Pictures and Tears by Elkins James;

Author:Elkins, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2005-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

The ice-cold rhetoric of tears

These days we resist Greuze’s brand of coercion. We do not want to feel manipulated, and we resent being tricked by a little girl’s false tears. Greuze’s eighteenth century, it seems, is very far away. We fancy ourselves more honest and sober, and less naive. We say Greuze is maudlin, and David histrionic. We say the paintings in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre are melodramatic, theatrical, and over-thetop: by which we mean that we see their tricks, and we aren’t going to fall for them.

To me this is a desperate situation. There isn’t much hope that any painting can keep its force into the indefinite future, because people’s reactions change as cultures come and go. But Greuze and David aren’t that far away from us (barely two hundred years), and already their paintings are only the brittlest shells of what they used to be. We regard them with all the condescension of scholarship: not because we are too mature to be swayed by histrionics and melodrama (the movies prove otherwise!), but because we have stopped believing that a painting’s value depends on its power to affect us. I find that very sad and largely inexplicable. How did we become so callous, so full of airy sophistication and false refinement? How did we lose the desire to cry openly?

I am tempted to say I know exactly why I am not moved by Greuze. He has a straightforward, go-for-the-jugular sense of drama, and in common with other twentieth-century viewers I strenuously resist being told when I am permitted to feel emotion. Greuze believed with the utmost naiveté that some people are naturally good and others evil, and that the two are opposed, just as selfishness is to charity, or prudence to impetuousness. He categorized people as Noble or Selfish, Prodigal or Improvident, Callous or Compassionate. A whole machinery of human types is at work in his paintings, coordinated by the engine of Human Nature. I distrust it all. Like most people from the mid-nineteenth century onward, I do not think human nature works that way. People are more complex, and people who appear Selfish one moment may be Noble the next. For me Pure Goodness is Pure Illusion. Since I am not a moral philosopher, I haven’t thought much about it, but it strikes me that there must be as many kinds of goodness as there are reasons to want to appear good. I can imagine a person who is genuinely good and also has ulterior motives: goodness does not seem all that cut and dried. For me, Greuze’s characters are caricatures.

Greuze is also utterly confident that he knows what makes a good family. He knows how fathers, wives, sons, and daughters should behave, and he thinks that those behaviors are simple enough so they can be depicted in paintings. But isn’t being a father or mother something that has to be worked at over a period of years? Can an image or two really set us

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