Getty’s ‘French Drawings’ Tells of Shattered Tradition

Fine visual art is a creature that gets to the future with its eyes firmly fixed on the past. Few historic periods illustrate the point better than the one that is the subject of the Getty museum’s latest jewel-box exhibition, “19th-Century French Drawings.”

That century saw the ossified traditions of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts shattered as firmly as a plaster cast dropped on a marble floor. A tradition of meticulously copying scenes from the Hellenic past gave way to depictions of everyday modern life rendered in ways conservative art lovers found shocking.

The old guard is represented by such artists as Jerome-Martin Langlois. His prize-winning 1819 “Alexander Ceding Campaspe to Apelles” is as classical as a toga. It mimes a story of Alexander the Great giving up his mistress when he learns she is in love with the legendary Greek painter. Its rendering is exquisitely obsessive.

When compared to a later work such as Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 “Portrait of Joseph Roulin,” it’s clear a revolution has happened. The picture of an unpretentious postman is rendered as loosely as a Japanese ink-splash painting. Where Langlois was clinical, Van Gogh is heartfelt.

Yet when one scans the two dozen images on view, they are really as striking for the way they extend the past as for the way they reject it.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was the leading academic fuddy-duddy of the century. Today he is still respected as a kind of closet forerunner of modernism. A work like “Madame Moitessier” shows how he brought it off. While never abandoning the classical urge to imitate sculpture, Ingres so attenuated his line that it seems to float in front of the form, taking on a decorative life of its own. Thus the old academician participated in dawning modernism’s urge to simultaneously limn the visual world and remind us that a work of art is a thing unto itself. It’s a little like a magician somehow seeming all the more magical after he tells you how he did the trick.

Millet’s “Shepherdess and Her Flock,” for example, is initially impressive for the way it seems to capture the volumetric reality of forms viewed at dusk. It’s even more affecting when we notice all this was done simply by manipulating the texture created by chalk on pebbled paper. In “Poplars,” Seurat carried the impressionistic effect so far that the trees become specters hovering well behind the fog of texture.

The Great Satan of the French neoclassicists were the radical Romantics led by Delacroix. Stylistically this doesn’t make sense. The Romantics found their inspiration in the Baroque, a way of working as well entrenched as the academic. The rivalry may have had a base in politics. Neoclassicism was associated with the Napoleonic era, the Baroque with the monarchy toppled by the revolution.

Superficially it’s very hard to distinguish Delacroix’s superb pastel “The Education of Achilles” from an academic work. Art, however, slices very fine. The Romantics worked with rich, active brushy surfaces. Compared to the cool, rational, impersonal lines of the classicists, that agitation spelled passion and subjectivity.

Romanticism was less a rebellion of form and more one of attitude. Artists like Gros and Gericault positively reveled in their own heroic quirkiness, setting the stage for this century’s fascination with irrationality. It’s amazing how much the obscure, self-taught Leon Bonvin’s “Landscape With a Bare Tree and Plowman” looks like Romanticism evolving into Surrealism.

Daumier took Baroque Romanticism a giant step into the modern world when he melded it with caricature, making it part of everyday life. Great modernist pioneers like Degas and Manet look more like synthesizers than radicals in this context. Manet’s “Bullfight” blends classical objectivity with Romantic agitation, throws in some Spanish realism, plays the whole thing in the present and, bingo, a brand-new art woven from the past.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; through Aug. 25, closed Mondays, advance parking reservations required. (310) 458-2003.