The WOW of "The Image in Its Otherness" at Three Geary Street Galleries

It was a quiet Friday lunchtime. Some of the galleries at the Geary Street buildings in San Francisco had closed their doors. But some doors to fabulous shows were open.  The three artists below seem to me to embody something a critic once wrote about “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” that it is “about the image in its otherness locked in with the real world” (Lisa Florman on Picasso in “The Difference Experience Makes in ‘The Philosphical Brothel,’” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 4, Dec. 2003, p. 777).

The “image in its otherness locked in with the real world”: what, exactly, is “otherness”?  Difference… distinguished by achievement or characteristics? or simply non-conforming? Strange? or distinctive, memorable? Me, and not-me.  The expected. The unexpected.  I want to take us into “otherness,” step by step, through the galleries, and return to Picasso at the end.

First, Ian McDonald offers a show of ceramic pieces at the Rena Bransten Gallery (77 Geary, San Francisco, through August 17, www.renabranstengallery.com). Ceramics are often viewed as purely utilitarian.  Museums offer rooms of early functional vessels created by hunter-gatherers and then, over time, we all begin to see a departure, finding artists who are searching for beauty and meaning: a fragile vase, a transformative mask, or Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party.” 

Ian McDonald’s chosen “difference” in this show (called, tellingly, “Parts and Pottery”) is not the province of the totem or the icon, but total, brazen, sensuality… the unexpected aesthetic pleasure of clay nearly morphing into iron.  A gleaming crankshaft, a rusting piston, screws, nuts and bolts laid out for a repair, looking under the hood of a ’65 Mercury … all these implements in the idea, now made soft and quiet and things-in-themselves by the touch of a hand:

 

This is my favorite of the 12 exhibits in this show,  “Arrangement #3 (Split Shelf).

The materials list reads “glazed ceramic, powder coated steel, wood and paint.” The show is calming, surprising, beautifully lit, wonderfully sculpted. It is “otherness” because it brings the pistons and crankshafts of the “real world’ into a soft, silent rebirth.

The second gallery exhibit was -- a “mixed media on paper” dress -- but not just any mixed media, and not just any dress -- by Isabelle De Borchgrave at Serge Sorokko, at 55 Geary Street. (Isabelle De Borchgrave is one of several artists represented (http://www.sorokko.com/artists/de_borchgrave/blue_delphos_dress/blue_delphos_dress.html).  

De Borchgrave immerses her work in art-historical riches. The Legion of Honor here in San Francisco exhibited rooms filled with  her paper costumes inspired by paintings (http://artistinanaframe.blogspot.com/2011/04/thick-rugs-and-thin-paper-at-legion-of.html). 

For this piece, a sculptural column at Serge Sorokko, the Charioteer at Delphi is the first source:

but the second source layer is a pleated silk dress with glass Murano beads hanging from the shoulders, designed and made by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo in Venice in 1907…. it was designed, in the era of corsets, to be worn over bare skin:

In the “Blue Delphos Dress,” there is also “nothing” underneath, “nothing” but air and imagination:

It isn’t just that De Borchgrave’s work is different, that she re-interprets the fabric of painted portraits or Greek statues or fashion designed in a Venetian palazzo and twists and irons and otherwise bends paper to serve as her art. It isn’t, here, just about the process. It’s about the new “real world” she makes us see.

The third artist will bring us back to Picasso and “The Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Picasso wrestled with several sets of drawn images, at last confining his women within a flat space, body parts touching, overlapping or going missing in folds of drapery.  I find myself disagreeing with Lisa Florman. This painting is not about “the image in its otherness locked in with the real world”; only half of this poetic statement is true. This painting is, instead, only “locked in with” a strange kind of powerful “otherness” of its very own.   There is no “real world” to see “locked in” or otherwise, here.  Picasso never pursued anything with this level of ferocity again.  He didn’t seem to know where to go from this point, and so backed away from connecting these women up with any kind of “real world.”

But there is an artist whose work pulls the “Demoiselles” -- and his other portraits -- into a fierce struggle with “the real world.”  The Haines Gallery, at 49 Geary Street in San Francisco is showing the work of Aimé Mpane (http://www.hainesgallery.com/mainpages/Exhib_Current/Exhib_Current.html)

The preoccupied figures in this massive piece, “La Peche Contemporaine,” are themselves caught up in a net (they are made of painted wood pieces floating on string, and the piece measures 81 “ x 84”) and are fishing for something they cannot eat, that peculiarly Western preoccupation with getting the ball into the net.  Mpane comes from Kinshasa (once the capital of the Belgian Congo, now in the Democratic Republic of Congo).  The question of exactly what one ought to fish for -- for food, for fame, for one’s country and history or for someone else’s profit -- might serve, all by itself, as a sufficiently pressing subject for art.

But then there’s the larger question of identity, present not just as an issue for the fishermen but for the rest of Mpane’s compelling show as well.  Mpane has “drawn” portraits (with layers of glued plywood that he edges with an adze -- a tool first used in the Stone Age), portraits of people that he knows in the Congo.  The resulting paintings/carvings are complete and missing, here and there, parts and whole, almost giving us the rings of years in the wood.  Here is my favorite single portrait, because it is so spare and simple, “Kinoct #40”:

There is enough left of her portrait head to give the wall a shadow.  Are we looking “through” or “beyond”? Is this woman hiding … or gone? How much do we actually see when we look?  Anything that is not a self-portrait is “other,” another, me, but not-me as well, a person, but not my person. How do we reconcile ourselves with the world?

Mpane’s strongest suit in the show -- for me -- is his artistic dialogue with Picasso and his “Demoiselles,” a conversation that is very much in “the real world.” There are seven of these two-sided masks arranged along a shelf in the gallery’s middle wall.  The wooden sides of each face are three-dimensional Demoiselles. Here is the face Picasso painted in as he completed the painting, the face we see to the far right:

And here is Mpane’s “La Demoiselle Perde/Masque Bi-Face: Picasso-Pende #2,” a two-sided piece, 12” x 12.5,” in that same adze-edged wood:

Look back and forth at these two.  Picasso’s Demoiselle-face would be physically impossible, not just for its jarring features, but because her back is towards the viewer; she could not be cupping her chin in that enormous hand.  When we first look at her face, her expression might seem angry, but the mouth is pursed, questioning, and she could also look…. surprised. Is she about to ask a question? She has that look.  Mpane’s response is to make his jagged face seem more human, the expression even more ambiguous, and then just as we are taking that in we see the other side of this face:

And we see the inner light. It’s an astonishingly uplifting image. These works will stay with me for a long, long time.

Thanks to the galleries and assistants, particularly Kate and Blake.

Kouros, a Demoiselle and a cold....

Couch-bound with a cold, I was leafing through a year-old journal from a trip to Los Angeles and found a postcard of a Kouros from our visit to the Getty. I noted in the margins that the museum says that the authenticity of this statue is in question -- and may be for some time -- so this might date from 530 B.C. or perhaps much, much later.  But I do think that, despite its questionable age, this statue is representative, perhaps because he was created by a very careful forger, but ... certainly he is typical of his fellow young males in marble, one foot forward, upright, shoulders back, some generic muscular definition, without any distinctive facial characteristics (not an unforgettable face, for example, like the Fayyum portraits--see my entry of 5/15/11). Here is the Getty Kouros:

And, because I never forget the Demoiselles,  I think of the young woman to the far left of that painting:

The Kouros, turned sideways? The fist, the foot forward, the mask-like face, the strong shoulder?

In which the author (re)visits the Demoiselles

The "Demoiselles d’Avignon” is a breakthrough painting for Picasso… I believe that he never really understood everything it represented, everything he could now work on, artistically, because he had painted this. The work, spurned by nearly all of Picasso’s acquaintances, spent several years in isolation. It did lead, in its way, to Cubism. But Picasso tired of that. He never again painted anything that could be considered the next great leap forward. He resisted pure abstraction. He returned to classicism. He had broken the rules. But he never seemed to find out ... why.

Art historians write about Picasso’s “Demoiselles” with some frequency. The possible sources for the painting, never really discussed by the artist, fascinate us all. Where did these women come from? Ingres, Delacroix, El Greco, a rivalry with Matisse… ? There are probably more sketchbook pages drawn in preparation for this painting than any other in Picasso’s life. He was poor as he was thinking about his Demoiselles, but he had a special canvas made.  Speculation seems … useful, and could help us see what Picasso saw.

I came across a painting the other day that I believe provided a source for these women. It isn’t mentioned by anyone else, as far as I know. Let me begin with some groundwork for my idea. (And, for the record, I don’t believe that Picasso was delineating women in a brothel).

In her exhaustive study, Picasso, Style and Meaning (NY: Phaidon Press, 2002),  Elizabeth Cowling mentions Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Judgement of Paris” as a “relevant” source for “Le Demoiselles d’Avignon,” because of the inclusion of a “peripheral” figure -- Rubens’s Mercury appears to prefigure the Demoiselle who leans into the picture at top right – and because the stance of Rubens’s Minerva is echoed by Picasso’s central Demoiselle (172-3).  She also mentions that Picasso spoke of Rubens’s “fiery genius” on a 1917 visit to the Prado, and indicated that he had known Rubens’s work “since boyhood” (318).  And she says that Picasso would return to Rubens, to his “Battle of Anghiari,” as he sketched the Vollard Suite in 1933-34 (405-6).  But Cowling also suggests that Picasso’s preparatory sketches for “Demoiselles” indicate that he was “trying out and rejecting the voluptuous Titianesque/Rubensian option” as a model for his women (178); certainly the Demoiselles are composed mostly of angles and seem rather un-harmoniously arranged. "Demoiselles" is not exactly a tender encounter in a forest glade.

Then there is Leo Steinberg’s “The Philosophical Brothel” (Art News, September 1972, pp. 20-29 and October 1972, pp. 38-47).  Steinberg writes that, in “Demoiselles,” Picasso “challenges far more than traditional focused perspective” principally because this painting announces a “farewell to stylistic consistency” and also because when we look at these women, in their different modes and different spaces, “neighboring objects diverge willfully into discrepant styles” (45).  He then says “the five figures, though conceptually freed from each other, become a conglomerate unity, cohere like tensed fingers, and the whole collapsing interior stage of the picture closes like a fist …. This is an interior space in compression” (46). [Isn’t he a fabulous writer?]

And, in her article, Lisa Florman (“The Difference Experience Makes in ‘The Philosophical Brothel,’” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Dec. 2003) pp. 769-783), pictures “The Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Musketeers’ Civic Guard (1534)” by Dirk Jacobsz (774), just as Steinberg did. The painting is an astonishing feat, a portrait of seventeen faces, crammed into a tiny space; because all the men are similarly dressed, clean shaven and in partial profile, each man looks ... different:

Florman returns to discussing “Demoiselles” and says “the picture is about the image in its otherness locked in with the real world” (777). She critiques the subjective and objective stances of Steinberg’s essay… but isn’t that what happens to each of us? We return to the “objective” facts of a painting before us approaching it with our own subjectivity each time… differently, each time.

Another article, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” by Carol Duncan (Art Journal, Vol. 48, No. 2, "Images of Rule: Issues of Interpretation," Summer 1989, pp. 171-8), argues that MoMA’s collection, its nudes, its “recurrent images of sexualized female bodies [with the Demoiselles as the primary examples] actively masculinize the museum as a social environment” (172). But I disagree with Duncan. And I disagree partly because I believe her article simplifies the act of museum-going … and simplifies Picasso … and also because I believe “Demoiselles” is based, in part, on a painting of 4 men and a philosophical bust.

The painting is Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Four Philosphers.”  Look at the figures up against the Demoiselles. Look at the curtain, upper left, and the blue slices of distant space that appear in both paintings. But, principally, look at the men and the women.  

Now, first, consider Cowling. Look at the figure breaking in at the upper right in Rubens’s “Judgement,”  and the figure of Seneca breaking into Rubens’s “Philosophers,”  and Picasso’s most isolated Demoiselle on the upper right; Mercury, Seneca, and an un-named, jarring, strident woman--- none of these figures, placed in the same spot in each work, belongs with any of the others in their paintings. These three figures each represent an intrusion and are painting to emphasize that intrusion: an extreme of judgment (Mercury), stoicism and stone (Seneca), and geometries of rejection (that Demoiselle).

Now think of Steinberg’s points… The five women in Picasso’s painting have been worked over  in “discrepant styles” yet, Steinberg says, represent a “conglomerate unity.” Now, look at Rubens’s five figures. Two men look at us, but one face is flushed, one composed … the one student seems as though he might be blind, or is staring, unseeing into a middle distance, and the farther right student is gazing with something like awe at… Rubens? And Seneca seems mildly embarassed; flowers protrude from some part of the niche where his bust has been awkwardly placed. Each “face” is in a different world --- yet we can see that they are together in an enclosed, academic “compression.”

Next, think of Florman’s care in placing the Jacobsz picture in her essay; Rubens’s men are like Joacobsz’s and also “about the image in its otherness locked in with the real world.”  Just like the Demoiselles. The mind reels with the zooming-in and zooming-out demanded by Rubens and Picasso.

Last, Duncan. Yes, nudes are important in art. And, yes, MoMA does bring many of these nudes to the foreground.  But if you see that Picasso may have moved his nudes into places once occupied by Rubens’s men – aren’t we saying that women who are not principally “sexualized” (think about it, now) have, with “Demoiselles,” finally, been granted the foreground?  Not a brothel… but definitely philosophical.