Where is the line between an exhibition and a propaganda display? For Jacques-Louis David, the most important painter of the late 18th century, art was an act of virtue: a template for citizens, a model of conduct, to be reinforced with beauty or brutality. “Jacques-Louis David,” opening at the Musée du Louvre in Paris on Oct. 15, is the largest retrospective in 35 years of an artist who transformed painting in the 1780s with his hard, precise scenes of Greek and Roman heroes. But when the revolution came, he stepped out of his studio and into the parliament — and when his fellow Jacobins starting purging the academies, he turned his paintbrush into a blade.
In the United States, where the incumbent administration has recently instructed its national museums to align its narration of history with the president’s wishes, we are hastily rediscovering that when politics shift, culture can change overnight. No one knew that better that David, and no one lived it more publicly. While he painted his stern scenes of hardy warriors and martyred children, he was masterminding revolutionary parades and uniforms. When the king’s fate came to a show of hands, David enthusiastically voted to send Louis XVI to the guillotine. Right here at the Louvre, the old palace that his fellow revolutionaries turned into a museum, David unveiled the signal image of the French Revolution: his starkly impassioned “Death of Marat,” sanctifying a fanatic journalist bleeding out in the bath. He unveiled it here on the very same day, in 1793, that the crowds in what’s now the Place de la Concorde cheered Marie-Antoinette’s severed head.
I’ve been wrestling with David for half my life. Beneath his rigor, I’ve always found a passion and even euphoria in his visions of a new republic, changing so fast no artist could keep up. But David was a menace, too — the very word terrorist comes from his days of revolutionary glory — and his fervor and flash carry a queasy aftertaste, especially after he emerged from prison to celebrate Napoleon as he crossed the Alps or crowned himself emperor. Painting or propaganda? True believer or opportunist? Now you get to pass sentence, as the Louvre supplements its own hefty David holdings with more than 100 special loans: among them the “Death of Marat,” visiting from Brussels, the city where David died in exile 200 years ago.
A second major encounter of painting and politics takes place in Paris this autumn: a review of the art of Gerhard Richter, now 93, who brought a Davidian chilliness to his reckoning with postwar German history. Opening Oct. 17 and filling every gallery of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, this show is aiming to be the definitive summation of Richter’s art, which, through both blurry photo-based paintings and streaky abstractions, sought new prospects for painting when all the paths seemed blocked.
Sheila Hicks, herself 91, the doyenne of fiber art and one of the great Americans in Paris, will be intertwining her textile innovations with Andean weavings at the Musée du Quai Branly (opening Sept. 30). And George Condo, a sometime Parisian himself, will debut the largest exhibition of his fractured paintings, drawings and sculptures at the Musée d’Art Moderne (from Oct. 10).
Can a painter bring, to depictions of our own time, the rigor David brought to his? “Kerry James Marshall: The Histories,” at the Royal Academy in London from Sept. 20, will spotlight our most ambitious renovator of the old tradition of history painting, whose intricate, erudite views of the U.S. foreground figures of uniform black. It will be Marshall’s largest presentation since his acclaimed midcareer retrospective “Mastry” almost a decade ago, and I’m hoping it jolts a city in need of some political and painterly seriousness. Other promising shows in London include “Nigerian Modernism,” a survey of more than 50 artists forging new modes of art making before and after independence (at Tate Modern, from Oct. 8); “Turner and Constable,” a grand review of British landscape in the recently fashionable format of painter-versus-painter death match (at Tate Britain, from Nov. 27); and “Yto Barrada: Thrill, Fill, Spill,” uniting the textiles, films and paintings of a poetic French-Moroccan artist constantly on the move (at the South London Gallery, from Sept. 26).
About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters; but when it came to ecstasy they made some good points too. The season’s most important exhibition of classic painting takes place in Florence, where from Sept. 26 the Palazzo Strozzi will exalt the religious visions of Fra Angelico, the Dominican friar who brought painting to a new state of spare sanctity at the start of the 15th century. (When I say this art is miraculous, I mean it almost literally; Pope John Paul II beatified Fra Angelico in 1982.) In Vienna, the Kunsthistorisches Museum assembles almost every known picture by Michaelina Wautier, an artist of the northern Baroque who defied expectations of what a woman could paint (from Sept. 30). The Museo del Prado, in Madrid, offers the largest study ever of Anton Raphael Mengs, who turned Enlightenment philosophy into painstaking portraiture (from Nov. 25).
There are the requisite biennials too: big ones in Istanbul and São Paulo, smaller ones from Ireland to Taiwan. The form has grown stale, though, and the only one that really matters to me now is the Kyiv Biennial — which, since the start of the full-scale war, has transformed itself into an international festival that places Ukraine at the heart of Europe. This fall’s edition takes place across five venues inside and outside the country; the largest section will open Oct. 3 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which moved into a giant new home this year after two nomadic decades. Works by two dozen contemporary artists will be joined by landmarks of the 20th-century Ukrainian avant-garde, on loan from Kyiv’s spectacular Mystetskyi Arsenal.
At last, closer to home, are two additional exhibitions of modern painting that should remind us of the pleasure, and the power, of living your life as close as possible to the new. “Manet & Morisot,” opening Oct. 11 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, unites the two French Impressionists Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, children of the haute bourgeoisie — they were brother- and sister-in-law, by the way — whose visions of leisure, fashion and city life shocked their own class and everyone else besides. And “Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets,” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia from Oct. 19, plunges us into the flat and fanciful universe of an artist who, from the city to the jungle, turned realism into a kind of dream.
Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.
The post 14 Art Shows Worth Traveling for, From Europe to the West Coast appeared first on New York Times.
