Romantics Shining Clear Light on Daily Existence
By ROBERTA SMITH
The first thing that distinguishes “Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century,” a compact, quietly splendid exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is simply this: Its galleries have been painted a wonderful shade of oyster-grayish white. In the context of the Met, where the walls of special exhibitions tend toward plum, russet or evergreen, this pale, elegant hue is the visual equivalent of smelling salts.
Its head-clearing effect is the perfect start for a show of artworks permeated for the most part by a luminous light and a concomitant clarity of vision that regularly translates life’s daily pleasures — starting with looking out windows — into images of surprising formal rigor and emotional weight.
As the title implies, the show has a fairly specific theme. Its 31 modest paintings and 26 works on paper, borrowed from museums all over Europe, depict interiors with windows. Organized by Sabine Rewald, of the Met’s department of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, the show explores the open window as a favored motif of certain Romantic painters — mostly German, Scandinavian or French.
It begins, chronologically, in the early 1800s with the great German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, and extends almost to 1860 with some presciently Impressionist works by the facile Adolph Menzel, also German. But the majority of its works fall between 1810 and 1830. As seen here, the window often is the focal point for a certain poignant, implicitly Romantic yearning, functioning as an interface between near and far, known and mysterious, private and public, art and nature. This yearning is especially tangible in Friedrich’s 1822 “Woman at the Window,” which shows his wife, her back to us, straining delicately to see out of a window narrowed by shutters.
The images in “Rooms With a View” range from cozy Biedermeier sitting rooms to vaulting studios at the Villa Medici in Rome and tend to convey a decidedly cosseted vision of life. You’d never know that parts of Europe were ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath for many of the years covered by this show.
Yet the works here may qualify as passively subversive. They determinedly say no to established authoritative statements: formal portraiture and large-scale history painting, or depictions of grand structures and even the stark or overwhelming landscapes characteristic of a more outdoorsy Romanticism, including Friedrich’s.
Instead the works here stay close to home, concentrating on the places and often the people the artists knew best, and resonating with intimate truths and internal logics of their own. The show sings with the satisfying visual rhyming of the four-square forms of windows, walls and rooms with the rectilinear format of canvas or paper. The geometries of everyday life echo the actual proportions of the works before our eyes, reinforcing and elaborating the act of looking.
Many of these images have the sweetness and modesty of photographs, whose rise was still years off when most of these works were made. Certainly they seem closer to photography in their realism and uninflected revelations of detail than to the interiors and genres scenes of the 17th-century Dutch paintings from which they descend, although they have an immediacy of detail and color that photography would not achieve until the early 20th century.
Each work presents an unpretentious, eminently habitable space that seems almost continuous with our own. Some rooms are depicted with one or more occupants — a standing couple, seemingly deep in conversation; a man sitting at a desk; a woman similarly situated, embroidering by an open window; another woman sewing at night, with one of the show’s few depictions of a lowered shade.
These particular events all transpire in small canvases painted from 1811 to 1827 by Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847), a close friend of Friedrich’s who is not well known to American audiences. He seemed to specialize in images of self-knowing solitude and, represented by seven paintings here, is one of the show’s stars.
Other images brim with quiet companionship. In Wilhelm Bendz’s marvelous interior, the artist’s two brothers pursue their studies in a slightly disheveled room distinguished by vivid turquoise walls. You may want to live there, once they pick up a bit. In “The Family Circle” by the Danish artist Emilius Baerentzen from around 1803, we encounter a man, three women and a child in a sitting room whose window, draped in a light-infused translucent red curtain, reveals a view of sunbathed building facades that reads as a separate painting.
Other rooms are empty or nearly so, and often become the occasion for richocheting reflections of form and space caught in mirrors. This happens quietly in the grays of Kersting’s watercolor “Interior II” and flamoyantly in an ink-wash rendering by Johann Erdmann Hummel, where one-point perspective is exquisitely amplified by the pulsing geometries of carpet and ceiling beams. Many of the interiors are modest domestic spaces, a sitting room or small study. But a substantial number are artists’ studios, whether they overlook the Elbe in Dresden or St. Peter’s in Rome.
One of the show’s subtexts, in fact, is the way artists lived and worked and related to one another during this era, often by painting one another at work. For example, Kersting’s 1812 painting of the painter Friedrich Matthäi in his studio shows a slight, nervous man hunched over a small oil study on his easel; heavier lifting awaits in the form of a wide swath of pristine canvas extending from a roll of the material onto a towering white framelike structure.
One of the show’s rare self-portraits is a seductive study in creamy textures from 1817 that shows the young French painter Léon Cogniet, in his high-ceilinged room at the French Academy’s recently acquired Villa Medici in Rome, newly arrived and with his bags barely unpacked. Cogniet leans against his bed reading what Ms. Rewald identifies as a letter from home, while the lush landscape visible through an open window resembles a large oil study that he might soon paint. Seemingly suspended between action and indolence, art and bed, the world back home and the one outside his window, Cogniet perfectly captures his ambivalence.
According to Ms. Rewald, all this began with Friedrich, who gave a new emphasis to the window motif in some sepia drawings from 1805-6 that depict one or another of the beautifully proportioned windows, set in generous, round-topped niches, in his studio overlooking the Dresden riverfront. Two of these drawings hang in the show’s third gallery, and their stripped-down severity still startles. They have the kind of unstinting precision that Ingres might lavish on a drawing of an elaborately accoutered Parisian, yet they exalt nothing but the bare-bones form of the windows and the gentle light they admit to a plain room that we barely see. (Friedrich’s studio was frequently compared to a monk’s cell, an observation borne out by Kersting’s 1811 painting of his friend hard at work at his easel. )
These works remained with Friedrich for years, influencing artists who visited him — including some with studios in the same Dresden building and who depicted views through similar windows in works that are also in the show. In one of these the Danish artist Johan Christian Dahl — wanting to avoid copying his friend too closely — has replaced the distant harbor view in Friedrich’s drawings with a glistening Prussian palace that was actually several miles upriver.
The room-window-view equation turned out to be a satisfying, self-ordering arrangement that continued to attract painters, reaching an apotheosis of sorts — but hardly exhausting itself — in the art of Matisse. Over the course of this marvelous show, that equation is under constant adjustment. In addition to windows that look like paintings in their own right, some windows are mere blank rectangles; others expand the painting-within-a-painting concept until the room all but disappears.
These fluctuations, with illumination as the constant, offer support for the argument that painting may ultimately be about little more than the communication of some quality of light and space, however abstract or indirect. In “Rooms With a View” this communication is marvelously direct.
From http://www.nytimes.com/
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