Nonpoisonous Painter

The same day that Hitler marched into what remained of France, Manhattan art lovers marched into the Wildenstein Galleries to see the biggest exhibition of France's famed Painter Camille Corot ever held in the U.S. Arranged for the benefit of the Salvation Army War Fund under the somewhat ironic title, The Serene World of Corot, the show filled two large galleries and a smaller room, overflowed into a corridor. Included were 74 paintings, eleven drawings and etchings, nine autographies and several personal souvenirs. More than half the paintings, borrowed from private collections, had never appeared in public before.

Both Corot's main periods were represented. Between 1826, when Corot painted the clean, realistic Bridge and Castle St. Angela (with St. Peter's dome in the distance), and 1851, when he painted the solid sunlit Harbor of La Rochelle, Corot's art seldom revealed a trace of the feathery brushwork that later made him so rich a man and so sentimental a landscapist. This less familiar period of Corot's work is represented by 22 canvases. Only the most fanatical Corot connoisseurs will recognize in these masterpieces the painter of so many gloomy women (The Pensive Muse, The Pensive Woman, The Gypsy with the Basque Drum), so many prancing nymphs and paintings like The Bacchante and the Panther, in which a nude woman holds up a dead bird to a panther ridden by a nude cherub.

This part of the show in itself makes this Corot exhibition an important artistic event. For those who prefer Corot's later period, there are a score of vaporous twilight landscapes.

Born in Paris in 1796 of parents who ran a successful millinery shop (Madame Corot was modiste to the court of Napoleon I), Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot started to paint at 26, did not sell a painting for many years. During that time he travelled incessantly (on a handsome allowance from his father), not for pleasure, but to study landscape. His chief inspiration came from Italy, where he did some of his best work: the brilliant, sunlit View of Genoa, the lovely Olevano with its Cezanne-like brushwork. Not until he was in his 50s and under the influence of the Barbizon school did Corot begin to paint, not what nature is, but his dream of what it ought to be.

How the kindly, peaceful old painter came to paint so many good pictures and so many bad ones has always mystified critics. Some critics believe that his lapse of taste was due to the influence of the camera, that as Corot approached modern Impressionism, he was guilty of "photographic flimsiness" in his drawing, in his effects of light and shade.

Others insist that in his later life he copied his own pictures to make enough money for his charities to fellow painters (Corot once refused 10,000 francs for some pictures, asked the buyer to give Millet's widow a ten-year 1,000-franc annuity instead). But as Bachelor Corot grew older, his pictures grew more effeminate, his landscapes became more wishy-washy, more virginal. Famed Critic Julius Meier-Graefe once summed up what was wrong with Corot as a painter by remarking that he "lacked the grain of poison which is the preservative of greatness."

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