Courtauld's Art

EXHIBITION

Samuel Courtauld made his fortune in British textiles and spent it on French paintings; by the time he died, in 1947, he had amassed one of the world's great collections of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art. This month, in Cleveland, the Courtauld Collection begins a yearlong tour of the U.S. The collection remains unique because it consists almost entirely of masterpieces—by Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and many others, including Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, a haunting elegy to the Parisian demimonde of bohemians, barmaids, and flaneurs. Although Courtauld was committed to arthistorical scholarship (he endowed the Courtauld Institute of Art, where Anita Brookner— when not writing elegant novels about frustrated female academics—lectures on French Romantic painting), there was nothing academic about his own attitude toward paintings. He collected them as Don Giovanni collected women; each new acquisition was a conquest, to be physically, as much as intellectually, savored. As he once said, "Beauty to me of course is spiritual as well as physical and the most complete beauty must be both.... Unless women have beauty they are anti-pathetic to me in life as well as art." Cleveland Museum of Art. (1114-318)

ANDREW GRAHAM-DIXON