A Dutch Master’s Surreal Visions

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/arts/design/a-dutch-masters-surreal-visions.html

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If you happened to see Werner Herzog’s video installation “Hearsay of the Soul” in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, you have already caught sight of the startlingly experimental etched vistas of the 17th-century Dutch master of the Golden Age, Hercules Segers. Greatly magnified details of his strangely barren, slightly unreal landscapes dominated Mr. Herzog’s five-channel video installation, which paid homage to Dutch artistry.

In “The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers,” a large, mesmerizing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we experience Segers’s epic prints whole, at full force. Segers used printmaking as it had never been used before, primarily to improvise unique artworks. If Mr. Herzog is a fan of his wonderlands, so was Rembrandt, who was influenced by Segers’s working methods and owned at least eight of his paintings, one printing plate and probably some prints. But much of Segers’s work was subsequently lost and biographical information is scant. As a result, his audaciousness has yet to receive its due.

This is the biggest Segers show staged anywhere, and the first held in the United States. It originated last fall at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has the world’s largest holdings in Segers, and has been overseen at the Met by Nadine M. Orenstein, who leads its department of prints and drawings. The show represents nearly all 53 of Segers’s known prints and contains more than half of his 182 surviving impressions, six of his 16 paintings and his two extant oil studies.

In prints, Segers was both a master technician and a visionary, besotted with color, fascinated by the textures possible with both the etching needle and other processes like the sugar lift, which he invented. Now called ground lift, it uses dissolving sugar to create texture. Dropping from sight, the technique was rediscovered 150 years later by the 18th-century English artist Paul Sandby, who is credited for it.

Segers apparently had little use for printmaking’s traditional goal of producing identical images, and only a passing interest in reality. Seemingly obsessed with mountains, he is thought never to have traveled beyond the Low Countries to actually see any. What he knew was gleaned from engravings of Alpine scenes based on designs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which may have freed, or required, him to imagine his lunar, almost surreal versions of the natural world. At their best and weirdest, they are full of impossibly similar pocked stones.

Segers, born around 1589 in Haarlem, was apprenticed in 1612 to a leading landscape painter in Amsterdam. After living briefly in The Hague, where printmaking was thriving, he returned to Amsterdam, married well, bought a house and prospered. Around 1630, his finances collapsed and the house was sold. After working briefly as an art dealer in Utrecht, he died, broke, possibly alcoholic, in The Hague, sometime between 1633 and 1638.

Segers’s disregard for the boundaries between mediums makes him feel very contemporary. He printed in blue, green and blue-green inks on paper washed with pink, blue, green or purple-brown, and frequently brushed on more color. He gave one rocky valley dark thunderclouds and backed a tree with a pink-and-blue sunset. Sometimes the color turns parts of landscapes ghostly and vague or is applied so casually that the prints are considered unfinished. It is applied more deliberately in one of seven impressions of “Valley With a River and a Town With Four Towers,” where orange rocks sit on blue ground. But no wonder Segers’s contemporaries called his efforts “painted prints.”

The show moves chronologically through Segers’s short, intense maturity, from 1618 to 1630. The works in the first gallery present the raw bones of his talent in small, delicate images of forests, farms and ruins: namely, his uncannily fine line and sensitivity to contrasting textures. Besides landscapes, he etched a stack of books that may be the first print of a still life made in Europe. He also depicted fairly accurately the buildings seen from a wood-lined room in his house; it has the all-inclusive magnetism of a great children’s book illustration. The largest print here, “Mountain Valley With Dead Pine Trees” (1622-25), introduces full-blown Segers. He confines most signs of civilization to the distance, usually limiting human life in the foreground to solitary travelers moving along stony roads.

The second gallery accentuates Segers’s refusal of repetition, especially in groups of impressions made from single plates whose extreme differences are mapped by helpfully clear labels. The shifts in color and clarity can amaze. In one version of “Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg From the South: Large Version,” painted additions in dark blues and reds all but obliterate the printed image. The seven versions of “Valley With a River and a Town With Four Towers” seem to track different times of day, starting with a version in black ink that has a stark high-noon brightness.

These groupings continue in the third gallery, where several of Segers’s last prints are among his largest and most complex. Sometimes the results are surprisingly conventional, especially in “Mountain Valley With Fenced Fields,” whose first version resembles a 19th-century hand-tinted engraving. But it’s not Segers’s fault that we see it that way. He printed the second version with blue ink and brushed on more blue, creating a lush nocturne that seems lighted by a full moon.

This exhibition has aspects of a valuable tutorial in etching, especially if you attend to its labels. And despite the lost personal history. it introduces a palpably impassioned sensibility and transgressive rule breaker, and it does so with one of the dreamiest, most immersive presentations of the year.