Monday, October 27, 2014

"Double Rhythm" Writings about Painting. Jean Helion. Collected with an Introduction by Deborah Rosenthal

I recall a conversation I had with Bill Bailey sometime in the Nineties, when I was making a transition from Figuration into Abstraction, in which I expressed the notion that maybe Abstraction one day would evolve into a trans-historical movement similar to Chinese landscape painting where Ming artists were still in dialogue with Sung artists. There would be an assumption of a metaphysical basis that was so rich and deep that one could forever draw upon it for inspiration. At the time I was playing with figure/ground tension, as I perceived it in the work of Al Held. It resulted in visual events where the eye is drawn into a visual play that keeps the painting alive. I can imagine abstract artists of the future being drawn to Held’s work for the same lesson it provided me about painting and moreover in the “Big N” the shared space of the visual with the written word. This dialogue would be akin to the hermeneutic circle espoused by Gadamer, where the present is always in dialogue with the past. The artist could be projected into a new space but only after orbiting an earlier conception of reality. Sort of like a satellite achieving escape velocity from an orbit around the earth.
 
"Equilibrium"  Helion
I recently received a copy of “Double Rhythm” (subtitled: “Writings About Painting, Jean Helion”), collected and with an introduction by Deborah Rosenthal. I had written about his influence on American figurative artists in another blog post, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to read his essays on art and in particular learn more about his life as an abstract painter. Helion started  his  career in the Twenties as an abstract painter in France, moved to the United States in the Thirties where he exhibited his work and wrote extensively on art. He returned to France at the outset of WW11 and embraced figuration after the war. The quality of the figuration was such that it had an enormous impact on a generation of American painters in particular Leland Bell, who in turn as an educator became an important force in the figurative revival of the late Sixties and Seventies. The essays range from an interesting analysis of how Abstraction evolved from Impressionism to an extended description of his life as a prisoner of war in Germany and his spectacular escape. There is no doubt from Deborah Rosenthal’s introduction (also published separately in the “Yale Review” this October) that Helion was a major player in the movement of abstraction and instrumental in introducing European abstraction to an American audience. I was intrigued by the level of self-awareness he expresses with the questions he raises about notions of lineage.  What is the essence of Abstraction? Is it found in the relation of reduction to complexity and growth?  Are they mutually exclusive or can reduction lead to complexity? The questions all appeared to me to be crucial to any self-awareness of an artist painting abstractly .

This notion of the hermeneutical way of thinking that I referred to in the first paragraph is evident throughout Helion’s writings. One intriguing essay tries to untangle the origins of Abstraction’s roots in Seurat and Cezanne. Who was more important in influencing Abstraction? Helion comes down on the side of Seurat. Cezanne, he feels, is still attached to the real space of objects and is more Janus-like looking backward as well as forward. Seurat’s work lends itself to further reduction, which is crucial to abstraction. Whether you agree with his analysis or not, it, again, seems important that this sort of question be asked by any artist embarking on the path of abstraction.
"Pegeen"(Guggenheim)  Helion


After the war his work turned decidedly toward figuration. As he describes in “They Shall Not Have Me” about his imprisonment and escape from a forced labor camp, his fantasies always turned to the untrammeled life of the city. Upon his return, it became his subject matter. He also wanted to achieve what he called “the maximum” in painting, a word he was fond of and something he found in Poussin. It is strange this haunting of the real that pursues abstract painters like the hound of heaven. Stella who started out his career embracing Abstraction and reducing it further to minimalism made an about face in his Norton lecture “Working Space” after sensing the power of Caravaggio’s work in which I assume he found the same sort of maximal qualities that Helion found in Poussin. Caravaggio had it all, abstraction, dynamic relation of parts to a whole. But most importantly a sense of the real, the feel of things as they present themselves to us moment to moment in deep space. Helion seems to say that the road to reduction can only go so far. Is this what Helion felt was being done to him as a POW ? Reduced to an animal, or a mechanical cog defined to fulfill narrowly designed tasks? It were as though music could aspire to no more than the reality of a hearing test in a soundproof box.  I have written elsewhere of what I call the Humpty Dumpty effect of Modernism. It breaks things down but never lets us put them back together again. That there is a tragedy in all of this reduction is not often seen.
"Conquest of Jerusalem" Poussin


His imprisonment I think had a two faceted effect on his art after the war. Imprisonment was both cold and abstract, yet human and real. Although reduced to a unit of production by the prison system, Helion’s day–to-day life as a prisoner was managed by human beings. If the system that enclosed him was “not to have him”, he had to be conscious at every moment of how to manipulate the actors of the prison system by an appeal to their humanness so as to avoid the most painful jobs that could kill him or to coerce out of them the pleasures we take for granted in the real world, such as coffee and cigarettes. Every gesture every word had to be judged as to whether it aided or impeded survival. When he escapes and finds at one point that his ruse was working to deceive the omnipresent police, he breathes a sigh of relief and says: ”Good”. This expression of relief sounded so true and real to me as to render everything we might think of as good about our lives, inconsequential.
 
Stella
The title of the collection of essays “Double Rhythm” refers to the dynamic that should exist in a “maximum” painting between the parts and the whole. Poussin is quoted by Helion as having said : ”I have ignored nothing.”  I mentioned above how this notion of complexity haunted Stella. This notion of parts and whole clearly was an obsession of the late Held.  The early work of both with limited numbers of color looked to achieve one visual punch. Held’s midcareer work imposed pure geometric order, an overall structure, which resembles a schematic drawing of the linear structure hidden in a Poussin or a Piero. The work at the end of his career tried to bring the two together, using color for visual impact in the parts but engaging geometry to tie it all into a whole. I recall listening to Guston in the 70’s talk about the importance of Piero to his work. It was the admiration for someone who could do it all: Piero had Christian metaphysics and a language of geometry to imbed that metaphysic into the painting.
Held


This interest in the “maximum” sought by these artists is attempted without what I would believe to be the necessary foundation in an overarching world view. To see our individual existence in that context has not been possible, since Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola attempted the NeoPlatonic /Christian synthesis of the Renaissance that inspired Botticelli and Piero de la Francesco . But that does not stop someone like Helion from attempting to make paintings which he, to use his own words, will  be ”loud with meaning”.

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8 comments:

  1. I was really delighted to see your long and interesting blog on Hélion and the book I did, Double Rhythm, both on your blog and on Painters' Table …Jean was a remarkably alive and serious painter and thinker on painting, and what I really hoped to elicit, in collecting and annotating his English-language oeuvre, was just the sort of rumination on abstraction, figuration, painting and life that you offer in your blog.

    Thanks for this contribution to the ongoing dialogue!

    Best,
    Deborah

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  2. Just ordered! Thanks for the tip and your insight, Martin.

    Best,

    Paul Behnke

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  3. A painter friend turned me on to this blog and I am in her debt.

    After reading this piece I was reminded of something I recently came across in Clark Coolidge's, "Philip Guston - Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations". In a 1974 talk at the New York Studio School, Guston has the following exchange with an audience member that your readers may find interesting:


    Audience: But don't you feel it's radically different from a man like Poussin who could say: "I neglected nothing". I mean, he probably didn't neglect anything. The idea that that situation is possible is alien. Nobody can maintain that anymore.

    Philip Guston: Mm-hmm.

    Aud: I'm sure he felt that way. That it was possible, even if he hadn't done it. That Raphael had done it, or someone had done it. Or that it could be done.

    PG: Yeah.

    Aud: Wait until next year. And I don't see anybody who means anything to us now who feels that way. It's a really alien stoicism.

    PG: Well, what about Poussin? I have a difficulty with Poussin. I mean he may have said that he'd neglected nothing, but he may have neglected the most important thing.

    Aud: To you. But I'm saying, to him. I'm not disputing whether Poussin did or did not include the whole world. But he did include his whole world. Or his whole world seemed possible to be contained....

    PG: Yeah. Well, of course, we can get into the discussion of Poussin. That's something else. I don't know whether we should or not. But when I look at Poussin, I'm made to be too aware of his order, of his construction. It's magnificent, but it doesn't move me in the sense that Piero does. I'm not aware of any construction Piero at all. I mean, Poussin is a big pileup. In Piero's "Flagellation", for instance, that painting looks like reality, without any order at all. It's like looking at doors and rooms and people. You can move in there anywhere. It's like real life. And at moments it's absolutely ordered and rigid. I mean, it has power to be other than what it appears to be. Whereas Poussin, it's great but it doesn't move move me to create. It's after all, I think, absolutely the most fantastic intelligence at work there.


    In the end, the distinctions being drawn here between Piero and Poussin seem somewhat irrelevant. What interests me is the implication that what the moderns had achieved (or even dreamed of) were merely fragments (great though they may have been) and that nobody could even conceive of a new painting that "neglected nothing". Of course, Helion could conceive of it and indeed, much of his career, abstract and figurative, seems dedicated to that proposition, even if he wouldn't have made that claim for himself.




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    Replies
    1. Great citation and contribution to the dialogue that Deborah hoped her book on Helion would elicit.It confirms what I recall Guston saying in 1970 at Yale Norfolk. Since we can't go back to the absolute certainty of the times of Piero it is hard to push ourselves toward a notion of completeness the absence of which is praised in Provisional painting.But for me the haunting of the past notion of the whole is hard to shake.I have addressed this also in my enframement essay on this blog site and on the essay on Provisional painting.

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  4. Floating around the internet I ended up influencing Rubinstein https://tinyurl.com/yc852tkp

    this excerpt is from his recent collection of essays "The Turn to Provisionality"

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  5. Weak Thought, Strong Painting
    (Gianni Vattimo)
    In a 2014 post titled "The nihilist condition and provisional painting à la
    Rubinstein," artist-blogger Martin Mugar confessed to being "astonished" that
    I didn't mention nihilism in my two articles on Provisional Painting, adding
    that Gianni Vattimo's "weak thought' would be a perfect concept to encapsulate
    where painting is in Rubinstein's provisional world." Although I had been
    aware of Vattimo's ideas since I encountered Arte Debole, an early 1990s
    movement inspired by his work, I confess that as of 2009 I had yet to read any
    of his writings (a failing since corrected). Vattimo's absence from my articles
    meant that I missed the opportunity to weave my ideas about provisionality
    into current philosophical debate, and vice versa. In a belated effort to make
    up for that lacuna, let me attempt, as briefly as possible, to outline Vattimo's
    concept of "weak thought" as it might apply to painting and to art in general
    When Vattimo was a professor of aesthetics at the University of Turin
    in the late 1970s, a number of his students who had been arrested for their
    alleged involvement with Italian "extra-parliamentary" leftist movements
    such as the Red Brigades wrote letters from prison that Vattimo found
    distressingly doctrinaire and filled with what he called "metaphysical and
    violent rhetorical subjectivity."? His students had, he feared, misunderstood
    his teachings and misinterpreted Nietzsche and Heidegger. As an antidote
    to their embrace of violence, he developed his notion of "weak thought."
    Believing that it was an insistence on the existence of definitive truths and
    belief in a unitary history that had led astray not just his students but Western
    philosophy as a whole, Vattimo argued that it was not a question of finding a
    new ground for philosophy, replacing, say, as Derrida urged, the metaphysics

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  6. almost ten years since this blogpost and I find, unbeknownst to myself, correcting Raphael Rubinstein.

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