Morgan Meis on Three Painters (Rubens, Marc, Mitchell)

So with Rubens...

We start with a painting.

It's titled The Drunken Silliness, right? You're taking your book title from the painting.

Correct.

And Rubens, you mentioned at the beginning of that book, you weren't keeping the flame for Rubens.

You were in Antwerp, and that coincidence was what made you curious about Rubens.

Yeah, I am fond in general of coincidence and accident when it comes to writing and thinking, maybe life in general.

So the fact that I found myself in Antwerp and that it's the city of Rubens, it was just a fact.

I was writing at that time also a lot of more magazine-style art criticism, so it seemed obvious that I had to think about Rubens a little bit.

And I was never particularly interested in Rubens.

And that brings in maybe the aspect of real coincidence or chance, in that, I don't know, maybe there's always a little touch of perversity in it.

What does it mean to get interested in someone who I'm not interested in and find distasteful? To some degree.

And suddenly that seemed intriguing to me.

Why don't I like this painter or not attracted to what this painter is doing or find that kind of whole period of art hard to access? And suddenly that got excited.

Something flipped, a switch flipped, and that felt exciting to me.

Yeah, because the impulse then is not one of fandom.

It was not one of fandom at all.

So you're in Antwerp and you're looking at Rubens.

You can't

really be in Antwerp and not look at Rubens.

If you go to the art museums and if you go around the city, you're constantly confronted with Rubens, which is also annoying.

Rubens has become a tourist brochure for the city to some degree.

So I'm confronting Rubens.

And

then