French drawings are a delight at Tacoma Art Museum

Before Modernism blew everybody out of the tree, Hector Giacomelli specialized in birds. Picasso's father, José Ruiz y Blasco, refined that specialization. He painted only pigeons. If you were a 19th-century French artist who needed birds to inflect your sky, you could count on Giacomelli, an Italian living in Paris. If you lived in Spain and wanted pigeons in your park, Picasso's dad could whip up a few in no time at all, with beady eyes and breasts the color of pavement.

"The Essence of Line: French Drawings From Ingres to Degas" at the Tacoma Art Museum omits Ruiz y Blasco but delivers Giacomelli. Line for him was a perch that he covered in feathers.

In David Lodge's excellent phrase, the "baggage handlers from the department of big think" have no time to waste on the Giacomellis of the world. Theorists walk into "Essence of Line" and narrow their eyes at the small work from a lost representational world, heavily framed and dimly lit. Although the title boasts of Ingres and Degas, the exhibit's heart is artists who fell from favor when imagination trumped skill, and a kiss from an academy became the kiss of death.

It had to happen. Nobody with any sense would trade Cezanne for a thousand pre-modernist academics, but our current pluralistic age allows us to be generous to artists buried in art history's back bins.

In "Essence of Line," they hang with history's brighter lights. Remarkably, many from the back bin hold their own. "Essence of Line" is a traveling show featuring more than 100 19th-century French drawings and watercolors from the Baltimore Museum of Art and Baltimore's Walters Art Museum.

From Antonine-Louis Barye, there's "Python in a Tree," a watercolor with thick, animal volumes moving through the dead dark branches of the tree, dirty gold scales catching the light. Barye, a sculptor, also has a "Large Lion" hanging next to Eugene Delacroix's "Lion and Snake." A comparison between a painter drawing (nervously animated line) and a sculptor (solid volumes) is fascinating.

There's very little Degas (clumsy dancer pulling up her dress) or Ingres (silky heads), but there are four Honoré Daumiers, each worth the trip. "The Good Friends," two old guys talking in a park, one holding forth, the other absorbed in sympathetic listening while a tree explodes in the light behind them, says all anyone could about friendship.

Daumier was no friend of lawyers. His self-important jurist descending marble stairs puts the lid on any hope of justice, and his "The Omnibus" was the key inspiration for Walker Evans' photos of people riding the subways in New York nearly a 100 years later. Daumier was so good at flesh sagging into a seat, the flash of a daydream across somebody's mental screen, the humor of our involuntary, close conjunctions in public transit.

Jean-Baptist-Camile-Corot, the master of trees, with light hanging in them and turning leaves a fleeting silver, is here with a rare "St. Sebastian." Corot wouldn't be drawn to the erotic drama of the saint, hands tied and riddled with arrows, but he liked the moment after, pale man on the ground tended by women with trees rolling overhead. William-Adolphe Bouguereau's "Flagellation of Christ" is unintentionally funny. Bouguereau was great at lace and sweet-faced girls, but the violence of a whipping he couldn't handle. His figures are posed, as if somebody were shooting a photo.

If you go, don't overlook Georges Seurat's tiny "Two Men Walking in a Field." One is disappearing into black scribble, but the other, advancing with his face blacked out by the sheer density of his depiction, stops us cold to stare at him.

My heart goes out to "At the Circus: Free Horses." A syphilitic alcoholic committed by his wealthy family, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted it in black crayon to prove he possessed the wit to remain at large. Two years later, he was dead at age 36. One horse, being led from the ring, rears back, and the others fail to follow. Three attempt to exit by climbing the bleachers, all empty, while the ringmaster, bowing to no applause, hangs his head, his shadow a puddle beneath him.

Those who like this show and others of its ilk have every reason to fear we aren't likely to see many more from Tacoma, now that Patricia McDonnell has left the museum. What a pleasure they have been.

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