High Drama, High Contrast: Finding the Baroque in Contemporary Art

ANTWERP, Belgium — This low-lying, discreetly wealthy city tends to a restrained approach to art and design today: Its riverside shops are full of stark, spare furniture, and its renowned fashion designers will sell you any number of black suits and shifts. But in the early 17th century, when Peter Paul Rubens shipped thousands of paintings out of the largest workshop in Europe, Antwerp’s house style was a much bolder affair. Head to the main cathedral here, for which Rubens painted his grandiose “Descent From the Cross,” and look at the eight figures bringing down Christ’s body in a torrent of sweeping fabrics and slashing light. The movement, the exaggeration, the unashamed flamboyance: This, my friends, is Flemish Baroque art in all its majesty.

Antwerp is in full Baroque mode, with half a dozen museums devoting their summer programming to the high-drama art of the 17th century, and to Rubens, the city’s favorite son. Even the Museum of Contemporary Art has got in the 17th-century spirit with the substantial exhibition “Sanguine/Bloedrood,” an exercise in luster, mortality and timeline-smashing. Recent works by Sigmar Polke, On Kawara and Marlene Dumas share space with a major late work by Caravaggio, and portraits by Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens.

The curator of “Sanguine/Bloedrood” is Luc Tuymans — the artist who bestrides Antwerp’s scene today as Rubens did four centuries ago, though his paintings are as cool and color-sapped as Rubens’ are showy and saturated. Tuymans is a practiced curator, a rarity among artists: In 2016 he organized a well-received retrospective of the Belgian expressionist James Ensor at the Royal Academy in London, and he has curated shows of German romanticism and Polish contemporary art. “Sanguine/Bloedrood” is not one of his more demanding curatorial efforts: It has nothing much to say about the older Baroque art on view, and its propositions rest too heavily on the offbeat contrasts that characterize “artist’s choice” shows.

Still, it’s worth scrambling expectations from time to time, and there is a certain pleasure in encountering Baroque paintings and sculptures in the purified realm of a contemporary art museum. The show’s anchor is Caravaggio’s “Flagellation of Christ,” painted in 1607-08, in which the bearded, thorn-crowned son of God looks downward as two men tie him to a column while a third prepares to flog his naked body with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Jesus’ bright, alabaster flesh is set off from the shadowy background in intense chiaroscuro, which Tuymans compounds by displaying the painting under a spotlight in an all-black circular gallery.

The “Flagellation” hangs here near two startling gilded statues of Mary and St. John by lesser-known sculptor Johann Georg Pinsel, as well as a C-list St. Sebastian, stiff and unconvincing, that Francisco de Zurbarán could not have spent much time on. In the same room are works of contemporary art. On the floor, as high as your ankle and refracting the Baroque works on the walls, is an abstract construction of mirrored triangular prisms by Antwerp artists Stéphane Schraenen and Carla Arocha — another work that produces drama through reflected light. (It’s also a reminder that this show’s curator does not play by the rules: Arocha is Tuymans’ wife.)

The classic definition of the Baroque comes to us from Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, whose “Principles of Art History” (1915) distinguished it from the earlier High Renaissance through a series of visual contrasts. Renaissance pictures are “linear,” each figure outlined and balanced within the picture plane; Baroque pictures are “painterly,” with figures melting into one another. The contrast isn’t without exceptions, but Wölfflin’s typology remains helpful: If Renaissance painting aimed to depict “the solid figure,” the art of the Baroque era favored “the changing appearance,” “movement” and “the form in function.”

A small number of the contemporary works in this exhibition have that same dynamism and heightened visual contrast. One is “The Kiss,” a lovely wall-mounted sculpture of undulating red velvet and a black wooden triangle, made in 1984 by the excellent and still underappreciated Flemish artist Lili Dujourie. There are also several kitsch rehashes of historical motifs, including Nadia Naveau’s clownish plaster busts of Figaro or a curly-haired courtier (whose Rococo curls seem more 18th-century anyway). And stately black-and-white photographs of Brazilian Baroque sculptures by Marcel Gautherot, the French photographer better known for documenting the construction of Brasília, expand the show’s focus from Europe to colonies in the new world.

Yet the Baroque is as much a temperament as a style. It’s theatrical, and obsessed with death. It’s also profoundly Catholic — the Baroque era coincides with the Counter-Reformation, and artists here in Flanders relied on cash from the church or from patrons in Spain, which ruled the Catholic Netherlands, to produce these extravagant images. It’s this visceral character that seems to interest Tuymans most in Baroque art, and much of the most compelling contemporary work in “Sanguine/Bloedrood” echoes the 17th-century tradition in its excess and intensity, rather than in its appearance. For “In Flanders Fields” (2000) by Berlinde De Bruyckere, perhaps the only Belgian artist more lugubrious than Tuymans himself, the embalmed corpses of three horses, their hides patched and their eyes sewn shut, lie in morbid suspension. (As always with animals in De Bruyckere’s art, the horses died of natural causes.) In the most striking move of “Sanguine/Bloedrood,” on a wall in the same gallery are a clutch of On Kawara’s frosty “Date Paintings,” each carefully lettered with the day, month and year on which the Japanese-American artist made it. These archetypes of conceptual painting, accompanied, too, by Kawara’s nearly unknown early prints of atomic bomb victims, have never appeared more operatic and ghoulish than they do here.

Those two understandings of the Baroque, one visual, one emotional, collide in Edward Kienholz’s “Five Car Stud,” a walk-in sculptural tableau of harrowing violence that was one of the most controversial artworks of the 1970s but has been little seen since. This giant installation, staged in an inflatable dome in a parking lot near the Museum of Contemporary Art, comprises four cars and a pickup truck whose headlights illuminate life-size figures in the center of the room. The figures are white men, wearing ghoulish rubber masks, who stand over and prepare to castrate a black man — presumably for being seen with the white woman sitting in the pickup’s cabin, hiding her face in agony.

Shown at the now-mythologized Documenta 5 of 1972, “Five Car Stud” spent the next four decades languishing in storage at a Japanese museum; it now belongs to the Fondazione Prada in Milan, where this show will go after its Antwerp run. Like Caravaggio’s “Flagellation,” its depiction of violence in chiaroscuro reaches Baroque heights of intensity and drama. Unlike in the Caravaggio, here that violence never resolves into beauty, and its actual-scale lynching grows only more disturbing the longer you look.

And perhaps this is the real point of Tuymans’ peculiar exhibition, beyond the formal echoes of light and shadow across centuries: that the extremity of Antwerp’s old style serves all too naturally for art that aims to depict our present age. For Kienholz and for so many other artists here, the Baroque had become a kind of realism.

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“Sanguine/Bloedrood”

Through Sept. 16 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA), Antwerp; muhka.be.