Frederic leighton paintings4/5/2023 ![]() ![]() If it fills out its image of luxury with simply its own standing portraits by James McNeill Whistler, it has made an exhibition before of " Whistler, Women, and Fashion." And if Leighton's over-the-top yet thoroughly academic art was long an embarrassment, the Frick has its period rooms for Jean Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher as well. While running up, rightly, against objections to expansion plans, it has been adept at collaborations with other small museums, such as the Norton Simon in Pasadena and the Scottish National Gallery. Not that the Frick Collection needs an excuse to indulge in elegance either, with a loan from Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. He did so for himself, too, in a bulky self-portrait. Leighton hardly needed an excuse to lend his sitters at once solidity, an assertive glance, and an outrageously diaphanous robe. Her face has the indifference of death but the reddish glow of life itself. The brightly lit shelf behind her could be the marble niche of an altar or a tomb, as if sculpture had come suddenly to life. She is asleep, in evident comfort, although her twisted pose makes it difficult to account for her limbs. She has a presence well beyond the fluid play of color, highlights, and shadows. The flowers above her to the right offer just one more temptation. Its satin flows as freely as her long brown hair, on top of still more sheer draperies in deep burgundy and yellow. A preternaturally large and muscular thigh occupies the painting's center, pressing tightly against the almost translucent fabric of her orange dress. A bare foot lightly touches the floor, as if she could spring up at any moment, leaving her flaming dress behind. His subject curls up so tightly that she could easily fit in a bathtub-and so close to the picture plane that one can almost reach out and touch. He found sex and death an enigma all the same. On its own, it has become his most popular and recognizable work. He definitely had luxury on his mind, quite as much as John Singer Sargent in portraiture, for Flaming June began as a detail, embellishing a marble bath in another painting. ![]() He may have had sex on his mind, too, because not even a man in his sixties needs an excuse for that. His career had won him a peerage, the first ever for an English painter, and presidency of the Royal Academy. It was the very year before his death, in 1896, although he was by no means ready to retire. Asleep and aflameįrederic Leighton may have had death on his mind. For another, its looking back reflects a thoroughgoing revulsion at modern life. What, though, did the style mean? For one thing, the artists took style seriously, in a time of arts for art's sake. The Guggenheim's curator, Vivien Greene with Ylinka Barotto, welcomes one into a near recreation of a Salon, right down to velvet red walls and background music-by such heroes of the movement as Richard Wagner and such contemporaries as Erik Satie. Toss in a fin de siècle weariness, a touch of the ancient Greeks, and a heavy dose of fantasy, like the willowy figure with a lyre in an exhibition poster by Aman-Jean, and one has a style. Yet it has one asking about the place of Symbolism in modern art. It would be criminal if it leaves visitors thinking that they have seen Symbolism. With just twenty paintings along with prints and documents, it comes off as a curator's thesis not yet ready for prime time. It suggests an obsession not with another world, much less a more spiritual future, but with the past. " Mystical Symbolism" tracks the annual Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris over its mere five years, beginning in 1892-six years after Jean Moréas, never once mentioned, published his Surrealist manifesto. It shows instead artists largely forgotten and even then late in the game. For the museum, he helped make Symbolism central to the arts, with an influence as far reaching as Kandinsky, Kupka, and Mondrian. At least he did so in his own eyes-and in the eyes of the Solomon R. That very year that Leighton was painting June, Péladan was creating a bridge from estheticism, decadence, and the spiritual to a still unknown modern art. ![]() Joséphin Péladan was a writer, a mystic, and not incidentally an entrepreneur. ![]() What could be more stylish than a carefully displaced tress of hair? With Flaming June, Frederic Leighton goes beyond style to a languid and ambiguous sexuality, perhaps close to death. In New York City Frederic Leighton's Flaming June and Mystical Symbolism ![]()
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