Smoke and Mirrored

Georges de La Tour, a masterful painter of foolish innocents cheated by rogues and of quiet, sanctified moments caught in candlelight, died in the duchy of Lorraine in France in 1652, but the world of art did not discover him until the 20th century.

His paintings, some unsigned, some signed only in dark, illegible corners, lay in provincial museums and mansions for almost 300 years, often attributed to some other painter or to no one. Finding, dating and authenticating La Tours, in fact, has become one of the great art detective stories of our time.

That detective work will be intensified when a rare exhibition of most of the known La Tours in the world, a show once destined for Los Angeles, opens today at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Philip Conisbee, curator of French paintings at the National Gallery, hopes that the exhibition will supply a host of new clues as scholars study unfamiliar La Tours hanging alongside familiar La Tours and start to argue about dates and brush strokes and subject matter.

The exhibition, “Georges de La Tour and his World,” remains at the National Gallery until Jan. 5. It then moves to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, running from Feb. 2 through May 11.

So far, art historians have identified only 40 La Tours in the world--some paintings of delightful hoaxes and tricks but most of saints in mysterious poses under dramatic lighting. Hermann Voss, a German scholar, uncovered the first La Tour, “The Denial of St. Peter,” in the French provincial museum at Nantes in 1914. The most recent discovery, “St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” turned up in an auction in Monaco just two years ago.

More are sure to show up someday. And some of the current 40 could conceivably be set aside as copies or mistakes or even fakes. The Sherlock Holmeses of the art world still have much to do.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was originally expected to originate the exhibition, but that idea vanished with the museum’s personnel losses of the last few years. Conisbee came up with the idea in 1991 when he was curator of European paintings and sculpture at LACMA. Talking with then-LACMA Director Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III and with Kimbell Director Edmund P. Pillsbury, he proposed an exhibition of the dozen or so La Tours in American hands.

The centerpieces would be LACMA’s “Magdalen With the Smoking Flame” and the Kimbell’s “The Cheat With the Ace of Clubs.” Both are well-known La Tours. In the Los Angeles painting, a repentant and contemplative Mary Magdalen stares into the flame of an oil lamp--a symbol of God--that lights up her pensive profile in the still night. In the Fort Worth painting, a foolish, foppish young man is cheated at cards by a wily courtesan and a player hiding an ace of clubs in the back of his belt.

But Powell was named director of the National Gallery in 1992, and Conisbee followed him there a year later. According to Conisbee in a recent interview, “Michael Shapiro [who succeeded Powell as director of LACMA and left under duress in 1993] was not particularly interested” in the project. In any case, when Conisbee left for the National Gallery, the idea left with him.

Powell, who was involved in the original planning, naturally welcomed the project and agreed to sponsor the show jointly with the Kimbell. Lenders do not like their paintings to make too many stops on a tour, Conisbee said, so any thought of including Los Angeles was quickly abandoned. J. Patrice Marandel, Conisbee’s replacement at LACMA, says now that the museum might have liked to present the show, but it was no longer available when he arrived.

As plans developed, the show grew ever more elaborate. Conisbee decided to ask foreign museums to lend paintings that were similar to the paintings in the United States so that variants of a subject could be examined by scholars. On these grounds, the Louvre in Paris, for example, sent its “The Cheat With the Ace of Diamonds,” a somewhat different version of the Kimbell painting.

Conisbee then added the handful of La Tour paintings discovered since the first and only retrospective of the painter was mounted in Paris in 1972. He also included paintings by contemporaries of La Tour to show how painters of that era handled similar subject matter.

In all, the exhibition will display 27 of the world’s 40 authenticated La Tours, including 10 from American and Canadian museums. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu has contributed “The Musicians’ Brawl,” a crowded canvas featuring a flute player warding off a knife-wielding hurdy-gurdy man.

The National Gallery of Art has chosen to ignore the most sensational accusation in the annals of La Tour detection: a British art historian’s insistence that three of the most popular of the artist’s paintings--the “Cheats” of Fort Worth and Paris and a companion piece, “The Fortune Teller,” owned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art--are all fakes painted in the first half of this century by a stable of forgers.

The historian, Christopher Wright, took his case against “The Fortune Teller” to the Metropolitan in the early 1970s. “The Fortune Teller” depicts another foolish young man, whose attention is diverted by an old Gypsy woman while two other women fleece him of his purse and jewelry. Wright argued that the costumes did not come out of the 17th century, that La Tour’s signature did not match those on documents in Lorraine and that the vulgar French word “merde” had been painted into the lace collar of one of the thieves.

Thomas Hoving, then director of the Metropolitan, wrote recently that he found Wright’s case persuasive at first. But evidence was produced later that indicated the painting was known to exist more than 100 years ago. It would have made no sense to forge a La Tour in the 19th century since he was completely unknown then. Hoving concluded that the painting was authentic. As for the French vulgarism, the Met, much to Wright’s chagrin, removed it after someone blamed the inclusion of the offensive word on a restorer. “The bottom line, to my mind, is that the Met’s picture cannot possibly be fake,” Hoving says in his recent book “False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes.”

Wright, however, believes that the 19th century document that lists the painting in an inventory is really describing another painting. He still condemns the Met’s painting as a forgery.

In a book written in 1985, Wright added the two “Cheats” to his list of fakes. He claims that his view is not accepted by the art establishment only because prominent art historians do not want to admit error.

Conisbee dismisses Wright’s contentions: “These ideas have found no general acceptance,” the curator says. “He’s really out on a limb. . . . Wright is wrong.” There is no mention of the controversy in either the National Gallery exhibition catalog or in the labels on the walls.

So little is known about the life of La Tour that the catalog accompanying the show is full of expressions about that artist such as “might well have experienced” and “could have come into contact with” and “must have encountered.” We do not even know what La Tour looked like or where he studied or how much time he spent in Paris.

We have a few facts and, of course, the beauty of his paintings. Georges de La Tour, the son of a prosperous baker, was born on March 14, 1593, in the town of Vic-sur-Seille in the duchy of Lorraine in what is now northeastern France. The independent duchy nestled between France and the German states of the Holy Roman Empire and found itself trampled as a battleground between these powers for much of La Tour’s life.

La Tour, identified as a painter in his marriage contract, wed Diane Le Nerf, the daughter of a wealthy and influential family from Luneville in Lorraine. Her father was the supervisor of finances for the Duke of Lorraine, the ruler of the duchy.

The greatest paintings of La Tour owe much to the style and subject matter of Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who worked in Rome when La Tour was a young man. Caravaggio liked to use common ordinary folk as models for his saints and developed a dramatic style that contrasted the darkness of night with figures illuminated partially by artificial light.

Scholars assume that La Tour traveled as a young painter to Rome to study the work of Caravaggio or to the Dutch city of Utrecht, where northern painters were working in the style of Caravaggio. But there is no documentary evidence that he ever visited either city. Caravaggio was so popular in his day that copies of his paintings could have made their way to Lorraine and influenced La Tour without him going anywhere else.

In 1620, at the age of 27, he moved to his wife’s town of Luneville, not far from Nancy, Lorraine’s cultural capital, and remained there as the town’s master painter for the rest of his life.

In the 1630s, King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, infuriated by the Duke of Lorraine’s open support of the Holy Roman Empire, sent French troops to annex Lorraine to France. Like most prominent people in Lorraine, La Tour swore allegiance to the French king in 1634. That did not stop the bloodletting; the French sacked and burned Luneville in 1638, and scholars believe that a large number of La Tour paintings were destroyed in the attack.

The only antique document that describes La Tour as a person rather than a statistic is not flattering. He evidently had become rather lordly in Luneville. In 1644, his neighbors complained, in a petition to the duke, that La Tour “is making himself obnoxious to everyone by the great number of dogs, greyhounds and spaniels he keeps, acting as though he were the Lord of the Manor, sending his dogs after hare into the standing crops, which they trample down and ruin.”

French rule enhanced La Tour’s reputation. Louis XIII took a painting as a gift, and several La Tours made their way into prominent Parisian households. Nevertheless, when La Tour died during some kind of epidemic in 1652, at the age of 59, he was dismissed as a provincial painter and soon slipped into obscurity.

At the height of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church instructed bishops to encourage painters to tell “the stories of the mysteries of our redemption” so that “the people are instructed and confirmed in the articles of faith.” The Counter-Reformation found fervent support in Catholic Lorraine, and La Tour spent most of the latter part of his life producing religious paintings.

To scholars, it is the nocturnal religious paintings--stark, simple and diffused with a contemplative quiet brought on by the contrast of darkness and flickering light--that power La Tour’s greatness.

In “The Newborn Child” from the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, France, for example, La Tour has painted a Mary holding a swaddled Christ child in her arms, the scene illuminated by a candle in the hand of St. Anne. The features of Mary reflect the wonder of any mother looking on her firstborn. There is nothing overtly religious about the painting--no halos or holy scriptures--but it is infused with a mood of supernatural awe.

Some of the best-known religious La Tours, such as the Louvre’s “Christ With St. Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop,” are not making the trip. But it would be churlish to complain. Although the exhibition is not a full retrospective, Conisbee has assembled more La Tours than have ever been seen together in the United States.

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“Georges de La Tour and His World” opens today at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and continues through Jan. 5. Information: (202) 737-4215.