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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Just in time for London's big Rubens exhibition, a challenge to one of the heroic Flemish painter's most celebrated pictures heats up again.
Dec 19, 2005 | There are few things the art world loves more than the whiff of scandal -- except, of course, a genuine, full-blown scandal. The bigger the money, the reputations of the power players and institutions, or the assumptions and authority of the art history that are involved, the better.
Now, as London's august National Gallery, home to one of the world's great collections of European art, trots out more than 100 drawings and paintings by the 17th century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens in a blockbuster survey, "Rubens: A Master in the Making" (on view through Jan. 15), a long-standing controversy surrounding one of the highlights of the show has resurfaced. At issue: the authenticity of "Samson and Delilah," the celebrated painting from around 1609-10 that depicts the Old Testament hero Samson in the lap of the lover who betrayed him. The work was made for Nicolaas Rockox, a well-known city-government official in Antwerp, Belgium, just after Rubens returned to that city after eight years in Italy.
The dispute over its authorship pits the Athens-based artist, author and independent scholar Euphrosyne Doxiades and her supporters -- unassuming Davids in a story about an artist whose subjects were often drawn from history and myth -- against the Goliath of one of the world's most venerated art repositories.
So could the National Gallery's "Samson and Delilah," for which it paid more than $5 million at a 1980 Christie's auction -- a record at the time -- be a fake? After years of study, Doxiades believes there is ample evidence that the painting may not be the masterpiece the National Gallery believes it owns -- enough evidence to, if not prove her case, at least warrant an open investigation. Among the criticisms, Doxiades and other challengers say the composition of the painting is not the same one that must have appeared in Rubens' original; they believe the picture is painted in a style that is more heavy-handed than the master's own renowned style and they also find it odd that, in the dramatic image, one of Samson's feet is truncated. (The hero's essential extremity is not fully depicted within the pictorial space.)
"Rubens is the painter's painter par excellence; as a colorist and a draftsman, he is unique in the history of art," Doxiades notes. Her husky voice is full of passion when she speaks about the art and artists she admires. It also carries a hint of weariness, for she has been investigating the history of the disputed painting for more than a decade. "When I first saw the National Gallery's 'Samson and Delilah' in 1987," she says, "immediately I thought it could not have been painted by Rubens and I supposed that it was a copy -- a 20th century copy." For an institution like the National Gallery to present such a work as genuine, she says, is "offensive."
In the context of the big survey, which tracks the artist's rise from a prodigious apprentice in Antwerp's guild system to the leading international painter of his time, that's a stinging criticism of one of the show's most celebrated pieces. The arguments that Doxiades and others who dispute the authenticity of the National Gallery's "Samson and Delilah" have put forward appear on a new Web site, AfterRubens.org, which Doxiades and her son, a London computer expert, launched to coincide with the National Gallery's splashy Rubens presentation.
In the exhibition, along with "Samson and Delilah," imposing works like "The Fall of Phaeton" (circa 1604-06) and "The Massacre of the Innocents" (circa 1611-12) showcase the superb draftsmanship, the sweeping, inventive compositions and the paint-handling bravura that are hallmarks of Rubens' muscular art. In Britain, the New Statesman praised the show for doing "full justice" to Rubens' impressive "early prowess," and for making viewers "impatient" to learn more about his later accomplishments. In the Guardian, critic Simon Schama pointed out that the show calls attention to the "meaty, animal energy and high-voltage design" aspects for which Rubens is renowned.
Doxiades just wishes that the museum were showing, as she puts it, the real "Samson and Delilah" to help illustrate Rubens' considerable achievements during the early phase of his career. The National Gallery, by including the disputed work in the current exhibition and effectively ignoring the debate surrounding it, believes it is doing just that.
Born in 1946, Doxiades studied with the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka at the school he ran in Salzburg and at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Later, when she was in her early 40s, she studied at the Wimbledon School of Art in London, as well. A regular instructor at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts, an international art school on the Greek island of Paros, Doxiades wrote "The Mysterious Fayum Portraits" (Thames & Hudson, 2000), a respected study of ancient, Roman-Egyptian paintings that were used, in their time, to honor the dead, and whose haunting beauty and technical refinement have dazzled artists right up to the present day.
In 1992, along with the London artists Steven Harvey and Siân Hopkinson, Doxiades submitted a written analysis to the National Gallery challenging the designated authorship of its "Samson and Delilah." (You can get the report in PDF format here.) For a while, it appeared that the museum took their argument seriously enough to have entered their analysis into its permanent research file on the historic work of art. More recently, however, in light of the current exhibition, the museum seems to regard the challenge as something of an annoyance.
"Anyone is allowed to say anything about any painting in a public collection," notes David Jaffe, the National Gallery's current senior curator, who says Doxiades and her colleagues' questions about the painting are "welcome." But he adds that he thinks their argument "probably just died out because there was no serious Rubens scholar who believed it." Jaffe's predecessor, Christopher Brown, who is now director of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University, had been in communication with Doxiades about the disputed Rubens painting during his tenure in London. In response to the 1992 analysis that Doxiades sent him, Brown had written back to the Greek artist, admitting that, because of the artwork's peculiar provenance, which was very sketchy, it was "impossible to be one-hundred percent certain that this is the picture [that Rubens] painted for Rockox." Brown did note, however, that there was "much circumstantial evidence" to support the assertion that the painting indeed was a real Rubens. (Asked to comment for Salon on his past involvement in the controversy surrounding "Samson and Delilah," Brown replied, by e-mail: "I am sorry but I don't want to do this. Please address your questions to the National Gallery.")
A few years after Doxiades and her colleagues sent their 1992 paper to the museum, the London Times' arts writer Dalya Alberge published an article about their challenge. Doxiades recalls that Alberge contacted Brown, who "agreed to do a dendrochronology test and said that I could be present."
At the time, Doxiades remembers, "it was very rewarding" to be taken seriously by the museum's chief curator, and to see that Peter Klein from the University of Hamburg, one of Europe's -- and the world's -- best-known dendrochronologists, had been brought in to do the test. (Dendrochronology examines tree rings in pieces of wood to establish their age. The technique has been used to determine when old pictures on wooden panels -- including many Netherlandish paintings on oak -- were created.) Ultimately, though, Klein's wood-age test corroborated the National Gallery's claim of the work's authenticity, at least in terms of its physical age.
Still, Doxiades had her doubts, especially since the opportunity to get up close and personal with the centuries-old artwork at the time of the test had allowed her to see it unencumbered, without a frame. It was then that she noticed that the backing board on which it had been mounted looked like blockboard, a modern kind of plywood.
