TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051192/05119935.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 6.5 KB | 132 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 61

ART

A Reliable Bag of Tricks


By ROBERT HUGHES

    SHOW: "William M. Harnett"
    WHERE: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
    WHAT: 19th Century Still Lifes

    THE BOTTOM LINE: An overblown look at work that
exemplifies the delights -- and limits -- of skillful realism.


    For some decades now, the eye-fooler William Harnett
(1848-92) has been one of the most popular American 19th century
painters. Everyone relishes the stories about his gee-whiz
illusionistic skills and how they mesmerized Americans at the
dawn of the photographic age a century ago, people less drenched
in images and less blase about them than we. "So real is it,"
wrote a Cincinnati journalist in 1886 about a Harnett called The
Old Violin, that a special guard "has been detailed to stand
beside the picture and suppress any attempts to take down the
fiddle and the bow." To some, Harnett suggested a classical
parallel. He was the American Zeuxis, the Greek painter (none
of whose works survive) who was said to be so good at trompe
l'oeil that birds flew down to peck the grapes in one of his
still lifes, thus proving that he could bamboozle not only men
but Nature herself. People loved Harnett's work because they
felt he was a con man. To be fooled and know you are being
fooled (along with others) is a truly democratic joy.

    But not even the resources of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art can turn Harnett into one of the best American artists of
his time. This is not for lack of trying. The Met's Harnett
show, which will travel to Fort Worth and San Francisco before
finishing at the National Gallery in Washington in the spring
of 1993, marks the 100th anniversary of his death and contains
most of his known work.

    Harnett's life is slim pickings for the biographer. The
son of an immigrant Irish shoemaker from Cork, he lived in
Philadelphia, worked in New York City as a journeyman artist and
engraver, studied briefly in Munich, showed his pictures in beer
halls as well as in art galleries, and died of kidney failure
at the age of 44 without leaving a single recorded comment on
his art or, indeed, on anything else, beyond declaring that "I
endeavour to make the composition tell a story." But one may be
fairly sure that if his ghost saw the Met's catalog, it would
utter an Irish oath of bewilderment. It features essays by 22
scholars, all solemnly excogitating on such weighty matters as
whether the horseshoes in his pictures are from dray horses or
Thoroughbreds. If one wanted an example of how art history gets
trivialized by sheer overpopulation of the field and turned into
a checkerboard of prolix specializations, this is it.

    On the wall, and somewhere under this tumulus of pedantry,
is a minor artist with some distinctly good moments and a
reliable bag of tricks, whose work can be enjoyed on its own
terms without loading it with significance. All his paintings
in the show -- with one exception, an inertly sentimental
picture of a small black boy in a paper hat -- are still lifes.
He was not interested in figures and had no feel for the human
face. The best of Harnett is, so to speak, the weak populist end
of the best strain in 19th century American art: its adherence
to pragmatic, empirical vision, to art as an instrument of the
world's measurement. (The great figures in this are Audubon,
Eakins and Homer.)

    His early paintings, of the 1870s, are stiff, naive and
curiously old-fashioned; they are almost exactly like the work
that Raphaelle Peale, America's first still-life artist, had
been doing around 1815. But Harnett hit his stride in the 1880s,
and in fact the most beautiful painting in this show, The
Artist's Letter Rack, dates from 1879: an image of letters,
visiting cards and a theater ticket, the meager index of an
artist's social life, held by a crisscrossed square of pink tape
to an unvarnished pine board. Everything is actual size, and the
flatness of the board corresponds to the flatness of the
painting, so that the illusion is nearly absolute. The pencil
and chalk marks on the board look just like pencil and chalk,
every grain line in the cheap wood and fiber in a torn paper
edge is there, and the play of the yellow and blue rectangles
and envelopes against the square of tape has the lovely
spareness of a Motherwell collage.

    Few other paintings in his career show the same fine play
between aesthetic intent and illusionism. Usually it's the
eye-fooling that wins. The comment of a great American
Modernist, Marsden Hartley, is cited by one essayist: "In
Harnett there is nothing to bother about, nothing to confuse,
nothing to interpret . . . there is the myopic persistence to
render every single thing singly." The catalog protests this,
pointing to the stories that underlie the conglomerations of
things in his still lifes, which do indeed provide something to
interpret. But was this what Hartley meant? In fact, no. He saw
what is plainly true -- that in Harnett there is little
imaginative dimension beyond the winsome, rebus-like narrative
and the skill.

    The late 19th century art audience, especially in America,
liked "puzzle pictures" -- images that told a hidden story.
Still life was a standard vehicle for these. It was the end of
an older tradition, that of the allegorical table piece, the
vanitas paintings that were so popular in the Netherlands in the
17th century. In them the lowly objects of still-life painting
become allegories of the senses or, with a skull and some musty
books, of death. Where Harnett is weakest and most derivative
is, precisely, where he tried to tell his stories. He liked
mild, kitschy allegorizing. His invocations of the past (the
classical bronze and the broken copy of Cervantes' Don Quixote
in The Old Cupboard Door, 1889, for instance) are parlor
antiquarianism with nothing to say about history. What they
respond to is the diffuse sentimentality about the past felt by
people ill at ease with the rawness and bustle of the American
republic, in the days before bric-a-brac became "collectibles."

    It would be some time -- about half a century after
Harnett's death, in fact -- before another and more reclusive
American, Joseph Cornell, would drag his fine net through the
junk stores of New York and turn what it caught into frail,
unique feats of the imagination that reach beyond illusionism
and nostalgia. One can't not enjoy Harnett, but he is not an
artist one should overrate.