Whole star score: ★★★★★
The works: ★★★★★
The present: ★★★★★
Neoclassicism is having a second. Lengthy thought to be essentially the most predictable and least admired of the grand actions of Western artwork, it’s turning out to be stuffed with surprises. In 2023, Antonio Canova, the motion’s pre-eminent sculptor, emerged as a type of proto-Expressionist in a double-venue US exhibition that highlighted his bracingly tough terracotta sketches. In 2024, France’s long-lost Caribbean-born practitioner, Guillaume Lethière, was rescued from oblivion in a landmark Franco-American present. And now, on the Musée du Louvre, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the best Neoclassical artist of all, is having his greatest survey in virtually 4 many years.
Opening a matter of days earlier than the museum’s headline-grabbing theft final October, Jacques-Louis David is a creative occasion of the best order, even when a cohort of thieves managed to steal its thunder. Complementing the Louvre’s personal definitive holdings with lavish however strategic loans from round France and eight different international locations, the exhibition—nominally mounted in honour of the two hundredth anniversary of the artist’s demise, aged 77, in 1825—is on par with the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer blockbuster in 2023, and the present Fra Angelico extravaganza in Florence (till 25 January). Comprising simply over 100 works, the Louvre present will outline its topic for many years to return. However can it redefine him as one thing aside from a Neoclassicist? That, it appears, is the curators’ shocking intent.
Opening with David’s handwritten visiting card from the final decade of his life, together with ghostly previews of two studio variations of his eerie and supreme work, The Loss of life of Marat (1793), the Louvre boldly proclaims that it’s breaking David freed from the longstanding Neoclassical label with the intention to current him, as a substitute, as a each a “realist” and an “idealist”.
That is a very well-arranged present, with a zigzagging set up marked by highly effective and poignant vistas and pairings. And it’s a venue-defiant present, which makes us overlook the woeful shortcomings of the Louvre’s Corridor Napoléon, the bunker-like rooms the place the museum holds essential particular exhibitions. However is it additionally revolutionary? Can it compel us to re-categorise the artist? After a number of visits, I must say that, kind of, sure, it’s, and does.
The essential information of David’s turbulent biography are comparatively well-known. Born in Paris in 1748, and raised at a time when the Rococo held sway (he obtained early recommendation from François Boucher), he was then swept up within the Neoclassical rejection of frippery and fancifulness, absorbing Italianate and classical sources whereas in Rome.
Dictator of the humanities
Later, again in Paris, as a favorite of the Bourbon ruling household within the remaining years of the Ancien Régime, he painted sombre, proto-revolutionary works that preached civic advantage. Then through the French Revolution itself, he turned a radical Jacobin and vocal supporter of Maximilien de Robespierre, an architect of the Reign of Terror. David held near-dictatorial powers over the humanities, and went as far as to name for the execution of his former patron, Louis XVI. A spell in jail after the autumn of Robespierre in 1794 was adopted by his return to fame and energy throughout Napoleon’s rise and reign, when, once more, he turned a regime’s favoured artist.
Bonaparte’s fall after Waterloo in 1815 and the return of the Bourbons to the French throne led to David’s official condemnation, and what amounted to a self-imposed exile in Brussels, the place he died out of kinds with the wobbly pretences of Restoration France.
The curators prepare the present round almost all of David’s main works. (A significant exception, The Coronation of Napoleon, 1807, has been left in its typical spot within the Denon Wing.) Whereas wanting on the early portray St. Roch Interceding with the Virgin for the Plague-Stricken (1780), on mortgage from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles, we are able to additionally simply glimpse the career-making Oath of the Horatii (1784), introduced down from its everlasting Louvre place. The early, shadowy non secular portray reveals nice expertise, whereas the later work, set in Historic Rome, is a taut and tense invocation of patriotism and secular sacrifice, by which the youthful David’s influences, Caravaggio and Poussin, have been reworked and transcended.
The trail ahead, to revolution, culminates within the Oath of the Horatii’s mirror work: the large, unfinished canvas fragment of David’s deliberate 10m-long The Tennis Courtroom Oath (1791-92), on mortgage from the Château de Versailles. Meant to commemorate a pivotal occasion within the French Revolution, when representatives of France’s Third Property vowed to assist a structure, the challenge—finally deserted by David—lives on as an immense, mysterious draft, with nameless nude our bodies in states of being completed off with actual individuals’s faces. The curators body it in a view incorporating two of David’s biggest works of portraiture, each from 1790: the Louvre’s portrait of the Marquise d’Orvilliers and, on mortgage from the Neue Pinakothek, that of her sister, the Comtesse de Sorcy. Depicted within the early and ebullient part of the revolution, they characterize the French class who at first needed the rupture, notes the Louvre’s Sébastien Allard, who co-curated the present with museum colleague Côme Fabre. Each work place their figures in David’s signature “impartial” backgrounds, as Allard says. And right here, the curators permit that discreet and deliberate blankness to play off the huge, clean expanse of the close by Tennis Courtroom work.
The darkish years of the Terror are commemorated in suitably darkish galleries, bookended with David’s two self-portraits, ending with the Louvre’s personal from 1794, accomplished whereas David was in jail. It’s in these gloomy areas that we encounter The Loss of life of Marat in triplicate—the autograph model, on mortgage from Brussels, and the 2 adjoining copies that we glimpsed on our approach in. Having all three is a reminder of the picture’s influence. The murdered revolutionary’s equivocal pose—which appears to counsel each sleep and demise, Allard says—has been much-imitated, however by no means demystified.
In what’s much less of a shock than an pressing reminder, the present paperwork the width and depth of David’s skills. He mastered each style, save panorama, and every little thing he did, from the smallest preparatory examine to the massive historical past work, seems to be distinctive right here.
Critics have tended to forged aspersions on David’s later work, discovering a component of satire creeping into the historical past work and post-Napoleonic portraits. However one remaining grouping is revelatory: The Anger of Achilles (1819), on mortgage from the Kimbell Artwork Museum in Texas; Portrait of the Comte de Turenne (1816), from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen; andthe Louvre’s Portrait of Juliette de Villeneuve (1824). Right here, we see how David’s nominally Neoclassical scenes are additionally group portraits, and the way real-life figures may also be gamers within the costume dramas of their time.
Although none of those is thought to be main, collectively they testify to the freshness and uniqueness of the artist. Is he a Neoclassicist? Sure, unreservedly. However is he way more than that? Sure. Certainly.
• Jacques-Louis David, Musée du Louvre, Paris, till 26 January
Curators: Sébastien Allard and Côme Fabre
Tickets: €22-€32 (included with common admission)
What the opposite critics stated
Jackie Wullschläger, writing within the Monetary Instances, calls it “a colossal, riveting retrospective” that may solely be staged by the Louvre “because it owns most of his work, together with some too large to maneuver. To this cornucopia are added important loans, making the exhibition a once-in-a-generation likelihood to know this tough, wily painter.” In Le Monde, Harry Bellet notes how the present differs from the Louvre’s big 1989 survey by being “extra cautious, extra nuanced” and breaking with the concept that David was only a Neoclassicist.
