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‘Ingres to Matisse: Masterpieces of French Painting’, presents an
overview of the development of French art, both academic and progressive, from
Ingres to Delacroix, to Picasso and Matisse, and provides insights into the
taste of those leading Baltimorean collectors who – often in advance of,
and certainly distinct from, their counterparts in such other major American
cities as New York, Boston and Chicago – sought out and acquired French
art of their time.
At the Courtauld Institute, the Fauve Painting show is small and vibrant, in
contrast to the great, ‘Fauve Landscape: Matisse, Derain, Braque and their
circle, 1904–1908’, from Los Angeles at the Royal Academy in 1991.
The name ‘Fauve’, as all students of modernism will recall, means
‘wild beasts’, a derisory statement coined by critic Louis Vauxcelles
when he reviewed the exhibition of the Paris Salon in 1905. He chose to single
out for praise an academic bust, by Albert Marque, which was displayed in the
same room as Matisse and his fellow artists. ‘The purity of this bust’,
he wrote in the periodical Gil Blas, ‘comes as a surprise in the
middle of the orgy of pure colours; it is Donatello among the wild beasts’.
In combination with the Royal Academy exhibition, the Courtauld show makes
up the best collection of works by Matisse to have been shown in England for
years. The Fauve show is the more exciting of the two. The enthusiastic reception
and success of exhibitions of French art in this country, is in marked contrast
to the hostility displayed by public and press when post-impressionist works
were first shown in London in November 1910. Showing the same enthusiasm and
insight as the Baltimore collectors, Roger Fry organised ‘Manet and the
Post-Impressionists’ at the Grafton galleries. With an almost missionary
zeal, Fry believed that post-impressionism would infuse British art with fresh
and powerful ideas, and free it from what he believed was chaos. The exhibition
introduced the British public to large numbers of work by Cézanne, Matisse,
Seurat, Van Gogh and Picasso, and caused a public outrage. The exhibition of
over 200 works was anchored to Manet, who had already become acceptable in England.
The public and press were angry partly because of the sheer size of the exhibition,
and because they felt they had been betrayed by a leading connoisseur that they
had trusted. By introducing this kind of work in Britain, Fry destroyed his
reputation as a critic. Desmond MacCarthy, who was secretary of the show, wrote,
‘kind people called him mad, and reminded others that his wife was in an
asylum. The majority declared him to be a subverter of morals and art, and a
blatant self-advertiser’. Virginia Woolf recalls that the public were thrown
into paroxysms of rage and laughter. The pictures, they insisted, could not
be taken seriously. They were, ‘outrageous, anarchistic, and childish’.
The works by Cézanne were compared to the scribbles of small children.
Ricketts claimed, ‘Why talk of the sincerity of all this rubbish’,
and his view that the works on show were the works of madmen was supported by
eminent doctors.
The exhibitions this summer are altogether less challenging now, and are primarily
a joy to attend. But they ought to remind us of the important roles played both
by enlightened critics and inspired benefactors who have enabled wild beasts
and their friends to enrich our lives.
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