Malibu, Calif.
A number of recent scholars and scholarly exhibitions have studied the rebirth of classicism in European modernist art produced in the years and wake of World War I. Many have argued that the radical figurative art of this period, marked by monumental forms, fluid line, ordered compositions and frequent evocations of a mythic, Mediterranean arcadia, can be aligned with the era’s bourgeois conservatism, reactionary politics and, at its darkest, the rising specter of totalitarian regimes.
In a provocative and demanding new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Villa, itself a pristine reproduction of an ancient artifact and ideal setting in which to contemplate the relevance of classical art in the modern world, Christopher Green of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Jens M. Daehner, a Getty curator of antiquities, have revisited and crucially revamped this well-trodden critical terrain. By juxtaposing the work of four profoundly disparate artists—Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger and Francis Picabia—with a selection of ancient artworks, all but one of the latter from the Getty’s collection, they compel us to reconsider in the broadest possible terms the appeal of classicism in an age when it was not only an abiding aesthetic and political force but a living phenomenon that demanded modern reinvention.
Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950
‘The Soothsayer’s Recompense’ (1913), by Giorgio de Chirico.
The exhibition is organized by theme, rather than chronologically, and studiously avoids pedantic pairings that might suggest definitive sources or direct comparisons between old and new. Instead, galleries such as that devoted to “Myths and Stories” brilliantly capture the dialogue across centuries that allowed modern artists to imagine redolent new contexts for classical art. In such dreamlike, revelatory images as “The Soothsayer’s Recompense” (1913), for example, de Chirico creates a haunting, modern locale for his painted evocation of the “Sleeping Ariadne,” one of the most renowned sculptural remnants of antiquity (de Chirico knew life-size depictions in Italy of the mythic, abandoned nymph, not the smaller figure here on view). Betraying none of the original narrative and only the most streamlined, modern vision of a classical arcade and deserted, raking piazza, de Chirico’s painting and especially his Ariadne, frozen in stony silence, powerfully convey the wistful, elegiac aura that the memory of the antique could summon in a contemporary setting.
Picasso, too, evoked the presence of classical sculpture in his painting, though usually in more emphatic and accessible terms. In such monumental, immobile figures as “The Source” (1921), a massively conceived and thickly painted reclining river goddess, the artist stages, as Mr. Green astutely argues, a sculpture vivante against a scrimlike landscape, and, in her far-from-elegant form and overtly theatrical space, exploits the artifice and inauthenticity of a static, classical ideal as reimagined in his work.
Modern Antiquity:
Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, and Picabia in the Presence of the Antique
J. Paul Getty Museum
Through Jan. 16
Any hint of parodic critique disappears, however, in Picasso’s lyrical, neoclassical drawings from the 1920s that explore the timeless virtues of classical line and form. In a connecting corridor in the exhibition, entitled “Graphic Mythologies,” his “Nessus and Dejanira” (1920), for example, is aligned with painted red-figured and white-ground Greek funerary jars and an incised, bronze Etruscan mirror to show how the subtle economy of means that marked Picasso’s invigorated and elegant new linear style owed as much to the classical past as did his painted evocations of ancient sculptures.
Picabia’s strange, decorative paintings, known as “transparencies,” hang in several of the exhibition’s galleries, and offer far more literal quotations from a past the artist refused to reinvent. With large, overlaid outlines of recognizable ancient and renaissance forms and stubbornly opaque subjects, they critique, as Picabia himself suggested, what he saw as the counterfeit classicism of his peers. One of them, the “Adam and Eve” of 1931, is exhibited near ancient Greek drinking vessels. Known as “eye cups,” they feature, as does the later painting, large staring eyes, and perhaps, the curators venture, an uncanny shared fascination with the mesmerizing power of the gaze.
Throughout the exhibition, the thoughtful array of selected antiquities and early-20th-century works also makes clear how indelibly our vision of ancient art has been shaped by modern artists. The missing limbs and head of the unrestored, Roman “Torso of a Draped Female” seem utterly dispensable when the sculpture is seen in the company of “The Poet’s Anguish” (1914-15), one of many enigmatic paintings in which de Chirico crowns an armless classical statue with a metaphysical mannequin’s head. To modern eyes, the focus on the beautifully articulated classical “Torso” is thoroughly of a piece not only with de Chirico but, as Mr. Daehner has suggested, with the most forceful, fragmentary sculptures of Auguste Rodin.
In far more legible fashion, Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) celebrates its modern antiquity as it seamlessly merges past and present. Painted on a saturated, blank background the artist appropriated from modern advertising, his nude, an ancient Aphrodite type transfigured by Léger’s gleaming industrial aesthetic, is thrust into our space and compels us to see the beauty and also the modernity of classical form. For Léger, as for Picasso, de Chirico and many of their vanguard peers, “the art of antiquity had meaning only if,” as Mr. Green writes, “it spoke in the present tense.”
Ms. Lewis, who writes frequently about the arts, teaches art history at Trinity College, Hartford.
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