Tour of a Long Spiral

This year's exhibition season in Europe's top museums has opened with some extraordinary displays. TIME Correspondent Horace Judson went to look at them, here reports what he saw and thought.

THOUGH nobody planned them that way, the shows resonate with one another. They assert how we see and have seen--over the best part of a millennium, and right at this moment. The assertions are sometimes disturbing. Munich: 396 icons, barbaric gemstones strewn across the velvet sophistications of Orthodox theology. Brussels: three Bruegels newly cleaned to support a reflective commemoration. Amsterdam: 24 matchless Rembrandts, the best from each of 21 collections the world round. Paris: 304 Giacomettis, shyly revealing beneath surfaces textured like used chewing gum, a tender-hearted portraitist.

The eyes insist that there is order among these exhibitions. Most obviously, they define a chronology of seeing through 700 years, during which the Western vision has come full spiral from the hieratic to the hieratic. For the anonymous Byzantine monk painting the Mother of God, the stylized emotions of iconography were public and functional, with few secrets but only shared mysteries; to Giacometti, portraiture was similarly stylized, yet obsessive and all but totally private. Between them on that spiral way, at the far point from which the return curve began, was Rembrandt, searching and searching his own face, his own eyes, in the mirror of his self-portraits.

Two Ways of Seeing. But Europe's fall shows also suggest a second theme: just how people are seeing here, now. The solipsism reaches hysteria at the Biennale de Paris, which proclaims itself the "manifestation of the young artists," meaning those under 35. The preoccupation this year was style, for its own sake. Noted in a random walk: a Parisian who signs himself Sibaja has sculpted two prizefighters out of red ice who bleed slowly into buckets under their boxing ring while a tape recorder plays crowd screams. They take a week to die. Minimal sculpture everywhere, reaching even into the Portuguese delegation. Pushbutton and wind-up sculptures break down in a matter of hours. Slides flicker against every flat surface until the bulbs fuse. Enough visual noise is, in point of fact, white light.

Overwhelming white light was once thought to define the sight of God. The flight to Munich leads to a world of luminous order at the Haus der Kunst: icons from the 13th to the 19th centuries, from Greece, Crete, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria. How can God, whose sight no living man has endured, be representable in a picture? The Orthodox were fundamentalists about that evident problem, but subtle ones: as the impression is to the seal that makes it, as the body to the soul, as the accidental to the essential, they reasoned, so the representation is to the spiritual reality.

Icon connotes intense feeling compressed into rigid pose, bend of neck, outsize tapered hands, images both remote and repetitive. At this exhibition, all those expectations are fulfilled, and then overthrown, by the variety bursting forth from the conventions.

Look at some faces. From Byzantium before the fall, the Mother of God as 13th century Greek patrician, mannered, smiling, cheekbones and elegant thin nose brushed with golden highlights like cosmetics. Completely opposite in mood, John the Baptist as a shaggy Serbian shepherd, fell of face and carrying the bloody future on a plate in the form of a duplicate of his own head--a shock of hysteron proteron almost prefiguring Rene Magritte. From Serbia again, Christ Pantocrator, normally the most remote of all the conventional poses, Christ distant with the presence of the law. But this Pantocrator has dancing eyes. His face is sharp, his mouth tiny with the effort of suppressing a grin, his fingers thin and dancing, too, where they hold the book. This book is closed; but he knows what is inside: the glee of goodness.

Curvets and Styles. The eye will take these all as portraits--and pulling back, will be bullied by the strength of color and pattern, the authority of the plane composition. Bold checks in black and brilliant red splashed across a Bulgarian St. Nicholas make him this year's Christmas poster. The white-bearded patron saint of children sits in a riot of patterns--robes, halo, throne and ermine sleeve-linings--put together with the abandon of some child who has just discovered scissors and discarded wrapping paper. St. George on a white carrousel horse, red cloak flowing back like an archangelical wing, curvets over the coiled body of the Worm, curvets out of 15th century Novgorod straight into the modern artist's essential vision of the picture as a flat surface. In the show's most unexpected discovery, several primitive crucifixions from the wilds of 19th century Ruthenia present Christ with the unaffected simplicity of comic strip or art brut--elongated arms, flecks of blood, writhing torso, doll-like among the surrounding mourners.

These pictures are inimitably decorative; today their visual sophistication seems immense. Thus they are easy to sentimentalize in the sort of process that has happened several times this century, notably when Picasso and followers discovered African primitive sculpture. What went into the icons, singly and slowly, was devotion and something that felt like realism. When what comes out is a flooding sense of style congenial to the contemporary eye but excluding the terms of their creation, it is the eye itself that is suspect.

Palpable Immanence. The eye is reassured at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, which have built a thoughtful memorial to the death 400 years ago of Pieter Bruegel the Elder around just six paintings, of which three are shown for the first time after remarkable cleaning and restoration. Worlds interpenetrate: not just Bruegel's imagination, but his very handling of paint makes the miraculous immanent. While the moldboard turns the palpable furrow, Icarus splashes down into the unconscious sea. From still darker depths, scaly, farting anxieties spew forth, nastily confounding the fecund and the fecal, only to be routed by the archangels; cleaning has revealed a dazzling exuberance of color that makes The Fall of the Rebel Angels an irrepressible hymn to sanity.

Two hours by Trans Europe Express to Amsterdam. Nearly half a million people have come there to see the Rembrandts at the Rijksmuseum. It is the most important exhibition in Europe this year because it is the best assemblage of Rembrandt's paintings that will ever again be seen. They have come from the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Metropolitan in New York, from Norton Simon and the Queen of England, from the Gulbenkian Museum and the Duke of Devonshire's collection, from Paris, London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Kassel, Boston.

The show leads from delight to marvel. Baroque Rembrandt: from Leningrad, The Sacrifice of Abraham, the conceit of the knife eternally falling as the angel grabs the old man's wrist, the strength beyond conceit of the writhing double helix of construction, and at last the pity beyond strength of the child's bared throat, blood pulsing under translucent skin. Commercial Rembrandt: the frosty pink uncertainty of healthy age that he painted into his client's face makes The Shipbuilder and His Wife a portrait that should be liberated forthwith from Buckingham Palace to go on public view in London's National Gallery.

Ultimately, Rembrandt on women and on himself. Women in all their ways. Old Woman Reading, lip and eyes and hand holding the page, totally alert and totally absorbed, is one of the world's rare great portraits of intellect. But he also knew what women smell like and painted their womanliness as nobody else has done: most takingly the simple Woman Bathing in a Stream, with her shift raised above her knees. He knew, in Yeats' phrase, their dark declivities. Of a piece with that honesty are the self-portraits in their endless transparency, their absolute renunciation of attitudes, their trembling mortality.

Scaffolding and Image. Once or twice, it may be that Alberto Giacometti peered into that same glass. Back in Paris, the thorough retrospective on two floors of the Orangerie suggests at first some disquieting cautions about Giacometti's standing. Particularly in sculpture, he developed late and slowly; nor is it certain that when it came time, he knew the difference between the scaffolding to be thrown away and the image to keep.

Yet approached through his portraits, Giacometti trembles into life. His mother appears in a long series, retreating ever further into cubicles and frames and visual veilings. There are friends enough for a Ph.D. thesis: Stravinsky, Matisse, Aragon, and a sketch in 1946 that may be the best portrait ever made of Jean-Paul Sartre, because it catches his truculent fleshiness of mind.

By the time he was doing these paintings, his sculpture had congealed into temple friezes. Yet the paintings, brought mentally to bear upon the statues, sometimes succeed in breaking the rigid spell, so that from the pinched, pewter-gray forms, his wife Annette or his brother Diego step forth.

Fused Concerns. They step forth hesitantly, to look about them at a world which has come a long way from the crystalline vision celebrated by the icon makers. Yet Giacometti, however attenuated the impulse, is still in the lineage that reaches back to Bruegel's exuberant vision, Rembrandt's passionate introspection, the language of humanism. Across town at the Biennale, the young propose that the visual concerns of seven centuries have been mined out, exhausted. The argument is none too convincing among the melted statues and faltering gadgetry. It suggests that their alternative is itself running out.

But the two--the old humanism and the young's denial--may yet fuse. How? The Paris Biennale offers only the most tantalizing hints. This looks like the beginning of the decade of the art group: from the U.S., from France, from Cuba, Canada, Eastern Europe, well over half the work that the young sent to Paris was created by teams. The other new beginning is a cool fascination with man's urban environment as subject--dream cityscapes, 21st century living and working places, architectural fantasies. But these are suggestive glimpses of the art that is forming toward the turn of the millennium.

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