"Duel after the Ball
(Sortie du bal masque or Un duel apres le bal)," Jean-Leon
Gerome, 1857. Oil on canvas from the collection of the State
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Gerome and
Goupil:
NEW YORK CITY - Organized by the Dahesh Museum of Art, the Musée
Goupil in Bordeaux, and the Frick Art & Historical Center in
Pittsburgh, the international loan exhibition "Gérôme &
Goupil: Art and Enterprise" makes its American debut at the
Dahesh Museum of Art, at 601 Fifth Avenue, and runs through May
5. New York will be able to see a spectacular group of
masterworks by France's greatest academic painter, Jean-Léon
Gérôme - the largest number exhibited in the city since the
Nineteenth Century - as well as the first American showing of
extraordinary reproductive prints of these paintings published
contemporaneously by the artist's dealer, Adolphe Goupil, and
today in the collection of the Musée Goupil.
"There has not been an exhibition in the United States devoted to
Jean-Léon Gérôme in nearly 30 years and never one devoted to the
House of Goupil & Cie and its founder Adolphe Goupil
(1806-1893), the most renowned art dealer/publisher in Nineteenth
Century France," says Stephen Edidin, curator of the Dahesh
Museum of Art.
Over a period that lasted nearly a century, Goupil developed and
utilized emerging printmaking and photographic technologies to
meet a growing popular demand for inexpensive art reproductions -
a demand they created in part and sought to satisfy. Although
Goupil & Cie was centered in Paris, it opened offices and
galleries throughout Europe, the Americas, and the Near and Far
East. In doing so, it helped create the international art market
we know today.
Many of Goupil's and Gérôme's clients were American. The
wealthiest families, including the Astors and Vanderbilts,
purchased paintings, while the expanding middle class bought
prints. These sales made Gérôme into an international celebrity,
blurring, long before Andy Warhol, the lines between high art and
popular culture.
"Pollice Verso/Thumbs Down," Jean-Leon Gerome, 1872. Oil on
canvas.
Curated by Pierre-Lin Renié of the Musée Goupil, the exhibition
features over 20 paintings and sculptures by Gérôme, most of them
originally sold by Goupil's. Among the well-known works on view
are "Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down)" - the inspiration for last
summer's hit film, Ridley Scott's Gladiator - "Almeh
(Belly Dancer)," "Arabs Crossing the Desert," "Cairene Horse
Dealer," "Cock Fight," "Duel After the Ball," "King Candaules,"
"Louis XIV and Moliere," "Moorish Bath," "Phryne," "Plain of
Thebes," "The Prisoner," and "Recreation in a Russian Camp."
Over 40 reproductions of these and other works, in various
formats ranging from small photographs (cartes de visite) to
large photogravures and prints, illustrate how new technologies
enabled the widespread dissemination of Goupil's prints and
photographs for all budgets. Many of the prints are themselves of
exquisite quality and introduce a new audience to generally
disregarded area of printmaking.
Public and private collections in the United States, France,
Russia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have lent works from the
exhibition, including the State Hermitage Museum, the
Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Hearst San Simeon State
Historical Monument.
The Musée Goupil has also lent important documents - family
photos, ledgers, catalogues, books, and illustrated magazines -
which demonstrate the economic benefits that accrued to Goupil
& Cie from their contractual relationship with Gérôme, who
became Goupil's son-in-law and, thus, part of the family
business. The enterprise created by a brilliant businessman and a
talented artist, reinforced by contractual and kinship ties,
provides a fascinating case history in the industrialization of
art in Nineteenth Century France and the mass production and
marketing of sought-after images, images that became as well
known and satisfying as movies or television images are today.
The exhibition explores the intertwined relationship between the
artist and his dealer/publisher/father-in-law as well as
detailing how the machine de guerre created by Goupil actually
worked.
"Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise" opens with Gérôme's
most grandiloquent and thoroughly cinematic image, "Pollice
Verso" (1878), a scene of a gladiator in the Colosseum.
Scrupulously researched, worked on for years, this scene of the
arena and gladiators dramatically poised, waiting for thumbs up
or thumbs down, was one that fascinated Gérôme. This is the same
125-year-old painting that served as a catalyst and reference for
Twenty-First Century Hollywood filmmaker Ridley Scott, who used
its very composition, costuming, coloration, and treatment of
light to set up his own sound stage and imagine the grisly Roman
contest. When he bought it in 1872, it was reproduced in
photographic form in four sizes and sold for three years;
thereafter it was reproduced as a photogravure. Goupil might sell
such reproductions for at least 20 years.
The exhibition follows Gérôme's career through his paintings, as
he moves from Classical Antique and Neo-Grec subjects in his
youth to the Orientalist subjects in his middle and later years,
while occasionally painting modern history subjects or Parisian
scenes. His virtuosity allowed him to produce simultaneously very
different kinds of work for the Salon. For the 1861 Salon, for
example, he submitted one Egyptian genre piece, four Neo-Grec
works, and a composition set in the Seventeenth Century.
The works exhibited span his first showing at the Salon in 1846
to 1873, the height of his career, a period of enormous
productivity for the artist and a time when conditions for
building a worldwide art market were good. The mid- to late
Nineteenth Century saw rapid economic expansion and vitality in
Europe and America. There was more money in circulation, a bigger
middle class, a desire for French art, new reproductive
technologies, and a belief in the moral virtue of cultural
consumption. And the world was becoming smaller. By 1869, the
Suez Canal connected Europe to India and the Union Pacific and
the Central Pacific railroads connected the eastern and western
United States. Better communication made it easier to market and
sell prints and paintings worldwide.
Two works of Gérôme demonstrate the effectiveness of massive
distribution through the reproductive processes perfected by the
House of Goupil. Various formats and types of reproduction, two
plates and a lithograph, accompany "After the Ball," while
photogravures in black and white and color complement "King
Candaules." Gérôme often made reductions or replicas of his most
popular paintings, sometimes reducing their dimensions, other
times actually shifting the compositions to please a customer or
make changes he felt would improve a work following its first
rendering. Multiple versions of one painting indicated its
popularity. The photogravure process also permitted making
variations to the plate, explaining slight variations within
prints on view here.
Goupil: Innovator And Entrepreneur
Adolph Goupil (1806-1893) was a descendent of the Drouais family
of painters. In 1829, he founded the Paris firm of Goupil, based
on a partnership with print-seller Henry Rittner, who arrived
from Stuttgart with the intention of selling German prints. The
firm's initial purpose was to make and publish original prints
and engravings of paintings using the traditional processes of
lithography and copperplate engraving. By developing and pursuing
such newer processes as photography for photogravure later in the
century, seeking always to mass-produce prints at lowest cost
with the highest quality, Goupil brought art publishing into the
industrial age.
By 1846, he expanded his business to include the sale of drawings
and paintings. Exclusive reproduction rights were included in his
contracts with artists, and before long he was able to control
and profit from all stages of the production process. His small
print shop on the Boulevard Montmartre developed into an
international industrial company with branches around the world,
including but not limited to Alexandria, Dresden, Geneva, Zurich,
Athens, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Florence, Havana, Melbourne, New
York, Sydney, Warsaw, and Johannesburg. A busy factory in
Asnieres, outside of Paris, employed engravers, photographers,
and printers who produced copies of artists' works. These were
sent off to various outlets - shops in Paris, provincial print
sellers, branches or warehouses abroad.
The first generation of artists that he published, Delaroche,
Gleyre, and Jalabert, benefited from the company's international
structure, dependable reputation, and sensitivity to consumer
interests and budgets. Everyone knew that by working with Goupil
one could become famous. Jean-Léon Gérôme, a jeweler's son from
Vesoul and an artistic prodigy, came to Paris in 1840 at the age
of 16 to study with Delaroche, then at the height of his fame,
and became his most loyal and devoted student. As Delaroche
produced paintings for the Salon, Goupil made prints of them - a
road that Gérôme was to follow.
Gérôme's Early Career
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) was a successful and productive
artist and teacher. His life spanned half a dozen changes in
government, all of which honored him, and at least four major
style movements, some of which he initiated, others, like
Impressionism, which he railed against but survived. He was
decorated repeatedly by the French government for his role in
promoting French art outside of France and awarded numerous
official commissions. During his lifetime - he died just before
his 79th birthday - he exhibited paintings at the Salon for 57
years and sculpture for 23 years. A vigorous, demanding, and
compassionate teacher, he taught at the Ecole for 40 years and
had 2,000 students, more than 150 of them Americans.
While he has become best known as an Orientalist painter, Gérôme
began his career as a leader of the Neo-Grecs, a group of young
painters studying with Paul Delaroche, who was experimenting with
creating a new kind of history painting that overlapped with
scenes of everyday life. Inspired by Greek art and the
discoveries of frescos at Pompei and Herculanum, the Neo-Grecs
painted antique genre scenes, often imbued with a spot of
otherwise taboo eroticism.
At the Salon of 1847, Gérôme's Neo-Grec painting "The Cock Fight"
attracted the attention of the poet and critic Theophile Gautier,
who sang the praises of this 23-year-old, predicting his
widespread fame. Gautier was delighted with this picture, not
only because of its lighter palette, which distinguished it from
other works at the Salon, but for treating an ordinary subject in
the manner of an historical theme with life-size figures. Gautier
interpreted this as a daring, poetic reaction to realism. He
immediately became Gérôme's journalistic promoter and eloquent
defender, a role he played throughout his career. Goupil
published a photographic reproduction of a reduced replica - both
in the exhibition - of the original painting.
As a result of this acclaim, Gérôme began to receive many state
commissions, including portraits, which he did not like doing,
and decorative projects like church paintings, and a government
commission for the Universal Exposition of 1855, which proved to
be the turning point in his career. First launched in London in
1851, international expositions commonly drew a million people a
month; they introduced artists to the widest possible audience, a
fact never lost on Gérôme.
He submitted two pictures in 1855: a traditional, large-scale
historical allegory, "Age of Augustus," a symbolic glorification
of the new reign of Emperor Napoleon III, and "Recreation in a
Russian Camp," his first realist or ethnographic work. The latter
is based on a sketch he took on his first trip to the Balkans,
when he was looking for Russian vassal types for his great
Augustus canvas. Enthusiastically praised, it outshone the more
official painting, and he was awarded the cross of a Knight of
the Legion of Honor, the first of many government decorations.
With the money from his commission, Gérôme financed his first
trip to Egypt in 1856. During this eight-month sojourn - four
months sailing on the Nile and four months in Cairo - he filled
notebook after notebook with sketches later used for his many
Orientalist paintings. He recorded every new sight: deserts,
street scenes, social types, Islamic architecture, and the
endless variety of costumes and accoutrements. After this first
trip, the Middle East became a regular destination and a source
of inspiration for much of his life. Between 1856 and 1880, he
made at least seven other trips. More than a third of his
finished paintings (250 out of 600) are of Orientalist subjects,
primarily of Islamic Cairo. Virtually all can be considered genre
paintings, where scenes from daily life are treated with an
attention to detail and a realistic technique that gives them
exceptional authority.
Returning from the Middle East, he prepared for the Salon of
1856, where he exhibited his first Orientalist paintings "Prayer
in the House of an Arnaut Chief" and "Egyptian Recruits Crossing
the Desert." That same year, these two works traveled to the
United States - his first paintings to be seen in America - and
were shown in New York by the London art dealer Ernest Gambart.
"After the Ball," one of his rare pictures of Parisian life, also
shown at the 1856 Salon, was a wild success and he became famous
almost overnight.
Gérôme's love of drama, theatre, gesture, and costume is on
display in this haunting image of the aftermath of a duel -
perhaps after insults exchanged at a masked ball, a popular
Parisian event. A wounded Pierrot has collapsed in the arms of a
Duke de Guise. A surgeon, dressed as the Doge of Venice, stanches
the flow of blood, while a frightened Domino holds his head. An
American Indian walks away with his second, the Harlequin. That
same year the city of Nantes bought from Gambart the "Plain of
Thebes," the artist's first work to enter a public collection.
The Collaboration Begins
When Goupil took an interest in him in 1859, Gérôme was already
famous and known to him through his connection to Delaroche, an
artist Goupil had published in the past. Their initial business
partnership is marked by the sale of six of Gérôme's paintings, a
mix of classical and Orientalist subjects.
Four years later, in 1863, Gérôme married Goupil's daughter Marie
(he was 39 and she was 21) and his relationship to the House of
Goupil was solidified, which led Zola to say in 1867 that "Mr
Gérôme works for the House of Goupil, he makes a painting in
order for it to be reproduced through photos and engravings and
to be sold in thousands of copies." But as far as we know, this
was no embarrassment. Both men understood the nature of their
profitable enterprise and their need for each other's services.
Both were intent on giving the public what it wanted, and they
reaped the benefits individually and for the family business.
Goupil bought directly from his son-in-law Gérôme and shared
profits with him, usually 50-50. Gérôme did not have the right to
sell a painting directly before the firm had reproduced it in
some way, nor could he give permission for reproduction without
referring to Goupil. Yet Goupil greatly contributed to Gérôme's
reputation by circulating prints and photographs of his work in
France and abroad.
From the time they began doing business together in 1859, 337 of
the artist's paintings were sold by the Gallery, representing 430
transactions, and nearly 370 different reproductions of 122 of
his paintings were made, in many different formats including
color. A 20-year period between 1865 and 1885 was the most
profitable with the American market and major collectors in
France and the Middle East, local dealers like Knoedler in New
York, and Wallace, Gambart, MacLean, and Colnaghi in London, who
were supplied directly by Goupil.
Already renowned and prospering, in 1864 Gérôme was appointed
professor of one of the three paintings ateliers at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in Paris. During his tenure, his students included
Boldini, Bonnard, Dagnan-Bouveret, de Nittis, Lecomte de Nouy,
Douanier Rousseau, the sculptors Bartholome and Maillol, and
Fernand Leger. Respected by his students for his skills and
concern, he influenced his father-in-law's choice of artists, and
some of the master's students belonged to Goupil's stable.
If their work fitted in with the publisher's commercial policy,
they benefited from its publishing sales and distribution
facilities. Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, whom Gérôme considered his
most worthy student, was one. Doing business with Goupil brought
fame. The publisher's choice and range of artists reflected the
overriding political ideas of the times and he received
government aid as well as awards in recognition of his efforts to
promote French art worldwide.
Printing Gérôme
Goupil left little to chance in his business. If a painting
interested him, as did "King Candaules," he would buy it and
sometimes commission a replica, if there was not already another
version. The engraver could use the replica, since the original
painting might still be for sale. Once the reproduction was
finished, the replica also went on sale. This whole process might
take a few years and a major financial investment, since
engraving - the high-end of a wide range of reproduction
techniques - was a costly and time-consuming activity. In fact,
only six of Gérôme paintings were engraved, but they had pride of
place in the publisher's catalogues.
At the other end of the range, mass-produced photographic
reproductions suitable for framing were launched under the title
"Photographic Gallery" in 1858. Photogravure, a technique
developed by Goupil, is a way of printing photographs by
copperplate engraving. It produces proofs with the qualities of
the finest prints, while being close to photography in the
continuous rendering of the image. Facing the plate with steel
allowed thousands of images to be pulled without damaging the
plate.
Three photographs comprised Goupil's first reproductions of
Gérôme paintings and appeared in 1859. From the end of the 1860s
on, most of the published photographs appeared in an album
containing works in various formats, sizes, and prices to satisfy
all levels of clientele. The most expensive were "Goupil Museum"
photographs suitable for framing. Smaller "Visiting Cards" or
"Album Cards" were less expensive. Photogravure versions,
published later, were more luxurious.
To keep costs and selling prices relatively low, most
photogravures were published in black and white, although a few
were published in color, such as "Phyrné Before the Tribunal" and
"After the Ball," his most popular images. A client could choose
the costume in red and green, or blue and yellow. Original
etchings, a more artistic product than photographs, connected
Goupil to an intermediate clientele. At the top of the price list
and clearly intended for the rich were six of Gérôme's works
engraved with a burin, a costly technique most often reserved for
great historical paintings.
The only painting published in lithographic form, even though it
was the cheapest and fastest means of reproduction, was "After
the Ball" in its original 1857 version. Although not typical of
the artist's work, it enjoyed the greatest popularity, attested
to by the variety of reproductions (etchings, photographs,
photogravures) and the different sizes. The only other
lithographs were after three drawings from the Bargue-Gérôme
drawing manual "Cours de Dessin - Head of a Fellah (¾ View),"
"Head of a Fellah in Profile," and "Alcibaide's Dog" - all on
view in the exhibition. Lithography was an especially appropriate
medium for reproducing drawings.
Gérôme's work was much more widely circulated in photographic
than in print form and he was well aware of the value of
photography in diffusing and popularizing his works. Photography,
he wrote, "...has opened our eyes and forced us to see what we
formerly would never have seen, it has done art a considerable,
inestimable service." This modern technique that he too used in
his work contributed to his success.
Juxtaposing paintings and prints throughout the exhibition allows
the visitor to compare how different media rendered the same
image, and how the variety of formats and sizes changed the
experience of viewing art.
While Goupil owned reproduction rights over the works it
published, he sometimes sold those rights to book publishers for
use as illustrations - in America it was Appleton, Cassell, or
Little, Brown & Co. - or even to tapestry makers to copy.
Goupil owned rights to slide reproduction, whether used for
educational purposes (the ubiquitous slide lecture) or theatrical
purposes, such as magic lantern shows. Authorization to use
Gérôme's "Almeh" was granted in 1902 for 105 francs for a "slide
show during performances given in various London theatres."
Publications and other transactions brought the artist
substantial royalties.
An unusual and profitable, if modest, activity for Goupil was the
production of statuettes made from subjects in Gérôme's
paintings. Goupil commissioned well-known sculptors such as
Alexandre Falguiere to make models from paintings and studies by
the master, perhaps adapting or changing it to make it more
marketable. Goupil served as intermediary between artists and
mold makers, marble and ivory carvers, and bronze founders. Two
of Gérôme's most sought-after works in the exhibition are the
statuettes of Almeh and Phyrné, the latter a figure from his
"scandalous" painting "Phyrné in the Areopagus."
Like the prints, the statuettes were produced in many different
sizes and materials - plaster, terracotta, ivory, marble, bronze
- with different mounts and, of course, different prices. From
1869, Goupil sold the statuettes in France and in New York
through Michael Knoedler. Before long they were found in
middle-class drawing rooms, as well as artists' and
photographers' studios, where they could serve as aids for posing
models à la "Phyrné."
Gérôme's Orientalism
Orientalist works, the largest category in the exhibition,
reflect Gérôme's embrace of his subject matter and its popularity
with the public. They show us the distance he had traveled from
his Neo-Grec style to ethnographic genre scenes, from Paris to
the Middle East, with deserts and caravans, prayers and mosques,
Arnauts and Bachi-Bouzouki, dancers and slave sales and secluded
women.
Charles Gleyre, an influential Swiss painter and teacher,
introduced Gérôme to Oriental subject matter when the young
artist briefly studied with him; he had traveled extensively in
Egypt in 1834-35. Gleyre's most successful painting, "Evening,"
became the source of Gérôme's popular "Prisoner," exhibited at
the Salon in 1863 along with "Louis XIV and Moliere," and his
controversial and endlessly reproduced "Phyrné Before the
Areopagus."
In an effort at ethnographic accuracy Gérôme "quoted" from early
writers like Edward Lane, who made his own drawings of religious
life, in Islamic compositions including "Prayer on the Housetops"
of 1865, "Young Greeks at the Mosque, Muezzin," and "Prayer in
the Mosque of Amr, Cairo." These quotations were widely accepted
in the Nineteenth Century as attempts at scientific ethnography,
often backed up with photographs, even if manipulated by the
painter's need for a more perfect composition.
In urban Cairo, Gérôme painted the picturesque, supposedly
ferocious but actually impotent "Arnauts with Two Whippets"
(1867). Arnauts were mercenary soldiers and no more than
decorative remnants of Cairo's glorious past, and Gérôme included
his own beloved pets - yet we still believe the scene is
authentically Oriental.
Although photographs and photogravures after such paintings as
"Almeh" and "Sabre Dance in a Café" (1876) surely cause less
scandal now than when first viewed, they still remain
intoxicating. But it is the nudes that evoked the most comment,
then as now. In the "Moorish Bath" (1872), shown with etchings,
photogravures, and photographs after it, the artist's control of
light in a secluded space heightened the sense of intimacy and
therefore the erotic charge of the composition. The photogravure
process, by its very nature, was especially effective in
capturing the atmospheric qualities of Gérôme's paintings.
Modern History Paintings
The last paintings and prints were done in the 1870s and include
Seventeenth Century subjects like "Rembrandt in his Studio,"
"Louis XIV et Moliere," "Collaboration," as well as modern
historical scenes set in his beloved Cairo: "General Bonaparte in
Egypt" and "General Bonaparte in Cairo," depicting the victor
surveying his new territory. Although Gérôme's foray into modern
or contemporary history was not extensive, only a small part of
his production, these works and prints made after them are well
represented in Goupil's catalogues.
Gérôme's art has made an amazing comeback in public and critical
esteem from a time in the mid-Twentieth Century when a major
canvas might fetch no more than a few hundred dollars - a far cry
from the glory days when he was one of the most famous artists in
France and the object of Goupil's marketing genius. It is once
again accepted that Gérôme was a great artist.
This exhibition demonstrates that with a group of choice
paintings and introduces a body of prints from the astonishing
collection of the Musée Goupil that helped make his reputation
more than a hundred years ago. These prints are not mere
historical documents, however, but often themselves fine works of
art.
When the exhibition closes in New York on May 5, it travels to
the Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburgh, where it
will be on view from June 7 to August 12.
"Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise" is accompanied by a
fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by leading French
and American scholars. The French- and English-language editions
of the catalogue, published by Reunion des Musées Nationaux,
Paris, contains essays by Gerald Ackerman, Helene
LaFont-Couturier, Regine Bigorne, Stephen R. Edidin, DeCourcy E.
McIntosh, and Florence Rionnet. The English edition is available
from the Dahesh Museum of Art for $45.
The Dahesh Museum of Art is at 601 Fifth Avenue. Hours are
Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm. For information, call
212/759-0606.
