Exhibition under the sign of Rubens

The State Historical and Art Museum “New Jerusalem” hosts the exhibition “Under the sign of Rubens. Flemish painting of the 17th century from museums and private collections in Russia.

Exhibitions of Western art are a rarity in Russia today, and all the more interesting is the new project of the curator Vadim Sadkov, doctor of art history, and the museum in Istra, near Moscow, entirely devoted to Flemish painting. This unique and, I dare say, masterpiece exhibition can be seen as a continuation of the two-year-old project “The Younger Brueghels and Their Era”, focused on the work of representatives of one dynasty of painters. In the new exhibition, we see significantly more great names and a more impressive number of collections from which the works came.

The project brought together paintings from the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, the Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum, the Arkhangelskoye Estate Museum, the Voronezh Regional Art Museum, the Serpukhov Museum of History and Art, the Tula Museum of Fine Arts, the Uglich State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum, the Yaroslavl Art Museum and State Historical and Art Museum “New Jerusalem”. Paintings from the private collections of Vladimir Nekrasov, Valeria and Konstantin Mauergauz, Dmitry Garibyan, Alexei Semin, and the Art Center. Moscow”.

The exhibition includes 67 iconic works by famous masters of the heyday of Flemish art. As conceived by the authors of the project, the works of the largest masters – Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens – are presented at the exhibition in the context of first-class examples of the creative heritage of other remarkable painters, complementing each other and demonstrating various aspects of the development of the Flemish school of painting. They demonstrate the inexhaustible talent of their creators, their sophisticated compositional, coloristic and pictorial skills. We have the good fortune to see works that came out of the workshops of the main artists of the Flemish school: Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Frans Snyders, Jan Brueghel the Velvet, David Teniers the Younger and Peter Paul Rubens himself, as well as extremely rare works of authors whose artistic heritage is estimated today as single copies.

The exhibition consists of three main sections. The exposition reveals organizational, business and creative relationships: on the one hand, between artists, students and apprentices, on the other hand, between the authors of paintings, sellers of paintings and collectors.

As the curator of the exhibition, doctor of art history, professor Vadim Sadkov said: “It is the demonstration of the diversity of the works of the Flemings and the evolution of their genre typology that is the main semantic axis of the exhibition. Its other important task is to study the problem of relationships between bright creative individuals who led and organized the activities of flourishing art workshops, their students and assistants, who collectively worked on the execution of numerous, sometimes laborious, orders.

Professor Sadkov said that there are many paintings at the exhibition, and each of them has a very interesting story of both creation and later life. Here, for example, is the painting by Jacob Jordaens Meleager and Atalanta. The picture was brought from Yekaterinburg, where it was transferred after the Great Patriotic War by the Hermitage as a thank you for keeping his masterpieces in evacuation. Why did the St. Petersburg museum donate such a valuable exhibit to the provinces? For a long time, the work was considered only a copy made by Jordaens’ students, and only a recent restoration carried out by the brilliant Olga Gornung made it possible to discover the master’s handwritten signature under a layer of darkened varnish. The autograph is poorly visible, but attentive viewers can still see it in the lower left corner, above the dog’s left ear. Not only the signature, but also the quality of the image of the same dog can be considered convincing evidence of the hand of a genius: we almost physically feel the stiffness of the coat, we see the gaze and the elusive direction of movement of the dog’s muzzle, emphasizing the overall dynamics and expressiveness of the composition.

In general, the exhibition contains quite a lot of works by artists whose works have survived to our time very little, and it is especially valuable that their names will remain in the history of art largely thanks to things from Russian collections and exhibitions like the current one. In particular, Nicolas Cave’s still life The Falcon and the Beaten Bird is of particular interest. It is the only signature painting by a follower of Clara Peters, an artist of the 17th century, whose art is highly valued today, but, alas, is not represented in our collections, has survived to this day. The presented work of another artist of the same era – Johanna Vergauven – is in Russia, it was transferred to the exhibition by the Arkhangelskoye Museum-Reserve.

The key image of the exposition was two works by Peter Paul Rubens and his workshop from a private collection, which are presented to the public for the first time. These are typical examples of Flemish painting of the first half of the 17th century. The main one is “The Coronation of Roxana by Alexander the Great” – a plot popular in classical Western European art. This is a large canvas, more than 2 meters in height. The painting was previously attributed to the workshop of Rubens and was considered one of the copies of the author’s composition, the versions of which are stored in Israel and Germany. It was in this status that the collector Vladimir Nekrasov bought it at Sotheby’s. The second famous painting – “The French King Henry IV uses a happy opportunity to make peace” – was to be part of a series to decorate the east wing of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. But, according to Vadim Sadkov, Rubens still had a hand in this, already at the final, glazing stage, correcting the work of his apprentices. “The painting was already restored in Russia, and after the removal of later recordings, restoration tinting, everything that was not the author’s, it was possible to reveal a very high quality level of painting on the one hand, and its unevenness on the other. In this picture, it is very convenient for art students to show where the hand of Rubens himself ends and the work of his assistants begins,” said curator Vadim Sadkov. Art lovers, of course, are unlikely to notice the very unevenness that the professor is talking about, but will simply be delighted with the purely Rubensian, full of energy and decorative splendor, multi-figured composition.

The 17th century is the golden era of Flemish painting, the time of its brilliant, albeit short-lived, heyday. Having headed the national art school in the first half of the 17th century, Peter Paul Rubens made it the main phenomenon of the cultural life of Flanders for a long time. The formation of textbook genres, the formation of the tastes of the customer, the active demand for the works of the Flemings and much more happened precisely under the sign of Rubens. This bright period of world art history is opened to visitors by an exhibition at the New Jerusalem Museum. The concept of the exhibition reflects the history of the formation of a new art market in Flanders during the 17th century. Collectors of various levels, professional art dealers, thanks to which a free art market was formed and a wide export of Flemish painting, also became the heroes of this exhibition.

The exhibition also gives rise to reflections on the main trends, similarities and differences in the approach to collecting old masters in Western Europe and Russia over the past three centuries. In Russia, the first paintings by Flemish artists appeared at the beginning of the 18th century, when, in the era of Peter the Great, mass purchases of works of Western European art began.

Already during the reign of Catherine II, the Imperial Hermitage in St. Petersburg was rightfully considered the owner of one of the world’s best collections of works of the Flemish school. Also, the paintings of the Flemings appeared in the collections of aristocratic families: the Shuvalovs, the Stroganovs, the Yusupovs, the Sheremetevs. In the “Fountain House” of Count Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev, there was, in particular, the painting by Jacob Jordaens “Meleagr and Atalanta” presented at the exhibition.

In the process of preparing the exhibition, the paintings selected for display were carefully and comprehensively studied. Some of them have received new attributions, and in many cases the dates and history of their former existence have also been clarified. Employees of regional museums – partners of this project took an active part in the work on compiling the scientific catalog. The catalog released for the exhibition tells about the development and diversity of Flemish painting, the history of collecting the Flemings in Russia, as well as approaches to collecting works by old masters in Western Europe and Russia over the course of three centuries.

As Vasily Kuznetsov, Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Moscow Region, noted: “Exhibitions with the widest geography of the collections presented have become for New Jerusalem not just a good tradition, but a vector of programmatic work. The museum maintains the status of the largest regional cultural platform, acquainting residents of the Moscow region and the capital with the works of great artists. Often such projects become an event of federal significance. This time, the unsurpassed Rubens and the influence of his work on contemporaries and followers are in the spotlight – among them are world-famous names, and rare artists, meeting with whose paintings is a great success. I am sure that the exhibition will be of interest to the widest range of viewers.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive additional program for visitors of different ages, including lectures, thematic and interactive tours, concert events and much more. The exposition is available to visitors until May 14, 2023.

Mikhail Kovalyov.

Author’s photo