TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/050889/05088900.068

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 6.3 KB | 109 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.