NOAH DILLON: So why did you choose this painting?

ERIC SUTPHIN: I chose it in part because it’s personal. When I was pretty young — before I ever had any kind of idea to be a critic or to write about art — I watched Simon Schama’s The Power of Art (2006), and he talked about this painting. He claimed that Manet had left this corner piece of sail completely bare and it was just raw canvas coming through, so that it was raw canvas doubling as the actual sail.

When I saw the painting in person I realized that’s not true — it’s painted. And that inaccuracy imprinted this painting in my mind. It made me suspicious that he never saw this painting in person, and that perhaps he was talking from a reproduction of the painting. It’s an interesting painting for a lot of reasons and it’s atypical of Impressionism. It’s actually one year after the Bouguereau painting I’d originally wanted to talk about.

I think it’s important that you chose this as a substitute, because even if you think this is atypical of Impressionism, that Bouguereau painting was his last before the Impressionists arrived and pushed him (and academic painting generally) aside in a big way.

Bouguereau was sort of the archetype of the enemy to the Impressionists. And almost 150 years later both artists are in the same museum. I felt a little embarrassed picking the Bouguereau, because there’s still a little baggage. Not that Boating feels particularly radical, but it shows how the field has expanded so that anything goes. And I can simultaneously get pleasure out of this and the other thing, but they’re so far out of context that both paintings mean something completely different from when they were done. And I think the Bouguereau is more complex than this painting, but I think that this painting, right now, has a lot of implications.

Standing here, looking at it, I realize there’s no horizon. That might not mean anything explicitly, but implicitly it must. I recently drafted a review of “The Forever Now” at MoMA, and I was easing my way into ideas introduced by Paul Virilio in Open Sky (2008), about the disappearance of the horizon and what that means. It’s complicated, but right now I’m realizing that this guy is, in a sense, backed into a corner. He has no privacy; a ubiquitous eye has invaded his personal space and he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the boat.

Or he could disappear into the amorphous, blue nothingness behind him.

The image is basically space-less, all foreground, with everything pushed to the front, on the surface. It’s completely immediate. There’s no pretense; there’s no allegory. That’s really the crux of the Impressionists’ objection to the academics and salon painters, was that it’s all allegory, and here there’s none of that.

In that regard, this upper right corner isn’t raw canvas, but it is just a grey space carved out there, which runs contrary to painting conventions. It’s an abstraction of the superficial framing of the image, along with the blue that you were talking about, which takes up most of the canvas. You’ve got the blue of the water, the blue of his hat, the blue of her dress — everything else is additional to that primacy. It also strikes me that, thinking about now, when everything is sort of up for grabs, in a similar way you’ve got this representational scene that these incidents of abstraction interrupt. They’re reflexive and disruptive, without appearing to call attention to themselves. That admixture of approaches has only become more open.

This is another reason I wanted to look at Boating: it’s a very severe painting. It’s all about the composition, about the negative shapes. And he’s framed it in such a way that every bit — even this little wedge of blue at the top right corner — becomes like a series of quadrilaterals. And then you see the portrait. That’s what the tension is — that the portrait is the center and you always come back to the guy’s face. But it’s ominous. He doesn’t want you looking at him; he’s tired of being looked at.

He’s responding to the painter. He’s not a sitter and he’s not someone in a scene, he’s got an indeterminate relationship to Manet.

And in the absence of allegory, you’re frozen there: the artist has stepped back, the painting’s finished, and it’s us. It’s uncanny in that sense that the face is so central to the painting, so we’re locked into a deadlock of looking at this person. His companion is almost there just for Manet to be playful when he paints her dress. I don’t know what that says about social relations between men and women in late 19th century painting, but it sounds like an opening to an uncomfortable issue. And while that’s important, it also seems tertiary to the composition and the sort of gridlock that the viewer gets into with the central figure. I think at first encounter there’s a sense of tranquility and you’re in this nebulous sea blue. But that slips away as you look at it, and you’re left with angles and the aggressive of his stare. And it becomes kind of uncomfortable.

There’s also the well-known affection the Impressionists had for Japanese prints but I think there are some compositional issues that are equally important here two things: it anticipates the camera view, the way Degas did, but also the disappearance of the horizon, which is maybe not so radical, but a fusion of eastern pictorial sense and with western developments in optical technology.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about this painting is that the rope was originally much farther left, buy was changed, leaving this pentimento. It’s a curiosity, to me, how that affects its appearance and how it’s read.

Well now it’s all I can see. The palimpsest of the movement of the rope is really weird, and the way that sort of imaginatively interacts with the scene. It becomes sort of like Cubist movement where you see two ropes simultaneously, like Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which inadvertently adds to the aggressiveness.

Is there a way in which this particular museum frames this painting for you? Or even where it is in the museum?

Well, in this room in particular it seems out of place, out of step with its time. It appears to belong to no time or era. Obviously it’s from a milieu and there’s a long tradition of these boat leisure scenes. But some of the other radical steps that Manet was making, pictorially, anticipate tactics that fully found their place 50 years later. It doesn’t really belong to its Impressionist counterparts, other than the handling of her dress and the fleeting quality of his brushstroke. But the rigidity of the composition feels very classical and it has this characteristic triangular golden ratio form. So in that sense it belongs to Bouguereau and the mannered history that preceded it.

How does this find itself in the writing you do and the art you’re attracted to? Or how does that relate to how or why you enjoy art?

I feel hopelessly pedestrian in choosing an Impressionist painting to talk about. So the question becomes how to talk about connecting this to contemporary concerns. I’ve been feeling depressed about a lot of contemporary art. But I’ve been looking at a lot of contemporary figurative work and I find it can be useful to think about that stuff in relation to strong figurative work such as this.

I’m always looking for a way to relate directly with a work of art: How does this work make me feel? What inside of me does the work incite? It connects to the things I’ve been thinking about with regard to contemporary vision. And these are all, for me, half-cooked ideas; I’m still working it out. This painting is not an end-all, be-all artwork for me. But it’s an important painting in a line of thinking I’m trying to explore with regard to how I take images, what I expect or what keeps me looking at something.

This painting feels rather stripped in a way, and I think our identification with some kind of subject, a human subject, is an important aspect of this painting. And it brings me into that by way of all of the vision games Manet’s playing. The Impressionists spent a lot of time, I think, considering vision. And sure it’s been explored, but I think it remains important. You brought that up when I was writing about “The Forever Now,” talking about light and surface, and you asked, “Isn’t that what the Impressionists were doing?” And that made me think, “You’re right, they were.” So maybe that’s what brought me back to this particular painting: the question of “What were they doing?” And I guess it comes back to the camera, which is just so… ugh.

[laughing]

But it’s interesting to see that problem as it was born and how it’s now complicated, in another way, by the prevalence of cameras and of photographic images.

When you spend a lot of time thinking about how contemporary vision is shifting as a result of the ubiquity of screens, lenses, cameras, all these things, it can feel a little scary, vertiginous. It’s a consolation to know that these guys were also at that same precipice. A significant difference between Bouguereau and Manet is the matter of vision and seeing. The two artists are representative of two types of seeing and a shift in the way that people perceive images. It’s not incidental: space like this becomes physiological, and by closing in on this scene Manet was both internalizing and depicting a new paradigm in perception.

That points back to the question of was Simon Schama looking at a photograph, or was he looking at the thing face to face?

I’ve looked at this painting at least 20 times, and the first time I saw it, I remembered the Schama video, which on the screen you could buy that it’s just raw canvas, and there was no way to verify or argue against it. It was there and I could see it, with an authority telling me that’s the case. That’s a fundamental issue for the authority the critic and their ethical responsibility. Somebody like Schama — who has television shows, who’s a populist and an entertainer — can make you see things: seeing is believing.

[laughing]

But I can go and look and see if they’ve done their due diligence. The disparity I experienced with the Schama video calls into question everything else I’ve ever seen. Do I have to see it in person before I buy it? I buy everything, I believe so much. I think we all do.

But so there’s this painting and in another room there’s another Manet painting: Lady with a Parrot (1866). It’s very gray and sort of claustrophobic, and it’s a little like two Manets: this is the Manet of the future, whereas that’s the Manet of the salon. So having this here you can see the work and corroborate it not only with its description, but with other works by the artist and by their contemporaries.
Eric Sutphin is a painter and writer based in New York City. Print and online publications include Art in America, artcritical.com, Painting is Dead, On Verge, American Artist Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. He has been a visiting critic at the Delaware College of Art and Design and The School of Visual Arts. Recent curatorial projects include “Detlef Aderhold: Null Komma Null,” “Berliner Liste” and “Rosemarie Beck: Paintings from the 60’s” at the National Arts Club. He is currently writing a biography of post-war American painter Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003). Eric received a BFA from Rutgers University: Mason Gross School of the Arts, and an MFA from The School of Visual arts in 2014.

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September 3-November 2, 2003

“Academic”: In the contemporary art world, it’s a term so often associated with inflexibility, reaction, and soulless polish that few New York painters would care to wear the label. Since 1995, however, the Dahesh Museum has bravely pushed on with some two dozen handsomely installed exhibitions, solidifying its status as the country’s only museum dedicated to nineteenth and early twentieth-century academic art. The curators clearly have a sense of mission, and it must be admitted that they also have something of a point; after all, if the purpose of art is to tell us about ourselves, then it’s pertinent that academic art reflects the most widespread tastes of that time, and possibly even ours-Bouguereau’s Water Girl, 1885, is probably more meaningful to most of Middle America today than a Gerhard Richter or even a Picasso. (The Museum’s very first exhibition was slyly titled When Art was Popular: The Salon and the Royal Academy in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries.)

The Dahesh is inaugurating its new, roomier quarters in the former IBM Gallery space with French Artists in Rome: Ingres to Degas, 1803-1873, an exhibition celebrating the bicentennial of another institutional move, that of the French Academy in Rome to the Villa Medici in 1803. Organized by the French Academy in Rome, Ingres to Degas opened in that city last spring. Its installation at the Dahesh includes 130 paintings and sculptures by the Prix de Rome winners who won residencies at the Villa Medici, along with works by contemporaries who traveled there independently. The works are attractively installed in several galleries following a hall of samplings from the Dahesh’s own permanent collection.

Founded in 1648 with the admirable goal of nourishing the study of antique and Renaissance masterpieces, the French Academy established its outpost in Rome in 1666. For some two centuries it retained an extraordinary power over the teaching, rating, and exhibiting of art in France, and during the eighteenth century the Academy’s members included such remarkable artists as Watteau (1684-1721) and Chardin (1699-1779). Of course there’s no recipe for genius, and Ingres to Degas confirms that its nineteenth-century members often replicated only the mannerisms of such masters as Raphael and Michelangelo.

That said, Ingres to Degas is an intriguing and entertaining exhibition, with the many less memorable works punctuated by some true gems as well as a few absolute howlers. The most impressive works tend to be by the artists that standard history books recommend: Ingres, Géricault, Degas, and Corot. (As it happens, Ingres was the only one of these to win the Prix de Rome; all the rest got to Italy on their own.)

There are a number of paintings of historical interest: self-portraits by Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-64), Adophe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905) and Alexandre Cabanel (1823-89), as well as the Prix de Rome-winning efforts by the young Ingres (1780-1867) and others. The freshest academic works tend to be small landscapes and views of studio interiors, and their evocative light and faithful accounting of everyday objects convey a genuine affection for the subject matter. Among these, two small paintings by Achilles-Etna Michallon (1792-1822) have a richness of color throughout a full, vivid range of tones, while several by François-Marius Granet (1775-1849) have lively hues except in their somewhat indeterminate shadows. Among the most affecting of the academic works is Bouguereau’s Teresa, c. 1854, a portrait that depicts every shading of skin and fold of garment with supple, evenhanded brilliance. The patient, slightly anxious expression makes one wonder of the model: Who was she? Was she happy? An especially sensitive photograph would elicit the same response, but here the mesmerizing craftsmanship prompts an additional question: Can you believe it’s just paint?

The larger paintings are mostly historical or mythological scenes, and these impress mainly with the seriousness of their sentiment-or more accurately, of their manufacturing of sentiment. These works are the most revealing of the limits of academic training of the time, which inculcated an exactitude of contours and an intractable modeling of volumes. In moderation these are hardly bad goals, but the regimen seems to have discouraged even the occasional use of more generous gestures to provide a sense of scale, and to have denied color any function beyond decorating the facts of drawing. Cabanel’s enormous Death of Moses, 1851, suffers from the same philosophy of coloration apparent in such smaller works as his famous Birth of Venus, 1863 (of which a replica currently hangs among the works from Dahesh’s permanent collection). The hues are heightened to the point of illumination, but no further; they give no momentum to his gestures. In a group portrait of musicians by François-Joseph Navez (1787-1869), the hues are garishly out of control, never settling to establish the pictorial weight of any element; his method, apparently, was to compensate for each overripe form by making the next more so.

Not that such paintings are incompetent. If anything, they are too competent at limited goals. Typical among the more appealing works here are the two large paintings by Émile Jean-Horace Vernet (1789-63) that convincingly render the appearance of individual objects, but lend little weight to their formal roles, so that there’s no overall gathering of impulse. The best of the academic works here tend to look limp next to Degas’ tiny, incisive pencil sketch, Study of a Boy Standing with Arms Raised, 1856. And most tell us nothing that we don’t already know about our immediate world (how an arm has volume, or skin is variously smooth and creased), while trying too hard to tickle us with technique and imagery.

Some visitors may be struck by the omission in the exhibition-in the wall text, labels, publicity materials, or catalogue-of any discussion of the difference between academic and great traditional painting. Of course, this would be asking the Museum to chart a territory hardly explored by the Academy itself-nor, ironically, by a great many contemporary art thinkers more absorbed in issues of semiotics and anthropology.

Thoreau’s unflattering view of institutional thinking doesn’t really apply. (“In short, as a snowdrift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up…”) The intensity of effort apparent in Ingres to Degas suggests a different mental condition. The Academy avidly pursued half-truths rather than succumbing sleepily to whole delusions. To borrow another quote (this time Delacroix’ uncharitable and not completely justifiable comment about Ingres), it represents “the complete expression of an incomplete mind”-that is, it put its full devotion into a small range of expressive possibilities, heedless of the rest.
What is the rest? This amounts to asking: what does art do, uniquely and surpassingly well? More eloquently, on its own visual terms, than literature, illustration, or philosophy?

The answer has to do with a particular kind of visual intelligence, one evident in a undated portrait in the exhibition by Géricault (1791-1824). In The Old Italian Woman, the largess of the drawing, pitting the steady vertical development of the features against the great folds of headgear and garments, impart a scale and character to each element. Géricault’s colors serve not as accents but as continuous, restless pressures on the momentum of forms. The result is a gravity of expression largely absent from the work next to it, a painting of the same model by Jean-Victor Schnetz (1787-1870), which has a felicitous light but a dutiful rather than inspired summation of the subject. Where Géricault re-creates in the language peculiar to painting, Schnetz documents with evenhanded skill. (The Géricault was formerly also attributed to Schnetz, which is surprising considering the entirely different order of articulation.)

Géricault’s thinking seems to be not “How do I make a picture of this?” but: “What is the unprejudiced, purely visual story of my subject, at this hour, in this light?”, “What impulses emerge on my palette?” and “Where do I find a toehold for these contrary, autonomous impulses on my canvas?” The simple ingredients of lines and colors end up as a surprising, expressive fact, so coherent as to seem practically inevitable. (Though likely any outcome would have seemed both surprising and inevitable, given Géricault’s gifts.)

Among the other gems in Ingres to Degas are two small landscapes by Corot (1796-1875), quietly monumental in their breadth of formal conception. In Rome: Castel Saint Angelo, ca.1826-27 (revised ca. 1835), the brusque emergence of domes, surmounted by tiny statues, into an expansively pale sky has a poignancy quite unlike any other landscapes here. Corot’s mastery of color continues into the subtly weighted planes that brace a nest of boats in the foreground. An Old Italian Woman, 1857, by Degas (1834-1917) seems a bit studied, but his darkly brilliant Dante and Virgil at the Entrance to the Inferno (1857-58) vividly captures the figures’ resilient loneliness.

Perhaps the oddest masterpiece here is Hesiod and the Muses, ca. 1860, by Gustave Moreau (1826-98). This painting combines an academic attachment to theatrical refinement and the exotic with some distinctly non-academic traits: fuzzy contours, “unrealistic” coloration, and large areas of sketchy, unidentifiable marks. Despite its domineering rose tones, the colors give force and definition to its internal rhythms. (Compare its authenticity of gesture to the weightless flings of limbs and wings in the Perseus, 1869, down the wall by Joseph-Paul Blanc, 1846-1904, or to Bouguereau’s The Battle Between the Centaurs and the Lapiths, 1852, a tour de force of all-over polishing that conveys more about the nature of a centaur’s teeth or a fabric’s wrinkles than the energy of a human form springing from the earth: imagine Veronese, marinated until the sinews soften, and then buffed to an impenetrable shine.)

One of the most compelling personalities of Ingres to Degas is Ingres himself, who as director of the French Academy at Rome from 1835 to 1840 inspired a large following of devoted students. His philosophy rings through a statement quoted in a Dahesh’s brochure: “The brushwork, as accomplished as it may be, should not be visible: otherwise it prevents the illusion, immobilizes everything. Instead of the object represented, it calls attention to the process: instead of the thought, it betrays the hand.” This compulsion to disguise process puts him, of course, in a headlong collision course with all modernist thinking. Even though we may not completely sympathize with his intentions, however, his works have a thoroughly original intensity. He is, arguably, the only artist here to be both a great academician and a great painter. Although somewhat stilted in their poses, the many figures in his 1801 Prix de Rome-winning painting convincing fill their pictorial roles. The colors of his portrait of Granet from 1807-09 occupy their contours vividly, but with measure; after the great swelling of the coat, the lapels surprise with their brilliant lightness, but still give way before the ruddy orb of the face. (And Ingres’ hues rigorously pace the intervals of the facial features within; compare to Vernet’s affectionate but comparatively flaccid portrait of his daughter down the wall.)

As it turned out, Ingres’ unique combination of abilities were not transmissible. The large Polites produced in 1834 by his pupil Hippolyte Flandrin has the master’s impeccable modeling and luminosity, but not the expansiveness of formal conception; there’s simply not the same momentum of rhythm. Radiating a careful gorgeousness, a nine-foot long vision of airborne angels by student Henri Lehmann (1814-82) manages to tame Ingres’ most interesting urges.

The artwork in Ingres to Degas is arranged thematically, moving as the wall text explains from Ingres’ academicism of the 1830s through the eclecticism of the 1880s. But it’s rewarding to trace another trail crossing back and forth over the academic divide. Corot studied with Bertin and Michallon (both represented here) and bested them; after a brief and unsatisfying period of study with Bouguereau, Matisse (not here, obviously) profited from studying with Moreau; Moreau was a close friend and mentor to Degas, who in turn was an avid collector of the work of Corot and especially Ingres. (Indeed, Degas owned Ingres’ oil sketch for his Prix de Rome-winning painting mentioned above.)

The nicely illustrated catalogue produced for the Dahesh installation contains the first-hand accounts of some of the intrepid students who journeyed to Rome, and in it their energy and perceptions sometimes come through more clearly than in their art. Their artwork says more about the expectations of the Academy-and, one can imagine, of contemporary tastes in general. Ingres to Degas intriguingly reveals these expectations were, and we are left to consider how they have changed since. For me, the exhibition suggests that as much as the Academy hoped to regulate style, in the long run style wasn’t even really the point. Painting turned out to be more complicated and subtle. The real temperament of a work-the vigor of conception that makes Corot, though stylistically challenged, a truer descendant of Titian than is Bouguereau-depends more on personal insights than either technique or cultural predispositions.

Curiously, in the post-Modern world, style appears to have re-emerged as a major player. The Dahesh’s dedication to its principles and the quality of its installations already make it a welcome addition to the New York scene, but the current emphasis on style makes the Museum’s mission ever more relevant. Likely enough, the Museum will find allies in unexpected places.

Consider Gerhard Richter and his forty-year exploration of various modern and post-modern styles. Bouguereau, to me, is the more impressive stylist. (Yes, I hasten to acknowledge that Richter’s art, properly viewed, is an investigation of our responses to his feelings about society’s attitudes about the role of art in postwar Germany. But is this really so different from Bouguereau, who seems every moment to be watching us watch him converse with painting conventions?) As with the Academy in the nineteenth century-and some thinkers on art today-Richter’s work shows no awareness of the distinction between academic and great traditional art. This puts his philosophy emphatically at odds with the lifework of such twentieth-century masters as Mondrian, Matisse, and de Kooning. And if we are to applaud Richter for his soulless interpretations of any number of styles, shouldn’t we also clap Bouguereau on the back, though he sterilized just one?

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