TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050889/05088900.068

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.4 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 95

The Partial Comeback of A Fallen Angel


After long neglect, a look at the 17th century's Guido Reni

By Robert Hughes


    Anyone who thinks art reputations, once made, are
imperishable, should think again -- about Guido Reni
(1575-1642). The retrospective show of 51 of his paintings is
on view through May 14 at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth,
having been seen in Bologna (in a larger form) and Los Angeles.
Reni was the leading Bolognese artist of the 17th century. For
nearly 200 years after his death, he was adored by a long line
of connoisseurs and tourists who held him to have been
angelically inspired, the greatest painter of his age: as famous
in his own way as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Van Gogh or Picasso.
Percy Bysshe Shelley thought that if some cataclysm destroyed
Rome, the loss of Raphael and Guido Reni would "be alone
regretted."

    But the scaly truth is that taste changes; and an anthology
of writings on Reni at the end of the catalog charts his fall.
You see the first puff of feathers detach itself from the wing
of the Angelic Limner in 1846, when John Ruskin lets fly in
Modern Painters: "A taint and stain, and jarring discord . . .
marked sensuality and impurity." In 1895 Romain Rolland downed
him: "He was able to deceive two entire centuries . . . Guido's
laborious conscientiousness is void of thought and true
feeling." Two years later, Bernard Berenson wrung his neck: "We
turn away from Guido Reni with disgust unspeakable." And it was
downhill from there; in 1910 one of his versions of Bacchus and
Ariadne sold at Christie's for just under (pounds)10, a fraction
of its auction price 60 years before. The nadir was in the late
'50s, when you could get a 10-ft. Guido Reni (if you wanted it,
which few did) for less than $300 at auction. Reni's posthumous
career is not one the heroes of the Late Modernist Art Industry
can contemplate with equanimity.

    What did him in? For the Victorians, the growing belief
that his piety was hypocritical. More seriously, Reni's
frequent combination of tepid high-mindedness and relentless
self-repetition looked insincere to early 20th century eyes. The
classicism of his languidly yearning saints, rolling their
eyeballs to the light of heaven, seemed trite and formulaic.

    Much of it still does. Reni did not make things easy for
himself. Apart from being superstitious (he kept seeing a
phantom light over his bed) and timid to the point of paranoia
(he refused any food sent to him as a gift for fear that it was
poisoned), he was a compulsive gambler. It was his only vice.
His sex life should certainly have appealed to prudish Ruskin,
for it did not exist: he shunned women in the fear that they
might be witches. But gambling debts led him to churn out hack
paintings, with predictable results for his reputation.

    Still, an artist deserves to be judged on his best work,
and the idea that Reni was just a painter of saccharine
devotional figures does not stand up. He will never get back on
the pedestal he occupied in the 17th and 18th centuries,
alongside Raphael. But there was a distinct grandeur in Reni,
which his sometimes irksome professional smoothness served, and
it is still perceptible today.

    This show is the first in a generation to restore Reni; the
last one, in his native Bologna, was in 1954. To a great extent
it succeeds. When the various phases of Reni's work are
assembled, he comes across as a far more diverse and interesting
painter than one ever expected. His precocity and rate of
absorption were equally striking, and they made room for sly
humor, as in a pastiche of Caravaggio he did around 1605, when
he was barely 30: David with the Head of Goliath, the David
sporting a raffishly theatrical feather in his cap as he tilts
the severed head like a connoisseur quizzing a sculptor. Some
of his key paintings, such as the Prado's extraordinary Atalanta
and Hippomenes, in which he achieved a grand synthesis of
Caravaggism and classical diction, are missing from Fort Worth.
But it is quite clear from a work like Joseph and Potiphar's
Wife that Reni could endow human figures with a Caravaggio-like
density and passion while pointing the way for a classicism
still to come. The figure of Joseph, moving away in its sandals
and serene quadrant of ocher cloak, might be striding toward his
eventual home in one of Poussin's paintings.

    Reni's image of the young Baptist, modeled to the nth
degree of sensitivity, warm against the cold blues and dark
greens of the framing landscape, seems about to speak; and to
look at the landscape background is to realize what English
artists a century later, particularly Gainsborough, would gain
from Reni. He had an inspired sense of the mechanics of
composition, as Nessus and Dejanira proves: an airy ballet on
the theme of rape, in which every billow and facet of the
drapery seems to operate as form.

    Partly because he worked from sketches, engravings or
memories of sculpture, Reni's heroic male nudes -- the Samson
Victorious, and the various figures of Hercules done for the
Gonzaga in Mantua -- have a sculptural intensity that blots out
the rest of the painting. Background figures scurry about in
deep recession, half transparent, like wraiths out of
Tintoretto; the landscape is simplified into broad plains;
against this, the single magnified body rises up. One remembers
only the imposing structure turning, as it were, before the eye,
displaying its stresses and bulges -- straining for embodiment
and yet defeating it with its own supercharged mannerism. More
than any other artist of his time, Reni adumbrated the
abstractness of the neoclassical figure, along with its faint
overtones of camp.

    That is why, however incongruously, some Renis call to mind
"classical" Picasso in the early '20s: both are parodies,
Reni's part-subliminal and Picasso's wholly deliberate, of the
same antique fantasy of ideal beings on the Mediterranean shore.
The point is made by Reni's Bacchus and Ariadne, with its
enameled colors, its air of travesty -- one doesn't believe for
a second in jilted Ariadne's grief, but one does wonder what her
right hand is about to do -- and its iron-butterfly stylishness.
This is an idyll that makes no bones about its own
artificiality. Brilliance is all, and it is just enough.