ART : Going Agog Over the Dutch Russians

The town has a regular genius for the impressive. Take a picture of this--”Dutch and Flemish Paintings From the Hermitage” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There. A shah would be impressed. A sultan or czar would be impressed. A doorman at a Park Avenue condo would be impressed. Who could fail to be agog at the idea of 51 pictures from the fabled Hermitage in Leningrad--which used to be called St. Petersburg after its founder, the great Peter the Great--paintings by the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Franz Hals if not Vermeer? The Hermitage doesn’t have a Vermeer, but what the heck, nobody can have everything.

Most of these pictures have not been outside Russia since the 18th Century, and now here they are, visiting America’s most capaciously conspicuous cultural repository until June 5, after which they will grace the marquee of the Chicago Art Institute from July 9 to Sept. 18.

(Chicago is on the comeback trail as an art force. They are also getting the once-in-a-lifetime Gauguin retrospective currently in Washington, while Los Angeles is getting neither.)

While all this may make us a bit jealous, that is no reason not to be generously impressed and see both shows if we happen to be in the Big Capital, the Windy Apple or the Nation’s City, whichever comes first.

But we were speaking of the Dutch Russians. Who could fail to be awed by such rarities of higher human endeavor? And if by chance--encountering them when gripped by griped mood or strangled schedule--we are not, what then? If we say out loud that we are less than enchanted by these treasures, are we not in danger of endangering further cultural bonding between superpowers, fogging the glass of glasnost , periling perestroika?

It seems we are patriotically obliged to be impressed. That rankles a bit. We are Yankees around here. We have a streak of mulishness--inclined to balk when banged from behind with ornamental goads that say we gotta get in line. What if we just hunker down in front of these pictures like ornery camels that won’t budge till they have made up their own minds? What then?

Well, to tell the truth, we are impressed.

We come away enlightened if not precisely in the fashion envisioned by the cadre of dedicated scholars, well-intentioned aparatchiks and kindly corporate sponsors (the Sara Lee Corp.) who whipped it all together.

One does not necessarily notice the pictures first. One notices the fashion in which folks look at art in the gloaming of the 20th Century.

First, independence notwithstanding, you do have to get in line or skitter around its edges, because art is so popular that high and lonely aesthetic contemplation is now done in groups.

Members of the group frequently wear earphones. Some may be listening to the ballgame on their Walkman, but most are following the acousti-guide tour. The dulcet, Charles Boyer tones of Met director Philippe de Montebello dribble out of headsets, telling visitors what they think about the pictures. You can pretty well tell where the lecture is when people clump up around certain pictures. Please proceed to No. 31. Gridlock in the galleries.

Naturally, nobody is obliged to rent an acousti-guide and those who do may find them authentically educational, but anybody who was raised to regard art as a participative activity--where the looker helps create the work--is liable to be a bit dismayed by art that comes with a sound track. Of course, it’s very contemporary. Does anybody turn off the sound on the telly and make up his own story? Nonsense.

But the art is wonderful. It is not quite of the caliber of Michelangelo’s “David” or Botticelli’s “Venus.” You don’t feel like you’ve died and gone to Bloomingdale’s, but they are wonderful rarities that press on the ozone layer without quite puncturing it.

Russians and Netherlanders share a reputation as hardy, earthy people. Peter the Great greatly admired the Dutch at the turn of the 17th Century for their liberality and empirical realism in science, philosophy and most everything else. Virtually all these paintings express a common view of the world as an expression of tumultuous energy. Landscapes, whether by Rubens, Van Ruisdael, or Van Goyen, express such palpable vitality that after a while, teeming trees, rushing water and roiling clouds all seem to be made of the same matter-as-energy, as if the artists poetically anticipated modern physics. Even the air here is palpable, boxed in neat Dutch interiors.

There is a bracing natural unity about an art that sees no separation between the vitality of the real and that of the spirit. It is an art that celebrates the natural as if saying, “Well, if it happens in God’s world, it is part of the order of things and therefore good.”

A soothing blousy serenity informs Aelbert Cuyp’s “The Dairymaid,” where smiling fat cows are no less content than the girl who strokes away at their teats, carrying on the linked flow of grass-feeding cows to make into milk to feed people. Modern men who think milk comes from cartons may have some trouble with Rubens’ “Roman Charity.” It shows a young beauty proffering her breast to an old man in chains. It looks vaguely obscene to us, like paintings depicting the incest of Lot and his daughters, but that is our problem. The Rubens evokes the Roman story of Cimon, condemned to die by starvation but saved by his daughter Pero, who suckled him like a child. You can see the story appealing to the Netherlandish sense of realism and the wholeness of things.

It is almost more than our alienated, fragmented social mind can absorb. It was OK to be Jordaens’ corpulent old man or Jan Fyt’s dead hare because both were part of the rich cyclical texture of life.

There is so much intensity here that Jan van Huysum’s bouquet of cut flowers is as ferociously beautiful as a Rubens lion. No wonder Willem De Kooning is Dutch. Paulus Potter’s “The Watchdog” is so alert in all his parts that they seem to break up into separate entities like a Surreal vision by Rene Magritte.

Either the curators stacked this show with crowd pleasers or the Netherlanders really loved life. We are inclined to believe the latter. When David Teniers satirized the gallant pretentions of young cavaliers by making them monkeys in a kitchen, it’s riotous fun. When Gerard Terborch shows an old procuress fixing up one of her girls with a shy young bumpkin, we find it as sweet as he did. Here Van Dyck’s bravura is gentled into compassionate personal lyricism, first in a romantic self-portrait and then in a touchingly sincere family group.

Was this the last time humankind could see itself as so productive a part of nature that it could both unabashedly celebrate its own nobility and be reassured that daily acts were of significance?

Rembrandt remains the master of that. A man’s turban is as monumental as an onion dome in Red Square. The artist’s plump first wife, Saskia, could become the goddess Flora without loss of her homey charm, and the holy family could show an everyday mama tending her crib without loss of dignity.

It was an amazing epoch. The great Fragonard exhibition in nearby galleries retains much of its energy, but it grows vaguely artificial and doubtful of human dignity. We have lost it altogether in a vision of ourselves as scourges of the planet.

The Hermitage selection shows a robust vision that has grown so strange we need an acousti-guide to see it.