A Higher Patriotism

John Haber
in New York City

Jacques-Louis David and Claude Gillot

Jacques-Louis David was literally the avant-garde. Four years before the storming of the Bastille, his art sent France to the barricades. He depicted the call to a republic as a greater patriotism and a higher calling.

He held so closely to it, too, that he went to prison once the reign of terror ended along with followers of Robespierre. He then switched sides, calling first for reconciliation and then for empire. With the restored Bourbon monarchy, he was at double risk, a revolutionary and a supporter of Napoleon, and he died in exile in Brussels in 1825. For the Met, his art was all about second thoughts—well over a dozen of them for a single painting. It displays works on paper along with a painting from the collection in "Radical Draftsman." His twists, turns, and epic theater changed the course of French painting.

Was Rococo a child of the Enlightenment? How about a grandchild? Its leading light, Jean Antoine Watteau, studied with an artist who embodied the Age of Reason—for whom anything but reason was a surrender to the most terrible of human instincts and a step toward anarchy and war. Could Claude Gillot reconcile those values with service to kings? For Gillot, it took each to maintain the other, but it has left him a transitional figure or worse. Now the Morgan Library hopes to recover a largely forgotten painter, illustrator, and designer as a harbinger of revolution, with "Satire in the Age of Reason."

From classicism to theater

At the Paris salon in 1785, David had at last his breakthrough, painted the year before, The Oath of the Horatii. Allow me to quote from a neglected contemporary account:

In this revolutionary scene, three men dressed for a toga party rush to the aid of an old man about to juggle three long swords. Two women doze off at the sight of male posturing, important painting, and the bare architecture. Its arches symbolize the Trinity, the Three Fates, the Three Stooges, and the old Brooklyn Dodger outfield. Fortunately, the lighting sinks two-thirds of them in shadow.

Well, maybe not all that contemporary. Still, France had no doubt: it had seen a new style of painting and a vision of its future. David depicts a moment in history after Livy, the first-century Roman chronicler. "The elder Horatius," the artist explained, "gathering his sons in their family home, makes them swear to conquer or to die." It is preliminary to a battle and a promise to defend Rome, just as the painting preceded a revolution.

Now the Met undertakes to explain what took him so long. What occupied David, born in 1748, all that time? What did he have to discard to focus on the eve of battle and a nation's uncertain fate? What took him dozens of preliminary sketches to achieve, and what has changed along the way? What if anything changed, for that matter, when he threw his support to Napoleon? But let me pick up the account of a painting:

David vividly highlights the soldiers from the rear, emphasizing the painting's innovative theme: never turn your back on a man with three sharp swords. The plastic power (© Tupperware Collection, 1785) and expressive drama of the Horatii are powerfully conveyed, as the second soldier has three legs, the third but one, and the left arm of the first is double-jointed. Their right arms have since been unscrewed and preserved in the Smithsonian. The return to a Caravaggiesque style invokes those long-gone days when Horatii were men, painting was painting, and a good cigar was a smoke.

Such is the radicalism of a radical draftsman.

Of course, the account is mine, and it embarrasses even me. Surely the creator of Neoclassical art knew how to draw, however it looks. He wrested painting away from the aristocratic foreplay of Rococo painting, to a tradition of his own invention—one that stretches from ancient Rome to Caravaggio in Baroque Italy and beyond. It favored clean lines, clear gestures, and weighty bodies, but not only that. It embraced distortion and exaggeration in the interest of human and moral drama. Classical art has become Neoclassical theater.

It did so from the very moment that he dedicated himself to art. The curator, Perrin Stein, opens with male nudes, probably drawn while David was still a workshop assistant under Joseph Marie Vien. A man stretches an arm to full extent while crossing his legs and twisting his head, looking down and away—all on a shallow ledge and against a less than comfortable looking rock. There is no hint of frivolity, but David pushes academic rigor to a curious extreme all the same. Even had he not discarded the dominant art under royalty, he would have made older artists uncomfortable, for all his trust in observation and display of learning. It took him four tries to win the Prix de Rome and a free trip abroad.

A losing battle

When he did, he found the theater he desired right before his eyes. In his sketches, women on the streets could have come right out of Roman architecture. He copies stone relief as well, while reimagining a mythic battle, with the emphasis on fallen shields and hand-to-hand combat. For David, it takes individuals to make an army, a nation, or a better world, one person at a time. If they happen to fall into proper sculptural pyramids, it is not for lack of preposterous gestures. These are theatrical gestures, and each man or woman has a role to play. Increasingly, men and women have their role in the state as well, maybe not at peace, but in the lead-up or aftermath to battle.

The show gives pride of place to David's single most thrilling gesture—and it does not require an outstretched arm. It occurs at dead center of a painting from the museum's collection, the sole completed painting in the show, and the Met hangs it dead center as well. In The Death of Socrates from 1787, the Greek philosopher points straight up, toward a higher cause than himself, but a more poignant gesture is the passing of a cup of hemlock, the poison, from another hand to his. Socrates has not just accepted but positively demanded his own death, surrounded by his anguished disciples. The long arms and ham actors return in a full-scale study for The Tennis Court Oath, begun in 1790. They have pledged themselves to the emerging French republic.

Has David nothing to show for all his skill but unnatural poses and virtuous intentions? For him, a resurgent France demanded nothing less. For him, too, if that was a weakness, he was the first to address it. A painting took him months or years and no end of studies. They try out poses, focus the eye, heighten colors, and eliminate distractions. When, that proves impossible, as with The Tennis Court Oath, he leaves the project unfinished.

The artist has become a stage manager, directing his cast to address his audience. He typically starts with nude studies, before lingering over the volume of a robe. He adds an arch and stairs at the left of Socrates, to give the painting a vanishing point, where Plato closes his eyes in silence, his writings at his feet. For Brutus in 1789, he sketches half a dozen mourners before dropping them. That leaves only Brutus in shadow, his wife and daughters in stage light, and officers barely visible in the background—bearing the bodies of his sons, who conspired to restore a monarchy. A model of civic virtue, Brutus himself condemned them to death.

Hokey enough? It is certainly uncompromising, but soon enough David is begging to compromise. What he retains is the stage, the demands on the individual, and the need to put the nation first. In prison, he sketches fellow political prisoners as downright fops. He paints the Sabine women, also a subject for Nicolas Poussin, not as rape victims crying for revenge, but as survivors seeking reconciliation. And, yes, he takes Napoleon's coronation in 1799 as his busiest scene ever. If you cannot pick out the players, no matter, for the emperor disdains them and crowns himself.

Empire gave David a court to paint, although the Met omits his mature portraits, as not requiring so many studies. Still, success came at a cost, quite apart from compromise and hypocrisy. It brought out his sexism, with men as actors and women as pleaders, hoping only to bring them home alive. It also identified civic virtue with loss and willful cruelty. Socrates loses his life and Brutus his sons, while David's last complex scene depicts Leonidas, the king of Sparta, and his army at Thermopylae, a losing battle. Still, David's drama was the ultimate winner, influencing artists from Neoclassicism to Romanticism—and from Baron Gérard and J. A. D. Ingres to Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix.

The age of courtly reason

Gillot's sheer existence may come as a surprise, and so must his shaping role in the art of Jean Antoine Watteau and a close follower, Nicolas Lancret. Claude Gillot made his reputation by 1700 as a satirist, while nothing could seem further from satire than Watteau in all his empathy and Rococo excess. Who needs the Enlightenment when you can have his fêtes champêtres—and the overflowing gardens soon to come with Jean Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher? Who, for that matter, needs satire when you can look back to life itself, in the golden age of Dutch painting and Dutch drawings or the measured calm of Poussin? No wonder Gillot has fallen between the cracks. To top it off, his was not exactly biting satire.

Satire suggests a sharp eye on life, but this artist ran more to fables. He illustrated fables new and old by another dimly remembered figure, Antoine Houdard, or M. de la Motte. In Gillot's most famous painting, two carriages come to a dead halt, because neither of their riders will give way. Still, fun as it is, the women hardly appear, apart from venial grins, much less put on airs, and the narrow streets are devoid of life. Is this really Paris, and is this really satire? His warm but dry colors and indifference to light hardly help.

Part of the dilemma faces any comedy of manners, from Restoration theater to Sex in the City and Breaking Bad—how to make fun of the trendy and pretentious while indulging in their tastes. Gillot refused to enter the Royal Academy, but his sympathies are with the elite. If he criticizes the well-off riders, the magistrate who arrives to mediate between them is clearly of their class, while the commoners pulling the carts are petty, angry instigators. The artist's entire world centers on Parisian theaters and on Versailles, where Louis XIV held court and Louis XV ascended to the throne. He designed costumes for the opera and tapestries for palaces. He depicts gardens where well-dressed women come as close to nature as need be and no more.

Part, too, is his very commitment to reason, so that unreason stops at the door. Remember the abduction of Helen that led to the Trojan War? Gillot sees instead the abduction of the abductor, Paris, and everyone on hand seems as a tame as their little dog. The show begins with sketches for an epic series of bacchanals and other riotous luxuriance, but the presiding deities do not look all that devilish. They command a symmetric composition at that, at the apex of a triangle. As for the rioters and monsters, there is not much to distinguish among them, least of all a devilish act. One must settle for the occasional taut nude and, again, nasty grin.

Had the work gone forward to palace murals, it might engulf the viewer in terror to this day. Still, surely satire would demand mythic deeds or contemporary misdeeds in the guise of myth. It would demand the cool mind and warm heart of satirists from Pieter Bruegel and William Hogarth to this day. To Gillot, it is all theater—and good theater at that. The curator, Jennifer Tonkovich, ends with his works for the opera and the commedia dell'arte. One remembers its harlequins more for their costumes than their clowning.

Where Voltaire poked fun at "the best of all possible worlds," Gillot found just that, on stage and at court. One can see his influence on Watteau all the same, in his courtliness and his harlequins. But then Watteau, too, has a place in the Age of Reason. The younger artist takes the aristocracy to the skies, but he never loses his humanity. One can see it in a drawing from the Morgan of a seated young woman, as cute as the girl next door and as plain as day. The Enlightenment had not ended after all, and revolution was in the air.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Jacques-Louis David drawings ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 15, 2022, Claude Gillot at The Morgan Library through May 28, 2023. I have an obvious debt to Absorption and Theatricality by Michael Fried.