Rubens has not found the going easy in this country. Painter Thomas Eakins once dismissed the Flemish master as "the nastiest most vulgar noisy painter that ever lived"—a remark that reflects, perhaps, American-puritanical distaste for the overtly corporeal, not to mention the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
In any event, the anecdote comes our way via the catalog to The Age of Rubens, which was, when it opened in 1993 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the first major survey of Rubens and his contemporaries organized in the United States. Put together by then-MFA curator Peter Sutton, with the purpose of dispelling that aversion, the exhibition drew from a variety of American and European collections. Rubens and His Age: Masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum, which opened last week at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, benefits a bit from Sutton's tilling, although certainly the soil here is fertile for fleshy images. More to the point, Rubens was an avid admirer of Titian, and what better backdrop than The Venetian for a follower of the Venetian?
You won't find any of Rubens' celebrated, sensual nudes here—the type that twisted his name into an adjective—although two paintings that welcome you to the gallery come close, especially "Venus and Adonis" (c. 1614). Painted roughly six years after Rubens returned to Antwerp from Italy, where he had absorbed the essentials of Renaissance and Baroque painting, "Venus and Adonis" finds him in full flower, all the staples of his work apparent—including the voluptuousness and surging energy of his figures and the use of mythology to make a point. The latter trait is apparent in the second sensuous picture, "The Union of Earth and Water" (c. 1618), in which Rubens enlists Cybele, mother of the gods, as an avatar of his city in a wishful-thinking allegory.
Rubens and His Age comprises paintings by a number of 17th-century Flemish artists, including two notable veterans of his studio, Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens, whose "Cleopatra's Feast" (1653) is one of its highlights. In fact, only 12 paintings here are by Rubens, but this is not worth fretting over for several reasons. One is that painters of the time maintained large studios, the better to vex future connoisseurs with thorny questions of authorship, so definitively identifying a painter's hand is problematic anyway. Another is that Rubens was undeniably the fountainhead of the Flemish Baroque, and his influence is evident in every painting here. Finally, you've got a problem with Van Dyck?
Some would argue that Van Dyck outshone his master, at least as a portraitist, and the last section of this show offers an excellent opportunity to test the thesis. Rubens has only his splendid oval portrait, "George Gaidge" (c. 1616-17) to speak for him here, but it has much to say about his noted skill in rendering flesh, down to the venous hand clutching the cape, as well as his ability to infuse a portrait with life. The room is dominated by full-scale Van Dyck portraits, including the paired "King Charles I" and "Queen Henrietta-Maria" (1638). Where Rubens delineates nearly every hue of the spectrum in Gaidge's face, Van Dyck smoothly evokes the tones and textures of flesh.
Organized by Hermitage curators Natalya Babina, Natalya Gritsay, Natalia Serebrianaya and Marina Lopato, along with Susan Davidson of the Guggenheim in New York, Rubens and His Age is the Guggenheim Hermitage's eighth show, and one of its best—not because it suits voluptuous Las Vegas, but because it presents a selection of splendid works in a context that enriches the experience of each.