Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was one of the most celebrated artists of his
day. Yet he had a miserable childhood, led a tumultuous life and fell in
and out of poverty with alarming regularity.
After his death at age 48, he slipped into relative obscurity. Now,
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-75) is receiving a spectacular tribute on
both sides of the Atlantic.
Not since his 1975 Grand Palais retrospective has Carpeaux been
acknowledged so lavishly: From March 10 to May 26, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art hosts “The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux,” a survey
of the artist’s entire career that will then travel to the Musée d’Orsay
(June 24 to September 28).
More than 160 works are on display at the Met, with loans from the
Musée des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes (Carpeaux’s birthplace), the Louvre
and the Petit Palais, among others. The Met centerpiece is one of that
museum’s proudest possessions: “Ugolino and his Sons,” a monumental
marble sculpture depicting a harrowing scene from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Traveling from Orsay will be “The Prince Impérial with His Dog Nero,”
an endearing marble portrait of Emperor Napoleon III’s young son with
the pet that his father received as a gift from the Russian ambassador.
Why Carpeaux, and why now? “We feel his time has come all over
again,” says James David Draper, the Henry R. Kravis Curator in the
Met’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. “He’s been
celebrated now and again, but not big-time for a long time.”
On Carpeaux’s artistic merits, Draper is unequivocal. “I think he’s
number one for the 19th century, certainly number one before Rodin. At
his best, he just blows my mind every time I look at him. The quality,
the force of emotion.”
Met visitors will discover not only his sculptures but also his
paintings, which have never been shown in the U.S. Ultimately though,
Draper believes that what will grab people most are the terracotta
models. “They are so, so passionate.”
For a sculptor so copiously fêted in his day, Carpeaux has
mysteriously faded from the public eye. “There are names that, all of a
sudden and for several years, go out of fashion,” explains Edouard
Papet, chief curator of sculpture at the Musée d’Orsay. “Since the
1990s, Carpeaux hasn’t conformed to contemporary tastes. There’s been
less of an attraction for his very figurative sculptures.”
Perhaps it’s also because some of his greatest works were commissioned
for monuments or public sites. “Essentially, his life revolved around
these set architectural sculptures, and that’s hard to appreciate in a
museum setting,” says the Met’s Draper. Examples of these site-specific
sculptures: “The Dance,” a spectacular group created for the Paris Opera
(now at Orsay and replaced with a copy by Paul Belmondo, the actor’s
father); a decorative group for the façade of the Louvre’s Pavillon de
Flore; and the Fountain of the Observatory in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Carpeaux has clearly been overshadowed by Auguste Rodin—his onetime
pupil and admirer. “There’s such a prejudice in favor of Rodin,” says
Draper. “The Modernist thing just took over. It’s the same thing with
Impressionism, it just cast everything else in a shadow for too long.
The Academics have only gradually been regaining attention.”
At Paris’s Musée Rodin, curator François Blanchetière insists that
Carpeaux is no more neglected than other sculptors. “Generally speaking,
sculpture interests people less than painting,” he says. “That’s
undeniable. Cultural programmers view it as a harder sell.” So where
does Rodin’s name recognition come from? “He’s frequently shown mainly
because there’s an institution, the Musée Rodin, that preserves his
studio collection and champions the artist. Carpeaux has had no such
luck.”
CARPEAUX COULD SCARCELY HAVE COME FROM MORE HUMBLE BEGINNINGS. He was
born in the northern French city of Valenciennes; his father was a
stonemason, and his mother a lacemaker who gave up her job to raise 10
children, only five of whom survived. The Carpeaux household, led by the
ill-tempered pater familias, lived frugally, dining on vegetable soup
and boiled red cabbage.
From the age of five, bright Jean-Baptiste showed a distaste for
conventional studies, so his father placed him as an apprentice with a
plasterer. His artistic talents were quickly noticed, and he was
enrolled in drawing school to become an architectural fitter. But family
finances forced him to quit school, and when his father got a railway
construction job in Paris, Jean-Baptiste was torn away from his beloved
hometown.
For four years, Jean-Baptiste’s days were spent mixing plaster at his
father’s workplace. Then in 1842, he got his first break: His father
signed him up to study architecture at the Ecole Royale Spéciale de
Dessin et de Mathématiques, commonly known as the Petite Ecole (as
opposed to the Grande Ecole, meaning the Ecole des Beaux-Arts).
Encouraged by a mentor, young Jean-Baptiste studied sculpture, winning
an award in his very first year of study. (When his father found out, he
was furious and briefly pulled his son out of school.)
Then Carpeaux père was offered a well-paying job on the
Versailles railway, and he and his wife moved again, leaving the
16-year-old art student shivering in an unheated Paris garret and
working as a porter in the market to make ends meet. The young man
resolved then and there to lift himself out of misery.
Fate and talent gave him a hand. When he dropped off a well-crafted
bas-relief at the atelier of sculptor François Rude, the master invited
him to return to his studio, an experience that he repeated with other
great sculptors of the era. Jean-Baptiste was thus able to hone his
skills, and in October 1844, he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Though his studies were interrupted yet again for monetary reasons,
benefactors intervened to get him back in class.
From the outset, the young man set his sights on winning the Prix de
Rome, the prestigious scholarship that gave prizewinners a residency at
the magnificent Villa Medici in the Italian capital. He eventually did,
arriving in January 1856—a year later than expected, to the director’s
irritation. Instead of creating marble copies of classical sculptures,
as was customary for first-year bursars, he roamed the city to sketch
peasants, beggars and passersby. “It is in the street that we must study
our art, not in the Vatican,” said the impetuous young artist (though
he did spend much time in the Sistine Chapel sketching the frescoes of
his hero Michelangelo).
During his time in Rome, Carpeaux did everything to live up to his
bad-boy reputation. He was often found at Papa Giulio, a tavern filled
with artists, or at Da Petronilla, a trattoria in Trastevere with live
entertainment. At one formal event at the Villa Medici, he drank
absinthe and wrestled a fellow artist to the floor.
Eventually, he fell in love. The object of his affections was
predictably unconventional: a peasant girl named Barbara Pasquarelli,
aged 15 or thereabouts, who sold fruit in the streets of Rome. Hailing
from the town of Palombara Sabina, she was known as La Palombella. The
teenager modeled for him, allowing him to produce an elegant bust that
ended up in the Paris Salon. Yet their love was doomed; as a pensionnaire,
he could not marry, and she was betrothed to a village boy. La
Palombella died after giving birth in 1860 to a boy she named Giulio
(Jules was Carpeaux’s childhood nickname).
Despite all the troublemaking, Carpeaux became a sensation in his
final year in Rome for producing the plaster version of one single work:
“Ugolino.” In that terrifying scene from Dante, Ugolino, a Pisan count
sentenced to starvation, gets ready to cannibalize his two sons and two
grandsons as they cry for mercy. Although the five-figure sculpture
broke rules that required Villa Medici residents to sculpt a single
figure, the Villa’s director relented and let it through.
“Carpeaux had many friends in the French Embassy to the Holy See who
appreciated his talent, and he just made things work his way,” explains
Draper. “He was very fiery, very ambitious, and I think a selfish beast.
He had lots of friends, and loyal friends, but boy, you sure had to
prove your loyalty.”
By the time he returned to Paris, Carpeaux was overwhelmed with
commissions of every kind. Egged on by his profiteering parents, he
reeled off multiple editions of his sculptures, too many to count.
Socially ambitious, he became the art tutor to Emperor Napoleon III’s
only son, the Prince Imperial. The prince’s portrait with his dog became
a huge hit and was reproduced endlessly in a variety of materials.
The relationship with his wife would
soon be poisoned by Carpeaux’s parents, who wanted to retain control
over the family cash cow.”
By the time the sculpture was unveiled in 1869, critics were split, one in particular denouncing “the obscenity of this group.” The piece was savaged by reviewers, and on the night of August 26, 1869, an unidentified vandal tossed a bottle of ink at it, staining a few of the figures. Pronounced pornographic, the sculpture became such a cause célèbre that the Emperor decided to take it down. But the 1870 war and Carpeaux’s death in 1875 ensured that it remained in place until the early 1960s, when, for preservation reasons, it was moved to the Louvre and later to Orsay.
As he was completing “The Dance,” Carpeaux met a young woman named Amélie de Montfort, whose father, an army general, had been a hero of the Battle of Solferino. Their marriage in July 1869 was celebrated before a plethora of high-born guests inside the Eglise de la Madeleine in Paris.
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The relationship would soon be poisoned by Carpeaux’s money-grubbing
parents—who wanted to retain control over the family cash cow—and by the
artist’s own violent and abusive temperament. “He was someone who was
both interested in representing maternity and maternal love, and who
most certainly beat his wife,” says Orsay’s Papet. “It’s very clearly
indicated in her letters. In a telegram to her mother, she recounts a
horrific scene where Carpeaux is breaking everything in the house.”
Carpeaux even had young Amélie followed by a detective on suspicions
of infidelity. “He allowed his parents to convince him, or they
convinced one another, that two of her children were illegitimate,” says
Draper. “They kept up a campaign against the poor woman. And I believe
she was innocent.”
By the time Carpeaux was in his late forties, the marriage became
untenable, and he was expelled from the marital home. The sculptor found
himself alone and in a desperate battle with cancer as well as bouts of
delirium. Homeless and in agony, he took refuge in the château of a
(calculating) princely collector. Lying there on his deathbed, with his
parents at his side, he asked to see one of his three children, the only
one he considered legitimate. Amélie, who had brought all three
children to the château, maintained that he should either see all three
or none at all. Carpeaux refused. He died on October 12, 1875, cut off
from those closest to him.
As is the case with so many other artists, Carpeaux’s terrible track
record as a husband and father has not cast a shadow on his artistic
legacy. “The big advantage is that visitors will know some of Carpeaux’s
sculptures without knowing his name. So the show will trigger something
in them,” says Orsay’s Papet. “Also, we’ve made a draconian selection,
choosing only works that are either of extremely high quality or
unquestionably original. So the public is bound to get hooked. We feel
that these truly strong works will pave the way for a genuine
rediscovery of Carpeaux.” 
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