OLD MASTERS STILL TEACHING LESSONS

Heribert Hutter gestured toward a painting that features a gallantly dressed cavalier and a woman. “Isn’t that a nice picture?” Hutter asked. The painting is part of the Dutch and Flemish masters exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art through Oct. 13.

With its soft gray tones and hazy light, the painting at first appears to be an elegant scene depicted by 17th-Century Dutch artist Jacob Duck. “But look closer at it,” Hutter said. “Look at what the soldier is doing with his thumb and fingers. It’s a lewd gesture.” The woman, he said, is unconscious from drink, as indicated by the half-empty wineglass in front of her. And in the background an old woman, displaying a ribald leer, is undoubtedly the house madam.

“This is the story of these people,” Hutter said, waving his arm at the painting: “Sleeping Woman and a Cavalier (The Proposition).” Too often, he said, we fail to stop and really look at the tales paintings can tell us.

The exhibit of “Dutch and Flemish Masters: Paintings From the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts” is the first U.S. exhibit from the academy’s extensive collection. Curated by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the exhibit has appeared there and at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, with San Diego as the final stop on its U.S. tour. “The idea was not to go to big cities,” Hutter said. “People come to Europe mostly from cities on the East Coast. Maybe it was a democratic idea to go to the people of the middle-sized cities.”

Hutter is the Vienna academy’s director of paintings and sculpture and said he believes a key purpose of exhibits is to educate: “An exhibition should be more than a show. It should be didactic.” The Vienna exhibit highlights the academy’s permanent collection of more than 740 Old Master paintings donated in 1822 by Count Anton Lamberg-Sprinzenstein.

The 40 paintings of the exhibit--exemplary work of masters rather than masterworks--have been selected for teaching and are divided into five segments: Dutch Italianate landscapes, native Dutch landscapes, Flemish and Dutch still lifes, Dutch genre scenes of town life and Dutch and Flemish portraiture. There are also four oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens.

Missing from the exhibit are examples of the larger Flemish works, which Hutter said were not feasible for transport from Vienna. However, Rubens’ oil sketches for larger works, including “The Circumcision of Christ,” “The Peaceful Reign of James I” and “The Ascension of Christ,” give the viewer an idea of the scope of such paintings.

But the exhibit, with its variety of paintings, offers opportunities to compare the styles of “the democratic Dutch and the aristocratic Flemish.” The Protestant Dutch, Hutter said, were more likely to paint the common man than were the Catholic Flemish, whose portraits are distinguished by their lavish use of sensuous flesh tones.

A strength of the Vienna academy’s Lamberg-Sprinzenstein collection is its Dutch Italianate paintings, which are represented in the exhibit with works by Jan Asselijn, Johannes Lingelbach, Thomas Wyck and Jan Miel from Antwerp. In the 17th Century, the Italians were shocked that the visiting Dutch painted the common people. On their visits to Italy, these painters assimilated Italianate styles into their own work; back home, they drew the southern landscapes from memory. “The topography is Italian but some of the faces of the people look Dutch,” Hutter said of Lingelbach’s “Roman Populace in the Piazza del Popolo.”

Among the portraits are paintings by Cornelis de Vos and Jacob Jordaens, and self-portraits including one by Barent Fabritius, a student of Rembrandt. “He painted himself as a shepherd. Look at him,” Hutter said. “You get the idea he is an artist and not a shepherd. Too proud.”

Hutter moved to the facing wall and a portrait of a tousle-haired adolescent youth. “Here’s a (Anthony) van Dyck, a Wunderkind. He painted this self-portrait at about 15.” The self-portrait, a simple candid likeness, is, according to the exhibit’s catalogue, an innovation, a departure from the mannered style in vogue at the time.

The self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes and contemporary paintings and sculpture in the academy’s collection are available for study by its 500 students.

The exhibit is paired with “Master Drawings by Gericault,” a show of 90 drawings and watercolors by French romanticist Jean Louis Gericault.