An Acquired Taste

Tom Cruise as Jean-Baptiste Greuze?

Well, the names do rhyme, offering some pronunciation help, but there’s more to the casting possibility than just a trick of the tongue.

The 18th century French artist was arrogant, ambitious, scandalous and brilliant. He led a juicy life--a life, as they say, made for the movies. Which is why, in a conversation about Greuze, curator Edgar Munhall tosses out a big star’s name, with a scheming little laugh.

Munhall retired in 1999 as chief curator at the Frick Collection in New York; he’s now Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the reference library there. For several decades, he has carried the scholarly torch for Greuze. In 1976, he organized the only comprehensive exhibition of the painter’s work since his death. Now he’s assembled “Greuze the Draftsman,” the first show to focus on the artist’s drawings. It opened last week at the J.Paul Getty Museum, with two other Getty-organized exhibitions, one featuring 12 of the artist’s paintings (five of them from Southern California collections), and the other presenting drawings by Greuze’s contemporaries in France.

Greuze scholarship has been a lonely field, laments Munhall, a dapper man of 69 with a pencil-thin mustache and a short bristle of salt-and-pepper hair. Shortly after the drawings show opened at the Frick in May, he sat for an interview in the Upper East Side mansion-museum, in a stately meeting room that was once Henry Clay Frick’s bedroom.

Art historians with a particular interest in Greuze are few, Munhall admits, and general interest in the artist’s work has also been limited.

“It’s either too sentimental,” he says with a sigh, “or we’re too cynical. One or the other.”

Reacting against the artificiality and sensual excess of the Rococo style, Greuze turned for his subject matter to ordinary people in their everyday lives: a family reading the Bible together around the dinner table, future in-laws arranging a marriage contract. His paintings read like domestic morality tales, populated by devoted children, loving mothers and respected elders. But also their opposite--defiant youths and punishing parents. To a contemporary eye, the work can seem melodramatic and dated, but less so if you consider it in the terms Munhall proposes.

“Basically, his is a narrative art, and the closest parallels are not so much in plays or operas, but in the medium of film,” he says. “I think he conceived those dramatic scenes in terms of light and shade and exploration of character just as a filmmaker would.”

Not only, then, does Greuze’s life lend itself to being told on film (Cruise’s availability notwithstanding), but his paintings function like movies, reflecting familiar situations in a staged but accessible format. If Greuze had been born 200 years later, Munhall speculates, he’d have been a great filmmaker. (To reinforce this connection, the Getty has scheduled a film program called “The Magnificent Melodrama” to overlap with the Greuze shows.)

When Munhall mentioned Greuze’s filmic approach to a dealer less kindly disposed toward the artist’s works, the dealer sneered, comparing them instead to television sitcoms.

There’s a certain truth to that as well, Munhall agrees. Starting in 1755, Greuze exhibited regularly at the biennial Salon exhibitions held at the Louvre. The Parisian public attended the shows in large numbers and grew familiar with Greuze’s characters, expecting, show after show, to track their lives in his work, as TV viewers might follow the exploits of the Cosby family or the Osbournes. Viewers would assume, for instance, that the young bride in one canvas was the same person as the daughter caring for her aged father in another. “People just ate that up,” Munhall says, “and Greuze exploited it for all it was worth.”

Greuze was one of only a few artists of his time to exhibit drawings as well as paintings at the Salon. In his drawings, wrote the philosopher and critic Denis Diderot, “Greuze truly shows himself to be a man of genius.”

His skill at rendering human form in all of its postures and permutations was extraordinary--and he knew it. When one of his professors noted what seemed like a physical deformity in a drawing of a male nude, Greuze snapped, “Monsieur, you would be happy if you could do one as good.”

The Getty’s supplementary show of French drawings includes work by Watteau, Fragonard and others, in ink, wash, pastel and colored chalk. Greuze was equally adept at all of them.

Greuze, says Getty drawings curator Lee Hendrix, “mastered everything. As Diderot said, ‘This man draws like an angel.’ And one of the things that distinguishes him, besides the incredible range, is the new way that he portrayed the lives of everyday people. He would go out into the streets of Paris to look for faces that spoke to him. And he reached into his own personal life in a way that was unprecedented, with a will to get to the truth as he saw it.”

Among the 70 drawings in “Greuze the Draftsman” is a group of expressive heads--tetes d’expression. Immediate and honest, they capture a range of intense emotions, from maternal distress to sexual rapture. The drawings were often made as preparatory studies for larger compositions, but they stand on their own, aesthetically. In Greuze’s day, they were collected as independent works of art.

“We’re beginning to get a clearer view of how people didn’t always keep drawings in portfolios or boxes, but were really hanging them in their houses, and usually in great profusion,” Munhall says. “They were in elaborate frames, under glass. People were paying big prices for them.” The market for them recently has also been lively, he adds. At a July auction, a Greuze chalk and wash drawing estimated at $30,000 to $45,000, sold for $59,000. Modern audiences seem better able to connect with the raw urgency of the drawings than with the more highly finished paintings.

The intimacy of the drawings owes something to their autobiographical nature. One of Greuze’s most repeated subjects, for instance, was his wife, Anne-Gabrielle Babuti, whom he married in 1759. At first, his drawings of her--especially the rapturous “Head of a Woman” from the early years of their marriage--reflect his unbridled love, in frankly erotic terms. Family scenes from those years, too, represent domesticity as happy and fulfilling. When Madame Greuze’s infidelities caused their relationship to sour, that too was chronicled in Greuze’s art, in scenes of increasing violence and pessimism. “The Angry Wife” (circa 1785) shows a woman possessed, lunging into a chaotic dining room to strike her husband, a sympathetic man flanked by two protective daughters.

Greuze made the drawing after he and his wife had separated, in part because of incidents like this in their home. In a deposition aimed at legalizing their separation, Greuze described being slapped and threatened by his wife, then returning, trembling, to his studio. “I take some chalk,” he wrote, “and make a sketch of that scene of horror. It is one of the most beautiful drawings I have done. I invite you to come see it.”

Greuze’s ambition, Munhall says, overrode all other factors.

“There was just no shame. He wanted to share everything, to as big a public as he could.”

Early success fed that ambition, which grew, eventually, to become an encumbrance. When Greuze, who was born and trained near Lyon, made his debut at the Salon in 1755, he was hailed as a “new athlete,” and elected to the Royal Academy as an associate member. When elected, Munhall explains, “it was expected that you would then give the academy an example of your work, as a sign of your gratitude for the honor and, just for the record, that they would have something by you in their collection.”

Greuze didn’t present his “reception painting” until an unconscionable 14 years after his election, and what he finally presented wasn’t what the academy had in mind. “Septimius Severus and Caracalla” was a history painting, and Greuze was a genre painter. Breaking rank like that, trying to boost himself up the hierarchical ladder, was an outrageous act by the standards of the day.

“Genre painting, the representation of everyday life, was considered lowly,” Munhall explains, “and history painting, which treated historical and mythological subjects, was considered the highest, because [the academy] thought it demanded greater talents. It was also supposed that a history painter was more of an intellectual. Also, history painters held positions of greater authority and were better paid than genre painters. They were the professors and directors of the Royal Academy, whereas the genre painter could never aspire to those positions of distinction and power and wealth. Well, all of this appealed to Greuze, who was highly ambitious and very proud of what he thought his talents were, so he decided to go whole-hog for the big job at the top. No one had ever done it before.”

Munhall describes Greuze’s “Caracalla” painting as “extremely modern and original, far beyond what his contemporaries were doing.” But the directors of the academy chafed at Greuze’s impertinence. They voted to receive him as a full member but still classified him as a genre painter. “He had already antagonized most of the members of the academy because he was so arrogant and outspoken, and they were only too happy to put him back in his place,” Munhall says.

Greuze gave up on his effort to be a history painter and resumed his chronicles of everyday life, perhaps, suggests Munhall, with a bit more sobriety. He conducted a personal boycott of the Salon, choosing not to show there for the next 30 years, but he used his studio in the Louvre to stage independent shows that coincided with the academy’s official exhibitions.

“Everyone knew about it,” Munhall says. “The critics all came to his studio and treated it as kind of an appendage of the official Salon. It wasn’t until Courbet had his own pavilion of realism in 1855 that another living artist would stage his own exhibitions in an independent way.”

Greuze’s renegade behavior and feisty personality certainly didn’t endear him to those he knew. “Not very lovable,” one biographer called him. A “bizarre man,” remarked a relative of one of his patrons.

Yet his work secured Greuze status as one of the leading artists of his day, well known and extremely well collected. A major supporter of his art was the court of Catherine II, whose collections formed the foundation of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The Hermitage holds the finest collection of Greuze drawings in the world, many of them loaned to the “Greuze the Draftsman” show.

When, in 1767, Greuze was invited to Russia by Catherine the Great, both his virtues and vices were noted in a letter opposing the trip by Diderot: “He’s an excellent artist, but a very disagreeable character. One should have his drawings and his paintings, and leave the man at that.”

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“Greuze the Draftsman,” “Greuze the Painter: Los Angeles Works in Context,” “French Drawings in the Age of Greuze,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Through Dec. 1. Open Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; free but parking reservations, $5 a car, are required on weekdays before 4 p.m. (310) 440-7300.

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Leah Ollman is a regular contributor to Calendar.