OPINION
By Alina Tortosa
For the Herald
Sunday. September 10, 2000
There is that quota of anguish in the appreciation of contemporary art
for the non initiated that causes them to look away, to withdraw, or to ignore
it. They may find it hard to come to
terms with life as it is today, and do not want to be reminded of the hard
edges. A commited and talented artist
has feelers that will interpret reality
for him, before it becomes real to most people. The work may appear far fetched or obsessed
because he has consciously or uncousciously understood social, historical and
biological processes ahead of most of his contemporaries.
In restrospect, the work of the
Impressionists seems harmless enough
today. Yet in its own
time it caused a major outroar.
To most people today,
Impressionsism is a sort of aesthetic oasis.
It was not like that at the time.
An interesting example is what
the french call "le leg. Caillebotte". Gustave Caillebotte, one of the until
recently less known impressionists, when
he died in 1984 left his art collection to the French nation "on condition
that 'it should go neither to an attic, nor a provincial museum, but straight
to the Luxembourg [the museum then devoted to the work of living artists} and
later to the Louvre' "[1]. The
collection was made up of nineteen Pissarros, fourteen Monets, ten Renoirs, nine Sisleys, seven Degas, five
Cézannes and four Mannets.
Renoir, who together with Martial Caillebote, Gustave's brother, was the executor of the
legacy, wrote to Henri Roujon, the
Director of Fine Arts, informing him of the bequest. As
Roujon was unsure of how to proceed, he asked for advise from
established artists, and from his coleagues.
Jean-Léon Gerôme, one of the
official artists said that to accept the legacy
would be a sign of "moral turpitude" and the end of the nation. The burocrats, Roujon included, argued that "they did not have space to hang
the collection, and some artists (such as monet and Pisarro) would be heavily
over-represented"[2].
It took a long time for the French State to agree to the terms of the
legacy. In 1895 the Musée du Luxembourg
received some of the work. But it was
only in 1928 when the government finally said that they would accept the
remaining twenty-nine paintings. The
widow of Martial Caillebotte's brother then "repudiated the terms of the
bequest". Good for her! And so much for the contemporary appreciation
and success of Impressionist art.
Alina Tortosa
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