It’s a fabulous success story, about a young Dutchman, born Lourens Alma Tadema, whose parents thought art was no profession for a gentleman, who worked himself into tuberculosis studying law and art at the same time, who became a British citizen, a Royal Academician and was knighted by Queen Victoria. Merchandised by a shrewd worldwide dealer, his work became hugely popular in that other burgeoning empire, the U.S.A.
Yes, but was it art? While van Gogh was painting his blazing sunflowers, Alma-Tadema was anachronistically putting sunflowers in a picture of ancient Pompeii. In 1907, while Picasso was dropping his cubist H-bomb with the “Demoiselles d’Avignon, " Alma-Tadema was giving a lecture on “Marbles: Their Ancient Application.”
Alma-Tadema is more a part of the history of media than of art. He created a dream factory, which anticipated film. Many of his best paintings (not all are at the Clark) are like frozen movies, in which he functions less as an artist than as a brilliant production designer. In “Caracalla and Geta” he painted with virtuoso precision 2,500 spectators in the Coliseum. “The Roses of Heliogabalus” showed the crazy Roman emperor suffocating some dinner guests under zillions of rose leaves. His famous house in St. John’s Wood was like a miniature movie studio with an aluminum dome that threw a silvery glow over his pictures and his mind. In fact, D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille used his paintings as models for epics like “Intolerance” and “Cleopatra.” At his famous house parties he received guests like Tchaikovsky and Caruso and played with his collection of mechanical toys, often belting out music-hall tunes like “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow.”
With classic Victorian equivocation, his paintings blend sublimation and sexuality. Scrumptious Anglo-Roman maidens disport themselves with seductive decorum in “An Apodyterium” (the undressing room), “The Frigidarium” (the cold room), “The Tepidarium” (the warm room). All these are really the same place-call it the Striparium. Alma-Tadema didn’t fool the bishop of Carlisle, who sternly reported that “my mind has been considerably exercised” by one of Alma-Tadema’s nudes. Perhaps the most compelling painting at the Clark is “The Women of Amphissa.” It’s a condensed epic showing maenads, zonked out after a night of Bacchic revelry, being cared for b the local women, who are protecting them from rapacious soldiers. Off to the left, the artist himself stands in voyeuristic awe at the potent sisterhood of women in their sexual and domestic roles.
Alma-Tadema’s death in 1912 was followed by the death of his world, both social and esthetic, in the first world war. His pictures, once world-class moneymakers, were dispersed to museum basements and dingy antique stores. In the 1960s the rise of pop art had the side effect of focusing attention on heretofore despised academic or “kitsch” painting. So it was fitting that the largest collection of Alma-Tademas was assembled by Allen Funt, founder of television’s kitschy “Candid Camera.” Hearing that John Ruskin had called Alma-Tadema the worst painter of the 19th century, Funt “swore I’d find someone worse no matter how long it took me.” Funt’s quest aborted when his accountant embezzled funds and committed suicide. Needing cash, Funt auctioned off his collection in 1972 and prices of Alma-Tademas started up again. Now “The Women of Amphissa” is worth about $500,000. So let’s hear it, in the words of an old song, for “Alma-TAD/Of the Royal A-CAD/The Royal Acade-MEE!”
