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| Marguerite Gérard and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, I Was Thinking of You (Je m'occupais de vous), about 1785-1787. J. Paul Getty Museum |
The Getty Museum has acquired a scene of 18th-century love by Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837), assisted by her teacher and brother-in-law, Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It becomes the museum's first work by Gérard and only the second painting by Fragonard. The date is almost the same as the Getty's Fountain of Love by Fragonard, though the style is distinct. Dutch genre painting by Gerard ter Borch and Gabriel Metsu was undergoing a revival of popularity in 1780s France. Gérard and Fragonard produced a group of contemporary genre scenes with Leiden fine-painter precision and Rococo prurience. All are of modest dimensions (21-5/8 by 17-11/16 in. in the case of the Getty picture), like their 17th-century models.
I Was Thinking of You was in Russian collections from the early 19th century. The Bolsheviks seized it and sent it to the Hermitage, where it was later sold to raise cash for Stalin's Five Year Plan. Dealer Gurr Johns Ltd. sold the painting to the Getty.
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| Marguerite Gérard and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Interesting Student, 1787. Sold at Sotheby's Paris, 2019 |
The nature of Gérard and Fragonard's collaboration is speculative. Gérard was in her mid 20s and still learning her craft, while Fragonard was a 50-something ex-wunderkind yoked to an increasingly unfashionable style. In one work attributed to both artists, The Interesting Student, the young woman is holding a framed print of Fragonard's The Fountain of Love. The metal sphere at lower right reflects the studio, revealing four spectral figures. Two are presumed to be Gérard, seated at an easel, and Fragonard standing behind her.
According to the Getty site, the shimmering costumes of I Was Thinking About You are Gérard's work. Fragonard supplied the faces and the male figure's hand. The facial expressions are a complex carom shot: The elder chaperone stares daggers at the young suitor, who only has eyes for the young lady. The mademoiselle breaks the fourth wall, her eyes theatrically addressing us. From that you might infer that Fragonard painted or retouched the most demanding bits.
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| Marguerite Gérard and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The First Steps, about 1780-1785. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum |
But Harvard has a pair of collaborative paintings in which Gérard is credited for the
"refined brushwork of the mothers' faces," while Fragonard is said to have painted the background foliage and figures. Harvard dates its paintings "c. 1780-1785," no later than the Getty picture's date of about 1785–1787.
Gérard's paintings (with or without Fragonard's involvement) have become popular with museums seeking to show early women artists. The National Gallery of Art bought
a pair of Gérards last year. The Huntington has had one (
The Kiss of Innocence, or The Swing)
since 1978.
UPDATE (Apr. 13, 2026).
I Was Thinking of You is now on view in the Getty Center's gallery S203.
Still Life with Assorted Fruit is an early and relatively colorful work by Claesz., marking the beginning of the Haarlem still life tradition. The painting's original viewers would have been familiar with quinces (top), medlars (bottom foreground), and gooseberries (lower right). It's the grapes that would have been exotic imports.
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| Pieter Claesz., Still Life, 1627. Timken Museum, San Diego |
Within a few years Claesz. was producing "monochrome" still lifes of disheveled tables in shades of brown and gray. There's a spectacular monochrome Claesz. at San Diego's Timken Museum. The healthy fruits of the Getty picture are replaced with beer, tobacco, and smoked herrings contorted into monsters. The searing light is inexplicable for a 17th-century interior.
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| Pieter Claesz., Still Life with Herring, Wine and Bread, 1647. LACMA, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter |
In a 1647 painting in LACMA's Carter collection, Claesz.'s style is more painterly, the vibe is less weird, and the food looks edible—probably a response to the popularity of
Jan Davidsz. de Heem's excess-maxxing still lifes.
Unlike de Heem, Claesz. struggled to make a living and was forgotten after his death. His name and oeuvre were reconstructed from the distinctive PC monogram he used to mark his paintings.
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| Monogram on knife of Still Life with Assorted Fruit |
Comments
> Claesz. struggled to
> make a living and
> was forgotten after
> his death.
Always wonder why some people do well, others not as well
A Van Gogh during his lifetime was ignored by buyers-collectors-museums, now he's one of the major names in the world of visual arts.
Old-time Dutch (and European) painters are technically amazing, but their style is more decorative than (in comparison, centuries later) something like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks----I just watched a bio about Hopper.
Speaking of decorative, when Richard Meier designed the Getty Center, he didn't care for the museum's period rooms. But certain objects in any museum are helped by the setting of a re-created house or building. That help offsets the look of a furniture store. Boston's Fine Arts Museum had a gallery where a row of early-Americana chairs were lined up. It was about as appealing as being in an Ikea---if that store sold 1700's-1800's-style furniture.
As for traditional museum settings that display centuries-old paintings (ie, an enfilade format), I've always wondered why the doorways of Beaux-Arts-type galleries indicate the walls between the rooms are very thick. Concealed storage space? More square footage intentionally set aside for blank spaces between the walls of galleries? Or thick walls in order to support really heavy floors and ceilings?
The museums of the first quarter of the 20th century all favor the enfilade-Beaux-Arts-Louvre look. Although the quality and quantity of their older European art will vary, most museums from long ago follow the same architectural format. They become sort of overly visually perfume-y too. Or the opposite extreme of too much plain gray concrete.
In terms of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Geffen Galleries, never thought I'd say it but they may be a long-needed paradigm for today's age of museums. The windows may appeal to visitors who drop by museums not so much because they're connoisseurs of the visual arts, as much as it's a place they can wander though.
LACMA will never be a tourist-must-see in the guise of an old-time art museum in Paris, NYC, Philadelphia or Chicago (or even SF's Legion of Honor), but it may be a better fit for today's era. And better than Pereira's tract house of 1965.
As for the Getty, the South pavilion will soon be remodeled getting rid of the period rooms in favor of streamlined cleaner galleries.
Getty. edu:
Getty Center, Museum South Pavilion, Gallery S116
This salon, or main reception room, is from a residence in Paris called the Maison Hosten... The complex is considered to have been among the most significant works of French domestic architecture by one of the leading architects of the 1700s.
You know nothing of art.
Twenty years in the making, the project, initiated by LACMA’s CEO...Michael Govan, has rightfully been the subject of intense critique, including in AN.
Joseph Giovannini has written over 53,000 words across 11 articles in the Los Angeles Review of Books. (Govan apparently intervened at the Los Angeles Times to get the paper to stop publishing Giovannini’s articles.)
In 2019, Carolina Miranda, then with the Los Angeles Times, said the building has the “profile of a small-city airport terminal.” In 2020, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his writing against the endeavor. More recently, architect Chris McVoy complained about its carbon footprint.
The project’s architect, Peter Zumthor, hasn’t been happy at times, mostly because of the build quality.... “There are no Zumthor details any more,” the architect “flatly” told Christopher Hawthorne in 2023. Though many invectives have been hurled at the museum, Govan, backed by his donors, has advanced with a classic American attitude: Fuck the haters, basically. [End quote]
^ FU or not, something had to be done with LACMA's campus. But if the Getty's owner wants to make their South Gallery Pavilion look more hip and trendy, it will be Govan-ized. Or period rooms shouldn't be "streamlined."
The Geffen replaces a design derided since 1965, whereas Richard Meier's buildings in the Sepulveda Pass have been generally well accepted.
Stay in your lane, with your Pereira/Zumthor 1965 stuttering. Leave the art criticism to me and others. Your pronouncements are an embarrassment.
--- J. Garcin
LOL. You forgot to add "MAGA crowd" or something like that. Okay, you and Ted aren't idiots. You're muthafuckkers. Or something like that.
And, Ted, you're such a moron you can't figure out that the way a museum displays its objects has nothing to do with details of furniture making, the techniques of decorative arts or things like how hot a kiln has to be for fine porcelain. SMH.
What the hell is wrong with you? lol.
The Metropolitan last year attracted over 5.7 million visitors, in 2023 LACMA is listed as less than a million.
Govan being aware of his managing a place that's been too much like an ailing shopping mall is a good thing----the former courtyard of the Ahmanson and Art of Americas buildings was really weak.
But not sure how much of a lack of enough popularity is due to the collection, the special exhibits ("a de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly it's not a very good one") or the Pereira-1986 campus.
I just wish the museum before 2020 had been critiqued in a more hard-nosed way. I know it wasn't up to par, but a lack of enough plain talk about the Pereira-1965 format didn't help things.
It was treated in a way not too different from a row of chairs displayed at the Boston Fine Arts museum being about as inspiring as strolling through an Ikea.
This did not happen.