Review: Hercules Segers: 400 Years New at The MET

Hercules Segers: 400 years New At The MET
By Barry Kostrinsky

I remember the Herzog Video at the Whitney Biennial 2 rounds past but forgot the name of the Dutch artist he portrayed. Now the MET has the definitive exhibition of Hercules Segers......Who? Yes, that artist. In the way only the MET can do with the help of the RijksMuseum and a few others you can see a very rare relatively complete moment in history 400 years ahead of itself. Most existent prints are here as well as several paintings and like a comet they will not cross our path in NY or anywhere for that matter for another 100 years.

The exhibit opens with a John Malkovic dramatic voice over to a compelling video of images and great insight with a sorrowful musical score. John is great but makes me think me Who is "Seeking Werner Herzog".

The Curator, Nadine Orenstein aptly pointed out Hercules unique approach to printing using different papers, inks and over working the prints to create true one-offs, monotypes, the kinds artist do today. Segers developed new techniques and history sat still and did not pick up his advanced foray into the printing field; However Rembrandt and his student's took note and the great master owned no less than 8 paintings by Segers: My refute to the curators claim that Hercules was not a great painter. The painting below speaks for itself and the great Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole (not Kinkade) comes to mind and does not hold his own to Segers.

Given the lack of dates of his death (~1640) and birth (~1590) and a thin historic accounting going from the work I'd throw out a few conjectures. Yes, he was active during the great Dutch era of creativity with Vermeer in the house and all that great realism and light, not to mention the flowers. He was in Amsterdam and of course Haarlem, hot then and now again but further west in NYC, BX15 or M125 buses.

What I see in the printing experimentation could have been a way for Hercules to achieve a multiplicity of a painting. He seems to take the color palette of his paintings and do individual prints to highlight the colors and then he adds or manipulates. Presented as a grouping you can see this possibility as the paintings seem to layer out into the prints. Colored photographs come to mind as do early advertisements and Paul Delvaux-below Le Récitant 1937, in the crusted form of his organic strokes.

The compositions were basic rifts on traditional themes Breugel inspired-copied-appropriated with the occasional steeple piercing the sky, entry points for the eye at the bottom with a river or path or branch that walk you in. Trails and paths in whimsically made up landscapes encouraged by his teacher dance the eye with branches doing crusted Robert Crumb like line play in the Book of Genesis.

He worked the dark on dark theme powerfully, emotionally and romantically and at the same time he seems to be an artist just drawing and experimenting. Figures almost seem to appear in his bush like forms that produce his hills and landscape.

As Steichen was to photography (here in The Pond from 1904) Segers is to printing: they both made painterly forms of their medium.

Did Turner and Blake see Segers' work? They could have in the London Museums.

No doubt this is an artist too far ahead of his time and his influence was missed by his peers and generations to come. A bright light not dimmed by its lack of mosquitos swarming round but nicely revealed by the MET for you to see and be enligthened by. Hercules Seger, A genius ahead of his time and alive in many contemporary artists today for you to see till Late May.

.http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/hercules-segers

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