A sketchy history

Civilizations must change or perish. Somebody said that. David Bowie wrote a song about… Civilizations must change or perish. Somebody said that. David Bowie wrote a song about change. Change is good – but more easily said than done for people who like what they like.

Violent political upheaval, the industrial revolution, urbanization and shifting philosophies created by the Enlightenment, turned the world of early 19th century France upside down. A new, modern world was emerging, leaving some longing for the past and some running from it. Many artists challenged the French Academy’s strict adherence to Classicism with works showing new subject matter, incorporating contemporary events or imaginary places with new styles and compositions. Others continued to uphold the ideal beauty reflected in glossy history painting.

Almost every major movement of French art can be traced through the current exhibition at The Frick Art Museum, “Drawn Toward the Avante-Garde: Nineteenth – and Twentieth – Century French Drawings from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.” Comprised of 80 drawings completed from the early 19th century through 1960, this exhibit is a comprehensive survey reflecting Romanticism, Exoticism, Realism, Impressionism, Abstraction and more. Artists whose works are displayed include Ingres, Manet, Degas, Gaugin, Moreau, Rodin, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau, Picasso and many others.

“Leopard Devouring a Wild Boar,” completed by Antoine-Louis Bayre around 1834, reflects the Romantic aesthetic for the primitive paralleled with an increasing preoccupation in the 19th century with exotic settings and foreign people as European colonial powers grew. In this small, symmetric composition, the predator and his prey comprise the center foreground against a roughly finished background of light and shadow illustrating tall grass. Varying angles forming the two animals in the composition created a dramatic realism. The leopard’s spotted coat contrasts sharply with the dark, solid boar’s and immediately signifies a primal, distant land.

A group of painters known as the Barbizon School left Paris in the 19th century for the countryside to work directly from nature, producing landscapes evoking nostalgia for a world prior to industrialization. Theodore Rousseau’s “Small Group of Tall Trees in the Macherin Forest,” completed around 1860, is an asymmetrical composition dominated by a row of tall, full, lush trees. It is an interesting scene in which the viewer is at once able to see beyond the trees and under them unto a sunny field in the horizon, drawn in the upper right corner.

“Pierrot,” completed by Edouard Vuillard around 1891, represents a stronger departure from academic representations seen before in Romanticism or Impressionism in which a mood is expressed from a highly decorative style, flat shapes – inspired by Japanese wood block prints – and simplified contour.

The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Copenhagen contains the oldest documented graphics collection in the world. Few of its works currently at The Frick Art Museum have been displayed outside of Denmark, and many have never been published.

“Drawn Toward the Avant-Garde” is a dynamic exhibition in which one can view works made during a time of rapid change in society and in art.

“Drawn Toward the Avant-Garde: 19th and 20th Century French Drawings From the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen” will be at the Frick Art Museum in Point Breeze through Jan. 5, 2003. The museum is located at 7227 Reynolds St., and is accessible from Oakland via the 71C. For more information, contact the museum at (412) 371-0600 or www.frickart.org.