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Humanizing Excess
John Haberin New York City
Clodion and Jean-Antoine Houdon
Giuseppe Penone at Sèvres
Like me, you may take comfort in the Frick Collection, with its paintings so near uniformly great as to have become old friends. You may take comfort, too, in its sculpture, decorative art, and furniture, as an ever so proper backdrop. Do you, though, actually look at them?
Speaking just for myself, almost never. More often that not, I take pride in just that. Like painting, though, they reflect not just excess, but sophisticated values—or the value of sophistication. In the Enlightenment and Romanticism, two winners of the Prix de Rome in sculpture, Clodion and Jean-Antoine Houdon, would have been happy to keep their passions in check. Would Giuseppe Penone closer to the present? Penone indulged himself with a trip to Europe's most famed center for porcelain, but he kept his hand in the game. 
So there we go again. Yesterday's struggling artist is today's producer of luxury goods for the few, and yesterday's avant garde is today's museum piece. Sèvres Porcelain invited Penone to its manufactory in 2013, to collaborate on a set of its finest wares. Even a starving artist might hesitate to use it for dinner. And now the Frick Madison brings them to Manhattan's luxuriant Upper East Side, to display with its magnificent collection as Propagazioni, or propagations. If this is Arte Povera, it has rich tastes indeed.
Love for sale
Love for sale. If your first thought is online dating or a song by Cole Porter, you will understand two sculptures by Claude Michel, better known as Clodion. If your first thought is appalling and illicit sex traffic, you may not like that love here is decidedly underage and in a cage, but take heart. The artist was merely copying a relief from Pompeii, the ancient city and the site of excavations only two years before he undertook the first version, in terra cotta in 1765, when he was under thirty and still in the market for love. Besides, Neoclassicism tempers its playfulness, as always, with a moral. Both buyers and sellers are young women, the Cupid pouting in captivity is male, and two other babes roam free, because no one can keep them in their place—but all is forgiven, for the women's future depends on properly managing the sale.
Not that the Enlightenment trusted to the triumph of reason, whatever you may have heard. Voltaire had made that clear in Candide less than ten years before. Unreason was bound to take its course, as in the art of Claude Gillot, and Clodion lived through the Reign of Terror and another age of empire and war. For him, unreason will always have its place, preferably in marble. For his last work on view at the Frick Collection, from 1799, he depicts Zephyrus, the god of the wind, and Flora, of vegetation, but caps their energetic spiral with a wreath. Like David d'Angers in the next century, he stands on the edge of Romanticism, but passions must still emerge from the whole.
Clodion shares the show with a slightly younger and even more stately contemporary, Jean-Antoine Houdon—with just half a dozen works each, half of them in terra cotta and half in marble, roughly half of them loans, and all fairly early work. (If you have never so much as noticed the Frick's portico, it runs along the Fifth Avenue lawn to the north, past Salisbury Cathedral by an artist soon after, John Constable.) When Clodion depicts caryatids, they emerge from a tight cluster with a shared head scarf, and when he unleashes gods and satyrs on bucolic vases, like Pierre Gouthière in gilding shortly before him, they take their ease. And sure enough, when Houdon lends a vestal the active stance of a hero, he keeps it beneath a cloak. He brings the same respect for strong feelings and for keeping them in check to portrait busts. A countess poses as a Bacchante, with leaves in her hair and a quarter turn toward madness, but with intelligence in her eyes and a tight reserve in her lips.
The Frick has always invested in sculpture. Not many willingly turn away from the paintings, but each room has its tabletop bronzes and marble—in the Boucher room, for characters right out of the painting on the wall. Many of the same artists (or their followers) have been in recent loans from the Hill collection, from Andrea Riccio and Giambologna in the late Renaissance to d'Angers and Joseph Chinard in the early nineteenth century. If the label "decorative arts" runs counter to the recovery of craft and design these days, and if it signals a fall-off from the early Renaissance, when Lorenzo Ghiberti or Donatello pointed the way to painting, it corresponds to real changes over the years in both function and style. Riccio's figures double as a candlestick holder, while Triton blowing his trumpet for Giambologna could pass for a snake eater.
The nineteenth century tempered and also humanized the decorative excess, but the process began with the Enlightenment. Clodion and Houdon also take a hesitant step toward naturalism. The first's Cupids have feathers after nature, while the second goes so far as a dead thrush hanging from a nail. It sounds preposterous to try to outdo trompe l'oeil in sculpture or Synthetic Cubism, where three dimensions are hardly an illusion. Still, the wings, the pointed beak, and the nail are duly threatening, and Houdon is working against the strictures of marble and in white. Besides, soon enough art for a growing middle class along with the aristocracy had its own serious excesses—as with another Prix de Rome winner for sculpture, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.
Most often, female portraiture serves as the expression of a human ideal, if also a refined one, most strikingly in the 1770s. A young woman plays the role of the innocent in Paris. A marquise takes in everything, while everything but her eyes are buttoned up. A tad more shockingly, the wife of a German banker lets her loose dress fall half off her shoulder, but not at the cost of her intellect. One cannot always keep passion in a cage, and the new aristocracy of finance demanded a buyer's market for love. Still, it was not yet ready to roam free.
Porcelain finish
In truth, Arte Povera was never a celebration of poverty or an affront to art. Starting in the 1950s, it was about transforming humble materials and raw gestures into a thing of beauty. Alberto Burri did it with pumice, rags, and tar, Lucio Fontana by taking a knife to canvas. Penone has worked with things as transient as wood and water, and his porcelain evokes both, with concentric circles on convex disks. Loosely drawn but tightly arranged, they suggest tree rings and waves—and those in turn suggest transience in marks of age and a rippling away. But then trees can live a long time, while ripples propagate outward, toward others yet to come.
Things change, but Penone is determined to leaves his mark. Has a growing emphasis on contemporary art all but bankrupted major museums, like the previous tenant of the former Whitney Museum, the Met Breuer? It criminal what money has done to art? Is this be a crime scene, he has left his fingerprints. In fact, he began with them, one at the center of each of eleven dishes, hung at eye level like paintings. The ripples propagate from there.
As they do, they should find themselves at home. Did Sèvres, founded in 1740 on the outskirts of Paris, quickly replace Meissen porcelain in Saxony as a standard? Does bone china take its name from Chinese arts? The very next room has ever so many examples of both, from the Frick's collection. The same floor at the Frick Madison has decorative sculpture, in bronze, from Penone's Italy and gilded clocks with a circular face, much like his. In the Frick's permanent home on Fifth Avenue, one might overlook the decorative arts as a mere backdrop to great painting, but not here.
The Frick insists on its interest in contemporary art like his, like it or not. The curator, Giulio Dalvi, mentions past shows of ceramics by Edmund de Waal and Arlene Shechet. (A portrait by Jenna Gribbon, one in a series of "queer views" by contemporary artists, was on view at the time of Penone's opening.) Still, temporary exhibitions are for now, thankfully, at a minimum. With his smudged print amid countless circles, Penone at seventy-five could be burying his traces. See, he seems to say, this is the Frick, with art for the centuries.
It sure seems that way. For Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and KAWS, money is precisely what makes their work art, but Penone asks for more. He chose convex disks as if refusing associations with design and dinner plates. For him, as for Oscar Wilde, "all art is utterly useless." If that sounds like special pleading, he leaves a broad border untouched on each disk, lending shimmer to white porcelain, while the eleventh disk adds gilding. The prints are all but indistinguishable from the rest of the disks, like accidents of their making.
In the end, that is just what they are. For all the talk of trees and water, his hands just happen to contain ten fingers, and titles identify each of ten disks with just one. Five on one wall, for his left hand, meet five on the adjacent wall, for his right, at his thumbs. Facing the room's corner, you can hold out your hands to imagine them as yours. Does a title like indice sinistro sound more sinister? Arte Povera always is, but these are still, as the Frick puts it, "gestures of marking, seeing, and touching."
Clodion and Jean-Antoine Houdon ran at the The Frick Collection through April 5, 2015, Giuseppe Penone at The Frick Madison through August 28, 2022.