Modern French painting and the art museum - The Problematics of Collecting and Display, part 2

For most members of the public, French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting is the glory of large-scale American art museums. The Impressionist galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston serve as the crowning spaces in their larger installations of European easel painting, and most of these Impressionist galleries have the highest attendance of any permanent collection spaces in the museums. This is in marked contrast to Europe, where, with the exceptions of the National Galleries of Berlin and London and, by fluke, the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums in St. Petersburg and Moscow, nineteenth-century French painting is either segregated from earlier art (as it is in Paris and Munich) or is almost altogether absent, as it is in Vienna, Madrid, or Milan.

International - and particularly British and American - scholarship in the area of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist French painting has been fervent and exciting during the last generation. Books, dissertations, exhibition catalogues, articles, and critical reviews have been produced in an attempt to rethink, reattribute, redate, retitle, and research virtually every artist, medium, artistic movement, and critical stance in French art from 1850 until World War I, and many of the methodological developments in this hotly debated field have led to critical breakthroughs in other areas of the history of art. Interestingly, many of these contributions to the history of art have been made under the aegis of art museums, whose exhibitions, publications, colloquia, and lecture programs have provided both a forum for critical debate in front of a nonuniversity audience and a chance for museum and university scholars to test their ideas in collaboration.

If this "velocity of exchange" (to use a concept from economic theory) has characterized scholarship, it has also affected the permanent collections in American (and British) museums. The National Gallery of Art in London has not only nearly tripled its collection of French nineteenth-century painting in the last fifteen years, but has also placed it in prominent galleries immediately adjacent to the main entrance on Trafalgar Square. And the permanent collection galleries of Impressionist painting in Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington have had carefully planned and expensive reinstallations during the past decade. The reinstallations have not merely been a reshuffling of familiar objects; they have also resulted from major acquisitions or from a reappraisal of works of art - such as "academic" painting or symbolist art - much of which had been in inaccessible storage in the last generation.

In many ways, these new installations have had a conservatizing effect on the modernist discourse to which the paintings contribute. Paintings that in most university courses continue to be taught as "radical," "subversive," and "avant-garde" - as the confident beginnings of modernist art - have been placed in superb nineteenth-century skylit galleries as the culmination of five centuries of European painting. What, for academic art historians, is a separation of modernist art from its academic traditions is, for many museums, the opposite. In Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and London one can see Renoir in a dialogue with Fragonard or Cezanne as the logical successor to Poussin. And Manet's many allusions to Italian and Spanish Old Master painting are clearer in all these institutions than they are at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, which is quite a hike from the Louvre. This view of modern art as a part of - rather than a separation from - the greatness of the Western tradition is also emphasized by smaller American museums such as the Kimbell Art Museum, the Getty Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Toledo Museum of Art. When it comes to "quality," Impressionism and Post-Impressionism have an unassailable place in our canon.

Ironically, the very fact that American and, later, British art museums have embraced vanguard modern art has led to a situation in which an art created in opposition to general art museums is no longer vanguard. Only in labels, lectures, articles, and books can its earlier radicalism be evoked. How different is the case of paintings of the Baroque, Roccoco, and Neoclassical periods, done before "the museum age." Yet their earliest homes were quasi-public palaces and churches of a grand scale rather than the apartments, cafes, commercial galleries, and rented rooms modified for the introduction of urban vanguard art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France. Cezanne never lived to see his paintings in spaces like those of the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of Art, or Chicago. Caravaggio, Guercino, Claude, Poussin, Tiepolo, Boucher, Reynolds, David, Constable, or Delacroix would be surprised only by the relative absence of decoration, by the sparseness of the hang, by the lack of furniture, and by the skylights; in scale and architectural grandeur, the picture galleries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have suited these artists just fine.