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Art: Artists old and new confront suffering

Suffering is part of life, and everyone must figure out how to respond to it. If you cry out in agony, aren't you at least hoping that the pain will stop? If you strive stoically to endure it, you maintain your dignity while acknowledging that suffering is endless and unavoidable.

"Carl Dean Kipper, Korea" (1953-54) by photographer Dave Heath.
"Carl Dean Kipper, Korea" (1953-54) by photographer Dave Heath.Read more

Suffering is part of life, and everyone must figure out how to respond to it. If you cry out in agony, aren't you at least hoping that the pain will stop? If you strive stoically to endure it, you maintain your dignity while acknowledging that suffering is endless and unavoidable.

Two new and very different exhibitions now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explore this potentially grim dilemma with exhilarating results. One, "The Wrath of the Gods," an extraordinary assemblage of Old Master paintings, drawings, and prints, treats suffering on an epic, supernatural, even cosmic scale. The other, "Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of Dave Heath," is a series of small, intimate images of people who seem mostly to be from the margins of society. Yet their suffering is no less real, and their response is no less dignified.

"The Wrath of the Gods" is organized around a painting, Prometheus Bound by Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, that has been in the museum's collection for 65 years and is almost always on display. Though it is a monumental work, full of action, flesh, and violence, many visitors probably pass it by without really looking at it, perhaps because its style and its ideas don't resonate today. Besides, the painting is always there, available to be seen next time.

"The Wrath of the Gods" invites us to look at this painting as if for the first time. It does so by placing it in the very distinguished company of works that shaped it or were influenced by it, and, equally important, by explicating the visual and philosophical ideas that animate it.

Rubens was a well-traveled, cosmopolitan artist who seemed to go everywhere, see everything, and synthesize it all in huge, ambitious works. This exhibition, organized by Christopher D.M. Atkins, pairs Prometheus Bound (1611-18) with its obvious predecessor, Titian's Tityus (1548-49) from the Prado in Madrid. It would almost be enough if the show consisted of just these two great paintings, so similar in composition and subject matter but very different in feeling. Titian's work feels freer and more fluid. Its eagle seems less like a bird than a flurry of pure energy. Rubens, by contrast, seems to be striving for the definitive. He did not even paint the eagle himself, but enlisted Snyders, a leading painter of animals, to do it.

But Titian was not the only influence on Rubens. Northern European artists were fascinated by fallen male figures, seen upside down and foreshortened. Michelangelo's frescos in the Sistine Chapel exerted a powerful influence. And Rubens had a brother who was a neo-Stoic philosopher and probably had an impact on the emotional tone of the painting.

The works on display are so closely related, in both composition and iconography, that one's first impression is that they are small variations of the same subject. In fact, though, several different stories are being told. Prometheus and Tityus are both figures from Greek mythology condemned to have their viscera eaten by raptors. Tityus, a giant condemned for attempting to rape a goddess, presumably deserved to be punished. Prometheus, one of the Titans deposed by Zeus and the other Olympian gods, was the creator of human beings who stole fire from the gods to give them life. His transgression made human life possible, and for centuries, he suffered for it. Thus, he can be seen as a precursor to Jesus, who also suffered on the cross for humanity's sake.

Michelangelo's chalk drawing of Tityus (1532) from the British royal collection literally brings these themes together on the same page. The front shows the nude, muscular Tityus, with his arm stretching upward as the raptor feeds. On the back of the sheet, Michelangelo has traced the figure without the bird, and, if you look at the figure upright, he is clearly an early version of the risen Christ who is the central figure of The Last Judgment (1536-41) in the Sistine Chapel.

In a short video on display in the gallery, Christopher Atkins makes the case that Rubens essentially took the body of Michelangelo's Jesus and rotated it to make his Prometheus. Rubens' Prometheus certainly has a massiveness, a sense of real weight and presence that is missing in Titian's Tityus, impressive as he is. His suffering is heroic.

The self-taught photographer Dave Heath was born in Philadelphia in 1931 and grew up in an orphanage and foster homes here. Although the catalog for "Multitude, Solitude" credits a gruesome war photo in The Inquirer with galvanizing his interest in photography, he also went to the Art Museum regularly.

When I saw his photograph Carl Dean Kipper, Korea (1953-54), with its foreshortened, unclothed, upside-down man, presumably a resting soldier, I couldn't help feeling that it echoes the visual strategy and even the emotional tone of Prometheus Bound. The man has his arm, not a bird's sharp talon, over his eye. Nevertheless, the extreme and violent stories of mythology have long been understood as reflections of interior struggles. The ordinary people Heath photographed seem to be shouldering titanic burdens.

Even when he was photographing so great and violent an event as the Korean War, Heath focused on faces and bodies. His photos rarely tell a clear story, though the depth of emotion he communicates implies that each of these people has many stories to tell. His work is part of the great tradition of street photography, and appears to be candid. But the overall effect is not one of voyeurism, a glimpse of how others live. Rather, he achieves empathy, as he invites us to identify with the often downtrodden people in his pictures.

This exhibition is organized by Keith F. Davis, chief curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., who is chief author of its beautiful, weighty catalog. It consists of work, all black-and-white, from the late 1940s, when Heath began taking pictures, to the late '60s. Its centerpiece is the original prints from his 1965 book A Dialogue with Solitude, itself a selection of photos taken in Philadelphia; Korea, where he served in the Army; New York, where he moved in 1955; Chicago; and other cities.

He grouped the photos not by place or date, but by emotion. Not all are dark: People kiss, children play. Still, as the title suggests, we are all condemned to be alone with our emotions.

tom@thomashine.com

Art: TWO EXHIBITS

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The Wrath of the Gods: Masterpieces by Rubens, Michelangelo, and Titian

Through Dec. 6.

Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of Dave Heath

Through Feb. 21.

Both at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday; until 8:45 p.m. Wednesday and Friday.

Closed Sept. 25-28.

Admission: $20; 65 and over, $18; students and 13-18, $14;

12 and under, free.

Information: 215-763-8100 or www.philmuseum.org.EndText