The Encounter
“Some art can be made in solitude, straight out of the artist’s head,” said Martin Gayford in The Spectator. Portraiture, however, is “a game for two”, a “complicated business” that is essentially a “record of a meeting between two people”. A portrait will be affected “not only by what the artist knows about art, but also by how well he or she knows the subject”. That is the “lesson” we take from The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt, a “marvellous” new exhibition of works on paper at the National Portrait Gallery. The show is essentially a “medley” of Old Master drawings from various British collections, bringing together around 50 pictures by the likes of Holbein, Parmigianino, Pontormo and Dürer. It contains many “intimate” works that “take you physically close to the marks of the artist’s hand”. Though this all makes it sound “a little on the quiet side”, the exhibition is “full of visual pleasures” and poses some “intriguing questions” about the nature of portraiture.
Holbein is the “star” here, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. His work gives a “genuine and electrifying sense of encounter between artist and subject”. Woman Wearing a White Headdress (c.1532-43), for example, “stares at you with a cool disdain and self-possession”, while his portrait of John Godsalve, a courtier to Henry VIII, is simply “unforgettable”. Elsewhere, however, this show has≈serious faults. Its title promises work by Leonardo and Rembrandt, yet it contains only one drawing apiece from both. There is a smattering of big names, but it generally focuses on an “eccentric selection” of obscure artists. Few of them are very compelling, and it reaches a nadir with two “horribly ugly” pictures of young men by the German Renaissance artist Leonhard Beck. Despite including some of the “greatest artists in history”, this exhibition somehow manages to seem “unfocused and slight”.
There are “moments of graphic brilliance” here, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. There’s a “thrilling” large work by Pontormo depicting a “snakily strange and elongated” figure picking up a child, while the Baroque artist Annibale Carracci’s likeness of a man with a physical deformity is impressive: his pose “is awkward, and so is the intense psychological contact he makes with us”. However, the show at large is “short on direction”, trying and failing to stick to a coherent theme and revealing nothing new about Old Master portraiture. These highlights and the wonderful Holbeins aside, this is a decidedly “flawed event”.