"Surface is Illusion, But So is Depth," says David Hockney: A Face by Rossetti, a Face by Manet

David Hockney recorded a film called “A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China, or Surface is Illusion, But So is Depth”; it is from 1988 and is only available now on VHS, which is really a shame (there is a post about the scroll at hardcorepainting.blogspot.com, however). I think Hockney’s comments in this interview reveal the ways we see.  And they may also reveal the ways we should be thinking about creating new art.

The film is a running commentary on two scrolls; the first dates from 1689, before Chinese artists were exposed to Western perspective, and the second is from 1770, and has become … almost Western.  Hockney examines the first scroll, which he clearly prefers; it is 27” high and about 72’ long, and the figures depicted are an inch high at most.  The artist depicted an Emperor’s journey in a barge down a river and the anticipatory activity (people are running… “he’s coming!”); we can look towards the villages expecting him.  Hockney unrolls the work, and says that “you can decide where to look … we can move down this street, at this angle … [it is an] intimate view” of life in the “back streets.”  And it is splendid to watch: we see cooking, people raising chickens, people lining up for the Emperor.  As the scroll opens, we can control its edges, we can move forward or back, we can even see over walls. Hockney contrasts this with a Canaletto, which is, he says, is too aware of walls, and boundaries, and a Canaletto view of Venice, say, is “a kind of window,” and so “a wall” is “an appropriate place to put it.” In the Western way that we see, we think too often of the camera, which is, Hockney says, “outside” of the depicted space; the first scroll is “inside.”  You are not looking “through” at anything. You are able to very nearly see around things, as if you were moving in the landscape. The first scroll shows you two sides of houses, as if you were approaching from either side. The figures do not grow smaller as they grow distant.  Mist separates jumps in time. “There is always movement, linkage” and there is, continues Hockney, “an incredible shimmer of life.”  But then Hockney show us that in the second scroll, the landscape recedes, figures seem stiff, isolated, posed.  I think this may also be the place where Hockney says that “when you stop moving, you die.”

Keep this in mind as you look at these two portraits. I saw the face at left this week, (at the show “The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde” exhibited at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Bocca Bacaciata: The Kissed Mouth,” from 1859, and on the right, we see Eduard Manet’s “The Railway,” from 1872-3:

There is a small problem of dates here, of course, and we’ll take a minute to acknowledge our poetic license. Manet and the Impressionists were, for Rossetti and friends, precursors, painters to react against, and yet this painting of Manet’s was completed at a later date than Rossetti’s. But the two faces are hauntingly similar, and so I am asking for a bit of Keatsian “negative capability” here. And that’s actually rather appropriate, since Rossetti’s poetry was heavily influenced by Keats. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite circle were reacting to the Impressionists (as well as anyone from Raphael, forward) because, as Rossetti apparently wrote himself in the journal “The Germ,” artists of their time needed “an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature.”  The landscapes must be real, the bodies must be real.

Okay. Now come back to Hockney for just a moment.  What is “real”?  Is it the one-inch Emperor, and his freely-painted back streets, open to any angle?  Or is it the more scientific, but rather stilted, world of the second scroll, with its boundaries like a window-frame or the view-finder of a camera?

Rossetti’s painting, seen “live,” is astonishingly small (12 5/8” x 10 5/8”).  Still, it is compelling. Rossetti’s model here was Fanny Cornforth, who would later become his second wife. “The Kissed Mouth” seems photographically realistic; there are perfect shadows and wrinkles at the neck, stray hairs, a face trapped in a too-small space, no lush eyelashes, and no direct gaze. The woman here almost retreats into the wallpaper; the flowers in her necklace echo those on the wall. She is still. The illusion is perfect; there are several figure painters working in this mode today. Rossetti and his group believed that Raphael, the Mannerists and the Impressionists had prescribed far too much about the ideal body, its dimensions, the spaces it must inhabit in a painting, the light, the way one pigment reacts to another … and so we are here looking at a painting which is very nearly … a photograph.  She belongs, I would say, to the world of Hockney’s second scroll.  The “depth” here is certainly illusion, and a good one. This woman is reflecting, we think, and we almost don’t want to bother her by looking too deeply at her.  

Manet’s painting was not placed with the Impressionists at their show that spring of 1874, but instead was exhibited at the Paris Salon.  It was not well-received, as historian Isabelle Dervaux tells us: "Visitors and critics found its subject baffling, its composition incoherent, and its execution sketchy.”  Here is the full painting:

And there is a really fine interpretation of Manet’s probable intent at the blog “Every Painter Paints Himself,” dated 13 January 2011, by Simon Abrahams, where he says that “the artist’s alter ego” is “constructing the very scene we are looking at, fusing the activity in the studio with that of the scene itself.”  You will need to read the full essay, I think, to see why he argues this; do read it].

Manet’s model for the woman gazing at us was Victorine Meurent, who gazes out at us, as she does in “Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” and “Olympia.” But here, she is even less fully drawn-in.  She is very much in the world, yet she remains mysterious; the tilt of her head suggests she may be about to move.  And that uncertainty is what keeps us looking.  A critic, Tim Lubbock, wrote that  “Manet's magic is not to insist on finding the eternal in the contemporary. It’s just a subliminal resonance”  (Friday 18 April, 2008, in The Independent, online).  Lubbock wasn’t talking about Rossetti’s principles, which could be described as “finding the eternal in the contemporary,” nor was he talking about Hockney’s discussion of that first Chinese scroll.  And yet … as artists, don’t we want “subliminal resonance”?  the “illusion” of the “surface”? 

I find myself liking the way the eye moves around the face in the Manet painting. I find I like that reference to the surface of things.  I think that’s what art needs to be: self-referential, reminding us that it is, after all, “surface.”

"Pure Painting": pictures following Roberta Smith's eye, from Howard Hodgkin back to J.M.W. Turner

In a short review of Howard Hodgkin's show now at the Gagosian Gallery, Roberta Smith says that the work is "surprising" and "risky" (The New York Times, December 16, 2011, "Art In Review" section).  But there is only a black-and-white photograph of one work -- not the one that interested me as I read the short essay by Smith. She mentions one work by Hodgkins in the show and proceeds to link it back to the "pure painting" of previous generations of painters. So I looked up the chain she mentions. Smith traces a line, first, from Hodgkin's "Breakfast" at the Gagosian:

back to an 1880 work by Manet. Manet had painted a bunch of asparagus for a collector and had expected 800 francs.  The collector sent him 1000 francs, and Manet, delighted, sent him back a small single painted asparagus, saying, "there was one missing from your bunch."  Here is "Asparagus":

Smith calls these examples of "pure painting" and gives us other names, like J.M.W. Turner. My choice for him is this "Snowstorm," from 1842:

I love Turner ... his landscapes, seas and clouds are filled with movement and allow us to perceive the world through abstract methods -- long before there was such a thing as abstract work.  Smith also mentions Vuillard, someone whose work I do not know very well, so it was really fun for me to look through his work and find one that seemed to fit this "pure painting" idea. It is "Album," from 1895:

The figures meld into the wallpaper, creating a figure-ground movement, back and forth between the two.  This makes it possible to gaze at the work for long periods of time -- this would be a likely way to define "pure painting," I would guess.  Last, Roberta Smith mentions the Abstract Expressionists in this category, and of the first-generation painters, I would choose Kline as my "pure"-brushstroke man. Here is his "Untitled," from 1957:

 

This lovely small work is in the Philips Collection.  People often think of Kline's work as only black and white, so I am deliberately picking this one to show you a work you might not have seen before.

That ends my tracing-through of Roberta Smith's examples; I have "illustrated" the article she wrote, just to see what all these paintings would look like together.  Only two of the works, the Hodgkin and the Kline, are by painters considered to be fully abstract; the Turner, Manet and Vuillard are "abstract" only if we look at the brush-work.  What links these five pieces as "pure paintings" is exactly that -- the tracings of movement by the artist's hand.  (I have written about this "hors-catégorie" linking of Jasper Johns back to his "tribe" here on November 28).

"Pure painting" here is demonstrably the brushstroke. It makes us want to "see," to look harder,  to touch the original (which, of course, we can't do!!) or at least trace the line of the brush a few inches away in the air.  Sometimes seeing a painting "live" for the first time is something of a shock.  I had seen Picassos, for example, here and there in museums, but when I first went to the Picasso Museum in Paris, in 1989, seeing room after room of his work, the thing that surprised me was the relative flatness of his work, the absence, in so many cases, of obvious brushstrokes, and the way the painting tended to fade out towards its edges.  I think that surprise was one of the origins for my "Odalisque" works -- imagining a more lively, brushed, colorful background for Picasso's 1907 "Demoiselles d'Avignon."  Here is my "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Pick Wildflowers" from 2010, where I take them out of Picasso's studio and give them some air:

 

So, as I am working now on the next few paintings in the series, I will be thinking of "pure painting."

The Rejected Portrait

According to today's New York Times, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has just acquired a Manet, which will be exhibited as of December 13.  The Getty's senior curator of paintings, Scott Schaefer, said that he "really wanted a Manet that showed his Spanish influence." 

But this isn't just any Manet. It's likely to be a painting that you have not seen before.  The portrait was rejected by its sitter, who, the Times notes, left the artist's studio in tears at the unveiling, and never saw the painting again.  Manet kept it until his death, and it changed hands a few times until the Getty was able to buy it.  Let's take a look at "Madame Brunet," painted between 1860-3, and re-worked again in 1867:

This is not a flattering portrait.  Madame Brunet is honest, open, seemingly unafraid. But she must have misunderstood Manet's work. He was not likely to lie.  Her face is right here.  The leaves in the background, at least in reproduction, seem as if they belong in another painting ... (perhaps, if we think about the essays about Manet's work on the site called "Every Painter Paints Himself," she is standing in front of a backdrop, here repainted faithfully) ... quite distant from her sophisticated pose.  The shimmering black paint is reminiscent of Velazquez or Goya. The gaze is also derived, perhaps from the Spanish. Here is a similar gaze, Goya's "Woman in Black":

The brushwork is looser in the Goya, the woman is a bit more seductive, but certainly the play of darks and lights and the artificial setting are very similar ... and yet ... what is Manet really thinking of?

Well, perhaps another painting, also completed in 1863, a painting rather more well-known, "Luncheon on the Grass":

 

If we look at the face of the model who is looking, fully un-clothed, at us, we can see some resemblances to Madame Brunet. The two faces seem quite similar, to me.  I suspect that Victorine Meurent, Manet's model for this, and "Olympia," and so many other paintings, was used to being painted without any gauzy effects.

I think that Manet was thinking about Meurent while he was painting Madame.

Tension, the artist's statement, and the painting "At the Milliner's"

The painting is from 1881, by Eduoard Manet, and only appeared after his death. It had been completed, and remained in his studio, for two years. Unusual. The painting is now part of the collection at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, where we saw it last weekend.  It is quite striking, a gorgeous display of Manet's mastery of dark-upon-dark color against a smaller set of lights; here is my photograph of the painting:

Manet gave the same title to at least two other works, a pastel and a print, which could confuse the scholarship a bit, but I have not seen any detailed discussion of this work, even on the museum's own website (which also just posted this piece today).  I would like to know more; I would like to be seated in the studio, asking Manet any number of questions. He would have been open to inquiry, I think;  he wrote a friend: "Please be good enough to come by the studio one of these afternoons -- I would hope to be there, but if by chance I am not take my key from the concierge."  Once we were seated, I would have mentioned that --  I feel that the a-symmetrical pull of the figure, that she is looking into so much space, means that this might have been part of a larger group scene.  Was it? Or is this a kind of "sketch"? Is the look on her face one of contentment? Ennui? Indecision? There is a combination of fluidity and specificity in the background wallpaper; how did you decide to leave the work in such a divided state? How did the perfect outline of the line of her back come to be? How did you see this as fitting in with the Bar at the Folies-Bergere, painted only a few months before?

In short, I'd like to see an artist's statement.

I do realize that is not going to happen. But after walking through a number of galleries yesterday, and reading many statements, I keep thinking, "what if?" What if I could ask Roy Lichtenstein about this print:

It is called "Seascape," and it is from the "Landscape Series," from 1985. I would ask ... what made Lichtenstein combine the meticulous lines with the gestural brushstrokes?  Where did the rust colors come from? And, again, where does this piece fit in with the living rooms and their windows, and with the Cezanne-ian landscapes of the later years (see my October 29 post) ... ?

Some artists do give us articulate, if all-too-brief, statements. Jasper Johns has said "Do something. Do something to that. And then do something to that."  But ---  how did he get to that?

Helen Frankenthaler told Henry Geldzahler (Artforum, 4., no.2, October 1965, p.37) that she remembered, clearly, how she had decided upon her artistic direction, despite coming of age in a time of (almost) too many possible influences: "De Kooning made enclosed linear shapes and 'applied' the brush.  Pollock used shoulder and ropes and ignored the edges and the corner.  I felt I could stretch more in the Pollock framework .... You could become a de Kooning disciple or satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock." I love Helen Frankenthaler.  How wonderful is her explanation?

So, artists' statements might base themselves on tension. Artistic tension, that is, not the kind that resides in your shoulder-blades.  Frankenthaler mentioned once (to Gene Baro, in "The Achievement of Helen Frankenthaler," in Art International, September 20, 1967, p. 36) that she knew a painting worked, for her, when she sensed that it was "a play of ambiguities," what she called, in another interview, the "active" role of "negative" space up against the "positive." 

And, if we think about it, that's where the Manet painting wins us over, and that's where the Lichtenstein breaks through.  Two things, at gentle war with one another, confined in a small space.  I saw many statements yesterday that indicated that the artists in question had come to accept a certain duality in their work: opposites such as high and low, painting and photography, line and color all vie for attention. And should.  I find this idea quite reassuring as I go about adding my odalisques to my abstractions.  It's the tension, really. Keep those statements coming.