Strike Up the Gershwin: “Americans in Paris”

Cecilia Beaux, “Ernesta (Child with Nurse),” 1894, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Curator Barbara Weinberg says she wants visitors to the Met’s upcoming show, Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 (opens Tuesday) to ask themselves:
Where have Charles Sprague Pearce and Dennis Miller Bunker been all my life?
Trust me, Barbara, that’s not going to happen. But along with the ho-hum journeymen, there are many pleasant discoveries and rediscoveries to be made at this sprawling show—enough to carry you over the dull spots that are necessary to a comprehensive survey of the French sway over late 19th-century American artists.
In fact, this show could be seen as a lesser sequel to one of the greatest shows mounted at the Met in recent times—2003’s “Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting.” It’s a bit of a shock to come to the “power wall” of the current show—a stunning line-up of huge canvases by Whistler and Sargent—and realize that two of the Sargents (“Madame X” and “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”) were also in the final gallery—devoted to the Spanish influence on American painting—that the Met appended to the Spanish/French show. We can infer from this that the Spanish influenced the French who influenced the Americans.
But unlike the previous show, this one displays no oeuvre by the influencers, only works by those influenced. Maybe that’s just as well: The great French Impressionists and post-Impressionists were, for the most part, in a different league from their imitators, who would suffer by comparison.
Still, the generous helping of Cassatts, plus fine works by Eakins, Sargent, Whistler and Hassam, make the show a steady source of delight. (However, notwithstanding its label, Hassam’s “Allies Day, May 1917” is no longer the artist’s “most famous of 30 views of New York’s flag-draped Fifth Avenue.” For all the wrong reasons, the version formerly owned by Brooke Astor now is.)
For me the discovery of the show was not Pearce or Bunker but Cecilia Beaux, whose work I had sporadically seen but not previously focused on. The three charming, accomplished depictions of women, children and a cat in this exhibition caught my eye and started me mentally curating an all-woman show juxtaposing Cassatt, Morisot and Beaux.
One of the paintings by Beaux, “The Last Days of Childhood,” and a Chase picture that CultureGrrl previously reproduced both reference an iconic work that was at the previous two venues for the show—London’s National Gallery and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—but, unfortunately, is not at the Met: Whistler’s “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1,” popularly known as “Whistler’s Mother.” New York did get one less famous but still iconic work that didn’t appear in the other two versions of the show: Cassatt’s “Mother about to Wash her Sleepy Child” (1880), considered to be her first major painting on the mother-child theme that was so central to her oeuvre.
So what exactly WAS the nature of the French influence, and how did our nation’s artists Americanize it? The wall text and object labels don’t provide deep insight into this central question. Rather, they document the various points of contact between the Americans and the French, and describe details about the subject matter of the paintings that you can easily see for yourself.
Perhaps the best clue to what the curators (Kathleen Adler from London, Erica Hirshler from Boston and Weinberg) are getting at is provided in a label for a painting towards the end of the show, Edmund Tarbell’s “Three Sisters—A Study in June Sunlight” (1890). With its densely painted, light-dappled figures, and its more loosely brushed, verdant background, it “epitomizes the artist’s typically American combination of academic fundamentals and Impressionist fluency.”
So there you have it.