Musee d’Orsay

We saw the light and dark of European 19th century art at the Musee d’Orsay: the world’s leading collection of Impressionism in the 5th floor permanent galleries and a special exhibition on the ground floor of “Dark Romanticism,” called, infelicitously from Poe, “The Angel of the Odd.” The latter featured art “that used terrifying and eerie images to captivate the viewer.” The first room was strong on J.H. Fuseli – best being his 1781 Nightmare from Detroit. Goya, of course, was also prominent, with small oils of cannibalism from the Prado as well as his Capriccios and Disasters of War prints. Gustave Moreau, Edvard Munch and Odilon Redo were obvious inclusions; the curators had to stretch a bit more for some of the works by Caspar David Friedrich and Eduard Vuillard, to name the famous. The final room was given over to the Surrealists, and you could make what you wanted, or not, of examples from Masson, Ernst, Miro and Dali. For most of them, better, more famous works come to mind, which is why, perhaps, they were included. Tying the show together were film clips – Dracula, Frankenstein, Hitchcock’s Rebecca – that probably held more universal appeal than the paintings, which in themselves weren’t all memorable. One surprise I will remember was Bouguereau’s first Salon submission in 1850, of cannibals fighting in hell, taken from Dante’s Inferno. My other highlight was a terrible Delacroix rendition of Hamlet and Horatio contemplating the skull of Yorick, in which the two figures appeared to be pasted onto the background and our attention was focused on Hamlet’s left shin. Paul Huet’s contribution was almost as bad and paled beside the Rocky Landscape of Carl Friedrich Lessing.
The Impressionists were simply wonderful – especially when, with so much to choose from, one could ignore Renoir and almost anything one wasn’t familiar with from art history classes and the many books and exhibitions one has encountered over the years. My favorite on the day was an 1872 Monet, Bassin at Argenteuil, that was so bright and sunny, white clouds in the azure sky, you forgot for a moment the grey March weather we’ve had here. And then The Magpie, at one time or another everyone’s Christmas card, captured the bright snow that lingered on the pedestrian bridge in front of the museum. Tara Whitbeck had warned us of the paucity of female representation, and indeed we counted only two Morisots, one Cassatt and, most major, one Gonzalez. For that matter, there were only two minor Caillebottes. Perhaps some examples had gone to New York for the Impressionism and Fashion show at the Met. Regardless, any time you can see Manet’s Balcony and Dejeuner sur l’Herbe in the same room with Whistler’s Mother and Monet’s Magpie, you feel enveloped by art history. By no means does the d’Orsay have all the ‘best’ – certainly not of Cezanne or Degas – but there are so many fine works by Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, and great works by Manet, that you feel you have landed in a soft meadow, with beauty and light all around.