By Clare Shreve
Porcelain faces with rosy cheeks stare out from gold-leafed frames, transfixed in the golden age of Madame de Pompadour.
An exhibit at the Portland Art Museum titled "La volupté du goût" presents 54 paintings depicting the classic French taste that de Pompadour so greatly influenced.
De Pompadour played mistress and confidante to King Louis XV for 19 years of her life. She was an integral part of the development of French culture, and eventually all of Europe, in the 18th century.
She had a luxurious yet playful taste in art and fashion, all of which comes through in the exhibit, aptly titled in English as "voluptuous taste."
With doughy cherubs, gods, pastoral scenes and portraits of sweet-faced women dressed for court, the exhibit offers a taste of the fanciful.
What hangs in this exhibit is referred to as "decorative art," while not always thought provoking, appeals to the senses and it exists to be enjoyed. According to the Portland Art Museum's audio guide for this exhibit, this type of decorative art comes from "a time when luxuriousness and the beautiful reign supreme."
With the whisper of operatic music heard throughout the first floor of the exhibit and the ghostly white faces of nobility there is a sense of grandeur in the museum. But behind the majesty, there lies little else.
There seems to be very little to discover within these paintings. Many times the title gives away all there is to know about the subject matter, for instance François Boucher's "Apollo Revealing his Divinity to Shepherdess Isse." There's no room for wondering.
"This was the kind of art you enjoyed in the privacy of your own home," said Kimberly Chrisman Campbell, costume expert.
Frivolous may be too harsh a word, but there is a definite sense of playfulness to each piece, save for one: "La Paresseuse Italienne." Painted in 1757, by Jean-Baptist Greuze, this piece seems out of place amidst the cheerful, coquettish, half-smiles of full-figured women lounging barefoot in forests or the women who are dressed to perfection in the shimmer of 18th century gowns.
The woman in Greuze's painting sits on a chair surrounded, not by cherubs, but by empty carafes, with one shoe off and her bare shoulder missing its shall. The woman's vacant stare and haphazardly dressed body offers more of an intrigue to the art that de Pompadour typically favored. This sole painting gives new depth to de Pompadour's taste of the overtly sensual and whimsical.
The focus of this exhibit is more on the shallow, popular art of the 18th century and less about the woman who made it so.
Although the museum promises only a glimpse of "the life of this legendarily beautiful woman," a glimpse is all you'll get. Rather than a collection of art that she took an interest in, the show may have been more successful if the life of this influential woman could have been chronicled in relation to her changing tastes.
