Louvre exhibits many dimensions of Ingres

Who exactly was Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres -- a reactionary or a modernist visionary? His Romantic contemporaries scorned his painting as too cold, too academic and too traditional. And yet Ingres had a serious streak of the renegade.

His nudes were elongated and contorted, his colors violent, and he was oddly obsessed by painting fashion details: gilded fans, jeweled rings, puffs of lace. Years later, these eccentricities endeared him to Picasso and other modern artists.

The Louvre Museum -- hosting the first career- and genre-spanning retrospective on Ingres in four decades -- offers no answer about what label to put on him. A 1967-68 retrospective at the Petit Palais in Paris glossed over works that art historians found unfashionable, such as his biggest, most ambitious historical paintings.

The Louvre exhibit, opening today, lays it all out so fans get a complete view of the contradictory French artist, who lived from 1780 to 1867. There are 180 tableaux and drawings on display, with major loans from U.S., British and Russian museums.

The mix and breadth is stunning. After seeing a few pious Virgin Marys ordered by churches, viewers come across Ingres’ famous “Turkish Bath” and its steamy room of sensual harem women.

There’s Napoleon in a fur-trimmed red velvet robe, staring resolutely from his throne, and then a pencil sketch of a 2-year-old boy with curly locks and an impish pout, swallowed up by an oversized armchair.

Huge mythological- or historical-themed oil paintings are juxtaposed with sublime, tiny sketches. Ingres made 10 drawings of his beloved wife, whom he married -- somewhat curiously -- after he had fallen in love with her unavailable cousin. The Louvre obtained nine sketches of the gentle-faced Madeleine. In one poignant image, she is pregnant with their only child, who was stillborn.

“I think that the public, going from room to room and passing from one universe to another, will find things they like and things they don’t,” curator Vincent Pomarede said during a recent media preview. “But they won’t be able to resist the pleasure that he obviously took in his works: painting a piece of jewelry, a falling book ... “

Fans of the Ingres portrait exhibit that showed in London, New York and Washington, D.C., in 1999 and 2000, will find plenty to love. Although Ingres complained that he hated time-consuming (but breadwinning) portraits, they are among his most arresting works.

An 1848 portrait of the Baronne James de Rothschild shows his gift for incredible detail: Her ruby bracelet glitters like a real jewel, and her hat is trimmed with white feathers that look ready to float off the painting.

Other portraits depict musicians of the period, including Paganini. Ingres was a talented violinist -- his instrument is on show -- who gave France the expression “violon d’Ingres,” meaning a hobby or pastime.

Some works will be unknown or surprising to fans, such as his “troubadour” paintings, which look something like scenes from a Renaissance stage play. In “Paolo and Francesca,” an earnest young man in tights kisses a fair maid, while a villain holding a dagger lurks behind a tapestry.

It seems difficult to believe this is the same artist who would later paint his extravagant portraits of society ladies or the sensual “Turkish Bath.” With the troubadour paintings, Ingres latched on to a genre popular at the time.

“People have always tried to insist that Ingres was an isolated artist,” a maverick going it alone, says Stephane Guegan, one of the curators. “But we have learned that we must be more nuanced. Ingres was also very much marked by the expectations of his times.”

“Ingres” shows at the Louvre until May 15.