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ShareWASHINGTON — During the late 19th century, the art world experienced an explosion of color, light and energy, as the celebrated impressionism movement created moments on canvas instilled with a beguiling joie de vie.
But the vibrant palette of the Impressionist style also had a decided counterpoint — an art more introspective and foreboding.
This flip side of 19th century art currently provides the subject of an intriguing exhibition here at the National Gallery of Art.
“The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900” taps a darker artistic vein of the late 1800s with works designed not so much for public display, but for personal viewing inside an owner’s home. The exhibit was organized by Peter Parshall, curator of old master prints at the National Gallery, and contains 120 prints and sculptures produced by an array of famous and lesser-known European artists.
You won’t find much in the way of feel-good art here. Nor does the show necessarily carry a risque connotation. Rather, the thematically ordered collection delves into complex emotional and psychological states.
The highlight of the opening section, “Possession,” proves as witty as it does provocative. A lithograph by Frenchman Georges Bottini, “Sagot’s Lithography Gallery” (1898), presents two smartly attired Parisian women perusing an outdoor display plying images of prostitutes.
The “Nature” segment explores artistic attempts to reflect an interior expression. Landscapes pieces, such as French artist Adolphe Appian’s view of a fisherman amid a dark forest realm in “Nocturne” (1887), often blend moody atmospheres with a meditative quality to produce a certain visual poetry.
Creative responses to the urban environment mix fantasy with menace in “The City.”
A biting skepticism about the changes brought on by modernity underscores art in this section. “Cholera in Paris” (1865) by French artist Francois-Nicolas Chifflart offers a sharp contrast to the colorful bustling streets found in Impressionist art with a striking interpretation of death hanging over the city during a cholera epidemic in 1865. In “Satan Sowing Tares over Paris, from Sataniques” (c. 1882/1883), Belgian artist Felicien Rops placed a towering skeletal figure striding over the city, strewing bodies from its boney hand.
Human relativity to the animal world range from the whimsical to tragic in the art devoted to “Creatures.”
The writings of Charles Darwin on evolution inspired many artists, albeit the result was not always very pleasant. In “Bear Pit in the Berlin Zoo” (1851), German artist Adolph Menzel opted for a playful mood, with bears peering up toward curious human onlookers. By contrast, “The Moles” (1854) by French engraver Felix Bracquemond has a more gruesome gist. Ten dead moles hang from a tree in the foreground, as their execution strolls off in the background, holding a rod dangling more moles.
The envisaging of introspective moments serves as the focus of “Reverie.”
Female subjects figure heavily in these works. A quartet of etchings by French artist Albert Besnard includes two spellbinding pieces. “Morphine Addicts” (1887) depicts two seated women in a tranquilized narcotic daze, while “Intimacy” (1889) communicates a more hypnotic state, as a young woman sits transfixed before the glow of an unseen fire. Nearby, a drypoint by Norwegian master Edvard Munch, “Girl at the Window” (1894), possesses an uneasy sedate tension.
A subtle erotic connotation surfaces in one particular group of works found in “Obsession.”
German artist Max Klinger explored one man’s fixation with a lost woman’s glove through a 10-piece series entitled “Abduction” (1878/1880). After the initial image of the man’s discovery of the glove, the sequence evolves into a neurotic crusade flush with symbolism and a fetish overtone.
In a sense, the exhibit’s final gallery, “Abjection” and “Violence and Death,” is not unlike coming up the proverbial traffic accident; it’s a scene most of us dread, but we can’t look away.
Three prints by German artist Kathe Kollwitz impart despair and overwhelming grief, particularly in her “Woman With a Dead Child” (1903), which shows a mother cradling and seemingly weeping over her deceased child.
Another Klinger etching series chronicles a true-life event: the attempted drowning suicide by an abused woman and her young child. In the series, the pair plunges into the water. The child dies, but the mother survives. In the third and final print, the mother stands trial for the murder of the child.
“The Acid Thrower” (1894), a photo-relief and watercolor stenciling by Swiss-born designer Eugene Grasset, illuminates an act that was considered a crime of passion at the time, typically committed by women who had been abandoned by men. The bluish female in the piece has an ill-tempered demeanor, and appears ready to strike as she holds a small bowl filled with acid.
Although a counterpoint to impressionism, the exhibit does not necessarily reject the popular movement. In fact, several leading Impressionist artists are represented here.
Works by famed French Impressionist Edouard Manet, for instance, appear in this part of exhibition.
A morbid air hangs over one Manet rendering of a dead bullfighter. The other of a dead soldier conveys the harsh combat and brutality that occurred during the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871.
“The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900” remains on view through Jan. 18, 2010. The exhibit will travel to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago (Feb. 11-June 10).
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IF YOU GO:
The National Gallery of Art is located between 3rd Street and 9th Street at Constitution Avenue NW
Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday
Admission: Free
Exhibit Web site: www.nga.gov/exhibitions/darkerinfo.shtm
