The Art of Jealousy – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna hosts the exhibition “Idols and Rivals”, which tells about competition as an engine of progress in art. 120 paintings, sculptures, drawings, vases and jewelry masterpieces from the main museums in Vienna and Europe remind us that the art world was a huge vanity fair where artists and clients competed endlessly with each other.
According to Joachim von Sandrart, and what else can we do, since he is the main historiographer of German art of his time, well, according to Sandrart, in 1666 there was a terrible misunderstanding. Albrecht Sigmund, Prince-Bishop of Freising, arranged a competition, as we would now call it, closed: only two painters were invited to participate – the court painter, the great Christopher Paudiss, one of the most gifted students of Rembrandt, and simply the artist Franz Rözel von Rosenhof, forgotten by everyone today an animator. Both had to paint a picture on a simple plot: a wolf torments a lamb and growls at a fox intending to steal its prey. Regarding this simple program, it is difficult to say whether it was born from the prince-bishop’s own hunting observations, or whether it reflected some hereditary-dynastic conflicts in the family of the Bavarian dukes. The painting by Rösel von Rosenhof is notable except for the fact that the wolf, baring his teeth, shows his tongue to the fox. Painting by Paudiss, sustained in his trademark dryish gray-ocher coloring, where the red of wolf and fox skins so amazingly harmonizes with the autumn landscape, is not devoid of psychologism and seems to anticipate La Fontaine – the first edition of Fables will be released two years later. The competition was judged by the organizer, that is, the prince-bishop, who awarded the victory to Rösel von Rosenhof. The loser Paudiss, Sandrart reports, was so upset that he died of grief a few days later. Both canvases were brought to the Kunsthistoriches exhibition from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich – judge for yourself which is better.
“Judge for yourself” is not a figure of speech. The exhibition “Idols and Rivals”, made by Gudrun Svoboda, a specialist in the theories of art of the classical era, is interactive – every viewer can become an arbiter in art competitions of the past, from the time of Pericles to the time of the French Revolution: voting devices for this or that are installed in the halls work, you can vote on the exhibition website. The site shows that the “Bavarian Rembrandt”, who fell victim to judicial myopia, is again unlucky – connoisseurs of Paudiss color are still in the minority. Zandrart, in The German Academy, says that Paudiss’s adversary “showed great zeal in depicting wool” – natural fur seems to have gone out of fashion, but the viewer clearly votes for a beautiful wolf skin. Competition, contests, winners, defeats, “let the loser cry” – all this also seems to be going out of fashion in modern culture with its ideals of horizontality, solidarity and collectivity. But just let a modern person judge one of the geniuses of the past, as he joyfully presses the button for voting.
The exhibition, dedicated to the spirit of competition in Western European art from the beginning of the Renaissance to the end of the Enlightenment, does not at all seek to awaken primitive instincts in the public. It’s just that the exhibition – not this particular one, but the exhibition as such – is the product of this competitive imperative. “A painting shown in an exhibition is like a printed book – everyone has the right to judge it,” the curator quotes the words of Etienne Lafont de Saint-Ien, one of the first art critics in history to write a review of the Salon of 1746. The section on the Paris Salons, regular exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, just ends with “Idols and Rivals”: the main European exhibition of the Enlightenment brought judgment about art into the public sphere – if earlier the artist’s success depended on the whim of the customer or intra-shop frictions and prejudices , then now he appeared before the court of the public and criticism, and not to say that this court was more just.
“I would take him for Vernet, if there were not an excess of these bright, warm tones here,” Denis Diderot writes in the “Salon of 1771” about “The Tempest at the Port” by Philippe-Jacques de Louterbourg, who is invariably ranked below another marine painter, Claude Joseph Vernet, whose “Ship in Distress in a Storm” is dedicated to an enthusiastic passage a few pages above. It is clear that for the public of the 18th century, including such a difficult one as Frederick the Great or Catherine the Great, Diderot was an indisputable authority. The public of the 21st century no longer listens to the critic-encyclopedist: the Munich Wernet and the Vienna Lutherbur are exhibited side by side; judging by the online voting, the favorite of Diderot, though in the lead, but by a small margin.
In the same 1771, another tragedy broke out in terms of judging: Joseph-Benoit Suvet won the competition for the Grand Prize of the Royal Academy, beating five applicants, among whom was Jacques-Louis David. The winner Suve went to Rome as a scholarship holder, the loser David harbored a grudge and in every way fouled his opponent – during the years of terror, David, who seized upon high positions, almost brought Suve to the guillotine, the poor fellow had to spend not the most pleasant days in Saint-Lazare prison. Two competition paintings for the plot “Battle of Minerva and Mars” were brought to Vienna: David – from the Louvre, Suve – from the Palace of Fine Arts in Lille. To a person who is more or less familiar with the history and theory of art of the Enlightenment, it is obvious that the academic jury was absolutely right: Suvet’s composition is clear, dynamic, laconic, modern, David’s composition is melodramatic, verbose, old-fashioned, smacks of some student mixture of Poussin and Bush. However, you can not know anything about Rococo and Classicism – Suvet’s canvas is much more perfect in terms of form, no matter from what time distance you look at it. The results of the voting on the site are such that, if Suve found out about them, he would have gone to the block himself: 99.5% of the viewers are for David who lost then (and rightly so!)
Here, of course, the magic of the name comes into play: who is Suvet against David? The exhibition on the principle of competition in the work of the old masters only partially explains how hierarchies are formed – geniuses, masterpieces, genres, art forms, collections: after the initial competitive assessment, there is a series of other assessments, reassessments, oblivions and resurrections, the whole machine of the history of culture works for one or a different reputation, and this work remains behind the scenes. Brunelleschi or Ghiberti, Leonardo or Michelangelo, Michelangelo or Titian, Cellini or Giambologna – Renaissance competition is erected to the agonal spirit of Ancient Greece, but, like everything ancient that was revived in the Renaissance, it turns into a more complex and multidimensional phenomenon, the phenomenon of the capitalist world, they said would be neo-Marxists. In the center of the first hall stands the famous red-figure amphora depicting a hoplite dressed in armor from the Munich Glyptothek. The masterpiece of the master Euthymides is famous not only for painting, but also for the inscription: “Evfimid painted it, as Euphronius never (could not)”. The simple-minded Athenian master does not yet know that black PR is also PR, and advertises his main competitor for free. The first work in the exhibition is a self-portrait of Cornelis Bisshoop from the Dordrecht Museum: in one hand he holds a palette, with the other he opens the curtain hiding the canvas. This is an allusion to the anecdote about the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, told by Pliny the Elder: Zeuxis deceived the birds that flew in to peck at the grapes he painted, Parrasius deceived Zeuxis, who wanted to pull off the painted veil from his picture. Since the beginning of the Renaissance, the European artist has competed with the ancient, perhaps never really existed.
Heart enemies and sworn friends, teachers and students, idols and imitators, customers and patrons, painting and sculpture, design and implementation – everything and everything competes with each other at this vanity fair. Look at the portraits of two famous antiquarians, Strahd’s father and son: Jacopo Strada by Titian (Kunsthistorisches) and Ottavio Strada by Tintoretto (Rijksmuseum). This is a real championship of jealousy and hatred, moreover, in a square, relating to both models and portrait painters: Jacopo deprived Ottavio of his inheritance, suspecting of patricidal intentions, Titian drove Tintoretto out of the workshop, jealous of the student’s talent. Of course, at the heart of each section of the exhibition, whether it be the duel of the “wounded Amazons” Polikleitos, Phidias and Kresilas, intended for the temple of Artemis of Ephesus, or the diplomatic wars of Rubens and van Dyck, there are some literary texts. Everything we know about these competitions has been described by historians and memoirists, so one might think that it is they, the cultural workers, who are to blame for the creation of a competition construct that has nothing to do with the nature of creativity.
In one of the last rooms of the exhibition, a fragment from the film “The Birds” by David Attenborough, filmed for the BBC, is shown. In the frame of the famous British naturalist documentary filmmaker, there is an Australian bowerbird: a hardworking bird builds, in the language of art history, an environment or an installation, decorates it with flowers, insects and plastic rubbish found in once virgin forests. The purpose of this work is to attract the attention of the female – the female will choose the creator of the most beautiful environment as her husband. This is not a nest, the building has no useful functions, the installation is done for the sake of pure beauty. David Attenborough, along with the bower, sends his heartfelt greetings to all who believe that the idea of beauty and the principle of competition have nothing to do with nature (art).
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