| From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar | |
| A Special Exhibition Review by Stan Parchin |
About the show:
Museum exhibitions that focus on the history of art collecting tend to be broad in historical scope. From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar rises above the norm. This remarkable show of primarily seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French drawings from Germany remains on view at New York's Frick Collection through August 7, 2005. Some 70 delicate works on paper from the Schlossmuseum and Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar, Germany now reside at the late Henry Clay Frick's Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City. The drawings emphasize figure studies, classical mythology and landscape, many exhibited in this country for the first time.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German philosopher and playwright, collected French drawings and prints insatiably. Ironically, this Francophile never visited France. Goethe encouraged Grand Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach to assemble a vast compendium of drawings and prints from which up-and-coming artists could learn about the history of Western art and human anatomy. The Grand Duke's descendants continued his royal tradition of artistic acquisition, amassing a collection that now totals some 30,000 sheets. Selections from Goethe's own assemblage of just over 2000 pieces thematically round out the drawings from the two collections represented here.
While the show displays a representative amount of seventeenth-century French drawings from the age of the Baroque, it's in pre-Revolutionary France that the exhibition achieves its dramatic height. The decadent frivolity usually associated with the French Rococo is stripped away in some unusually telling masterpieces of expert draftsmanship.
A Triton Holding a Stoup in His Hands (1752) by François Boucher (1703-1770) is one of a pair of preparatory drawings for The Setting of the Sun, a tapestry commissioned from the famous Gobelins by Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV of France. The Triton, a lesser sea deity and son of Poseidon in classical mythology, is seen from his left side clasping a shell between both hands. Boucher's deliberate use of stumped (rolled and blended) black chalk, heightened by passages of white chalk, accentuates this male nude's raw musculature.
François Boucher (1703–1770)
A Triton Holding a Stoup in His Hands, 1752
Stumped black chalk, heightened with
white chalk, on cream paper
328 x 297 mm
Schlossmuseum, Germany
The Weimar Collection also includes fascinating portraits. Madame de Marsollier and Her Daughter (1757) by Jean-Marc Nattier (1685-1766) is particularly captivating. Scholars theorize that Nattier completed his drawing after the finished portrait (hanging in The Metropolitan Museum of Art) as a testament to one of the artist's most successful commissions. In the drawing as well as in the painting, Nattier depicted the wife of a silk merchant with her child. The staid decorative elegance of mother and child in the composition suggests the nervous tension that existed in Old Regime France before the Revolution.
Jean-Marc Nattier (1685-1766)
Madame Marsollier and Her Daughter, 1757
Black chalk, stump, heightened with
white chalk, on brown paper
428 x 324 mm
Schlossmuseum, Germany
From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar offers the viewer a vivid visual cross-section of French society at a critical point in France's vibrant cultural history.
About the catalogue:
Mandrella, David, Hermann Mildenberger, Benjamin Peronet and Pierre Rosenberg. From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar (exh. cat.). Berlin: G + H Verlag, 2005.
The 349-page, illustrated color catalogue describes in detail 107 drawings and includes a complete inventory of all French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drawings in Weimar. The description of each drawing is succinct.
For further reading:
Goldfarb, Hilliard Todd (ed). Richelieu: Art and Power (exh. cat.). Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2002.
The wily Cardinal Richelieu became chief minister to King Louis XIII in 1624 and remained in office until his death in 1642. In that time, he amassed a formidable art collection that included works by Titian, Michelangelo, Peter Paul Rubens and Nicolas Poussin. This catalogue is a comprehensive study of the prelate's patronage of the arts in early seventeenth-century France.
Rand, Richard, et al. Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France (exh. cat).
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
This catalogue of a paintings exhibition features an excellent essay by Anne L. Schroder on the development of genre prints in eighteenth-century France.
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection.
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980.
The book provides a good overview of a noteworthy assemblage of French drawings from the same period as those from Weimar in the special exhibition currently at The Frick Collection.
"From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar" is on view through August 7, 2005 at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70 Street, New York, NY 10021-4967 (Telephone: 212-288-0700; Website: www.frick.org). The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM and Sunday from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Admission is $12.00 for adults, $8.00 for senior citizens (62 years of age and over) and $5.00 for students, which includes the ArtPhone recorded tour. Children ages 10 to 15 years of age must be accompanied by an adult.
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From your Guide: Stan Parchin, Senior Correspondent for Museums and Special Exhibitions, is a specialist in ancient, late-medieval and Renaissance art and history. His interests include: the art and culture of Old and New Kingdom Egypt; the Italian and Northern Renaissances; Church history; and witchcraft, heresy and social dissent in late-medieval and early Modern Europe.
See all Special Exhibition and Catalogue Reviews from Stan Parchin.
