Revealing the "glimpse" and in the Flow, thanks to eb

A rainy day in Northern California:

So I am thinking … I tend to dream about practical things: continuing a conversation with one of our children, anticipating an afternoon out, remembering to buy coffee.  But once or twice, I dreamed about Picasso and Gertrude Stein.  I wondered (while I was awake!) what language they used to communicate. In my dream, Picasso and I were walking along a Connecticut beach.  “She was so smart,” he said.  I asked him – did they speak together in Spanish? French? English?  “French,” he said.  “We spoke decent French. Enough to talk about art and sex.”

Definitely not a practical, earth-bound dream.  And then I dreamt about Picasso, again.  He was very tall, looming over me, kindly, concerned. And he handed me his guitar.  I suspect this dream came from my reading that when Picasso was young, his painter-professor father had handed him his own brushes, naming him, symbolically, his artistic heir.  So, I used to interpret this dream as evidence that I wanted to be Picasso.  And I don’t know why, but it gave me courage. I wasn’t afraid of it.

That was twenty years ago.  And over that time, my artist-models broadened to include not only Picasso, but Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Agnes Martin and David Hockney.  I was seeing myself as a (third? generation) post-post Abstract Expressionist.  And painting large paintings, 2’ x 4’ or 3’ square, lovely, mine. Each new painting became part of a series, beginning with French-inspired abstract landscapes and ending with my odalisques.

But each time I completed a series of paintings, I was inconsolable, waiting for the next series. And I wasn’t painting enough, I knew that, and I was painting too carefully. Everything had to be perfect, which had not been my feeling twenty-odd years ago when I began to paint, feeling, then, a sense of great freedom and joy.  My inspiration over the years came not only from my Picasso-guitar dream, but from Robert Motherwell: “The problem is to seize the glimpse. The ethic lies in making the glimpse invisible.” So he might be painting about the Spanish Civil War, for example, but there wouldn’t be a soldier, a weapon, or a destroyed town in sight.  Only what he would call “the essence,” which often came down to black and white forms as “protagonists.” So I shifted styles, settings, always seeing that the painting was mine, but always looking for something bigger, greater.

We go to art shows all the time. I saw people painting or installing work that was different for the sake of newness, but not, I thought, any kind of real move forward. And, at the same time, abstract art has become trendy again.  I kept looking for the grand gesture, and got somewhat ahead of myself until I was virtually (artistically) paralyzed. I wrote and painted an artist’s book about the problem that I could not quite articulate.  The story line concerned Isabella, me, but wiser, who was trying to move beyond Motherwell. She begins to listen to a line from Vito Acconci. Here are three pages from the book:

(The arrow in the photograph above is pointing to the nearly hidden Connecticut River).

But then Isabella goes into a kind of funk.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where I found myself earlier this year.  I had no ideas.  So I stopped reading all the blogs that discussed seizing and hiding the glimpse, stopped looking at all the trendy re-visions of Mondrian and de Kooning, and started looking for artists who were finding and revealing the glimpse. And successfully bringing that glimpse forward, into the light.  

And I found several people trying to do just this, live in the “glimpse” of each moment, one of them an artist whose work I have come to love. It glows. Her blog is “Be… Dream… Play…”(http://elizabethbunsen.typepad.com/be_dream_play).

Elizabeth Bunsen creates journals, fabric art, paints … there is a very good interview with her at the site “Finally Me” that introduces us to Elizabeth’s life and work: http://www.finallyme.com/2012/01/20/fascinating-women-elizabeth-bunsen .  Here are four of my favorite images from her site (used with permission from eb):

What I love here is the flow: the way the sunlight catches the x’s and o’s and crossed lines in the first golden-black work; the reds and blues and greens where the lines move from color to color seemingly without effort in the second piece;  the facility in the third, with just circles, script and neutrals, that despite its small size creates a wall-size effect;  and the outline of a crow, that somehow reminds me of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” – here is a stanza from that poem:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Elizabeth’s work echoes, like those “innuendoes” in Stevens’s poem.  And it resonates with a kind of joy, the joy of someone who has found her way.  I contacted eb (as she signs herself) and lamented that I could not take one of her workshops in person. I sent eb images from her site which were most striking to me, and she wrote me back with some ways she works, with writing, with coffee stains, with lace, collage, gesso, “I build layers,” eb wrote, and “…. keep going until it feels complete but still airy -- hopefully a bit spacious … I am striving increasingly for quiet simplicity.”  I wrote what I most needed to do –- re-capture that glimpse I once found in my art -- and we set up a web course together.  eb encouraged me to “allow” myself to be “messy” and “play” with different combinations of gesso and words and drawn shapes, and “add what comes by way of impulse and make it your own.” And I send her each assigment and she writes me back with helpful commentaries and new assignments (growing a little more complex each time!).

Really good teachers don’t just teach the techniques they have learned and developed; they teach you how to do your own art.  And eb is such a teacher.

I have shelves filled with journals, but none were like these: works of art.  And I have a room half-filled with big paintings on wood and canvas, but I needed, I thought, to try to work small. It’s one thing to want a viewer to feel surrounded by your work because of its sheer size. It’s quite another to find yourself surrounded by a series of 9” x 12” paintings and drawings on paper.  And I wanted to create work that was portable, closer to the bone, closer to the glimpse.  And I am beginning to get there, thanks to eb.  Here are a few examples of my new work, mostly 9” x 12” but all of it between 5” x 7” and 14” x 17”:

As my teacher and I have discussed, these works have placed me back into the “flow” I had lost, and taught me about the worth and weight of the small, the personal, the intensity of going down into a color and a shape.

In my little book about “Isabella,” I had tried to get there, and I guess I was anticipating the artistic re-birth that, thanks to this class with eb, I have found:

Thank you, eb! And here’s hoping that you have had such an awakening sometime, when you needed it most … let me know!

artMRKT San Francisco: Big Art on Small Canvases

We went to 620 7^th Street at Brannan in San Francisco to see this year’s Contemporary and Modern art fair, artMRKT SF.  There is one more day, Sunday, May 20, 2012, and the fair will be open from noon to 6:00 p.m.  If you are anywhere within walking, Bart-ing or driving distance, please try to go.  This was really a revelation to me.

My husband and I assumed that we would be less than fully welcome, as we are not buying Joan Mitchell, Frank Stella, or the newer artists (one price I heard, for a single work by a living artist, was $32,500).  But everyone -- the guards, the executive chef, the dealers, the gallery assistants -- everyone was entirely at home with the art being shown and was sweet and helpful and REALLY into the art.  They were as happy as we were to see it, and every time they gestured to a painting to explain it, they looked at it as if they were seeing it again for the first time.

I have begun working smaller (more about that will come in a post sometime soon!) so I was particularly interested in finding small work with a big impact…. I should stress that there are many LARGE works as well.

I should begin with art we had already seen in one of the galleries in downtown San Francisco.  The Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, from 49 Geary Street, presented a painting by Kenjilo Nanao, called “Cobalt Night,” from 1964. Here is my photograph:

We remembered this painting from before; it’s a sky, or a landscape, or simply a study in contrasts, but even though it is relatively small (32” x 30”), its intense BLUE surrounds the viewer, as if it were room-sized. 

I sometimes wonder how it would be possible to take the work of someone like Francis Bacon, learn from it, and create new work.  Jack Fischer Gallery (also from 49 Geary Street) showed paintings by Rogelio Manzo. He has, I think, pulled in closer to his subjects, who are, like Bacon’s, posed against plain backgrounds, but Manzo’s faces aren’t exactly distorted or tortured in the same way. There are worlds in these faces, which is really a feat, considering that these works, too, are roughly 18” x 24”-- here are my photos:

The paintings have a transparency to them, as well, as they are made of oil on resin, so there is a kind of sheen.

Three small studies by Tom Wesselman stood out in the booth from the Forum Gallery (730 Fifth Avenue, New York).  The one I found myself drawn to was called “Study for Drop Out,” from 1981:

It is so simple, and it’s maybe 5” x 7” – the small shapes and colors fit together to transform breasts, thighs and hair from a body into layers of carefully-carved rock cliffs.   It’s a new way of seeing the human body.

Modernism, Inc., (685 Market Street in San Francisco) had three works by the architect Le Corbusier, which were all gorgeous.  I had never seen any drawings by him before; these were ink, gouache and collaged newspaper or water, ink and graphite.  The small painting below, “Etude pour la Sculpture,” is from 1940:

It doesn’t seem 70 years old to me.  It seems fresh and new.  The colors hold from across the room.  The dealer here was very sweet, and gave me a Le Corbusier poster because I couldn’t seem to leave the booth.

The one really big painting (that I have to add in here!) that I liked was by John Di Paolo, roughly 48” square, oil and enamel, called “Accelerator,” and it was done in 2012. His gallery is Dolby Chadwick (210 Post Street in SF). Here is my photograph followed by a detail:

This was really two paintings, in a way, a full-color work and then patches of whitish or ivory paint applied thickly over sections; it is a fusion of Gerhard Richter (the thick application in great palette-knife layers) and Willem de Kooning (the evidence of the hand in many, many brushstrokes).  Di Paolo pulls in a lot of light here.

My husband pulled me into the display of works from the Jerald Melberg Gallery (625 South Sharon Amity Road, Charlotte, North Carolina) where two walls were filled with Motherwells, from his work with James Joyce’s Ulysses and from a continuation of that fascination, a series called “The Irish Suite.” Here are three photos I took; these are all small works, maybe about the size of a hand, but, again, it was wonderful to see the simple power here:

My favorite discovery, though, is an artist who shows with the Boltax Gallery (21 North Ferry Road, Shelter Island, New York); his name is Steven Corsano.  He has drawn a series of 10 works on brown paper; again, very simple, very small, but quite a bit of emotion is packed into his small paintings. Some are neutral in color, others have added bright shapes, some have script, others typed words. These three images are from that series, courtesy of the Boltax Gallery:

The gallery has generously offered one of these for sale by auction, to benefit the Verge Center for the Arts (details on the auction online at www.art-MRKT.com).  

Go, if you can, or visit the galleries yourselves ... this is only a small (small!) portion of what you can see!

"The Hole Between Art and Life": Robert Rauschenberg Unpacked

A very young Robert Rauschenberg is perched high on a ladder in front of a cathedral-style arched window, answering questions (undated video, link posted at http://judys-journal.blogspot.com).  We hardly hear the interviewer.  Rauschenberg seems totally relaxed, and really interested in describing his painterly approaches as accurately as possible.

Let’s begin with his combine painting, “Rebus” (from 1955, now at MOMA; photo below by Suzanne DeChillo for The New York Times):

Rauschenberg began with “a ground of newspapers … the funnies …. I had an already-going surface, so there wouldn’t be a beginning to the picture.”  Now this is a very interesting admission.  The blank canvas can be daunting, so I really like the idea of starting, as Rauschenberg says, “an already-going surface.” (Rauschenberg is usually pretty articulate, so the awkward structure of his phrase, “already-going,” seems particularly telling –- it was deeply felt). Robert Motherwell had said that he started paintings by making some kind of painted “gesture” on the canvas, and then, he said, he would have a problem to solve.  Rauschenberg did not identify with Abstract Expressionists like Motherwell, but he says, in this video, that what he did take away from their “passion” was the fact that “they let their brushstrokes show.”  But he also, tellingly, begins with a “gesture.”  For Motherwell it was a sweeping brushstroke, for Rauschenberg it was “the funnies,” but the need for a prompt is the same.  We all need to start somewhere.

After he confirms that “there wouldn’t be a beginning to the picture,” because the funny papers had given him a starting point, he says this very strange thing:  “And so it [would] all just be additive …. It doesn’t matter what’s inside.”  I see what he means about the idea of “additive,” that, given the newspaper ground, he just starts adding more collage or paint or inks or wood.  But then what does he mean by “It doesn’t matter what’s inside”?  “Inside” of what?  He doesn’t mean inside his own mind (because that does matter) or inside his plan for a painting (because there isn’t one).  I think he means that it doesn’t matter what the bottom layer consists of, because it is “inside” the finished combine.  It may peek through, but it is merely the starting point, and it is the accumulation of stages that is important.

Rauschenberg continues, “it’s like when it stops because you’re dealing with an object, what it can make you think of how it could continue.  You begin with the possibilities of the materials and then you let them do what they can do.”  Again, the language is rolling out and he’s not policing it. 

I am going to take some liberties here to try and see what he is really saying.  Rauschenberg certainly never re-presented any objects in his work. He collaged photographs of a Titian nude, or a rocket, or a street scene, but he never described an object on a canvas with his own hand.  What he explains to us, here, is why.  The flow of working “stops” for him when he thinks about “dealing with an object” on its own.  If he were, say, to try and work on a single “object,” the way Manet has with his 1882 painting, “Flowers in a Crystal Vase”:

… it would all stop.  The initial gesture, the idea of adding elements to the combine or painting, the flow of work would all be compromised, because of the necessity of getting the vase and the water and the petals just so.  And so there can’t be a hand-painted, technically-perfect, light-and-shadows-following-the-curve object for him.  When you land on an object, it lands you. 

And I know exactly what he means (assuming this is what he means).  When I was painting my odalisque series, I was so worried about getting the outlines, getting the form, getting the whiteness down right, as here, with “RIVER: Anonymous Odalisque Reclines with Pillows” (3’ x 3’):

And I did love these paintings, but somehow the need to paint them stopped.  I thought of them as exercises in freeing the odalisques, seeing them outside in a new context, a beach, a riverbank.  But somehow they weren’t similarly freeing for me.  And then my son said (not unkindly, but trying to help me see why it wasn’t working for me anymore) “Well, there you are. A woman stuck on wood.”  And then I got it.  That’s exactly right.  The object “stops” the artist in his or her tracks.  And that’s what Rauschenberg is saying. 

We can’t, any of us, anymore, draw a vase filled with flowers, the object re-pictured in its precise entirety on canvas.  We can’t make the flowers out of wax and armatures.  But you can nail a flower to 2 x 4.  Early on in the video, Rauschenberg gives us what may be his most important piece of advice:  “You have to work in the hole between life and art,” he says, because “you can’t make either.” 

"Seven Days in the Art World," and One Day at the Hess Art Museum

There is no date.  Some people say it was the 1860’s.  It could have started in the Renaissance.  Perhaps it began in Venice, or maybe later, in Paris or New York.

Art got loose.  It found a hole in the fence.  And it wouldn’t -- anymore -- be judged by how gently the artist draped painted lace falling over a hand, or the shadow thrown past a vase, or those columns receding in perfect order, diminishing to a horizon line.

And as everybody began to chase after Art, and put it back in some kind of order, two things happened.  A bad thing, but also a couple of good things.

The bad thing is that auction houses, blue-chip galleries, and art fairs are now the arbiters of artistic “worth.”  Art is only valuable when someone buys it. And what makes people pay more for one painting rather than another?  The artist’s text: the lengthy bio, the MFA, the awards, the “buzz.”  The written lists and hype now trump the actual image (see posts here from January 20, 25, 31 and February 8, 2012). 

So, continuing with that bad thing that happened: I just read Seven Days in the Art World.  It isn’t new -- Sarah Thornton’s research was done in 2004-2007 -- but she was allowed into all the back rooms the rest of us can’t find. And I suspect that not very much has changed since the book was published. Here are a few examples of what Thornton found.  As she sits in on a critique at CalArts, Thornton says the students say that using words like “creative,” “beautiful,” “sublime,” and “masterpiece” are all “embarrassing,” so these terms are not allowed.  No “value judgments,” they say (65).  But if not here, where?

Thronton interviews the finalists for the Turner Prize of 2006, a very small world, with overlapping text. One artist, Tomma Abts, who eventually won the prize, tells Thornton during the process that “I have been part of the London art world for eleven years …. There are 4 artists nominated [for this prize] every year. I always know at least one.”  Both Abts and another of the four finalists, Phil Collins [not the drummer], were awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award, both showed at the Istanbul Biennial and both showed at the Wong Gallery in New York.  The Turner Prize is such a major award that betting shops give odds on the winner.  And yet, it seems the choices, year after year, don’t range very far afield.  Thornton also writes a chapter on her visit to the offices of Artforum, where she talks to the editors and to one of their contributors, Tom McDonough, an Associate professor of Art History at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  McDonough says that critics “reward work not because they think it is the most important work being made … but because it’s a little corner that they can own” (170).  It’s not even really necessary to comment on this, is it?

Thornton watches the preparation for a 2004 auction at Christie’s and then sits in on the auction.  The interviews in her auction-house chapter seem more moderated,  the stated opinions more circumspect, but, still, the manipulation of the art market becomes clear.  One of the people Thornton talks to, Josh Baer, says that “without auctions, the art world wouldn’t have the financial value it has.  They give the illusion of liquidity …. If people thought they couldn’t resell … many wouldn’t buy a thing” (26-7).  The sales placed in an order according to what will sell and raise the level of excitement, as a staff member confirms: “we lay out a sale commercially. If we laid it out art-historically -- chronologically or thematically – it would probably bomb.  The first ten lots have to go well …. At around Lot Twelve or Thirteen, we’d better be entering a serious price point” (27).   The auction seems more and more orchestrated, the crowd worked in hushed tones.  An art consultant says that “People want to become part of the lifestyle …. To collect contemporary art is to buy a ticket into a club of passionate people who meet in extraordinary places, look at art together, and go to parties. It is extremely appealing” (34).  Thornton ends the chapter with this discouraging observation: “Even if the people here tonight were initially lured into the auction room by a love of art, they find themselves participating in a spectacle where the dollar value of the work has virtually slaughtered its other meanings” (39).

So that’s the bad thing.  So, now that art cannot be judged by chiaroscuro, or perspective, or established models of how to paint velvet, or a chalice, or the perfectly-proportioned body, is there a good thing that comes of this freedom?

A good thing: freedom.  Robert Motherwell said that the Abstract Expressionist artists thought that, since no-one cared what they did, they could do -- anything. 

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? How do you not care, as an artist, that the art world is so insane, and that no-one cares what you do?  

“Work engenders work,” Georgia O’Keeffe said, so that’s one good thing an artist can do: work, work in freedom.  Work, and not care how many or how few people see it or buy it. You don’t want your art to be like the art in the student critique, where no-one can say that it is “beautiful.”  You don’t want a critic to seize upon your work and award you a prize just because she has backed you into ”her” corner.  You don’t want your art to be a piece of a box-tour “lifestyle,” just another liquid possession.  Just keep working.  Maybe learn to play the accordion or knit or box, too.  

Another good thing that can come of this wide-open field is the ability to see art in open studio weekends, in cafés, in galleries, and … wineries.  We went to Napa and, up a residential and then increasingly twisty and fragrant road, we found the Hess Winery and Museum.  And they are not kidding.  It is a small, perfect museum.

We were directed up a stairway, carefully tucked with lots of glass and steel inside a massive stone building.  The art on display, we were told, is about 20% of Hess’s collection; he has other museums in South Africa and Argentina and another is planned for Australia.  We stopped along some drawings and paintings by John Connell, an artist born in 1940 who lives in Maine. The painting below, “For Yr Little Autumnals,” is from 1987. It isn’t actually in the gallery, but it is typical of the painted work by Connell:

Connell blends words, sometimes the title of the piece, and roughly-inked and painted figures or abstract shapes, on paper. The paintings and drawings were filled with an apparently spontaneous energy. My favorite title was “Pumpkin with Breath Knocked Out.”  Connell says the idea of “Wabi” is “my aesthetics, sensibility and inclination” and he quotes Jen No Rikyu: “Beauty concealed under a wretched surface” (Hess Art Collection catalogue, p. 82).  Alongside some of the drawings were small statues of Buddhas, like these, taking on the character of sandcastles:

And then there are more works lining the landing and we turn into the first room and there are huge paintings by Theodoros Stamos and Robert Motherwell, and then, continuing on, Frank Stella, Per Kirkeby, Anselm Kiefer.  We are already overwhelmed.  Among the Motherwells is one I had never seen. It looks like a combination of a Rothko and a Mondrian, with a purple stripe left, red blocks of color upper and lower right, and grey and black stripes in between.  Totally uncharacteristic of Motherwell … but then, next to it, as if for reassurance, is an “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 160.”  Then we came to a room filled with 3 types of works by Andy Goldsworthy: “Surface Tension” from 1993, “Earth and Snow” from 1995, and “Rock Pools” from 2000.  I don’t expect to see Goldsworthy indoors.  This is one of the best installations I have ever seen, by anybody, anywhere. Here is a photograph by Paul Kirchner from the catalogue (spread over 2 pages):

The rocks on the floor are real rocks that have been placed in a kiln and transformed.  The hanging at the end of the room is “horse chestnut leaf stalks connected with hawthorn thorns” and it’s an amazing, delicate structure.  But then we arrive at a wall of Francis Bacon paintings: a triptych, a “Study of Pope Innocent X (1965)” and maybe the most perfect Bacon ever,  “Study for a Man Talking” from 1981:

The forms behind the figure are crisp, the shredded receipts at the man’s feet sufficiently mysterious, the suit blocked loosely in, with all the wear and tear of life etched into it.  The face is coming forward and receding, moving and blurred, flushed and graying.  And the catalogue gives us a single quote from bacon: “One wants to do this thing of just walking along the edge of the precipice.”  And the painting does just that.

There is also, by the way, a roomful of Rauschenbergs, really fine, and some work by George Baselitz.  There was another discovery for us, Frank Gertsch, a Swiss artist, both figurative and abstract, wood cuts and a piece made with “mineral pigment with Damar varnish used as a binder.”

I tried to find out how it was that Donald Hess found all these works of art, because each work represents its maker accurately and each one astonishes.  I never did find it.  Hess is to be congratulated for throwing the doors open. 

Art got loose. And these two good things -- making art, no matter what, and seeing art, no matter where – can, if we let them, more than balance out the bad things in the current art-as-commodity world.

Gertrude Stein, Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko and Larry Rivers: The "Real" Work

“An audience never does prove to you that you are you”

                                          from “Identity A Poem,” summer 1935, Gertrude Stein

In her wonderful Gertrude Stein Reader, Ulla Dydo offers corrected and annotated Stein texts.  In her introduction to this small “play,” called “Identity A Poem,” Dydo notes that Stein is very tempted by “’audience writing,’” because she is thinking too much about what an audience would want. This was a state of mind that Stein’s new post-Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas  life (and American book tour) had given her.  Fame paralyzed Stein’s best writing. She knew that, and was trying to keep herself focused on what she called the “human mind,” which, Dydo explains, “is free of time, memory, identity, and free of the human need for applause” (p. 588).  The line above is a little reminder from Stein to … herself.

We all need these little reminders.  Stein’s audience wanted more of the stories about Matisse and Picasso and life in Paris and … but she wanted to return to writing the works that are still, after all these years, resistant and very, very Modern. And Stein still, even after she became famous, had to pay to publish that work herself. Alice B. Toklas continued to publish (the “resistant” texts) after Stein’s death.

It was heroic, really, all of it.  But Stein had gotten to a place, fairly early on (I think it was with Tender Buttons, myself) where she knew what she wanted to write. 

How does one do that? How does a person discover the way? I think you have to just keep looking until you find it.  You have to accept, along the way, that maybe you never will truly find your own style, the style so obvious and wonderful that you can stay with it forever, the way Stein did, molding and adjusting and not minding (mostly) if the audience can’t hear the rhythms the way you do.

Is the discovery interior? Perhaps we just need solitude, time to ourselves, time to work hard. The painter Agnes Martin’s writings call for this kind of solitude, and they can seem so authoritative.  And, yet, her authoritative voice only arrived after multiple failures. Consider this, an early “New Mexican Mountain Landscape” by Martin:

Martin wrote that “I used to paint mountains here in New Mexico and I thought my mountains looked like ant hills.”  (And she was right!).  But she continued to try:  “I saw the plain driving out of New Mexico and I thought the plain had it ….  [Now,] when I draw horizontals/ you see this big plane and you have certain feelings like/ you’re expanding over the plane” (“The Untroubled Mind”).  Martin turned a “plain” into a “plane.” The sheer simplicity of her lines and rectangles overwhelmed the realistic landscapes and won.  She writes “Defeated you will stand at the door of your house to welcome the unknown, putting behind you all that is known” (“On the Perfection Underlying Life”).   She takes a ruler and a pencil and begins -- but only once she has seen the full painting in her mind.  Here is a painting -- with more color than usual – by Martin, called “Stars”:

I think I also read somewhere that Martin tried to destroy all her early work.  But I am glad that she didn’t get every last piece.  We need to know, the rest of us, that she didn’t always know what she was doing.  Martin is not alone in her radical change of style; look at Mark Rothko’s early piece, “Number 26, 1947”:

Now, I really like this painting, actually; it is a perfectly credible AbEx accomplishment.  I wonder what it was that drove Rothko on until he found the layered blocks of color. Here, “Number 14, 1960” (www.sfmoma.org):

I don’t have any of Rothko’s writings that explain this shift. How did he know that the earlier works were not enough?  Was Rothko wanting to distinguish himself from the other AbEx painters? Or was it that he felt something inside of him was not getting expressed?  I know that he was intense, that he felt the work he finally arrived at was not meant to be “abstract” but, instead, tragic, filled with emotion. But I would like to know the ways the work unfolded to its end.  

The third painter whose changed work interests me is Larry Rivers.  Here is “Studio Interior” from 1948:

I think it’s clear why Rivers had to keep working through this style. It seems both Matissean and Van Gogh-esque (if that is even possible).  It has no air. The painting is stilted, false, and begs for a really long, tough conversation with the artist.  Here’s a later work, a “true” Rivers, with AbEx brush strokes and superimposed figures and Pop references, “Matisse and the Model”:

What a relief that must have been.  Maybe Agnes Martin said it best: “I thought that I was big and the work was small. It is not possible to go on that way.”

And maybe that’s what each of them saw: the work was too “small.”  I wonder, you know, I wonder about this searching for the perfect artistic creation.  It’s about the perfect piece of art, the one that you know is it. It’s the same search that we all have for the landscape that seems like “home.”  In the end, it really isn’t about audience, I think; it may be more about Stein’s idea of the “human mind.”  It’s one’s own realizations, restlessness, a longing for the art to seem “real.”  It doesn’t matter if we live in relative solitude, or become part of a wider artistic movement; we just have to be happy with the art we make. What about you? Have you decided on the “forever” work?

"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.”

Alberto Burri's "Grande Cretto": On "Extended Wings"

"Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings."
                          from "Sunday Morning," by Wallace Stevens

"To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything."
                          Ernest Becker

I was reading a passionate review of the show "The Indiscipline of Painting," in an article called "Disciplined and Polished or Burn, Burri, Burn!" by John Bunker (read it at www.abstractcritical.com, 10 February 2012).  Bunker suggests that, all too often, the way contemporary abstract artists paint and the way we write about abstraction is "too rarified, too polished, too conceptual" and he insists that painting should be about "engagement with the materiality of paint or any kind of matter without recourse to obvious mimesis."  Too often, painters copy one another, copy their thoughts, copy without feeling. Bunker goes on to say that he is "interested in abstract art as an expression of human agency operating in the cracks and fissures of an image-saturated consumer society."  And he points out that the works of the artist Alberto Burri (1915-1995) are the works that put "abstraction back into direct relationship with life lived." We need this, Bunker says, and I agree completely. Painting should wake the viewer up and feel entirely part of lived life.  Bunker concludes by saying that Burri's retrospective [at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London] has "the advantage of channeling the power and potential of 'dark matter.'"

I had seen Burri's "Sacking and Red" and thought it in the same inventive, process-centered mode as the art of Robert Rauschenberg or Antoni Tapies.  Burri was part of a movement called "Art Informel," where process, not the finished work, was the point. But it wasn't until I read John Bunker's article and began thinking about it that I realized that I had already seen Burri's most powerful work of art.

My husband and I were driving through the Belice Valley in Northwestern Sicily. The countryside was beautiful, dramatic, with some agriculture, some goats and sheep, and very few people.  The houses were simple, stone with red-tile roofs.  But we began to see some unsettling vistas: deserted houses, towns where there were no people, no windows, and only the movement of a few flocks of birds and wandering dogs:

We stopped at the next populated cafe and asked.  "Oh, yes," an old woman told us, "the Belice Valley earthquake. 1968."  We went back out, stunned.  The hardest-hit places were Poggio Reale, Salaparuta, and Gibellina, all still there.  But they were so quiet; everyone had left and, worse,  no-one had ever come back.  I took another photograph:

And, soon after, we rounded a corner and saw this, and I began to take more pictures:

We drove up to the site. This is Alberto Burri's major work, called "Grande Cretto," created in the 1980's.  He kept the debris of the town of Gibellina, moved it into the even square blocks where houses had once stood, keeping the streets clear. He then covered all the destroyed houses with concrete:

You can walk through the streets, looking back at two or three once-grand houses in ruins up on the hill.  Below is the village, now the "Grande Cretto," with my husband in the corner of the first photo to give you an idea of the scale of this project:

It is a memorial, but one that has its own life. This was a more astonishing way to "see" the dead village than scattered ruins would have been.  This is what John Bunker meant, I think, by "direct relationship to life lived."

I see it as a combination of the beauty of Stevens's conclusion to "Sunday Morning" and the underlying monster in Ernest Becker's words above.  I think that powerful art addresses both beauty and the "rumble of terror."

The Artist Draws, Talking to Himself: Wallace Stevens, Ingres, Degas, Picasso ... and Us

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.

                        --from “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
                        by Wallace Stevens

I have been reading Wallace Stevens’s poems and some critical essays about his work.  One writer, Milton J. Bates, researched Stevens’s early letters to the woman who would become his wife, Elsie (“Stevens in Love: The Woman Won, The Woman Lost,” in ELH, Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring 1981).  In these letters, Stevens creates personages for the two of them in love; they are in costume or in imaginary landscapes, but, always, they are together. Here is an excerpt from one of his letters to Elsie, from about 1909, where he pictures them in a garden by a fountain (possibly somewhere in Europe, where neither of them had travelled):

The wind has fallen. The moon has risen. We are where we have never been, listening to what we have never heard. We are in a dark place listening – contentedly, to – well, nightingales – why not? ….  And can’t you possibly close your eyes and, by imagination, feel that it is perfectly real – the dark circle of poplars, with the round moon among them, the air moving, the water falling …

Elsie was his first audience, and the letters an early experiment, but later on, Bates says, Elsie turned away, because “the writing of poetry might have qualified in Elsie’s eyes as metaphysical adultery.”  She felt betrayed as he began to publish; this was her husband, these were her poems.  But poets need readers. Think of the stanza quoted above, where Stevens wrote “We make a dwelling in the evening air.”  The poet takes the stuff of the natural world, “the same light … the evening air,” and creates an imagined “dwelling” within it through “the central mind.”   The “we” must include all of us; as Bates says, “no audience, no inspiration.”  In the end, Stevens’s life work would not be love poetry, but rather a philosophical exploration of seeing and being in the world.  And he needed to find a way of speaking beyond the letters and he needed an audience beyond Elsie.

Another critic, Michel Benamou, wrote about Stevens’s  Cubist influences (“Wallace Stevens: Some Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” in Comparative Literature, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1959).  But he goes on, more importantly, to say this: “There were two realities for Stevens – the reality of things observed and the reality of things imagined”; the world is “a monster,” but the poem “was the ‘necessary angel’ of reality, and there’s ‘a war that never ends’ between the imagination and the monster of nature.”  Once Elsie had turned away, the poet looked rather inward, confronting “nature” alone.  Stevens begins to find that poetry can pull the monster into its world. Benamou says that when Stevens wrote, in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” that “we seek/ The poem of pure reality …. We seek nothing beyond reality,” he means that “this pure reality is the monster mastered and purified by the imagination” (pp. 58-9).  Stevens puts the imagined conversation into poetic form and we overhear the whole (monologue or dialogue) of the poem.  So, when we enter Stevens’s poetic world, we see both our natural world and the poetic one, and if we are listening, we can enter into the world more completely, we are caught up in it; “nightingales – why not?”  

The final critic I read, the fabulous Marjorie Perloff (in “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” in New Literary History, Vol. 13, No. 3, Spring 1982) says that this world of Stevens is “built upon the central reality of our age, the death of the gods …. in their place it offers the austere satisfactions of a ‘self’ dependent on the pure poetry of the physical world, a ‘self’ whose terrifying lack of belief is turned into a source of freedom.”  Our fear, as we confront what Benamou called the “monster” of reality, can be transformed by “the pure poetry of the physical world.”  Perloff says that, in Stevens’s [mature] poems, “the addressee is always the poet himself.”  He is no longer speaking to Elsie; he is speaking to his own fears, his own observations, and we watch him, turning the everyday objects into poetry, and, says Perloff, he “teaches us how to talk to ourselves.”

We need to talk to ourselves every day as we confront monsters.  So that got me thinking, how do painters talk to themselves?

They draw.  Here are three drawings that can teach us “how to talk to ourselves,” in pencil and charcoal.  The first is by Ingres, “Study of Seated Female Nude,” from 1830.  We are, to quote Stevens’s letter to Elsie, “where we have never been”:

The model looks back out at Ingres, and so, at us, the audience.  Ingres has played with light and shadow, with different types of lines, with idealizing (her perfect hands and face) and with bodily imperfection (her swayed posture, her uneven breasts).  He has lavished attention on a drawing that no-one else might ever see. The drawing is complete in itself: you can almost hear the model breathe. What does this beautiful, calm figure have to do with Stevens and monsters, you ask?  Outside the studio, Paris was not calm.  1830 was the year the King (Charles X, of the House of Bourbon) tightened censorship one day and dissolved parliament the next; in July came the Revolution, the Trois Glorieuses, where the newly-unemployed threw paving-stones and roof tiles and then destroyed all the streetlights. The King abdicated and Louis-Philippe (the House of Orléans) took the throne.  This drawing is, I think, a way for Ingres to settle into himself, to control the chaos through creating its opposite: perfect artistic order. In this year of turmoil, Ingres might well need to talk to himself.  

The next drawing is by Degas, and prepares for a painting of the Bellilli family that he would begin in 1859 (the same year as this sketch) and complete in the next. This pastel drawing is of Degas’s cousin, Giulia Bellilli, and it is now in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection:

There is something about the unfinished character of this sketch that pulls the imagination in; we are “in a dark place listening.” The artist’s presentation of the (probably impatient) girl, her pinafore, and the addition of that blue means that he was lingering, here, longer than he probably needed to; was he talking to himself? Likely, yes; the final painting of the family is Degas’s “monster.”  There was great tension between his aunt and her husband, and, despite the soft blue wall and Gilia’s placement between them, it shows in the final work:

This was painted in Florence. The painting is now exhibited in the Musée d’Orsay, where the website mentions its “climate of oppression” and says that even the little dog at lower right is seeking to “escape” beyond the frame.

Our final sketch is “Seated Nude and Standing Nude,” by Pablo Picasso, from 1906:

For Picasso, this was one of a series of drawings in the notebooks leading up to his “Demoiselles d’Avignon” of 1907.  In the fall of 1905 and winter of 1906, Gertrude Stein had sat for her portrait, and these two nudes have some resemblance to Stein (seated, left) and Picasso’s then-lover, Fernande (standing, right), who sat with them as Picasso painted and read aloud.  In Picasso and His Friends, Fernande would later write that, sometime between the Bateau-Lavoir studio and the one at the Boulevard de Clichy, she and Picasso had taken hashish with Apollinaire and Max Jacob. The poets, Fernande says, were delighted with the sensation, but Picasso, “in a state of nervous hysteria” began to shout “that he had discovered photography, that he wanted to kill himself, that he had nothing left to learn” (translated by Jane Miller, New York: Appleton-Century, p. 134).  He had drawn these two women in a way that no camera could, and still he was afraid.

There is a poem by Stevens, oddly called “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch.”  It was written in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1943, during  World War II, at a time when the Allies were bombing Hamburg and when the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was crushed. It was also a year of personal difficulties for Stevens: his sister had died and he had quarreled with his daughter.  And yet Stevens writes of an odalisque, painted

On her side, reclining on her elbow…

              this apparition….

She floats in the air at the level of

The eye, completely anonymous ….

     She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea

And the idea as thing. She is half who made her….

This arrangement contains the desire of

The artist….One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world

As anything but sculpture.

She is beyond the war, the family quarrels, this painted anonymous “apparition,” and in his concentration on her, half herself, half the artist’s creation, Stevens pulls the world into a tight few lines.  When we do walk outside again, we, like the narrator here, will see that the sand we walk on is “unpainted,” and that the monsters of the world are still there, “anything but sculpture,” and yet we have learned something about being in the world. Stevens concludes the poem with this:

               Good-bye,

Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

The apparition is gone, but the poet is still free to keep speaking to himself (and, if we are lucky, to us).