Legacy 21- Clark Collection French Art

Impressionism from Paris to Massachusetts

Aug 23, '12 5:10 AM for everyone

I believe it’s a rule of thumb for all art galleries that putting “Impressionist” in the title of an exhibition is a good way of boosting the numbers coming through the doors.   While it would be unfair to accuse the Royal Academy of doing this in a fraudulent way in its current hosting of a show of 19^th century French art from the Clark collection now housed in Williamstown Massachusetts- a lot of the art is indeed Impressionist- the lure of the name seemed to be working when I went to have a look at it, with the Sackler galleries a good deal busier than usual.

The exhibition is about half way through a world tour which takes in places like Milan, Montreal, Tokyo and Shanghai as its home base undergoes renovation and upgrade- no doubt the publicity and income will be welcome too.   The works on display don’t represent the totality of the Clark collection, which includes a good deal of art from other periods, but form an important sub-section of it.   This (one or two pieces acquired later from endowment income apart) is very much the product of the enthusiasms, taste (not to mention money) of one individual, Robert Sterling Clark, aided and abetted by his wife Francine.  

Clark was a rich American in Paris.  It’s tempting to see him as a kind of Henry James or Edith Wharton character come to life, though in fact his back story is a bit more complex than the average fictional American of pre-1914 literature.   Obviously he had enough money not to have to worry about vulgar things like work (the family money came from a business connection with the Singer sewing machine company).   By the time he hit Paris, however, he was a man in his thirties and had seen a good deal of the world as a soldier and military engineer- he saw service in China during the Boxer Rebellion and undertook major mapping projects there in the early years of the 20^th century.  He was no wide eyed innocent American naïve abroad.   Nor was he on the make seeking family advantage in Europe- relations with his family were at best tense (they broke down completely in the 1920’s) and he seems to have come to Europe to put an ocean between them and him.   Once settled in Paris he rapidly acquired a French partner- Francine, an actress of part Polish origins, who already had a child by an earlier relationship.  He also began dabbling in the art market, initially because it was the done thing and because he needed to cover the walls of his accommodation rather than from any profound enthusiasm.   Like most neophytes unsure of their taste, he started with Old Masters.  After being burned a couple of times through over-optimistic attributions and over-restored paintings (an experience which left him with an abiding distrust of art historians and other experts- ironic given that the college where his collection now lives specialises in educating such people!) he switched his main focus to contemporary or near-contemporary French art.   He also had a clear sense that Old Masters were becoming poor value for money- he may have been very rich by most normal calculations but he was a millionaire rather than a billionaire and always very careful to balance cost against quality.   How far Francine played a role is unclear, though she was clearly an active partner in collecting (she could even persuade him to pay more for a piece than he originally intended).   Impressionism, and other recent French art, was still relatively cheap in the 1910s even for a purchaser who worked entirely through art dealers- Clark, unlike some slightly earlier American collectors, never appears to have cultivated personal relationships with the artists whose works he collected.

Clark remained in Paris during the First World War, rejoining the US Army when his native land entered the conflict.   He finally got round to marrying Francine in 1919- an action which triggered a final breach with his family, who probably didn’t approve of her and weren’t prepared to make provision for her and her daughter when carving up the family assets.   The couple (who had no children of their own) remained largely Paris based for much of the inter-war period though Clark was careful to ensure that they had a base on the far side of the Atlantic in case of a future European war.   The Great Depression actually worked to his advantage- his inheritance doesn’t appear to have been badly affected and he was able to buy up works from financially embarrassed collectors on both sides of the Atlantic.   With war looming (the couple were in France when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939) they shut up their Paris home and shipped their art off to sit in a Montreal vault for some time, until they acquired a New York home with enough wall space to show it off (a flat with some two hundred paintings can’t have been much fun for the cleaning staff….).   They were still collecting in the early 1950’s, pretty well up to Sterling’s death.  

The Clarks seem to have been a very close and on some levels intensely private couple.   They very rarely lent items from their collection (which, in addition to the paintings, included antique silverware and Old Master drawings) to public exhibitions in their lifetimes.  They weren’t even particularly noted as collectors; Sterling Clark was far better known to contemporaries as a breeder and owner of racehorses (one of which won the Epsom Derby in 1954) than as an art connoisseur.  Nevertheless from the 1930’s onwards he  was actively looking for somewhere to put his art collection on display- ideally a locating in which it would be the star attraction, not overshadowed by other works.   A variety of schemes came and went before the Williamstown option was finally adopted in the early 1950’s.   The now-elderly couple apparently took up more or less permanent residence on site as the gallery was constructed; it was completed just in time for Sterling to be present at the opening.  Francine lived a few years longer, bossing the museum trustees round over her interpretation of his wishes until she too died in 1960.

Part of the fascination of this sort of exhibition is the way in which it reflects the idiosyncratic tastes and preferences of one collector (the Clarks seem to have been such a close couple that they count as one).   What is striking is how stable their collecting patterns were after the 1910’s.  Right up to the 1950’s they were still buying art created (mostly) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.   To the extent that buying Impressionist art was still radical and cutting edge when they started out, it was distinctly conservative by the 1950’s.   This was obviously a very conscious choice.   Sterling Clark had little time for the art which was being produced in Paris in the inter-war years, which he thought was artistically inferior and ludicrously over-priced - indeed one of the conditions imposed on the trustees of the collection limited their ability to buy art to the work of painters who had been dead more than twenty five years.   It’s therefore not surprising that there aren’t any Picassos, Braques or Vuillards in the show .   What is a little more unexpected is that many of the later generation of Impressionists get comprehensively cold shouldered- no Van Goghs and no Cezannes.  Indeed the exhibition as displayed if anything underplays their conservatism since it includes an early Bonnard and one rather strange Gauguin (see below) which were both acquired by the collection trustees after the Clarks' deaths; neither artist was represented at all in their own purchases.  

 By contrast, the pre-Impressionisms of the Barbizon school, Millet and Corot are well represented as are the works of Academic opponents of Impressionism like Gerome or Bouguereau.  The image of French art presented by the show is therefore a somewhat peculiar and truncated one which favours certain linkages and influences while ignoring others.

Even among the artists who are represented in the collection there are certain biases in what the Clarks collected.  Both Renoir and Monet made the cut- but only in respect of their earlier works.   The publicity for the show makes a lot of the fact that the Clark collection contains over thirty Renoirs and Sterling Clark went into print raving over Renoir’s gifts.  Despite that, there’s no suggestion in the catalogue that he ever met the artist, let along bought art directly from him even though Clark’s residence in Paris overlapped with the last decade or so of Renoir’s life.  The works in the collection are almost all from the 1880’s or earlier.  I can’t say I’m sorry about this from a personal point of view.   I’m not a great Renoir fan and I find his late works- all chocolate box colours, blurry lines and women with the same vacuous blank expression on their faces- well nigh impossible to look at.   While the earlier works often show all too clearly the signs of what was to follow- especially when painting young women- there are some unusual and idiosyncratic works which appeal to me (like the still life at the top of the page or a couple of Italian cityscapes).   To a less pronounced extent the same applies to Monet, represented by paintings like the one below depicting the famous sea arch near Etretat on the Norman coast rather than his massive late water lily paintings.

Obviously as collectors who bought their art through dealers rather than cultivating relationships with living artists the Clarks were to a considerable extent dependent on the vagaries of the art market, especially as time passed, the Impressionists became increasingly part of the established mainstream artistic canon, prices increased and works which might once have come on the open market began being acquired for or willed to public collections.   Issues of availability may have skewed their acquisitions (at least to the extent that Sterling Clark was not prepared to pay what he regarded as excessive prices for works) and pushed them towards early or thematically unusual pieces but I doubt if that was a really major inhibition.   What we have, then, is an intriguingly conservative view of what was in its origins a thoroughly revolutionary artistic movement- though one which I suspect fits quite well with contemporary expectations of what an Impressionist show ought to look like.

The show is divided up by genre rather than taking a chronological view (I think I’d have arranged it by date of acquisition……).   Naturally all the standard genres are there- portraits, landscapes, genre scenes and so on.   There are few obvious surprises here.   Paintings in urban Parisian settings are thinner on the ground than they would be in a statistically representative survey of Impressionist art, though there is a very nice late Pissaro depicting the busy industrial port of Rouen (again a post-Clark acquisition by the trustees).   Given Sterling Clark’s own passion for horse racing I might have expected more than one example of Degas at the races (see below). 

  On the other hand there is quite a lot of naked female flesh- several of the Renoirs, for instance, are nudes or semi-nudes.  The fondness of Academic painters for “Oriental” themes is well represented in the show-  indeed the majority of the paintings in the “Orientalism” section have a female nude or two to arouse male interest and some of the paintings housed in other sections also have distinct erotic undertones.   One wonders how far Francine got a say in those acquisitions…….