Dasha Shkurpela

Truth in Painting: Velázquez’ Portraits

There’s a chastened cacophony in the Met’s antechamber, a discord of different languages and voices, indistinct. An orchestra on the second floor is playing, its sound drowning in the human buzz. People meander. People loiter. Texting and taking selfies next to the ten-foot-tall, almost nine ton, 4000-year-old black granite Pharaoh in the lobby. The white cherry blossoms are in the vase right in the middle and in the four alcoves flanking the entrance to the Museum and the Great Stairs across, leading to the second floor. The snow is still covering the ground outside. Will it melt or will the blossoms wilt first?

And here are the seven portraits by Velázquez that I am looking for, hung in the row on wall in a small gallery. Born in Seville in 1599, Diego Velázquez moved to Madrid in his early 20s and died there in 1660. He was the most important painter at the court of Phillip IV. There are two more paintings by Velázquez, Supper at Emmaus and Phillip IV, next to the entrances on the north and south walls, and two Riberas, two Murillos and a still life by a lesser-known artist on the east wall. A string in front of the seven portraits keeps viewers a foot away.

The exhibition is titled Truth in Painting. The phrase is taken from the 1724 Antonio Palomino’s Life of Velázquez: “This portrait (which is half-length and done from life)….received such universal acclaim that in the opinion of all the painters of different nations everything else seemed like painting but this alone like truth.” Which of the seven is this portrait?

Two portraits on each end of the row look like the images of the same man. The first one is painted in the early 1630s, the other – in 1650. Both were thought to be self-portraits, but today scholars question the identity of the sitter and of the artist. In the earlier portrait the man is in his mid-30s, and in the latter he is around 50. The focus and light are profoundly different. It is sharper in the later picture, which is now thought (with some doubt) to be a portrait of Velázquez by Juan Batista del Mazo, his best pupil and son-in-law.

I come to the painting right in the middle, between the maidservant and the cardinal, a portrait of Juan de Pareja. Its energy is different, and I am going to leave it for last, so I can fully focus. I sit down on a bench facing the Cardinal.

Velázquez painted him in 1650, when Camillo Astalli was made the prince of the church and took the name of Cardinal Pamphili. He was in his early 30s. His head is tilted slightly to left upwards, creating a wide angle at his neck with the row of buttons on his scarlet cape running from his chin to the left downwards. His biretta sits on a slant, as if he unwittingly moved his head while lost in his thoughts. I am waiting for him to lean back, to command the frame, but instead I share his instance of precariousness, hesitation and transience. The scarlet dances on his cheeks and nose, and I remember that this color symbolizes a cardinal’s readiness to die for his faith. Is that was he is thinking about? Realizing his now different relationship to life and death?

People keep passing. Taking pictures and selfies. Talking. Barely glancing at the portraits. I move my eyes to the right, to the portrait of Maria Theresa, presumptive heir to the Spanish throne.

Velázquez painted this portrait in the early 1650s, when she was around 14 years old. As she approached marriageable age, the royal offspring of Europe were eager to have her portrait. This picture of her in a wig decorated with butterflies served as a model for assistants to copy from to satisfy the growing demand. Maria Theresa became the queen of France through her marriage to her double first cousin, Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil. Her face is soft, her cheeks are pink. There are both childishness and resignation in her expression, as if like this portrait, she was an object in royal negotiations.

A middle aged man looked at each painting; stopped and embraced them all with his eyes. He sat down onto my bench, his gaze moving along the line of portraits from one to the next, and in reverse, his mouth slight agape. His right leg had a nervous tick, and the bench vibrated as I observed his way of looking. He turned around and examined the full length portrait of Phillip IV in the left opposite corner.

This is Maria Theresa’s father, painted almost 30 years earlier at the age of 19. He was married at the age of 10 and ascended the throne at 16. Philip IV is in all black, almost a silhouette, rather than a body subject to the force of gravity. His gold chain mirrors a curve of his face, running from his left shoulder across the chest to the waist. The transparent collar holds his head immobile.

Old woman with a cane is photographing everything twice with a hefty camera. The large pack of keys hanging on a string around her neck makes noise, her cane clicks each time she takes a step. She pauses for a long a time in front of a portrait of a young girl, Velázquez’ only portrait of a child who was not a member of the royal family.

The girl’s face is gentle, yet determined. Those black eyes have seen some life. Her dark hair drapes around her face softly, yet ominously, as a weighty scroll. Velázquez did not finish her dress; the brushstrokes on the collar are visible. The lines are wavy, surging, rushing.

On the right of the girl is a portrait of a young maidservant, her tanned face and burnt cheeks enveloped in a white kerchief. Her posture is at a barely noticeable diagonal to the left, as if she stopped just for a second for an artist to capture her. Scholars think this painting is a study, because Velázquez’ brushstroke is quick and rough. The maidservant’s coat is sketched with a few strokes. Her face is distant, lost in light, making you want to squint to bring it into focus.

The chubby bespectacled guard, his hands in his pockets, leans onto a wall, looking up. The ceiling in this gallery is divided into 220 squares.

I return to the painting in the middle. Velázquez painted Juan de Pareja in 1650. Pareja is wearing a cape, his right arm folded around himself. The pleats of his cape are precise, labored, defining his posture, his presence, and his bearing. The background in this portrait is varied, there’s a gradation from darkness to light diagonally from top left to right bottom. His complexion is dark – Pareja was of mixed race (Spanish father and Moor mother). The light bounces off his forehead. It is this very portrait that Palomino likened to truth.

What is different about it? The distance is different. The relationship to the frame. It does not keep him in the space beyond, rather it brings him into the arena of mortal bodies. And elderly couple spends some time before Pareja. His posture is straight, erect, and confident. There’s a challenge, an unspoken question in the eyes and in the expression of Juan de Pareja. The artist is looking at his sitter, who in turn observes the artist. The sitter’s eyes aren’t dreamy like the cardinal’s, or turned inward like Maria Theresa’s. He is not an object of painting; there’s a relationship to the artist in his look. The 44-year old Pareja was not just sitting for a portrait. He was Velázquez’ enslaved assistant. That same year that he painted him, Velázquez signed a contract of manumission that liberated Pareja from serfdom four years later (the delay was the usual custom).

Velazquez painted Pareja from life during his two-year sojourn in Rome. He was buying paintings and sculptures for Philip IV, working on a commissioned portrait of Pope Innoncent X and painting princes of the church, including Cardinal Pamphili. He exhibited Pareja’s portrait during the yearly feast of Saint Joseph in the Pantheon, where the painting received universal acclaim as reported by Palomino. It was also Velázquez’ first publicly exhibited work in Rome. A debut with a portrait of the enslaved assistant? What is the truth in this portrait?

I wonder if it is beyond painting, because Velázquez had de Pareja’s life not only in his brush, but in his hands as well. What does an artist paint when working on a portrait of another human being? An artist is acting on his sitter, making him visible, (re)creating him in a painted flesh. Pareja’s wasn’t just a sitter, a subject of a painting. He was a subject, an object in life. Yet there was a relationship between him and the artist on this side of the frame. Imagine him preparing paints for Velazquez and watching him working, observing the artist studying his subjects. Perhaps, the synchronism of subject and object in the artist’s relationship with Pareja both in life and in painting brought the question of what it means to be human into focus, aided by the contrast of painting princely portraits. From an artist’s perspective it takes the same skill of observation to paint a slave and a pope. Perhaps it is the meditation on human nature, overpainting of conventions, seeing another anew and changing his life with a movement of hand, is what makes this portrait more than just a painting. Painting another human being free, giving his sitter the freedom that should be his. Challenging his viewers with another perspective. I wonder if this is the artist’s ultimate gift so few are able or dare to accept.

It’s dark when I go out. The steps are empty. I look at the building. The lights will soon be turned off and the portraits can close their eyes. It must be exhausting to keep looking for hundreds of years.

I come back the following week. The snow is gone. There are pink cherry blossoms and pussy-willow in the vases, a few branches have small green leaves. What is the truth in painting? That we are here only for a short time, so often shocked by its lack once the end is in view? Perhaps this is why on average people spend between 15 and 30 seconds in front of a painting, running away from the objects that will outlive them, averting their eyes from the faces of those no longer alive.

Back on the bench, in front of Juan de Pareja. A man with dreadlocks blocks my view, but not for long. A young woman tactfully stays on the side respecting my focused look. I imagine Pareja looking at his own portrait. How did he see himself through his master’s eyes? Was it difficult to face one’s own dimensions seen by another, and perhaps not by oneself? By another to whom you belonged? What was the moment like when the master and the servant looked at the portrait of the latter as two independent men? Once free in 1654, Pareja remained Velázquez’s assistant, and after the artist’s death in 1660, he became an assistant to Del Mazo, Velázquez’ son-in-law who succeeded him as a portrait painter to Philip IV. Subsequently, in a very unusual turn for his times, Juan de Pareja established his own career as an artist and acquired a reputation as a portraitist.

A wall panel quoted Reynolds: “What we are all attempting to do with labor, Velázquez does at once.” But what is that “what” of Reynolds? Technique? Do we give ourselves only seconds when face to face with paintings, because it is ourselves that we do not want to face? I wonder if this is what Velazquez did at once – faced himself in his sitters. So each portrait is also a container of new knowledge of self. The fluidity of Velázquez’ brushstroke is often noted. And I think that his touch is his feeling of himself through another. This is the mastery of expression to be able to see unseen in another through yourself and make it visible.

As I exit the Museum I am bit by the cold wind. I close my eyes to the blinding sun. It’s too much after the subdued sheen inside. I imagine Velázquez and Juan de Pareja in the blazing light of Rome, looking into each other’s eyes as they travel and work together, and then as they confront each other as artist and model in the midst of their interlaced lives. The studio functions as a virtual frame uniting them in one space, leaving everything else temporarily out. As does Museum for me. Perhaps that is what this portrait reflects – the act of looking at and seeing another and recognizing oneself in another, so difficult for a human to attain and to sustain, reminding us to face each other and ourselves while there’s still time, even if in the blinding light.

Morandi's Bottles

Pause the film, please. I want to see the painting. Oh, it is a Morandi still life from 1941.

Go on, play the movie.

• “Listen, I see that you have a wonderful [magnifico] Morandi.”
• “Oh, yes, he’s my favorite painter. The objects are flooded with a wistful light and yet painted with such a detachment, precision, rigor that makes them almost tangible. You can say that it’s an art where nothing is coincidental.”

We are in the 1950s. In Rome. At a party at Steiner’s. Morandi’s painting brings Marcello (Mastroianni) and Steiner (Alan Cluny) closer together in a respite from glamour, glitz and triviality. The scene is from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Morandi was 70 when the film came out in 1960. He never saw it. He did not go to the movies or concerts because he was hard of hearing.

A Morandi show at David Zwirner in New York last year. Twenty two works. Fifteen paintings from late 1940s to early 1960s. Average size between thirteen and seventeen inches. I stood entranced. The small paintings filled the room with restrained glow. I was no longer a viewer, but a partaker brought to a halt, my eyes lulled to focus on modest paintings of ordinary bottles and bowls. The world retreated. The space in the room merged with the space within the paintings’ frames. Aware of my body, of my breath, I became one of the objects, alive and stilled. 

Whenever I see Morandi’s works, I find my own sauntering from painting to painting distracting; the rustle of the catalogue pages disruptive. I wish I could find a way to take in everything at once in the stillness of my being. I want to be at rest, in my body, clinging with my eyes to his works, witnessing how his painted objects gently, barely noticeably, yet incessantly change, as do I. What is it about these unassuming, seemingly monochrome paintings of outwardly mundane objects looking at which gives me an instant of such peace and lets me perceive a piece of an instant?

Morandi found his objects in second-hand stores and flea markets. Occasionally he “prepared” his finds - he painted his bottles, sometimes from inside filling them with paint, sometimes brushing them on the outside. He made his own objects from tin. And he collected dust, letting it accumulate and shroud his containers.

Born in 1890 in Bologna, the oldest of five children, Morandi spent his 74 years in his native town. He lived on via Fondazza since 1909 with his three unmarried sisters and their mother until her death. The family moved from a second floor apartment to the ground floor in the 1930s. Morandi’s room was small (eleven square yards), chosen for quality of light, rather than size or convenience of access. He painted and slept in the same room.  He had to pass through one of his sisters’ bedrooms to get to his space. Knock, pause, wait. John Rewald, an American scholar of Impressionism, visited Morandi in 1964, shortly before the artist’s death:

No skylight, no vast expanses, an ordinary room in a middle class apartment lit by two ordinary windows. But the rest was extraordinary; on the floor, on shelves, on a table, everywhere, boxes, bottles, vases. All kinds of containers in all kinds of shapes. They cluttered all available space, except for two simple easels…They must have been there for a long time; on the surfaces of the shelves or tables, as well as on the flat tops of boxes, cans or similar receptacles, there was a thick layer of dust. It was a dense, gray, velvety dust, like a soft coat of felt, its color and texture seemingly providing the unifying element for these tall boxes and deep bowls, old pitchers and coffee pots, quaint vases and tin boxes. It was a dust that was not the result of negligence and untidiness but of patience, a witness to complete peace. In the stillness of his humble retreat from the excitement of an agitated world, these everyday objects led their own, still life. Here, in this small room….nothing was ever changed, nothing moved, except when the master carefully lifted a few of these unassuming objects to reassemble them in yet another order.

Janet Abramovicz, a painter and a scholar who visited Morandi in the 1950s, saw only one window overlooking the back garden and a single light source.

Morandi spent his summers in Grizzana, a small village about 24 miles southeast of Bologna, painting landscapes. He was usually accompanied by at least one of his sisters. Morandi refrained from interviews for most of his life, wanting peace and quiet. In 1962 he kindly declined an exhibition invitation from Siegen saying

I am obliged to renounce this honor for a number of reasons, the main one being the fact that I have rejected other invitations that have been so insistently sent to me from various other parts of Europe, including Germany, asking me to organise exhibitions of my work. You will understand, dear Dottore, what an embarrassing situation I would find myself in were I to accept the invitation of the city of Siegen, having turned down all others…

In a rare interview, Morandi mentioned he was afraid of words and that was why he painted. Once he became internationally famous, he complained of the distraction caused by visitors he had to receive and correspondence he had to answer.

After finishing his training in 1913 Morandi taught drawing at the Bologna public schools until 1930 and then, until 1956, etching at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, a traditional institution established in the 16^th century by the Carracci brothers, where Morandi studied in his youth. The quiet artist was quite involved in the Bolognese and Italian art scenes, widely exhibiting and participating in all Venice Biennale planning committees from 1947 to 1962. While in his twenties, Morandi travelled extensively throughout Italy to see art. Yet he left his native country only three times, after he retired in 1956, visiting Switzerland on all three occasions.

Looking at his work I forget that his seemingly serene and uneventful life unfurled as the First World War gave way to Mussolini and the Second World War. Morandi was drafted into the army during WWI, but was dismissed because of his health. He was ill for the next few years. In the 1930s Morandi, as many Italian artists, was a member of the Fascists’ printmakers union. Even though his art was not in line with Fascist aesthetics, he participated in more than 30 exhibitions, in Italy and abroad. Morandi claimed to not have read news or followed politics. In the late 1930s as the anti-Semitic laws were introduced, a few of Morandi’s Jewish friends lost their jobs overnight or could no longer publish or exhibit. He was briefly imprisoned by Fascists in 1943 because of his connections with friends involved in the Resistance. In 1943 Bologna, a city with the oldest university in Europe and the heart of Italian rail connections, was heavily bombed. Almost half of the city buildings were destroyed. Bologna was under Nazi control until the end of the 1944, and it was not possible to travel in and out of the city. In Grizzana, a home to local Partisans, the civilian population suffered cruel executions.

Morandi concentrated on his work during the war. In the years between 1940 and 1943 he painted 78 landscapes and 122 still lifes. And only three landscapes and seven still lives in 1944, and just twelve paintings the following year. He wrote from Grizzana in 1944:

I am working very little….Every day the airplanes are overhead, and when they are not bombing us, they shoot at each other. You can understand that with that going on it’s impossible to think about painting. I no longer have that quiet that is so indispensable for my work.

Morandi’s 1941 landscape at the Zwirner is a little out of focus. I am not sure where I am looking from – straight across the distance, down from above, or up from below. The harder I stare the blurrier it gets. It escapes me. I am no longer confident in my vision. I turn to Natalia Ginzburg to envision Morandi’s world:

Some things are incurable, and though years go by, we never recover… Anyone who has seen houses collapse knows all too well how fragile vases of flowers, paintings and white walls really are. He knows all too well what a house is made of. A house is made of bricks and mortar and it can crumble. A house is nothing very solid. It can crumble one moment to the next. Behind the serene vases of flowers, behind the teapots, the rugs and the waxed floors, is the other, the true face of the house, the horrible face of the crumpled house…

Looking at Morandi’s paintings, I sense fragility, vulnerability, uncertainty, transience, and also peace. And I wonder how much I am not seeing, so removed from Morandi’s time, his world and his experiences. How do I accept the fallibility of my vision, of human vision? And the limits of language. I feel the anguish of my inability to see fully. I question my ability to express what I am seeing. I suffer Morandi’s fear of words in this instant. And I experience what I think might be an artist’s fear of seeing and not-seeing, and of looking at what one has managed to see.

Morandi worked almost every day, in the afternoon as he needed natural light for painting. He drew into the night. In the 1950s Morandi estimated that he produced around 600 paintings, and guessed he was creating about four or five paintings a year as he was having trouble with his eyesight. In fact, the artist completed around 600 paintings in the 37 years between 1910 and 1947, and over 772 in 16 years between 1948 and 1964, the year he died, which was around 48 paintings a year. Only 30 paintings were of the human figure, seven of which were self-portraits, the rest were mostly still lifes and some landscapes that the artist painted during his summers in Grizzana. Morandi also produced over 100 etchings and around 250 watercolors. Imagine arranging all those bottles and containers into still lifes and painting them hundreds of times. What such intensity of looking is like? The unremitting gaze. The concentration. As if Morandi re-created those objects with and through his look.

There were over 40 Morandis on view at the Center for Italian Modern Art earlier this year. Most works were from the 1930s. The layers of paint in his paintings from this decade create almost a shield, a cartilaginous shell. Layers of doubt? Of effort? Forms intrude into space, and space pushes back. The brushstroke is on the heavier side, tentative. The painted objects are in a state of timid collision, as if stumbling in the dark into walls and each other. The edges are wounded.

I ponder how Morandi worked. Observing the bottles and bowls day after day; painting them day after day – contemplating their physical properties and relationships to and with each other. I am re-thinking the intensity of looking as I think of his unremarkable routine practice of painting small still lifes. Intensity suddenly sounds too dramatic. Perhaps, tenacity is more fitting. Leo Steinberg, a great art historian, said that “you can, as an artist, try to say something big about life, or be content to make the stuff in your hands come to life. And this humbler task is greater, for all else merely follows.” What can an artist hope for? Mastery of the profession? Insight? Acceptance of never being able to fully express one’s vision? Or having a simple practice of looking, of making unseen visible in faith and in doubt that it will then be seen by another?

I imagine Morandi handling his objects. Did he leave fingerprints on their dusty shrouds? Each object had a story. Each connected to a memory or to something forgotten. His putting together of a still life, staging his objects, was a creative act in itself. Why did he need his collection of bottles and bowls to think, to observe, to express? Morandi said:

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we can know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

Why did he need objects then? What took place when Morandi kept his eyes on his objects, moving his eyes from one to another, perhaps pausing, looking at his canvas, and looking back at his objects? How does taking simple objects, placing them together, touching them, observing them, and painting them facilitate one’s understanding of painting? of life? of passage of time?

Have these objects functioned as our own body does in meditation? Just as our breath is an anchor for us in our bodies, Morandi’s objects operated as anchors for his gaze through which he explored vision. The daily practice of observing one’s own looking, of paying attention to constant permutation, and of studying the nature of seeing. “Nothing is more alien to me than an art which sets out to serve other purposes than those implied in the work of art in itself,” he said. Morandi did not paint objects arranged in space – he painted the ever changing relationships between form and space as observed within the provisional and tentative environment of both his studio and his still lifes. Matter let him touch the intangible.

Umberto Eco appreciated Morandi’s method of variation:

What is the elementary mechanism of innovation and development? Variation. Musical variation works on infinitesimal and allows the melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic discourse to unfold by feigning repetition, the marking of time.”

And variation can go on forever.  The number of possible combinations of his simple, destructible, and fragile objects was infinite. The two smalls still lifes from 1952 in Zwirner show look very similar. I wondered if they were done from the same setting of objects. The longer I looked, the clearer I saw how different their worlds were. The light was sharper in the square one, while the objects in the horizontal painting were enveloped in a subdued haze. The postures of objects were different, as if they were the same people in two photographs; they have adjusted their poses, and something took place in the time in between the two shots. The group is little further in the square painting.  Suddenly, I glimpsed the painted objects alive; previously unnoticed ongoing change has become visible. My instant of peace and a piece of an instant. Are those bottles and bowls full of time, holding it in a way they hold emptiness? Morandi found a way to touch eternity through the ephemeral.

Perhaps, Morandi felt as Cezanne did, one of his favorite painters, that “expressing what exists is an endless task.” Might looking be an endless task as well? I have time then. To return, to revisit, and to reexamine. To observe the change in myself by retracing my gaze. I wonder if Morandi’s paintings function for me the way his objects might have functioned for him. Familiar, yet never the same. Deflecting the gaze so the artist, and now beholder, could also observe the change in their own vision.

I think of dusk, the dimness of Morandi’s earlier paintings, and the lightness, luminosity of his later work. In the earlier works the frame does not embrace the objects; some “leave” the canvas. In his later work – they are a center of gravity, holding the frame in place. The shadows are often no less solid than objects. The form and space wash over each other in a caress. The brushstroke is alive, flowing. The canvas surface is visible underneath the thin, translucent layer of paint.

But it is the late watercolors that put me out of breath. As if at high altitude. The air is thinner. There are no layers of paint in watercolors. I feel my heart beat. I am slightly disoriented. What am I seeing? What is form and what is space? Where’s an object and where’s a shadow? If earlier works bare the piercing observation, these watercolors are like glances. Apparitions. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. I wonder if this is looking transformed into seeing. Morandi’s gesture is neither confident nor tentative; rather, I feel, it is final in its careful awareness of revealing something important, something precious about the way we see. I wonder if what I take as a restraint is actually a maximum that can be shown and seen. Looking at his paintings I followed the edges of Morandi’s objects and his brushstroke with my eyes. In front of these watercolors I feel my eyes stop moving. I absorb these works in the stillness of my vision. Are those watercolors the artist’s last glimpses of this world?  Last breaths?

“We know that all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it.” I contemplate the ultimately un-seeable and unknowable world. I wonder about the nature of painting, the limits of my sight mirrored in picture frames. And through this shortcoming in vision I encounter Morandi’s art works not as static inanimate objects, but as possibilities to follow another’s eye, to see the previously unseen, and to change one’s own vision. Several years before he died Morandi wrote  that“…since each time we begin, we always think we’ve understood, that we have all the answers, but we’re always starting over again from the beginning.” And I wonder if I can learn to see so each of my acts of looking functions as a blank canvas.

Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim

Up the spiral again I go. And before I make my first turn, I look up. I see the glass dome, twelve parts. The image of a Gothic rose window looms in my mind. In the 1940s, in a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, Hilla Rebay, the eccentric curator of the Guggenheim collection, described her vision of the future museum as ‘a temple of spirit.’ Only this cathedral is turned on its side, its glass not stained, letting the light in from the very summit; its void disturbed, giving rise to a reeling wave which in its tumult finds a new equilibrium, bringing the spatial maelstrom to everlasting restrained gyre. I turn on my axis, the spiral rotates, taking concave dip, its gravity pulling me in up the ramp.

I take the bowed rise to the first level, and enter the room on the side. It holds twelve square paintings from 1979, The Islands I - XII, 72 inches each. The paintings’ ground is cooler and lighter than the yellowish wall. At first glance, the canvases seem similar, with subtle variance. But as I go from one to the next, I realize how different they are; the same graphite lines create a new space in each work and establish a distinct rhythm.  Each one takes its time to emerge in front of my eyes. They slow down my viewing. I become aware of my head turning, of my eyes’ curvilinear paths, of my breath rising and falling as I mill around and depart each island.

I exit the alcove and start at the beginning. Or so I think. The earliest paintings in the show date from the mid-1950s. Martin was born in 1912 in Canada. She started painting when she was 30. In one of the short films screened in the museum library, Martin mentions that until she turned 44, she burned her paintings in a bonfire at the end of each year. Very few of her paintings from the 1940s, her first New Mexico sojourn, survive, and none are included in this show of over 100 works. I lean unto the railing with my back, imagining the flames, the melting paint, the chemical smell. Wasn’t it like destroying a part of yourself? shedding an old skin? clearing a new space? rebirth in fire? Perhaps all of it. And I wonder if we can ever fully comprehend the artist’s creative process, which is never about creating a piece, but realizing a vision. I imagine such call is like a force of nature that conceives and breaks down for creation to continue. I catch the sound of water flowing in the fountain right below me. And I remember the Russian saying “water grinds the stone” wondering if an artist’s eye functions similarly. Gliding over countless times, faceting the stone of the visible world so the unseen dimensions will come alight.

The spiral’s bands cut my views, slicing each level, cropping paintings, truncating viewers. As I take the next turn, I glance back down at the ramp: The spiral is reversed. Across the void, people walking down. I look into the room with the Islands from the balcony created by the second level of spiral. From above, these paintings look much more in focus. Gone is the soft misty transition from one to the next that I felt at level with them, as if one would slowly release me from its atmosphere, while another gently envelop into its own nebula. From this distance and downward angle, each work’s lines are as if incised, the modulations of color are fine and clear cut. There’s a precision, rigor and single-mindedness about this body of work that makes me think of a perfect cluster in which each body is dependent on each, and the gravity of each is mutually offset, resulting in a gently vibrating, restrained balance.

I watch Martin painting on film. The two short films, screened in the library, were recorded by the filmmaker Mary Lance in 2001 and 2002, just before the artist’s death in 2004. One captures the artist painting; another is a short interview. Together they last about 11 minutes. At that time of filming, 90-year old Martin lived in the retirement home in Taos, New Mexico, maintaining a small studio nearby. The canvas she is working on is about her height. Her heavy body moves along it slowly, painting yellow bands with thin water-consistency paint in a bowl she holds in her hand. I feel I witness a mystery. There’s hardly a space between the artist’s body and her canvas, her brush presses it, diluted paint runs down, and only barely audible sounds of human body at work are present. She is on the screen in front of us, and yet she is somewhere else, where there’s only her and her canvas. Watching her at work for these several minutes, I realize she is present in her work with her body, as if her painting and her shared a skin.

During the filmed interview Martin says that she does not think when she paints, but keeps her mind empty. Stilled mind, concentration, absence of wandering thoughts?  I can sense it in the movement of her filmed body at work. Somehow there are no gestures or motions or deliberations; rather a single restrained drive, a slow protracted impulse of her whole being imprinting her presence in the world on an empty canvas. Martin mentions that her works come to her as visions, the size of postage stamps, and then she actualizes them in her paintings and drawings. Is the emptiness a space for a vision to find its form, its body?

As I watch and listen, and later read her work, I feel the distance between her work and her words. Martin wrote a lot, and I wonder what her words meant for her and her practice. I am afraid that the scope and function of her words is often reduced when they are put to work to explain her art or are interpreted literally, rather than symbolically, with the recognition that the artist’s internal world is out of our reach. One of the wall labels reads that”…perhaps informed by her interest in Taoism, she [Martin] believed that the purest freedom and thus greatest happiness resided in the mind of a newborn child, an innocent mind unconditioned by learning and socialization…” If only we truly came here as tabula rasa.

Back to the artist’s words:

You must discover the art work that you like and realize the response that you make to it. You must especially know the response that you make to your own work. It is in this way that you discover your direction and the truth about yourself. If you do not discover your response to your own work you miss the reward. You must look at the work and know how it makes you feel.

If you are not an artist you can make discoveries about yourself by knowing your response to work that you like.

I wonder if writing for Martin was about discovering her response and not just to her work in its sense of a materialized instance of vision, but to her practice of painting, drawing, looking and in this way being in the world as creative instrument herself. It takes me effort to imagine an artist continuously responding to her own practice, and not just her work, because I suppose that process involves a separation from that very practice that is essentially yourself. Watching the film again: The artist’s mellow, yet tenacious, presence in her act of painting with her body. Perhaps in her writing she is searching for her response and for her (re)discovery of the world altered by her own vision. Her writing is not subordinate to or explanatory of her painting.  It is her presence outside her painting, in her internal world unknowable to us.

As I think about her words, I gain in freedom of my looking at her work, observing encounters between it and myself. Approaching it through my body; watching my movement, my mind.  And later, separated, I make my response visible to myself in words. I ask myself if her work to an extent mirrors her practice onto a viewer.

Turn. I come to the slanted railing and look across the void. People are walking up, strolling down. Which direction does the spiral run? As if its spring has unraveled and its perfect twine is now in a state of disarray. I return to the artist’s work. It is early 1960s, and Martin has been living in New York for over 10 years, now moving to the Coenties Slip (today South Street Seaport) neighborhood where many artists lived at the time. I look at small works, around 12 inches on each side, and large 72 inch paintings. The small work is tentative, exploratory, like journal entries. Small grids. Uneven dots carefully arranged in lines. I am curious how Martin worked on these pieces. On the easel? Hunched over them at the table? These works I cannot counter with my full body. I come close, I bend forward, I peer in, I want to hold, to touch them. Perhaps, I feel the vulnerability of the artist’s intimacy with those small paintings that she handled with her hands, possibly turning around, up and down, hovering over them, enveloping them with her body.

The large grids are different. I don’t see the grid-work unless I come close, and at that instance I feel a gentle push back. I oscillate, stepping back, nearing, and retreating again. As if there’s a soft coil between me and the work. I think of discipline, focus, routine, and determination. The artist in front of the six foot canvas making a fine grid with graphite. I imagine having to keep your hand steady on the somewhat uneven canvas surface. Your whole body would feel every tiny bump, every coarse patch. Step away – the grid recedes. Come close – the order emerges. The fluctuation of distance and proximity in the touch embodied in the graphite line, in the look alternating between close-up and whole, and in the body moving back and forth in the making and in the observing. The elusive structure, the fugitive consistency, and an instance of harmony as I center myself in the flux of my looking and being. I bend over the railing to peek at the grid of the dome above.

I come to the large painting from 1963, titled Friendship. It is a grid, incised on the gold leaf. I like this painting the least; I pause trying to discover it. I think of a shield, sarcophagus. If the graphite grids emit light, this work absorbs it. Its beaten, distressed gold is not about luminosity, but patina. To me, it is too much of an object, overdetermined in its breathless gilt, a precious trophy, rather than a footprint of a quest that beckons to wonder, to question, to doubt, and to go on.

Just before and right after I look at the small works on paper, around 10 inches, of grids and lines, sketches or postscripts, perhaps both. I like these unassuming, modest explorations, with line venturing into new space, and then finding refuge in the familiar grid. It is not graphite on canvas, but ink and watercolor on paper; the question is not of steadiness in friction, but of balance and (dis)continuity of flow. Each piece is a query.

Caesura. Martin stopped painting in 1967, living New York. After a year and a half on the road in the United States and Canada, she moved back to New Mexico and built a house around Cuba living by herself till the end of her life. And I leave it at that, not trying to imagine anything, not wondering, not interpreting. I sit down, feeling her absence, suspending my step, my mind. I feel the distance, the retreat from the world.

I get up, come to the edge of the tier, following the spiral with my eyes. Scraps of conversations... separate words...  ’art stores’.... ’are you crazy’….yet I am unable to hear, to tune in. I feel like I have a seashell at my ear, only the sound is not of waves, but of human cacophony. Where am I? My body experiencing the tug of two universes, of spiral and grid. One summons me forward, another asking me to stop, even if for a moment, to linger, to come to a standstill, however brief.  I wish for silence. And then I wonder if Martin had one. She is said to have been hearing voices (diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1960s). Perhaps, her universe was full of sound and echo of the world she left behind.

I continue and come to a group of 30 screen prints from 1973, On a Clear Day. Martin’s return to making work. They are small and simple, essentially variations on a grid. I think of coordinates, of charting one’s place in the world once again. And in the paintings and small drawings from the mid and late-1970s that follow, in their airy blue, transparent pink, in their wide and narrow bands, vertical and horizontal, I feel my eyes rest; bathe in a subdued light, in fresh tears. I think of rainbow, of reflections in water, of seeing something familiar in a different light. I look across the void. From a distance the grids from the 1960s now look murky; I experience their weight.

Turn.  I spend some time in front of the austere grey paintings from 1989 and 1990. Martin called them her “black paintings.” They are the darkest of her grey pieces, the most opaque of all her work. I obey their gravity – they hold me close for a while. As I follow each band, each line from left to right and in reverse, shifting between different tones of grey and widths of bands and lines, I detect the magnetic-like force that compelled me to a halt and is making me realize the solidity of my body, the weight of my movements and gestures, as if shifting the layers of air as I surrender to and resist the works’ pull. There’s a feeling of readjustment in this experience, as if my body is finding itself at a different elevation or in a different environment needing to become aware of itself once again, to feel the new ground and to make it familiar.

Just one more level till the end of the spiral. In the mid-1990s Martin’s delicate blue and blushing pink became crisper and more ethereal. In 1993 the artist moved into a retirement home in Taos.  Around that time, her large square canvases went down from 72 to 60 inches to allow for easier handling. I stop in front of the 60 inch painting from 2001, titled Gratitude. Two narrow yellow stripes at the top and bottom edges of canvas, a white and a gauzy red two horizontal stripes cutting the canvas in half, its  areas above and below washed in a light thinned-down green. I think of a shifting, of balancing. I feel my body gently, barely noticeably vacillating from left to right and back, my eyes holding onto stripes running in the middle of painting. I think of my body breathing, living its bodily life so often not seen or felt by me. I watch my breath and notice the air touching my skin, passing through my body, as I become aware of my feet being firmly on the ground, yet my body moving in space.

Lost in that sensation, I find myself in front of two untitled works from 2003 and 2004, the years just before Martin’s death in 2004. There’s a split: two black triangles in the center in one, two black squares positioned diagonally in top left and bottom right in the second. I think of passage, of dichotomy, of being here and elsewhere.  These paintings accelerate time, an instant feels long, they push me to keep going, but I sit down and take in the seeming tautness of these works’ stretch, the tension of their frames. As if the forms want to break free from the power that holds them within the limits of canvas.

And here it is, the very last painting at the very end of the spiral, my favorite in the show. Three bands of thin, fluid grey wash on white ground; the middle band is twice as wide as the two at the top and the bottom. The edges are not perfect. The wash is not uniform. I think of doubt, of uncertainty, of hesitation. But not in its sense of lack of faith or confidence, rather as a new vision which puts in question everything previously seen.

I am under the dome. It is not a rose window, far away, dazzling with color and light. It is a massive structure, layers of grid-iron, frosted glass panes. It is not soaring, but bearing the void, holding it in place, setting the spiral in reverse motion, so it can bounce back from the ground in its continuous tussle with gravity. I put my hand on top of the railing as I walk down, feeling the curve of the spiral, orbiting the void, my eyes drifting over paintings. The dome recedes. I am back on the ground, turning around myself trying to sync in with the spiral’s rotation. I exit and look at the building from outside. I think of an artist being in her body in this world. And I wonder if with time her body becomes an instrument attuned to the relationships in nature and universe, which an artist then embodies in her work.

Self-Portrait (Meditation on Late Rembrandt)

Self-Portrait, 1658, Oil on Canvas, 133.7 x 103.8 cm, (52 5/8 x 40 7/8 in) , The Frick Collection

Will you come with me to the Frick Collection? I want to look at Rembrandt’s self-portrait again. I like to stand in front of it and take it in with my body. I like to sit on the bench at the opposite wall and look at it; look at it as people stop by it, pass by it; look at it hoping that the painted artist will gesture at me; look at it waiting for his gaze to meet mine. Has he been looking at his beholders strolling by him at the Frick, day after day, for years? What a change from a solitary studio, where the only person the self-portrait had to confront was his own creator. I recall this self-portrait: majestic, tilted slightly forward, with arms calmly spread (suddenly I don’t remember if his arms are holding something or are just on the knees, even though I saw it many times), in a costume of steadily shimmering gold. I think of the knotted, composed hands and the eyes that see something inaccessible from my side of the frame.

I don’t trust my memory, and here I am in front of the self-portrait again. They moved the painting further to the left, and it is harder to see it from the bench where I like to sit. I come up close. It is softer than I remembered it, mistier, more subdued. Oh, he is holding a stick. Scholars disagree which one: a maulstick or a walking stick. That day I see the artist a little wearier than I recall, as if he has to endure us looking at him. We are moving, stopping, pointing, listening to audio guides; talking. And the artist in his self-portrait in his calm presence, observing and at the same time removed, in his thoughts.

I imagine Rembrandt in his studio, working on his self-portrait. Just himself and himself and himself; in the flesh, in the mirror, on the canvas. Looking at his self-portrait now, three and a half centuries later, I feel another person's distance, another’s quest to recreate oneself in another matter, in a different form. I wonder what he is considering, which aspect of creativity in its sense of inquiring into life (and death) via a medium that seems utterly random, profoundly subjective, and finite. In this very instance I am in awe that over a few hundred years nothing happened to this self-portrait; that it did not rot somewhere, got burned, or destroyed by water.

I look closely at the painting. I notice its uneven surface: in a way it is like skin, the varnish, the brushstrokes form a unique pattern; the delicate cracks - lines on the painting's palm. What are his eyes seeing? They are on the brink of the shade, same distance from the top of his head as the brim of his hat… two black points of detached focus. The frontal pose, traditionally reserved for royalty or divinity. Two arms, painting smock (or fur-trimmed mantle?) embracing the light, holding it, gathering it. What is this presence?

The late Kenneth Clark called this self-portrait the “philosopher-king.” Rembrandt painted it in 1658, the very year he had to sell his collection having declared bankruptcy two years before, yet it is, as Clark beautifully described it, “the embodiment of philosophical calm.[1]” But, why, after all, shouldn’t one feel absolute calmness in the midst of a financial crisis? It is certainly possible to have a relationship with and to life, in which upheaval means a profound rotation. Self-portraits go far beyond exterior biographical reality. I wonder if self-portrait as genre is about putting a finger on the connection between internal and external, following the Möbius strip of the continuous passage. Perhaps, this is a portrait of letting go of the world in one’s previous understanding of it. The king leaving his throne and possessions to continue his journey unencumbered by what is no longer needed.

Imagine having done dozens of self-portraits. Think of being in a room surrounded by canvases from which you are looking at yourself across time. What is a self-portrait? I imagine seeing myself on paper or canvas in front of myself. Brush in hand I am touching my painted face. Is it me? I see myself looking at myself. I am not meeting my own eyes. What am I seeing (and not seeing) at the moment of committing myself to canvas?  Do I recognize myself now? Who am I? The brush connects my living flesh with the painted one. Where am I? I see myself forming in front of my eyes. Is this me? A part of me. A slice of me. A glance of me. Who am I? Imagine having done dozens of self-portraits. Think of being in a room surrounded by canvases from which you are looking at yourself across time.

I savor T.J. Clark’s breathtaking review of the exhibition at the National Gallery in London last year Rembrandt: The Late Works[2]. In his essay Clark considers both at Rembrandt’s portraits of others and his self-portraits. He tries to unlock the mystery of the latter looking back 20 years, at his own earlier view of self-portraiture:

Let us assume – this was my previous starting point – that what we are looking at in a self-portrait is the image a painter saw in a mirror. It seems to follow that the kind of attention we are shown is special, not to say exotic: the look of someone looking at himself looking.  The trouble is that we can only decide where to put an end to that final phrase by pure fiat. It seems designed to go on for ever:

The look of someone looking at himself looking at the look he has when it is a matter of looking not just at anything, at something else, but back to the place from which one is looking…. Would that do better? Is that what self-portraiture is about? Simple questions in this area seem to open onto infinite dialectical regress. And isn’t one of the things we admire in the best of the genre precisely the effort to represent this dialectical vertigo? Isn’t that what Rembrandt is doing?

I wonder. I think Rembrandt is doing much more.  Self-portraiture is not limited to looking at oneself looking. Rembrandt completed almost 100 portraits over his life time. Picture what is it like to look at yourself so many times, to re-create yourself so many times, and to be confronted by these re-creations so many times. I imagine that by the time you work on your 40^th self-portrait, your brush knows the way your eyebrow bends, your chin curves, your wrinkles entangle your eyes. Your brush carries the memory of your face as time imprints it; it remembers the changes that have taken place. But besides, you have a sense of yourself from inside. I found the expression of this kind of knowing in Sándor Márai’s “Portraits of a Marriage”, as heroine describes accidentally running into her former husband:

He was calm, his eyes closed, and I could see his face through my tears, the way women see the baby’s face when the child is still inside them. You don’t need eyes to see what is yours.[3]

You don’t need eyes to see what is yours. And what is yours, I wonder?

Suddenly, Picasso’s thought that “painting is a blind’s man profession” comes to my mind. I always thought he was talking about an artist’s intention to paint not what was seen, but what was unseen, thus making it visible. But now, I wonder if this something that is unseen is known; known intrinsically, viscerally, from within. Perhaps, Picasso was also trying to say that it was the artist’s hand that had eyes. And what if I take Picasso literally? Can painting be a blind’s man profession? Is it possible to re-create another human being (and their world) without experiencing it physically – seeing with the eyes or by intermediary of touch?

Imagine painting yourself. We can never see our own face as it is, just its reflection. But we can touch it (and we do). We wash it, we dry it, we scratch the head, we hold the chin, and we rub the temples. What is the relationship between touch and vision? Psychologist Richard Gregory describes a 52 year old man (Bradford) blind from birth who regained his sight through surgery. And it was only his knowledge acquired through touch during his blindness that allowed him to interpret what he saw correctly, a phenomenon known as cross-modal transfer from touch to vision. For instance, he could judge the distances between scattered chairs in the ward (familiar from touch), but not from the hospital windows to the ground. Gregory mentions that perspective meant nothing to the man’s visual system. He goes on to say that:

 ….vision was generally thought to be separate from other senses, and is still mainly studied in isolation. Yet Bradford showed that exploratory touch – as well no doubt as taste, sound and other sensory experiences – gives richness and meaning to retinal images.[4]

Imagine yourself painting yourself. Seeing only a reflection of your own face, your own head, which you not only touch from outside, but live in, inhabit from inside. How do I differentiate outside from inside? Where am I when my hand is touching my face? And it is not only my own touch, but my own being in myself that finds its way into self-portrait. I am taken by Rembrandt’s two late self-portraits from the early 1660s with the tools of his trade in his hand, in the Louvre and in the Kenwood House.

 

Self-Portrait, 1665 / 1669, Oil on Canvas, 114.3 cm × 94 cm (45 in × 37 in), Kenwood House

Self-Portrait at an Easel, 1660, Oil on Canvas, 110.9 x 90.6 cm (43.7 x 35.7 in), Musée du Louvre

I look into the artist’s eyes, but they are still. I don’t feel the act of active looking, of inquiring, of questioning. I see a look of pause, of recognizing, of knowing, of accepting. It is tranquil; it is calm and somewhat distant. The artist is looking in more than he is looking out. Perhaps, the brushes in his hands, as an intermediary of continuous touch both of one’s face and of one’s canvas, make note of his knowledge of himself that has come from beyond looking.

***

I go back in time and look at the artist’s self-portraits chronologically. I pause at the 1648 etching self-portrait, self-portrait of the artist in studio clothes, drawing at a window.

Self-Portrait, 1948, Etching / Drypoint, 16 x 13 cm (6.3 x 5.1 cm), Rijksmuseum

Clark saw in it “an indication of how little we know about Rembrandt’s life that we have no idea what happened to him in the late 1640s to change his attitude from self-satisfaction to anxious self-questioning.[5]” Clark notes that “in abandoning his romantic disguise he has also abandoned all romantic illusions about his face, and although he was to dress himself up again, he never again shows us the plump, confident visage of the 1640s.”[6] This is an incisive observation. An artist’s face, of which he only sees a reflection, yet by which his fellow humans recognize him, reveals the most inner of changes. This begs the question of a self-portrait in relation to change, and what it means if an artist engages in painting him or herself in a sustained manner over a lifetime. Ten years later, at the time of the “philosopher-king”, even though we do know something about the artist’s life at this time, it is not enough for us to understand the seemingly discordant arrival of his otherworldly composure. The 1658 signals another major turning-point in Rembrandt’s attitude to himself and the world. Look at his eyes in the self-portraits of the last ten years. Where is he looking? Mirror? Canvas? Is he thinking? His detached look makes one want to lightly touch him on the shoulder asking “where are you?” Where is he? The artist is not looking into the outside world. To me, it is a state of having arrived, but not somewhere glorious or full of promises of a bright future, but to seeing himself and life as they are, unadorned, beset with pain and finite. It is a realization that makes the vertical wrinkles between the eyebrows sharper and gathers the lines around his eyes in tighter ripples. His body recedes into darkness. The intensity of his gaze has turned inward.

Will you come with me to the Met? I want to look at Rembrandt’s 1660 self-portrait. I also want to see him looking at other people, looking outward. Here I am in front of the self-portrait.

Self-Portrait, 1660, Oil on Canvas, 80.3 x 67.3 cm (31 5/8 x 26 1/2 in), The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The look is detached; the eyes are two black rounds with no spark; the artist is thinking deeply. The two lightest spots are on the forehead and the tip of the nose. The forehead is wrinkled, the furrows are of concentration. The vertical crease between the eyebrows repeats the vertical folds of his coat. I come close. The brush strokes are perceptible, definite, and physical. The contact of his body with the darkness is soft. The figure has weight; it is subject to gravity; and it is comfortable in darkness. His portraits of others are sharper in touch, yet nowhere do I feel that I am facing another human being: I know I am looking at a portrait. T.J. Clark has beautifully forged this feeling in words: “Rembrandt and I – the look was our term of agreement – were face to face.”[7] Only I think the look is our term of the disagreement. We are looking largely in the opposite directions in the case of the artist’s late self-portraits. In his self-portraits he is looking beyond looking; he is face to face with himself.

Imagine Rembrandt as a viewer of his own self-portraits. What it is like to face yourself in this way? You are looking at an image of yourself that you have created through more than visual means. It is an image truly made by the human hand, your very own, on the linen cloth. There’s no miracle. Perhaps, self-portrait is the most human of all in painting. Think of painting portraits of others; it is as if one is looking across the universe. There’s an unsurmountable distance between an artist and his subject. When painting yourself, you touch the painted you directly, you push the canvas with your brush as you apply layers and layers of paint, imprinting your image with your hands. I savored T.J. Clark’s observation that “perhaps blue is excluded from Rembrandt’s worldview because he knew that the other great colourists, who were always in his sights, had made it so indelibly the marker of heaven on earth. And in Rembrandt there’s no heaven.”[8] I wonder if Rembrandt’s darkness is also a darkness of knowledge - of aloneness, impermanence, evanescence, uncertainty, mortality, love, and of limits of knowledge itself. What is it like to see yourself emerge from this darkness?

Look at Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1661, as the Apostle Paul.

Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul, 1661, Oil on Canvas, 91 x 77 cm (35.8 x 30.3 in), Rijksmuseum

I examine the artist’s face: his brows are raised as if he is surprised, his forehead is wrinkled, his eyes have a look of him thinking, considering something, the look is directed more in than out, though it acknowledges having seen something, something that made his eyebrows go up in arches. I think of self-examination, of conversion, of transformation from one state to its opposite that St. Paul embodies. I wonder if this might be one of the reasons that impelled Rembrandt to put this guise on. If this might be so, from which and to what opposite did the artist go? Is it the turn in the direction of the artist’s gaze? Or is it recognition of the profound transformational character of the self-portrait as such? The continuous, unremitting tête-à- tête between vision and touch, between apperception and knowing, between man and portrait. Each look, each brushstroke is a change. How does self-portrait alter his creator?

***

The view of the self-portrait from a beholder’s perspective is a painting of a likeness of its author, a representation of its creator. But for an artist, I think, the act and the process of painting a self-portrait is in a way another body; a  body not only as a noun, but as a verb; not only as enduring entity, but also as unceasing activity, ongoing change; not only as subject of painting, but also as instrument of creating. Can you find the line separating one from the other?  For an artist, the self-portrait (in its unity of object and process) is as close as one can get to the core of the profession – one is artist, his own subject, his own instrument, his act of creation, and his own viewer. What is it like to be in this place? It is difficult to imagine. What is interior and what is exterior? Where am I in the world? What do I see and from where? What happens when you become part of your profession; when it is no longer something you do, but something you are? What happens when you regain your distance?

Look at the 1663 laughing self-portrait in Cologne, self-portrait as Zeuxis.

Self-Portrait, c. 1668, Oil on Canvas, 82.5 x 65 cm (32.5 x 25.6 in), Wallraf Richartz Museum

Two legends about Zeuxis, a Greek painter, came down to us via Pliny. Zeuxis was able to paint a bunch of grapes so that the birds tried to nibble on it as if it were real. Yet, he lost the painting contest to another painter Parrhasius, extending the hand to pull the curtain to see the latter’s painting, not realizing that the curtain was it. Pliny continued that “with a modesty that did him honour he yielded up the prize, saying that whereas he had deceived birds Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.”[9] What is this story about? What does it tell us about the meaning of the profession? Is it about the border separating art and life? How does an artist look at a painting of another artist? Is it about the limits of looking? The intention of painting? The second legend tells of Zeuxis working on a painting of Helen. He “held an inspection of maidens…. paraded naked and chose five, for the purpose of reproducing in the picture the most admirable points in the form of each.”[10]

Rembrandt did not strive for the ideal. He recorded his own every wrinkle. He asked the question of meaning not through trompe l’oeil, but by painting himself. He brought forth the paradox of the profession, which is rooted in vision, yet at its highest levels arrives at the very limits of looking and seeing. For Rembrandt, touch did not ascertain the limits of vision (and painting) as it did for Zeuxis. The meeting point of painting and life lay in and with the artist himself. The relationship between the two wasn’t (and isn’t) of confusion or rivalry, rather the artist’s touch reached beyond seeing and made unseen visible. There can be no mix-up of a man with his self-portrait, yet I wonder again what the relationship is between the two.

Zeuxis is said to have died laughing. He was laughing at his own painting of an old woman imagining her to be alive[11]. Why is Rembrandt laughing? Might he be laughing at Zeuxis who seems to have thought that painting is to perfectly mimic visible reality? Or at his own old face looking at him from the canvas? Or as Kenneth Clark wonders:

He is laughing and, as so often with Rembrandt, we are dumbfounded. Hendrickje was dead; Titus had married and left him. He was in the worst money trouble of his life, and actually had to break open his daughter Cornelia’s money-box in order to pay for a meal. Rembrandt had no reason to laugh. Of course one could compose a little piece of literature on the subject of tragic laughter; but I doubt if this would really interpret his intention. I am more inclined to think that he looked back, as elderly artists often do, at some of his early successes, and thought he would see if he could still achieve that vivacity of expression that first brought him fame.[12]

Perhaps. I think the real question is what does Rembrandt’s laughing has to do with his looking. In his self-portrait(s) Rembrandt is at a place in his profession where painted images are directly related to the primary vehicles of the profession; one of which is looking and seeing, or not-seeing, or making visible.  Laughter actually changes the way we see. The usual visual state of a human being is a binocular rivalry, because each eye sends slightly different picture to each side of the brain, and the brain has to switch awareness between the two. The most well-known demonstration of this phenomenon in action is the Necker cube that can be seen as a transparent solid or as an empty grid. But the switching stops during laughter, a theory being that in state of amusement the material in both halves of the brain merges more than usual[13].

The Necker Cube

Laughter erases duality? Which is the duality that Rembrandt is beyond, laughing? Painting and Life? Self-portrait and Artist? Life and Death? Does self-portrait change just as artist? Does it become different when the artist is no longer? It’s unlikely that Rembrandt was aware of the connection between laughter and vision; he might have known it viscerally. In his self-portrait, artist knows the least separation between him and his painting, because he is his own subject, process, and instrument. I think this is as close as one can bring painting and life (apart from laughing along). One of the theories of humor is  a resolution of an incongruity or a conflict.[14] I wonder if for an artist self-portrait is it: an image of oneself that emerges from the unseen. I think Rembrandt’s laughing self-portrait is the result of the life-long sustained engagement with the very core of profession: creation of an image that is profoundly about the nature of vision, one’s own ability to see, and the limits of both. This is the conundrum of the profession in flesh.

Every time I see any of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, I see them differently. But now I wonder if it is not only me who (I hope) changes, but self-portraits as well. Next time I go to look at them, I will go laughing. I will remember that this is as close as painting and life can come.

 

[1] Clark, Kenneth, An Introduction to Rembrandt, Harper & Row, 1978, p. 28

[2] Clark, T.J., “Word of Faces,” London Review of Books, December 4, 2014, p.16

[3] Márai, Sándor, Portraits of a Marriage, Alfred A. Knofp, 2011, p. 284

[4] Gregory, Robert, “The blind leading the sighted,” Nature, Vol.430, August 2004. I also feel compelled to mention Esref Armagan, a blind from birth figurative painter, able to represent the world which he never saw.

[5] Clark, Kenneth, p. 23. H. Perry Chapman gives an account of the artist’s life in her Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits. A Study  in Seventeenth-Century Identity enriching the understanding of his life and work, yet deepening the enigma of his self-portraits.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Clark, T.J., p. 16

[8] Ibid., p. 18

[9] Pliny, Natural History, Book XXXV, 61-67, Harvard University Press, 1999

[10] Ibid.

[11] Mentioned in Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 4, chapter 17; cited in Elizabeth Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth and Mimesis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007, P. 155

[12] Clark, Kenneth, pp. 35-37

[13] Carter, Rita, The Human Brain, Dorling Kindersley 2009, p. 87 [see about more scholarly source]

[14] Restak, Richard, “Laughter and the Brain,” The American Scholar – get the date. Weems, Scott, HA! The Science of When We Laugh and Why, Basic Books, 2014, pp. xii-iii, xv, 47.

Matisse's Cut-Outs at MOMA

I am watching the footage of Matisse at work on his cut-outs. The artist cuts in the air. He holds and turns the sheet of paper, which stops being stock, and becomes skin, a living membrane. The form is alive, moving and twisting as it comes into the world. I am mesmerized by the physicality of Matisse's act of cutting, of rotating the paper, of turning the scissors, of the two struggling with one another.

The film is part of the exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs on view at MOMA through February 10, 2015. The show, a collaboration with Tate Modern, came to New York from London, where it could have been seen last Spring and Summer. The most comprehensive exhibition of the cut-outs to date, it comprises almost a hundred, many on loan from public and private collections from around the world; and includes the iconic and newly conserved The Swimming Pool (1952), acquired by MOMA in 1975 and on view for the first time in more than 20 years.  The cut-outs are accompanied by drawings, prints, illustrated books, textiles, and stained glass related to either preparatory work on the cut-outs or their subsequent incarnation in a different medium. The 300-page catalogue reproduces over 70 photographs of the cut-outs in progress in Matisse’s various studios.

I continue to watch the film. Matisse does not cut along drawn lines or in the flat plane, but surely in 3-dimensional space. A young woman helps him with the membrane; her youth, her keen agile movements as if transfer even more life, more vividness to the membrane.  Another woman in a yellow dress tacks the cut-outs to the background paper on the wall. Her bare arms, the material of her flowing dress and the sinuous, alive cut forms are inseparable. The cut-outs are a skin shed; not lifeless - but transforming into another life.

In several episodes the artist cuts in his sunglasses. I think of another movie that I have recently seen, Frederick Wiseman’s The National Gallery. I was captivated by a sequence of the art history classroom: People seated board room style and a teacher talking about Camille Pissaro’s The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897). She passed what looked like black-and-white diagrams of the painting around the table. They were medium-sized sheets of paper (I took them to be slightly larger than A4) with black lines designating main diagonals and shapes of the painting.  As the camera circled the classroom, I noticed that most students were older people, several wearing sunglasses. As I observed the people starting to work with the diagram, I realized most students were blind. Each student had a partner who took their hands and placed them on the diagram, guiding their touch along what must have been palpable lines, shadowing the teacher who described the color and light making Montmartre at Night visible. I found this experience breathtaking; seeing a painting with your touch, sensing really.

I wish I could touch the cut-outs. I want to follow the edges of their shapes. I want to close my eyes and steer my finger along the wavy paper thresholds. Will an occasional (and perhaps not fully adhered) sharp edge cut my finger? Did Matisse (and his assistants) get a few paper cuts? I imagine the contrast of the dull sting with the jubilation of form and color. Perhaps, it is not a contrast, but an accompaniment.

I contemplate the four Blue Nudes (1952). Matisse’s model and assistant Lydia Delectorskaya recalls that the Blue Nudes I, II and III were cut “with mastery. Each on a different day, they had been cut in one line / stroke, with one stroke of the scissor, in 10 minutes or 15 at the maximum.”[i] But look at the Blue Nude IV: charcoal traces, many pieces of paper as if struggling to feel each other. Matisse started working on it first, but finished only after having cut the other three, hence the first became the fourth.

I study the photographs of the nine states of the Blue Nude IV in the catalogue. It is as if a body is trying to find a comfortable pose, not knowing what to do with the right arm, folding the right leg, and finally submitting, putting her arm on her knee, tilting her head forward, taking a breath, stopping. I turn to the opposite page and look again at the final state. Many faded lines enmesh the figure. The blue body is cut and patched. It has seen life and carries a few scars. I feel the pain of the cut and of being human in this work more than in any other cut-out.

I turn the page and look at theBlue Nude I and five pencil studies for it on the opposite page. The pencil line is trying to feel the body, to discover its shape, its curvature, its way of moving, of shifting, and of flowing.  The form runs smoothly, as if a blue liquid flooded the paper in the most natural way. The Nudes II and III are a little tauter. The Second thinking with her head bent forward. The Third brought her head back touching her forehead with her arm as if trying to wrap her mind around something.

In the exhibition catalogue Flavia Frigeri mentions that Matisse could no longer handle the strain of easel painting because of increasing fatigue and weakening eyesight; and after 1948 did not engage with painting in any sustained way[ii]. He started making cut-outs around 1941, after debilitating surgery for abdominal cancer; he was using wheelchair, and gave cut-outs more and more time and space.

I imagine Matisse cutting in the wheelchair, struggling with his own physical limits, and with the help of youth and beauty pinning the fluid bright forms onto the walls. Perhaps, the artist cut the past and current pleasures and pains through a metamorphosis in the body of his opposite. I wonder if these works also register that cutting and looking can transform one another.

Writing about Matisse’s cut-outs few writers fail to mention the artist’s state of health and his supposed feeling of living on borrowed time, hence the unabashed joy of the cut-outs, which I agree is also true.  But I don’t see the bright colors, precise edges and stark forms simply as an expression of such joy perhaps akin to le bonheur de vivre he felt early in the century and recorded in the eponymous painting of 1905-06.  I wonder if facing one’s own finiteness, touching one’s own mortality intensifies the light of the world; and one is able to see its true piercing crispness, its beautiful intensity. In a way, light becomes cutting.  It stings. And cut-outs do not just express this, but give it flesh. I wonder if the visible spectrum becomes more dazzling, and diminishing eyesight might be a synergetic sacrifice of chromatic nuance to vision beyond visibility.

I ask myself if this quality – finding form that not just portrays, but materializes a fundamental stratum of life, of human nature, or of human condition – is what sets truly great art apart. It is when an artist does not just render an idea via his medium, but musters his medium to substantialize idea in a possibility of a medium that corresponds to idea. Just as Rembrandt’s light and darkness take one beyond good and evil, Matisse’s cut dissects life’s pain and pleasure, the continuity of life at large and the finiteness of one’s own.

When excising his cut-outs, Matisse made sketches and drawings before, studying his subject, exploring a form, feeling a shape, but cut right into the paper’s flesh. In the catalogue Samantha Friedman mentions that Matisse related his practice of cutting to the feeling of flying: “the sensation of flight which emanated from me helped me better to adjust my hand when it used the scissors. It’s rather difficult to explain. It’s a kind of linear and graphic equivalence to the sensation of flight.”[iii] I contemplated this statement for a long time. What does the artist mean? A human can only imagine a true sensation of flight or experience it in a dream.

I muse at the cut-outs. The cut-out forms are wandering; they sometimes move from one work to another.  There’s fluidity to their shapes and trajectories. The cut-outs are dis-attached, yet they are attached in more ways than one. They are pinned, like butterflies, then glued. They are locked in with the paper they are pasted onto by way of their negative (or positive, if the artist chose to use the negative of his cut-out). I look at Icarus (1943-44), and I don’t see him either flying or falling, but rather caught in stillness, even if only for an instant. I see the final cut-outs almost in reverse to the original act of cutting out. As if by putting cut-outs in place, the artist was trying to pinpoint the gravitational forces that would hold them together in the two-dimensional world.

When I look at the algae-like forms that lock in with the light paper they are pasted onto, I think of a ying-yang symbol with its perfect balance of two worlds. I see Matisse’s dichotomy as being in search of its point of equilibrium, perhaps in a state of continuous tug-of-war between life and death. I think this is reflected both in the studio practice of composing the cut-outs, and in the contrast between the act of cutting and the final “settled” state.

I appreciated the curators’ question interpreting Matisse’s unceasing reworking of the cut-outs on the walls of his studio:

Can the incessant rearranging in those last years be seen as a means of warding off the most absolute of terminations, that is death?....

The profusion and lack of finish of the cut-outs, then, were not solely the product of wartime, but might be described as the central features of what some call ‘late style’, a set of practices based on the artist’s understanding that one’s working life is rapidly nearing its end.[iv]

In his New York Times review of the exhibition Holland Cotter quotes the famous observation of Edward Said on late style:

Each of us can readily supply evidence of how it is that the late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, unresolved contradiction?

Yet the artist himself felt:

By creating these colored, paper cutouts, it seems to me that I am happily anticipating things to come. I don’t think that I have ever found such balance as I have in creating these paper cut-outs. But I know that it will only be much later that people will realize to what extent, the work I am doing today is in step with the future.[v]

I wonder if the difference between balance and irresolution is felt only outside the rift between life and death.  Perhaps this is what Matisse meant by the sensation of flying in his act of cutting. He was in the ebb and flow of this rift.

In the catalogue Jodi Hauptman asks where the viewer is when encountering The Swimming Pool (1952): “The frieze is above us – and Matisse probably composed it seated – so are we at the bottom of the pool looking up? Above the pool looking down? Treading water alongside the swimmers, watching as their bodies cross in and out of water?”[vi] Hauptman observes that the work “presents a perfect melding of subject and means: cutting through paper is shown to be equivalent to swimming through water.” She considers two earlier wall size works of Matisse, Oceania, the Sky and Oceania, The Sea (both 1946), citing the artist as envisioning a “cosmic space in which I was as unconscious of any walls as a fish in the sea.”[vii] To me, these works mirror two spaces, the air and water, perhaps flying and swimming, splitting the question of “where” in two as well. Where’s the viewer? Where’s the artist? I am not sure if the word ‘where’ is of much help here. I think cut-outs go beyond the space bound by our adverbs aimed to determine location in relation to the beholder. The viewer is in the state of looking. The artist is in the state of being. And the work itself unites these two states.

As the photographs of Matisse’s studios testify, his works evolved over long periods of time.  I think of Picasso’s paintings of his studio from the 1950s and the two different places the studio claimed in each artist’s practice during these years. In Picasso’s case, the studio came into his work afresh. In Matisse’s, the work overtook the studio, and the artist was in both simultaneously. What was it like to live in your work, sleep in your work, and dream in it? I think that cutting as an equivalent to swimming through water is only a case of a larger phenomenon of cutting as equivalent to being in its sense of creative presence here and now. Matisse is here, cutting directly into paper. But then, he is all looking, choosing, shifting, affixing his shapes. And it is the resulting state of found stillness that the viewer witnesses. Where’s (s)he? Can we define perspective from which (s)he catches the state of being, in whatever guise it might take (swimming, algae, or acrobat).  I think the cut-outs register the ultimate non-coincidence of creator and beholder, the paradox of these two states in an artist, and the threshold separating an artist from his (un)finished work.

But what about the two late cut-outs: the Snail (1953) and the Memory of Oceania (1952 – 53)? The forms do not lock with the background or with each other. Their world is shifting. The gravitation is weakening. The cut forms are unraveling, opening a passage somewhere. I sense these two works are about exit, about crossing the rift. They are beyond irresolution or balance. These works seem to defy the stillness and continue to create themselves before the beholder. I think the Snail might be the equilibrium found.

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[i]Hauptman, Jodi, “Bodies and Waves”, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, The Museum of Modern Art, 2014, p. 194

[ii] Frigeri, Flavia, “Chapel Factory”, Ibid.,  p. 156

[iii] Friedman, Samantha, “Avant la Lettre” , Ibid., p. 89; in her essay “Bodies and Waves” Jodi Hauptman cites the same, but slightly differently translated statement. Ibid., p. 201

[iv] “The Studio as Site and Subject”, Ibid., p. 15

[v] Hauptman, Jodi, “Inventing a New Operation”, Ibid., p. 23

[vi] Hauptman, Jodi, “Bodies and Waves”, Ibid., p. 198

[vii] Ibid., p. 201

The Nyugat Generation

Leo Kepler on Hungarian literature @ Fiction Advocate

I imagine that sometimes, in his restless wandering, the mercurial Spirit of literature lingers a little longer in certain places, gracing them with strange intensity that finds flesh in language. This otherworldly urgency can inspire a whole generation of writers. It is as if this task, at this moment, in this particular place, is too much for a single human being to shoulder.

I feel this way about the work of the so-called Nyugat generation of writers and poets that came of age around the turn of the 20th century in Budapest. They were named after the Nyugat (Hungarian for “west” or “Occident”), a progressive literary magazine established in 1908, which published new prose and poetry and provided soil for literary careers to sprout and mature. Most of these writers are still practically unknown outside of Hungary.

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Arab Literature in Europe

Leo Kepler's "Arab Literature in Europe" in Shirkah, Swiss Magazine of Islamic Finance, Economics and Culture, October 2012 issue.

Study, translation and publishing of Arab literature in Europe.

Picasso and Françoise Gilot at Gagosian Gallery

On the one hand I wonder what it was like to have been a 21 year old artist, meet 61 year old Picasso and fall in love with him. I wonder how a weathered artist and man looked at a young talented painter and blossoming young woman who was a self-described tomboy at the time. On the other hand, I am not confounded. Love creates unlikely and irrational connections between people and mercifully and cruelly catches them in the state of the natural partial blindness and knowledge.

 The show is based on a difficult, if not impossible premise. The exhibition of almost 200 works is about the relationship, both contemporaneous and retrospective as he is no longer alive. How do you follow it? It is very hard to thoroughly understand one’s own relationship, let alone the relationships of other people. Can one observe the show with detachment and without trying to make sense? Or is it beyond human not to seek meaning, however limited and flawed?

 The relationship is reflected in the 378 pages of the catalogue somewhat differently than in the exhibition halls. The catalogue includes many more photographs of Gilot and Picasso than the show (over 100). The photographs and the artists’ works are on a similar scale, limited by the sizes of the pages. You glimpse at the moments of their life and lives and you see them in and next to each other’s paintings. Life and art truly concur in this book. The catalogue also includes excerpts from Gilot’s book Life with Picasso which the artist tried to stop from being published. She wrote it when she was in her early forties, and now, in her 90s, she is looking back again.

 We will never know the extent of Picasso’s and Gilot’s mutually encompassing visions. It may seem strange to insist on blindness and to focus on the unseen and unseeable, but if we follow Picasso’s vision of painting being a blind man’s profession (as recorded by Cocteau)[1], than we can look from an unusual perspective at the relationship of a man and a woman, both artists, separated by a sea of time, lived and unlived lives, and future.

 What did Picasso mean when he said that painting was a blind man’s profession? We’ll never know. I wonder if he fully knew. Genuineness of insight is not always rooted in knowledge. Perhaps, he meant that a painter works not with what is seen, but what is unseen.  Essentially, the artist walks his road blind; if you see where the painting will end, why even start? It is of course a great irony of the profession that the artist’s journey in the province of unseen and unknown is often looked at, understood and judged as visual artifact or optical illusion. For Picasso, the act of painting and the act of love weren’t rooted in different realms. I dare to say they mirrored each other. He famously said to Brassai that art was never chaste[2], and claimed there was no difference between art and eroticism[3].

 The show is beautifully installed. The room on the 6^th floor gives space to the dialogue between his paintings and sculptures. The 1946 Femme dans un fauteuil talks to the 1953 sculpture Femme portent un enfant. I couldn’t miss the bond between the two grisaille paintings from 1946 La femme-fleur (Francoise Gilot) and Anatomie feminine and the 1950 bronze La femme enceinte I. Yet I felt the limits of my vision intensely. At home, as I was looking through the catalogue I read the conversation between Gilot and Richardson about the 1950 painting Paysage d’hiver, which was a diagram of Picasso’s and Gilot’s relationship. I understood that many, if not all of the paintings from this period must have a deeply private dimension. I returned to see the show, acutely aware that I was witnessing an intimate diary written in an unspoken language.

 The first hall on the 5^th floor is divided in two, Picasso’s paintings and Gilot’s. Both bodies of work are about their life together (with the exception of her early work), their children and private rituals. The second hall on the 5^th floor is all about Gilot – the way he saw her, painted her and drew her. The walls in this room are colored a soft, yet vivid crisp green, almost the green from his 1947 Femme en vert et mauve. The color choice couldn’t be more precise. Perhaps, because Gilot is known as femme-fleur and this color invoked this image.

 As I was talking with a friend about the show, he exclaimed: “Imagine painting in Picasso’s backyard?” The Picasso we know is very different from the one Gilot knew. Gilot mentions that she was much more enamored with Braque’s and Matisse’s art at the time. On the other hand, when you are very close to someone, their talent that is so remote to outsiders is very natural to you. You can’t imagine it otherwise, sometimes it even becomes ordinary. It is rarely separate from a person and his or her humanity.

 I like Gilot’s work form the early 1940s. I found the paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s less exciting. I missed the gravity holding everything together, the density of the works from the early 1940s. I could not quite relate to the later works’ literalness and weightlessness (as compared to the solidity of the earlier paintings). And I forgot that their author was still only in her 20s or early 30s. But the more I looked at them, the more I appreciated the later paintings. I started to understand their seeming looseness. I sense that they are about loss. I think they are about letting your erstwhile self go, which is a difficult risk to take. I wonder if these works embody a fundamental personal reinvention.

Picasso’s work from these years is all about perpetual metamorphosis. He is inventing and re-inventing, imagining and re-imagining endlessly. And this mode is most obvious in his portraits of her. Gilot tells a story about her recurrent childhood dream of an old mansion and her first visit to Picasso’s studio, which she realized resembled the attic in her dream. She talks about another coincidence (as if there’s such a thing) when she and Picasso discovered that she looked like one of the female characters in his 1930s etchings Suite Vollard. She would have been eight years old at the time. Picasso’s reaction was possessive: “So, I invented you. Art always precedes nature, it’s not the other way round… I foresaw you as you are now. You should be thankful to me.”[4]

What does his continuous re-imagining of her mean? Why did he transform her into a flower in a few of his paintings? In mythology flowers (or plants) often symbolize the passage from life to death in the multitude of its meanings. For example, Daphne was transformed into laurel, Baucis and Philemon became trees, Narcissus and Hyacinth turned into flowers that took their names.

In her essay “Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot: mano a mano” (in the catalogue), Gilot describes them drawing together in his album. She compares their relationship to a mano a mano bullfight, in which two matadors take turns fighting and killing six or eight bulls. She says their fight was not with art, but for art, as in French the verb achever means ‘to complete’ and also ‘to kill’. The finished work is a death in a way. Gilot talks about “the strange fraternity that must exist between artistic partners in which emulation must never degenerate into rivalry” and that she felt existed between her and Picasso.

In this essay she talks about the end of their relationship:

After Pablo and I separated, even though new loves entered our lives, a sense of loss remained. It was the end of a great passion. It had run its course without complacency or concession, and it had left us depleted like two exhausted warriors. But it had been an honorable fight, a quest for the absolute.[5]

Gilot’s recent conversation with John Richardson (in the catalogue) gives a different, more earthly view of their complex and passionate relationship. When she talks about the end of the relationship, she says:

…I was in two minds. Would it be better if I left or stayed in at Vallauris with the children? Had I stayed, it would have ended in my death.[6]

I wonder if the intensity and passion of the relationship was rooted in a heightened awareness of the continual struggle between life and death. I wonder if the profession in which the works had to be completed (“executed”) heightened this. It was during this period that Picasso started to work in the mode of variations more intensely than ever before. I wrote at length about Picasso’s variations in my review of the 2010 show at MOMA Picasso: Themes and Variations. I see variations as denying the end to which a work of art must come when it is completed. Variations, as opposed to series, are not just united by a common theme or a common formal idea, but are this idea lived once again. It is as if you could re-live your life indefinitely, each time taking another turn at a different point in the road. Variations are not separate pieces with a common preoccupation, whether thematic or formal, but one piece with many beginnings and without end. Each variation is a step in a metamorphosis. The last one one is not the end, but another "if" that still lingers in the air. Printmaking makes the mode of variations visible, as the artist returns to the printing plate time and again. Only Picasso’s obsessive dating of each work in a set of variations placed them in succession and metamorphosis in time.

The exhibition includes the famous lithographs of Gilot done in 1948 – 1949 Femme au Fauteuil). The comprehensive graph of the 30 variations is published in the catalogue. In the fall of 1948, Picasso made a color lithograph for which he developed five stones, one stone for each color as this was the only way to print a color lithograph. Only three proofs of this lithograph were printed. He then let go the color, but used the five stones as five separate “tracks”. Each “track” had a number of “states”. All five were interrelated through what was left out – color. Each was a sliver of the original composition.  Working on each piece, the artist was bound to respond to what was present, not present, present elsewhere and could be present. Each stone and each print allowed only a partial view. This work gave form to the state of partial vision and fragmentary grasp that could not be completed, but on the contrary, was about infinte points of view and instants of perception. There was no end to it.

 

I hesitated to write about this show. I was afraid of the enterprise rooted in the unknowable. I feared crossing the boundaries beyond which interpretation becomes intrusive. I did not know (and still don’t) how to walk the grey area between painting and love. Both deny words. I tried to find words for painting; I fell completely short of finding words for passion and love. It is hard to look in two mirrors at once. But then I did find them. The words aren’t mine. They are unusual:

 

…Does life mean well? Nature is not benign. Do you think it means to make you happy with this feeling? Nature has no need of human pipe dreams. All nature wants is to beget and destroy: that is its business. It is ruthless because its plan is indifferent to human predicament, beyond the human. Nature has gifted us with passion, but it insists that the passion be unconditional…

…You know, that flood of spring-is-here feeling most people experience at the start of a relationship…. I am deeply suspicious of it. Passion does not celebrate holidays! It’s a dark force that builds and destroys worlds and waits on no answer from those it has touched, not does it ask them whether they feel good as a result. Frankly, it doesn’t care either way. It gives everything and demands everything: it is that unconditional passion of which the deepest stratum is nothing less than life-and-death…

…It is no accident that history has regarded great lovers with the same awe and veneration as heroes, as brave pioneers who have risked all by voluntarily embarking on a hopeless but extraordinary human enterprise…

Behind each lover’s embrace stands the figure of Death, whose shadows are no less powerful than those wild flashes of joy. Behind every kiss looms the secret desire for annihilation, for an ultimate happiness that is no longer in the mood for argument but knows that to be happy is to cease entirely and surrender to feeling.

            Love is feeling without an end in view….[7]

 

  

Picasso and Françoise Gilot

 Gagosian Gallery

980 Madison Avenue (at 77^th street)
New York, NY 10075
 Hours: Tue-Sat 10-6

Map

 Official Picasso site: www.picasso.fr 

On-line Picasso project: http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/   

 

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[1] Picasso on Art, Dore Ashton, ed., Da Capo Press, Inc., 1972, p.79

[2] Brassai, Conversations with Picasso, The University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 223

[3] Picasso: Mosqueteros, Gagosian Gallery, 2009, p. 29

[4] Picasso and Fraçoise Gilot, Gagosian Gallery, 2012, p. 305

[5] Ibid., p. 307

[6] Ibid., p. 35

[7] Sándor Márai, Portraits of a marriage, New York: Alfred Knopf, 2011, pp. 201-202

Islamic Art in Europe

Leo Kepler's "Islamic Art in Europe" in Shirkah, Swiss Magazine of Islamic Finance, Economics and Culture, November 2011 issue.

The overview of the collections of Islamic Art in European Museums and European market of Islamic Art.

Night Vision: Photography after Dark at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This small show is dimly lit. Soft spotlights gently envelop each photograph and, aided by pale mats and thin black frames, draw each image out from the darkness of charcoal colored walls.

 In the show’s approximately forty photographs by American, European and Japanese photographers, the viewer can look into the night through the eyes of Brassai, André Kertész, Edward Steichen, Robert Frank, Bill Brandt, Josef Sudek, Hiroshi Sugimoto and others[1].

 Night photography didn’t really exist before the turn of the century. The equipment and materials did not allow the recording of images under low-light conditions. With technical innovation, cameras became less cumbersome to haul around and set up, the film became faster and the flash got brighter. These developments made it possible to explore the world of shadows and varied light: the threshold of darkness in Faigenbaums’s Portrait of my Mother and  Sudek’s The Arrival of Night; the mellow glow of street lamps in Brassai’s Morris Column in the Fog and Coburn’s Broadway at Night; the radiance of illuminated high-rises as in Kertész’s Skyscraper at Night and Berenice Abbott’s Nightview, New York; the sheen of billboards in the photographs of Knud Lonberg-Holm and the scintillation of neon signs in the pictures of Werner Martz and Marcel Bovis.

 As the camera evolved, it became possible to venture out in the rain, snow or fog and chase reflections, alter egos, and apparitions. A man in a dark coat has paused next to the Morris column in Brassai’s picture. A ghostly figure is running across the street in Robert Frank’s 1952 London. A phantom silhouette is walking past the wall plastered with posters in Otto Steinert’s image. A weightless shadow-like character is up on the ladder working on a theater marquee in William Klein’s 1954 photograph. Steiglitz’ Reflection: Night, New York arrests flickering lights and creates an antithesis to Pim Van Os’ night street scene in which the layers of reflections and shadows seem to shift subtly and constantly as if disobeying the stillness imposed by film.

 Edward Steichen describes the call of the lightless:

 What a beautiful hour of the day is that of the twilight when things disappear and seem to melt into each other, and this great feeling of peace overshadows all.

 The Met installation is nothing like Steichen’s twilight – each image is carefully separated and brought to light; yet to me it conveyed a similar feeling of peace. As I walked from photograph to photograph, from one vision to another, from one glimpse to the next, and despite a number of disconcerting images, life in its multiplicity and the knowledge that somebody was able to look, to see and to record it, filled me with peace. The presence of a witness gave a gift of continuity. Life did not simply disappear into darkness even if it originated there; life endured, if only on paper and in fragments.

 The darkness brought into focus a different kind of witness - unwelcome, accidental, and unknowing. Daido Moriyama glanced into a car with two young women. This photograph is untitled, as if the photographer acknowledged the limits of his knowing.  Without reading the label, it would be hard to guess that a glittering row of candle-like lamp posts in the middle of what looks like a small sleeping town in Stephen Tourlentes’ picture Avenal, California, is a row of high-powered searchlights at a high security prison. The viewer is asked to acknowledge the limits of his or her vision. Bill Brandt’s Soho Bedroom is a staged shot; his brother is playing the role of the lover, and the photographer – the role of the witness. Yoshiyuki’s untitled photograph of 1971 is a snapshot of covert nocturnal sex life in the Tokyo parks in the 1970s, a time in Japan when premarital or gay sex was not accepted; young people lived with their parents and had no space except parks for any private life. The subjects of Yoshiyuki’s photographs in this series are the peeping Toms who watched (and sometimes participated in) the lovemaking. The photographer was witnessing the witnesses.

 What is a night vision? Bill Brandt who photographed London during the Blitz blackouts described the change:

The darkened town, lit only by moonlight, looked more beautiful than before or since. It was fascinating to walk through the deserted streets and to photograph houses which I knew well, and which no longer looked three-dimensional, but flat like painted stage scenery.

 One of my favorite observations is Leo Steinberg’s “that major stylistic changes in art alter art’s interaction with the beholder.” Correspondingly, the ability of the beholder to alter his or her customary perspective will change his or her interaction with art.

 The photographer is simultaneously beholder and artist. His or her act of looking coincides with a camera click. Night photography changed that blend of artist and beholder in the photographer. Darkness, after all, always implies the possibility of not being able to see. So night photography compelled the artist to interact differently with the world, and the beholder with the art, since world and art came together in the act of looking.

 Night photography was not the first instance of night vision in visual arts. Many paintings set in darkness come to mind; Rembrandt, for instance. Yet, the night vision in photography, because of the simultaneity of beholder and artist and a chance of sightlessness, can explore a different ground. It can be more than a look at the world after sundown. It can be more than a creation of images in which light and darkness are the leading means, both formally and spiritually. Because darkness can blind, it can take the photographer’s act of looking to its limits. Darkness can’t engulf a painter; he or she paints it but not in it.

 Of course, not all night photographs, and not all photographs in this show, challenge the act of looking itself. Many are visions of the world in darkness or with the lights turned on; others are explorations of light and its formal possibilities. But remember Steichen’s twilight in which things slowly vanish. Consider Brassai’s 1934 A Pillar of the Corvisant Metro in which a short, starkly lit column blocks the view. Can one move it with one’s eyes and witness the darkness behind?  Look at Frank’s photograph: The small dark somewhat hazy figure is crossing the road in the fog; he is looking away. Our gaze follows the man as he scurries off the paper in the upper right part of the photo. There are other blurred silhouettes and streetlights in the murky background. Diagonally, across from the rushing figure, in the lower left corner, there’s a word - “look” - impressed in the pavement. The slightly tilted perspective makes the word comparable in size to the figure. The beholder’s look concentrates as if it must immobilize the hurrying figure to not let it run off the paper into darkness.

 Can one behold darkness? Is light a condition for seeing? What’s darkness like without light? Sugimoto’s Ionian Sea, Santa Cesarea, 1990, is an image of the sea at night. There’s no light source in this photo; the darkness is almost complete. To me this is the most fantastic, most unreal image in this show. When you think about it, the state of absolute darkness is almost impossible in our universe; there’s usually a source of light, whether from a lamp or a star. Unless the dark night of the soul falls; this internal night can dim all light, and I wonder if such darkness can be made fully visible. Or eyes can’t see or are forever closed. But blindness or death would put one beyond light or darkness. Even though it is set in almost complete darkness, there’s still dichotomy in Sugimoto’s picture. The horizon is visible. Perhaps it is a visual tribute to what I grasped in the night of this show as a true photographer’s credo: I see therefore I am. Darkness inevitable.

 

Night Vision: Photography after Dark at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 Fifth Avenue (at 82nd Street)
New York, NY 10028

Directions

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[1] I found it curious that sometimes passport rather than sensibility defined the artists. For instance, Hungarian born Kertész — who lived in Paris for years, immigrated to the States in his forties and struggled to be recognized in this country — was labeled American. In an age when citizenship and homeland are complex and rootlessness is common, it should be obvious that artists don’t belong to a country. Mentioning the locations of birth and death should suffice.

 

Revolutionary Film Posters: Aesthetic Experiments of Constructivist Russia, 1920 – 1933, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery

The time from the teens of the 20^th century through the early 30s is often referred to as the golden age of the Soviet cinema. In The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929, Peter Kenez gives a meticulous account of the Soviet movie industry in these years. For the government of a country in which more than half of the population was illiterate, movies presented a special opportunity. A number of the Soviet leaders, including Lenin, articulated the importance of cinema’s potential to educate the masses and disseminate propaganda. But of course there was the audience, which did not want to be enlightened, but entertained.

 The Civil War of 1918–21 ravaged the country and completely destroyed the pre-revolutionary cinema infrastructure. Materials and equipment for filmmaking were scarce as Russia did not produce any and had to purchase them abroad. There were no trained professionals, either to make or show films. The movie theaters were closed due to intermittent electricity, lack of heat, shortage of projectors and absence of people who could read intertitles to illiterate audiences.

 Both the government and private entrepreneurs realized cinema’s money-making potential. The State struggled for years to restore and nationalize the industry, but had to allow private theaters and foreign imports to revive the industry, attract audiences and establish revenue for the State through taxes on imports and movie tickets. Raising ticket prices did not work as it made the cost of going to the movies prohibitively expensive and ticket sales plummeted. The weak State was simply unable to control and censor films, and hence some freedom was permitted. During these years of New Economic Policy, Soviet audiences were able to see the same films as moviegoers abroad, with some delay. By 1924 the production of Soviet films continued to grow, reaching its peak in 1928. But even in 1926-27, over half of all films shown were imported. Moreover, imports were 10 times more profitable than the domestic films. However, this was the last year of foreign domination. Sadly, it was not a shift in moviegoers’ tastes or Soviet directors’ successful competition with foreign colleagues but government’s suppression of ideologically harmful art.  This embargo marked the end of the imports, avant-garde, and the free spirit of the Revolution, and signaled the beginning of Socialist Realism.

 The show at Tony Shafrazi encapsulates the spirit of Russia in those years. It is not just a creative heartbeat that one feels in the exhibition rooms, but also the heartache of the country. Imagine Russia in those years: a whirlwind of tragedy, utopia and hope. Imagine artistic Russia – a world in which Malevich, Kandinsky and Rodchenko crossed paths and where an art movement (and there were many – Suprematism, Constructivism, Rayonnism to name several) wasn’t just an original creative idea, but a messenger of new existential vision. The packed exposition of almost a hundred film posters and three films reveals the intensity of this age. It is harder to see that this intensity, though fueled by the Revolution and the spirit of change, was steeped in conflict. Creative experiments defied the goals of propaganda. As often happens, what came to represent this age was too radical for the age itself.

 The show at Shafrazi treats viewers to ninety five film posters by leading Russian avant-garde artists of the time, including Alexander Rodchenko, the Stenberg Brothers, Yakov Ruklevsky, Nathan Altman, Mikhail Dlugach, Nikolai Prusakov, Alexander Naumov and others. Dlugach designed more posters than any other artist - over 500, and the Stenberg Brothers – over 300. All of these posters are rare; a few reached a print run of several hundred or even thousand, but not many copies survived. The transience of purpose and the cheap materials decided their fate. Thus, a show of such scale of these posters is very unusual.

 Yakov Ruklevsky was the head of the cinema advertising division and hired young artists. They eagerly took commissions fashioning film posters. Many were attracted to cinema which embodied a new world and new possibilities. A few artists, including the Stenberg brothers, were trained and practiced as engineers, architects, sculptors or commercial designers. They shared the utopian idea of integration of avant-garde art and everyday life. For many artists, fine arts in its traditional sense stood for bourgeois values, so art had to be of use to society. Poster art was a perfect meeting point of art and utility, and, perhaps, of art and daily bread.

 The subject of most of these posters is Soviet movies of the 1920s and 30s. Some are legendary, like Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927), Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). The restored footage of these films (except October) is shown alongside the posters. The inclusion of the films in the exhibition was a momentous curatorial decision. If the posters bespeak free rein, the films betray disconcerting reality. The ardent colors of the posters offset the black and white world of films.  The posters looked to the future (that was not to come). In the films, the clash of artistic experimentation, narratives and recorded images registers a disordered society. Perhaps, the difference in purpose of the posters and films accounts for this. The posters’ objective was simpler: to promote the films and, excursively, to convey the allure of this new world of the moving image and of new possibilities. The images and the visual experiments take the center stage. The posters are based on films; they are one step further from recorded reality. The films are entangled in it, particularly these early Soviet films that focus on the change that was taking place.

 Three films screened at Shafrazi were seen as somewhat problematic by both the state and film professionals. Dovzhenko’s Earth, a meditation on collectivization in Ukraine and on uprooting the traditional peasant way of life, received criticism for its complexity. It failed to provide clear-cut collectivization propaganda. Eisenstein was often attacked for his innovative camera work. Once the revolutionary times were over, both directors went on to have successful but complex careers under the Soviets (i.e., Stalin), and both died from heart attacks. Dziga Vertov was perceived as too radical in his technique and content. His movies often failed to attract audiences and fill theaters. The Soviet government rejected many of his projects. In the last 10 years of his life he made no films, but worked in the news industry.

 Posters for lesser known films that are still important in the Soviet cinema include Dovzhenko’s earlier films Zvenihora (1928) and Arsenal (1928), Vertov’s The Sixth Part of the World (1926) and The Eleventh Year (1928), Yakov Protazanov’s The Forty-first (1927) and The Case of the Three Million (1926), Abram Room’s Traitor (1926), Ivan Pyryev’s The Foreign (Strange) Woman (1929) and The Conveyor of Death (1933), and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (1926). A number of posters feature American movie stars, Harold Lloyd (Doctor Jack), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (The Three Musketeers), Buster Keaton (The General) and others. Soviet moviegoers of these years also saw some of the best foreign films created during this period as the poster for Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922) attests.

 The show at Shafrazi spotlights the Stenberg brothers. It includes 49 of their posters, three of which are collaborations with Ruklevsky. The brothers always worked together, eventually devising a special signature “2 Stenberg 2”. Georgii died in 1933 at the age of 33 in a motorcycle accident. Vladimir continued his mixed artistic career.  He served as Chief of Design for Red Square until 1964. He was briefly imprisoned in 1952 and died in 1982.

 The Stenbergs’ posters (as well as posters by other artists) combine the cinematic vision and avant-garde aesthetic. There are unusual perspectives and angles, juxtapositions of different scales, use of shadow to reveal another dimension, geometry that blurs the line between figurative and abstract, montage and collage, and of course bold color and audacious lines. The Stenbergs’ posters have a different sensibility than those by other artists. They maintain a precarious balance between the stillness of graphic art and the flow of the moving image.  It often appears that the different elements of their compositions have paused, and might start moving again at any moment. Perhaps, such “camera freeze” was a product of collaboration, of two visions that were continuously being reconciled.

 Vertov’s film The Man with a Movie Camera is also a brotherly enterprise. His younger brother, Mikhail Kaufman, was the cameraman. This film records the events of a single day. There are no actors and no script. Camera moves slow, fast, and in reverse. Images overlap, move perpendicular to each other, are shot from different angles, and form a montage. This might be the most experimental film of the Golden Age of the Soviet Cinema. I perceive it to be a raw contemplation on seeing: looking at things differently, witnessing change taking place, glancing, peeping, peering, seeking, combining perspectives and turning away.  It is an attempt to look at the world though different eyes – the eye of a movie camera; and perhaps, through the eyes of another human being (brother) as well. On a more universal level, like any truly exciting work of art, it is about seeing anew via new means and methods, and making a viewer see things differently. In a way, Vertov’s film is a documentary about this spirit of seeing afresh. It is precisely this spirit which makes the art of this age thoroughly fascinating. Of course, it is this unpredictability that made this art unacceptable to the Soviet state. Once the revolutionary period was over, the avant-garde works, including film posters, were never publicly shown during the Soviet times.

 Unfortunately, this wonderful show is not accompanied by a catalogue and does not provide detailed information about the subjects of the posters in the labels. For instance, names of directors or year of film production are never given. Moreover, some labels contain inaccuracies. The title for Anatoly Belsky’s 1933 poster is imprecisely translated as Annenkov. The subject of this 1933 film by Nikolai Beresnev is the Red Army’s struggle against the white divisions of Annenkov during the Civil War. It would more accurate to translate the title as Annenkovism(s) since it is Annenkovschina in the original Russian. The poster by an unknown artist for the 1930 film World Name by Nikolai Verhovsky gives the year of the poster’s creation as 1931 and leaves the title, film production year and the director’s name unknown. These errors could have been easily avoided through careful translation and basic research.

 Also part of the show is Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument for the Third International on view for the first time in the United States. This model was built in 1968 in consultation with Tatlin’s widow and his original collaborator, and is considered to be the most accurate replica of Tatlin’s 1920 design. Doubtless, it is the most famous Constructivist project, and the definite symbol of the era.

 

 Literature consulted:

 Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929, Cambridge University Press, 1985

 Kenez, Peter, and Mount, Christopher, Stenberg Brothers: Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002

 Pack, Susan, Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde, Taschen, 1995

 

 Tony Shafrazi Gallery

www.tonyshafrazigallery.com

544 West 26^th St.

new York, NY 10001

Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter: L’Amour Fou at Gagosian Gallery

Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter: L’Amour Fou at Gagosian Gallery 21^st street location is the third recent Picasso show for which Gagosian partnered with Picasso’s celebrated biographer John Richardson. Sublime Picasso: Mosqueteros took place in this very same location in 2009. This was a show of late work, of “the race against death” as Richardson aptly called it. In the summer of 2010 Britannia Street was a home to Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945-62). And at the end of that year a number of works from this show came to the Madison Street as a small show Pablo Picasso: Important Paintings and Sculpture. The exhibitions were accompanied by comprehensive catalogues edited by Richardson.

Octogenarian Richardson is finishing (has finished?) the 4^th volume of his monumental biography of the artist. The first three cover the years up to 1932 when Picasso turned 50. With his exhibitions Richardson works in reverse chronology. In Mosqueteros, Picasso’s time in life coincided with Richardson’s: the curator at the end of his life looked at the artist’s late work. The Mediterranean Years contemplated on the two preceding decades. And L’Amour Fou, which embraces the years between 1927 and 1940, overlaps with the completed years of his Picasso biography. It is as if Richardson is coming full circle in this exhibition.

All three exhibitions have been accurately described as museum-like in scale and quality, but to me they simultaneously felt strikingly personal. Contrapuntally to scholarly rigor, there was a free flowing intense intimacy in the exhibitions halls.  Perhaps, because all three shows included works from private collections of Picasso’s descendants, that is works that the artist did not want or could not part with during his lifetime. L’Amour Fou has an extra touch of affection: Marie-Thérèse’s granddaughter, art historian Diana Widmaier-Picasso, co-curated this show with Richardson.

Picasso’s liaison with Marie- Thérèse was a secret one; only a handful of his closest friends knew about her existence.  At the time, he was married to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whom he then desperately (and unsuccessfully) tried to divorce. This exhibition brings to light the layer of Picasso’s life during these years that was almost completely hidden from everybody at the time.

Picasso’s subsequent mistress, Dora Maar, made a keen observation that a new woman brought major changes into the artist’s life.  Or was it the change in the artist that led him to a new muse? This makes the periods when the shift was taking place, when two muses  bump into each other, simply fascinating. I wonder if sometimes it was not a change in a sense of a fresh page, but in a sense of transposing.  As if, the artist revisited places, only in disguise and in a different tonality. Olga marked Picasso’s turn to Neoclassicism. Marie-Thérèse (and her classical profile) inspired the artist’s reinvention, leading him from Neoclassicism to Classical World (and underworld). In a way it was an ancient story of transformation through love, only Marie- Thérèse was too young (17 when the relationship started) to understand the journey she prompted.

 

^{Unique cast}

^{Private Collection}

 ^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{© P.A.R. Photo by Philippe De Putter. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

The 1928 sculptural portrait of Marie-Thérèse in this exhibition is titled Personnage Feminin (La Metamorphose II). Metamorphosis is really what Picasso was in the midst of during these years, and Marie- Thérèse its catalyst. I think Picasso painted more different visions of Marie- Thérèse than he did of any other woman.  In the five halls at Gagosian we see Marie- Thérèse sleeping, dreaming, thinking, playing on the beach, reading, wearing her red beret or a wreath of flowers. But she was not just a passive subject of his portraits. She was a mythic character in many of his works, for instance, his famous etchings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , not included in this exhibition. Similarly to nymphs, she took form of objects (in his still-lives). But above all, she was a radiant force in his private universe (the dark one was Olga, and then, Dora). She is a girl with a lantern opposite the Minotaur in his etching La Minotauromachie in this show.

 

 

^{Private Collection}

^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo by Béatrice Hatala. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

 

^{Private Collection}

 ^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo by Béatrice Hatala. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

I think Picasso’s route of metamorphosis is carved out in his sculpture of these years.  Look at the sculptures in this show – the small slim wooden figures and weighty heads – both groups have an archaic, mythical quality to them.  They are not simply portraits of Marie-Thérèse, but grasps of the archetypal. Why has this taken place in sculpture? Perhaps, because, as Picasso himself said, sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting. It may be that while painting Marie- Thérèse sleeping, he shaped the dreams in wood, metal, clay or plaster. The fleeting asked for the palpable. 

 

 

^{Private Collection}

 ^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo by Béatrice Hatala. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

^{Nasher Sculpture Center , Dallas}

^{Raymond and Pasty Nasher Collection}

^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo by David Heald. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

I wonder if the invisibility of their relationship found its way into his work by putting the question of seeing in focus. In his essay “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers” Leo Steinberg astutely observed that Picasso often watched his lovers sleeping. But I think that paintings of Marie- Thérèse sleeping stand apart from his other dreamers. In some of them, the artist is not watching, but is himself dreaming.  Some of them are about not seeing or being unable to look. Even the eyes possessing mirada fuerte - the untranslatable Andalusian expression for a strong, penetrating, domineering gaze, adopted by Richardson to describe Picasso’s powerful stare - must be closed sometimes. Two paintings made me wonder if his eyes were open. Both are charcoal on gessoed canvas.  Nue Endormie, 1932, in which Marie- Thérèse’s body is rendered by a faint charcoal line, is a trace of his touch, of movement of his hand feeling her body. And in Nue Couché, also from 1932, each line is a caress, a stroke, a pat, a tender brush, a rub, a fondle.

 

 
^{Private Collection}

^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

In the third volume of his biography, Richardson cites a conversation between Picasso’s dealer Kanhweiler and the artist in March 1932. Picasso invited Kanhweiler to show his new work. Kanhweiler wrote about this visit to a friend:

We saw two paintings at his place which he had just finished. Two nudes, perhaps the most moving things he’s done. “A satyr who had just killed a woman might have painted this picture,” I told him. It’s neither cubist nor naturalist. And it’s without painterly artifice: very alive, very erotic, but the eroticism of a giant. For years Picasso hasn’t done anything like it. He had told me a few days before, “I want to paint like a blind man, who does a buttock by feel.” It really is that. We came away overwhelmed.

 

 
^{Private Collection}

^{"© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo: © P.A.R. Photo: Eric Baudouin. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery".}

 

There are a number of paintings of Marie- Thérèse asleep in this show; many are a blend of a memory of touch and of possessive gaze, for example, La Sieste from 1932. But what about the small painting in the 4^th hall, Dormeuse au coussin rouge, 1932, that is devoid of line? Marie- Thérèse’s body is an array of soft contoured color splotches at a point of no tension. Is it a painting of the moment when the artist is falling asleep next to her? What was he seeing with his eyes closed? We can catch a glimpse of it in his work.

This is the paradox of Picasso’s work in these years. It is about seeing, but not just with the eyes. In his biography of Picasso, Richardson quotes the artist who joked he had an eye at the end of his penis.  But he also often said to Cocteau (if we trust the latter) that painting was a blind man’s profession.

The show is closing this coming Saturday, June 25^th. Don’t miss it… and be prepared to stand in line to get in.

 Extended to July 15, 2011

Official Picasso site: www.picasso.fr  

On-line Picasso project: http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/    

 

Gagosian Gallery

www.gagosian.com

522 West 21^st Street

Take the C or E train to West 23rd Street and/or take the M23 bus to 23^rd Street and 11th Avenue

Gallery hours: Mon—Sat, 10 am to 6 pm

Malevich and the American Legacy at the Gagosian Gallery in New York and beyond

 

The end / beginning

 Kazimir Malevich spent 56 years on planet Earth. Born in Kiev’s suburbs, the first of the 14 (9 surviving) children of a sugar refinery manager, he died in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1935. He created his most famous (and notorious) painting Black Square (or, more correctly, Black Quadrilateral) in 1915. That year Malevich wrote From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. The New Realism in Painting:

 I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.

 I have transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation.

 In 1915 Malevich showed 39 Suprematist paintings at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings “0.10”. He hung the Black Quadrilateral at the top in the corner of the room – the so called “red corner” where icons would be placed in the homes of believing Russians. He called it “the icon of my time.” And in a 1916 letter to Alexandre Benois, one of the founders of a magazine and movement leaning towards romanticism, World of Art, Malevich wrote, responding to Benois’s unsympathetic reaction to Suprematism, that :

You will never see sweet Psyche’s smile on my square.

And it will never be a mattress for love-making.

 Somebody took a picture of Malevich on his death bed in his apartment. Black Square was hung on the wall above his head. Malevich’s body was placed into a Suprematist coffin, built by his colleague and friend Nikolai Suetin according to Malevich’s sketches. One of the sketches had a cross on the lid which did not become part of the final product. The Suprematist coffin was brought to the House of the Artist for public mourning, and then was transported on an open platform truck (with a black square on the hood) to the train station followed by a procession of friends and colleagues.  After the cremation, the artist’s ashes were buried under the oak tree in a small village Nemchinovka (then Borvikha) in the vicinity of St. Petersburg and his grave was marked with a cube that had a black square on it. Suetin designed and executed it. There is a photograph from 1935 showing his widow and daughter standing next to it. The grave was lost during the 2^nd World War. Malevich’s name was erased from Russian art history during Soviet times; his works were not publicly seen in his own country until 1988. That year, his grave was restored; it retained the form of a cube, but the square on it became red.

 

The exhibition

The show, organized in collaboration with Malevich’s heirs, takes up all three floors of the Gagosian’s Madison street location. Curator Andrea Crane, with much salesperson flair and special emphasis on the word “fantastic” (used 5 times in 5-minute part 1 of her video) invoking her 3-year old son’s take on Malevich (“he’s coming to this with the most pure eyes”), gives a three part video tour of the exhibition. In the first part, titled Genesis, she tells us that Malevich created approximately 85 Suprematist paintings, 22 of which were lost or destroyed and 47 are in public collections, which leave only 16 in private hands. 

 

 Desk and Room, 1913

Oil on canvas

311/4 x 311/4 inches (79.5 x 79.5 cm)

Collection of the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

 

 There are six Maleviches in the show. Desk and Room, 1913, on the 4^th floor, is from a pre-Suprematist period and belongs to the heirs of the artist. Four paintings are dated 1915, the birth year of Suprematism. Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915, on the 5^th floor, is from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The other three, and the painting dated 1920-27 take up the central wall on the 6^th floor of the gallery. Suprematism, 18^th Construction, 1915, and Mystic Suprematism, 1920-27, belong to the heirs.

 

 

Suprematism, 18th Construction, 1915

Oil on canvas

207/8 x 207/8 inches  (53 x 53 cm)

Collection of the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

 

 

 Mystic Suprematism, 1920–27

Oil on canvas

393/8 x 235/8 inches(100.5 x 60 cm)

Collection of the Heirs of Kazimir Malevich

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

 

 

Suprematist Painting: Rectangle and Circle, 1915, is from the Sepherot Foundation in Liechtenstein. And Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the 4^th Dimension, 1915, was just purchased from the heirs by the Art Institute of Chicago which has now become the second public institution in the US to have Suprematist painting by Malevich in its collection.

 

 
 
 

Painterly Realism of a Football Player— Color Masses in the 4th Dimension, 1915

Oil on canvas

271/2 x 173/8 inches (70 x 44 cm)

The Art Institute of Chicago, through prior gift of Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester

Collection; Art Institute of Chicago

Acquisition Funds, 2011.1

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

 

 Malevich’s American legacy includes Richard Serra, Donald Judd, David Smith, James Turrell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, Alexander Calder, Mel Bochner, Mark Grotjahn, John Baldessari, Ellsworth Kelly, Charles Ray, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Ad Reinhardt, Ed Ruscha, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and Carl Andre. The earliest work, Newman’s By Twos is from 1949, the latest is Turrell’s Untitled: 32LIB+C from 2010. Crane mentions that several artists, including Serra, provided some guidance.

 

 Afterlife

 During his lifetime Malevich went abroad only once, in 1927. He had two shows during this trip, the largest shows of his work in the West in his lifetime. He exhibited some of his works in Warsaw, Poland, and took part in the Great Berlin Exhibition (Grosse Beliner Kunstausstellung) – he got a separate hall. After the Berlin show the artist planned to go to Paris, but the Soviet authorities declined the request to extend his stay abroad. He left Berlin entrusting the works he had brought with him and which were still on exhibition, and related documents, to the architect Hugo Häring, and he left his theoretical writings – with his host, engineer Gustav von Riesen. Once the exhibition was closed, most of the works of the artist were stored by Alexander Dorner, then the director of the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover. It was Dorner who introduced Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art at the time, to Malevich’s paintings in 1935 when Barr was traveling in Europe preparing his exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. Strangely, this was the year Malevich died. By then, Malevich’s works were considered “degenerative art” in Nazi Germany. Barr secretly took several works with him. Dorner sent more by various ways and brought others when Barr helped him to emigrate to the US in the late 1930s. Twenty one works by Malevich came to US this way. Cubism and Abstract Art was on view at the Modern Art Museum in New York and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Fourteen works of Malevich were listed in the exhibition catalogue. Once the show was closed, the works stayed at the MOMA. For a long time, this was the only public collection that boasted Suprematist works by Malevich.

The large scale works from the Berlin exhibition, which were hard to transport, stayed in Germany and were destroyed during WWII. Hugo Häring preserved what he had in his care through the war, but at the end of his life, in 1958, experiencing financial hardships, sold everything he had to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam which now has the most comprehensive Malevich collection in the world. The legal ownership of Malevich’s Berlin legacy and other works he did not sell or gifted himself was brought to court by the artist’ heirs but was resolved: with Stedlijk in 2008,  with the Museum of Modern Art and with the Harvard University Busch-Reisinger Museum in 1999. Busch-Reisinger received the 1915 painting Rectangle and Circle and a drawing, through Dorner’s will in 1957 to keep until the owner could be determined. Rectangle and Circle was included in the first retrospective of the artist in the winter of 1919-20 and in the 1927 Berlin exhibition. When Troels Andersen published his catalogue raisonné of the 1927 Berlin show in 1970, the whereabouts of this painting were listed as unknown. The four paintings at the Gagosian marked as belonging to the heirs, were part of the 1958 Stedelijk acquisition from Haring.

It was not until the 1958 Stedelijk purchase from Haring that Malevich’s Suprematist works showed their colors. Stedelijik organized a number of Malevich exhibitions in Europe in the late 1950s and early 60s. The breakthrough exhibition was probably the 1959 show at the Whitechapel gallery in London showing works from the Stedelijk and accompanied by a catalogue with an introduction by Camilla Gray. The 1960s and 1970s saw more shows and publications, including Stedelijk’s curator Troels Andersen’s anthology of the artist’s writings and the catalogue raisonné of the Malevich 1927 Berlin exhibition.

The Guggenheim Museum put up a major show of Malevich in 1973. Donald Judd reviewed it in Art in America in 1974, and Artforum’s editor-in-chief John Coplans interviewed Mel Bochner on Malevich in 1974 as well. Both Judd’s scrupulous review and Bochner’s sublime interview are reprinted in the Gagosian exhibition catalogue.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union brought the artist’s works out of the closets of the Russian State Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery and other smaller institutions. At last, Malevich was re-instated in the history of art. More exhibitions and scholarly publications followed and more of his writings were translated and published.

Since then, the major US exhibitions included the 1990-1991 Kazimir Malevich, 1878-1935, co-organized by the National Gallery of At, The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art with loans from European and Russian public and private collections; the 1992 The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915-1932, a collaboration of the Guggenheim, the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the 2003 Malevich: Suprematism, a joint project of the Guggenheim and the Menil Foundation, and the Guggenheim’s small show Malevich in Focus: 1912-1922 just last year.

 

 Legacy?

 What is Malevich’s legacy, including its American share? In part 1 of her promotion video, Crane asks this question. She acknowledges that his influence could be formal or conceptual; she recognizes that some artists never realized they were influenced by Malevich and some never thought about him for a second. But, she says, the links do exist. Crane gives an example. She connects weightlessness and pure form in Serra’s 1964 Malmo Roll (on view in the show) to Malevich’s 1915 Suprematist Painting: Rectangle and Circle. She continues to talk about dialogues with Malevich (only he can no longer respond).

Larry Gagosian, in the catalogue introduction, insists that “it is not only formal analogy that connects him with American artists, but also deeper aesthetic, conceptual and spiritual correspondences.” And, in the end, “the charged abstractions of Charles Ray, Mark Grotjahn, and Banks Violette testify to Suprematism’s dramatic reach into the present and allow for its future impact.” Legacy? To me this sounds like the genesis of a trust fund for Ray, Grotjahn and Violette.

But what is legacy? Legacy is something handed down from the past. Malevich’s legacy is his paintings and writings. That is not to say that his work in any medium – his legacy - did not influence American or any other artists. But legacy and influence are worlds apart. If legacy is something he left, then influence, including impact contrary to the intention, is out of his hands.

On the other hand, what about ideas? To a certain extent, they live independently of objects, whether paintings or sculptures; to a degree, objects are byproducts. And what are ideas? Stuff an artist left or places he visited? Does idea, as an independent force, create convergences? Doesn’t it happen sometimes that when you are thinking about a certain issue intensely, you come across a record of somebody else’s thinking on the same matter (a book or a painting) as if by a chance? If ideas are places, than one’s intellectual path goes through many; you bump into past visitors, but places change in time. And thinking about a common problem might be akin to staying in the same hotel on a completely different itinerary. And, of course, confusion shapes ideas too.

Curatorial waters are muddy. Magdalena Dabrowski suggests that discourse between American artists and Malevich evolved subconsciously. Yve-Alain Bois ends up on the other side of the world. Talking about Reinhardt’s black cross and the black cross of Malevich which Reinhardt could not have seen when he developed his own similar form, Yve-Alain Bois concludes that it must be what Erwin Panofsky called pseudomorphosis – “the emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view.” Bois applies this diagnosis to Kelly and Johns. About Kelly he says that the artist might have seen some Malevich’s works at MOMA and in reproduction, but that it was unlikely that they would have fully registered. What does “registered” mean? Bois questions the same limits of what was seen and perceived as Dabrowksi, but on purely rational grounds.

Limits are tricky. It is impossible to really know who saw what and when, who took what and how much. One person can come away with more having seen five paintings by an artist than another who saw fifty. Misunderstanding and misinterpretation can also be liberating in unpredictable ways. And would intentional pondering be decisive? I don’t think that the lack of it necessarily lands an artist into the subconscious. The nature of art is such that an artist also thinks with the brush (or pencil, or whatever). (S)he thinks in  and with forms. Common forms might mean pseudomorphosis, might betray a one-way conversation or might constitute independent preoccupation with a related idea but for different means and purposes. But how do you gauge this?

Crane’s statement about unrealized and unknown influence makes artist an orphan who knows nothing about his biological parents, but comes a curator who finds them. Bois locates an ancestor:

 Johns seems never to have alluded to Malevich in his statements and interviews, and the resemblance of his surfaces to those of Malevich, in both painting and drawing, is most likely another case of pseudomorphosis, though not a complete one: as Malevich’s Bather (F-193), a large gouache of 1911, attests, there’s a genetic link between the two artists: Paul Cézanne.

 Picasso called Cézanne “the father of us all” a while ago. Who wouldn’t be related? But Picasso describes something like a move to a new country in which descendants now have to grow up (until they are ready to leave the family nest). This connection is quite unlike Gagosian’s blanket “spiritual correspondences”, which assign artists to a yahoo group of sorts.

At heart, relationship is a private affair. The way, for example, Judd relates to Malevich is quite different from Bochner as the reproduced essay and interview reveal. For the American artists, the 1973 Guggenheim show was the fist occasion to see Malevich’s works in the flesh in a more or less comprehensive way, although Judd mentions that “the present exhibition seems not to contain the greater portion of either the existing paintings and drawings, or of his total work; and of that portion, more than half are early Fauve or Cubist paintings.”  The show included about 50 paintings. Judd said he would have liked to see many more Suprematist paintings. To me reading Judd’s article was like reading travel notes of somebody not just visiting but exploring a new place. Judd was looking carefully. He might have seen some of the works before in reproduction, as James Turrell says he did in his conversation with Mark Francis (also included in the catalogue). Now they are in front of him. Judd’s reference point is his own creative place and time; he looks at Malevich through his personal creative preoccupations. He breaks down Malevich into color, form, surface, and structure when thinking about the artist’s achievements. Judd is like a detective.

Mel Bochner’s view is in a way opposite to Judd’s. He is a peripatetic passerby. His detachment gives him freedom. He tries to understand the artist’s time. If he breaks him down, he is not guided by his creative concerns, but by Malevich’s. He recognizes his own distance and limits. When asked about the relationship of the 1913 Malevich Suprematist drawings to American artists (Kelly, Albers, Reinhardt, and Newman), Bochner said:

 I think that the intention of Malevich is so radically different, it’s not beneficial to make comparisons. Those kinds of relationships are really made on formal grounds.

 Further, he continues:

 Art is not illustrating ideas, particularly received ideas. Art has to do with the intent of the work – how it moves out, how it structures itself from a central preoccupation. A central preoccupation can’t be really a formal problem, such as how you deal with the edge of the canvas. It comes from content.

And content comes from a creator.

 

 

Suprematism

 In his 1920 essay Suprematism. 34 Drawings Malevich “split” it:

 Suprematism falls into three stages, according to the number of squares in black, red and white: the black period, the colored and the white. In the latter, white shapes are painted on white. All three periods of development extend from 1913 to 1918.

 Malevich puts 1913 as the beginning of Suprematism, because the first ever black square appeared in the sketch for the backdrop for the 1913 opera Victory over the Sun, but did not become part of the final production.

In December 1919 – January 1920, Malevich’s first retrospective took place as part of the 16th State Exhibition and was titled Kazimir Malevich. His Route from Impressionism towards Suprematism. In this show the works representing different stages and periods of his creative activity were organized chronologically. Suprematism was divided into three stages: black, color, white. The exposition was crowned by two plain white canvases. The same conception of the exhibition was duplicated when Unovis (Creators of New Art - the Vitebsk artistic group founded by Malevich in 1920) exhibited its collective project in “The Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Trends 1918 - 1923” which opened in May of 1923. The project exhibited paintings by its members, including paintings of Malevich himself, without any names or attributions. Two plain white canvases also completed it. This was the last Unovis show. Three years lie between these two exhibitions. During those years Malevich did not paint; he taught and wrote articulating and presenting Suprematism and his understanding of art in its context. On the occasion of the 1923 exhibition, Malevich wrote his manifesto Suprematist Mirror in which everything came to zero. He also called his plain empty canvases Suprematist mirrors. He did not create truly new works until his return from Berlin.

I like that Bochner mistrusts Malevich:

Yes, but I think that there is a yawning gap between his theoretical writings and the actual visual facts themselves; I don’t feel that you can use his writings as a key to what the paintings are about.

 I agree. To me the question is who wrote? The artist or his alter ego? And what does it mean that for a period of time, it was only writing, and no painting. When Malevich returned to painting, it was no longer non-objective. Was that pause reinvention? What did he leave or loose? Bochner reflects on Malevich’s work just before the pause:

 Dead end? – yes, but perhaps more like a “loose end.” People used to talk about White on White as if it had no cause – as if it were sui generis; there it is, it’s a fact, it’s there, there’s nothing before and there’s nothing after. But that relegated it to being a gesture. A one-shot thing. On the contrary, I think it’s one of the prime objects of the twentieth century. A “prime object” exists in such a way that it contains a fundamental set of ideas which don’t have to be seen or known explicitly by anyone else to exert their pressure. The ideas insinuate their way into the world. I think Malevich really represents very major issues to art today.

 I think Malevich might have literally actualized a prime object. Several years ago my friend and mentor opened my eyes to the simple fact that Malevich’s square plain canvas, regardless of the artist’s claim of absolute zero, is an object, a canvas on a stretcher. The “world as non-objectivity” hit object head on.

Did Malevich realize this? Was it an idea that, perhaps, made its stark brief appearance in these works? Did the writer not follow the artist? Did the non-realization on the part of Malevich or his “heirs” of the conflict of its object-hood with the artist’s pronouncement of “white free abyss” make it less potent? Did it register in some way once plain canvases were seen in the 1923 Unovis exhibition photograph? In his post-Suprematist figurative painting, Malevich himself went down a different road than his “heirs.”

I don’t think there is plain canvas after all, but a ‘prime object.’ No artist starts with a tabula rasa, but with a set of ideas. Every artist is entangled in genetic links, and influences are many. But in the end, it’s leaving places or dead end.

 

 Malevich and the American Legacy is on view at the Gagosian Gallery through April 30, 2011

980 Madison Avenue (at 77^th street)
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 The concurrent exhibition The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection 1910 - 1918 at the Guggenheim Museum of Art provides a global context for the years surrounding the birth of Suprematism and includes two paintings by Malevich, a cubo-futurist Morning in the Village after Snowstorm, 1912 and Untitled, circa 1916. On view through June 1, 2011.

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 The Museum of Modern Art has five Malevichs on view as part of the permanent collection on the 5^th floor: two cubo-futurist paintings, Reservist of the First Division, 1914, and Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement, 1912-13, and three Suprematist works: Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, Suprematist Painting, 1916-1917, and Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapscak – Color Masses in the Forth Dimension, 1915.  More holdings can be viewed online.

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 Malevich at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow: collection online

 

 More on Malevich’s legal ownership

Misaligned

The exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the 20^th Century at the Museum of Modern Art took its title from Vasily Kandinsky’s 1914 article On line. In this article Kandinsky defines line as a point in motion. The exhibition “argues for an expanded history of drawing that moves off the page into space and time.”  But, to my eye, the show curators, Catherine de Zegher and Cornelia Butler, used Kandinsky’s vision as a lens to blur the view of drawing in the 20^th century and at large.

The exhibition comprised over 300 works by more than 100 artists spanning many practices: drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video and some cutting across several disciplines. The exhibition “charts the radical transformation of the medium between 1910 and 2010, as artists broke down drawing to its core elements, making line the subject of intense exploration: as the path of a moving point or a human body in motion (the dancer tracing dynamic lines across the stage, the wandering artist tracing lines across the land), as an element in a network, and as a boundary—political, cultural, or social.” To me this sounds as if artists got together and broke down drawing to its core elements, and that communal undertaking lasted a whole century. And what does it mean to break down drawing to its core elements? What are those? Point? Line? Smudge? As if different types of marks are part of a puzzle called drawing. Line does not exist in a vacuum; it is a part of space. Line embodies relationship(s) within and with space; it has never been just a mark on a flat surface. I believe that it is in the relationship to space that the transformation took place. The transformation is rooted in drawing, but it is a gross simplification to attribute it to isolation of line as trace. After all, if line is a point in motion, can point be a line in at rest?

The opening text panel grouped the works according to three major “uses” of line in the 20^th century as seen by the exhibition curators: 

-         Surface tension, featuring artistic drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane

-         Line extension, composed of works in which lines extend beyond flatness into real space – that is, into social space

-         Confluence, presenting works in which line and background are fused, giving greater significances to the space between the lines.

 The fundamental flaw of this thinking is that it is governed by concepts disconnected from creative practice. It produces vagueness. Artistic drive to construct and represent movement within the flat picture plane is by no means limited to the 20^th century or to drawing. I wish for greater precision, specifying (dis)continuity of drawing in the 20^th century or its interface with painting if this is what that group is about. Represent movement through line? But isn’t line a point in motion? But then, it sounds as if lines extend like telegraph wire. And does real space (3-D?) equal social space? And, when ever has space between the lines had been less significant than in the 20^th century? Line is inseparable from space; it constitutes a spatial relationship.  In that sense, there’s no space between the lines but multiple relationships of bodies and spaces within a larger universe, whether two- or three-dimensional. The disconnected nature of the texts accompanying this exhibition shows the misunderstanding of the nature of drawing, and hence, line, reducing it to a mark,  limiting it to drawing, and then inflating the definitions: adding a third dimension (tracing takes place in 3-d) and building metaphorical sand castles (line ≈ divide ≈ political boundary).

Even before its “radical transformation” drawing was always inherent in other art forms. This exhibition never established the distinction between drawing as an independent, even if preparatory, undertaking, and drawing as an aspect of painting. But line is about relationship which is by no means limited to drawing. A number of paintings were included in the show, but the junction between painting and drawing was never really addressed in a fundamental way; nor was the nature of drawing seriously contemplated. Movement- and motion-focused futurist paintings were given a prominent place in the exhibition and in the catalogue, but the essays coasted over a list of paintings and drawings from this period but never explored the relationship between painting and drawing in this place and at this time, nor line as a relationship(s) in either painting or drawing, and if and how it was different.

In the same way, the venture of line into real space starts at drawing’s inherent presence in three-dimensional works. It is not just that line extended beyond flatness; as if a previously hidden armature unwound. De Zegher quotes Alexander Rodchenko’s remarkable statement on this subject:

 The perfected significance of the line was finally clarified – on the one hand, its bordering and edge relationship, and on the other – as a factor of the main construction of every organism that exists in life, the skeleton, so to speak (or the foundation, carcass, system). The line is the first and last, both in painting and in any construction at all. The line is the path of passing through, movement, collision, edge, attachment, joining, sectioning.

 And then she proceeds to talk about importance of line for Constructivism and its strife to transform two-dimensional into three-dimensional ignoring the meta aspect of what Rodchenko had said about the nature of line at large. It is part of every organism because it relates it to a larger world.

In drawing (in its traditional sense), the space is provisional (so is time); the mind and body converge in a tool; then, they diverge on a piece of paper. The process becomes visible in relationships established on paper. This is true for painting as well, but drawing is the most direct means of visual expression, the most simple, and often, the most private. For artists at the highest levels of practice, it reaches absolute immediacy as a way to relate to the world; this immediacy overflows into other practices (painting, sculpture, and others). I think it becomes natural because a certain constant level of synchronization is reached between mind and body, between a body and the space it inhabits. I don’t mean a body as human flesh, but as a point in motion. Artistic breakthroughs mostly germinate in drawing. And, I think, this is the reason why many new ideas in the 20^th century art are rooted in drawing. I don’t think these new ideas necessarily expanded the practice of drawing, its history or definition, but re-defined the relationship to and the understanding of space. The invisible aspect of drawing – the body as a point in motion – acquired flesh in the 20th century brining about new practices.

In the catalogue curators include a defensive clause:

 Like all curatorial practice, On Line has involved the exercise of judgment, but the aim in doing so has not been to take a definitive position but to build a nexus of attention and to be conscious of potential consequence. A survey like this one can never be exhaustive and should not attempt an authoritative determining voice. Following no single line across the century, it instead examines the interconnections of numerous lines and their constitution of networks of meaning. We hope that it encourages others to develop alternative connections and readings.

Well, of course, almost no exhibition can be an exhaustive survey, each one involves an exercise of judgment, and most likely each will provoke alternative readings. But definitive position does not necessarily coincide with authoritative voice and does not mean adherence to a single line. To me, definitive position involves rigorous thinking and an exhaustive approach to understanding and articulating the issues at stake. But I am afraid that vagueness and obfuscation is the set in stone party line in the field of art criticism.

The catalogue of over 200 pages moves through all the works at the speed of light, with line as the Ariadne’s thread that, alas, doesn’t help one to find the way out of this verbal maze. The catalogue is packed with information: artists’ quotes, excerpts from interviews with authors, and citations of other scholars. But meaning is mostly simplified, if not lost. It is as if both curators wrote their essays in a great hurry, jotting down every single idea, however fleeting, but never getting to sustained thinking.

De Zegher’s essay obeys chronological order and provides a lot of context treating 20^th century artistic developments as if they were part of some pre-ordained grand scheme, as if each new step was somehow predetermined, as if each necessarily leads to the next:

 In postwar Europe, a number of artists sought ways to expose the emerging forms of capitalism and mass consumerism centered on the image. Anticipating British and American Pop art, they analyzed this “society of the spectacle,” as Guy Debord would call it.

Did they anticipate, meaning expected or imagined, British and American Pop art before it happened? Or did British and American artists, perhaps, take their inspiration from the postwar European art scene? Keenness of spirit is very different from anticipation. But there seems to have been no time for definitions. The essay is full of pseudo-connections:

The use of the index as a counter to action painting’s sense of authorial presence coincided with the autonomous movement of the line in European and South American kinetic art.

As if the artists and their decisions didn’t really matter. But this statement is beyond understanding; it moves autonomously as a counter to this curator’s sense of authorial presence.

The painting and drawing of the Gutai group, founded in Japan in 1954, and the mechanically generated, meter-long lines boxed in containers by Piero Manzoni in 1959-61 explored related concepts of gestural performativity in their different actions with line. This development would continue in the process and performance art of the 1960s.

How, exactly, are these concepts of gestural “performativity” (and what are they) related? Which development?

If Meireles’s grids, besides their political implications (a critique of the imprisonments and disappearances under the dictatorship in Brazil), deal with phenomenology (a long-term concern in Brazilian art), Mona Hatoum and Cornelia Parker’s take up typical mannerisms of late formalism but load them with signs and symbols of political engagement, overwhelming the residual formal statement.

I guess politics connects these three artists, two of which overwhelm the residual formal statement (whatever that is) with signs and symbols of political engagement. The line is in the grid, by the way.

There are 120 pages of such quasi-connections. Fortunately, they are interspersed with illustrations. And then come another 100 pages (Butler’s essay) organized not chronologically, but conceptually, focusing on the connection between drawing and dance in the 20^th century, but never brining it into focus. Again, a stream of artwork, choreography pieces, films and words engulfs you.

 One of the opening cadences of twentieth-century art was the eruption of modern dance out of its devotion to classical forms and into dialogue with other arts. Having moved in and out of the periphery of avant-garde art practice for most of the century, dance – the poetics and mechanics of the movement of the body in space – now seems clearly to have titillated the visual arts with its adventurous sense of permission and its apparent connection to deep aesthetic impulses codified in the body.

If dance titillated the visual arts….. but it only seems clearly that it has……No definitive position, only nexus of attention and networks of meaning.

The precise distinction between movement and dance is never really established; the motion of body in space and movement of the body as an art form are often slapped together. Movement of the body in space, movement of a line in space and on the flat surface, line as a point in motion – all mashed together, but better yet

In thinking about line and movement, drawing and dance, across the twentieth century, a handful of artists seem essential.

I understand this as a verbal carelessness, but I can’t help but ask why then over 100 artists were included in the show? Or most of them are just about drawing, without dance or movement? Or were the non-essential included to highlight the essential ones?  And do line and movement mirror drawing and dance?

Luckily, words did not fully defeat the spirit (perhaps, despite the exercise of judgment). One of my favorite dialogues in the show was between 44 seconds of Loie Fuller’s Danse Serpentine (II) and Yvonne Rainer’s 10 minute long film Trio A.

Fuller called her dance practice a “metachory,” or “beyond dance.” She extended her flowing skirts with bamboo rods, used silk overlays of different length and had changing color light projected onto the stage where she performed. What is the relationship of her moving body to the surrounding space? A shifting of form? A rupture? A cut? A flow? A connection? A collision?  As a relationship, line is one of the most straightforward, yet it is arcane because the economy of its means has potential for endless variations. As a relationship it is about change and, therefore, duration. Dance is too. Fuller’s change is about possibilities.

Rainer’s is rooted in uncertainties. Trio A was choreographed in 1968, and originally, was part of a three-part series A Mind is a Muscle. The filmed version in this show was danced by Rainer herself in 1978. The choreography for this piece includes two sequences: forward and reverse. On the screen, her eyes never meet the eyes of the viewer. The viewer just watches a body moving through space and then (re)moving its movements. Like Fuller’s, Rainer’s choreography is beyond dance. But unlike Fuller’s, it is not about moving in space, but is about thinking in space. Rainer’s body is a mediator between mind and space; it is a point in motion. Fuller’s is a body in motion; it never concentrates in a point, never renounces its flesh.  

Interestingly, it was very hard to claim a point of rest within the show. There was not a single bench in any of the exhibition rooms. Yet, a number of time-based pieces – videos – were on display. I saw many people not watching them fully, also because standing still for a period of time was uncomfortable. And I wondered if benches were removed on purpose so we, spectators, became aware of our bodies in motion, at stop, in need for rest and in relationship to our minds.

 

On Line: Drawing Through the 20^th Century has closed but maintains an online presence

Watch Loie Fuller’s Dance Serpentine on YouTube (filmed in 1896 by Lumière Brothers, and, according to the comments, danced by an imitator.)

Yvonne Rainer talks to Robert Storr at the Boston University School of Visual Arts.  Several Rainer’s pieces, including Trio A (1978 filmed version), are screened during this conversation.

Picasso’s themes and variations at the Museum of Modern Art, and at large

  

Three portraits of Françoise Gilot ignore you when you walk into the exhibition gallery at MOMA. Gilot’s gaze wanders elsewhere. The beholder’s presence seems to be absent from her universe.

 

These lithographs are from the sequence of at least 28 portraits of Gilot done in the 1948 – 1949 titled The Armchair Woman (Femme au Fauteuil). These three were done around the New Year and are dated December 30^th, January 3^rd and January 16^th.  They depict Françoise wearing an embroidered Polish jacket that Picasso brought her back from one of his Communist Party-related trips to Poland. The portrait done on December 30^th is the most temperate of the three. The sleeves of the jacket mirror Gilot’s coiffure. The pattern on the sleeves stands out. She is lost in thought. The January 3^rd version is less spontaneous, more structured. She put a veil over her hair. The armchair is firmly placed in space. Her posture is somewhat strained. She is thinking of something intensely. There’s a regal hieroglyphic quality to her pose. Is he seeing her through a lens of Velazquez? Two weeks later the incised lines almost completely dissipate in black. She practically wore away the pattern of her blouse. Her face lost the softness of the December portrait; she is in a state of a tense absorption now.

The exhibition labels tell us that we are seeing 3 out of 28 variations, but the show curator, Deborah Wye, is less specific in the catalogue entry accompanying the December portrait. She says that Picasso made “no fewer than twenty-eight variations of this composition.” This nuance becomes particularly important when we learn how these lithographs came into existence. Apparently, Picasso intended to make a color lithograph for which he developed 5 plates (one plate per color because the only way to print a color lithograph was to have a separate plate for each color). He then decided to let go the color, and walked five separate black-and-white roads, developing each plate as a concurrent composition which, sometimes, had several incarnations. Thus the portrait done on December 30^th comes from the red plate; the portrait done on January 3^rd – from the violet; and the portrait dated January 16^th is not reproduced in the catalogue and this significant detail is not included in the label or MOMA online collection entry, but the numbering seems to suggest it was done from the same plate (red) as the December 30^th portrait. Moreover, the December 30^th litho is state VIII, the January 3^rd - state V, and the January 16^th – state XI. I assume that some states were intermediate and some Picasso saw as accomplished works, perhaps, nevertheless still continuing to develop those into new variations.

These variations interlock through absence, through what has been abandoned – color. The original lithograph-to-be was sliced into five layers. One can only guess what each color sheltered, but when having started to work on each plate as a separate color-less composition the artist was responding to what was there, not there, and elsewhere. Each time his “field of vision” was partial; he made his way in relation to what was present and absent, both in each state and in his subject.

The chamber-scale in feel Picasso: Themes and Variations which actually includes over 130 prints gives us a chance to catch a glimpse of what is not tangible or present. Picasso’s prints are remarkable not just as finished products, but also as footprints of his process. I wish the labels guided us through this process by providing all the fleshly details, for instance the colors of all the original plates for the above variations. I also wished for reproductions (in the catalogue) of all the variations’ states, including those that are not part of the MOMA collection and therefore not part of the exhibition. I wondered why these fine points and larger visual context were deemed negligible. The works were understood as illustrating the main themes, but the continuity of themes was not distinguished from variations as a mode of thinking.  The framing of the show leads us to believe that the theme is pure subject: bulls, studio, Marie-Therese, Françoise, Jacqueline, Dora, or old masters. Those are all themes that pulsate through Picasso’s work and embrace single pieces, series and variations. But variations have additional ties.

For an artist, working on a piece essentially equals walking through a garden of forking paths, but it is a stroll in reverse since the multiple possibilities for each decision are to be pruned if the next step is to be taken. Variations are an attempt to walk several routes, parallel, intersecting or partially coinciding, through a single garden. Variations relate to each other also through a dominant formal idea that is subject to metamorphosis in all the works that constitute a set of variations. This is the Ariadne’s thread guiding an artist through a labyrinth of possibilities. Series are different from variations. They are tied by a common thread, but they do not share a printing plate or a common composition.  The delicate, light for instance etchings that form a body of work on the subject of artist and model from the Vollard Suite, , string the line through space letting it roam freely in an attempt to define it, find balance and make sense of form-space relationship.  They are separate pieces with a common formal preoccupation, in contrast to variations which are also”restrained” by a common reference point (a composition or a plate, for example) and constitute one work, with beginning, but without end.  Variations as a mode of thinking and working heighten “if.”  What if I take this turn? Finiteness, as it happens in a single work, never occurs in variations. In a way, each variant becomes a beginning. The last one is not the end, but just another “if” that still hangs in the air. The statement of Picasso’s printers at the Mourlot lithography shop cited by Wye, about his famous variations of 1945 The Bull that “he finished where, normally, he ought to have started” is a misunderstanding of the artist’s process. He did not finish.  He started but never continued. Variations’ nature is indeterminacy.

 

In the catalogue introduction Wye mentions that a large number of Picasso’s prints were not published until after his death. His relative indifference to a finished product sheds light on the role prints played in Picasso’s creative process. Wye includes several of his statements on this subject. Picasso described his printmaking “as his own way of “writing fiction’”. He said: “The movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.” I find the first statement very intriguing. What did he mean by that? Very few of his print series or variations constitute a story; almost all are records of different states of things. Their continuity is a continuity of means not of narrative; it is an exploration of the parallel possibilities of a given language whether it is line, light, or structure. Even the seemingly narrative erotic series Raphael and the Fornarina from the Suite 347 which was recently on view at Metropolitan Art Museum Picasso show, forms a story that is primarily about the acts of looking, seeing, and metamorphosis rather than the actions of the characters. Variations are the most intense manifestation of this aspect of Picasso’s process.

            Picasso’s well-known saying about his take on painting quoted by Dore Ashton in her book Picasso on Art holds key to understanding his sustained engagement with printmaking and its consequences for his creative practice at large:

Paintings are but research and experiment.

I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search incessantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research. That is why I number them. It’s an experiment in time. I number them and date them. Maybe one day someone will be grateful…..

 

Printmaking with its option of returning to and reworking the plate and seeing the changed stage(s) next to the previous one(s) created an unparalleled research and experimentation laboratory. The final edition was less important than the movement of thought; in a way, it was almost a by-product.

 On August 10, 1945 in his conversation with the photographer Brassaï and the Russian dancer Marina Berg, referred to but not looked at in depth by Wye, Picasso talked about his painting The Charnel House, then in progress, lamenting the impossibility of preserving the different states of a painting:

I am treading very gently. I don’t want to spoil the first freshness of my work. If it were possible, I would leave it as it is, while I began over and carried it to a more advanced state on another canvas. Then I would do the same thing with that one. There would never be a “finished” canvas, but just the different “states” of a single painting, which normally disappear in the course of work. To finish, to achieve – don’t those words actually have a double meaning? To terminate, to execute, but also to put to death, to give the coup de grâce?

 In his later years Picasso seems to not only have overridden this incongruity and but gone much further in adopting the variations mode of thinking as the primary one in his creative practice at large. Think of his 1964 bodies of work Head of a Man and Artist (done on 29 copies of a reproduction of his painting) or his variations of 1954/55 on Delacroix’s Women of Algiers. These paintings are, of course, free from the shared printing plate, but are anchored by a common composition which is reinvented in each canvas (or sheet of paper in the case of the Artist).

In his print variations Picasso was subject to the force of a linear consecutive course because he was working from a single plate – the turns could be taken one after another though, of course, he could take a step back. In The Armchair Woman he broke the course of a single time flow into five concurrent interconnected sequences. But in his variations in painting, the single continuity was abandoned altogether. The works were done in succession, but each was started at an identical visual state, most often on a fresh canvas, and could have been commenced at any point. There was no common printing plate that exerted the gravity; and the common reference was not binding to a previous state in a way a return to a plate was. Each piece was a beginning and an end, or, rather, a pause. But together they formed a circular canon with no beginning or end. Only Picasso’s meticulous dating of each work placed these experiments in succession and traced the movement of his thought in time.

Variations occupied Picasso more and more as his own time was running out.  What if he could slow it down?  What if he could go back? What if he could start again? What if there was no end?

  

PICASSO: THEMES AND VARIATIONS is on view through August 30

 The Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53^rd St. (betweeen 6^th and 5^th Avenues)

New York, NY 10019

Hours: Wed – Mon 10:30 am – 5:30pm, Fri 10:30 am – 8:00 pm, closed Tue

www.moma.org

Directions

 

 Official Picasso site: www.picasso.fr

 On-line Picasso project: http://picasso.shsu.edu/

William Kentridge stops in New York

 Three major New York cultural institutions have hosted William Kentridge this year. The Museum of Modern Art put up a retrospective exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes this spring. Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera The Nose produced by Kentridge was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in February; the preparatory work is on view at the Gallery Met through the end of the season. And the artist’s four films make up the ongoing exhibition South African Projections: Films by William Kentridge at the Jewish Museum.

The five themes of the exhibition at the Modern set forth the five dominant themes of Kentridge’s work at large: Parcours D’Atelier, or Artist in the Studio (1979 – 2003), The Nose opera production and the related work (2008 – 2010), The Magic Flute opera production and the surrounding projects (2003 – 2007), and the films and drawings from the two series, Soho and Felix (1989 – 2003) and Ubu and the Procession (1990 – 2002). But the show reveals another, discrete, set of five themes - five leitmotifs that interlace through the artist’s work in both realms, of ideas and of forms, and weave the dominant themes into a seamless fabric. These crosscut themes are: body, shadow, destruction, transformation, and history.

 

            Thinking with the body

To me, Parcours D’Atelier, or Artist in the Studio was the voice leading the show because it encapsulated the artist’s creative effort as it took form and became tangible. Kentridge described his process:

Walking, thinking, stalking the image. Many of the hours spent in the studio are hours of walking, pacing back and forth across the space gathering energy, the clarity to make the first mark. It is not so much a period of planning as a time of allowing the ideas surrounding the project to percolate. A space for many different possible trajectories of an image, where sequences can suggest themselves, to be tested as internal projections.[i]

Watching Kentridge in his studio in the film installation 7 Fragments for George Méliès, 2003, was an almost carnal event which heightened my awareness of the artist’s body. Kentridge was far from being physically intense in the studio; he was not constantly moving, but was often sitting down and sometimes slouching in his chair. Yet his body was constantly negotiating space in a similar way to an artist’s brush making advances on a fresh canvas or paper. Perhaps, it is the legacy of Kentridge’s theater past, but before he thinks with the brush, he seems to think with his body. His brush is aware of this. The body in each of the Ubu Drawings (Bicycle, Dancing Man, Listening Man, and Sleeper), 1997 – 1998, struggles to fit within the sheet of paper in a way similar to Kentridge physically testing the continuum of his studio. The character in these drawings looks remarkably like the artist himself, but they are not self-portraits. I found these works to be impersonations: the artist’s brush recorded the artist’s corporeal absorption in his subject.

Sometimes a naked woman (the artist’s wife?) subtly appears as if from nowhere; she sails in from behind and clings to the artist with her whole body or lightly touches him on the shoulder, but before he turns, she is gone. Sometimes he looks through a telescope only to see her slowly moving further and further away. Who is she? An apparition? A fantasy? A muse? A pause? Her appearances ruptures the course of his working and thinking, but it doesn’t feel to be a distraction, rather as a sudden shift elsewhere. She always brings an abrupt stillness, a cessation of time, even if for a second. Her body is disembodied; she is weightless and does not seem to obey the gravity that holds the artist. Is she, paradoxically, an expression of the moment when he abandons his body for the brush?

 

Up and down the stairs

In the 7 Fragments Kentridge frequently carries, moves around, and then goes up and down a ladder. Much of the popular ladder symbolism derives from the Genesis story of Jacob’s ladder. The ladder represents communication with higher powers, connection between the two worlds, ascent and descent, gaining of experience, and movement between different levels of consciousness. All of these meanings, as inescapable collective assets, are present in Kentridge’s work. But the artist does not go up this ladder – he takes it out of his studio, breaks it apart and reinvents it. As always, he confronts meaning through conversion of form.

In the performance I am not me the horse is not mine, 2008 – 2010, there are two characters on stage: the artist himself and the platform step ladder. The performance is no monologue: Kentridge engages with the ladder as if it were his interlocutor (or interlocutress for that matter). That conversation is spatial, gestural and motoric. Or, perhaps, it is the artist’s conversation with himself, the ladder being his inanimate alter ego? As if in contrast to impersonation, this time he de-personates.

This performance (and the identically titled related cinematic installation of eight projections) is part of Kentridge’s work surrounding Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera The Nose which is based on Nikolai Gogol’s story of the same title. The performance and the installation relate to the opera tangentially: they explore the years surrounding the opera’s creation – 1920s and 1930s in Russia, the absurdity of the original story and the relationship between source(s), interpretation and reality(ies). Kentridge describes this work as “an elegy (perhaps loud for an elegy) both for the formal artistic language that was crushed in the 1920s and for the possibilities of human transformation so many hoped for and believed in during the revolution.”[ii] The transformation turned into destruction: freedom (creative and human) and many lives were shattered during these years. In the installation, the viewer is a witness to one of the lives about to become a body:  Nikolai Bukharin’s (one of the most prominent Soviet politicians of these years) 1937 interrogation transcript is running on one of the screens.

The ladder was the building block of the opera production; it was disassembled and recast as steps, stairs, platforms, ramps and landings. Those fractured the three-dimensional space of the stage and the continuous opera time into many concurrent worlds: the whole was functioning as a universe full of different “planets” that the artist would zoom into when the time came. Gogol’s story, Shostakovich’s opera and the Soviet history of the period merged into a single continuum at a relative loss of narrative continuity which translated into a conceptual and visual state of fluctuation, with each image and form constantly evolving into something else. The ladder in its perpetual unwinding embodied the transformation, in both its creative and negative dimensions.

 

Past (and present)

History is the subject of two other bodies of work, Ubu and the Procession and Soho and Felix. But this time Kentridge was (and is) a witness; apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its aftermath were (and are) his present, and he observes it from two different perspectives, both existentially and formally.

Kentridge looks at the past intimately through the eyes of two fictional personas, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum, in the eight films shown at the Modern, Johannesburg, 2^nd Greatest City after Paris, 1989; Monument, 1990; Mine, 1991; Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old, 1991; Felix in Exile, 1994; History of the Main Complaint, 1996; WEIGHING…. And WANTING, 1997; Tide Table, 2003 (the first four are on view at the Jewish Museum through September 17^th). He touches the communal Past and History via his own private and creative history. These films inscroll the least visible dimension of Kentridge’s work: destruction, undoing, and re-creation. The viewer is witnessing the development of an image - drawing, erasing, correcting, and over-painting, - as if he is watching an artist’s hand at work. If 7 Fragments make the percolation of ideas visible, then Soho and Felix make the process of ‘thinking with the brush’ unfold in front of our eyes.  The films are loosely autobiographical; they are not only about his life, but also about fantasies, dreams, lives unlived, and lives of others. The creation, destruction, and re-creation of images become a metaphor to (re)creation and/or forgetting of the past, both publicly and individually, and, simultaneously, to the possibility of transformation. Soho and Felix (Kentridge’s alter egos, or simply his fractions) personify duality, but, if to speak in terms of light and dark, the artist focuses on shadows. The two characters intersect in a third one, Mrs. Eckstein who is Felix’s lover. She is less ethereal than the woman in the 7 Fragments – she makes love – but, similarly, she softly appears and shortly is gone.

In Ubu and the Procession films, Kentridge’s “viewfinder” is akin to the one he uses for the work related to The Nose; vice-versa actually, since the former was the earlier undertaking. Just as with Soviet history, Kentridge peers through the prism of another work of art of which absurdity is also a denominator - Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (Ubu the King). The objects constantly reconfigure themselves in the film Ubu Tells the Truth: a lounge chair folds and unfolds never quite finding another form; a pair of compasses turn into a menacing creature and back into an instrument once again; the objects take on human qualities and humans become objects. The transformation is never allowed to take place; its aspects of re-configuration and destruction are dominant.

The Nose is in many ways the same train of thought taken further. The intermediary story (or stories) of both works also functions as a lens revealing several questions Kentridge, as an artist, cannot bypass: a freedom that an artist (and/or a person) can or cannot claim; creative (and personal) compromise; the (im?)possibility of transformation through art; and the (im)possibility of representation of humanity’s horrors in visual art. Possibly, the 1920s and 1930s in Russia, being more distant from Kentridge, in some way, bring these questions closer, because the “mediator”, composer Shostakovich, was himself swept up by the political absurdity of his times (as well as many other avant-garde artists for whom, initially, the Revolution meant new beginnings in life and in art). Or it may seem so to me, since the Soviet history integral part of my universe.

 

Shadows of the Past

In the Shadow Procession film and works on paper, shadow becomes a visual trope. Kentridge’s shadows are composed from torn pieces of paper which endow them with movement and autonomy from the body. But unlike the tale of Hans Christian Andersen, in Kentridge’s work it is not the body that lost its shadow, but it is the shadow that lost its body. In The Nose the loss becomes complete. In contrast to Kovalyov’s nose, the shadow never returns to where it belongs, but forms a parallel reality that is not a reflection of the tangible one. In the performance, as the artist was moving around the stage, his projection on the background screen was pacing back and forth, carrying a chair, moving a stepladder, and was followed by yet another replica of himself. The screen “twins” of the artist had no shadows, which emphasized the shadows of the artist and the stepladder on stage turning the floor into a horizontal plane full of intense visual action. In the opera, the projected shadows were inverted – they were light – running counter to the real shadows on stage, perhaps, testifying to the absurdity that was the subject of the work, and drawing a parallel with the central theme of the artist’s previous opera production, The Magic Flute.

The history as subject – public, private and creative - that was explored concurrently, yet separately, in the Felix and Soho, Ubu, and Shadow Procession, was no longer divisible in The Nose; it all collided in the opera production and related work. Even if it was, indeed, an elegy for the crushed possibilities of transformation, paradoxically (and wisely) it was written in the language of transformation.

Transformation, particularly inversion as its manifestation, is a subject of the work surrounding Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute: two miniature theaters (Learning the Flute and Black Box / Chambre Noire) and the film Preparing the Flute. In his film and the opera miniature theater, Kentridge works tonally, in black and white, often inverting and transposing light and dark. He talks about his film Learning the Flute which takes the form of a blackboard chalk drawing and is the initial, pre-production, project in this body of work:

The shifting from positive to negative and back again gave me the photographic language and the theme of the subsequent work, but it also became a way of thinking of darkness and light, of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, priest of the Sun.[iii]

The two post-production miniature theaters, the Learning the Flute and the Black Box separate light and darkness into two distinct worlds: in the installation at MOMA they were placed opposite each other across the room with the benches for the audience in between; the Flute was shown first, followed by the Black Box. But together they explored shadow as light’s companion. As Kentridge himself expressed it:

In Mozart’s opera there are hints at the dangers and limitations of Sarastro and his certainties. In Black Box I wanted to look at the political unconscious of The Magic Flute – at the damages of colonialism, which described its predations to itself as bringing enlightenment to the Dark Continent.[iv]

The past seems to be always present in Kentridge’s work (and life).

 

            The other side

             Kentridge’s near obsession with light and dark (and shadows, of course) is in many ways not surprising: he came from the world divided into black and white. I feel that for the artist in him, this split anchors the very act of looking and seeing. What do we see? How much do we see? What is possible to see? What is hidden from us? What can we not look at directly? What blinds us? Are we able to perceive change? I think that Kentridge records his act of looking through transformation. When one thinks about it, much of the visual art is about stopping the time that is condensing the change it brings, “stilling” life. And the most eye-opening understanding of the still-life as a genre (the genre of “stop”) I came across was a colleague’s parallel to a universe, as if objects were planets or celestial bodies slowly affecting and transforming each other, and the artist’s job was to register this ongoing change. For Kentridge, transformation is different; it is not limited to what is seen, but embraces what is unseen, what is impossible to see, and what makes one want to avert his or her eyes. Poignantly, an eye is a character in the Ubu films.

I think Kentridge disagrees with the viewpoint that an empty piece of paper or canvas is one of the scariest, even if recurring, events for an artist. I hear him say that in a way, there’s never a tabula rasa for an artist; there’s always the other, unseen, side of the sheet.

 

The Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53^rd St. (betweeen 6^th and 5^th Avenues)

New York, NY 10019

Hours: Wed – Mon 10:30 am – 5:30pm, Fri 10:30 am – 8:00 pm, closed Tue

www.moma.org

Directions

 William Kentridge: Five Themes

  

The Jewish Museum
1109 5^th Avenue at 92nd Street
New York, NY 10128

Hours: Sun – Tue 11:00 am – 5:45 pm, Thur 11:00 am – 8:00 pm, closed Wed, Sat (3/13/10 – 11/01/10) 11:00 am – 5:45 pm

www.thejewishmuseum.org

Directions

 

Gallery Met @ Lincoln Center

Hours: Mon - Fri: 6pm – last intermission, Sat noon – last intermission, closed Sun

http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/news/features/detail.aspx?id=11230

Directions

 

New York Public Library

LEARNING FROM THE ABSURD: A Conversation with William Kentridge hosted by

Paul Holdengräber

http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2010/03/12/william-kentridge-paul-holdengraber

 

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[i] William Kentridge: Five Themes,  the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2010, p. 13

[ii] Ibid., p. 204

[iii] Ibid., p. 170

[iv] Ibid.