As Oskar Reinhart’s Winterthur art museum near Zurich is undergoing refurbishment this year, The Courtauld has cleverly seized the opportunity to display twenty-five of its more important works in its exhibition Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection. This is a real coup, the Winterthur collection never having loaned out its painting en masse like this before, alone marking the exhibition an exciting one. Reinhart’s predilection for the ever-popular Impressionists also affords the occasion for a crowd-pleasing show. While perforce eclectic, a substantial number of the paintings, more than one might expect, really do strike home.
The show opens with Goya’s sole contribution, Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks (1808-12). An exercise in skill rather than delight, there is little appetising about these slabs of fish flesh which, probably intentionally, look more like meat. This painting has attracted considerable interest, perhaps being an allegory, in a time of political censorship, for the dreadful carnage of the Napoleonic War, so famously depicted in Goya’s other works. Next to it, and equally dominated by a gloomy, crepuscular background, is Théodore Géricault’s A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank (c. 1819-22), a study, it is believed, in mental illness, with the subject wearing his hospital tag like a military medal. (The theme of psychological disquiet within a hospital is returned to later in the show). The melancholy continues with Gustave Courbet’s The Wave (1870), a large time leap to an artist who inspired early Impressionists, in which a crushing wave under a storm-laden sky threatens to soak the viewer. And then, in a complete change of mood, comes Courbet’s The Hammock (1844), an airy, light-weight work depicting a young woman provocatively lolling in a grove. Controversial in its time, it is as if a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood picture has turned just a bit seedy. More decorum is afforded to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Girl Reading (1850-55): sweet, accomplished and perhaps a little dull. That this painting was a favourite of Reinhart, and that Pierre-Auguste Renoir (as we shall see) was his most much-loved Impressionist, strongly suggests a substantial sentimental streak within the collector.
From hereon in we are in mid-1860s onwards territory. The rest of the first room comprises four more paintings. Two are portraits by Edouard Manet and Cézanne, the latter, yet another Portrait of Dominque Aubert (1866), being the more accomplished of the two. Here, Cézanne lays on thick applications of oils with a palette knife and establishes his potential as an artist. Even so, both he and the later Manet (1873) still adhere to a conventional murky, even black, background. A distinctly odd Honoré Daumier painting, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (c.1865-70), sees Mannerism meet the modern. Finally, the first of four Renoirs makes its appearance, the frankly hideous Lily and the Greenhouse Plants (1864), an early effort devoid of his later lustre and sparkle.
If this seems an unimposing start, the second room begins in a similar vein, with three more Renoirs in a row, all portraits. While one can appreciate the delicacy of Renoir’s brushwork and execution, the effect is almost uniformly saccharine and just plain twee. What people see in his depictions of chubbily cherubic children, fit only for the lid of a Victorian biscuit tin, I cannot fathom. His adults are rarely better. But the middle of the three on show — Portrait of Victor Chocquet (c. 1876) — has the merit of being more interesting than the others. The subject, being male, is not depicted with the usual degree of Renoir’s grating, soft focus filter. Here, the black gaze of Chocquet contrasts with great effect the lightness and colour of the rest of the painting. At least we have moved on from the omnipresent sepulchral backgrounds of earlier portrait painting.
And then the transformation begins. The following eight paintings on the next two walls have a sensational effect, both collectively and individually. The ubiquitous but, at the same time, neglected Alfred Sisley (where was the exhibition to celebrate his works last year during the 150th anniversary celebrations of Impressionism’s beginnings?) starts things off gently and assuredly with Barges on the Saint-Martin Canal (1870). Here we are acquainted fully with the familiar Impressionist style. It is a typical Sisley and, like all his work, a scene out in the open. Short strokes capture the water while the grey clouds behind bare trees retain a blueish tinge for light. Next to him, Claude Monet takes Impressionism some steps further with his Break-up of Ice on the Seine (1880-1), its pinkish, light-blue hues for sky and river and white dabs for ice approach the abstract, while assuredly and with great control not crossing into it. The elegiac atmosphere is reinforced by the knowledge that Monet had recently lost his wife.
Cézanne’s absolute mastery and understanding of colour truly elevate his still lifes to great art
Three majestic Cézannes are displayed in succession. Two wonderful landscapes — The Pilon du Roi (1887-88) and The Château Noir (c.1885) — depict the groundbreaking skill of the artist, the first admirably displaying his technique of horizontal planar layering to project perspective, the latter adding mystery at the deliberate expense of clarity as we peer through lush, green trees to a non-distinct ochre building. But best of all — and for this viewer the highlight of the exhibition — is his large and ambitious Still Life with Faience Jug and Fruit (c. 1900), which, in his characteristic modernist inclinations, renders the simple and quotidian into something both luxurious and indulgent and, simultaneously, imbuing it with profound meaning. Here there is less of his more familiar still life off-lines, lack of physical balance, gravity-defying fruit and tables seemingly defying the laws of physics. It really is beautiful. Cézanne’s absolute mastery and understanding of colour truly elevate his still lifes to great art. Make no mistake, it is Cézanne who dominates this exhibition.
Another visionary of colour presented here is Van Gogh. He will always cause the greatest herding around a painting in any show. The two on display at The Courtauld do just that. The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles (1889) wonderfully depicts a scene of yellows and flowers which remains very much the same to this day. Much rarer is his The Ward in the Hospital at Arles (1889), an interior that is altogether more uneasy in tone. Van Gogh stayed there, convalescing after his self-mutilating breakdown. As he wrote to his brother, “a few days in the hospital were very interesting …. One perhaps learns how to live from the sick.” One is unsettlingly reminded of sketches made by prisoners of war in internment camps.
An ordinary Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, and two watercolours (the only ones in the show) by Cézanne, almost complete the selection. But two others are eminently worthy of notice, both representing early-career achievements. Paul Gauguin’s richly coloured Blue Roofs (Rouen) (1884) and Picasso’s magnificent Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto (1901) from his blue period, reveal the talent of these artists before restraint and maturity were superseded by innovation for its own sake. That Picasso’s painting could easily be mistaken for a Cézanne reveals again how the French artist towers over this interesting and often exhilarating exhibition. For, as Picasso declared, Cézanne “is the father of us all”.
