In 1867, the novelist and critic Emile Zola curtly dismissed the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme as “but a cynical manufacturer of anecdotal images for mass reproduction.”2In other words, Gérôme was the antithesis, in both theory and practice, of “sincere” and committed Modernists, like Édouard Manet, who were respected by the likes of Zola.
Zola’s evaluation was right on the mark. Gérôme was indeed a master of the telling anecdote as opposed to the grand rhetorical gesture. He made extensive use of photography at every stage of his artistic process, while the Parisian firm of Goupil & Cie, run by the artist’s father-in-law, oversaw the photographic and photo-lithographic reproduction of his work, as well as its widespread distribution in every conceivable size and format—to fit every wallet and purse. Gérôme’s embrace of photography and lithographic reproduction left him open to oft-repeated charges that he was no better than an illustrator. But it undoubtedly maximized his audience, and might be seen as a process of democratization, rather than one of self-conscious commodification.
Zola’s critical voice was by no means the only one. Although the artist was immensely popular both at home and abroad, and regularly decorated by the Parisian art establishment, he was just as regularly derogated in both the progressive and the conservative press. Their reactions and Gérôme’s work, taken all-in-all, suggest an artist whose pictorial production was akin to that of a possible Postmodernism, the salient characteristics of which might include brilliant if “unethical” pictorial strategies, internal contradictions, self-consciously subversive intentions, and a proto-cinematic sensibility.3
This, at least, seems to be the major thesis advanced by an impressive re-evaluation of the artist’s work, The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, recently mounted at the J. Paul Getty Museum: a show whose none-too-subtle evocation of Guy Debord’s Situationist manifesto The Society of the Spectacle is hardly accidental.4 Despite its articulate defense by the authors of the catalog, this thesis that Gérôme’s work escapes the Modernist master narrative as a foreshadowing of Postmodernism, rather like a roll of distant thunder, must stand or fall finally on the strength and complexity of the works themselves. Indeed, Gérôme’s output is the product of a painter whose masterful technical skill draws you into his represented worlds in ways that entice, seduce, and finally force you to grapple with them both on their own pictorial and ideological terms, and in terms of their positions as artifacts serving the interests of twenty-first-century history and criticism.
In surveying the rather sprawling and heterogeneous show, three overlapping groups of works raise particularly salient issues: those that point toward the dissolution of traditional modes of history painting; those that invoke and explore the dynamics of sexual politics at the intersection between pictorial and social worlds; and those that exploit the ideologically charged, nineteenth-century fascination with all things “Oriental.” Finally, some account must be taken of Gérôme’s interest in photography as a tool in the service of painting, as well as his long-standing association with the Parisian publishing firm of Goupil & Cie, and the implications of that association for the marketing both of Gérôme’s work and of his image as perhaps the first painter absolutely at home in a world of mechanical reproduction.
As a history painter of impeccable Davidian pedigree, Gérôme often appears to have been willfully transgressive in his disregard for the canons of his art. On the one hand, he seems to have confused trivial anecdote with heroic narrative, as in one of his best known works, the beautifully ironic commedia tragedy Duel after the Ball, which exists in numerous painted versions (as well as photographic and lithographic reproductions in both black and white and color) produced from 1857 through the late 1880s.5 And on the other, he quite clearly ignored the basic rules governing the pictorial presentation of such narratives. Least damning among his transgressions in this regard was a tendency to pile up extraneous, if painstakingly researched and exquisitely rendered, details that dispersed visual interest across the surface of the canvas, a problem often encountered by his critics in his scenes of gladiatorial combat and Christian martyrdom in the Roman arena.6 He was also cited for real or imagined violations of the vaunted rules of classical decorum, as demonstrated perhaps most explicitly in the group of six white-clad vestal virgins who participate with almost demonic glee in the blood sport of Pollice Verso (1872).7
More immediately interesting, although in my view a little overstressed in the Getty exhibition catalog entries, is the notion that Gérôme’s works were occasionally imbued with a kind of proto-cinematic sensibility. The prime example here is The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayers (1863–83). Around the vast space of the deadly amphitheater is arranged a circular a row of condemned prisoners, their bodies slathered with pitch and tied to crude crosses. Almost invisible at first glance, we eventually become aware of a man dressed in blood red who uses a long, thin torch to light the victims one after another. Moving from left to right, the sequence of burning, just lit, and unlit crucifixes constitutes a kind of virtual “pan” that draws our vision along the narrative path of the picture from regal and ravening beasts toward the group of helpless victims. (And starting from this initial pan, it is quite easy to elaborate the mental image of a powerful and horrendous cinematic sequence.)
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Death of Caesar, 1859–67. Oil on canvas, 33 11/16 x 57 5/16 in. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.
But what really distinguishes Gérôme’s most difficult histories is their tendency, combined with one or more of the strategies outlined above, to cast their entire narratives in radically oblique terms. In The Death of Caesar (1867), for example, he marginalizes the body of the dead Caesar, which becomes an implacably mute and lifeless thing;8 and centers the composition on the mosaic head of Medusa, whose silent scream becomes an aporia announcing the void that has momentarily opened up at the heart of the Roman world. Gérôme epitomizes the fleeing assassins in terms of a sharply drawn yet finally opaque anecdote; and borrows a stock figure from comedic genre, the corpulent and (apparently) sleeping senator, to function as an internal observer who becomes “the spectator of history with a capital H,”9 despite the fact that “capital H” history seems resolutely absent from the death scene as the painter portrays it.
We, however, live in a world where the oblique nature of pictorial or textual narrative is virtually taken for granted; where such narratives routinely seem drained of moral or ethical force; and where art’s seemingly relentless self-referentiality makes a mockery of the idea that historical subjects must of necessity present an aspect that is at once both “tragic and timeless.”10 Take an example referenced in the catalog: Andy Warhol’s White Burning Car III (1963). The small figure that walks from right to left across the background of the image can be taken to establish, by its very unconcern, its apparent obliviousness to the horrific particulars of the grotesque foreground scene, and that the work itself is all surface and no substance, all copy and no original, all screen and no corpse.
These are not quite claims that can yet be made for Gérôme’s Caesar. Even though the body of Caesar has become no more than a corpse like any other, the referencing presence of the portly senator remains to guarantee that the Roman Empire and all that it entails will live on. While in the last analysis Warhol’s victim may be no more than an image, a simulacrum of death without real human signification, Gérôme’s Caesar remains a point of human and historical reference despite both the political and the painterly violence that has been done to it. Gérôme cleverly, and quite consciously, undercuts precisely the conventions of academic history painting that we might have expected him to defend against Modernist painters such as Édouard Manet. It is as if, in contrast to Warhol strolling through the world of spectacle and simulacrum, Gérôme sits in his seat in the Senate, brooding on a world where significance may be sure, but where the power of painting to represent that significance has been called into question.
Although Gérôme and Manet might seem strange bedfellows, they appear in juxtaposition on several occasions in the catalog discussion, where, to borrow a military metaphor, they are apparently intended to function as the two prongs of a double envelopment that overwhelms and eventually obliterates the moribund academic tradition. This strikes me as a brilliant revisionist strategy, since it doesn’t just present a free-floating re-reading or re-evaluation of Gérôme, but rather places him as a significant figure in what we can begin to see as an alternative art-historical narrative, one that does not depend on the idea of inevitable Modernist triumphalism. Although this is no place to attempt a full articulation of such a narrative, we might just note that it would counter-pose the “Just Say No” (to the classical tradition) attitude of the Impressionists against the work of Manet, Gérôme, and eventually Cezanne, all three of whom were deeply engaged with the classical tradition, albeit in radically different ways.
Between the three of them, however, they subjected that tradition to a microscopic, analytical examination that had the ultimate effect of undercutting its authority as a normative model for artistic practice, while at the same time leaving it available as an archive of images virtually endless in its extent and immediately available for appropriation, quotation, reconfiguration, mass reproduction, etc.—in short, for re-assimilation as raw material in the process of cultural production.
Thus, while the quality of Manet’s facture, as well as his disregard of accurate perspectival construction (for example, in the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe of 1863), guarantee the “sincerity” of his Modernism, the fact that his most powerful works, like Déjeuner and Olympia (1863) are unthinkable without his experience of Giorgione and Titian places him in a position of active art-historical engagement. He shares this engagement with Gérôme (whose slick, Davidian production values and flawless spatial construction would seem to identify him as “the Man” in this situation) and not with, say, Monet or the Renoir of the 1860s, who strove to give the impression of disrupting or denying tradition in every aspect of their practice.
We can see an example of such a historically informed approach in Gérôme’s extraordinary The Death of Marshal Ney (1868), also known as December 7, 1815, 9 O’Clock in the Morning. Especially given Gérôme’s own conservative, even Bonapartist politics, this stark canvas, in which we see the executed Marshal Ney of Napoleon’s triumphant armies lying dead in a muddy, rutted road against the backdrop of a dirty wall marred by partially effaced imperial graffiti, brings home the brutality of the marshal’s death as a fact of furtive banality—almost, as it were, the government’s “dirty little secret.”11 The painter makes brilliant use of the military regulation that required that the executed general’s body lay “for a quarter of an hour in the place of execution,”12 while the commander of the detail that has carried out the execution pauses for a final backward glance. This kind of presentation violates all of the accepted and heroic codes of mid-nineteenth century history painting as clarified by the exhibition catalog discussion, which provides a trenchant comparison with Manet’s contemporaneous Execution of [the Emperor] Maximilian (1867–68), which retains a traditional “heroic intensity,” even as it struggles against tradition on the level of form and facture.13
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phryné Before the Tribunal, 1861. Oil on canvas, 31 1/4 x 50 3/8 in. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Photo: Elke Walford. Courtesy Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.Equally instructive might be a comparison between Manet’s notorious Olympia (1863) and Gérôme’s Phryné before the Areopagus (1861) (also called Phryné before the Tribunal), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1861, and the object of extensive vituperation, caricature, and parody. While Manet’s nude drew fire both for the quality of its painterly surface (all paint and no woman) and for the character of its subject, whose self-assured control over the commodification of her own body has become an introductory course set piece in discussions of the theme of the reclining female nude,14 Gérôme’s attack follows a different line. Thus, while his depiction of Phryné, the mistress of Praxiteles and model for the Knidian Aphrodite, brought before the Athenian court on a charge of impiety, was criticized, for example, as but “a little girl ashamed, who wants to hide,”15 the real opprobrium falls not on the female figure, but on her judges, or, as H. Delaborde opined, “twenty satyrs dressed as judges.”16 The spectacle of Phryné’s unveiling becomes as it were the unveiling of a picture within a picture, where the judges, each wonderfully and satirically individualized in his response of mock horror that undoubtedly (and not always effectively) masks his desire, stands in for the external male viewers of the picture as a whole. The hypocritical sexual politics of the Parisian bourgeoisie of the early 1860s are unveiled as surely as the body of the coy young model.17
In general, however, Gérôme’s essays in sexuality are cast in the milieu of classical antiquity, such as The Cockfight (1846), The Idylle (also known as Daphnis and Chloe) (1852), and even King Candaules (1859). They engage our attention with languid bodies— both male and female—posed in settings of extraordinary, yet never overpowering detail. This tendency reaches its apex in the extravagant The Greek Interior (The Gynaeceum)(1850), whose central standing figure looks forward toward the Phryné, while the languid figure sleeping in the foreground might well serve to remind us that in the middle of the nineteenth century, “the Orient” still began in Greece.18
In another key group of much later paintings, Gérôme thematized his own work, not as a painter, but as a sculptor. These canvases were executed relatively late in the artist’s life, after he had become seriously involved with the creation of sculpture in the round.
Taken as a group, Gérôme’s polychrome sculpture is difficult to like. Their nineteenth- century history and context is complex.19 Their web of possible references, precedents, and subsequent reverberations is fraught: recovering an ancient technology and aesthetic, do they look back toward the classical Athena Parthenos of Pheidias?20 Or, as ironically kitsch commodities, do they point forward, as the catalog seems to suggest, toward such provocatively bombastic pieces of self-advertisement as Jeff Koons’s Dirty Jeff on Top (1991)?21 Many express a remote, frigid sexuality; a few, notably the Tanagra (1890) with her formal pose and wonderfully if artlessly placed feet, seem to preserve something of the vivaciousness of the living models.22 Alternatively, the Bellona (1892) is presented in full Wagnerian drag, and the Sarah Bernhardt (1895–1901) is frighteningly ghoulish, a true fin-de-siècle vampire.
If the catalog tells us anything, it may be, first, that as a mature artist Gérôme embraced a medium (or, perhaps more precisely, a variety of related mediums) that had previously been of marginal importance to his creative process and began an intense and spirited exploration of their possibilities; and, second, that he was never able to resolve this exploration to his satisfaction. Perhaps all this boils down to saying that within the space of a few years, we see condensed all the explosive energy and irresolution that in fact marked his entire career as a painter.
What complicates this reading of these later works, however, are the paintings (as well as a number of photographs) within which the artist mostly restages his own workshop practice. There remains a tension that we can see summed up most forcefully in two works: the mythological Pygmalion and Galatea (1890) and the much more mundane The Artist’s Model (1895). In the first instance, the power of art to literally vivify stone is captured with a beautifully understated exuberance, and the head-down transformation of Galatea’s body is handled with a sureness of touch that reminds one of Daphne’s transformation from girl to tree in Gianlorenzo Bernini’s famous sculpture. In my estimation, one could hardly ask for a more perfect pictorial realization of the Pygmalion myth. Even the sexuality, though obvious, is muted and a bit ambiguous.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Artist’s Model, 1895. Oil on canvas. 19 7/8 x 15 9/16 in. Dahesh Museum of Art. Image © Dahesh Museum of Art, New York / Bridgeman Art Library.
Although what looks to be a framed oil sketch of the earlier canvas hangs on the wall of the studio in The Artist’s Model (1895), the aged Gérôme is hardly comparable to the youthful Pygmalion. All that remains of the miraculous transformation from marble to flesh is the assuredly not fortuitous juxtaposition of the model’s and figure’s left arms, leaving us with the uncanny impression that the model has one arm of flesh and one of marble. The sculptor works slowly, carefully, caressing and polishing the figure’s thighs, his eyes traveling toward the crotch of the model, whose part in the actual process of production has long since been rendered redundant. The model can now only function as a kind of muse, a physical, sexual presence alive in the workshop, yet still and silent as marble, protected from physical contact by the artist’s gloves. She is available only to his gaze, which is the gaze of an old man in a dark time, when myth is no longer an active cultural force and the process of production is at best difficult and uncertain.23
It should be noted that many of Gérôme’s models are male, and a generally unacknowledged homoerotic dynamic is at play in many of his depictions of the male nude. This sometimes latent, sometimes explicit homoerotic charge may in fact comprise a residue of “the homoerotic pedagogy and politics of [Jacques- Louis] David’s atelier,” as Allan Doyle argues in his provocative Reconsidering Gérôme essay, “Groping the Antique.”24 But, whatever its source, it provides a potentially disruptive, male-on-male counterpoint to the dynamics of objectification and commodification that are so readily implicated in Gérôme’s sexual politics as usual. The creative myth of the chaste and devoted Pygmalion and his Galatea is confronted by the tawdry anecdote of the blind and lecherous Michelangelo and the Belvedere Torso.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, circa 1870. Oil on canvas. 32 13/16 x 48 1/16 in. Courtesy of and © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Photo: Michael Agee.
Perhaps the most dubious of all Gérôme’s distinctions is not one associated with his relentless repudiation of progressive currents in nineteenth-century French painting, nor his often brutal pummeling at the hands of both progressive and conservative critics, but rather a decision made decades after his death by a cover designer for Vintage Books: a decision that inextricably linked a detail from his canvas, The Snake Charmer (c. 1870), with the blistering polemic of the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s iconic, post-colonial manifesto Orientalism (1st ed., New York, 1978). Said was primarily a literary theorist and a critic of texts, as well as a vocal advocate for Palestinian rights. However, his analysis of European textual culture during the nineteenth century, which plots in exhaustive detail the ethno-centric and colonialist construction of an image of “the Orient” that functioned to define and defend a set of political, religious, and cultural power relations advantageous always to the European position, can easily be applied to the visual arts as well.25 Framed by Said’s argument, Gérôme’s Snake Charmer (which still adorns the cover of the 25th anniversary edition of the book) seems to capture a world of exotic decadence, violence, racial depravity, slavery, pagan indolence, child pornography, and bestiality (have I left anything out?) that defines the essence of the softest underbelly of European Orientalism. It is a shameful picture, serving a shameful ideology.
It is also, perhaps unfortunately, an extremely seductive picture. A congeries of minute descriptive detail of diverse racial and ethnic types (which, curiously, never sink to the level of caricature), a backdrop of incredible decorative and calligraphic complexity, a beautiful chromatic balance of blue and brown (each seemingly present in a hundred shades), a splash of red and green, the tongue of the snake, the tilt of a head, the sparkle of an eye, the flash of brilliant white teeth, innocence, experience, danger conjured and controlled: it is a world, fantastic in conception, fictitious in form, malign in ideology—and completely captivating and convincing. It is hard to look at without coming to feel that the richness of your aesthetic experience must inevitably be tainted by its depravity. For an aesthetically sophisticated nineteenth-century viewer already implicated in that ideological world, the experience must have been extraordinary, as it was for me 130 years later.
This is, admittedly, a hard rap for Gérôme to beat. And it is made the more so by works like For Sale (The Slave Market) (1871), which, although rooted in what was still a real international problem in 1871, dwells on the brutal and erotic aspects of the transaction with an attention that certainly seems more kinkily pornographic than righteously indignant. We are clearly not in the presence of a champion of human rights, just a canny businessman who knew perfectly well that “sex sells,” whether in the slave markets of contemporary Egypt and ancient Rome, or the salons of nineteenth-century Europe.26
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Corinth, 1903–04. Tinted marble, colored marble, gilt bronze, enamel, and semiprecious stones. Dimensions, including base: 78 x 17 1/2 x 17 1/2 in. Courtesy J. Nicholson, Beverly Hills, California.
Wisely, the exhibition curators have not attempted to defuse the issue; but they have attempted to place Gérôme’s Orientalizing pictures in as rich a contemporary context as possible, showing that the nineteenth-century construction of “the Orient” involved self- fashioning as well as European fantasizing, and that the flow of cultural information, cultural documentation, and cultural imagination flowed West-to-East as well as East-to-West. This strategy by no means absolves Gérôme of his complicity in Europe’s colonial-era sins, but it does lay out some interesting scenarios. The painter was apparently very well connected at the Ottoman court, where there was a brisk market in European pictures. One scenario plots the use made both by Gérôme and his Ottoman contacts of the singing bashi-bazouk, whom Gérôme celebrated in an 1868 canvas.27
In the case of many of the Orientalizing pictures on exhibit, the viewing dynamic, at least for me, recapitulated to a greater or lesser extent that of The Snake Charmer: a constant struggle to maintain an intellectual distance and a critical political stance in the face of a seductive visual experience, the presence or absence of inviting flesh, both male and female, notwithstanding.
In addition, there were other aspects of these works that complicated the viewing experience even further. The first, which was primarily historical, involved the extent, alluded to above, to which Gérôme’s construction of the Orient was part of a complicated circulation of ideas and images that was centered both on Paris and Constantinople, and in which the West by no means played an obviously dominant role. This aspect of the story is complex, involving as it does French and Ottoman foreign and domestic cultural policy, diplomatic overtures and behind-the- scenes machinations, the career strategies of Gérôme and other French artists, as well as French and Constantinopolitan dealers. This makes for a lot of text, both at the exhibition and in the catalog. (I must say that I found the reading eye opening and provocative, especially when posed against overly simplistic readings of Said’s equally trenchant critique.)
Some remarkable and historically valuable images on display, including a selection of photographs by the firm Abdullah frères, photographers to the Ottoman court, testify both to the desire of that court to document its imperial realms using the latest Western technological means, and to the use which Gérôme himself made of this kind of local documentation. For example, a photo of the interior of the Topkapi Palace is refigured as the back wall of the outdoor street scene in The Snake Charmer. Although this may seem a nominal example, it is symptomatic of the systematic, synthetic, combinatorial strategy that Gérôme used in assembling in the studio what appear in his most successful pictures as naturalized, seamless constructs: he can give the fictive world of the West’s Oriental dream a striking physical authority that belies the obvious artifice, for example, of poetic evocations in the contemporary, romantic mode.
The second, and this may simply reflect my own unguarded or unfiltered reaction, involves what seemed to me a real sense of dignified presence, of internal power or authority projected by many of the male figures depicted by Gérôme in his Orientalizing works. Although this is true of many of the actors in his multi-figure compositions, the feeling was strongest in my one-on-one confrontations with individual figures. The brooding melancholy of the portrait of the Greek freedom fighter Marcus Boutsaris (1874) is a case in point, although, save for the exoticism of the costume and setting, this might well be a contemporary European portrait.
Much more unsettling, in a sense, and certainly much less European in its superficial aspect, is the extraordinary The Black Bard (1888). The picture is simple in composition,rich in detail, and almost hypnotically powerful in its impact. The figure, swathed in a salmon- colored robe and seated cross-legged on his rug with a pair of lemon-yellow slippers to his left, appears more natural than posed, although his body seems easily to have assumed the static, stable shape of an equilateral triangle. His hands lay informally in his lap. His face is individualized, yet beautifully structured as a set of overlapping darker and lighter circles; and his gaze is intense, and seems fixed on something above or beyond the external observer. At the exhibition, I returned to this work again and again, drawn irresistibly to the bard’s painted presence as if into the presence of a living being, one who is a repository of a knowledge of tradition, and possessed of a skill in its transmission that I could never hope to understand or master. Whatever the use to which such an image might have been put, however powerfully it may have served the establishment of a romanticized, colonial “other,” it will remain in my experience also an amazing portrait, and one of the most sensitively humane images of a black man ever produced by a European painter.28
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Corinthe, 1903. Painted plaster, 18 3/4 x 13 x 11 1/4 in. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.
“As if into the presence of a living being”—this was certainly one of the overarching themes of Gérôme’s art: painting (and sculpture) poised between the vivifying myth of Pygmalion on the one hand and the objectifying mechanism of the camera on the other. It might also serve as a fitting epigraph for this portrait. Today, we might easily praise it for its apparently “photographic” power—its ability to capture the look of a documented time and place, or to give the sense of a transient moment captured, even in the expression on the old bard’s face. But in fact, the overall effect is quite other than that of a nineteenth-century photograph. That sense of otherness inheres in the brilliance and the subtlety of the interplay of colors across the surface—something no photograph could approach in 1888. In that sense, The Black Bard is like the polychromed plaster model for the marble Corinth (1903): a demonstration of the artist’s Pygmalion-like power to bring us into the living presence of his model at a moment in time when photography was still struggling to achieve a similar effect.29
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Oedipus, 1886. Oil on canvas; unframed: 23 3/4 x 39 3/4 in. © Hearst Castle / California State Parks, San Simeon, California.
One of the major themes that runs throughout Said’s book concerns the nineteenth-century development of two distinct, if interrelated, European Orientalisms—one based in England, the other in France.30 That which developed in France, romantic in essence and bound up inextricably with a sense of “what might have been,” was grounded inevitably and inexorably in Napoleon’s ill-fated Egyptian adventure of 1798–99. Gérôme speaks eloquently to exactly that sense in his Oedipus (ca.1863–66), where the French general, relatively small against the vastness of the desert, sits astride his horse addressing the buried and damaged Great Sphinx, whose eyes see across the millennia, whose lips remain sealed, and whose presence embodies the inscrutable blankness of our Orient, neither asking nor answering (at least in the language for which we listen).31 Stripped of the army of savants, whose labors produced, through “a continuous application… of the arts and sciences,”32 the twenty-eight volume Description de l’Égypt (1809–28), Napoleon is dwarfed by the land, the culture, even the distant sky—a perfect illustration of Said’s thesis.
In sum: the Getty has delivered a sprawling and multifaceted show covering the work of an artist whose output was likewise sprawling and multifaceted. It should lay forever to rest the notion that Gérôme was at best an illustrateur whose work is fit only to adorn the pages of high school Latin texts. Rather, we have been given an artist deeply implicated (both for good and ill) in many of the most important cultural currents and cross-currents of his time: a superb and self- conscious technician whose best work, if not Postmodern in a narrow sense, demonstrates an approach that, especially in the arena of history painting, challenges his own time’s most deeply held and cherished assumptions. At once a reactionary and a revolutionary, he was never quite able to bring Galatea to life, never quite able to give up his seat on the Areopagus. But he might well have seen his own skill and experience reflected in the face of The Black Bard; while his work, thanks to the reproductive efforts of Goupil & Cie, could be literally collected as an entire set.
Glenn Harcourt received a PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. He currently live and works in Los Angeles.