Creatively Seeing: Part III

In the previous two posts (Creatively Seeing and Creatively Seeing: Part II), I described how art informs perception.

Seems I have more to say.

Last week I attended a lecture at the Barnes Foundation about the current Salvatore Pinto exhibit at the Woodmere Art Museum.

I attended for several reasons, but only one of them had to do with Salvatore: (1) Angelo Pinto, his brother,  taught me the traditions at the Barnes Foundation in the late 1970s—and I continue to refer to my notes from those classes when I prepare my own classes; (2) in the late 1970s, I attended one of Angelo’s exhibits, fell in love with one of his reverse paintings on glass, and to this day lament I did not purchase it because I could not afford its modest selling price; (3) during the many years I visited and then taught at the Barnes, I enjoyed the 11 paintings—two by Salvatore and nine by his brothers  Biagio and Angelo—in the collection.

The curator at the Woodmere, Dr. Matthew Palczynski, described not only Salvatore Pinto’s work but also the work of his two brothers.  He described their backgrounds, their relationship with Dr. Barnes (included in the title of the exhibit—Salvatore Pinto: A Retrospective Celebrating the Barnes Legacy), their methods, and their sources in the traditions.

The lecture piqued my interest to see more of Salvatore’s work, and I visited Woodmere this past Sunday to do that.

After my visit, I felt perplexed. I wondered if Salvatore’s work, at least the work in this exhibit, so heavily indebted to Matisse’s work, was more imitative than creative. Edward Sozanski, in his review of the exhibit, concluded that Salvatore’s work is “uncomfortably close to Matisse.”

Dr. Barnes, in The Art in Painting, said the work of all three Pinto brothers (along with John Kane, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Settanni), is entitled to respect because “it represents personal visions embodied in individual plastic forms.” (p. 347)

I decided to put the “originality” debate out of my mind, or so I thought.  In this post, I decided to describe how Salvatore Pinto’s work helped me see creatively.

First, look at Salvatore’s two pictures in the Barnes Foundation:

 Ajaccio, Corsica, c. 1932-1933, Barnes

Marrakech, 1933, Barnes

                                             

                                                        

In both pictures, rich, lush color applied in pulled, curled, thick brushwork orchestrates subtle space recession.

Each picture, at first, seems directly simple: landscapes consisting of rounded color masses moving backwards in relatively shallow space.

And, yes, Matisse comes to mind. 

Look at these two pictures and compare them:

 Matisse,Eucalyptus, Montalban, 1918, The Cone Collection

                                                                

Now compare these details:

Pinto’s color masses, constructed with rectilinear strokes that tend to curve, build round, dense volumes.  These volumes overlap in compressed space.  Matisse’s color masses not only are less lushly vibrant, they are flatter in volume and separated by dark punctuations setting them off from each other. Qualities of lightness and airiness define the qualities in Matisse’s picture.

By 1918, Matisse had experienced the light, color, and atmosphere in Nice, and the fiery drama of his earlier Fauve work and the boldness of those statements became tempered with delicacy and luminosity.

Examine this earlier painting by Matisse, and you will see what I see:

Matisse, The Sea Seen from Collioure, 1906, Barnes

                                       

The color drama of this Matisse, orchestrated by dashes and dabs of washy peach, cool greens, purple, cerulean and ultramarine, become transformed by Pinto into a densely opaque, closely applied series of arcs and curls—not animated as in Van Gogh’s work, or lively as in Glackens’ work, but heavy, set, and solid.

I also see Renoir in Pinto’s visual statement.  Do you? 

Look at this picture:

 Renoir, Farmhouse, 1917, Barnes

                                                     

Pinto’s interest, like Renoir, directs his perception to rounded, rolling back, overlapping luminous color masses built with arc-shaped brush strokes.  But Pinto does not use chorded color to build his volumes; therefore, his color volumes, unlike either Matisse’s or Renoir’s, have a velvety density quite distinctly his.   

This brings me back to what I sidestepped, or said I did.

Once I started looking carefully at these two Salvatore Pinto paintings, I could see what he invented that was his and not Matisse’s or anyone else’s.  Or, to put it another way, what he borrowed from Matisse he then paid back with his interest in something entirely different—richness, boldness, and structural solidity of color volumes. 

I’ve scratched the surface here.  To do justice to my budding perceptions, I would need to do what Violette de Mazia did in her “Glackens-spiel,” her four-hour lecture that became her twenty-seven page essay “The Case of Glackens vs. Renoir.” (The Barnes Foundation Journal of the Art Department, Autumn, 1971, Vol. II, No. 2, pp. 3-30).  In it, she defended Glackens as a genuinely creative artist, albeit strongly influenced by Renoir.

I suspect, but have not yet objectively determined, the same is true of Salvatore Pinto: strongly influenced by Matisse, Salvatore Pinto selects subjects he subjects to an expressively illustrative interest, not an expressively decorative interest as did Matisse.  He is closer to Glackens in this—a simple, direct, vibrant, picturesque expressive illustration but stressing weight and solidity rather than lightness and liveliness as did Glackens.

Which brings me back to creatively seeing. 

Yesterday, because of the heat, I walked on a trail I usually use for my run.  I spotted a grouping of trees, and I stopped to examine them. 

Why?

The clumps of foliage reminded me of Salvatore Pinto’s orbs of receding color units in shallow space.

However, the relentless green of this scene wearied me.  So I experimented a little. I looked at it through the lens Salvatore Pinto’s paintings provided me: to the series of round, heavy color volumes set one behind the other in compressed space, I added Pinto’s lush, rich, purples, oranges, pinks, cool blues and greens.  Then I moved the color units until the color orbs fit together in weighty masses, and I changed the trunk color of the small tree on the right from dark brown to deep red.

I walked on, refreshed.

I did not subject my subject to Matisse’s vision.  I did not see it this way:

Matisse, Periwinkles/Moroccan Garden, 1912, MoMA

                                           

In Periwinkles, Matisse abstracts  color shapes, flattens them, and places them, one behind the other, like slices of rightward sloping curvilinear paper cutouts.  They are rhythmically balanced by arcs (the wider, red “tree trunk,” then the slimmer black “tree trunk,” then the thinner red “tree trunk”) that bend to the left and move slightly back in space.  If you look more closely, you will find more rhythms of curves, arcs, ribbons, lines, all echoing the decorative theme. 

The catalog to the Woodmere exhibit contains the transcript of a conversation: William Valero, the director and CEO of Woodmere; Matthew Palczynski, curator; poet Jim Cory; and John Ignarri, great-nephew of Salvatore Pinto.  In talking about influences in Salvatore’s beach paintings, John Ignarri says, “It’s related and it’s all from something.” (p. 21)

This concise statement describes what we are doing. 

I creatively perceived my “landscape” because works of art informed my vision.  Assisting me in my adventure in perception, I recalled Lipstick palm trees I saw in the Allerton Garden in the National Tropical Botanical Garden  in Kauai. The red of their trunks astounded me. Now I used that visual experience, allowing me to enliven the boring landscape in front of me by creatively perceiving the trunk of the foreground tree as “red.” 

Along with the verticality of their red trunks, I enjoyed the colorfulness of the in-and-out movement of the Lipstick palm’s decorative fronds because I knew Matisse’s work.  I remember thinking, “Matisse did not ‘invent’ red tree trunks.  There are red tree trunks.”  

Cyrtostachys renda, Lipstick palm or Red sealing wax palm

It’s all there, but it remains invisible until artist's show it to us or until we look for it.

Even if there were not red tree trunks, we, as well as artists, see what we look for, what we want and need to re-make our visual world to say what we want it to say.

There is nothing new under the sun; all creation is re-creation.

                                               

My recent exploration of Salvatore Pinto’s work enabled me to have an adventure in perception as I explored a hazy, hot, green-saturated setting in Delaware.

We, as well as artists, acquire visual acuity from everyday experiences as well as from works of art (aka the traditions). 

We, as well as artists, learn to see creatively based on our everyday visual experiences informed by what we understand and enjoy in relevant works of art (aka the traditions of art).

While the two statements seem to say the same thing, they do not.  The difference between what artists do and what we do is this: artists record the meaning of their visual aesthetic experience in their pictures.  Salvatore Pinto, to paraphrase Matisse, did not make a landscape (or a beach scene, or a ballet dancer).  He made a picture.  In his picture, he orchestrated the qualities he discovered in the subject he used.  The subject did not determine what his picture would be; he did.  And he determined what his picture would be based on his everyday visual experiences along with what he borrowed from visual color statements recorded in other artists’ work. 

Try this.

Bring your camera or smart phone with you when you take a walk.  If you see a subject that interests you, see it through Salvatore Pinto’s eyes.  Take the picture.  Send it to me via e-mail. Tell me why you found it interesting and how you choreographed it, and I will post it.                                                                            

If you do this work imaginatively, you will experience the fruit of your aesthetic labors—you will be creatively seeing.

I also recommend you visit the Barnes Foundation and go on a treasure hunt to find all the Pinto pictures.  Visit the Woodmere Art Museum and see the Salvatore Pinto: A Retrospective Celebrating the Barnes Legacy exhibit. 

Then click here and let me know what you experienced or write me a message below.  I’d love to know your discoveries. 

   

Creatively Seeing: Part II

In the previous post, Creatively Seeing, I described how art informs perception.

This post will describe how appreciating the art in the Allerton Garden (in the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kauai) does just that.

First, some background. 

Robert Allerton (1873-1964), the son of Samuel W. Allerton (the force behind the founding of the Union Stockyards and the First National Bank of Chicago), spent five years in Europe studying painting before deciding he lacked talent. 

After giving up painting, Allerton dedicated himself to garden design, sculpture, and landscape architecture.  He returned to Chicago to create Piatt County estate, now called Allerton Park and operated as a conference center by nearby University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Allerton bought hundreds of gifts for the Art Institute of Chicago, bestowing on the museum its first Rodin sculptures and its first Picasso drawing, and funded a new wing, becoming the facility's largest donor.

His partner, John Gregg Allerton, had studied architecture at the University of Illinois in the 1920's. In 1938, while returning from a winter trip to Australia, they stopped off in Kauai and discovered beachfront land on the southern end of the island along the Lawai River.  It was for sale.  They purchased 80 acres and named the property “Lawai-Kai” for “valley of plenty.”

One of the two previous owners was Queen Emma, widow of King Kamehameha IV.  The Allertons tried not to disturb the flowers and vegetation the Queen had planted: kiawe (a species of mesquite), tamarind, ferns, rose apple, and bougainvillea that still flourishes beside their house.

Allerton Garden is one of the five gardens of the now National Tropical Botanical Garden.

Later in his life, Robert Allerton would join a group of individuals and organizations who were attempting to establish a tropical botanical garden on U.S. soil. In the final year before he died, Allerton witnessed the creation of the Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden (now National Tropical Botanical Garden). John Gregg Allerton maintained the garden until his death in 1986 and left it in Trust. A few years later, the National Tropical Botanical Garden assumed management and the garden was named Allerton Garden after its founding fathers.

That’s where I come in.

My guided sunset tour took me to Allerton Garden late in the day.  Ryan, our guide, stopped to show us the view into the valley from high above, and I glimpsed what must have enchanted the Allertons:

Ryan said, “this is my office.

Lucky man.

After we arrived in the valley, Ryan parked the van at Pump Six, once the building housing irrigation pumps for the former sugar plantation.  A brief walk took us to the Thanksgiving Room, the first of what the Allertons called their “garden rooms.” All horizontally formatted, each has a unique theme despite shoebox-like containers.

Ryan guided us to “see” the aesthetic meaning imbedded in this “room.”

Look at this photograph, and see if you can identify the visual theme of the Thanksgiving Room:

In this case, “up” is a fitting one-word description.

The gazebo with its triangular finials point up.  The latticework arches point up.  And the two spindly palms towering above thrust up.

In this “room,” up is the rhythmic clue.

Remember rhythm? 

Dr. Barnes says, “It is rhythm that first strikes our attention and produces the pleasure that holds us longest.  No plastic element in a painting stands by itself, but is repeated, varied, counter-balanced by similar elements in other parts of the picture.  “It is this repetition, variation, and counterbalance that constitute rhythm.” (The Art in Painting, p. 62). 

I described the aesthetic effect of rhythm in a previous post “Come to Your Senses.”

While “up” is the visual clue here, only analysis can determine if all the elements in a picture or in a garden work together and contribute to the over-all composition.  The clue, orchestrated into an ensemble, establishes “design in its highest estate.”  Barnes argues this is comparable to the harmonious merging of musical chords and melodies in a symphony.

Here is the illustrative “story” of this “room”:  the Allertons had invited guests to a casual picnic on Thanksgiving Day.  Instead, they brought them to this “room” for a formal banquet.

This “story” is akin to a description of “what was” the subject of a painting—interesting, yes, but not helpful in determining aesthetic significance.

And, you are asking, how does this help us see creatively?  A good question, as it is the title of this post (and the last post), and I have digressed.

Look at this picture by Modigliani:

Cypresses and Houses at Cagnes, 1919, Barnes

                                  

Here we have a similar picture “theme”: a towering repoussoir (push back) of two color units lifts up as it sets back blocky rectilinear flattened color units in relatively shallow space.

However, in the Modigliani picture, the chalky, light, ochre and tan rectilinear units stand in contrast to the deep, saturated greens of the two “cypress trees.”  The resulting compressed space provides subtle contrasts of rectilinear rhythms beating a gentle “tap-tap-tap" as our eye moves from one color unit to another.

In your everyday world, do you see anything that expresses qualities similar to those two visual statements?  Think about this, and look closely at what you see for the next few days.  See if what you learned from the Allerton Thanksgiving Garden and the Modigliani Cypresses and Houses at Cagnes painting informed your perception.

The Mermaid Room presented another theme.  Look at these three photos:

 

List what you see.

While you are doing that, I will tell you the illustrative “story” of how these bronze statues, the shell pool, and the waterway originated.  First, the statues were commissioned for the Italian Pavilion of the 1931 World’s Fair in Paris.  Then, a plaster pair adorned the ballroom of an Italian cruise ship.  They later appeared near the entrance of an Italian pavilion restaurant at the 1939 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, New York, where the Allertons saw them.  Robert contacted the Italian consul to ask if he could purchase a bronze set of the Mermaids.

The Allertons intended them for “The Farms,” the Allerton family property located 150 miles south of Chicago but, when they arrived, they realized they were best suited for Lawai-Kai, and they shipped them there.  Later, their Kauai contractor created the waterway based on John’s duplication of the one at Villa Farnese—home to the Italian president—in Caprarola, Italy.  The shell pool at the end of the waterway was copied from one they admired at the capitol building in Stockholm.

You must be thinking, what is original about this?  How is this creative?  They did not invent anything.  They just put together a bunch of stuff that was already available.

That takes us back to the difference between “subject” and “subject matter” doesn’t it?  It is akin to saying, as people do, “I hate Renoir paintings—all those fat women dressed in fancy clothes—if they are dressed at all—so not now.”  But we know the “art” is in what Renoir (or any other artist) does to and with a subject.  Subjects repeat.  The illustrative is of the “here and now.”  Art is always new, and it is universal. 

Artists subject subjects to a new interest, a visual interest (as I said in a previous post, Subject Subjected to Interest). 

More about this later.

Now look at your list.

Did you notice the rhythms?

The U-shaped curve of the “mermaids’ tails” is the clue.  Follow the scallop-shape to the undulating waterway, the “shell,” the spouting water in the “shell,” the curves in the pot on the “mermaids” heads, on their pedestal bases, and in the bench between the “shell” and the “mermaid.”

Then look at the foliage.  This is an enlarged image of the palm fronds directly behind and to the left of the far “mermaid”:

Licuala spinosa, a clumping fan palm native to Java and the Moluccas

Notice how the edges of the large pleated fronds echo the scallop rhythm in a minor key.

None of this is an accident.  The Mermaid Room, meticulously orchestrated, says just what their designers wanted it to say: a series of scalloped shapes repeating with variety throughout a spacious, lush, sensuous rectilinear format.  The water pulsing through the “canal” creates its own seductive beat, adding to the charm of this room.

Violette de Mazia argued that art is always the same and always new.  To paraphrase the poet, Omar Khayyam, artists re-make the world, bringing it nearer to their heart’s desire.

I suspect you now will find “curls, scallops, and spirals” frequently as you walk, drive, or go about your daily tasks.  I know I do.

I have no idea if the Allertons knew Dr. Barnes or Violette de Mazia and their pioneering guide to objective aesthetic analysis.  I do know they all speak the same aesthetic language, as does Ryan, the guide at the National Tropical Botanical Garden.  As do I.  As do you.

We practice creatively seeing.

   

 

Creatively Seeing

In the previous post, “Subject Subjected to Interest,” I showed how pictures originating from different subjects have similar plastic orchestrations, or, as Dr. Barnes asserts, “a picture of a massacre and one of a wedding may be of exactly the same type as works of art.” (The Art in Painting, p.72).

One of my readers asked me this question: Did you find the photos to replicate the paintings or was it the other way around?

It was the other way around.  I noticed the foliage, the flower, or the landscape, and I enjoyed what I saw.  I did not go any further than that.  After I came home, suffering from jet lag and re-entry disorientation, all of a sudden, unbidden, paintings attached themselves to the photos I had taken. 

As I thought about the question asked and my response to it, I identified another question: why do I, and why do you, do this work?  We know it is difficult, takes time, and does not result in fame or fortune (the usual reasons given for undertaking tedious and difficult work). 

An idea emerged—an important one—and I wrote the post.

Ideas sometimes surprise like this.

The idea:  We do this work because appreciating works of art enriches perception.  We do it because appreciating works of art educates visual perception. We do it, simply, because appreciating works of art teaches us how to see—creatively. 

Here’s how.

As you know, I recently returned from a trip to Kauai.  There, I twice visited the National Tropical Botanical Garden.  In the McBryde Garden, I marveled at the curvilinear and angular orchestration of vines, the complex spatial rhythms they created, and the horizontal color bands they pushed back, all of which I described in the previous post, “Subject Subjected to Interest.” Once home, I connected the plastic qualities of those roots to Van Gogh’s painting, Vines, with its similar aesthetic qualities.   

There is more to it, though.  I would not have noticed the vines in the McBryde Garden if I had not already known the Van Gogh painting.  And I would have never connected the two experiences if I had not practiced the objective method.  The Van Gogh painting enabled me to see and enjoy similar qualities in the vines in the McBryde Garden.  I suspect many people walked right by those vines, and they did not stop long enough to appreciate their aesthetic meaning.  

                              
Consequently, my hard work in getting to know Van Gogh’s painting rewarded me by allowing me to enjoy the aesthetic qualities in vines as I walked through a tropical garden.

Convinced?

Here’s another example:

Look at this photograph of the roots of a fig tree (Moreton Bay Fig, or Ficus macrophylla -- a Banyan tree native to Australia) and the following one of the three fig trees I saw in the Allerton Garden:

As I looked at these massive, surging snake-like monsters, I listened to what our guide told us: “Jurassic Park, filmed in the Allerton Garden, used these fig trees in the movie.”

When I got home, I found these pictures of two scenes from the movie:

In Jurassic Park, viewers see two notable specimens of the Moreton Bay Fig Tree. The first is the one Dr. Grant climbs, along with Lex and Tim, to spend the night:

And here is the one when Dr. Grant discovers the dinosaur nest:

These informative facts educated me about the making of a movie.  What I did not yet know was “what wealth the show to me had brought,” as Wordsworth’s poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud says.

As I looked at the fig trees and their roots in the Allerton Garden, I thought: Soutine.

This Soutine:

Gorge du Loup, c. 1920, Galerie Crillon, Paris

Gorge du Loup depicts twisted, tortured roads and valleys in a cataclysmic tangle.  But the aesthetic meaning has to do with surging, writhing, massive, solid, dramatic color units pulsing upwards in space. 

In the Allerton Garden, I followed the palm roots upwards, as they twisted and turned, and dwarfed the people who posed in the spaces they created.  I entered those spaces visually, and felt the dramatic difference between the “wall” of the root and the “canyons” created by them.  I examined the overlapping and receding planes in space contrasted with the sudden rise upwards.  I silently thanked Soutine for making this adventure in perception possible, for awakening me to its possibilities, for causing me to stop and take notice.

That’s the reward for the hard work we do.

Convinced yet?

If not, here is another example:

Look at this photograph of heliconia:

If you walked by this Parrot’s beak heliconia in the Allerton Garden, would you stop to examine its aesthetic qualities? 

You would if you knew Rousseau’s work, as in the following picture:

Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest, c. 1905-06, Barnes

                             

Rousseau’s painting is a series of triangular rhythms that subtly recede into deep space.  Like the heliconia, small “coasters” (sense focalizing units of red, orange, and blue-white) act as signposts, and they direct the spatial recession.  Units overlap, intersect, and move up and in creating varied spatial rhythms.  That is why I stopped to look and enjoy the heliconia, and I stayed awhile to do so.

Here is one more:

You may be thinking, as I did, that this is a man-made orchestration, that no “real” tree could grow these perfect cascading jewel-like “necklaces.”

I titled it “The Necklace of Seed Pods.”  I took a picture of it on my iPhone, and I showed the picture to the guide.  He told me they were seedpods of a palm tree. 

When I arrived home, I sent my picture in an e-mail to the National Tropical Botanical Garden asking for help in identifying the specific palm tree.  Dr. David H. Lorence, Director of Science, told me my picture shows the fruits of a palm native to the Philippines and Palau (Republic of Belau) in Micronesia.  The scientific name is Pinanga insignis.  In Palau it is called Chebouch. 

What do you see?

I see an upright pole-like unit (tree trunk) punctuated with horizontal green bands from which three sets of downward flowing strings of richly colored beads descend like ornamental necklaces. 

I felt captivated by it because I had experienced an ecological miracle and an aesthetic one.

Suddenly, I remembered this painting by Violette de Mazia:

A Necklace of Boats, 1949, Oil on wood panel, Barnes

In the painting, the triangular “boats” hang on brightly colored lines and stretch horizontally across the picture plane.  The triangular color shapes rhythmically echo in the reflections in the “water” and contrast with the blobby background “foliage” that undulates across the picture plane.  The “string” of color shapes hangs slightly in front of four horizontal color bands.  Compressed shallow space gives the entire ensemble a rigid, claustrophobic atmosphere, very different from the cascading quality of the palm pods.

Yet, the contrasting dots of color in the palm pods, the horizontality of the trunk’s bands, and the vivid, saturated color of the repeating units, speak much the same language.

With a mind educated by aesthetic appreciation, everything encountered becomes visually enriching. 

If you continue to use the objective method, and keep doing all the hard work genuine aesthetic appreciation demands, your everyday world will reward you with visual gifts to enjoy.

“Creatively Seeing, Part II,” the next post, will describe the “rooms” Robert Allerton created.

  

                                                                                        

                      

                                                                                                                                              

Subject Subjected to Interest

You thought we were finished with this topic, didn’t you?

I thought so too.

However, I just returned from a two-week visit to Kauai and, during my stay in this tropical paradise, the plants I saw kept talking to me.  Fascinated at the difference between how they looked and what use artists had made of their qualities, I kept saying “Van Gogh would have loved this,” or “Matisse used these colors and shapes.”  Neither one visited Kauai.  But they each were sensitive to similar qualities in the subjects they experienced in their own world.

Dr. Barnes argues “It is no easy task for a novice to banish from his mind the independent interest of the subject-matter and to fix his attention upon the manner in which color, line, space, and light are employed and interrelated; it involves the breaking up of a set of old, firmly riveted habits and the beginning of new ones.” (Art in Painting, 72-73)

You know this.

Indulge me this jet-lagged foray into familiar territory.  My defense: I give it all a new twist (literally).

For example, look at this photograph of vines that grow in the McBryde Garden in Kauai’s National Tropical Botanical Garden:

Woody liana Entada phaseoloides 

The vines are climbing over a Monkey Pod tree.  The common name is the St. Thomas Bean. 

Now do what we do: describe their plastic qualities (light, line, color, and space).

You will come up with something like: a vertical series of dramatic curvilinear, angular, and twisted rhythms decoratively setting off a series of horizontal wavy bands.

Now look at this picture by Van Gogh:

Vines, 1890, Van Gogh Museum

Look closely at the Van Gogh.  Notice how linear brush strokes echo the palm fronds in the top right of the photograph as well as the short, light, thin strips of branches on the foreground.

Of course, there are many differences as well. List them.

My point is not to compare and contrast these two pictures, but to stress a simple fact: where genuine interest drives inquiry, you will be unable to focus solely on the subject because you have already built the habit of aesthetic perception.  This now operates automatically.  You don’t get distracted.

Now look at this photograph of a view from Kukuiolono Park in Kalāheo:

Again, describe its light, line, color, and space.

Here is what I would say: a vertical repoussoir on the right pushes back a series of brightly colored rectilinear bands; they, in turn, push back a lower series of variegated patches of ochre and deep green.  These patches are interspersed with triangular verticals that recede into deeper space.  The spatial recession stops at a strip of dark brown, above which a wider band of deep blue connects with a band of grayed white to box in the middle wedge.  The light, white shapes at the top echo the rhythms of the landscape as they float in front of the lighter blue horizontal band.   

Now compare it to this Matisse painting:

The Sea Seen from Collioure, 1906, Barnes

                    

One big difference between the Matisse and the photograph is the circular framing device Matisse employs.  Do you see it?  If you follow the left moving “tree branch” you will see it connect to the change in the “water” from dark blue on the left to a lighter cerulean.  That “skewer” in turn connects to the left of the red “pizza slice,” which then connects to the black descending line that moves toward the “tree trunk.”  

And yet, those oranges, ochres, and greens—they captivate our eye.  Decorative, enticing, rich, compelling: qualities of both.

The point of this short post, then, is this:  to an educated eye, attention is fixed upon the manner on which color, line, space, and light are employed and interrelated. 

I soon will see the current exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Acadia.  If you have any questions or topics you would like to me address, please click here and let me know.   

Reign of Error

The Van Gogh Up Close exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art closes today.  I’m sorry about that, because I intended to write several more posts based on individual pictures in it.

What I will write instead has to do with the “blockbuster” success of this exhibit, not that that is a bad thing.  It isn’t.

What concerns me has to do with the idea of “self-guided” tours that have very little to do with the “self.”

When the students in my Van Gogh Seminar attended the exhibit at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, we were some of the first to enter.  Some of the first does not quite paint the correct picture: hordes of us entered at 10 and hordes more followed every few minutes.  The guards admonished our group of 15 “not to speak to each other” about the pictures, but to “self-guide.”  Translation: listen mutely to the information given through the headphones.

Fortunately, I had provided my students a Study Guide.  This enabled them to focus on individual work and to scrutinize several pictures closely so they could answer the questions I posed.

My questions had to do with the aesthetic information they were to uncover via objective analysis. 

Our “self” experiences what is in the work and is very different from our “receptacle” that collects what someone else says about the work.

By that I mean, when we confront a painting, we must use everything we have learned:  (1) how to uncover visual meaning in works of art; (2) how to read color and determine creativity; and (3) how to appreciate aesthetic achievement.  All by ourselves.

My students and I have been attempting something even more challenging.  We have been trying to decide for ourselves if Dr. Barnes’ assessment of Van Gogh’s achievement remains as credible today, May 6, 2012, as it was when he wrote it in 1925.  Never one to gush, Dr. Barnes said this:

His color is bright, often exotic, and usually employed in daring contrasts; but it lacks structural quality, it does not often function effectively in organizing the painting, and rarely adds anything expressive to the form.  His pictures are always rhythmic, but the rhythms are obvious and usually mechanical.  The result is that the total compositional activity of the color is chiefly decorative, and the technical means of achieving animated effects and striking patterns are rather specious and overaccentuated.  His compositions are generally flat, his drawing and modeling are relatively unvaried and not very original (The Art in Painting, p. 334).

Do we agree?

I began this discussion in the previous two posts (Is This the Sun? and Is This the Sun? Cont’d).  Those posts discussed two of Van Gogh’s paintings in which he used olive trees as his subject.

This time, let’s study this picture:

Houses at Auvers, 1890, MFA Boston

It’s at moments like this when I simply want to sigh, smile, and revel in the colorfulness and liveliness I see. 

It’s then I hear the ghosts of Dr. Barnes and Violette de Mazia whispering to me: “Get a grip, girl.  Go to work,” they say.

When I turn the picture upside down, I can do just that:

Now I see a crumpled section of wiggling, flowing, ins and outs of rectilinear and curvilinear striated vivid color shapes occupying ¾ of the picture.  The remaining ¼ blue color band slips behind the larger section and converts curling motifs of “trees” and “shrubs” into interlocking curls of “clouds” that move horizontally across that background plane.

Here are some cropped details:

This first one, of the thatched roof, orchestrates rows of insistent repeated striations of olive, black, orange, and brown tones within a curved flattened color plane.  The “cottage” sets back and moves slightly in and out via horizontal rectilinear dabs of light blue and cerulean on a lavender ground.  To the right, longer, vertical strips of creamy white, muted greens and blues are held within darker outlines—like empty vertical boxes. 

This second one reaffirms the motifs:  the “road” is swept up (not back) then left (including its “shadow”), and wraps around the “cottage,” pulsing with movement.  These fluid triangular shapes of long, overlapping pulled bands rise slightly on the far right to create a small, ledge-like structure.  The green/tan “figure” moves in much the same way the curl of “foliage” does on the top left of the ledge-like unit. 

Notice, too, how the lower edge of the “thatched roof” sits on a descending step-like unit of projecting “house” and ascending “step-like” bushes.

The above detail of “sky” shows the cerulean/lavender color harmonies repeated but now writ large and dramatic and broken by “chain-like” links of pink/blue/white color arcs that push leftwards across it.  Below, dark lines rhythmically repeat the interlocking chain motif of the “clouds.”

This cropped detail, once again, exhibits what we now expect:  linear short color stripes contained within light boxy color shapes bend and swirl across the picture plane.  Of all the rooftops, however, one is not modulated: the red one.  Every other rectilinear color unit is animated by either vertical stripes or horizontal ones.  The red one, however, is a flat, opaque rectangle.

As a practitioner of the objective method, I have to call it as I see it.  No matter how much I love this picture, no matter how happy the color and the dynamic movement of the color shapes makes me, it has “issues” as we would say today.  Violette de Mazia calls them “holes.” 

Here is what she said about Van Gogh’s painting “House and Figure”:

Houses at Auvers, 1890, MFA Boston

“Here, although a measure of unity is imposed by the twisted shape of the area that makes up
the red roof of the cottage in the foreground, the lack of variations in the color of the brush strokes creates a break in the organic unity of the picture, and the roof is a hole” (E Pluribus Unum—Cont’d: Part IV, p. 32)

I continue to love this one as well.

If you have been reading these posts for this long, you know what we do takes time, effort, and patience.  All we have is our own interest, curiosity and the objective method to guide us.  The Reign of Error assumes all we need is information about the works of art: facts, dates, subjects used, history, biography.    

I do not know yet what my students will conclude about Van Gogh’s achievement.  I can say, thanks to the Van Gogh Up Close exhibit and our work together, we have had an intense, exciting, and rewarding experience getting to know Vincent van Gogh’s work.  If anything, we have affirmed a basic truth: creation is messy.  Not all pictures are perfect.  There are levels of genuine achievement lower than the loftiest.

Van Gogh’s work continues to provide me with ways of seeing I could not have attained had he not shown them to me in his pictures.