Opening a Path to Natural Vision

By ROBERT HUGHES

A unique retrospective of Ruisdael at the Fogg

Is an Ice Age coming for American museums? Considering the cutbacks in Government cultural funding, the inflated art prices and the spiraling administrative costs, some pessimists would say yes, and in the past few weeks they have pointed to the Fogg Art Museum for evidence. The Fogg, attached to Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., is beyond doubt the most distinguished university collection in the U.S. Its building is also one of the most outmoded, and in 1981 Harvard announced that James Stirling, England's leading architect, would design an addition to it. But early last February, with $21.5 million raised, Harvard President Derek Bok decided to scrap the whole project, citing risks of construction cost overruns and fears that the new museum would be too expensive to maintain. Amid general confusion and doubt, Bok agreed to back off, provided donors could come up with $3 million more by mid-March and a further $3 million during the next three years. By last week, the Fogg's supporters had pledged the additional money, and Stirling's needed building will now be built after all.

Meanwhile, the show in the existing Fogg continued to prove the worth of the museum. It is a retrospective--improbably enough, the only one ever held--of 56 paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael, who was by general consent the greatest landscape painter to live in 17th century Holland. It will not go elsewhere in the U.S., so anyone with a serious interest in the art of landscape should get to the Fogg before April 11. We see Ruisdael entire, for the first and perhaps the last time. The man, however, disappears behind the work. Little is known of his life, except that he was the son of a mediocre painter, was baptized as an adult into the Reformed Church and was a sick man. He lived from 1628 to 1682. Nobody wrote about him or painted his portrait. Of his tastes, ambitions, fears and character, we know nothing.

Yet this shadowy creature changed some of the history of European art. There was landscape before Ruisdael and landscape after him; his vision exerted a subtle, intrusive pressure on Dutch, French and English painters well into the 19th century. The idea that landscape did not have to be "moralized" as allegory or treated merely as a background to royal portraits or Crucifixions--that it could be seen and loved for its own sake, as the repository of unburnished natural truth--was widely confirmed by Ruisdael's work.

Many of his best pictures were hung in England. Gainsborough copied his gnarled-oak thickets; Turner's early marine paintings were done under the partial spell of Ruisdael's sea pieces, his slim parallelograms of rusty sail leaning on the wind-chopped estuary. Most of all, John Constable was inspired by his sense of nature seen fresh, without evident convention: the patches of scudding sunlight on wheat fields, the broken arc of a rainbow, the painterly delight in filling three-quarters of a canvas with high piling clouds. Time and again, one sees images in Constable that might have been lifted straight from Ruisdael. Hadleigh Castle, 1829, with its tall split tower and ruins behind, virtually repeats the motif of Ruisdael's melancholy Landscape with the Ruins of the Castle of Egmond, painted 170 years before.

If this exhibition is not so much an epiphany as the great 1976 Constable show in London, the reason is that impressionism taught us to put light, more than anything else, in landscape; Constable's surface, dewed with points of white and radiantly matinal, seems "truer" than Ruisdael's. We no longer want meadows to have, as some English academician is supposed to have said, the color of an old violin. But if one views Ruisdael's work against the conventions of his own day, it is easier to understand how original he really was--how inventive in form, how specific in vision.

Ruisdael was not an on-the-spot painter. His landscapes are "composites," made up in the studio from sketches, memory and imagination; there is no finding the spot where Ruisdael "really" stood on the shore of the IJ. Some places he painted without seeing them at all. The Dutch market, in the late 1650s, had a vogue for Scandinavian waterfalls; Ruisdael obligingly painted about a hundred of them, undeterred by the fact that he had never been north of Holland. His Haarlempjes, or "Views of Haarlem," were also bread and butter; their usual format is one of the best-loved images of Dutch landscape--a wide, flat horizon, punctuated by a church tower, overwhelmed by blowing clouds and permeated by Ruisdael's mild northern light. They repeat themselves, but a man has a right to his own cliches--up to a point.

Ruisdael's work bears traces of many older attitudes. The impossible God's-eye view of a remote earth from above, as done by 16th century artists from Altdorfer to Leonardo, was echoed by Ruisdael in a small panorama of Amsterdam seen from the scaffolding of the unfinished New Town Hall. He also made his homages to the landscape of symbols. The most spectacular paysage moralise in his work was the motif for two versions of The Jewish Cemetery, circa 1655. This gloomy landscape pullulates with symbols: the broken tree over the dark brook, suggesting a bridge across the Styx; the wan rainbow; the ruins, the air of desolation, transience and decay; and the crystalline, stony geometry of the tombs. Their purity interested Goethe, who would later design an abstract memorial for himself. "Even in their ruined state," he declared, Ruisdael's monuments "point to a past beyond the past; they are tombs of themselves," abstractions of an abstraction.

Ruisdael's most popular paintings, however, have always tended to be the ones of "natural vision": the vast pearly expanses of flat Dutch land, richly differentiated in light and shadow; and the woodland scenes. Without straining for effect, he hit the exact note over and over again. Even a self-conscious device, like the ocher scar on the old oak that anchors the radiating composition of Hilly Landscape with a Great Oak Tree and a Grain Field, circa 1654, is perfectly assimilated to the other elements of the painting. Such a canvas is pure Ruisdael: the precise eye for detail, the loving description of foliage, grass and bark that never degenerates into mere fact hunting; the hard-won density of tonal structure, the blessings of silvery light dropping from the sky. One can enter these pastures. Through them, the path to realism is seen to open.

--By Robert Hughes

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