French landscapes at the Getty

"Today our sight is a little weary," Paul Cézanne confessed one day in 1902, and why wonder at it? Stare at the same mountain for half a lifetime and you might start seeing spots too.

But Cézanne wasn't referring to nature, or to eye trouble. "[We are] burdened by the memory of a thousand images," he continued, ". . . . We no longer see nature; we see pictures over and over again."

The artist's little secret is that he sees not nature but art. The name we give to this phenomenon is tradition— the chain of artists who see not so much what has been seen before but the way it has been seen.

The Chinese never had any trouble with this notion. To repeat the styles and motifs of the past was to pay homage to past masters and take one's place, with suitable pride and humility, in a theoretically unending chain.

Our fear of repetition

Western art however— preoccupied, as Ezra Pound put it, with making it new— fears nothing so much as repetition, though in the nature of the case one can't help copying from others, and of course from oneself. No wonder Cézanne's eyes were sore.

This question of influence was very much to the fore in the Getty Museum's small but choice exhibit of three centuries of French landscape drawings. If we date that tradition to Claude Lorrain, the first thing to observe about it is that, for a good hundred years or so, what French artists painted or drew was not France but Italy, whether at first hand or through the scrim of a classical Arcadia.

This realization is all the more striking in that the great German and Netherlandish schools of landscape art in the 16th and 17th Centuries lovingly represented their native soil. The French, though, were dazzled by Italy, or rather by the idea of antiquity as refracted through it. What one sees depicted in Claude, Poussin and their successors down to the end of the 18th Century isn't so much place as time, a landscape of autumnal castles and ruins meant to evoke a vanished grandeur.

The Louis XIV factor

When we think of where this tradition went— to the obsessive contemplation of a single Provençal mountain, Sainte Victoire, by Cézanne— it seems doubly strange that the French should have neglected their own lovely pays for so long. I can't prove this, quite, but I think the French obsession with Italy (in which they were not, of course, alone) was bound up with the imperial aspirations of the long reign of Louis XIV, which turned instinctively toward ancient Rome. Perhaps we should even date the Franco-Italian connection to the Babylonian Captivity of the 14th Century, when for some 70 years the papacy was headquartered in Avignon?

Be that as it may, Italian landscape in French hands has a distinctively imperial touch, as in the rearing mountains of Jacques Callot's A View of Mountains Across a Lake in the current exhibition, or in the exaggerated hillsides of Claude's own View of Tivoli.

In the 18th Century, ruins tended to take the place of mountains, as in Fragonard's Ruins of an Imperial Palace, in which the viewer is made to look upward at the bulwarks of the Palatine Hill, or Hubert Robert's Landscape with Ruins, one of the most impressive of that master's hundreds of Italian vistas.

Man vs. nature

The ruin in question in Hubert's watercolor—an actual one, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina— has been transported from its site on the Roman Forum to a riverside with washerwomen and a monumental crag in the background. The real tension in the picture, however, comes from the opposition between the temple— majestic even in its ruined state— and the blasted tree— all nervous, retractile lines— that faces it across the river.

The message would appear to be the dominion of man over nature by the exercise of reason, as embodied in the calm proportions of the man-made structure. The tree still flowers, however, while vegetation sprouts from the crown of the temple; and the subtler secondary message is the omnipotent recurrence of natural growth and the transitory nature of human endeavor.

It's not until the 19th Century that French artists turn to the open countryside of their native land. The Getty's selection includes some of the big names you'd expect— Géricault, Delacroix, Van Gogh (he's French, of course, only by adoption)— but none of the Impressionists, with the exception of a fine Pissarro.

Driven to suicide

Some of the show's best surprises are from relatively obscure names; among these, the most striking is Leon Bonvin's Landscape with a Bare Tree and Ploughman, a small, melancholy jewel of a work by an artist who committed suicide at the age of 31 after a dealer had rejected his work as "too dark, not gay enough."

(One wonders what the dealer would have thought of the deeply saturated blacks of Seurat's Poplars, also by an artist who died at 31.)

There was, in fact, a kind of somberness to the show as a whole, a severity of perception that's quintessentially French. Perhaps that's why the curator, Edouard Kopp, decided to pass up the Impressionists, whom we generally (though not always accurately) associate with vivacity and light. But for those who like their intelligence sharp and their observation keen, this small but scintillating show was rich in pleasures.