The Italian tour has been a rite of passage for artists for hundreds of years. It's difficult to appreciate the practical function of such a journey, but it is potent.

So much so that, how an artist experiences Italy, no doubt says a great deal about how he or she experiences art.

For French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), who won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1752, and spent three years studying in Rome, it seems to have been a profound and overwhelming encounter.

Fragonard was in such awe of Italian Painters, Michelangelo, Rafael, Barocci, Pietro da Cortona, Solimena, Tiepolo, Caravaggio, Guercino, Rubens, the Carraccis, Correggio, Giordano, Cagnacci et al, that he was moved to tears, and immobilized.

The current LA Exhibition (there are 26 on display and 139 in all) are faithful copies of the Masters, reproduced with impressive precise imagery, deft technique and intimate scale. The shading is rich and full-bodied; the line sprightly and confident.

Though heralded, Fragonard could only duplicate, not rival his idols.

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ART REVIEW
ITALY, THE CLASSROOM

A show featuring Jean-Honoré Fragonard's drawings tells the story of the painter's education...

The Los Angeles Times
By Holly Myers,
Special to The Times
April 28 2004

The Italian tour has been a rite of passage for young Western artists for hundreds of years. In our own era, with most major museum collections only a mouse click away, it's difficult to appreciate the practical function of such a journey, but its empirical effects are no less potent. As anyone who's seen Michelangelo's "David" will likely attest, no photograph can prepare you for the awe that tower of marble inspires.

How an artist experiences Italy no doubt says a great deal about how he or she experiences art. For French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), who won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1752 and spent three years studying in that city, it seems to have been a profound but occasionally overwhelming encounter, to which he adopted a very practical approach.

"I was in awe of Michelangelo's energy," he later recounted. "I felt things I could not express. When I saw the beauty of the Rafaels, I was moved to tears, and I could hardly hold my pencil. For several months I remained in a state of apathy that I was unable to overcome, until I resolved to study the painters whom I felt I had a chance of rivaling: and so I turned my attention to Barocci, Pietro da Cortona, Solimena, and Tiepolo."

The quote appears in an appealing if less than revelatory exhibition of the artist's drawings now at the Norton Simon Museum. Made in 1760-1761 shortly after his stay in Rome, the works are faithful copies of paintings he encountered while traveling with a patron named Jean-Claude Richard, the abbé de Saint-Non.

The selection reflects the sentiments expressed above: These are mostly Baroque painters whom, as the drawings themselves demonstrate, Fragonard is clearly capable of "rivaling," at least in a technical sense. He is an excellent draftsman and reproduces the imagery with impressive, if rather impersonal, precision. (A small reproduction of each painting allows viewers to compare.) The shading is rich and full-bodied; the line sprightly and confident.

Between this deft technique and the intimate scale, the works are exceedingly consumable: visual bon bons, you might say, largely detached from any sense of historical or religious purpose.

Among the most charming is a study of Guido Cagnacci's "Venus Captured by Love," which depicts the two title figures locked in a sumptuous tussle. Curiously, this is one of the only images that Fragonard altered, removing Love's shirt, giving him wings, and replacing his dagger with a delicate arrow — a shift that points toward the erotic sentimentalism that will distinguish the artist's later career.

The lessons Fragonard appears to be gleaning from these painters — Caravaggio, Guercino, Rubens, the Carraccis, Correggio, Luca Giordano and others — relate primarily to the figure and its role in composition. The bodies, in typical Baroque fashion, are robust and active, muscular and expressive. They twist and tumble through space, limbs interwoven, lush draperies flaring.

In his study of Poussin's "Holy Family," we find the protagonists suspended in a swarm of eager cherubs. In his version of Cortona's "Minerva Carrying Off a Young Prince," the helmeted heroine snatches that unhappy adolescent from a pool of fleshy women.

In several works near the end of the show, he looks at bodies that have been woven into architectural forms. Most striking among these is a pair of caryatids by Ludovico Carracci made from male figures so tightly entwined that the embrace appears sexual.

Aside from the sheer pleasure of Fragonard's technique, the show's merits are fairly academic. The works — all of which come from the Norton Simon Foundation Collection (there are 26 on display and 139 in all) — are interesting insofar as they reveal the mechanics of a young 18th century painter's education. But they say little about Fragonard personally and less about their original sources. Nor does the exhibition elaborate very extensively on the relationship between the two. (The reasons for the artist's attraction to Baroque, for example — though introduced in the opening quotation — go largely unexplained, as does the role it played in later work.) Ultimately, these are simply good copies of good paintings — perfectly enjoyable as such but little more in themselves.

The shortcoming is hardly surprising, as Fragonard, the last of the French Rococo painters, isn't generally regarded as one of art history's heavyweights. "The Happy Lovers" (c. 1760-65), for example — one of two paintings that hang in the museum's permanent collection — is pure sugar: pink-faced youth lolling idly beneath a flowering arbor in a fantasy landscape that rivals any in the world of Thomas Kinkade.

Compare this with a nearby work by Fragonard's aforementioned rival Tiepolo — "Triumph of Virtue and Nobility Over Ignorance" (c.1740--1750) — and the difference is profound. Surely one of the greatest pre-Modern paintings hanging in a Los Angeles collection today, the work is a dazzlingly sophisticated piece of visual poetry, combining a virtuosic manipulation of space, daunting characterizations and an unlikely, almost Modern color scheme.

Unable or unwilling to adapt to the developments of Neoclassicism, Fragonard wound up on the wrong side of the French Revolution and ultimately died in poverty. The drawings assembled here offer a glimpse to the opposite end of that journey: to youth, in all its hubris and humility.
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An Artist's Education: Fragonard and the Old Masters

Where: Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
When: Mondays, Wednesdays-Thursdays, Saturdays-Sundays, noon-6 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m.
Ends: June 7
Price: $3-$6
Contact: (626) 449-6840

calendarlive.com: Italy, the classroom
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/
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