"Visions of Arcadia' at the Art Museum (3rd review)

Arcadia isn't a place one tends to associate with Philadelphia, Fairmount Park notwithstanding. This was even less the case as the Philadelphia Museum of Art closed out its summer show, "Visions of Arcadia," with its entrance blocked by the giant sound stage of a rock music festival whose dulcet tones doubtless sent any nearby fauns and nymphs scurrying for shelter. I caught the show on a more peaceful day, marred only by the occasional cell phone.

Arcadia was and is a rugged area in southwestern Greece, a famously urban civilization not given to sentimentalizing its backwaters. The Roman poets, particularly Virgil, imagined it as a pastoral ideal and a mental refuge from that monster city of antiquity, Rome. After the shock of the barbarian invasions, people were disinclined to romanticize open spaces; and medieval art, depicting cities enclosed behind high protective walls, scarcely acknowledged anything beyond them.

This attitude changed with the Renaissance. If I had to pinpoint the moment of transition, I'd say it was with Masaccio's Adam and Eve. Masaccio's fresco caused a sensation by its realistic depiction of the nude human form, but what really stimulated the imagination was what the painting left out, rather than what it showed: namely the Eden from which its two figures were being driven.

Backdrop for nudity

Eden was the perfect place to which humanity could never return or even so much as glimpse. The bodies of the fleeing Adam and Eve are already fully mortal in their unstylized and unidealized corporeality, and their mortality is what bars the gates of the earthly paradise to them. Eden was no country for old men.

Arcadia, once Renaissance artists had discovered landscape, was the next best substitute. It provided the perfect backdrop to depict nudity (especially female nudity) and to portray sexuality and fecundity in general. No bears or wolves prowled here, let alone barbarians, and only the mischief of fauns added spice to the scene.

The only unwelcome guest was the unavoidable one: Death, who announced his presence in the famous classical tag line, "Et in Arcadia ego" ("And I too am in Arcadia").

Industrial suburbs

The French were a little slow to pick up on the Arcadian vogue, but with Poussin and Claude they entered the game, and Arcadia was to prove a more durable theme for French artists than those of any other country. The Art Museum's show focused on the climactic moment of the tradition in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries— also the climax of French art, now mysteriously gone missing— but the accompanying catalogue, as my BSR colleague Steve Cohen points out, is a far richer and more comprehensive account of the Arcadian phenomenon. If less is not necessarily more, however, it is sometimes enough, and the 60-odd works in the show were just about right to make its point.

A full account of French Arcadia would have included several examples of Poussin and Claude, and the important 18th-Century representatives, Watteau and Fragonard. Instead, there is only a single, early Poussin, very much influenced by Titian, and then a gap until Corot, an enormously significant figure but one whose works defy easy classification— some indeed are Arcadian, but others are more Romantic than classicizing.

This situation introduces a complicating factor, because Arcadia, like any perdurable archetype, must adapt itself to changing perceptions of society if it is to retain its viability. Watteau and Fragonard set their Arcadia in an aristocratic dream world of lords and ladies at their leisure, but by the late 19th Century the point of reference was bourgeois, and Arcadia often appeared in the setting of a public park, sometimes with industrial suburbs in the background.

Seurat's send-up

The culminating vision here is Seurat's Grande Jatte, which, like his Models, is both a celebration and a send-up of the classical tradition. That work wasn't in the show, but a fascinating oil sketch for the completed painting was, with the park empty of all figures and a dazzling alteration of shadow and light defining the charged landscape.

Of course, the hand of Poussin still lay heavily on the French tradition, and the works of the once-celebrated Puvis de Chavannes as well as a later epigone, Maurice Denis, show the decadence that sets in when a master example becomes merely an imitated one.

The real commentary that problematized the received tradition is Paul Gauguin's great Tahitian tableau, Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98). Gauguin's South Sea islanders, isolated even when shown in groups and with an androgynous central figure whose arms are raised in supplication, convey not serenity but an air of diffuse anxiety.

In the lower left-hand corner, an old woman looks balefully at the viewer, as if disinviting him. The gold lunettes at each upper corner emphasize the artifice of the scene. This is not humanity au naturel, but a dispirited-looking troupe play-acting at paradise.

Naked dominatrix

Henri Rousseau's The Dream, executed in the year of his death (1910), makes a similar point about alienation (and also colonial conquest) in his image of a female nude stretched out on a red velvet sofa in the midst of a thick jungle. The various animals that populate it look out of what seems a Peaceable Kingdom; but the nude, while wholly disconnected from them, is a master image both of domination and exclusion.

There's much more in this troubling work than that. But on the level of Arcadian representation, the meaning is clear: This is not paradise troubled, but paradise lost.

Cézanne's large Bathers, one of the Art Museum's own crown jewels, de-idealizes (or at least declassicizes) the female nude even as it reaffirms the Arcadian tradition.

In Matisse's great Bathers by the River (1909-17), the figures become solemn caryatids divided by vertical panels, a revolutionary spatialization that assimilates Cubism and suggests monumentality frozen in time. It's perhaps the culminating vision of the entire tradition. The show might well have concluded with it, for although the tradition continued in France and elsewhere for another few generations (and arguably beyond), its great modern moment had passed.

End of the dream

Cézanne and Matisse are not an easy act to follow, as even Picasso (who subsumed rather than depicted Arcadia in some of his earlier work, emphasizing male rather than female sexuality) would discover. But the coup de grace for Arcadia, at least for the present, was the Great War. It was difficult for a vision of bucolic bliss to survive a carnage that shook Western civilization to its core.

In our current dystopic world, lost Edens are a bridge too far. But Arcadia kept its hold on the Western imagination for two millennia, with great adaptability to times and climes. Grand archetypes have a way of re-emerging, sometimes in much altered guises. In the meantime, the Art Museum's mostly successful show has kept the conversation going.

♦


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