"Visions of Arcadia' at the Art Museum (2nd review)

Why would three of the most radical artists of their time turn to Arcadia as the subject for their largest and most ambitious paintings? And what is Arcadia, anyway?

Arcadia— a land of dreams, an ephemeral and fictitious realm based on a region of ancient Greece—was celebrated in poetry and art as a beautiful, secluded, unspoiled area, a paradise, a Utopia, a Shangri-la, a Brigadoon, a Garden of Eden.

In other words, a place where people lay around naked outdoors, partaking of wine and sex.

Sensual delights gave Arcadia its allure. But from the First Century, when Virgil wrote about it in his Eclogues, there's been a sadness that stems from the fact that Arcadia was a transitory state of being. Paintings of Arcadia seem to say: Look how happy those times were; too bad it didn't last; will we ever get it back?

Virgil himself grew up in a beautiful valley in northern Italy. He wrote his Eclogues as petitions to regain his family's property after it had been seized by the Roman government. (In the fighting to succeed Julius Caesar, Octavian paid off his soldiers with farms appropriated from landowners like Virgil's family.) His poem uses pastoral tropes to protest land confiscations and extol pastoral life, "sitting careless in the shade."

The dollar bill, too

Virgil imagined that happy days would come back: "The great order of the ages is born afresh, and justice returns." That phrase was included in the Great Seal of the United States and is printed on the American dollar bill— an indication of the breadth of Arcadia's influence, from poetry and art to music, theater and even to government.

The temporary essence of life was reinforced in The Arcadian Shepherds, a Nicolas Poussin painting that depicted herdsmen from antiquity. In the painting, a Latin phrase appears on a tomb discovered by youthful figures in classical garb: "Et in Arcadia ego"— "Even in Arcadia, I am there," a cautionary reminder of the temporary nature of life and the inevitability of death. (The "I" is death.)

The Art Museum's current exhibition displays publications of the Virgil poem that were ornately illustrated by Aristide Maillol. Oils from the 1820s and 1830s by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot show how he added maidens, goatherds and animals to classical landscapes. You can observe the influence of Poussin and Corot in later canvases by Seurat. Then you come to a large room containing the show's most impressive works.

Dazzling jungle

Rousseau's The Dream is a dazzling jungle with animals, a piper and a nude on what, at first, seems to be an incongruous sofa. Rousseau explained that the woman was dreaming that she had been enchanted and transported into the forest— that is, Arcadia.

Gauguin considered Where Do We Come From...Where Are We Going? as his testament, his most personal canvas. It's very long, at four feet by twelve, amidst a lush landscape, and contains a progression through the stages of life where the destination is a question mark.

Cézanne's The Large Bathers, is a seven-foot by eight-foot masterpiece in which arches of trees frame a group of naked people on a riverbank. Matisse's Bathers by a River is even larger: eight feet by almost 13 feet divided into three vertical panels, each with a separate figure. It makes a powerful pairing with the big Cézanne.

How about Ravel?

Four other paintings of bathers by Cézanne, in adjacent rooms, reveal varied aspects of his vision of Arcadia, including playful energy and celebration of women's strong backs. Matisse's early Nude in a Wood is close to the look of Cézanne yet with wilder splashes of color.

It's too bad we can't hear some Daphnis et Chloe music by Ravel, who was contemporary with many of these painters. Would the museum consider adding some discreet music as background to the visual arts?

The exhibit's later stages feature less well-known Russian and German expressionist interpretations of Arcadia, by Goncharova, Roerich, Kirchner, Marc and Pechstein. Franz Marc wrote about his "pantheistic empathy with nature," but his dreams of harmonious and peaceful life ended when he was killed in the First World War.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read Steve Cohen's review of the catalogue for "Visions of Arcadia," click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.