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ART OVERSEAS - THE ARCIMBOLDO EFFECT - REVIEW |
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The
Arcimboldo Effect Yet another attempt
to provide a provenance for Modernist painting has been made with “The
Arcimboldo Effect” exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
Restored and funded by the Agnelli (FIAT) fortune, the Palazzo Grassi is
establishing itself as a major exhibiting gallery, following its
Futurism show last year. Giuseppe Arcimboldo
(1537-1593) was a Milanese painter who moved to Vienna and Praque, and
is remembered for portraits where the components of the face are made up
from fruit, vegetables, birds, fish or books. Alfred Barr claimed him as
a precursor for Surrealism. The 1987 exhibition would like to turn him
into the forefather of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism as well. The Venice
exhibition is a broke-back affair. On the first floor is a splendid
display of Arcimboldo’s works, similar visual puzzles by this
contemporaries, as well as volumes about magic. The catalogue essays
made a persuasive case for reading Arcimboldo’s use of non-human
elements in portrait-making as philosophical and political statements,
and not just as a tiresomely clever device. On the second
floor, there is a survey of twentieth-century art form Magritte and
Bunuel to Pollock and Warhol, linked back to an idea of Leonardo’s.
There are also works influenced by the revival of interest in Arcimboldo,
including a Time magazine cover. The commercial items document the ways
in which high art has been used as fodder for the mass media. What is
not convincing is the attempt to turn Arcimboldo’s remaking of the
natural world into a source for Modernism. This ahistorical step denies
the careful analysis provided of Arcimboldo’s place within the
metaphysics of his age, and precludes a parallel explanation for
Modernism, That the curators sensed this weakness is apparent in the
exhibition’s subtitle, which refers only to changing images of the
face. One juxtaposition
is visually convincing: Picasso’s portrait of Kahnweiler next to
Arcimboldo’s image of a librarian. The faceted planes in the former
are matched by the open pages of the book that is the nose of the
latter. If nothing were known about Picasso we could accept his Cubist
portrait as a reworking of The Librarian. The safest conclusion is that
even pictorial similarities are less than adequate evidence for art
historical interpretation, One further hazard
in trying to overload Arcimboldo with the glories of Modernism is that
the exhibition is in danger of losing sight of what Arcimboldo did
achieve. Although accepting that there was an alchemistic element in his
faces, it is also helpful to see him as part of the then recently
revived tradition of the Grotesque, y which is meant the mingling of
disparate elements such as were found in the Roman grottoes about 1500,
and which Michaelangelo used for his decoration. The otherwise excellent
catalogue never mentions the Grotesque and thereby loses one way of
connecting Arcimboldo with Modernism. This loss is keenly felt in a city
which hosts so much of what Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice, called the
noble grotesque. |