GérÓ´me revival at the Getty in Los Angeles

The French academician Jean-Léon GérÓ´me (1824-1904) was once perhaps the most famous painter in the world. His historical scenes and his views of a newly colonized North Africa were in great demand, and his canny exploitation of photomechanical imaging made him popular with an international public.

Nor did his popularity abate; many of his works acquired iconic status, and even influenced such modern-day costume drama filmmakers as Ridley Scott.

GérÓ´me worked in the approved conventions of his day, which derived their canons of taste and beauty from the Renaissance. His early Arcadian landscapes followed the style of Poussin; his portraits derived from Ingres, and his Roman scenes from David.

He brought to these traditions a fine sense of composition, a robust palette, and, in his North African paintings, shrewd observation. In short, GérÓ´me added fresh touches to an established tradition with which a broad bourgeois public, hankering after respectability with a bit of spice on the side, would be highly pleased.

This is still an excellent recipe for success. It's also a pitfall for kitsch, which is what happens when a fading but still-popular style begins to seem inauthentic.

A generation before GérÓ´me, Eugène Delacroix broke the classical conventions of line and color to produce an art that crackled with new energy and life. GérÓ´me's slightly elder contemporary, Gustave Courbet, had daringly darkened the traditional French palette and shocked public taste with his frank and even clinical eroticism. These innovators remained sports within the French tradition; but with Manet and the Impressionists, a new school had arrived that broke with three centuries of received aesthetics.

"'King of kitsch'

GérÓ´me, still in his 40s, stuck with what he knew. He developed within his chosen style, never becoming merely formulaic, and he continued to experiment with the forms and techniques of his art, devoting most of his last years to sculpture. His public continued to adore him. Only toward the end of his life, when Impressionism and its even more radical successors had swept the field (at least among serious artists themselves) did GérÓ´me understand that he had outlived his age.

Within a couple of generations, the great GérÓ´me had become the king of kitsch, and then a forgotten figure entirely. The present exhibition of his art at the Getty Museum is the first in 40 years.

I must admit that I approached this show with a good deal of skepticism. Museums are desperate for dollars these days, and kitsch, suitably packaged, remains perhaps the most popular taste of all. You'll certainly find plenty of it in GérÓ´me, both early and late.

It's not that he set out to create it— no one does, except out of pure cynicism— but that certain styles, at a certain point in their evolution, are vulnerable to what the taste of a later age will find phony, over the top and, worst of all, risible.

If a single quality defines kitsch, it's sentimentality— false feeling. This doesn't mean that the artist is insincere, but that he reaches too easily for an image or an association that he can more or less confidently predict will arouse an equally easy (and hence gratifying) emotion in the viewer.

Christians vs. lions

Let us consider two GérÓ´me versions of a traditional subject: Christians awaiting sacrifice in the arena. In one, a small group, dressed in white, clusters around a praying, white-bearded elder. It's close to kitsch, but somehow rescued by a gruesome background, in which three martyrs are tied to partly charred stakes.

This isn't realism— the stakes have no place in the arena— but is, presumably, an image of the violent death and redemptive martyrdom that awaits the victims. The picture is disturbing because the martyrs seem merely dead and not at all transfigured, as if GérÓ´me is subverting rather than memorializing conventional piety.

In the other version, GérÓ´me takes the unusual tack of foregrounding one of the lions, whose raised haunches clearly anticipate the meal awaiting him at the other end of the arena. The martyrs in this case are a small and indistinct group; you recognize them because you understand the setting and the genre.

Here GérÓ´me has sought to avoid conventionality by changing the point of view, but he falls into kitsch instead because the lion, seen from the rear, is merely silly. GérÓ´me confronts the dilemma of any artist dealing with a subject worn to the point of cliché. He tries to compensate by juggling the symbolism or changing the angle of composition, in one case with some success but in the other producing only mirth.

Caesar's assassins

GérÓ´me is much more successful in portraying wild nature in a landscape scene, Lion on the Lookout, and also in changing point of view in The Death of Caesar, where the fallen dictator's body lies partially concealed while the picture focuses on the conspirators, rapidly exiting the scene of their crime. The contrast between the stilled body and the flight of the Senators conveys the trauma of violence more effectively than a direct representation of the assassination could do; GérÓ´me is able here to exploit the viewer's understanding of another familiar scene to refresh our perception.

In short, it's fair to say that if GérÓ´me didn't attempt to challenge the conventions of his time, he did attempt to rethink them, and sometimes with success.

Those backward Africans

Probably the most controversial part of GérÓ´me's work, however— at least to the modern eye— emerges in his North African scenes. France began to colonize that region after 1830, and many French artists followed the flag. This cultural imperialism now goes by the name of Orientalism, an idea that, since Edward Said's book of that title, has been in extremely bad odor.

Orientalism means condescending exoticism, the denigrating fascination with the peculiar mores of backward peoples who are, of course, to be gradually lifted to the plane of bourgeois Western civilization. Orientalism was a widespread phenomenon (George W. Bush may be regarded as its last avatar), but nowhere did it take greater root than in France, perhaps because of the geographical proximity between the metropolis and its colonies. Delacroix was first on the ground, to be followed by such disparate figures as Flaubert, Saint-Saëns and Matisse.

GérÓ´me was of their company, if not their quality. He traveled extensively in the Maghreb and in what was then known as the Near East, and he went everywhere: into markets and mosques, hammams and harems. He recorded studiously and composed meticulously.

Working from life freshened his palette and rescued it from the often-deadening correctness of his historical scenes. The classicizing frame he brought to everything lent an archaic dignity to some of his portraits, such as the highly regarded The Muezzin (1879). This idealization was in itself an aspect of Orientalism— the Noble Savage— but the best of GérÓ´me's work reflects candor and honesty, the desire to record what is actually seen.

Of course this perception is filtered through Western assumptions and attitudes; how could it not be? But taken as a whole, GérÓ´me's Orientalist work is an intriguing ethnographic as well as artistic record.

Talent, yes; originality, no

We need, in fact, a new post-postcolonial aesthetics of Orientalism— one that sees it not merely as a phenomenon of imperialism but as a complex cultural interaction. In such an aesthetics, Jean-Léon GérÓ´me would hold a far from dishonorable place.

So, what are we to make of GérÓ´me? He was an imposing talent who, measured by the highest standards, fell short of the originality— the impulse to make it new— that defines genius. He worked in a style that was soon to be démodé, and he suffered, partly for this reason, some unquestionable lapses of taste, many of them unfortunately in some of his most popular works.

No one will ever make GérÓ´me part of the canon again. But he painted some very good pictures that can still be viewed with pleasure, and there's no reason to deny him his due.

Our habit has been to valorize the avant-garde and to dismiss whatever it replaced. There's a certain rough justice in this approach but also a danger, for in fallow periods such as our own, the quest for novelty leads only to an eclecticism that's pure fodder for kitsch.

As a style, French academicism was able to support a visual culture whose true geniuses— a Watteau, a Boucher, a Fragonard— could transcend it without repudiating it. Today we have no equivalent baseline, no authoritative model to follow or contest. This situation isn't entirely to our advantage.