It has been quite a few years since I lived and taught in New York, but were I teaching there now I would team up with the art teacher in school and take my students on a field trip to the Frick Collection - [
www.frick.org] - to see their current exhibit of “Jacob and His Twelve Sons.â€
Here is the story that led me to learn about it -
[
www.newyorker.com]
An excerpt:
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Francisco de Zurbarán’s Biblical Vision
The thirteen life-size portraits that make up “Jacob and His Twelve Sons†come to the Frick.
By Peter Schjeldahl
The Frick Collection has a surprise for us: a room-filling loan show of “Jacob and His Twelve Sons†(circa 1640-45), thirteen full-length, life-size imagined portraits, all but unknown in the United States until now, by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán. Twelve are from the dining room of Auckland Castle, in the small northeastern English town of Bishop Auckland, and one, reuniting the suite, is from another English collection. They constitute a terrific feat of Baroque storytelling: movies of their day. All the characters—each a distinct personality uniquely posed, costumed, and accessorized, and towering against a bright, clouded sky and a low swath of sylvan scenery—appear to be approximately as old as they are in the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis. There the dying Jacob prophesies, in gorgeous verse, the fates of the founders-to-be of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Some will fare better than others: poorly, in the case of the eldest, Reuben, “unstable as water,†and in the cases of the second and third, Simeon and Levi, “for in their anger they killed men,†and very well indeed in those of Judah, from whom the “sceptre shall not depart,†and—of course—Joseph, “a fruitful bough†once sold into slavery by his brothers and subsequently their benefactor as the overlord of Egypt. (No, I haven’t read Thomas Mann’s tetralogy, “Joseph and His Brothersâ€â€”to my acute and, on deadline, irremediable regret. Note to friends: please stop telling me how wonderful it is!) The show enthralls in numerous ways.
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The “Jacob†paintings are unsigned—indicating a substantial role in their execution by Zurbarán’s assistants, who, incidentally, may well be immortalized in the realistic faces of the figures—and uneven in quality. In addition, after nearly four centuries, the canvases sorely need cleaning. The brilliance of their colors has dimmed, notably in passages of brocade and other sumptuous fabrics—a forte of Zurbarán, whose father was a haberdasher. (At least one hue is defunct: that of the pigment smalt blue, which blackens with age.) But most of the pictures retain power aplenty. Spend time with them, half an hour minimum. Their glories bloom slowly, as you register the formal decisions that practically spring the figures from their surfaces into the room with you, and as you ponder, if you will, the stories that they plumb. Near-masterpieces include the regally attired “Asher,†who in Jacob’s words “shall provide royal delicacies,†carrying a basket of bread loaves that display Zurbarán’s subtle mastery of still-life, and “Dan,†who “shall be a snake by the roadside†(apparently, a good thing for a man associated with judges) and who gestures blithely, as if speaking to someone out of frame, while wielding a live serpent on a stick. Finest of all is “Joseph,†as profound a painting as its subject is a foundational personage in the world’s religious heritage.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/18/2018 05:11PM by mlb.
