TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011491/0114400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.0 KB | 169 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 58

A Meteor That Didn't Burn Out


The precocious Van Dyck chased the Tudor stiffness out of
English painting

By ROBERT HUGHES


    King Charles I of England had several court painters, not
all equally lucky. Anthony van Dyck was the luckiest of all.
But how could one envy, say, Richard Gibson? He was not only
a miniaturist but a dwarf who at a court banquet had to skip
from a pie and walk the length of the table bearing portraits
of the King and Queen he had copied after Van Dyck on playing
cards. It cannot have been fun to be this small, if distinct,
talent, awaiting his cue in a dark pastry coffin. But to be Van
Dyck himself? A different matter.

    A child prodigy at 14, a full professional by his early 20s
and dead at 42, Van Dyck had one of those careers that is
conventionally dubbed meteoric -- except that it did not burn
out. His name has lasted three centuries. Which is not to say
that he has altogether received his due. In a curious way, Van
Dyck remains a somewhat underrated artist, as anyone might if
he had to be constantly compared with Rubens, his master, and
Titian, his even greater model. Especially, he is not well
known to the American public, though some of his finest
paintings are in America, owing to the vogue for his portraits
among the robber barons of the early 20th century. Those who
saw "Van Dyck in England," organized by Oliver Millar for the
National Portrait Gallery in London eight years ago, are not
likely to forget the impact of its high-strung, cool
virtuosity. But the show did not travel to the U.S., and so the
Van Dyck exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, curated with such care and scholarly zest by three
art historians -- Susan J. Barnes, Julius S. Held and Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr. -- offers many people their first proper look at
this artist.

    Van Dyck covered a lot of territory in his short life. He
was Rubens' most gifted assistant in Antwerp, and his early
ability to reproduce the style of his idol has led to prolonged
squabbles over the attribution of some of his early paintings.
What they leave no doubt of is Van Dyck's precocity, the speed
with which he metabolized the lessons of his master. In 1620,
when he was only 21, he was hired by King James I as a court
painter in London. A year later he was in Genoa, painting its
nobles and dignitaries, making study trips to Rome, Florence
and Palermo. By 1627 he was back in Antwerp, and by 1632 the
new English monarch, Charles I, had brought him back to London,
knighted him and made him "principalle Paynter in ordinary to
their Majesties." For his last 10 years he moved between
London, Antwerp and Paris, accumulating honors, commissions and
fame. All in all, he was as genuinely international a painter
as Rubens had been, though he did not fly at quite the same
diplomatic height.

    In Washington one gets a full sense of his range, which was
very large, from formal to intimate portraiture, from state
commemoration to religious allegory. His big religious
paintings, mostly for Flemish churches, are bravura
performances, but none of them have the trumpeting conviction
or the sheer inventiveness of Rubens'. His best paintings were
his portraits and his secular allegories, like Rinaldo and
Armida, 1629, done under the spell of Titian. Taken from
Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, a great favorite at
Charles' court, it illustrates the moment when the sorceress
Armida falls in love with the wandering Christian knight
Rinaldo on glimpsing his sleeping face. The sensuous color, the
glow of flesh and even the eyeline of the scene -- shot, as it
were, from slightly below -- recall the Titians and Veroneses
that Van Dyck had avidly studied in Venice seven years before;
the flutter of Armida's red cloak, a discreet image of erotic
turmoil, recalls the love god's cloak in Titian's Bacchus and
Ariadne.

    Van Dyck was truly a painter's painter. There is nothing
intimidating about his work, as there often is about Rubens'.
He loved private character and painted the interplay between
that character and the public mask with a sensitivity that few
artists have rivaled since. Sometimes he would seem to have
done this by guesswork. His 1633 portrait of Henry Percy, "the
Wizard Earl" who spent 16 years of his life immured in the
Tower of London for his supposed complicity in the Gunpowder
Plot, is an icon of saturnine intellect, from the same
introspective domain as Robert Burton's The Anatomy of
Melancholy. But Van Dyck probably never met Percy, who died in
1632; he was working from a younger portrait by someone else.

    Van Dyck loved the stuff of the world -- the shimmer and
exact texture of fabrics (he was, after all, the son of a silk
merchant in Antwerp), the brightness of flesh or the passing
melancholy that settles on a face, the layering of vapor and
light in the sky, the sheen of armor. In this sense of
lavishness he was, of course, very much Titian's heir, and it
is wonderful to see how much pictorial interest he could
discover in inert substances -- particularly the brocades and
velvets worn by his sitters -- in the course of translating
them into patches and trails of pigment on canvas. He endowed
the gold damascened parade armor of Emmanuel Philiberto of
Savoy with a density of inspection that makes you feel you
could lift it off the canvas if the prince were not wearing it.

    The mark of Van Dyck's style is its extraordinary
refinement, a delicacy that runs counter to what English 17th
century taste had come to expect from Holland: "robustious
boistrous druncken headed imaginary Gods," as Charles I's agent
in Brussels remarked when trying to decide on an artist from
whom to commission a story of Cupid and Psyche.

    Van Dyck was not given to theorizing, but an intriguing
phrase crops up in his scattered writings: he wanted to
achieve, he said, een loechte maniere, "an airy style." In the
process, writes Jeffrey M. Muller in the catalog, he
"intentionally formed a style representative of grace." Grace
meant facility, apparent ease, but in no superficial way: a
style analogous to the poise and manners of the true gentleman,
a conception of human character that was forming at the Stuart
court even as he worked there and was thought to radiate from
the person of the King. Let the French have their Roi Soleil,
a periwigged divinity; Van Dyck would give the court an
iconography of kingship that was, if not exactly informal, at
least more humanly accessible.

    When Bernini was to do a sculpture of Charles and would not
come to England, it was Van Dyck who supplied the "natural"
image of the King -- three faces, looking left, right and
straight ahead -- from which the Roman artist was to work. Van
Dyck's portraits of Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria fixed
them for posterity with a completion that few later artists
could rival. They have the subtlest quality of propaganda: they
make you forget that they are propaganda. If we think of
Charles as the cultivated king par excellence, it is largely
thanks to Van Dyck. There cannot be a more tender and intimate
royal portrait than his effigy of the couple in conversation
in a rocky landscape, their bonding signified by, among other
things, their dress -- he in pink slashed silk with pale gray
showing beneath, she in the same gray with pink ribbons and
laces; he giving her an olive twig, she giving him a laurel
wreath.

    Here and elsewhere in this excellent show, one sees Van Dyke
chasing the Tudor stiffness out of painting, inventing the
conventions of future English portraiture, the tropes on which
Gainsborough, Reynolds and even Sargent would continually draw.
The court he served was the most sophisticated one England
would ever have. He did not outlive it; it was collapsing as
he lay dying at the end of 1641. But Van Dyck had already
changed English art decisively, and much for the better.