WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.- Liberté, égalité … and that third one, what is it again?
On July 14, 1789 (exactly 235 years ago this Sunday), some idealistic Parisians stormed a not especially crowded prison. They overthrew the king’s guard. They set in train a three-pronged revolution: for individual liberty, for civil equality, and, last and rarest, for communal obligation. That July fraternity passed from the realm of genealogy into politics — and this July’s startling French legislative election, fought over race, migration and national belonging, confirms how agitated that third virtue remains. Who is my brother? In the National Assembly of 1789 and the National Assembly of 2024, some questions never get a final answer.
Far from the Bastille, at the Clark Art Institute in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, one of the most remarkable exhibitions I’ve seen in years punches right at the heart of today’s altercations over nationality and democracy, culture and politics, and what it means to be a citizen. Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) was a neoclassical painter of mixed race who has never, until now, been the subject of a solo museum show. Born in the French Caribbean, almost certainly into slavery, he reached the summits of artistic achievement in Paris and Rome. As rebellions and revolutions shook both France and the Caribbean, he painted massive history paintings of heroes in togas, and portraits of men and women from Europe and the Antilles. It was Lethière’s calling, in an era where no bonds seemed stable, to give form to fraternité.
This groundbreaking show was organized over five years by Esther Bell and Olivier Meslay of the Clark, along with Marie-Pierre Salé of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where the exhibition will travel in November. Bell and Meslay have also edited an imposing 400-page catalog, bulky with contributions from leading scholars of French and Caribbean history. But “Guillaume Lethière” is not — this point is critical — a corrective exhibition, highlighting some marginal figure excluded from a white, European establishment. Lethière couldn’t have been more central to the Paris art world of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. He ran one of the leading academies. He painted empress Joséphine, a fellow Creole. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres drew him and his family. In a 1798 painting depicting France’s celebrity artists of that age of revolution, Lethière stands in the most prominent position, bathed in light.
Even today, at the Louvre, he is hiding in plain sight. If you’ve ever fought through the throngs in the Italian painting wing, you may remember being spat out of the Mona Lisa gallery into a grand chamber with a concession selling magnets, mugs and other souvenirs. In all my years, I never really looked up in that room — but right there, hanging above the Leonardo Rubik’s cubes and Eiffel Tower figurines, are two giant paintings by Lethière, two stentorian 25-footers of antique virtue and death. A consul orders his sons beheaded for betraying the Roman Republic. A centurion stabs his daughter to save her from enslavement.
That’s our guy! As weighty as marble. As serious as the law. What you are going to see in this show is the cold beauty of neoclassicism: a style predicated on Greek and Roman examples that found favor during the French Revolution, everywhere from painting and architecture to fashion and furniture design. Neoclassicism frowns on pleasure. It sneers at ornament. Its greatest exponent was Jacques-Louis David, a Jacobin artist/terrorist and Lethière’s great rival, who painted Roman history and myth as moral lessons for the new French republic.
I tingle, fellow citizen, from the aloof precision of Lethière’s line in a portrait such as “Woman Leaning on a Portfolio” (1799), which pictures his stepdaughter clutching an artist’s papers. I can gorge all afternoon on his stonyhearted Roman metaphors. But this stuff sure isn’t cuddly, and one never has the sense, as I get from David, that history is careening ahead and art must change or die. Lethière was both a political and an artistic moderate, yet his occasional stodginess is actually one of the fascinations of this show. His restraint and self-control permit a counter-reading of art and politics after 1789, from an artist whose own biography frames art’s entanglement with colonial and racial politics.
Because this story starts far from Paris, on a sugar plantation on the eastern coast of Guadeloupe. It belonged to Lethière’s father, Pierre Guillon, a prosecutor for Louis XVI’s colonial government. Lethière’s mother, Marie-Françoise Pepeye, is described in a later document as a mulâtresse affranchie (“emancipated mixed-race woman”) — which implies, though does not conclusively prove, that she was enslaved by Guillon at the time of his birth, and that the artist was therefore enslaved from birth as well. Records suggest that Guillon freed Pepeye and their children before 1770, when Guillaume was 10, but the documents are scanty.
In 1774, just as Guillon was about to sail from Guadeloupe to Bordeaux, his only legitimate son died of fever. Guillaume got the trans-Atlantic ticket instead. He studied painting in Rouen, and early nude studies here display the youthful proficiency that got him sent up to Paris. He started to go after the biggest honor of all: the Prix de Rome, an art prize that came with a multiyear Italian residency. He never won it, but Lethière got a Roman residency anyway thanks to some choice endorsement letters from Paris’ Creole elite.
So he was out of town when things kicked off in Versailles. He missed the oath of the tennis court, the storming of the Bastille, the rabble-rousing speeches in the Palais Royal. In Paris, the third estate was taking power. In Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint-Domingue, the enslaved were taking up arms. Still, news traveled fast in 1789, across the Alps and the Atlantic. And during his first five-year Italian sojourn, Lethière began to envision the major works, densely packed with wailing Romans, that now get overlooked at the Louvre.
In the first, “Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death,” the consul who established the Roman Republic witnesses the execution of his own children, who had conspired to bring back the monarchy. A second Roman scene, “The Death of Virginia,” depicts a famous episode of a Roman tyrant who lusts after a beautiful woman and, to possess her, claims that she is the daughter of a slave and thus a slave herself. The young woman’s father, to save her honor, stabs her in the public square. Both filicides are represented in this show through drawings, oil sketches and later engravings, which confirm how exactingly Lethière choreographed his two tableaus of gore and government.
Brutus shows no emotion as his own child’s decapitated head is held aloft. Virginia’s father turns his back on the daughter he has just slain. Watch Lethière’s pen, and the care with which he draws this Roman carnage. At the dead son’s bleeding neck. At the dying daughter’s slumped torso, and her father’s face of righteous fury. Kings are just men now. Citizenship is sacrifice. Justice is worth dying for. Worth killing for, too.
By the time the artist got back to Paris, the king and his wife were under palace-arrest. Lethière played it safe during the Terror (although David did try to have him guillotined at one point), but in his paintings of the 1790s, you can see how everything has changed. The woman who sat for his “Portrait of a Composer” (1791), lent here from a small museum in Guadeloupe, has cast off the heavy silks of the ancien régime for a lightweight white cotton sheath — in imitation of Greek fashion, but directly adopted from the diaphanous dresses that free women of color wore in the Antilles. In “The Homeland Is in Danger” (1799), a crowded celebration of the revolutionary army, you can see a Black legislator, in blue-white-red uniform, looking on as soldiers kiss their sweethearts goodbye.
And then one day — the 18th day of Brumaire, by the new calendar — the revolution was over, consolidated into one small man. Napoleon’s bloodless coup of November 1799 ushered in a new elite, and Lethière, loyal to the emperor’s brother Lucien, secured choice commissions and eventually an appointment as director of the French Academy in Rome, his artistic alma mater. Napoleon also reversed the revolutionaries’ abolition of slavery in the French colonies, which unleashed more violence in Guadeloupe. Lethière, who never returned to the Caribbean, inherited the family plantation with his sister Andrèze in 1800. He sold his share eventually, but there’s no question that the adult Lethière profited from the slave system he had once been subjected to. And still, even as he owned part of the plantation on which he was born, he somehow also watched the unfolding events in the Antilles with an eye on abolition.
In 1804, the uprisings and liberation struggles on Saint-Domingue, the richest slave colony in the Caribbean, culminated in a victory for the rebels and a new name, Haïti. Years later, Lethière would paint two of Haiti’s revolutionary leaders, Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in a 13-foot-tall painting, “Oath of the Ancestors,” totally unlike his Roman pageants. In their opulent uniforms, the Black and mixed-race former rivals vow to fight together for independence, while an avuncular white God offers his blessing from a cloud above. Broken manacles lie under the duo’s feet. On the stele between the men is the artist’s signature and an additional phrase he had never used before: G. Guillon Lethière. Born in Guadeloupe.
When Lethière painted that work in 1822, France had still not recognized Haiti’s independence. He therefore never showed the painting in Paris, and entrusted his son to deliver it to the Haitian president in Port-au-Prince. Painted explicitly for a Caribbean public, inscribed with his Caribbean birthplace, “Oath of the Ancestors” was a surreptitious endorsement from this ultimate French insider of France’s expulsion from the colonies. It is an awkward, awesome summation of how people, commodities, images and ideas crisscrossed the Atlantic, until revolutions of art and politics became irresistible.
Or at least I think it is, because I can only judge “Oath of the Ancestors” from reproduction. The painting was badly damaged in the Haitian earthquake of 2010, although it was restored thereafter, and Haiti’s National Pantheon Museum agreed to lend it to the Clark for this unprecedented exhibition. Now, Haiti has fallen once again into an acute humanitarian crisis, which made its transport impossible. Some revolutionaries end up in the Louvre, and some end up in the rubble.
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‘Guillaume Lethière’
Through Oct. 14 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; 413-458-2303, clarkart.edu.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
