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."

The Anxiety of Influence vs. "It was her voice that made/ The sky acutest at its vanishing..."

"She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker ..."  from "The Idea of Order at Key West,"
                    by Wallace Stevens

So I was just sitting here, sketching ...

And I was thinking about the ways writers and artists balance artistic influence against developing their own artistic "voices" or styles. Stevens's poem, quoted above, gives us a woman whose voice is so surely her own that the sea clings to it.  I attended a reading the other day; the writer's day job was ...   "editor."  And so, in the question-and-answer period, I asked her how she protected "your own voice" while reading so many other contemporary writers.  And she gave us all a long, wandering answer that never circled back to her "own voice." Why didn't she answer?

My memory -- which I will admit, is shaky on this point, so I will be very brief! -- of Harold Bloom's book The Anxiety of Influence  centers on the weight of all those writers (or, in my case, artists) who have come before.  And, that, where one is most influenced, one is most prone to deny that influence.  Picasso, for example, doesn't mention Renoir anywhere that I have seen, and of course we would not expect him to. The lush Impressionist works seem to have nothing to do with Picasso's thin washes of color and focus on the hard-edged line. And yet, and yet: a show called "Picasso: Challenging the Past" came together at the National Gallery in London in 2009, and we see the names we expect: Ingres, Velazquez, El Greco, Delacroix. And then the one we do not expect, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with "Seated Bather in a Landscape, called Euridice," from 1885-1890, a painting that, the catalogue tells us, Picasso owned.  The curators (Elizabeth Cowling, Neil Cox, Simonetta Fraquelli, Susan Grace Galassi, Christopher Riopelle and Anne Robbins) have placed a Picasso, "Large Bather," 1921, up against it. See what you think.

I have always wondered where Picasso's large bathers came from. This seems pretty definitive to me. But Picasso's voice survives these influences, in part because he has folded them into his "own voice." His style often shifts in reaction to other artists' work. The influence moves him forward.  But it could, just as easily, set any of us back. So how to escape it?

And then I thought of Helen Frankenthaler (not a new thing for me: see November 9th and 14th entries).  She lived with first one, then another of the biggest art-world names of her time, Clement Greenberg and Robert Motherwell. I once heard her work dismissed by someone who didn't know any better as "second-rate Motherwell."  But Frankenthaler, despite the weight of living with these two men, created her own world, just as Stevens's woman does in the poem above. Frankenthaler created color-field painting. She was, in Stevens's words, "the single artificer of the world/ In which she sang." Before anyone else poured thin washes of paint onto untreated canvas, there she was; she had taken the thrown lines of Pollock's paint into a new direction.  And now she has moved on, to a graceful printing style -- influenced by Japanese prints -- and has rediscovered another "voice."  Here are two prints; the first is "Madame Butterfly," and the second is "Book of Clouds":

 

No-one else works this way. So, to my novelist, if you are reading this ... I hope it helps you see what I was asking.

Nakedly Nude IV

In his own way, Picasso did actually sketch a Van-Gogh-esque nude. Here is a gouache sketch sometimes called "La Belle Hollandaise" from 1905:

And here is a Van Gogh, from Paris in 1886, "Standing Female Nude Seen from The Side":

Rather close ... perhaps Picasso never drew an odalisque in the style of Van Gogh because he already had ...

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.

"Lots of things women can't be....

'Sauvage' is one of them."  The painter Joan Mitchell (from an interview in the film by Marion Cajori)

But first coffee, then discussions about artists, women and not.... this coffee may be art, actually, especially when it is served in one of these Illy cups (all these photos are my own):

Thus fortified, we went in search of autumn colors in the vineyards. We began here:

And then we tried a different angle, and the same sky only differently blue:

And then we found clusters of grapes:

We then decided to head home, and work on art.... because we wish to be ever so "sauvage,"  like Joan Mitchell. I think that my lovely Van Gogh woman is too much his; I am not an appropriation artist, and so ... she must be visited by other beings, naked bodies more in my own mode. So here she was:

She is lovely. But she is still Van Gogh's. So, I am working, slowly, on adding visitors, anonymous women, who will inter-fold with Madame just like the yellow and orange and red leaves fold in among themselves in the autumn vineyard. Here we are so far:

Sometimes we are lucky in our choice of walks .... Picasso said "The painter goes through states of fullness and evacuation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of the sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions" (p. 10, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, edited by Dore Ashton, Da Capo Press, 1988).  And here, it is soft pinks, oranges, yellows... perhaps I will add reds tomorrow? I don't yet know. But I will try to remain sufficiently ... 'sauvage.'

One more pair ... this, a set of drawings from the Odalisque series

after yesterday's Austen quotes. I have changed the Matisse "Blue Nude" -- clearly she was lonely! -- here is (a detail of) her company for Tea:

"Cherchez La Femme"

.... means many things. The literal translation is "look for the woman," and the generally-understood meaning is that a woman is at the bottom of it all (she began it, she's to blame, she's the solution you seek...).  This drawing comes from thinking that Picasso looked for a woman whenever ... he really needed to create a breakthrough work, like the Demoiselles. Below, my sketch of "her":