MUSEUM

The Frick
Flaming June - Frederic Leighton

The painting captivates me.  The sheerness of the drapery over the human form that is still visible in detail.  The color and the colors.  The triangle of head to hip to knee.  But most of all, the left foot that projects forward, foreshortened, under the sheerness of the fabric yet the anatomy of the foot is completely visible.  I'm not even close to being a painter but that looks difficult to do.

Review: ‘Flaming June’ Arrives in New York, Preceded by Its Reputation

“Flaming June” by Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), a famous Victorian painting, has come to New York for the first time in more than 35 years, for a solo turn at the Frick Collection.

Anyone who’s ever perused books of late-19th-century British art will instantly recognize the idyllic image of a young woman in a sheer, incandescent orange dress curled up in sleep on piles of drapery on a marble bench, with a sunstruck Mediterranean in the distance. She’s particularly memorable for her disproportionately long and muscular right thigh. Tightly wrapped in diaphanous fabric, it extends from buttock to bended knee across the lower middle of the picture, practically dwarfing the upper part of her body. Leighton based her pose on Michelangelo’s sculpture “Night” and on a copy of his lost painting “Leda and the Swan,” both of which feature similarly bent legs with powerful thighs.

Measuring just under 4 feet by 4 feet, “Flaming June,” circa 1895, appears within a brightly gold-leafed, tabernacle frame that imitates the Ionic architecture of ancient Greco-Roman temples. It invites viewers into a hallucinatory space of pagan mystery. At the Frick, the whole assemblage hangs between dark, wooden, Ionic pilasters in the museum’s Oval Room. In the company of James McNeill Whistler’s tall portraits of three fashionable women and a man, all brushily rendered in muted colors (they are permanent Frick fixtures), “Flaming June” glows. It looks as if she was always meant to be here. (Why it’s called “Flaming June,” no one knows.)

It’s not one of the world’s greatest works of art — this isn’t anything like Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” which visited the Frick in 2013. Leighton’s subject has none of the magical vitality of Vermeer’s. Painted with academic virtuosity in viscous glazes, she seems as if immersed in Jell-O. But as an artifact of Victorian consciousness, Leighton’s painting is exceptionally interesting.

Organized by Susan Grace Galassi, the Frick’s senior curator, “Leighton’s ‘Flaming June’ “ includes one other piece — a lovely, 4-inch-by-4-inch painted study for the final work.

Pablo Pérez d’Ors, associate curator of European art at the Museo de Arte de Ponce, in Ponce, P.R., the painting’s permanent residence, notes in his catalog essay that the beautiful woman asleep in some archaic past was a recurrent motif in Victorian art. He speculatively connects that with fantasies about opium dens popularized in stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, which “paved the way for the appearance of symbolic allusions to the unconscious and to death.” Along these lines, he points out that the red flowers in the scene’s upper-right corner are oleanders, which were known to be poisonous. This makes the woman a femme fatale, a dangerously alluring figure who would seduce the unwary into oblivion.

Because she’s asleep and possibly dreaming, and because the image itself is like a dream, it’s hard to resist some psychoanalysis, the method that Freud was inventing around the same time that Leighton was working on his picture, the last and most famous of his career. Two elements are conspicuous: the weirdly oversized, unmistakably phallic thigh and the fluttering drapery all around the figure, which makes her appear to be “enfolded in a field of energy,” as Ms. Galassi puts it in her catalog essay. What else can this be, a Freudian might rhetorically ask, but an image of what the French call “la petite mort”? But the broader context of European history and its accelerating second Industrial Revolution is worth considering, too. The figure of the languid woman is more than just an object of erotic desire. She’s the opposite of the rationalist, ever-striving, murderously competitive spirit — once conventionally thought of as distinctively masculine. She embodies a yearning to relax, to retire from the fray and take pleasure in just being alive. As a shape-shifting archetype, she turns up repeatedly in Modernist art: in paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and countless other, usually male, artists. She’s the countercultural soul of modernity.

Leighton himself was no rebel. Born into a wealthy family and trained in Frankfurt, Paris and Rome, he was for many years president of the Royal Academy. But the 20th century wasn’t kind to his memory. Until the 1970s, Victorian art in general was regarded by sophisticates as stale, morally stultifying, formulaic kitsch. Then the tide turned. With their complex narratives, poetic metaphors, references to times past, the Victorians appealed to a Postmodernist sensibility. That new enthusiasm precipitated an avalanche of art books in which “Flaming June” was frequently reproduced. Now it belongs as much popular as to high culture. You can even buy “Flaming June” jewelry: earrings and pendants featuring miniature reproductions of the picture.

That the painting is so widely known today is owed mainly to Luis A. Ferré, who, in 1965, founded the Museo de Arte de Ponce. How Mr. Ferré acquired it is a tale of luck and passion. From 1915 to 1928, the painting was exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, after which it disappeared. Then in 1962 it was discovered hidden behind a false panel in a house in London. The following year Mr. Ferré spotted Leighton’s siren in a London gallery and, as he put it, “fell in love with her at first sight.” He bought it for about $8,000, factoring in inflation. The original frame was lost, but it turned out that the molds used to make it still existed at Arnold Wiggins and Sons. The firm created a new frame just like the old one in 1994, and “Flaming June,” called in its day “the most wonderful painting in existence” by the collector Samuel Courtauld, was finally restored to its former glory.

A Sleeper Awakened With Color

ByJames Gardner

June 26, 2015 5:38 p.m. ET

Like most Englishmen of the 19th century, Frederic Leighton believed that beautiful art consisted in the depiction of beautiful things. In practice, this conviction led to images of statuesque women wearing robes of exemplary loveliness and sitting on marble thrones in southern lands. 

Lord Leighton’s generation was perhaps the last to share this belief across the length and breadth of society, and it is doubtful whether it was ever asserted with greater energy than in “Flaming June,” a painting that he completed in 1895, shortly before he died at age 65. For the next three months, the Museo de Arte de Ponce, in Puerto Rico, is lending the work to the Frick Collection, in New York, where it appears between two of the Frick’s ethereal portraits of women by James McNeill Whistler, together with a small oil-sketch for Leighton’s painting, on loan from a private collection. (Two other Whistler portraits are hanging on the opposite wall.) 

“Flaming June” depicts a radiant young woman dressed in classical robes, asleep on a marble bench under the stars. Behind her, beneath a golden-orange awning, a thin grayish sliver of water is visible, infused with the light of the full moon. The spirit of the work is almost realist in its depiction of antiquity as somehow sharing a border with the here and now. Unlike Leighton’s “Garden of the Hesperides” from three years before, no residue of reverie or myth stands between the viewer and the subject of this work. At the same time, there is a powerful physicality—even carnality—to this beautiful, but hardly ethereal, young woman.

The overwhelming aesthetic thrust of the work is its circular composition—defined by the sleeper’s limbs and the folds of her garments—as well as the startling emphasis on the orange or saffron that defines her robes. This abundance of orange is nearly unprecedented in Western art until well into the 20th century. Its insistent use in the sleeper’s robes is repeated in the awning overhead, so artfully as to approach that ideal of monochromatic painting that haunted Whistler, not least in his two grayish-white female portraits that flank Leighton’s painting as it hangs in the Frick.

And yet, there is a vital paradox at the heart of “Flaming June.” The central figure is in a state of deep sleep: One can almost sense the dreams flitting about her eyes. At the same time, the robes that engulf her are like a relentless eddy in their churning movement, an extremity of dynamism in an extremity of repose. This contradiction is played out in the overall composition as well. If its emphatic circularity is rare in British art at this time, no less rare is the insistently four-square context in which Leighton has set it. Five strong horizontal bands, defined by the awning, the sky, the sea, the marble bench and the marble pavement, are deployed by the artist to contain the whirlwind of the sleeper’s robes.

There are surely ancient and pre-modern precedents for the painting, in classical friezes and several works by Michelangelo. But perhaps the most direct and important precedent is Albert Joseph Moore’s “Midsummer” (at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth, England), completed in 1887. Here too a beautiful young woman of antiquity sleeps on a sumptuous throne, and the preponderance of orange in the two paintings is so striking that it can hardly be coincidental. 

But if Moore’s painting is a charming though somewhat musty example of late Victoriana, “Flaming June” is a true and accomplished work of art. The defining failure of most 19th-century academic painting is its overwhelming tendency to see art as a substitute for reality or an improvement on it (hence all those unnaturally perfect women lounging around in unnaturally perfect weather). Allied to this is an unwillingness or an inability to see the work of art as sovereign and autonomous, which is roughly how the Old Masters and the Modernists saw it. This experiential surrogacy is still to some degree an element of “Flaming June.” But in this painting Leighton, perhaps inspired by Whistler, is animated by the far higher ambition to create a unified work of art that can stand as much on its formal strength as on its contextual terms.

Leighton himself was the supreme academician of his day, even though he was influenced by the Realists, the Pre-Raphaelites and finally the Aesthetic Movement. He was associated with the Royal Academy for over 30 years, and for the last 17 years of his life he served as its president. It was precisely during the period of his presidency that artistic modernism began to take root in London, about a generation after it first appeared in Paris. And it may well be that Oscar Wilde has Leighton in his sights when, at the opening of “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” he describes a party attended by “several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists.”

Wilde’s snipe at Academic art was merely a foretaste of what was to come. With the spread of modernism in the first half of the 20th century, few artistic movements fell into steeper disrepute than Leighton’s academicism. Although “Flaming June” was greatly admired in its day, and was displayed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 1915 to 1928, thereafter it disappeared from sight and from the memory of the art world. For more than 30 years it somehow remained hidden behind a panel above an old chimney in a house in Clapham Common, South London, only to be fortuitously rediscovered in 1962. One year later, Luis A. Ferré, who was then beginning to acquire art for the museum he intended to found, the Museo de Arte de Ponce, came upon the work in a London gallery. Without hesitating, he bought it and spirited it back to the Caribbean, where to this day it remains the pride and centerpiece of his collection.

“Flaming June” is not without its shortcomings. There is a certain perfunctoriness to its details, in the cluster of oleander at the top right, for example, as well as an inability—which almost defines 19th-century Academic art—fully to energize the paint textures. But its composition and chromatic harmony succeed so well that it compels us to re-examine our most inveterate assumptions about this sort of art. Sometimes, from out of the general mass of pleasing mediocrity that defines this style, a work of real power like “Flaming June” can emerge, and, if proof were needed, “Flaming June” is it.