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	Book Reviews

Greuze the Draftsman

By Edgar Munhall
(Book Review)

© 2002 Merrell Publishers
283 pages, 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white
ISBN 1-85894-158-X
Hardcover, $75.00

And what about those drawings? Because that's where Greuze truly shows himself to be a man of genius.

Denis Diderot, quoted in Greuze the Draftsman

Greuze the Draftsman represents the cream of fine art books: superb works, solid scholarship, and a subtle excellence of graphic layout that presents both at their elegant best. Greuze's skill in drawing compasses the charming, the agitated, the erotic: the spectrum of human feeling, illustrated with beauty and vigor. Magnificently illustrated, with text by Edgar Munhall, Curator Emeritus of the Frick Collection, Greuze the Draftsman presents a collection of the artist's work for a new and revelatory look. This beautiful, highly recommended book appeals to the senses and the intellect, and will please anyone who appreciates fine craftsmanship in art.

Both the drawings and paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), the eighteenth-century French artist, were much sought after in his own day. He was the popular illustrator of what art historian Anita Brookner called sensibilité, a certain flush of emotion cultivated by the rich and idle, already prevalent in French literature and the theatre, and expressing itself finally in painting. But the rationale behind what Greuze chose to represent, and his luxurious public as well, disappeared in the social upheaval that shook France to its roots. Nineteenth-century French art critics, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt noted his financial and professional ruin: "The Revolution robbed Greuze of everything... His period was already the past, his public had lived their lives. At each new picture by David, silence and contempt gathered increasingly over the painting of the ancien régime." Time has somewhat restored Greuze's reputation among art historians, but his paintings are not a meal for modern tastes. They seem alternately overdramatized, precieux, or profane: vulnerable to the relentless irony of our twentieth, and now twenty-first, century.

His drawings, on the other hand, transcend time. In Greuze the Draftsman, Edgar Munhall has brought together a body of work well worth attention. The illustrated works display the artist's mastery of anatomy, his skillful evocation of emotion and drama, his capacity for freshness. Munhall's study of this artist has been a lifetime vocation, and Greuze the Draftsman, the first book devoted exclusively to Greuze's drawings in particular, is worthy fruit.

Greuze's mastery of a variety of drawing media is visual pleasure at its most basic. He is omnitalented, with the ability to conjure mass, volume and form equally well from such diversity as the ink-moistened tip of a brush or the dry stroke of a chalk crayon. Munhall notes the artist's light, adept rendering of the small dog in A Dog Running to the Right, Study for "The Broken Mirror" (pl. 27):

In Greuze's The Broken Mirror (fig. 83)... a cavalier King Charles spaniel is depicted rushing in to inspect the mirror his mistress has just broken (fig. 78). Employing the trois crayons medium on blue paper, a relative rarity for him, the artist captured the speed and weightlessness of the dog through short, curling strokes of the chalks and soft stumping -- in contrast to the sculpturesque rendering in red chalk of the muscular mastiff in number 25.

Other works show Greuze's range of freedom within a single medium, from the casual style of A Family Scene (pl. 28) with its lightly delineated grouping of mother, father, and daughter, to the intense, graven detail of The Spoiled Child (pl. 33), intended to serve as a model for printed works -- both executed in ink washes, but radically different in feel and effect.

Head of a Girl (pl. 52) shows that particular ease that informs all this artist's anatomical representation. Diderot's famous quote, "This man draws like an angel," is a well-deserved epithet: Greuze has effectively captured the youthful proportions and rosy bloom of this trustingly upward-gazing child. Head of a Girl may be contrasted with Head of an Old Woman Looking Up, Study for "The Stepmother" (plate 36) or Head of an Old Man (pl. 51), where the chalk deftly shades the lines and creases, the wear of a lifetime, the loosened connective tissue of folded jowls and sagging noses. Not only does this man draw like an angel, he knows his anatomy; he knows his flesh. He easily compasses hands and eyes, both known banes of the artistic student, for whom this book could easily serve as a portable masterclass.

Each of Greuze's studies is also a swift quoting of personality or of emotional state, drawing the viewer into a fleeting glimpse of mind and character. The rapt crowd in The Dancing Doll (pl. 58); the contemplative feel of Head of a Woman Seen from Above (pl. 10); the erotic heat of Head of a Woman (pl. 47); the homely charm of A Family Scene (pl. 28) all move, all reference a specific emotion, usually an uncomplicated one, but one which evokes as clearly as a spoken word. It seems that wherever Greuze touches down, his hand is sure: whether in anatomy, flawless technique, intuitive understanding of the workings of bone and its pendent flesh. And, finally, in that which makes him more than just a skilled technician: that understanding of how these contain, and express, an inner glow of animation.

In drawing, his hand is sure: and yet... These drawings, so exquisite, retain a quality Greuze was never quite able to translate into his paintings. The Goncourts expressed it as a loss of freshness: "His sketches, his notes taken in the street, lost, in their passage from the paper to the canvas, from his sheet of studies to the scene in his picture, all sincerity of action, all the honesty, so to speak, of actual life." Greuze the Draftsman, well-supplied with comparative illustrations, including the paintings for which the pictorial studies were made, encourages exploration of this phenomenon. The Father's Curse: The Ungrateful Son is seen in four variants that show Greuze's progression from initial idea to oil painting. Plate 81, the later rendering, features a light swiftness, a fluid handling of flesh; the clothing, in particular, has a naturalistic flowing, almost creamy 'hand'; and the whole work is expressive of dramatic but still believable emotion. By the final painting (figure 16) and its engraver's model (plate 82), a certain rigor mortis has set in. The composition has ossified into an opera buffa scene of overworked drama, the actors trying too hard to impress; the flowing drapery is an impossible multitude of hard, chiselled folds; and the impromptu pathos of the original idea (plate 48), with its gloomy, book-illustration charm, has almost entirely disappeared.

High-quality printing and good graphic design make Greuze the Draftsman a fine balance of the beautiful and the useful. The chalk works are especially lush, the reproductions capturing the richness of the crayon right down to the lay of the paper as revealed by strokes and shading. Author Edgar Munhall is a leading authority on the artist, making Greuze the Draftsman not only a beautiful art book but a fully appointed scholarly work. Munhall's commentary includes detailed notes on provenance, exhibitions, bibliographic reference and footnotes for each plate. The book's graphic design delivers this considerable variety of information in a layout visually pleasing, pleasurably legible: the eye is able to capture it all clearly at a glance.

Greuze the Draftsman offers the best of both worlds, a book that is both a definitive scholarly reference, and a beautiful work appealing to any art lover. In a sense, the vision this collection presents is of an untroubled Greuze: as a master craftsman, sketching for himself alone, might smile, play, feel pleasure and freedom in the extension of his abilities. Such may not have been the case, but most of the works here do have a certain simplicity and uplifting freedom. There is less of the heavy-handed interpolation of moralising that invested his paintings, and more of an even spontaneity of presentation. Greuze is able to convey both physiognomy and emotion, both flesh and its animating spirit, in a wealth of scenes, settings and media: and his considerable skill makes Greuze the Draftsman a book to linger over in contemplation and pleasure.

Greuze the Draftsman is the catalogue companion to a museum exhibition of Greuze's collected drawings, which was shown at The Frick Collection in New York (http://www.frick.org/html/prgreuze.htm) from May 14 through August 4, 2002, and will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/greuze/greuze.html) from September 10 through December 1, 2002.

--Katherine Rook Lieber

Katherine Rook Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual and Performing Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.

Editorial Note: All quotes, unless otherwise identified, are from the reviewed book itself. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt are quoted from French Eighteenth-Century Painters (Cornell Paperbacks/Cornell University Press:1981). Anita Brookner's excellent work Greuze: The rise and fall of an eighteenth century phenomenon (New York Graphic Society, Ltd.:1972) is another definitive reference on this artist.

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