David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument Back

Event Date(s): 11th Nov 2013

Location: The Frick Collection, New York City

Event web link: Click here

 

Reviewed by: Lucy Gellman

Reviewed on: 20th Nov 2013

This is, it seems, the glorious year of David d’Angers. Or rather, the glorious years of David d’Angers, finally bringing to the United States a trend that started in late 2011 with the compelling exhibition David d’Angers: Les Visages du Romantisme at the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Cabinet des Médailles, unraveled itself in 2013 in the corridors of the Louvre with David d’Angers: Dessins des musées d’Angers, and travelled to New York City where the Frick Collection is currently showing David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument.

Born Pierre-Jean David in 1788, David D’Angers studied with draughtsman Jean-Jacques Delusse and sculptor Philippe-Laurent Roland before entering the studio of the revered Jacques-Louis David, adopting his nom d’emprunt to both pay homage to his teacher and distinguish himself from the man who became, quite simply, the David of the centuries. With its ambitious title, the exhibition does more than take a modernist bent: it lays claim to David’s role as the founder of modern and specifically romantic sculpture on a monumental scale.* The first major show to introduce American viewers to the man Victor Hugo rightly called ‘the Michelangelo of Paris’, it has a significant and long overdue tenor, for which it and its curator Emerson Bowyer specifically must be credited. Set in two small downstairs galleries, the exhibition makes relevant the sculptor’s melding of old (neoclassical) and new (romantic) from its outset: his obsessively polished Ann Buchan Robinson (1831) hovers not far from his expressive La Douleur (1811) around the first didactic panel, immediately introducing viewers to an artist who jumps from the precarious edge of tradition and lands squarely on his feet. Indeed, as it displays several of his important busts, small casts for major monuments, bronze portrait medallions, and preparatory drawings – many on view for the first time – David d’Angers suggests a perfect introduction to the sculptor and his modern moment.

The exhibition as a whole, however, strikes the same ‘tension between movement and stasis’ with which David’s busts are described in the catalogue: it is a traditional, expected, and remarkably safe curatorial venture. No single factor is entirely to blame: to do such an exhibition outside of France is quite literally an exercise in scaling back, and due to the year’s busy and exciting exhibition calendar and the buzz surrounding the Frick’s larger Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis (22 October 2013 – 19 January 2014), David’s galleries are sleepy and undergroomed, bestowing on the show a slightly secondhand feeling. There are yet plenty of moments that instruct and delight: the aforementioned La Douleur, placed provocatively at the front of the exhibition, feels still fresh in the striking quarter-gape of its mouth; Liberty of 1834 in the exhibition’s main gallery is a resonant echo of a strong and contentious republicanism and may bring to mind, not coincidentally, several early modern to romantic renderings of Judith; a small bronze statuette of David’s Monument to Bonchamps (1824) reveals the tenuous, delicate and not always entirely clear bridge between neoclassical and romantic traditions; and his statuettes of poet and translator Ludwig Tieck (1834), pensive military surgeon Ambroise Paré (1840) and naval commander Jean Bart (1845), scattered pleasingly on pedestals throughout the main gallery, cue us into the more immediate – and decidedly modern – hearts and minds of his tremendous and tumultuous era.

Where the exhibition leaves a bit to be desired is in its mimetic execution of curatorial work that has been done elsewhere. While a large section dedicated to David’s portrait medallions is promising with its depiction of animalier Rosa Bonheur and contextualizing wax models for the medallions of Émile Deschamps (1829) and the Abbé de Lamennais (1831), it is very much owing to Thierry Laugée’s curatorial groundwork in the Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition, and feels derivative after a show that so thoroughly and provocatively investigated the sculptor’s works as sociopolitical and pseudo-scientific texts. It comes as a disappointment, likewise, that the show is over-informed (or perhaps overfed) by the heavy and too-often static hand of French académie. There is an over-reliance on established David d’Angers scholar Jacques de Caso, leaving the viewer with the unsettled feeling that the exhibition is coasting on a mixture of its perceived novelty and minted academic merit. The small catalogue continues this trend; while a newly published and translated essay by David himself at the end is welcome and fascinating, there is a certain hastiness reflected in typographical errors and recycled language throughout. This speaks perhaps to a greater overarching theme: there is no great attempt to push the academic envelope, so much as to preserve an artist’s oeuvre as a historical document of the period.

We do well to remember, however, that this is largely in keeping with the Frick’s institutional approach – to preserve and promote art, rather than to provoke and push with it – and David d’Angers very much fulfills its responsibility to the public in this sense. Viewers who enter the Collection not yet familiar with the sculptor will leave with a new knowledge of and – one might hope – passion for his work. It is a more technical than interpretive venture, however, and those with a firm grip on the period’s history may leave wanting just a bit more.
 
* The author has kept with the catalogue’s convention of ‘David’ rather than ‘D’Angers’ when referring to the artist.
 
David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument is on view at the Frick Collection, New York, until 8 December 2013.