Rembrandt and the Face of Loper

What’s in a face?

From the aesthetic point of view, everything we need to know.

Unfortunately, most exhibit catalogs, headphones, or wall posts do not help much if what you want to understand is the art in the painting of a face.

Case in point: On August 3, the Philadelphia Museum of Art launched an exhibit titled “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.”  Most of the information about the exhibit has nothing to do with Rembrandt’s visual innovations and everything to do with his contribution to “humanizing” the face of Jesus.  The focus is on religious and historic significance, not aesthetic.

A few months ago, I visited an art exhibit of Edward Loper, Jr.’s work in Wilmington, Delaware.  There I saw a self-portrait he had recently completed.

Eddie Loper (I will call him Eddie to distinguish him from his father, Edward) had provided me a wonderful gift: a chance to show how a 21^st century artist could use visual ideas invented by a 17^th century Dutchman.  And make them new.

On the right is Rembrandt’s Self-portrait with Beret and Turned up Collar.  On the left is Loper's Self-Portrait.

Rembrandt, Self-portrait with Beret and Turned up Collar, 1659,NGA

Edward Loper, Jr., Self-Portrait, 2011, Private Collection

                  

Let’s compare and contrast these two self-portraits. 

What did Eddie Loper borrow from Rembrandt, and what did he do to and with those borrowings?  What visual ideas did he borrow from other artists? 

1.       Obviously, Eddie Loper knows the Rembrandt painting.  He used Rembrandt’s painting as his subject, and he dressed and posed as Rembrandt did.  Nothing new here.  Artists have done this sort of thing throughout the history of art.

2.       Loper’s picture is more colorful, with light illuminating both the figure and the background.  Rembrandt’s color is limited in variety, but his use of chiaroscuro creates a richness and depth of color.  Consequently, while Rembrandt’s colors are limited in range, somber, and not bright, they have expressive power.

3.       The space in the Rembrandt recedes limitlessly.  The shallow space in the Loper acts as a projector, and this makes the central mass (the head) loom forward.

4.       Loper’s brush strokes, visible as pulled, banded, overlapping, and full of energy and movement, create a convincing, solid, central mass.  Rembrandt’s brushstrokes are so subtle they are imperceptible.  They build a solid, three-dimensional mass that stands out from a receding background and create color units that render the different feelings of hair, flesh and textures, but how they do this is impossible to detect.  

5.       Loper’s line demarcates edges and outlines detail decoratively, while Rembrandt’s line does not exist as a separate entity.  His line merges so completely with chiaroscuro, the central volume emerges from the background as if by magic. 

Rembrandt is a tough act to follow.

That said, let’s see what other visual ideas Loper borrowed to make his self-portrait and whether those borrowings lead to a new and personal end.

Dr. Barnes argues that few painters have been able to use Rembrandt’s ideas creatively.  He mentions Daumier and Monticelli as two who achieved some degree of success.

Look at the Daumier and Monticelli pictures below:

Daumier, The Painter at His Easel, 1870, Barnes

Monticelli, As You Like It, n.d., Phillips Collection

                                                                                                          

   
Like Rembrandt, Daumier, in this tiny picture measuring 4 5/8 x 3 1/8 inches, modifies chiaroscuro to achieve deep, rich color-harmonies with somber colors.  The solid three-dimensionality of the figure results from the surrounding space, a type of “space-decoration” Dr. Barnes calls it, decoration that is an integral part of the structure of the picture.  The Painter at His Easel shows line creating dynamic movement, a quivering, curly, wavy activity producing a convincing drama and force.

Monticelli’s juicy color takes Rembrandt’s somber color-harmonies up a notch while maintaining the effects of chiaroscuro to create glowing, three-dimensional masses moving in and out of a relatively compressed space.  The thick, impasto color creates a decorative charge in itself.

Now consider Soutine and Matisse.

Examine the cropped details of the pictures below:

Soutine, The Pastry Cook (detail), c. 1919, Barnes 

Matisse, The Woman with the Hat (detail), 1905, San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art

                                                                               

                                                                                                                                       

Loper’s painting incorporates Soutine’s rich, variegated color and Matisse’s decorative bright, vivid, contrasted color areas.  While he does not stress Soutine’s animation and motion, nor Matisse’s dramatic cold/warm color contrasts, he adapts their pulled, banded, vigorous brush-strokes , their bold distortions, and their vivid, intense, and dramatic rhythms.

To what end?

Eddie Loper’s Self-Portrait draws us in via the illustrative: something about that “wicked” eye, and that angry, set jaw, start us on our journey.  It would be so easy here to slip backwards into a biographical discussion of the artist’s life, what might have made him so “angry,” or “fierce,” or “determined.”  However, our goal is to understand the color statement.  To do that, we need to subdue the subject by turning the picture upside down.

Now you can see the sweep of banded, saturated, vivid color units.  To the upside-down picture’s left, you see a dome-like mass bulging forward (the shoulder) echoed by several strips of lower-key color bands receding to the right (the other shoulder).  Bulging further forward and centered is a large, solid warm color mass (the head) made up of thick, pulled, and dragged color units topped by receding arcs of violet and cerulean blue (the cap).

The head sinks into the peachy, rosy background like a melon into Jell-O.  The amorphous browns and violets in the mid-section of the picture, between the background and the body, recede slightly.

Did you see this before I turned the picture upside down?  I didn’t.

“Faces,” or anything to do with portraits present an additional challenge.  We easily stop seeing the aesthetic message conveyed by color on a flat surface once curiosity about the subject is aroused.

What, then, has Loper given back that is his: a picture built of fiery color bands organized into vibrant color masses and compelling spatial intricacies informed by ideas he adapted from Matisse, Soutine, Monticelli, Daumier, Rembrandt, and his father Edward L. Loper, Sr.  You have seen Edward L. Loper Sr.’s work in these posts, enabling you to verify his work as one source for his son’s work.   If you  wish to re-read those posts, click on the following titles: Loper’s Link; How Creation Happens, Cont’d;  Making Connections; Tackling Transfers; Pentimento.

 

Pentimento

Last fall my 11-year-old grandson broke his wrist when he fell from his pogo stick.  Not a big deal in itself, except that he broke his right wrist and that made writing (and because I was teaching him to draw and paint), very difficult. 

We adapted: he posed for me, and I explained to him how I made the picture as I worked.

Trouble was, I had made a painting using him as a subject when he was five months old.  He liked that picture.  He did not like this one.

Zig Zag Josh, Oil on canvas, 2010, Private Collection 

Baby with Ball, Oil on canvas, 1999, Private Collection

                

After a back and forth debate on my work process, he asked, “Why can’t you just paint it like you did the other one?”

“Because I can’t,” I replied.  Then, to be more precise, I added, “because I don’t see that way now.”

In other words, as the saying goes, I changed my mind.  To be more precise, my perception changed.

What I just described explains how I adapted new visual ideas resulting in a transformation of perception.  I used two very different subjects separated by an 11- year span; this is not the definition of pentimento.  Pentimento means the artist has changed his mind either during the process of making a picture or after.  The same picture.  The word derives from the Italian pentirsi, meaning to repent.  Pentimenti (the plural) may show changes in composition or reveal over-painting (via X-rays, infra-red reflectograms, and photographs), a covering up of the first painted application.    

Table and Flowers, the Ed Loper painting I showed you in the last post, is a good example of pentimento.  He changed his mind after he completed the picture you studied.

I first saw the original painting in Ed Loper’s house.  Then I later saw it in an exhibit at the Stuart Kingston Gallery in Wilmington, Delaware.  Then I purchased the painting last week.

Before I purchased the painting, I analyzed the picture in the previous post using a digital image Ed’s wife Janet provided me.  When I picked up the painting a few days ago, I knew immediately that the image was not the same as the painting now in front of me.  In that instant, I remembered Ed telling me at the exhibit he had “re-worked” the entire picture.

Look at the two images below. On the left is the digital image I first used, and on the right is a digital image of the painting I bought.

Table and Flowers 1 

Table and Flowers 2

                     

                        

My reaction, I am embarrassed to say, matched my grandson’s.  I grumbled, “I liked it the way it was. It was perfect.  Why did he touch it?”

When rationality returned sometime later, I knew I had to get to know the painting now hanging on my living room wall, not the image.  And, to be honest, I would have had to do this anyway, even if Ed Loper had not changed a thing, because the painting hanging on my living room wall is not the same as either of the digital images above.  That is the frustrating, but true, fact we have to remember when we look at digital images.  A digital image bears the same resemblance to an original painting as a description of sex bears to the actual sensuous encounter—a very different experience. 

We must work with what we have.

List what you see as the differences, and then compare your list to my list below.

1. Painting 2, at first glance, looks cooler.  This results from the application of cerulean blue in the wall unit, the plant in the left corner, and the addition of a carpet on the floor.

2.     Painting 2 looks lighter.  The drama of Painting 1, a result of the darker background wall setting off the sharp brightness of the chair cushion and the tabletop, now has become a softer, more suffused, pinkish glow.

3.     What Painting 2 lost in color drama it gained in spatial drama: the space opens up on the right because the table is smaller and the floor unit now contains two deep pink bands that push back in space.  Moreover, the tabletop now tilts further up rather than sweeps downward to the right.  The “surfboard” has become an elevated rounded oval on which the objects precariously hang.

4.     That plant. When I first saw Painting 2, that one unit disappointment me the most. In Painting 1, the plant swelled, pulsed, and danced as it connected to and “rode” the “surfboard.”  Soutine-like in exuberance, its energy captivated me. In Painting 2, it quietly glows in a cool fusion of greens, blues, and violets, creating puffs of luminous, rounded, volumes receding into the corner.  To give the devil his due, this does make sense from the point of view of reality.  That said, it also makes sense from the point of view of rhythm: those “puffs” now connect to the flowers on the right, the fruit in the bowl on the table, and the foliage outside the window.

5.     The tablecloth, the unit that established the rhythms of bands and stripes in Painting 1, no longer sparkles in Painting 2 but, instead, resonates with a depth and richness of oranges, yellows, reds, and greens that reoccur in the edges of the picture frames, the chair slats, the cabinet, and the stripes on the floor.  The tablecloth also possesses a more illustrative lacy edge, and that “lacy-ness,” as a color unit, connects with the pattern on the flowerpot on the cabinet as well as the patterns of foliage outside the window.

What we have here is a slight variation on the same picture idea.  Painting 1, I said, was not a picture of a dining room, but a series of luminous, sparkling, fiery, geometric, solid, color units that push and pull through relatively deep, color-in-light space.

Painting 2 is not a picture of a dining room, but a series of luminous, rich, warm, geometric, solid, color units that push and pull through deep, color-in-light space.

When I asked Ed Loper why he felt the need to “re-paint” Painting 1, he shrugged and said, “I did not feel satisfied.  Something was wrong.  So I fixed it.”

I eagerly anticipate my getting to know Painting 3, the one hanging on my living room wall.

  

Tackling Transfers

Recently I traveled to the Boston area to visit the Museum of Fine Arts and make new paintings in Rockport, a picturesque coastal town on Cape Ann.

To travel to the museum from Rockport, I rode the T from Rockport to North Station.  At North Station, I had to exit the terminal and walk to an adjacent terminal to take an in-bound train.  There, I needed to purchase a Charlie Card, a credit card with a chip in it that can be “read” by the turnstile card reader.  A cheerful Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Transit worker showed me how to work the machine, figure out what I owed for a senior ticket, and how to use the card.  He guided me, and the other baffled tourists, where and how to hold the card so the light on the turnstile could read the chip, and he cautioned us NEVER to put the card in the slot. 

Then I had to find the Green Line train platform, not the Orange Line, and wait specifically for the E train on the Green Line. 

The transfers necessitated complicated ticket purchases and confusing passages from one system to another.  They took time, but they worked, and the trains got me where I needed to go and deposited me across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts.

In these posts, I have been showing you how to make aesthetic transfers.  Again, not easy, sometimes complicated and confusing, but the tools you learned get you where you need to go.

In the last post, I asked you to look at Table and Flowers, a 2009 painting by Edward L. Loper, Sr.  I showed you how to appreciate the art in it, and I showed you the visual ideas Loper adapted from the traditions to say what he had to say.

When we looked at this picture, we made the first transfer: from what the subject was to what the color says.  Here is the picture again.

Edward L. Loper, Sr., Table and Flowers, Oil on canvas, 2009, Private Collection

 

                                              

We said the subject of this picture was a dining room.  We recognized a central, oval table with objects on its left edge.  We recognized two corners of the room.  The left corner showed a picture window revealing a patio and garden, and the other corner showed a wall with pictures hanging on it. We noticed that the floor on the left tilted up, and we noticed that the tabletop did as well.

First, therefore, we recognized what we knew, the ordinary things in our world.

However, we also knew that all we really saw were colors on a flat surface.  Turning the picture upside down helped us downplay the subject’s seduction and allowed us to concentrate on the color shapes in their flat space.

Areas of color on a flat surface: nothing else is there.


We perceived the relationships that occurred within these color areas and things happened. I made a list of what I discovered, and you did too.

We recognized three dimensionality and the volume-ness of color units that are actually two dimensional.   

We transferred this knowing into the color areas.  We said: oval, tipped, striped color volume, not tabletop.  We said: geometric thrusts of glowing color units, not window, wall, or cabinet.

We first transferred from the category of everyday things (table, chair, window, wall) what all of us easily recognized.  We then ascribed qualities to the color units like structural, glowing volumes, or geometric thrusts in space.  None of these perceptions gave you much trouble, and I easily verified your responses.

Then I showed you what Ed Loper transferred from the traditions.  Again, I did this, you verified it, and we, together, could see what he gave back based on his interest.

In other words, we made transfers.

When I said, “The stripes and bands not only build the table, creating a large, elongated, oval-shaped mass that pushes across the picture like a surfboard,” I transferred my own, personal perception and connection of table to surfboard.  When I said, “The candlestick, bowl of fruit, books, etc., balanced precariously, ‘ride’ the “surfboard,” I did the same thing.

You might have provided different images to communicate what those color shapes did in the picture.  As long as we could verify each-others perceptions, we communicated.

My point: everything we see in a picture results from a transfer of information.  The transfer comes from the world we inhabit or from the traditions of art or from the plastic means an artist uses to make a picture.  We transfer in order to appreciate aesthetically.

At the end of the last post, I said I would describe, in this post, Loper’s visual inventions by focusing on his color-in-light atmosphere, his late-work adaptation of Venetian glow.

First, look at these pictures:

Titian, Concert in the Open Air, 1510-11, Louvre

     

Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1510, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

Giorgione, Three Philosophers, 1508-09, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, c. 1510, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

                                   

                                                 

Examine both the color volumes and the spatial atmosphere in the four paintings.

Warmth, golden suffusion, and glowing, structural color volumes define them.

Dr. Barnes said the “chief characteristic of the Venetian form is the use of color, first structurally, and then in combination with light, in the form of a pervasive, circumambient atmosphere or glow.” (Art in Painting, 155).

Now look back at Loper’s Table and Flowers.

The chief characteristic of Loper’s late form, as represented by Table and Flowers, is his use of color, structurally, and in combination with light, in the form of a pervasive, circumambient fiery luminosity.

The luminosity, as we saw in the previous post, achieves a sensuous richness that holds the design together.  In addition, because of Loper’s adaptation of the broken color of the impressionists via both Cézanne and Renoir, his color strokes echo and repeat each other, creating intricate rhythms that move the eye from one color unit to another.  A continuous succession of color-chords fill the entire canvas and create, what I have called, a color-in-light suffusion.  This, in itself, is an important unifying agent.

Consider this detail of the background wall:

Notice how each orb of luminous color overlaps and pulses with those surrounding it to create a shimmering, floating, color volume.

Then look at this detail of the plant in the left corner:

Each orb of color here also overlaps and pulses with those surrounding it to create a shimmering, floating, color volume.  The color harmonies are different, but the effect is the same.

As you examine the picture, you will see more of these rhythms working together to the same end.

The transfers I described here summarize all the tools you now possess.  Use them and, like the Charlie Card, they will get you where you want to go, the appreciation of the art in art. 

I am not yet out of Loper calendars.  If you wish to do the exercise I outlined in the previous post, “Making Connections,” click here and go to work.   

Making Connections

In 1943, the Bignou Gallery in New York City pioneered a prophetic exhibit titled Ancient Chinese and Modern European Paintings.  Chinese paintings of many centuries past hung side by side with paintings by Cezanne, Demuth, Dufy, Glackens, Van Gogh, Goya, Gritchenko, Matisse, Modigliani, Pascin, Picasso, Renoir, Henri Rousseau, and others. 

I say “prophetic,” because the contributors to the catalogue, Dr. Hu Shih, Pearl S. Buck, Albert C. Barnes, and Violette de Mazia, demonstrated how artists speak to each other across time and place.

This is what making connections is all about.

In the previous post, you examined a 1975 painting by Edward L. Loper, Sr., and I showed you

how to identify the visual qualities he borrowed from the traditions and how to determine what he did to and with those ideas.  

My “connections” impressed some of you.  One reader said she admired how I “unified so many artists and schools of painting.”  While not easy, I now see connections relatively quickly because I have been looking at and studying works of art for a very long time. 

You can do it, too, with practice. 

Every time you see a work of art, every time you visit a museum or gallery, you are storing visual ideas.  If you study the traditions for visual information rather than historical, biographical, or illustrative information, you will amass the relevant background that helps you make the connections.

Let’s try the “Yes, But” analysis again.

Below you will see Table and Flowers, a painting Ed Loper completed in 2009.

Edward L. Loper, Sr., Table and Flowers, Oil on canvas, 2009, Collection of Janet and Edward L. Loper, Sr.

 What visual ideas did Ed Loper use to make this painting?  What is the resulting picture idea?

First, as always, look at the painting.

If you find it helpful, turn it upside down:

List what you see.

(Please make your list before you read any further).

Now compare your list to my list:

1.     Rich, glowing, hot colors organized into stripes and bands.

2.     The central unit, the table, tilted up and pushing across the picture space, sets the spatial theme for every color unit in the picture.

3.     The stripes and bands not only build the table, creating a large, elongated, oval-shaped mass that pushes across the picture like a surfboard, they also connect with the half-oval chair cushion, the three chair back slats, and the horizontal ridges of the cabinet.

4.     The candlestick, bowl of fruit, books, etc., balanced precariously, “ride” the “surf board.” The plant behind the table attaches to the still life objects like a busty, small-headed woman, her head thrown back, with arms akimbo and swirling skirt.

 

5.     The table’s central oval contrasts with the rectilinear pictures on the walls and stacked in the corner.  The vertical rhythms repeat in the chair back and legs, the windowpanes, the tree trunk, the lawn chair, the fence in the garden, the drapery folds, the candles on the cabinet and the candle on the table.  

6.     The horizontal rhythm of stripes and bands repeat in the cabinet, the chair back, and the windowpanes.

7.     All of these vertical, horizontal, and diagonal units move the eye through the spaces they help define: (a) look at the space between the single candle on the table and the candelabra on the cabinet; (b) look at the space created by the diagonal edge of the picture window and the vertical edge of the tablecloth; (c) look at the space created by the tree trunk and the stretcher of the canvas against the wall; (d) add to that space the vertical corner of the wall as it is interrupted by the forward leaning picture on the wall; (e) look how the green strip above the window and the green carpet on the floor of the patio connects with the cerulean stripes on the top and the sides of the table cloth.

8.     Now look at the rhythms of color: (a) the yellows outside the window connecting with the yellows in the tablecloth; (b) the red of the lamp above the window, the back of the lawn chair, the matt on the patio, the reds of the inside floor, the table cloth, the back wall, the pictures and their frames or stretches, the highlights on the chair, the candlesticks, the flowers, all draw the eye through the space.

9.     The cerulean and green rectilinear rhythms also connect with the greens on the wall and in the foliage of the plant.

10.  Thrusts and counterthrusts dramatically continue the beat: (a) the diagonal thrust of the table set against the vertical drapery edge and the contrasting push of the lower edge of the window; (b) the horizontal thrust of the cabinet edge along with the slats of the chair back and the chair seat, and the edges of the three hanging pictures, contrast with the books on the table, all set at different angles.

11.  Ovals echo other ovals: look at the candlestick holder on the table, the blue-green bowls on the cabinet, the flowerpot, the flowers in the flowerpot, the fluted fruit bowl on the table revealing rounded, glowing, ovals of solid, saturated color that echo the bulging rounded color volumes of the plant.

12.  All this (and I suspect you found other details I missed) conspire to produce not just a picture of a dining room, but a series of luminous, sparkling, fiery, geometric, solid, color units that push and pull through relatively deep, color-in-light space.

That color-in-light spatial atmosphere sets the color key.  Compare the fiery atmosphere in the Loper painting with the cool, powdery atmosphere is Seurat’s The Models:

Seurat, The Models, 1886-88, Barnes

In Loper’s painting, the atmosphere smolders like a summer mid-day in the tropics.  In Seurat’s painting, the atmosphere looks cool and moonlit. 

This “heat” derives from Renoir via Bonnard.  Compare the following two pictures:

Renoir, Bather, c. 1917-18, PMA

Bonnard,Garden, c. 1937, Musée du Petit Palais

                                   

You can see the “rose” suffusion in the Renoir along with rippling, soft, flowing and glowing color chords orchestrated into light, structural volumes.  Bonnard converts the “warmth” into decorative strips of flattened areas of uniform hot color contrasted with cooler blues to create an ensemble with a surface sparkle rather than a glow from within.

However, if you now compare this Bonnard to the Loper, you will see a closer relationship:

Bonnard, Bowl and Basket of Fruits, 1944, Private Collection

In this picture, Bonnard uses ovals of saturated reds, oranges, and yellows set in shallow space to produce an ensemble of globular, structurally solid volumes moving across a flat spatial plane.

 

Now study these two pictures:

Renoir, Terrace at Cagnes, c. 1905-06, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo

  

Bonnard, Peaches and Grapes on a Red Tablecloth, 1943, Private Collection

Notice again how Bonnard achieves color drama by reducing, not increasing, color chording.  He achieves luminosity via contrasts rather than via small dabs of juxtaposed colors.

Loper’s luminosity results from dabs of intense, juxtaposed color along with layering of color on color in order to build structurally solid color volumes that lure, beguile, and captivate the eye. 

Lynn Luft, a reader of this blog, says it this way: “Mr. Loper paints in a very complex style, using more than one type of stroke, but the effect for me is like a symphony from the Romantic period or even a later Russian composition.  The different methods flow together with a definite reason that he has incorporated after years of study and painting.  There is an immediate continuing sense of underlying forceful rhythm in his lines and spaces, but he has purposefully inserted melodic interludes of colors everywhere and accentuated the junctures very carefully to send our eyes to other areas of the painting, which will often repeat his theme with variations, some cool or quiet and others warm and intense.  When the whole work is absorbed from a distance, it becomes the fourth movement of later Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, almost thundering its message.” 

Lynn eloquently summarizes what I just said.

I’d like you to try to use the “Yes, But” tool.

I know it is late August, and you are relaxing and not wanting to think too hard, but please do the following exercise. 

Send me your response, and I will reward you with a 2002 calendar of Ed Loper’s paintings.  I know you can’t use an old calendar, but I also know you will find the 12 reproductions of Loper paintings worth framing or studying and enjoying. This edition also includes Ed Loper quotes describing his philosophy, teaching, and appreciation of art.

Loper, Houses and Hotel, 2000, Private Collection

 

Cezanne, Chateau Noir, 1904-06, MoMA

                        

Compare and contrast these two pictures.  What visual ideas does Loper borrow from Cézanne?  What new visual ideas does Loper invent to pay back his loan with his interest? 

Click here to submit your response. 

In the next post, I will continue to explore Ed Loper’s visual inventions by focusing on his color-in-light atmosphere--his remarkable late work adaptation of Venetian glow via Renoir.