by Judy Jones
Rubens’ The Judgment of Paris
KEY WORKS: As with Titian, it’s the shooting match, not the individual shot. However, The Judgment of Paris (National Gallery, London; that’s his second wife in the middle); the Marie de’ Medici series (Louvre, Paris; thirty-six panels’ worth of commemoration); and the late landscapes (various museums), with the Rubens family chateau in the background, will give you a sense of his range.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: A rung down the ladder, Anthony van Dyck, the portraitist of aristocrats, especially English ones, and Rubens’ one-time assistant. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN (1606-1669)
Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait
The son of a miller and a baker’s daughter, with a face— famous from over a hundred self-portraits—much likened to a loaf of bread. But, as Miss Piggy, herself every inch a Rubens gal, might say, quel loaf of bread. The man who manipulated tonality (lights and darks, to you) and eschewed contour better than anybody ever, Rembrandt was also the painter who realized, first and most fully, that the eye could take in a human figure, the floor it was standing on, the wall behind it, plus the flock of pigeons visible through the window in that wall, without having to make any conscious adjustments. (If we were talking automotive rather than art history, Rembrandt would be the advent of the automatic transmission.) More than that, even, Rembrandt was the very model of the sensitive and perceptive person, as some of us used to say sophomore year, taking the sober, commonplace Dutch panorama—guildhall and slum, merchant and beggar—and portraying it in all its poignancy and detail; even Christianity, the inspiration for the other half of the Rembrandtian output, becomes, in his hands and for the first time since Giotto, an affair for ordinary men and women. And if all that’s not enough, Rembrandt’s still the answer most game-show contestants would come up with when asked to name a famous painter. Historical generalization: Rembrandt (and the rest of the seventeenth-century Dutch, who had no popes or patrons farming out commissions) turned out the first art to be consumed exclusively by us mere-mortal types, paintings that were to be tucked under your arm, carried home, and hung over the living-room sofa.
KEY WORKS: Many. The ones that come up over and over are The Night Watch and The Syndics of the Cloth Guild (the latter adopted by the Dutch Masters cigars folks; both, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and a pair of late self-portraits (1659, National Gallery, London; 1660, Kenwood, London). And you’ll need one of the religious paintings, perhaps Return of the Prodigal Son (Hermitage, Leningrad). But beware: Since 1968, the Rembrandt Research Project, based in Amsterdam, has been reassessing the authenticity of the entire Rembrandt corpus. Among the casualties: The Polish Rider, The Man in the Golden Helmet, and The Girl at the Door, each now attributed to a different student of Rembrandt’s.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Lots of them; painting and painters were as much in evidence in seventeenth-century Holland as they’d been in fifteenth-century Florence. You should know Frans Hals (impulsive, with a predilection for people hanging out and getting drunk) and Jan Vermeer (intimate, with a predilection for people opening mail and pouring milk). Everybody else is categorized as a “Little Dutchman,” a genre painter specializing in landscapes, still lifes, portraits, or interiors. CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
The problem is, you’re dealing with two legendary reputations (and that’s not counting Manet, Monet’s hip contemporary). The first Monet is the Father of Impressionism. You remember Impressionism: the mid-nineteenth-century movement that grabbed an easel and a handful of paintbrushes and announced it was going outdoors; that attempted to capture the spontaneous and transitory effects of light and color by painting with the eye (and what it saw), rather than with the mind (and what it knew to be true); that couldn’t have cared less about form, in the sense of either composition or solidity; that was initially reviled by the conservative French critics and artgoing public; and that wound up becoming, in our time, the most popular, most cooed-over style of painting ever. The second Monet is the great-uncle of Modernism, the man who—getting progressively blinder and more obsessed with reducing the visible world to terms of pure light—eventually gave up form altogether and took out the first patent on abstraction; it’s this Monet the avant-garde has tended to prefer. Note to those wondering what happened to the eighteenth century: You shouldn’t exactly forget about it, but any hundred-year period whose biggest box-office draw is Watteau is strictly optional.
Monet’s Terrace at Sainte-Adresse
KEY WORKS: For the Impressionist Monet: at your discretion. Try Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1866, Metropolitan, New York) or Impression—Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris). For the proto-Modernist Monet: The touchstones are the Rouen Cathedral series (1894, Metropolitan, New York, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others) and the water lilies series (1899, 1904–1925, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Carnegie Institute Art Museum, Pittsburgh, among others).
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: The only “true” Impressionists besides Monet are Pissarro and Sisley. Manet is a proto-Impressionist, among other things. Degas and Renoir are quasi-Impressionists. Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin are post-Impressionists. And Toulouse-Lautrec is played by José Ferrer, on his knees, with his feet strapped to his buttocks. PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906)
This is a test. Pass it—that is, “get” what Cézanne was up to, maybe even like it—and chances are you’ll have no trouble with “modern” art, abstraction, alienation, and all. Flunk it—that is, wonder what the fuss is about and move immediately on to Van Gogh and/or Gauguin—and you’ve got big problems ahead of you. As to what Cézanne was up to, exactly: First, he was rejecting Impressionism (note that he’s an exact contemporary of Monet), not only its commitment to transience and to truth-as-what-the-eye-sees, but its affiliation with the bourgeoisie and the boulevards; Cézanne wanted to infuse some gravity, even grandeur, back into painting. Second, he was refuting classical “one-point” perspective, which makes the viewer the person on whom everything converges and for whom everything is done. For Cézanne “seeing” was a process, a weighing of choices, not a product. (He also decreed color, not line, to be the definer of form; geometry, not the needs of composition, to be its basis; and the laws of representation to be revokable at will.) Third, he was single-handedly reversing the pendulum swing toward representational “accuracy” that Giotto had set in motion six hundred years before; from here on in, how you perceive is going to count for more than what you perceive, the artist’s modus operandi for more than the illusions he can bring off. Granted, this is pretty heavy stuff, but at least the paintings are sensuous, inviting, and still of the world as we know it. The sledding gets rougher with Picasso and the Cubists, up next.
KEY WORKS: Any still life. Ditto, any view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, in Cézanne’s native Provence, the mountain in art history. Ditto, any and all scenes of card players. And the portraits of his wife and himself. In general, the later a Cézanne, the bigger a deal it’s likely to be—also the more abstract. A lot of people consider Bathers (1898–1905, Philadelphia Museum of Art) the painter’s summa, but follow his example and come to it last.
Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: The other three Post-Impressionists: Seurat (the one with the thousands of little dots), Van Gogh (him you know), and Gauguin (of Brittany and Tahiti). PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Try to rise to the occasion. God knows, the critics and commentators try, labeling Picasso, among other things, “the charging bull of modern art,” “that Nietzschean monster from Málaga,” and “the walking scrotum, the inexhaustible old stud of the Côte d’Azur.” Be all that as it may, you’ve got to understand something about Cubism (which has nothing to do with actual cubes, and everything to do with seeing things in relationship to one another, simultaneously, and from more than one vantage point at a time, with the result that you may find yourself looking at a teacup, say, or a birdcage, both head on and from the air). And something about celebrity (Picasso, toward the end, enjoyed a fame no paint
er, not even worldlings like Raphael and Rubens, had ever known, complete with bastard heirs, sycophantic dealers, and Life magazine covers). Beyond those two basics there’s the energy, the fecundity, the frankness, the no-flies-on-me penchant for metamorphosis and the consequent welter of styles (one critic counted eighty of them, and that was back in the early Fifties), the mythologizing (watch for Minotaurs, nymphs, and river gods), and, in a personal vein, the womanizing (he was notorious for classifying his lady friends as either “goddesses” or “doormats”). You should know that Cézanne and the primitive sculpture of Africa and pre-Christian Spain were big influences and El Greco a lesser one; that the “pathetic” Blue and “wistful” Rose periods predate Cubism per se; that the appeal of collage—literally, “gluing”—was that it got scraps of modern life right inside the picture frame; that Picasso claimed to “paint forms as I think them, not as I see them” (let alone as they looked); and that the painting after 1950 (not the sculpture, however) was once judged to be lacking in intensity.
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
KEY WORKS: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York), arguably the most “radical” of all paintings, and Guernica (1937, Prado), last of the great “political” paintings. Also, a sculpture; try The Guitar (1912, Museum of Modern Art), all metal sheets and empty spaces.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Georges Braque, who once commented that he and Picasso were “roped together like mountaineers,” but who wound up playing Ashley Wilkes to his friend’s Rhett Butler. For the record: Juan Gris and Fernand Léger are the two other ranking Cubists; Henri Matisse (see under “Fauvism”), the other great painter of the century; Marcel Duchamp, the alternative role model (see under “Dada”) for young—and subversive—artists; Salvador Dalí (see under “Surrealism”), the fellow Spaniard who valued publicity and the high life even more than Picasso did.
The Leonardo/Michelangelo Crib Sheet
Practical Italian for the
Gallery-Goer
Artwise, New York may have recently had a field day, but it’s Italy that had a High Renaissance. Which means that if it’s snob appeal you’re after, you’re going to have to learn to roll your rs a bit. Here’s your basic lesson.
CHIAROSCURO (kee-ahr-e-SKEWR-o): Literally means “bright-dark” in Italian and describes the technique, in painting or drawing, of modeling three-dimensional figures by contrasting or gradating areas of light and dark. Leonardo da Vinci was among the first to use chiaroscuro to break out of the tradition of flat, one-dimensional outlining of figures. One of the great achievements of the Renaissance, chiaroscuro soon became part and parcel of painting. Rembrandt is the acknowledged master of the technique; if you want a more recherché example, try Caravaggio.
Chiaroscuro: Caravaggio’s The Musicians
CONTRAPPOSTO (kohn-tra-POH-stoe): In sculptures of the human form, the pose in which the upper body faces in a slightly different direction from the lower, with the weight resting on one leg. Contrapposto was originally the Greeks’ solution to the problem of balancing the weight of the body in sculpture. The earlier formula had been the frontal, static pose, in which the legs were treated like two columns with the torso set squarely on top of them and the head balancing on top of that. The Greeks, rightly, found this boring and stupid. Renaissance sculptors revived the Greek formula, renamed it, and added dynamic tension by making the placement of body parts more extreme and contrasting. This may seem like picky technical stuff to you, but it was a watershed in the history of art. Contrapposto is all over the place in Renaissance sculpture, but the example you can’t get away with ignoring is Michelangelo’s David.
Contrapposto: Cristofano da Bracciano’s Orpheus
FRESCO: This was the method for painting indoor murals, from the days of the Minoan civilization in Crete right up to the seventeenth century. It involves brushing water-based pigments onto fresh, moist lime plaster (fresco means “fresh” in Italian), so that the pigment is absorbed by the plaster as it dries and becomes part of the wall. Fresco painting reached its peak during the Renaissance, when artists had the backing—and the backup crews—to allow them to undertake the kind of monumental works the technique is best suited to. Today, it’s also referred to as “buon fresco” or “true fresco,” to distinguish it from “secco” or “mezzo” fresco, a later method of painting on dry plaster that allowed artists to get similar results with less trouble. Frescoes abound in European art history, but some of the most famous are Michelangelo’s, in the Sistine Chapel; Raphael’s, in the Stanza della Segnatura and the Loggia of the Vatican; and Giotto’s, at the Arena Chapel in Padua. During the 1930s and 1940s, the WPA Federal Arts Project commissioned a couple thousand frescoes, mostly for municipal buildings and mostly forgettable.
IMPASTO: The technique of applying thick layers or strokes of oil paint, so that they stand out from the surface of a canvas or panel: also called “loaded brush.” Such seventeenth-century painters as Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Frans Hals used impasto to emphasize pictorial highlights; in the nineteenth century, Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and others used it more extensively for texture and variety. Some modern painters, including de Kooning and Dubuffet, took to laying the paint on with a palette knife or simply squeezing it directly from the tube. (One does not, it should be clear, create impasto with water colors.)
Impasto: Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait
MORBIDEZZA (MOR-buh-DETZ-uh): Literally, “softness,” “tenderness.” Used to describe the soft blending of tones in painting—by Correggio, for instance— or rounding of edges in sculpture, especially in the rendering of human flesh. On a bad day, could seem to degenerate into effeminacy and sickliness.
PENTIMENTO: A painter’s term (and Lillian Hellman’s) derived from the Italian word for “repentance,” and referring to the evidence that an artist changed his mind, or made a mistake, and tried to conceal it by painting over it. As time goes by, the top layer of paint may become transparent, and the artist’s original statement begins to show through. Pentimento can often be found in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, in which the artists commonly used thin layers of paint to obliterate an element of a composition— one of the children, say, in an interior— only to have its ghost reappear behind a lady’s dress or a piece of furniture a couple hundred years later. One of the most famous examples of pentimento is the double hat brim in Rembrandt’s portrait Flora.
Pentimento: Rembrandt’s Flora
PUTTO (POO-toe): Putti (note the plural) are those naked, chubby babies that cavort through Italian paintings, especially from the fifteenth century on. “Putto” means “little boy” in Italian, and originally the figure was derived from personifications of Eros in early Greek and Roman art; by extension, the term came to apply to any naked child in a painting. Putti were very popular in Renaissance and Baroque paintings, where they stood for anything from Cupid, to the pagan attendants of a god or goddess, to cherubim celebrating the Madonna and child.
QUATTROCENTO; CINQUECENTO (KWA-tro-CHEN-toe; CHINGK-weh-CHEN-toe): Literally, “the four hundred” and “the five hundred”; to art buffs, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively. In other words, the Early and the High Renaissances.
Putti in Veronese’s Mars and Venus United by Love
SFUMATO (sfoo-MAH-toe): Comes from the Italian word for “smoke” and describes a method of fusing areas of color or tone to create a soft, hazy, atmospheric effect, not unlike the soft focus in old Hollywood movies. Sfumato is most often mentioned in connection with Leonardo and his followers.
SOTTO IN SU (soh-toe-in-SOO): This one is good for a few brownie points; it means, approximately, “under on up,” and describes the trick of painting figures in perspective on a ceiling so that they are extremely foreshortened, giving the impression, when viewed from directly underneath, that they’re floating high overhead instead of lying flat in a picture plane. Sotto in su was especially popular in Italy during the Baroque and Rococo periods (seventeenth a
nd eighteenth centuries), when lots of people were painting ceilings and trying to create elaborate visual illusions. The names to drop: Tiepolo, Correggio, Mantegna.
VEDUTA (veh-DOO-tah): Means “view”; in this case, a detailed, graphic, and more or less factual view of a town, city, or landscape. Vedute (note the plural) were in vogue during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the artists who painted, drew, or etched them were known as vedutisti. A variation of the veduta was the veduta ideata (“idealized”), in which the realistic elements were juxtaposed in such a way as to produce a scene that was positively bizarre (e.g., Canaletto’s drawing of St. Peter’s in Rome rising above the Doge’s Palace in Venice). The vedutisti to remember: Canaletto, the Guardi family, Piranesi.
