Rubens and His Legacy: crass analogies, bad ideas – and barely any Rubens
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Version 0 of 1. The irritation started when I entered the first room of the Royal Academy’s much-touted epic exhibition Rubens and His Legacy and my eyes fell on a painting by John Constable. It is hard to think of a painter who has less in common with Rubens. But the curators have spotted one connection I never guessed: they both painted rainbows. Perhaps this room should also include paintings with rainbows in them by Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay and the Chapman brothers. Why not? That is the RA’s less than precise approach to art history. So Rubens invented the rainbow, apparently. He also invented the grand portrait, the nude and Jesus Christ – or so you might believe if you took Rubens and His Legacy seriously. To be fair, Constable’s intensely churned landscape painting Cottage at East Bergholt (c 1833) does indeed emulate the composition of Rubens’ Landscape with Rainbow (mid-1630s) hanging nearby. The trouble is, such isolated facts are given hugely exaggerated significance in this sloppy exhibition. Rubens and His Legacy tries to distort the rich and complex story of art to fit a simplistic big idea. Constable, Turner and Gainsborough – all of whose landscapes are juxtaposed with those of Rubens here – were fascinated by the great European masters: their biggest “influence” was the 17th-century French landscape artist Claude. So why try to claim that Rubens was somehow their one true source? Rubens and His Legacy applies a simplistic theory and smashes as much evidence as it can into its rigid, short-sighted argument that Rubens is the fons et origo of almost everything painters have ever done. And not just painters: in an incredibly desperate extra room of the exhibition, curated by mediocre Royal Academician Jenny Saville, there are sculptures by Sarah Lucas and Rebecca Warren, whose carnality is roped in as “Rubens-like”. Come on. Two fried eggs and a baroque kebab? At some shallow level there is, of course, a crass analogy that’s not worth making between Lucas’s stockinged nude sprawled on a chair and a Rubens woman – but it’s not a revealing insight about either artist. Far more baffling is the inclusion of a Warhol portrait of Jackie Kennedy. Or did I dream it? I really don’t see any possible similarity between Rubens and Warhol. Thinking very hard, the Warhol portrait is presumably meant to fit into the exhibition’s sub-category of “Elegance”. Rubens and His Legacy is arranged according to a series of themes that sum up aspects of Rubens, including “Poetry”, “Power”, “Lust” and “Violence”. The Elegance room – it sounds like a department of Harrods – sets the grand social portraits of Rubens alongside artists they “influenced”. What this means is that a truly fascinating picture by Rubens – his fantastical, ingenious portrait of Marchesa aria Grimaldi, and her Dwarf (c 1606) in which a ruff collar takes on the proportions and complexity of the Milky Way and the beautiful Grimaldi is closely accompanied by her jowly retainer – is shown among a host of lesser works. Blimey, it turns out that Van Dyck was influenced by Rubens! That’s scarcely news, since he was his assistant. What is striking, though, is how flat and dull his portrait of a Genoese noblewoman looks alongside his master’s masterpiece. Dullness is this room’s ruling spirit. Facing the Rubens is a whole row of tall dead portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and the like. Perhaps this exhibition is trying to show that Rubens was a really bad influence on art. Why else include a sentimental copy of his Christ on the Cross by the trite Victorian animal artist Sir Edwin Landseer? You may be wondering how, with all these works by apparently every European artist born since 1600, the curators have found space for the splendid array of dazzling paintings by Rubens at the heart of the exhibition. The answer is: they haven’t. There are just six major Rubens – less than one per room – as well as a smattering of oil sketches and drawings. Around this mere handful of works by its hero – which do at least include his sumptuous The Garden of Love (c 1635) and his vulnerable, shivering nude the Venus Frigida (1614) – the curators have strung together a fragile daisy chain of prints, copies and daubs of dubious relevance, and sometimes very poor quality. Did crucial loans fall through? Rubens seems at times to have vanished from his own show. There are many copies of his colossal The Fall of the Damned, which the catalogue calls “without doubt one of the most impressive paintings” in Munich’s venerable art museum the Alte Pinakothek – but no Fall of the Damned. I found this stress on an absent work frustrating, to say the least. Ideas can be revelatory, exciting and inspiring even when they are dead wrong. Of course exhibitions should take on ambitious arguments and make unexpected comparisons. But the idea here does not open up new ways of seeing. The RA’s search for echoes of Rubens even when they are very tenuous becomes quite risible. The publicity emphasises Cezanne. I expected a whole section about how this revolutionary artist engaged with Rubens. Instead there is just one early Bathers composition by him. The women are a bit plump – Rubens-like? Maybe, maybe not. Picasso is wheeled on too, but his print of a satyr contemplating a nymph is a homage to Rembrandt, not Rubens. This entire exhibition is based on a colossal and obvious distortion of the truth. The implication throughout is that Rubens generated western art’s great themes. Yet he himself claimed no such originality. If he invented anything, it was the cult of influence itself. Rubens was self-consciously and openly indebted to other artists. He spent years studying the Italian Renaissance. His elegant portraits? They pay homage to Titian and Veronese. His triptych of the dead Christ? Its Christ is a sculpture by Michelangelo. His colossal hunting scene? It is part of a series of violent images in which Rubens works out his obsession with Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari. Rubens is not a solitary source of painterly genius, but a gregarious master who never hid his own quotations of earlier art. A serious exhibition about his influence would need to start with the influences on him. Art is an endless game of copying, parody and rejection: imitation and rivalry. This exhibition fails to say anything about the compex phenomenon of influence, or to make a genuine case for the importance of Rubens. Maybe the otherwise enigmatic presence of Andy Warhol is an allusion to his disaster paintings. For Rubens and His Legacy is a car crash. |