ART : Browsing Through Munich’s ‘Masterworks’

Everybody worries about forgetting. Forget the name of an artist you admired in the ‘50s and you are sure your brain is turning to mush. Forget where you put the car keys and suspicions of senility claw at the back of the mind. Actually, forgetfulness is a blessing.

Obviously, it is a boon to forget all the gauche things you did as a kid. After you’ve been around the block several times, forgetting is good because if you didn’t forget things you have already done you’d never have any new experiences.

Not long ago I visited Munich for the first time since college. Time had neatly blurred the memory of a city whose museums boggle across history from early Classical Greece to Kandinsky. Blessed forgetfulness turned a rerun into a fresh revelation with a deliciously mysterious edge of deja vu .

On the other hand, having a good memory is supposed to be an admirable trait. We stand in awe of spouses who remember cousin Maxwell’s address or friends who can recite the entire “Threepenny Opera” in German. (Actually, I can do that and nobody seems to want to hear it. But you get the idea.)

The truth is, remembering can be a big nuisance. Memory clutters up the mind and makes one prone to holding grudges.

Recently, for example, a loan exhibition called “Masterworks From Munich” came trooping over to visit the National Gallery until Sept. 5. It consists of about 60 European paintings that dribble along from the 16th to 18th centuries and include such Promethean authors as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyke, Tintoretto and Jean Honore Fragonard. The whole caboodle comes from the Alte Pinakothek, Munich’s big Old Master repository.

Now anybody with a decent degree of absent-mindedness would be perfectly gratified if not entirely blown away by an assemblage that includes such awesome icons as Rubens’ “The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” and such classics of naughtiness as Jean Honore Fragonard’s “Girl With a Dog.”

One would be, that is, if one were not cursed by still-vivid memories of a day spent wandering the precincts of the genuine joint in Munich. Odious comparison inevitably follows; it dilutes tangible present experience in favor of fictive recall, resulting in a silliness similar to preferring nostalgia for an old love to the flesh-and-blood touch of a new one.

Instead of beguiling one’s eye with the miraculous transformation of paint-into-flowers in a Dutch still life, one longs for the cavernous Munich galleries with their astonishing juicy Rubenses, two stories tall.

The loan show is clearly intended as one of those samplers-of-small-crowd-pleaser-masterpieces from a great museum laced through with scholarly works as worthy and hard to swallow as castor oil.

Basically, it’s a browser’s show. If you try to makes sense of it the effect of alienation is heightened because you can’t locate yourself in space or time.

It’s a package tour. Three Centuries and Six Countries in 90 minutes or less. One minute you’re in Carlo Dolci’s Florence circa 1650 looking at a powdery Madonna holding glass flowers, and the next you’re tippling in a Flemish peasant hut with Adriaen Brouwer’s jolly fiddler.

If it’s Tuesday it must be Holland with Hendrick Goltzius’ tarty Venus coming on to a dumb but willing Adonis. Back in the bus for an excursion to Velazquez’s Madrid and a side trip to Poussin’s impenetrable classical never-never land.

Somehow this time-machine tour strips the pictures of their cultural patina. They become just so many square feet of aging canvas covered with a thin layer of centuries-old paint. These are carefully conserved pictures, but nothing can prevent their looking like frail old things slowly fading and crumbling back into the nothingness from which they emerged.

Visiting them is, for a time, like trying to carry on a conversation with people who have miraculously and pathetically lived to be 300 or 400 years old. We wonder if modern sensibility is really equipped to understand them.

Viewed in purely pedestrian terms, “The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” is a heroic depiction of a heinous crime of violence against women. By current standards it is a wildly objectionable picture that we can deal with only by forgetfully filtering violence through metaphor and the poetic celebration of its lush paint surface.

Rubens’ Flemish Baroque style made the fleshiness of life seem so real that it’s not easy to displace it into symbolism. His follower Jacob Jordaens plops a naked mythical satyr down in the midst of a peasant meal. The only way a purely modern mind can deal with it is as a kind of Lucas/Spielberg special effect where the satyr becomes a visiting off-world alien. Come to think of it, that’s about right. Myths don’t change much.

The Spaniard Bartolome Esteban Murillo painted ragamuffin street kids with dirty-bottomed bare feet who shoot dice like grown-ups or scarf down fruit like they hadn’t eaten for a week. You just know they swiped it. Murillo is saddled with a reputation for sentimentalizing these scenes, but here he just muffles the misery of homeless urchins. Unhappily, they don’t look all that unfamiliar these days.

Bit by bit you get your mind off wishing you were in Munich and off the time-warp tour bus. There’s no problem gaining access to the cuddly charm of Rubens’ collaboration with Frans Snyders on a bunch of baby boys carrying a garland of fruit. There is no resisting the mannered elegance of Tintoretto’s “Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan.”

An incredible love of the density of reality runs through all these paintings, from Dutch burlesque to Van Dyke’s aristocratic self-portrait. His cherry-lipped good looks and come-hither glance are scarcely a fashionable male type these days, but they lead right into the world of the gentleman cavalier poet. The shadowy and sensitive Dutch artist Carel Fabritius painted himself as a young dandy trying to look macho behind a wispy mustache. Art history has always regretted the early death of this Rembrandt follower, who seemed headed for Vermeer-like refinement.

Finally, the sense-making part of the mind just gives up and bounces softly around from the passionate mysticism of El Greco’s “The Disrobing of Christ” to the marshmallow sexiness of Boucher’s erotic classic “The Blond Odalisque.”

If that’s your kind of show and you can’t get to D.C., remember it’s going to Cincinnati in October. On the other hand, if you forget, you don’t have to go to Cincinnati in the winter. Works both ways.