There seems to be a conspiracy between the art media and museum curators to prevent the public from learning how to look at paintings. Is it not their responsibility to help us to understand the true purpose of the artist in each painting?
Criticising the inadequate way in which the press and the National Gallery presented the Rembrandt self-portrait exhibition (August, Prospect), I argued that their speculation about why Rembrandt liked dressing up in different hats, combined with a vacuous CD commentary on the paintings, did nothing to further our understanding of the complex pictorial language Rembrandt used to represent the three-dimentional world on a flat surface.
Now the Royal Academy presents a long-awaited Chardin retrospective, together with an accompanying catalogue. The commentaries on each painting are banal and sometimes misleading. Described in the catalogue as an "acknowledged expert" on Chardin, Pierre Rosenberg confesses that it is not his "ambition to explain the miracle... the 'magic' of Chardin," claiming that "great painters have always eluded enquiry and defied description." This is not true. Great painters down the centuries have used a common language to express themselves. "Magic" their paintings may appear to be, but there is an underlying grammar to each one, the logic of which Rosenberg does not feel compelled to share. He merely describes the "hours and hours" that Chardin spent "trying to get the colours right" without describing how the artist seeks to express the relationship between things; the way colours, such as red and green, affect each other.
We are told, absurdly, that in his two paintings of musical instruments, Chardin shows "his desire to control space in a structured way in order to convince his audience that decorative painting can and should be as good as normal painting." What does this mean? What, in this context, does "normal" mean? Instead of giving us shopping-list descriptions of the paintings (three eggs, a basket of onions and a ray), Rosenberg might have offered suggestions as to the role played by each object in the pictorial drama. Instead he writes inanely about composition; "the format is unusual"; "this tour de force... sets out to dazzle." We are told that Chardin "gives his attention to the structure of his compositions," yet we are given no insight into the means Chardin uses; the role, for example, of an open doorway as a vertical device which echoes the edge of the picture plane; or how he uses strategically placed objects to lead the eye around the painting and to animate the rectangle; how he creates scale by juxtaposing large figures against small ones; and how he constructs an illusion of light by piecing together shapes of relative colour values.
Commenting on Preparations for Lunch (above), Rosenberg states that "Chardin has not concerned himself too much with details such as the crumbs of bread in the foreground, preferring to concentrate on the overall effect..."
But at school, we learned the pivotal role which can be played, in Shakespeare's plays, by seemingly unimportant characters, such as a watchman or a maid; how they reveal something about the protagonist or move the action forward. Chardin was a visual dramatist who chose the rectangular canvas as his stage and used a concise pictorial language to express the beauty of objects in space.
The crumbs are in fact an integral part of the "overall effect" and Chardin would have understood their precise significance in the painting using them as a device for articulating (like stage footlights) the front of the ledge and as a bright "note" to lead the viewer into the drama. He achieves the "overall effect" by organising the rectangle into three "acts," the middle of which is occupied by the height of the bottle. Its horizontal top signifies his eye-level, from which descends the relative ellipses of the knife-handle, the goblet and the dish.
Rosenberg declares that "it is undeniable that his approach to painting had no real precedent." And yet Chardin must have learned this language from his predecessors-such as Titian and Rembrandt-just as C?zanne and Matisse proclaimed their debt to Chardin.
Chardin himself said that "the eye has to be taught to look at nature." We have to be taught to look at paintings. This was the responsibility given to Rosenberg by the organisers of this exhibition. It is one which he has woefully failed to fulfil.
