Hear the phrase ‘Rubenesque’, and chances are it’s the Flemish master’s women that you’ll picture – big and buxom, fleshy and sexy. Yet beyond that, the expression points to a broader ethos of abundance and vitality, both in terms of Peter Paul Rubens’s own life (besides being an artist, he was a diplomat and all-round celebrity), and also his paintings in general, stuffed full with muscular, almost orgiastic scenes of energy and tumult.
The Royal Academy captures this side of Rubens extremely well, eschewing a chronological display in favour of themed sections – ‘Violence’, ‘Lust’, ‘Power’ and so on – that showcase his baroque virtuosity: from his heady, sensuous masterpiece ‘The Garden of Love’ (1633, pictured), to landscapes brimming with eerie, esoteric detail, to astonishingly action-packed sketches of dancing peasants or savage lion hunts. Yet actually the exhibition’s main focus isn’t really Rubens at all (sometimes he has only a couple of works in a room), but rather an attempt to chart his inevitable influence across the centuries. It’s an approach that generally makes sense, with the dozens of prints that derived from Rubens’s compositions, or works by artists such as Van Dyck (a former pupil of his who went on to become equally celebrated) or Sir Joshua Reynolds (who tried to model his own, boringly proficient portraiture after Rubens). In certain cases, however, the concept gets stretched too thin, with too many mediocre works or vague comparisons – most ludicrously in a room featuring modern or contemporary artists like Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol and Sarah Lucas, as if any art whatsoever that depicts women’s bodies automatically derives from Rubens.
Still, just because you may not agree with the show’s argument doesn’t mean it’s not full of compelling works. Highlights include a clutch of shimmeringly exuberant pieces from the Romantic era, some crazily violent Victorian melodramas and, perhaps most mesmerisingly weird of all, a folk-art copy of a Rubens crucifixion painted on an eighteenth-century Chinese plate.
Gabriel Coxhead