Peter Paul Rubens is known as the "prince of painters". From hunting scenes to allegorical depictions of love, his compositions are epic, his colours rich and his figures voluptuous. He epitomises the Baroque style: his women are chased, seduced, raped; their skin luminescent and their flesh sensual. From his 17th century ideal of female beauty we have the term Rubanesque, a stark contrast to conceptions of femininity today.
A new exhibition at the Royal Academy includes a room curated by British painter Jenny Saville, which traces Rubens’s legacy from Cézanne to Sarah Lucas, tracing both the influence of Rubens through to contemporary abstract art while revealing much about the Saville herself. Famous for her large-scale nudes and often graphic self-portraiture, Saville has often been compared with Rubens. Her room – featuring works from the likes of Willem de Kooning, Picasso, Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly – brings Rubens, with his mythical figures and sexual energy, into the 21st-century.
Paul Cézanne,Three Bathers, c. 1875
Paul Cézanne In this painting, Cézanne captures the movement of Rubens’s figures by painting three bathers in an outdoor environment. The influence of Rubens can be seen in the brush strokes and skin tones – creamy skin is outlined in luminous red. Cézanne is also eschewing preconceived ideals of feminine beauty: see the foregrounded figure rushing towards the water.
Francis Bacon Snoozing across from Cézanne is Francis Bacon’s Sleeping Figure (1959), a languid male figure whose skin tones immediately recall Rubens’s Angelica. As a figurative painter, Bacon is often hailed as one of Jenny Saville’s key influences. From Rubens, he came to explore his own abstracted figures, and, like Saville, explored his own disturbing and melancholy elements.
Cecily Brown, Untitled, 2008Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Genevieve Hanson
Cecily Brown When it comes to figuration and abstraction, Cecily Brown tries to have it both ways, inspired by the history of painting, from Rubens to de Kooning. Her paintings are teeming with life, and whilst she nods to classical notions of genre and narrative, she simultaneously frees her subjects from these contexts and creates a new abstracted reality.
Sarah Lucas, Suffolk Bunny, 1997-2004Private collection, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
Sarah Lucas What YBA Sarah Lucas shares with Rubens is the quest to explore the human body through sexual energy. There are two of her sculptures including in the exhibition, including her humorous installation Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, consisting of two eggs and a kebab laid out on a table to depict the female form.
