Rubens’ The Judgment of Paris
KEY WORKS: As with Titian, it’s the shooting match, not the individual shot. However, The Judgment of Paris (National Gallery, London; that’s his second wife in the middle); the Marie de’ Medici series (Louvre, Paris; thirty-six panels’ worth of commemoration); and the late landscapes (various museums), with the Rubens family chateau in the background, will give you a sense of his range.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: A rung down the ladder, Anthony van Dyck, the portraitist of aristocrats, especially English ones, and Rubens’ one-time assistant. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN (1606-1669)
Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait
The son of a miller and a baker’s daughter, with a face— famous from over a hundred self-portraits—much likened to a loaf of bread. But, as Miss Piggy, herself every inch a Rubens gal, might say, quel loaf of bread. The man who manipulated tonality (lights and darks, to you) and eschewed contour better than anybody ever, Rembrandt was also the painter who realized, first and most fully, that the eye could take in a human figure, the floor it was standing on, the wall behind it, plus the flock of pigeons visible through the window in that wall, without having to make any conscious adjustments. (If we were talking automotive rather than art history, Rembrandt would be the advent of the automatic transmission.) More than that, even, Rembrandt was the very model of the sensitive and perceptive person, as some of us used to say sophomore year, taking the sober, commonplace Dutch panorama—guildhall and slum, merchant and beggar—and portraying it in all its poignancy and detail; even Christianity, the inspiration for the other half of the Rembrandtian output, becomes, in his hands and for the first time since Giotto, an affair for ordinary men and women. And if all that’s not enough, Rembrandt’s still the answer most game-show contestants would come up with when asked to name a famous painter. Historical generalization: Rembrandt (and the rest of the seventeenth-century Dutch, who had no popes or patrons farming out commissions) turned out the first art to be consumed exclusively by us mere-mortal types, paintings that were to be tucked under your arm, carried home, and hung over the living-room sofa.
KEY WORKS: Many. The ones that come up over and over are The Night Watch and The Syndics of the Cloth Guild (the latter adopted by the Dutch Masters cigars folks; both, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and a pair of late self-portraits (1659, National Gallery, London; 1660, Kenwood, London). And you’ll need one of the religious paintings, perhaps Return of the Prodigal Son (Hermitage, Leningrad). But beware: Since 1968, the Rembrandt Research Project, based in Amsterdam, has been reassessing the authenticity of the entire Rembrandt corpus. Among the casualties: The Polish Rider, The Man in the Golden Helmet, and The Girl at the Door, each now attributed to a different student of Rembrandt’s.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Lots of them; painting and painters were as much in evidence in seventeenth-century Holland as they’d been in fifteenth-century Florence. You should know Frans Hals (impulsive, with a predilection for people hanging out and getting drunk) and Jan Vermeer (intimate, with a predilection for people opening mail and pouring milk). Everybody else is categorized as a “Little Dutchman,” a genre painter specializing in landscapes, still lifes, portraits, or interiors. CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
The problem is, you’re dealing with two legendary reputations (and that’s not counting Manet, Monet’s hip contemporary). The first Monet is the Father of Impressionism. You remember Impressionism: the mid-nineteenth-century movement that grabbed an easel and a handful of paintbrushes and announced it was going outdoors; that attempted to capture the spontaneous and transitory effects of light and color by painting with the eye (and what it saw), rather than with the mind (and what it knew to be true); that couldn’t have cared less about form, in the sense of either composition or solidity; that was initially reviled by the conservative French critics and artgoing public; and that wound up becoming, in our time, the most popular, most cooed-over style of painting ever. The second Monet is the great-uncle of Modernism, the man who—getting progressively blinder and more obsessed with reducing the visible world to terms of pure light—eventually gave up form altogether and took out the first patent on abstraction; it’s this Monet the avant-garde has tended to prefer. Note to those wondering what happened to the eighteenth century: You shouldn’t exactly forget about it, but any hundred-year period whose biggest box-office draw is Watteau is strictly optional.
Monet’s Terrace at Sainte-Adresse
KEY WORKS: For the Impressionist Monet: at your discretion. Try Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1866, Metropolitan, New York) or Impression—Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris). For the proto-Modernist Monet: The touchstones are the Rouen Cathedral series (1894, Metropolitan, New York, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others) and the water lilies series (1899, 1904–1925, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Carnegie Institute Art Museum, Pittsburgh, among others).
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: The only “true” Impressionists besides Monet are Pissarro and Sisley. Manet is a proto-Impressionist, among other things. Degas and Renoir are quasi-Impressionists. Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin are post-Impressionists. And Toulouse-Lautrec is played by José Ferrer, on his knees, with his feet strapped to his buttocks. PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906)
This is a test. Pass it—that is, “get” what Cézanne was up to, maybe even like it—and chances are you’ll have no trouble with “modern” art, abstraction, alienation, and all. Flunk it—that is, wonder what the fuss is about and move immediately on to Van Gogh and/or Gauguin—and you’ve got big problems ahead of you. As to what Cézanne was up to, exactly: First, he was rejecting Impressionism (note that he’s an exact contemporary of Monet), not only its commitment to transience and to truth-as-what-the-eye-sees, but its affiliation with the bourgeoisie and the boulevards; Cézanne wanted to infuse some gravity, even grandeur, back into painting. Second, he was refuting classical “one-point” perspective, which makes the viewer the person on whom everything converges and for whom everything is done. For Cézanne “seeing” was a process, a weighing of choices, not a product. (He also decreed color, not line, to be the definer of form; geometry, not the needs of composition, to be its basis; and the laws of representation to be revokable at will.) Third, he was single-handedly reversing the pendulum swing toward representational “accuracy” that Giotto had set in motion six hundred years before; from here on in, how you perceive is going to count for more than what you perceive, the artist’s modus operandi for more than the illusions he can bring off. Granted, this is pretty heavy stuff, but at least the paintings are sensuous, inviting, and still of the world as we know it. The sledding gets rougher with Picasso and the Cubists, up next.