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.

What's It All About, Alfie?: On Abstract Art and the Question of Meaning

Here are two paintings from the year 1824. The first is a "Seascape Study with Rain Clouds" by Constable:

This certainly could be an abstract work by a contemporary artist, hanging somewhere in Chelsea. The second is by Caspar David Friedrich, "The Sea of Ice":

Again, if I had not yet seen this, and someone told me that this painting was in a gallery in London, just completed by a young German artist, I would be impressed.  Both of these works are actually likely to have been studies: of light, of form, of the layering of paint. They contribute to each artist's practice, and yet neither is really characteristic of the major works of these men.  I find them moving. And yet, I have friends who belittle abstract art, who, when they are faced with a work by one of our contemporaries that seems as "abstract" as these, laugh, or think of them as "studies" for something more significant, as works with no meaning, as mere decoration. I have seen a sweet little old man point his umbrella towards the center of a huge De Kooning and say "There, there's the lighthouse. And the rock is just over here."


I remember an interview with Robert Motherwell on PBS, where he said, at one point, very slowly and forcefully, that "If the abstraction, the violence, the humanity was valid in Abstract Expressionism, then it cut out the ground from every other kind of painting."  And we look at a Motherwell, "Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV" from 1953-4, measuring 80 x 100" (think here of scale):

When you have been in a roomful of Motherwells,  it is impossible to deny their "violence" and "humanity." They are not decorative. They are meant to evoke feeling. I knew someone who worked for Motherwell once, who, fresh out of art school and trying to become a famous painter, asked his new teacher a series of questions. And Motherwell, a very articulate and learned person (Stanford, Harvard, Columbia), fed up, said, finally "Don't talk to me about theory.  *#%$  theory. Go home and astound me."  Abstract art may provoke theory, but it isn't made out of it.

It can be easy to walk right past a painting and not even try to take it in: it's too hard, it's too late in the day, it seems a silly exercise, people say. And yet, and yet. Take Mark Rothko.  Here is a work of his from 1954, called "Homage to Matisse" (who had just died that year):

Matisse is right there. Rothko said that "there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing."  He meant, he said, to express "tragedy, ecstasy, doom ..." through his work.  Rothko's work does not reproduce well. It must be seen. He created it through transluscent layering, and, when you stand in front of one, you can see the colors peeking through, the way memories appear, unbidden. The paintings reverberate in real life. There is a DVD called "Rothko's Rooms" which is a pretty powerful introduction to his complexities as a person and to the aims of his art.  Kirk Varnedoe said that "Rothko may make us think anew about the evening sky, but having once thought about the evening sky, we think about Rothko differently."

Josef Albers created a series of works over years, working through the way that colors could show us the way to see.  Art and science were one, for him, and he worked through endless combinations of colors, sometimes with only faintly observable changes from one to the next, all in the same shapes, squares nested inside of squares.  Below is "Study for Homage to the Square" from 1970:

 

Even in digital reproduction, we can see something happening here.  As I thought through my list of abstract painters, I had no luck finding anyone who painted in the void. I can't think of anyone who didn't have recourse to feeling or meaning as the paintings developed. Not anyone. Albers may have said it best: "Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it."

And so I leave you with one last view, of a Northern California winter sky:

Artist Statement VI: "The picture did not live within the frame ... it did not belong within the frame"

One thing that needs to be included in my artist's statement is the question of movement. I have always felt that one of the chief weaknesses of traditional landscape painting -- and perhaps even of portrait painting -- is the fact that the figure and ground, the objects and the composition, often show no sense that the whole thing could move at any second.  That is, the model could get up, the artist could turn her head or move the easel closer to the stand of trees, the light is changing ... The Cubists and the Futurists considered this point, but I believe it still needs to be resolved pictorially -- now.

If we look back at Constable's "Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames: Morning After a Stormy Night" (see my post from November 10), we see the castle, the river, the rocks, the sky spread out before us.  But -- how wonderful would it be if we could see all the things he could see as he was actually painting? The castle comes into greater focus, or the dog runs ahead ...

In her Lectures in America, in "Pictures," Gertrude Stein talks about movement: "Does an oil painting tend to go back into its frame because after all an oil painting belongs in its frame. Or does it not .... And if it does belong in its frame, must an oil painting be static."  And she answers her own question -- no -- a painting need not be "static," and Stein goes to the example of a painting that seems --to her -- to move, Leonardo Da Vinci's 1499 work, "The Virgin, the Child, Saint Anne and John the Baptist."  As it happens, we saw this painting at the National Gallery in London last year; it is a "sketch" for a more formal painting that was never completed, stretched across eight sheets of paper, but it is more beautiful than any "final" painting could be, I think:

Stein says that "in this picture there was an internal movement, not of the people or light or any of these things but inside .... In other words the picture did not live within the frame, in other words it did not belong within the frame .... [and since then] I have passionately hoped that some picture would remain out of its frame."  And there is internal movement here; you can feel it, walking around in the gallery with it. This can be explained in part by the figures' sinewy curves, and by the background that dances just a bit beyond specificity.  But really, as Stein goes on to say, a painting "must not completely only exist in its frame. It must have its own life. And yet it may not move nor imitate movement, not really, nor must it stay still. It must not only be in its frame but it must not, only, be in its frame." This is, in part, a discussion of the Modernist idea that a painting must be a thing in itself, and not representative of something outside of itself, but I also think this is about the life in a painting, the way a painting can feel like a very brief, exciting moment in a life.

So the artist, and the work of art, have this difficult task, to allow the art to move without moving.  Can this be done now, without resorting to one-point perspective or any sort of illusion? Well, look at Helen Frankenthaler at work:

She is moving, the paint is moving, but it will all have to stop and, at some point, the painting will be in a show ... will it survive? I think so. Let's look at "Madame Matisse," from 1983:

Matisse had painted his wife with an enormous hat and a green stripe along her nose, a painting bought by Leo and Gertrude Stein, actually, and this painting takes that stripe and makes it move.

Part of what I am still working on, both in my statement and in this new series, is the idea that paintings should encourage the viewer to see ... to see just as if you were in the same landscape as the painting, and see the colors and the shapes as you would if you were walking by. Sometimes this will lead to the shapes seeming to be a blur, or to seem as if they were shrinking or growing; other times it will lead to one thing seeming specific, because it is what the painter chose to look at and to paint. We turn our heads, we focus in on objects, as we walk ... anywhere.  Here is an early example of my landscape-as-movement idea, a 2 x 4' painting called "Landscape as Drama":

"I have done a good deal of skying...": the Artist's Statement II

What we would all like, I suspect, is a chance to see the artist at work. Here is a photograph of the painter Trevor Bell, who lives and works near Penzance, Cornwall:

Lovely. A cup of tea, a bit of small talk, and then some big questions, please....

So why would an artist find it difficult to write out a statement?  Perhaps today's truth will be obsolete as you move into a new painting phase. Perhaps you don't really see your own work as clearly as you hope. Or, worst of all, perhaps someone might come along and say to you, "well, if you really knew what you were doing, if you were John Constable or someone like that, you might not feel such a need to talk about your work; it would all be so clear."

To which I would say, "Really? Let's test your theory, shall we?" And off we go in search of John Constable. We saw this painting at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven: "Hadleigh Castle, the mouth of the Thames: Morning after a Stormy Night" from 1829:

 

It is the morning after a storm, as he has mentioned in the title. The light would be constantly shifting; it wouldn't be easy to re-capture the exact shadows, even coming out at the same time every day.  But he is an accomplished painter by this time, aged 53. He knows the days are always too short; he complained once to a friend that there is too little daylight, "imagine to yourself how a pearl must look through a burnt glass" (in other words, no reflection, no transparency, nothing to paint at all).  On one painting trip, Constable wrote a friend that "I have done a good deal of skying for I am determined to conquer all difficulties." (And, in fact, there was an entire wall at Yale filled with his sky studies).

Now, look again at the painting. The sky seems perfect, reflecting a lonely landscape lit, only for the moment, by the aftermath of rain.  And look again, just for a minute or two, and fix for yourself, in your mind, the emotion, the scale, the breadth of what Constable has captured on the canvas. Now, here is the final public statement that Constable made about his work, just seven years later, one year before he died: "Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments."

Maybe it's just me ... but does this painting look like a scientific experiment to you?  Constable wrote another letter "quite alone amongst the Oaks and solitude of Helmingham Park,"  where he said he was not entirely sure, yet, of the quality of the work he had done so far; he did not know, he said, "what I may have to show you .... I shall not come home yet."  His inquiries were continuing on. Even Constable, it seems, wanted to leave a written record of what he believed he had achieved with his art, and even we might disagree with what he concluded ...

"So," says your skeptical friend, "jump ahead a bit, and look at Cezanne. He didn't need any notes."  You smile, just for a second. "Okay."  So you go to the man who painted with Pissarro, who showed the next generation of artists the way forward, a new way of seeing.  And you find he did converse, quite freely, about the ways he worked: "Basically I don't think of anything when I paint. I see colours. I strive with joy to convey them onto my canvas just as I see them. They arrange themselves as they choose."  Yes, very funny. No, really, what happened?  Well, Cezanne wrote in a letter from Estaque (a sea-side town near Marseille) to Pissarro that "the sun here is so terrific that objects appear silhouetted not only in white or black, but in blue, red, brown, violet. I may be wrong, but it seems to me the opposite of modeling."  And that is true. When we lived in Malta, the sun, even in winter, was so strong, so "white," that it flattened everything out, and it flattened things out just in their own colors. What Cezanne was doing, in his pulling colors onto the canvas, was, perhaps, just seeing the south for itself.

So, what does Cezanne tell us about what artists should do? he says "the artist must silence all the voices of prejudice within him, he must forget .... and then the entire landscape will engrave itself on the sensitive part of his being."  As proof, here Cezanne will tell us that he waited and waited before he painted the mountain that is forever linked to him: "For a long time I was unable to paint [Mont] Sainte-Victoire ... because ... I imagined the shadow had to be concave, whereas in fact it's convex, it disperses outward from the centre.  Instead of accumulating, it evaporates, becomes fluid, bluish, participating in the movements of the surrounding air." 

This is from 1904. I feel that I haven't seen it before. I never saw the interchange between the air and the mountain before, not until I read that last observation.

Perhaps the ideal artist's statement is not about what you actually paint but about the nexus of stimuli in which you are working ... the air that shapes you.  That's where I am going to start.

A Few (Playful!) Ideas on Perspective and the Fourth Wall

 "Me to play" (Hamm, in Samuel Beckett's Endgame)

In the first chapter of her book, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, Rosalind Krauss mentions perspective. She is working on detaching perspective’s crossed wires (the ones we all remember from Art History blackboards) from her reader’s impressions of the grid, which she wants to discuss at much greater length. It may not be fully polite to pull these few brief phrases on perspective away from their context for greater attention, but I do believe that Rosalind Krauss will understand. I am playing with what she says here, starting with her entirely authoritative view on the subject....

A young model and painter recently remarked that she was collecting books about perspective. She doesn’t mention why. I believe that we do not think about the ways we “assume” perspective, any more than we think about the fourth wall between us and actors on the stage -- until a dramatist calls our attention to it. Modernism and post-modernism and post-post were the arts meant to wake us up -- but we still see those lines in our dreams.

Here is the core of what Krauss writes: for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, “the perspective lattice is inscribed on the depicted world as the armature of its organization …. Perspective was … the science of the real, not the mode of withdrawing from it.  Perspective was the demonstration of the way reality and its representation could be mapped onto one another, the way the painted image and its real-world referent did in fact relate to one another – the first being a form of knowledge about the second …” (10). 

The “lattice” of perspective is “inscribed on” a picture as the “armature of its organization,” Krauss says. She is perfectly right; the “lattice” is not integral to the scene the artist wishes to portray. Lovely word, lattice, but, architecturally, it is meant to separate the man or woman at the window from all that he or she surveys, as with these women in John Frederick Lewis's "Indoor Gossip, Cairo" from 1873:

 And, as Krauss notes, perspectival lines must be “inscribed” by the artist’s hand, imposed from without; the landscape is branded, really, re-organized, so that we can readily trace the object back from our marked spot as viewer to the vanishing point.  

We have been taught to see. We imagine the horizon line, and not only when we look at a painted landscape.  As we go on vacation, and gaze at sunsets, we sketch in the diagonal lines ourselves, and see the two rows of trees, or the grapevines, or the jetty, stretching to that imaginary horizon, each tree or rock diminishing, one after the other, in precise rhythm.  As we do this bit of artwork up against real horizons, we must not move, ourselves, as that would completely spoil the lines.

Krauss says that perspective was  [and many would say, still is] “the science of the real, not the mode of withdrawing from it.”  And yet, think of that lattice: a means of withdrawal; again, John Frederick Lewis, in "The Siesta," from 1876:

(See... isn't this fun?) We must remain motionless, on its other side, just as we must remain motionless in our seats and imagine that “wall” between us and the very-contemporary human onstage playing the role of the king, the one written in the 16^th century.  And yet, even Shakespeare wrote in asides, the little winks to the audience that broke the wall.  Aren’t we able, then, to move from our rooted spot in the landscape, as Constable did when he packed up his brushes and went in to lunch, after painting "Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames -- Morning After a Stormy Night," in 1829:

Wouldn’t movement be more scientific?

Krauss ends the remarks on perspective by saying that “reality and its representation” were, for these early artists, “mapped onto one another,” since they saw perspective as a “form of knowledge” about their “real-world referent” (10).  It was, for a long time, a required way of knowing. But it should not carry such pure authority now. David Hockney has said that the problem with perspective is that “it stops time. …. Space has become frozen, petrified” (from True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Wechsler, published in paper by The University of California Press, p. 66).  And that same critic who interviewed Hockney, Lawrence Wechsler, quotes an earlier artist, Jacques Riviere, who said in 1912 that “perspective is the sign of an instant, of the instant when a certain man is as a certain point …. But in reality, we can change position: a step to the right, a step to the left, completes our vision” (Wechsler, 197). 

So, wouldn’t it be fun to really think about perspective; if we do use it, as painters, let’s play with it, let’s break it down, the way a Shakespearean actor breaks down that final wall, with an aside to our audiences…. As Hamm would say, "Me to play."