As one makes it way through the stately headquarters of the Richard Feigen gallery, the distinguished atmosphere of this converted Upper East side townhouse might lead to an anticipation of its current display of love and lust throughout art history as being a conservative one.
Feigen’s world class inventory can surely make for an attractive billing of Old Masters vs. the Moderns, yet it would ultimately amount to a curatorial tour of territory that has already been explored. Visions of amalgamated torsos from a Mannerist painting merged together in a tryst, compared against the interlocking parts of a Cubist portrait of an embracing couple come to mind. Aesthetic comparisons like these are tidy, yet they only engage a viewer so far.
The exhibition’s main room , however, immediately puts such presumptions to rest. A disparate collection of works that range across medium, era, and recognition factor is a spectacle in itself. There seems to be no unity between these pieces, and the eye is at first pinballing around the room trying to find a place to start.
Fortunately enough, a remarkable painting by the late Renaissance Bolognese painter known as Il Nosadella, titled Thyestes and Aerope, anchors the room with a cool incandescence. OMNP was left wondering at how such a restrained picture can be so alluring. On one hand, the figures in the painting lack emotion. The sculptural influences of Michelangism (an idiom indebted to the Florentine master that was quite popular during Nosadella’s time) makes them seem statuesque, and lacking the pathos of adultery and betrayal that entails the tragedy of this Greek myth.
Nevertheless, the virtuous use of chiaroscuro and color are the driving forces behind this work. Patches of light and dark are interspersed throughout the entire picture, which give the composition a fluid energy and divides it into several different viewing planes. These individual segments are then brought into harmony through a luxurious palette of red, plum, yellow and brown, creating a magnetic glow. Such magnificence is perhaps only surpassed by the work’s shockingly undervalued price (around $1 million dollars) The fact that such an exceptional piece can be available from a painter by which fewer than 15 paintings are known to exist today seems blasphemous.
Turning away from the Nosadella, it becomes evident that there is no overarching narrative by which love and lust is presented in this show, no similarity that binds all of the works together. That however, may be exactly the point. The scope of such a basic and dynamic aspect of human nature encompasses several interpretations. Lust can be suggestive- like the archer, ready to “shoot his bolt” at the viewer in Jacob de Gheyn’s Archer and the Milkmaid. Or it can be explicit-like the detached carnality found in John Currin’s forays into Mannerism meeting porn. And it can be delicate-like the intimate affection that gods bestow upon mere mortals in Girodet’s Cephalus and Aurora, or The Sleep of Endymion. These works are only a few examples from a variety of looks at the subject. Suffice it to say, that such an eclectic selection is definitely worth checking out if you are in NYC over the holiday break.
“EROS: Love, Lust, and Its Consequences,” October 30, 2008-January 9, 2009
at Richard L. Feigen & Co., 34 East 69th Street, NYC
