Thinking, once more, about Cubism

The "early"/Analytic phase of Cubism came together through the combined efforts of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Cubism came of real struggle. No-one had ever pulled all the pieces together before. And the resulting new painting was harsh, jagged, deep, an ugly overthrow of everyone whose recent art was so pleasing, from Klimt to Renoir. "Synthetic" Cubism, then, coming later, when the tempest winds were calmer, amounts to something far less potent.

I had not ever worried about this distinction until now. But I have just been reading "Dime Novels," the final chapter of Rosalind Krauss's "The Picasso Papers." And while distinguishing between these phases is not her full argument, it is a distinction she feels to be crucial. Were the later practitioners leaning on their oars?

Douglas Cooper's The Cubist Epoch changes the names and takes, as he says, the terminology of Renaissance art (which, he says, held sway for about four hundred and fifty years by painting "only what the eye sees of things, incomplete and deceptive though this may often be" until Cubism arrived). Cooper prefers the terms "early" Cubism (from the end of 1906 until the summer of 1910), "high" (summer of 1910 until winter 1912), "late" (a.k.a. Synthetic, the time of collage, roughly 1912-14) and an "aftermath" (not a Renaissance term, but a time of freer development of the art by Braque, Gris and Picasso).  "Early" and "high" Cubism are also, for Cooper, "True" Cubism, and Picasso's "Three Musicians" was the end of Cubism entirely, he says (pp. 11, 13 15-6).

If we think of the important phases of Cubism as those which taught us to see... taking the slight upward tilt of Cezanne's tables all the way, or thinking of all sides of an object instead of just one... yes, both sets of categories, Krauss's and Cooper's, work perfectly. The latter phase does seem to be weaker. Let's look....

Two examples, one from "early" and one from "late" Cubism here.... The first, "early" work is by Georges Braque, "Piano and Mandola," from 1909-1910, here shown in a detail:

Cooper says that, generally, Braque's work from this time is "painterly, lyrical, suave and cohesive," and he says about this work that it is "superb," the "faceting" is "elaborate," yet "the objects represented remain legible' (p.44).  Yes, to all that; also, there is an incredible, dizzying depth here, that I can't readily unpack.... and yet the whole work looks effortless.  Our second example is by Albert Gleizes, again in a detail; this "late" Cubist painting is called "Harvest Threshing," and it is from 1912:

Cooper is very critical of this work, saying that "nowhere are the geometric forms derived from the objects represented, nor do they serve to create volumes; sometimes they are awkward stylizations, often their significance is ambiguous" (p. 74).  And I agree; while the painting is very pretty, with a round frame of figures that functions almost as a wreath, its tidiness is very flat.  It is totally off its point, it seems to me; if I were looking at this without its title, I would see it as a portrayal of an indoor scene, dancers and spectators on couches.  One-point perspective is still there, I would argue, just a little dazzled by a refined re-arrangement; not the point of the Cubist endeavor, not at all.

So,  the "late" works, the Synthetic works are, with a few exceptions, different. Perhaps it isn't fair to say that the painters are leaning on their oars, since Gleizes, for instance, is a co-author of a treatise on Cubism; he took its directives seriously. Maybe the temptation towards the harmonies of one-point perspective are unconscious, here, but the pull seems clear to me. Stand just there and don't move. The pull of that vanishing point is so ingrained that these artists didn't see it there... it's just that, in this painting, the vanishing point is in the center. Still pulling us in, hypnotically, not breaking the spell... Cubism may not be "a monument" (see my May 11th entry) but it does mean to break the spell.

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."

Grids and Layers...

Rosalind Krauss is visiting ... via 2 of her books. I have a feeling she will be here for a long time, as she has a good deal to say.

  

In the first chapter of Originality, Krauss discusses grids (does the grid by each artist cut off -- or contain -- the world?), and reproduces work by Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Caspar David Friedrich, Odilon Redon, Piet Mondrian, and Joseph Cornell.  I once attended a lecture by an artist who said that he always knew that when he was reading theory, the studio work was not going well; "fiction," he said, "means it's a go." But ... I like reading theory! Krauss's grids are everywhere for me at the moment; here is a screen in Essex, Connecticut:

Then the question of layers ... I read an article today by Simon Abrahams, who writes the blog at "Every Painter Paints Himself." The article discusses two paintings by Manet ("Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe" and "Mlle. V in the Costume of an Espada"), centering on the question of the different picture planes, and the different types of brushwork in each work. Read the article; here is the short version: http://www.everypainterpaintshimself.com/essays/manets_le_dejeuner_and_mlle._v._simply_explained/   The article is of a piece with his website, which also, by the way, has a splendid gallery of images, arranged alphabetically by painter.

And here is a close-up of a layered work I am just starting:

In which the author has many things to say about...audience, the good and meaning

There was a young woman poet, C.S. Merrill, who worked for Georgia O'Keeffe in her final years, from 1973 to 1979, doing a bit of everything to help out (except art). She would sit down after each day and write what she and the artist discussed or did, and later published a book of poems, O'Keeffe: Days in a Life, (New Mexico: La Alameda Press, 2000). From these poetic notes, we find that O'Keeffe tended not to like her most popular paintings; she liked "a painting/with black V/white below/blue above" which was "what she was trying/to do." But it wasn't in the desired style -- so it was not going to be famous. Georgia O'Keeffe overly concerned about audience? At odds with what they wanted? She, the woman who said "I am not fine..."!!!  How astonishing!

Then comes a poem that gets to a central difficulty artists have, making the judgment: "Is it finished? Is it good?"   When I think I have done all I can with a painting, and am painfully aware of all the decisions I have made, all the work I have done to complete it, and remember the other destroyed paintings in its wake, I think, "this is a good painting." Since it is so easy for me to talk to myself and agree with what I have said, I have had to develop a system: if Charley and I both like it, then it is good.  O'Keeffe settled that; she had an African mask "oval and black with protruding mouth/and slitty eyes; long braid/extending up from the head:

She used to take it with her summers
hang a painting next to it --
if it held its own
the painting was good,
next to the mask.  (from "68,"  January, 1978)

And so it was good.

Turning back to Rosalind Krauss and Rauschenberg, Krauss unpacks the ways that he was changing the audience's expectations: how, after so many modern movements, to find meaning. Krauss refers to Renaissance art, to that little tiny landscape, tucked just over the Virgin's ear in so many Annunciation paintings, the little world going about its quiet little business just out of reach of miracles. She says this kind of painting portrays "a tunnel of deep perspective -- an allee of trees, say" which is "just about to arrive at its destination in the horizon's vanishing point, when something at the very forefront of the picture -- the lily the angel of the Annunciation is handing to the Virgin, for example -- blocks the whoosh into depth." So you have, on the one hand, this little distant world that is beautifully fixed in illusionistic space, in miniature, but then you are brought back to the flat faces of Mary and the angel and the world of the icon and halo.  The moment in the foreground, Krauss says, must "'hold' the surface, preventing its 'violation by an unimpeded spatial rush.'" And, generally, it does, even though we see the "two conflicting modes of being ... real versus ideal, secular versus sacred, physical versus iconic, deep versus flat" and the funny thing is that it is that tiny real world back there behind the halo that is "real," and yet it is the one part of the painting that most makes use of illusion, perspective, the whole ball of wax. It is "the flattened wafer of the surface-bound icon that is touchably real" (p. 88, from "Perpetual Inventory" cited in yesterday's post). And so, if I am understanding her properly, what Krauss seems to suggest is that this dual nature of the picture plane requires us to perform the Keatsian suspension of disbelief and thus re-integrate the picture.

And, if I am getting that right, then I would suggest that the Keatsian moment and the re-integration, finding that meaning, is REALLY FUN for us as viewers and what can take the place of that exactly once you've broken it and you say you don't want anyone to put it back together? ...  Yes, well, while Rauschenberg may have said, or hinted, that he didn't want it all put back together,  he did, actually. Krauss quotes another critic, Brian O'Doherty, who says that Rauschenberg really was invested in "the integrity of the picture plane" (87).  For me, Rauschenberg's most compelling work is the large photographic prints (there was a show recently in Los Angeles of several Gemini prints). Krauss discusses the "seamlessness" (95) he achieved with this breakthrough.  And yet, for me, there is, along with the "seamlessness," an in-and-out quality not unlike that Renaissance duel.

So, again, as I did yesterday, I am going to say I will stop here and go work.... and buy an early Krauss book, because, clearly, when I read some of her pieces years ago, I wasn't ready.

Shadowing Rosalind Krauss ... or is it Rauschenberg?

Rosalind Krauss begins her article "Perpetual Inventory" (October, Vol. 88, Spring 1999, pp. 86-116) with a headnote referring to its title, from a remark Robert Rauschenberg made to Barbara Rose: "I went in for my interview for this fantastic job .... The job had a great name -- I might use it for a painting -- 'Perpetual Inventory.'" And I immediately began to think that, yes, everything gets counted in ... and I thought, that's a really intriguing way to think of painting, as checking into the mind for what is important, how it presents itself in the imagination, what, then, it would be possible to re-present and then working onto canvas with a concerted effort.  Later, speaking of Rauschenberg's photograph-laden silscreens in the early 60's, Krauss contrasts his approach, which is something of "a chance cut from the ongoing fabric of the whole world" with the art of a Renaissance painting, "a contraction around a gravitational center" (95). Voila. Brilliant.

So I thought that, for me, the two worlds could, instead of contrasting, converge. What if you had both a contraction and an explosion ... something like the Queen's Skirt series I have been thinking of ... the surface of the painting would be terribly active and the work itself a real challenge. So off I go.

"Work engenders work."

Okay. Theoretically, I love this idea that I have been pursuing ... the idea of the Queen's skirt and the model. But I have made several sketches, now, and they are just not working for me. The drawings are messy where I don't want mess, and clean-lined when I want a little disorder; they are, in short, uncertain.

The Queen will need to sit in the studio a bit longer. Luckily, as Georgia O'Keeffe once said "Work engenders work" (or, it could be said, "work engenders better work"). Since I have been sketching and reading and gathering stones (you'll see) and looking out of windows, three things have turned up in the Queen's regal place:

1. I know I should have read this a very long time ago, but I just now finished Rosalind Krauss's original article, "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition," (published in October, Vol. 18, Autumn, 1981, pp. 47-66).  I won't try to summarize her argument, as she has published a book on the subject since this essay first appeared. She begins by reminding us that the avant-garde's claim to originality (and thus their whole reason for being) is their insistence on an "absolute distinction" between their world and "a tradition-laden past" (53).  There is a piece of her argument concerning this search for the "new" that really interests me: her discussion of the grid. Krauss argues that the grid, the "new beginning" adopted by Mondrian, Josef Albers, and my hero Agnes Martin (see my entry from May 25th), isn't so "new"; Krauss calls it, to remind us of its long history, a "graph-paper ground" (54-6).  The grid may seem to be "effective as a badge of freedom," and yet "it is extremely restrictive in the actual exercise of freedom" (56).  It is vertical lines crossed by horizontal lines; it can, as Krauss says, "only be repeated" (56).  She continues with the idea that originality and repetition are more "bound together" than we like to think, and that in seeking the original, we end up, well, repeating... (I had an idea, later, of an example of art-making that Krauss does not deal with in this article, though she may have gotten to it in the book... Robert Rauschenberg's erasing of the DeKooning drawing -- now in SFMOMA -- done with DeKooning's permission, is neither an original nor a repetition, and yet it is certainly avant-garde for its time... how to include that in the theory? And, then, there is Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence,  where the strong poet must creatively misread his precursors -- not repeat or imitate -- and then erase all traces of the earlier poem, so that the new-generation poet's work will seem unique and yet -- written by the same hand as the earlier poem. Hmmm... ). But, finally, what stays with me, here, is the idea of the grid and its (new-to-me) "rut."

2. Hunting for rocks on a beach: I have found a set of rocks shaped like oysters, oyster-rocks:

And, here is a photograph of a recent dinner:

3. And, last, we had an insane thunder-and-lightning and wind-storm last night. The wind was scary ... it broke a window:

The lightning was a discovery: it would selectively light up first the house next door, then leap to a fence, then the distant sky, then the yard... so it seems those flashes of light must find their way into a painting.

So, here is the newest sketch. The oyster-rocks attack the grid, helped along by the occasional body (for added organic shape), and lit, from time to time, by boxes of lightning: