"But you the viewer...": Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne, and Vincent Van Gogh

David Hockney was talking about his trees-in-Bridlington paintings with his friend and (best?) critic, Lawrence Weschler:  Hockney says " 'I've taken to thinking of these recent canvases of mine as figure paintings.' He waited two beats till I obliged him: 'But they're just landscapes,' I pointed out. 'There are no figures in them.'  'Ah,' he corrected me triumphantly, 'but you the viewer are the figure in them.' " (from True to Life: 25 Years of Conversations with David Hockney, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p. 222).

We visited the legion of honor and saw the new exhibit "Pissarro's People"; this was the first chance I have had to see the whole range of his art.  Pissarro seems, at least to me, the least well-known of his contemporaries.  He lost hundreds of paintings when he was forced to abandon his home during the Franco-Prussian war; this loss would have demoralized many artists, but he kept painting. Cézanne would call him "the first Impressionist," but, then,  Pissarro moved on to his own form of Post-Impressionism, and to pointillism. His final works seem free and loose, perhaps finally beyond "-isms."

The show at the Legion of Honor focuses on "People" and brings together pictures of Pissarro's family, of household servants, apple-pickers, people attending markets in Normandy and Picardy, and of men and women bringing in the harvest. The colors are generally muted and soft, and brushstrokes are dominant.  My husband pulled me over to a painting. "Look," he said, "it's Cézanne's tilted table." And, if you look at this one work, "The Little Country Maid," from 1882, you can see that in addition to the single, front-view perspective, Pissarro has added a second viewpoint, almost an overhead glance at the chair seats and tabletop:

It's very casual, almost tossed-off, but it's definitely there. When we got home, we did some research on the interests and influence of Pissarro. He loved Japanese prints, and he was impressed enough with pointillism after seeing Seurat and Signac to work for three years in that style. Pissarro exhibited with the Impressionists at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 and, later, became "a father for me," said Cézanne. Vincent Van Gogh showed Pissarro his work and was influenced by him. I think if we look at three works by these artists, we will see the line of sight they shared. The first painting is a pastel by Pissarro:

 

Look at these colors... look at the forms! Now, here is a Van Gogh, "Shelter on Montmartre," from 1886, (in the permanent collection of the Legion of Honor):

Again, the shapes and the colors ... along Pissarro's lines, but developing into what we think of as the style of Van Gogh.  And here is an 1895 painting by Cézanne, "Large Pine and Red Earth":

In their way, I think, these painters are best seen, at least once, as a group; there, they are complete, finished, as it were, by all of us, as Hockney notes.

"Work engenders work."

Okay. Theoretically, I love this idea that I have been pursuing ... the idea of the Queen's skirt and the model. But I have made several sketches, now, and they are just not working for me. The drawings are messy where I don't want mess, and clean-lined when I want a little disorder; they are, in short, uncertain.

The Queen will need to sit in the studio a bit longer. Luckily, as Georgia O'Keeffe once said "Work engenders work" (or, it could be said, "work engenders better work"). Since I have been sketching and reading and gathering stones (you'll see) and looking out of windows, three things have turned up in the Queen's regal place:

1. I know I should have read this a very long time ago, but I just now finished Rosalind Krauss's original article, "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition," (published in October, Vol. 18, Autumn, 1981, pp. 47-66).  I won't try to summarize her argument, as she has published a book on the subject since this essay first appeared. She begins by reminding us that the avant-garde's claim to originality (and thus their whole reason for being) is their insistence on an "absolute distinction" between their world and "a tradition-laden past" (53).  There is a piece of her argument concerning this search for the "new" that really interests me: her discussion of the grid. Krauss argues that the grid, the "new beginning" adopted by Mondrian, Josef Albers, and my hero Agnes Martin (see my entry from May 25th), isn't so "new"; Krauss calls it, to remind us of its long history, a "graph-paper ground" (54-6).  The grid may seem to be "effective as a badge of freedom," and yet "it is extremely restrictive in the actual exercise of freedom" (56).  It is vertical lines crossed by horizontal lines; it can, as Krauss says, "only be repeated" (56).  She continues with the idea that originality and repetition are more "bound together" than we like to think, and that in seeking the original, we end up, well, repeating... (I had an idea, later, of an example of art-making that Krauss does not deal with in this article, though she may have gotten to it in the book... Robert Rauschenberg's erasing of the DeKooning drawing -- now in SFMOMA -- done with DeKooning's permission, is neither an original nor a repetition, and yet it is certainly avant-garde for its time... how to include that in the theory? And, then, there is Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence,  where the strong poet must creatively misread his precursors -- not repeat or imitate -- and then erase all traces of the earlier poem, so that the new-generation poet's work will seem unique and yet -- written by the same hand as the earlier poem. Hmmm... ). But, finally, what stays with me, here, is the idea of the grid and its (new-to-me) "rut."

2. Hunting for rocks on a beach: I have found a set of rocks shaped like oysters, oyster-rocks:

And, here is a photograph of a recent dinner:

3. And, last, we had an insane thunder-and-lightning and wind-storm last night. The wind was scary ... it broke a window:

The lightning was a discovery: it would selectively light up first the house next door, then leap to a fence, then the distant sky, then the yard... so it seems those flashes of light must find their way into a painting.

So, here is the newest sketch. The oyster-rocks attack the grid, helped along by the occasional body (for added organic shape), and lit, from time to time, by boxes of lightning: