In 1869, at 50 years old, the famed Realist painter Gustave Courbet turned his eye toward the ocean and painted waves. Seascapes, even specifically waves, have fascinated many painters but the subject isn’t one that art historians typically associate with Courbet. He had made a name for himself nearly 20 years prior for painting gritty pictures of people: dead people [okay, a funeral], laboring people, meeting people, or even just a vagina. A year after his trip to the coast to paint waves, the painter would take on a leading role in the Paris Commune, most famously leading the group that toppled the Vendôme Column in May of 1871. Courbet’s wave looks more ominous than inviting, slapdash splatters of froth indicating conflicting currents in an unforgiving sea.
One of Courbet’s five wave paintings (along with another non-gritty Courbet landscape, The Edge of the Pool from 1867) is on view at the Portland Art Museum this summer in French Moderns: Monet to Matisse 1850-1950. The show features paintings and sculptures from the Brooklyn Art Museum and is a sort of opening statement for Lloyd DeWitt, PAM’s new Richard and Janet Geary Curator of European & American Art Pre-1930, who started at the museum in January of this year. French Moderns, as well as the concurrent 14-work exhibition Pissarro to Picasso: Masterworks on Loan from the Kirkland Family Collection, are DeWitt’s first exhibitions for the Portland Art Museum.
DeWitt’s arrival in Portland in January closes a span of just under three years (32 months) in which PAM was without a curator of European art. The previous Richard and Janet Geary Curator of European Art, Dawson Carr, retired in April of 2021. When I interviewed Carr on the occasion of his retirement he predicted an extended vacancy of his position; he estimated 18 months. Based on the interview with Carr, I wrote two articles for ArtsWatch in April and May of 2021. The first article celebrated Carr and his contributions to Portland; the second questioned the larger implications of the display of European art in Portland.
In late June, I interviewed DeWitt about French Moderns and his thoughts on what the future display of PAM’s European and American art pre-1930 holdings might look like. Our conversation (not surprisingly since I wrote the questions) pulled at many of the same threads from my earlier conversation with Carr. As a result, this article is at once a review of the current shows, an introduction to DeWitt, and a response to my own earlier ruminations.
DeWitt comes to Portland by way of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was the Chief Curator. Prior to the Chrysler Museum, he was at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He presented French Moderns to Brian Ferriso as a potential opportunity for PAM while interviewing for the PAM position in 2023.
French Moderns features almost 60 works from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection, grouped into four categories: landscape, still life, portraits and figures, and the nude. It has been circulating at various museums, including the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, since 2017. It was at the Palazzo Zabarella in Padua, Italy directly before coming to Portland. It’s a well-traveled exhibition and one that seems to have some content differences depending on location; there are some works in the Portland iteration of the show that aren’t in the 2017 catalog, most notably, a stand-out example from Monet’s Houses of Parliament series.
The pendant exhibition, Pissarro to Picasso, will only be on view in Portland. The 14 works are new additions to the collection of the Kirkland family (real estate fortune, no relation to Costco), and all were purchased at auction or through private sale in the past year. This is a “tax-break exhibition”: the collectors get a significant break on taxes if they put their newly purchased works on view at a public museum. This 2014 article from The Seattle Times explained the practice in relation to one of Portland Art Museum’s most famous loans in recent memory: the wildly expensive Three Studies of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon. It’s a benefit for museums as well: visitors get to see works before they’re cloistered in private hands.
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The availability of this particular collection was fortuitous. DeWitt revealed little about details for privacy reasons but it sounds as though these works were selected from a larger roster of possibilities. The ties between exhibitions are tight: 10 of the 13 works are by artists working in France between 1850 and 1950; the other three are a Georgia O’Keeffe, a large tropical landscape, and a work by a Belgian Post-Impressionist). DeWitt titled the exhibition accordingly with the same alliterative name format (Monet to Matisse and Pissarro to Picasso).
I’ll admit that neither the premise of French Moderns nor Pissarro to Picasso immediately sent my heart aflutter. There’s an acknowledgment among art historians that Monet is a surefire way to get people in the museum door, that an Impressionism exhibit is a sort of cash cow. I thought these exhibits were a foil to the shoe exhibit downstairs: bring the young, cool crowd in with the shoes and the ‘ladies who lunch’ in with the Monets. The prominent use of Monet’s Rising Tide at Pourville (1882) in the publicity materials seemed poised to confirm this suspicion. There’s even a billboard on I-5 advertising the show with Monet’s Houses of Parliament and Pierre Bonnard’s In the Garden.
Is DeWitt’s opening statement at PAM simply a ploy to get bodies through the door? There is a billboard. It isn’t as though PAM has been catering to European art aficionados of late. The museum’s exhibition roster in the past year has featured things decisively other than European art: sneakers, fashion, Black Artists of Oregon. Is DeWitt just playing it safe with this gentle launch? Does this presage a similarly bland curatorial ethos?
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French Moderns as a traveling exhibition seems to have some built-in flexibility. There’s the question of the shifting checklist of artworks, but the framing of the exhibition seems to be equally mutable. The landing page for the same show at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2019 indicates that it is “organized primarily chronologically,” and lists the subsections as “The Academy, Breaking from the Academy, The Impressionists and their Circle, Early Modernism, Surrealism and Abstraction.” In other words, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the works from the Brooklyn Museum were slotted into a traditional art-history narrative in which one thing follows another in a sort of orderly parade.
In contrast, DeWitt has been adamant that the show doesn’t offer a chronology so much as insight into the diversity of styles that flourished in Paris in the century in question. He explained it to Willamette Week that the “way the show is installed, you glance across the gallery and see these parallel phenomena…I would encourage visitors to consider what all is happening at the same time – innovative, important paintings and sculptures from wildly different styles and movements, but made in Paris at nearly the same time.” He invested a good deal of time and thought setting up the sightlines in the exhibition space to emphasize this purpose.
DeWitt provides chronology by way of a timeline at the entrance to the show. Key political events sit above the line, including entries about the Franco-Prussian war (with colorful details about eating zoo animals) and each of the world wars. Art-historical events are below the line, with individual entries for each of the eight Impressionist exhibitions (between 1874 and 1886) along other notable events such as “1924: André Breton publishes the Surrealist Manifesto.”
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The prominence of Impressionism confirms that DeWitt knows what (many) people are coming to see and is happy to oblige with some additional historical framing. My art-historian heart loves a good timeline, but it is DeWitt’s other contribution to the show that confirms that French Moderns as an opening statement is more strategy than softball.
Titled “The Brooklyn Museum’s Collectors,” the panel features photographs and small biographical blurbs about 8 individual art collectors who donated works in the show to the Brooklyn Museum. Some of the donors are big names familiar in the world of art donations (Barnes, Cantor, Havemeyer) but other names are less well-known, smaller collectors who had the means to purchase art and happened to donate that art to the Brooklyn Museum.
Art collectors aren’t often heralded or celebrated the way that artists are – it’s easier to romanticize the person who made the art than the person who bought the art – but by featuring the collectors DeWitt emphasizes their central role in amassing the collection at the Brooklyn Museum and then, by extension, suggests an argument about the collection at the Portland Art Museum and the role it can and should play in the community.
PAM’s previous European curator, Dawson Carr, came to Portland from the National Gallery in London and prior to that had held positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Those are big institutions with holdings and budgets that match their stature. DeWitt, in contrast, has made his career at institutions more peer-ish of PAM, institutions without royal (blood or oil) foundational collections.
The American love affair with French art is nothing new. Paul Durand-Ruel, the art dealer who in the words of the title of a 2015 show at the National Gallery of London “invented Impressionism” (Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market), had more success selling “modern French painting” in the United States than he did in France. In 1886, Durand-Ruel wrote a letter in defense of his American clients: “Do not think the Americans are savages. On the contrary, they are less ignorant, less close-minded than our French collectors.”
American museum collections are often strong in French modernism because that’s what American collectors were buying at the time. It’s the reason a show like French Moderns exists: because the Brooklyn Museum has extensive holdings of French artwork from between 1850 and 1950. Some of it is great (I loved seeing Paul Cézanne’s incomplete The Village of Gardanne from 1885-1886), some of it is less great (a few too many flower paintings for my taste), some of it is just odd (I’m still perplexed by Jehan-Georges Vibert’s An Embarrassment of Choices). Some are works by famed artists like Courbet; not the best-known works that end up in art history textbooks, but other works that attest to an artist’s long career, and truth be told, that gain more clout than is maybe warranted because of name recognition.
Courbet’s Wave falls into this last category, but it is evidence of something else as well, the “open-mindedness” of American collectors in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The Wave, along with several other works in the show, was donated to the Brooklyn Museum by Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, the daughter-in-law of the famous American collector Louisine Havemeyer. Louisine Havemeyer was one of Paul Durand-Ruel’s best customers (she even leased him gallery space in one of her mansions); not coincidentally, Durand-Ruel had extensive inventory in Courbet landscapes after having purchased large groups of canvases (26 paintings purchased in April of 1872 and 24 more purchased in 1873) in the aftermath of the Paris Commune for which Courbet was imprisoned and then went into self-imposed exile in Switzerland. Purchasing a Courbet was an open-minded choice in the last decades of the 19th century.
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The idealism and pluck of American collectors associated with museums like the Brooklyn Museum or the Portland Art Museum was something that emerged in my conversation with DeWitt, and something that I hadn’t fully appreciated. From the vantage point of 2024, French modernism is easy to cast as “default art” – it’s not edgy or controversial, it’s the stuff of stodgy textbooks. It’s what is expected of art: it’s pretty and fun to look at and people flock to see it accordingly. You’d put it on a billboard. That wasn’t always the case, though. There was a time when French modernism was not the expected choice; that distinction went to “Old Master” works.
In our conversation, DeWitt drew a distinction between the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. The Met collectors were “looking to the past to establish pedigree … people in the Met wanted to make it look like an English country house. They were status insecure, and so they just imitated their betters … You see Van Dycks in Chatsworth, you see Van Dycks in the Met; you see them in Blenheim, you see them in the Met. It was a straight one-for-one because we were taking over the empire. It’s about that power. But it’s not about progress and the way that vision and art are changing.”
The collection at PAM, like the collection at the Brooklyn Museum and that of many North American museums, is the result of a community effort. DeWitt wants Portlanders to connect the Brooklyn Museum collectors’ commitment, or as he put it in our conversation: “Brooklyn is a wonderful way to reflect Portland to Portland.” He points to the Portland Art Museum founders’ similar commitment to contemporary art in 1913, when the Portland museum hosted the infamous “Armory Show,” the one derided as the “chatter of anarchistic monkeys” when it debuted in New York. DeWitt argues that bringing the Armory Show proves that Portlanders “really wanted to make us a modern city and a contemporary art city. … They were met with a lot of hostility at certain points but they established a school and really moved strongly in that direction.”
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It was questions of power and progress that occupied my thoughts in 2021 in response to my “exit interview” with Carr. We were still in the thick of the pandemic and the early stages of sorting through the racial upheavals of 2020. What gave me pause at the time was Carr’s insistence that things would go on “business as usual” in terms of displaying European art. The American and European galleries, at the time, were upstairs in a prime location in the Belluschi building. Carr was aware of some community backlash, explaining that “European art at the moment is being denigrated, and very self-consciously so, by a generation that espouses cancel culture. The colonial powers deserve to be punished [they argue].”
I had (and have) no interest in canceling European art – and not only because I’ve spent way too long fashioning a career out of studying it – but argued for an awareness of the consequences of defining “art” based on European norms and how that is entangled with ideas of white superiority; ideas that were dominant when PAM was founded and are perpetuated when we do things the way they have always been done. Keeping the American and European collections siloed signals a value judgment: “this is more important”. Progress, in this case, demands change. I advocated for hanging the collection thematically rather than geographically to better serve the museum’s mission of creating “a deeper understanding of our shared humanity.”
The museum came to the same conclusion. By the fall of 2022, at least one of the European galleries in the Belluschi building had been uninstalled to make room for Jeffrey Gibson’s To Name An Other. In October of 2023, the museum announced a “new vision for the collection” to be fully realized with the 2025 opening of the Rothko Pavilion. Throughlines opened in conjunction with that announcement, housed in the spaces formerly occupied by the American and European galleries, and was touted as an example of the museum’s “evolving [our] curatorial approach with a more collaborative approach internally.”
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DeWitt wasn’t yet hired and so did not participate in the initial Throughlines experiment (though there are inclusions from the European and American collections). In our conversation, however, he expressed great enthusiasm for the forthcoming project of reinstalling the collections. In line with his intentions with French Moderns, he spoke of wanting “people to feel pride of place” when the new Rothko Pavilion and renovated gallery spaces open. DeWitt wants to focus on “what draws us together, what binds us together as a community and expresses our identity in very positive ways, the strengths of the collection and the variety of it.”
It remains to be seen what this will look like or how this is possible. I don’t think DeWitt knows yet, either. The big reveal is set to be in Fall of 2025. What strikes me about this focus, though, particularly in light of French Moderns, is its consistency with the intentions of the people that started these North American art museums. Their motives were good; they wanted to make museums that were points of civic pride, that provided access to art to inspire the citizenry. They did that the best way they knew how at the time and chose to focus on contemporary art because they were committed to being progressive, to making a better world.
It’s easy to look back and fault founders and collectors, even artists, for what they didn’t know, for how their choices and actions perpetuated systems we don’t agree with. It’s harder to look back and appreciate their intentions as good, but products of a particular time and place, and limited accordingly. Presumably, our intentions will be regarded with similar disdain by future generations: some humility is in order.
The road that’s paved with good intentions only goes to hell if we insist on staying the set course. If we change directions, and move forward in accord with our current values, then it’s just the pavement behind us. Its actions over the past couple of years indicate that the Portland Art Museum is committed to shifting direction. DeWitt seems to be positioning himself as the advocate for the good intentions of the road behind. Maybe reclaiming some of that starry-eyed idealism is the right call.
