REMBRANDT/LUCIAN FREUD at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West) to May 23. $18, srs $15, stu $10, free Wednesday 6-8:30 pm. 416-979-6648. Rating: NNNN
In Rembrandt/Freud: Etchings From Life, the AGO hosts a fascinating side-by-side conversation between two great masters of etching. Both are towering figures of their respective eras, but, more importantly, they serve as bookends to a span of history.
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Rembrandt (1606-1669), riding the wave of Holland’s new humanism and burgeoning prosperity, made prints filled with vitality, bold experimentation, humour and warmth. Lucian Freud scrutinizes his subjects through a much darker and more anxious 20th-century lens.
Rembrandt’s vigorous celebration of the female form in all its overflowing – and unabashedly unidealized – glory marked a radical departure from Renaissance portrayals of the human body. His women are plainly real in a way that makes the sculpted classical nudes of earlier masters look cold and prudish.
By contrast, Freud, fascinated with the texture and weight of the human form, creates formal and unsparing images: they often seem closer to animal than human, suspended in a dreamy state of pure physicality, and move toward a convergence of the grotesque and the beautiful.
You sense the same difference again in the portraits. Rembrandt’s are plain and insightful, but not unkind. There’s a reverence and immediacy to the way he portrays the human face. Freud’s, with their swirling, grimly compressed grids and scores of lines, capture moments of introspection that seem entirely private, often verging on melancholy.
To look at these two artists side by side is to see Rembrandt’s humanistic images morph into Freud’s stark vision. The contrast is more than telling, and makes this a show that can’t be missed.
art@nowtoronto.com
