Insight Rewards the Work of Art

 

At the end of my previous post, “A Cuban Adventure Totally Objective,” I said I would revisit the need to transform subject facts into picture facts if appreciating the art in painting is the goal. 

Since then, I fell into that blank space writers unhappily know all too well: I had no idea how to approach this topic without repeating past posts.  Its other name is writer’s block.  So I wallowed in this misery until this morning.  Then, like a gift, as I ran in the freezing air, I connected two disparate exhibits: a Matisse exhibit at the Met I visited a few weekends ago and a new exhibit at the Met, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,” that opens February 26.  Roberta Smith summarized the new one, “Impressionism,” this way: “In fresh, groundbreaking ways this show details the entwined rise of modern painting, modern fashion and modern (upper middle-class) life over some two dozen years of rapid change in Paris, 1862-1867.” (New York Times, 2/22/13, pp. C1 and C21).

In November, Roberta Smith summarized “Matisse: In Search of True Painting” this way: “As ravishing as it is succinct, it skims across this French master’s long productive career with a mere 49 paintings, but nearly all are stellar if not pivotal works…. The textbook simplicity of this format is irresistible. The visual self-schooling particular to looking at art kicks in, and almost before you know it your eyes are off and running, darting back and forth, parsing differences in style, brushwork, color, detail and overall effect, the expression of emotion that Matisse said he was always after.” (New York Times, 11/30/2012, p. C21 and C24.) 

In other words, the “Matisse” exhibit encouraged viewers to do the work of art (with work used as a verb, since what we do is definitely labor intensive).

In the “Matisse” exhibit, Matisse’s painting “The Large Blue Dress” hangs to the left of the skirt Lydia Delectorskaya, his model, wore while posing. Rebecca Rabinow tells us, in the catalog to the exhibit, Lydia made the dress herself: “a blue gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves, embellished with white organza cuffs and ruffles along the edges of the overskirt, neckline, and bodice.”  (“The Woman in Blue,” Matisse: In Search of True Painting, 2012, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, pp. 142-143.



Matisse, The Large Blue Dress,1937, PMA

Skirt sewn by Lydia Delectorskaya, and worn by her while posing for Matisse's The Large Blue Dress, ca. 1936. Silk with cotton lace trim. Private collection

Matisse used this skirt.  He converted it into oil paint (color) and brushed that color onto a canvas (a flat surface).  The created color unit (no longer a skirt, is it?) now serves as one visual clue to the aesthetic meaning of the picture. 

If you go to the Met website and you listen to a short video describing this painting, you will hear the curator, Rebecca Rabinow, also describe the photographs a photographer Matisse named Matossian made to document his progress.  Rabinow says: “The sequence of photographs show Matisse first presenting Lydia within the interior of his studio. But as the painting evolved, it becomes less about him trying to portray a specific person, as opposed to creating or conveying [the] emotion that he has. These photographs show not studies for the painting, but the actual evolution of the canvas. The skirt, the dress—it all changes dimensions. Shadows climb up. The settee's arms become arabesque curves. He's not in the least bit interested in a naturalistic representation of what he sees. He used [the dress] … to express the emotion that he felt when he looked at an object. He's trying to capture [its] essence.”  (Click here to view the video and listen to Rabinow’s description:  Matisse.)

Let’s examine some key words she uses: “the emotion that he felt,” and “trying to capture its essence.”

If I synthesize her language even more, the key words become “feelings” and “essence.”

What do “feelings” mean in this context?  And what is the “essence” of an object?

In Dr. Barnes and Violette de Mazia’s vocabulary, feelings are the broad human qualities an artist perceives in an object (feelings like power, drama, fluidity, delicacy), that become the “essence” of the object as an artist transforms a subject into a picture idea. 

It is as if the artist says, “I feel a strong sense of solidity in this apple,” or “I feel such delicacy and fragility in this landscape.”  At this moment, whatever the object was (apple, chair, hat, skirt, tree), it becomes a color unit and is orchestrated into a color composition.  The artist creates an entirely new object, a picture.  And embedded in the picture is the meaning of the artist’s aesthetic experience.

My classroom students tell me they know this.  They feel insulted when I remind them that a color unit is not the same as what it represents.  But when they look at a painting, they continue to describe the colors on the flat surface as if they were trees, or apples, or figures. 

Let’s look at this another way.  In one of the last essays Violette de Mazia wrote, she examined the use of headdresses in painting.  She described “hats” used by Cézanne, Renoir, and Matisse, not the same hats, but the use of “hats” as they functioned in each picture—in the   broad human values expressed as revealed by the qualities each “hat” embodied.

Here is each painting:

Cézanne, Madame Cézanne with Green Hat,1891–1892, Barnes

Renoir, The Artist's Family, 1896, Barnes

Matisse, Seated Riffian, 1912, Barnes



De Mazia says: (1) In the case of the Cézanne, the hat, a platform topped by a rising column, is as if made of stone or metal—hard, solid, weighty, frozen—and provides, at the top of the picture area, a counterbalance to the lap and hands at the picture’s lower portion, at the same time equilibrating the thrust and counter-thrust of the architectural components of the figure:

 

(2) The hat of the standing woman in the Renoir, made of lush colors, as of a garden of flowers, is a voluptuous volume that is echoed in the small tree at the side, in the houses, in the woman’s blouse and skirt, in the child’s bonnet; it is, in addition, one of a group of hats that includes the hat on the boy and the hat on the girl, all three of which, by their relationships to each other, emphasize the closed-in effect of the composition and the contrast of axial planes created by the presentation of the figures:

  

(3) In the Matisse, the headdress is essentially a set of more or less parallel, curvilinear, contrasting bands of color that are in keeping with and complete the theme of bands and stripes in the rest of the painting. (“The Form of Seurat’s ‘The Models,’” Vistas, Vol. V, No. 1, 1990, pp. 9-10)

 

De Mazia’s point: the transformation of “hat” into color unit fits the purpose and the context of the picture.  It is not the artist’s job to record the kind of hat the figure wore, but “to record the aesthetic character it acquired from the artist’s imaginative perception of a situation in which the hat plays a part and to record it in terms of broad human values.”

In Cézanne’s picture, power and architectural equilibrium are expressed, and the color unit that says “hat” fits that purpose; in Renoir’s picture, fluidity, warmth, and richness are expressed, and the units that say “hats” fit that purpose; in the Matisse, the contrast of exotic color drama comes about by pattern of shapes, and the “hat” fits that purpose.

Now examine the Matisse painting that started this exploration: The Large Blue Dress.

Here it is upside down:

 

Matisse transformed Lydia Delectorskaya wearing her blue dress into a series of symmetrical arabesques, flattened bright color units, set in a subtle space recession.  He uses single flat colors evenly filling a pattern of clean-cut areas—an idea that eventually leads him to paper cut-outs. 

For the artist, the conversion of subject to picture idea occurs in magic moments that change everything.  While Matossian’s photographs reveal some of the revisions Matisse made to this picture over a period of time, they do not account for the why.  The picture holds the answer, and we discover it by uncovering the art in it.

Notice the following pictures facts when I slice the picture in half.  First, the left side:

 

1.     The background black grid sets off the “swan’s neck” yellow arabesque, followed by the red arc with its pink linear pattern, and the blue-gray curve of the “skirt,” all units sliding one behind the other.

2.     The white “skirt’s trim” rhythmically echoes the yellow arabesque.

3.     The internal pink linear pattern in the red arc is rhythmically echoed in the gray rectangle above and to the right of the black grid’s top arc.

4.     The curvilinear pattern of the “skirt’s trim” is echoed in the smaller yellow rectangle to the left of the gray one.

5.     The red background repeats the grid of the black arc, but with larger rectangles.

6.     The “black/white” motif occurs again in the dots of “beads” wrapping around the large leaf-shaped “hand” with its splayed “thumb.”

7.     All the color units move backward from the bulbous shoulder, arm, and skirt in a series of curvilinear, dovetailing shapes.

8.     The red arc sets the mid-space and allows the background red to move behind the top yellow rectilinear color areas.  

Now examine the right side:

 

 

1.     Now the red background, the shape of a larger arc, rhythmically balances its twin on the leftwhile, at the same time, its angular top bends inward like the number 3. 

 

2.     The yellow arabesque, pushed to the edge of the right side of the picture, hugs the red arc while the gray-blue “sleeve and cuff” and the ball-shaped shoulder slide behind it.  

 

3.     The “skirt’s trim” now mirrors the yellow “S.” 

 

4.     Each color unit, as on the left, starting with the “trim,” moves backward in space ending in the black grid on the right.  However, that black-grid background now pushes further back than on the right because of the configuration of blue-gray arm sandwiched between the yellow “S” and the red “3.”

 

5.     The gold open circles of the “necklace” connects to the semi-circle of gold hair and continues the motif of black/white circles enveloped in the downward flow of the “foliage-shaped hand” that echo the yellow “flowers” behind the oval head.

 

6.     The red “mouth” sets the spatial key for all the red units.  Take a good look at those spatial rhythms.  I think you will enjoy the experience. Or spend some time with the pinks lined in white of the face, neck, and hands to enjoy how those repetitions echo the white/gray motifs in the “dress’s” trim, then reverse in the dress’s gray/white units.

I could go on, and the surprise of this statement is two-fold: at first glance, this picture looks effortless, facile even, simple enough to see in one quick look.  However, only when you look at it long and carefully do you see the decorativeness of the flattened, compactly wedged planes, the balancing of foreground and background into a single, rhythmically organized surface, and the arabesques of areas and lines.

Insight rewards the work of art.  Insight allows us to discern the true nature of a situation and to grasp the inward or hidden nature of things.  As I said in a previous post, insight makes the invisible visible (see Making the Invisible Visible).

I hope you visit the Met to see both exhibits.  “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” opens February 26 and closes May 27, 2013.  “Matisse: In Search of True Painting” closes March 17.  For more information, click here: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

 

 

 

A Cuban Adventure Totally Objective

 

In the last post, A Cuban Adventure Not Totally Objective, I began a description of El Rapto de las Mulatas (The Abduction of the Mulatto Women), a 1938 painting by Carlos Enríquez.

I asked you to analyze the painting and share with me your aesthetic discoveries, and I am happy to report many of you did.

What follows is my synthesis of your perceptions and mine.

Here is the painting:

 

Carlos Enríquez, Abduction of the Mulatto Women, 1938, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana

The picture is an orchestration of light, airy, translucent color masses that twist, turn, and spin in a compressed space.  Right side up, as it is above, that much is clear.

Here it is upside down:

 

Upside down, the picture divides into two sections: slightly above center, a semi-circle separates the now lower half from the upper.  The lower half consists of lighter, transparent, almost diaphanous volumes rising upward and bulging forward to the right, crowning in the “hat.”  Notice how the “hat” to the left sinks back in space; how the head of the “mulata” between the two “policemen” is the furthest back in space, nestled in a dark crevice; how the oval, bent-back head of the “mulata” on the right floats forward and holds its position in space just below the “policeman” to the right, and her “body,” a cone of deep reds, bulges up and then recedes back completing the curve that divides the picture. 

The now bottom of the picture, like fluffy blue/pink cotton-candy, wisps, curls, and floats creating pockets of space made deeper by the vertical, delicate, curving “palm trees” as they set off the dove-tailing landscape of rolling hills in the far distance.

Look carefully at how far back the space recedes by comparing the “hat,” right side up, to the space created to its right:

 

Even the “rifle,” its black barrel dramatically pointed back and right, guides us both backward and across this rolling, blue-pink configuration of receding planes.

And while we are here, examine the brush strokes that build that “hat.”  A few of you detected a Cézanne-esque application of short, horizontal strokes that become vertical bands, building its volume.  Notice, too, how the brim is more of a bowl, with the crown of the hat sinking down into a pocket of space and revealing the “eye” and “nose” of the policeman through an open space made by the rising edge of the rim’s golden band.  Notice, also, that the Cézanne brush strokes do not build a solid, set volume, but rather a light, airy one.  Notice, as well, that the vertical alternating blue/gold bands that structure the crown of the hat are rhythmically repeated in the double row of “palm trees” in the far right of the picture.

Now look at this detail of the lower section of the top part of the picture, as the figures meet the two horses:

 

Swirls of color volumes swim across the picture plane.  The breasts and shoulder of the “mulata” to the left, a bubble-like mass of transparent, muted color, floats between the flattened “policeman’s” body and her thrown-back head.  Her oval “head” contrasts in both color and value to the warmth, lightness, and transparency of her upper body.  In tones of tan, black, gray, and green, the oval volume also sinks down into, and is encircled by, a crown of black.  The undulating  color mass around her completes the color unit, and it consists of the “policeman’s” hand and arm pressing downward and both her arms rising upward, fingers splayed and pointed, the spaces between them rhythmically echoing the men’s bullet vests.   

Wedged between the two “men,” the other “mulata,” is folded legs to chin, and gripped in a two-handed vise.  Her rounded thighs and knees duplicate the rounded, bubble motif of her companion’s upper body, but in Cézanne-esque brushstrokes of heavier, darker tones.  Painted similarly to her companion in tones of blue-gray and tan, her oval face slips slightly behind the left “policeman’s” shoulder. 

To her right, the second “policeman” melts, cubist piece by cubist piece, into the background.

That’s merely the top half.

Now let’s look at the bottom part:

 

All the color units crowd the frontal plane.  No space recedes between any of the color units.  The horses: one frontal, a swirling volume of blue-grays and tan; the other (to the right) seen from the rear, bulging volumes of reds, oranges, and browns.  Blue-gray wisps fly from the left “horse” and float to the right.  On the top left, the “mulata’s body, a bulging red/orange mass pushes forward and down, closing off the space.  On the right, the “horse’s” rump pushes left against the central “horse,” dramatically and forcefully squeezing it forward as it explodes outwards into the frontal plane.    

Moreover, the color masses, remarkably luminous in combination with strong dark and light accents, do not hark back to Rubens.  Enriquez may have used a subject similar to The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, adapting it to a historically Cuban experience, but he did not borrow Rubens’ bright color or textual and fleshy fidelity. 

Look at the Rubens again:

Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, c. 1617, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Enriquez stresses expressive qualities of movement, drama, forcefulness and power—Cézanne-esque qualities with similar subtle colorful modulations—but none of Cézanne’s architectonic setness or solidity. 

His color and swirl has much in common with Pascin’s.

Look at the following pictures to see if you agree:



Pascin, Southern Scene, 1915, Barnes

Pascin, Cubam Hospitality, 1915, Barnes

 

Pascin, like Rubens, expresses an activity of swirling rhythms and he models volumes by contrasting bands of color.  Like the cubists, he uses angles and planes to orchestrate those units in space.  He adapts Renoir’s lightness, delicacy, and fluidity of color.  Dr. Barnes argues that Pascin creates a “sort of swirl which, though less colorful than Rubens’, and less powerful than Tintoretto’s is akin to both.” (The Art in Painting, p. 376).

That said, Pascin’s color has a pastel quality.  Enriquez color does not.  Enriquez color looks to be the result of applied strokes of tinted air, as though made out of exhaled breath, not pigment.  The marvel is that these delicate, light, airy, translucent color volumes also forcefully and dramatically writhe, swirl, and pulse thereby, in El Rapto de las Mulatas, legitimately linking subject facts to picture facts.  

In my next post, I will review that last sentence.  At the end of last semester, as I read my students’ final papers, I noticed how much trouble they had stating the picture idea for the painting they were analyzing.  While they all were able to discuss their picture as made of colors on a flat surface, when they described those colors, they could not move past what they “represented.”  They talked about hats, not a color volume in space, for example.  This conversion from subject to subject matter, from what we refer to as everyday reality to visual perception, is no easy task.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Cuban Adventure Not Totally Objective

 

Last week,  in the Havana Museum of Fine Arts,  I listened to a guide describing El Rapto de las Mulatas (The Abduction of the Mulatto Women), a 1938 painting by Carlos Enríquez.

I explored the picture as he talked about Enríquez, but when he said, “Enriquez married Alice Neel in 1925,” I started listening.  Alice Neel.  I knew her work, and I recalled some of her life: hard, I remembered, with the death of one child and separation from another. 

I knew none of this mattered if what I wanted to understand was the art in the Enríquez painting, but I, nevertheless, being human and curious, could not wait to trace the story.

As soon as I arrived home, I did.

Alice Neel, born to parents from the Philadelphia area on January 28, 1900, attended the Philadelphia School of Art and Design for Women, now Moore College of Art and Design.  Anne d’Harnoncourt wrote (in the catalog forward to the 2000 exhibition marking Neel’s 100^th birthday), Neel was the artist “who took the preferred genre of her Philadelphia forerunners, Charles Wilson Peale, Thomas Eakins, Cecilia Beaux, and Mary Cassatt, into the modern age.” (p. 8).

In July 1924, Neel attended the Chester Springs summer school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where she met the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez (1900-1957), son of a prominent family in Havana.

In the spring of 1925, Neel graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, and on June 1, she married Enríquez in Colwyn, Pennsylvania.  However, she was unwilling to travel to Havana with him.  He eventually left for Havana, where he took a job with the Independent Coal Company and participated in his first exhibition with a group of young artists who became the leaders of the Cuban vanguardia movement. 

In 1926, Enríquez returned to Colwyn to convince Neel to join him in Cuba.  She traveled to Havana with him, and they lived with his parents in their house in El Vedado, later moving into their own apartment on the waterfront, and then to a rented house in the neighborhood of La Vibora.  Neel had her first solo exhibition in Havana, and on December 26 gave birth to a daughter, Santillana del Mar Enríquez.

Several exhibits with Enríquez followed, but in May, Neel returned to Colwyn with Santillana.  That fall, Enríquez joined them in Colwyn, and the family moved to an apartment on West 81^st Street in New York City.  That winter they moved to Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.  In December, Santillana died of diphtheria.

On November 24, 1928, Neel gave birth to Isabella Lillian Enríquez (called Isabetta).  In May 1930, Enríquez left Neel, taking Isabetta with him to Cuba.  His two sisters helped him raise Isabetta. 

In August, Neel suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized at Orthopedic Hospital in Philadelphia where she stayed through Christmas.  In January, Enríquez returned to the United States and visited Neel a few times in the hospital.  After she was discharged, he took her back to her parents’ home in Colwyn. 

A short time later, Neel attempted suicide by turning on the gas oven in her parents’ kitchen.  She was hospitalized in Wilmington Hospital in Delaware for a few days and then was returned to Orthopedic Hospital in Philadephia where she attempted suicide by smashing a glass with the intention of swallowing the shards.  She was sent to the suicidal ward at Philadelphia General Hospital where she stayed through Easter.  At some point during this time, Enríquez returned to Paris and then Cuba.  They never saw each other again.

After several months at Gladwyne Colony, a private sanatorium, Neel was discharged, and she resumed living with her parents.  Four years later, she rented a house in the town of Belmar on the New Jersey shore, where her parents stayed with her while Isabetta visited from Cuba. 

Enough?

For me, it is.  I did not like Enríquez, and I feared my negative feelings about him would influence my analysis of his painting.

Moreover, researching what happened between them delayed the hard work of examining the painting.  I found it so much easier to research biographical information, I kept putting off confronting the painting.

Finally, I got to work.  Here is the painting:

Carlos Enríquez, Abduction of the Mulatto Women, 1938, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.

This painting attracted me because of its swirls, its light, airy color masses, and because I remembered  Rubens’ painting, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus. In other words, it seduced me.  At first glance, I enjoyed how Enríquez had transformed the Rubens.  Here is the Rubens:

 

c. 1617, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Here they are, side by side:

 

 

                                                                                                             

From the point of view of subject, Enríquez uses the same subject facts as Rubens: two women abducted by two men surrounded by leaping horses set in a relatively serene landscape.

And there the similarities end.

Enríquez adapts Rubens’ combination of vigorous movement, swirls of broken light, animation, drama, and bright color into a series of more abstract, light, airy, translucent color masses that twist, turn, and spin in a compressed space.

In the Rubens, the mythological half-brothers Castor and Pollux abduct the daughters of a king of Messene.  Rubens depicts polished armor, horsehair, silk, and flesh, and the textures feel palpable.  The curves of the overall pinwheel composition find rhythmic echoes within the figures themselves.

Our guide said Enríquez had a horse brought to his workshop, tied Sara Cheméndez (his female model at the time) to the horse, and had the animal lashed: this provided him a more realistic scene for the painting.

Our guide went on to describe how Enríquez transformed the Rubens’ painting into a specifically Cuban story. In the Enríquez, rural Cuban policemen, sensual women, restless horses, and a windy landscape of palm trees and rolling hills are the main illustrative elements, a setting establishing confrontation, eroticism, and conflict, he said. Two mulata women, taken on horseback by two armed “mambise” riders (popularized Cuban soldiers of the War for Independence), ride through the Cuban countryside. In contrast to the men in full uniform, the abducted mulatas are nude.

Our guide said the bright red and yellow brushstrokes that erupt from the scene evoke pervasive sexual energy.  The mulatas are depicted as highly sexual beings that find pleasure in being abducted. There is also an aggressive and confrontational element in the women’s character. One of the women, challenging her abductor, is staring directly into the eyes of the soldier who has her in his grasp. The look she is giving him may be read two ways:  as a look of confident seduction or a look of defiance. Either way, the mulata is portrayed as powerful and assertive.

I stopped listening at this point. I felt insulted by the blatant assumption that any woman would enjoy a forceful abduction and a sexual assault.
The antidote, as always, is this: turn the picture upside down.

 

Now go to work.

That’s right.  I am not going any further in this post.  I have not posted in more than a month.  It has been a long time since I’ve asked you to do some careful looking.  If you do the work, I promise you a rich and rewarding experience.

If you wish to share your discoveries with me, click here:  Marilyn’s e-mail.  Or write your perceptions in the space provided on the blog. 

In the next post, I will summarize your contributions and describe the art in The Abduction of the Mulatto Women.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sherlock Connection

 

In the Preface to the First Edition of The Art in Painting, Dr. Barnes says the objective method he pioneered at the Barnes Foundation to understand and appreciate paintings comprises “the observation of facts, reflection upon them, and the testing of the conclusions by their success in application.”

Sherlock Holmes, then, practiced the objective method.

I came upon this seemingly odd connection in a synchronistic way.

A few weeks ago, I prepared to drive to my nephew’s surprise 40^th birthday party in Poughkeepsie, NY, a four-hour trip.  I usually go to the library and borrow an audiobook to distract me from the tedium.  The day before, I realized I forgot to do so, so I did the next best thing: I went to iTunes to look for an audiobook I could download to my cell phone.  Instead, I found a free APP containing numerous audiobooks.

Once in the car, I selected the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  To Poughkeepsie and back, I listened to Sherlock tell Watson how he did what he did and why, and I wished I had a pen and paper so I could record the statements connecting his “method” to Dr. Barnes’s method.

Once home, though, Google saved the day.  I typed into the search box “Sherlock Holmes quotes,” and up came a website that had done the job for me.  I copied and pasted the relevant quotes into a Word document, and I handed them out during the last CSI for Art Detectives classes I taught at both the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Wilmington and the Chester County Historical Society in West Chester.  My students found these quotes a “fitting” culmination to their Color Scene Investigations.

Then today I opened my New York Times and read an article in the Opinion section titled “The Power of Concentration,” a discussion of what we can learn from the way Sherlock Holmes trains his mind, by Maria Konnikova, the author of “Mastermind:  How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.” 

What can we learn?

According to Konnikova, “the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. That’s exactly what Holmes does when he taps together the tips of his fingers, or exhales a fine cloud of smoke. He is centering his attention on a single element. And somehow, despite the seeming pause in activity, he emerges, time and time again, far ahead of his energetic colleagues. In the time it takes old detective Mac to traipse around all those country towns in search of a missing bicyclist in ‘The Valley of Fear,’ Holmes solves the entire crime without leaving the room where the murder occurred. That’s the thing about mindfulness. It seems to slow you down, but it actually gives you the resources you need to speed up your thinking."

Konnikova goes on to say that "The difference between a Holmes and a Watson is, essentially, one of practice. Attention is finite, it’s true — but it is also trainable. Through modifying our practices of thought toward a more Holmes-like concentration, we can build up neural real estate that is better able to deal with the variegated demands of the endlessly multitasking, infinitely connected modern world.”

What has this to do with the objective method in appreciating the art in painting?  Think about what I have taught you to do in these posts.  I have instructed you to look for picture facts, not subject facts.  You scrutinize the painting to see and describe the relationships among light, line, color, and space.  You look for aesthetic rhythm (repetition with variety).  You look for other aesthetic qualities: balance, symmetry, novelty, suspense, expectancy, surprise.    You look for a theme and its variations (unity and variety).   And you do this yourself, without needing biographical, historical, or any other information outside the picture. 

Many of my classroom students and many of you, my readers, tell me this is very hard work.  Many complain that this method takes a long time to master. 

I agree.

It is hard work, and it takes a long time to master.

When you see it through, you not only understand the art in a painting, you feel the satisfaction, the pleasure, the thrill, that is the result of a complete aesthetic experience.  And nothing touches that delicious experience. 

Nothing.

Sherlock knew this.  We know this.

Now I can add another benefit, a health benefit.  Konnikova also argues that “Mindfulness may have a prophylactic effect: it can strengthen the areas that are most susceptible to cognitive decline. When we learn to unitask, to think more in line with Holmes’s detached approach, we may be doing more than increasing our observational prowess. We may be investing in a sounder mental future — no matter how old we are.”

That’s pretty exciting stuff.  Not only do you, as practitioners of the objective method for appreciating the art in painting increase your aesthetic experiences, you also enhance your mindfulness capabilities.  And increasing mindfulness capabilities has all kinds of benefits from speeding up thought process, to paying attention, to slowing memory decline.

Finally, here it is in the words of the great detective himself, Sherlock Holmes:

1.     “You see, but you do not observe.  The distinction is clear.” (A Scandal in Bohemia)

2.     “There is nothing new under the sun.  It has all been done before.” (A Study in Scarlet)

3.     “What one man can invent another can discover.” (The Adventure of the Dancing Man)

4.     “There is nothing like first-hand evidence.” (A Study in Scarlet)

5.     “Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result.  This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.” (A Study in Scarlet)

In case you need evidence, look at this chart:

We start from the picture, and we work backwards.  If we pay attention to all the clues in the picture, we arrive at that charmed moment when we, as the artist did, confront the picture’s source, uncover the visual message embedded in it, and feel we understand it. 

You have this power. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Swan's Way: Part II

 

In the previous post, “The Swan’s Way,” we studied Cézanne’s Leda and the Swan. My analysis concluded with this statement: In Cézanne’s Leda, dominating colors, pervasive linear-volumes, steady rhythms of echoed themes, and simple sets of contrasts repeat.  The color motifs lock in and pin the areas of volume and intervals of space, establishing expressive unity.

I asked you to contrast Cézanne’s Leda with Laurencin’s, and I asked you to send me your responses to Laurencin’s picture.

Here is what one of you said:

1.     An obvious parallel of the cocked heads and necks of the major color units.

2.     Use of black color for eyes, Leda’s hair, and on the beak of the swan, moves the eye.

3.     Black again used in railing (parallel straight lines rigid and bold) compared to dreamy overall canvas.

4.     The bent arm cradling Leda's head and the arm resting on the wing of the swan do not evoke strength or vigor, but express gentleness.

5.     A variety of color in what appears to be white in background, flesh, and feathers reveals transparency due to color structure and produces the quality of delicacy.

Here is what another said: “My emotional reaction is so different in regard to the two paintings it is startling given the subject facts are the same. Perhaps social morays affected the expression of the interpretation.”

And another:  “Laurencin’s is lighter—both in weight and in brightness. She looks airy—like you could blow her away. The other is solid, typical Cézanne.”

And another:  “Laurencin’s Leda seems lascivious, as though she is seducing the swan, not the other way around.  She is clothed in a diaphanous cape held in place by a soft, ribbon tied into a flowery ornament on her right shoulder—like something a woman would buy in Victoria’s Secret to prepare for lovemaking.  She caresses the swan as if to entice him.”

In a blog post by Liz Hager, I found this statement: “Marie Laurencin was one of the first modern female artists to tackle Leda. In her 1923 work, she elicits the protective mother through the tender embrace of the woman’s arm around her swan. Note the calming hand upon on the bird’s back. This painting speaks quietly but convincingly of the nurturing female.”

On the Philadelphia Museum of Art website, I found this statement:  “Leda caresses the swan's feathered neck and back, yet the black railing that separates them suggests an insurmountable division between the sexes, perhaps reflecting Laurencin's own position as one of the few female artists within the French avant-garde.”

Here is Laurencin’s picture: 



Laurencin, Leda and the Swan, 1923, Oil on canvas, PMA

 

This is a work of art.  My emphasis is on the word work.

Let’s go to work.

1.     The color is soft, light, and dry, a pastel-like quality.

2.     A series of arcs and soft curves create rhythms: look at the curve of the swan’s neck as it joins and turns with the swan’s wing;  look at the relationship between Leda’s left arm (to our right)and the swan’s neck and the background; look at the repetition of the shapes created by Leda’s “cape” with the subtle recession of the blue/green “background”;  look at the repetition of the shapes in Leda’s hairpiece with the shapes at the right background, the shape of her left hand, and the shape of the swan’s feathers in the lower right;  find all the beak-shapes (don’t miss the green one right under Leda’s breasts);  look for the repetition of the slits that say “eyes” in the blackish mass in the upper right;  find all the small circle variety of those repetitions on the swan’s back, in the green-beak shape, in the tiny rectangle and small triangle at the base of Leda’s cape, and in the projections on her cape (in fact, keep looking, because they occur other places as well); look how the black mass in the upper right hangs in the picture space; examine how the beak shapes created by the intersection of the “foliage” in the lower right with the black mass reasserts the subtle space recession of the left side.

 If turning the picture upside down makes your scrutiny more productive, here it is:

 

This detail may prove helpful as well.  Ask yourself: is this a swan?  Are those hands?  If not, what are they?

  

Subtlety, not power and drama, defines Laurencin’s picture.  The ivory/gray central volumes gently intersect and envelope.  The transparent, pastel-like colors overlap and recede gradually in space.  Curvilinear, airy, color volumes create repeated arc-shaped or circular motifs moving the eye through the picture.  Softness, lightness, delicacy, fragility, and haziness invite us to enter this quiet, still color world.

Information abounds about Laurencin’s life.  Some of that information produced the speculation I quoted in the first part of this post.  Laurencin moved in the circle surrounding Picasso and Juan Gris.  Apollinaire praised her work, and he became her lover (not sure in what order).  Her work was included with many artists admired for their originality: Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Juan Gris, Delaunay, and Marcoussis.  She claimed Picasso used her as a model for one of the nude figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Her first sale was to Gertrude Stein. She ably resisted the pressure of her surroundings, the abstraction and intellectualism of the Cubists and later the Dadaists.  She maintained and expressed her unique, visual interests, her world as it appeared to her, throughout her career.

That said, as with any picture, if you want to appreciate it, you must look at it.  The tools you have learned will always assist you in uncovering the art in it.  The process of doing so, hard work as it is, allows you to experience the pleasure that accompanies aesthetic understanding.