From God to humanity, from celestial power to earthly reality, the exhibition offers a whole story of (Western) art. Vice, virtue, desire, madness. Three centuries of Flemish masterpieces. The Brueghel, Rubens, Van Dyck and other Jordaens who have just landed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) address the major themes that made Flanders a crossroads for painting (especially) between 1450 and 1700.
The subject of the exhibition, certainly historical, spans the centuries… up to us. It talks about dramas – religious wars, for example –, about a faithful representation of reality, but also about the laudable effort to include women in the portrait. It should also be noted that Flemish art is one of the four axes of the MMFA’s encyclopedic collection.
The 150 works all come, except around fifteen, from the Quebec museum, from the Phoebus Foundation, a sort of Belgian Frick Collection, based in Antwerp. Previously passed through Denver and Dallas, Vice, virtue, desire, madness honors both a Flemish art and institution. The 430-page brick produced for the occasion, and translated into French due to the Montreal ruling, is not the usual catalog, but a summary of what this territory in northern Europe has brought to history of art, taking the Phoebus collection as an object of study.
The story offered at the museum, initially chronological, is ultimately similar to that of the book. It is divided into seven sections, some as clear as the genre it announces (the portrait), others more imprecise (“Mythology and nature”). He places Flanders at the origin of the pictorial revival, more realistic, which breaks with what the Middle Ages advocated. In the post-Columbus era, Antwerp became, through its port, a center of world trade. It has also been established that the art market was born there, in the 16the century. Artists no longer depend on orders from the Church and non-religious subjects multiply.
Still life of game (around 1640), the immense canvas by Frans Snyders which appears as a preamble at the top of the staircase of the Michal and Renata Hornstein pavilion, is a fabulous summary of the program which will follow. If the “still life” genre with hunting trophies became popular in the 17th centurye century — there is more than one example in the exhibition — Snyders opposes abundance and restraint, pleasures (including carnal ones), spirituality and chastity. The wild boar, attribute of Diana, virgin goddess, is painted, upside down, legs in the air.
Constant duality
The first room, the most religious, brings together altarpieces, Nativity scenes, more than one Virgin and Child and a few crucifixions. The contrast with Snyders’ secular painting is striking, even if the Marys and other saints are more human, and detailed, than previously offered in Gothic and Romanesque art. The rhythm will be like this, in constant duality.
The portraits of bourgeois people imbued with dignity and triumphalism in the following section are followed by the dark or laughable characters in the section entitled “Faith and Madness”. The wall that separates the two parties acts as a social class divider. It remains that between Portrait of Archduke Albert of Austria (around 1615), by Peter Paul Rubens, in velvet red, luminous, and the whimsical nature of Crazy trade (around 1550), a portrait of society tinged with morality by Frans Verbeeck, an entire era is revealed, with its failings, its excesses, its pretensions.
The following three rooms interweave similar themes, always with the attention that curators Katharina Van Cauteren, of Phoebus, and Chloé Pelletier, the new curator of European art at the MMFA, have had for contrasting effects. In “Mythology and Nature”, an Apollo dominating the darkness in a slightly too heavy oil comes close to the science of Rembert Dodoens, doctor and author of a delicate botanical treatise. In “World Meetings”, the exoticism of a cabinet of curiosities confronts the emerging cartography of the planet. In “A World in Crisis”, religious subjects resurface, echoing the efforts of the Spanish sovereigns who tried to keep Flanders Catholic through art. Placed face to face, two paintings by Jacob Jordaens, a serenade and a Holy Family illustrate the two narrative trends.
The last room is a real feast for the eyes. Critical in content. Under the title “Vanity”, the curators have brought together life and death, as this allegorical term requires, and placed around forty well-glued paintings, in the manner of the private salons of the time. Katharina Van Cauteren and Chloé Pelletier ask the question about the validity of the collections that emerged in the 17th centurye century and those of museums, heirs of the first. “We invite you,” they write, “to reflect on the range of desires — to connect, to own, to marvel, to learn — that underlie the collection and exhibition of works of art, then and now ‘today. »
Vices and virtues, like desires and follies, are timeless human characteristics that lead to good and bad. The desire to include those excluded from history allows us to discover four artists (Catharina van Hemessen, Michaelina Wautier, Catarina Ykens, Clara Peeters). This is commendable. However, the small number of works (one of each) makes their presence almost anecdotal. The exhibition does not say whether this is like the Phoebus collection. However, it gives the impression of falling short of a recent update concerning, for example, Wautier, who was entitled, elsewhere, to his retrospective in 2018.