149 Paintings You Really Need to See in North America. Julian Porter
8. The Dead Christ with Angels (c. 1524–27)
Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo)
(1494–1540)
Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo), The Dead Christ with Angels, c. 1524–27
Oil on panel, 133.4 x 104.1 cm
Charles Potter Kling Fund (58.527)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
Imagine if you were a painter just after Raphael, Leonardo — what would you do? What could you create to surpass the greats? How could you outdraw Raphael? You couldn’t. Hence artists had to try other trails.
There were touches of elongated lines in the last paintings of Michelangelo, a style the Mannerists pursued, producing more willowy figures, more elongated forms. Mannerists spread from Tintoretto to El Greco and more pronounced ones: Parmigianino, Pontormo, and Rosso Fiorentino. He painted The Descent from the Cross in Volterra, Italy, which hinted at the birth of acrylic paints, electric colours, and jolting forms. Here are acid colours — unreal, garish hues — a revolt against the balance ideal of the High Renaissance.
There is a painting of this rare master in America! The Dead Christ has the elongated drape of the Mannerist painting. Christ is dead but oddly relaxed. Christ’s body here is carved, a coffee-coloured marble soon for a resurrection. A tiny hand feeling his chest wound, so tentative and tender. His face lightly whiskered, grey lips, a sense of sleep.
Note Christ’s long-boned thigh and his ballerina toes. See the young, pretty angels, all kissy-kissy, spring-coiled tresses, wings meant for flight. More whispering nothings than grieving beings. But what pretty blouses!
So much for his paintings; what of the man? Fiorentino’s life is larded with apocryphal stories.
He falsely accused a friend of stealing hundreds of ducats from him — this according to Vasari, who would have known him. When the accused was found innocent, he sued Rosso for libel. Rosso, too stubborn to eat his words, took poison “rather than be punished by others.”
He was vain, proud of his red hair, and with a fine presence, which he enhanced by keeping a tame ape.
I am a little too old for this.
JP
9. Susie (1988)
Lucian Freud (1992–2011)
Lucian Freud, Susie, 1988
Oil on canvas, 27.3 x 22.2 cm
Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Collection (2003.37)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Estate of Lucian Freud
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
What a singular, staggering artist! What depth, what evocation of the human form and spirit is found in his paintings. Susie resonates with raw purpose, shattering our expectations of artistic representation. Lucian Freud became best known for his unabashed use of nudity and his grotesque portraits, but it would be a waste of feeling, betray a hardness, not to see the beauty in this face.
Grandson of Sigmund, Freud moved to London while still very young, after living for only a few years in Germany. During his studies, his talent for portraits and the human figure became apparent to his teachers, but it was not until after the Second World War that he became a full-time painter. The war sparked his need to paint the harsh reality of these postwar conditions. He distinguished himself from his contemporaries through his lifelike portraits, often using his friends as models, and nudity, this of the non-erotic kind.
In his mature phase, Freud used different types of paint brushes, saturating them in heavier and thicker paint. Although he continued to experiment as an artist, Freud never abandoned his mundane but generally bright colours. In The Man with the Blue Scarf , art critic Martin Gayford deconstructs his experience as a sitter for a Freud portrait.3 The resultant piece captures the fullness of the man with vibrancy and verve. If you get the opportunity to see the work, examine the brilliance of the blue. Breathtaking!
Still later, Freud was introduced to Leigh Bowery, a performance artist of whom he painted an entire nude series. As it transpired, Freud painted many nudes, including many nudes of women. Freud eschewed painting perfection or the “ideal” woman, however. Instead, he created heavily impastoed, very real paintings that forged an air of beauty. The figures he painted were consistently “real” figures. In his nude painting of the English supermodel Kate Moss, for example, she has a rounded belly and wider legs and darker hair than one usually sees in her fashion photographs.
The fact that Freud didn’t glamourize his subjects does not mean that he was misanthropic. Rather, he wanted to portray the real, not the fanciful. Susie is a powerful example of Freud’s talent in portraiture and one could spend hours plumbing the depths of that visage.
One of the greatest figurative painters of the last half-century, Freud died in 2011.
SG
10. Where Do We Come From? What Are We?
Where Are We Going? (1897–98)
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)
Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897–98
Oil on canvas, 139.1 x 374.6 cm
Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund (36.270)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
At some point in your artistic journey, you must come to terms with Gauguin. I find him complex and somewhat disturbing. I like best his pastoral rural scenes of Brittany farmers with white caps harvesting wheat. But he is best known for his Tahitian works. He lived there from 1891 to 1893 and fell in love with the place.
He wrote to Theo van Gogh on November 20, 1889:
You know I have Indian blood, Inca blood in me, and it’s reflected in everything I do. It’s the basis of my personality. I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on savagery.
Gauguin was a complicated man. He was an avid self-publicist yet claimed to loathe the society in which he promoted himself. He gave many press interviews about his work, his desire for seclusion, and his contempt for Europe, yet he strove for its approval and its money. Even in Tahiti you need money.
In 1897, he was profoundly depressed. One of his daughters had died and his Danish wife had stopped writing him. He felt death was imminent. He worked on what he viewed as his last and largest painting (4.5 m x 1.70 m) at the end of 1897 and finished it in January 1898. By his account, when he finished this huge painting he went into the hills to kill himself with arsenic. He tried it, but did not take enough. He survived six more years.
Well, what of his painting?
In his work, Gauguin always strove for simplicity, using large sections of strong colour, virtually no shadows, and giving the figures in his paintings boundaries almost as strongly defined as those found in the panels of a stained-glass window. No real depth — just patterns.
This work fits with that pattern. At first it is painfully flat. Sit down, take a deep breath, slow down, this will be work. In this broad, rough, sack-cloth of a canvas there is a gentle sweep of mellow blue with hints of thunder. To the right, three bodies representing life — relaxing, maybe curious, perhaps drifting. The body in the middle, perhaps an Adam reaching for the apple, spelling death. But Gauguin believed