Young, gifted and cut down by war
THERE is an appealing air of youthfulness in every room of the National Gallery of Art’s with the Frédéric Bazille exhibition, which is running in Washington DC until July 9.
The show covers a mere seven years of the French artist’s career, from an album of student sketches he began making as early as 1863 to his last paintings before he was killed in 1870 fighting in the Franco-Prussian War.
The pervasive sense of high spirits is in part an ironic shadow cast by his premature death at age 28, in a despicable war, which tagged him posthumously as one of the most tragic figures of the generation that came of age with Renoir and Monet.
But it also has to do with subject matter – often young people, some of them nudes, all of them appealing. And with his bold, sun-drenched colour palette, which some critics attribute to his origins in the southern French region of Languedoc, which remained a source of inspiration and material for him even after he began building a career in Paris.
Finally, and most important, it has to do with the work itself, its experimentation and variety, its unresolved tension between roughness and boldness. The best of Bazille is almost surreal, growing stranger the longer you look at it, and ever more unlike how we imagine we actually see the world.
Bazille’s short career but huge talent has made him a perennial but sacred footnote to the early or pre-Impressionist years of the 1860s. He was born to a prosperous bourgeois family, discouraged from studying art professionally, and spent time (not very valiantly) pursuing medicine before turning to painting as an aspiring professional.
He left behind a relatively small number of paintings – only about 60 have been firmly attributed to him – but several of these are large, striking and unforgettable.
The National Gallery of Art exhibition includes about three-quarters of his output, with complementary works by Monet, including a tender portrait of Bazille rendered with blunt candour, a landscape by Théodore Rousseau, several Renoirs, including nudes and still lifes, and works by Cézanne, Manet, Courbet and Berthe Morisot.
Bazille forged relationships with other artists early in his Paris days, first as a student in the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he met Monet, Renoir and Alfred Sisley, and in the salon hosted by a cousin in Paris, where he encountered leading figures of the larger Parisian avant-garde, including Baudelaire, Verlaine and Zola.
His friendship with Monet was stormy – this was Monet’s fault – but it may have improved his work, especially his landscapes.
Bazille identified with the impulses of the avant-garde, even as his own painting oscillated between traditional and radical tendencies. He painted ordinary people, in everyday dress, sometimes posing out of doors, and all of these decisions were relatively unconventional in an age that celebrated luminous and perfectly idealised figures, often borrowed from history or myth.
And while he and his close artistic allies were in open rebellion against the conventions, polish and formula of “academic” painting, he was more than capable of working on those turns, as in another late work, La Toilette, from 1870. This painting, of a naked woman attended by a dark-skinned servant, played to the Orientalist fantasies and conventional appetites of the mainstream art audience, including the powerful arbiters of taste who controlled the official Salon.
Was he choosing his subjects with calculated bourgeois pragmatism, using different manners to appeal to different audiences? Or was he still searching for his own manner and style? He died too young for anyone to be certain about the matter.
Indeed, the paintings by which he is defined today may not be the paintings he would have chosen as his best or most characteristic work, had he lived long enough to have a career. His memory is defined by stunning works like The Family Gathering from 18671868 and Summer Scene (Bathers) from 1869-1870. The former is considered his masterpiece, a large and exuberantly colourful image of Bazille’s family gathered on a terrace, while the latter shows a group of men swimming and relaxing in a lush landscape.
The two paintings make sense considered together, as two different images of family, both rendered in natural sunlight. The first is Bazille’s biological and extended family, grouped together in the shade of a tree.
They stare at the viewer with a mix of irritation and familiarity – almost as if this was a photographic snapshot, some of the figures posing, others clearly annoyed at the intrusion – while a self-portrait of the artist stands sheepishly at the far left.
The group of men bathing, wrestling and lounging around an inviting swimming hole in Summer Scene might be considered Bazille’s chosen family, an imagined and idealised group that includes male figures – borrowed from art history – who helped form his artistic sensibility.
Bazille never married, always seemed to have some good excuse for his failed efforts at heterosexual romance, and enjoyed deep friendships with men throughout his youth.
These two large-format family portraits may get at a tension the artist felt between his conventional upbringing and his life as an artist in Paris, and his relation to innovation and tradition.
The Family Gathering is one of the first group portraits made in France out of doors (and the earliest family portrait in that kind of setting), so it was unconventional from the beginning. It also shows the artist divided, present as a figure among the group, but also present by implication as the figure at which everyone is staring, and none too happily. He has defined himself against his family, yet cannot separate from them. They exist to propel him into the world.
The figures in Summer Scene seem strikingly more conventional, even though the men are wearing only bathing togs and the painting is on a square canvas, which wasn’t common at the time. The Adonis at left is a classic Saint Sebastian, resting against a tree; another young man reclining on the ground recalls any number of somnolent shepherds or mythological figures sated with love.
On August 16, 1870, Bazille surprised everyone and enlisted in the French army to fight the Germans. His intimates were scandalised and perplexed. On November 28, Bazille was shot twice and killed. His father, who had struggled to keep his son from pursuing art, was disconsolate.
There is no clear documentary evidence to explain Bazille’s decision. But there are those family portraits. So, we might conclude this: His family sent him to war. But which family?
Was he asserting conventional patriotic pieties? Covering up for a perceived masculine deficiency? Seeking the stimulus of a homosocial environment? Or some combination of all these? He may not have known the answer himself.