Unfinished paintings, perhaps: "No vanity's displayed..."

W.B. Yeats wrote, in what must be his best book of poems, The Winding Stair, a poem called "Before The World Was Made," and here is its first stanza:

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

So I was rooting around in my folders filled with images from magazines and from my xeroxed drawings, and I found this wonderful picture, from a French magazine article on Ingres (from six? years ago?):

The "vide intérieur" of this portrait, (the "empty interior"), the caption on the lower left reads, echoes a passage from Flaubert's Sentimental Education.  But I wasn't clever enough to save the name of this work. It is exhibited in Le Musée Ingres in Montauban, France. One of Ingres's assistants painted in the background, and Ingres started in on the outline and figure.  The closest Ingres woman to this sketch, in pose and manner, is his "Madame Moitessier," from 1856:

 

Ingres was not interested, initially, in painting a portrait, but here we are.  I like the idea of the "vide intérieur"  passing through to this finished version; Madame's face is perfect, but rather out-matched by her dress.  If we look closely at the mirror image of her face, however, the less "finished" portrait, there is a kind of mystery (a mystery that Picasso's large faces would pick up on, years later).  I love the mirror image here, and that's what made me think of the Yeats poem, of the woman looking in "mirror after mirror" for the face she had "before the world was made."  I like the fact that the "world" of Ingres's portrait was not quite finished in that mirrored face ... not-quite-finished works appeal, because you can almost see the artist thinking. Take a look at this sketch, an Ingres work called "Woman with Three Arms," from 1859, three years after the portrait of Madame:

Wow.  Here, there are no draperies, no distractions. The face here is more "finished" than Madame's, I would argue; you can see the model clearly, here. The third arm here will help Ingres make a decision about where to place the arms on the woman on the far right border of his 1862 "Turkish Bath":

 

We can see that he made his decision ... her head is framed by her arms. Ingres was 82 when he painted this scene.  But the face of the (formerly three-armed) woman on the right is less complex and compelling than the "sketch" above...

I went to Picasso, next, who knew Ingres's work well; here is his "The Artist and His Model," from 1914:

 

This is a work emerging from Cubism ... Picasso had completed his best works in that mode by this point ... and we can almost feel the uncertainty here.  "What now?"the artist, and the painting, seem to be asking.  The unfinished work is playing figure against ground, the lines of an Ingres portrait against a less well-defined landscape ... because it is so open, so much a question, I find it fascinating.

One more, this from De Kooning, his "Seated Woman" of 1940, a "portrait" of Elaine, who would marry him three years later.  De Kooning's "Women" have divided critics.  I think they all descend from this sketch ... it feels, to me, just a bit unfinished ... and the beauty here appears and disappears, like the Ingres face in the mirror so many years before:

Matisse-ian, no? The fore-grounding of the figure here is clear, and yet... the powerful blues and oranges tend to overwhelm the body. De Kooning seems to be looking for Elaine's face, still.  On November 5, I had written that if we can see that the artist is still looking, the work feels unfinished ... here, I think, that is true. "I'm looking for the face ... [she] had/  Before the world was made."

Jasper Johns Traces Cézanne's Bathers and Cézanne was after ... Ingres?

In her article "Jasper Johns: This Is Not A Drawing"  in The Journal of Art (April 1991, pp. 16-17), Barbara Rose discusses Johns's drawings for the 1986 panels "The Seasons," which she says are his "first works to depict the human figure." She notes that Johns remembered seeing Cézanne's youthful murals, his "Seasons," preserved on his parents' dining room walls.  The figures, writes Rose, are "poorly, laboriously, and unconvincingly drawn" and, "as if to mock his own ineptitude," they are signed "Ingres."  Ingres, like Raphael, drew, without apparent effort, the most perfect continuous lines (David Hockney argues, in his book Secret Knowledge, that lenses were involved for Ingres ... check his claims out).  Rose tells us that Johns, in creating his own "Seasons," would face "the problem Cézanne devoted his life to solving: how to draw the contours of shapes without either flattening form into pattern or creating an illusion of space..."   Rose then discusses the fact that many of Jasper Johns's critics have not looked at "The Seasons" in terms of "formal concerns .... as art." She believes that Johns, in "The Seasons," "faces head-on his major weakness as an artist," and says that critics should look into Johns's decisions here: "formal constructions ... how they deal with line, shape, space, et al."

So let's do that, shall we? Today, my husband visited several artists who participated in the Berkeley Open Studios weekend (continuing on weekends through the 18th of December -- and even the 24th in some cases).  One artist, Nancy Fernandez, showed work that highlighted her exceptional drawing skills. She explained that she had studied in Florence, Italy, for three years, according to a classical system (followed from at least the nineteenth century onwards-- this was Picasso's course of study). Students begin by drawing casts, then progress to live models, all in pencil and charcoal, and may only move to colors when they have proven themselves worthy. Artists have -- always? -- copied the work of more established painters to learn how they made their decisions and, as Rose suggests, to see how works came to be "art."

So I was pretty surprised to read a critique by Jed Perl, written in 1996, about a group of late works by Jasper Johns, on display in the final room of the show "Jasper Johns: A Retrospective" at MOMA in 1996-7.  Perl writes, in Eyewitness: Reports from An Art Word in Crisis, that in these works completed in 1994,  Johns merely "crops, edits, cuts and pastes" (147) from master works.  And he goes on to say, "Any art student ought to know that a tracing of a painting isn't a response or an interpretation" and that the final pieces are dominated by rather "lackluster washes" (148).  Okay, you are asking (unless you have scrolled ahead) -- what works did he copy -- what did his copies look like?  I have to say that after reading this description by Perl (someone whose work I normally respect)  I thought I would see a set of works displaying only a few bland outlines -- with a clear absence of effort and interest on the part of the artist.

I happen to have the catalogue for that retrospective, because we saw it in 1996. And then I flipped to the final images, and there were Johns's works:  tracings of "Cézanne's Bathers" (1900-1905, 52 1/8" x 86 1/4") ... and, I have it on good authority, these were not tracings from a painting, but tracings of a poster for a 1991 show in Philadelphia and Washington (that exhibited the "Bathers" from the Barnes Collection).  So here I am thinking, before I really look at the photographs of the drawings, still, these will be silly ... from posters? tracings? Even though I knew that Johns owns a Cézanne himself, I thought, he has to be just playing. Here is the Cézanne that Johns owns, by the way, before we get to the original and its tracings: he owns "Bather with Outstretched Arms" (from 1877-8, Picasso, anyone?):

Cool, huh? Okay... I have delayed long enough. The original work that Johns traced, on plastic paper, six times that we know of -- the "Bathers":

There they are. There are a few of these "Bathers," but this is the one that struck Johns.  I believe that he was continuing the work he began with his first painterly figures, "The Seasons,"  and giving himself his own version of a classical education.  I am going to give you three of these "tracings," because I want you to see the variety of Johns's drawing and painting skills here. These are all called "Tracing After Cézanne," all ink on plastic, all from 1994. The first measures 18 1/8"x 30 3/8":

I think this is beautiful ... it catches the light and shadows and makes the most of the background, rather than the figures (a question I am very interested in right now), and also creates a kind of figure out of the right-hand tree.  Here is the second that I like, which measures 18 1/8" x 28 3/8":

 

This creates a brown sheet or flag-like form in the center, a rooted tree or human outline in the lower left, a very delicate basket of food, and a happy explosion of tree limbs at top right.  It adds much more light than the first tracing.  Then, here is the third, which measures 18 x 28 1/8":

This is the final tracing. I love the way he has selected which lines to bring forward (the outlines of the center-right female and the woman just to the right of her arm) and the sky has really taken off here.  I think we can say that Johns has entered the world of Cézanne, and, I would argue, the world of Ingres:

 

 

There is more detail in the hairline and along the bottom of noses and tops of lips, but, the forms and the sweep of the clothing, the setting of a mood, the hand of the artist? You decide. Are these in the same worlds, the world of art? I think they are.

Nakedly Nude, III: Ingres to Van Gogh to Picasso...

I have been looking at these nudes of mine and feel that the best ones contain elements of both naked and nude bodies (see previous posts, Nakedly Nude I and II).  Picasso once said that he wanted to draw Ingres's Grande Odalisque as if he were Van Gogh, drawing. So I have been working on Ingres's Odalisque and making her a little more like the cafe owner that Van Gogh drew in Paris. My odalisque still has about 800 vertebrae, but she knows we are here; her face is broader and more relaxed:

Then I kept looking at my Watch Hill triptych, with my fairly perfect nude. She just seemed a bit too well-balanced, like a Cirque du Soleil performer on a wire, and I want, as I said yesterday, to have a bit of Joan Mitchell's "sauvage" (which she also called truth-telling) in there. So here is a new naked body, strewn over the same beach, hearing the waves:

And now, I think, we have come closer to the truth.

Nudely Naked: The Through-Line from Degas to Van Gogh to Matisse

"Look out my window, look at the way things are
Just wonder how, how did things ever get this far ...
Vince Taylor used to live here, nobody's heard of him,
(Ain't that a shame), just who he was, just where he fits in."
                                     lyrics from "Goin' Down Geneva" by Van Morrison

Last Friday, October 21, The New York Times published an article by Karen Rosenberg called "An Unblushing Career of Undressing Women," about an exhibition called "Degas and The Nude" (which she says, only half joking, should have been called "Degas and the Naked") at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (p. C25).  It got me to thinking, with Van Morrison echoing in my mind, "just where he fits in."

There's a distinction familiar to art students and their teachers, a distinction between "nude" and "naked." The nude in art history is often Venus, Diana, Susannah (and the elders), an odalisque in an inaccessible harem, mythological, fantastical, glorious, nearly air-brushed, and not anything you'd see in your own world. Here is a lovely, smooth-skinned example from Ingres, the master of the nude, called "The Bather of Valpincon" from 1808:

She is perfect. (I should add that David Hockney has traced this perfection to its -- very likely -- source. There was an article in The New Yorker, "The Looking Glass," by Lawrence Weschler on January 31, 2000, which traced the beginnings of Hockney's theory that painters including Ingres, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Hals, Chardin, and Vélazquez all must have employed lenses or some form of camera obscura to achieve their photographic images. This article was then followed in 2001 by the book Secret Knowledge. In both, Hockney tells us that he suspects that Ingres must have used lenses ... how else would he be able to have such an assured line with no preparatory drawings, why else would the drawings be so small, and, I would add, how else could he reproduce that back over and over again, here and in the "Turkish Bath"?). Ingres draws fantabulous nudes. But Degas's women are naked. (And after enough time has passed, Hockney argues, with Cezanne, the lenses are discarded for a new kind of art and, as Weschler reports, then "[deliberate] awkwardness returns to European painting, for the first time, really, since Giotto," and continues on through Cubism). And awkwardness = nakedness, no?. In her article on the Boston MFA's Degas show, Rosenberg writes that the museum unflinchingly presents "the raunchiest of his 'brothel monotypes' alongside the the more genteel voyeurism of his women at their toilette ... His working girls are plump and slovenly, with tufts of dark hair between their thighs. (Even Manet never went that far) ... [but] In Degas naturalism cancels out voyeurism."  So, to finish the explanation between "nude" and "naked," Degas's women are naked. And we can see that, exactly, here, in The Tub," from 1886:

This does look like someone, anyone, that we might know .... And I began to see something. I have been looking at Van Gogh's nudes (there are not very many, and the ones I love come from his time in Paris, in 1886 and 1887).  And I began to wonder if Van Gogh might have seen Degas's women in Paris then. And then the new biography, Van Gogh: The Life arrived (by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, New York: Random House, 2011). And yes, Van Gogh saw the Impressionists in 1886, but was not impressed with them as a group: "one is bitterly, bitterly disappointed, and thinks them slovenly, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, bad in color, everything that's miserable" and he says, as opposed to most of the painters in the group, "I have faith in color" (519).  And yet, and yet, the biography notes that Van Gogh "commented favorably only on a suite of nude women, in pastel, by Degas (520).  Yes! he did. Here is Van Gogh's "Study for Reclining Female Nude" from 1887 in Paris; it's difficult not to see Degas in this:

There is no idealized goddess to be found here. This woman is naked, formed from rough pencil strokes. Her skin is wrinkled, her breasts are not perfectly-formed oranges, she is a bit uncomfortable and awkward. This is a body, not a dream.

So then, I wondered, because I have been doing this series of nudes with some references back to Henri Matisse, whether he refers to Degas and Van Gogh.  Degas, one feels, would have been inescapable, given Matisse's contacts and Degas's reputation. But Van Gogh was relatively unknown.  In 1899, Matisse bought a Van Gogh drawing from Vollard. Years later, in 1945, Matisse would say that "Van Gogh and Gauguin were ignored. A wall had to be knocked down in order to get through" (p. 158, Matisse on Art, edited by Jack Flam (revised edition, Berkeley: University of California, 1995).  See for yourself; is this "Seated Nude" from 1906 (she's looking pretty naked!) knocking down that wall?

the BEACH, echoes from a picnic to a painting

We were picnicking about a month ago on Muir Beach ... the day was sunny (you can just see a bit of blue in the upper right-hand corner).   And the rock in this picture, layered in fog,  looks to me now a bit like a body. So it is no great surprise that one of my odalisques came to be layered in fog, as well:

She is, as I intended in this series, in a very different place.

The very air is charged....

Francis Bacon painted the body electric. The works are a gorgeous study in figure (charged) ground (not) relations.... I have discussed Bacon's work before (April 9, July 2, July 7, all 2011, here).  I love his work. But I do believe that there is room for a dialogue of sorts, an annotation, if you will.  Bodies do not always look as if they are undergoing great emotional stress. Sometimes, it is the context that has changed utterly.

We change our whereabouts, our contexts, our landscapes, all the time. Sometimes the place we find ourselves is familiar, or it may be the same place but without people we knew, or it may be the same place, but the stand of trees has been felled.  Or, we may be somewhere completely new to us -- "I have been someplace I never would go to," sings Joan Armatrading, in "Everybody Gotta Know This Feeling." So the air is different --- not always us. We carry our "person" with us. But the air? Not the same.

So I have been painting these odalisques -- my definition of the word is pretty loose, as I include Titian's "Venus" and then Picasso's Demoiselles and Lucian Freud's Leigh Bowery work among them.  Sometimes, as with Delacroix, or Matisse, the models are from North Africa. But in the case of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, the models are Parisian, or situated in Rome (when he won the Prix), and for Freud, the model is a Londoner. All these nudes that I work from are painted, very decidedly, indoors.  I pull each form out of its "frame" (the harem, Freud's city studio with skylight, Picasso's triangular blue -- but very much an indoor -- "sky").  I supply the body with a new place, out-of-doors,  "someplace ... [s/he] never would go to." I want to see what the body looks like in an imagined new world.  The body is on the canvas, pretty much in the form of the original painting, so both here, and ... there, in a clearing, or in a working port with container ships arriving, or.... anywhere but in a Paris or London salon.  Here is my latest, based on Titian's "Venus of Urbino":

Not "Seven Types of Ambiguity" but Three Types of Calligraphy, equal a drawing, and

" ... all drawing is collage," says David Hockney.

In 1816, Hokusai wrote, in his Album of Drawings in Three Styles, that he would like to bring together the three types of writing and ... drawing (mentioned, with examples from his work, Hokusai: Prints and Drawings, ed. Matthi Forrer, Prestel: Munich, 2010, discussion of figure 59).  The three most common styles of Japanese writing, as I understand from my brief research on several sites today, are:
1. shin/kaisha: block characters, with clear shapes and structure
2. gyo/gyosho: where the points and lines of a character are connected, a near-cursive rendering,
rhythmic
3. sho/sosho: true cursive, sometimes called running, abbreviated, fast

The general progression from kaisha to gyosho to sosho is toward fluidity and abstraction. I shouldn't imply that any particular style is "best," however, because, as I read about him, I doubt Hokusai would say anything like that. I think he was trying to give lines in a drawing the same chance to be recognized and described as those in writing. So, I thought, the Hokusai book shows us his response; what about putting together three examples from other people?

So, for kaisha, I choose Ingres, "The Source":

There is some lovely fluidity in the portrayal of this body and the falling water; I am saying that this is like block or clear characters in writing because it is so crystal clear and clean of line. To demonstrate gyosho, or everything being connected, a Matisse, "Faith the Model," (this detail from the catalog The Steins Collect (plate 135),  because it was purchased from Matisse by Sarah and Michael Stein, and this nude now lives in San Francisco):

There she is, completely moving into cursive, blending the colors of background and foreground, but still keeping recognizable form. For sosho, the style of writing that one source said might not even be readable to some people, I collaged and drew a form myself:

It is no longer as clear what is being "said" here ... and I would say that it is fully "cursive."

The Queen's Skirt Explodes: silk vs. skin

I was looking at a series of paintings from 1994, a series I never exhibited. At the time, I was struck by a feature of most formal portraits that I have never seen anyone discuss at all. When Ingres painted the Princesse de Broglie in 1853, for example, he takes care with her face, and yet ... he takes far more care with her silk dress and bustle, and with the lace on her sleeves, even with the upholstery on the divan.  I think that one could argue that this is proving one's worth as a painter; if you can paint a rounded, gleaming pearl, you can paint anything. It's something of an artist's resume, the velvet, the silk, the fur, the amethyst. But what of the face, when there is so much detail in the fabric and the jewels?

I began a group of paintings that would illustrate the problem ... the wealthy patron arrives for her portrait, and she is far less interesting to the artist than the usual model (think of Manet and Matisse, who painted the same woman repeatedly ... certainly because something about her particular presence would become significant in the final work).  In the series, the Queen and the model ... clash. The model holds the artist's attention ... the Queen's skirt is actually the only thing keeping the painter looking in the Queen's direction. And so it goes ... here is the final work in the series, 38 x 50":