January 26, 2011 | 2:51
pm
This Fragonard canvas isn’t much larger than a sheet of typing paper. It shows a pastel-colored company of elegant ladies and gentlemen in a garden landscape, overhung by a blue-gray mist that either predicts a lowering storm or is simply the underpainting. The game of blindman’s bluff has been interrupted. No one is paying attention to the "blindman," who waits under a parasol in his blindfold while everyone, including a marble statue, is looking out to the left toward something we cannot see, something that is either coming or leaving. But every coming is also a leaving, as every leaving is also a coming. Is it the dark cloud of 1789 coming or the twilit glow of the ancien regime leaving? The painting is a puzzle without a solution that reminds me of my own “Last Days of Pompeii” photographs. Is the postmodern rococo or is the rococo postmodern?
— Artist Eleanor Antin, as told to Jori Finkel
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Image: Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Blindman's Bluff (Le Colin-Maillard), circa 1775-80, oil on canvas. The Putnam Foundation Collection, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego.
