Thursday, February 19, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Gallery 642 of the Met
Birds in every frame…a man-faced owl reading from a great book propped upon a lectionary of imps’ spines…Japanese tourists with a guidebook that steers one after another to a Flemish triptych…Christ in the corners, relegated…a flattish hand of golden grain pointing to its fellow grainy hand behind the trees…a convergence of showy brushwork in white, rendering sunrays, water flow, water spray and water fowl.
This square gallery has just six works, all Flemish, and the effect of their fewness is to emphasize them. Two especially: a triptych of perfunctory figures in the foreground who occasion the happy, deep backgrounds of fields and towns behind them, and a harvest time scene of grain and field hands, some working, some eating. But it is a third – which must share both a wall and a corner – that finally arrests, by its technical showmanship with a little white paint.
The harvest scene is as golden as grain in Autumn light, which it portrays. The ears of wheat are convincingly even, as flat as the tops of mature grain fields in truth, reaching over a low hill, where the scythe has narrowed what remains standing to a single row. This row points like a finger to the stand of trees that half-obscure the scene beyond: another hand-like, half-harvested field, itself nearer the town and the steeple of the church, almost obscured. The church, indeed, is hardly in this scene, secular despite its time (around 1600). Instead we have the resting field hands, one carving off a crescent-rind of bread, finishing the work begun with the curving scythe not twenty paces away. If there is falseness, it is in rhyme: the people are as flat as the tops of the grain, or slices of crusty, round loaves. That and the oxcart in the middle distance, laden with sheaves, looks as if it were instead carrying a giant square loaf, a sort of Weinermobile of bread. It is a generous scene, convivial and prosperous, pacific and suburban, well fed and flat in the foreground, but with the town itself still there, behind the stand of trees, and the shore village beyond. It knows that there is more than wheat and fields, beer and bread, hillocks and farm ponds, but feels content where it is, and when it is.
Let the triptych be, with its self-sure composition, its Γ of blue, the Galilee as nearly vertical on the left as the mountain-sea horizon is horizontal along the top.
Let the hellscape be, with its angular composition, Christ emanating weirdly from a rock at the vertex, with a lower arm of Biblical figures, from Adam and Eve through Noah to whoever, and an upper arm of fiery and volcanic highlights. And the man-faced owl, reading from a book, hardly noticing the big owl facing Christ, opposite.
Let the woodland road scene be, a Flemish market-day must be over the ridge, or behind the viewer; it is a secular pilgrimage, one woman carrying a basket in one hand, scratching her butt with the other.
Let the fantastic road scene be, with the Christian story (again!) relegated to a corner, and really about the wiggly roads of chalky pastel. Roads that run like hot icing off a Bundt cake.
And turn to the landscape of de Keuninck. It is almost two paintings, split by the middle. But the brighter, wide open left mainly serves to play with color – its greenish turquoise of mountain ranges – and to supply the sunlight, whose rays, in razor lines of thin, white paint, reach into the darker, heavier left. This is the side that drives the painting, and like the black velvet of a jeweler’s case, its darkness is there to set off the flashes of white paint.
There are rays of sun, in thin, dry, straight strokes of white, which the whole composition has permitted – not realistically but effectively and at once – to be as defined as crepuscular rays through trees, yet as open as sunbeams in an open field. It is the sort of sunray that might shine down on Mary, but there is nothing religious in this painting, so the ray is left as if it could exist in nature. And then there is the thin – but more opaque – white of the waterfall, which leaps down into something really gaudy. The painter has flecked the canvas with tiny spots of white paint to suggest the spray of the water as the fall hits an unseen pool. And in this spray, a fleeting white bird or quick strokes, wonderfully suggesting flight, and a brooding black bird, formed as much from the absence of white paint spots, as from a bit of dark brushwork. (Was the dark bird the work of some special technique – application-then-removal of a little bird-shaped paper that protected the canvas from the flicking of white paint? Possible.) But the effect is at least four layers of transparent white: the spray in front, the vertical drop of water in back, the alighting bird, and the beams of sun. It is quite a show, unsubtle, but if you can paint it, flaunt it, baby, and it quite justifies the counterbalancing turquoise action on the other side.
This square gallery has just six works, all Flemish, and the effect of their fewness is to emphasize them. Two especially: a triptych of perfunctory figures in the foreground who occasion the happy, deep backgrounds of fields and towns behind them, and a harvest time scene of grain and field hands, some working, some eating. But it is a third – which must share both a wall and a corner – that finally arrests, by its technical showmanship with a little white paint.
The harvest scene is as golden as grain in Autumn light, which it portrays. The ears of wheat are convincingly even, as flat as the tops of mature grain fields in truth, reaching over a low hill, where the scythe has narrowed what remains standing to a single row. This row points like a finger to the stand of trees that half-obscure the scene beyond: another hand-like, half-harvested field, itself nearer the town and the steeple of the church, almost obscured. The church, indeed, is hardly in this scene, secular despite its time (around 1600). Instead we have the resting field hands, one carving off a crescent-rind of bread, finishing the work begun with the curving scythe not twenty paces away. If there is falseness, it is in rhyme: the people are as flat as the tops of the grain, or slices of crusty, round loaves. That and the oxcart in the middle distance, laden with sheaves, looks as if it were instead carrying a giant square loaf, a sort of Weinermobile of bread. It is a generous scene, convivial and prosperous, pacific and suburban, well fed and flat in the foreground, but with the town itself still there, behind the stand of trees, and the shore village beyond. It knows that there is more than wheat and fields, beer and bread, hillocks and farm ponds, but feels content where it is, and when it is.
Let the triptych be, with its self-sure composition, its Γ of blue, the Galilee as nearly vertical on the left as the mountain-sea horizon is horizontal along the top.
Let the hellscape be, with its angular composition, Christ emanating weirdly from a rock at the vertex, with a lower arm of Biblical figures, from Adam and Eve through Noah to whoever, and an upper arm of fiery and volcanic highlights. And the man-faced owl, reading from a book, hardly noticing the big owl facing Christ, opposite.
Let the woodland road scene be, a Flemish market-day must be over the ridge, or behind the viewer; it is a secular pilgrimage, one woman carrying a basket in one hand, scratching her butt with the other.
Let the fantastic road scene be, with the Christian story (again!) relegated to a corner, and really about the wiggly roads of chalky pastel. Roads that run like hot icing off a Bundt cake.
And turn to the landscape of de Keuninck. It is almost two paintings, split by the middle. But the brighter, wide open left mainly serves to play with color – its greenish turquoise of mountain ranges – and to supply the sunlight, whose rays, in razor lines of thin, white paint, reach into the darker, heavier left. This is the side that drives the painting, and like the black velvet of a jeweler’s case, its darkness is there to set off the flashes of white paint.
There are rays of sun, in thin, dry, straight strokes of white, which the whole composition has permitted – not realistically but effectively and at once – to be as defined as crepuscular rays through trees, yet as open as sunbeams in an open field. It is the sort of sunray that might shine down on Mary, but there is nothing religious in this painting, so the ray is left as if it could exist in nature. And then there is the thin – but more opaque – white of the waterfall, which leaps down into something really gaudy. The painter has flecked the canvas with tiny spots of white paint to suggest the spray of the water as the fall hits an unseen pool. And in this spray, a fleeting white bird or quick strokes, wonderfully suggesting flight, and a brooding black bird, formed as much from the absence of white paint spots, as from a bit of dark brushwork. (Was the dark bird the work of some special technique – application-then-removal of a little bird-shaped paper that protected the canvas from the flicking of white paint? Possible.) But the effect is at least four layers of transparent white: the spray in front, the vertical drop of water in back, the alighting bird, and the beams of sun. It is quite a show, unsubtle, but if you can paint it, flaunt it, baby, and it quite justifies the counterbalancing turquoise action on the other side.
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