Just Sublime

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), whose drawings are the subject of an excellent new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is an odd figure among major artists in 18th century France. He’s his own peculiar man.

His work doesn’t sparkle with sensual magic and fragility, as Jean-Antoine Watteau’s does. It doesn’t bubble with froth, as do those by Jean Honore Fragonard and Francois Boucher, in which the world seems poised to dissolve like a sugar cube dropped in warm water. The humility of a Jean Simeon Chardin still life strikes a whole different register, as does the sense of momentous occasion in even the most modestly scaled picture by Jacques Louis David.

Now and then Greuze touches all these chords--he was a painter of his time, after all, and his careerist ambitions made him keenly aware of what other artists were doing. But his sensibility is finally distinct. Greuze was the master of what I think of as “the bourgeois sublime.”

A moralist, he painted pictures that examine nuances of human nature in order to advocate respectability. Eroticism is never out of bounds, nor do those nuances overlook the dark side. Sex and violence are as much subjects in his art as harmony or bliss. But the drama of domestic life is far more than just a generalized artistic approach in Greuze’s work. It’s a theme to be honored with the laurel wreath of art.

The Getty’s show is the first exclusively devoted to Greuze’s drawings. It includes important loans from the Louvre, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, the Albertina in Vienna and other public and private collections internationally. Though slightly trimmed from its original presentation at New York’s Frick Museum, where it was organized and then shown over the summer, “Greuze the Draftsman” gives a full overview of the artist’s 50-year career.

Its 71 sheets reveal an exceptionally gifted draftsman whose work with chalk and ink is unsurpassed by any of his countrymen--with the notable exception of the incomparable Watteau. (To measure for yourself, drop into the Getty’s permanent collection galleries and see the four works by Watteau in a concurrent show of French drawings.) It’s easy to see why Denis Diderot, the writer and encyclopedist, became Greuze’s ardent early champion.

In fact, Greuze was something of a prodigy. Born in a small town near the Swiss border, he went to Paris at 25. Five short years later, he was a sensation at the biennial Salon exhibition at the Royal Academy.

One painting he showed there is on view in an adjacent gallery at the Getty. The unusual subject of “The Sleeping Schoolboy” (1755) is a small child who has dozed off while reading. It’s an intensely focused study of the dead weight of sleep: a head pressing down on a hand used as a pillow, which in turn presses down on the pages of an open book. The mysterious condition of slumber wouldn’t seem so palpable again until the sculptures of Brancusi a century and a half later.

“The Sleeping Schoolboy” is a marvel of intimate observation. You find yourself scrutinizing a quotidian experience you’ve had many times, but which--for obvious reasons--went unexamined. It was through drawing that Greuze developed the skill underlying this painting.

Drawing was the backbone of his training at the Royal Academy. The show emphasizes two types of work he learned there.

One was called the expressive head: a close analysis of idiosyncratic facial features and how they can convey psychological states that are ephemeral but recognizable. The other was the narrative figural composition, in which an event’s dramatic sweep could be condensed and arrayed in a coherent way to convey a moral lesson.

Some of the drawings of expressive heads were based on other art, as was a red chalk study of a swooning woman. Dark, firm, parallel strokes of chalk surround the woman’s delicately shaded face and veil. The ardor of the marks and their repetition create a voluptuous, dramatic context for the head, which is based on Giovanni Bernini’s famous sculpture of St. Theresa in ecstasy. (Greuze saw the Bernini when he made the necessary pilgrimage to Rome, after the triumph of his Salon debut.)

Most of the drawings were made from direct observation of living models. Another red chalk drawing of a swooning woman, her tossed-back head framed by streaming tendrils of hair, shows the artist’s wife in what the catalog describes as post-orgasmic delirium. (This is the drawing currently reproduced on street-lamp advertising banners all over town, making traffic jams more tolerable.) Madame Greuze in ecstasy is obviously informed by the artist’s own carnal experience, as well as by the sculptural example of Bernini.

As for Greuze’s figural groupings, a recitation of some titles shows their distinctiveness: “The Beloved Mother,” “The Father’s Curse: The Ungrateful Son,” “The Schoolmistress,” “The Spoiled Child.” As a painter at the Royal Academy, Greuze did render figures from classical history, like Achilles preparing the body of Patroklos for burial and the Roman heroine Pero nursing her starving and imprisoned father, Cimon, at her breast. But the classical stuff was mostly done as preparation for his favored subject, contemporary domestic life.

Some of those familial subjects can make you cringe. “The Beloved Mother,” for example, transforms the ecstatic swoon that he drew elsewhere as an erotic thrill into a blissful reverie generated by six clambering children, who smother their creampuff mom with hugs and kisses. Meanwhile, proud papa, boisterously returning from the hunt with his rifle and his dogs, looks on in happy satisfaction.

I’m in agreement with the prominent collector of the day who dismissed the squirming mass of little bodies as “a fricassee of children.” The French know their food.

Still, the drawing is instructive. Greuze’s unprecedented aim as an artist was to give middle-class family life the gravity and importance of history painting, and history painting represented the highest aspiration of academic art. His paintings can be labored and dry, and sometimes their moralizing pomposity can be astounding. But that labored quality might well partly be a function of his mastery of drawing.

Greuze drew well and with intensity. More than most painters, he made drawing after drawing after drawing, both as preparatory studies and as independent works of art. Greuze’s paintings can feel remote and, in the showiness of their costume drama, even vaguely comical. But the works on paper are always lively, whether a chalk study of a facial expression or a fluid ink wash that blocks out the cast of characters in their theatricalized setting. The spontaneity of the drawings appeals to modern eyes, which are attuned to art as an unfolding process of thought and emotion and as the courting of fortuitous accident.

“Greuze the Draftsman” has been augmented at the Getty by two small but absorbing presentations.

“Greuze and the Academy” brings together illustrations from Diderot’s encyclopedia and critics’ pamphlets from the Salon to show how formal artistic training was shaped in the 18th century and how the French public responded. “Greuze the Painter” brings together all five of the artist’s paintings now in Los Angeles collections; they’re supplemented by eight others that provide an enlightening context.

Greuze’s effort to elevate domestic subjects didn’t pan out with the Royal Academy, which caused a scandal by in turn refusing to elevate the hugely popular artist from the low rank of genre painter. Greuze, stunned, stopped showing at the Salon for the next 30 years, and he made a success of it. That’s another thing that makes him so appealing today.

J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, (310) 440-7300, through Dec. 1. Closed Mondays. Parking reservations required weekdays before 4 p.m.