Profound Gaps and Valuable Spaces (in one beloved
institution)

As I was browsing through the Barbizon and Impressionist "rooms" at the National Gallery, a number of predictably unpleasant thoughts regarding the collecting mentality began to take shape in my mind. Those who are familiar with my "take" on collectors and collecting will probabably be able to guess them accurately enough. (I must inject a qualification here and say categorically that I don't necessarily expect ANYBODY to be familiar with my thought process. I am just assumming that the curious handful may have scanned my blog and it is of this possible population that I speak.)

At any rate, as I was browsing a very persistent thought began to assert itself. "Why this?" might be an accurate expression of that thought. (Or, rather:
Why JUST this?") Any lower-case national gallery should bring together, from the various significant movements of art history, a sort of compendium of the best of these movements and trot them out for the public. What it chooses should be carefully considered. I suppose gaps are to be expected, but in our National Gallery's emphasis on the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, it misses the boat significantly. Art history has, for some time now, cast so-called academic painters in the role of villains and villainnesses. They were the ones who fought so hard to keep the radicals out. And indeed many did. But in the Eighteen Seventies, Monet seemed to be working in daubs and swatches. Later on, Cezanne also seemed to be brewing up a sort of lunatic potion of broad directional strokes and eye-searing, board-flat colorations. Van Gogh might be seen as a real lunatic, with his borrowings from Japan - which were far more oddball than Whistler's - and his expressionistic (as opposed to illusion-centered) handling of form, color, and spatial relationships.
These people were very, very odd - though a casual study situates them all just to the left of the academic painters with whom they studied for a while, but whose more conventional techniques and (to use that scrumptious word) methodologies they ultimately spurned.

However, as I browsed, I remembered that there were a few academic paintings among the great roomfuls of now-acceptable daubs and I went to see them. Before making my pilgrimage, however, I studied Manet for a while. And Bazille. Manet was essentially a studio painter incurably smitten with Velasquez and Murillo.
He did not really understand natural light and is therefore an impressionist-by-default. Degas understood it much better and was by far the more complex talent. The National has done well by him and collected figures studies, portraits, and interiors by him. Manet shows very poorly alongside of him.

Bazille's work looks hopefully wooden and incoherent.
He simply doesn't belong in a great national collection. The wallspace is just too dear.

The academic paintings are, by and large, not much better. If there is a duller classicist than Puvis de Chavannes, I'd like to know what he or she might be.
There are way too many of his paintings - which is to say, one is almost too much. He belongs in the basement. But the Benjamin Constant and Arnold Bocklin - two very different people - are a credit to the collection. Constant does what Manet attempted to do - academic set-pieces - but beats him all to hell in capturing natural light, and is easily his superior in terms of what Manet is famous for: paint application and/or painterly texture. His offering is no less (or more) absurd than Manet's stagey painting of studio models together in a non-setting - and is called something on the lines of "The Emir's Favorite." It shows two lovely ladies posing langorously in a shadowy courtyard with the cool Mediterranean in the distance. A casual study is rewarding. You notice that the handling, while solid, is reliant on suggestion. The golden lights of veils are dragged with the brush over previous layers.
Shadows are mysteriously transparent, faces are not overdeveloped. It is a pretty damned good painting, all in all, and makes you wonder whether the academic painters, for all their infamous conservatism, weren't justifiably exercised when they first set eyes on the Impressionists and their dissentious colleagues. They actually knew how to do what they Impressionists were trying to do, but were, alas, chained to a system in which success was determined by rigid rules and intractible aesthetics. Delacroix gave you exotic paintings of a similar type, but he too diverged from the classical presentation of them and thereby won himself a place in the pre-Impressionist pantheon.

The Bocklin is a marvel, in places, of palpable representation. I forget the title of the painting, but no matter. It's really about his fantastically luminous marble wall against a brooding, storm-laden sky. I wondered, while looking at this wall, why everybody was stuck with the Van Goghs. But, of course, that's me and while I "get" Van Gogh in my own way, the nuances of perception were not his strong suit. Van Gogh was among the first painters to offer up his inner life as something to be gazed upon and valued for itself. A hard thing to do at the time, and I admire him for it. But I must admit that I often prefer the text of his paintings - the great letters to his brother and patron, Theo - to the paintings themselves. They just don't have much to offer visually, which is not a good thing in a painting. And in this regard I'm sure almost any cross section of sophisticated museum-goers will disagree with me.

At any rate, yes, I'd rather look at these particular academic paintings than most of the impressionist paintings in the place. There are some good Monets, of course, a few decent Cezannes, and an early Renoir
- a Diana done when the artist was twenty-six (at the Gleyre Atelier, if I'm not mistaken) - that could almost be a Courbet.

However, why not have a mixture rather than have the Impressionists predominate? It does the public a great disservice by subtracting from art history significant movers and shakers who have merely fallen, through some sort of coattail consensus among art collectors and historians, out of our consciousness.
We, the public, should not only know who the Impressionists were opposing - but what. It is possible that, upon seeing the opposition, we, the public, might like it better - or, at any rate, just as well. Many excellent painters, now relegated to basements or provincial museums, could easily hang in the rooms the Impressionists have taken over. And they could be purchased with just a few astute and cash-conscious de-accessionings.

This is our National Gallery and I think it should be as good as it can be. It's pretty damned good as it is, but it is lacking both in great European art of the 19th-century (where are the Danes, Poles, Russians, among others?), but also in American art, which seems to stop cold in about 1910. Where is the contract that severs a national institution from living painters and refuses to include anybody other than the Pop, Absract Expressionist and Minimalist Crowd? If Rothko can have an entire gallery in the East Wing, why shouldn't equal space be given over to John Koch, Raphael Soyer, Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus - to name a few of his realist contemporaries. Our National Gallery does not tell OUR story and it ought
to. Moreoever, we ought to insist that it does.