Ingres

by Walter Pach

290 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1939

About the author

Walter Pach (July 1, 1883 – November 27, 1958) was an American artist, critic, lecturer, art adviser, and art historian who wrote extensively about modern art and championed its cause.

Pach's fluency in French, German, and Spanish made it possible for him to understand and interpret the avant-garde ideas developing in Europe and translate them for the English-speaking audience.

Reviews

[Dorai]

I've been looking for a bio plus catalog of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, especially referring to his pencil drawings, and came upon this 1939 work by someone who I gather was a U.S. art critic. Usually art criticism cannot hope to be as timeless as art, and that is certainly the case here. Pach holds up Ingres as establishing European preeminence in visual art, and continuing the classical Greco-Roman traditions at a time of apparently rising self-doubt among the European races (his word) when encountering Asian, African, and Native American art. He is not completely dismissive of non-Euro art, but he does assert European superiority, and this kind of geographical and/or racial competitiveness reads very strange now. I didn't really see why he went there at all.

The book does have many photos of Ingres's work, but they are mostly of his paintings. None of the pencil work that first attracted me to Ingres appear here. The photos are black-and-white, but luckily this is not as lossy as it might be for other artists. Ingres disdained the use of color for its own sake, so his work looks quite good grayscaled. (I do wish mentions in the text to the paintings used some kind of easy cross-reference to the photos, but perhaps that was beyond the typographical capabilities of the 1930s.)

While Pach celebrates the drawing focus (roughly, line versus chiaroscuro) of Ingres, and seems to make much of it, he eventually and unaccountably says his paintings are better than his drawings. Perhaps they are, but I'd have liked more insight about and examples of Ingres's drawing philosophy. Ingres himself doesn't seem to agree with Pach, as he cannily wouldn't hang his drawing studies next to his final paintings, suspecting that the former would "kill" the latter. While I can't know for sure, I can't escape the suspicion that Ingres painted because that's what was expected and paid the bills; left to himself, he may have concentrated on his amazing pencil studies.

The book contains a lot of rather tedious and very complicated and unsubstantiated assertions of the superiority of Ingres to the "fools" around him, with the one exception of Eugène Delacroix -- apparently the two great artists were at loggerheads during their lifetime, and Pach takes it upon himself to establish a posthumous reconciliation. I wish there was more of a bringing out of the special genius of Ingres, instead of gratuitous odious comparisons with other artists who I suspect were probably quite good in their own right.