Art Review : ‘Flemish Drawings’ Offers Glimpses of Life and Myths

One of the great, simple things about old art is that it provides a literal picture of how the world looked when we weren’t here. At the moment, the J. Paul Getty Museum offers a glimpse of a long-vanished country in “Flemish Drawings of the 16th and 17th Centuries.”

Then the little nation flowered to a Golden Age in parts of what are today Belgium and Luxembourg. It became the dominant province of the southern Netherlands as Holland did in the north. In sensibility, the historic art of the two places is linked. The differences between them hinge on the fact that the religious Reformation of the 16th Century caused Holland to become independent and Protestant while Flanders remained royalist and Catholic. Dutch art got more secular. Flemish art, although equally earthy, participated in the grand Baroque style of the Counter-Reformation.

That circumstance certainly accounts for the fact that so many of these 25 rare drawings appear to have one foot in airy myth and the other in juicy reality. An artist who called himself Stradanus provides a striking example. “The Arno With Fisherman” is a view of Florence so accurate it remains instantly recognizable today. It depicts fisherman along the river plying their trade. In their midst, however, stands a corpulent nude male figure clearly from another world. He looks like the ancient Roman god Bacchus in his decadence. Here, he serves as an allegorical figure representing the natural fecundity of the Arno.

The image provokes a pleasurable triple-take. It effortlessly layers ordinary reality with the dream of the classical past. It is a drawing so richly worked up it--like many here--resembles a painting. It makes an implausible scene so convincing that it provokes a ping of surprise in the fashion of the Florentine Mannerism that clearly influenced the artist. It’s a neat, slightly perverse thing.

The towering master of all this was, of course, Peter Paul Rubens. Along with Italy’s Bernini, he’s the undisputed Baroque genius of the sumptuously executed operatic scheme charged with energy and tempered with human sympathy. He was the guy who could make you believe there really were cherubs flying overhead when the queen arrived, that goddesses are made of palpable flesh, and lots of it.

The half-dozen of his drawings on view do a good job of hinting at Rubens’ range. Michelangelesque studies of nude male figures are nearly grotesque in their dynamism. Most unusual is a sheet of studies based on Euripides’ “Medea.” There is something startlingly modern in the way Rubens came to grips with a tragic circumstance so monstrous it causes a mother to kill her children.

Anthony van Dyck is often styled as the virtuoso who refined Rubens’ style into courtly elegance, Jacob Jordaens as the man who made it almost clownishly overripe. Here both are seen in rather subdued mood. Van Dyck applies aristocratic discretion to an everyday landscape; Jordaens’ earthy exuberance looks sympathetically on a homely woman.

Both lean to the other polarity of the Flemish genius, that urge to celebrate the everyday that most closely resembled their Dutch neighbors.

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The liveliest of these is Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s version of the life of the biblical prodigal son. He put the action in a contemporary village and styled the prodigal as a prodigious wastrel. Cleverly staging episodic action in a single setting, Van Aelst shows the anti-hero squandering his substance on gambling and whores. Finally scourged out of the local cathouse for non-payment of pleasure, he winds up begging to sleep in a hog wallow before going home to his forgiving father.

Similar genre scenes by Jan Verbeek, David Vinckboons and Roelandt Savery suggest the persistence of this appetite for the richness of common life. But Flemish art wasn’t all meat, potatoes and whipped cream. A taste for the delicately detailed wafts from a miniature landscape by Hans Bol representing the secularization of the illuminated manuscript. Jan van Kessel’s playing-card sized composition of “Butterflies, Insects and Currants” is the essence of innocent sweetness.

This art represents an open-hearted celebration of life. The country that made it is vanished. But the land is still there with its richly productive soil, felicitous seaports and smart, adaptable people. The place was so pretty and naturally endowed its neighbors decided to use it as a battleground. Foreign wars were fought on it until kings turned to dictators, so many that it was nicknamed, “the cockpit of Europe.”

So much for generosity.

* The J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through Nov. 12, closed Mondays, parking reservations required, (310) 458-1104.