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In 2006, the Frick Collection presented the works of Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789), this artist's first in North America and one of his few anywhere. The review in the New York Times asked, "Liotard? He's a specialty item now, but in his era, Enlightenment Europe, he was a smash success. Even then he was seen as a maverick, a figure of contradictions. He was Swiss, but interesting; he was a stone-cold realist in an age of rococo frills. He had ultra-fancy patrons — princes, a pope, Madame de Pompadour — but a provincial education. He was a vigorous mover; he rarely stayed in one place for long. But he wasn't a shaker: he sparked no new style, inspired no disciples.
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"His apartness was as much circumstantial as personal. He was born in Calvinist Geneva, far from a Parisan art world dominated by the fashions, politics and hierarchies of the Royal Academy. Rather than study history painting, the prestige genre, he started out as a portrait miniaturist, steady-income work. In a great age of oil paint, he was partial to pastel. But he also mastered enamel work, printmaking, watercolor and drawing, a true high-low mix.
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"He had itchy feet. He worked in Paris for a while, traveled with a French patron to Italy, then with a British sponsor to Constantinople. Little of the art he did there survives, though the show includes...one of a European lady in elaborate native dress. Other artists might have made her exotic; under Liotard's clinical, detail-obsessed gaze she's an anthropological specimen.
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"...the large self-portrait, known as "Liotard With a Beard." Beards were out of fashion in 18th-century Europe. He had grown his while in Turkey. Long, full and unruly, it was a bold cosmetic statement and, it turned out, a public relations coup. Heads turned when he walked the streets of Paris. People called him the Turkish painter. Commissions piled up.
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"He kept moving. He went to Vienna, where he established a working friendship with the Empress Maria Theresa. It says something about Liotard's character that he maintained long-term contact with this particular court, the most austere and least corrupt in Europe. And it says something about his gifts that the empress gave him the commissions she did.
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"Other artists got to do big-gun official portraits, the kind that turned a pawky prince into Adonis or Zeus. Maria Theresa asked Liotard to draw portraits of her children, intimate pictures that a fond mother could carry on her travels. She had quite a brood, 16 children in all.
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"Whatever Liotard was paid for these pictures, it was too little. He poured every ounce of his talent into them. Each seamlessly blends several mediums: black and red chalk, pencil, pastel and watercolor. Details are executed with a watchmaker's precision. To give the figures a naturalistic glow, Liotard colored the reverse side of each thin sheet of paper. Marie-Antoinette is bathed in a rosiness that you sense rather than actually see.
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"The Vienna stays were harmonious interludes in larger journeys. Were Liotard working today, he would live in airports, waiting for the next flight to Venice, Milan, Darmstadt, Lyon. He spent two years in London, then two in Holland, where, at 54, he married. He shaved off his beard for the wedding. He didn't need it anymore. He was rich and famous, and ready at last to be a good Swiss householder.
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"The portraits kept coming, of his growing family, of Genevan merchants and intellectuals. They are delightful, not just for their candor and skill but for their variety...and you discover that there was absolutely nothing he could not do with pastel.
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"But his kind of realism was veracity, not verismo. Facts were his strength; truth of observation his goal. He delivers breathtaking flourishes, but always contained within solid forms. For him exactitude is the rule; but this means flaws are unavoidable, his sitters' and his own.
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"Is his the face of the Enlightenment? Yes, and the Enlightenment at its best. It speaks of no sanctity, no pretension, no Fall, no fear, no ideology, no "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." It says: The world is all right, period. And all wrong. All everything. And the artist — worker, entertainer, recorder — is happy to be here, wherever here is. For Liotard it seems to have been pretty much everywhere.
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"It is a concrete sense of hereness that makes his art refreshing. It makes every picture feel as if he approached it as his first and the last picture; as if no picture had a memory of any other; and as if each was an experiment, a flier to who knew where. Some took off; some didn't. He didn't fret over "great." He moved on to see what was next. He was wise that way, cool that way, modern that way."
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See Jean-Étienne Liotard, the Unrelenting Eye of the Enlightenment by Holland Cotter New York Times June 23, 2006
