Word: fourment
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Later in his life, a widowed Rubens abandoned his roles as diplomat and teacher, and settled down quietly with a second, younger wife, Helene Fourment. He said he fully intended to enjoy "the illicit pleasures of marriage." His sugary, mildly erotic Garden of Love, replete with cherubic angels and sparkling applications of paint, is a far cry from the violent and dramatic Prometheus. Illustrating an open-air party of fleshy, amorous aristocrats dressed in satin, Garden of Love is an obvious precursor of the eighteenth-century fete-champetre popularized by Rococco artists such as Watteau...
...very greatest drawings on the Morgan's walls is Rubens' portrait of his sister-in-law Susanna Fourment, a likeness breathed onto the paper with lyric, impalpable precision in three schematic chalks (white, black and sanguine), conveying the fullest sense of Rubens' appetite for character studies delicately balanced between intimacy and formality. Viewing such work, one realizes that there is no Rubens (or Durer, or Mantegna, or Watteau) of / the late 20th century; what we see here are emblems of a tradition that ended, except for footnotes, with Picasso...
...cannot hope for: the Louvre would never lend any of the giant canvases from Rubens' Marie de Médicis cycle, any more than his landscape The Cháteau de Steen in Autumn could be expected to travel from London or the Hélène Fourment in a Fur Cloak from Vienna. Still, this is the most concentrated view of Rubens, set in one place, that will ever be seen...
...Venetian art: with every object, from a wineglass to a woman's belly, brought to its fullest luster as substance, "luxury" meant completeness of being. There is something quite transcendental about Rubens' incessant delight in the material world. Every dimple or blush on the skin of Helene Fourment, the child wife of his old age (she was 16, he 53, when they were married in 1630), is both the record of desire and a proclamation of God's generosity. Rubens' world was tumescent; even the eyes in his portraits, large, white, engorged with visual appetite, look...
...course, the face is familiar. Like the pink convexities of Rubens' child-wife Hélène Fourment, it is one of the obsessive human presences of 17th century painting: Philip IV of Spain, growing older in the long succession of Diego Velásquez's court portraits. This one was painted late in the monarch's life, around 1653. The King's features-the bulbed Habsburg lip, the forehead's waxy promontory, the thick ball of a chin, the upswept mustache that Salvador Dali would appropriate and vulgarize-must have been more familiar...