Glueck G 1997 December 19 Art Review Beyond Bonheurs horse Fairã¢ââ¢new York Times
PORTRAIT OF AN Creative person
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May 24, 1981
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ROSA BONHEUR A Life and a Legend. Text past Dore Ashton. Illustrations and Captions by Denise Browne Hare. 206 pp. New York: A Studio Book/The Viking Printing. $20.
POPULAR trends in gustation and ideas have fabricated many a career, though when the vogue dies, obscurity follows. Simply Rosa Bonheur, both in this century and the last, has succeeded in defying convention and the odds. From her 19th-century audience, ''RB,'' every bit she was known to her contemporaries, received fame and financial rewards past catering to its particular enthusiasm for paintings based on direct and detailed ascertainment of nature and the sentimental delineation of animals. And at present Bonheur is brought to the public'due south attention again for reasons that have fiddling to do with the original crusade of her fame. Indeed, few 20th-century sensibilities are equipped to see her pictures as anything other than quaint amusements. Bonheur's reappearance on the cultural scene is the result not of fashions in art but in politics. She is the beneficiary of a full general interest in the reassessment of social history that has been stimulated by the women's movement. Today we have notice of RB considering in her time she was an anomaly: a successful and selfdirected female creative person.
When she was built-in in Bordeaux in 1822, Rosalie Bonheur fit i stereotype of the female artist - she was the daughter of a painter. Her upbringing was an unusual one, equally Dore Ashton describes information technology. Her father, Raimond Bonheur, had become a follower of the French social philosopher Saint-Simon (among whose tenets was a belief in the equality of the sexes), and Bonheur's unconventional ideas had considerable bear on on his daughter's evolution. Thus, afterwards an abortive attempt to amateur her to a dressmaker, Rosa was trained past her father every bit an creative person, offset working only with pencils, copying plaster casts in his studio, then making copies in oil of the masters at the Louvre. Later, Bonheur Pere would introduce his girl to the Romantic musing of l'Abbe Lammenais, who exhorted artists not to effort to reproduce nature just to ''recapture in themselves the palpitating life ... which animates their piece of work as the spirit of God animates and fills the universe.''
To this hybrid of bookish conventions and vague utopian ideals, Rosa added an interest of her ain, one which seems more than suited to the girl nosotros see in the pictures that illustrate the book. This solid, earthy young woman with the cropped pilus and serious expression was passionately attracted to the natural globe, especially to animals. Through her father, RB met the celebrated French scientist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and was allowed to wander in his zoological gardens. When Rosa outset exhibited at the annual Paris Salon at the age of 19, she showed paintings that reflected what would be a lifelong obsession with beasts of all forms. Her oil painting of rabbits and a cartoon of goats and sheep attracted immediate response and established RB's reputation.
Within a few years, she was winning medals and commissions, and enjoying enormous success. Until the end of her life in 1899, Rosa lived comfortably in the financial security that had eluded her parents - an economic freedom that was due in large measure out to the wisdom of her dealer, Ernest Gambart. The clever Gambart pioneered the concept of subsidiary rights, and under his direction Rosa earned considerable sums, not only from the sale of her pictures but from copyrights held on reproductions of her work. With this affluence, RB created a world well suited to her own special passions at the Chateau de By near Fontainbleau, an establishment that was simultaneously studio, hunting lodge and game preserve. Denise Browne Hare'due south photographs of the business firm - which is now restored and open to visitors -are marvelously evocative.
Only a shadow falls beyond this tale of glory and monetary proceeds, for the paintings illustrated hither are disconcertingly vapid. Though Miss Ashton's text tries valiantly to put the work of this best known of animaliers into context, perhaps it is inevitable that a modern viewer should neglect to appreciate an image that a 19th-century critic valued because it was ''painted but equally I would like to be painted if I were a domestic dog.'' Merely the problem surely lies deeper, and Miss Ashton just begins to debate with it in her all-time chapter, an analysis of ''The Horse Fair.''
''The Horse Fair'' is Bonheur's acknowledged masterpiece. Today, despite - or because of - its theatricalism, its overstuffed splendor, the painting withal produces a rush of excitement when one approaches information technology in the Metropolitan Museum's Andre Meyer Galleries. It is a turbulent scene of Percherons being put through their paces for the benefit of buyers. Never has horseflesh looked more powerful. Miss Ashton gives a conscientious reading of the piece of work's historical precedents in art, besides as an analysis of the considerations of class and facture that guided RB. Almost by indirection the reader comes to understand what is missing in Rosa's other efforts:
''Since RB was far more comfortable generally with the new standards, in which composition was no longer considered a major business in painting and then long equally the artist was scientifically correct in what he depicted, it seems likely that this unique, carefully constructed painting was inspired directly by Gericault.''
The ''series of small cerise accents'' that unites the sprawling sail and the other formal niceties that Bonheur used here - both in emulation of Theodore Gericault and to brandish her seriousness of purpose - are cast bated in RB's other paintings. But why? Was information technology simply, equally Miss Ashton's historical framework seems to imply, Bonheur'south response to the times? At the core of the author's assay here is a faltering, a reticence. After laying out the finely researched facts of Rosa's life and the milieu of Second Republic and Second Empire France, Miss Ashton hesitates when dealing with the two central questions of this study: the quality of Bonheur'southward oeuvre and her ambivalence in regard to her own sexuality.
Some writers accept suggested that these questions are continued, that there is a link between the artist'south indifference to compositional concerns, her poorly articulated human forms, and the ambiguity toward her own sexuality that began in childhood. When Rosa was xi her mother died - the result, in the kid'south opinion, of overwork and her married man'due south neglect. From this event, it is felt, stemmed Bonheur's later rejection of the traditional feminine role in favor of masculine attire and independence, every bit well every bit the showtime stirrings of her dislike for men as a class. Miss Ashton quotes RB responding many years after her mother's death to an acquaintance's playful implication of a flirtation between the creative person and a married man: ''... if you just knew how piddling I care for your sexual practice, yous wouldn't get such queer ideas into your head. The fact is, in the fashion of males, I like only the bulls I paint. ''
For companionship and honey, Bonheur turned to women: first to Nathalie Micas, and after her decease, to the American artist Anna Klumpke, whom the painter regarded as ''my wife.'' Although the author quotes Professor Albert Boime on RB's awkward renderings of people in her paintings - ''(a problem) non ... of skill but a psychological declining'' - Miss Ashton resists cartoon the connections and conclusions for the reader. Nowhere do we find annihilation every bit direct every bit Germaine Greer'south statement about RB in ''The Obstacle Race'':
''Rose Bonheur, who managed to divest herself of actual corsets, was at the pinnacle of her fame still so uncertain ... that, as she herself has said, she 'painted every grass blade twice over.' There is no doubt that the talent revealed in her sketches ... is economical, assured and thoroughly painterly, while the finished works tend to be labored, the paint surfaces deadened past besides much treatment.''
The existent strength of this book is in its re-cosmos of the European artistic, social and political climate at mid 19th century. Miss Ashton's historical perspective comes at an appropriate moment, for, while a fresh consideration of the arts in the areas of architecture, blueprint and music in this period is well under way, such is non the case with painting and sculpture. Certainly that is changing -next autumn, for example, the Philadelphia Museum will mount an exhibition of Edward Landseer's work, the English language animal painter whom Bonheur so admired. Thus Miss Ashton's study is timely too as useful. But even a fresh perspective on the art of the Salons will not modify the quality of Bonheur'south work. With the exception of ''The Horse Fair,'' RB will ever be more interesting as a woman than as an artist.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/24/books/portrait-of-an-artist.html
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