The How and the Why

Dr. Megan Hunt, the testy medical examiner played by Dana Delany on ABC’s Body of Proof, in a recent episode, told a forensic pathology student she must “first find the how and then the why.”

We must do this too.

In a former post (What to Look for in Art, Cont’d), I quoted John Ciardi.  In his book, How Does a Poem Mean? Ciardi argues poems hold their meanings in the relationships among their means.  To understand poems, you must know the language of word sounds.

For us as well, the question needing an answer is not “what does a picture mean?” but “how does a picture mean?”  We learn and use the language of color.

If we were a forensic pathologist doing an autopsy, therefore, we would first determine how the person died.  Then we would try to find out why (and, in the case of the TV show, by following the clues our forensic scrutiny revealed, we would figure out who committed the murder). 

If we think of our work as doing an autopsy on a picture, we first determine how its body of color evidence looks: (1) its relationships of light, line, color, and space and what qualities those relationships express; (2) its composition or plan; (3) its rhythms and motifs.  In other words, we dissect it, and we look for clues.

We are not looking for a cause of death.  Quite the opposite.  We are looking to bring alive its visual sensuous information, its aesthetic meaning. 

Only after we do that are we able to ask why: why was it all done this way? And the answer to that question reveals the BIG IDEA, the visual experience recorded in the picture.

In the last post (To Thine Own Self Be True), I asked you to examine this picture by Edward L. Loper, Sr.

The Magnificent Bouquet, 2009, Private Collection

The first time I saw this picture, I feel in love with its vivid reds and its luminosity.

I started, therefore, with a preference.  However, as Dr. Barnes said in The Art in Painting, “…the method gives results as objective as possible within any field of aesthetic experience and…it reduces to a minimum the role of merely personal and arbitrary preference. Preference will always remain, but its existence is consistent with a much higher degree of objective judgment than at present prevails.”

Let’s see if I can be objective.

First, I always turn pictures upside down:

Now when I look at it, I see shallow, almost claustrophobic space.  I start questioning myself: seems like a hodge-podge of colors without a focus; confusing; a jumble.

That surprises me.  Why did I like it so readily when it was right side up, and now I can’t find a place to start?  Since I can’t answer this question, I keep looking.

As I do, I notice that units start to move backwards: in the frontal plane a circular mass of red, orange, and yellow color strips joins forces with a dark flattened rectangle (aka the vase), a dark ovoid volume (aka eggplant) and a curly medium blue funnel (aka drapery) that wraps around all three units.  This entire unit floats in front of the darkened background to its right.  To its left, another lighter gray/white rectangle (aka cloth) slips back pushing forward the white bowl of red grapes.  The entire ensemble sits on a tilted forward pushing ledge backed by a vertical brownish rectangle.  Behind all this, an amorphous dark space causes the entire structure to float.

It reminds me of the pop-up books my grandchildren love, and how the  contents jump out when they open them. 

Ah, I think: drama.  A color drama of rich, vivid, glowing units set in subtle spatial intervals and looming forward.

That’s a start.

If you analyze what I just did, you will see how I study a picture.  It is not the only or the best way; it is my way.

You may find making lists of the plastic means (the light, line, color, and space) works best for you.  So long as you are looking at color units in space and not flowers and fruit, you can’t go wrong.

After that start, I go on.  Upside down, I now see strips of color applied side by side.  The strips build each unit.  Look at the following (right side up) cropped enlargement:

Each color unit orchestrates strips of color.  If these color strips look familiar to you, as they did to me, you are thinking Van Gogh. 

Look at this picture:

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1887, Rijksmuseum

Notice how Van Gogh builds color units by applying strips of color side by side, not just in the sunflowers but also in the background.

The difference, however, between Loper’s ribbonlike brush strokes and Van Gogh’s is that Loper’s are not linear.  Van Gogh draws lines to create a striking pattern of line and color.  Loper pulls his bands, or applies them with a heavier application of pigment.  This results in a less decorative statement and a more expressive one.  Van Gogh contrasts the dynamic quality of his banded streaks of striking, vivid color units producing an active, lively color statement, but the result is not as moving aesthetically compared to Loper’s more structurally powerful form. 

The reds in the Loper attracted some of you.  Beth Ann Kessler saw a similarity between Loper’s reds and those of Biagio Pinto.  What do you think?

Biagio Pinto, Modernist Still Life, 50 x 40 inches, n.d., Private Collection

Full disclosure: Biagio Pinto (1911-1989), was born in Philadelphia, studied at the School of Industrial Arts and the Barnes Foundation as well as in England, France, Italy, and Spain.  Two of his five brothers, Angelo and Salvatore, were painters.  Angelo Pinto was my traditions' instructor at the Barnes Foundation.

Tom Del Porte said this about the Loper:

Nothing quiet about this... from the hot colors to the sliding diagonal lines... even the eggplant looks like it might roll at any second. It's not Cezanne. It's not Renoir or Soutine... it has some of their soul, but no bones there... Even Carravaggio is whispering in there...
To me this is an excitement... a shiver of tension, a shout of glee.

Diana Meyers Bennett Roberts said this:

In some ways, this painting has characteristics I associate with van Gogh: an explosive exuberance of color and brush strokes. In another way, I am reminded of Cezanne, but a failed Cezanne. The severe tilt of the objects sliding off to the right (facing the painting) are not sufficiently held back by an object or opposite tilting line. For me the work lacks the tension of balance/imbalance that keeps your eye constantly moving in Cezanne's still lifes. That said, however, doesn't take away for me the pleasure of looking at this painting over and over and joining in its dance!

These all are good places to start.  As you keep looking, fueled now by your interest and clues, you will find more and more either to support or refute your hypothesis.

As I continue my adventure, I see the twisted yellow strips now at the top (of the inverted picture).  I enjoy their bony finger-like projections setting off the receding space between the “digits.”  I see how the spatial recessions are subtle and shallow, reinforcing my original picture idea. 

Then I find their repetitions in the bird of paradise units, in the crenelated edges of the flowers, and in the spiky trio of color units now at the bottom.  These rhythms create aesthetic satisfaction.  I enjoy them.

Continuing my exploration, I look to see what holds this picture together.  I am curious if my upside down picture unifies and balances.  The more I look, the more I conclude that, unlike Cézanne, Loper does not resolve a perceived imbalance by creating an architectonic structure to pull the units into equilibrium.  That downward and right tilt of what was a table top with its right and left sides creating a perspective push back in space is so tilted the entire picture seems off balance.

And then I look some more: the markings on that rectilinear unit of tabletop, like rescue girders, pin each color unit in place.  Look below the white bowl on the right (right side up now).  See that vertical pinkish-grey band?  Look at the base of the dark vase.  See that vertical brownish-pink vertical band? Look how the light area to the left of the eggplant skewers the blue-grey cloth.  Look at the leftward tilt of the dark vase.  Notice how all the color units that were flowers follow a darkened path to the top of the picture.

That one darkened pathway pulls all the tilted units leftward and helps balance the entire picture.

You can find many more skewers.  Keep looking.  They all serve the same purpose: to hold the color units in place and to balance the entire picture with an underpinning of directional thrusts. 

Since the reds seduced me, I knew I needed to decide whether they were derivative.  The only way to do this is to determine what Loper gave back to the traditions from which he borrowed. 

In a previous post (Making Connections), I traced Loper’s warm glow back to Renoir and Bonnard. I argued that Loper’s luminosity resulted 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.  I have not changed my mind.  However, in this picture, the resulting luminosity, the lure of the red, occurs not because of “dabs of intense, juxtaposed color along with layering of color on color” but because of the application of color bands that build volumes coupled with dabs of color applied to them that make them glow.   Biagio Pinto’s vivid, vibrant reds, set off by clean-cut, clear spatial atmosphere, do not smolder.  They achieve their color drama from the contrasts created by the color units around them. 

In this picture, then, the ribbons of color surprised me.  Still, the resulting picture takes its place with Loper’s late work. In all of his pictures of the past 10 years, luminosity unifies the design.  Because of Loper’s adaptation of the broken color of the impressionists via both Cézanne and Renoir, his color strokes tend to echo and repeat each other whether they occur in dabs or strips, creating intricate rhythms that move the eye from one color unit to another.  Continuous successions of color-chords fill each canvas and create a color-in-light suffusion. 

My next post, titled “What’s Next?” will offer you some choices.  I spent four days in New York City recently to celebrate my birthday, and I visited the Met (with its stunning renovated American Wing), MoMA, the Neue Gallerie, and the Frick, along with seeing a David Parsons Dance performance, War Horse (the theatre production, not the movie), "The Artist" (the movie), and the 9/11 Memorial.

I came home with many ideas for future posts.  In the next post, I will share some of them with you and ask you to let me know which ones I should pursue.

To Thine Own Self Be True

For the past few days, I felt prodded to write another post, not by a new idea, or by a work of art that moved me, but by “hints” from disparate places that seemed directed to me.  One came from a student who asked me to “tell her” exactly what “she was supposed” to see in a picture.  Another came in my horoscope in my local paper (yes, I sometimes read them).  It said: “Your sign mate Ellen DeGeneres said, ‘Stay true to yourself.  Never follow someone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path.  By all means, you should follow that.”

I liked that one.

Then I read in the New York Times (Sunday, January 15, 2012) that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.  In fact, introverts, the psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, are creative by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand.”  They do not get distracted by matters unrelated to work.

Finally, as I was looking for a quote by Dr. Barnes in The Art in Painting, I saw (for the first time after reading this book for more than 45 years) this statement in the preface to the first edition: “It is not presumed that the conclusions reached with regard to particular paintings are the only ones compatible with the use of the method: any one of them is of course subject to revision.  What is claimed is that the method gives results as objective as possible within any field of aesthetic experience and that it reduces to a minimum the role of merely personal and arbitrary preference. Preference will always remain, but its existence is consistent with a much higher degree of objective judgment than at present prevails.”

I had no choice.

I had to tackle, again, preference as it relates to aesthetic appreciation.

I say “again” because you might think I exhausted this issue in the past four posts:

(1)  What’s Feeling Got To Do With It? (2) What’s the Subject Got To Do With It?
(3) Subject Facts, Picture Facts, and Us and (4) The Means Justify the End, but this time the emphasis is different.

This time I want to explain how our own reluctance to approach this work by ourselves, in solitude, without listening to what anyone else (particularly an expert) tells us, or what our friends think, or what our teachers say, or what the wall labels tell us, or the headphones tell us, or what we read in books, magazines, and newspapers—that reluctance prevents us from making honest, personal, and creative discoveries.

The analyses you read in these posts are shorter and less scholarly then those in the books and essays written by Dr. Barnes and Violette de Mazia.  I use fewer allusions.  I write shorter sentences.  I use a simpler vocabulary.  That I do this keeps me up nights.  I agonize over my “shortcomings.”  I worry I do not do justice to the method or the work of art I explain.  Mostly, I feel inferior to their “legacy” and intimidated by the innovative contribution they made to aesthetic appreciation, their dedication to their work, and their fierce defense of their discoveries.

My life would definitely be easier, less stressful, and more fun if I functioned either as a student of Ed Loper or a student of Barnes and de Mazia. 

You are thinking, I am sure: “They are all dead.  You could not have continued as their student.” 

Ah, but I could. 

While Ed Loper and I remained friends, I stopped studying with him 25 years before he died.  I stopped because I had to figure out where his vision ended and mine began. 

As with these posts, for many years I worried my painting suffered.  I feared I did not have what it took to do my work on my own with no help from anyone.  I struggled to make decisions about my work.  Sometimes I had no idea what to do with a picture, and I had to put it away and take it out again a long time later.  I missed his classes, the group of Loper students who hung out together, traveled together, and had parties together.  I felt lonely.

What kept me going was Ed Loper’s life story.  He taught himself. He worked alone.  He hit dead ends.  And he kept working.  He may have been a tyrant to his students, and he definitely liked to paint other people’s pictures by “telling” them what to do, but no one, absolutely no one, told him what to do.  He struggled with his pictures himself. 

Artists do that.

Violette de Mazia believed an artist’s vision was a special and fragile thing.  She told a story of Dr. Barnes and Soutine to make this point.  She said Soutine begged Dr. Barnes for a long time to tell him what his weaknesses were.  Dr. Barnes resisted.  But one day he told Soutine that some of his pictures lacked organization. 

When he returned to see Soutine the following year, Soutine proudly showed him his new work and declared them “better organized.”  However, the Soutine-ness that Dr. Barnes admired—the animation, motion, vividness, intensity, and drama—was compromised.  Dr. Barnes later argued that “the bulk of [Soutine’s] work is very uneven—excess of intensity prevents synthesis of all the parts of the picture into an organic whole, even when individual units are effectively done.” (Art in Painting, 375).  Despite his shortcomings, Barnes said, Soutine, at his best, compared “in strength and dramatic power with important painters of the past and present.” 

Dr. Barnes practiced objective judgment.  This results in measured evaluation, not adoration.

If, therefore, I had continued to act like a student of Ed Loper even after I no longer studied with him, and I did not attempt to find out what interested me and how to solve my own aesthetic problems, I would have been a “Loperino,” an acolyte making pictures that were more his than mine.  Better to make bad Bauman’s than derivative Loper’s, I told myself.

Same thing with these posts.  If all I did here was summarize what I learned at the Barnes Foundation, I doubt you would be reading them.  They are not as learned or groundbreaking as my predecessors’ explanations, but they are mine.  They grow out of my experience. 

Here is my point.  If you do not approach a picture and see it as a challenge you can confront, as an adventure you are equipped to undertake, or as work you and you alone are able to do, you will continue to rely on what others say, what I say, what other readers say, and you will not gain confidence by jumping in and doing the best you can.  What do you have to lose?  Maybe you will feel embarrassed if you miss something important in a picture, but as far as I can tell, there is nothing life threatening about this.

For the start of this New Year, I invite you to look at this painting by Edward Loper, Sr.  As always, see what you see.  Spend some time with it.  Turn it upside down if that helps.  Do this before you read my next post.

As Warren Buffet says, “Put some skin in the game.”  Do not sit back and wait for me or anyone else to do this work for you. 

If you wish, share your discoveries with me via e-mail (click here).  I look forward to hearing from you.

The Magnificent Bouquet, 2009, Private Collection

Lost Art and How to Restore It

My New Year began with a treat.  My granddaughter, Lily, a third grader, attends Schuylkill Elementary School.  Each month, her teacher invites a “mystery reader” to come in and read a book to the class.  Before the event, she provides some clues to the reader’s identity.  The children try to guess who it is.

My clues were: someone who works with colors; someone who likes to go to museums; someone who makes things to see.

On January 3, Lily guessed it was me.

I read When Pigasso met Mootisse by Nina Laden, a delightful tale of Pigasso, a talented pig, meeting Mootisse, an artistic bull, and their relationship.

At the end of the book, biographies of Matisse and Picasso tell the “real” story.

In the real story, Matisse said this to Picasso: “We must talk to each other as much as we can.  When one of us dies, there will be some things the other will never be able to talk of with anyone else.”


That gave me pause.

While I never said those exact words to Ed Loper (see the post Mysticism in Art), I certainly understand their veracity.  What are the “things” artists talk about with each other?  Why are they unable to talk with anyone else about them?

Here’s why.

I brought in a few of my paintings to show the students.  They wanted to know: (1) If I was famous; (2) How much each painting cost; (3) How long it took to paint each one.

I told them none of that mattered to me, that fame and fortune were overrated.  I painted pictures because I loved the process.  When I see a world full of color and meaning, I am happy.  I told them it was hard work, but my reward came when someone looked at one of my pictures and appreciated it, enjoyed it by understanding it.  I told them each picture took 70 years to paint, because that is how long I have been seeing.

Their eyes glazed over.

This is heady stuff for 8 year olds.

But it is what Ed and I would discuss. 

When I visited him a few weeks before he died, I told him I wrote about his picture Table and Flowers (see Pentimento).   I asked him why he no longer “fractured” his spatial planes.  I asked him why he now adapted visual ideas from Renoir and Bonnard rather than Cézanne. 

He told me he could not paint “that way” anymore. 

“Could not, or would not?” I questioned.  “Could not,” he said.  “I see differently now,” he told me.

“But you always argued Renoir was a dead end.  You said he did not leave any ideas for other artists to develop.” 

He gave me one of his “looks,” a combination of a smirk and a challenge: “I haven’t the least idea.  You figure it out,” he said.

And so it went.  We talked about the loneliness of making pictures.  We talked about how hard it was, as time went on, to feel inspired.  We talked about the strength of our interest in doing the work.

When I read to him what I had written about his picture, he thanked me.  He said, “I had no idea I did all that.”

The best compliment I ever received.

Dr. Barnes said:

To see as an artist sees is an accomplishment to which there is no short cut, which cannot be acquired by any formula or trick; it requires not only the best energies of which we are capable, but a methodical direction of those energies, based upon scientific understanding of the meaning of art and its relation to human nature. (Art in Painting, 7)  

This New Year, I thank Albert Barnes, Violette de Mazia, Angelo Pinto, Harry Sefarbi, Barton Church, and Edward Loper for inviting me into their world.  Their teaching and/or writing and painting informed my vision and my life. 

You, the readers of and responders to these posts, by your commitment to this process, continue the conversation.  We talk of “these things” with each other, and in so doing, according to Dr. Barnes, we build up the habits of perception and background which admit us to the world of aesthetic experience.       

The Means Justify the End

Machiavelli had it backwards.  For us, it is not “the end justifies the means,” but the means that justify the end.  In other words, you must pay attention to all the plastic means—light, line, color, space, subject, and tradition—as you search for the art in a painting. 

At the end of my last post (“Subject Facts, Picture Facts, and Us”), I asked you to examine two pictures: Renoir’s Pomegranates and Soutine’s Flayed Rabbit.  I also asked you to reconcile, in each picture, if the starting point (aka the subject) affected the outcome (aka what effect, if any, did the subject contribute to the expressive meaning?).  If it did, describe it.

Your responses accurately stated the similarities:  sinuous line and shape, juicy, rich, and vibrant color, and structurally rendered, centered volumes set off by a platform device.  In each picture, the central volume is “split open,” or “exposed,” which one of you described as an “inside out” presentation.

Here are the two pictures:

Renoir, Pomegranates,c. 1910, Barnes

Soutine, Flayed Rabbit, c. 1921, Barnes

The two paintings are expressive of such qualities as dramatic activity, color richness, gritty unctuosity, and luminosity. 

Yet, all of you said the Soutine picture repulsed you—the “Yuk effect.”

In short, we feel differently about a depiction of a skinned rabbit on a tabletop than we do about pomegranates. 

How do those “human values” relate to the picture idea?

We faced a similar dilemma in the post “What’s the Subject Got to Do With It?” when we confronted Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons:

1821-23, Plaster mounted on canvas, Prado

In this case, I argued Goya rendered movement, power, and drama via a color statement.  The color statement connected the plastic, aesthetic reality to the horror of the subject.  The transformation into color converted our repulsion toward a brutal act into the order and consolation of art.  We felt horrified by what Saturn did, but we enjoyed what Goya did.

Pomegranates as a subject, therefore, can’t mean what a flayed rabbit can mean.  We react differently to a depiction of a dead animal than we do to cut fruit, and the transformation into art does not do away with that difference.  Rather, in the hands of an artist, as Dr. Barnes stated, both the intrinsic interest of the subject and the perfect coördination all the means, color, light, line, space, make up the total esthetic effect and can establish a painting as … a great achievement of plastic art no matter what the subject was and, in essence, the opposite: because of what the subject was.

How do you work with this?

Here’s the way.  Try objectivity.

Let’s first examine the Renoir painting upside down:

Make a list:

1.     Three globular volumes “float” in the shallow space of two undulating horizontal bands.

2.     Glowing color chords of ribbon-like strokes build solid volumes: the central volume opens into a crevice composed of smaller orbs, ruby-like in color and sparkle.  This “inside-out,” back and forth in space establishes the central theme.

3.     To our left, the yellow/green color volume slips behind the central one causing the central volume to levitate.  To our right, the smaller ruby-red color volume hangs in space barely touching the central one but gently vibrating next to it.

4.     The brush strokes on the globular volumes create a soft, velvety, “skin” that appears thick yet supple, and connect with other brush strokes in the background, creating a gently curving, flowing movement.

5.     In the lower brown band, darker shades of brown/red/and gray echo the roundness of the three volumes as well as move the eye back (on the left) and forward (on the right). 

6.     In the wider, upper “white” band, the horizontal color strokes of blue, pink, white, gray, and brown flow, ripple-like,  toward the center.

7.     At the top center, a series of short blue/gray strokes that say “fold” in the “cloth” connect, skewer-like, to the “peeled back skin” of the central volume in an arabesque that draws attention to its rhythmic counterpart on the bottom right where the smaller volume meets the brown background.

Renoir’s picture holds together by a tightly knit continuous interflow of color.  Solid color volumes infused with light join with the banded setting because of the interflow of their respective colors.  Compactly organized ribbons of color flow throughout the picture.

In this case, pomegranates on a table transform into a continuous sequence of arabesque-movement of line, light, color, volumes and spatial intervals varying in luminosity and definitiveness of shape.  Foreground, middle ground, and background form an integral part of the main compositional theme, the arabesque-movement of solid volumes in colored space.

Now look at the Soutine upside down:

 Make a list:

1.     In this case, when the subject’s hold diminishes, the picture facts can be perceived with less emotion: a large central twisted mass of unctuous, contorted, pulled, smeared, vigorous, forceful brushstrokes pattern the highly luminous color shapes. The central mass is set off by the two receding slightly diagonal rectilinear flattened projectors:  an irregularly shaped, crumpled “white” rectangle and a solid brown rectangle.  These two areas are surrounded on three sides by a darker brown/black.  This creates a pocket of space that “floats” the first two.

2.     The “head” of the central mass slides back in the lower center because of the darker “shadow” color to its right and left on the brown background.  Because of the darker color next to each “leg,” another “sinking” occurs at the top center

3.     The “exposed” area that makes up the “body” reveals gristly, contrasted swirls of thick, vibrant, rich layers of reds, pinks, oranges, and brown/black. 

4.     Echoes of the central mass occur in the white “cloth”: the ovoid “body” appears in the upper right as a lighter circle of white within which grays and blacks recede; the foreground “legs” are echoed to their left and right; the “white cloth” pushes away from the upper left “leg” as the upper right leg sinks into it.

5.     The brown “tabletop” equally pulses with swirls of pulled bands of color.  Less “thick,” these color bands agitate and animate its surface.

One of you argued that the Renoir painting portrays fruit, a subject that is life giving.  The Soutine blatantly displays death—a flayed rabbit—at its most gruesome—violent, bleeding and dramatic. 

Maybe.

Each of us will have an emotional response to the subject.  Accept it.  If we intend to make rabbit stew, a hunter, a butcher, or a cook will feel quite differently about the rabbit than those of us used to buying meat already cut and packaged and far removed from the slaughtering.  We will feel differently about a pomegranate than we do about a skinned rabbit when we are in the grocery store, but when we are in a museum looking at a picture, we must connect our human emotions to the plastic reality depicted.

So feeling is involved.  Fruit as a subject has been used for centuries, but it is the individual artist’s conception of fruit that matters.  Dead animals have been used as a subject for centuries as well.  Soutine, himself, used all sorts of dead animals and fish as subjects: turkeys, sides of beef, ray fish, etc.  And we respond to these differently if we feel compassion for suffering or if we feel contempt for the destruction of life.  Illustration arouses sentiment, and this is legitimate it we respond to what the artist shows us, not to what he doesn’t. 

In the Renoir and Soutine paintings, the plastic means unite what the subject was with what the work of art demands: a visual theme that unifies all the means into a coherent whole.

Think about Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring One of His Sons.  Here, Goya’s expressive illustration of an insane act of infanticide and cannibalism exaggerates the qualities that renders the subject repellent:  dark/light drama; sharp, jagged angularity; light shapes emerge from darkness, and light shapes are sucked into darkness.

No matter what feelings the subject may arouse in us, our job is to examine what we have in front of us: colors on a flat surface.  And read them. 

Remember Matisse’s words: “the [subject] is an actor.  It must act powerfully on the imagination.  It means only what [the artist] makes it mean.”

I wish all my readers a wonderful holiday season.  If you have questions or ideas for the next series of posts, just click here and send them to me.

 

Subject Facts, Picture Facts, and Us

You are probably feeling you understand the relationship between subject facts and picture facts.  You may feel the subject does not matter much if what you are after is the art in the picture.  Or you may feel it does matter a lot because it refers us to our everyday world and makes the picture facts more relevant.

After I studied at the Barnes Foundation for four years, and I believed I understood the method and could use it effectively, I actually “read” page 77 in The Art in Painting.  I don’t know why I had not “read” this page with understanding before, but I hadn’t.

On that page, you will find the following two pictures:

Titian, Entombment,1584, Louvre

Cézanne, Curtain, Jug, and Compotier, 1893-94, Collection Mrs. John Hay Whitney

At the bottom of the page, Dr. Barnes described the design of both paintings as very similar in structure and expressive content because the interrelationships of plastic elements is basically similar.    

I had no problem with that statement.  I could see the similarity of compositional device (see diagrams below). 

Titian

  Cézanne

                                                         
However, I now had a problem with Dr. Barnes’ discussion in the pages that preceded page 77.  In those pages, he argued that the subject of entombment arouses very different feelings then the subject of a jug and fruit on a table.

He said our emotions aroused by subjects like “entombment,”  in so far as there is an appeal to “such sentiments as sorrow, pity, wonder, awe,” or an awareness of human suffering and compassion,  are perfectly reasonable so long as they are “united with the other elements in the substance of the painting—the  plastic form.” (p. 25)

OK so far.

He further declared, “An object is more than a pattern of lines and colors; it is an individual thing, and its form, as we have seen, is what gives it individuality and significance.  Its significance may reside in its appeal to our more specific instincts, or it may be due to the realization of mass and space, of the qualities common to all material objects.” (48)

OK still.

But here is where I got confused:

“In either case, the particular colored and patterned object takes on a more universal appeal, and moves us not only by what it is, but by what it suggests and embodies.  Obviously, the greatest satisfaction is possible from an object which combines these decorative and expressive interests and in which what is expressed is not only the universal qualities of the natural world, but human values also.” (49)

Human values?  What’s human emotion got to do with it? I asked.  I thought we left that behind when we embarked on the plastic analysis.

The following paragraph worsened my confusion:

“In Titian’s ‘Entombment,’ the subject is solemn, sad, pathetic; but the solemnity and pathos are restrained and dignified…When viewed plastically the picture presents a group of figures unified into a firmly-knit, self-enframing, oval composition, similar to, but more complex than that in Giotto’s ‘Lamentation over Christ.’ The drawing is highly expressive of movement and gesture but does not indicate exaggerated grief or despair, such as we find in treatments of the same subject by many lesser men.  The color, though glowing, does not flaunt itself, but is of a subdued richness which pervades the whole canvas and contributes to compositional unity.  The robes in the bending figures to the right and left are brighter in color and serve as a sort of secondary frame, enclosing the members of the group, and setting them off from the background.  The color, in other words, functions as an organizing principle.  Finally, the use of light, powerfully enhanced by color, brings out the figure of the dead Christ, and is so distributed over the whole canvas as to form a pattern in itself, reënforce and harmonize the color-values, contribute to the composition, and heighten the sense of mystery and awe characteristic of the event depicted.  In this painting it is both the intrinsic interest of the event and the perfect coördination all the means, color, light, line, space, which make up the total esthetic effect and establish the painting as one of the great achievements of plastic art.  One need not be a Christian, or indeed have any special interest in the event itself, to obtain from the painting the rich human values, the nobility, intrinsic to sympathy, solemnity, tragedy.  These values are rendered plastically, by means of color, light, line, mass, and space, all unified into a rich, rhythmic design.” (74)

Why, you might be thinking, was I confused?

And, even odder still, why did it take me so long to know I missed something?

The answer is akin to “looking” at a picture for years, but not “seeing” it.

It happens.

Here I was, a converted practitioner of the objective method, well into my 4^th year of study at the Barnes Foundation, and my 3^rd year of study with Violette de Mazia herself and, before I really read these pages and understood what the words were saying, I thought I just needed to get past the subject to “see” the art in the picture. 

But that is not the case at all. 

Subject facts connect to picture facts and, most important, also connect to us.

Subject facts converted into “color stuff” (also known as subject-matter or substance) and plastic form are not separable.

Violette de Mazia told me Titian’s Entombment and Cézanne’s Curtain, Jug, and Compotier, while sharing plastic characteristics, do not share human values as those values relate to expressive meaning.  They can’t.  We do not “feel” the same about the burial of a person as we do about fruit on a table.  And our feelings count; they factor into the objective equation.

At that moment, in that class, I knew I still had much to learn.

My challenge centered on my ability to understand that a picture of a crucifixion or a wedding may, when converted into works of art, read the same plastically. We can abstract from each the form which is made of the plastic elements—line, light, color, space—and determine the quality of that form as a unified fusion of those elements.

Or, as Violette de Mazia said, “all art is always the same, and always different,” when I again asked her to help me resolve my confusion regarding the human response—the feelings of pity, awe, grief, horror, inspired by the subject—as opposed to the objective one—the form revealed via plastic analysis. 

Now that you and I have acquired the habit of objective analysis, the appeal or repulsion of the subject should not thwart our understanding of the art in the picture.  In fact, the reverse is true: a work of art based on a subject of profound human significance made by a gifted artist through his re-action and re-creation of it, elicits strong feelings that we objectify as we do the work of aesthetic analysis.   

In other words, in the previous post, “What’s the Subject Got To Do With It?” you and I were horrified by what Saturn did but enjoyed aesthetically what Goya did.

Or, as Dr. Barnes said, “this ultimate dependence of esthetic appreciation upon something which much be felt, and cannot simply be abstractly formulated, is the final proof of the affinity between art and instinct. . .In the final analysis it is a matter of interest, and interests, as we have seen, are themselves determined by our instincts.” (44)

You may not yet be ready to tackle the question of how much the subject matters, whether you feel a loss when you confront a non-representational picture, or feel no difference at all, or feel, finally, freed from dealing with recognizable things. 

I will tackle those questions next year.

For now, I offer you an end-of-year challenge.  Diana Meyers-Bennett Roberts commented after reading the previous post that she was “reminded of Soutine's flayed rabbit painting. It shares qualities with Renoir's benign still life of a cut open pomegranate.”

Study the following two pictures and, based on the ideas in the previous posts, write an analysis comparing and contrasting them.

Send your responses to me via e-mail.  I will reward each responder with a copy of my book, Edward L. Loper, Sr., The Prophet of Color.

Renoir, Pomegranates, c. 1910, Barnes

Soutine, Flayed Rabbit, c. 1921, Barnes

What's the Subject Got To Do With It?

At the end of the last post, “What’s Feeling Got To Do With It?” I asked you to examine this Goya painting, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons:

1821-23, Plaster mounted on canvas, Prado

When I show this picture to children, they say, “gross,” or “yuk.” They look away.  They ask why anyone would paint such a horrible picture.

This, from the same kids who have no problem watching vampire movies, or play video games, like “Call of Duty,” in which they, in one way or another, blow up, maim or kill their opponents without breaking a sweat.

I tell them the subject facts: (1) that this is one of Goya’s “Black Paintings,” uncommissioned and not meant for public display; (2) that Goya painted it with oil directly on the wall of his house, along with 13 others; (3) that the subject depicts the mythological Saturn swallowing one of his sons because he feared the prophesy that a son would overthrow him, just as he had overthrown his father, Caelus.  Usually, they remain unmoved.  They still feel repelled by the savagery and grotesqueness of the subject. 

That’s the power of the subject.

However, our job is to discover the aesthetic meaning in this picture.  When I turn it upside down, you can see how the “color stuff,” as I call it, tells quite a different story—a story that has to do with visual qualities and volumes in space and a story that, when understood, produces a far different feeling.

Inverted, we see dramatic light-and-dark effects, somber richness and ruggedness of paint application, thrusts and counter thrusts of sinewy, bony volumes, and a forceful pattern of color units that set up an animated, subtly varied composition expressing jagged, angular movement. Light shapes emerge from darkness, and light shapes are sucked into darkness.

Emerging from blackness, the lights force you to follow them: (now from top to bottom) the v-shaped “legs” extend like a wishbone; the “baby’s calves,” “thighs,” and rounded “buttocks,” undulate up to the lineal, horizontal vise-like grip that were “hands” as they dig into the “back”  to continue a skewered line of “back-bone” that bends to the left.  Moving to the right, a sliver of curved light enters the black hole of the “mouth,” where it disappears; the “whites” of the “eyes” punctuate the receding “forehead,” from which “flames” of “hair” shoot out into the darkness and connect to the extended T-bone pocket of the right “arm.”  The “pupils,” black dots in white circles, continue the rhythmic, jumpy movement.

The light-and-dark volumes jut, bend, sink, squeeze, and pulse. 

Then, within this over-all brown/black tonality punctuated by lighter, but dull whites and yellows, we see the red.  The “surprise” of it arrests attention.  We follow it from the twisting, edginess it gives to the “arm” and what is left of the “back” as it leads our eye to those gripping “hands,” an extraordinarily expressive lineal movement that says captured, held, and sucked into—like a chicken neck into a vacuum hose.

Squint if you can’t see it.  Do whatever you can to loosen the grip of that subject.

In this case, the subject repulses, but the aesthetic experience of power, drama, and movement, satisfies perception.  As we experience the color statement, instead of disgust, we feel rewarded.

The pieces fit. 

The color story is not one we have “read” before, so we feel a sense of excitement as we piece together the various components, establish the relationships of light, line, color, and space, and recognize that a horrific myth becomes a convincing plastic reality because Goya can render movement, power, and drama via a color statement.  The color statement gives plastic, aesthetic reality to the horror of the subject.  The transformation into color converts the chaos and horror of life into the order and consolation of art. 

The medium is the message, and this message connects to a recognizable, if terrifying, subject. 

Look at this Soutine painting:

The Soutine has a lot in common with the Goya once you get past the warm richness of color (I know, that is a lot to ask).  However, upside down, you can’t “see” the subject. You can see thrust and counter thrust, power, drama, and movement.  Do you miss the subject?

Here is the painting, right side up:

 The Philosopher, c. 1921, Private Collection

                                             

Violette de Mazia argues a recognizable subject makes more specific what the picture says.  The subject gives us a clue to what started the artist on his aesthetic adventure. 

Dr. Barnes argues, “forms may be charged with esthetic feeling even when they represent nothing definite in the real world or when what they represent is clearly without appeal in itself…When we cannot find in a picture representation of any particular object, what it represents may be the qualities which all particular objects share, such as color, extensity, solidity, movement, rhythm, etc.”  (Art in Painting, p. 35). 

In other words, in the case of the Goya painting and the Soutine right side up, we have a clear starting point, albeit distorted.  In the case of Mitch Lyons’ clay print, Medicine Man, described in the previous post, we did not. 

Check your pulse. By that I mean, consider whether your aesthetic understanding transmitted more or less “delight” as you uncovered the art in each of them.

Now you can answer the question that began this post: what does the subject have to do with it?