Dusty Art

My prior Art posts can be found HERE.

How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it..

Let’s study art history together.

Richard I the Lionheart

Artist	Merry-Joseph Blondel
Year	1841
Medium	oil on canvas
Dimensions	height: 170 cm (66.9 in); width: 114 cm (44.8 in)
Location	Salle des croisades, Palace of Versailles

This is a historical portrait of Richard I, completed seven hundred years after Richard’s death. The piece has what the youths might call ‘aura.’ Or maybe as a fan of Superman, I just like the blue outfit, chest shield, red cape combination.

Nah. Adding the crown and the sword to that wardrobe combo is just *chef’s kiss* and it’s undoubtedly an indicator of a significant life. I mean, just imagine having someone else aura-farming on your behalf several centuries after your death. If called upon, I would wear this and lead my people.

One of the downsides of living in a democratic society is that we’re perpetually too divided to ever accept anything like this for a leader of today. When we see the leader of the other party trying to look cool, it infuriates us. If Barack Obama had commissioned a portrait like this one above – or you know, a modern version – the political Right would have been outraged. (Instead, President Obama commissioned one of the worst and most disappointing presidential portraits of all time – containing therein exactly zero aura along with a lot of confusion.)

And yeah. Donald Trump is more likely to have something like the Blondel portrait done, and if that happens, the American Left will go bananas and do everything possible to hide it from view, from history, to vandalize it, etc. That’s just how it goes. We’re inherently unwilling and unable to unite under portraiture aura in a democratic society.

My point is that there is something to be said for Monarchy – at least insofar as unity via the arts are concerned. Maybe if you’re an American, the appropriate distance you need for supporting something like this today would be cheering it on via the restoration of the French monarchy. If you didn’t know, that’s being discussed (though whether seriously so remains to be seen.) I hoe so. There’s a segment of my fellow Americans who obsess over the British royals. I feel like they deserve a whole other family to follow. And experimentally, I’d like to know if the French people would or could have something under which they could unify.

I’ve gone far afield.

Merry-Joseph Blondel is not as well-remembered today as some of his contemporaries, but he was a big deal in the French Neo-Classical movement. He was born in the early part of the French Revolution’s chaos, witnessed the dissolution of the monarchy, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the restoration of the monarchy, and eventually its dissolution again in 1830. He was a big figure in the art world that emerged in the midst of that chaos.

I’ve always found it pretty fascinating that the art world embraced a Neo-Classical style during this era. Today we might link the pre-Christian Greeks and Romans with our idea of “the West” and think of them as joining with the Christianity that followed and being of one piece. At the time, the embrace of the pre-Christian Greeks and Romans represented a rejection of the status quo and in the Paris of Blondel’s youth, it was a wildly violent rejection. You could argue – and many have – that the French Revolution was something of a beta test for what became Communist Revolution a century later. Nevertheless, we still get portraiture of key Western Christian figures like Richard I from the art in this era, but done in a Greek and Roman style. It might be that it’s important to project stability in the midst of turnover and I suppose citing the ancient past as your present would signal stability.

In fact, over time, we saw in Western Europe a marriage between this love of the Neo-Classical period and Christianity. It is not uncommon today to hear someone argue that “The West” is a blend of Christian morality, Roman Law, and Greek Philosophy. Will those things remain successfully welded together across time? That remains to be seen, though I have my doubts. As the centuries have passed, we’ve seen all three elements fade from their former place of prominence. I don’t know that they were ever really designed to stand together.

Perhaps the Enlightenment was always a doomed enterprise because it was a bit confused internally. How do you keep the trappings of a tree you inherited (Christian Civilization) while rejecting and changing / replacing its roots with something else (scientism, deism, atheism, Greek and Roman philosophy, etc.)? Perhaps “The West” exchanged a dramatic fall in favor of slow decline and rot? If so, then we might expect to see calls for a return to the pre-Enlightenment as the rot grows more visible… and those things are beginning to spring up.

More on Blondel, via wiki:

Merry-Joseph Blondel (French pronunciation: [mɛʁi ʒozɛf blɔ̃dɛl]; 25 July 1781 – 12 June 1853) was a French history painter of the Neoclassical school. He was a winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1803. After the Salon of 1824, he was bestowed with the rank of Knight in the order of the Legion d’Honneur by Charles X of France and offered a professorship at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts: a position in which he remained until his death in 1853. In 1832, he was elected to a seat at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Blondel was a student of the Neoclassical master Baron Jean-Baptiste Regnault and from 1809, a lifelong friend of the painter Ingres.

For much of Blondel’s painting career, he was occupied with public commissions for paintings and frescoes in important buildings, including palaces, museums and churches. Blondel completed major commissions for the Palace of Fontainebleau, the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, the Brongniart Palace (also known as the Bourse de Paris), the Luxembourg Palace, and the churches of St.Thomas Aquinas and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.

Blondel’s 1814 painting La Circassienne au Bain became infamous during the early part of the 20th century for being the subject of the largest claim for financial compensation made against the White Star Line, for a single item of luggage lost by a passenger on the RMS Titanic.

Early life

Merry-Joseph was born on 25 July 1781 to Joseph-Armand Blondel (1740–1805), a painter and expert in stucco decoration, and his second wife Marie-Geneviève Marchand (died 1819). Merry-Joseph had two brothers and a sister, including Charles-Francois Armand Blondel, an architect. Several generations of the Blondel family had become associated with architecture and the design and decoration of buildings. Blondel’s great uncle, Jacques-Francois Blondel (1705–1774) wrote a treatise on the subject and opened the first dedicated school of architecture in Paris.

Career

Dihl & Guerhard

At the age of fourteen, on the advice of his maternal uncle, Merry-Joseph went to work in the office of a Notary, an experience which he would later describe as “excruciating”. After two years of complaining to his father, in 1797, a place was secured for him as an apprentice at the Dihl and Guerhard porcelain factory, where young apprentices received figure drawing lessons from the celebrated Charles-Etienne Leguay for five out of every ten working days. By 1801, however, demand for Dihl and Guerhard porcelain had increased so much that the drawing department was eliminated and apprentices were expected to focus on decorative techniques more suited to the demands of mass-production, directly on the factory floor.

Regnault’s studio and the Prix de Rome

In 1801, once again, Blondel convinced his father to break his apprenticeship contract as his drawing talent secured him a place in the studio of Baron Jean-Baptiste Regnault. Within a year, Blondel had acquired the nickname Monsieur Cinq-Prix (Mr Five-prizes) among his peers at the studio, on account of the number of medals and prizes he had won for his drawing. Another year on and Blondel’s entry to the 1803 salon, a painting depicting Aeneas rescuing his father from the burning city of Troy, won him the Grand Prix de Rome. However, due to a change in the system and the temporary suspension of scholarships, no students were sent to the French Academy in Rome that year and Blondel would have to wait until 1809 before he could take his place at the Villa Medici.

Rome and Ingres

On arrival at the Villa Medici in Rome in 1809, Blondel struck up a friendship with fellow student Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres which, as correspondence between the two artists demonstrated, lasted for the rest of their lives. In 1835, Ingres returned as the director of the French Academy in Rome and Blondel appeared to be the favourite to succeed him in 1840. Together with his second wife, Louise Emilie Delafontaine, Blondel stayed at the Villa Medici as a guest of Ingres for four months in 1839, during which time the three of them undertook a lengthy sketching tour of the Marches and Umbria. When Blondel was unexpectedly overlooked for the position of director of the academy in 1840, Ingres sent him a “lengthy and heartfelt” letter of condolence.

Further Awards

After three years in Rome, Blondel returned to Paris and became a regular exhibitor at the Louvre salon exhibitions. At the salon of 1817, Blondel won a gold medal for his painting depicting the Death of Louis XII. After the Salon of 1824, the rank of Chevalier (Knight) in the order of the Legion d’Honneur, was bestowed upon both Blondel and Ingres by the French King, Charles X.

Académie and École

In 1824, the year of his knighthood, Blondel was awarded a professorship at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, a position which he occupied until his death in 1853. In that same year, Blondel also competed for a vacant seat at the Académie des beaux-arts but lost out to Ingres. He was eventually elected to a seat at the Académie in 1832.

Public commissions

By the mid-1820s, his many notable achievements had firmly established Blondel as a history painter of great renown and he was accordingly rewarded with many public commissions for paintings and frescoes in important buildings, including museums, palaces and churches. Most notable among these commissions were:

• at the palace of Fontainebleau – Salon and Gallery of Diana, a fresco series of 21 paintings of scenes related to the goddess Diana.
• the Palace of Versailles – a series of full sized portraits depicting all the known kings and queens of France.

• the Louvre Museum – frescoes in the Grand staircase (Personification of France receiving the constitutional charter), the Salle Henri II (scene depicting Minerva and Neptune), Rooms of the state counsel (La France victorieuse à Bouvines to commemorate the victory at the Battle of Bouvines).
• the Brongniart Palace (also known as the Bourse de Paris) – Ceiling painting and several cameos.
• the Luxembourg Palace – ceiling fresco in the Salle des Séances.
• the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.
• the church of St.Thomas Aquinas – fresco cycle.

Blondel was working on his fresco cycle at the church of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 7e arrondissement when he fell ill and died in 1853.