Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/062992/06299936.000

Text File | 1992-09-24 | 6KB | 122 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 81

ART

The Vision of The Squinter


By ROBERT HUGHES

    EXHIBIT: "Guercino"
    WHERE: The Drawing Center, New York City
    WHAT: 60 Drawings from the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle

    THE BOTTOM LINE: These superb, spontaneous works show a
17th century master at his best.


    Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known from
childhood and, since his death, to art history as Guercino --
"the Squinter." Thus he joins Masaccio ("Tom the Lump") and
Sodoma among the notable Italian painters who survive in
pejorative nicknames. One flinches to think what this practice
might have done to the self-esteem of artists in the late 20th
century had it gone on.

    The beautiful show of Guercino drawings on loan from the
Royal Collection in Windsor Castle that opened this month at the
Drawing Center in New York City reminds you, moreover, how
labile reputation can be. Guercino was one of those 17th century
Italian artists who sank under the weight of an earlier age's
revival. Critics and collectors at the end of the 19th century
were so obsessed with the study and acquisition of Renaissance
art that they had little time for the seicento; for them,
Italian genius lay in "primitive" gold-ground altarpieces and
15th and 16th century frescoes. Consequently, Guercino, like a
number of his contemporaries -- Guido Reni and the Carraccis,
for instance, or even Caravaggio -- was slighted. The first
Guercino exhibition was not held until three centuries after his
death, in his birthplace in central Italy, the small Emilian
city of Cento, in 1967. His rediscovery was due almost entirely
to the love and labors of one English art historian, the late
Denis Mahon, who wrote the basic texts on him, defined the canon
of his work and was probably the last connoisseur to "own"
single-handedly a major European artist in this way.

    Guercino worked in an age when, although the mechanisms of
fame were becoming more centralized, it was still possible to
sustain a life's work on a provincial reputation. He lived in
Emilia most of his life. But Rome was the great magnet, and he
almost made it to the Roman big time when his patron, the
Bolognese Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, became Pope in 1621 and
summoned Guercino to the Vatican. There he painted one enormous
canvas, the Burial and Reception into Heaven of Saint
Petronilla, for an altar in Saint Peter's, but the Pope died in
1623, and back to Cento the painter went. Later he moved to
nearby Bologna. Guercino had a steady stream of commissions from
local churches in Emilia, but from Rome's point of view he was
overshadowed by other Bolognese virtuosi who worked in the
metropolis: the Carraccis and especially Reni.

    And in fact, Guercino did not have Reni's breathtaking
skill as a painter. But he was not afflicted by Reni's
sentimentality either, and where he shone, as this compact and
rewarding show makes clear, was in the act of drawing. By
comparison with his preparatory drawings, Guercino's final
paintings are quite often labored and stodgy. It is the drawings
that contain his finest and most spontaneously registered
perceptions, and fortunately many survive. George III, an avid
collector, acquired nearly 350 of them, of which 60 are in the
Drawing Center's show, and this can be only a fraction of the
stream of sketches and preliminary studies, caricatures and
genre scenes that flowed from Guercino's hand.

    No doubt one's preference for Guercino's drawings over his
paintings is partly caused by the modern liking for the
immediate over the highly finished. Guercino liked the flicker
of consciousness to show. In a famous passage, Leonardo da Vinci
advised the painter to take inspiration from random pattern,
like the mottled stains on an old wall; Guercino seems to have
believed this too. One of the drawings in the show, Three
Bathers Surprised by a Monster, starts with some random
splatters of ink on the blank page; briskly and humorously, with
a few minimal strokes, one of these blot clusters is converted
into the animal face of a creature with haglike breasts that
surges out of a pool to frighten the bathing nymphs.

    At times there is something proleptically surrealistic
about Guercino -- or is it only that the Surrealists picked up
on some of the mannerisms Guercino shared with other Italian
artists, the exaggerated perspectives, the distant figures? For
whatever reasons, there is one drawing in the show -- a
scarecrow large in the foreground, ominous birds, a tiny
gesticulating woman -- that could have come straight out of the
background of a Dali.

    The mainstream of Guercino's graphic work was his studies
for commissions. He worked in many media -- chalk, charcoal,
crayon, pencil -- but his favorite was pen and ink wash, from
which he produced brilliant summaries of movement, light and
shade. The trace of the pen twists and flourishes, now with a
liquid agitation, now in sheaves of parallel hatching as tense
as wires. Nodes of darkness in a head or down the flank of a
torso link up across the whiteness of the paper, and the
fearlessness of tonal range attests to Guercino's mastery. He
could work passages of light and dark that no reproduction can
successfully convey.

    One example is the mopheads of the practicing choristers
in Four Youths Singing, Watched by an Old Man, in which glints
of white paper show through the dense tangle of pen and wash,
providing the highlights within the hair. In such drawings, the
balance between specific details like this and the more
generalized effects -- the well-judged breadth of tonal washes
that firm up the singing group, or the intricate set of quick
dabs to give the bony structure of the old music teacher's face
-- can still surprise you. Four hundred years after his birth,
the Squinter remains as fresh as a daisy.