Exhibition Hopping - Part 1

Over the past two months I've seen three exhibitions that have shown the impressive curating teams at three of our Canadian museums. Two have been right here in Ottawa and the third in Montreal.

Gustave Doré: Master of Imagination - National Gallery of Canada

Traditionally the NGC attempts to mount a "blockbuster" for the summer months when the tourists are flocking to the National Capital to stare through the fences at the now inaccessible Parliament Buildings and manouveur the detours and construction that is Ottawa.  In past years it has included a Van Gogh Exhibition (with not a sunflower in sight!!) that drew the biggest crowds in the history of the Gallery.  This year's Exhibition deserves to have a similar success but unfortunately a drop in tourism, road construction that makes access difficult and the sad fact that Doré is not a household name has meant that attendance has been disappointingly low.

The National Gallery and Musée d'Orsay used Doré's well-known illustration of Le Chat botté as their poster for Gustave Doré: Master of Imagination.  A click on the picture will take you to their mini-site devoted to this exceptional exhibition.

If attendance has been low the quality of the exhibition is of the highest.  Of course Doré the illustrator is a known quantity: it is Doré the sculptor and, for me at least, Doré the landscape artist that astounds the most.  As you enter the exhibition area it is difficult to miss Poème de la vigne, the massive (4 metres high and weighing in at 6000 lbs) bronze that was brought to Ottawa on a flatbed from its home at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.  But as is often the case as impressive as the large pieces are it is  the smaller exhibits that cause that little catch in the throat that says you are looking at a master at work.

Frolic (Leapfrog) is a bronze from 1881 - a brilliant piece of suspended animation.  Its form and fluidity are a prime example of the talents of the artist as more than an illustrator.  The delicate balance of the work is an astounding piece of calculation.

If his bronzes impressed it was his landscapes, particularly those of Scotland and the Pyrenees that came as a complete surprise.  Unfortunately I found that most of his religious paintings - and he did a great many - reeked of that faux-sanctitity that was typical of French art of the period.  But those landscapes! 

A range in the Pyrenees painted in 1860 - Doré's landscapes are romanticism at its highest - and that is meant as a compliment.

Several years ago the summer show was a brilliant exhibition: The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as a Clown.   It celebrated the history of the circus with some 200 lithographs, paintings, photographs and sculptures.  Though Picasso's overwhelming show curtain for Parade had me near tears with its sheer exuberant glory what stuck in my memory were two paintings of French street performers:   Grimaces et Misères (Les Saltimbanques) (1888) by Fernand Pelez and an earlier work by Doré: La famille du Saltimbanque: L'enfant blessé (The Family of Street Acrobats: the injured child (1874).  

 The artist's comment on the painting removes any taint of maudlin sentiment and places the scene in the very real world:

He (the child) is dying.  I wished to depict the tardy awakening of nature in those two hardened, almost brutalized beings.  To gain money they have killed their child, and in killing him they have found out that they had hearts.

When curators Paul Lang, Édouard Papet and Phillipe Kaenel set up the exhibition they wanted to show the often overlooked influence that Doré has had over visual arts up to our own time.  In the work of cinema directors as diverse as George Méliès, Jean Cocteau, Cecil B. DeMille, Carol Reed, Terry Gilliam,  and Roman Polanski entire frames mirror the work of the Illustrator.   And the sway he has held over cartoonists and graphic artists to this day is another aspect of this remarkable man that, until now, has been neglected.

That rocket struck Moon in George Méliès La voyage dans la lune bears a more than passing resemblance to Dore's Frost-Bitten Sun.

During a recent members' night a series of Méliès' films were shown including a Cendrillon which was Doré inspired by way of the Folies Bergère.   At times it was like one of Doré's Contes de Fées come to life at other times pure escapism for the tired tycoon.  And the special effects were remarkable considering Méliès was working with one camera and very primitive techniques.  And a recent viewing of L'Inferno - the first full length silent film ever made in Italy - reveals that many of the tableau vivant and effects are straight out of Doré's famous plates for Dante's masterpiece.  And in more recent times take a look at that Dream Works Puss in Boots?  He remind you of anyone?

Two very different views of Street People by Doré.  Above:  London from a series of studies of Victorian London that accentuate the grim and smog laden atmosphere of the world's largest city of the period.  Below:  The Beggars of Burgos, the former capital of Castille have a more romantic appearance than their Albion neighbours.   Doré's views of Spain were to add to the Romantic notions the French seemed to harbour about the people beyond the Pyrenees.

There are only two weeks left before the exhibition ends (September 14) and I urge anyone in and around Ottawa to catch it while you can.  I certainly plan to make a visit in the next few days - once was not enough.

"How long must one be an illustrator before they become illustrious?" - Gustave Doré

August 30 - 1918: Fanni Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. This, along with the assassination of Bolshevik senior official Moisei Uritsky days earlier, prompts the decree for Red Terror.

Time to Van Gogh

As I mentioned a few days ago the big "blockbuster" exhibition at the National Gallery for this summer is Van Gogh: Up Close - the first major showing of a collection of the Dutch post-impressionists paintings in Canada for 25 years.  The first time I saw a real Van Gogh would have been in the late 1950s - if my fading memory serves me right.   I vaguely remember lining up to shuffle - and in some case be shoved - passed some of his more famous works at the old AGO.  I do recall a flash of brilliant yellow and orange sunflowers until someone barked at me that "others wanna see the pictures too you know!" or at least that was the gist of the remark.  Ah the sophistication of Toronto in the 1950s.

The opening night of the current exhibition dragged that memory out of the fog of time as we joined the crowds gathering around the 40 paintings that have been culled from private and public collections from around the world.  It was difficult to appreciate the stated purpose of the exhibition to give us an "up close" view of his development - the volume of people meant you were either at a distance or really really close up.  I'll hold off on giving an opinion on it after a second - hopefully less crowded - visit in the next month or two.

Painted in Paris early in 1887 this is one of a series of canvases capturing the worn
footwear of a labourer.  The Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Fine Art  

But as so often happens I found that as lovely as the Iris and the Almond Blossom paintings are I was captivated by a still life Van Gogh completed in 1887 of a pair of old shoes.  Shoes were the subject of at least seven of his oils between 1886 and 1888.  Not the shoes of the ladies and gentleman of the salons but the worn, scuffed and oft mended shoes of labourers and workmen.  There have been lectures, dissertations and the odd thesis written about the meaning of these works.  Is Van Gogh using them as a metaphor for the wearing artistic road he has chosen?  Do the shoes symbolize the rough existence of the painter in an unappreciative world?  Or are they just a pair of shoes? Simply just another subject for a still-life?  What ever it is I found it one of the more interesting paintings in the exhibition.

Van Gogh purchased a number of woodcut prints in the dockyards at Antwerp and began to paint
copies of several of them including this one of The Plum Garden in Kameido.  I have to say that
I prefer the Hiroshige original(left) to the Van Gogh copy. I find he has turned something
that was light and has life into a dark, flat and ponderous vision.

100 Famous Views of Edo
Evening Shower at Atake
and the Great Bridge
Hiroshige - 1856-1856

Now I may just be being perverse but on first viewing I enjoyed two other related exhibits more than the major one.   With the opening of trade from Japan Ukiyo-e had begun to appear on the European scene at the time and Van Gogh had purchased a series of the stylized woodblock paintings that were to influence many of his works.  I had forgotten that the Royal Ontario Museum has an extensive collection of these pieces; thirty of them were on loan to the Gallery as illustrations of the style and their impact on the painter.  The majority of them were by the renowned and much revered 18th century artist Hiroshige - Van Gogh painted copies of several of the Japanese master's works.  My own feeling was that though it did accomplish its stated purpose - to illustrate their influence on Van Gogh  - this small exhibition was of such quality and interest that it could have stood very well on its own.

One of the thirty five small landscapes that Augustin Hirschvogel etched between 1545 and 1549.  This small jewel
is only 5.4 by 15.5 cms (2.126" by 6.102") but is filled with details that bring the scene to life.

Perhaps a little more obscure in purpose was a collection of graphics - etchings, pen and ink - from the National Gallery's own collection.  Many of the pieces on display are squirrelled  away in the archives of the Gallery - there just isn't enough space - and aren't often on display.  A lady beside mentioned that they can be viewed by arrangement with the gallery - which is perhaps a project for the future????  There were three in particular that immediately attracted me and that I must admit I spent more time in front of than anything else at the exhibition.   First and foremost was a small landscape by Augustin Hirschvogel - a tiny perfect view of a small town.  Hirschvogel was a member of the Danube School and is best known for a series of small landscapes he etched between 1545 and 1549.  I was fascinated by the detail that he achieved in a medium which he had only taken up in the last decade of his life.

Kolbe's The Cow in the Reeds is typical of his work - the vegetation takes on
gigantic proportions and dominates the scene almost overwhelming the resting cow.  Perhaps given all that
greenery the cow has decided she would be foolish to leave such abundant grazing.

Beside the Hirschvogel was a lovely study of St Jerome and the Lion amongst Ruins from the same period.  I haven't been able to track down anything about it either on the Gallery's website or through Google.  I will have to make another visit to find out more about it.  From a later period (1801) was an etching by Karl Wilhelm Kolbe, a German artist who seemed to have a bit of an obsession with cows.  A quick search revealed that his studies of various flora seemed to have cows as their fauna on more than one occasion.  I found The Cow in the Reeds which he did somewhere between 1800 and 1803 a delight.  It took a bit to find the cow but she is definitely there and seem quite quite contented.

During a bit of a hiatus in my work life at the beginning of July - more about that another time - I'll try and get back to the Gallery for a second more leisurely look.  But in the meantime I'm gearing up for the possibility of more Van Gogh's when I spend a few days in Amsterdam next week  - and more about that later.

02 June - 1846: Birth of the Italian Republic: In a referendum, Italians vote to turn Italy from a monarchy into a Republic.