Early Rubens at the Legion of Honor
Painting at a time, early to mid 17c, when there was still genius in art and the church and state sanctioned such genius, allowing Rubens to have as many assistants as he wished. Not like Warhol's factory, where no one needed a paintbrush, but entirely reasonable to picture a talented assistant, classically taught as Rubens was classically taught, brushing the delicate whiskers on the lion in the painting, "Daniel in the Lions' Den." The 'ruffs' too, those high collars noble men and women wore in politie society and at court, all exquistely rendered, as if a fine brush had just made the stroke. In fact the paintings--the show is titled "Early Rubens"--cannot be imagined having been made without assistants! The scale, the ferocity of subject matter...and without photographic mnemonic devices to help with the rendering of the images. For some reason I found this thrilling, as I find the music made by large choral groups thrilling.
The lighting at the show is, alas, deplorable, hung in the Legion basement, more or less a wine cellar. The lighting on too many of the paintings, large and small, is irregular, producing hot beams of pinpoint light on some parts of a canvas and leaving other parts of the same canvas almost in the dark. It would have been better to have no light, or to allow patrons to use their iPhones to illuminate the paintings.
Walking around the show, with its heavy Christian content and parade of portraits made of important people in Antwerp, several of them Rubens patrons, I was happy to be in the past, a place where everything had already happened. The atmosphere seemed so reassuring, calm even, only the murmur of the other museum-goers as they stood before one of the grand paintings making their quiet remarks quietly. This is the way the world should be, I thought as I walked around the show, aimlessly, the paintings creating a kind of safe-zone from the news-of-the-moment, the same news, I thought, that had been lived through centuries before. This is what art is good for, Matisse's armchair at the end of the day.
The show closes Sunday, September 8, 2019.