Date: 04-02-1992
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   19th Century  20th Century      

IN 1870 Camille Pissarro took refuge in London from the Franco-Prussian War and found the city a less than congenial bolt-hole. ''It is only abroad,'' the artist wrote wistfully to his friend Theodore Duret, ''that one feels how beautiful, great and hospitable France is. What a difference here! One gathers only contempt, indifference, even rudeness . . . '' Pissarro had experienced, at first hand, the attitudes that would characterise British taste for the following half- century or more: a specific, subtle dislike for French art, particularly among collectors and curators; and a pronounced distrust of just about any painting tainted by associations with the avant-garde.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at the National Gallery, whose custodians battled tooth and nail to preserve the museum as a sanctum of Old Master painting, uncorrupted by any evidence of the revolutions of early modern art. Sir Charles Eastlake, the National Gallery's first director, put the point of view succinctly in his scathing comment that ''A crying defect in all French painters, though perhaps not so much their fault as their country's, is that gout libre which is such a terrible abuse of the art''. The grimace of distaste with which he must have pronounced those two foreign words can still be sensed.

So what would Eastlake have made of the National Gallery's nineteenth-century collection - which was recently reopened to the public, after a complete rehang? He would, doubtless, have been horrified by the prominence given to that great riverbank idyll of the fin de siecle, Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres - a perfect example, after all, of just that kind of progressive Frenchy art which he so disliked. Yet the passage of time can do strange things to pictures, and seeing Seurat's Bathers at the National Gallery now you are more liable to notice its affinities with the Old Master tradition than its supposed radicalism. Seurat's painting seems, peculiarly, to belong in the National Gallery. It is a work in which so many of the qualities of the great Piero della Francescas in the collection - the sense of grand stasis, of timeless repose - seem strongly reincarnated. Its presence in the museum forcibly makes the point that the history of art is not just a history of change but, too, a history of deep and unpredictable continuities.

The new hang has, perhaps, made the unusual character of the National Gallery's nineteenth-century collection clearer than before. Although the National Gallery is not particularly famous for its holdings of nineteenth-century pictures, there is no better place to see Seurat or Cezanne, especially now that the pictures by those artists placed on long- term loan to the museum by Heinz Berggruen have been integrated into the general hang. But although the National Gallery has a far more considerable collection of nineteenth-century art than once seemed possible, it has, too, retained a somewhat parochial character. It still seems, in some respects, to reflect a peculiarly British conception of what should be valued in painting.

The British have traditionally favoured the so-called ''minor'' genres such as landscape, portraiture, still life and equestrian art, and this preference would seem to have filtered into what the National Gallery owns. So while, for example, it does not have any of Gericault's more ambitious history paintings or oil sketches, it does possess his Horse Frightened by Lightning, a painting which has its roots in the artist's own anglophilia and which seems to look back to Stubbs for its inspiration. It is, in fact, a great and unsettling painting, which adumbrates in miniature the sublime terrors of the artist's largest and most famous work, The Raft of the Medusa. Yet it was probably bought as an example of his skill as an animalier, a Gericault adapted to British tastes.

Likewise, the outstanding Courbet in the National Gallery, his Still Life with Apples and Pomegranates, is another work which may have been bought with a British audience in mind. It will appeal to the traditionally strong empirical streak in the British temperament, since it is a work from which Courbet's considerable self- importance and missionary sense of social purpose, are almost entirely absent. The emphasis, here, is placed on Courbet's weighty materialism - his sense, so evident in this painting of clustered, bruised fruit, of the heaviness of things. Courbet's whole world, full of pain and gravitas, is present, but understated.

Maybe because the National Gallery's collection is a British collection, it reveals some strengths of European painting that can easily be overlooked in other museums containing art of that time. The National Gallery might not be strong in nineteenth-century history painting, but it is extremely strong in portraiture - indeed, claims could be made for it as one of the great collections of nineteenth-century portraiture.

So the Goya that will be remembered by visitors to london is not the dark fantasist of the Quinta del Sordo but the alternately brutal, melancholy and sensual portraitist who painted the sullen challenge on the face of a rival court painter, Don Andres de Peral, who painted the infinite weariness of The Duke of Wellington on his Napoleonic campaigns and who painted the startling coquettishness of Dona Isabel de Paul.

The Ingres memorialised by the National Gallery is not the Neoclassicist of his subject painting but the painter of Second Empire opulence that he became in his portraiture of the 1840s and 1850s - although it is also true that his great portrait of Madame Moitessier Seated represents a peculiar rapprochement between Ingres' ascetic, classicising sensibility and his fascination with the rich stuffs and surfaces, the gilded splendours of the well- heeled.

The National Gallery also establishes Degas as one of the great portrait painters. His Princess Metternich is an extraordinary small painting, whose blurred appearance may represent one of the earliest attempts by an artist to replicate the effects of a photograph taken while the subject is in motion and which almost seems - in its translation to the static art of painting a sense of the individual as a mobile, volatile presence - to predict the much later portraits of Francis Bacon.

Heinz Berggruen's paintings, particularly his Seurat Channel at Gravelines and study for Les Poseuses, and his Cezanne Mont Sainte-Victoire, have greatly enriched the National Gallery's Post-Impressionist galleries. They have made other differences besides. They allow the museum, for instance, to enter the twentieth century with a bang rather than a whimper. Berggruen's fine sequence of Cubist Picassos and Braques has taken a heavy responsibility from the shoulders of Monet's Waterlilies because now it need no longer be presented as the last major work in the museum.

But the Berggruen Picassos, in particular, also introduce complications into the National Gallery's scheme of things, its whole view of The History of Western Art. Consider, for example, what is now the latest painting in the museum: Picasso's Portrait of a Woman of 1940. Her face is a strange, twisted thing, an example of the kind of eyes-and-nose-askew late, late Cubism that some people still like to poke fun at. A thoroughly modern painting, therefore, and possibly just the sort of thing that many will feel should not be in this particular museum. But then look at the woman's right hand, held to her cheek, and at the echo of the profile in the mirror, and you see that this enigmatic, Sphinx-like figure is really a reincarnation of Ingres' Madame Moitessier, a few galleries back. This is not a fanciful interpretation. We know that Ingres' painting always fascinated Picasso.

So The Portrait of a Woman poses a difficult question. Where does Old Master painting end and modern art begin? Where, exactly, does what people like to think of as the great Western tradition of painting run out of steam, to be replaced by this new and quite other thing called modernism? Picasso's Portrait of a Woman prompts the thought that perhaps the very idea of modernism, as something distinct from the art that preceded it, is a crude simplification which has been accorded the status of a truth.

So where, in turn, does this leave the National Gallery? As a museum, perhaps, that should not have an ending: as a museum whose task should not be to stress some notional caesura dividing the old from the new, but to challenge and test the idea that such a thing can ever be said to exist. Perhaps the National Gallery should acquire some twentieth-century American painting - a Pollock, maybe, which might amomg other things demonstrate that Monet's Waterlilies would lead to some of the most ambitious art of our century; or a Rothko, which might show that the nineteenth-century Northern Romantic tradition of landscape painting embodied by the Gallery's Caspar David Friedrich, and by its Turners, would continue in the hands of later artists.

It is not hard to imagine what Charles Eastlake might have thought of this, but then he is no longer director. It is possible that the present director and his staff are, however quietly, redrawing the boundaries of the museum. Certainly the gap between Old Master and modern master, at the National Gallery, has never seemed narrower.