Overlooked Works That Deserve Another Glance By KAREN ROSENBERG

December 30, 2010
Overlooked Works That Deserve Another Glance By KAREN ROSENBERG

‘MANUEL OSORIO MANRIQUE DE ZUÑIGA,’ BY GOYA, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART There’s a reason that this painting is one of the first you see when you walk up the Met’s main staircase, pass through the heavy glass doors into European Paintings, and turn right (as museumgoers invariably do). It isn’t just the color — an arresting tomato red against green-gray — or the adorably precocious subject, the third son of the count of Altamira. It’s the unsettling way in which Goya complicates 18th-century ideas about childhood.

The small brown-eyed boy, the caged finches, the magpie on a leash and the predatory cats (who reappear as feral monstrosities in Goya’s “Caprichos”) lend themselves to different, and contradictory, readings. You can look at this painting (possibly from the 1790s) and see a careless kid about to lose a pet, or you can see the light-haloed Manuel as a magical innocent. (More than one art historian has compared him to the Christ child.) Either way, you sense “Goya’s awareness of how contingent life is,” to quote the critic Robert Hughes.

That awareness is certainly heightened by the fact that Manuel never lived to see adulthood (he died in 1792, and it’s thought that the portrait may be a memorial) and by our knowledge of Goya’s own losses. (At least seven of his offspring died in infancy.) Although the dark mood of later Goya is much in evidence here, the painting has talismanic properties, as if the image of Manuel could somehow warn or protect other children.

Goya painted other members of the Altamira family, though not with as much intensity. His portrait of the countess — shown seated and expressionless in a pale pink satin dress, balancing Manuel’s baby sister on her lap — is at the Met too, in the Lehman Wing. And Manuel has a not-too-distant cousin in Manet’s “Boy With a Sword,” also at the museum, another poker-faced youth toting some very adult baggage.

‘ST. FRANCIS IN THE DESERT,’ BY GIOVANNI BELLINI, THE FRICK COLLECTION This transfixing figure in a landscape stands up to a formidable squad of portraits — two Titians, two Holbeins and an El Greco — in the Frick’s Living Hall. The painting’s subject is a matter of some debate, but it is most likely St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata on Mount Alverna. (Note the red marks on his hands.) Unquestionably the work, from 1480, links nature and religious ecstasy in ways that would be familiar to 19th- and 20th-century artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole and Charles Burchfield.

The saint, emerging from a cavelike shelter into brilliant sunshine, stands on a precipice in the foreground. His torso inclines in a near-perfect echo of the laurel tree at the upper left corner. Behind him a rabbit, a heron, a donkey and a flock of sheep find footholds in the hilly Tuscan landscape, which retains its crystalline level of focus as it zigs and zags into the far distance.

His expression is wonderfully ambiguous. Is he joyous? Wary? Awestruck? Or, as some scholars have suggested, might he be singing hymns?

Those who wish to can spend days parsing the painting’s symbolism: the sandals, the skull, the little spout of water. (Even the rock formations are said to allude to specific elements of Franciscan literature.) But I’d much rather linger over the shimmering blue-gold surfaces and creeping light. Apparently the Frick’s conservators would too; last March and April they removed the Bellini for close study with x-radiographs, microscopes and other instruments. Their findings will be revealed this spring at a “dossier” exhibition in the Oval Room.

In the meantime Bellini’s “St. Francis” is a refuge within the Frick. It absorbs the withering stares of El Greco’s “St. Jerome” and Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More,” across the room, and deflects the seductive vanity and materialism of the Titians on either side. It’s hard to think of another painting that would be up to the task.

‘THE SEA,’ BY COURBET, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART This pint-size painting, from 1873, hangs in a gallery with larger, more important Courbets like the Salon painting “Woman With a Parrot.” It’s one of the many seascapes, or “marines,” he made in the 1860s and ’70s: a body of work many critics have dismissed as representing the more conventional, and marketable, side of this rebellious Realist. But for some reason I can’t get enough of it.

It’s a Janus of a painting, saluting the Romanticism of Turner and Géricault while hailing a nascent Impressionism. Courbet started to make seascapes like this one in the mid-1860s; Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise,” considered the movement’s inaugural work, dates from 1872.

Courbet’s sea, though, is more salt and grit than light and air. He called his seascapes “sea landscapes,” an apt description given the solidity of the water. He made liberal use of the palette knife, not just in the sandy strip of foreground but also along the wave crests. The painting’s insistent materiality incites covetousness, in defiance of its vast and unpossessable subject.

At the same time the sea and the sky seem to belong to two different pictures. Art historians think Courbet might have been looking at photographs of the ocean made by Gustave Le Gray and others that were sometimes printed from two negatives with different exposure times. The painting has a similarly eerie split along the horizon, with its distant but fast-charging clouds that don’t seem — yet — to have teased the waves to significant heights.

In that sky, and along those whitecaps, you can see modernism gathering force: Marsden Hartley, maybe even Rothko and Brice Marden. But a big part of the painting’s appeal is Courbet’s particular brand of nervy Realism. As Cézanne said of a different Courbet seascape (the spectacular “Wave,” from 1870, in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin): “You have to step back. The entire room feels the spray.”

‘PAINTING,’ BY PHILIP GUSTON, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Though it’s currently on view in the Modern’s “Abstract Expressionist New York,” this Guston from 1954 could just as easily hang with the Cézannes, Maleviches, Monets and Mondrians up on the fifth floor.

Guston was looking closely at Mondrian’s “plus-minus” paintings — and undoubtedly at Cézanne as well — as he crosshatched his way around the canvas. His welter of marks looks controlled but not schematic. “Abstract Impressionism” it was termed at the time, though the clunkier phrase “Post-Impressionist Neo-Plasticism” is closer to the truth.

“Painting” is also small, by the standards of this show (which runs through April 25). It takes a while to appreciate that Guston, like his Ab-Ex peers, was reorienting the artist-canvas relationship. He did it not with drips or big sweeps of the arm but by working close-up and not stepping back until he was finished.

Color also sets Guston’s painting apart from just about everything else in the Ab-Ex rehang, with the possible exception of de Kooning’s “Woman I.” The diffuse pinkish-orange blob at the center of “Painting,” offset by the faintest touch of green, is icy hot — like frostbitten skin or a cigarette tossed into a snowdrift. I also like to think of this work as a blushing monochrome, a literalization of Guston’s famous credo “painting is ‘impure.’ ”

Long-suppressed figures would re-emerge in Guston’s post-1970 painting, which is probably more important to artists working today. But this midcentury canvas is, for me, one of the best moments in a show that includes whole rooms of Pollocks and Rothkos.

‘STILL LIFE WITH APPLES,’ BY CéZANNE, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART You’ll find this still life from 1895-98 on the Modern’s fifth floor, just to the right of Cézanne’s halting “Bather,” and generally ignored by the crowds moving on to van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” If you’ve seen one Cézanne still life, you’ve seen them all, the thinking goes.

Find a viewing spot in the stream of traffic, though, and you’ll be rewarded with a work of art that has some serious momentum — heading full tilt for Cubism, Matisse and Morandi.

The apples, of all different colors and sizes, seem to be tumbling out of the print on the curtain, scattering across the table like billiards balls. They look more alive than the bather, who seems to be frozen in place. And they’re not just moving, but coming into being: getting progressively rounder, heavier, more applelike, as they approach the right side of the picture.

Like other Cézanne still lifes this one feels experimental. But I also love it for its unscientific quirks (I hesitate to call them flaws): the unfinished upper-left corner, the meringuelike peaks of the white tablecloth, the squashed ellipse of that bowl. Can you really separate volume from perspective? This painting answers that question with a resounding yes.