Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century
National Gallery, London

Nicky Charlish
posted 12 July 2006

The idea of the artist as a tortured genius struggling for his art is so well established as to be beyond the realm of the cliché. Yet it only started to take root a couple of centuries ago. This exhibition takes work from that period to explain how this view came to take a dominant place in our view of the arts.

Until the late eighteenth century, artists were heroes of the establishment rather than outsiders, and the exhibition gives us several examples. Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun's 'Self Portrait in a Straw Hat' (after 1782) shows this artist, a favourite of Queen Marie Antoinette, with her mouth open slightly, hesitantly, possibly wondering if her artistic work - symbolised by the palette and brushes she holds - is going to be praised. In his 'Self Portrait' (about 1779-80), Sir Joshua Reynolds wears his robes as a doctor of civil law whilst his beret establishes a connection with Rembrandt, but his self-confidence seems undermined by hesitancy over whether he's fully achieved acceptance.

But a couple of decades later and it's the artist, rather than the establishment he or she serves, who's started to become the focus of attention. He's a genius awaiting the diving light. 'Friedrich in His Studio' of 1812 by Georg Friedrich Kersting shows the artist awaiting inspiration, symbolised by light pouring through the nearby window, to descend upon him. Meanwhile he looks at the canvas before him on its easel as if the subject-matter for his painting is half-formed there already. And when the artist's not a genius at work, he's tortured for his art, as shown in Gustave Courbet's Self Portrait, 'The Desperate Man' of 1843. The artist, with staring eyes, is tearing at his hair with claw-like hands as if he's almost a madman from central casting.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Romantic myth of the artist as a genius condemned to suffering and rejection by a philistine public was well on its way to becoming an established view. It was reinforced by Henry Wallis in his 'Chatterton' of 1855-56, showing the poet, who has committed suicide by taking arsenic, lying dead on the bed in his filthy garret, through the window of which we see the brightly-illuminated city that's rejected him. He could be taken as a template for every druggy pop idol who has miscalculated his fix.

But how - apart from Romanticism's exaltation of emotion - did this status for the artist come about? A possible clue lies in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' 'The Death of Leonardo da Vinci' of 1818. Framed by the red canopy of his death-bed, the artist lies held reverently by King Francis the First of France. The kneeling priest administering the last rites is hidden in the shadows. Does this symbolise the side-lining of religion which, whilst retaining a formal hold over its adherents was, in the nineteenth century, intellectually running out of steam, leaving a void to be filled by the artist who would become embraced by the establishment as its new chaplain, social commentator and prophet rolled into one?

For this was how the artist was now starting to shape-up. Also, he was now firmly enrolling himself as a bohemian figure, outside of convention. In 'The Artist' (Marcellin Desboutin) of 1875, Edouard Manet shows this artist with an expression of assertion shot through with sadness, wearing a black suit with a white shirt and his trademark black hat (an early exercise in branding?). The artist was also the flâneur, a man about the town who could observe the bourgeoisie without detection. And he was the dandy and aesthete who, by his dress and aristocratic pose, symbolised rejection of bourgeois vulgarity and mediocrity. Aubrey Beardsley's 1894 'Portrait of Himself in Bed' shows the Fra Angelico of decadence as a world-weary infant/aesthete cocooned in a baroque, womb-like bed. And Jacques-Emile Blanche's 'Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley' of 1895 shows the artist in a grey suit, his tie worn in the loose French style, and with a flower in his buttonhole. He is eye-catching by his very understatedness. And Lovis Corinth's 'The Painter Otto Eckmann' of 1897 shows the painter uncertain yet defiant, wide-eyed, the symbolic masculinity of his well-waxed handlebar moustache undermined by the flower which the artist delicately holds. (You can't help wondering what Beardsley and Eckmann would think - other than in sexual terms - of today's decidedly low-brow mainstream gay culture.).

The artist didn't just rail against the utilitarianism and materialism of the middle-classes like a street preacher. He revealed the path of righteousness, too. In his 'Portrait of Paul Serusier, Le Nabi a la Barbe Rutilante' of 1894, Georges Lacombe shows the artist with a somewhat puzzled expression surrounded by the flaming red hair of his head and beard. ('The Nabi' was a quasi-religious artistic group, its name derived from the combined Hebrew/Arabic words for prophet.). An artist of a very different kind is given to us in Emile Bernard's 'Portrait of Verkade' of 1893. Jan Verkade (1868-1946) was a painter who believed that the value of art depended on religious conviction. With his serious but clear-minded expression and monastic cropped hair (he later joined the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron), Verkade seems to incarnate the Thomist intellectual revival that was taking place among Catholic thinkers at the time, with its emphasis on a correct approach to the making of art, until it was overtaken by the rival Catholic philosophy of integral humanism pioneered by Jacques Maritain.

But if the artist seemed to be a rebel he was generally, in one respect, decidedly old-fashioned. And that was in his view of women. Traditional female virtues like intuition and creativity were acceptable only when manifested by males (in which case, surely, they were universal traits). Other than that, woman was either muse or femme fatale. In his 'The Inspiration of the Painter' of 1897, Jacek Malczewski shows us an imperious female model with the artist painting her slumping at the easel whilst three onlookers stare with horror, and Gustave Moreau's 'The Poet and the Siren' of 1894 shows an effeminate, naked poet fallen at the feet of a staring, predatory woman. But Paula Modersohn-Boecker's 'Self Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Anniversary' of 1906 shows us the self-assured artist with a necklace emphasising her breasts whilst her curving belly symbolises female creativity.

But even at the height of the cult-building process, some could see what shape the future might take. In his 'Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto' of 1903, we see Pablo Picasso's depiction of his artist friend - with bleary-eyes and twisted mouth during what seems to be a heavy night out on the town - who manifested no serious application to the arts but who was happy to jump onto the boho wagon.

Today, the image of the artist as the poor and perpetually-unloved outsider is - however firmly established it's become - difficult to take seriously in the face of some hard contrary evidence. Tom Wolfe's book The Painted Word showed how rebel artists were quite happy to be wooed by - and eventually become part of - the establishment they'd started-off by despising. Rock/pop musicians followed the example of this career-path, whilst successive generations of avant-garde artists have progressed through profitable infamy to ultimate respectability. Meanwhile, the exhibition is worth seeing for its wide-ranging and fascinating selection of works illustrating how the radical arts establishment has come about.

Till 28 August 2006.