ART
An Artist of Dual Allegiances
By KAREN WILKIN
 |
| 'Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene' (1625) by Hendrick ter Brugghen. |
Washington
In 2006, Pierre Rosenberg, the former director of the Louvre, published a book titled "Only in America: One Hundred Paintings in American Museums Unmatched in European Collections." The cover is a detail from "Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene," a spectacular devotional picture by the Dutch painter Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588-1629), from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. Made in 1625, the painting is unquestionably ter Brugghen's masterpiece—a powerfully constructed, dramatically lit fusion of Northern specificity with Italian generosity of form.
Ter Brugghen came by this double allegiance legitimately. Believed to be born in The Hague and to have first studied in Utrecht, he traveled to Italy about 1607 to hone his pictorial skills. There he met Peter Paul Rubens, who was on a similar quest, and remained in Rome until 1614. The most influential painter of the day was Caravaggio, whose unflinching dramas, enacted by large figures bathed in theatrical light, set new standards for intensity, economy and immediacy. Caravaggio was not in Rome during ter Brugghen's stay—he fled in 1606 after killing someone in a street fight and would die in exile in 1610—but some of his most potent works were visible in the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and San Luigi dei Francesi. Ter Brugghen absorbed the lessons of Caravaggio's paintings, as did many young artists all over Europe, and after his return to the Netherlands he became celebrated as one of a group of Utrecht painters now known as the Dutch Caravaggisti, specializing in both religious and genre paintings.
Oberlin's great painting makes clear how much ter Brugghen learned from Caravaggio (and from Caravaggio's followers), but it also reveals his individuality. The figures' ample scale, the way they fill the canvas edge to edge, nearly bursting into our own space, along with the sturdy geometry of the composition and the shaft of light illuminating the scene, all have Caravaggesque precedents. So does the brutal subject. Sebastian, a Roman soldier and a secret Christian, was shot full of arrows because of his faith; left for dead, he was rescued and nursed back to health by his fellow Christian, Irene. (He was definitively martyred later on, but that's another matter.) Ter Brugghen emphasizes the suffering young man's pallor, dwells on his strained arm muscles, and itemizes the arrow wounds, but where Caravaggio would have given us downstage gore, there are only delicate trickles of blood, neatly lined up with the picture plane. Also ter Brugghen's own is the tenderness with which Irene supports the collapsing martyr and begins to extract an arrow.
Since the Allen Memorial Art Museum is being renovated, selections from Oberlin's collection have been traveling and were seen last fall at the Phillips Collection. Earlier, "Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene" was at the Metropolitan, in New York, for comparison with that museum's own large ter Brugghen crucifixion, a gnarled, "Northern" picture so different from "Saint Sebastian" in spirit, scale and conception of the body that it was surprising to realize that the two pictures were painted about the same time. Oberlin's painting is now installed at the National Gallery, Washington, as the focal point of a miniature exhibition, "Larger Than Life," paired with the gallery's recently acquired ter Brugghen "Bagpipe Player" (1624), a robust half-length figure that exemplifies the secular side of the artist's practice as brilliantly as "Saint Sebastian" does the religious side.
"Bagpipe Player" is a slow picture, with none of the lush color notes or drama of "Saint Sebastian." But it shares a similar density and amplitude of construction, and a similar combination of Caravaggism and originality. The three figures in "Saint Sebastian" and the lone Bagpipe Player fill their respective canvases, carving out space with their bodies. Sebastian's angled torso and four-square legs, together with the lifted arms of Irene's helper, hold a memory of the complex arrangements of Caravaggio's great paintings in Santa Maria del Popolo; in the same way, the bare shoulder and the spatial articulation of the piper, as he turns away from us to concentrate on playing, remind us that ter Brugghen knew Caravaggio's paintings of ambiguous musicians. But the bagpipe player is no seductive Roman street boy. He's a chunky Northerner, despite his pastoral shirt and bare shoulder. The seduction comes from the painting's subtle orchestration of browns and creams, and the marvelous play of light on flesh and fabric.
"Larger Than Life" both refers to the size of ter Brugghen's figures and encapsulates the impact of the National Gallery's exhibition. A pair of small, crowded biblical scenes, by ter Brugghen's Utrecht Mannerist contemporaries, Roland Savery and Joachim Antonisz. Wtewael, provide contrast and context; otherwise it's just "Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene" and "Bagpipe Player." Yet these paradigmatic paintings tell us just about everything we need to know about ter Brugghen, the Utrecht School, and Dutch Caravaggism at its best. That's a lot.
Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.
MORE IN ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704422204576130501786334930.html?mod=WSJ_ArtsEnt_LifestyleArtEnt_4
No comments:
Post a Comment