The Met's Chardin Retrospective

The Quiet Man Jean-Simeon Chardin, one of the 18th century's most important artists and arguably history's most accomplished painter of still lifes, was born in Paris in a humble household, the son of a maker of cabinets and billiard tables. Narrowly avoiding a tradesman's career, Chardin joined a venerable but undistinguished art academy, then left the school for an apprenticeship in the studio of a better-known history painter, Pierre-Jacques Cazes. There he learned to draw nudes, studied the classics and generally produced poor imitations of what the elite students painted at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Chardin's epiphany came, if we are to believe his biographer Cochin, when he painted the first of a nearly obsessive number of dead rabbits. Mulling over the taxing problem of how to paint the animal's fur, Chardin resolved to forgo drawing, attack the canvas directly with his dark oils, and generally attempt to get down, as exactly as possible, the literally mortified nature before him. "The eye must be taught to look at nature," he told the philosopher Denis Diderot. By painting essentially what he saw and nothing more, Chardin sneaked a quiet, nearly imperceptible fragment of subversion into an intransigent painting establishment that detonated like a cluster bomb with the arrival of the impressionists and Cezanne.

Received into the Academie in 1728 on his first application as a "skilled painter of animals and fruit," Chardin timidly, silently, even unwittingly went about inverting an artistic order underpinned by a set of bourgeois values in which he, at least consciously, fully shared. In the Academie, painters were authoritatively classified by the subjects they chose to tackle. History painting (including mythological and religious fare) incontestably claimed first place, followed by portraiture, genre scenes and, lastly, Chardin's favorite, the meagerly considered still life. Two principles dictated the Academie's stiff, absurd hierarchy: firstly, the proto-Babbitt-like idea that painting the visible world was inherently easier than painting from mind or memory (say, for example, a saint's martyrdom or a biblical story); and secondly, the notion that the only worthwhile pursuit for first-rate painters was the depiction of gods, heroes or great deeds.

Chardin, for his part, accepted the rules of the Academie with a zeal that was oddly exemplary, all the while churning out exquisite still life and genre paintings that impressed the toughest, most jaded of critics. Praised in his lifetime by Diderot and the Goncourt brothers, among others, and posthumously by artists like Proust, Gide and Van Gogh, he made slow but steady progress in turning 18th-century painting toward unsentimentalized nature and away from the lavish, frivolous parades of gold brocade and pink flesh confected by artists like Francois Boucher, for whom the natural world was, in his phrase, "too green and badly lit."

CHARDIN, THE COPPER CISTERN, ABOUT 1735

Of the 66 works now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's full-dress Chardin retrospective, it is still the artist's still lifes that acquire the greatest distinction when scrutinized by the 20th-century gaze. Chardin's genre scenes?begun during a hesitant middle period in the artist's career when he needed money (genre scenes often wound up as engravings, which in turn became real income earners) and worried about tiring his audience with his natures mortes?claim their place as historically innovative without ever matching the eerie calm of his trademark dead animals.

If Chardin was unsuited to history painting because he was incapable of painting a figure in motion, he pictured the models in his genre pieces in cold, rapt attitudes of contemplation, frozen like zombies into livelier domestic settings: the scullery maid distractedly peels turnips; the doll-faced girl holds a racket and a shuttlecock while staring beyond the picture; in the painting of a lady taking tea, the canvas' most striking detail is not her indifferent mug but the bright red varnished table. Though he painted hands well, Chardin's faces are uniformly round and all have the same distracted, sad air. They never smile, they face away from the viewer and often even stare dangerously away from activities like cutting vegetables or cleaning crockery. But place them next to the efflorescent, gilded, hyperallegorical paintings that determined the painter's milieu, and Chardin's modest idealizations of the back rooms of the Parisian petit bourgeoisie glow with simple sobriety, suggesting unadorned humanity apprehended in plain sight. Alas, they were and still are not entirely and exclusively that.

Chardin's tableaux de chasse or hunting pictures, on the other hand, are, to put it plainly, something else. Painstaking reproductions of observed, inanimate nature?the kind the slow but hardworking Chardin was comfortable with?the artist's still lifes build, like an anthill, under the pressure of dense, discreet detail, both from painting to painting and within individual pictures. The stiffened legs of a rabbit or woodcock, the perfect sheen on a copper cistern, a pair of glistening raw kidneys laid out on a stone slab: each painting an eye-bending copy and a solemn meditation.

Painted early in his career, Chardin's The Ray was the picture that gained him entrance into the Academie. A study in carefully arranged and observed morbidity, the painting places everyday objects like a jug, a casserole and a skimming ladle on one side of the composition, a pair of expired carp, oysters and a live cat (one of the last living things Chardin dared to paint), representatives of the animal and vegetable world, on the other. Between them, the painter placed the bloody image of a gutted manta ray, its entrails disgorging with the brutal frankness of an autopsy, the ray's eyeholes and a slit for a mouth the devil's own grin. "A terrifying face," the writer Raymond Queneau called it. For a hyperbolic Proust, it signaled the transformation of a "strange monster" into "the nave of a polychrome cathedral."

For the rest of us, Chardin's collection of brooding, nearly picture-perfect images of dark fruit, brioches, teapots, translucent bottles and rigor-mortised animals can appear the product of a reserved but death-obsessed imagination. The artist, in fact, lost two children in infancy and a young wife, was himself seriously ill for a time and suffered the suicide of his eldest son, a frustrated painter whom he pushed into doing the very historical subjects he avoided. Nothing of the painter's biography, art historians tell us, shows up in the artist's work. But for Chardin, outlived only by his second wife and closedmouthed to the point of legend, his oeuvre is, for all effects, his biography. It is difficult not to read into it a preoccupation with the abandonment and fading bloom of death.

"Chardin," through Sept. 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave. (82nd St.), 879-5500.