13 JUNE, 2011
(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books by Maria Popova
What the limits of the universe have to do with the history of jazz and the secret of happiness.
Last week, I was reorganizing my library and realized that some of my favorite books are ones that introduced me to subjects I either admired but knew little about or was unaware of altogether. The kinds of reads that profoundly enrich one’s lens on the world. So I thought I’d put together a modest reading list of essential primers for, well, everything. Okay, maybe not everything — I’m keenly aware of how laughable that proposition is — but a fair amount to offer a basis for the kind of cross-disciplinary understanding of culture that I believe is crucial to contributing to the world in a meaningful way. To begin, here are ten essential primers on everything from jazz to data visualization to money.
DATA VISUALIZATIONLong before there was The Visual Miscellaneum or Data Flow, there was Graphis diagrams: The graphic visualization of abstract data — a seminal vision for the convergence of aesthetics and information value, originally published in 1974, which codified the conventions of contemporary data visualization and information design. One of the 100 most influential design books of the past 100 years, it features work by icons like iconic designer and animator Saul Bass, Brain Pickings favorite Milton Glaser, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and many more.
Images courtesy of insect54
JAZZAs a lover of jazz, I was thrilled for this month’s release of The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia‘s fascinating and ambitious cultural biography of the genre, though such classification is incredibly reductionist, that permeated just about every facet of creative culture, social dynamics and politics.
The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. It required the development of a different aesthetic before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.
In our own day, we have embraced just such a new aesthetic, one that allows audience not only to accept, but often rush to praise, willy-nilly, various transformations of vernacular forms of culture into serious art. This tendency is evident not only — or even primarily — in jazz but in virtually every contemporary genre and style of creative human expression. But even in tolerant, liberal-mined times, the tension between these two streams of activity continues to seethe under the surface. This dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion — of African and European, composition and improvisation, spontaneity and deliberation, the popular and the serious, high and low — will follow us at virtually every turn as we unfold the complex history of jazz music.” ~ Ted Gioia
COSMOLOGYIn 1988, legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote what’s commonly held as the most important book in popular science ever published. A Brief History of Time attempted to answer one of humanity’s most fundamental questions — where did the universe come from? — and tackled the complex subject of cosmology through a multitude of angles, including the Big Bang theory, black holes, high mathematics, the nature of time, gravity and much more, yet did it in a way digestible enough to invite the non-expert reader to consider the universe in an entirely new way. (Eight years later, a fantastic illustrated edition offered a revised, updated and expanded version of the book.) With a foreword by none other than Carl Sagan, the book remains a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for understanding the cosmos, our place in it, how we got there and where we might be going.
Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:
If we find [a unified theory], it would be the ultimate triumph — for then we would know the mind of God.”
INFORMATION THEORYThe future of information is something I’m deeply interested in, but no such intellectual exploit is complete without a full understanding of its past. Running the risk of overbeating that drum — since I both reviewed it separately earlier this year and placed it atop my annual summer reading list for 2011 — I still maintain that James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is the most important and ambitious work in illuminating human communication and media theory since the days of Marshall McLuhan. Gleick illustrates the central dogma of information theory through a riveting journey across African drum languages, the story of the Morse code, the history of the French optical telegraph, and a number of other fascinating facets of humanity’s infinite quest to transmit what matters with ever-greater efficiency.
We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma screens, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground. But it has always been there.” ~ James Gleick
But what makes the book truly shine is that, unlike some of his more techno-dystopian contemporaries, Gleick roots his core argument in a certain faith in humanity, in our moral and intellectual capacity for elevation, making the evolution and flood of information an occasion to celebrate new opportunities and expand our limits, rather than to despair over our limitations.
MONEYIn The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson makes a compelling case for banking and the development of currency as a central force behind how civilization has evolved. As we begin to emerge from one of the biggest global recessions in recorded history, Ferguson offers a timely and timeless reminder of one of the greatest truths in financial history and, I would add, human psychology at large: Sooner or later, every bubble bursts. What makes the book even more interesting is that Ferguson completed his research for it prior to the actual economic recession in the U.S., yet many of his insights and conclusions presage what was about to happen with uncanny accuracy.
Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like theMedici mad fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.” ~ Niall Ferguson
Above all, the book — one of 5 must-read books by this year’s TED Global speakers and a companion read to a BBC documentary of the same name, now free to watch online — is an admirable effort to break down what Ferguson calls “the dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge,” a hallmark of the holistic knowledge and cross-disciplinary curiosity I so firmly believe are the key to a richer, more creative, more intelligent life.
CLASSICAL MUSICClassical music is something most people recognize for its cultural importance, but admire from a safe distance. Yet its influence on contemporary culture, both musically and beyond, is wide and all-permeating. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross dances across the most essential 20th-century pieces in major and minor with so much grace and eloquence that you emerge with a newfound understanding for and appreciation of the beautiful language of classical music. From Strauss to Mahler to Coltrane to Glass, from politics to technological innovation to art history, Ross offers a biographical, historical and social context for the most elevated soundtrack of the past century and extends an invitation to listen to it with new ears and new heart.
Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers, and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshape the landscape in which composers worked.” ~ Alex Ross
Ross’s sequel, Listen to This, is one of 7 must-read books on music, emotion and the brain.
WRITINGWhen it was published earlier this year, it didn’t take long to recognize How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish as the most important and ambitious work on the art and craft of language since Strunk and White’s iconic 1918 classic, The Elements of Style. In fact, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal to some of the cultish mandates of Strunk and White’s bible, most notably the blind insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. To make his case, he picks apart some of history’s most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary forensics to excavate the essence of beautiful language through its fundamental building block, the sentence.
The pleasure I take in the sentence has nothing to do with the case or with the merits of either the majority’s or the dissent’s arguments. It is the pleasure of appreciating a technical achievement — here the athletic analogy might be to target shooting. [...] I carry the sentence around with me as others might carry a precious gem or a fine Swiss watch. I pull it out and look at it. I pull it out and invite others (who are sometimes reluctant) to look at it. I put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings.” ~ Stanley Fish
FILMHoward Suber is considered America’s most distinguished film scholar, having founded the UCLA Film Archive and dramatically reformed the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and The Power of Film is nothing short of a remarkable reflection of his reputation and his lifetime of teaching film. In fact, screenwriter David Koepp might not be exaggerating when he says that what Aristotle did for drama, Suber has done for film. The book is essentially a laboratory exploring the patterns, principles and elements of cinematic storytelling that make a film successful, memorable and culturally impactful. And, as Francis Ford Coppola points out about the book, “[m]uch of it is surprisingly contrary to what ‘everyone knows.’”
Popular films are a special kind of drama. While much that is in them can be traced back to the ancient dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose works were performed in a kind of popular theater for Athenians, only some of what was true for dramatists and their audiences then continues to be true twenty-five centuries later.
Popular films have their own principles, patterns and structures. These deal not so much with style and technique as with the psychology of storytelling, which ultimately is the psychology of contemporary human beings.” ~ Howard Suber
SCIENCE FICTIONScience fiction is a relatively nascent literary genre, and yet it has become intricately intertwined with much of contemporary culture, from entertainment to design to scientific inquiry to technological innovation. As Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously noted in a 1980 letter, “[t]he links between science fiction and science are well-established.” In The Secret History of Science Fiction anthologists James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel offer a fascinating parallel history of the genre born out of an active rebellion against the very term “genre” and a frustration with the multitude of definitions of “science fiction.”
We understand why some might say that, after the mid-1970s, sf went back to the playroom, never to be taken seriously again. But they do a vast disservice to the writers and readers of the next thirty years. What we hope to present in this anthology is an alternative vision of sf from the early 1970s to the present, one in which it becomes evident that the literary potential of sf was not squandered. We offer evidence that the developments of the 1960s and early ’70s have been carried forth, if mostly outside of the public eye. For years they have been overshadowed by popular media sf and best-selling books that cater to the media audience. And at the same time that, on one side of the genre divide, sf was being written at the highest levels of ambition, on the other side, writers came to use the materials of sf for their own purposes, writing fiction that is clearly science fiction, but not identified by that name.”
The book features 19 stories from iconic authors, many not classically considered science fiction writers, including Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem and George Saunders. (It’s also incredibly refreshing to see such a gender-balanced anthology.)
HAPPINESSEarlier this year, I did an extensive reading list of what I consider to be the 7 most essential books on the art and science of happiness. Topping it was Jonathan Haidt‘s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, which examines millennia of philosophical thought on the grand question of what makes us happy to unearth ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past. From Plato to Jesus to Buddha, they reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)
Haidt takes this ambitious analysis of philosophical thought over the centuries and examines it through the prism of modern psychology research to paint a profound portrait of our civilization’s understanding of happiness and extract a remarkably compelling blueprint for optimizing the human condition for well-being.
The story begins with an account of how the human mind works. Not a full account, of course, just two ancient truths that must be understood before you can take advantage of modern psychology to improve your life. The first truth is the foundational idea of this book: The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. Nowadays, we know the causes of these divisions, and a few ways to help the rider and the elephant work better as a team.” ~ Jonathan Haidt
* * *
What are the books that gave you new understanding of something or opened your eyes to a facet of culture that had been previously foreign to you?
Showing posts with label Visual Arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Visual Arts. Show all posts
Monday, June 13, 2011
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Wired Article on Data as Visual Art | Unique Presentations of Data
See 110308_Wired_DataGraphsAsArt in TempArchive
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Landscapes and Still Lifes of New Territories By ROBERTA SMITH
December 30, 2010
Landscapes and Still Lifes of New Territories By ROBERTA SMITH
FAVORITE paintings in New York museums? You don’t have to be an art critic to have a few, or a few dozen. Winnowing these treasures down to five — the assignment here for three critics for The New York Times — is a pleasant, invigorating yet implicitly arbitrary endeavor. The resulting lists can only be characterized conditionally, as personal, partial or provisional.
All told the city offers one of the world’s great accounts of the medium. The paintings selected here range from Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” from 1480, in the Frick Collection to “Do the Dance,” from 2005, by Elizabeth Murray in the Museum of Modern Art. (The choices are on Pages 26 through 28.)
Paintings, like poetry or music, are essential nutrients that help people sustain healthy lives. They’re not recreational pleasures or sidelines. They are tools that help us grasp the diversity of the world and its history, and explore the emotional capacities with which we navigate that world. They illuminate, they humble, they nurture, they inspire. They teach us to use our eyes and to know ourselves by knowing others.
If New York’s legions of irresistible paintings could sing, these hills would be magnificently alive with the sound of their music.
‘GREEN STILL LIFE,’ BY PICASSO, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART One requisite for “favorite painting” status would seem to be an irrational, mood-boosting thrill each time you see it. Even by that standard my soft spot for this popular Synthetic Cubist Picasso is especially spongy.
I looked at it regularly before I had any inking of Picasso, Cubism or the Museum of Modern Art (which received it as a bequest from one of its founders, Lillie P. Bliss, in 1934). Or at least I looked at a handsome, possibly full-size reproduction, stylishly framed in white, that hung in my parents’ house in Lawrence, Kan. The facsimile even hinted at, I think, some of the bumpiness fanning out from the white, darkly shadowed compote dish that is one of its central elements. Its reworked roughness could be signs of an earlier composition painted over. Still, Picasso made the best of it, eventually reinforcing the turbulence with radiating dashes of color that first scale the neck of the wine bottle that is the compote’s consort and then scatter beyond.
Picasso painted “Green Still Life” in the summer of 1914 in Avignon, after ushering the interlocking planes of his Analytic Cubist paintings into robust three dimensions with his various guitar sculptures. Robustness prevails here too, in the solid, flat green field that is about as close as Picasso gets to the modernist monochrome. It can be read as a response to Matisse’s “Red Studio” of 1911, especially as it hangs just a few galleries away at the Modern.
But in the main, “Green Still Life” shows Picasso relaxing into Synthetic Cubism’s flirtier, simpler compositions, brighter colors and Pointillist dots, which in this case intimate table runners and a spider web catching the yellow light. The letters J O U, a Cubist staple, are further away from “Journal” (French for newspaper) and closer to “jouer” (to play) or “jou-jou” (child’s toy) than ever. Fancifully shaped and stippled in black and white, they actually seem carved into a little block.
Other visual witticisms include the outline of a pear that contains a bit of lovingly exact pear flesh, a large bristling orb that might be a pineapple or artichoke, a cut-glass vessel and a hand wrapped around a grenade. It is the summer of 1914; World War I is just getting under way.
‘HEAT,’ BY FLORINE STETTHEIMER, BROOKLYN MUSEUM The Brooklyn Museum has the city’s best painting by the eccentric if thoroughly modern Florine Stettheimer, a greater artist than Georgia O’Keeffe. It is “Heat” (1919), a smoldering flaglike field of wide bands of orange, deep yellow and olive green dotted with the figures of Stettheimer, her sisters Ettie, Carrie and Stella and their revered mother, Rosetta. It was painted in 1919, the year Stettheimer turned 48 and was at the peak of her strange powers as an artist.
These powers revolved around an unwavering faith in saturated color laid on thickly, and a slightly wicked gift for caricature. Perched on the steeply banked color bands, the women are arrayed in a circle. In the foreground is a lighted birthday cake set on a table whose oval top is one of the few concessions to spatial recession, although the foreshortening mainly serves to fuse cake and tabletop into a very large eye that adds to the painting’s mesmerizing power. The Stettheimers are enduring the summer heat in different ways, while also enacting varying states of consciousness: limp collapse, wakening, sitting up and finally conversing with Mama, who wears head-to-toe Victorian black and appears to be fully alert. A kind of life cycle, perhaps, with death at the top.
Private wealth ensured Florine Stettheimer a genteel, uncompromised life. She declined to have solo shows during her lifetime (despite the enthusiasm of artist friends like Marcel Duchamp and Hilla Rebay and the critic Henry McBride). She disliked selling her work. The capsule about “Heat” on the Brooklyn Museum’s Web site begins with her observation that “letting people have your paintings is like letting them wear your clothes.” This statement hints at something of the iron butterfly that you sense in the merciless color and tactility of “Heat,” not to mention the suggestion of an inverted, probably male torso in the black tree visible in the background.
One indication of a painting’s staying power is its ability to function like a two-sided mirror, showing parts of both the past and future of painting side by side. “Heat” looks back to the languid fetes of Watteau (as the art historian Barbara Bloemink has pointed out) and the solid colors of the Italian primitives, and forward to two artists rarely mentioned in the same sentence: Mark Rothko and Tim Burton.
‘MORNING IN THE VILLAGE AFTER SNOWSTORM,’ BY MALEVICH, GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM Like so many works from the 1910s Malevich’s “Morning in the Village After Snowstorm” (1912) hovers deliciously between abstraction and representation, object and image, imagined and perceived.
Within two years of assembling this gleaming, scalloped vortex of snow drifts, peasants, houses and trees, Malevich would bring forth what is generally considered Western painting’s first pure abstraction, the first of his “Black Square” compositions, which he set against a field of white and described as a “full void.” In the Guggenheim painting we sense the fullness of his mystical void as an approaching whiteout, a kind of blazing light that threatens to burn away image. Strictly speaking, this would leave us with something closer to his “Suprematist Composition: White on White” of 1918, the tilting kitelike square of cool white on a slightly warmer white ground in the Museum of Modern Art.
In the meantime “Morning” ravishes the eye with its sparkling facets of red, blue, black and tan, shaded to white. The gaze moves through the scene like an icebreaker. The forms heave to either side, nearly filling the available space but leaving a narrow path to a tiny figure pulling a sled in the distance. One-point perspective and the Renaissance notion of the picture plane as a window are bid fond farewell.
Among the crowning achievements of that marvelous Russian mongrel Cubo-Futurism, “Morning” has Malevich both scaling up and calming down Cézanne’s anxious cylinders, spheres and especially cones to the point of majesty. Malevich then enlists them to render country life as he knew it from his childhood, a return to roots that proved similarly effective for other early modernist painters, including Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Chagall and, as we shall see, Miró.
The smoothness of Malevich’s paint application adds to the forms’ metallic sheen. We are in the world of Dorothy’s Tin Man, a realm in which, if you cast the mind forward a bit, you can imagine both the metal Minimalist boxes of Donald Judd and the fluorescent glow of Dan Flavin’s light installations.
‘VINES AND OLIVE TREES, TARRAGONA,’ BY MIRó, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Before Miró cut loose with his well-known improvisations of balloon forms, raw, washy colors and meandering automatist lines, he was a wonderfully fussy painter. His strength lay in tightening and tweaking reality a little beyond the real, creating a sharp and exacting artifice that brought the decorative, the abstract and the natural into perfect harmony. “Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona” was painted in 1919, the year before Miró left Barcelona for Paris. Although he was certainly no stranger to the latest modernist styles, it shows him considering them at a remove in a sequence of contrasting landscape treatments that celebrates nature’s bounty.
Miró’s subject is the countryside near Tarragona, Spain, south of Barcelona and not far from his parents’ farm in Montroig, terrain he knew well and clearly loved. The composition proceeds like a succession of stage flats, different yet connected, beginning with the parallel bands of sun-baked furrows running across the bottom of the picture, where young vines are cradled in freshly dug, impossibly consistent holes. Their feathery leaves are attached to twigs of a calligraphic angularity that brings to mind wrought iron.
In the next tier — or field — the furrows pivot toward the horizon, but they don’t get far. Instead they erupt into accordionlike pleats, with locked-together edges that are alternately jagged or curvaceous (and anticipate Matisse’s cutouts) and flat, bright colors of blue-green, dark pink and yellow, a kind of naturalized version of the primary colors.
A series of tilting geometric shapes — studded with the Pointillist dots of Synthetic Cubism — follows, suggesting village roofs. Then, with the dots continuing, and accompanied by spike-leafed plants suggesting yuccas, the olive trees start up. Their cotton-ball shapes blend into a level, oceanlike mass on the left, while on the right, a single tree rises above all else, its sinuous branches and leaves performing a kind of fan dance that causes other trees to follow suit into the distance.
Finally, at the farthest reaches of the painting, a soft, lavender of mountains is visible in the haze, a parting tribute to Impressionism. This gentle fade makes you all the more aware of the carefully orchestrated cacophony that has brought you there. Now nearly 100 years old, this work is a relative newcomer to the ranks of New York’s painting gems, having arrived at the Met as part of the Gelman Collection in 1998. Welcome.
‘DO THE DANCE,’ BY ELIZABETH MURRAY, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Elizabeth Murray’s “Do the Dance” is a late painting, made in 2005 after she had received the diagnosis of the brain cancer that would kill her two years hence, at 66. Made of five separate shaped canvases that create the illusion of scores of individual smaller canvases percolating momentarily into a rectangular cluster, it is obliquely autobiographical, as all convincing art probably must be to some extent. Most of Murray’s paintings can be read as tallies of both the private emotions and events of her life and of the visual sources that fed her art throughout her career. Her vocabulary was built on elements from the work of Braque, Picasso, Miró and Malevich, as well as Jim Nutt and R. Crumb.
Like my other choices here “Do the Dance” operates in the lavishly appointed gap between the actual and the abstract. In its lower-left corner we see a character familiar from earlier Murrays — a rubbery Gumby figure whose limbs stretch into ribbonlike extensions. This figure is now apparently the patient, attached to a light-green IV, lying on white and yellow sheets whose red-flecked patterns discreetly evoke blood. Near its head a small four-pronged shape resembles a rubber glove, yet its cartoony, splatlike silhouette is one that recurs throughout Murray’s art, as spilled coffee, for example. (The hospital, like everywhere else, seems to have brimmed with expressive potential for her.)
Just above the brown figure a series of white round canvases connected by a blue laddered line that might be a spinal column or a sutured incision implies another figure. This one’s head is crisscrossed with red lines and attached to an oxygen tube. On the right half of the painting two baggy, biomorphic shapes — one yellow, one lavender — occupy their own irregular canvases; they form a couple struggling to stay connected while closely resembling examples of Murray’s earlier work. So does an undulant cloud of purple-brown, punctuated by a white dotted line. Other irregular, bulbous lines snake and coil among and around these larger shapes, suggesting tubes, wiring or cords of synaptic nodes.
At the bottom of it all, in the form of a long blue squiggle, lie the waters of Manhattan. “Do the Dance,” Murray tells us, when the end is near. The dance is life. And life, for her, was painting.
Landscapes and Still Lifes of New Territories By ROBERTA SMITH
FAVORITE paintings in New York museums? You don’t have to be an art critic to have a few, or a few dozen. Winnowing these treasures down to five — the assignment here for three critics for The New York Times — is a pleasant, invigorating yet implicitly arbitrary endeavor. The resulting lists can only be characterized conditionally, as personal, partial or provisional.
All told the city offers one of the world’s great accounts of the medium. The paintings selected here range from Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” from 1480, in the Frick Collection to “Do the Dance,” from 2005, by Elizabeth Murray in the Museum of Modern Art. (The choices are on Pages 26 through 28.)
Paintings, like poetry or music, are essential nutrients that help people sustain healthy lives. They’re not recreational pleasures or sidelines. They are tools that help us grasp the diversity of the world and its history, and explore the emotional capacities with which we navigate that world. They illuminate, they humble, they nurture, they inspire. They teach us to use our eyes and to know ourselves by knowing others.
If New York’s legions of irresistible paintings could sing, these hills would be magnificently alive with the sound of their music.
‘GREEN STILL LIFE,’ BY PICASSO, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART One requisite for “favorite painting” status would seem to be an irrational, mood-boosting thrill each time you see it. Even by that standard my soft spot for this popular Synthetic Cubist Picasso is especially spongy.
I looked at it regularly before I had any inking of Picasso, Cubism or the Museum of Modern Art (which received it as a bequest from one of its founders, Lillie P. Bliss, in 1934). Or at least I looked at a handsome, possibly full-size reproduction, stylishly framed in white, that hung in my parents’ house in Lawrence, Kan. The facsimile even hinted at, I think, some of the bumpiness fanning out from the white, darkly shadowed compote dish that is one of its central elements. Its reworked roughness could be signs of an earlier composition painted over. Still, Picasso made the best of it, eventually reinforcing the turbulence with radiating dashes of color that first scale the neck of the wine bottle that is the compote’s consort and then scatter beyond.
Picasso painted “Green Still Life” in the summer of 1914 in Avignon, after ushering the interlocking planes of his Analytic Cubist paintings into robust three dimensions with his various guitar sculptures. Robustness prevails here too, in the solid, flat green field that is about as close as Picasso gets to the modernist monochrome. It can be read as a response to Matisse’s “Red Studio” of 1911, especially as it hangs just a few galleries away at the Modern.
But in the main, “Green Still Life” shows Picasso relaxing into Synthetic Cubism’s flirtier, simpler compositions, brighter colors and Pointillist dots, which in this case intimate table runners and a spider web catching the yellow light. The letters J O U, a Cubist staple, are further away from “Journal” (French for newspaper) and closer to “jouer” (to play) or “jou-jou” (child’s toy) than ever. Fancifully shaped and stippled in black and white, they actually seem carved into a little block.
Other visual witticisms include the outline of a pear that contains a bit of lovingly exact pear flesh, a large bristling orb that might be a pineapple or artichoke, a cut-glass vessel and a hand wrapped around a grenade. It is the summer of 1914; World War I is just getting under way.
‘HEAT,’ BY FLORINE STETTHEIMER, BROOKLYN MUSEUM The Brooklyn Museum has the city’s best painting by the eccentric if thoroughly modern Florine Stettheimer, a greater artist than Georgia O’Keeffe. It is “Heat” (1919), a smoldering flaglike field of wide bands of orange, deep yellow and olive green dotted with the figures of Stettheimer, her sisters Ettie, Carrie and Stella and their revered mother, Rosetta. It was painted in 1919, the year Stettheimer turned 48 and was at the peak of her strange powers as an artist.
These powers revolved around an unwavering faith in saturated color laid on thickly, and a slightly wicked gift for caricature. Perched on the steeply banked color bands, the women are arrayed in a circle. In the foreground is a lighted birthday cake set on a table whose oval top is one of the few concessions to spatial recession, although the foreshortening mainly serves to fuse cake and tabletop into a very large eye that adds to the painting’s mesmerizing power. The Stettheimers are enduring the summer heat in different ways, while also enacting varying states of consciousness: limp collapse, wakening, sitting up and finally conversing with Mama, who wears head-to-toe Victorian black and appears to be fully alert. A kind of life cycle, perhaps, with death at the top.
Private wealth ensured Florine Stettheimer a genteel, uncompromised life. She declined to have solo shows during her lifetime (despite the enthusiasm of artist friends like Marcel Duchamp and Hilla Rebay and the critic Henry McBride). She disliked selling her work. The capsule about “Heat” on the Brooklyn Museum’s Web site begins with her observation that “letting people have your paintings is like letting them wear your clothes.” This statement hints at something of the iron butterfly that you sense in the merciless color and tactility of “Heat,” not to mention the suggestion of an inverted, probably male torso in the black tree visible in the background.
One indication of a painting’s staying power is its ability to function like a two-sided mirror, showing parts of both the past and future of painting side by side. “Heat” looks back to the languid fetes of Watteau (as the art historian Barbara Bloemink has pointed out) and the solid colors of the Italian primitives, and forward to two artists rarely mentioned in the same sentence: Mark Rothko and Tim Burton.
‘MORNING IN THE VILLAGE AFTER SNOWSTORM,’ BY MALEVICH, GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM Like so many works from the 1910s Malevich’s “Morning in the Village After Snowstorm” (1912) hovers deliciously between abstraction and representation, object and image, imagined and perceived.
Within two years of assembling this gleaming, scalloped vortex of snow drifts, peasants, houses and trees, Malevich would bring forth what is generally considered Western painting’s first pure abstraction, the first of his “Black Square” compositions, which he set against a field of white and described as a “full void.” In the Guggenheim painting we sense the fullness of his mystical void as an approaching whiteout, a kind of blazing light that threatens to burn away image. Strictly speaking, this would leave us with something closer to his “Suprematist Composition: White on White” of 1918, the tilting kitelike square of cool white on a slightly warmer white ground in the Museum of Modern Art.
In the meantime “Morning” ravishes the eye with its sparkling facets of red, blue, black and tan, shaded to white. The gaze moves through the scene like an icebreaker. The forms heave to either side, nearly filling the available space but leaving a narrow path to a tiny figure pulling a sled in the distance. One-point perspective and the Renaissance notion of the picture plane as a window are bid fond farewell.
Among the crowning achievements of that marvelous Russian mongrel Cubo-Futurism, “Morning” has Malevich both scaling up and calming down Cézanne’s anxious cylinders, spheres and especially cones to the point of majesty. Malevich then enlists them to render country life as he knew it from his childhood, a return to roots that proved similarly effective for other early modernist painters, including Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Chagall and, as we shall see, Miró.
The smoothness of Malevich’s paint application adds to the forms’ metallic sheen. We are in the world of Dorothy’s Tin Man, a realm in which, if you cast the mind forward a bit, you can imagine both the metal Minimalist boxes of Donald Judd and the fluorescent glow of Dan Flavin’s light installations.
‘VINES AND OLIVE TREES, TARRAGONA,’ BY MIRó, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Before Miró cut loose with his well-known improvisations of balloon forms, raw, washy colors and meandering automatist lines, he was a wonderfully fussy painter. His strength lay in tightening and tweaking reality a little beyond the real, creating a sharp and exacting artifice that brought the decorative, the abstract and the natural into perfect harmony. “Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona” was painted in 1919, the year before Miró left Barcelona for Paris. Although he was certainly no stranger to the latest modernist styles, it shows him considering them at a remove in a sequence of contrasting landscape treatments that celebrates nature’s bounty.
Miró’s subject is the countryside near Tarragona, Spain, south of Barcelona and not far from his parents’ farm in Montroig, terrain he knew well and clearly loved. The composition proceeds like a succession of stage flats, different yet connected, beginning with the parallel bands of sun-baked furrows running across the bottom of the picture, where young vines are cradled in freshly dug, impossibly consistent holes. Their feathery leaves are attached to twigs of a calligraphic angularity that brings to mind wrought iron.
In the next tier — or field — the furrows pivot toward the horizon, but they don’t get far. Instead they erupt into accordionlike pleats, with locked-together edges that are alternately jagged or curvaceous (and anticipate Matisse’s cutouts) and flat, bright colors of blue-green, dark pink and yellow, a kind of naturalized version of the primary colors.
A series of tilting geometric shapes — studded with the Pointillist dots of Synthetic Cubism — follows, suggesting village roofs. Then, with the dots continuing, and accompanied by spike-leafed plants suggesting yuccas, the olive trees start up. Their cotton-ball shapes blend into a level, oceanlike mass on the left, while on the right, a single tree rises above all else, its sinuous branches and leaves performing a kind of fan dance that causes other trees to follow suit into the distance.
Finally, at the farthest reaches of the painting, a soft, lavender of mountains is visible in the haze, a parting tribute to Impressionism. This gentle fade makes you all the more aware of the carefully orchestrated cacophony that has brought you there. Now nearly 100 years old, this work is a relative newcomer to the ranks of New York’s painting gems, having arrived at the Met as part of the Gelman Collection in 1998. Welcome.
‘DO THE DANCE,’ BY ELIZABETH MURRAY, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Elizabeth Murray’s “Do the Dance” is a late painting, made in 2005 after she had received the diagnosis of the brain cancer that would kill her two years hence, at 66. Made of five separate shaped canvases that create the illusion of scores of individual smaller canvases percolating momentarily into a rectangular cluster, it is obliquely autobiographical, as all convincing art probably must be to some extent. Most of Murray’s paintings can be read as tallies of both the private emotions and events of her life and of the visual sources that fed her art throughout her career. Her vocabulary was built on elements from the work of Braque, Picasso, Miró and Malevich, as well as Jim Nutt and R. Crumb.
Like my other choices here “Do the Dance” operates in the lavishly appointed gap between the actual and the abstract. In its lower-left corner we see a character familiar from earlier Murrays — a rubbery Gumby figure whose limbs stretch into ribbonlike extensions. This figure is now apparently the patient, attached to a light-green IV, lying on white and yellow sheets whose red-flecked patterns discreetly evoke blood. Near its head a small four-pronged shape resembles a rubber glove, yet its cartoony, splatlike silhouette is one that recurs throughout Murray’s art, as spilled coffee, for example. (The hospital, like everywhere else, seems to have brimmed with expressive potential for her.)
Just above the brown figure a series of white round canvases connected by a blue laddered line that might be a spinal column or a sutured incision implies another figure. This one’s head is crisscrossed with red lines and attached to an oxygen tube. On the right half of the painting two baggy, biomorphic shapes — one yellow, one lavender — occupy their own irregular canvases; they form a couple struggling to stay connected while closely resembling examples of Murray’s earlier work. So does an undulant cloud of purple-brown, punctuated by a white dotted line. Other irregular, bulbous lines snake and coil among and around these larger shapes, suggesting tubes, wiring or cords of synaptic nodes.
At the bottom of it all, in the form of a long blue squiggle, lie the waters of Manhattan. “Do the Dance,” Murray tells us, when the end is near. The dance is life. And life, for her, was painting.
Overlooked Works That Deserve Another Glance By KAREN ROSENBERG
December 30, 2010
Overlooked Works That Deserve Another Glance By KAREN ROSENBERG
‘MANUEL OSORIO MANRIQUE DE ZUÑIGA,’ BY GOYA, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART There’s a reason that this painting is one of the first you see when you walk up the Met’s main staircase, pass through the heavy glass doors into European Paintings, and turn right (as museumgoers invariably do). It isn’t just the color — an arresting tomato red against green-gray — or the adorably precocious subject, the third son of the count of Altamira. It’s the unsettling way in which Goya complicates 18th-century ideas about childhood.
The small brown-eyed boy, the caged finches, the magpie on a leash and the predatory cats (who reappear as feral monstrosities in Goya’s “Caprichos”) lend themselves to different, and contradictory, readings. You can look at this painting (possibly from the 1790s) and see a careless kid about to lose a pet, or you can see the light-haloed Manuel as a magical innocent. (More than one art historian has compared him to the Christ child.) Either way, you sense “Goya’s awareness of how contingent life is,” to quote the critic Robert Hughes.
That awareness is certainly heightened by the fact that Manuel never lived to see adulthood (he died in 1792, and it’s thought that the portrait may be a memorial) and by our knowledge of Goya’s own losses. (At least seven of his offspring died in infancy.) Although the dark mood of later Goya is much in evidence here, the painting has talismanic properties, as if the image of Manuel could somehow warn or protect other children.
Goya painted other members of the Altamira family, though not with as much intensity. His portrait of the countess — shown seated and expressionless in a pale pink satin dress, balancing Manuel’s baby sister on her lap — is at the Met too, in the Lehman Wing. And Manuel has a not-too-distant cousin in Manet’s “Boy With a Sword,” also at the museum, another poker-faced youth toting some very adult baggage.
‘ST. FRANCIS IN THE DESERT,’ BY GIOVANNI BELLINI, THE FRICK COLLECTION This transfixing figure in a landscape stands up to a formidable squad of portraits — two Titians, two Holbeins and an El Greco — in the Frick’s Living Hall. The painting’s subject is a matter of some debate, but it is most likely St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata on Mount Alverna. (Note the red marks on his hands.) Unquestionably the work, from 1480, links nature and religious ecstasy in ways that would be familiar to 19th- and 20th-century artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole and Charles Burchfield.
The saint, emerging from a cavelike shelter into brilliant sunshine, stands on a precipice in the foreground. His torso inclines in a near-perfect echo of the laurel tree at the upper left corner. Behind him a rabbit, a heron, a donkey and a flock of sheep find footholds in the hilly Tuscan landscape, which retains its crystalline level of focus as it zigs and zags into the far distance.
His expression is wonderfully ambiguous. Is he joyous? Wary? Awestruck? Or, as some scholars have suggested, might he be singing hymns?
Those who wish to can spend days parsing the painting’s symbolism: the sandals, the skull, the little spout of water. (Even the rock formations are said to allude to specific elements of Franciscan literature.) But I’d much rather linger over the shimmering blue-gold surfaces and creeping light. Apparently the Frick’s conservators would too; last March and April they removed the Bellini for close study with x-radiographs, microscopes and other instruments. Their findings will be revealed this spring at a “dossier” exhibition in the Oval Room.
In the meantime Bellini’s “St. Francis” is a refuge within the Frick. It absorbs the withering stares of El Greco’s “St. Jerome” and Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More,” across the room, and deflects the seductive vanity and materialism of the Titians on either side. It’s hard to think of another painting that would be up to the task.
‘THE SEA,’ BY COURBET, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART This pint-size painting, from 1873, hangs in a gallery with larger, more important Courbets like the Salon painting “Woman With a Parrot.” It’s one of the many seascapes, or “marines,” he made in the 1860s and ’70s: a body of work many critics have dismissed as representing the more conventional, and marketable, side of this rebellious Realist. But for some reason I can’t get enough of it.
It’s a Janus of a painting, saluting the Romanticism of Turner and Géricault while hailing a nascent Impressionism. Courbet started to make seascapes like this one in the mid-1860s; Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise,” considered the movement’s inaugural work, dates from 1872.
Courbet’s sea, though, is more salt and grit than light and air. He called his seascapes “sea landscapes,” an apt description given the solidity of the water. He made liberal use of the palette knife, not just in the sandy strip of foreground but also along the wave crests. The painting’s insistent materiality incites covetousness, in defiance of its vast and unpossessable subject.
At the same time the sea and the sky seem to belong to two different pictures. Art historians think Courbet might have been looking at photographs of the ocean made by Gustave Le Gray and others that were sometimes printed from two negatives with different exposure times. The painting has a similarly eerie split along the horizon, with its distant but fast-charging clouds that don’t seem — yet — to have teased the waves to significant heights.
In that sky, and along those whitecaps, you can see modernism gathering force: Marsden Hartley, maybe even Rothko and Brice Marden. But a big part of the painting’s appeal is Courbet’s particular brand of nervy Realism. As Cézanne said of a different Courbet seascape (the spectacular “Wave,” from 1870, in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin): “You have to step back. The entire room feels the spray.”
‘PAINTING,’ BY PHILIP GUSTON, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Though it’s currently on view in the Modern’s “Abstract Expressionist New York,” this Guston from 1954 could just as easily hang with the Cézannes, Maleviches, Monets and Mondrians up on the fifth floor.
Guston was looking closely at Mondrian’s “plus-minus” paintings — and undoubtedly at Cézanne as well — as he crosshatched his way around the canvas. His welter of marks looks controlled but not schematic. “Abstract Impressionism” it was termed at the time, though the clunkier phrase “Post-Impressionist Neo-Plasticism” is closer to the truth.
“Painting” is also small, by the standards of this show (which runs through April 25). It takes a while to appreciate that Guston, like his Ab-Ex peers, was reorienting the artist-canvas relationship. He did it not with drips or big sweeps of the arm but by working close-up and not stepping back until he was finished.
Color also sets Guston’s painting apart from just about everything else in the Ab-Ex rehang, with the possible exception of de Kooning’s “Woman I.” The diffuse pinkish-orange blob at the center of “Painting,” offset by the faintest touch of green, is icy hot — like frostbitten skin or a cigarette tossed into a snowdrift. I also like to think of this work as a blushing monochrome, a literalization of Guston’s famous credo “painting is ‘impure.’ ”
Long-suppressed figures would re-emerge in Guston’s post-1970 painting, which is probably more important to artists working today. But this midcentury canvas is, for me, one of the best moments in a show that includes whole rooms of Pollocks and Rothkos.
‘STILL LIFE WITH APPLES,’ BY CéZANNE, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART You’ll find this still life from 1895-98 on the Modern’s fifth floor, just to the right of Cézanne’s halting “Bather,” and generally ignored by the crowds moving on to van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” If you’ve seen one Cézanne still life, you’ve seen them all, the thinking goes.
Find a viewing spot in the stream of traffic, though, and you’ll be rewarded with a work of art that has some serious momentum — heading full tilt for Cubism, Matisse and Morandi.
The apples, of all different colors and sizes, seem to be tumbling out of the print on the curtain, scattering across the table like billiards balls. They look more alive than the bather, who seems to be frozen in place. And they’re not just moving, but coming into being: getting progressively rounder, heavier, more applelike, as they approach the right side of the picture.
Like other Cézanne still lifes this one feels experimental. But I also love it for its unscientific quirks (I hesitate to call them flaws): the unfinished upper-left corner, the meringuelike peaks of the white tablecloth, the squashed ellipse of that bowl. Can you really separate volume from perspective? This painting answers that question with a resounding yes.
Overlooked Works That Deserve Another Glance By KAREN ROSENBERG
‘MANUEL OSORIO MANRIQUE DE ZUÑIGA,’ BY GOYA, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART There’s a reason that this painting is one of the first you see when you walk up the Met’s main staircase, pass through the heavy glass doors into European Paintings, and turn right (as museumgoers invariably do). It isn’t just the color — an arresting tomato red against green-gray — or the adorably precocious subject, the third son of the count of Altamira. It’s the unsettling way in which Goya complicates 18th-century ideas about childhood.
The small brown-eyed boy, the caged finches, the magpie on a leash and the predatory cats (who reappear as feral monstrosities in Goya’s “Caprichos”) lend themselves to different, and contradictory, readings. You can look at this painting (possibly from the 1790s) and see a careless kid about to lose a pet, or you can see the light-haloed Manuel as a magical innocent. (More than one art historian has compared him to the Christ child.) Either way, you sense “Goya’s awareness of how contingent life is,” to quote the critic Robert Hughes.
That awareness is certainly heightened by the fact that Manuel never lived to see adulthood (he died in 1792, and it’s thought that the portrait may be a memorial) and by our knowledge of Goya’s own losses. (At least seven of his offspring died in infancy.) Although the dark mood of later Goya is much in evidence here, the painting has talismanic properties, as if the image of Manuel could somehow warn or protect other children.
Goya painted other members of the Altamira family, though not with as much intensity. His portrait of the countess — shown seated and expressionless in a pale pink satin dress, balancing Manuel’s baby sister on her lap — is at the Met too, in the Lehman Wing. And Manuel has a not-too-distant cousin in Manet’s “Boy With a Sword,” also at the museum, another poker-faced youth toting some very adult baggage.
‘ST. FRANCIS IN THE DESERT,’ BY GIOVANNI BELLINI, THE FRICK COLLECTION This transfixing figure in a landscape stands up to a formidable squad of portraits — two Titians, two Holbeins and an El Greco — in the Frick’s Living Hall. The painting’s subject is a matter of some debate, but it is most likely St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata on Mount Alverna. (Note the red marks on his hands.) Unquestionably the work, from 1480, links nature and religious ecstasy in ways that would be familiar to 19th- and 20th-century artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole and Charles Burchfield.
The saint, emerging from a cavelike shelter into brilliant sunshine, stands on a precipice in the foreground. His torso inclines in a near-perfect echo of the laurel tree at the upper left corner. Behind him a rabbit, a heron, a donkey and a flock of sheep find footholds in the hilly Tuscan landscape, which retains its crystalline level of focus as it zigs and zags into the far distance.
His expression is wonderfully ambiguous. Is he joyous? Wary? Awestruck? Or, as some scholars have suggested, might he be singing hymns?
Those who wish to can spend days parsing the painting’s symbolism: the sandals, the skull, the little spout of water. (Even the rock formations are said to allude to specific elements of Franciscan literature.) But I’d much rather linger over the shimmering blue-gold surfaces and creeping light. Apparently the Frick’s conservators would too; last March and April they removed the Bellini for close study with x-radiographs, microscopes and other instruments. Their findings will be revealed this spring at a “dossier” exhibition in the Oval Room.
In the meantime Bellini’s “St. Francis” is a refuge within the Frick. It absorbs the withering stares of El Greco’s “St. Jerome” and Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More,” across the room, and deflects the seductive vanity and materialism of the Titians on either side. It’s hard to think of another painting that would be up to the task.
‘THE SEA,’ BY COURBET, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART This pint-size painting, from 1873, hangs in a gallery with larger, more important Courbets like the Salon painting “Woman With a Parrot.” It’s one of the many seascapes, or “marines,” he made in the 1860s and ’70s: a body of work many critics have dismissed as representing the more conventional, and marketable, side of this rebellious Realist. But for some reason I can’t get enough of it.
It’s a Janus of a painting, saluting the Romanticism of Turner and Géricault while hailing a nascent Impressionism. Courbet started to make seascapes like this one in the mid-1860s; Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise,” considered the movement’s inaugural work, dates from 1872.
Courbet’s sea, though, is more salt and grit than light and air. He called his seascapes “sea landscapes,” an apt description given the solidity of the water. He made liberal use of the palette knife, not just in the sandy strip of foreground but also along the wave crests. The painting’s insistent materiality incites covetousness, in defiance of its vast and unpossessable subject.
At the same time the sea and the sky seem to belong to two different pictures. Art historians think Courbet might have been looking at photographs of the ocean made by Gustave Le Gray and others that were sometimes printed from two negatives with different exposure times. The painting has a similarly eerie split along the horizon, with its distant but fast-charging clouds that don’t seem — yet — to have teased the waves to significant heights.
In that sky, and along those whitecaps, you can see modernism gathering force: Marsden Hartley, maybe even Rothko and Brice Marden. But a big part of the painting’s appeal is Courbet’s particular brand of nervy Realism. As Cézanne said of a different Courbet seascape (the spectacular “Wave,” from 1870, in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin): “You have to step back. The entire room feels the spray.”
‘PAINTING,’ BY PHILIP GUSTON, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Though it’s currently on view in the Modern’s “Abstract Expressionist New York,” this Guston from 1954 could just as easily hang with the Cézannes, Maleviches, Monets and Mondrians up on the fifth floor.
Guston was looking closely at Mondrian’s “plus-minus” paintings — and undoubtedly at Cézanne as well — as he crosshatched his way around the canvas. His welter of marks looks controlled but not schematic. “Abstract Impressionism” it was termed at the time, though the clunkier phrase “Post-Impressionist Neo-Plasticism” is closer to the truth.
“Painting” is also small, by the standards of this show (which runs through April 25). It takes a while to appreciate that Guston, like his Ab-Ex peers, was reorienting the artist-canvas relationship. He did it not with drips or big sweeps of the arm but by working close-up and not stepping back until he was finished.
Color also sets Guston’s painting apart from just about everything else in the Ab-Ex rehang, with the possible exception of de Kooning’s “Woman I.” The diffuse pinkish-orange blob at the center of “Painting,” offset by the faintest touch of green, is icy hot — like frostbitten skin or a cigarette tossed into a snowdrift. I also like to think of this work as a blushing monochrome, a literalization of Guston’s famous credo “painting is ‘impure.’ ”
Long-suppressed figures would re-emerge in Guston’s post-1970 painting, which is probably more important to artists working today. But this midcentury canvas is, for me, one of the best moments in a show that includes whole rooms of Pollocks and Rothkos.
‘STILL LIFE WITH APPLES,’ BY CéZANNE, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART You’ll find this still life from 1895-98 on the Modern’s fifth floor, just to the right of Cézanne’s halting “Bather,” and generally ignored by the crowds moving on to van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” If you’ve seen one Cézanne still life, you’ve seen them all, the thinking goes.
Find a viewing spot in the stream of traffic, though, and you’ll be rewarded with a work of art that has some serious momentum — heading full tilt for Cubism, Matisse and Morandi.
The apples, of all different colors and sizes, seem to be tumbling out of the print on the curtain, scattering across the table like billiards balls. They look more alive than the bather, who seems to be frozen in place. And they’re not just moving, but coming into being: getting progressively rounder, heavier, more applelike, as they approach the right side of the picture.
Like other Cézanne still lifes this one feels experimental. But I also love it for its unscientific quirks (I hesitate to call them flaws): the unfinished upper-left corner, the meringuelike peaks of the white tablecloth, the squashed ellipse of that bowl. Can you really separate volume from perspective? This painting answers that question with a resounding yes.
Perfect Poise, Pulled From Jaws of Distortion By KEN JOHNSON
December 30, 2010 Perfect Poise, Pulled From Jaws of Distortion By KEN JOHNSON
‘COMTESSE D’HAUSSONVILLE,’ BY INGRES, THE FRICK COLLECTION If not always for the same reasons, people of both genders love to feast their eyes on beautiful women. So it is no coincidence that some of the world’s most compelling works of art are weddings of female and painterly beauty. One is at the Frick Collection: “Comtesse d’Haussonville” (1845), a near life-size portrait of a lovely young woman standing before a mirror in a blue satin dress. Rendered by Ingres in a cool, neo-Classical style, she tilts her head, holds an index finger to her chin and gazes back with lowered eyelids and a quizzical, enigmatic expression.
The blue dress is a tour de force of realistic depiction, its every fold and wrinkle attended to with as much care as the marmoreal surfaces of the comtesse’s flawless skin. (Ingres drew about 60 studies for the dress alone during the three years he worked on the portrait.) And yet, as art historians never tire of pointing out to novice viewers, her body is oddly misshapen. Her pudgy right arm seems to have grown out of her stomach, her upper back looks painfully hunched, and her egg-shaped head appears about to roll off her elongated neck as if in a Monty Python cartoon.
You don’t notice the distortions at first because of how subtly Ingres folded her parts into a configuration of interlocking ovals, giving the impression of perfect poise. The painting may be a triumph of form over anatomy — Picasso certainly took notice — but the comtesse still casts a spell.
Intellectually ambitious as well as beautiful, the comtesse, a k a Louise d’Haussonville, went on to write memoirs, romantic novels, historical studies and biographies, including two volumes on Lord Byron. She was 27 when Ingres finished her portrait; he was 65. A friend told her, “M. Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you this way.” Indeed.
‘THE MOUNTAIN,’ BY BALTHUS, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART The hikers in Balthus’s “Mountain” (1936-37) could be a group of patients on an alpine excursion from Carl Jung’s psychiatric clinic just outside Zurich. It is not like a French Impressionist holiday scene. These mountaineers have a sculptural solidity about them; they seem magically frozen into living statues. Each has a curiously distracted expression. The sky is blue, but not in an airy way; it seems heavy and dark, enhancing the ominous atmosphere of the picture.
At more than 8 feet tall and 12 feet wide “The Mountain” is the biggest painting Balthus made, and it is markedly different from the works for which he is best known. Updating neo-Classical style and narrative, he made interior scenes in which young girls are viewed with an erotic interest that many critics have found unseemly.
Though comparatively chaste, “The Mountain” is not without a certain dreamy, sexual tension. The girl who stretches like a cat in the light of the sun is a typical Balthusian object of desire, and so is the girl reclining at her feet in sleep.
What this gathering means is hard to say, but each figure seems emblematic in some way. The man gripping a pipe in his teeth and kneeling in the foreground has his face pinched into a mask of saturnine tension. He is earthy and rocklike. The sun-struck, stretching girl is day; the sleeping one night. The androgynous figure in a red, short-sleeve jacket looking on from the middle distance with enigmatic intent seems elfin and mischievous, perhaps an agent of transformation.
Another strange thing is how the landscape echoes the figures. The highest peak seems to heave up in response to the stretching girl. A vaguely humanoid projection mimics the swayed posture of the elfin androgyne. The man and woman at the edge of the illuminated abyss point excitedly at a mass of rock that resembles a Cubist sculpture of a couple kissing.
Somehow the picture would not be complete without the tiny, lone figure in the distance on a rising field of grass: a romantic wanderer traveling far away from human society and ever closer to the divine.
‘EARLY SUNDAY MORNING,’ BY EDWARD HOPPER, THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Many of Hopper’s most beloved paintings offer nocturnal views from the outside into electrically lighted interiors: a diner in which night owls sit at the counter or an apartment in which a single woman ponders her life. It’s as if we were seeing through the eyes of a lonely insomniac pining for human contact.
In “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) we look out rather than in, but the piercing loneliness is just as palpable. The raking sun is hard and cold. The windows of the buildings are implacably dark. Painted with a dry, slightly brushy touch, it is a scene of aching solitude, although relieved by the transcendental light.
The subject is a stretch of buildings on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, but it could just as well be the main street of a factory town upstate or somewhere in New England. A red, white and blue barber pole and a squat fireplug stand in for absent pedestrians. The bright barber pole looks oddly incongruous, even surrealistically so, on this dingy street. A totemlike symbol of patriotic, small-town American values, it is another sign of human community that Hopper, always the outsider, considers with mordant curiosity.
American Scene painting by artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood was popular at the time; maybe Hopper’s painting was a wry nod to that chauvinistic trend.
And yet there is also a feeling of wonder. People will be out and about in a while, but for now they are sleeping in, nestled in apartments above the street-level shops, wrapped up in their dreams. The early-rising viewer has the world all to himself.
Though tinged by melancholy — the Great Depression had hit the nation like a hurricane — there a sense of possibility in the air and light. This moment might have come at the end of an all-night bender, but there it is, the promise of a brand new day.
‘A STORM IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, MT. ROSALIE,’ BY ALBERT BIERSTADT, THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM If Albert Bierstadt were reincarnated as a Hollywood movie director, he would surely give James Cameron a run for his money. In the mid-19th century Bierstadt advanced the art of spectacular illusion making to great popular acclaim, as viewers by the thousands lined up and paid money to see his enormous Western landscapes, meticulously rendered with nearly photographic verisimilitude, presented in gaslighted, theatrical installations. Also like Mr. Cameron, Bierstadt projected visions of transcendentalist pantheism in which American Indians and deer lived, like the Na’vi in “Avatar,” in conditions of Edenic bliss.
In the 12-foot-wide “Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie” (1866) sunlight breaking through angry, dark clouds shines on a peaceful lake like a promise from God. This was the age of Emerson and Thoreau, who found in every part of nature, from leaves of grass to towering mountains, metaphors of divine beneficence. Bierstadt was as attentive to the microscopic as he was to the macro, and this makes for an enthralling visual and poetic experience.
Bierstadt named Mount Rosalie, now called Mount Evans, after Rosalie Osborne Ludlow, who married him in 1866 after she divorced his traveling companion Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Fitz Hugh Ludlow is remembered today for his best-selling autobiographical book “The Hasheesh Eater” (1857), in which he explored the wonders of subjective experience under the influence of cannabis.
As it turned out, Bierstadt’s paintings of the Wild West did more to attract than to discourage invasion by forces of industrial progress. For most of the 20th century his paintings were relegated to the dustbin of art history along with similarly operatic landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church.
Many scholars still view them as unworthy confections of overwrought kitsch. I find myself helplessly thrilled by these artists’ proto-cinematic extravaganzas and, at the same time, saddened to think of the lost paradises they memorialize. For better or worse “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains” tells a story about America that should never be forgotten.
‘YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER PITCHER,’ BY VERMEER, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Vermeer’s “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” (around 1662) might be my No. 1 desert island pick. Partly it would be for sensory and formal reasons: the silky application of paint, the finely tuned orchestration of velvety blues and coolly luminous near-whites and the structure of nested rectangles. But it is the way that material dimension embodies the image of the girl at the window — caught in the act of turning her head as if to listen for something she thought she heard outdoors — that cinches the deal.
I think of the painting as a kind of Annunciation, making contemporary the moment Mary learns she will conceive and bear a divine child. With her head enveloped by a starchy, crisply creased cowl of virginal whiteness, Vermeer’s young woman is bathed in the light of the Holy Spirit. She holds the handle of a silver pitcher filled with water, the stuff of life, which stands on a silver platter on a tapestry-covered, domestic altar. Pearls and a ribbon spill from a reliquarylike jewel box. All is painted with excruciating, reverential tenderness.
To be sure, everything going on in the picture can be explained without invoking supernatural agency. In its slightly blurry, photographic realism, the painting presents an implacably empirical view of the world. The image looks almost as if it had been photo-chemically imprinted on the canvas without manual intervention, and the picture in turn stamps itself on our retinas. Optical nerves fire, neurotransmitters swarm and the image somehow appears in our minds. Whether you believe in intelligent design or Darwinian happenstance, it is pretty miraculous.
The image in our mind’s eye pictures a painting that pictures a moment in historical time — note the map of Europe on the wall — that may or may not have actually happened but that in any case appears at once immediately real and distantly fictive. All of this incites a hyper-alertness about seeing and a heightened consciousness of consciousness itself and its construction of the real. “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” announces the birth of the modern, self-reflexive mind.
‘COMTESSE D’HAUSSONVILLE,’ BY INGRES, THE FRICK COLLECTION If not always for the same reasons, people of both genders love to feast their eyes on beautiful women. So it is no coincidence that some of the world’s most compelling works of art are weddings of female and painterly beauty. One is at the Frick Collection: “Comtesse d’Haussonville” (1845), a near life-size portrait of a lovely young woman standing before a mirror in a blue satin dress. Rendered by Ingres in a cool, neo-Classical style, she tilts her head, holds an index finger to her chin and gazes back with lowered eyelids and a quizzical, enigmatic expression.
The blue dress is a tour de force of realistic depiction, its every fold and wrinkle attended to with as much care as the marmoreal surfaces of the comtesse’s flawless skin. (Ingres drew about 60 studies for the dress alone during the three years he worked on the portrait.) And yet, as art historians never tire of pointing out to novice viewers, her body is oddly misshapen. Her pudgy right arm seems to have grown out of her stomach, her upper back looks painfully hunched, and her egg-shaped head appears about to roll off her elongated neck as if in a Monty Python cartoon.
You don’t notice the distortions at first because of how subtly Ingres folded her parts into a configuration of interlocking ovals, giving the impression of perfect poise. The painting may be a triumph of form over anatomy — Picasso certainly took notice — but the comtesse still casts a spell.
Intellectually ambitious as well as beautiful, the comtesse, a k a Louise d’Haussonville, went on to write memoirs, romantic novels, historical studies and biographies, including two volumes on Lord Byron. She was 27 when Ingres finished her portrait; he was 65. A friend told her, “M. Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you this way.” Indeed.
‘THE MOUNTAIN,’ BY BALTHUS, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART The hikers in Balthus’s “Mountain” (1936-37) could be a group of patients on an alpine excursion from Carl Jung’s psychiatric clinic just outside Zurich. It is not like a French Impressionist holiday scene. These mountaineers have a sculptural solidity about them; they seem magically frozen into living statues. Each has a curiously distracted expression. The sky is blue, but not in an airy way; it seems heavy and dark, enhancing the ominous atmosphere of the picture.
At more than 8 feet tall and 12 feet wide “The Mountain” is the biggest painting Balthus made, and it is markedly different from the works for which he is best known. Updating neo-Classical style and narrative, he made interior scenes in which young girls are viewed with an erotic interest that many critics have found unseemly.
Though comparatively chaste, “The Mountain” is not without a certain dreamy, sexual tension. The girl who stretches like a cat in the light of the sun is a typical Balthusian object of desire, and so is the girl reclining at her feet in sleep.
What this gathering means is hard to say, but each figure seems emblematic in some way. The man gripping a pipe in his teeth and kneeling in the foreground has his face pinched into a mask of saturnine tension. He is earthy and rocklike. The sun-struck, stretching girl is day; the sleeping one night. The androgynous figure in a red, short-sleeve jacket looking on from the middle distance with enigmatic intent seems elfin and mischievous, perhaps an agent of transformation.
Another strange thing is how the landscape echoes the figures. The highest peak seems to heave up in response to the stretching girl. A vaguely humanoid projection mimics the swayed posture of the elfin androgyne. The man and woman at the edge of the illuminated abyss point excitedly at a mass of rock that resembles a Cubist sculpture of a couple kissing.
Somehow the picture would not be complete without the tiny, lone figure in the distance on a rising field of grass: a romantic wanderer traveling far away from human society and ever closer to the divine.
‘EARLY SUNDAY MORNING,’ BY EDWARD HOPPER, THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Many of Hopper’s most beloved paintings offer nocturnal views from the outside into electrically lighted interiors: a diner in which night owls sit at the counter or an apartment in which a single woman ponders her life. It’s as if we were seeing through the eyes of a lonely insomniac pining for human contact.
In “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) we look out rather than in, but the piercing loneliness is just as palpable. The raking sun is hard and cold. The windows of the buildings are implacably dark. Painted with a dry, slightly brushy touch, it is a scene of aching solitude, although relieved by the transcendental light.
The subject is a stretch of buildings on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, but it could just as well be the main street of a factory town upstate or somewhere in New England. A red, white and blue barber pole and a squat fireplug stand in for absent pedestrians. The bright barber pole looks oddly incongruous, even surrealistically so, on this dingy street. A totemlike symbol of patriotic, small-town American values, it is another sign of human community that Hopper, always the outsider, considers with mordant curiosity.
American Scene painting by artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood was popular at the time; maybe Hopper’s painting was a wry nod to that chauvinistic trend.
And yet there is also a feeling of wonder. People will be out and about in a while, but for now they are sleeping in, nestled in apartments above the street-level shops, wrapped up in their dreams. The early-rising viewer has the world all to himself.
Though tinged by melancholy — the Great Depression had hit the nation like a hurricane — there a sense of possibility in the air and light. This moment might have come at the end of an all-night bender, but there it is, the promise of a brand new day.
‘A STORM IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, MT. ROSALIE,’ BY ALBERT BIERSTADT, THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM If Albert Bierstadt were reincarnated as a Hollywood movie director, he would surely give James Cameron a run for his money. In the mid-19th century Bierstadt advanced the art of spectacular illusion making to great popular acclaim, as viewers by the thousands lined up and paid money to see his enormous Western landscapes, meticulously rendered with nearly photographic verisimilitude, presented in gaslighted, theatrical installations. Also like Mr. Cameron, Bierstadt projected visions of transcendentalist pantheism in which American Indians and deer lived, like the Na’vi in “Avatar,” in conditions of Edenic bliss.
In the 12-foot-wide “Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie” (1866) sunlight breaking through angry, dark clouds shines on a peaceful lake like a promise from God. This was the age of Emerson and Thoreau, who found in every part of nature, from leaves of grass to towering mountains, metaphors of divine beneficence. Bierstadt was as attentive to the microscopic as he was to the macro, and this makes for an enthralling visual and poetic experience.
Bierstadt named Mount Rosalie, now called Mount Evans, after Rosalie Osborne Ludlow, who married him in 1866 after she divorced his traveling companion Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Fitz Hugh Ludlow is remembered today for his best-selling autobiographical book “The Hasheesh Eater” (1857), in which he explored the wonders of subjective experience under the influence of cannabis.
As it turned out, Bierstadt’s paintings of the Wild West did more to attract than to discourage invasion by forces of industrial progress. For most of the 20th century his paintings were relegated to the dustbin of art history along with similarly operatic landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church.
Many scholars still view them as unworthy confections of overwrought kitsch. I find myself helplessly thrilled by these artists’ proto-cinematic extravaganzas and, at the same time, saddened to think of the lost paradises they memorialize. For better or worse “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains” tells a story about America that should never be forgotten.
‘YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER PITCHER,’ BY VERMEER, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Vermeer’s “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” (around 1662) might be my No. 1 desert island pick. Partly it would be for sensory and formal reasons: the silky application of paint, the finely tuned orchestration of velvety blues and coolly luminous near-whites and the structure of nested rectangles. But it is the way that material dimension embodies the image of the girl at the window — caught in the act of turning her head as if to listen for something she thought she heard outdoors — that cinches the deal.
I think of the painting as a kind of Annunciation, making contemporary the moment Mary learns she will conceive and bear a divine child. With her head enveloped by a starchy, crisply creased cowl of virginal whiteness, Vermeer’s young woman is bathed in the light of the Holy Spirit. She holds the handle of a silver pitcher filled with water, the stuff of life, which stands on a silver platter on a tapestry-covered, domestic altar. Pearls and a ribbon spill from a reliquarylike jewel box. All is painted with excruciating, reverential tenderness.
To be sure, everything going on in the picture can be explained without invoking supernatural agency. In its slightly blurry, photographic realism, the painting presents an implacably empirical view of the world. The image looks almost as if it had been photo-chemically imprinted on the canvas without manual intervention, and the picture in turn stamps itself on our retinas. Optical nerves fire, neurotransmitters swarm and the image somehow appears in our minds. Whether you believe in intelligent design or Darwinian happenstance, it is pretty miraculous.
The image in our mind’s eye pictures a painting that pictures a moment in historical time — note the map of Europe on the wall — that may or may not have actually happened but that in any case appears at once immediately real and distantly fictive. All of this incites a hyper-alertness about seeing and a heightened consciousness of consciousness itself and its construction of the real. “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” announces the birth of the modern, self-reflexive mind.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Giorgio Morandi's still-lifes. by Peter Schjeldahl
The Art World
Tables for One
Giorgio Morandi's still-lifes. by Peter Schjeldahl September 22, 2008
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"Natura Morta" (1954). Italians so revered Morandi that Fellini used him as a symbol of lofty sensibility in "La Dolce Vita."
"Natura Morta" (1954). Italians so revered Morandi that Fellini used him as a symbol of lofty sensibility in "La Dolce Vita."
Keywords
Morandi, Giorgio;
Painters;
Metropolitan Museum of Art;
Italians;
Retrospectives;
Still-Lifes;
Abramowicz, Janet
In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: "Stay fit the Morandi way!" Take your dream pick from among the hundred and ten works in the potent retrospective of the Italian modern master now at the Metropolitan Museum. You can hardly go wrong with anything dated after 1920 or so, once Morandi, who died in 1964, at the age of seventy-three, had worked through his early involvements with Cézanne, Cubism, Futurism, and the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. But make your choice a still-life. Morandi painted some striking landscapes and the odd, tentative self-portrait, but the arenas of his greatness were the tabletops in his small studio. He passed nearly his entire life in an apartment in Bologna with his mother, until her death, in 1950, and three younger sisters, who, like him, never married. (His businessman father died in 1909, four years before Morandi's graduation from Bologna's art academy.) Morandi's stagings of his repertory company of nondescript bottles, vases, pitchers, and whatnot are definitive twentieth-century art works. They breathe intimacy with the past—Piero della Francesca, Chardin—and address a future that still glimmers, just out of reach. They remain unbeatably radical meditations on what can and can't happen when three dimensions are transposed into two. Morandi will always rivet painters and educate all who care for painting.
He seems to have cared for nothing else. If he ever had a sexual interest, it is unrecorded. He first set foot outside Italy in 1956, and then only in Switzerland. His most frequent forays were to Florence, to consult Piero, Masaccio, Giotto, and Uccello. A man "unwilling even to squash an insect in his garden," according to a fine biography by Janet Abramowicz, "Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence," he suffered a breakdown when he was drafted into the Italian Army, in 1915, after which he was excused from service. He supported himself by teaching painting and etching. (His etchings amaze, triggering subliminal sensations of color with nothing but variations in crosshatched black lines.) He had friends, and he liked to laugh, with the ironical and at times scathing humor of a sensitive man. The academic establishment in Bologna, a university town, disparaged him until late in his career. He participated in the right-wing, ruralist Strapaese movement of the late nineteen-twenties. His attitude toward Mussolini, whose regime gave him teaching jobs, was more positive than not, although he was briefly imprisoned in 1943 for associating with anti-Fascists. (If ever an artist merited political amnesty, on the ground of unworldliness, it would be Morandi.) Fame came to him after the war: he won first prize for an Italian painter at the 1948 Venice Biennale, and became so revered in Italy that filmmakers, notably Federico Fellini, in "La Dolce Vita," used his work as a ready symbol of lofty sensibility. Morandi had a last adventurous phase of nearly abstract drawings and watercolors that condense into swift marks a lifetime of looking.
* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this
The still-lifes vary from bright to crepuscular in tone, from crisply limned to almost illegibly blurred, and, in texture, from creamy to arid. To describe any one of them as exemplary is to provoke tacit protests from the rest. So, in general: The paintings present objects singly, side by side, or in overlapping groups. They feel monumental because they are viewed at eye level, or from just above. (Morandi, who stood six feet four, built a high table that he often used for that purpose.) He disregarded the receding plane of the tabletop, often shrouding the back edge with brown paper, so that it wouldn't distract him. The horizon of that edge commonly seems arbitrary, and the tabletop itself may be woozily indefinite. Morandi anchors his objects frontally, pressed against our gaze. He often paints them all but flat, adding only dim highlights and perfunctory shadings, which at first excite and then gently relax our automatic effort to read roundedness and depth in the pictures. It can take time—minutes, not seconds—to get over what we think we are seeing and to behold what's there. But a sensitive eye may catch on right away. The most helpful piece of writing on Morandi that I know is the painter Vija Celmins's description of her first encounter with one of his still-lifes (in 1961, when she was twenty-one), which "projected an extraordinary set of grays far into the gallery and into my eyes. On closer inspection, I discovered how strange the painting was, how the objects seemed to be fighting for each other's space. One could not determine their size or location. They appeared both flat and dimensional, and were so tenderly painted that the paint itself seemed to be the subject."
The ambiguity of "size or location" is key to Morandi's indelible modernity. It's as if he had set out, time and again, to nail down the whatness of his objects but couldn't get beyond the preliminary matter of their whereness. (He didn't much value the things in themselves. Photographs show that some were slathered or, in the case of clear glass bottles, filled with pigments—they were dedicated to painting the way animals are raised for food.) Morandi was free of the organizing prejudice of perspective. Go look at a Cézanne after seeing this show. It will seem old-fashioned. Conventional pictorial space remained a safety net for the great Frenchman, whose influence Morandi subsumed. Even Picasso didn't as fully abandon perspective—smashing it to localized bits in his Cubism, letting it creep in where it was convenient thereafter. Morandi fumbled, thrillingly, amid the ruins of mental concepts of space. He reversed the thrust of his beloved early-Renaissance inventors of perspective. In an Uccello, say, we register both a mathematical formula of spatial recession and the fact that it is clumsily artificial. Even the majestic Piero fell short of dissolving the preëminent appeal of the painted surface into the fiction of a window view. (Leonardo would do that.) Morandi's eye and mind lived in the surface, marooned there by honest, anxious skepticism. Dramatic uncertainty intensified in his work as he aged. In one of the show's last paintings (the one I want to take home), a jug, whose ochre hue interpenetrates with that of the wall behind it, abuts a tall box in livid, very pale blue; a corrugated ball, half ochre and half greenish blue, rests on the gray table in what would be the foreground—were not the picture, in its effect, all foreground. Dark, jittery outlines startlingly anticipate a look of late work by Philip Guston. That's not unusual in Morandi, whose explorations fortuitously scout the distinctive qualities of subsequent artists. The step from some of his landscapes—with forms at once filmy in color and corporeal in substance—to certain works by the brilliant Luc Tuymans is almost no step at all.
Painting for Morandi was manual labor, first and last. For a time, he ground his own pigments. He stretched his own canvases, constantly varying their proportions. (In the Met show, there are almost as many different sizes of picture as there are pictures.) No one work builds on another. Infinitely refined, Morandi never succumbs to elegance. Even his effulgently pinkish floral still-lifes abjure virtuosity, though they beguile. (One might be made of ice cream; another stiffens to marzipan.) That's because the exigencies of rendering—tiny slippages between eye and hand—constituted, for him, a permanent emergency, requiring incessant adjustment. (Rose petals may jam up like large people competing to pass through a small door.) He did not have a style. He had a signature: "Morandi," written large, often, to broadcast that a picture had done all it could. He is a painter's painter, because to look at his work is to re-create it, feeling in your wrist and fingers the sequence of strokes, each a stab of decision which discovers a new problem.
Color works hard in Morandi. His hues tend toward muddy pastels, always warm. He employs an unabridged dictionary of browns. Even his blues and greens usually secrete invisibly admixed red or yellow, insuring the projection of "an extraordinary set of grays far into the gallery" which Celmins noted. The colors are muted like voices lowered so as not to disturb a sleeper; but their melody and tone penetrate. A Morandi grabs your eye at any distance. Moreover, it's the same picture at any distance, as resolved and unresolved near at hand as far away. (His comprehension of art history skips the Baroque and every other type of synthesized illusion.) Morandi has never been a popular artist and never will be. He engages the world one solitary viewer at a time. The experience of his work is unsharable even, in a way, with oneself, like a word remembered but not remembered, on the tip of the tongue. ♦
Tables for One
Giorgio Morandi's still-lifes. by Peter Schjeldahl September 22, 2008
Text Size:
Small Text
Medium Text
Large Text
Print E-Mail Feeds
"Natura Morta" (1954). Italians so revered Morandi that Fellini used him as a symbol of lofty sensibility in "La Dolce Vita."
"Natura Morta" (1954). Italians so revered Morandi that Fellini used him as a symbol of lofty sensibility in "La Dolce Vita."
Keywords
Morandi, Giorgio;
Painters;
Metropolitan Museum of Art;
Italians;
Retrospectives;
Still-Lifes;
Abramowicz, Janet
In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: "Stay fit the Morandi way!" Take your dream pick from among the hundred and ten works in the potent retrospective of the Italian modern master now at the Metropolitan Museum. You can hardly go wrong with anything dated after 1920 or so, once Morandi, who died in 1964, at the age of seventy-three, had worked through his early involvements with Cézanne, Cubism, Futurism, and the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. But make your choice a still-life. Morandi painted some striking landscapes and the odd, tentative self-portrait, but the arenas of his greatness were the tabletops in his small studio. He passed nearly his entire life in an apartment in Bologna with his mother, until her death, in 1950, and three younger sisters, who, like him, never married. (His businessman father died in 1909, four years before Morandi's graduation from Bologna's art academy.) Morandi's stagings of his repertory company of nondescript bottles, vases, pitchers, and whatnot are definitive twentieth-century art works. They breathe intimacy with the past—Piero della Francesca, Chardin—and address a future that still glimmers, just out of reach. They remain unbeatably radical meditations on what can and can't happen when three dimensions are transposed into two. Morandi will always rivet painters and educate all who care for painting.
He seems to have cared for nothing else. If he ever had a sexual interest, it is unrecorded. He first set foot outside Italy in 1956, and then only in Switzerland. His most frequent forays were to Florence, to consult Piero, Masaccio, Giotto, and Uccello. A man "unwilling even to squash an insect in his garden," according to a fine biography by Janet Abramowicz, "Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence," he suffered a breakdown when he was drafted into the Italian Army, in 1915, after which he was excused from service. He supported himself by teaching painting and etching. (His etchings amaze, triggering subliminal sensations of color with nothing but variations in crosshatched black lines.) He had friends, and he liked to laugh, with the ironical and at times scathing humor of a sensitive man. The academic establishment in Bologna, a university town, disparaged him until late in his career. He participated in the right-wing, ruralist Strapaese movement of the late nineteen-twenties. His attitude toward Mussolini, whose regime gave him teaching jobs, was more positive than not, although he was briefly imprisoned in 1943 for associating with anti-Fascists. (If ever an artist merited political amnesty, on the ground of unworldliness, it would be Morandi.) Fame came to him after the war: he won first prize for an Italian painter at the 1948 Venice Biennale, and became so revered in Italy that filmmakers, notably Federico Fellini, in "La Dolce Vita," used his work as a ready symbol of lofty sensibility. Morandi had a last adventurous phase of nearly abstract drawings and watercolors that condense into swift marks a lifetime of looking.
* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this
The still-lifes vary from bright to crepuscular in tone, from crisply limned to almost illegibly blurred, and, in texture, from creamy to arid. To describe any one of them as exemplary is to provoke tacit protests from the rest. So, in general: The paintings present objects singly, side by side, or in overlapping groups. They feel monumental because they are viewed at eye level, or from just above. (Morandi, who stood six feet four, built a high table that he often used for that purpose.) He disregarded the receding plane of the tabletop, often shrouding the back edge with brown paper, so that it wouldn't distract him. The horizon of that edge commonly seems arbitrary, and the tabletop itself may be woozily indefinite. Morandi anchors his objects frontally, pressed against our gaze. He often paints them all but flat, adding only dim highlights and perfunctory shadings, which at first excite and then gently relax our automatic effort to read roundedness and depth in the pictures. It can take time—minutes, not seconds—to get over what we think we are seeing and to behold what's there. But a sensitive eye may catch on right away. The most helpful piece of writing on Morandi that I know is the painter Vija Celmins's description of her first encounter with one of his still-lifes (in 1961, when she was twenty-one), which "projected an extraordinary set of grays far into the gallery and into my eyes. On closer inspection, I discovered how strange the painting was, how the objects seemed to be fighting for each other's space. One could not determine their size or location. They appeared both flat and dimensional, and were so tenderly painted that the paint itself seemed to be the subject."
The ambiguity of "size or location" is key to Morandi's indelible modernity. It's as if he had set out, time and again, to nail down the whatness of his objects but couldn't get beyond the preliminary matter of their whereness. (He didn't much value the things in themselves. Photographs show that some were slathered or, in the case of clear glass bottles, filled with pigments—they were dedicated to painting the way animals are raised for food.) Morandi was free of the organizing prejudice of perspective. Go look at a Cézanne after seeing this show. It will seem old-fashioned. Conventional pictorial space remained a safety net for the great Frenchman, whose influence Morandi subsumed. Even Picasso didn't as fully abandon perspective—smashing it to localized bits in his Cubism, letting it creep in where it was convenient thereafter. Morandi fumbled, thrillingly, amid the ruins of mental concepts of space. He reversed the thrust of his beloved early-Renaissance inventors of perspective. In an Uccello, say, we register both a mathematical formula of spatial recession and the fact that it is clumsily artificial. Even the majestic Piero fell short of dissolving the preëminent appeal of the painted surface into the fiction of a window view. (Leonardo would do that.) Morandi's eye and mind lived in the surface, marooned there by honest, anxious skepticism. Dramatic uncertainty intensified in his work as he aged. In one of the show's last paintings (the one I want to take home), a jug, whose ochre hue interpenetrates with that of the wall behind it, abuts a tall box in livid, very pale blue; a corrugated ball, half ochre and half greenish blue, rests on the gray table in what would be the foreground—were not the picture, in its effect, all foreground. Dark, jittery outlines startlingly anticipate a look of late work by Philip Guston. That's not unusual in Morandi, whose explorations fortuitously scout the distinctive qualities of subsequent artists. The step from some of his landscapes—with forms at once filmy in color and corporeal in substance—to certain works by the brilliant Luc Tuymans is almost no step at all.
Painting for Morandi was manual labor, first and last. For a time, he ground his own pigments. He stretched his own canvases, constantly varying their proportions. (In the Met show, there are almost as many different sizes of picture as there are pictures.) No one work builds on another. Infinitely refined, Morandi never succumbs to elegance. Even his effulgently pinkish floral still-lifes abjure virtuosity, though they beguile. (One might be made of ice cream; another stiffens to marzipan.) That's because the exigencies of rendering—tiny slippages between eye and hand—constituted, for him, a permanent emergency, requiring incessant adjustment. (Rose petals may jam up like large people competing to pass through a small door.) He did not have a style. He had a signature: "Morandi," written large, often, to broadcast that a picture had done all it could. He is a painter's painter, because to look at his work is to re-create it, feeling in your wrist and fingers the sequence of strokes, each a stab of decision which discovers a new problem.
Color works hard in Morandi. His hues tend toward muddy pastels, always warm. He employs an unabridged dictionary of browns. Even his blues and greens usually secrete invisibly admixed red or yellow, insuring the projection of "an extraordinary set of grays far into the gallery" which Celmins noted. The colors are muted like voices lowered so as not to disturb a sleeper; but their melody and tone penetrate. A Morandi grabs your eye at any distance. Moreover, it's the same picture at any distance, as resolved and unresolved near at hand as far away. (His comprehension of art history skips the Baroque and every other type of synthesized illusion.) Morandi has never been a popular artist and never will be. He engages the world one solitary viewer at a time. The experience of his work is unsharable even, in a way, with oneself, like a word remembered but not remembered, on the tip of the tongue. ♦
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