Thumbs Up: Reconsidering Jean-Léon Gérôme

If you think that a thumbs up in ancient Rome meant that the beaten gladiator would live and that a thumbs down meant death, you can thank Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1872 painting Pollice Verso (shown above) for that. In reality, thumbs down meant “stick your sword in the ground” and no kill. Thumbs up meant “stick the sword in his neck.” It’s amazing to think of how a single work could generate such a widespread idea, but Gérôme enjoyed that kind of influence in the nineteenth century thanks to hi show-stopping scenes of the ancient world and exotic east. As tastes shifted towards modernism with the turn of the twentieth century, Gérôme slid into obscurity. Reconsidering Gérôme, edited by Scott Allan and Mary Morton, accompanies The Getty Center’s exhibition, The Spectacular Art of Gérôme, in trying to restore Gérôme’s good name in today’s art world. Their efforts amount to one big thumbs up for an artist whose old-fashioned realism masks modernist impulses that make Gérôme’s art relevant today. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Thumbs Up."

[Image: Jean-Léon Gérôme. Pollice Verso, 1872. Oil on canvas, 39.5 x 58.6 cm (15.5 x 23 in.). Phoenix Art Museum. Museum purchase.]

[Many thanks to Getty Publications for providing me with a review copy of Reconsidering Gérôme, edited by Scott Allan and Mary Morton. The Spectacular Art of Gérôme continues at the Getty Center through September 12, 2010.]

Urban Myths

Henri Rousseau, better known by some as “Le Douanier” or “The Customs Officer” (his occupation until his retirement in 1893), painted in obscurity during his lifetime but is known well today for his mysterious, almost childlike paintings of wonder such as Sleeping Gypsy and The Snake Charmer. Born May 21, 1844 in the Loire Valley, Rousseau’s most famous works present a strange jungle world, yet he himself inhabited the urban jungle of Paris for most of his career. Rousseau’s Self-Portrait of 1890 (above) shows him situated in a civilized setting, yet still retains the simplicity and unstudied charm of his other works. During his lifetime, Rousseau withstood the ridicule of other artists who couldn’t understand his primitive style. However, Jean-Léon Gérôme, an academic painter himself, gave tips to his friend Rousseau as “Le Douanier” pursued painting past the point of being a hobby into a true outlet for his unique perspective. As much as I love Rousseau’s dark jungles, I find it equally fascinating how he applied his unique vision to the real world around him, spying modern wonders with that same childlike fascination.

When Rousseau painted The Eiffel Tower (above, from 1898), Gustave Eiffel’s colossus was less than a decade old. Anyone who has visited Paris has some visual memory of the tower, either from a vantage point in the city or, if you’ve taken the ride up, from above, looking down upon Paris itself. The Eiffel Tower anchors Paris like a lighthouse shining its beacon to guide lost travelers home. With that powerful effect in mind, it’s fascinating that Rousseau chooses to literally cut the Eiffel Tower down to size in a painting named after it. He reduces the landmark to the size of a gift shop replica hanging from a key chain. Instead, the waterways of Paris dominate the scene as the Parisians who work the banks go about their daily jobs. Rousseau flips the idea of importance on its head in this painting. All adults “know” that the Eiffel Tower is the most “important” thing in this painting, but children don’t know such things. Children visually value the waterways and the workings of the people just as much, if not more, as Rousseau tries to show in this painting.

Before his death in 1910, Rousseau got to witness the advent of powered flight, which began with the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903. In View of the Bridge at Sevres and the Hills at Clamert, Saint Cloud and Bellevue (above, from 1908), Rousseau paints a Wright Brothers-style plane sputtering across the sky. Nearby, a type of dirigible flies. The early twentieth century saw a “golden age” of blimps and dirigibles. Races were even held above Paris using the Eiffel Tower as a turning stake. In the distance between the plane and the dirigible, a hot air balloon floats. The first manned balloon ride happened in Paris in 1783 in a contraption built by the famous Montgolfier brothers. Rousseau’s arrangement of these three flying machines suggests the advent of the plane and blimp and the decline of the hot air balloon technologically. (Thomas Eakins’ 1871 Max Schmitt in a Single Scull creates a similar hierarchy by showing older, slower watery craft in the distance behind the Schmitt’s sleek racer.) To Rousseau’s old, yet young eyes, these new flying machines must have seemed magical. Critics credit Rousseau for opening up avenues of seeing that paved the way for the Surrealists, but in his more “real” works of wonder, Rousseau showed us more importantly the value of seeing as a child sees and recognizing the magic all around us every day.

A Purpose-Driven Life

Born May 2, 1806, Charles Gleyre fills perfectly the definition of a late bloomer. Born in Switzerland, Gleyre moved to France as a small child after the death of both of his parents. After a few years of art school, Gleyre rambled through Italy to drink in the Renaissance before spending six years in Greece and the Middle East, including Egypt and Syria. While on this vision quest, Gleyre contracted ophthalmia, an inflammation of the eye that threatened his eyesight for the rest of his life. Gleyre, however, waited until his return to Paris to begin creating art based on all that he had seen. Gleyre’s Evening (later re-titled Lost Illusions; above, from 1843) won an exhibition medal and, more importantly, recognition from the art world. Remembering a dreamy evening he spent on the bank of the Nile River in 1835, Gleyre paints himself as a lyre-wielding poet watching a boatload of muse-like singers float away. Although Gleyre dipped often into his mental storehouse of Orientalist imagery, he had a clear-eyed view of the work of the artist and worked with a pragmatic single-mindedness that became legendary.

When Gleyre’s teacher, Paul Delaroche closed his teaching studio in 1843, he recommended that his students continue on with Gleyre as their teacher. Gleyre ushered in a golden age of the French atelier that would continue with the next generation of Jean-Leon Gerome, Leon Bonnat, and others. From 1843 through 1864, when Gleyre’s eye problems forced his retirement, great artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley studied under Gleyre, yet he never took a fee for teaching. Whereas other teachers try to create disciples molded in their own image, Gleyre imparted to his students a seriousness of purpose in the art life rather than a specific style of painting. Renoir loved Gleyre specifically for the free hand he gave to his students—allowing the young Impressionists to paint outdoors while he preferred working in the studio from memory. Gleyre’s Separation of the Apostles (above, from 1845) perfectly captures this sense of teaching and trusting that students will find their own way.


Gleyre lived an almost monk-like existence. He never married and actually saw marriage as an impediment to the careers of other artists. Gleyre literally married his work. Despite the sensuality of such works as La Danse des Bacchantes (above, from 1849), Gleyre was reportedly celibate his entire life. For him, the flesh painted on the canvas in mythological scenes always remained a myth, an unfelt abstraction. Gleyre earned a reputation for perfectionism that many of his students took away from his atelier. The way that Gleyre returned again and again to the same works can be seen, for example, in Monet’s obsessive series of water lilies, haystacks, cathedrals, etc., etc. Gleyre and Monet differ widely in style, but their commitment to depicting a personal vision is exactly the same. Like Michelangelo, one of Gleyre’s Renaissance heroes, Gleyre’s only secret was hard work, free of illusions of an easy life in art.

A Man of His Time

Any statement by any artist is always to some degree a document of that time and place. It’s an unavoidable truth. Either by consciously fighting against or unconsciously following along with the status quo, artists always act in response to the here and now. Many critics today look at Thomas Eakins’ The Dancing Lesson (above, from 1878) and see a sympathetic rendering of three generations of African-Americans sharing the music and dance of their culture. In Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, however, Alan C. Braddock sees something different going on. He argues that the definition of “culture” that modern critics read into The Dancing Lesson, which was originally called simply The Negroes, is one Eakins would never have known. “The art of Eakins embodies a premodern understanding of cultural difference,” Braddock argues. Eakins and the late nineteenth century would have seen African-American culture as a “lesser” kind or a preliminary step in the evolutionary ladder leading up to Western European culture, the pinnacle of civilization, at least to Western Europeans and their descendents. Eakins places in the upper left corner of The Dancing Lesson a photo of Abraham Lincoln reading with his son Tad, thus illustrating the gap between African-American tradition and white Anglo-American tradition. Only in the 1920s and 1930s did anthropologists see culture as a social construct rather than a racial one. In Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, Braddock steps back in time and puts himself in Eakins nineteenth century shoes to better understand the American mind on the cusp of a new concept of culture.

Braddock excels in making familiar images from Eakins’ oeuvre come to fresh life with new implications. He begins by tracing Eakins’ conflict with culture back to his time training in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome from 1866 through 1870 and his time in Spain on the suggestion of his other teacher Leon Bonnat. Yet another teacher, Hippolyte Taine, put into words the cultural theories that Eakins worked under. Taine “asserted the importance of viewing works of human creativity as the natural, objective residue of national character,” Braddock writes. In Paris during the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Eakins experienced a world of difference as representatives (and misrepresentatives) of different nations and races gathered together in what Braddock calls “a monumental spectacle of nomadic strangeness.” That world fair placed people on display for the first time, providing “living evidence of evolutionary difference,” Braddock explains, for Eakins and his contemporaries. Gerome, Eakins’ primary teacher, excelled in exotic Orientalism that never progressed beyond picturesque slumming. Eakins echoes Gerome’s view of Western civilization’s primacy throughout his career, even as late as 1885 with Swimming (above). Setting Swimming in an idyllic, but still identifiable location outside Philadelphia, Eakins both evokes the ancient Greeks and escapes from the contemporary ethnic masses then filling the city. Braddock sees this “aesthetic vision of suburban retreat to a contemporary, local Arcadia” as a precursor to the modern phenomenon of “white flight” now decimating major American cities.

As a life-long Philadelphian, I find it hard to believe that the waters of the Schuylkill River once were even more polluted in the nineteenth century, leading to a public health hazard that claimed many lives, including that of Eakins’ own sister Margaret. Yet, when Eakins painted The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (above, from 1871), we see not the green ooze of contemporary descriptions Braddock provides but a blue oasis. Braddock bashes the familiar trope of Eakins as the ruthlessly exacting realist, showing how “none of the gritty frankness about modern environmental realities” enters the pictures. Eakins specifically plays with the facts to “sell” the “commodity” of “local color,” which for Philadelphia meant outdoor activities such as rowing. This local color makes up much of the culture of Eakins time and place, but that local color owes much to the internationalism of Eakins’ art education. “Viewing Eakins and his art simply in terms of Philadelphia ‘roots’ or American national character also misses the cosmopolitanism of ‘local color’ itself as a widely circulating commodity in which he and many contemporaries traded,” Braddock writes. Eakins painted a very ordered world in which heroic whites such as Max Schmitt rowed the “beautiful” waters of the Schuylkill while black guides led middle-class hunters through the marshes in paintings such as Pushing for Rail. “Eakins’s realism differentiated the various people and aquatic zones around Philadelphia according to a picturesque logic that embodied middle-class expectations and assumptions,” Braddock argues. Even when the harsh reality of life in Philadelphia claimed one of his family, Eakins refused to disrupt his view of the neatly ordered pyramid of cultural progression.

Eakins’ scandalous dismissal from teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886 put that ordered world into jeopardy. Following the popular trend begun by Theodore Roosevelt, Eakins looked west, and traveled to the Badlands. For Eakins and others, the American West becomes “a powerful metaphor of national renewal, progress, and civilization at a pivotal moment of modernization,” Braddock explains. Taking in the ideas behind TR’s glorification of the victory of white settlers over Native Americans as well as the racial subtext of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Eakins idolized the American cowboy as the epitome of American cultural superiority overcoming their lesser, i.e., the Native Americans. As Braddock points out, Eakins’s Cowboys in the Badlands (above, from 1888) clearly echoes Gerome’s Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, which shows the conquering Napoleon looking down upon ancient Egyptian culture. The template of cultural evolution inherent in Gerome’s work finds its way again and again into that of his greatest student.

For all the study of Eakins’ relationship with physicians, most famously in his masterpiece The Gross Clinic, less attention has been paid to the artists’ relationship with several of the anthropologists that helped found The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Science and Art (now known as The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology) in 1889. Eakins painted portraits of seven people heavily involved in the growing field of anthropology at the turn of the century. “Standing chronologically on the threshold of the modern culture concept but never really encountering or comprehending it,” Braddock writes, “Eakins and his art marked the twilight of nineteenth-century anthropological thought. The portraits [of these anthropologists] serve s the visual epitaphs to an obsolescent paradigm.” The most fitting painted epitaph of this paradigmatic twilight may be Eakins portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing (above, from 1895). Cushing studied the culture of Zuni Native Americans in New Mexico, adopted their dress, and even learned some of their rituals. Eakins shows Cushing engaged in incantations in full ceremonial dress. Braddock recounts meetings with present-day Zuni Indians who recoil from the portrait and how it disrespects their sacred customs. That sense of of the portrait’s insensitivity serves as a handy barometer for just how different the concept of culture between Eakins’ time and ours.

Braddock provides excellent insights into Eakins’ place in nineteenth century art as the world began to grow smaller and cultural interactions became increasingly unavoidable. He shows the biases and, to modern audiences, racism of Eakins without demonizing him ala Henry Adams in Eakins Revealed. Most criticism of Eakins still lingers in the shadow of Lloyd Goodrich’s adoption of Eakins as the quintessential American artist in the 1920s, much as literary critics rediscovered Herman Melville as the quintessential American novelist in that period’s manic race to generate a legacy of American culture long after the fact. Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity strips away the easy generalities of Eakins the ruthless realist and Eakins the cultural outsider to recover the flesh and blood Eakins of his time and place, for good and ill, in all his wonderfully flawed humanity.

[Many thanks to the University of California Press for providing me with a review copy of Alan C. Braddock’s Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity.]

My Brave Face

George de Forest Brush (American, 1854/1855-1941). Mourning Her Brave, 1883. Oil on panel. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Traveling through western railroad towns in the early 1880s, the painter George de Forest Brush saw poor Native Americans struggling to survive. The sight of these “wretched creatures,” Brush later wrote, made him feel “deceived” by the Wild West tales of his youth. George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings, an exhibition currently at the National Gallery of Art, examines the complex motivations behind Brush’s adoption of Native Americans as his primary subject. In the catalogue to the exhibition, Nancy K. Anderson gathers together a series of essays that place Brush not only in the context of late nineteenth century America but also in the context of the academic tradition. Brush sought to find a place for Native Americans in both art history and human history. “In choosing Indians as subjects for art, I do not paint from the historian’s or the antiquary’s point of view,” Brush said. “I am interested in those habits and deeds in which we have feelings in common… If I were required to resort to [historical facts] to bring out the poetry, I would drop the subject at once.” For Brush, Anderson writes, “Young Indian men, living independently on their ancestral land, were the equal of the ancient Greeks in physical beauty and thus entirely suitable as subjects for art.” A figure such as the Native American mother in Mourning Her Brave (above) says nothing about native dress or traditions but speaks volumes of the shared, universal emotions Brush saw as the truest, most human link between cultures.

George de Forest Brush (American, 1854/1855-1941). An Aztec Sculptor, 1887. Oil on panel. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift (Partial and Promised) of the Ann and Tom Barwick Family Collection

The Brush renaissance reflected in this exhibition arrives thanks to the reemergence of several paintings lost to public view for almost a century. An Aztec Sculptor (above) disappeared after 1899 until a 2004 sale and subsequent donation to the NGA. Other Indian paintings by Brush have enjoyed similar resurrections, providing scholars with additional insight into this little known artist. Perhaps the most fascinating revelation of Brush’s brush with Indian culture is that he shared little of the political fervor for easing the Native Americans’ condition that peaked with the 1881 publication of Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor, a brutal reckoning of the United States’ Government’s history of cruelty against Native Americans. However, “[d]espite heated public debate and constant media attention,” Anderson writes, “no hint of racial conflict—an undeniable fact of the day—appeared in any of Brush’s Indian paintings.” Brush denies this “undeniable fact” by lifting himself above the political fray, using the Indian and Indian culture as a metaphor for the personal and cultural issues Brush could not address directly in his work. Brush’s flirtation with painting the story of Ossian, the mythical Irish primitive, proves that it was their primitivism rather than anything specific about Native Americans that drew him to them as a subject. Brush later became active in reform politics, specifically child labor laws, but even that action originated in his general fear of industrialization’s effect on humanity rather than in a particular political viewpoint.

George de Forest Brush (American, 1854/1855-1941). The Indian and the Lily, 1887. Oil on canvas. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photography by Dwight Primiano.

From 1873 through 1879, Brush studied art in Europe, most notably with Jean-Leon Gerome, renowned artist and teacher of other American artists such as Thomas Eakins. Returning to America, Brush wanted to use his European training yet give his work a distinctly American flavor that would make it palatable for American collectors. Nothing seemed more American at the time than the Wild West and Native Americans. Traveling through Wyoming and Montana, Brush lived with and studied the Arapahoe, Shoshone, and Crow tribes, actually painting them within the teepee studio he build himself. Collecting just enough facts to make his works recognizably “Indian,” Brush soon returned East and painted from props in the studio. Anderson calls Brush’s Indian paintings “layered fiction” in that beneath “an entirely convincing illusion of reality,” Brush painted “layer upon layer of personal and aesthetic disquiet.” When Brush painted the simple existence of Indians, he really painted his distrust of the growing complexity of American society as it modernized and mechanized on the eve of the twentieth century. When Brush painted figures such as The Indian and the Lily, he painted a Native American version of the classical Narcissus, both drawing a parallel between the old world and the new and arguing for American roots equal to the Greek and Roman roots of European society. “The Indian world [Brush] created in his paintings (for it did not exist anywhere else),” Anderson concludes, “may thus be seen as a very personal form of protest.”

George de Forest Brush (American, 1854/1855-1941). The Picture Writer's Story, 1884. Oil on canvas. The Anschutz Collection.

Brush alluded to many classic works of Western art in his Indian paintings. In The Picture Writer’s Story (above), the storyteller mimics the pose of Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Laying Away a Brave follows the composition of Rubens’ Descent from the Cross, recasting Christ as a fallen warrior. Brush’s even alludes to his contemporary Winslow Homer in Before the Battle, which honors Homer’s Prisoners from the Front. All of these allusions add up to Brush’s obsession with story telling and the tradition of passing down culture from generation to generation, as the picture writer does above to the young braves nearby. The artist thus becomes just another transmitter of culture like any artisan. Mary Lublin, in “Living for Art: Brush and His Indians,” sees Brush’s Indian paintings as “a sustained artistic meditation on human creativity” in which “a dynamic interaction with nature is presented as both the foundation of art and a source of cultural growth.” The Native American’s ties to the earth serve as the template for all art and all cultural advancement. “Brush’s impassioned, enduring, and all-encompassing antimodernism” accompanied “a commitment to academic principles and pre-industrial ideals that informed his life as well as his art,” Emily D. Shapiro writes in her essay, “’A Purpose in Every Stroke’: Brush’s Images of Indian Artistry.” Following in Gerome’s footsteps, Brush became a teacher himself and gained the love and respect of generations of students. While the Arts and Crafts Movement flourished in England, Brush tended his own American garden in which nature and creativity provided an oasis from invading industrialization.

George de Forest Brush (American, 1854/1855-1941). The Head Dress, 1890. Oil on canvas. Property of the Westervelt Company and displayed in The Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings walks a fine line between presenting the artist as a respectfully creative user of Native American traditions and a exploiter of those traditions. “You must not confuse me with a would-be historian of the people,” Brush wrote in a letter. “I live for art and not for Indians.” Diane Dillon’s essay on “Indianicity” in the context of the 1893 World’s Fair demonstrates how the idea of the Indian became a commodity that “[l]ike money,… served as a medium of exchange, lubricating concrete and conceptual transactions.” Brush’s painted transactions with his audience buy into as well as sell the commodity of “Indianicity” in universalizing that culture and, thus, losing the particularity and individual humanity of Native Americans as people. After 1891, Brush moved away from painting Indians and turned his attention to portraits modeled on the works of the Italian Renaissance, even moving to Italy with his family. Brush continued to practice the Native American crafts he had learned—cutting moccasins, making a bow and arrow, carving a canoe, making a headdress (as in the painting above)—and even posed in Native American dress for photographs until his death in 1941. Whether Brush’s Indian paintings did anything to help those “wretched creatures” he saw from a passing train years before seems to be a question he never concerned himself about. George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings opens a door on the work of an unjustly forgotten artist as well as on a conflicted era in American history when the continent’s first peoples were slowly becoming more an idea than a reality.

[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art for providing me with a review copy of George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings and for the images above from the exhibition.]