Monuments and Archways: Constable and Pissarro

I have this idea that the world of art divides into monuments and archways. I think of a monument as something created at the peak of an artist’s desire to solidify every artistic achievement that has occurred up to the moment of signing the art work. Up against monumental art work comes the archway piece, the one that an artist makes as s/he looks towards an un-realized artistic future.

I’m going to take two small works, both in London’s National Gallery, as examples. John Constable’s “Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire” (from 1833-36) helps my theory by being a painting of a monument,

but that’s not why I chose it. Constable has put everything he knows into this painting, everything about every leaf, the way light falls within a cluster of trees, the way dead leaves blow onto stones... it’s a memoriam to everything he would have us know that Reynolds means to him, but, more than that, it is everything, down to the stag, pictured in an almost photographic perfection.It is letting us know that a painting of a landscape deserves the same recognition as a painting of a battle.

The second painting, my archway painting, is Camille Pissarro’s “Fox Hill, Upper Norwood,” from 1870:

It, too, is a landscape, but something is different. There is a tree, but it is sketched in, a fence, caught in a few brushstrokes, dirty lines of snow where the carriages have come, a man meeting women... nothing is firmly placed. This is not aiming at grandeur. Blink and it’s gone.

Even though the Constable places us in the center of his personal artistic debt, and it’s a beautiful and arresting work, the Pissarro feels more personal to me. The viewer is invited to walk down that same road, in that same contented mood, crossing through the archway that links us (impossibly, but artistically) to a country road in 1870.

The Flâneur: Pissarro, Grimshaw, Vuillard

The flâneur -- the person who strolls, gazes, looks through the city streets for the life, the sights, and the sounds that are worth noting in an increasingly complex world -- seems an interesting idea to look into.  I thought we could take a minute and think about the most revealing intersections, corners, windows, doors, outside spaces that I know, some I have been to and photographed

... like this enclosed garden that once belonged to Lawrence Durrell in a city somewhere in the South of France ... or this graffiti in (I think) Lyon:

But we can look farther out ... who looks at, and paints, outside scenes? Pissarro, for one, here a Paris Street/Montmartre scene, from 1877:

 

We can imagine walking in this rain, with the lights just coming on, people hurrying. I found a painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw, "Boar Lane, Leeds" from 1881:

 

Dusk, again, people heading out for drinks or home for dinner, and our flâneur just watching it all, detached, in no rush at all.  Last, a lovely Vuillard, "Place Vintimille," from 1908-10:

It has the lovely rounded feeling of a fine Japanese screen. Where have you been that you'd like to paint just as if you were our flâneur?

Out of the Usual Categories ... "hors-catégorie" ... Cubist, Impressionist... and Into... Brushstrokes

Continuing with Barbara Rose on Jasper Johns ... in Artforum in March 1970, she wrote that Johns's "single images did not depend on Cubist 'rhyming' for their structure ... they were understood first as holistic gestalts .... [and because of the small-sized] brushstrokes" which were "methodically applied with equal pressure over the entire canvas surface," Rose says that Johns's work is "reminiscent of mature Impressionism" ("The Graphic Work of Jasper Johns, Part I," p. 39).

Okay, so let's unpack that for a second ... the front-and-back-and-all-sides images present in Cubist work were not Johns's aim, she argues. Instead, there is an all-over "whole," which is intended to be visible at first glance, and to remain visible as the viewer continues to "see" the work.  So, he is not exactly Cubist, and his steady, all-encompassing brushstrokes identify him with late Impressionist work.  Rose is persuasive. But this is a really interesting angle of attack. If Johns isn't Cubist, can he really be an heir to the Impressionists? Does that place him up against, say, Van Gogh?

I started to think that perhaps at least some artists burst free of categories, and that Johns is one of them.  None of the movements I have seen him tied to fit him, exactly. Yes, there are the bronzed beer cans, but they shift into a painting like "Decoy," from 1971, and then (see yesterday's post), he goes from "The Seasons" straight to Cézanne.  The Tour de France has developed a term for the mountains too towering to be classified, the most demanding for the riders; the term for these is hors-catégorie. There must be artists like Johns that are hors-catégorie, beyond the normal reach of art-historical labels. Where can we find Jasper Johns's peers, his lines of inquiry and influence?

Start with the basics. I like to see, as I argued yesterday, traces of the artist's hand -- in paintings, this is the brushstroke.  So, since that's a famous trait of Johns's work (think of the cross-hatch paintings), let's set up some artists whose strokes are, in Rose's words, "methodically applied with equal pressure over the entire canvas surface" and see what we get. We'll go chronologically, starting in 1870.

I have a new admiration for Camille Pissarro, having seen him at the Legion of Honor recently (see November 7th post) and think his "The Stagecoach at Louveciennes" is a good place to begin:

The clouds, the water on the path, the horses, the tree limbs -- they are not offering us the sort of brush-free illusion we see in a Vermeer.  If we take just a corner of the piece, the lower left:

This shows us -- not quite as clearly as I'd like -- what we could see if we were before the actual work.

Now look at the surface of Vincent Van Gogh's  "In the Cafe: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin" from 1887:

 

 

This is not the Van Gogh we tend to think of ... pointillism and grand distortions are for other paintings. But this is an energetically painted work.  Now look at Braque's "The Portuguese," from 1911:

 

 

We aren't looking at subject matter here ... but at the application of paint. Again, we are seeing, I think,  brushstrokes applied with "equal pressure over the entire canvas surface."   Here comes a sketch from John Singer Sargent, "A Mountain Stream, Tyrol," from 1914:

 

  

You can feel Sargent painting here. Now, for Monet, one of the "mature Impressionists" that Rose was likely thinking about. This is "Nympheas," from 1916-1919:

And, yes, there are a few brushstrokes here!  On to the man of the hour, Jasper Johns, and his "Canvas," from 1956:

 

There is a lot of Monet here ... and now to Joan Mitchell, who has been called Monet's heir, with "Row Row" from 1982:

If you take away the brilliance of the colors, for just a second, (perhaps imagine some grays?) this energy and application is very close to that of Jasper Johns.  I have one more person to bring in. In an interview, Gerhard Richter is asked about his mark-making. The implication is that the application of paint is "quasi-mechanical or anonymous," but Richter responds: "A brush is a brush, whether it's five millimetres wide or fifty centimetres." And he goes on to say that the two yellow brushstrokes under discussion "only look like two strokes of a giant brush. In reality they were painted with a lot of little strokes .... it's all genuine, so to speak" (interview with Benjamin Buchloch, 1986, from Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, pp. 161-66).  I could not find the two-brushstroke work, but here is a 2009 painting by Richter, called "Vienna":

I think if you scroll back over these, you will see another way of looking at these works, the way of the brushstroke, something that unites them across their named movements. This is Johns's tribe.

"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.