Rubens Retrospective Set To Open At City Art Museum

The first major retrospect ever to be devoted to the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens in the United States will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on January 15. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): The Drawings, will bring together 115 of the versatile Baroque master’s finest and most representative drawings, including dozens that have never before been on view in the United States. Court painter, diplomat, and international celebrity, Rubens was one of the most influential artists of northern Europe in the 17th century. Best known for his paintings, this universal genius is among the most imaginative of draftsmen. His topics vary from engaging biblical scenes to alluring nudes, from animated and stately portraits to poignant animal studies, and from landscapes sketched form nature to complex allegories.

At the core of the exhibition will be a major unprecedented loan from the Albertina - more than 30 drawings by Rubens that will leave Vienna for the first time. The exhibition will span Rubens’ entire career, beginning with his early training under Otto van Veen in Antwerp, where he made ingenious copies after prints of 16th-century German mas-ters like Hans Gikbeub and Tobias Stimmer. From 1600 to 1608, Rubens lived and worked in Italy, a mind-changing experience for the young Flemish artist. In the service of the Duke of Gonzaga in Mantua, he was allowed to travel extensively through-out the peninsula and even made a brief trip to Spain. Rubens repeatedly copied antique sculptures to study their intrinsic beauty, and to learn about ana-tomy. Highly impressed by the work of Michelangelo, he copied from the Sistine ceiling extensively. Rubens’s Libyan Sibyl (1601-1602, Musée du Louvre, shown above), after the fresco by Michelangelo, will be exhibited alongside Michelangelo’s Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (ca. 1512, Metropolitan Museum).

For Rubens, the drawings, above all else, fulfilled specific functions in the production of other works of art, usually paintings, but also prints, sculptures, and architecture. Consequently, the artist had different types of drawings to suit different purposes. Twelve of the drawings in the exhibition have come to light only within the last few years and will be exhibited in the context of Rubens’s oeuvre for the first time. His drawing after the antique sculpture of the Centaur Tormented by Cupid is one of three Rubens studies discovered in Cologne in 2000; it will be shown with the previously known Rubens drawing after the same sculpture from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. On view from the Ashmolean Museum, Osford, will be the recently acquired Por-trait of Thomas Howard, Second Earl of Arundel (1629-30), along with the better-known portrait drawing from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, allowing a direct comparison for the first time. The Metropo-litan Museum’s newly acquired, unpublished Susanna drawing will be shown together with the dynamic Susanna study from the Musée Atger, Montpellier. Another extraordinary work, The Man on Horseback (1603, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich), is a study for Rubens’s early equetrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma in Madrid. This large, meticulously executed sheet, a recent bequest to the Munich printroom, became known only in 1996.

The exhibition will be featured on the museum’s Web site (www.metmuseum.org).