Page 56 - Studio International - December 1967

PARIS

commentary by
Paul Waldo Schwartz

Ingres at the Petit Palais; 5th Biennale
des Jeunes; Tapies at Galerie Maeght;
Sarkis at Blumenthal-Mommaton ;
Seurat to César at Claude Bernard;
John Wragg at Alexandre lolas.

For months now, Paris has been anticipating
the arrival of Jean Baptiste Dominique Ingres as
though it were the coming of a once celebrated but
now distressingly decrepit uncle. True, uncle was
once the Napoleon of Painting. True, his contri-
bution, like it or not, is known to be inimitable.
And he will naturally get the best fauteuil in the
house. But the conversation threatens to pall.
Eveyone knows uncle has done nothing for anyone
lately, and the rumour is that his legacy has long
since been spent.
This is the hundredth anniversary of Ingres'
death, chronologically speaking, and of course
light years away in any other respect. By 1867,
Courbet was almost acceptable, Manet, Baudelaire
and Flaubert were already threats, and there was
Ingres smacking of the First Empire, insisting upon
Raphael and offering no generic challenge to the
Salon's fondest principles.
But of all things—and the painters would
naturally be least surprised—uncle turns out to be
loveable. Not senile at all, and really quite
responsive at that. Under the circumstances it
ought to be stated with maximum naiveté that
Ingres was a formidably authentic vision. Most
pertinent, the hero is visible. He began as a
perfectionist, which is all the century asked of an
artist, and yet he had the courage to become a
realist. Which, in another key, is precisely what
happened to Flaubert.
The gilded ladder of academic temptation was
accessible to Ingres, and at times he did climb.
So that Jupiter and Thetis became pure camp, just
as did Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony. It can
be added that a religious theme was certain to be
fatal. But in the portraits verisimilitude prevailed
and reality dictated, just as in Bovary and
L'Education Sentimentale. It will be said that the drawings are
the best of it all, and this may be true. Certainly,
the drawings contain the pith of Ingres' most
perceptive gifts and are—without slighting their
plastic virtues—among the most incisive literature
of the 19th century. In that sense they rank with
Balzac and Jane Austen, so that the crowd at the
PETIT PALAIS mirrors the eyes and jaws and souls struggle with everything that lay within time. He to Manet. So that in both cases the results were
of those drawings to an uncanny extent. Rastignacs tried to accept the Italianate, idealized precon- strangely varied. The portrait of the Duc d'Or-
and Goriots reborn. Still, the paintings were the ception that was the Salon's fatal flaw, but he leans, a stagelight affair intended to set the idea of
central struggle and they deserve a hard look even survived all the same. Ironically, the half-purpose- kingliness above the fact of anatomy and person-
if this be uncle's more garrulous side. ful, half-circumstantial salvation that came to ality, still came out as dry and solid and structural
Timelessness pressed upon him, yet he won the Ingres parallels what was just beginning to happen as Poussin. For that matter, the sketches for Le
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