In Celebration of Paul Mellon, a showcase of the great philanthropist’s “most treasured works on paper,” is a fine collection of art by the great American, English, and French masters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There isn’t much linking the pieces at this exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, save their common collector and a general tendency towards the restrained and the undramatic, but the collection holds quite a bit of interest in its disparate pieces.
Much of the artwork, particularly the earlier Europeans in the collection, has a pleasant, aesthetically understated aspect. Typical of this general mood is Samuel Palmer’s Harvesters by Firelight (1830). It is one of the earliest pieces in the collection, but could easily be mistaken for the work of an abstract Impressionist—Cezanne, for instance. A striking blend of oranges and yellows, swaying, stylized trees and a few heavily abstracted figures in the background (the harvesters themselves), set against a purple sky in that indeterminate period of time between day and night, give the scene a fairytale air of forgotten England.
There are two J.M.W. Turners here, and both forgo Turner’s famous fiery sunsets and dramatic oceans for quiet scenes of English countryside (a boat off Dover; a beach off Yorkshire). The most prominent Impressionist featured is Degas, and most of his works here are charcoal outlines of still men and horses; Van Gogh’s best piece on display is Harvest – The Plain of La Crau (1888), a beautiful Provencal landscape that recalls a pointillist style. Monet’s snowy hamlets, Pissarro’s boulevards, and Renoir’s giddy luncheons—with all their life and scenery and inviting French landscapes—don’t make an appearance. Thus, the effect remains a contemplative one. There isn’t terribly much here to get the blood racing, but it does not matter. Strolling past the Northern European waters and fields and dignified faces of late 19th century men and women, ushers in a general belle époque aesthetic more convincing, and thus subtly more moving, than a gallery full of post-Impressionist greats.
The most popular piece in the exhibition, Picasso’s The Death of Harlequin (1905), a Rose Period work, is far more affecting—indeed, it’s positively haunting—but stands with the European and American landscapes and portraiture for its lack of motion and the quietude of its narrative. A long, slender man, presumably Harlequin, is reclining on a bed comprised of a few splotches of blue, watched over by two ghostly figures. There are maybe four or five colors in the whole work: earthy yellow for background and an icy blue and white for the three figures. The disembodied heads of the two spectators disappear into the rust background; their faces are ghostly still and bone-white, the very image of death. It’s no wonder that the visitors all stop here and not at, say, Whistler’s languid The Return of the Fishing Boats (c. 1885).
But by and large, it is the American works that are the most interesting: Two great boxing lithographs by George Bellows signal a furious physicality and movement otherwise missing from the exhibition. The pugilists and spectators stand in dark rooms, their faces hideously contorted, grotesque. In one of the two (Preliminaries to the Big Bout (1916), the boxers are in the distant background, far enough that they cannot be individually made out, and in the foreground a woman is turning her face so that she is looking straight out of the print. The moment is arresting, and it elicits of the viewer that same unanswerable curiosity for context (Who is the woman? What is she doing there? What’s on her mind?) as the best of Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec.
The most compelling section of the exhibition is the wall of Winslow Homers; in contrast with the Turners and Whistler around here (but more in keeping with the lively Prendergast), these lovely scenes of 1870s American life are brimming with vivacity and personal charm. Bright watercolors of roving children and bonneted women climbing stiles, inspecting chickens, and wading through the beach, they suggest the later artwork of Andrew Wyeth or, for that matter, the fiction of Sherwood Anderson. Amid the rest of the gallery, what stands out most about the Winslow Homer paintings is how populated they are, and looking at one of them elicits a sense of affinity with a long-departed yet somehow familiar picture of America.
Ultimately, there isn’t much of a unifying theme to the exhibit, except that all the works are on paper, and that most are fairly commonplace and undramatic. But a walk through would be a pleasant tour, all the same: These aren’t the most exciting works in the world, but they are pleasant and beautiful, and it’s not hard to imagine how they could entice a collector like Mellon.
Max Bloom is a student at the University of Chicago and an intern at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
