The Vision of The Squinter

By ROBERT HUGHES

EXHIBIT: "GUERCINO"

WHERE: THE DRAWING CENTER, NEW YORK CITY

WHAT: 60 DRAWINGS FROM THE ROYAL COLLECTION IN WINDSOR CASTLE

THE BOTTOM LINE: These superb, spontaneous works show a 17th century master at his best.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known from childhood and, since his death, to art history as Guercino -- "the Squinter." Thus he joins Masaccio ("Tom the Lump") and Sodoma among the notable Italian painters who survive in pejorative nicknames. One flinches to think what this practice might have done to the self-esteem of artists in the late 20th century had it gone on.

The beautiful show of Guercino drawings on loan from the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle that opened this month at the Drawing Center in New York City reminds you, moreover, how labile reputation can be. Guercino was one of those 17th century Italian artists who sank under the weight of an earlier age's revival. Critics and collectors at the end of the 19th century were so obsessed with the study and acquisition of Renaissance art that they had little time for the seicento; for them, Italian genius lay in "primitive" gold-ground altarpieces and 15th and 16th century frescoes. Consequently, Guercino, like a number of his contemporaries -- Guido Reni and the Carraccis, for instance, or even Caravaggio -- was slighted. The first Guercino exhibition was not held until three centuries after his death, in his ! birthplace in central Italy, the small Emilian city of Cento, in 1967. His rediscovery was due almost entirely to the love and labors of one English art historian, the late Denis Mahon, who wrote the basic texts on him, defined the canon of his work and was probably the last connoisseur to "own" single- handedly a major European artist in this way.

Guercino worked in an age when, although the mechanisms of fame were becoming more centralized, it was still possible to sustain a life's work on a provincial reputation. He lived in Emilia most of his life. But Rome was the great magnet, and he almost made it to the Roman big time when his patron, the Bolognese Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, became Pope in 1621 and summoned Guercino to the Vatican. There he painted one enormous canvas, the Burial and Reception into Heaven of Saint Petronilla, for an altar in Saint Peter's, but the Pope died in 1623, and back to Cento the painter went. Later he moved to nearby Bologna. Guercino had a steady stream of commissions from local churches in Emilia, but from Rome's point of view he was overshadowed by other Bolognese virtuosi who worked in the metropolis: the Carraccis and especially Reni.

And in fact, Guercino did not have Reni's breathtaking skill as a painter. But he was not afflicted by Reni's sentimentality either, and where he shone, as this compact and rewarding show makes clear, was in the act of drawing. By comparison with his preparatory drawings, Guercino's final paintings are quite often labored and stodgy. It is the drawings that contain his finest and most spontaneously registered perceptions, and fortunately many survive. George III, an avid collector, acquired nearly 350 of them, of which 60 are in the Drawing Center's show, and this can be only a fraction of the stream of sketches and preliminary studies, caricatures and genre scenes that flowed from Guercino's hand.

No doubt one's preference for Guercino's drawings over his paintings is partly caused by the modern liking for the immediate over the highly finished. Guercino liked the flicker of consciousness to show. In a famous passage, Leonardo da Vinci advised the painter to take inspiration from random pattern, like the mottled stains on an old wall; Guercino seems to have believed this too. One of the drawings in the show, Three Bathers Surprised by a Monster, starts with some random splatters of ink on the blank page; briskly and humorously, with a few minimal strokes, one of these blot clusters is converted into the animal face of a creature with haglike breasts that surges out of a pool to frighten the bathing nymphs.

At times there is something proleptically surrealistic about Guercino -- or is it only that the Surrealists picked up on some of the mannerisms Guercino shared with other Italian artists, the exaggerated perspectives, the distant figures? For whatever reasons, there is one drawing in the show -- a scarecrow large in the foreground, ominous birds, a tiny gesticulating woman -- that could have come straight out of the background of a Dali.

The mainstream of Guercino's graphic work was his studies for commissions. He worked in many media -- chalk, charcoal, crayon, pencil -- but his favorite was pen and ink wash, from which he produced brilliant summaries of movement, light and shade. The trace of the pen twists and flourishes, now with a liquid agitation, now in sheaves of parallel hatching as tense as wires. Nodes of darkness in a head or down the flank of a torso link up across the whiteness of the paper, and the fearlessness of tonal range attests to Guercino's mastery. He could work passages of light and dark that no reproduction can successfully convey.

One example is the mopheads of the practicing choristers in Four Youths Singing, Watched by an Old Man, in which glints of white paper show through the dense tangle of pen and wash, providing the highlights within the hair. In such drawings, the balance between specific details like this and the more generalized effects -- the well-judged breadth of tonal washes that firm up the singing group, or the intricate set of quick dabs to give the bony structure of the old music teacher's face -- can still surprise you. Four hundred years after his birth, the Squinter remains as fresh as a daisy.