Not so long ago, heroic public statuary felt irrelevant—good for locating yourself in traffic circles but otherwise dismissed as a relic of some credulous, great-man-besotted past. The fact that places like Pyongyang and Ashgabat still went in for it just confirmed the association with autocratic backwardness and childish megalomania.
Things have changed. In Washington, D.C.
© Estate of David Hockney. Edition of 75. Photograph by Richard Schmidt.
David Hockney, Contrejour in the French Style, 1974. Etching, soft-ground etching, aquatint.David Hockney, who died at 88 in June, became famous as a young artist for imbuing 20th-century life with the formality and stasis of early Renaissance painting. His sharp-edged figures stand by the pool or sit by a coffee table in spaces as orderly as those in a Fra Angelico annunciation.
Pieter de Hooch was a contemporary of Johannes Vermeer in the Dutch city of Delft for a time; they painted similar subjects, in similar costumes, engaged in similarly quotidian activities. But they were quite different artists. De Hooch’s 1663 painting Interior With Women Beside a Linen Cupboard delivers exactly as little drama and numinous transcendence as its title promises. (It was formerly called The Good Housewife, which is hardly better.) The intrigue lies elsewhere.
“We know of nothing,” Henry James observed in 1875, “that is a better proof of the essential impotence of criticism, in the last resort, than Mr. Church’s pictures.” James wasn’t (in this instance) being spiteful.
Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important.
For museums and their public, Impressionism is the Goldilocks movement: not too old or too new, not too challenging or too sappy; just right. Renaissance art may baffle with arcane religious symbolism, contemporary art may baffle on purpose, but put people in a gallery with Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, and explanatory wall texts feel superfluous. Eyes roam contentedly over canvases suffused with light, vibrant with gesture, and alive with affable people doing pleasant things.