The list of heavyweight masters showing at the Portland Museum of Art should be sufficient to lure you into the gallery, at least on “Free Friday,” so as to postpone whatever more sinister and less edifying urban schemes you may have planned. Are you so disaffected, drained by a persistent sense of ennui that you would pass up the opportunity to witness the work of Monet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and even Matisse and Van Gogh, with your own eyeballs?
In a season of big-guns-style curatorial choices, the PMA deftly walks a line between giving to the masses the names and styles that provide a level of immediate gratification and a more subtle, almost subversive, program that illuminates the historical changes in perception and artistic traditions that occurred in late 19th-century France.
The names on display may stimulate excitement, but the collected works found in the “Paris and the Countryside” exhibit share in the period’s ominous sense of urban detachment. The intellect is poked and prodded, consciously being asked to make connections between increasingly distant responses to the rapid urbanization of the period. Imagine the mixtape a friend makes for you that contains B-sides of bands instead of their hits so as to create a more coherent arc over the course of the program. “Paris and the Countryside” is a show about organizing pieces to create a pointed history lesson.
Fans of Toulouse-Lautrec and Monet can rejoice that the two artists dominate the exhibit. Their weighty presence is, however, molded into specific eddies of thematic intent. Prints of Parisian nightlife are flagship examples of the shift to the life of the lower classes as a primary subject for many artists. On a more portentous level, Toulouse-Lautrec’s work in the commercial world mirrors and builds upon the newborn capitalist spectacle nipping at the heels of industrial innovation. His use of celebrity, as in “Divan japonais” of 1893 which depicts the famous dancer Jane Avril as an authority on seeing and being seen, promotes a culture of (other people’s) personality that is so firmly entrenched in our way of life it is hard to fathom an alternative.
“Young Woman with Red Bow” by Van Gogh and several works by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen highlight the poor in a manner that reflects on the artists’ lifestyles themselves as well as political leanings. Gone is the umbilical cord to the courts and churches, allowing (or forcing) the artist to migrate to the impoverished areas of the city where the new social mores are explored. Eroding tradition and new modes of living developing at such a rapid pace define the urban jungle, for which these artists settle into the treetops to observe the lay of the ever-changing land.
A sort of zero-point gem of the exhibit that at once holds to an impressionistic sense while alluding to burgeoning abstraction is Degas’s “The Laundress Ironing.” With a Vermeer-like sense of geometrical composition coupled with emotional color and ephemeral brushstrokes, this painting qualifies as a quiet masterwork.
