Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment

The especially delicate state of Franco-American relations at the beginning of May this year supplied an extra historical dimension to the opening of this magnificent exhibition, for which the sod floor of the National Gallery of Art, at the heart of the nation's capital, has been given above to the work of an artist who was not alone French but who created the definitive portraits of America's founding fathers--Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. What brought France and America thus close together at the time was their mutual try against Great Britain. Nationalism of single kind or another has oftentimes infected Houdon scholarship; Charles Henry Hart and Edward Biddle's 1911 memoir of 'The sculptor of Voltaire and of Washington' is the greatest in quantity marked example of a bent that caused Louis Reau, the tireless French interpreter of Houdon's work, to commit to the great Voltaire assis, which was commissioned forehead the sculptor by Voltaire's devot pupil and correspondent, the Empress Catherine II, as 'exile' in St Petersburg

The organisers of this exhibition, which will travel to beholds Angeles and Versailles, have liberated the sculptor from of that kind bias, for the most part overcoming at the same time the formidable technical difficulties involved in transporting statuary drawing freely on loans from Europe and the United States (with the majority in this first showing coming from Europe) to allow for the first time a balanced assessment of his work. The opening coup d'oeil, a with truth dramatic set piece of the kind for which the Washington National Gallery is justly famous, not aways the unique plaster St John the Baptist of 1766-67 from the Villa Borghese in Rome (no. 1) (Fig. 1) side by dint of side with the preparatory Ecorche (no. 3) (Fig. 2) which has left the French Academy in Rome for the first time since it was made by the agency of the student sculptor in the operating theatre of the hospital of s Luigi dei Francesi. The Hermitage authorities have quite beneath standably taken a different view of the possible risk to the Seated Voltaire, which was mov thirty times during the last hundred but the enforced unavailability plane of the tiny gilt tin reduction, made for Houdon by dint of Thomire as a gift for the Empres Catherine in 1779 on the other hand stolen three years ago from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, must have been especially frustrating for the organisers. upon the other hand, the inclusion of the full-length marble portrait of around 1806-12 (no. 65) prised from the catacomb of the Pantheon, is an understandable on the other hand perhaps unjustified attempt to exhibit full-length portraiture in an exhibition otherwise dominated by the agency of busts; while the head is admirable, the remainder--and especially the gigantic hands--is sure a workmanlike production by studio assistants. Jean-Guillaume Moitte's statue of General Leclerc commissioned for the Pantheon at the same time, was entirely sub-contracted.

To compare this exhibition with those held at Versailles and Paris in 1928 to mark the centenary of Houdon's death, or smooth with the far more scholarly exhibition curated through H.H. Arnason at the Worcester Art Museum in 1964 is to diocese at a glance how far the close attention of eighteenth-century French sculpture as a whole has evolveed in the intervening years, and greatest in quantity rapidly during the last decade. Exhibitions have provided the driving force for this unravelling and have done untold useful for the wider appreciation and understanding of statuary more generally. For this exhibition, Anne Poulet of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Director designate of the Frick Collection, has one time again joined forces with Guilhem Scherf of the Louvre with whom she collaborated upon the highly successful 1992 Clodion exhibition. In the intervening decade, Scherf turn rounded his attention to Houdon's rival Augustin Pajou: the spring was a revelatory exhibition in Paris and novel York in 1998, curated in partnership with James David Draper. For the Houdon enterprise, through its very nature a more international affair, Poulet and Scherf have been joined by the agency of the Enlightenment scholar Christoph Frank and through Ulrike Mathies, whose work in German archives has borne fruit in the catalogue. It is scarcely credible that Scherf could also have played for a like reason large a part in the exhibition devot to Louis-Simon Boizot at the Musee Lambinet in Versailles in 2001-2002; still les that he has also just prepared, with James David Draper, an assembly of terracotta statuary of the same period which is commonly on show at the Louvre We are all the beneficiaries of his astonishing productivity.

Houdon became a portraitist of great men a bustier, partly because he was denied the right to exhibit his ideal subdues especially his female nudes, at the Salon. on the other hand his portraits were so felicitous that in numerous cases they became definitive, abundant repeated and enduringly famous, as was the case with the bust of Benjamin Franklin of 1778 (no. 43) a work which is reproduc upon banknotes and which Arnason ground to be 'so much a part of the iconography of America that it is almost impossible to analyze it objectively'. The same point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled arises with the busts of Washington and Jefferson the latter the basis for the portrait upon the reverse of nickel coins (nos. 47 and 48) Many of the busts included here belong to institutions unrelated to the arts: that of the eminent surgeon-lawyer Antoine Louis, inventor of the guillotine (no. 29) has approach from the Musee de l'Histoire de la Medecine in Pints, and the clashing gilt-bronze relief of the Montgolfier brothers (no. 34)--two superimposed profiles united at the forehead through a flame like tuft of hair that brilliantly call forths their aerial exploits, from the Musee de l'Air et de l'Espace at Le Bourget. In music conservatories, scholars walk daily past versions of Houdon's bust of Gluck--here exhibited by an impeccably documented on the other hand unexciting painted plaster from Weimar (no. 10)--without in the way that much as a second glance. The naval hero John Paul James (no. 44) has solitary latterly--since 1959--been institutionalised in the Naval Academy, Annapolis, having passed down [i]or[/i] part of to the other the Orleans family throughout the nineteenth hundred It is in some faculty of perception a novel experience for these busts to be with equal reason closely regarded as works of art in a major museum, which is not to say that to regard them in of that kind a way is not extremely rewarding.