Art: Silent Mysteries

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The show of 99 works by the French artist Jean-Simeon Chardin, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, falls just 21 years after the last Chardin retrospective in America--which took place at the Cleveland Museum of Art and didn't reach Manhattan. Does the new show add much to our knowledge of Chardin? In a sense no, because not many fresh facts about him have surfaced in the past two decades. But in the sense that really matters, yes, and yes again. Any extended contact with Chardin is invigorating and marvelous.

The show's otherwise excellent catalog frets a bit. Why, it wonders, should there be another Chardin show so close on the heels of the first? Well, the answer is that in human life--if not in that of a museum or a reputation--20 years is a long time. A generation of art lovers (maybe two) has come into being since 1979. All those interested kids who don't know Chardin, who have never seen him at full stretch! And, it might have added, what about the rest of us, for whom 20 years is far too long between full exposures to this genius of bourgeois imagination?

No question, Chardin was one of the greatest artists who ever picked up a brush--and all the greater for painting without the attributes of greatness. Eighteenth century France was a fine incubator for pictorial grandeur, as in the history pieces of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Its sexual rhetoric--think of Boucher's pink and frothy shepherdesses--was peerless. Since the reign of Louis XIV, whose minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had striven to connect the visual arts to the very essence of French gloire, every kind of official discourse had flourished in French painting and sculpture, as it did in the arts of Italy. But unofficial life--the relatively ordinary pleasures and utterances of the bourgeois center, the common protein of French society--did not as yet have its painter laureate.

Chardin became that man. There was nothing extraordinary about his career except the beauty of the works it produced. His field of social vision was narrow. But by painting what he knew, neither more nor less, he became the standard-bearer of visual truth to a generation of French intellectuals, the Encyclopedists, led by the philosopher Denis Diderot. To them, Chardin's refusal of the highfalutin theme seemed exemplary. He showed that a jar of apricots on a table could be just as important and freighted with meaning as a battle scene in an epic of Alexander, the impregnation of a nymph by Apollo, or the reception into Heaven of a patron's patron saint. In time, Chardin's "natural vision" would be eclipsed by a new form of idealism, that of the neoclassicists, like David. But never for long. People may admire David, but they love Chardin. They cleave to his lack of pretension and see it as something fundamental to the art of painting--which it is.

Chardin didn't say much--at least, not much that he did say has been preserved, since he had no Boswell and the gossips who adored his work, like the Goncourt brothers, came from a later generation and never met him. But there is a tantalizing remark attributed to him by a writer of the 1780s, Charles-Nicolas Cochin: "I must forget everything I have seen and even forget the way such objects have been treated by others." This hints at the extreme pride and immense ambition that underwrote Chardin's apparently modest arrangements of brown jugs, water glasses, dead rabbits and fruit.