WTDTW-Xmas!

This being Christmas Day, The Arts Muse would like to share a special edition of What To Do This Weekend by focusing on one rare exhibit. It's "James Tissot: 'The Life of Christ'," at the Brooklyn Museum through Jan. 17, and it's the perfect show to blog about today not only because of its subject matter but because the story behind it is the kind of redemption tale that crystallizes Christianity and the yuletide spirit.

Tissot — the French John Singer Sargent — was a boulevardier, a flaneur, a connoisseur and painter of stylish women and, in his own words, "a Catholic more by courtesy than conviction." (Ah, the French. Such politesse, not really believing in God but nonetheless afraid to give offense.)

Naturally, a person of such lukewarm religious faith has to undergo a road-to-Damascus moment, right? Tissot's came as he was doing research for the last in a series of paintings about shopping. (Well, what did you expect? This is a story set in Paris, after all.) He stopped by the Church of Saint-Sulplice, and as the priest elevated the Host during Mass, experienced a vision of a bloodied Jesus comforting the poor amid a building's rubble. In the sleepless, fevered aftermath, Tissot turned his vision into the 1885 oil on canvas "Inward Voices (The Ruins)."

This foreshadowed an artistic pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1886-87 and '89), which in turn led him to create "The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ," a series of 350 watercolors that was exhibited successfully, turned into a best seller and ultimately purchased, at the instigation of the aforementioned John Singer Sargent, by the institution we now know as the Brooklyn Museum. (The current exhibit, which features 124 of the watercolors, marks the first time in more than 20 years that any of the works have been on display at the museum.)

Portraying Jesus is — as Robert DeNiro reportedly observed when he turned down the role in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" — a no-win situation. As universal God to believers and specific historical figure, he is truly, as Simeon describes him in the Gospels, "a sign to be contradicted". And those perpendicular contradictions are the cross on which Jesus artists are hanged. Depict him as universal God — with Asian or African features, for example — and you offend some. Capture him as a Jewish teacher living in Palestine in the early days of the Roman Empire, and you offend others.

Tissot's Jesus was deemed too Catholic, too Jewish, not Jewish enough, not Protestant enough, too masculine, too feminine. What I find most fascinating about him, after poring over the excellent, definitive catalog of reproductions — and what I think will resonate with contemporary Americans, who've been raised on movies — is that Tissot's auburn-haired, blue-eyed, sculpted Jesus would be right at home in Hollywood, say in Nicholas Ray's "King of Kings" (Jeffrey Hunter), Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" (Robert Powell) or even Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (Jim Caviezel).

Curiously, for all Jesus' obvious centrality to the Gospel stories, he doesn't dominate Tissot's paintings. The exception is "Jesus Looking Through A Lattice" (1886-94, above), a painting inspired by the "Song of Solomon" that I first fell in love with in Debra N. Mancoff's "Sunflowers" (Thames & Hudson), the lattice being decorated with the flowers. This Jesus compels — half-glimpsed through the diamond-shaped pattern, curious and reaching, interesting because he is interested.

By going to the Holy Land, Tissot wanted to strip away the anachronisms he saw in the religious painting of the Old Masters. But how could he when what he saw were 19th-century people, not the folk of Jesus' day? Anyway, portraits of Jesus tell us more about the artist than they do Jesus. Try as he might, Tissot couldn't erase his artistic heritage. And yet, he brought his own unique approach to the work. His "The Resurrection of Lazarus" (1886-94) owes its chiaroscuro to Rembrandt perhaps. But Tissot's placement of the figures is unusual and dramatic, with Lazarus, swathed in white burial cloths, emerging seemingly from the bowels of the earth.

Similarly, his angel Gabriel in "The Annunciation" (1886-94) is decidedly female, glamorous, a made-up face surrounded by delicate rays of light. Tissot was no monk. He never lost his eye for the ladies. But then long before his Damascus moment, he was interested in Christian themes, having painted a series that was a modern retelling of the Prodigal Son parable.

Tissot was always a Catholic, albeit a sensual one. People don't really change. They become more of themselves.

For more, contact the Brooklyn Museum at 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. Image courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.