ART: Private passion, public betrayal
Harvard's Winthrop Collection at the National Gallery
Gratitude Harvard-style
Before he settled down to the serious life-work of amassing an enormous collection of fine art, Grenville Lindall Winthrop (1864-1943) had practised briefly as a lawyer. Thus his pale patrician shade must have been particularly bemused when, about five years ago, the director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard — the family alma mater to which Winthrop had bequeathed his collection only 55 years before — figured out a way to break a major condition of the bequest: Winthrop's insistence that the items bequeathed should remain at Harvard, for the use of students there, rather than being spirited off to far-flung corners of the world as institutional loans.
Winthrop's will had stipulated that if the Fogg ever loaned out an work from the bequest, it would have to pay the Foundlings Hospital in New York City what was, in 1937 when the will was drafted, the prohibitive sum of $100,000. Half a century later, by which time inflation had gnawed that amount into insignificance, the director of the Fogg was able to dash off a one-off cheque — effectively spitting in the face of one of the most generous benefactors any university collection has ever known, but now he's dead and gone, what does it matter? Meanwhile the act has attracted predictable accolades from people who are keen on 'access' — although the Fogg, located just outside of Boston, is open to all visitors; I've been there plenty of times myself — as well as presumably from curators elsewhere anxious for a chance to rifle through the Winthrop Collection's prizes. Hence, anyway, the present exhibition, A Private Passion, at the National Gallery, on its way back from exile in Japan and Lyon and before its forthcoming season in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. (In his later years Winthrop lived across the street from the Met, but would only rarely loan to them, and his decision not to leave them anything was very much a conscious one.) Then perhaps the works will be allowed to spend a little time at Harvard before being hawked around to boost their custodians' careers once again?
A proper Bostonian
Although he spent much of his life in New York City, Winthrop was the fortunate son of one of Boston's grander families. His ancestor Governor John Winthrop was the author of the 'city set upon a hill' sermon — the greatest and gravest exposition of what puritanism, transplanted to American soil, most feared and wished for itself. That, of course, was in 1630. By the time Grenville Winthrop went up to Harvard 250 years later, the confessional stance of the so-called Boston Brahmins had matured into something more circumspect and sublimated, if no less demanding. So when the shy boy first encountered the lectures of Charles Eliot Norton — a friend of Ruskin's — on the moral force of beauty, the seeds that were scattered could have encountered no more receptive soil. Retiring from the law aged 32 — he was, fortunately, able fall back upon a substantial inherited income — he turned to collecting. Nor were the tastes of this self-contained, apparently rather cold man as circumscribed as subsequent generations might assume. He collected not only French, British and American paintings, drawings and sculpture — recent work as well as acknowledged masters — but also the decorative arts, Peruvian gold and archaic Chinese jades and bronzes. By the time he died the collection he left to Harvard included over 4,000 items, including the best group of works by Ingres outside the Louvre.
In a way it is a pity that A Private Passion, the exhibition currently at the National Gallery, is limited to French, British and American paintings and drawings, and those only from the nineteenth century. Yet despite this perhaps inevitable editing, the result still throws up a surprisingly powerful intellectual and aesthetic portrait of Winthrop himself. In his later years he was consciously trying to create a collection that would be of use to what he called the 'Younger Generation'. He was, after all, no ignorant, eager-to-please robber baron; he knew perfectly well what he wanted to do. Rejecting suggestions that he might give some of the work to the US National Gallery, he wrote:
I admit that more people of the general public will visit Washington than Cambridge [where Harvard is located], but I am not so much interested in the 'general public' as I am in the Younger Generation whom I want to reach in their impressionable years and to prove to them that true art is founded on traditions and is not the product of any one country or century and that Beauty may be found in all countries and in all periods, providing the eye be trained to find it.
Winthrop's objective was to provide the sort of study collection that would support and invigorate that training. And perhaps it is worth noting — if only for the sake of scaring off what is, in this case, a particularly lazy mistake — that what Winthrop was doing was far more than some crude attempt to buy in Old World 'culture' for a young country that did not yet have enough of its own. If anything, he was reminding the young country of its continuous and unavoidable relatedness, culturally and morally, to a wider and more various world.
Icy eroticism and the perfect finish
Winthrop's pedagogic scheme undoubtedly does much to inform the content of the collection — even the selected highlights of it that have been chosen for exhibition. There is an emphasis on rigorous drawing, on a clean clear finish, and on addressing the human figure. When it comes to content, religious themes were clearly of interest, as were works infused with a slightly icy eroticism — overlapping occasionally, most spectacularly in Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for Salome but also in a number of works by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Gustave Moreau. Later in life, the insistence on smooth finish lapsed enough to admit artists like Whistler, Degas, Renoir, Sargent and Van Gogh. There is a lot of drama in the work he seems to have liked best, as well as an interest in psychological insight and a lot of narrative content, historical or imaginary. So reductivist though it might be, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Winthrop — by all accounts an undemonstrative man whose wife died young and whose two daughters, brought up amid a cocoon of paternalistic protectiveness, both eloped on the same day, one with the family electrician and the other with their chauffeur — sublimated a great deal into art that he could not, or did not choose to express within the confines of his day-to-day life.
The coldly glittering superstars of the show are, obviously, the works by Ingres. Here in the Sainsbury Wing, they fill a whole room, including a divider inserted down the middle of the room to create more hanging-space. At the time Winthrop began collecting, Ingres' name was a by-word for exquisite drawing and for a near-miraculous state of finish. Both are triumphantly on show here. A group portrait in pencil of the family of Lucien Bonaparte (1815, just at the start of the Hundred Days) is a masterpiece of what Ingres does best, which is to combine an obsessive, almost eccentric stylisation (those sloping shoulders, almond eyes, sleek round heads) with flashes of extravagant verisimilitude. Odalisque with the Slave (c. 1837-40), on the other hand, stands in frankly amusing contrast with The Bather (given here as c. 1808, or c. 1824-33). The former is a rich, sickly-sweet concoction of Orientalist excess — an underdressed concubine writhes lubriciously on a silken throw — saved from descent into kitsch by its genuinely exciting acid colours. The latter, on the other hand, is as cool, airy, subtle and expressive an account of a human back as has ever been painted; despite the exposed sole, the confidently-drawn arch of the thigh, eroticism here seems to matter so much less than the air of tranquil avoidance summed up in the averted face, the hidden hands, those eyes trained on something we can't quite see just off the right margin of the paper. This little watercolour is as perfect as anything Chardin or even Watteau ever produced. Finally, Ingres' great portrait of his friend Madame Reiset (1846) is itself unforgettable. Madame Reiset turns sideways to face the viewer. Her silk taffeta bodice is crisp; her lace collar starched; her satin-smooth curls are recorded with lovely precision. Compared, then, with the sharply-rendered details that frame it, her plain but kind-looking face takes on an extraordinary softness, especially around her lips and pale, slightly mismatched eyes. With its masterly delicacy of tone, its variation of 'focus' and its almost palpable affection, this astounding painting seems to posit some sort of reproof to photograph and its ridiculous claims to 'realism'. If this were the only work in the exhibition, it would still be worth seeing.
The Winthrop Collection's French holdings did not stop, though, at Ingres. His work is framed, chronologically at least, by a magnificent portrait of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1817) by Ingres' great master Jacques-Louis David, and at the other end of the spectrum by some impressive work by Gericault, especially the drawing The Mutiny on the Raft of the Medusa (1818), in which the admittedly brilliant drawing all but vanishes under the sheer weight of the drama — the churning sea, the hideous tangle of bodies, the darkening sky. Later on, one sees not only the extravagances of Moreau — nicely juxtaposed here with work by Britain's Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — but eventually the Impressionists and their followers. Degas' pastel drawing Two Dancers entering the Stage (c. 1876-88) is remarkable not only for the bloodiness of those roses, but also for the contrast between, for example, the solidity of the left-hand dancer's right leg and the froth of the tutu above it. Daumier, Manet, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet and Renoir are also represented. Of these latter, perhaps the most attractive is Monet's strangely melancholy Road towards the Farm, Saint-Simeon, Honfleur (1867) where the sharp smells of snow and woodsmoke seem to hover in front of the small, unassuming scene; the most boring are some flowers in a vase by Renoir, which like so much of his work lead one to wonder why this man is still considered an important painter, commanding vast prices and acres of prime gallery-space.
American beauties
Britain is represented not only by Blake and by a succession of Pre-Raphaelite painters — Rosetti, Ford Maddox Brown, Burne Jones — all much consumed with their various faintly sinister or silly fascinations, but also, as mentioned, by Beardsley, at his most lushly erotic in a series of four pen-and-ink drawings. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, expatriates Whistler and Sargent are left to span whatever cultural gap might be seen to exist between British exoticism and Yankee matter-of-factness. Of the three Whistler Nocturnes, one was denounced by Ruskin in the course of Whistler's famous libel suit, and although in some ways it is hard now to see what all the fuss was about — like most things that are still endless imitated, the original now has the drained look of something on which vampires have been supping — it is nonetheless oddly moving to see it there on the wall, small and blue-green and tranquil, still delivering a recognisable if unremarkable view of the Thames. As for Sargent, The Breakfast Table, with its air of having escaped from a Henry James novel, was a particular delight — nothing understated here, with the bravura treatment of the gleaming silver on the table, the glass orb of the lamp floating above — the inconsequence of an apple suspended in the air and yet unbitten freighted with infinite significance. If effortlessness can be learned by example, it is hard to imagine a better exemplar than this.
It was the homegrown American art, though, which perhaps provided the most bracing surprise. Winslow Homer may well be America's greatest nineteenth-century painter, for although his complete lack of bombast pulls against everything that non-Americans (and for that matter, plenty of Americans) tend to assume about American art, no other American painter would ever again find such a happy balance between form and content, aspiration and execution, in the pursuit of such uniquely American visions. Yet he is not as well-known as he might be, even in America, and very rarely represented outside the United States. Thus the three watercolours here were all very welcome additions. Of these, Sailboat and Fourth of July Fireworks (1880) is the obvious star — a technically brilliant exercise in wet-into-wet painting, where a very limited palette and a few inchoate blobs suddenly turn into fire and water, earth and air in a sort of fit of near-magical alchemy — but also brilliant on other levels, not least in its neat red-white-and-blue colour-scheme.
Yet my favourite here was another Homer watercolour — Mink Pond (1891), a simple account of a bullfrog looking at a rising fish against a background of very black water. Here the artist has painted with precision, rather than bravado. Everything has a jewel-like luminescence. There is a powerful sense that in just a moment, something will happen. What we are seeing cannot last, in its savage magic, for more than a second or so. It is wild and slightly terrible, as well as beautiful, and in a way it may well be something we are not meant to see, for why would anyone be in such a place, there in the dark by a pond, watching such a thing? On an obvious level, Beardsley's Salome drawings are more full of menace, darkness, tension — but on a non-obvious level (and hence, surely, the one to appeal to any Boston Brahmin man?) Mink Pond is a far more tense, menacing painting, and one furthermore to which no reproduction is likely to do justice. Like all Homer's greatest works, this flirts with anecdotal lightness or even whimsy, but somehow emerges radiating darkly persuasive symbolism and no great optimism about the human condition. As such, it is no bad epigraph to the whole exhibition.
Parva sed apta
Perceptive readers will have noticed by now that I very much enjoyed A Private Passion. It is not an enormous exhibition full of five-star masterpieces — which means that, unlike the Titian show earlier this year, it can survive the low ceilings, crepuscular lighting and oddly deadening atmosphere of the uncharismatic Sainsbury Wing special exhibition spaces. Unlike the rather unsatisfactory Pompadour show, it does not look forlorn when stripped of its architectural and historical context and stuffed into a grim little basement. The hanging is sympathetic and thoughtful, throwing up some genuinely stimulating juxtapositions, and if there is some weak work (as there obviously is) and a lingering wish that the 'history of taste' angle might have been pursued more rigorously both in the catalogues and in the exhibition itself, this in no way detracts from the impact of the stronger work or from the impression one carries away of Winthrop himself — the meticulous collector and generous philanthropist, cheated with emetic cynicism in death by people who will never, I suppose, understand the uncomfortable need to do the right thing that men like Winthrop so often and so obviously possessed.
Of course, when it comes to the way in which the show has been hung, there is always scope for one particular complaint familiar to ERO readers — a complaint about the violence done to art by ripping it out of one context and planting it in another, and the absolutely need for imagination and sympathy in mediating the effects of that violence. It would be easy enough to assert what places like the Frick Collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Wallace Collection all in their various ways continue to proclaim so clearly — that there is a lot to be said for keeping a great collector's accumulated treasure in one place, preferably the place that he or she chose for it, complete with all the dud works, the forgeries, the things that haven't aged well, the revealing preoccupations and the other inimitably individual things that make an important collection a work of art above and beyond any individual masterpieces it might include. Anyone who has visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum marooned in its increasingly nasty area, scaled its theatrical grand staircase amid visions of a young Bernard Berenson flirting with that fierce old nightmare of a patron who was every bit as determined as he was, and paused to laugh at some of the more atrocious failures of taste will see what I mean — as will anyone who has found in the Wallace Collection, just a few hundred yards north of Oxford Street, a perfect oasis of civilised calm that still looks far more like grand private house than a gallery. Such collections can have their own peculiarly awful troubles, as the Barnes Foundation — perhaps as a legacy of its peculiarly awful founder — has made all too clear. Yet because their eccentric, accidental, contingent character is so much more transparent, they always seem to me to show their pictures in a much clearer, more revealing light. Some of my favourite museums in the world fall into this category or near it — not least, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which despite all the changes it has seen over the years says more about what beauty looked like before romanticism than any other place I know.
The wisdom of Professor Haskell
The other thing, of course, that would have to be said about all these collections — so much more vivid, so much more human than any show in the basement of the Sainsbury Wing could ever be — is that most of them are governed by extremely strange rules and provisions. Many of these have, over time, suffered the usual assaults and attempted subversions. The late Francis Haskell spent much of his later life locked in battle with the other trustees of the Wallace Collection, trying to prevent the destruction of the rule which had for so long prohibited the loaning-out of works. Professor Haskell held the line, although for how long? Similarly, the only way pictures leave the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is by theft, although that happens more often than strictly desirable. A few other collections preserve their maidenly integrity. On one level, of course this hampers 'access' — but on another level, I'd argue strongly that it gives the visitor who can be bothered to seek out these less promiscuous gems a much richer, much more memorable experience once he arrives at the end of his quest. And to take another of Professor Haskell's points, if one makes anything too easy there is no thrill in achieving it. A Vermeer in a big Vermeer show is — well, another Vermeer that one can't quite see because of the people standing in front of it — whereas an out-of-the-way Vermeer that has required research, travel and effort can lodge in one's mind forever. 'Access' has its qualitative side, as well as its quantitative one.
Yet the reason I have not insisted that the Winthrop Collection should still, like the Frick Collection, be kept in Winthrop's handsome house across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that, quite simply, this wasn't what he wanted to happen to it. He wanted it to become a study collection. It is worth stressing what that did not mean. He did not want his collection to become a sort of secular monument over his tomb, showing what a man of wealth and discernment he was — Winthrops don't go in for that sort of thing. Nor did he want it, Charles Saatchi-like, to be a place of amusement or entertainment — Winthrops don't really go in for that sort of thing, either. Rather, he wanted a particular group of young men and women to be able to live with these works on a day-to-day basis — not admiring them or being in awe of them, but actually handling them, examining them critically, engaging with them in such a way that would both build America's curatorial and critical capacity, but also — and I know that this sounds quaint today, but never mind — because of the moral benefits he believed this would bring both them, and America. He chose this particular group of young people not out of snobbery — anyone who knows much about the early life of his sometime-advisor Berenson, in the Harvard class below him incidentally, will realise how robustly meritocratic Harvard admissions were from a very early point — but because he knew how much Harvard had done for him, and because he wanted — in another terribly quaint phrase — to 'give something back' to his college and his community. That, historically, is the sort of thing that Winthrops do.
So although I loved seeing A Private Passion, the fact that it ever reached these shores can only be a source of sorrow. It is not just the shade of Grenville Winthrop I worry about — although I do worry about our discourtesy and lack of generosity in the face of the dead. I worry about the monster this thing called 'art' has become, that decent, law-abiding people should become so casual about their dead fellow creatures' wishes when issues of 'access' are concerned. I worry whether any sane person would ever give anything to a hallowed institution when these institutions have become so brash in their sub-legal lunges for whatever it is they want. And I worry about a legal system that cannot see any point in treating contracts — solemn binding oaths — as something with ongoing validity rather than purely subjective, situational, a-la-carte arrangements that can be overturned when they are no longer fashionable, since this rather seems to undermine the whole point of law in the first place. So by all means, go and see A Private Passion. It's a handsome exhibition and one that includes some haunting and beautiful works. But at the same time, spare a thought for Grenville Winthrop and the way in which his generosity has been betrayed — and whatever you do, don't leave a brass farthing to Harvard University.
A Private Passion: Harvard's Winthrop Collection (sponsored by ExxonMobil) will be at the National Gallery from 25 June — 14 September 2003. Tickets cost £7 (concessions £5, students and 12-18s £3, under 12s free).
Bunny Smedley is ERO's arts editor.
Bunny Smedley, June 26, 2003 01:39 PM