PARIS.- Unlike in Switzerland where he is regularly celebrated, no French national museum to date has devoted an exhibition to Charles Gleyre. His role in French painting of the mid 19th century is still underestimated. Although championed after his death by art critic and historian Charles Clément, a lack of knowledge about Gleyre’s life and his creative diversity has long led him to be considered a cold, conventional aesthete, blind to the aesthetic revolutions of his time, a solitary, nostalgic and misanthropic figure. New discoveries and fresh interpretations of his work, including first and foremost the analysis published by Michel Thévoz in L’Académisme et ses fantasmes (1980), William Hauptman’s catalogue raisonné (1996) and the exhibition organised by Catherine Lepdor in Lausanne in 2006, have uncovered both the originality and power of his creativity, and offered an insight into his character - restless, contradictory and independent but entirely connected to his time.
It is still not well known that Gleyre, a Swiss citizen, probably had the deepest and most intimate knowledge of the Near East and North Africa of any artist of his generation, having spent almost four years there enjoying dazzling experiences yet suffering greatly with his health. He was also an important figure on the Parisian art scene: unassuming and discreet, he was nonetheless greatly appreciated by his peers and by the intelligentsia (Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, Gustave Planche, etc.) as well as by a broad section of the public. Indeed we have forgotten that Le Soir [Evening] – better known as Les Illusions perdues [Lost Illusions] – acquired by the State in 1843 and now in the Musée du Louvre, was, for a hundred years, a great favourite with the French public. An anticlerical republican and a democrat, Charles Gleyre ran for twenty five years the most tolerant and productive teaching studio in Paris, where he not only brought together the future Impressionists (Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet) but also gave us the Neo-Grec painters (Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henry-Pierre Picou, Auguste Toulmouche) and many Swiss, German, British and American painters, including James Whistler.
However, the apparent perfection of Charles Gleyre’s painting masks its ambiguity and depth: beneath the crystal clarity of form and the delicate refinement of detail, his work seethes with juvenile fantasies, extreme violence and cruel disillusionment. The originality of his personal creations reflects a rich inner inspiration, very different from the conformism of Academism, and recalling the remarkable, inventive genius of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon before him. Finally, in spite of his misogynous stance and being a confirmed bachelor, Gleyre produced, through his painting, a monument to the beauty and creativity of Woman: a stunning Minerva or languid bacchante, heralding the obsessions of the Symbolists.
The Musée d’Orsay, the leading museum for western art of the 19th century, is presenting a complementary perspective to the solo exhibition “Charles Gleyre. The Genius of Invention” organised in 2006 by the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne.
This project first recounts the adventurous life of a tormented, demanding and sincere artist, without concealing his setbacks, his doubts and his disillusionment. The principle stages of his career raise thematic questions that challenge his professed Academism. The exhibition reveals the violent Romanticism through which the young artist first asserted himself, the terrible physical and aesthetic ordeal of his journey to the Orient, and his difficulty reacclimatising to Paris, his depiction of great episodes in the history of Switzerland, a surprisingly archaeological approach to landscape, a new vision – oriental and wild – of the world of ancient Greece, and finally, the artist’s reconciliation, later in life, with earthly harmony, his gradual move away from narrative painting towards experiments on the nude in natural light, in tune with some of his pupils, the future Impressionists.
The exhibition also broadens the context by placing Gleyre’s masterpieces alongside the paintings of the Academic masters (Léopold Robert, Horace Vernet, Louis Hersent) and those young artists who were his devoted pupils (Auguste Renoir, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri-Pierre Picou) or who shared his aesthetic approach (Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Boulanger). In bringing these paintings together, the museum aims above all else to re-establish Gleyre’s position in French painting, be it Romantic, Neo-Grec, Proto-Symbolist or Impressionist, and thus to enrich the interpretation of his works.
Half of the 120 works are drawings, an art at which Gleyre excelled, and with the benefit of many special loans from the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, and in addition, the presentation by the Musée du Louvre of Evening for the first time following its amazing and spectacular restoration, the exhibition “Charles Gleyre. The Reformed Romantic” brings together all the artist’s masterpieces for the first time.
