Tous les demi-savants, après avoir consciencieusement admiré un tableau de Corot, et lui avoir loyalement payé leur tribut d’éloges, trouvent que cela pèche par l’exécution, et s’accordent en ceci, que définitivement M. Corot ne sait pas peindre.—Braves gens! qui ignorent d’abord qu’une oeuvre de génie … une oeuvre d’âme—où tout est bein vu, bien observé, bien compris, bien imaginé—toujours très bien exécutée …
—Baudelaire, Curiosités Esthétiques

We went to Corot’s studio. … Corot is a true artist. One needs to see a painter in his own place to have an idea of his merit. I saw there, and appreciated in quite a different way, pictures which I had seen in the Salon and which had made but a moderate impression on me.
—Delacroix, Journals (1847)

In 1795, the year before the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born, the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller published the beginning sections of his famous essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”). Schiller sought in that essay to distinguish between “two entirely different modes of poetry” and, by extension, two entirely different relations to nature and ways of looking at the world. It is worth stressing that Schiller did not intend “naïve” as a term of disparagement. Far from it. By “naïve” he meant not a deficiency of perception (as we generally do when using the word) but rather an immediacy of perception. For Schiller, the naïve poet was lacking not in insight but in calculation. He adduces Homer and Shakespeare as historical models, and he clearly had Goethe in mind as a contemporary example of “naïve” genius—genius that “triumphs over the complications of art by simplicity,” proceeding “not by the accepted principles, but by flashes of insight and feeling.”

Schiller likewise used the term “sentimental” in an idiosyncratic sense. The sentimental poet—in whose ranks Schiller arrayed himself—is one who entertains not false emotions but elegiac ones: cut off from the immediate enjoyment of nature by self-consciousness, he longs to recapture it. “The poet,” Schiller wrote, “either is nature or he will seek her. The former is the naïve, the latter the sentimental poet.”

The complicated and highly artificial nature of modern society, Schiller thought, encouraged the sentimental (in his special sense) and made the appearance of naïve poets a vanishing rarity. The naïve in general he associated with childhood and its spontaneous, unselfconscious enjoyment of nature; the sentimental he associated with the reflective craving for these benisons. When we ask what is so pleasing to us about the contemplation of “a modest flower, a stream, a mossy stone, the chirping of birds, the humming of bees, etc.,” Schiller answers that they represent not only “our lost childhood, which … fills us with a certain melancholy,” but also the ideal of prospective freedom and unity, which affords us “the sweetest enjoyment of our humanity as an idea.” In other words, such simple contemplation of nature reveals a moral as well as an aesthetic ideal, the ideal of a life unblemished by conflict, limitation, and stormy self-consciousness.

Among important nineteenth-century artists, perhaps none has the reputation of fulfilling Schiller’s ideal of naïve genius more fully than Corot, whose bicentennial this year has sparked renewed interest in his art and has provided the occasion for an ambitious traveling retrospective and other exhibitions centered around his work.

As of this writing, New York is the home to three such events. The largest is “Corot” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the last stop for a retrospective of some 160 paintings representing every phase and direction of Corot’s long and prolific career.[1] At the Brooklyn Museum is “In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting,” a collection of 130 paintings of the Italian landscape in and around Rome and Naples by forty-eight European artists.[1] Featuring nineteen small pictures painted by Corot on his first trip to Italy in the late 1820s, “In the Light of Italy” comprises works painted between 1780 and 1840. It includes canvases by Corot’s first teacher, the precocious and ill-fated Achille-Etna Michallon (1796–1822), and several important works by Michallon’s teacher, the Neoclassical academician Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819), whose influential theories on landscape painting Corot imbibed in his formative years as an artist. Finally, there is a small but exquisite exhibition of some thirty late paintings by Corot at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in Manhattan; several of these works, which date from the mid-1840s, are for sale and nearly all represent Corot at his most concentrated and intense.

Corot has always been an enormously popular artist. He was once so popular, indeed, that even his immense output—the catalogue raisonné by Corot’s friend Alfred Robaut lists upwards of 2,500 objects—could not satisfy the demand for his painting; consequently, his work has the distinction of being among the most frequently forged in history. The art historian René Huyghe was the first to quip, in 1936, that “Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America.” This is an exaggeration—but the point remains. One notorious collection alone contained over 2,414 fake Corots.

Corot’s popularity also helps to explain why he has so frequently been associated with fashionable artistic schools or movements in which he doesn’t really belong. For example, Corot is often nominated as an honorary Barbizon painter; but, although he made many pictures in and around Fontainebleau, his dreamy, often nymph-filled paintings are really very different in mood and ambition from the anti-Neoclassical plein-air landscapes of central Barbizon figures like Théodore Rousseau or Jules Dupré.

Again, Corot’s landscapes, especially his late, silvery Souvenirs, are often cited as proto-Impressionist works. There is no doubt that many of the Impressionists greatly admired Corot. The catalogue for the exhibition at the Met begins with famous statements by Monet and Degas as epigraphs: “There is only one master here—Corot,” Monet said in 1897: “We are nothing compared to him, nothing.” And Degas, not someone given to making excessively generous comments about other artists, declared in 1883 that Corot “is the strongest of us all, he foresaw everything.”

Whatever the Impressionists may have taken from Corot, the truth is that Corot did not, like the Impressionists, seek to render his visual impressions as purely and directly as possible; rather—in his landscapes, anyway—he showed himself to be the descendant of Claude: he poetically reinterpreted his impressions, populating many of his canvases with figures from myth or private fancy and suffusing them with a light that is true less to an optical than to an interior reality. “After my outings,” Corot noted,

I invite Nature to come spend several days with me; that is when my madness begins. Brush in hand, I look for hazelnuts among the trees in my studio; I hear birds singing there, trees trembling in the wind; I see rushing streams and rivers laden with a thousand reflections of sky and earth; the sun sets and rises in my studio.

It is in this sense that Clement Greenberg, writing in 1942, was right to compare Corot to “a symbolist poet,” who “does not try to create a specific world but rather to awaken in the spectator limitless associations, muting the contrasts of light and dark lest things become too definite.”

It is a testimony to Corot’s specifically artistic vitality that aspects of his work have appealed to temperaments that differed radically from his own. Corot was no more a Realist than he was an Impressionist—much less, in fact; and yet there are Realist elements in some of his paintings and we know that his works held a great fascination for Courbet (and vice versa: Corot greatly admired Courbet). In 1866, Emile Zola impatiently wrote that “if M. Corot could kill, once and for all, the nymphs of his woods and replace them with peasants, I should like him beyond measure.” What is surprising is not the existence of such complaints—and Zola’s was hardly unique—but that Corot’s reputation rose above them essentially unscathed.

There are technical, painterly reasons for Corot’s widespread appeal: the misty modulations of light in his late landscapes attracted the Impressionists; the stripped-down modeling and simplifications of his Italian landscapes and his figure paintings attracted modernists from Gauguin and Van Gogh to Cézanne, Juan Gris, and Picasso. It is easy, for example, to see why the young Picasso admired Corot’s dark, brooding Mademoiselle de Foudras, a remarkable late portrait from 1872 that Picasso copied in 1920.

But another reason for Corot’s popularity lies in the appeal of the naïve in a “sentimental”—that is to say a deeply unsettled—age. “The naïve,” Schiller wrote, “is childlikeness where it is no longer expected.” Corot lived in an age of great artistic and political ferment. Who could have expected his composure, his delicacy, his tranquil perseverance? The revolution of 1848; the Salon des Refusés in 1863; the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71; the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, the year before Corot died: what is remarkable is not that Corot’s painting changed and evolved, especially from the late 1840s on, but that it displayed an essential serenity throughout.

In his important essay on Corot in The Development of Modern Art (1905), the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe repeatedly stressed the childlike element in Corot’s character and his art. Corot worked playfully, Meier-Graefe noted, with a “fancy characteristic of boyhood.” And although he was a year older than Delacroix, “nothing of the wild period”—the excess, the galloping Romanticism—“had touched him. A virginal soul dwelt in the sturdy body.” Corot was, Meier-Graefe concludes, “a child; we cannot describe his nature more exactly.”

These elements in Corot’s character (and work) can be overstressed. But the essential picture is correct. Cheerfulness was always breaking in. Corot’s art, Meier-Graefe wrote, “was like a smiling, well-protected coast, on which the waves ripple gently and never break in fury.” No doubt his sense of security had its origin in part in Corot’s circumstances and upbringing. Corot was born in Paris, the second of three children and only son of increasingly well-to-do merchants. His mother was a fashionable milliner of Swiss origin, his father the son of a wigmaker who ably ran his wife’s business, catering to the beau monde from a shop on the rue de Bac. A revealing portrait of Corot’s mother from the mid 1830s is included in the Met exhibition. Madame Corot sits in a fashionable blue dress with puffed sleeves, one of her magnificent bonnets perched atop her dark hair, its ribbons dangling untied down to her waist. This is a businesslike rather than a maternal creature: self-possessed, competent down to the tips of her elegantly gloved hands. She leans slightly forward with an expression of wry, impatient concentration—having just sat down, one feels, or else just about to rise. Altogether a formidable lady.

Camille was sent to boarding school in Paris at the age of four and then, in 1807, to school at the Collège de Rouen. An indifferent student, he completed his formal education in Poissy in 1814 at the age of eighteen. Although he was beginning to take an interest in art, at the behest of his father he worked in the cloth trade in Paris for nearly eight years. It may be tempting to apply the cliché of young-artist-rebels-against-bourgeois-parents-with-their-obtuse-commercial-ambitions to Corot, but it wasn’t like that at all. For one thing, Corot was an extremely dutiful son who didn’t have a rebellious bone in his body. For another, as Vincent Pomarède observes in his excellent essay for the Met’s catalogue, Corot’s experience in the cloth trade “clearly contributed to the formation of his aesthetic sensibility and taste, since it meant eight years spent in the world of fashion, where texture and exact colors of fabrics matter a great deal.” (Years later, toward the end of his life, Corot was delighted to discover evidence of his fame in a Parisian draper’s shop selling fabric in a color called gris-Corot, Corot gray.)

In 1817, Corot’s parents bought a property at Ville-d’Avray, near Versailles, that later provided the subject for so many landscapes. In 1822, some months after the tragic death of his younger sister, Victoire-Anne, Corot’s parents presented him with a choice: they would give him his inheritance—100,000 francs—to establish him in the cloth trade on his own, or he could pursue his interest in painting and make do with the interest on Victoire-Anne’s dowry—1,500 to 2,000 francs per year—as an allowance. Corot didn’t hesitate. He instantly set up in a studio on the quai Voltaire (though he continued to live with his parents) and studied intensively with Achille-Etna Michallon until Michallon’s untimely death from pneumonia later that year. Corot then began a three-year stint studying with Jean-Victor Bertin (1767– 1842), another pupil of Valenciennes.

Physically, Corot was blessed with an exceedingly robust constitution and was as productive and energetic in his late seventies as in his fifties. An avid and tireless traveler, he lived simply and dressed, it is said, like a peasant. (So much for his mother’s finery.) By all accounts, he was devoted to his family, especially to his older sister Annette-Octavie and “la belle dame,” his mother, on whom he doted—and on whom he was financially dependent—until her death in 1851.

There is a quality of fathomless silence in many of Corot’s paintings, an essential stillness that impresses one as contemplative or quietly melancholic by turns. Yet Corot himself was intensely sociable, generally preferred painting with friends around him, and was remarkably generous. In 1868, when Daumier was on the point of being evicted from his apartment because he could not pay the rent, Corot bought a small house in Valmondois and gave it to him. It is also worth noting that he seems to have suffered not at all from artistic hauteur or temperament. When someone complained that one of Corot’s models “prattled, sang, laughed, and didn’t stay put,” the painter said, “It’s just that changeability that I love in her. … I am not one of those specialists who makes set pieces. My object is to express life. I need a model who moves around.”

Meier-Graefe describes Corot as “devout” and tells us that he attended Mass regularly. Gary Tinterow notes in his essay for the Met’s catalogue that in his later years Corot was accustomed to read Thomas à Kempis’s devotional classic The Imitation of Christ before retiring. “It is this book,” Corot said to a friend,

that has helped me lead my life with such serenity and has always left me with a contented heart. It has taught me that men should not puff themselves up with pride, whether they are emperors adding this or that province to their empires or painters who gain a reputation.

Nevertheless, Corot’s Catholicism was clearly of the world-affirming, Mediterranean variety. As Meier-Graefe puts it, “although a good Christian, he was not a bad Pagan Greek.” So it is that, although Corot never married, he was hardly indifferent to female beauty. Writing from Rome in 1827 to a friend, he mentions an occasional dalliance with a local girl (“expensive”) and dilates on the charms of Italian women: “les yeaux, les épaules, les mains et les culs sont superbes.” Admitting to the same correspondent that a certain girl “pleased me greatly and still does,” he explained that “I have only one goal in life that I want to pursue faithfully: to make landscapes. This firm resolution keeps me from a serious attachment.” For some, the spectacle of Corot’s apparently unflappable contentment was an irritation. Writing in 1855, when Corot was widely celebrated, Edmond de Goncourt fumed that the painter was

the happy man par excellence. When he is painting, happy to paint; when he is not painting, happy to rest. Happy with his modest fortune before he inherited; happy with his inheritance when he inherited. Happy to live in obscurity when he was unknown; happy with his successes …

and, Goncourt sneered, happy with his models: “et tirant tous les mois son coup avec quelque sale modèle qui vient le voir.”

The catty Goncourt is not necessarily a reliable witness. But it is certainly true that Corot’s otherworldliness can be overstated. Reflecting critically on the common use of the word “chaste” to describe Corot’s pictures, Meier-Graefe warns that “in Corot we find neither negation nor affirmation of the sexual element, but that higher virtue, which first demands beauty from what is sensual, before inquiring whether it is moral: the purity of the healthy.” It is instructive in this regard to compare Corot’s reclining nudes, the earliest of which dates from the late 1830s, with Manet’s Olympia (1865). In Corot, sensuality has a voluptuous, inviting, slightly dreamlike quality, whereas in Manet the flesh, like the light, is wide awake, challenging, predatory.

In a much-quoted passage from his 1853 monograph on Corot, the painter’s friend Théophile Silvestre noted that “Corot sometimes exaggerates even to himself the cheerfulness of his character, while I see the melancholy so often present in his work and the expression of sadness that occasionally takes possession of his features.” Again, though, it is a dreamy, seductive melancholy one senses in Corot’s work. In a letter written in 1835, when he was thirty-nine, Corot hinted at some nameless sorrow and confided that his spirits “now lean toward sadness and melancholy.” But such expostulations are extremely rare in Corot’s correspondence, and one comes away feeling that whatever sadnesses he experienced were soon incorporated into an overarching spirit of affirmation, shadows necessary to set off an abiding luminosity.

Corot’s career really began to take root during his extended three-year trip to Italy (the first of three trips) from 1825 to 1828. This was a period of intense study, absorption, and painterly consolidation, the time when he definitively emerged from his artistic apprenticeship. Meier-Graefe spoke of Corot as “one of those wonder-children, who are born with a sense of form.” At least, it was a sense he soon acquired. Corot wrote to friends about being “absolutely tormented” in his struggle to capture the Italian light. To another correspondent he wrote that the more progress he made the more difficulties he encountered: “There are certain aspects of painting that I would like to deal with but that seem to me impenetrable.” Still, on the evidence of the remarkably fluent and harmonious pictures in the Brooklyn exhibition and pictures like the Phillips Collection’s View from the Farnese Gardens: Morning (1826) at the Met, these were struggles in which Corot was ultimately victorious.

Corot always placed a great premium on spontaneity. In a notebook entry made in Rome circa 1828, he wrote that “I have noticed that whatever is finished at one sitting is fresher, better drawn, and profits from many lucky accidents, while when one retouches this initial harmonious glow is lost.” There are some remarkable pictures made in a single sitting, including a small gem on view at Salander-O’Reilly. But in fact Corot often took great pains and many sessions to achieve the freshness and harmonious glow he sought. Vincent Pomarède describes a four-stage process:

He began outdoors, blocking in the subject fairly completely, usually in pencil but sometimes in oil; then in the studio, using oils, he repainted from memory, making the drawing and the effects of light and shadow more precise; next he returned to the site to analyze in detail various elements of the landscape; finally he retouched the painting in the studio, sometimes over a period of years.

Spontaneity, or at least the look of spontaneity, is sometimes achieved through painstaking and meticulous labor.

Corot began exhibiting regularly at the Salon in 1827 and had his first notable success in 1835 with Hagar in the Wilderness, now in the Met. This large canvas (nearly six by eight feet) is an ambitious Biblical scene in which the figures—a despairing Hagar, the infant Ishmael, and, floating off in the distance, a ministering angel—are dwarfed by a parched and desolate landscape. It is a forceful but not, to my mind, an especially likable picture. In any event, it is hardly the sort of picture that we associate with Corot; indeed, as Meier-Graefe noted, “we scarcely recognize Corot here.” It is, in fact, one of the curiosities of Corot’s career that many of the works that first made his reputation now seem secondary, while some of the works we most admire were ignored or even scorned when they were first exhibited.

By the late 1840s, Corot’s reputation was firmly established. But his path to success was not unencumbered. In 1843, for example, his submissions (notably the melodramatic Destruction of Sodom) were rejected by the Salon. He was nominated for the Legion of Honor in 1846 (at the news of which, Corot’s father wondered whether he should increase his son’s allowance), but never received a first-class medal from the Salon. In fact, as Michael Pantazzi notes in his essay for the Met catalogue, “In a world used to official rewards,” Corot’s recognition was “inadequate.” “State patronage, which was less than enthusiastic for an artist of Corot’s stature, ceased in 1851 after the purchase of five pictures.”

The growth of Corot’s reputation really took place slightly to one side of the established system of patronage and reward. He made his first important sale in 1839 to the duc d’Orléans, but it was the enthusiasm of certain critics and fellow artists that assured Corot’s stature. Already in 1845, Baudelaire had singled him out as the leader of the modern school of landscape painters. In 1851 Philippe de Chennevières called him “the greatest landscape painter of our time,” and in 1853 Nadar referred to Corot as “always and eternally the master.”

What is it in Corot’s painting that elicited such enthusiasm? Meier-Graefe noted that “tone was Corot’s great medium,” “the Alpha and Omega of his development.” If he was sometimes called “the Rembrandt of the open air,” it was because, like Rembrandt, he made color out of a subtle modulation of light and shade. Baudelaire perceived something similar when, writing about the Salon of 1846, he noted that Corot was “plutôt un harmoniste qu’un coloriste,” a harmonist rather than a colorist. In a notebook entry from 1870, Corot himself put it this way:

What there is to see in painting, or rather what I am looking for, is the form, the whole, the value of the tones. … That is why for me the color comes after, because I love more than anything the overall effect, the harmony of the tones, while color gives you a kind of shock that I don’t like.

Corot’s mastery of “tone,” his skill as a visual “harmoniste,” is perhaps most obvious in his great, light-diffused landscapes, beginning with his 1850 masterpiece, Une Matinée, also called La Danse des nymphes, which is now in the Musée d’Orsay. This remarkable work, which has been cited as a possible source for Cézanne’s Bathers, is a kind of Dance to the Music of Time à la Claude. It also, as the Met’s catalogue notes, “represented the turning point toward Corot’s late, vaporous manner and an increasing reliance on dramatic effects of mood, the culmination of a development begun ten years before” with Corot’s Virgilian idylls, e.g., Paysage; soleil couchant (1840).

Not all of Corot’s masterly experiments in harmony were immediate successes. One of his greatest masterpieces, Paysage avec figures (also called La Toilette), was declared “middling antique” by one critic when it was first exhibited in the 1859 Salon. But this fabulous picture, from a private collection in Paris, is one of Corot’s proudest achievements. Measuring about three by five feet, it presents a gentle wooded scene, a medley of silhouetted browns and greens and yellows; in the foreground, a seated nude turns three-quarters toward the viewer. Her left arm is raised with her hand on the back of her head, her right arm is cocked to hold a dangling tress; standing over her from behind an attending maid bends slightly to help fix her hair. The nude’s gaze slyly rises to meet our eyes in an attitude of composed query: there is recognition, even perhaps acknowledgment, but it registers from a seemingly unbridgeable distance. Behind and to the right, leaning against a tree, is another female figure absorbed in a book.

Corot was obviously fascinated by the spectacle of absorbed concentration that reading figures—particularly female figures—presented. “Nobody,” Pantazzi notes, “painted so many books.” Une Liseuse (1869–70), La Lecture interrompue (1870–73): in such pictures of women reading, or having just been interrupted reading, Corot uses books as something more than props: they are symbols of enchantment. Reading, in which we absent ourselves partially from the press of everyday life, provided a kind of intellectual correlative to the sort of experience Corot sought, with increasing success, to recreate in his gauzy landscapes: an experience of unity, of the timeless within time, the Arcadian ideal instituted in the precincts of contemporary life.

In any event, despite its lukewarm reception, Corot rated La Toilette very highly indeed, no doubt partly because of the immense efforts he expended on it. “You see the pains I take to hide the attachment [of the muscles] at the clavicles and sternum,” Corot recalled,

to soften the modeling of the ribs where it seems that the breasts just begin to swell; I try to go about it entirely differently from the usual way. … As this is not an anatomy lesson, I must bind together as seen in nature everything covering the armatures that make up and support the body, in order to put down only what I experience faced with these tissues of flesh that let one sense the blood beneath while they reflect the light of the sky.

The result of this effort to indite his experience is an exquisitely balanced tone poem in which a beguiling sensuousness is is held in delicate, reflective suspension.

Some of Corot’s later, more atmospheric landscapes are less sensual but perhaps even more beguiling. To be sure, Corot flirted with what Meier-Graefe called a species of mannerism in some of his silvery dreamscapes. But the best of them resist mannerism with a suave tautness of composition and subtle modulation of tone. In L’Etoile du berger (1864), for example, or the justly famous Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864), bought by Louis-Napoleon and now in the Louvre, Corot achieves an all-over unity of effect—a perfectly modulated surface—in which tone, form, and subject matter meld into one another in an expression of articulate visual yearning: a harmony of contrasts so skillful that it seems to resolve itself into a single note.

Corot’s mastery of tone and skill as a visual harmonist are evident in paintings other than his mist-filled landscapes. Indeed, Meier-Graefe rather deprecates these works in favor of some of Corot’s figure paintings, in which the tonal control is perhaps less blatant but just as consummate. Among the most famous are Femme à la perle (1858–68)—the decoration is actually a leaf, not a pearl—and La Dame en bleu (1874), both from the Louvre. Writing about the latter, Meier-Graefe called it “a perfect parure in blue,” noting that the striking effect of the blue dress was due as much to Corot’s subtle brushwork as to the color itself. La Dame en bleu is another “un-Corot-like” Corot, Corot in the tradition of Gainsborough, on the one hand, and looking forward to astringencies of Manet (an artist Corot didn’t care for), on the other.

Corot’s greatest strengths—his unfailing sense of composition, his mastery of tone, his “poetry”—have also been held against him by critics who insisted on a different standard of pictorial accuracy. “Poetry,” after all, can conceal a multitude of evils, or at least incapacities, in a painter. But Clement Greenberg was right that “there have been very few painters more fully in possession of their craft.” As some of his figure paintings show, Corot was technically capable of optical verisimilitude; but he was generally after other qualities, deeper accuracies. As he put it in a notebook, “I never hurry to arrive at details; the masses and the character of a picture interest me before anything else.” Curiously, his avid interest in the young art of photography reinforced this preference for masses and tone over detail: it was the spectrum of grays and revelation of tonality that Corot responded to in photography, not its anatomy of detail.

The catalogue for “Corot” at the Met notes that this is the first American retrospective of Corot’s work in thirty-five years. The curators—Vincent Pomarède, Michael Pantazzi, and Gary Tinterow—are right that “a thorough reappraisal of his work is clearly long overdue.” It is a pity, then, that this ambitious exhibition is such a serious disappointment. But a disappointment it is—as well as a missed opportunity. An occasion for a Corot retrospective on this scale will not come again soon. All the elements were in place: an intelligent and informative catalogue, a long list of masterpieces, but the tout ensemble just doesn’t come off.

Why? The curators themselves give a clue when they note in their introduction that they sought to represent “every aspect” of Corot’s painted oeuvre in their retrospective. A “different kind of exhibition might have shown Corot only at his most ravishing,” they note, but they insist that this would have been “deceptive” because a “fundamental aspect of Corot’s work is that his drawing is sometimes awkward, his compositions sometimes formulaic.” Well, it is certainly true that the curators have treated viewers to some second- and third-rank Corots in this exhibition: some are mere curiosities, like Soissons: House and Factory of Mr. Henry (1833) or Cow in a Stable (1840–45), others simply imperfectly realized works.

But the real problem with this exhibition is its pedantic didacticism. This is not an exhibition designed to be looked at but rather one to be dissected: striving to make a point about Corot it overlooks … Corot. In the end, a successful exhibition of Corot’s painting must to some extent emulate his own practice. That is to say, it must seek a unity or at least a harmony of tone; it cannot subordinate—as the Met exhibition does—the visual experience of the painting to lectures on why a particular work was or was not well received at the Salon in a given year. Moreover, a successful exhibition of Corot’s painting must make some effort to preserve the atmosphere of his distinctive aesthetic achievement: “Corot” fails at this abysmally. The curators of “Corot” tell us that Alfred Barr, the founder of the Museum of Modern Art, once predicted that Corot’s influence on twentieth-century art would be as great as Cézanne’s. We may think it a pity that Alfred Barr does not seem to have been right in this prediction. But the evidence of “Corot” gives us little understanding of why this great connoisseur of modern art should have thought Corot so potent a force to begin with.

Notes
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1. “Corot” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on October 29, 1996, and remains on view through January 19, 1997. The show was first seen at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (February 27–May 27, 1996), and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (June 21–September 22, 1996). A catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by Vincent Pomarède, Michael Pantazzi, and Gary Tinterow, has been published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Harry N. Abrams (496 pages, $60; $45 paper). Go back to the text.
2. “In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting” opened at the Brooklyn Museum on October 11, 1996, and will remain on view through January 12, 1997. The show was first seen at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (May 26–September 2, 1996), and will travel to the Saint Louis Art Museum (February 21–May 18, 1997). A catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by Philip Conisbee, Sarah Faunce, Jeremy Strick, and Vincent Pomarède, has been published by the National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press (288 pages, $50; $27 paper). Go back to the text.
3. “Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: Late Paintings” opens at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York, on December 5, 1996, and will remain on view through January 13, 1997. A catalogue of the exhibition, written by Martin Dieterle, has been published by Salander-O’Reilly Galleries (48 pages, $20). Go back to the text.