Our latest adventure was a trip to the big city to visit the Jacques Louis David show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We had been invited by old and dear friends, who also took us to lunch and rescued us from problems of elder telephone incompetence in arranging a Lyft afterwards. I am slowly inuring myself to being the little old lady who needs a boy scout to help me cross the street. We feel lucky there are so many about. Boy scouts, I mean, not streets. Our friend Susan also invoked her special privilege as a museum docent to get a significantly reduced price on the magnificent show catalogue, Jacques Louis David, Radical Draftsman. In theory I am in a phase of library reduction, but…
David was born in 1748 and died in 1825. The “radical” of the catalogue title can be taken in a double sense. David the classicist spent years in Italy searching for the roots of his art in the monuments of ancient Rome. More obviously the word refers to his radical politics during the Revolution, in which he was active both as committed republican and anti-royalist, and as an artist. The “Draftsman” part points to the central originality of this particular exhibition, which focuses on the literally thousands of drawings he prepared, either to record antique Roman monuments he admired and studied or in making preliminary sketches for possible paintings. In a preliminary essays the exhibition’s curator, Perrin Stein, and Philippe Bordes, a leading David scholar and the former director of the Museum of the French Revolution, explain the previously insufficiently appreciated importance of the practice of sketched copies and preliminary drawing for the painters of the period.
The evaluation of museum exhibitions, like the subjects and artefacts to which they are devoted, is to a large extent a matter of personal taste and cultural metabolism. For me “Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman” (which is open until the middle of May) gets an “A” rating—for at least two reasons. The first is its educational clarity. Any intelligent viewing of a work of art will teach you something, but the context in which objects in museums are presented makes an enormous difference. There is in this exhibition a very clear and illuminating focus on draftsmanship, especially with regard to the postures of the human body, and most especially with human bodies in relationship. David kept many notebooks from his years of Italian apprenticeship in which the viewer can find evidence of the artist’s experiments and self-corrections. Of course, many of his sketched copies and imaginative drawings, including some obviously intended for contingent and experimental purposes, give the appearance of free-standing works of art.
"Death of Socrates
So the exhibition has a very evident “through line”: the usually invisible preparatory work behind the great work of a great artist. You may be familiar with several of David’s famous paintings displayed in the exhibit, and two are perhaps especially relevant to the painter’s use of classical themes for political purpose. These are “The Death of Socrates,” an historical allegory in which Enlightenment rationality suffers at the hands of tyrannical power, and “The Tennis Court Oath.” The latter refers not to one of the expletives with which so many amateur athletes are familiar, but a cast-of-thousands canvas commemorating in highly imaginative fashion an important revolutionary event of June 1789.
"Tennis Court Oath"
The second great virtue of the exhibition from my point of view is its manageable size. I find something uniquely exhausting about the mode of perambulation required of exhibition-viewers. This may well be simply a personal liability. It long antedates my use of a cane. There is also a definite limit to the volume of visual data I can intelligently accommodate. Seldom straying too far from their well-defined themes, the curators have laid out a wonderfully coherent and instructive itinerary in a few generously sized rooms. It may get crowded with real spring weather and the hoped-for further improvement in the Covid situation, but things were perfectly manageable the day we were there.
The tempestuous period of the French Revolution commanded David’s serious engagement in radical politics, as evidenced in his civic life as well as in his art. He was a delegate to the National Assembly, and in the wake of the fall of Robespierre his Jacobin sympathies and associations led to his brief imprisonment on two occasions. Like a number of the former revolutionary radicals, he made his peace with Napoleon with surprising ease. It was David who painted what is probably history’s most famous “great man on horseback” canvas. The reactionary restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, forced upon France after Waterloo, precipitated the artist’s exile in Brussels during the last years of his life. Wherever he was, David remained true to his craft. Some of his most extraordinary small portraits were made in prison.
People sometimes ask me, usually somewhat indirectly, why I write a blog essay each week. It is a perfectly good question for which there is no simple answer. It is certainly not because I feel particularly qualified to write about many of the topics I choose, though in an obvious way I do find the project consistent with my long career as a teacher. As the name of the blog implies, there is a symbiotic relationship between teaching and learning. In writing many of my little essays I often learn things I did not previously consciously know, especially about myself. I had an important moment of self-realization during this visit to the Met. I have never known much about the French classical painter Jacques Louis David, but I remember very distinctly my first introduction to him. A lot of my scholarly work has centered on visual culture, and I now realize that it all began in my sophomore year at Sewanee when I took my one and only art survey course. I had never heard of Jacques David or Théodore Géricault, both introduced to me in a single lecture. And I noted that in speaking of the former one did not say DAYvud with its Sunday School pronunciation, but Frenchified dahVEED—the same word, yet different, one of those little distinctions or finesses which, when multiplied a thousand times, constitute the veneer of a liberal education whether it cover finely-grained oak or particle board. It came back to me in a flash that the teacher was a Frenchman named Alain de Leiris, a really nice guy of whom I had not thought in years. I realize now that this man was a research scholar temporarily lodged in a liberal arts college with many fine teachers but few actively publishing scholars. Whatever had become of him? A tiny bit of internet research, which included reading obituaries of his widow, very recently deceased at age ninety-five, provided the quick answer. I did not find his own death notice, but he seems to have had a long and distinguished career at the University of Maryland, his specialty being nineteenth-century French painters, especially Manet. But the best rewards of education are not material, and therefore, one hopes, not entirely mortal. Perhaps I may even now, however tardily, record my gratitude for a fine teacher?
