Perfect Poise, Pulled From Jaws of Distortion By KEN JOHNSON

December 30, 2010 Perfect Poise, Pulled From Jaws of Distortion By KEN JOHNSON

‘COMTESSE D’HAUSSONVILLE,’ BY INGRES, THE FRICK COLLECTION If not always for the same reasons, people of both genders love to feast their eyes on beautiful women. So it is no coincidence that some of the world’s most compelling works of art are weddings of female and painterly beauty. One is at the Frick Collection: “Comtesse d’Haussonville” (1845), a near life-size portrait of a lovely young woman standing before a mirror in a blue satin dress. Rendered by Ingres in a cool, neo-Classical style, she tilts her head, holds an index finger to her chin and gazes back with lowered eyelids and a quizzical, enigmatic expression.

The blue dress is a tour de force of realistic depiction, its every fold and wrinkle attended to with as much care as the marmoreal surfaces of the comtesse’s flawless skin. (Ingres drew about 60 studies for the dress alone during the three years he worked on the portrait.) And yet, as art historians never tire of pointing out to novice viewers, her body is oddly misshapen. Her pudgy right arm seems to have grown out of her stomach, her upper back looks painfully hunched, and her egg-shaped head appears about to roll off her elongated neck as if in a Monty Python cartoon.

You don’t notice the distortions at first because of how subtly Ingres folded her parts into a configuration of interlocking ovals, giving the impression of perfect poise. The painting may be a triumph of form over anatomy — Picasso certainly took notice — but the comtesse still casts a spell.

Intellectually ambitious as well as beautiful, the comtesse, a k a Louise d’Haussonville, went on to write memoirs, romantic novels, historical studies and biographies, including two volumes on Lord Byron. She was 27 when Ingres finished her portrait; he was 65. A friend told her, “M. Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you this way.” Indeed.

‘THE MOUNTAIN,’ BY BALTHUS, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART The hikers in Balthus’s “Mountain” (1936-37) could be a group of patients on an alpine excursion from Carl Jung’s psychiatric clinic just outside Zurich. It is not like a French Impressionist holiday scene. These mountaineers have a sculptural solidity about them; they seem magically frozen into living statues. Each has a curiously distracted expression. The sky is blue, but not in an airy way; it seems heavy and dark, enhancing the ominous atmosphere of the picture.

At more than 8 feet tall and 12 feet wide “The Mountain” is the biggest painting Balthus made, and it is markedly different from the works for which he is best known. Updating neo-Classical style and narrative, he made interior scenes in which young girls are viewed with an erotic interest that many critics have found unseemly.

Though comparatively chaste, “The Mountain” is not without a certain dreamy, sexual tension. The girl who stretches like a cat in the light of the sun is a typical Balthusian object of desire, and so is the girl reclining at her feet in sleep.

What this gathering means is hard to say, but each figure seems emblematic in some way. The man gripping a pipe in his teeth and kneeling in the foreground has his face pinched into a mask of saturnine tension. He is earthy and rocklike. The sun-struck, stretching girl is day; the sleeping one night. The androgynous figure in a red, short-sleeve jacket looking on from the middle distance with enigmatic intent seems elfin and mischievous, perhaps an agent of transformation.

Another strange thing is how the landscape echoes the figures. The highest peak seems to heave up in response to the stretching girl. A vaguely humanoid projection mimics the swayed posture of the elfin androgyne. The man and woman at the edge of the illuminated abyss point excitedly at a mass of rock that resembles a Cubist sculpture of a couple kissing.

Somehow the picture would not be complete without the tiny, lone figure in the distance on a rising field of grass: a romantic wanderer traveling far away from human society and ever closer to the divine.

‘EARLY SUNDAY MORNING,’ BY EDWARD HOPPER, THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Many of Hopper’s most beloved paintings offer nocturnal views from the outside into electrically lighted interiors: a diner in which night owls sit at the counter or an apartment in which a single woman ponders her life. It’s as if we were seeing through the eyes of a lonely insomniac pining for human contact.

In “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) we look out rather than in, but the piercing loneliness is just as palpable. The raking sun is hard and cold. The windows of the buildings are implacably dark. Painted with a dry, slightly brushy touch, it is a scene of aching solitude, although relieved by the transcendental light.

The subject is a stretch of buildings on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, but it could just as well be the main street of a factory town upstate or somewhere in New England. A red, white and blue barber pole and a squat fireplug stand in for absent pedestrians. The bright barber pole looks oddly incongruous, even surrealistically so, on this dingy street. A totemlike symbol of patriotic, small-town American values, it is another sign of human community that Hopper, always the outsider, considers with mordant curiosity.

American Scene painting by artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood was popular at the time; maybe Hopper’s painting was a wry nod to that chauvinistic trend.

And yet there is also a feeling of wonder. People will be out and about in a while, but for now they are sleeping in, nestled in apartments above the street-level shops, wrapped up in their dreams. The early-rising viewer has the world all to himself.

Though tinged by melancholy — the Great Depression had hit the nation like a hurricane — there a sense of possibility in the air and light. This moment might have come at the end of an all-night bender, but there it is, the promise of a brand new day.

‘A STORM IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, MT. ROSALIE,’ BY ALBERT BIERSTADT, THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM If Albert Bierstadt were reincarnated as a Hollywood movie director, he would surely give James Cameron a run for his money. In the mid-19th century Bierstadt advanced the art of spectacular illusion making to great popular acclaim, as viewers by the thousands lined up and paid money to see his enormous Western landscapes, meticulously rendered with nearly photographic verisimilitude, presented in gaslighted, theatrical installations. Also like Mr. Cameron, Bierstadt projected visions of transcendentalist pantheism in which American Indians and deer lived, like the Na’vi in “Avatar,” in conditions of Edenic bliss.

In the 12-foot-wide “Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie” (1866) sunlight breaking through angry, dark clouds shines on a peaceful lake like a promise from God. This was the age of Emerson and Thoreau, who found in every part of nature, from leaves of grass to towering mountains, metaphors of divine beneficence. Bierstadt was as attentive to the microscopic as he was to the macro, and this makes for an enthralling visual and poetic experience.

Bierstadt named Mount Rosalie, now called Mount Evans, after Rosalie Osborne Ludlow, who married him in 1866 after she divorced his traveling companion Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Fitz Hugh Ludlow is remembered today for his best-selling autobiographical book “The Hasheesh Eater” (1857), in which he explored the wonders of subjective experience under the influence of cannabis.

As it turned out, Bierstadt’s paintings of the Wild West did more to attract than to discourage invasion by forces of industrial progress. For most of the 20th century his paintings were relegated to the dustbin of art history along with similarly operatic landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church.

Many scholars still view them as unworthy confections of overwrought kitsch. I find myself helplessly thrilled by these artists’ proto-cinematic extravaganzas and, at the same time, saddened to think of the lost paradises they memorialize. For better or worse “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains” tells a story about America that should never be forgotten.

‘YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER PITCHER,’ BY VERMEER, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Vermeer’s “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” (around 1662) might be my No. 1 desert island pick. Partly it would be for sensory and formal reasons: the silky application of paint, the finely tuned orchestration of velvety blues and coolly luminous near-whites and the structure of nested rectangles. But it is the way that material dimension embodies the image of the girl at the window — caught in the act of turning her head as if to listen for something she thought she heard outdoors — that cinches the deal.

I think of the painting as a kind of Annunciation, making contemporary the moment Mary learns she will conceive and bear a divine child. With her head enveloped by a starchy, crisply creased cowl of virginal whiteness, Vermeer’s young woman is bathed in the light of the Holy Spirit. She holds the handle of a silver pitcher filled with water, the stuff of life, which stands on a silver platter on a tapestry-covered, domestic altar. Pearls and a ribbon spill from a reliquarylike jewel box. All is painted with excruciating, reverential tenderness.

To be sure, everything going on in the picture can be explained without invoking supernatural agency. In its slightly blurry, photographic realism, the painting presents an implacably empirical view of the world. The image looks almost as if it had been photo-chemically imprinted on the canvas without manual intervention, and the picture in turn stamps itself on our retinas. Optical nerves fire, neurotransmitters swarm and the image somehow appears in our minds. Whether you believe in intelligent design or Darwinian happenstance, it is pretty miraculous.

The image in our mind’s eye pictures a painting that pictures a moment in historical time — note the map of Europe on the wall — that may or may not have actually happened but that in any case appears at once immediately real and distantly fictive. All of this incites a hyper-alertness about seeing and a heightened consciousness of consciousness itself and its construction of the real. “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” announces the birth of the modern, self-reflexive mind.