Exhibitions
Room for improvement
Martin Gaylord
Rain fell over Edinburgh in unseasonable torrents while I was there. 'It's been like this all summer,' my taxi driver remarked sombrely. On similar occasions, he added, the Waters of Leith have risen in flood. As I write, there is no sign that Auld Reekie will suffer the fate of Prague and Dresden. But conditions for viewing the Festival exhibitions of Edinburgh were far from encouraging, except to umbrella sellers.
And, as has been the case for several years, the pickings as far as the visual arts are concerned were on the slim side. That's how they will remain until completion of the new large exhibition venue currently being created in the Royal Scottish Academy — which of the twin neo-classical temples on the Mound is the one nearest Princes Street. Works have now reached such a point that it is currently impossible to enter the other twin — the National Gallery of Scotland — via the front entrance. Instead you are channelled through the building site and in through the back.
When the new galleries are ready, Edinburgh should he able to take the place it deserves among the exhibition venues of Europe. And, as a capital city, the owner of one of the choicest smaller Old Master collections in Europe, plus a Gallery of Modern Art which in some areas — Surrealism for example — excels the Tate, it ought to get some pretty good blockbusters.
Meanwhile, there is nothing likely to provoke queues or booking frenzy on the menu at Edinburgh. But when you finally enter the National Gallery, you discover an intriguing if somewhat dry small-scale exhibition entitled Rubens: Drawing on Italy (until 1 September). The title is punning, since the show consists largely of works on paper, but the subject is not Rubens's drawings, but what that great painter gained from his contact with Italian art.
Of all the great northern European artists. Rubens was the one who most actively took on the inheritance of the Italian Renaissance. He lived for a number of years in Italy, learning from such predecessors as Michelangelo and Leonardo, but also competing with his southern contemporaries. Rubens was court artist to the Gonzagas of Mantua, and won commissions for huge altarpieces in churches in Rome and Genoa (the Jesuit church in Genoa remains, with Antwerp and Malines, the best place in the world to see
Rubens's religious work in situ). Po.
This background helps to explain Rubens's curious attitude towards the work of other artists — or at any rate curious to a 21st-century, conservation-minded sensibility. The great man copied many Italian works himself, both by drawing and in oils. He also bought up quantities of other people's drawings and copies of famous images — obviously as a sort of visual memory bank to take back with him to Flanders.
But as he copied he recast the original into his own idiom — he Rubens-ised it. And he felt free to alter the drawings of others — in one case a drawing by no less a master than Annibale Carracci — so as to transport them into his own graphic world. As a result, a large number of the exhibits in this exhibition are attributed to someone or other — generally anonymous — 'retouched by Rubens'.
The catalogue points out that behaving like this amounted to partial destruction of the work of the previous artist. To the modern mind it is a sin against the ideal of artistic autonomy — the notion that every work is the product of a unique creative sensibility. But of course Rubens didn't think like that at all. He thought of the art of the past as a huge source book, ripe for incorporation into his own work (just as Handel, for example, was perfectly happy to cannibalise other composers' music). Doubtless, also, Rubens thought of the great painters of the past not only as heroes but as rivals whom he might with luck outdo. (In their hearts contemporary artists still think that.) As a painter, one of Rubens's most important predecessors was Titian. Interestingly, he tended to copy Roman and Florentine artists on paper perhaps because what he wanted to get from them was to do with drawing. But he copied Titian in oils, presumably because he wanted to discover the secrets of that great master's fabled ability to simulate the surfaces of such diverse things as flesh, fabric, metal and fur in oil paint.
There are a number of Rubens's copies after Titian on show, and several more in existence. Among them is a version of an important Titian, 'Charles V in Armour with a Drawn Sword', the original of which has completely disappeared. But the centrepiece of this little show is the confrontation of Rubens's copy of 'Diana and Callisto' with the original, owned by the Duke of Sutherland but on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Scotland (and, in many people's estimate, one of the world's greatest pictures).
The Rubens version is very close, but in lots of ways utterly different. It's in better condition than the Titian, but that can't be the whole reason why the flesh of Rubens's figures is not only cooler, but looks harder. The Titian is both grander and more mysterious. In the end, the comparison is not in Rubens's favour. But then copies always lack energy in the presence of the original. It probably was much better for Rubens himself to withdraw to Antwerp and modify all those Italian images in his imagination, so that his own version developed a life of its own.
By all accounts there were some exhilarating fireworks in Edinburgh to celebrate the 70th birthday of Sir Howard Hodgkin on 6 August. To mark the same anniversary, there is a fine exhibition of 20 Large Paintings 1984-2002 by Hodgkin at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (until 6 October). Some of these have been seen before, several are brand-new. All are hung on a background of royal blue that nobody would ever have chosen for the work of any other painter, but which somehow works admirably for Hodgkin.
There are more pictures by senior contemporary painters at Inverleith House, where works by the American Cy Twombly are on show (until 27 October). Another American big-hitter, Ellsworth Kelly, is included in Abstraction, a very enterprisingsounding exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery, 6 Carlton Terrace (until 7 September), of which I have had excellent reports. Had it not been for severe climatic conditions I would have visited it myself. As it was I spent much of my time in Edinburgh sheltering under a sodden umbrella, waiting in vain for a taxi. The work of an art critic is hard and physical, as I frequently try to explain, but almost nobody — bar other art critics — has ever taken me seriously.
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