SATCHEL PAIGE WAS THE GREATEST PITCHER in the old Negro Leagues before he graced the Major Leagues in 1948. He was fond of advising younger ballplayers: “Don’t look over your shoulder. You might see someone gaining on you.” That comes to mind every so often in Chelsea where it is impossible not to meet waves of artists watching what the next guy is doing. Time out, fellas, please. Monitoring one’s contemporaries has certain career uses. But in today’s anything-goes production climate, there is little for the spirit to feed on. It is good for the soul to step back from the competition and gaze with gratitude and wonder at what history offers.
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Coming to Chicago’s Joel Oppenheimer Gallery, is France 1500: The Pictorial Arts at the Dawn of the Renaissance. The show is brief, running from April 12 to April 23. It coordinates with a major international exhibition, “Entre Moyen Age et Renaissance France 1500,” organized by the Réunion des musées nationaux (Paris) and the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum exhibition takes place first in Paris (Grand Palais, October 6, 2010 to January 10, 2011) and then in Chicago (February 26, 2011 to May 30, 2011). The primary, but not exclusive, focus is on illuminated manuscripts and miniatures.
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This exhibition does not tackle head on the tricky question of whether or not there was a French “Renaissance.” It does not pose the question: Did the period around 1500 see the end of medieval civilization and the dawn of a modern age? Instead, it provides a window into certain proto-modernisms: the importance of printing, the relaxing of artistic conventions in favor of individual assertions, the expansion of artistic influence beyond city walls and national boundaries, and the promulation of classical and humanist texts. The breakdown of stringent medieval conventions that confined artists to practicing in a single media was characteristic of the period. Noel Bellemare, among others, executed stained glass, retables, and illuminated manuscripts. The Master of François de Rohan supplied drawings for printed books. Jean Fouquet tried his hand at enamels and stained glass.
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You do not have to hop a plane for this. And probably should not. But you can certainly take the terrific visual tour that is online here. Commentary is succinct and to the point. The online tour is a useful précis of French influence at a time when France was an artistic melting pot that attracted artists from all over Europe. We tend to concentrate on Italy when we speak of the Renaissance. But the decades on either side of the year 1500 cover a period of great stability and prosperity in France, while Italy was a political vacuum—one viewed by its northern neighbors as a “lost paradise”—at the time.
Back to Satchel Paige: “Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be uncommon.” There is nothing common about what France produced half a millennium ago. For all the interpretive assurance curators and critics bring to contemporary art, it is in the longue durée that we find the means to assess the production of our own times.
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© 2011 Maureen Mullarkey
