Elizabeth Frank
AT THE GALLERIES
A curious thing happens at the end of the Fragonard· ex–
hibition at the Met. The show exits into a room full of Spanish paint–
ings, chiefly by Velazquez and
EI
Greco. The effect is sudden and
tonic. From an overdose of vacuous prettiness, one comes upon
force, brilliance, and conviction.
It
isn't simply a difference in style,
epoch, or national tradition. Fragonard had it within him to be a
great painter, but he was not a great artist. His art is cut short by
some missing quality or combination of qualities - courage being the
most important, perhaps, but also something closer to temperament
or personality, that would compel us not only to recognize a
signature style, but to be moved by it, believe in it, assent to it.
It seems oddly coincidental that at a time when deconstruction
and poststructuralism have mounted an attack on received ideas of
genius, authenticity, and originality in art, Fragonard should sud–
denly swim into view-and yet remain a blur. Art history has chosen
so far to see him as a descendant of Watteau and Boucher and a pro–
vider of amatory froufrou to aristocratic patrons secure in their taste
for soap-bubble erotica, yet this was just one of his modes. He worked
in numerous genres and styles. In addition to an early foray into
history painting, which he abandoned upon presenting a grand
"machine" (the forgettable
Coresus and Callirhoe)
to the Academy in
1765, he
didjetes galantes,
amorous idylls, pastorals, genre paintings,
landscapes, portraits, paintings of animals, sentimental and domes–
tic scenes, and a more "realistic" late treatment of erotic motifs. To
say of any of these modes that it represents the "real" Fragonard is
impossible. Something elusive, enigmatic, and unsatisfying inheres
in all of them.
Fragonard may have been someone who, in his incapacity to be
himself, managed to be a little bit of everyone else - a bit of
··Fragonard," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 2-May 8,
1988, curated by Pierre Rosenberg, Conservateur en Chef, Department des Pein–
tures, Musee du Louvre, Paris, assisted by Marie-Anne Dupuy; and Katharine
Baeber, Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York.
