Insights From ‘The Age of Elegance’ Easy to Savor

SAN DIEGO — From his simple tacked-leather chair, Mr. Cooper Penrose casts a bemused glance across the gallery at a pair of barefoot lovers lounging on a verdant hillside. He sits silently, as if deep in thought, a model of aristocratic sobriety. The lovers, meanwhile, flirt and sigh in a landscape aflutter with new growth and ripe sensuality.

Being characters in separate painted scenes, Mr. Penrose and the young lovers never actually meet, but in a current installation at the Timken Museum of Art, they face off in what amounts to a confrontation between generations, styles and sensibilities.

“The Age of Elegance: France in the 18th Century” brings together works of decorative art from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and paintings from the Putnam Foundation Collection housed at the Timken Museum. As always with special exhibitions at the Timken, this show is incisively aimed at furthering understanding of the museum’s permanent holdings. Such efforts underscore the museum’s value as a rich community resource, edifying and educational. Though temporary, the show’s lessons and insights can easily be savored on repeat visits to the Timken collection.

“The Age of Elegance” is a small, elegant show--as elegant as the period it surveys and full of rich, resonant correspondences. The confrontation between Jacques-Louis David’s “Portrait of Mr. Cooper Penrose” (1802) and Francois Boucher’s “Lovers in a Park” (1758) illustrates in an instant the polarities contained within 18th-Century French art. Boucher’s frothy vision epitomizes the style known as Rococo, with its celebration of fantasy, luxury and pleasure. This light hedonism gets a stern riposte in the portrait by David, in which Penrose, an Irish businessman, occupies the gray space of the painting like an anchor--solid, serious, unadorned.

Painted as a mortal hero in the Neoclassical style, David’s Penrose quietly flaunts his moral superiority over two other portrait subjects in the show, Barthelemy-Jean-Claude Pupil and Marguerite de Seve, a husband and wife team painted in 1729 by Nicolas de Largillierre. The rising material wealth of the upper classes in 18th-Century France seems to come to fruition in the opulent dress of these two sitters: his crinkly satin legal robes and her fur-lined shawl over an ornate metal bodice.

Though all of these paintings are on permanent view at the Timken, the added context supplied by the decorative objects and informative texts in the current show helps sharpen the focus on the works’ distinctions and differences.

Furniture, too, embodied some of the same polarities between Rococo and Neoclassical styles, as the commodes and tables on view attest. One chest from around 1750 wears a veneer of mahogany, cut and inlaid in a startling, wave-like pattern. Decorative gilt bronze mounts in foliate designs encrust the corners of the chest, which is topped by a striated, gray-green slab of marble.

The chest stands beneath the portrait of Marguerite de Seve, who matches its tenor of visual and textural overkill with sartorial extremities of her own. But the cool sobriety of Mr. Cooper Penrose has its match, too, in the more restrained geometric-shaped mounts on another chest, this one with a herringbone patterned veneer. Eighteenth-century artisans excelled at marquetry, and the numerous examples here demonstrate well their innovative designs and extraordinary techniques. To better convey the complexity of this art, a copy of an 18th-Century cabinetmaking shop has been erected in the Timken, and demonstrations will be made throughout the show.

The artisans of the period borrowed heavily from the Orient, using fine Japanese lacquer panels as the sides to a commode, or adding handles to a delicate Chinese porcelain vase to transform it into a pitcher. The effects vary, but most of these hybrid works feel incongruous--their French features florid and overwrought, their Asian ones graceful and refined.

The emotional and intellectual range of 18th-Century France emerges well in this compact show, which was organized by Hal Fischer, director of exhibitions at the Timken. Several bronze sculptures, a lovely array of rare French silver, a remarkable Beauvais tapestry, a pair of upholstered chairs, and a spectacular grouping of porcelain vases from the famous Sevres Manufactory round out the show. These works, which are ordinarily installed at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, have been borrowed while the San Francisco facility undergoes two years of “seismic upgrading.”

Their temporary home here could not be more accommodating.

* “The Age of Elegance” continues at the Timken Museum of Art through Aug. 31, 1994. Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10-4:30, Sunday 1:30-4:30.

ART NOTES

Kathryn Kanjo has been hired as assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, to replace Madeleine Grynsztejn, who recently left to take a job at the Art Institute of Chicago. Kanjo formerly managed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Equitable branch in midtown Manhattan. . . .

The Linda Moore Gallery will be San Diego’s sole representative at ARCO, the international art fair in Madrid next February. The Tasende Gallery of La Jolla, which will not attend, is the only other local gallery that in the past has exhibited work at the contemporary art fair.