Early Paintings
of Corot
Salander-O'Reilly Galleries
20 East 79th Street
New York, NY 10021
May 5 to June 5,
2004
By
JOHN
GOODRICH
Jean-Baptiste-Camille
Corot Lake Como and the Town 1834
oil on canvas, 11-3/8 x 16-1/2 inches
Courtesy Salander-O'Reilly Galleries
"He is the
rare and exceptional genius and the father of modern landscape painting,"
noted Delacroix noted in 1861. "He is still the strongest, he has
anticipated everything," Degas affirmed some 20 years later. "There
is only one master here…Compared to him, the rest of us are nothing,
absolutely nothing." (Monet, 1897) The object of all this adulation
is Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and at least a couple twentieth-century
artists seemed to have agreed: Picasso actually owned several of his
paintings, and in 1912 Matisse listed his favorite masters as Goya,
Dürer, Rembrandt, Manet, and yes, Corot.
Surprised? Corot obviously supplied these painters with what they asked
of art, but his star has sunk considerably since--"The official
Corot is generally a bore." (Robert Hughes, 1996) Corot's low-key
paintings, with their traditional subjects, their unflashy brushwork
and subtle colors, won't grab those looking for demonstrative technique
or psychological undercurrents. Unlike Manet or Courbet, his images
never hint at subverting an existing order-Rule No. 1, of course, for
any relevant art. And in regards to Rule No. 2, Corot's work illuminates
absolutely nothing about the connection between artist and audience,
unless you find the escapist fantasy of feathery trees and mist-drenched
lakes to be a kind of social commentary.
Matisse and Degas knew of what they spoke, however. Corot's virtues
are formidable, though they assume a kind of communication between painter
and viewer instead of explicating it. Like Courbet, Rembrandt and other
masters, Corot was supremely conscious of the geometric relationships
of forms and colors, and for the receptive viewer his paintings communicate
a remarkable vitality of gesture and scale, whether the subject be trees,
figures, panoramas, or interiors. While not subversive, Corot's work
is certainly innovative. Unlike Claude Lorrain's logical spatial recessions,
his energized space is full of the contradictions of observed light;
he "subverted" traditional notions of space by coaxing a purely
empirical experience of nature, somehow untrammeled, through a classical
discipline of forms and intervals. His quiet paintings are indeed the
most powerful connection between neo-Classicism and Impressionism. (And
you'll notice that Matisse's list includes no painters from either of
these schools.)
For those who delight in this lyrical language of form, Salander-O'Reilly
Galleries' Early Paintings by Corot was one of the season's real treats.
The fifteen small oils date mostly from the artist's first stay in Italy,
the period from 1825-28 that marked the culmination of his years of
study. He apparently considered these works just studies (exhibiting
only one of them during his lifetime), but their crisp brushstrokes,
bold delineations of masses and nuanced, planar colors make them among
his most widely praised paintings today.
"Lake Como
and the Town," (1834) is the latest painting here, but it reflects
the broad attack of his early style. Its motif-a cluster of domes and
towers nestled under ragged mountains viewed across a glistening alpine
lake-is nothing if not picturesque. Corot's impulse, however, is not
to render the scenic but to uncover its rhythmic meaning. He actually
explained his approach: he first established outlines, then tones, then
colors, and finally qualities of finish. One can sense the start of
the process in the stark outlines of distant peaks that, crossing the
image's full horizontal dimension, eerily mirror the jagged shoreline
at the viewers' feet, elasticizing the painting's entire middle space.
Swathes of tones within this space separate elements into two camps:
those areas warmed by sunlight, and those deprived of it. Subtle colors
further differentiate the tones, and as these dozens of colored patches
shift with the dictates of the light, their sequences also gather somehow
into the "real" impulses of objects in space and light; gestures
attain weight, so that mountains (wedges of elusive, mauve-green-gray
shadows among warm, olive-hued flanks) lumber gracefully above the staccato,
horizontal facets of buildings (pale pinkish flicks among somber reddish-umber
shadows.) Close up on the canvas' right edge (one can almost touch it)
a dark tree trunk runs up the vertical dimension, rhyming playfully
with the tiny, distant verticals of towers.
Strategically hung
opposite the entrance, this small sketch quietly gleams from across
the room. Its brilliance lies not in heightened "realistic"
description but in a luminous comprehension of plastic rhythms. It neatly
illustrates a point: though often considered a "tonal painter"
Corot is actually a superb colorist. No tone in this sketch exists apart
from color, which becomes the engine that drives the rhythms.
Another gem in the
exhibition is "Venice: Santa Maria della Salute from the Campo
della Carita," (1828), in which brisk hues and strokes cohere as
gondolas and canal receding towards a distant church. Their hues vividly
capture the Venetian atmosphere, but the visual weight of these forms
also initiates a larger rhythm in which dark swoops of prows oppose
lights of domes, again animating the middle space. Eighty years later
Monet was to depict the same kind of scene on his trip to Venice, and
while his surfaces are more luscious and his atmosphere richer and denser,
he rarely attained this sketch's agile sense of rhythm and scale. In
the Corot one arrives at details in their appointed time; as the waters
of the canal recede into the painting's depths, the eye rests finally
upon a small patch of distinctly darker blue, and the pause lends a
restive breadth to the whole shimmering plane leading up to it. One
suspects that the artist reveled not just in the exotic stimuli of a
scene, but also in what each element meant.
The same might be
said of "Cloudy Sky," (1826-28), a study of scuttling clouds
that irresistibly begged comparison with the paintings upstairs in Salander's
concurrent exhibition, Constable's Skies. Corot can't match the churning
volumes and empassioned brushwork of the English master, but again,
he imparts something else: a sense of pacing-in this case, of moving
from streams of clouds compressed along the lower edge to a broad and
vacant portion of sky above, which the artist punctuates with a single,
self-contained cloud. If there's more Sturm und Drang to Constable's
skies, then Corot's image has more of the fleet-footed variety of classical
representation.
In later years,
of course, Corot's style turned increasingly towards the feathery, mist-drenched
landscapes that (in the words of Vincent Pomarède, curator at
the Louvre Museum) "perfectly matched the tastes of the provincial
middle classes of the late nineteenth century." The sentimentality
of description in many of these works can indeed by cloying, but it's
worth noting that in his later life Corot often worked simultaneously
in different styles for paintings that ranged from large mythological
scenes for the Salons to intimate portraits, and from hazy river scenes
to crystalline town views. A second, deeper look at these paintings
reveals the same Corot at work, who, never content with mere description,
always located the mass of a tree with the authority of a master. It
should be added that throughout his painting life he was a transparently
clumsy stylist by the Academy's standards; the irony is that his naïve
modeling, so regularly condemned by his detractors up until his late,
"fuzzy" paintings, was to become part of the appeal of his
early work for later critics.
Was he a naïve
sentimentalist, or a practical man absolutely secure in his priorities?
Quite likely he was both. Contemporary accounts confirm that he was
a deeply kind and modest man, but also a painter of great ambition and
determination. He endured two decades of relative obscurity and sometimes
venomous criticism ("…There are those who call that painting.
They are very kind…"), but once his career blossomed in late
middle age, he could be diffident to a fault. ("It would take so
little to make it a real Corot. Here!" he purportedly exclaimed
as he reworked and signed one of the countless "Corot" forgeries.
His more noble gestures include buying a house for the elderly and destitute
Daumier and providing for Millet's widow.) It might be fair to say that
he knew what mattered to him privately in art and publicly in life,
and found ways of accommodating the two.
Now if only Corot had been slightly more obliging, he would have produced
not just a bumper crop of paintings in the currently popular style,
but also a whole secret cache for future tastes. Oddly, such a scenario
did come to pass, in a sense. After the artist died at the ripe age
of 78, the Paris art world was surprised to find he had been quietly
at work on a large series of figure paintings. Many of these works,
as luminous in color and expansive in gesture as anything he'd done,
with possibly a newly meditative quality, are among his most extraordinary
efforts. These late figure paintings happen to be Degas' favorite Corots.
They also provoke
a tantalizing notion. Someday, might they too become the occasion for
a Salander-O'Reilly exhibition?
