Masterpieces

Powerful landscapes at the Wadsworth

by Leon Nigrosh

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE: MASTERWORKS FROM THE CARMEN THYSSENBORNEMISZA COLLECTION. At the Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main Street, Hartford, Connecticut through March 15.

The world of private art collecting can often seem arcane and nefarious with its secret auctions, third-party bidders, sale codes, and confidential reserves. Even if the sales are legitimate, the works are usually whisked off to some secret hideaway never to see the light of day again.

Fortunately for us there is at least one collector, the Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, who believes that art is the most universal of languages and "is the best instrument to make people open their minds." Rather than shelter the family collection, the Thyssens opened a public museum in Madrid in 1992 and regularly send exhibits to major venues around the world.

One such exhibit is currently on display in the Huntington Gallery of the Wadsworth Atheneum. The small selection of 19 paintings is an eclectic mixture of 18th-century French paintings, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, and examples of less-familiar German and Spanish artists. What ties them all together is the notion that we are getting to see the aesthetic taste of a single individual, and through that, a hint at what the Baroness might think.

All the canvases are landscapes, virtually every one includes at least one figure, for the most part the colors are natural, and each is surrounded by a gaudy, gold-leafed, rococo frame -- except the painting by Dario de Regoyos Y Valdes (1857-1913), one of the founding fathers of Spanish modernism. Although Landscape with Snow by Night (Haarlem) depicts a particular place, it is a night scene painted in dark, foreboding tones that exudes the chill of a ghostly mist as it hovers over street lamps reflected in a frozen canal. The pewter-tinted frame, with its low relief geometric images, extends the frigid atmosphere beyond the canvas.

Although many of the artists represented in this exhibit are almost household names, their particular works are not nearly as well-known. Mention the name of British landscape painter John Constable (1766-1890) and vast scenes with sweeping skyscapes like his Hampstead Heath come to mind. But here we see a close-up of a happy and virtuous canal worker opening The Lock in a romanticized depiction of what in real life was sweaty, backbreaking toil. A Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) painting is also included. It is not one of his brilliantly colored, eccentric works produced in his later years, but rather an early, staid rendition of The Water Mill at Gennep.

We get to compare two works by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) executed only four years apart, but from different worlds -- literally. His Path in Martinique borrows coloring and brushwork from Cézanne's Post-Impressionism to portray, in Gauguin's own words, "black women arrayed in gaudy dress, swaying in an endless variety of movement." On the other hand, Mata Mua (In Olden Times) is pure Tahitian fantasy, with its flat areas of luminous color in a decorative pattern of forms and figures -- the style for which Gauguin is best-known.

The four marble sculptures by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) are complete departures in style, material, and content from the rest of the works in this exhibit. Commissioned directly from the artist by the present Baron's grandfather in 1905, this is the first time they have been displayed in the United States. Instead of the usual heroic size associated with Rodin, these works are small and intimate in scale (the largest is just over three feet long), yet they contain all the majesty and sensuous power of his greater sculptures.

In Rodin's The Death of Athens a nude female swoons across a partially buried Ionic column just pushing up from the roughened mass. For his The Dream (The Kiss of the Angel), Rodin again plays the rough, unfinished texture of scored marble against the smooth surface of a voluptuous sleeping woman being caressed by a nude winged being. Two female nudes are locked together in Birth of Venus as they spring forth from the roiling ocean foam. All of these sculptures are redolent with erotic overtones, but the most surprising of these works is Rodin's Christ and Mary Magdalen wherein both principals are totally nude, with Jesus on the cross and a robust Magdalen apparently ministering to body parts other than his feet.

In the final analysis, this exhibition is less about the actual paintings and sculptures on display (culled from more than 600 works acquired by the Baroness in just the past decade), but more about revealing the idiosyncratic tastes of an idealistic and generous family of extraordinary means.