The Changing Face of a Painting

In early February,  Gallery One Ct was expecting to hang an exhibition at The Guilford Art Center beginning in mid-May, 2020. My husband and I had just returned from visiting our son in Los Angeles, and my head was filled with our talks with him about Gilles Deleuze. I knew him mostly from his book on Francis Bacon. But there is so much more... one piece: we watched Deleuze on film, with English subtitles, talking through "What is the Creative Act," (on YouTube, dating from 1987). And I gathered notes from that and began to see Deleuze's statements as a way to dig in & start a new series.

I get asked, a lot, about my work. Some people feel that abstract art is over; it died with Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Other people don't "get" abstracts; they think it's a closed circle, something that needs an MFA to understand, or something their six-year old can do. Perhaps Deleuze could help me frame some ideas. Then I also read a 2018 interview with the filmmaker Diana Thater, (in "Los Angeles Studio Conversations: Sixteen Women Talk about their Art," Ed. Stephanie Buhmann, purchased at Book Soup in LA-- should be required reading for artists). Thater says "I am always in my work as is my crew" and uses multiple screens because she wants to reveal "the whole construct and setup of the film." And I wondered, can I do that in paint? 

I started by dividing the canvas up, to show how I think and work. The left side was left blank, to portray the (daunting) empty canvas. Then the next vertical "stripe" was for the articulation of the idea: words, quick sketches... then the first attempt, then the finished "piece" far left. I found that the last two morphed into one another, so the first paintings had just three compartments. 

Then... the thing happened that always happens... the paintings began, as they should, to take on their own lives. And the first painting, the one I thought would be the base, the thing to then aspire to in the next paintings, began to tell me it was unhappy with its state .... so, the top version, the first "finished" version, became the second version, the one below. Other things changed too. The "idea," or first muse-quote, changed space from its vertical presentation to be across the top and the vertical lines just did not seem as important. Here's a new painting:

I still love the text. Diana Thater and Gilles Deleuze are still in there. See what you think.

Artist Statements in 4" x 6"

We drove south on backroads on a whim; we needed to see art, but saw two disappointing sets of artworks and felt defeated. One more try, we thought. We stopped for the first time at the Chester Gallery (in Chester, Connecticut, one of the most beautiful small villages in New England).

Chester Gallery is hosting this year's Holiday Postcard Show; everything is 4" x 6" or smaller. There are many of these kinds of small works shows, designed to make art affordable and give-able, and this is the best one I have seen. Its final day is today--and maybe tomorrow, Sunday the 13th of January 2019.

On the way down in the car, I was reading various artist statements aloud to my husband. Mostly, they seemed forced. It is very difficult to write about the thing your hand and imagination put together without sounding... odd. If you can write about it, after all, why paint it? [I wrote several posts on the artist statement on this blog back in 2011]. I never stop trying to figure out how best to discuss my own and other people's art.

There will be some reflected light on these pieces; I apologize! as the photographs are all mine. Do go and see these in person. Here is the first little cluster I loved:

Because of scale, these paintings sit quite a bit closer to one another than is usually possible. This allows for a good deal of cross-fertilization: the way the blues in the two left-hand paintings glide into each other, or the way the gray in the lower left is echoed and deepened by the deep blacks in the lower-right painting, where the orange is brought out more fully by the rust-orange in the work above it. Some of this interplay happens in any show, but, for some reason, it happened a lot more in this gallery than usual. Serendipitous hanging, probably, but also really good art.

Okay, so why are these pieces appealing to me? Let me try and figure that out with you. Here is "Day's End," a monotype by Kathleen DeMeo:

On her website, this artist publishes what may be the shortest and sweetest artist statement ever:

"I paint with a brayer and press
A color lover with monochrome moods
Hard-edged geometry or melted lines
Depends on the day"

This monotype (the least expensive, at $45, of any of these works, so an amazing bargain) falls into the middle of DeMeo's statement. It isn't monochrome, though the black lines lend the piece structure. The colors are so subtle, but there is something about the shades of that ochre-yellow that pulls us in. Instead of shadows around the tree, we see rings of a kind of grounded halo (those "melted lines"?).  I can almost feel the weight of air around the tree. DeMeo's artist statement is perfect, as it discusses her method, allows her leeway, and doesn't try to say too much.

The next piece I liked was by Claudia Van Nes, who opened Maple and Main, then, recently, closed the gallery and now works in a group called River Valley Artists.  My favorite part of her biography is her true starting point as a child, where she "spent drawing elaborate homes and villages for rabbits." I bet she almost didn't include that, but it makes perfect sense, because look at the detail in this watercolor, "Oranges on a Dish," where the scale (think of these orange slices up against DeMeo's tree) is so interesting:

Just as rabbit villages cannot be realistic, these oranges are not nudging into photographic realism. They are something seen out of the corner of your eye, an overlooked artistic moment in a day filled with far more important things. But isn't that what art can do, is give us those glimpses that we can hold onto?

Nearby sits "Snow at Devil's Hopyard," by Katherine Clarkson:

I like this primarily because I am often drawn to art that is on the edge of realism and abstraction. If it were not for the tree trunks in the background, this would be a far more conceptual piece. But we see the trees, then that leads us to the boulders, then the water, and the snow of the title. I could not find Katherine Clarkson's statement about her work, so here I go... Robert Motherwell said something like "start with the full picture and pare it down to the essence." The view, here, gets to put in all the detail that Clarkson didn't need: the deeper grays and veins in the rocks, the green-grays running through the water, the footprints and fallen leaves in the snow... It's all there, but she gives it to you to fill back in. Abstract art can be a gift to the viewer: "here, look at this, and imagine yourself inside ..."

"Lines," two pieces by Moya Aiken, go full-out abstract.

She writes of her work that "Even the solid areas of my work consist of many varying lines forming a solid mass in which there are time lines of shadows, a result of the different depths of graphite." Pencils can be under-rated by painters, but not by Aiken. Her pieces here show the lines running off the paper to another unseen place. The negative space here is substantial... and playful.  It looks as though the pencil began the lines and the paint or ink completed them... the lines seem to float.

Catherine Christiano says she "works from close observation of subjects... while also drawing from... art history when determining compositions." Here is an Irish street scene that could have been painted  in another time and place:

Christiano paints perfect forms and edges in her larger oils, but here her brushstrokes are looser, freer,  and the gray day is lit by the soft and misted lights of the storefront. She has given us flat shapes that indicate something more behind them-- a vase, a tray, a book. This is  a street, a painting, to wander in. It reminds us of places we have walked along but, as Christiano's statement says, it also reminds us of streets we have seen in galleries and museums portraying other times.

This show will be coming down, but the gallery owner, Nancy Pinney, can talk to you about any of these artists. Chester Gallery has shows coming, and here are two large paintings that were hanging in the back room to give you an idea of what kinds of things might be in store. The landscape is by Nancy Pinney and the still life with cat by Sheila Barbone:

Small is Beautiful, Right?

After a two-person exhibition, “Shaking Loose,” with the artist Rhys Davies at Hope and Feathers (Amherst, Massachusetts), I am back to small works...

Why? I had been working, steadily, slowly, towards abstract works that shimmer with color and stay largely clear of line and image, clear of outlined foreground and background. Here are a couple of examples from the Hope and Feathers show. The first is called “Friday Noon,” and the second “Tuesday Morning, 10:30.”

I love these paintings. I do.  But they are, I have discovered, their own end-point.  If I look through all of my paintings (www.annknickerbocker.com), I can see the work change over time, and I can see what lead to these paintings... but I can’t take this work any farther. No lines, no discernible shapes... what could come next? I could, I suppose, by painting, say, an all-blue canvas.  So where can I go?

I looked online, pulling up “abstract” and “zombie formalism” and the names of various strong abstract artists. I saw too many paintings that shared sensibilities, colors, and brushwork with mine. We constitute a small country, us abstractionists, and it became difficult for me to sort my work out from anyone else’s. The art critics are tired of it, and the woman who comes into the gallery from the cold doesn't feel it. 

So I am working small, with digital means (adobe sketch)

 or inktense blocks and gouache and watercolor and the occasional flourish of acrylic. 

The sizes are 14” x 17” and 11” x 14” for now... I may be able to blow these up to billboard size at some point. But for now, I am going back in to places and moments and drawing lines and text and the slightly wonky images that I see when I think with closed eyes.

An Ekphrastic poem by Charles Tarlton

James McNeill Whistler’s Red and Black: the Fan (1894)  and Kenneth Paul Block’s Drawing for the cover of James Brady’s novel, Fashion Show (2009)

All good colors are equally beautiful;  it is only in the question of their combination that art comes in.

                         -- Oscar Wilde

In the austere harmony of red and black there is at once both contradiction and beauty.  Where red is nearly all, the thinner black slithers up, punctuates the shape of red.  Oh, that long black feathered line down the middle of her red dress!  On the right, the black dress flaunts a splash of bright red flowers or ribbons in the décolletage, and catches our eye, the black dress slinky as the boa on the red.  I would make metaphors of these two, and have each contemplate the other in her gaze.

strike me a Grecian

coin between hard iron dies

a silver drachma -

heads, the goddess Athena

a wise old owl comes up tails

my lady in red

leans forward in the mirror

dreaming of a black

gossamer frock dotted red

dreaming herself into it

see the girl inside

that black dress.  What does she crave?

to hang on a wall

where the museum displays  

its admired Whistler women

Matisse/Diebenkorn: Paint It Black

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) is set in its own majestic portico’d place, augmented with a sweeping addition. It seems very far away from the city, and to travel there is to be (somehow) in art. BMA presents the “Matisse-Diebenkorn” through January 29^, 2017 and then, after a re-hanging, the show opens again at SFMOMA in the spring.

What would these two artists say to one another across time? We know that Matisse went all the way to the edge of abstraction and just peered over with great delicacy, (with “View of Notre Dame” in 1914, for example):

and then retreated a few inches.  Diebenkorn set up shop just past his predecessor, but would make use of Matisse’s floral grillwork for safety’s sake.  You’ll see.

Pretty much everyone can picture a Matisse. Close your eyes. Okay? Got one?

This is my Matisse, “Red Room (Harmony in Red)” from 1908:

But not everyone can pull a Richard Diebenkorn image out of thin air.  And if you could, what period would you choose? Abstract? Figurative? or Ocean Park? Maybe, after seeing the show at BMA or SFMOMA, it would be this one, “Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad,” 1965, which is Matissean but also Diebenkornish:

To Begin with Diebenkorn

Let’s start by thinking about the “new” guy. I had seen a massive Diebenkorn exhibition at the Royal Academy (RA) in London in the spring of 2015.*  The Royal Academy offered generous texts on their walls and a thorough introduction to the artist on their site. Here is an example:

(www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/richard-diebenkorn-inside-the-show).   

To weigh Diebenkorn’s reception in England, so Paul Carey-Kent, a financial policy analyst and art critic, brought 6  “well-established painters” to the RA’s Diebenkorn show, and recorded their comments along with his own. Carey-Kent started with the assumption that Diebenkorn is “a painter’s painter.” Half of his guests were pleased with the art on view, half were not. The painters are: Katrina Blamin, Claudia Carr, Christina Niederberger, Michael Stubbs, D.J. Simpson and Dolly Tompsett ; see the article for details (www.artcritical.com/2015/05/04/paul-carey-kent-richard-diebenkorn).

In the article, Michael Stubbs observes that Diebenkorn’s abstract work of the 1950’s was “typical of the early ‘50’s, in developing a Cubist space into more fluid forms which value spontaneous gestures, and which simultaneously construct and contradict the space.” YES. Diebenkorn faced into everything, right up through Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, and found his own voice. This is what makes him a “painter’s painter”: we can see him struggle, almost watch him think. Diebenkorn reveals everything beautiful and unsightly, brushstrokes that lesser artists would worry about exposing. Here is a detail from “Ocean Park 43” (Royal Academy of Arts exhibition catalogue, 14 March-17 June, 2015, p. 140):

Look at the escaped blue squiggle, up against a deliberate long dripped line. Now take another look at the gray line that anchors the blue triangle: there is another shape partly visible inside that. There are no straight lines on either top or bottom of the purple stripe; the artist didn’t auto-correct. The green drip slams into an orange line that then veers off to nothing, allowing the green to re-appear. This is not the work of a minute. This apparent spontaneity is earned through time and incredible patience on the part of the artist.  Marking, erasure, marking, stopping.

Another of the artists brought to the RA exhibition, D.J. Simpson, uses an electric router to mark/draw onto his wood support, and then paints in the backgrounds to make his art (his art is “fetishising,” says the artist and critic John Chilver). Simpson thinks that Diebenkorn knew exactly “when there was enough push and not enough pull.”  I think that, by “push” Simpson means the sustained agitation in the painting, flowing and just a bit untethered. Here is the question... Does Simpson mean that Diebenkorn would then add in the “pull” to lock in the work? Or does he mean that Diebenkorn would allow the painting to remain un-resolved, that this state of flux was the goal?

Matisse and Diebenkorn

The RA ‘s Diebenkorn show was big and beautiful. But it was a show that crested with the Ocean Park series, as if all the previous work was only preparatory.  The hanging was rather convincing as a yellow brick road, and it left me very little room to breathe. In this context, I saw the 1950’s work as flawed, and left feeling odd. I should have liked it; Diebenkorn is a painter’s painter, and, even more, an abstract painter’s painter.

So I was really eager to see the Matisse-Diebenkorn show.  Would Diebenkorn flounder in the face of the older man’s work? I had expected, because I have always loved him, to gravitate to the Matisses.  A brief aside: here is a lovely Matisse, (not at the show at BMA), called “Entrance to the Casbah,” (1912/3):

Years ago, I had gone to a Matisse show** and loved many paintings with this intense blue-dominated palette and come home immersed in what I thought of “Matisse blue.”  Bonnard said of a Matisse on his walls that

By day it is the blue that takes the lead. What an intense life the colors have, and how they vary with the light!  (1946)

On impulse, I added the color to every canvas then on my studio walls. It ruined them all, of course, because the paintings hadn’t called for that kind of interference.  What kind of interference would Matisse cause Diebenkorn? I thought blue might be involved.

But I was wrong. It was black, deep and abiding black. (Black is so important that one artist has recently claimed exclusive rights to the newest, strongest black mixture, Vantablack  (http://hyperallergic.com/279243/anish-kapoor-gets-exclusive-rights-to-the-worlds-darkest-pigment).  

But I get ahead of myself.  I should start with the observation that the wall texts and the essays for this show are entirely convincing. The research is solid, the relationship clear. Diebenkorn studied Matisse beginning with his days at Stanford. He saw Matisse’s paintings in the home of Sarah Stein. He visited MOMA in New York and the Pompidou in Paris. Diebenkorn owned forty-one books on Matisse, even loaning one to MOMA’s curator John Elderfield in 1983 to help with an upcoming exhibition. Diebenkorn saw little-known Matisse paintings as a guest of the Soviet Artists’ Union (Matisse/Diebenkorn catalogue, eds. Janet Bishop and Katherine Rothkopf, BMA and SFMOMA, 2016).

Near the show’s entrance, I found myself moving back and forth, looking at Matisse’s “Studio, Quai Saint-Michel”:

And his “Goldfish and Palette”:

And then, with those two firmly in mind, I took in “Urbana 2”

And “Urbana 6”:

 And basically didn’t want to move on. (So I will basically stay here for this writing, but know that there are many, many more works in the show and go see it!). The irony of the day was that the two Diebenkorn paintings had both been in the RA show, but I obviously hadn’t SEEN them.  I saw them now. And they blew me away. I remember thinking about each one, “is it a room? a landscape? a state of mind?”  The “Urbana” series was all that abstract paintings are meant to be. They were open, un-resolvable, but there might be a key, if I stood there long enough, maybe... I wanted to stay in front of them forever. And what held me in was the black pigment. Look back at “Urbana 6” and imagine just the black in outline as I drew it in my sketchbook:

The shapes are powerful, even in outline, but here they are again in black:

The black paint won’t give it up.  It hangs there, receding and coming forward as if it were actually moving. Curator Janet Bishop writes about “Studio, Quai Saint-Michel” and “Urbana #4” that

... the young painter appears to have repurposed the blocks of color that make up the Parisian studio interior to create a composition seemingly devoid of familiar points of reference (catalogue, p. 23)

This is the goal. The “pull,” Mr. Simpson, is left up to the viewer. 

It is as if Matisse lived long enough to move a little closer to that abstract edge; Diebenkorn completes Matisse’s line of thought, taking the loose shutter of  “French Window at Collioure” (which, curator Katherine Rothkopf writes, was changed by Matisse to cover over  ‘a balcony and a landscape in the distance” were covered over by “a wash of black paint” [!!] (catalogue, p. 123) :

 And fastening it down (the “shutter” in Ocean Park #105):

*My husband, Charles Tarlton, wrote a series of ekphrastic tanka prose about the Ocean Park paintings, based on our visit; see artistinanaframe.blogspot.com, the entry on Diebenkorn from 11/21/16; there is a drama in prose & poetry on the relationship of Matisse and Picasso printed there as well.

**”M

Charles Tarlton's "Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park 17"

"...[the] classic situation of trying to reveal in language what the act of seeing provokes.”

                                                                                                              — Robert Creeley

The artist stands ready in the presence of a blank canvas, but nothing so far has happened.  Up ahead in time a finished painting is waiting, but something has to take place now to launch the creative act.  The painter has a long straight edge and a piece of charcoal; he draws three parallel horizontal lines, and then, fidgeting with the straight edge, lays in three more parallel lines diagonally.  The canvas has been “besmirched,” and the artist has his problem.

these are not pictures

out the transom, but pictures roused

by the geometry

of it. The lines creating

shapes in a regular pattern

from the toothings

of these inaugural gestures

the painting grows

according to a logic born

of the moment’s vagaries

Here is a definition of process.  Building on the stimulus of the first lines he drew on the canvas, the painter improvises colored shapes as needed, drawing other lines, following the promptings of whatever just emerged, gesture, then color, then another gesture, until he is exhausted.  But, wait, the next morning, back in the studio, he repents, and begins to scratch out and paint over yesterday’s markings, leaving hints to reveal here and there the way he had come.

he only knew it was

finished once he’d come back

from abandoning it

in despair, to find it all

working perfectly

any truth in the art

derives from his accruing

fragmented judgments

over a frantic period

of exasperated struggle

You cannot ask what any of it means or represents, more than his efforts to get right the thing that had kept going.  The peculiar angular drawings in the top half of the picture just happened in the working out of pressures from the day before.  They are pictures of nothing, lines arranged to the emotional satisfaction of the artist.  Still, they are interesting, are they not?

what do you think

stairways, the generally celestial?

closer up, the details

confute interpretation in the sense

of particular visions

what’s wonderful

is exactly that elaborate

drawing of figures

without subject or reference

then knowing they were right

All the Ocean Parks started the same manner, though this is not something one can say in a strictly historically way.  No one was there watching, but the familiar diagonals appear in nearly every painting (are they hiding in every one?) cutting across the horizontal-vertical matrix.  And in nearly every painting they have been worked back into the deep pentimenti by over-painting and erasure, never completely obliterated because they constituted the glimpse from which the works arose.  Not perfect evidence, perhaps, but enough to help us understand the genesis of the archetypal motif.

but still it’s details

differentiate each painting

from the others

keep each one interesting

in its own familial way

no two days alike

exactly, no two Ocean Parks

precisely the same

number of triangles, the same

dispositions of red

Art Criticism 101B

what if he had

a giant dictionary in his head

could he give meanings

to the shapes in their arrangement

so we’d know what they meant?

we might then indeed

find California light made manifest

O, geography of the west

in the myriad exotic objects

he is said to have portrayed

*Ocean Park #17 can be viewed online at: http://uima.uiowa.edu/richard-diebenkorn/

Here is an excerpt from the descriptive curatorial essay on the University of Iowa Museum of Art’s website, a perfect illustration of what is most wrong with Diebenkorn criticism today.

No. 17 is a brilliant example of Richard Diebenkorn's now legendary exploration of architecture and light in his Ocean Park series.  The Ocean Park works are essentially conversations between "ocean" — broad areas of atmospheric color implying nature's vastness — and "park" — ambiguous lines evoking a desire for order and containment.

“Ocean Park” refers neither to the “ocean” nor to a “park,” but to an area near the beach in Santa Monica, California, north and south of Ocean Park Blvd.  This is where Diebenkorn had a studio. 

Architecture?  The idea must arise from all the straight lines.  Light?  All the bright colors, yellow and white, why, they must be representative of—light.  Ocean?  I don’t know.  You tell me.  And park?  You mean park like grass and trees and, oh, aren’t those the legs of giant picnic tables?

Charles Tarlton, "The Turn of Art"

This piece was originally published in Fiction International, Issue 45, "About Seeing." It is dedicated to Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA, whose tour around "The Steins Collect" was so exhilarating.

The Turn of Art

A dramatic scene in prose and verse

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris.  It is 1907.

The room is filled with heavy furniture, a large writing desk, sideboards, tables, and cupboards.

1. Pablo Picasso (Left Stage Center) and Henri Matisse (right Stage Center) sit in low chairs across from each other in front of the fireplace (Up Stage Center). They face us as if looking into a camera (think of the famous photo of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by Man Ray taken in 1922).

On the wall (Up Stage Left) behind PICASSO, 5 MATISSE paintings are hanging—Woman in a hat (1905), Madame Matisse (1905), Le Bonheur de vivre (1905-6), Blue Nude (1907), and Self-portrait (1906).

On the wall (Up Stage Right) behind MATISSE we see 5 PICASSO paintings—Boy Leading a Horse (1905-6)), Gertrude Stein (1905-6), Young Acrobat on a Ball (1905), Nude with Joined Hands (1906), and Self-portrait (1906).

PICASSO

once we had turned

our backs on the museums

            Pause.

where could we go?

            Indicates MATISSE, sarcastically.

then he started drawing

lines of paint an inch wide

MATISSE

wasn’t easy

while so many others

were portraying

the fine line of a nose

details in strands of hair

PICASSO

not enough, not

for him.  Just to make it

look like real fruit

            Pause.

no more trompe-l'œil for him

            Pause.

dot’s enough for a nipple

MATISSE

I drew with brush

loads of flat blue house paint

made my lines thick

all around the outside

black between trees and sky

Pause.

MATISSE stands and crosses the room.  He takes Boy Leading a Horse from the wall and carries it back to his chair.  He leans it against the wall beside his chair and sits down.

Not every one, however, followed my lead.

Pause, admiring Picasso’s picture.

browns and some grays

this is a precocious child’s

drawing.  A horse!

a boy’s dream of the West

the open plains to ride

PICASSO

a poetic

dream might more easily

bring in the cash

hung on their wall till 1913

you often saw it there

Pause, PICASSO points to a spot on the wall

later Nazis forced

von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

to liquidate

hispano-judaic

art smuggled out and sold

MATISSE

marketable

like pigeons in St Marks

swarmed around you

as they changed to property

they escaped like wild birds

Pause.

I was waiting

for you to drop it all

come up to art

renounce celebrity

stop showing off—show us!

works of genius

make us feel supremely

diminutive

genius has to give it up

forfeit its advantage

PICASSO

has to give up what?

MATISSE

superiority

Pause.

they used to say

I wish I could draw like that

now they say, anyone could

            Pause.

PICASSO

I felt deeply

every brush stroke of these

as I made them

but in cold aftermath

just financial success

            Pause, as if reflecting.

I was watching, you know, despite my cool demeanor.  But, I loved the life in the cafés, you know, the money, spreading my name around.  And the women, they all wanted to touch my genius. 

            Pause.

You did none of that.  You ran no races, gave no quarter.

How was that?

you were ahead

tossing off thick-limbed monsters

driving me mad

you made these obstacles

I had to climb over

MATISSE

Finally!

PICASSO

I wanted to paint

with a heavier hand

lose all my fear

of teachers, my father

forget about the saints

MATISSE

could see clearly

down into the world’s heart

below surfaces

but you kept painting them,

the surfaces, the smiles

PICASSO stands and claps.  He then crosses the room behind MATISSE and removes Woman with a hat and carries it back to his chair and holds it on his lap, partly turning it so the audience can see.

PICASSO

this is, of course

all odd lumps of color

unexpected

rub out the woman’s face

PICASSO covers the face with his hand.

—and behold Kandinsky!

you sped ahead

on wings of distortion

shape and color

yours to waste, invent

new wonders for the eye

Pause.

no milliner

could make a hat like that

it was conceived

on an insane palette

laughing, you were laughing

MATISSE looks around the room, as if trying to orient himself. Coughs.

MATISSE

Somewhere near here, art’s roadmap changed abruptly.  Up ahead or looking just behind us, out of the corner of my eye, we were poking forward, looking for the line just so we could step over it. 

I saw you coming up.

PICASSO

the other side,

how I longed to be free

overstepping

there’d be no looking back

MATISSE

make the first real pictures!

2. The stage goes dark. Two middle-aged men emerge from the wings (Down Stage Right) under a single spot, dressed as GERTRUDE STEIN (PETER CARMODY) and ALICE B. TOKLAS (ANDREW BLIGHT) and wearing the same hats worn in the famous snapshot taken in Aix-les-Bains, 1927.

CARMODY (GERTRUDE)

they never knew

what the very next thing 

might be—tiny

legs, an arm, thick as trees

palm tree fronds like fish bones

BLIGHT (ALICE)

They were always searching for it, for the new.  At first in different ways; Picasso, of course, classically trained, gifted, was a long time shaking off the lessons, his tutored instincts.  The Blue and Rose periods—he could have been using a camera. 

            Pause.

Henri was different, all for crude outlines, sudden colors, rough dabs of paint, the merest suggestion.

CARMODY

he made it strange

defied the viewer’s eye

BLIGHT

no matter what

it was, it disappeared

CARMODY

into paint, just the paint

Pause.

That’s it, of course.  He overthrew the subject.

Only the paint counted.

That was where the eye fell; there, on the paint, the thick paint piling up, the paint on top of other paint, the paint plowed by the brush like a field readied for planting. 

Pause.

Look on the wall!  You see the picture of his wife, Madame Matisse, with the green line down her nose?  See what I mean? 

Compare that to Picasso; choose one there on the wall.

What about the portrait of Gertrude Stein?

            Pause.

I mean, my portrait.

PICASSO and MATISSE rise and retrieve their respective paintings and bring them (Down Stage Right).  They stand under the spot, holding the paintings in front of their chests.

BLIGHT

He meant it to look like you, a resemblance, but, he said, if it didn’t look like you right now, that was all right, because it eventually would.

CARMODY

it was just exactly me.

PICASSO holds the painting out and turns it so he can see it.  He looks at CARMODY.

PICASSO

I was looking for truth

not just surfaces

behind those eyes, a mind

was watching for a sign

CARMODY

You’re right, I had seen so much

Pauses, musing.

on the lookout

PICASSO

your eyes reach out to probe

what you’re hearing

as if to say, I had hoped

you’d not be like the rest

MATISSE

And, what do we say about Madame Matisse’s portrait? 

Can your discerning eye probe deeper meaning there? 

What do you make of that green stripe?

BLIGHT

perhaps you meant

only to encompass

her, register

your discontent with life

the burden of marriage

I always felt

MATISSE

pushed into the background

disapproval

in those black eyes, stern lips

BLIGHT

how would you even know?

CARMODY

I still say it’s the paint; the spirits of all the wild emotions caught up in spread paint, bone splinters in the ambergris—color, thickness, smell—wide brushes. 

It looks like whatever you want it to look like. 

Pause.

No. It was not about looking, or smelling, or being like anything at all. 

It meant in fact—red, the green, the violet, and orange; just as it means blue, black, and yellow—in any of their many permutations, in a chance encounter, as crude parts of the world.

MATISSE

it was to paint

because I was making

PICASSO

objects from paint

Pause.

my mind’s eye gave the world

only the quickest glance

3. CARMODY AND BLIGHT exit. Spot off, Stage lights up. MATISSE and PICASSO are back in their chairs.  PICASSO points up at a painting, The Young Acrobat on a Ball.

MATISSE

there’s a story

in that one for certain

pure narrative

tempts us to wondering

who the large sad man is

Pause.

I contemplate

more the lonely woman

child, boy, and dog

dreamily facing hills

where a white horse grazes

the acrobat

is a boy or a girl

learning to stand

on such uncertainty

focussing attention

PICASSO

it was Giotto

or me, could draw perfect

freehand circles

MATISSE

painted like Velázquez

aims now to be a child

MATISSE crosses the room and stands under his painting, Le Bonheur de Vivre. He points up to it.

PICASSO

Childishness, to be sure, yet there’s nothing childish about it. 

Your hills and distances are but suggested (did you notice?) while the big ideas, all the rest, are wild reds and greens, hints of mythology in all the playful poses, but circles and careless dots for eyes, spring frolics, and a touch of sensuousness, perspective out of whack

—verges on humorous.

far more expressive

than my pouting giant

or my morose

pale hills.  Your lovers run in

search of cartoon nudity

MATISSE

So, you want to talk about nudes?

MATISSE reaches up and removes Nude with Joined Hands.  He looks closely at it.

You were still painting like Velázquez.

            Pause.

you’re so polite

your nude’s too well-mannered

covers herself

could be from Pompey’s walls

a goddess or priestess

she’s a mural

painted on Spanish stucco

inside a church

PICASSO

I meant to paint

women someone could love

I was out to show the world who was master.  Infinite reflection and dark resignation show on the faces of my men; the deepest sadness, calm, or joy appears on the faces of my women, because they are so beautiful. The children know so much. 

I could not paint the kind of pulsing stones, the female boulders you were so happy to make.

Pause.

I dreamt women

you could take out walking

they’d hold your arm

it took time seeing how

wrong; longer catching up.

4. PICASSO goes behind his chair and takes out a long pointer rod.  He goes over to the paintings and stands in front of Blue Nude.  He points to it.

            Long Pause. He is just looking at the painting, transfixed for a moment.

this was vulgar

so I at first decided

androgynous

whore-sailor all in one

promiscuously drawn

PICASSO comes to (Down Stage Center), Pauses again, and leans intimately toward the audience, in confidence.

Pornographic.

            Pause, sighs in resignation.

this beautiful hulk is

REALITY

Look at it!  Look at it!

a carcass of hip bones

ankles, twisted rib cage

Pause, to MATISSE directly, as if, for the moment, giving in.

This was your high water mark. 

I knew it instantly.  I ran home and drew a hundred chunky naked women leaning on their elbows, sharp hip bones and one leg flung over the other—a hundred, at least. 

You had launched a thunderbolt, for certain, but I thought to myself, “I will rise to that, rise up to that!”

MATISSE

caught by surprise

lost sight of the way ahead

in a fever to catch up

            Pause.

with this the history

of modern art resumes 

PICASSO

that we could teach

the art world to embrace

this meaty toad

MATISSE

love and art together

move closer to the truth

PICASSO

The way ahead congealed, the compass and the raw materials were set. 

MATISSE

If anyone could have seen into the future, this would have been…

MATISSE makes an all-inclusive gesture with his waving arm.

…where it all started.

5. PICASSO reaches up and takes down the Self-portrait by MATISSE; MATISSE takes down the Self-portrait by PICASSO.  They both come (Down Stage Center) and stand holding the paintings and facing the audience. PICASSO pulls a false beard from the portrait of MATISSE. The two portraits reveal a strong family resemblance—the portraits of two brothers.

Curtain