Charged by the ideal of liberty

A rudimentary description of Jacques-Louis David, the Neoclassical artistic genius, casts him as the chief image maker along the Enlightenment road to the French Revolution. He’s the one whose Greco-Roman parables of noble civic duty and wrenching personal sacrifice to national ideals, painted as grand episodes from historical theater, so impressed Thomas Jefferson when the American went to Paris in the 1780s. The story of David is a story of fervent commitment to an ideal of independence -- one that sometimes seems even pathological.

In David’s idolization of self-determination and liberty, it’s the pathological end of the spectrum that has always been hard to reconcile. After 1789 he sided with the despotic Robespierre, whose frustration with the progress of the revolution erupted into the Reign of Terror.

David was tossed into prison, missing the guillotine’s blade by a hair. When he got out he tied his wagon to Napoleon Bonaparte, the brilliant general who soon crowned himself emperor. When Napoleon was exiled to the British island of St. Helena, David exiled himself to Brussels; he chose to paint on his own in modest circumstances rather than accept a big-ticket offer from the king of Prussia.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum, a magnificent new exhibition goes a long way toward effecting reconciliation between the authentically heroic David of the revolutionary years and his more puzzling -- and disturbing -- pathological side. “Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile” is the first show ever to specifically examine the work the artist made during the 30 years that followed his release from prison. (He died in 1825, at the age of 76.) Because of his pivotal role in the French Revolution, we think of David, appropriately, as a late 18th century artist. (Stendhal, writing in 1824, wickedly praised his compatriot as “the greatest painter of the 18th century.”) But he was also an early 19th century painter, working on the cusp of the modern world. The 26 paintings and 22 drawings show how.

Remarkably, “Empire to Exile” isn’t just the first survey of David’s late work. It’s also the first David survey of any kind to be organized by an American museum. (In June the show will travel to the co-sponsoring institution, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.) It shares some things with earlier Getty exhibitions -- Baroque sculpture by Adriaen de Vries, Flemish Renaissance manuscript painting, luminous church interiors by 17th century Dutch painter Pieter Saenredam and many more. Unprecedented, modestly scaled, sharply focused and thoroughly absorbing, it’s the kind of show we’ve come to expect as this museum’s norm.

Like those others, this one also has an admirable motive -- one that sometimes gets lost in the three-ring circus more common to today’s museum extravaganzas. The Getty uses its exhibition program to study its permanent collection. Three late paintings by David, all acquired in the 1980s, prior to the museum’s move into the Brentwood complex, are in the current presentation. They are put into the context of the latest scholarship. We’ll look at them differently from here on in.

The show is divided into three parts: portraits, history paintings and, from David’s exile years, portraits again. (Two interludes of drawings separate the sections.) Portraits were a way to earn money when he got out of prison and, later, when he arrived in Brussels for his final years -- although sometimes he painted portraits as lavish gifts, which might help endear him to influential people.

The show opens with a remarkable self-portrait, painted shortly after he went to prison in 1794, in the wake of Robespierre’s downfall. Dominated by slate grays and russet browns, it shows an intensely focused middle-aged man brandishing a palette in his right hand and a brush in his left hand. These are the attributes of an artist, which had not been commonly featured in self-portraits for centuries. Here, they underscore the look of defiance in David’s eyes. From the confines of jail the picture virtually proclaims: “I am a painter!”

David is also a somewhat vain painter. His self-portrait carefully hides in shadow the puffy, swollen cheek -- caused by a benign tumor -- that disfigured his face. Vanity is the inflation of personal regard, and David knew more than most how to manipulate that familiar human trait as a tool of pictorial authority.

Which brings us to Napoleon. The florid equestrian portrait of the general triumphantly crossing the Alps is among the artist’s most famous works, even if its registration in the public mind today has been dulled by years of reproduction in cognac advertisements. But talk about showing off!

The general, shown wrapped in a golden cape whipped by Parnassian winds, is seated astride a rearing steed that seems poised to fly over Europe’s tallest mountains, like Pegasus at Helicon. The ancient archetype of the mounted soldier as godlike hero is transformed from dignified authority figure into sensational superhero. It’s one of art history’s greatest kitschy moments.

There were some complaints -- including from the sitter -- that the likeness bore little actual resemblance to Napoleon. (The king of Spain commissioned the painting, which is one of five versions David made.) An enthusiastic fan responded that the artist had merely rejected nature’s little details to allow for only the hero to appear. The portrait might not look like Napoleon today, in other words -- but it will.

And so it does.

David’s unsentimental insight into the civic power wielded by Napoleon is perhaps most clearly articulated in a drawing. It shows the dramatic moment during his coronation when the emperor seized the crown and placed it on his own head, as Pope Pius VII sat passively behind him. The artist depicts Napoleon holding the crown just above his head, encircled by a laurel wreath, while directly beneath his chin his other hand presses the handle of a sword against his heart.

He is emperor, this drawing asserts, not through any supernatural assistance, but through the sheer, individual authority of his human acumen and military strength. This image of a self-made emperor is light-years from the aristocratic inheritance of a sputtering Louis XVI, whom David had helped send to his death in the revolution.

That, more or less, is what attracted David to Napoleon -- dictator or not. The painter, like the ruler, prized individualism and independence. It partly explains David’s later refusal of the Prussian king when he went into exile -- why work for another royal court? -- and it explains something else about his drawings.

The self-crowning drawing is not in the exhibition -- reproduced in the show’s first-rate catalog, it was lamentably pulled at the last moment for conservation reasons by the Louvre Museum, the lending institution. But many others are. They differ from the drawings of most contemporaries in that none was made as a finished work of art. All are preparatory studies and graphic experiments. Sometimes crude, often blunt in execution, they are classic working drawings.

David was disgusted by the burgeoning commercial market for big, polished studio drawings -- a market he inadvertently helped to create. When the royal academy was dismantled after the revolution, and court patronage for artists disappeared, a commercial market rose up in its place. To work according to the shifting fashions of the marketplace represented, to David, a loss of artistic freedom not unlike working for a king.

The Getty exhibition, ably organized by guest curator Philippe Bordes, a scholar at the University of Lyon, also includes the mesmerizing painting of an adolescent, grinning Cupid sneaking out of sleeping Psyche’s bed before the light of dawn. He’s portrayed, in other words, as your average impudent guy. Recognizable human behavior replaces the old moralizing traits of the antique gods.

David painted “Cupid and Psyche” in Brussels, and its humanism describes many of the portraits with which the show concludes. Among them is the disconcerting double-portrait of Napoleon’s nieces, from the Getty’s collection.

As personalities the sisters are a study in opposites -- one assertive, mature, protective; the other shy, modest, reticent -- yet bound together by inseparable familial ties. (In addition to their encircling arms and sashes, the enveloping red couch on which they huddle is adorned with Napoleonic bees.) David paints the sisters in clear, bright, almost enameled colors that show his interest in Flemish painting. But the complexity of this visual essay in unique, independent identity within the bonds of blood is compelling. It’s essence of David.

*

‘Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, closed Mondays.

Ends: April 24

Price: Free; parking, $7

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu