THEY OUGHTA BE (AND ARE) IN PICTURES : Casting Real Live Folks in Masterpieces of Art

There will be no unseemly jokes about elegant French paintings at a barbecue dressed in chaps and bandannas saying “Bonjour, y’all.” Neither will vulgar tittering be permitted at the spectacle of slightly shabby wildcat oil barons in beaver hats scrutinizing the paintings through lorgnettes and whispering, “Heck, its provenance is unpeckable but its iconography is iconoclastic.”

No snide voice will be raised at the imagined spectacle of British scholars arriving at the museum in Cadillacs with steer horns on the hood. Everyone will behave with decorum, but the fact is that some 50 great French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings that belong to a legendary London center of art historical studies have roosted in Texas and some wag might see that as an occasion for levity.

One reason it is not is that the pictures are visiting the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. The building was designed by Louis Kahn and is considered a model small museum with its joined barrel vaults and a collection revered for aesthetic quality. The Kimbell is directed by Edmund Pillsbury, who is so highly regarded in the art world that he was recently seriously considered for the directorship of London’s National Gallery even though he is an American. The museum is the kind of place the Getty might call for advice (or vice versa) and, handsomely endowed, it can still do things like buying an important painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, which it just did the other day. If anybody can imagine a Frick Collection in the vastness of the Lone Star State, this is it.

Another reason not to smirk is that the paintings come from the Courtauld Collection and include such triple grade-A masterpieces as Edouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere,” a painting most art votaries would travel a couple of continents to see by itself. This is not to mention such other legitimate show-stoppers as Renoir’s “La Loge,” Cezanne’s “Card Players,” Seurat’s “Young Woman Powdering Herself” and Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Tete-a-Tete Supper,” to cite just the mega-pictures in an all-star cast.

If any Californians continue to think there is something droll in all this going to Texas, they need only contemplate the fact that the exhibition is not coming any farther west on its first and very likely only visit to the States. Once recovered from the recurrent aggravation ignited by these shows that elude us, we can either hop a Greyhound before Sept. 22, when the show leaves Texas, or wait until it retreats to Chicago or Kansas City, by which time it will be plenty cold.

When your faithful scribe viewed the exhibition during its sojourn at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, there was some grumbling in Gotham about the fact that the whole thing was like a theatrical benefit, with grand celebrities doing individual turns that didn’t add up to anything. In fact, the show is something of a benefit. The rare pictures are being allowed to circulate to drum up interest in the institute’s efforts to raise money to convert London’s Somerset House into galleries, classrooms and libraries for the graduate art history program of the University of London. Well, if Prince Charles and Princess Diana are humble enough to go on the stump for British trade, it doesn’t seem undignified for the Courtauld to do the same. At least they are not claiming that the Lord will strike them down if we don’t send in our pledges.

We are left free to contemplate art the way it was meant to be seen before wise historians and clever curators commenced to make sense of it through juxtaposition and organization. Here we see if it resonates one picture at a time.

Viewers who do not know enough to go straight away to “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere” will probably find the picture comes to them, so authoritative is its presence. Finished in 1882, it was Manet’s last major opus before his death the following year at age 51. It is a proper finale for an artist who was at once so straightforward and so enigmatic. All his life, he modeled himself on Old Masters, inspired by everyone from Raphael to Titian and Velasquez, but he came down in history as the first direct ancestor of modern art with its emphasis on formal experimentation and subversive themes.

“A Bar at the Folies-Bergere” is a self-evidently gorgeous picture with its richly subdued tonalities of silver and black punctuated by enlivening splashes of oranges and green liquor bottles. It is as flat out as a Dutch still-life. Bottles, fruit and flowers are arranged on a marble counter that appears dead frontal to the viewer. Behind it, a girl stands symmetrically centered wearing bangs, a black velvet coat trimmed with white lace. She is gussied up with a bracelet, a brooch on a black choker and flowers at her bosom, but she wears an expression of slight distraction edged with ennui.

Modernist observers took Manet’s objectivity to indicate an indifference to content, and they concentrated on the work’s formal character, the underlying right-angle grid of the composition, the fact that the reflections in the mirror behind the bar don’t make sense. Much was made of the fact that you can see the girl’s back reflected in the mirror while she addresses a goateed customer in a top hat. Modernists saw this spatial ambiguity as foretelling the fracture of Cubism and, in fact, the space in it does torque about piquantly.

Recently Post-Modern commentators exhumed sociological and literary qualities that are legitimately to be found in Manet. (I don’t know why British art always gets characterized as “literary” when French art often evokes whole novels. There is a whole lot of Zola in Manet, and maybe even more Flaubert.) Anyway, one late theory is that this painting was a muffled feminist statement about the plight of women at the time. The argument went that the servers at the Folies were available as prostitutes and that the man in the mirror is not just ordering a drink.

What tends to get lost in making verbal sense out of visual experience is that all of the above can rightly be found in the painting, plus a lot more. It is in the nature of great art to tell some sort of mute truth that has the resonant ambiguity of an oracle, echoing with veracity and always eluding precise definition. Manet may have been great because he was both laconically frank and a complete sphinx. If that doesn’t seem like a big deal, consider the fact that nobody has been able to quite achieve it since.

The nice thing about finding a exhibition that doesn’t make curatorial sense is that it leaves the viewer free to find his own themes, and one is permitted to be completely capricious about this.

My own take on the Courtauld pictures was undoubtedly conditioned by an enchanted bit of serendipity that crystallized on the flight to New York. The actress Bernadette Peters was seated hard by in the cabin, and other passengers were visibly atwitter about her presence. I am not normally moved to talk to celebrities because of some combination of politeness, shyness and indifference but, well, Bernadette Peters, for heaven’s sake.

I watch a videotape of the wonderful flop “Pennies From Heaven” frequently. It’s a superb art movie, and Peters and Steve Martin act like they are about to enter another dimension. Moreover, thanks to another bit of journalistic serendipity, I had had the chance to review the Sondheim musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” which was about Georges Seurat and starred Peters. I had to talk to her even though I felt like a 10-year-old with his first crush.

She was gracious and asked about my mission. Upon learning that the Courtauld pictures were on the slate, she said, “Oh, the collection with the Seurat of the girl powdering herself.” Obviously she had done her homework in preparing to play Seurat’s models all mooshed into one character, including the powdering girl.

Facing the real Seurat capped the serendipity. It made Peters’ character seem like a match made in casting directors’ heaven. She shares the painted girl’s combination of cool, demure wit and pouty sensuality. Of course, the original model is more buxom than today’s fashion, but Peters has a subtler sort of roundness. Anyway, that is not really the point. In reality, the growing urge to try to cast actresses as the women in the Courtauld paintings is a game of finding out something about the character of the artist’s interpretation.

In the Godard film “The Detective,” a character says the troubled heroine looks like a “fake Botticelli.” That is the actress Nathalie Baye. In “The Return of Martin Guerre,” she plays an innocent farm girl who turns out to be an earthy sensualist who knew all along that the sexy man pretending to be her lost husband was an impostor. She just went for him. Baye’s quiet beauty and inner gutsiness puts her nicely behind Manet’s bar and talks about the aura of the painting.

What about Renoir’s “La Loge”? Current fashion doesn’t include a lot of actresses as at once rosily healthy and dignified as the young woman in the black-and-white striped dress in the theater box. Maybe a young Claudette Colbert, when she was a little chubby.

The tough thing about this casting game is that most actresses are more striking than the women in these paintings, probably because the artists tended to subdue the sitter’s personality slightly for the sake of the painting. That is important. It is not the character of the model we read in a painting, it is the character of the painting.

Bonnard’s “Young Woman in an Interior” may bear some vague resemblance to a current child-woman, like Pia Zadora, but to get a real match you have to come up with a French type like the effervescent maid in Jean Renoir’s classic, “The Rules of the Game.”

Even an artist as openly graphic and theatrical as Toulouse-Lautrec is hard to cast from real-life make-believe. It is certainly significant that so many of his women suggest men in drag. You might get Hermione Gingold into “Tete-a-Tete Supper” in a particularly obscene mood.

The game doesn’t even work for everybody, or illuminate everybody. Most of Degas’ women don’t look like anybody. Well, Sissy Spacek might do for his sculpture of the little 14-year-old dancer, but it’s not in the show. Cezanne is too busy painting mountains to do many women, and they look like mountains too, or Marjorie Main.

It’s a fun game that can ignite insights, but you get the feeling they might not approve at the Courtauld. Maybe if you play it, you should send them a donation to atone for the impertinence.