Art: Before Your Very Eyes

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The English painters as a whole may not have been after universal themes; but they caught an age for all time, with all its grace and majesty and the sordidness that lay beneath. A Constable landscape may be a vast vista of perfect peace; but Hogarth is not far behind to remind one, like a conscience, that art must also deal with filth, poverty and disease. The Mellon collection gives a fresh view of a time of stunning versatility and charm. To the English, art was a craft to be perfected with loving care, and the grace note was often as important as the thundering chord. Yet, when no longer seen through the haze of Victorian valentines that followed it, the age is shown as robust and meaty, not a time of pallid sentiment but of potency and health.

The greatest of the 19th century masters was Joseph Mallord William Turner. He studied nature for mood, and he was probably at his best when the mood was ugly. His Harlech Castle is filled with menace, and in his later work, he could whip up the sea to a point that the rage of nature—painted with sponge, knife, finger, or even bits of bread—drowned form in a mist of abstraction.

An Ageless Ornament. In Paris, too, an attempt at rehabilitation is going on. The painter Giovanni Boldini came to Paris in 1872 from his native Italy, where his father made quite a good living faking Guardis and Mantegnas. To this unusual but effective grounding in the old masters, Boldini added a talent for portraiture, and soon all of high society was knocking at his studio. When Paris opened its current retrospective of nearly 300 works, Jean Cocteau made a strained effort to rank Boldini as a precursor of Giacometti and Georges Mathieu. But turning Boldini into a "modern" is beside the point. His Comtesse de Leusse is an ageless ornament that might have adorned the imperial court of Rome, a palazzo of Renaissance Italy, or Buckingham Palace today. Only her clothes freeze her in time.

Boldini died in 1931 at the age of 88, blandly unaffected by the storms that had rent the art world since the century began. Among the storms was the "Blue Rider" group, which Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded in 1911. They extended their hands to all modern artists whose art followed no particular line, but grew "out of inner necessity." As a result, they became associated with all the master rebels of their day—men who were churning up the rules of perspective, blasting out the innards of form, melting down the image to unrecognizable shapes. Manhattan's Leonard Hutton Galleries has restaged those days when the manifesto in capital letters was a standard prop of the art world.

Kandinsky's place as a founder of modern abstraction is obvious. No one knows what the extent of Marc's influence might have been had he not been killed at the age of 36 in World War I. His first paintings were based on the theme of the animal in harmony with all creation. He later arranged idealized shapes of pure color in such a way that each canvas seemed to have its own jagged rhythm. But what he left behind was more than a technical achievement; it was an enchanted world, half sophisticated, half childlike, of animals colored like toys in a nursery wonderland where pears could be bigger than cows. Marc commandeered nature's forms, transformed them as he saw fit, and then rebuilt nature any way he wanted.