Text/Holland Cotter Compiled/Daisy
The special exhibition "Titian: Women, Myths and Power" is currently on tour at the Isabella Jana Museum of Art in Boston, USA, focusing on six "Poetry Paintings" series including Plundering Europa. The series, which took place between 1551 and 1562, is based on a narrative from Ovid's Metamorphosis, commissioned by King Philip II of Spain to create Titian, with the intention of portraying him as the "conqueror of the world". The paintings show titian's magician-like expressiveness, but from the perspective of the present, the violence in the work, especially against women, raises ethical questions. Can great art be exempt from moral scrutiny? Holland Cotter, the author of this article, raises this question, arguing that for these classical works, today's curation should focus on their duality and the meaning of the contemporary context.
Titian (c. 1488–1576) was a representative painter of the Venetian school of painting in the late Italian Renaissance. His use of color influenced not only Italian painters during the Renaissance era, but also Western art. With the exhibition "Titian: Women, Myth & Power", the Isabella Jana Museum of Art in Boston created a miracle of art history. The exhibition will make institutions several times larger envious, and those eager to see the masterpieces of the Old Masters will feel lucky. However, it is also this exhibition, if you look at it from the current political perspective, you will find a conflict between aesthetics and ethics.
"Titian: Women, Myths and Power" exhibition scene Photo: Matt Cosby for The New York Times
The exhibition first appeared at the National Gallery in London, and then toured to the Prado Museum in Madrid, where the Garner Museum of Art was the last stop and its only tour in the United States. At the heart of the exhibition is a set of large-scale oil paintings depicting mythological scenes, which Titian created for King Philip II of Spain later in his career.
The works were first exhibited in a room in the Royal Palace of Madrid and have since dispersed around the world. One remained in Spain; four flowed into Britain; the last appeared in Boston in 1896, first in art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner's studio on Beacon Street, and later in her palace-like residence in Fenway. The arrival caused a sensation, and Gardner bought the painting for about $100,000 (equivalent to $3.2 million today), which was called the most expensive oil painting in the United States at the time.
Plunder of Europa, 1559-62 ©Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The painting is called The Rape of Europa. Today, allegations and reports of sexual assault on women can be seen in the news almost every day, and the subject of this painting — the disguised god kidnapping a young woman, a Phoenician princess, and forcibly impregnating her — makes one raise a red alarm. The fact that the entire body of works repeats the manipulation and exposure of the female flesh by male power raises many questions about whether art, however "great," can be exempt from moral scrutiny.
On the other hand, this group of works of art is great from the point of view of formal innovation and historical influence. By the time Titian had just been commissioned by Philip (later Philip II) in 1550, he was already widely recognized in Europe as the boldest and most expressive painter in the art world. Unlike his Florentine contemporaries, he let color have its own physical and emotional life, stroke by stroke.
Titian realized that Philip was a patron who was willing to pay him well and delegate his creative powers. Philip found Titian to be a highly respected artist who could establish himself as a conqueror of the world, controlling much of Western Europe, gaining a foothold in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, and establishing his empire. He found a painter with both an experimental spirit and a sense of brand, enough to create a unique, forward-looking court style.
The novelty of this style can be summed up in a word that Titian himself used to describe the series: "poesie"—a poetic painting in which the images are also imaginative metaphors. In fact, the group itself is based on the narrative epic The Metamorphoses, created by the Roman poet Ovid around the 8th century AD.
It's a wild work, a dystopian chronicle of god-man interactions set in a world long past the Golden Age, which is moving into moral chaos. There are uplifting and humorous etchings, but violence is the norm, and rape is a form of violence that usually takes.
Danae 1551–1553 ©Stratfield Saye Preservation Trust
The first painting in the series, Danae, was like this. This work, on loan from the Wellington Collection in London, was created between 1551 and 1553. The work tells the story of a young woman named Danae, who is locked in a tower by her father in order to keep her away from the greedy men. But the god Jupiter, a serial abuser, found a way to enter the tower. He transformed himself into a rain of golden dust that fell from the sky, in this form on Danae's reclining naked body.
Venus and Adonis circa 1553-1554 ©Baztán Lacasa José/Museo Nacional del Prado
Nudity, or near-nude female figures, are recurring themes in the series. This symbol of eroticism, as bright as a beam of light, can be seen wherever you stand. In Venus and Adonis (The Prado Museum), we see this figure from the back; in Perseus and Andromeda (the Wallace Collection, London), the woman faces the front and is bound by a rope; in Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Diana and Callisto), this theme becomes entangled with multiple characters. The two paintings are co-owned by the National Gallery in London and the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.
Only one female character, Diana, the goddess of purity, is portrayed as confident and majestic, but her actions are arbitrary and brutal. She denounces the pregnancy of the young follower, the fairy Calisto, and conceals it (Jupiter is also a seducer). The young hunter Akteon is reprimanded for bumping into her bathing outdoors, and in her anger she causes him a terrible fate: she turns into a stag and is chased by her own dog.
Diana and Aktaione, 1556–69
In each scene, Titian proves himself to be a gifted "dramatist", compressing the past, present, and future into a single event. In addition, he is particularly adept at showing a world of physical and mental imbalances, with characters tilted, twisted, or withdrawn. This dynamic is particularly evident in Plundering Europa, the last in this group and, in a way, the most violent.
Titian carefully follows Ovid's account, according to which Europa is partying with friends at the seaside, and Jupiter appears as a snow-white bull. He appeared so docile that Europa put flowers on him and climbed onto his back. Suddenly—and this is what we saw—the shore drifted away, and the bull rushed into the deep water. Europa's robe slipped off, his legs awkwardly open, grabbing his horns to keep his balance. She looked back at her friends, but there was nowhere to escape.
This image is powerful. But is it "beautiful"? When you get up close, it really is. Titian was a magician who used pigments. Later Velázquez, Rubens, and Manet all appreciated him. A few steps from the surface of the painting, you'll see why: his magician's hand is hidden in the frame.
Then you take a step back and see the panorama of the picture, and you will find that it is cruel, a narrative about innocent victims, but also a narrative that shows lust: you can perceive this from Europa's writhing limbs, the greedy eyes of a bull, and a cupid riding on a dolphin imitating Europa's posture. On top of all this, you have to take into account the intention of this series of creations—to please the conquerors of a world—and you will find that such art is mixed with things that are not good.
For those "old" art, if it is to retain its vitality in front of new audiences, it must be presented from this dual perspective– both a remarkable work in form and a difficult and often negative history.
The Isabella Jana Art Museum clearly understands this, with printed text and interview audios placing 16th-century works in the context of contemporary critical thinking, in addition to two contemporary works commissioned for the exhibition. Among them, Barbara Kruger's Body Language hangs on the museum's façade: a huge banner enlarging the details of Diana and Acteon, with a strong, dark male leg "horizontally" on another pale naked female thigh, as if to hold it in place.
Matt Cosby for The New York Times
Another new work is a nine-minute black-and-white film titled Plundered Europa by this year's artist-in-residence groups of the Isabella Jana Art Museum, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. The work has been thoughtfully created to present the kidnapped and pregnant Europa as a feminist of the 21st century, preserving the creative history of women from ancient times to the present day. As Ovid could have done, the piece was quirky and surreal, and politically sharp.
Marie Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley in the film "Plundering Europa" ©films
But your real intention of coming here is for Titian, and the spark of those works. Unless you've been to exhibitions in London or Madrid, you'll never see them in full at once. They are exciting and trigger moral questions. The educational significance of these works is priceless: we can love art because of beauty, or we can shout out because of its blindness. We can lift it up to the sky or we can drop it to the ground. Old and new, art is the best of us and the worst of us.
The exhibition will run until 2 January 2022.
(This article is compiled from The New York Times)
Editor-in-charge: Qian Xue'er
Proofreader: Ding Xiao