Magnificent Rubens

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The New York Sun

Before I saw the exquisite show of roughly 40 oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens currently on view at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., I imagined it would be a good, appetite whetting prelude to the Metropolitan Museum’s upcoming retrospective of 115 of Rubens’s drawings. (The Met’s drawing exhibition opens on January 15,just two weeks before “Drawn by the Brush” closes.) But the Bruce show is splendid all by itself.


This exhibition, the first in this country devoted exclusively to Rubens’s oil sketches, may prove to be one of the most exciting events of the fall season. In most of Rubens’s works, the animals or shrubbery or secondary characters may have been painted almost entirely by assistants. But every swashbuckling brushstroke in this astonishing, exhausting show is all Rubens all the time.


A Renaissance man who epitomized the Baroque, Rubens (1577-1640) was an esteemed scholar and diplomat, fluent in five languages, and referred to


as “one of the wonders of the world.” He was also one of the most influential, sought-after, and prolific artists of his or any generation. Rubens’s Antwerp workshop, which employed numerous assistants and turned out more than 2,000 commissions, was legendary throughout Europe. Yet it was understood that every work from start to finish, no matter how many artists touched it, was controlled by the master’s hand.


Before Rubens began working on a large commission – a huge altarpiece, a lion hunt, or a grand cycle of tapestries or paintings, such as the Louvre’s 21-work cycle “Life of Marie de Medicis” (1622-25) – he would first do an oil sketch. These sketches, tiny to easel-scale in varying degrees of finish, were executed principally as studies to be worked up into larger compositions by his assistants. They were also shown to clients – princes, archdukes, ecclesiastical leaders – as samples or for approval before the final works were begun.


Occasionally, as in the direct portrait heads Rubens painted from life (three of which are included in “Drawn by the Brush”), oil sketches were used repeatedly as models for figures in paintings. Rubens also made some for his own collection as copies or as records of his artworks after they were completed. It seems he valued them very highly, both professionally and as works of art, for he would lock them up while he was away to keep his competitors from seeing them.


Diderot preferred the oil sketches to the finished paintings, claiming that “[they] frequently have a fire that the finished paintings lack.” Certainly there is an unbridled urgency to them. “Drawn by the Brush” is a powerhouse of a show that builds from start to finish, gaining momentum like a runaway train.


Arranged chronologically, the show includes examples of the entire range of Rubens’s subjects (mythological, religious, allegorical) and artistic approaches to the oil sketch. It begins, annoyingly, with a video of a finished painting projected next to its oil sketch, and the unfortunate lighting from the projector rakes the frames’ shadows across the painting. But every gallery seems to top the last. With age Rubens only seems to have gotten better, and freer with his brush.


Rubens was inspired most by Titian’s vibrating, translucent color, Raphael’s idealized classicism, and Caravaggio’s brusque directness and realism. His oil sketches – astonishing for the monumental volume they achieve with minimum, seemingly improvised effort – fuse elements of each of those artists in works that are entirely unique.


The sketches usually have reddish brown, glazed grounds. Sometimes these appear dry; sometimes dark and oily; sometimes gritty, smoky, or washy. Yet they are always different and alive, glowing with light. Rubens stirs these fluid grounds into turbulent, swelling masses.


His assured brush agitates the ground as if his were the hand of Creation, whisking figures into being. A wind seems to blow through the oil sketches, unfurling limbs and drapery, kicking up dust into form. Rubens’s weightiness, freshness, and directness, his ability to create paintings that appear to expand beyond their frames, is unequaled in all of art.


The tightly painted, upturned “Head of a Youth” (1601-2), an early, angelic head that Rubens used often in paintings throughout his career, is a full-bodied, rapturous work of swashbuckling hair, longing eyes, and swelling neck. “Samson and Delilah” (c. 1609), swimming in a ground of alizarin and hot red, is close in feel to the finished painting. As in many of the works on view, the handling from form to form is extremely varied.


In some works, mere suggestions of bodies, expressed in vaporous, quivering line, scumbled surface, or wet-into-wet scratching, improbably carry entire areas. Flesh, no matter how Rubens creates it, is as full as fruit and flickers with light. “The Road to Calvary: Christ Carrying the Cross” (c. 1632) is a nearly grisaille work in reddish brown and silvery, predawn blue tonalities – punctuated by pinks, ivies, reds, and pearly gray whites. Its metallic surface, like so many works in this show, spins, flexes, and rushes. Heavy darks are electrified by zipping white lines.


Rubens stretches us like taffy. We are never allowed to linger. He keeps us bouncing from foreshortened form to foreshortened form, from rotundity to rotundity. The largest work on view is the amazing “The Elevation of the Cross” (c. 1637-8), the sketch for the Louvre triptych “The Raising of the Cross.” In both works, the elongated diagonal of Christ’s corkscrewing body and Cross wrenches and twists the space.


“Drawn by the Brush” is the kind of show that is difficult to take in and difficult to leave. Each work is so packed with movement and form that it is impossible to process it all, let alone to hold on for the entire ride. I will certainly be back at the Bruce very soon.


The New York Sun

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