At the Galleries

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2008 by Wilkin, Karen

Throughout the show, we were treated to outstanding works by the exhibition's stars: El Greco's portrait of Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, clutching an enormous book, radiating intelligence and sensitivity, for example, and Velázquez's severe close-up of the fierce, tight-lipped, hawk-nosed Luis de Góngora y Argote, both from the Boston Museum, or Ribera's vigorous portrayal of a greedy man about to tuck into a dish of tiny eels, The Sense of Taste, from the Wadsworth Atheneum. "El Greco to Velázquez" also included an illuminating selection of works by artists less celebrated than those of the title who nonetheless enjoyed substantial reputations in their day and were often the influential teachers of the show's better known practitioners. There were some happy surprises among these less familiar figures' work-the Italian-born Vincente Carducho's devotional pictures often achieved a fine balance between accomplished paint handling and religious intensity. But while it was instructive to see works by, say, Francisco Pacheco, Vélazquez's teacher, the show's thematic organization provoked inevitable comparisons that, in this and other instances, left little doubt about the relative merits of master and pupil. Some of the more obscure efforts on view seemed rigidly provincial, while the ambition of others-or of the people who optimistically commissioned them-exceeded their abilities. But just when we began to tire of not-quite-first-rank scenes from the life of Saint Francis or macabre images of the martyrdoms of Spanish saints, a wall of half-length devotional images of apostles by El Greco, Velázquez, and Ribera provided a perfect illustration of the evolution of the best of Spanish Baroque painting.

As a bonus, the era's wealth and its wide-ranging tastes were conjured up by an imaginative re-creation of the Duke of Lerma's camarín-a sort of Wunderkammer-inspired by the accounts of awestruck visitors. A staggering array of objects of the type collected by the immensely rich and powerful Duke (the de facto ruler of Spain, under Philip III) were ranged on tall shelves: Chinese porcelains, Venetian glass, Spanish earthenware with lustrous glazes, Mexican pottery, even a chambered nautilus. Goblets and perfume jars, vases and plates, bowls and cups from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Spain's vast New World empire evoked the seventeenth-century taste for the exotic and the luxurious. The elegance and abundance of the display seemed, in some ways, at odds with the undercurrent of austerity that always informs Spanish painting-the stiff-backed formality and asperity that persists no matter how opulent the embroidery and lace depicted. Like the selection of less familiar Spanish painters included in "El Greco to Velázquez," these precious objects enlarged our sense of the context in which these renowned masters worked and even enriched our sense of the seventeenth century, in general.

If "El Greco to Velázquez" broadened our ideas about Spanish painting, our preconceptions of the characteristics of Northern European painting were reinforced by the German artist Neo Rauch's exhibition of recent works at David Zwirner Gallery, last spring. No one could ever mistake Rauch's rather creepy, densely populated narratives for the work of a Southern European. Words like "pinched, sour, dislocated, crowded" present themselves, unbidden, when we are confronted by Rauch's paintings. It's almost impossible to figure out what's happening, but whatever it is, it seems sinister. In one recent painting, a legless man appears to have his way with a willing woman, seated on the lap of a fish-tailed man, on the hood of a car; in another, some sort of political allegory is enacted-or maybe not. (Many of these compositions are said to originate from dream imagery.)