SOUTINE’S SPLASH

The show of Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) now at the Jewish Museum in New York is full of delights—some pretty standard images in all the art history texts, but other, lesser-known surprises. And one of the nifty things about this show is that very few of the pieces are under glass, so you can really eyeball the surfaces–sometimes to Soutine’s advantage, but not always. He gets messy.

The piece right inside the door (okay, under glass, but sensitively lit) is his famous and magnificent “Still Life With Rayfish.”

The closer you look, the more fascinating is the loose, splashy handling—color and brushwork wonderfully expressive but having little, if anything, to do with physical description.

 

 

Then the odd “Hanging Turkey” c.1925. with its human female torso.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And “Turkey” c. 1925. The turkey almost gets lost because the dark neck against the dark surround separates the head from the body, the leg shapes and color are repeated along the side, and there’s that odd mechanical piece coming in from the corner.

But once you’re hooked in, you come closer and closer, fascinated with how Soutine dances between representation and abstraction.

 

 

 

 

A FAVORITE THEOPHILUS BROWN

Theophilus Brown (1919 – 2012) was a member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and continued drawing and painting into the new century.

This undated lithograph ( 8½ x 6” ) lives happily on my dining room wall. I admire the strong, sharp design – those sleeves, those two improbable but perfect light lines coming down the wall, and then the horizontally delineated floor panels. The rich dark shadows here and there that press foreground and background into one plane. The figure modeled in unabashedly direct, diagonal strokes. 

Bit by bit and all at once the piece hits that exciting balance between image and abstraction that those Figurative fellas understood so well.

 

 

“MADAME CEZANNE”

One of the fascinations of the prime work of Paul Cezanne is how he builds his compositions by a process of minute discovery. A new book, Cezanne Portraits by John Elderfield, is full of wonderful examples. “Madame Cezanne” is one.

It’s instructive to compare Cezanne’s execution with Edouard Manet’s in a work of similar size. Manet goes for the strong hit. The blacks are all pushed very black, the background bright and simple to set off the figure, the face essentially done in three tones: decisive, rich, and strong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whereas Cezanne goes in the opposite direction. The result is strong, but not by virtue of a few big decisions. It’s built up of many small-scale explorations. In painting, no brushstroke is ever exactly as intended. You can regard that as an imperfection to be corrected, or as opening, perhaps, some intriguing, unanticipated direction. Cezanne clearly follows the second method. Follow the line of the jaw, chin, and cheek. A rather washy blue shape starts at the ear, then is dropped and then picked up again. It’s strengthened by a thin, darker blue line that passes around the chin, paralleled by another, below. Then a thicker, darker blue line/shape; then, all the way around the face to the eye, a succession of little lines, not tentative but also not bossy, sometimes within the modeling of the cheek and sometimes just outside it. The effect is descriptive, but also painterly to the nines, almost abstract, intricate and fascinating.

 

Look at any feature – the mouth, the ear, the modeling of the cheek – you find the same process of exploration and discovery and delight, with nothing assumed, nothing taken for granted.

Cezanne was notorious for making his models sit perfectly still through endlessly protracted sittings while he did his thing. You can see why from the result.

 

“Madame Cezanne” is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

SHEELER’S LINES

I had seen Charles Sheeler’s work before, but it was only while pondering several of his things in “The Cult of the Machine”, the show at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, that I noticed his systematic use of fine black lines around almost all his shapes.

 

You’d think such a mechanical device would be stultifying, but in fact it enables the delicacy of his tonal progressions. In this detail, the brights and shades, and especially the roofs and sky, are so close in value that without those lines they would have to be modeled much more robustly. By keeping the tones light and close he is able to keep this complicated little cluster of buildings as a unified bright shape in the center of his composition.

 

Even more surprisingly, we find him using the same device in his masterpiece, “Rolling Power.”

All those shapes, and even tonal shifts within shapes, sit on a layin of tiny black lines.

 

Of course, Sheeler didn’t invent the device. In this example from two hundred years before, Tiepolo saves his big, simple architectural shape from going mushy by throwing in a scattering of tiny black lines. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My own art education happened when painting was bigger, splashier, more abstract. We were never taught this stuff. But there are always interesting new things to notice if you pay attention.

 

THE ECONOMY OF MAGRITTE

Rene Magritte (1898 – 1967) was an adroit painter, but his best work is not given to painterly luxuriance. His images revolve around their surrealistic joke, and the more simply and directly the point is made, the better. Imagine “The Son of Man” as richly composed and modeled as “Alfred Flechtheim.” The effect would be absurd rather than surrealistic. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which is not to say that his works are not well painted. They are. Both day and night parts of “The Dominion of Light” are sensitively done. There are rather a lot of clouds in the sky, to make the point that it’s full day, and not dawn, and houses and trees are lively, albeit low key. But the trees, especially, are kept dark, strong, and simple, for contrast – lively silhouettes, but nowhere near as interesting as they would be if Magritte were not holding them in.

 

Similarly, the two skies in “The Grand Family” are each kept simple so that the grand point, the bird, doesn’t get lost.

 

The works shown here are included in a show of Magritte’s work currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern art. It includes these and some other wonderful pieces together with a larger number that are pretty humdrum. The problem with works that depend on a joke is that once you’ve seen it, repetitions and slight variations have little to add, and incite comparisons of quality in which most examples can only disappoint.

 

 

SCHNABEL AT THE LEGION

A saucy challenge often underlies cultural fashion: This isn’t blowhard nonsense, it’s the New Real Thing! Don’t you get it?

For example, “Julian Schnabel: Symbols of Actual Life” at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Coming into the courtyard you are confronted by six 24-foot-square canvases (all titled “Untitled,” which is perhaps just as well) and three large plaster –– well, sculptures, for want of a more mordantly descriptive term.

 

The intention of all this, apparently, is to immerse the visitor in the esthetic experience of Actual Life. It does not. You wouldn’t look at these canvases twice if they were 24 inches instead of feet. Nor have they any resonance with the courtyard, its formal architecture, the prominent focus of the space — Rodin’s “Thinker”– or Actual Life as I, at any rate, have experienced it. The excitement apparently consists of their being painted in gesso on expanses of “found fabric”, and the fact that they are so daringly exposed to the elements. 

 

 

The three sculptures in the courtyard are plaster lumps. The one above, with the branches sticking up, is “Helen of Troy.” The piece below is “Gradiva”. Gradiva is an ancient Greek figure, “the woman who walks.” Schnabel’s contribution to this theme is opaque to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are more pieces inside. Here, in a gallery featuring more Rodins, hangs “Untitled (The Sky of Illimitableness)”: a jokey picture of a goat with silly, as if daring, swoops of paint across it. 

 

Rodin’s St. John the Baptist seems to be making a break for the exit. You can’t blame him.

 

A FAVORITE: PORTRAIT OF JOHN THE FEARLESS

John the Fearless (1379-1419) was Duke of Burgundy during the Hundred Years War. The life he led was like so many of the upper crust, then and now: contention, scheming, betrayal, murder, and war. Portraits of such people tend to be muscular and assertive: I’m tough, get it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Certainly, John was a busy player in the years leading up to his assassination. There was his artful dalliance with Henry V of England, his sneaky murder of the rival Duke of Orléans, his shifting political alliances, and so on. 

 

But then we have this portrait. It’s not about an overbearing big shot. Those half-closed eyes, the serious brows, the almost-smile. Also the straight, stiff neck: he’s thoughtful, but alert and disciplined. There is almost a puckish air about it, as if he were contemplating some unspoken, probably not very funny joke — perhaps even a regret.

 

 

 

BOUCHER AND DOWNWARD  

    San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor has long been a reliable place to see old, reliable European art. A recent show, “Casanova: the Seduction of Europe”, for example, was several rooms full of work by those resplendent 18^th Century names you see in all the art history books. Boucher’s “Portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy” (1752): there it was in the flesh (that happy turn of phrase being in this case barely sufficient). Along with many other super pieces.

       Recently, however, there has been an effort to jazz the place up a bit: get past the old stuff, shake off the dust. Last fall, for example, there was a show of Sarah Lucas sculpture. The come-on piece in the lobby was a plaster cast of a woman’s lower half, with a cigarette stuck up her anus. 

        No doubt the guards accumulated a raft of hilarious anecdotes of parents, caught off guard, trying to explain this to their children. I didn’t ask.

 

 

TWOMBLY & REMBRANDT, LIKE/UNLIKE

Here we have two pieces–one by Cy Twombly (1928 – 2011), the other by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669)–that begin with different intentions, but end with similar results.

The Twombly is not, at first, surprising; swirling and splashing is what his painting is about. But while it’s certainly abstract, it’s not quite non-representational. His swirlings have an intricate and repetitive tension about them that implies a narrative. The swoops  draw the eye around and around and toward the right, while the background veil of thin vertical drips provide stability for the swirls to play against.

So: abstract, but inclining to narrative.

 

 

 

While the Rembrandt, also predominantly composed of swirls,  proceeds from the opposite direction, from narrative to abstraction. We spot the subject, a view of cottage and trees, right away, but it isn’t a formal illustration of picturesque cottage and tree. What Rembrandt was responding to was the lashing, constantly changing shapes as the branches whip this way and that in a strong wind blowing from left to right. It’s the wildness, the disorderliness of it, that he’s after. The action is in the swirls of foliage. The straight, mostly vertical lines of the cottage, and the oblique foreground ditch, provide the same still grounding that Twombly gets from his thin vertical drips. And for a contrasting negative, each artist provides a blank space beginning at the upper left–not as spacious in the Twombly as in the Rembrandt, but present in both pieces, and for the same reason.

 

For a discussion of similar issues with respect to Turner, Constable, and Kline, go >blog>archive>May 12, 2012: abstract and not.

LEARNING FROM NOT SO GOOD

We grow so accustomed to seeing really good art that it’s easy to miss what makes it good–hence the comparison here between treatments by Hans Bol (1534-1593) and Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885) of figures in rather similar big landscapes.

The vital difference here is coherence. Nothing in Bol’s piece quite relates to anything else. It’s a jumble of elements in search of an overall narrative. The foreground group, four figures and a fish, is drawn as if each were a separate little study that has been cut out with scissors and pasted down wherever there is room. The whole group on its little island has the same lack of relation to the rest of the composition as  the pieces do to each other. It kisses the farther shore in a few places, enough to muddle, for example, the woman’s outline, without really connecting foreground and distance. Follow the shoreline as it drifts aimlessly, rising and falling. Middle tones baffle Bol. Shapes are left left white unless there is some immediate descriptive necessity. Objects are seen one by one, rather than as contributory pieces of a whole with a whole meaning. Poor Phaethon and his horses are lost in the muddle of shapeless clouds.

Bresdin’s landscape, on the other hand, while quite similar in design, is seen from large to small. The mountain shapes to left and right form a V, joining with the foreground copse of trees. The trees gather into strong darks above the water–so dark that the eye jumps to the whites of the bathers. Contrasted with the middle tone of the pond they are drawn very simply (compare with Bol’s muddled lady).

From the V the hills fold back, first in a long recession on the right, then a more distant formation on the left, and finally to the far horizon. The richly worked sky–several swoopy horizontal bands–links the mountains to right and left, and by its weight keeps the eye from floating away from the foreground.

Within this grand design there are many unifying themes. Look for bright white shapes. Look for textures. Again and again they are varied and repeated. The horizontal shading of the water reflects the sky. The light, meanwhile, comes consistently from the left.

In a word, Bresdin’s is a wonderfully intricate but in no way mechanical composition. Compare with Bol. You will, in fact, find resemblances, but the results are very different.