‘Turner to Czanne’ is a hit at Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse
In 1908, two straight-laced Welsh sisters became the world’s unlikeliest avant-garde art collectors.
Gwendoline and Margaret Davies were strict Calvinists, teetotalers and spinsters. They also had a passion for sumptuous Impressionist paintings — and the means to gratify it.
Granddaughters of a railway magnate, each received the modern equivalent of $195 million at age 25. For 12 years, they hunted down seductive canvases by Monet, Renoir, Czanne and others.
The astonishing results of their shared obsession have arrived at Syracuse’s Everson Museum of Art. More than 50 of their 260 artworks are showcased in a touring exhibit that has drawn 15,000 guests since Oct. 9.
“That’s many times greater than our normal visitorship,” says director Steven Kern. “This is considered one of the premier collections of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art in the world. Outside large cities, very few exhibits of this type are on the road right now.”
Syracuse is one of the show’s five American stops, and its only destination in the Northeast. The tour was organized by the National Museum of Wales, which houses the massive collection.
It lives up to its hype. Expert art sleuths helped the sisters find spectacular masterpieces that build a lively sense of evolving artistic trends in England and France. Well-chosen works by the Impressionists’ fore-runners and followers put this group’s contributions in context.
The sisters were bold enough to buy Rodin’s sensuous nude sculpture, The Kiss. But they shied away from gritty Parisian scenes featuring street walkers and absinthe drinkers.
“They didn’t appreciate the harsher realism of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec,” says Kern. “Their tastes were relatively staid compared to some American collectors.”
Nonetheless, “Turner to Czanne” creates a genuine sense of surprise, even suspense. The Impressionists’ stature was far from assured in 1908. The exhibit’s chronological presentation highlights the innovations that made these artists’ career paths so bumpy.
You may recognize many of these paintings from coffee-table art books. But no reproduction can match the impact of ogling them a few feet away.
Czanne’s Provence Landscape (1887) can puzzle art students who know it only from textbook illustrations. A patch of bare earth abuts a narrow row of swaying trees. Why the big fuss?
At the Everson, the answer is immediately apparent. The soil glows with a rich, saturated orange, as if lighted through the back of the canvas.
The tree trunks dance in a rhythm that vibrates their luminous foliage, drawing your eye upward. Nature holds rapt communion with itself. Its quiet power is imparted by Czanne’s warm colors and short, urgent brush strokes.
Van Gogh’s Rain-Auvers (1890), painted shortly before the artist killed himself, is deeply unsettling up close. Crows swoop over wheat fields that roll toward a village like gathering waves. Rain pelts the entire scene in long blue streaks — almost as if the artist had slashed through his canvas. Van Gogh conveys a sense of foreboding verging on nausea.
The exhibit’s colossal centerpiece is Renoir’s life-size portrait, La Parisienne. Its subject, actress Henriette Henriot, was Paris’ “it girl” in 1874. Clad in an ornate blue gown, she’s a walking tapestry of bustles, buttons and flounces. Atop this silk confection, her face peeks out with a direct, confident gaze.
She’s all attitude — and her brazen independence is mirrored in the chic armor she wears. No wonder conservative critics got so upset at this early liberated woman.
Those critics’ favorite academic paintings also find a place in the exhibit. They often depict 18th-century attire and décor with sharp, realistic characterization.
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, for instance, portrays naïve card players who look as gaudy as the three musketeers. Like those disaster-prone heroes, they’re about to get a nasty surprise from the hardened swindlers across the table.
“Turner to Czanne” also devotes a lot of attention to the Impressionists’ English predecessors and successors. Monet’s favorite Brit, J.M.W. Turner, is represented by The Storm (1840-45) — a nightmarish seascape of plunging hulls and torrential gusts.
Lesser-known British disciples are acknowledged, too. Robert Bevan tips his hat to Gauguin in a lyrical 1914 landscape of Sussex maple trees. One year later, Matthew Smith takes his cue from Van Gogh with a radiant still life of apples on a wicker chair.
Of course, most visitors will beeline straight for the French masters. Even with these in store, some Rochester drivers will debate whether to make the 1½ hour trip in winter.
I know just what to tell them.
One of my college roommates returned from a summer abroad gushing about Paris. His mother acidly reminded him: “Any idiot can love Paris.”
Any old fools can love the Impressionists. And they’d be still more foolish to pass up the chance.
Related posts:
- Prado Extends the Opening Hours of its Turner Exhibition
- Everson Museum Presents the Work of Gerald DiGiusto
- Glasgow-Born Sound Artist Susan Philipsz Wins 2010 Turner Prize
- Fantasies and Fairy-Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print Opens at Everson
- The Turner Prize Goes to BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in 2011
