This Rubens show only came about because Lille, France, is so close (only 10 miles from Flanders, Rubens homeland), and Lille shares with Genoa the rotating title of European cultural capital this year, giving it occasion to organize a host of cultural events and "Rubens," offered the best hope of drawing visitors from afar.

This will be the FIRST EVER overview of Rubens work to be presented in France!

Why??.. Because, Since the early 1300s Italy was for 200 years the almost singular source of European Art, and from the early 1500s for 300 years, France, was the arbiter of European cultural taste, and the prevailing consensus in France was that only Italian art truly merited attention.

Further, Nicolas Poussin, who was arguably France's first great painter, was favored by the "nationalistic" French, who felt that any accolades to the Flemish Ruben,
would diminish their Poussin. Poussin lived most of his life in Rome, while Ruben spent his 20s in Italy, both studying under the Italian Masters.

When has any country so dominated the Visual Arts for so long???
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RUBENS, THE 'PRINCE OF PAINTERS', FINALLY GETS HIS DUE IN FRANCE
New York Times
By Alan Riding
March 10, 2004

LILLE, France — Rubens is so omnipresent in museums and collections, so renowned for his portraits and religious, historical and mythological paintings, that any retrospective of his work raises the question: Is there anything new to say? In France there is. Remarkably, a major Rubens exhibition that opened March 6 in this northern city is the first overview of his work to be presented in France.

How could France have ignored this 17th-century Flemish giant? One reason is nationalism. Nicolas Poussin was arguably France's first great painter, and though he died in 1665, 25 years after Rubens, French art historians insisted on measuring him against Rubens, duly concluding that Poussin was superior. It became a bizarre zero-sum game: admiration for Rubens somehow meant less glory for Poussin.

But there is another reason. The prevailing consensus in France was that only Italian art truly merited attention. Rubens spent his 20's in Italy, learning from Titian, Bassano and Tintoretto, but he went his own way after he returned to Antwerp in 1608 and never again visited Italy. Poussin, in contrast, lived most of life in Rome and looked to Raphael and other Renaissance masters for inspiration.

The French obsession with Italian art spawned an isolation from other great European art that lasted into the 19th century.

Only then, thanks to Géricault and Delacroix, did some painters begin to pay heed to the Spanish Golden Age of El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Zurbarán and Murillo as well as to earlier Dutch and Flemish masters, from Bosch and Brueghel to Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyck and Rubens himself.

Rubens finally won some recognition here in the 20th century. A 1936 exhibition in Paris, "Rubens and his Times," included 38 of his paintings; another, "The Century of Rubens in French collections" in 1997, showed 42 of his works. But in the age of blockbusters the greatest Flemish exponent of Baroque painting has been largely overlooked here.

...The excuse for this show is mundane. This year Lille shares with Genoa the rotating title of European cultural capital, giving it occasion not only to spruce up the city but also to organize a host of parades, theatrical events, concerts, ballet and circus performances, and no fewer than 80 art exhibitions. Of these "Rubens," at the Palais des Beaux-Arts through June 14, offers the best hope of drawing visitors from afar...

Unable to borrow the "great masterpieces," Rubens is represented by all styles and periods of his career through 154 paintings, sketches and drawings, as well as a dozen tapestries.

The show opens with Rubens's arrival in Italy in 1600, when he was 23. Over the next eight years, first as a court painter in Mantua, then in Venice, Genoa and Rome, he copied Renaissance greats and also did numerous major portraits. Two in this show stand out: "Self-Portrait in the Company of Friends," painted in Mantua around 1602, with the artist as the central figure; and "Portrait of a Lady with Her Dwarf," painted in Genoa around 1606, in which Rubens's mastery in painting fabric is evident.

He returned to Antwerp in 1608, which proved to be good timing. The following year a 12-year truce signed between warring Dutch separatists and the Spanish occupiers of Flanders set the stage for Rubens's emergence as the dominant Flemish artist of his time. Peace led to the redecoration of dozens of local churches, and Rubens was in demand. Among the highlights of this show are three giant works that Rubens painted for churches in Lille and its environs...

"Rubens" illustrates his extraordinary versatility. But inevitably it cannot convey the sheer volume of his output. He complained that he was "the busiest and most harassed man in the world." His work for the royal households of England, Spain and France won him fame as the painter of princes and the prince of painters.When he died in 1640, his influence lived on among younger contemporary painters and also among later French champions of the Baroque. Yet even after his devotion to color bore fruit in the Impressionist movement, Rubens was better known in France as a "painter's painter." Now, belatedly, Lille is giving him a chance to become a public favorite here, too.

Rubens, the ’Prince of Painters,’ Finally Gets His Due in France
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/arts/design/10RUBE.html