Masterpieces on display at Guggenheim Hermitage

Lynn Goya

Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2002 | 8:29 a.m.

Art History class is rarely this fun. In an exhibit that cuts straight to the heart of the Western art movement, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at The Venetian has pulled together some of the artistic trendsetters of the past 600 years.

"It is like little bonbons of art history," says Barbara J. Bloemink, managing director of the Guggenheim Hermitage.

The second exhibit to open at the 8,000-square-foot museum, "Art Through The Ages: Masterpieces of Painting From Titian to Picasso," lets viewers see firsthand the two central themes that possessed painters from the Renaissance to the 1960s: the interpretation of light and reality.

The 39 paintings are drawn from the collections of three of the world's greatest museums: The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; the Gemaldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

This is the first full-scale exhibition to come out of an agreement reached in early 2001 that opened the door to joint programming and collection-sharing by the three museums. It is also the first time Old Masters have been available for view in the Las Vegas area.

In this exhibit, light and reality seem like partners in a dance that is sometimes delicate, sometime passionate.

The exhibition begins with two early portraits that began the dialogue that preoccupied the art world for the next few hundred years.

Fifteenth-century Northern Renaissance painter Jan van Eyck, ("Portrait of Jan de Leeuw," 1436) begins the quest to understand light; Albrecht Durer ("Portrait of Johannes Kelberger," 1526) begins to analyze reality.

Van Eyck is considered the most innovative of the Flemish painters of his era, at one time being credited with inventing oil paints. What he did invent, in fact, was a stable varnish that would dry evenly over paint. By mixing the varnish into the paints he transformed the flat, egg-based colors of tempura into a luminous medium that allowed canvases to glow with natural light.

Durer, renowned for his flat, detailed woodcuts, invented the precursor to the photographic camera, the first device that could produce an image by purely mechanical means. Yet it is his exquisitely rendered paintings that seem to see into the essence of his subjects, capturing their inner reality.

French painter Nicolas Poussin, as seen in "The Victory of Joshua Over the Amelekites" (1625) eschews the inner reality, and instead seems to take passionate, often violent subjects and intellectualizes them with an almost coldly geometric precision.

In Spain, Diego Velazquez's works balanced color, light, space, rhythm of line and mass. Velazquez was a master realist, who, with a few broad strokes, brought his subjects to life, as in the portrait of young Prince Philip Prosper, who died at age 4. Velazquez influenced artists as diverse as Francisco de Goya, Camille Corot and Edouard Manet.

The fascination with light continues with the intense, somber paintings of Peter Paul Rubens as seen in his "Self-Portrait" (circa 1638-40) and Paulus Potter's "The Wolf Hound" (circa 1650). Reflecting the low light of their climates, their moody paintings illuminate a subject with a single shaft of light that barely seems able to penetrate into the mysterious darkness beyond.

Eighteenth-century French painter, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's "Pond in the Forest" (1865-70), on the other hand, is a shimmering landscape that presages Impressionism. Part of the Romantic movement, Corot evolved dramatically during his career. His early work was naturally poetic without idealization. His later work played with light to soften the edges of reality, making scenes feel almost mystical.

To the Impressionists, light and reality became synonymous. One contemporary critic complained that their paintings were so bright they hurt his eyes. The brilliant, effusive light of the sunny French countryside is seen in Monet's "Haystack at Giverny" (1886) and in the vibrant colors of Vincent van Gogh's "Mountains at Saint-Remy" (1889).

If Corot was the precursor to Impressionism, Paul Cezanne started to break away from reality completely. His works toy with the laws of physics and nature. Fruit floats unobtrusively off the edge of a table, table edges appear solid, but upon closer examination, the edges don't jibe.

Picasso, whose Blue Period is shown in "Woman Ironing" (1904), disregards any pretense of capturing light, and, taking Cezanne's abstractions to the extreme, shattering reality similar to a crystal, instead exploring the time, space and substance within.

Picasso's flat, energetic compositions lead to Abstract Expressism where reality is expressed through feeling, unclouded by representationtal images, as in Joan Miro's "Surrealistic Landscape (The Hare)" (1927) and Piet Mondrian's pure "Composition No. 1" (1930).

Finally, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein brings the show to a humorous close with his cartoonish commentary, "Grrrrrrrrrrr!" that expresses the essence of a dog without worrying about either light or reality.