Broad Strokes, page 5
Marching along the cold avenues, then rattling on the subway back downtown, I couldn’t shake my depression. This was why Labille-Guiard was nearly lost to history. Her most ambitious work had been destroyed. And though she fought the Academy quota on women, that long fight came to nothing. Her students did not go on to glorious careers. She had no successors.
My seminar presentation was exhilarating and, at nearly two hours, exhausting. In the darkened room no one could see my sweaty hairline and flushed face, lipstick gone, mascara smearing, but I felt exposed. Such passion I knew was gravely unacademic, maybe even unseemly.
Lit up behind me was Labille-Guiard’s final painting of Vincent, from 1795. It’s a tender portrait of an aging fellow artist holding what power he still wields in a volatile world: paintbrushes and a palette. Unidealized and clear-eyed, it is nonetheless a portrait forged, like her career itself, in fierce loyalty and love.
Maybe the only good thing to come out of the revolution for Labille-Guiard was the legalization of divorce. In 1800, after decades of devoted artistic and romantic partnership, she and Vincent were married. Labille-Guiard lived just three more years.
From out of the dark, Rosenblum’s voice.
“Where is it now?” His tone said he liked the painting.
“The Louvre,” I sighed, thinking but not adding: They don’t deserve it.
Weeks later, Rosenblum stopped me in the hall, handing me the slide of a painting possibly by Labille-Guiard to authenticate for a midtown gallery. The sort of task promising grad students were given. To be singled out for my work on Labille-Guiard felt like an art historical benediction, and I was grateful. Rosenblum was a kind and excellent teacher.
Just not, it turns out, my teacher. But he pointed the way to her.
I put the slide in the back pocket of my binder, and did not look at it again. I had already decided to follow Labille-Guiard, not study her. I wanted to be like her, to explore what talent might lie inside me with passion and courage. The way she’d taught me to. At the end of the school year I was leaving, to write.
CHAPTER 4:
MARIE DENISE VILLERS
Perhaps the greatest picture ever painted by a woman is the portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes.
—THOMAS B. HESS, ARTNEWS
Its cleverly concealed weaknesses, its ensemble made up from a thousand subtle artifices, all seem to reveal the feminine spirit.
—CHARLES STERLING, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
AS A BABY ART HISTORIAN, I was taught that the very essence of my training was in cultivating an unerring sense of connoisseurship.
Um, what?
Basically: knowing who made what, just by looking at it. To be able to perceive, by attitude, gesture, mood, and style, what belongs to whom. A lofty goal. Daunting. But when I got into grad school in New York at an old-world bastion of connoisseurship training, I believed such power would someday be mine.
At lunch one day when still an undergraduate—newly cocky about my acceptance to grad school—I was eating at an outdoor table with a new boyfriend (fellow art history student, now husband) when Professor Alfred Moir came out, tray in hand, and asked to join us. I licked my teeth, feeling for lettuce bits. My boyfriend, a grad student used to proximity with the great man, was capable of inviting him to sit down.
Moir was a formidable presence, bigheaded, bearded, and curly haired, as classical and timeless looking as Laocoön (look it up). But he was also charming, earnest, and funny. I couldn’t wait to drop my good news about going to New York.
I finally did it, in some ham-handed look at me gesture. Instead of heaping on praise, as every other person in the know had done, Moir pushed back his chair and crossed his big arms. “The Institute, huh?”
I nodded, awaiting congratulations.
Moir nodded back. “You know the problem with connoisseurship?”
I did not. I had no idea there was a problem with connoisseurship.
“It doesn’t take into account the artist waking up on the wrong side of the bed.” He leaned forward and lifted a finger, as if to shake it in my face. “It doesn’t consider the really shitty day.”
Years later, when I’d discover that Moir had been one of the first Caravaggio scholars to champion Artemisia Gentileschi, I’d think, “Yeah! That’s my guy!” I was team Moir from that afternoon on.
I never forgot it: The Really Shitty Day.
Later it would occur to me, what about the opposite? The Day When Everything Goes Right. The Fucking Excellent Day.
In 1917, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York received what was, even by their august standards, a fabulous gift. One Isaac Dudley Fletcher bequeathed a monumental painting, Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, by father and undisputed master of eighteenth-century French Neoclassicism, Jacques Louis David.
The Met could hardly overstate the importance of the gift. The original press release (they had them already in 1917) announced, “As one of the masterpieces of this artist, the Fletcher picture will henceforth be known in the art world as ‘the New York David,’ just as we speak of the Man with a Fur Cap of the Hermitage, or the Sistine Madonna of Dresden.” In other words, a landmark work in the Met’s already world-class collection.
The press release also crowed over the impressive original price: “Mr. Fletcher is said to have paid $200,000 for this great David.” In 1971, Thomas B. Hess wrote, “The Fletchers paid the contemporary equivalent of about $2 million.” So how much would that be today? Who knows how to even figure out such things? But let’s say it would be millions and millions in today’s dollars.
Why was Hess writing about the cost of the Met’s painting—a gift, after all—more than fifty years later?
Because, as it turns out, “the New York David” is not by David. It’s by a woman. And that changes everything.
Right away the Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes was one of the Met’s most popular works. If they’d had merchandizing back in 1917, it would have been slapped on umbrellas and coasters and sold like beer at a ballpark. Which is to say, widely and well. Generations of visitors penned letters telling the Met how they adored it, how it moved them, and what it meant to them.
Marie Denise Villers. Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes. 1801.
It is a haunting painting. Standing before it, it’s difficult to look away. For years I paused in front of the young and compelling Charlotte du Val d’Ognes on my near-daily visits to Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait with Two Pupils. They hung on adjacent walls. Sometimes I lingered with Charlotte for as long as I spent with Labille-Guiard, the reason I’d come. The feeling never left me that if the gallery would just clear out and leave me alone with her, she might speak. There was something she wanted me to know.
Charlotte wears a simple white dress and hunches in a slightly adolescent, but not un-winning, way. Her only adornments are a rose-colored sash tied just below her small breasts, a simple brooch holding together a scarf at her neck, and a single pin in her upturned hair. Thrown over the back of her chair—she’s sitting on part of it—is a plain, solid-colored shawl that matches her ribbon. This is not the fabulously attired artist we’ve come to expect (compare to Judith Leyster, or Labille-Guiard nearby), though this young woman is an artist.
In her right hand she holds a pencil or pen, and with her left she balances a large cardboard folder across her thighs, of a type traditionally used to hold drawings. She stares out so intently that we—or whatever we stand in place of—must be the subject of her sketch. Her expression is impossible to read. Is she smiling or serious? Thoughtful or sad? She is mysterious. She might be called the Mona Lisa of the Met.
The simple chair where she sits is the only piece of furniture in an otherwise empty room. The wall behind her is dark, nothing to see, but there is a window and, looking closely, the pane nearest to Charlotte is cracked. Through the broken pane we can just make out a man and woman on some kind of raised balcony, their indistinct faces turned toward each other. The woman in the background looks to be dressed like Charlotte in the foreground, in a white dress, with a rosy shawl around her shoulders.
It’s a great painting.
But what does it mean? What’s happening? How are we supposed to understand it?
No one knows for sure. But had I encountered it back when it was supposed to have been by David, I know how I’d interpret it. I’d say it was about a love affair. That the woman in the background and the woman in the foreground are the same person, that two separate moments in time occur within the same picture, as in early Renaissance paintings. See Masaccio’s Tribute Money for a good example.
And then I’d think that the broken window symbolizes a loss of innocence, a sexual awakening. Maybe the sitter’s mysterious secret is that she’s pregnant. The picture it reminds me of most is on the other end of the century, Edvard Munch’s Puberty from the mid-1890s, a painting unquestionably about sexual anxiety.
But, that’s me.
And anyway, our painting is not by a man.
The first frisson of dissent came from within the Met itself. Charles Sterling, a French art historian who was at the Louvre until fleeing the Nazis (along with most of Europe’s Jewish artists and art historians, probably the greatest boon American art has ever known and certainly the greatest for New York) and was after the war attached to both museums, made a startling discovery. In 1947 he was preparing catalogs for the Met’s French paintings collection, when he found an engraving from the official Salon of 1801. There, he saw something chilling: the David portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, depicted hanging on the Salon wall. Why was this a problem? Because David had loudly refused to show at the 1801 Salon. If the Met David was in the engraving, then it had been in the Salon, which meant it was not by David.
In 1951, Sterling published a piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin revealing publicly that it was not by David and tentatively assigning it to Constance Charpentier. She’d shown work at the 1801 Salon and her one known signed painting, Melancholy, also depicts a woman in white, a bit hunchy, and looking to the right.
Sterling was surprised when his possible attribution was instantly taken as gospel. But it mostly was, and it was big news for academic and mainstream publications alike. It was reported as fact in TIME magazine, and in the Saturday Review, where James Thrall Soby found “a certain poetic justice in the fact that an outstanding icon of a masculine epoch is probably the work of a woman.”
Still, no one much celebrated having found a previously unknown painter who was equal to the great David. Though the public continued to love the painting—they may not have known David from Delacroix, at any rate—some academics had a change of heart about the painting itself.
Sterling (see start of chapter) said some not-very-nice things, beginning with, “The notion that our portrait may have been painted by a woman is, let us confess, an attractive idea.” Why attractive? Because it explains everything wrong with the work: “cleverly concealed weaknesses” and “a thousand subtle artifices” that all add up to “the feminine spirit.”
In other words: Isn’t that just like a woman?
After the reattribution, scholars also would claim they were never fooled. British critic James Laver wrote, “Although the painting is extremely attractive as a period piece, there are certain weaknesses of which a painter of David’s caliber would not have been guilty.”
Marie Victoire Lemoine. The Interior of an Atelier of a Woman Painter. 1789.
But none other than Bernard Berenson, one of the most renowned art historians of his day and famous for his work in attributions, still considered it one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. And so also continued to insist that it must be by David.
It may be worth saying here that though the Met itself had published in its January 1951 Bulletin that the famous painting was not by the famous painter, it wasn’t until 1977 that David’s name was removed from the bottom of the picture frame.
After he retired from museum work, Sterling crossed Fifth Ave and became a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts in 1969. I would attend grad school at the Institute twenty years later, when a woman named Margaret Oppenheimer was working on her PhD there. I didn’t know her (though wish I had), but that’s not the point.
The point is that while still a doctoral candidate, Oppenheimer realized that Sterling was wrong (he would not have been surprised). By astounding coincidence—considering that less than 15 percent of the artists showing at the 1801 Salon were women—she discovered that the Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes must be by another female painter, Marie Denise Villers.
About whom, little is known. Her maiden name was Lemoine and she went by “Nisa.” She was married to an architect. She came from a family of artists, and her two older sisters, Marie Elisabeth Gabiou and Marie Victoire Lemoine, were also painters. Perhaps her mother, like my mother, believed girls are best named Mary.
One sister, Marie Victoire Lemoine, has her own work, The Interior of an Atelier of a Woman Painter, in the Met’s collection. It’s not found in the same grand gallery as Villers’s painting, which hangs alongside masterful portraits by David, Labille-Guiard, and Vigée-Lebrun. It is, in fact, rarely on view. But Lemoine’s painting also depicts a young artist, bent over a folder of drawing paper balanced on her thighs. And there the similarities end. It’s just not very good.
Lemoine’s painting is thought to be a tribute to Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who, dressed all in white (not ideal for painting surely) with a long mahlstick in hand, stands before a canvas depicting the goddess Athena, while her apprentice sketches at her feet. The student is believed to be Lemoine herself, and the painting a not entirely successful homage to her teacher.
But then, even Villers’s own paintings aren’t nearly as good as the one in the Met. Oppenheimer based her reattribution on an oil modello, a reduced-scale preliminary version, of a lost painting by Villers, A Young Woman Seated by a Window. It depicts a woman in white who looks similar to the sitter in the Met’s painting, down to a lovely oval-shaped face, updone hairdo, and the very same pin in her hair. What’s more, she wears white, her body hooks to the right, and she sits on a window seat.
But even with all that, it’s hard to believe it’s by the same person. It’s bland and a little illustrate-y, more like a Maxfield Parrish print in my grandparents’ bedroom than the towering genius of Jacques Louis David. The only signed work by Villers in a major collection is Study of a Woman from Nature, at the Louvre, where Sterling himself must have seen it. It’s also a bit like the Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes. A young woman, this time mostly in black, facing right, bent over tying her shoe. Her face is similarly shaped to the Met painting, her hair is also up. She looks out at us.
But there is no magic.
So how can the Met’s portrait possibly be by Villers?
Marie Denise Villers. A Young Woman Seated by a Window. 1801.
Marie Denise Villers. Study of a Woman from Nature (also sometimes called Madame Soustra). 1802.
We need a closer look at the painting’s ostensible subject, Charlotte du Val d’Ognes. In a Metropolitan Museum of Art lecture from 2014 (online, and well worth seeing), art historian and consummate gumshoe Ann Higonnet describes traveling to Paris in search of the very room where the young woman sits for her portrait.
And finding it.
It is a gallery of the Louvre itself. An atelier dedicated to female art students, where they could receive instruction (separate and unequal) apart from male colleagues. Further sleuthing by Higonnet concludes that while the painting’s authorship should be transferred to Villers, the identity of the sitter remains Charlotte du Val d’Ognes. Both studied there at the time the portrait was done.
Higonnet’s discovery helps us close an important gap in our psychic understanding of the painting: It’s the portrait of one young female artist by another.
So it’s not about sexual anxiety after all, but about artistic anxiety. Though in the case of early nineteenth-century women artists, the two can hardly be untwined. For the vast majority of female art students then, giving in to romantic love meant giving up painting. And in Marie Denise Villers’s portrait, what separates the interior of the Louvre (where art is made and fame secured) from the outside world (of romance and domestic life) is a broken pane of glass.
Charlotte du Val d’Ognes is an object lesson. Like so many women, she gave up the dream of success as a professional artist when she became a wife. Her giving up is not surprising. Not just because social pressure bore down on women to put their husbands and children before all else. But it was also a terrible time to be a woman artist in France. “Although politically advanced,” notes feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, “the revolution was in many ways socially conservative.”
The gains that women painters like Labille-Guiard hoped to achieve never materialized.
In fact, things only got worse. By 1804, Napoleon had shut down every avenue of official education and exhibition for women artists in France. Not until the end of the century would women be admitted to the prestigious École des Beaux-Art. And only then because the rise of Modernism was making its sort of classical training obsolete.
Villers had already been married five years when she painted the portrait of her fellow art student, Charlotte du Val d’Ognes. Her husband, it seems, supported her ambition. Villers carried on as a professional even as things in France became more difficult. Her last painting is dated 1814. She died seven years later. What happened in between is unknown, though of course, as we’ve seen, paintings are easily lost or misattributed.
