"Visions of Arcadia' at the Art Museum (1st review)

"The wolf plans no ambush for the stag."

So wrote the poet Virgil, with more than a little wishful thinking, I suspect. "Arcadia," as a concept, gives rise to wishful thinking. It's antiquity's version of The Big Rock-Candy Mountain.

Arcadia calls to mind pastoral visions of shepherds playing their pipes while their sheep graze peacefully in the pastures. The Art Museum's "Visions of Arcadia" shows how late-19th and early-20th-Century artists attempted to revivify this notion.

By subtitling the exhibit, "Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse" the Museum does the show a bit of a disservice. This is actually an incredibly rich anthology show with some other big names (like Picasso and Henri Rousseau) discreetly slipped in through the back door.

If the show has a message, I would say it's this: There are as many visions of Arcadia as there are artists to create them.

For example, there's "Arcadia as the Joys of Flesh." This is perhaps the eldest sister of all the Arcadian visions on display. It's certainly as old as antiquity. To underscore this point, the exhibit opens with dueling sets of prints: Aristide Maillol's Illustrations for Virgil's Eclogen, and Matisse's illustrations to Mallarme's poem, Afternoon of the Faun.

Flesh and blood vs. pipe dream

The Maillols are more muscular works, with thick black lines, as though to remind us that this artist was a sculptor as well. The Matisse illustrations, by contrast, are whiplash-thin and airy to the point of being ethereal. It's a case of antiquity as flesh and blood versus antiquity as lovely pipe dream.

The pipe-dream notion carries well into the next gallery, where we see what I call "Academic Arcadia." Here we find the works of two 19th-Century French artists: Corot, who may now be considered a bit old-fashioned, and Puvis de Chavannes— once as famous as Picasso, now sadly forgotten.

Silenus, an artwork by Corot, is far more classical/academic than his later moody landscapes. Although his people are dwarfed by surrounding Nature, everything in Silenus is bustle and activity. The later works are still and dream-like.

The real world

Next we have a group of French painters trying to create Arcadia out of the real world that surrounds them. This is "Physical Arcadia," conveniently located along the sun-kissed shores of the Mediterranean.

A group of Neo-Impressionist painters— Seurat, Signac, Cross and Luce— recreate a pagan simplicity; Cross even brings back our old friend, the Faun. (Obviously the French hadn't read their Arthur Machen, so they still regarded fauns as images of carefree living and unbridled sensuality.)

The perceptive critic Felix Feneon remarked that Seurat's great La Grand Jatte painting was merely "modernized Puvis," and the same can be applied to all of these paintings. That said, they're also among the prettiest works in the show.

Color above all

Following close on the heels of the Neo-Impressionists are the Fauves, who seem to have found their Arcadia in the liberation of color. A work like Derain's Earthly Paradise can be said to be the color and nothing but the color.

Somewhat out of sequence chronologically, we arrive at last to the work of the show's marquee artist, Gauguin.

In a sense, Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence ruined Gauguin for all of us by rendering the artist a romantic figure. In Gauguin's own diaries and writings, we find a cantankerous fellow, endlessly squabbling with colonial and church authorities. Whatever else Gauguin found in the South Seas, the "Arcadia" of Virgil wasn't it.

But the paintings he created are another matter. Gauguin might have despised organized religion, but he remained in awe of man's capacity for worship. His early Breton-period work, The Vision After the Sermon, was a sort of Classics Illustrated version of his later Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?— one of the masterworks of Symbolist art.

(And lest we forget, Gauguin was a "card-carrying" member of the Symbolist school; his first work, Noa-Noa, was co-authored with the poet Charles Morice.)

Infancy to old age

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? itself is a sort of Ages of Man allegory, reaching from infancy at the right side of the painting to old age at the left. It also contains elements of creation myth, and it's constructed around the same type of allegorical groupings of figures that was Puvis de Chavannes's stock-in-trade.

Women By the Sea, painted by Gauguin's friend Maurice Denis about a decade later, finds Arcadia in a simple vision of a seaside frolic. But then, Denis was a man of simpler tastes who never sought Arcadia in the South Seas; and far from rebelling against the Catholic Church, Denis painted more than his share of devotional images.

Henri Rousseau's The Dream is the other great work in this section of the show. Although it's been endlessly reproduced in reduced format and crappy color, nothing really prepares you the impact made by the work itself. It's big (almost seven feet by ten), and one can imagine the gasps of those who first encountered it in 1910. No wonder they thought poor Rousseau was a loon! Perhaps only Rousseau could picture an Arcadia in which a nubile nude reclines comfortably upon a plush sofa— in the middle of a jungle.

Weekend skinny-dipping

Placing Poussin's 1664 painting, Apollo and Daphne, directly across from Cézanne's The Large Bathers, creates an interesting dialogue between past and present. Of course by the year 1664 no one bought the notion of Arcadia as a design of living. But it still had a viable existence as an artistic concept.

Poems and plays were being written, and paintings were being painted, about a carefree rustic world where gods and men— well, women— sported in ever-vernal forest glades. By 1906, when Cézanne completed his great work, all that remained of this vision was a weekend in the country with some skinny-dipping. (Walt Whitman, in Song of Myself, may have been the prophet of his new Industrial-Age Eclogue.)

Hung in close proximity to the Cézanne is Derain's Bathers. This 1907 painting is almost a refutation of the technique behind Derain's own Earthly Paradise. While the earlier work was loose and depended almost entirely on the play of the colors for its effect, The Bathers is tightly organized, and the drawing is decisive. The colors are primal and hard. The finished work looks more like a colored woodcut than an oil painting, but it's most impressive.

Matisse's Bathers by a River offers the most stylized approach seen thus far in the show. Matisse reduces his nudes to greyish totemic figures, and the overall effect is almost that of a stained-glass window in a modernist cathedral.

After the carnage

Now we enter what I like to call "Exploded Arcadia." After the carnage of World War I, who was going to deal in fauns and shepherds? The Cubist works presented in the show make even lazing in the sun seem hectic.

Delaunay's City of Paris makes an interesting contrast to Derain's Bathers. Both works depict three nudes. While the figures in the Derain are solid and brightly colored, Delaunay's are pale and seem fragmented. In contrast to Derain's almost lurid yellows and greens, Delaunay offers cool grays and blues with discreet smatterings of reds, browns and greens.

Derain's nudes are simply frolicking; Delaunay's, in their stylized poses, may well constitute a modernized version of the classic "Three Graces."

The Expressionists— Germany's answer to the Fauves— seem less interested in the myth of Arcadia, and their work appears to be more an outgrowth of that old German love of outdoors living. Only Franz Marc moves beyond this sentimental vision to create a mystical evocation of man living in harmony with nature— or, in his Deer in the Forest I, nature living in harmony with itself.

Up close and amazing

Interestingly Marc seems closer to the Russian painters Goncharova and Roerich than to his countrymen Kirchner and Pechstein. In allowing local audiences to get even a taste of such seldom-seen "exotics" as Pechstein and Goncharova, group shows like "Visions of Arcadia" perform some of their best educational work.

Upon seeing Kirchner and Pechstein up close— as opposed to reproduced in books of Expressionist art— I was amazed by the smoothness of the surfaces of their paintings. There is none of the kinetic paint-on-canvas feel of a Van Gogh. Kirchner might have been seized by wild visions, but apparently he recorded them in careful, even brushstrokes.

The exhibit concludes with might be called "Your Private Arcadia": a gallery in which you, the visitor, are invited to draw and post your own Arcadian visions.♦


To read anther review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read Steve Cohen's review of the catalogue for "Visions of Arcadia," click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.