Out of the Attic

Twentieth-century tastes in art have rescued from oblivion or minor status an imposing list of old masters, e.g., Italy's Piero della Francesca, Spain's El Greco, The Netherlands' Vermeer. Still least-known of the rediscovered old masters is France's 17th century Georges de La Tour (TIME, July 12, 1948), three of whose works have just been acquired by U.S. museums (see color page). The wonder seems less that such paintings are recognized as masterworks than that they were ever consigned to the attic.

Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) was a leading painter (and father of ten children) in the prosperous town of Luneville in the French duchy of Lorraine. Historians guess that La Tour went to Rome as a young man, learned there the technique of Caravaggio's dramatically spotlighted paintings. Back home he refined his work to make light itself not only a dramatic highlight but the modeling element and dramatic center of his painting.

In his heyday La Tour could count on the patronage of nobles, won an appointment as court painter to King Louis

XIII. What cast his work into the shadow was the rule of King Louis XIV, who favored the glorifying allegories and myths of the classic style, abhorred naturalism and humanism. Shown a work by one of La Tour's fellow realists, Louis le Nain, the Sun King snorted: "Take those maggots away from me."

In the 19th century, scholars pieced together enough to establish that La Tour had been a famous painter in his day. Not until 1915 were the first two of his works identified by Kaiser Friedrich Museum Director Hermann Voss. Since then, scholars have winnowed through works variously attributed to such Spanish masters as Zurbaran, Velasquez, Ribera and Murillo, have now identified more than 25 of them as La Tours. His matching portraits, Peasant Man and Peasant Woman were presented by Art Patron Roscoe Oakes to San Francisco's De Young Museum, where they will be unveiled this week. Major works in La Tour's early style, they are tentatively dated 1620, when La Tour would have been only 27. St. Louis' City Art Museum's Young Man with Pipe, recently acquired for $28,000, dates from La Tour's mid-40s when he had fully developed his technique of molding his figures with light, setting them against a background of elemental night.

Of La Tour's style, De Young Director Walter Heil says: "It is almost an abstract realism." Wrote French Critic Andree Malraux: "No other painter, not even Rembrandt, can so well suggest that vast, elemental stillness; La Tour alone is the interpreter of the serene that dwells in the heart of darkness."

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