For the first time in France, the great Flemish painter gets the lights of  a monographic exhibition. These paintings come from the biggest European and American museums. In the collective imagination, Van Dyck is this artist whose portraits adorn boxes of chocolate available doubtful evening feast. For the more cultured, it is a court portraitist to the limits of the mundane, until the excess talented, but whose interest is limited to a time exceeded European history. Contemporary advised its bid, stressing that Van Dyck was to paint is to make visible splendor with a very strange human beings populated distinguished, favored by the gods in the flesh, however, which is a soul complex, contradictory, and knows is deadly. They are right. It is precisely this which makes Antoon Van Dyck more than just playing inspired portrait of colors and materials, a virtuoso with one worldly haunting the courts of Europe. He is the one who, rising above the constraints of gender, social correspondence and a vision of the man behind them, succeeded in moving the art of portraiture, to make visible an incarnation news. The beautiful retrospective monograph at Jacquemart-Andre museum is dedicated to this painter friends, "born" a second time in the studio of Rubens in 1617. He then 18 years and started a dazzling career as worldly and artistic who will travel across Europe and will end in 1641 to Blackfriars (England). In the meantime, he attended courses in Italy and Sicily (1621-1627), the Flemish nobility of Antwerp (1627-1632) and the English monarchy (1632-1641). It has become the favorite painter of Genoese patricians and has received orders of the viceroy of Sicily. Last but not least, it has been elevated to the first painter of Charles I, King of England, who knighted and pensioners in 1633. His artistic reputation was such that his contemporaries saw in him the equal of Rembrandt or Titian. All this was what exhilarated, and painter who loved drunkenness and debauchery was without the doubt, it is a disease which won languor prematurely 42 years.  Van Dyck was a virtuoso, no doubt. It does not have Rubens in 18 years without some talent and it is not recognized as a favorite by him without reason. But Van Dyck situation is quickly beyond mere virtuosity. The Family Portrait, painted in 1620, shows. It is primarily a representation of bourgeois fairly conventional Antwerp, which reflects fairly well the austere standards that govern the art of portraiture in Flanders in the early seventeenth century, with this concern for expression of a dignity impersonal. But under the influence of Rubens in particular, Antoon Van Dyck will change the situation by introducing in the table of elements incompatible with the rules of the time. The oblique arm and seats intersect and are complemented by those curtains, introducing a circular dynamic that links the characters between them and suggests an intensity and intimacy family break with the verticality and external dynastic recommended by gender. But the movement is also one of souls. The characters are not emptied of their feelings to achieve a kind of serenity cold very popular at the time. They express with restraint a complex game of mixed feelings: seriousness, melancholy, in human dignity, pride, reserve, goodwill among women. The event affects so this revelation of souls through the body requires special treatment of carnations. The study of hands and faces in this table shows that Van Dyck must Titian and Rubens: a taste of the rich color, attention to subtleties of light, a master gradients, a delicate chiaroscuro, all things necessary for the expression of complex animated chairs.  By introducing the art of portraiture the movement of body and the event in their emotional depths, Van Dyck visible animated flesh of the Interior, but in doing so, it introduces a new dimension and unorthodox in its representation: the weather.  For the portrait of the era, like their models, time is the enemy to be ignored. He opposed in effect to this ideal of immortality profane and worldly inherited from antiquity and some Renaissance, which explains very clearly the law of the genre: immobilize the flesh or the soul in the immutable abstract representation of a virtue physical or moral, a social commitment. Introduce time in style means making the flesh at its truth condition of possibility of revelation of a soul, but also Limit here. She submits the model contingency reminding its finiteness. In departing subtly standards and practices that codify human representation in his time, Van Dyck abandoned the ideal of the portrait statue as moral or social effigy to enter the incarnation.  The path that leads through Italy, which makes Van Dyck in 1621. There remains six years in which he assiduously attend courses and palaces, many will execute orders, will undoubtedly become the gentleman that dream but to explore two main routes which are expensive: first, the dizzying Venetians chromatic richness of the Cinquecento, including Titian, he hunts euvres throughout Italy on the other hand, the processes to boost his compositions. The introduction of time and movement in place portraits indeed aristocratic Van Dyck front of contradictions. How can two realities simultaneously visible human inseparable but contradictory: a longing for eternity may take various masks social recognition, desire for greatness, or heroism, and the duration in which they are necessarily registered which puts invalid and that aspiration? How to reconcile, in representation, the constant elements of a natural sound, its essence and time passing through and modified and condemns its attributes? The Self (1623), the Portrait of a Man (1624) and Portrait of brothers Wael (1627) illustrate this tension. In these three euvres, there is this desire to magnify or idealizing nature or quality of the soul in detention.  But simultaneously, Van Dyck, boosting postures by the inclination of head and unbalanced positions with oblique puts this desire for permanent by including it in a movement, so in a period. This tension, combined with an ongoing effort to enrich carnations so that they can express the feelings of models, gives the portrait and designed a living presence of a rare intensity. This living presence is what makes the genius of Van Dyck and characterized some of the masterpieces made his return from Italy. Whether pieces its Antwerp period (1627-1632: Portrait of Jacques le Roy, Portrait of Anna Wake) or pieces his English period (1632-1641: Portrait of Charles I in the habit of the Garter ), Van Dyck is in full possession of the means necessary for the expression of his genius. He returned to Italy and some daring, tempered by the still rigid framework of Flemish culture, he loves the summaries are more subtle and deeper. It can also bind to the same gesture and a requirement even be timeless nobility and its inclusion in a stylish animated flesh, so perishable, the permanence of the identity of a model and its variations are consistent with its skins and poses, the virtues of toughness and fragility of the body, they resist, the reserve requirement and the passions of the soul that the attempt.  This high vision of man that this brief but fascinating anthology of the portrait vandyckien proposed museum Jacquemart-Andre enable us to reach closer. The wealth of artwork  is exposed to the ambitions of the place: to present a genius visionary breaking with its reputation as a painter goldsmith, delicate and valuable if not charming, under which we buried for ages. A wrong.

"Van Dyck" at the Museum Jacquemart-Andre, 158, boulevard Haussmann, 75008 Paris (01.45.62.11.59). From 8 October 2008 to 25 January 2009.