Marc Mulders, Heir to Tradition

A persistent myth that arose during the Romantic period would have us believe that the genuine artist creates in the same way as God, out of nothing. For the last two centuries originality has been considered the prime criterion by which it was thought the worth of an oeuvre could be judged. Though the Romantic cult of genius has now been put into perspective by postmodernism, this has still had hardly any effect on the common belief that new work that resembles familiar work is by definition less significant than work that lays down its own set of standards.

The extent to which the Romantic view of total creativity is based on a myth can be confirmed by every museum visitor. Even when a series of successive works shows changes, it is a gradual process, variations on models that change just a slowly or rapidly as man himself. T.S. Eliot was right in saying that originally is nothing other than deviation from tradition.

In this sense the old is always retained in the new. Artists reach out towards each other across a chasm many centuries wide; Eliot meets Donne, Stravinsky greets Pergolesi, Francis Bacon revives a Velasquez motif. The repetition of a theme or motif can be considered as a tribute that endorses the tradition. But at the same time there are variations that are evidence of character and individuality.

In 1989 the Dutch painter Marc Mulders (1958-) painted his large canvas called Ecce Homo. The image is dominated by a man's dead body with its feet towards the spectator, its head slightly raised and the abdomen cut open. Anyone familiar with art history will recognise at a glance the central motif from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Deyman. Those who have read their art history books even more thoroughly will know in addi­tion that Rembrandt based his composition on that of Mantegna's famous painting of The Burial of Christ.

This reference, confirmed by one of the photo-collages Mulders himself describes as a sort of preliminary study, is more than a gratuitous display of erudition or a manifestation of the postmodernist realisation that everything is bound to repeat itself. There is no noncommittal eclecticism here, nor irony; each allusion to the art-historical past is part of an overall view.

The tribute to Mantegna and Rembrandt that can be descried in Ecce Homo may be considered as a testimony. Mulders feels himself to be indebted not only to pictorial tradition, but also to the ideas embedded in that tradition. The way he refers to these two paintings in his work shows that the affinity between them is based on a shared concern for suffering. It's true that Mantegna was preoccupied with the passion of the god become man and Rembrandt with the destiny of man as a mortal individual, but in both cases what we see is a manifestation of the body in its most vulnerable and tragic state. In this respect Mulders conforms to the essence of all Western art, which experienced peaks not only among the realistic painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also in the work of the Greek trage­dians and Shakespeare, in Picasso's Guernica and Eliot's The Waste Land.

There is, however, more than the theme of suffering. In his variations on Mantegna and Rembrandt's central idea, Mulders demonstrates that his involvement with his predecessors is at least as much one of form as of content. After Cézanne, anything else would be difficult. Since art was revolutionised a century ago, we know that a painting is, in the first instance, a question of form and that it is the form that determines the content rather than the other way round. Concentrating on the work of Mulders: in the making of the painting the suffering body undergoes a transformation into paint. But at the same time the material with which the artist is working undergoes a process by which means it in its turn becomes a body. Mulders himself once made a telling observation on this when he described the rela­tionship between model and image: 'Painting from a piece of meat in my left hand, the meat became soaked in oil and splashes of paint and became paint, the paint on the canvas became meat.' And: 'The paint behaves like a muscle, exposed and contracting.'

From close up, Mulders' paintings look like tanned hides covered in scars, or the gnarled bark of a tree. The canvas is covered in scratches and scoring, traces of the knife that appears to have tattooed the paint into it. The likeness to a tanned skin suggests a form of life that continues in the coagu­lated end product. The term still-life takes on a new meaning here: life is stopped still, like a single frame from a film. The dynamics of Mulders' flower pieces and portrayals of dead wild animals confirm this impression; they also show how much he differs from the seventeenth-century detail painters with whom he shares this choice of subject. The life-dynamic that also appears to continue into the process of decomposition is given shape on canvas in the series that Mulders paints: roses, dead rabbits and deer are, in a series of works, followed in a process of transformation which still carries on even in death.