Love Renaissance: March 2011

Jonathan Jones and Laura Cumming, both of the Guardian Arts online, write the following reviews on the exhibition, which i am about to visit this weekend! I will let you know my thoughts next week!

Jonathan Jones writes;

In 15th-century Flanders, late medieval painters performed miracles that in some ways left their Italian contemporaries far behind, offering microscopically precise views of towns and interiors, discovering the magic of human character in lifelike portraits. So why aren't there crowds in front of Van Eyck's mesmerising Madonna of Chancellor Rolin to match those in front of the Mona Lisa?

This seems especially odd when you consider the work of Jan Gossaert, one of the first Flemish artists to visit Rome and take on the challenge of the classical nude. He started his career at the time Michelangelo was unveiling David, but gave the majestic human body portrayed in stone by the ancients and rediscovered by Italians his own rollicking, saucy finesse in paint. Throughout this exhibition, you see his northern gothic tendencies, his delight in twisting architectural forms and luxurious draperies, intertwine with the Renaissance passion for human proportions, Greek myth and drawing – skills that he learned by travelling to Rome and sketching ancient sculpture there.

The exhibition is called Jan Gossaert's Renaissance, and that title invites us to ponder two questions – what was the Renaissance, and what was it for him? Neither is easy to answer. The Renaissance began as a movement by Italian intellectuals to rediscover the true meaning and value of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. But, as this show reveals, by the early 1500s the Renaissance was spreading far beyond Italy and changing as it travelled. It includes wonderful works by Albrecht Dürer and Jacopo de' Barbari as well as Gossaert, that reveal how the classical ideal mutated and interbred with more folkish ideas when it crossed the Alps. There is even a hair-raising print by Dürer that uses the new Renaissance convention of the nude to portray a coven of witches, weaving their enchantments while their master the devil grimaces at the door.

Gossaert fixed on the image of Adam and Eve as a way to explore nudity within the intensely Christian cultures of the north, where women still wore wimples and Martin Luther was wrestling with his conscience. Inspired partly by Dürer's astonishing drawings, prints and paintings of Adam and Eve – also on show here – he takes a sophisticated, relaxed pleasure in these Edenic bodies. Gossaert is an incredibly fleshy painter, a consummate sensualist whose greatest talent is to play with the possibilities of the nude form, make skin ripple and tauten. In one of his drawings, Eve offers Adam the apple not in a coy proposal, but in a passionate embrace that is clearly leading them into a sinful experience: the Fall as foreplay. Nor did he confine his eroticism to the Garden of Eden. In small paintings done for his employer, the erotically uninhibited Philip of Burgundy, he delights in the lewdness of pagan Greco-Roman myth. He paints Venus nude except for fine jewels and headgear, the ornaments heightening the profanity.

This show is a cabinet of curiosities. Gossaert is almost Warholian in his fascination with surface, a rich observer of the physical world who hesitates to go beyond. Even his portraits are sensual studies of faces rather than introspective studies of character. These portraits are fascinating in their concentration on the creamy skins, curling facial features and bright eyes of their subjects, as if he were studying them as physiognomic specimens. Even his religious paintings – above all his mighty picture of St Luke, patron saint of artists, and his sumptuous Adoration of the Magi – are opulent feasts of surface effects. His work holds in balance the tensions between visionary revelation and realism, design and colour, painting and sculpture, showing the ambiguities of his world, on the cusp of the middle ages and modernity. In Gossaert's Renaissance, the classical ideal is always playfully involved with a messy life. You feel he would have been good to talk to and meet, a good teacher, someone who enjoyed a glass and a joke – a true Renaissance man.

Laura Cumming writes;

Jan Gossaert is not a name on everyone's lips. It feels safe to say that he is no longer famous at all. Presumably the National Gallery aims to revive the Flemish painter's dormant reputation with this immense survey, organised jointly with the Metropolitan Museum in New York and accompanied by a catalogue raisonné so weighty one wouldn't invest in it lightly. But this is one of those occasions where scholarship doesn't have all the answers, notably to the simple question of why Gossaert's peculiar pictures should be admired in the first place.

For the claims made about him these days are vast: Gossaert (c.1478-1532) is startling, a pivotal old master, the man who changed the course of Flemish art. His portraits are favourably compared to Dürer, Memling and Holbein. He goes way beyond the tradition of Van Eyck. He is Rubens a century in advance.

The last holds true, in a sense. For if Gossaert is known for anything in particular, it is for being the first Flemish artist to visit Italy and bring the sultry south back to the north. He goes to Rome in 1508 and returns with visions of bare flesh, erotic vigour and Adam and Eve in the exact transition from innocently naked to suggestively nude. His figures are sturdy, intertwined, earthy.

They pleased his notoriously lusty patron, Philip of Burgundy, who commissioned many Gossaert girls for his walls. They scandalised the British, for example the diarist John Evelyn, who was shocked by the explicit belly buttons of Adam and Eve (surely the first man and woman came without them, begotten not made, from the mind of God). Certainly they broke the ice.

There is a tremendous drawing here of the first couple spaced out like drug addicts. Adam is slack-jawed, nearly drooling as he rests his head on Eve's breast, clinging to her like a drowning man. He is stubby, wasted, bent like a pretzel. She is lithe and upright, but entirely mesmerised by the apple. The fall of man is epitomised as eternal insatiable hunger.

This is Gossaert at his best, unbridled and free, working away in ink and white gouache on a sheet of gray paper, and there are other drawings here that reveal a mind alive to physical release as well as repression, to coyness, discomfort and many nuances of sex. These show Gossaert's workings very well.

Indeed as far as art history is concerned, this exhibition is exemplary. It has more than 80 works from all over the world, including the National Gallery's own large group. It puts them in context and alongside comparable works by other painters. The restoration, cleaning and firming up of attributions are plainly scrupulous. But compared to the drawings, the paintings are indifferent and unfulfilled. They leave me completely cold.

Take the portraits. It is as if the sitters were never in the room with Gossaert at all, these images are so devoid of personality. Or as if whatever interest these people once held has slowly evaporated during the lengthy business of describing eyebrows, hands or hats. The pictures have a concise, mechanical look, with a workmanlike attention to detail, that comes over well in reproduction but has no charisma whatsoever on the wall.

Gossaert goes in for architectural devices; the frame within a frame, the ledge and sill, the figure apparently leaning forward out of one into the other. The attempt at animation doesn't work. Neither does the effort to describe appearance or character. One merchant looks much like another, bar marginal adjustments of props or pose. All three children of Christian II are identically bug-eyed and sickly, like some unfortunate three-headed monster.

Perhaps the cleaning has been too brutal, for Gossaert seems to lack a sense of touch or relish. Look at the painting chosen to promote the show, Washington's Portrait of a Man (c.1530), and it is hard to differentiate the textures of the red sleeve from the red sealing wax, or the forehead from the fingernails, or the fur from the hair. This is arguably his finest portrait, yet Gossaert is no more or less attentive to the merchant's inner being than the paperwork festooning the walls.

The man is one more item to add to the inventory of objects; and in the gallery, likewise, the wall text lists them all over again in lieu of something, anything, to say.

Every Gossaert makes one long to be looking at some other northern painter – Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling, Brueghel. It is hard to fix upon any particular painting to praise. His masterpiece, for many people, is the National Gallery's own The Adoration of the Kings (1510-15) with its mise-en-scène of angels, three-storey ruins and adoring sovereigns, partly famous for including what may be the first black figure in northern painting.

All you can see and more! The Adoration is dense with detail: a golden bowl full of gold coins and the reflections therein, the underside of baby Jesus's plump little foot, the checkerboard tiles, the green hills far away. It is positively Flemish in its fascination with the look of things.

But the meaning of the scene, its atmosphere of awe and tenderness, its juxtaposition of poverty, wealth and faith, its portents for the future, its religious significance – none of this is in the painting's content. What strikes is the placing of people and objects like elements in a child's wooden nativity set, the virtuosity of detail, the emphatic perspective now tellingly exposed as the receding lines of the underdrawing have become visible beneath the oil paint.

The National Gallery's recent policy of avoiding blockbusters in favour of shows that focus on aspects of its own collection is in many ways admirable. To summarise: work with what you've got. But what they've got here is not going to catch a light, no matter how superb the scholarship, when the art itself lacks fire. There hasn't been a Gossaert survey for almost 50 years, and now one understands why.

These articles and others regarding this exhibition and Jan Gossaert can be found on the below links:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/feb/27/jan-gossaert-renaissance-review?intcmp=239

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/feb/22/jan-gossaert-renaissance-national-gallery?intcmp=239

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/04/jan-gossaert-renaissance-review?intcmp=239

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/feb/22/jan-gossaert-national-gallery-renaissance?intcmp=239

Love Renaissance

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Little Apology & Sneak Peak!

Friday 11 March 2011

Jan Gossaert's Renaissance Exhibition Reviews

Wednesday 2 March 2011

Jan Gossaert's Renaissance Exhibition at the National Gallery, London