Art at its best reflects on its own optical origins. Even
when it appears to be breaking away into new territory as in the work of the Impressionists
and the Post Impressionists, it is meditating on its roots that were evident in
the optics of the perspective of the Renaissance and the chiaroscuro of the early
Baroque. Western art seems to fluctuate back and forth between seminal periods
of rigorously based optically grounded art and art that takes that construct as
dogma and perceives it as reality. My favorite concept from Marxist criticism
is the notion of reification. It is used to critique concepts of social
organization that are taken for reality rather than as human inventions. It
can be applied to art when the world of Bourgeoisie, for example, is solidifiedinto the Realism of the late 19thc. Although
used by the Marxists to accuse people of Bourgeois bad faith and to recommend
them for a curative stay in the gulag, when used to critique art it does a
pretty good job of detecting when large groups of people smugly take the shape
of things in the visual world as just the way things are.
A good example of reification was evident in the work I saw of
many, heretofore unknown to me, Realists at the Petit Palais in Paris, who
appeared to be followers of Courbet’s Social Realism. Their subjects were the
poor of Paris. One huge large scale painting showed a street theatre presentation
comprised mostly of young children, whose sorrowful looks conveyed obvious
exploitation. In my essay on my blog on the Impressionist show at the MFA from
the the mid 90’s I quoted Michael Baxandall, who felt that the work of Chardin
drew its strength from the way it understood that the structuring of the visual
reality had its roots in the eye/mind and its language of chiaroscuro. http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2011/11/modern-arts-considered-this-article-for.html
This notion becomes reified in the hands of the artist of
the late 19thc where the balance between seer and seen is lost. The paintings
are too much about the sad-eyed urchins and not the event of seeing them. The
limpidity for example of the work of Caravaggio is achieved by its
hypersensitivity to how the eye organizes the visual world. Subtle distinctions
between the seer and the seen (scene) are the sine qua non of great art.
In the 20thc, this balancing of that distinction is most
evident in the work of the Abstract Expressionists. The evanescence of Rothko’s
late work appears as an optical apparition. It partakes of the reductionist
chromatic trope supported by Greenberg’s philosophy but stays rooted in the
language of seeing in its use of subtly juxtaposed warms and cools. It stays in
the Western Tradition of seeing that goes back to Vermeer and in fact his work
seems at times to be a detail of, say a pearl, on the necklace of the woman in
one of his most famous paintings, the so-called “Woman with a Pearl Earing”.
Rothko’s work has been seen as an example of Talmudic
mysticism. When it comes to respecting the namelessness of God it seems
Abstraction is a most authentic vehicle .It intrigues me as I hear myself use
seer and seen that it resonates with the words of mystics from the Upanishads.
Or the constant reference to the struggle to merge the observer and the
observed in the work of Krishnamurti evidenced by his constant frustration at finding
the right word for this conundrum.
There seems to be a relationship between the interest in how
the eye sees and mysticism .If the cognitive structure of the eye shapes
reality, then an exploration of this structure puts the artist on the edge of
knowing and unknowing. Is it any surprise that the artists, who walk this line, this razor’s edge are not the happiest people in the world? The comforting
sense that the world we move in is a seamless whole has not been granted to them.
A simple figure/ground exercise for Rothko becomes a meditation on Being and
Nothingness.
For the artist ,who pursues abstraction, the risk of
reification becomes enormous. There is the assumption that, of course, abstraction is not reality, so there is no risk but it can be as leaden as a
Bougereau. It seems that artists think they are given two choices, that they
think are incompatible: Either you have a unique vision or you are a follower. That you have to be both seems to escape them. If you are influenced, you really can’t be an artist. This seems to be the case of the winners of a
recent annual art show and competition comprised of New England Artists, in
which I was included. In its generosity to include as many artists as possible
it ran the gamut between sophistic and amateur. The art is divided into work
selected by an outside curator and the rest is included in a concurrent show
with another name. In the end there was not much difference in quality between
the two groups. For the most part the show is made up of Abstraction, that
wallows in a mix of expressionist mark making and a vague sense of pattern and Photorealist
work, both of which seemed to catch the eye of the outside curator. The abstract
artists who did not question or embrace their roots were among the winners
of the competition. It would have been refreshing to see some humble exploration
of the rich language of 20thc abstraction.
We are in a post-ideological era in art. Therefore, the
realism is not suported by the doctrines of a movement, as it did in the late Sixties
and the Abstraction does not have the austere words ofAd Reinhardt to push it toward purity. Maybe
that is a good thing. But the results are not encouraging for the future of
painting. In this show the work floats on its own merits, which are no longer
to seduce the viewer with its ideological purity, but to do so by the lowest
common denominator of emotionality in the case of abstraction or crass
facticity in the case of the realism. I suppose that this is a normal evolution
similar to that from the High Renaissance to the Mannerists in Italy, before
chiaroscuro regrounded painting in the Baroque. But in the case of the prizewinners, they show no intelligence in regards to their sources. Like little bubble boys
and girls they can’t absorb any influences. They suffer from terminal narcissism.
Maybe that is the Modern aesthetic. The current manifestation of reification.
I can think of two artists who are presently painting in the
Boston area, whose art radiates a gracious interest in the tradition of painting
.Jim Falck and Addison Parks.For them the Tradition is the period from the beginning
of the 20thc: the world of Matisse and Picasso, which could be summed up as the
pushing of paint, with the dynamics of color and figure ground, toward the
simplicity of the written word. Recently I witnessed the finished product of a
mural Jim was asked to do at the gallery at Montserrat College of Art. It was a
full-sized mural, that was constructed of abstracted figures woven together with
as much understanding of time and space as Picasso’s “Desmoiselles d’Avignon”. Figure
and ground give the figures a visual life that keeps the viewer’s eye
constantly moving. The colors bounce back and forth between warm and cool to
create a mood of sunlit Italy and the Mediterranean. This is not a blind use of
the tradition but a respect for how it can integrate the figure into the environment
to create one organic being, which is “Life”. Jim’s favorite word. All one had
to do was compare his mural to the other ones done on adjacent walls to know
how smart Jim is. The others used paint in a additive manner. One mark on top of the other with no
sense of integration.
Addison nourishes his work with the artists he loves, Hoffmann
and Marin, Hartley and Miro. Here is the love of painting as language, that
allows for buoyancy and joy, to permeate the work. The language paints the painting.
This guy lives art, thinks art. There is such an abundance of letting things
be, through the language of painting. Parks, who is a writer, knows how words live
as part of an organic whole. You never know how they will react, when they are
juxtaposed with each other.
In a culture where everything has its shelf life, I don’t
expect the art community to carry these artists on their shoulders through the
streets of Boston, as local heroes. I have been in Boston long enough to recall
the hushed tones with which a new local art hero is discussed, and remember that
in every case the work of these artists has reeked of emotionality. The art
dealers knew that was needed for it to jump off the shelf in the art supermarket.
None of these artists were capable of organic evolution. Their success made that lack of organic growth inevitable. For Falck and Parks,
their love of art as language gives their art a life of its own and because it is "Life" itself, it breathes and pulsates and continue to grow.
Impressions of France: Money, Renoir,
Pisarro and Their Rivals
Fall 1995,The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“Impressions of France”, a somewhat
unwieldy exhibition of French landscape painting from the mid to late 19th
century documents parallels and differences between mainstream landscapes
painted principally for purchase by the French State and those of the
Impressionists which although contemporaneous were not initially considered
worthy of acquisition by the French Government. The work of Cezanne, Pisarro,
Monet and Sisley on view represent a way of seeing that is now considered to be
the foundation of modernism; on the other hand in the Salon landscapes we
witness the winding down of a universally accepted style that had had its
origin in the Baroque and which in the hands of the French Salon painters
becomes decidedly decadent . This simultaneous winding down of one style and
the burgeoning growth of another raises questions of how historically styles
succeed one another. The notion of what is decadent and what authentic looms
large in this show and most importantly the role that individual vision and
imagination play in establishing a new style.
According to Michael Baxandall’s book
”Shadows and Enlightenment” scientists and artists of the 18th century were
interested in the nature of perception and in particular the way the retina
translates patterns of light and dark into form. According to Baxandall the
authenticity of an artist such as Chardin lies in great measure in his ability
to convey the notion that the observed is the invention of the seer. #1. The
paintings center of gravity is always within the observer. The acceptance of a
unique light source and the fluency and immediacy of the brush strokes
contribute as well to the sensation that we are inside the artist’s
consciousness. Although the narrative and the social implications are important,
the studied expression of the perceptual experience as visual event is primary.
In the case of the salon painters the center of gravity seems to lie outside
the viewer in the landscape and with the story the landscape would convey to
the socially dominant class that might purchase the painting. All socially
relevant detail is explicitly represented: The geographical location,
recognizable monuments such as Chartres Cathedral, the social class of the
people in the landscape (usually peasants). The brush strokes vary within each
painting depending on what they are conveying .The formulas and motifs are
repeated enough to be identified as such: over and over we are served up the
road narrowing in perspective and several individuals strolling along this road
which reaches its vanishing point midpoint in the horizon.
The overwhelming mood of the Salon
paintings is one of melancholy . The oversized canvasses with their large
expanses of sky, sea or field induce a feeling of disorientation . The preferred
time of day is dusk. The self that is manifest is not the strong self that
eventually dominates 20th century art from Picasso to deKooning and Serra. In
the salon painting man is clearly not the measure by which the expanse of space
is parceled out. These artists believe naively in the illusion that chiaroscuro
creates. Once that illusion is established, the references to social
narrative abandon both the facticity of the objects represented and the object
making ability of the eye. The artists space is neither universal nor personal
but one of shared social assumptions and prejudices, especially those
assumptions based on institutions such as the Church and the bourgeoisie which
represent the conservatism of the dominant social order. To convey the dominant
role of the former, Churches figure prominently in many of the paintings and to
reassure the bourgeoisie of its control over the working class comforting
images of peasants quietly accepting their burden of labor in the fields fill
numerous landscapes.
How were the Impressionists capable of
becoming the “forerunners of modernism” affecting ultimately a sea change in
art, which relegates their competitors of the academy to the dustbin of
history. Merleau-Ponty in an insightful essay on Cezanne, entitled “Cezanne’s
Doubt” provides a possible explanation in his description of the psyche of the
most important artist of the pre-modernist revolution. #2 In Merleau-Ponty’s
view Cezanne is clinically schizophrenic. Felicitous human interaction is
beyond him. Most of his personal relationships are fraught with suspicion. Over
the course of this life he appears according to the observations of townsfolk
to become more and more embittered and alienated. Although lacking in the
social skills of the world and according to his childhood friend Emile Zola
insensitive to the social and political issues of the late 19th century France,
he was exquisitely attuned to the shape that the impressions of the observed
world took within him. These are impressions not shared with his fellow
citizens. There are no labels on his paintings either figuratively or literally
like the name on the stern of a boat on Elodie La VIllette’s painting that
situates the landscape for the viewer in Dieppe. A church or anything
recognizable except primordial rocks, trees and sky, does not dominate
Cezanne’s landscape. The impressions are configured into an architecture where
each stroke is part of a whole. There is no sloppy variation of style from part
to part as we see in the Salon painters.
The thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s essay is
that Cezanne’s illness defined his attitude toward painting. Merleau-Ponty goes
to great lengths to distinguish this emotional background from Cezanne’s
project, which starting from the hand that nature dealt him builds out of it a
noble oeuvre. What I find helpful in this analysis is the notion that that
Cezanne’s illness made him incapable at both the personal and the societal
level of reading the social signs that bind us to society; so that at heart he
remained unsocialized and therefore eminently qualified to focus on the inner
experience of apprehending the landscape as landscape rather than the role is
plays in French Culture. Everything is turned inside out. The roads that
meander off into the horizon from the bottom of the painting in a large number
of the Salon landscapes are present in Cezanne’s paintings but he subverts the
expected reality so that the road ends up closer to the viewer at its vanishing
point than where it began. What serves as an entry point into the painting for
the salon artists actually functions as an obstacle to entering into Cezanne’s
painting.
Seeing the work of Cezanne side by side
with his once well-established contemporaries accentuates the common notion of
Cezanne as “farouche” and renders the Salon artist more insipid than they would
appear beyond the context of this show. Cezanne’s choice of what to paint
reflects the thought processes of someone who “just doesn’t get it”. In one
small landscape (most of the impressionist works are noticeably smaller than
those of their salon counterparts) he paints a landscape with branches
obscuring the road. One can almost imagine that he was dropped blindfolded
before the scene and asked to paint unflinchingly the scene before him when the
blindfold was removed. He would be forced to abandon all conventions and go
beyond the narrative constructs that lock us into daily life. Whereas La
Villette, Bavoux and the countless unknown artist of the late 19th century
continue to paint in the now fatigued manner of the of the once radical
concepts of chiaroscuro and perspective, Cezanne drops down from the retina
which is the locus of value perception to the striate cortex of the brain where
the values are analyzed according to verticality, horizontality and
diagonality. #3 Just as Caravaggio’s rigorous and powerful use of chiaroscuro
spread rapidly throughout Europe to define the styles of Velasquez, Rembrandt
and Vermeer, Cezanne’s understanding of the role of line direction and its
relations to seeing space becomes the raw material for cubism, minimalism and
various optically based art forms of the 20th century.
The implication of my interpretation of
Cezanne’s personality on a general notion of the evolution of the language of
painting is that stylistic change can be achieved not only by deconstructing
the current visual language but by going beyond it to the underpinnings of that
language which are not yet culturally appropriated. Those thinkers and artists
who promote modern paradigms of cultural revolution that aim to deconstruct
accepted ways of seeing at a cultural level in order to go beyond them would do
well to study Cezanne. Oblivious to the social signs and symbols, the accretion
of his inherited culture he could more fully discover the inner visual
structure of the eye/mind. The battle of transformation is not won only by
questioning the notions of the current visual order but by digging deeper into
the structure of the eye/mind itself. That the possibilities of the language of
chiaroscuro had run their course could only be understood by a few people who
were not easily seduced by its current incarnation as a vehicle for describing
the social order of the late 19th century. The creation of these artists was anew language, more vigorous and inclusive of varieties of the visual
experience, which grew out of how the landscape was internally apprehended, not
what is was supposed to represent externally to the class of collectors and
cognoscenti of the time.
#1 Baxandall, Michael.” Shadows and
Enlightenment”, (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
#2Merleau-Ponty,Maurice “Cezanne’s
Doubt” in “Sense and Non-Sense”, Translated by Hubert L. Derives and Patricia
Allen Derives, 6th edition (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern U. Press, 1991)
pages 9-25
#3Hoffman,Howard S, “Vision and the Art
of Drawing”, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989) pages 48-67.
