National Gallery of Art Shows Its 'Darker Side'
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 2, 2009
If the print and sculpture exhibition that just opened at the National Gallery of Art were a movie, it would be rated PG-13. Maybe even R. Far from explicit, "The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900" still very definitely caters to mature audiences.
The most intriguing of a trio of new shows kicking off the museum's fall season, this assortment of some 120 prints, drawings, illustrated books and small sculptures from the late 19th century contains male and female nudity, sensuality, violence and drug use. Oh, and vampires, too. Even the standard Humane Society disclaimer -- "No animals were harmed in the making of this film" -- would not apply to these pre-celluloid images, given the number of dead animals on the walls (in etchings by Felix Bracquemond and Charles Emile Jacque). But the largest category of questionable material you'll find is what the Motion Picture Association of America refers to as "thematic elements": grief, madness, suicide, spousal abuse and fetishism, to name just a few of the themes explored.
It's a wonderfully perverse -- yet surprisingly mesmerizing -- little show.
Most helpful? The truth-in-advertising signage that steers viewers toward favorite subject areas (or, more realistically, warns off the more squeamish). "Obsession," "Abjection" and "Death" are just some of the show's more hot-button subject areas, along with the tamer "Reverie," "Creatures" and "The City." Just don't expect tourist-friendly views in that last section. "Cholera in Paris," Francois-Nicolas Chifflart's 1865 etching of the second of two epidemics that ravaged Paris, is more like it.
No, it isn't everyone's cup of tea. So just who is the target demographic for this strange brew, a mix of the contemplative and the just plain creepy? According to curator Peter Parshall, who describes the show's tone as a tonic to the cliched "boating on the Seine" flavor of so much late 19th-century art, it is nothing less than "the audience of curious people."
Presumably, you know who you are.
Despite the show's modest size, there's plenty here to satisfy that curiosity, from the familiar (e.g., Edvard Munch and James Ensor, notorious for their dark tendencies) to the unknown (Emmanuel Phelippes-Beaulieux, anyone?).
The idea behind the show may be to surprise, but it is not, paradoxically, to shock. If its works feel out of place in a museum, that's only partly because of subject matter. For these are images that were originally collected not for public exhibition, but for private viewing -- postcard-size prints, mainly, preserved in albums and portfolios, rather than displayed on walls. The handful of table-top statuettes would be more at home in someone's darkened study than in the glare -- albeit dim -- of museum lights.
It's useful to compare "Darker Side" to the two other shows that have simultaneously opened at the National Gallery.
Just like the modern and contemporary art on view in "The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works," the art in "Darker Side" was originally purchased for someone's home. But unlike the bold, colorful abstractions favored by the Meyerhoffs -- collectors who filled their home in Phoenix, Md., with big, postwar paintings by Jasper Johns, Brice Marden and other favorites until Jane's death in 2004 -- the works in "Darker Side" don't shout. If they invite you into a conversation, it's one of whispered intimacy. And perhaps not for the children to overhear.
In that sense, the pictures in "Darker Side" are more akin to the small, light-sensitive works on view in "Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings From the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800." But that's a pretty show, filled with bucolic landscapes, figure studies, domestic scenes and portraits. "Darker Side" is anything but.
One artist alone, Albert Besnard, contributes depictions of rape, morphine addiction and suicide.
Yet it's not all despair on the "Darker Side." Eugene Carriere's "Sleep," for example -- an 1890 lithograph of a woman laying her head in weariness upon her folded hands -- is among the most sheerly beautiful pictures in this moody show. If her dreams are troubled by nightmares, as the work's dramatic lighting seems to suggest, the picture also hints at the restorative powers of a good night's slumber, which, as Shakespeare famously wrote, "knits up the raveled sleave of care."
