Total star rating: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
The works: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
The show: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
Neoclassicism is having a moment. Long regarded as the most predictable and least admired of the grand movements of Western art, it is turning out to be full of surprises. In 2023, Antonio Canova, the movement\u2019s pre-eminent sculptor, emerged as a kind of proto-Expressionist in a double-venue US exhibition that highlighted his bracingly rough terracotta sketches. In 2024, France\u2019s long-lost Caribbean-born practitioner, Guillaume Lethi\u00e8re, was rescued from oblivion in a landmark Franco-American show. And now, at the Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the greatest Neoclassical artist of all, is having his biggest survey in almost four decades.<\/p>\n
Opening a matter of days before the museum\u2019s headline-grabbing robbery last October,\u00a0Jacques-Louis David\u00a0is an artistic event of the highest order, even if a cohort of thieves managed to steal its thunder. Complementing the Louvre\u2019s own definitive holdings with lavish but strategic loans from around France and eight other countries, the exhibition\u2014nominally mounted in honour of the 200th anniversary of the artist\u2019s death, aged 77, in 1825\u2014is on par with the Rijksmuseum\u2019s\u00a0Vermeer\u00a0blockbuster in 2023, and the current Fra Angelico\u00a0extravaganza in Florence (until 25 January).\u00a0Comprising just over 100 works, the Louvre show will define its subject for decades to come. But can it redefine him as something other than a Neoclassicist? That, it seems, is the curators\u2019 surprising intent.<\/p>\n
Opening with David\u2019s handwritten visiting card from the last decade of his life, along with ghostly previews of two studio versions of his eerie and supreme work,\u00a0The Death of Marat (1793), the Louvre boldly announces that it is breaking David free of the longstanding Neoclassical label in order to present him, instead, as a both a \u201crealist\u201d and an \u201cidealist\u201d.<\/p>\n
This is an extraordinarily well-arranged show, with a zigzagging installation marked by powerful and poignant vistas and pairings.\u00a0And it is a venue-defiant show, which makes us forget the woeful shortcomings of the Louvre\u2019s Hall Napol\u00e9on, the bunker-like rooms where the museum holds important special exhibitions.\u00a0But is it also revolutionary? Can it compel us to re-
categorise the artist? After several visits, I would have to say that, more or less, yes, it is, and does.<\/p>\n
The crucial facts of David\u2019s turbulent biography are relatively well-known. Born in Paris in 1748, and raised at a time when the Rococo held sway (he received early advice from Fran\u00e7ois Boucher), he was then swept up in the Neoclassical rejection of frippery and fancifulness, absorbing Italianate and classical sources while in Rome.<\/p>\n
Dictator of the arts<\/p>\n
Later, back in Paris, as a favourite of the Bourbon ruling family in the final years of the\u00a0Ancien R\u00e9gime,\u00a0he painted sombre, proto-revolutionary works that preached civic virtue. Then during the French Revolution itself, he became a radical Jacobin and vocal supporter of Maximilien de Robespierre, an architect of the Reign of Terror. David held near-dictatorial powers over the arts, and went so far as to call for the execution of his former patron, Louis XVI.\u00a0A spell in prison after the fall of Robespierre in 1794 was followed by his return to fame and power during Napoleon\u2019s rise and reign, when, again, he became a regime\u2019s favoured artist.<\/p>\n
Bonaparte\u2019s fall after Waterloo in 1815 and the return of the Bourbons to the French throne led to David\u2019s official condemnation, and what amounted to a self-imposed exile in Brussels, where he died out of sorts with the wobbly pretences of Restoration France.<\/p>\n
The curators arrange the show around nearly all of David\u2019s major works. (A major exception, The Coronation of Napoleon, 1807, has been left in its usual spot in the Denon Wing.) While looking at the early painting St. Roch Interceding with the Virgin for the Plague-Stricken (1780), on loan from the Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles, we can also just glimpse the career-making\u00a0Oath of the Horatii (1784), brought down from its permanent Louvre position. The early, shadowy religious painting shows great talent, while the later work, set in Ancient Rome, is a taut and tense invocation of patriotism and secular sacrifice, in which the younger David\u2019s influences, Caravaggio and Poussin, have been transformed and transcended.<\/p>\n
The path forward, to revolution, culminates in the Oath of the Horatii\u2019s mirror work: the gigantic, unfinished canvas fragment of David\u2019s planned 10m-long\u00a0The Tennis Court Oath (1791-92), on loan from the Ch\u00e2teau de Versailles. Meant to commemorate a pivotal event in the French Revolution, when representatives of France\u2019s Third Estate vowed to support a constitution, the project\u2014eventually abandoned by David\u2014lives on as an immense, mysterious draft, with anonymous nude bodies in states of being finished off with real people\u2019s faces. The curators frame it in a view incorporating two of David\u2019s greatest works of portraiture, both from 1790: the Louvre\u2019s portrait of the Marquise d\u2019Orvilliers and, on loan from the Neue Pinakothek, that of her sister, the Comtesse de Sorcy. Depicted in the early and ebullient phase of the revolution, they represent the French class who at first wanted the rupture, notes the Louvre\u2019s Se\u0301bastien Allard, who co-curated the show with museum colleague Co\u0302me Fabre. Both paintings position their figures in David\u2019s signature \u201cneutral\u201d backgrounds, as Allard says. And here, the curators allow that discreet and deliberate blankness to play\u00a0off the vast, blank expanse of the nearby Tennis Court work.<\/p>\n
The dark years of the Terror are commemorated in suitably dark galleries, bookended with David\u2019s two self-portraits, ending with the Louvre\u2019s own from 1794, completed while David was in prison.\u00a0It is in these gloomy spaces that we encounter\u00a0The Death of Marat\u00a0in triplicate\u2014the autograph version, on loan from Brussels, and the two adjacent copies that we glimpsed on our way in.\u00a0Having all three is a reminder of the image\u2019s impact. The murdered revolutionary\u2019s equivocal pose\u2014which seems to suggest both sleep and death, Allard says\u2014has been much-imitated, but never demystified.<\/p>\n
In what is less of a surprise than an urgent reminder, the show documents the width and depth of David\u2019s talents. He mastered every genre, save landscape, and everything he did, from the smallest preparatory study to the large history paintings, looks exceptional here.<\/p>\n
Critics have tended to cast aspersions on David\u2019s later work, finding an element of satire creeping into the history paintings and post-Napoleonic portraits. But one final grouping is revelatory: The Anger of Achilles\u00a0(1819), on loan from the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas; Portrait of the Comte de Turenne (1816), from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen; andthe Louvre\u2019s Portrait of Juliette de Villeneuve (1824). Here, we see how David\u2019s nominally Neoclassical scenes are also group portraits, and how real-life figures can also be players in the costume dramas of their time.<\/p>\n
Though none of these is regarded as major, together they testify to the freshness and uniqueness of the artist. Is he a Neoclassicist? Yes, unreservedly. But is he much more than that? Yes. Indeed.<\/p>\n