AR102: ART HISTORY 2

From the Assembly Line of a Genius

By: Michael Kimmelman

The New York Times, January 14, 2005

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YOUNG, ethereal-looking beauty, big-eyed, rosy-cheeked, gazes down and off to the side, lost in thought, one hand to her breast. Her frizzy hair is a tangle of black and red chalk, a halo. White highlights pick out the light on her cheekbones and chin and around her mouth. The artist understands the nuance of skin as it stretches over bone, knows how to make flesh look silken and breathe.

The artist is Peter Paul Rubens, and the drawing is in the Rubens show opening this afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum. Rubens exhibitions come and go all the time in Europe, but not so often in this country, until lately, it seems. A cache of his oil sketches recently arrived at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. And now this, the first big Rubens drawings survey ever in the United States.

Why the historic reluctance (if that's the right thing to call it) on Americans' part toward Rubens? He was too Baroque, too Catholic, I suppose—all those angels, all that rolling, dimpled flesh. The funny thing about Rubens's reputation, of course, is that his work isn't really mystical or erotic. It's sensuous. He was the most mature sort of artist, a painter of women, not girls—he was of this world, in other words, and also out of it, virtuosically speaking.

We love Rembrandt: Protestant, sober, brooding, the champion of burghers and bankers. He even has a catchy riches-to-rags story (never mind that it's full of holes). By contrast, Rubens's life is a flat line of shining success. No setbacks, no hesitations. Born in Antwerp in 1577, into the family of a prominent lawyer and alderman, given a classical education and boarded in a noble household so he would learn aristocratic manners, he lived his entire life, until 1640, as a beloved figure, a court painter, rich, esteemed by kings, employed as a high-level diplomat, admired for his kindness and learning, married to beautiful women. He worked tirelessly to improve himself, from beginning to end.

And he was ridiculously gifted. The Met show is sublime. The curators are Michiel Plomp and Anne-Marie Logan, of the drawings department. It makes not the slightest difference that they have no grand thesis, provide no narrative arc, offer up a few newly discovered drawings and fresh, solid scholarship but no radical twist on the artist. If there is any artistic justice, the exhibition ought to inspire the sort of mobbish devotion that the Met show of Leonardo's drawings did two years ago.

Reviewing the work seems a bit silly. What is there to say, except that the drawings illustrate the limits of what is humanly possible with a piece of chalk and a pen and paper? It is profoundly heartening. Rubens loved to draw and loved that he could draw like a god, and his joy is ours, in looking at what he drew. Most shows these days are too big. With 115 drawings and a few related prints, this one isn't small, but I would gladly have looked at another hundred drawings if they were all this interesting.

Drawings stress one tendentious aspect of Rubens: the artist on his own, without assistants, in the process of thinking. They are a modern way to approach his art.

I mean modern in the sense that for Rubens drawings were rough drafts toward finished paintings or prints and also instructional tools for pupils to copy. He did not regard them as we would regard artists' drawings today, as ends in themselves. They were not meant to be seen publicly. Rubens kept them to himself, in his studio, like trade secrets, so that no one outside would steal his ideas, or see him at anything except his best (not that he was ever anything except his best). A show of drawings would no doubt have shocked him.

It demonstrates his industrial process. He conceived a painting in steps. First came quick pen and ink sketches, rudimentary, like mental notes jotted down. A swift washy ink sketch of Judith killing Holofernes suggests his speed and ease: it's a robust miracle of pure, condensed drama, Holofernes's foreshortened body twisting below the athletic Judith's upraised sword, which is hidden in shadow, hard light picking out her tensed neck and broad back.

Judith Killing Holofernes, c.1609-10

From the ink sketches, Rubens developed more elaborate drawings and oil sketches, like small paintings (whereupon he seems to have felt free to throw away the jottings, which even drawings collectors in his day would not have regarded as valuable).

Yet more refined drawings would follow the oil sketches, for which live models assumed the poses of figures in the compositions. Finally, apprentices would paint the paintings, with the oil sketches and detailed drawings as guides. Rubens would come in at the end to touch things up (adjusting the price depending on how much he contributed). It was Baroque art's luxury version of an assembly line, albeit an assembly line overseen by a genius, who employed assistants who were geniuses, too, like Anthony van Dyck.

The show has a few little reproductions of his paintings on wall labels, but it might have benefited from some of the oil sketches and real paintings to illustrate his studio procedure. A late gouache of Hercules and Minerva battling Mars is a kind of oil sketch on paper rather than canvas, and it gives you a fleeting sense of Rubens's color and also of his restless, spirited hand in later years: a swirl of activity, it shows brawny figures straining for embodiment but succumbing to Rubens's supercharged brush.

At the Albertina in Vienna, which organized the show with the Met, Rubens's painting ''Daniel in the Lions' Den'' was exhibited alongside drawings for it, the picture having been flown from Washington in its own jet. Not here. The drawings, of lions Rubens must have gone to sketch at the zoo in Ghent, are alone.

Daniel in the Lions' Den, 1615

So be it. The drawings speak for themselves. Some of the best are of his family, of the landscape around his country house, of his cows: meditations on happiness and prosperity, which could become fodder for paintings, too. They are intimate and immediate. His portrait of Nicolas Trigault, a Jesuit missionary, standing stiffly in a Chinese costume is, by Rubens's standards, also a model of opulent restraint: with just a hint of blue in the collar, red on the face, the action distilled into the heavy folds of the silk robe.

Portrait of Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume, 1617

Restraint of a sort—although, being restless and full of ideas, Rubens clearly didn't leave anything alone if he thought he could improve on it. His ''Baptism of Christ,'' an early commission from the Duke of Mantua, one of the glories in this exhibition, is a delicate essay in outsize musculature and faint touch, going Michelangelo one better. Twisting he-men disport around the thick trunk of a phallic tree. Like Michelangelo, Rubens devised ever more complex ways of drawing figures: his ''Susanna'' is a coiled spring, her right leg positioned back to us, hips turned 45 degrees, shoulders turned farther around, head even more so, so that she looks behind her at one of the spying elders, whom we can see obliquely, from the side and below.

He couldn't even leave his own art as it was: the last works in the show are drawings for prints based on a Rubens painting, ''The Garden of Love.'' Rubens started the drawings, evidently got bored after a while and decided he had done enough, then asked the printmaker, Christoffel Jegher, to fill in the figures with pen and brown ink, but still couldn't help himself and went back in after Jegher to add some white highlights and tinker with his brush.

The Garden of Love, 1634

My favorite works are a few old master drawings with which Rubens also fussed, sticking in angels here, touching up a beard there. He amassed stacks of these often anonymous drawings. On a 16th-century Swiss drawing of a young woman holding a shield, he performed plastic surgery: he softened her face, puffed up her sleeves, rearranged her hair and tucked the shield behind her skirt, which he made to look more billowy. As I said, drawings weren't valued the same way back then. One of Rubens's own drawings, of a crouching man, includes some black shadows added a century later by Jacob de Wit.

Crouching Man Seen From the Back, c.1610

I love these curios because they are like musical improvisations. Rubens riffed on other artists' melodies, adding his own trills and cadenzas. It was an act of homage, not defacement. One plus one equaled two, or three. It helped, obviously, that Rubens was the equivalent of Mozart or Duke Ellington or Beethoven building his cathedral of variations on Diabelli's little waltz. Rubens regarded drawings, other people's and his own, as organic, to be learned from and endlessly improved upon, like life.