Sonneteer of a World at Rest

By ROBERT HUGHES

Jean-Simeon Chardin: a bicentennial retrospective

By general consent, Jean-Simeon Chardin was one of the supreme artists of the 18th century, and probably the greatest master of still life in the history of painting. Yet there has not been, until now, a full-dress retrospective of his work. To mark the 200th anniversary of his death, at the age of 80 in 1779, a huge Chardin show opened in January at the Grand Palais in his native Paris, with 142 paintings, drawings and pastels, and a catalogue by one of Europe's most distinguished art historians, Pierre Rosenberg. Two American institutions took part in the production, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; this month the Chardin exhibition--shorn, alas, to 90 works--opened in Cleveland, before moving to Boston in the fall. It is a real event: the kind of show, rare today, that quietly assigns the Tuts and Pompeiis to the perspective of show-biz trivia in which they belong.

To see Chardin's art, in the twilight of a period stuffed with every kind of jerky innovation, narcissistic blurting and trashy "relevance," is to be reminded that lucidity, deliberation, unaffectedness, probity and calm are still the chief virtues of the art of painting. Chardin has long been a painter's painter, studied--and, when his work was cheap, collected--by other artists. He deeply affected at least three of the founders of modernism, Cezanne, Matisse and Braque, and Van Gogh compared him to Rembrandt. What seized them in his work was not the humility of its subject matter so .much as its ambition as pure painting. The mediation between the eye and the world that Chardin's canvases propose is inexhaustible.

If he were judged merely as a social recorder, he would not have a special place. One does not need to be a historian to know how narrow his field of social vision was. He ignored the public ostentation of his time, as well as the private misery. Most of his paintings are condensed sonnets in praise of the middle path, the sober life of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie, especially as embodied in his own household. He is said to have had a chirpy sense of humor, and there is certainly a sly and robust irony in his singeries, or monkey paintings, where hairy little parodies of man play at being painters and connoisseurs.

But of social criticism there is no trace. The nurse in Meal for a Convalescent, who stands opening a boiled egg in a kind of reverential silence, like a secular descendant of Georges de la Tour's saints, is not a representative of the class war; the efforts of some historians to see Chardin's servants as emblems of an oppressed proletariat on the eve of the French Revolution are simply beside the point. A sense of social precariousness is the last thing one could expect to meet in a Chardin; indeed, one can hardly imagine him working without the conviction that his way of life was immutable--that there would always be nurses to make beef tea, scullions to bargain for chickens, and governesses to scold the children; that the kitchen skimmers and casseroles and spice pots that he painted, over and over again, were in some important sense as durable as the Maison Carree or the Colosseum.

No painter ever traveled less in search of nourishment. Apart from trips to Versailles, Chardin may not have left Paris once in all his years. He was a completely metropolitan man, a fact that seems oddly at variance with his paintings, since, as Pierre Rosenberg remarks, "one would like to imagine Chardin a solitary individual, a provincial."

Chardin's prolonged meditation on brown crockery and the spiky fur of dead hares took place in the midst of an efflorescence of luxury art--pink bodies, swirling fronds of gold ornament, rinsed allegorical skies: the rococo style. It pervaded his milieu, and he did not despise it; but it was alien to his temperament.

What he craved was neither luxury nor the high rhetoric of history painting, but apprehensible truth, visible, familiar, open to touch and repetition. The truth about an onion could be tested again and again; the truth about a Versailles shepherdess was, to put it mildly, more labile.

This fixation on truth and nature endeared him to advanced thinkers in France, especially to Denis Diderot, compiler of the monumental Encyclopedia. "It is the chief business of art," Diderot declared in 1765, "to touch and to move, and to do this by getting close to nature." Chardin, Diderot said, epitomized that ambition at work: "Welcome back, great magician, with your mute compositions! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they tell him about the representation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" Few painters have ever had such a press as the one which, interrupted by a few decades of neglect after his death, greeted Chardin from Diderot, the Goncourt brothers, Gide, Proust and dozens of others.

And, what is rarer, their praise was deserved. For Chardin had two great gifts. The first was his ability to absorb himself in the visual to the point of self-effacement. Now and again, as in his Basket of Wild Strawberries--the glowing red cone, compressing the effulgence of a volcano onto a kitchen table, balanced by two white carnations and the cold, silvery transparencies of a water glass--the sense of rapture is delivered almost before the painting is grasped.

But the fervor of this painting, almost literally an opposition of fire and ice, is comparatively rare in Chardin's output. Generally his still lifes declare themselves more slowly. One needs to savor the Jar of Apricots, for instance, before discovering its resonances, which are not only visual but tactile: how the tambour lid of the round box accords with the oval shape of the canvas itself and is echoed by the drumlike tightness of the paper tied over the apricot jar; how the horizontal axis of the table is played upon by the stuttering line of red--wineglass, fruit, and painted fruit on the coffee cups; how the slab of bread repeats the rectangular form of the packet on the right, with its cunningly placed strings; and how all these rhymes of shape and format are reinforced by the subtle interchange of color and reflection between the objects, the warm paste of Chardin's paint holding an infinite series of correspondences.

Unfortunately, some of this is lost in the Cleveland installation, which denies the paintings the daylight they need, and bathes everything in electric glare. What remains unmistakable is the way Chardin extended his ideal of the family to include groups of objects as well as people. Once one has been through the show, the props of his still lifes, which were also the normal appurtenances of his home life, become like familiar faces: the patriarchal mass of his copper water urn, perched on its squat tripod; the white teapot with its rakish finial; the painted china that signaled his growing prosperity, and so on down to the last stoneware daubiere, all signifying a world in which the eye could work without alienation or even strain.

This patient construction, this sense of the intrinsic worth of seeing, combines with Chardin's second gift: his remarkable feeling for the poetic (rather than didactic) moments of human gesture. It permeates his genre scenes and portraits, especially the portraits of children; the gentle muteness that Diderot perceived often turns into a noble ineloquence, as though Piero della Francesca were visiting the nursery. In some way Chardin's absorption in the act of painting paralleled the absorption of children in their games, which he painted. One has only to look at the figure in his portrait Little Girl with Shuttlecock--the expressionless face and white shoulders jammed into the stiff bodice like an ice cream into its cone, the sequence of forms pinned together by accents of blue on her cap, her dress, her scissors ribbon and the feathers of the shuttlecock-- to realize the truth of Rosenberg's insight: "The world that Chardin imposes on his figures is a closed world, a stopped world . . . a world at rest, a world of Indefinite duration.' "

There are almost no precedents in earlier art for Chardin's extraordinary blend of intimacy and decorum; and to find anything like it in later painting, one must go forward a century to impressionism, without often finding its equal there.

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