The Cognacq-Jay Museum holds no grudges.
Although having recently seen the authors of Boilly's catalog raisonné downgrade as copies two of the five paintings he owns by this painter, he is devoting an exhibition to him.
This monograph, entrusted precisely to the two specialists Étienne Bréton and Pascal Zuber, certainly does not equal in scope the retrospective, the first and only to date, that they had mounted ten years ago at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille (birthplace of the artist).
But it still extends over nine rooms and cabinets.
And turns out to be rich with 40 unpublished;
70% of the 128 works brought together come from private collections.
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Moreover, focusing on genre scenes and satirical portraits of Parisians who lived from the Revolution to the twilight of the July Monarchy, it continues to pull Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) out of the category of the little master of anecdote or joke chronicle.
Because Boilly is a modern, a great, even, we say to ourselves at the end of the visit.
Here there are no gods, no heroes.
Here is a painter who will have spoken only of his present.
Like Louis-Sébastien Mercier, his elder by twenty years, the first in literature to aspire to describe all the life of the capital from the gutter to the palace.
Like Balzac, again, the contemporary who in his
Human Comedy
pinpointed as an ethnologist almost all "social species".
Like finally Daumier, the youngest, king of caricature and genius of black lithography.
This process, Boilly, although already excellent in precise drawing and porcelain oil, will have been the pioneer in France.
And better: from the outset he amused himself by diverting it, provoking in passing a reflection on the new powers of reproducibility.
Laughing John
, circa 1808-1810.
Oil on canvas, 21.5 × 17 cm.
Private collection/Guillaume Benoît
Thus, on the picture rails, this portrait of the engraver Susemihl (on loan from the BnF).
This litho, which dates from 1802, imitates… the pencil!
In an identical spirit, but much later, an Andy Warhol will subject the advertising poster to his painting.
Boilly is equally astonishing with this greyness painted in oil but which one would think drawn in pencil.
Thirty-three heads of expression
is a fake study sheet.
Just like the oils
La Queue au lait
or
My little soldiers
(portrait of the artist's children) are false black and white prints.
We feel here more than a simple facetiousness, like a desire for photography.
Time concordance?
Daguerre seized onlookers on the Boulevard du Temple in 1839.
False studies
"Trompe-l'oeil" is an expression that was invented to describe the most amazing of these creations.
The route presents some of them in a section that could be off topic (no Parisian chronicle here) but whose title makes up for it: “Les paris de Boilly”.
Here a greedy cat bursts a web to eat herring hanging from its back.
Here fake studies, sketches and etchings seem tight, piled up in a fake wooden frame, under a fake broken glass that the surrealists would not have denied.
Even the protagonists of minimal art or conceptual art.
Did a Marcel Duchamp come across this kind of fantasy before creating his
Large Glass
?
But let's not push Boilly too far.
His
Cluster of White Grapes
refers to the legendary Zeuxis, the first Greek painter who is said to have been able to counterfeit nature to perfection.
Even his fake broken glasses are of an ancient genre.
This type of vanity is found in the art of the ancient Netherlands.
In this game of dupe, Boilly turns out to be the most crafty.
He paints a stack of various papers, coins and other small objects as if emptied from a pocket and thrown pell-mell on a mahogany table… real that one!
And not far from this real false piece of furniture, one does not dare what to think of this absolutely bogus crucifix, really not made for private devotion, which subverts as much as it celebrates the art of looking.
Icing on this simulacrum: even the signature has been treated as a trompe-l'oeil.
A man of enlightenment
Between these surprises, the route still offers some showcases with scenes of magic lantern sessions (the ancestor of cinema) and others with optical instruments.
They bear witness to Boilly, a scientist as well as a magician.
Thus, the further one goes, the more one realizes to what extent this manufacturer of wonders for amateur cabinets will have been a man of the Enlightenment.
His inventory of grimaces, a veritable lithographed encyclopedia, bears witness to this.
These faces, like genre scenes, certainly perpetuate the Nordic art of the 17th century.
And again, stem from the range of expressions developed by Charles Le Brun.
But finally, how not to see in these bulging eyes, in these prognathic faces the reflection of the time.
The one during which terror and violence are systematized?
Moreover, we can read a comparable anguish and delirium in the busts of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, the engravings of Goya or the drawings of Jean-Jacques Lequeu.
So many contemporaries… Soon phrenological pseudoscience will take over and everyone will be classified according to their alleged flaws or alleged talents, minus the humor.
Self-portrait in sans-culotte
, Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845), oil on cardboard, 23 × 17 cm, around 1793. Private collection / Guillaume Benoît
The first room, which introduces the artist through his self-portraits, already confused genres and disturbed the senses.
Here Boilly is a sans-culotte.
Pipe, cockade and haughty air of a plebeian.
Here he is in muscadin.
Jacket reversal?
No because, obviously for him, everything will have been only costumes, carnival, appearances.
Together, hung as pendants, these works mock the political game.
Just like, hung not far away,
Jean who laughs
and
Jean who cries
.
These two other portraits are attacking the ages of the man and their agreed qualities.
Youth is allegorized as a happy fool rather than a successful entrepreneur.
And old age, as a grieving depressive rather than a stoic sage.
Everyone takes for his rank in this ironic who, as a pirouette signature, multiplies his figurations in his compositions.
Did Hitchcock, who appears so much in his films, see Boilly?
Even everyday scenes escape simple discourse.
None is just a folk vignette.
In this view of a prostitute asylum, the guards wear lustful faces.
The real patients are not those we believe.
Genders are also sources of confusion.
Are some women really?
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Who does what altogether?
Guess and there's a good chance you'll be wrong.
The public that gathers in front of a theater is itself a spectacle.
And here we think of the earthy Alain Schifres and his so apt essay pointing out the immemorial failings of Parisians:
“What makes a place successful is that it is successful…”
.
Even waiting for a horse-drawn carriage or crossing a flooded street makes for a highly comic sketch.
At the heart of the route, hung side by side, 40 of the pocket portraits which ensured Boilly's ease (he would have painted up to 5,000 of them) tell the truth of the many adjacent crowd scenes.
All stand out.
From the worker to the noble, from the seamstress to the bourgeois, we are dealing with an addition of individuals.
Not yet to an anonymous mass or a disembodied class struggle.
The people of Paris are there rather than with any ideologue.
Until June 26 at the Cognacq-Jay Museum, Paris 3rd.
Paris Museums catalog 160 p., €29.90.
The catalog raisonné compiled by Étienne Bréton and Pascal Zuber, Éditions Paris Musées, two volumes, 1008 p., €250.
museecognacqjay.paris.fr