"Visions of Arcadia': Now for the catalogue

Few people who flock to a major art show buy the catalogue, and even fewer read it. Most folks buy art catalogues as souvenirs or coffee table ornaments.

Some 250,000 patrons attended the Art Museum's "Van Gogh Up Close" show earlier this year, but only 10,000 purchased the catalogue.

That's their mistake. These publications can be fascinating reading.

Consider the hardcover Visions of Arcadia: Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, which ventures far beyond the contents of the current show of the same name. It's a provocative exploration of the unspoiled, ephemeral and fictitious land of dreams called Arcadia— a subject that's far more complex than the study of any artist.

Clearly, the Art Museum's exhibition is only a starting point for this wider exploration, and the book discusses and reproduces 245 Arcadian paintings— far more than the 60 in the show.

The text, edited and largely written by Joseph Rishel, brings coherence to a subject that's been interpreted in poetry and art over two millennia. Artists come to life through anecdotes about their friendships and influences on each other. Cézanne, for example, spent his childhood summers in such Acadian pursuits swimming and lounging by the Arc River with his pal, Emile Zola, and writing poems to Zola that paraphrased Virgil.

Titian's sensual side

Any visitor to the Art Museum galleries sees only the tip of an iceberg, because the exhibit doesn't contain the presaging art of Titian (Concert Champêtre) and Botticelli (La Primavera); both are shown and discussed in the book. (The originals remain in the Louvre and Florence's Uffizi respectively.)

Titian's scene is late afternoon: A setting sun casts a rosy light on a goatherd driving his flock homeward, while a young nobleman under a tree strums his lute and sings a love song to two nude nymphs. One nymph holds a flute while the other pours a drink. It's a sensuality I don't normally expect from Titian, and it aroused my curiosity to see more. The book obliged me with an illustration of Titian's The Andrians (hanging in Madrid's Prado), which shows even more debauchery and a blatantly erotic nude in the foreground.

Rishel, who curated the exhibition, persuaded the Fine Arts Museum of Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago to loan two giant works— respectively, Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? and Matisse's Bathers by a River. When you see these giant paintings together, you sense some of their connections with a third, the Philadelphia Museum's own The Large Bathers , by Cézanne. But Rishel's essay explains even more.

Picasso's best

Among the paintings not in the show is Picasso's best depiction of Arcadia— The Joy of Life (1946), with Pan piping his tunes for a satyr, a centaur and dancing animals. You can see it only at the Musée Picasso in Paris, or in this book.

Nicolas Poussin, similarly, is exhibited only with his final work, Apollo and Daphne, whereas his seminal work, The Arcadian Shepherds, is examined in the book.

Incidentally, Botticelli, Poussin and Titian were painting Arcadian visions in the 15th and 16th Centuries. Anyone who expected the Art Museum, show to focus only on the period of Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse is in for some pleasant surprises. Ditto for anyone who reads the catalogue.♦


To read Steve Cohen's review of the Art Museum's "Visions of Arcadia" show, click here.