”Impressionist & Post-Impressionist Masterpieces: The Courtauld Collection,” which opened Saturday at the Art Institute, is a nice, old-fashioned show that includes some very great paintings.
Among the 48 pieces on view are works by Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Seurat and others.
The exhibition has no overriding theory. Nor does it urge a fresh look at the past. It is simply the first American presentation of some of the highlights of a famous London collection.
Whether that will be enough is difficult to say, especially for anyone who saw ”A Day in the Country” or ”The New Painting,” exhibitions that covered the same period, offering scholarship as well as visual pleasure. The Courtauld show provides its scholarship only in the pages of the catalogue; it is not part of the exhibition`s reason for being.
The show was put together solely to remind viewers that the Courtauld Institute still needs a good deal of money before its school and collection can be housed in the same building. This plan, which has been crawling forward since 1978, was aided financially by sending a larger exhibition to Japan three years ago.
Now IBM has supported an American tour as well as supplied a large grant toward the renovation of Somerset House, the historic London mansion that will consolidate the entire Courtauld operation for the first time since the collection outgrew its space in 1958.
Today, the collection ranges from early Italian painting to contemporary art, owing to many gifts and bequests. The core, however, was formed between 1922 and 1937 by Samuel Courtauld, a manufacturer of textiles who took a small but prosperous family business and made it a tremendous success.
Courtauld was not a daring collector. His tastes ranged approximately from Manet to Matisse but excluded Fauve and Cubist works, preferring from those later artists works done in less radical phases.
Still, whatever he did collect he pursued with surety of vision, making few mistakes. For example, the two largest Seurats on view-”The Bridge at Courbevoie” and ”Young Woman Powdering Herself”-were brilliant acquisitions made only four years after he began collecting in earnest.
The Seurats are especially worthy of mention because, as in the case of Cezanne, Courtauld overcame his early resistance and went on to assemble a group of surpassingly fine examples. In this, perhaps his acquaintance with British painter and critic Roger Fry was a help. Nevertheless, Courtauld had the reputation of acquiring nothing that he hadn`t decided on himself.
Only one work in the exhibition, Bonnard`s ”A Young Lady in an Interior,” came from a bequest by someone else. Thus a viewer is able to grasp Courtauld`s discernment and compare it with that of his contemporaries in Chicago, as the show proves a fascinating supplement to the Institute`s own extensive holdings.
Most impressive is its second, small version of Manet`s ”Le Dejeuner sur l`Herbe” (thought to be from 1863) and the artist`s last major completed canvas, ”A Bar at the Folies-Bergere” (1881-82). The ambiguities and unresolved questions of these pictures demand considerable scrutiny, and one could visig the exhibition for that alone.
But then there is the very different charm of Renoir`s ”La Loge”
(1874), Rousseau`s ”The Customs Post” (about 1890) and Vuillard`s
”Interior With a Screen” (c. 1909-10), each representative specimens showing the artists at something close to the top of their form.
The nine paintings by Cezanne include several great landscapes
(culminating in a radiant late view of the Lake of Annecy) and two strong peasant subjects in addition to the incredibly complex ”Still Life With Plaster Cast” (c. 1894), a picture that requires close and repeated viewings. Gauguin`s ”Nevermore” and ”Te Rerioa,” which probably will return for the Institute`s retrospective a year from now, again are spectacular examples. Here they are shown to advantage across from Manet`s ”Folies-Bergere,” as if to underline how much the works of the older artist occupied Gauguin before he returned to Tahiti.
Two unfinished works, Degas` ”Seated Woman Adjusting Her Hair” (1884?)
and Daumier`s ”Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” (1870?), also hold more than usual interest, though the catalogue is good to remind us that an enthusiasm for rapidity and incompleteness dates from the 20th Century rather than from the time when these pictures were drawn and painted, respectively.
As for the space in which the show is hung, architect John Vinci has transformed some of the McKinlock Court galleries (formerly housing contemporary art) into an area that will be used for three radically different exhibitions. At present, views of the court are welcome while the inordinately high ceilings are not, but this doubtless will be reversed for the next show, a Georgia O`Keeffe retrospective. In any case, gray-pink walls now offer a nice compromise between the brightness characteristic of contemporary installations and the deep colors used in art of a century ago.
Such differences are the focus of the catalogue essay by John House, who calls for a rigorous sorting out of the strands that have formed our understanding of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work. His argument is persuasive and eventually will lead to the next generation of viewers looking at these paintings with new eyes.
However, some will feel that the groundwork could have been laid with the present exhibition or, at least, one with a more scholarly point, as a strong intellectual concept certainly would have been welcome along with so much to admire and enjoy.
The exhibition continues at the Art Institute through Jan. 3. Thereafter, it will complete its five-city American tour at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. (Jan. 30-April 3).
