The Business of Art: The Partnership of Gerome and Goupil

The prodigious reputation of Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) could not withstand the advent of modernism. Immediately after his death, the market in his works began to plunge. Few voices were raised in his defense. By the time Andy Warhol was painting his early Pop images, you could buy a Gerome for a few hundred dollars.

The market has since changed its mind about Gerome, perhaps as a reaction to modernist painting itself. Gerome was a consummate painter, brought up in the classical traditions of the French Academy and was the pupil of Paul Delaroche. He was admirable for his 'finish.' It is this element that has largely revived his reputation.

Artists who live by the market are likely to die by it, and Gerome's association with his kinsman, the art dealer Adolphe Goupil (1806-1893), is an object lesson for this principle. A scholarly exhibition at the Frick Art Museum considers the relationship of art and the market in the context of these two men. It is more about marketing than it is about art, and the strange thing is that this (one might think, boring) topic is entirely fascinating.

Many of the prints will be familiar to the general public, for Goupil did his job well, selling millions of reproductive prints after Gerome's paintings. It's easy enough to find impressions of many of them in junk shops, on eBay, at more knowing print dealers or your grandmother's attic. You might not know the titles of the works, but the subject matter is fixed in your mind. There is the Capuchin monk courted on the royal staircase by French aristocrats ('Grey Eminence'), or the well-known 'Louis XIV and Moliere.' There are Moorish interiors ('La Priere Publique'), classical allegories ('Ave Cesar Imperator Morituri Te Salutant') that seem to anticipate Hollywood. And, maybe the most famous of all, there is 'The Duel After the Ball.'

'The Duel After the Ball' is a painting that was adjudged a great success at the Paris Salon of 1857. A replica of that work is on show at the Frick. Although Goupil was not the first to reproduce the image as a print, he wasted no time in issuing a whole variety of versions. Lithographs, photographs, etchings, steel-faced copper photo-engraving, photogravure and Woodburytypes are but a few of the techniques employed in making these prints. Some were expensive; others were cheap. Arranged on the walls of the Frick, these images present an instructive lesson as to the range of Goupil's 'stock.' Two years after the Salon, Goupil and Gerome entered into a partnership by means of which the artist's paintings were to be sold through Goupil, who also was to issue reproductions in various formats. When Goupil's last trade catalog was issued in 1909, Gerome's work still figured on its pages.

This highly systematic marketing was to draw mixed, largely unfavorable, opinions from the French critics. Emile Zola was the most effective, and in the rotunda of the Frick, his words are inscribed on the wall: 'Obviously Gerome works for the House of Goupil; he makes a painting in order for the painting to be engraved or reproduced photographically and copies sold by the thousands.' In the catalog of the exhibition, Zola is quoted further, addressing the artist: 'I search in vain for the creativity in you. You have neither breath, nor character, nor any type of personality. You do not live in your work; you are oblivious to passion, the all-powerful spirit that motivates the true artist'.

With these acerbic observations in mind, one appreciates the radical program of the organizers of this exhibition as it evolves from gallery to gallery. It is certainly an important exhibition, an eye-opener to the controversial marketing practices of the 19th century. Goupil was not alone in developing them, for art has always been a business. In America, where business is a kind of religion, such things were readily accepted, and Goupil's firm flourished. In England in the late 18th century, the printseller Alderman James Boydell was criticized in much the same way as Zola attacked Gerome. So also in America, where the publishing house of Prang marketed chromolithographs with remarkable business efficiency.

The show would have been helped if the extraordinary technical aspects of print production that were being developed throughout the 19th century were outlined in greater detail. These techniques, such as lithography and the steel-facing of copper plates, allowed mass production of prints for a mass market. Without them, Goupil's activities would have been much inhibited. One has a sense of the productive energy of the times in the densely hung walls of the exhibition. Dick McIntosh, one of the organizers of the exhibition, comments, almost ruefully, that the exhibition could have been much larger.

A final, lingering question remains. Was Goupil good for Gerome• There's no real answer to that, but the last works in the show, particularly those depicting historical scenes ('Louis XIV and Moliere' and 'Bonaparte at Cairo') surely represent a real decline in the artist's talents. They were, to be sure, hugely popular, and fit for the time. But one is left with the feeling that Goupil, hovering in the background, brandishing a checkbook, was a counterproductive force. Zola saw that. Even so, the Goupil phenomenon is a remarkable one, and makes the art world of the 19th century so much more understandable.

Graham Shearing can be reached at gshearing@tribweb.com .