Volume 24, Number 2 · February 17, 1977
Machines for Sentiment
By Garry Wills
Jean-Baptiste Greuze: 1725-1805 1976-January 23, 1977 (Also at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, March 5-May 1, 1977, and at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, June 4-July 31, 1977)
Selection and catalogue by Edgar Munhall. For exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, December 1,
Wadsworth Atheneum, 225 pp., $16.95
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who played Turner to Diderot's Ruskin, was the most influential French painter in the crucial decades 1760-1780; yet the show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford is the world's first special exhibit devoted to him. By the middle of the nineteenth century he had become the very type of the prurient preacher. The Goncourt brothers called him 'the man fated to establish in France the lamentable school of literary painting and of moralizing art.'[1] He created a kind of eighteenth-century soap opera of the Salons: Tune in next year to find out what happened to the man cursed by his father or the family that prayed together. The very popularity of Greuze swamped his later career in an after-wash of cheap imitators; to compete with them, he ended his life cranking out 'têtes d'expression' of pretty girls in precocious orgasms of piety. They all seem mislabeled—'Psyche' instead of 'Simper,' 'Innocence' instead of 'Complicity,' undying 'Hope' instead of 'Wet Dream.'
Review, 2327 words
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