ART REVIEW : A Family Reunion of Look-Alikes

Remember when the Sunday funnies included a page of puzzles and games? A drawing called What’s Wrong With This Picture? challenged us to spot all sorts of goofy things like ladies with mustaches and trains with no tracks. In a variation, we were supposed to pick out differences in two apparently identical drawings. Those games were great basic training in how to look at art.

Very carefully.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will launch a new series of small exhibitions called “Masterpiece in Focus.” It has the praiseworthy intent of drawing attention to a great museum treasure often taken for granted. The permanent collection.

The masterpiece in focus here is “Soap Bubbles” by the 18th-Century French genius of genre, Jean-Simeon Chardin. Any traveler who takes museums casually might get an attack of deja vu upon encountering “Soap Bubbles.” Didn’t I see that at the National Gallery in Washington? Maybe it was the Metropolitan in New York. Can’t remember.

Actually, both.

All three museums own versions of this beloved picture. Anybody who lacks a photographic memory can be forgiven for thinking they are identical. Well, LACMA has borrowed the other two, and they all hang in the European paintings gallery waiting to be seen-- really seen side by side by side.

What’s right with these pictures?

Each depicts a boy leaning on a stone casement blowing a bubble through a straw. A toddler in a plumed hat peeps over the parapet to see what’s going on. Fasten on that central image and it’s like looking at triplets. Everything is in the same place--bubbles, noses, pony-tailed hair, the crook of a finger. Looks like the artist used a template, and he probably did.

Chardin (1699-1779) came from a modest background and lacked the classical education it usually took to join the elite Royal Academy painters of mythical and historical subjects. Even though he eventually made it into the academy, it was as a painter of declasse still lifes. In the early 1730s, he took to scenes of everyday life with the double motive of improving his status in the pecking order and turning a profit by tailgating a fashion for Dutch genre--paintings of everyday life. LACMA curator Philip Conisbee and conservator Joseph Fronck explain it all in an informative brochure.

Anyway, “Soap Bubbles” was among his first forays into the genre and painting was tough for him at the best of times. Apparently, after an exhausting struggle to bring off the original, he decided to capitalize the effort.

Copies! Fakes!

Piffle. Before the Romantic movement, people weren’t as obsessed with artistic uniqueness as they later became. But which is the original?

All of the above.

Each bears Chardin’s undisputed signature painted on the parapet as if carved in the stone.

None of the above.

There is a fourth painting in the installation, not another “Soap Bubbles,” but Chardin’s picture of a girl playing knucklebones--a primitive form of jacks. Scholars think it was a companion piece to the original “Soap Bubbles” but it bears a significant difference that can only be seen with X-ray. The evidence is on view. Under the surface of “Knucklebones” the camera sees marks of the artist changing his mind as he worked, giving the girl more decolletage, for example. By significant contrast, none of the three “Soap Bubbles” shows changes--so-called pentimenti. Chances are all three are the artist’s copies of a lost original.

But we’re talking about looking at paintings, not through them. Even though very similar, these are clearly not Warhol Brillo boxes. Each has subtly different expressive vectors. Oddly enough, each tends to match one of three interpretations traditionally attached to all of them.

In art, all differences make a difference.

The New York canvas takes a certain authority from being a few inches larger. It was expanded at some point, but it’s always been vertical. Verticality lends alertness. Tendrils of honeysuckle waft from an upper corner softening a somber palette to dreaminess. Hinting of Chardin’s rococo contemporary, Boucher, it most closely belongs to those romantics who feel in it the bittersweet brevity of love.

The National Gallery’s picture was badly served by additions and wrong-headed restoration long before it came to Washington. Still charming, it is not helped by some clunky honeysuckle clearly added by another hand. A horizontal format lends it gravity, both physical and expressive. It will bear the interpretation of those who think “Soap Bubbles” is a gentle French nag directed at youths who waste time on nice days.

Also horizontal, but bereft of foliage, the L.A. version is the starkest of the three. It’s also in the best visual condition with its slow, assured modeling. Could be this was one of the later copies made when Chardin had perfected his practice. It comes off according to the classic memento mori interpretation as a rumination on the fragility of life itself. It somehow recalls the great Zurburan still life in the Norton Simon Museum.

Isolating a preference among these paintings is like Paris trying to pick his lady. It might change according to mood, but the fact a choice exists shows how telling a nuance can be, even among paintings that are so nearly alike.

Which of these pictures is best? Well, if you like tough art and polite aesthetic competition, the home team wins.