Works on paper by the early 16th century Dutch artist, Hendrick Goltzius (1558 - 1617) are on show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. These graphic works, mostly engravings, are eccentric, intricately detailed images in the Mannerist style. Goltzius was a Mannerist's Mannerists -- he exploits the pretensions of this style, its operatic gestures and lugubrious subject matter, for all that it's worth: the results aren't pretty, but the work is fascinating,: over-wrought images of saints and apostles, learned mythological allegories requiring copious footnotes, strangely muscular figures rendered uncanny by bizarre perspectives and extreme foreshortening. This is pretentious virtuoso stuff, all the more remarkable because rendered by an artist whose right (dominant) hand had been maimed in a childhood accident and was essentially immobile -- indeed, it seems that the virtuosic draftsmanship and the cunning bite of the engraver's burin are all efforts to compensate for Goltzius' personal infirmity, his ruined right hand. (Goltzius hand was crippled in a fire that burned him when he was a child; the artist made many studies of his hand showing its twisted fingers and fused joints.)
The Goltzius etchings are shown in two small rooms, about 50 pictures displayed in an intimate show. You have to look at these things closely; the pictures are hung at eye-level and you can examine them at close range. The curator of prints at the MIA is a wit and his (or her) explanatory labels are written in an appealingly jaunty style -- there are lots of references to TV reality shows and contemporary celebrities. Normally, efforts like this to gin-up relevance are annoying -- but the descriptive labels in this show are so good-natured and amusing that I thought them inoffensive and, even, amusing (as well as helpful). As with many Mannerists, the subject matter of many of the prints is extremely recondite: Hercules with Cacus, the Demogorgon in the Cave of Eternity, and various allegories, portrayed as feasts of the gods, including a bizarre print showing King Midas with ass's ears. Goltzius made a cycle of small prints depicting each of the 12 apostles and there's a group of etchings that depict God's creation of the world that look like kinky precursors to William Blake (God holds calipers to measure out his creation) but in a pretentiously learned style. Goltzius' self-consciously scholarly approach to print-making culminates in a series of pictures showing the life of the Virgin, each of images imitating the style of some other famous artist -- for instance, the Mannerist Parmigiano, Albrecht Duerer, Raphael, and others. In one remarkable, and surreal image, the Goddess of War in Teutonic nippled breast-plates attacks the Turks blowing a sinuous war-horn. In several pictures, roiling clouds look like the convolutions of the small intestines. A cat killing a bird postures like a diva in an opera -- Goltzius' figures all look like professional wrestlers; they have vacant expressions and bulging, ripped muscles. (In one of his paintings, not in this show, Goltzius shows a dog flexing its pecs and shoulder muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger.) Nothing in this show could be conceived as pretty in any conventional sense -- indeed, the images are, more or less, grotesque. His creatures have bland automaton-like faces and often their skulls are macrocephalic -- heads are deformed as if by the practice of cranial binding. Goltzius delights in chiaroscuro effects and he makes his serpentine engraved lines quivery and tense with energy, darkness full of snakes coiled and about to strike.
An ongoing show features Chinese wall-hangings of hermit-scholars in spectacular landscapes. The big paintings, made on silk banners, show small figures brooding over foaming waterfalls and mountains shaped like sprouts of asparagus and mushrooms. These are about 800 years old and intensely poetic images. I don't have any idea what emotional valence these things had for their original users. Similarly, I don't know how the banners, which are narrow but about ten to 12 feet tall, were used -- were these objects of devotion, images for contemplation, or just ornate decorations. Your eye, at first, can find no purchase in the chaos of clouds, foaming waterfalls, and beetling rock formations, sometimes with the disk of the moon hovering overhead. However, the pictures invite you to scan them for little gazebo-like temples and tea-houses; as your eye seeks out the hermit gazing into this wilderness, you end up seeing the spiky rocks and canyons and the mountains shaped like shaggy pointer fingers in the image -- it's a way to trick you into seeing, indeed, seeing closely the landscapes that are the raison d'etre of the images. (Labels says that the pictures are supposed to illustrate precepts of the Tao or "the Way.")
Tucked away in the Oceania hall, full of wonders --huge totem-poles carved into enigmatic hermaphroditic figures with abstract skeletal frigate birds overlaying them as a stylized lattice-work -- there 's a two-foot long sculpture of a little monster with a menacing egg-shaped head, bulging eyes, and a rib cage that is exposed and suggests either death or extreme famine. This object is from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and it's called Moai Kavakava (that is, "image with ribs"). The culture of Easter Island was so ravaged by European colonizers that no one really knows what the small teak-wood sculpture is supposed to represent -- it looks a bit like statues of the ascetic Gautama Buddha half dead from starvation with his ribs and other bones poking through his taut skin. But, unlike the famished Buddha, this little thing isn't benign - it's a deity that looks like it wants to kill you.
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