-Portrait Torn Between Music and Painting, where Kauffman is also indicating the more important choice.

A remarkable work.

George Paul Leroux, Part I

The more I look at pictures, the more I am delighted, moved and intrigued by what I find.  I’m sure that the name Georges Paul Leroux (1877-1957) is one unfamiliar to many, but his work is alternately beautiful and disturbing.  He is something of a forgotten master, and I suspect that this is a result of the historical moment in which he lived, and his stark, bleak representations of The Great War.

Surely a look at the Academic male nude below demonstrates his mastery of form, his coolly controlled drawing and his sensitivity to light and dark.  However, these qualities became less relevant as the Twentieth Century progressed, and the vapid tropes of Modernism came to the fore.  As Leroux grew older, the fundamental artistic language he spoke was lost.

Leroux was born in Paris, son of Gustav Ferdinand Leroux, a printer of art prints.  Leroux and his brother, Auguste, would study art in Trelly, before serving in the 130 Infantry Regiment, completing his military service in Chartres, where he would regularly draw and paint the cathedral.  It was in Chartres that he met painter Paul Jouve (1978-1973), who became his lifelong friend.

Leroux studied at the national School of Decorative Arts and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, later working in the studio of Leon Bonnat (1833-1922).  Leroux painted many slice-of-life pictures of Paris before going to Rome in 1907.  He would grow to love the Italy, and he would return there almost every year to paint the Italian countryside.  On Friday, we will look at his most beautiful Italian picture.

The Great War, however, changed much of his life.  He would marry Mathilde Gabrielle Planquais in Meudon in 1915, and his international travels were curtailed by the War.  It was after the War that Leroux would paint two of his masterful war pictures.

In Eparges, 1915, Leroux depicts the stark horrors of war in a manner less grotesque than Goya, but equally compelling.  The Great War irrevocably changed the notions of warfare in the popular imagination.  The tens of thousands of dead – an entire Lost Generation – erased visions of heroic leaders cleaving through anonymous cannon fodder, the heavens above heralding the victory of God’s chosen.  Rather, greater access to communications, photographs and written first-hand narratives underscored the fact that war involved vast quantities of mud, blood, pain, and dead men.

It is the dead, in fact, that create the focal point of In Eparges, 1915.  Look at the living figures in this fascinating picture.  The living men find the corpse of a comrade, examining his papers to identify him before lowering him into the grave that the others are digging.  But all of these men are anonymous – faces are turned from us, or in shadow.  It is almost as if the living were the ghosts … and the dead man the only animated figure.

The off white the dead man’s shirt and the focus of light on his white head and hands provide the human focal point. His uniform lies crumpled beside him (obviously stripped off by his brother soldiers) – he is no longer a soldier, a figure representing a nation or an ideology, but simply a dead man.  There is no excessive gore or carnage to inspire horror – it is just our stark humanity laid bare.  That, I think, is the root of the picture’s power.

The landscape is dotted with simple, hand-made crosses; the upturned mud littered with burial tools and stones.  The only hint of transcendence, aside from the peaceful look on the dead man’s face, are the faint stars above.  I cannot but help think the dead man looks at the stars, or that the stars look down on him.  Otherwise, the circumstances surrounding the dead man would be too terrible to contemplate.

Esther Pasztory Will Discuss Artist Jean-Frédéric Waldeck at The Dahesh Museum Gift Shop

This week readers can return to the Dahesh Museum of Art Gift Shop, located at 145 Sixth Avenue in New York for another edition of the Salon Thursdays series.  Salon Thursdays is a free program where leading arts scholars provide illustrated lectures, and on November 1st at 6:30 P.M. the Dahesh presents Jean-Frederic Waldeck: A Nineteenth-Century Artist Painting Exotic Mexico, courtesy of Esther Pasztory, Professor of Pre-Columbian Art History at Columbia University.  She will discuss the life and work of this quirky Orientalist who went to Mexico and made the ancient Mayans and Aztecs vivid in an entirely modern way.  Professor Pasztory is the author of Jean-Frédéric Waldeck: Artist of Exotic Mexico, a fascinating look at this controversial figure.  For further details, call the Dahesh at 212.759.0606.

The life of Jean-Frédéric Waldeck (1766-1875) is shrouded in mystery.  He gave his birthplace as Paris, and Prague and Vienna, and alternated between claiming that he was English, Austrian or German.  Depending on circumstances, he also claimed to be a Baron, a Duke or a Count.

What is certain is that he went to Mexico when he was 60 years old to copy the newly discovered Maya ruins of Palenque and other Mesoamerican centers.  His representations of Mayan and Aztec art were the first produced by a European artist, and as such, were seen through a Neoclassic lens.  Waldeck eventually went native, painting his Mayan mistress and scenes of everyday life.

Because of the many half-truths and sometimes outright falsehoods he told over his lifetime (including that he participated in major exploratory expeditions that have no record of his involvement), Waldeck’s reputation has now been of interest mainly to scholars and archivists.  Professor Pasztory took some time from her busy schedule to talk about Waldeck and her upcoming lecture with The Jade Sphinx:

Can you please tell us a little about your talk at the Dahesh this Thursday?

I’m going to talk about Waldeck’s life and work; first about the inaccuracies people have perceived in the work and why they do not value him, and, also about my discovery that there are inaccuracies in his work because he was mainly more interested in art than he was in illustration.  I will also provide insight on various paintings he made while he was in Mexico.

Waldeck tried to approach Mayan and Aztec art through a European artistic tradition – what were the values or pitfalls of such an approach?

Let’s put it this way: Waldeck tried to be everything.  He tried to be an illustrator, he tried to be an artist, and he tried for anything in his era he could probably be in order to make fame and fortune.  And by being a Neoclassic artist, he was able to see the naturalistic and beautiful aspects of Mayan art that his contemporaries would not see.

Waldeck has not been taken seriously by scholars, and his work, mostly hidden in archives, is unknown to most art historians.  Is it time for a reassessment?

I definitely think so.  I think he is an artist like the Orientalists of the 19th Century, but rather than go East, he went West.  And he was interested in the exotic, and he gave us some fascinating images of the exotic in the Americas.

In my cursory look at Waldeck’s biography, I see that he sometimes said he was various different European nationalities.  He often claimed royal titles.  How were you able to get your arms around such an elusive figure?

It was not that difficult.  We don’t know where he was born, but it’s probable that it was in Prague or Vienna.  When he was a child (and we don’t know how old), he went to Paris, France, where he operated as a French artist.  All of his journals are in French, there are no German or foreign language words in his notes.  So though he was not of French birth, he was French by his upbringing.

He didn’t go into Mexico until his late middle age.  The great mystery of Waldeck is that we don’t know a great deal about his early life.  He made a lot of grand statements about the expeditions he was on, but they can’t be proven.  The only part of his life that we can prove is that period in Mexico.  He went to Mexico specifically to paint the Mayan ruins that he came across in a lithographer’s studio in England.  (He was working in England at the time.)

Please tell us about your book, Jean-Frédéric Waldeck: Artist of Exotic Mexico.

What I tried to do was situate Waldeck in his time, and within the aesthetic ideas of his time.  What would his background and training bring to the Mayan ruins?  Actually, he brought a great many books with him, as he was an intelligent and learned person.  So I was mainly interested in the context through which he saw these things.  I also thought he was an interesting 19th Century artist – not a major one, but certainly an important minor one.

Do you have other books in the works?

Yes – Aliens and Fakes, which is about the crazy theories people have about the origins of Native Americans; things like extraterrestrials, and Lost Tribes of Israel and trans-Pacific travel.  All of these strange theories people come up with to explain the existence and heritage of an entire people.

I’ve always found that pseudoscience both fascinating and a little ridiculous.

I think I don’t want to poke fun at it – that’s all too easy.  I want to explain why people believe in these ideas, why it made sense to them, and why it still does, to some extent.  It’s a phenomenon that does not want to go away.