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Art Review: Gerome-Goupil exhibit looks at merchandising
Thursday, June 14, 2001 By Donald Miller, Post-Gazette Senior Editor
DeCourcy "Dick" McIntosh sees "Gerome and Goupil: Art and Enterprise," his last exhibition at the Frick Art & Historical Center as executive director, as a study of art merchandising rather than aesthetics.
He is correct. Although the 20 paintings by Jean-Leon Gerome in the Point Breeze show are significant, they are not meant as a gathering of his best or even best-known works.
"Gerome & Goupil: Art and Enterprise"
WHERE: Frick Art & Historical Center, Point Breeze.
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; noon to 6 p.m. Sundays. The exhibition runs through Aug. 12; several related events are scheduled at various times.
ADMISSION: free (docent tours offered); 412-371-0600 or www.frickart.org.
Instead the emphasis is on the highly profitable working arrangement between French academician Gerome (1824-1904) and his astute father-in-law, the prominent Parisian art dealer and print publisher Adolphe Goupil (1806-93). Of 337 sold Gerome paintings, 122 were made into about 370 print editions. So although there are 20 paintings on view, they are interspersed in the galleries with mounted prints. The strong contrast between the two mediums is helped by the galleries' bright wall colors.
Goupil established a fine arts gallery in New York, still in business as M. Knoedler, that dealt with many wealthy Pittsburghers. He also successfully marketed prints made from Gerome's paintings to a global audience, making the French painter one of the most popular artists of his day.
No wonder. Gerome's subjects breathed life into ancient stories, particularly those from the Bible or Roman antiquity. Being an intelligent eclectic, Gerome traveled to exotic Islamic lands, loved painting beautiful nude women and spent much time depicting majestic animals, especially lions and horses, on canvas. From there the images would be turned into photogravure prints. Both the paintings and prints would be sold.
Gerome often depicted emotion as well as reality. He took pains to get his compositions and anatomy correct and delighted as much in decorative detail as he did the sinuous curves of a dancing girl's back or the sheen of an Arabian stallion. Like most artists of his period and particularly the French naturalist painters, Gerome used photographs to aid his memory and ideas. So often his human figures possessed a realism strongly at odds with the impressionists. Gerome depicted his stylistic disagreement with American impressionist James A. M. Whistler metaphorically in "Lion and Butterfly" at Carnegie Museum of Art. The lion growls at the butterfly at his nose.
Gerome was so practiced in his art and so brilliant a colorist that American painting giant Thomas Eakins studied with Gerome in Paris. At the same time, Gerome as a French Victorian often chose subjects that were super dramatic and a bit much for today's cooler taste.
In "Duel After the Ball," 1857, from the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Gerome's exquisite brushwork portrays a man dying in a Pierrot costume. He has been pierced through with an epee and is supported by friends in a snowy field. His collapsed legs virtually point to two men at right. One is the other duelist, dressed as an American Indian, who has dropped his sword in the snow. We can imagine the fun Victorians had interpreting this puzzling study without an answer. Perhaps it is about romantic love gone wrong.
Gerome's flamboyance was at home with historic subject matter such as "The Death of Caesar," 1859, in which the viewer sees the bloody scene after the assassination as the murderers file from the columned Senate. The dramatics reach a high point in "Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down)," 1875, in which the successful gladiator asks spectators if he should spare his beaten foe's life.
Yet Gerome was equally alive to his Islamic subjects seen in "The Public Prayer," 1871, Metropolitan Museum of Art, with gorgeously robed men worshipping in a Cairo mosque. This exhibition was born in research for "Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890-1910," which the Frick Art & Historical Center published four years ago. In turn, it will be a source for Dick McIntosh's history of the Knoedler Gallery, his next assignment.
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