An exhibit with only 5 pictures at the Frick Collection

What museum would have the audacity to promote a special “exhibition” consisting of just five pictures? In fact, the current exhibition at the Frick Collection seems sprawling compared to the one-picture exhibit the Frick put on a year ago (the “Antea” by the Italian master Parmigianino, lent by a museum in Italy). And this five-painting exhibit from the Norton Simon Museum of Art (Pasadena) is practically perfect.

Constable's "The White Horse"

The Frick already has way more than its fair share of the world’s greatest pictures. Where would one even start to list them? Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert”? Constable’s “The White Horse”? Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More (copies of which can be found in the offices of most Roman Catholic lawyers)? Despite its riches, there are still a few of the Old Masters who are not represented at the Frick. The Norton Simon Museum has now lent the Frick superb examples by five such artists: Guercino, Rubens, Murillo, Zurbarán, and Bassano.

We loved these pictures. But do you know what got our attention? This passage from the Frick’s promotional materials: “This exhibition marks the beginning of a series of reciprocal loan exchanges between the two institutions.”

What gives? Wasn’t it a condition of Mr. Frick’s trust, nearly 100 years ago, that his paintings would never, ever leave the museum? Wasn’t the Frick the only museum that wouldn’t share its three Vermeers a few years ago when the Met organized an exhibition of every known Vermeer painting in the world? We remember the small placard at the Met’s exhibit advising exhibit patrons, more in sorrow than in anger, that if they wanted to see the remaining three Vermeers, they’d have to walk down 5th Avenue to the Frick, because it didn’t lend its works to other museums.

The Ingres portrait will be traveling to Pasadena in October 2009

There apparently has been a breach in the citadel. We checked the Norton Simon Museum’s website, and sure enough, in October 2009 the Frick will indeed be lending that museum one of its best-known pictures, Jean-August-Dominique Ingres’s celebrated 1845 portrait of Comtesse d’Haussonville. What loophole has been discovered in Mr. Frick’s trust agreement?  Will the Rembrandts or the Duccio be lent out next?

The five superb pictures in the current show may be seen in the octagonal gallery where Gainsboroughs and Van Dykes usually hang. We were especially looking forward to seeing the painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, the Spanish master who became one of our favorite artists after we visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery (just south of London) several years ago. Murillo seems to be only modestly represented in American museums.

As Renoir is to the sterner Cezanne, Murillo is to the more austere Velasquez.  The Norton Simon Museum has an especially fine Murillo depicting the scene recorded in Luke 1:57: “Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy.” The elderly Elizabeth is in bed in the dim upper right after giving birth to John; we couldn’t help wondering if Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, the future mother of the Saviour, is the young woman holding the white garments in the lower right.

As an art collector, Mr. Frick was clearly partial to landscapes and portraits; there are only two biblical pictures (Gerard David’s “The Deposition” and Claude Lorraine’s “The Sermon on the Mount”) in his grand gallery. Still, it seems surprising that Mr. Frick never bought a major Rubens; the Norton Simon Museum’s “The Holy Women at the Sepulchre” seems like just the sort of thing Mr. Frick would have liked. It would have been a worthy complement to “The Deposition.”

The most arresting of the five pictures from the Norton Simon Museum, however, is a 1625 portrait of a dog by Guercino, another painter in whom we became interested as a result of our visit to the Dulwich Picture Gallery (which owns Guercino’s affecting “Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery”) . Now Guercino the painter of classical and biblical scenes we knew. But Guercino the animal portraitist we did not expect.

Suffice it to say that the dog, apparently the pride and joy of an Italian nobleman named Aldrovandi, dominates Guercino’s canvas. On seeing the Aldrovandi Dog, we immediately glanced over to the adjacent grand gallery, where another seventeenth-century picture dominated by an animal was directly in our line of sight. In Nicolas Poussin’s “Hannibal Crossing the Alps,” the predominant figure is not Hannibal, but his elephant.

How nicely Poussin's "A Dance to the Music of Time" (the Wallace Collection, in London), would have graced the Frick Collection!

Poussin’s elephant picture is fairly new to the Frick; we first saw it there last year. The Frick says that it is on long-term loan to the Frick till sometime next year, and we’ve been speculating as to what will happen then. Is the owner thinking of donating it to the Frick?  Mr. Frick’s failure to acquire a Poussin was arguably his most glaring omission when he assembled his collection. Is the Frick thinking of buying “Hannibal Crossing the Alps,” even though it’s hardly typical of Poussin’s style?

The curators have bravely hung Poussin’s elephant near a Corot and a Hals portrait in the Frick’s grand gallery, no doubt hoping that visitors will take to it. After several visits, we still find the elephant jarring. We are unpersuaded that it’s truly a good match for the personality of the Frick Collection.

Ten pictures you shouldn’t miss at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In Philadelphia on business last week, this art museum junkie was able to spend a pleasant afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he found the usual tourists posing for souvenir photos at the top of the famous steps in triumphal “Rocky” poses. Unfortunately for the photos, most of this fine building is temporarily covered with scaffolding (even more than in this 2007 shot).

Inside, the collection is as rewarding as ever, but can’t be seen all in a day. If you have a chance to visit, Emsworth offers a modest list of ten pictures at this museum that he wouldn’t want his friends to miss.

1. Interior (Edgar Degas). Never mind the famous paintings of ballet rehearsals and nudes getting into their baths — this melodramatic 1868 painting is the Degas that appeals to me most. There’s a story here, but what is it?

The room, with its old-fashioned wallpaper, looks like a set from a play. The painting has been subtitled The Rape, as if the impassive man has just taken from the unfortunate, half-dressed woman something she can never get back. Is this a pictoral re-telling of the story of Amnon (son of King David), who tricked and raped his half-sister Tamar? “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.” 2 Samuel 13:15 (KJV). But what to make of the oddly lit jewelry box on the table in the middle of the room?

2. Rhetoricians at a Window (Jan Steen). Even without a Rembrandt or a Vermeer, the collection of Dutch and Flemish old masters at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is outstanding. It includes at least half a dozen marvelous genre paintings by the Dutchman Jan Steen, of which Rhetoricians at a Window, painted in 1661, is my favorite by an eyelash. Most of these portray working-class citizens in everyday activities, although one illustrates the Exodus scene of Moses striking the rock in anger to get water for the Israelites.

3. A Temperance Meeting (Homer). But Dutch genre paintings have nothing on American genre paintings. The Dutch peasant with the cup in Steen’s painting isn’t drinking milk, but the American farmboy in Winslow Homer’s scene, painted in 1874, is.

4. Christ Bearing the Cross (Murillo). The Gospel of John tells us that, after his trial, Jesus was forced to carry his own cross to Calvary, where he was to be executed by crucifixion. In this large picture by the great Spanish master Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jesus meets his mother Mary and kneels to rest, with his cross on his shoulder. Mary holds out her hands as if to ask Jesus whether he truly must give up his life, a conversation she surely had with her son long before his arrest at Passover. Jesus confirms his mission with an expressive look.

Murillo’s picture is not a literal portrayal of the scene on the road to Calvary, because Jesus was guarded and whipped along by His tormentors on his way to Calvary, and it seems unlikely that they left Him alone for a private moment with His mother. Its meaning is, I think, figurative. Jesus surely knew long before his arrest that He had been sent to yield up His life as a sacrifice for the sins of mankind, and in a real sense He was carrying the cross throughout the years of His ministry. None of the many works of art with Christian themes in the Philadelphia Museum of Art will speak more movingly to believers than this 1665 picture.

5. Pont Neuf, Afternoon Sunshine (Pissarro). The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a spectacular collection of French impressionist paintings, but the sheer pleasure afforded by this heavily textured view of the most famous of the Paris bridges that cross the Seine is unmatched. Every part of this 1901 painting, from the colorful wagons and figures on the bridge to the fantastical greens and mauves of the river itself, is a sensual treat. To my great disappointment, it was not on the gallery walls during my mid-July 2008 visit.

6. Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (Duchamp). This cubist painting made a stir when it was first exhibited nearly a century ago (in 1914), but it’s not at all salacious. In fact, it’s difficult to find the nude subject of this monochromatic painting at all, let alone identify any particular parts of her anatomy. Nude Descending a Staircase may be the best-known cubist painting in the world. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an excellent collection of other cubist works, especially by Picasso, Leger, and Juan Gris.

The museum has devoted an entire gallery to Marcel Duchamp. What a sad case study is his career! Some early paintings by Duchamp in the gallery, in what might be considered a post-impressionist style, show his exceptional talent. These include, for example, a fine portrait of his father. But Duchamp was caught up in the rapidly changing artistic and intellectual movements of the day. First, in a cubist phase, as represented by Nude Descending a Staircase, he abandoned representational art. Then, perhaps finding that celebrity and notoriety suited him more than artistic achievement, Duchamp abandoned his discipline altogether. He gave up painting, bought a bicycle wheel, mounted it on a pedestal, and announced that it was art.

Gratified with the attention, Duchamp repeated the trick over the years with a urinal, a comb, and other objects, a number of which are exhibited in this gallery. Remarkably, people took these stunts seriously; apparently some still do. The gallery chronicles Duchamp’s fall. The visitor will marvel at a century of public gullibility.

7. William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuykill River (Thomas Eakins). In the shadows, the famous sculptor chips away at his masterpiece. Neither Rush nor the elderly chaperone look at the nude model, who holds a box on her shoulder to help hold her pose. The model’s clothing, laid on a chair, is by far the brightest part of the painting.

8. The Large Bathers (Cezanne). It’s the picture that’s large (83 by 93 inches), not the bathers. Cezanne painted three versions of The Large Bathers, one in the London’s National Gallery, one at the Barnes Foundation, in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, and this 1906 work, which is the finest of the three.

Paul Cezanne’s masterpiece can be seen 50 yards away down the long gallery lined with impressionist masterpieces that leads to the circular fountain court gallery.

9. The Rialto (Sargent). If Emsworth ever visits Venice, it will be because of John Singer Sargent’s evocative paintings of scenes from that city.

Visitors to the Philadelphia museum who want to see all the Sargents are led a merry chase. The curators have hung The Rialto among the works of late 19th-century European, presumably for no other reason than that it is a European scene. Portrait of Lady Eden is in the same gallery, presumably because the subject was British. But other Sargent paintings, including several fine portraits and a strikingly modern late landscape, are found among the works of his fellow Americans.

10. Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg (Matisse). In 1914, while Picasso and Braque were painting the same Cubist painting over and over again, Henri Matisse was using art’s new-found freedom to paint this unique portrait. As an afficionado, Emsworth was frustrated no end to find on his recent visit to Philadelphia (July 2008) that hardly anything by Matisse was on the walls.

These are not necessarily the finest or the most famous paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I have not forgotten Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Rubens’s Prometheus Unbound, Renoir’s Large Bathers, Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, or Monet’s Japanese Footbridge and Lily Pool. But you’d see them anyway.