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Understanding Bosch, with Help from Maryan Ainsworth

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BOSCHcolor-8-5
A close up image taken from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”

By Anne W. Semmes
Sentinel Columnist

When I learned of the new documentary film “Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil,” showing at New York’s Film Forum, something immediately resonated. This is art of the surreal—a bit like how I’m seeing the world these days. 

But there was the bonus: Maryan Ainsworth of Old Greenwich was to be featured in a Q & A following the film. Maryan and the life she leads as curator of European Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is worth following.

This year, being the 500th anniversary of the death of Dutch master Bosch, Maryan had attended the exhibit of 20 of the known two dozen or so paintings and panels done by this wildly imaginative artist in his hometown familiarly called Den Bosch or ’s-Hertogenbosch, at its Noordbrabants Museum. Maryan’s visit to Madrid’s Prado exhibit came next, where perhaps the artist’s most famous work is seen, the triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” which the museum has for 400 years been loath to loan.

Maryan also took part in an extraordinary “Bosch Research and Conservation Project,” where international experts, using the latest technology, scrutinized Bosch’s works to determine whether his right hand or hands of those of his painterly family had brought forth some of these nightmarish visions. (“There are few artists in the western tradition who stay as current as Bosch has in people’s dreams,” is how my son puts it.)

It is this scrutiny that the film’s director, Pieter van Huystee, so masterfully and persistently captures by following the experts in their work over five years. I was riveted by the camera’s focus on the many owls Bosch included as “predictors of evil,” of the individuality of faces, of the fiery depictions in his “Last Judgment,” fed no doubt by a tragic fire the artist witnessed as a boy in his hometown. And then there were those provocative details in the “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” with its vision of heaven and hell. “He’s caught up in the moral choices we make,” noted one expert.

The Q & A offered a lively exchange between director van Huystee, who spoke of the experts as “passionate people,” and Maryan, who quipped of Bosch, “I always thought he was on LSD, myself.” Maryan was incidentally introduced as one of the world’s foremost experts on Hieronymus Bosch. The Met’s only Bosch, she said, is the “Adoration of the Magi,” the artist’s earliest known painting. “’The Garden of Earthly Delights’ really draws a crowd,” she said. “There are so many wonderful details.” But how to explain those bizarre visions? “It’s a mind that comes out of nowhere,” she said. “It’s the inventive way he puts together the figures.”

Van Huystee’s film, which is traveling the world, has had “a big response in Moscow and Brazil,” he said in his Dutch-accented English. The “huge interest” he sees in Bosch’s works can be measured on the Bosch study project’s website, boschproject.org. “It’s had a million hits around the world,” he said. “You see the Garden of Delights with new synched viewer technology that moves over the painting.”

Sharing a train ride home with Maryan, I had the chance to pitch a question not addressed in the Q & A. So, with all the sleuthing about in the film as to whose hand was at work, why wasn’t Bosch signing his paintings? Bosch signed nine of his works, she said. “But back in the 15th century painters were considered craftsmen. Very few signed their works. We have the names of artists but not the paintings they painted.”

Two other early Netherlandish painters, Jan Van Eyck and Petrus Christus, she said, were exceptions. “Artists first started using their initials, as did Durer and Da Vinci,” she explained. “Durer’s signature, AD, was all over his art.” Then there was the problem of some artists signing the frames of their paintings, and not the actual work. “If the frames were changed, you lost that information.”

She spoke of that high moment in the film when a small painting, “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” in Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, suspected of being done by those in Bosch’s workshop, was determined by the experts (not including Maryan) to be by Bosch. “The researchers were primarily comparing the face of St. Anthony with Bosch’s other portrayal of the saint,” she said, which seemed to beg the question, How would Maryan determine the Bosch hand?

“It comes down to four things,” she said. “The humanity expressed—the human character of the faces; the extraordinary attention given to the specific characterization of so many little details in the painting; the way that animals and figures are placed that exhibits a kind of rhythm—the rhythm of the motifs; and the understanding of light, in the deft handling of brush strokes and how they touch the edges of forms in a very convincing way, like those white figures caught up in his horrific fire scenes.”

Arriving in Greenwich, Maryan told of leaving the next day for Maine to join other curators, museum scientists, and painting conservators, and those who teach art history at universities around the world for the first-of-its-kind Kress Foundation sponsored workshop on building a curriculum at the undergraduate level for teaching “technical art history.”

“It’s an interdisciplinary method of studying art, conservation, art history and science, all working together to solve problems about questions of our national monuments, paintings, and sculpture—our heritage. It’s what I do.

“We want people to begin to be trained to fill these positions in the future,” she said.

The documentary film, “Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil” is showing at New York’s Film Forum through August 9, before moving on to Los Angeles. For more information, visit filmforum.org.

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