At the Galleries

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2008 by Wilkin, Karen

At the Galleries

THE MOST SPECTACULAR SHOW OF THE PAST SEASON was almost certainly "El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III," an overview of Spanish painting in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, jointly organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, seen April 20-July 27 in Boston and August 21-November 9 at Duke. The period surveyed-Philip III occupied the throne from 1598-1621-is a key moment in the history of Baroque art internationally. In Spain, these were years marked by considerable upheaval, plague and its aftermath, unrest in the Netherlandish provinces, and the excesses of the Counter-Reformation, but it was also a time when the enormous power and wealth of the Spanish monarchy often translated into notable artistic achievement. The pattern had been established much earlier by Philip's father, the cosmopolitan, well-traveled Philip II, who moved the court from Toledo to Madrid in 1561, transforming the city into Spain's most important artistic center. He became a secular patron of the arts whose appetite for important works rivaled that of the Counter-Reformation Catholic church.

As the Boston exhibition made clear, both the court and the church continued to exploit the potency of the visual during the reign of Philip II's son, Philip III, by commissioning portraits and devotional images from the leading artists of the day. What made the show so exciting was that those "leading artists" included El Greco, nearing the end of his distinguished career (he died in 1614), the young Diego Velázquez, in his formative years (born in 1599, a year after Philip ascended the throne), and Jusepe Ribera (eight years Velázquez's senior), early in his life as an artist. Peter Paul Rubens arrived at the Spanish court in 1603, on a diplomatic mission from his Italian patron, with a gift of nearly forty paintings by various masters; he stayed long enough to copy masterpieces in the royal collections and to paint some portraits of the nobility. And as if this weren't enough, throughout Philip III's reign, riches and curiosities continued to arrive from Spain's enormous New World empire, fueling artistic energies and sustaining major ambitious projects.

The Boston show provided a capsule history of Spanish Baroque art, tracking both patronage in general and the efforts of the Catholic church to assert itself through the power of the visual. The dazzling first gallery, dedicated to late El Greco, almost alone justified the trip. The stellar group of works included the Metropolitan Museum's The Vision of St. John, set beside the National Gallery's Laocoön to provide a matchless opportunity to compare the way El Greco used the nude as a carrier of emotion, both in the guise of wholly imagined creatures, seen only in the fantasy of the painting's protagonist, and as legendary figures from the mythological past. The conversation between these iconic pictures reminded us, too, of how successful seventeenth-century painters thriftily reused figure types in different works. The nearby presence of the Met's View of Toledo affirmed, as well, that for El Greco, the distinctive image of his adopted home was a kind of emblem for city. In Laocoön, Toledo appears as Troy; the hapless priest and his sons struggle with the serpents sent to destroy them against a background of strangely familiar, distant towers and buildings. The space in each of these amazing paintings is markedly different, but whether the subject is topography, religious fervor, or ancient tragedy, El Greco presents us with an ecstatic, flickering, urgently brushed, and ultimately unnerving image, seemingly revealed to us by a flash of stormy light and likely to vanish if our attention wavers.

The full range of the elderly, Venetian-trained Greek expatriate's accomplishment was attested to by a small, eerie crucifixion from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Met's fierce Saint Jerome as Scholar, and the National Gallery's Saint Martin and the Beggar-in which we glimpse Toledo once again, this time through the legs of the armor-clad saint's elegant, foreshortened white horse, with the green of the landscape becoming an echo of the rich green cloak St. Martin hands to the naked supplicant beside him. Through the entry to the next gallery, facing Saint Martin, we could see Rubens' imposing portrait of the Duke of Lerma, from the Prado, with the armor-clad grandee seen from a similar angle and mounted on a gorgeous, foreshortened white steed. The installation may have simply been a piece of curatorial wit, but the fact that Rubens painted the Duke about three years after El Greco produced his equestrian saint was food for speculation.

The works in "El Greco to Velázquez" embraced the full spectrum of themes from images of temporal power to embodiments of the spiritual to still lifes from the bodegón tradition-this last a deep-rooted and very Spanish fascination with the particulars of objects still to be found in the work of contemporary artists from the Iberian peninsula. In the bodegón section, Juan Sánchez Cotán's uncanny fruits and vegetables, painted about 1600, asserted their authority; scrupulously rendered cardoons, cabbages, and melons, suspended against dark backgrounds, became the unlikely protagonists of intense proto-surrealist dramas. A superb group of earthy kitchen scenes painted by Velázquez almost two decades later than the Sánchez Cotáns bore further witness not only to the endurance of this concern for the particular but also to its transformation, by this phenomenally gifted teenager, into an examination of the expressive qualities of light and of paint itself. In Velázquez's eloquent images of kitchen maids at work or old women cooking eggs, lovingly rendered still life objects are treated as accoutrements to sturdy, Caravaggesque, half-length figures performing unremarkable tasks. Like the best of the bodegón painters, the young Velázquez reveled in his ability to evoke flesh, cloth, pottery, metal, and glass, but unlike his predecessors, he never made this virtuosity an end in itself. Instead, he orchestrated figures and objects into subtly organized wholes, modulating a wide range of things, textures, and figures with pools of unifying, form-defining light. The relaxed authority of these pictures signals the beginning of something new in Spanish painting-a suggestion of transparency, generosity, and calm that marks a radical departure from both the obsessive quest for verisimilitude of the bodegán tradition and the feverish instability and heightened emotion announced by the El Grecos at the beginning of the exhibition.