The Game of Art Part 3

The general Dutch masters, the De Hooch, kitchen garden type painters, must come next. Their very origins after all were in the service of the bourgeois and the markets, and to the general museum-going public they represent ubiquity, the avoidance of controversial themes or techniques, comfort, such technical virtuosities as can be pointed out and enjoyed with satisfying ease. In our times they are able to inspire novels sold in airports and Wal-Marts about the imagined lives of their obstensible subjects, a status formerly restricted to the Impressionists. Rubens and Brueghel, as well as the more exquisite aspects of Vermeer must rate a little higher. Among their more interested general fans we are approaching the realm of the semi-educated here. While associated among the masses primarily as an aficiondo of fat women, one who is willing to examine a few pictures will know that Rubens tackled grand subjects in a grand manner, and even smaller ones with an eye and boldness that distinguishes him from the more mannered craftsmen of his age. The Chapeau de Paille, such a favorite of Anthony Powell's that I felt compelled to go look at it the last time I was in London (a long time ago), is one of those paintings for me that is so entirely different when one sees it in person as to constitute a transformative experience. Not such as makes one an artistic spirit or interesting at cocktail parties, alas, but which nonetheless becomes imprinted on the mind as a permanent part of one's experience of life. Some other artistic works which have made this impression on me: The Birth of Venus, which I had thought of as a cliche almost but which is truly spectacular to see in person; the Florence Duomo when it appears before you; Villon's Ballade des Dames de Temps Jadis, the most perfect short poem ever written;Blake's Jerusalem; the Gymnopaedie of Satie; one of Debussy's impressionist pieces, I can't remember the name. These are what immediately come to mind. Novels and long books are in a different category because their impression is not so immediate.
Brueghel has managed at least to inspire poems by the likes of Auden, as well as William Carlos Williams, who must outrank Tracy Chevalier in the annals of literary admirers.
I don't have the slightest idea where Rembrandt fits in. As a youth my main experience of him was as the comparative figure most referred to when some serious person was trying to get across to the mass American public how inferior Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth were, though in recent years Picasso seems to have been tapped to fill this role. This makes good sense in that museumgoers seek out Picasso as often as they do Rembrandt without displaying much genuine enthusiasm for either's work that I can see. These two seem to be the Milton and Beckett of the art world (which would make Rockwell and Wyeth approximately J.D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath?).
The Renaissance masters--Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Raphael--though obvious, generally require a trip to Europe to see them and revel in the ecstasy their work can produce in aesthetically constricted and frustrated Americans, which, while not the barrier it once was, still carries some clout in the Game. Caravaggio ranks higher because most Impressionist fans can't distinguish between him and Corregio, and a surprising number of committed snobs remain devoted to him as if he were still their own secret, oblivious that the word of his status has gotten out in force among the middling-bourgeois in recent years.
We're getting there.