If you spotted a crazed man shouting hosannas and hallelujahs up Madison Avenue the other day, that was me. What can I say? A great season for art has descended upon New York. No, it has nothing to do with the 2004 Whitney Biennial. This year’s Whitney survey, campy and escapist, contemporary art zoned-out on I-Pod, was as palatable as an infusion of hemlock mixed by the Kool-Aid Man. The one thing to be said of the flashing, blinking, inflatable nothing was that its website crashed in Internet Explorer. So The New Yorker’s art reviewer called it “startlingly good” and better than anyone “could have expected”? That’s Stockholm Syndrome for you.

But salvation is here. A host of exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum alone will take up half your summer. The other half should go to the galleries. Those bullish precincts of capitalism, what do you know, are organizing some of the best shows of art right now.

Up the stairs on the second floor of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, off the sweating pavement of Seventy-ninth Street, I experienced the single best gallery moment—maybe ever. Here in two hushed galleries, painted a deep red, windows blacked out, is the first American exhibition dedicated to the sky studies of John Constable, RA (1776–1837).[1] With more than twenty-five works assembled from museums and private collections, including the two from the Frick Collection, and not one for sale—not a one!—the experience is total and soaring, perfect. A number of Constable’s breezy big-sky landscape compositions are paired to his more formal, all-sky “Cloud Studies.” Constable undertook his “skying” campaigns in 1821 and 1822 upon relocating to Hampstead, a summer retreat five miles north of London. He scribbled the date and the time of day on the reverse of many of his studies and landscapes, even including some meteorological notes: “31st Sepr 10–11 o’clock morning looking Eastward a gentle wind to East” he wrote on the puffy Cloud Study from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (he got something wrong: thirty days hath September).

Taken together, these Studies create a comprehensive, sublime record of a time and place—mainly Hampstead, summer of 1822. The gallery director Stephen Harvey suggested that to escape the New York heat one could do worse than spend it in this air-conditioned ether. I agree. And I am bringing a picnic blanket.

The catalogue is rewarding in its own right. Here are essays on Constable’s biography, his religious commitments (informed by William Paley’s Natural Theology [1802]), the early nineteenth-century science of clouds (Luke Howard’s Latin nomenclature of cloud types was first published in 1803; his Climate of London in 1818), exhaustive scientific analyses of Constable’s paint and paper, and even contemporary poetry.

One essay that stands apart from the rest is a contribution from Leon Wieseltier, the Literary Editor of The New Republic. Wieseltier’s embrace of—I don’t even know what … secularism? radical anti-spiritualism? disestablishmentarianism?—is so total that he cannot come to grips with Constable’s spiritual interest in the natural world, as explained cogently in a number of other essays in this catalogue. The coy title of Wieseltier effort, “Spirit in the Sky”—with its reference to a 1960s pop song—illustrates Wieseltier’s antipathy to Constable’s sensibility.

But the soul, like the eye, does not wish to be fooled forever … the desacralization of the sky was begun… . Constable wanted also to diminish the romance of art… . They are not reveries, they are analyses… . These are emblems of passing, and utterly unsentimental ones… . Constable’s cloud studies … are exercises in an emancipation from the tyranny of matter.

Is this an aging radical’s idea of a joke?

The coup de grâce is Wieseltier’s contempt for Constable’s “piety.” He quotes from Constable’s final lecture at Hampstead: “Our wisest and best teachers, the sculptures themselves teach us, that our Maker is most seen in his work—and best adored in our wonder and admiration of them.” To this Wieseltier adds: “The words seem simple and anachronistic, but they are sincere.”

One could offer a couple words in response to Wieseltier—simple, anachronistic, sincere—but Constable’s sky paintings speak for themselves.

Guy Pène du Bois (1884–1958), the American artist, New-York born, did not fare well in the contest of twentieth-century modernism. His graphic style—realistic and volumetric—and his choice of subject matter—glamorous, urbane genre scenes satirically rendered—put him at odds with the trends of modernism as early as The Armory Show of 1913. In a painting of 1950, called Another Expulsion, Pène du Bois captured the feeling with typical aplomb: a Piccassoid character expels two Masaccio-like figures of Adam and Eve from the temple as the circus freaks of modernism enter behind. That temple might just as well be The Museum of Modern Art.

James Graham & Sons has undertaken an extensive two-part survey of this artist, the first part of which is now on display, the second to go up in the Spring of 2006.[2] An inclusive catalogue, with a retrospective essay by Betsy Fahlman, accompanies the show. Here is another example of a gallery doing just the right thing in a world of wrongs. A number of excellent Pène du Bois drawings from 1914 and 1915—smart and witty as anything he accomplished—are on loan from the Whitney Museum vaults. Don’t expect these works to see the light of day again anytime soon, except on the Whitney auction block. The scenes are perfect Pène du Bois. In one drawing called “Can You Act?” (1914), with dialogue written in pencil, a movie director presses the question on an aspiring star. Her reply: “Sure—I jumped from High Bridge once.”

Pène du Bois studied art at the New York School of Art. His teachers at the turn of the century were William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. His classmates: Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and George Bellows. You can see a common style running through their early work—brushy, dark, focused on the theater of modern life. It was not until the late 1910s that Pène du Bois arrived at his signature style: smooth, rounded, ballooning figures, the men stuffed into tuxedos, the women, mannequin-like. As in the sculpture of Elie Nadelman, makeup and fashion play a key role in the drama. You won’t find any better example of this than in Pène du Bois’s sensuous painting The Sisters (1919). Twentieth-century modernism be damned—this is great work.

The Italian-Scotsman Eduardo Paolozzi (born 1922) was a forerunner of the British Pop Art movement, a member of The Independent Group in the early 1950s, and someone whose notions of mass culture were marketed to great effect by Andy Warhol. This is all true. But one can also make the case that Paolozzi, the John Soane of twentieth-century junk, cast his net more widely and more intelligently than American Pop. He never disabused himself of the rooted traditions of European modernism. He also came to reject mass culture, as taken only on its own terms, and the movement with which he is now associated.

A small show at Flowers, the New York outlet of the British gallery chain, assembles two sets of Paolozzi collages from the late 1940s and early 1950s.[3] The first matches images of classical statuary with diagrams of machines; the pairing of the two has always been a preoccupation of Paolozzi’s sculptural program. Some of his most recent busts and abstract assemblies are available for view, if you ask, in the gallery offices, and you can see his connection to Alberto Giacometti in this work. The second set of collages, horizontal cut-ups of magazine portraits, owes a debt to synthetic cubism. Most of these collages have been assembled from Time magazine covers. The effect can be chilling, with lines and hatch-marks scribbled in as though part of a physiognomial grand plan. Paolozzi’s take on Eugene Dennis, Communist Party boss, in To Rule is to Take Orders (1952) is downright diabolical. To our disenchanted gaze, this work is more affecting than his consumer-based, candy-colored work as collected in the BUNK! portfolios of 1972—although these pop icons will always be his most remembered artifacts.

Collectors of artifacts—books, paintings, furniture, gems and minerals—on a totally different scale have been the fourteen generations and five centuries of the Cavendish family—the earls and dukes of Devonshire, the marquesses of Hartington, and the earls of Burlington—at Chatsworth Settlement in the Peak district of England. The portion of this collection most significant to art history is a set of old-master drawings purchased in 1723 by William, the second duke (1673– 1729). A number of Chatsworth Parmigianinos, for example, were lent to the recent Frick exhibition. But the real story here is the history of this eccentric family, now on full display at the Bard Graduate Center as part of a six-city American tour.[4]

The single degrees of separation between this family and the rest of modern history are astounding: Thomas Hobbes was the second earl of Devonshire’s tutor and librarian (his handwritten library catalogue of Chatsworth from 1628 is on display); John Smith of Pocahontas fame provided maps of the Cavendish East India investments in Virginia; and Evelyn Waugh sent a printer’s binding proof of his biography of Ronald Knox, with nothing but blank pages, to the duchess of Devonshire, the sister of Nancy Mitford. He included this inscription: “For Darling Debo, with love from Evelyn. You will not find a word in this to offend your Protestant sympathies.” An excellent gallery guide and catalogue highlight these delights. The catalogue’s account of rescuing Chatsworth from an 80 percent inheritance charge, levied in 1950, is alone worth reading. It took seventeen years to satisfy the taxman—the story will sour anyone to progressive taxation. We owe Chatsworth’s salvation to Andrew Cavendish, the eleventh duke, who died on May 3, age 84. It is due to his lifetime of effort that Chatsworth remains a triumph.

Notes
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  1. “Constable’s Skies” opened at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York, on May 5 and remains on view through June 25, 2004. A 188-page catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Frederic Bancroft, is available for purchase from the gallery. Go back to the text.
  2. “Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Modern Life,” the first of a two-part show, opened at James Graham & Sons, New York, on May 6 and remains on view through July 9, 2004. A catalogue is available at the gallery and from Quantuck Lane Press (176 pages, $39.95). Go back to the text.
  3. “Eduardo Paolozzi: Works on Paper and Collage” opened at Flowers, New York, on May 14 and remains on view through June 12, 2004. Go back to the text.
  4. “The Devonshire Inheritance: Five Centuries of Collecting at Chatsworth” opened at the Bard Graduate Center, New York, on March 18 and remains on view through June 20, 2004. A catalogue of the exhibition is available from Art Services International (431 pages, $59.95). Go back to the text.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 22 Number 10, on page 45
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