Revolutionary Olympus

By ROBERT HUGHES

In 1774 Louis XVI became King of France; in 1830, Charles X fell. The texture of French thought changed more radically in those 56 years than it ever had before, or would again. So did its cultural surface, especially in painting, which moved, as it were, from the pink thighs of Boucher's Miss O'Murphy to the martial sinews of David's Horatii and thence to the tumescent flesh of Delacroix's slave girls almost within the lifetime of one man. Yet these tremendous years of the Revolution, the Directorate and the Empire have long been the art historian's Bermuda Triangle. They are crudely charted with the routine marks "classical" and "romantic," shoaled with contradiction, ready to sink almost any generalization.

It takes one great exhibition to open the subject afresh; and now it has come, under the title "French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution." Jointly organized by France's Reunion des Musees Nationaux, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Metropolitan Museum, it was seen last year at the Grand Palais in Paris. In an abbreviated form (149 paintings out of the original 207), it opened last week in Detroit, and will go to the Met in June.

Despite the cuts forced by the Met's director, Thomas Hoving, the show remains a triumph of connoisseurship --one of the great museum events of the past 20 years. This is due in no small part to the detail. Rather than being a portmanteau of highlights, the exhibition includes an immense range of underrated "minor" figures like the neoclassicists Jean-Franc,ois-Pierre Peyron and Jean Germain Drouais. The subject matter runs from the grandest of historical paintings to an eccentric still life with stuffed birds; the figures, from a swooning and epicene Death of Hyacinth by Jean Broc to the passionate and despairing cragginess of Delacroix's Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1827 (see color page).

About Heroes. One fiction that the show destroys is the lingering idea that revolutions in politics produce revolutionary art styles. The notion that the events of 1789 filled the Salon with blood, grapeshot and equality is a myth. As the catalogue reminds us, "It is generally agreed that the Revolution did not seriously affect the development of French painting." Thus when it came, the successful portraitists--most of whom, like the gifted Adelaide Labille-Guiard, were women--simply turned from painting the court to recording the features of eminences like Robespierre and Talleyrand.

What became the Revolution's house style, neoclassicism, had been steadily developing since the reign of Louis XV. The grand exhortations to "order and severity" produced by the Revolution's painter laureate, Jacques-Louis David--The Oath of the Horatii, Socrates Drinking the Hemlock--were about as hierarchical and elitist as art can be. They were about heroes, not average men; and the world of stoic virtue and exemplary action that unfolds in them is far removed from the reality of the Revolution. The fate of David's portrait of Lavoisier and His Wife was instructive. He rendered this savant, the discoverer of oxygen, in heroic terms, though muted by domesticity; like Homer or Dante, Lavoisier is seen with symbolic appurtenances (the magnificent still life of scientific instruments does duty for the bardic wreath and scroll), presided over by his wife as Muse. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined in the Terror, and the painting was kept from exhibition for political reasons.

However, the Revolution's big gift to art was not some chimera of "radical style." It was the museum. There, as David and his colleagues foresaw, the eclectic authority of the past would become the teacher, displacing the personal authority of whatever mitre was running the academy. Thus the museum became the embodiment of free choice.

Epic Greed. It was there that the tremendous vitality of 19th century French painting would henceforth be nourished. Napoleon's art adviser, Dominique Vivant Denon, a man so feared for his rapacity that he was known throughout Europe as l'emballeur (the packer), set out to bring back to Paris every portable masterpiece he could lay hands on in conquered territory. This exercise in epic greed was an unqualified success. It assured the dominance of French art for another hundred years.

Meanwhile, the seeds of "romanticism" were being laid within the authoritarian gloire of the Empire. Where did the impulse toward exotic subjects, far travel and weird archaeologies, which would propel Delacroix to Algiers, begin? The show's thesis is that it was fixed in the French imagination by Napoleon's campaigns, especially by the invasion of Egypt. The lure of the crag and the mystery of the Pyramids were Napoleonic properties; and when Hubert Robert, in 1798, took a maypole dance in Arcady and transformed it into a ring of nymphs dancing around an eroded and indecently suggestive obelisk, he gave a pastoral form to the obsession which, in part, seems to have driven Napoleon to the Nile --the symbolic conquest of eternity by masculinity.

By the same token, the classic-romantic pigeonholes have conspired to make us think of neoclassical art as sensually diluted. A sharp contour supposedly driveth out lust. Of course it does not, and the sensuality of a Delacroix nude seems quite uncomplicated beside the grandiose perversity of Ingres's Jupiter and Thetis. That monument of ivory and fulgid blue, with the nymph's body twining in supplication up the huge patriarchal block of a torso, achieves a sexual pitch within its insistent abstraction that not even Matisse could rival.

There is, in short, almost no detail of our inherited sense of this period of French art that this exhibition cannot challenge or revise. What museum enterprise could hope for more than that? sbRobert Hughes

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