On Rembrandt and the Inward in Art

Odilon Redon, one of the great heroes of the mysterious in painting, thought of Rembrandt van Rijn as "the precursor of all deeply inward art." And this, I believe, rather than Rembrandt's considerable excellence of technical skill, is the secret of the master's enduring appeal.

The Currier Museum in Manchester, NH is currently showing prints and drawings in ink by Rembrdandt and other Dutch artists of the 1600s. 

The many prints by notable Old Masters invite admiration for the artists' facility with such an intractable medium as scratching into metal or stone. 

Indeed, the exhibition's curators invite viewers to marvel at the amazing level of detail by handing out magnifying glasses at the entrance. But, really it's the feeling in art that counts.

And it's Rembrandt's work, distinguished from the rest by its depth of thought and emotion, that actually matters.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at a Window, 1648. Etching, drypoint, and burin.

Look at that brooding self-portrait, simply honest and full of emotion and humility. The figure's placement in a  shadowy interior while the daylight blazes outside could almost stand as a metaphor for the kind of inwardness that Redon said Rembrandt introduced to art. Most of the figures in the prints by the other artists in the show reference Biblical events or everyday cliches. But here, the figure stands for everyman; his humble self-presentation suggests the ordinary trials of the human condition. Works of art like this stop us in our day and can even change our lives.

A vision by Odilon Redon.

Above is a pastel by Odilon Redon that shows you what he meant by the inward in art. For him, the inward meant the world of dreams, fantasy, mystery, mysticism, and private revelations of both the unknown and the known. But the essential language is the same in both artists' work, even if everything being said is not.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Studies of the Head of Saskia and Others, 1636.
Etching

Rembrandt was an artist of his own inwardness but also that of others. These portrait studies accomplish what the majority of artists prior to Rembrandt's period rarely attempted: they pass beyond depicting physical likeness to convey the inner spirit of unidealized, ordinary individuals captured in moments of reflection.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Bust of an Oriental in a Turban, abt. 1633.
Ink on paper.

Lest we neglect Rembrandt's technical powers, look at the pen and ink drawing of a man wearing a turban above. The reproduction doesn't really show it, but there's an astonishing disparity between the amount of feeling and content Rembrandt gets across and the sheer "economy of means" with which he does it. In a few clearly rapid marks and lines, Rembrandt gives us all the information we need to read volumes into the man's life and identity. This is not just a colorfully "different" character type in 17th century Holland, it's a solid human being with a history of dreams, defeats, triumphs, and desires.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman Bathing Her Feet at a Brook, 1658
Etching.

This etching emphasizes Rembrandt's rejection of traditional idealization in western art. The woman here reads not as a type (a Venus, let's say, or a Mary Magdalene), but as a real person, with thick legs and a less than "perfect" body. The pose, elemental setting, and the very human subject matter elevate this work to the universality of poetry, even as it attests to Rembrandt's dedication to really seeing the subjects of his art.

Rembrandt van Rijn, One-Hundred Guilder Print, 1647.
Etching, drypoint, and burin.

The above print is the most fully elaborated of the Rembrandts on display, the one that most resembles his more complex and masterful oil paintings. It depicts Jesus bringing comfort and redemption to the sick and the poor. It has an essentially mystical quality, brought on by the deep chiaroscuro, where rays of light seem to be thrown off from the glowing foreground figures into the shadowy deeps and stony textures beyond. Redon would have loved the supernatural quality of this.

Robert Vickrey, Old Clown, 1957. Tempera on gessoed Masonite.

On my way out of the museum I was stopped by the painting above. There's actually a Roualt in the Currier that depicts clowns also, and the placard on that painting explains how the artist saw the circus as a metaphor for human life, with each of us, like clowns, possessing a public mask that we show each other daily and a truer inner self that's rarely seen. In a much softer way, the above painting by Robert Vickrey expresses an essential human dignity intensified by its proximity to the "superficial" levity associated with the archetype of the clown. The figure's downcast eyes and indeterminate expression emphasize the man's inner world, clearly the result of a life of varied experience - joys suggested by indelible laugh lines and sorrows attested by furrowed brow, clenched jaw, and lips shriveled and pursed. Here, some 300 years later, is the same compassion and insight into humanity that Rembrandt taught the world to love.

Edgar Degas, Repetition au Foyer de la Danse, 1882.

But lest we conclude that art is only concerned with profound human feeling, there are several Impressionist works on display that have recently been obtained on loan. It was with relief and a lightened heart, I admit, that I stumbled onto the charming Degas above, proving once again how much of the life and joy of art depends upon embracing color and deign rather than on brooding statements about humanity. The same truth springs from the breezy, light-filled Sisley below, which the Currier's curators have done well to hang next to the Degas.

Alfred Sisley, Un Noyer dans la Prairie de Thomery, 1880

Such contrasts remind one that art is various, its means diverse, and its compass practically boundless. 

Anyone can develop technical ability; it takes technical ability plus a cultivated inner life to produce important art. But even that isn't enough; as Redon noted it's a far more mysterious affair in the end. "No-one makes the art that they want to," he wrote. The work evolves on its own, "according to its own laws."

So there you have it: it just is, and that's that. "Art is a flower which blossoms freely, to the exclusion of all rules," Redon said. "In my view, it leaves in sad disarray the microscopic analyses of the 'aestheticians' who seek to explain it."

Amen.

Return of the Vanishing Spectacular Landscape

Last month, one of the world's most important exhibitions for contemporary art commissioned a stunning installation that brought a new immediacy to the questions surrounding the nature and function of the landscape genre in the 21st century.

The work, titled Fatigues, 2012, by British artist Tacita Dean, consisted of six unframed blackboard panels containing images of mountains in Afghanistan exquisitely rendered in white chalk. The floor-to-celing panels were suspended around a two-story staircase of ornate, antiquated design. It was commissioned by the dOCUMENTA 13 exhibition and installed in a former finance building in Kassel, Germany.

Tacita Dean's Fatigues, 2012, for dOCUMENTA 13.

The title I take to refer both to the fatigues worn by soldiers in the war-torn region and to the contemporary art world's disinterest in anything that smacks of traditional Nature-glorifying picture-making in the grand Romantic manner exemplified by the outsize panoramas of the Hudson River School. When nineteenth-century landscapists Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, or Frederick Church exhibited their majestic renditions of the American wilderness, crowds lined up as if for a blockbuster movie. A small group would be let into the exhibition space, and the silk curtains would be drawn back from an enormous canvas to breathless, admiring exhalations. Fatigues was defyingly reminiscent of such dramatic presentations.

Frederick Church's Heart of the Andes as exhibited in New York City in 1864.

But Dean's work has less to do with the sublime grandeur of transcendent Nature than with the nature of landscape painting and art in general. As documented in photographs proliferating online, her panels deny the traditional function of the work of art as a window opening onto a convincing illusion. Instead of the referential (or reverential) colors of oil paint, these landscapes are drawn in black and white with ordinary schoolhouse chalk. (Though just how ordinary white chalk is anymore in these days of digital whiteboards and video projectors is questionable in itself, I suppose).

The stark whiteness of floating peaks and glaciers and amorphous forms and textures suggesting ice and stone project in unnatural contrast to the ghostly deeps of the surrounding space. Some of the panels contain only traces of line, suggesting the movement of rivers, snow, and the interaction of these elements with sunlight. 

I'd be willing to bet that viewing the work in its intended setting was thrilling. Even in the National Gallery, where there's a whole room devoted to Cole's "Stages of Life" series, you don't get to walk up and down between enormous landscapes as if inside a movie.

In fact, Dean's installation began as a Middle-Eastern film project that failed when she returned from Kabul to find her footage spoiled by technical flaws. Best known as a photographer and filmmaker, Dean began drawing in chalk after painting out the backgrounds of photographs, at first using white gouache, and later using black chalkboard paint.

Dean's use of Afghanistan as her subject adds another ripple to the experience. Like the audience for landscape in the nineteenth century, we are "touring" a natural phenomenon charged with meaning. But these are disembodied images, oddly adrift, otherworldly ghosts of a topography that would be beautiful, even sublime, were it permissible or possible to see it free of the inescapable psychological-historical-political  context in which it's framed.

The use of chalk on blackboard panels, an inherently unstable medium (chalkboards are meant to be erased), suggests to me something of nostalgia, the fragility of experience and immateriality of place, as well as the instability and precariousness of our threatened - and actually vanishing - natural world. The incongruous hand-railings with their Victorian metalwork hint at humanity's at times equally frail structures (not excluding the late nineteenth century's short-lived surge of spiritual naturalism).

Paradoxically, even though the absence of colors other than black and white could be intended to undermine landscape's habit of referring to an actual world "out there," here the white chalk is actually quite appropriate for representing the snowy terrain of the subject matter. At every turn, this work contradicts our assumptions, opening in at least two directions: it speaks both to the emotions and to the intellect, and in doing so, raises anew the "question" of landscape painting in the 21st century.

Dean explicitly disrupts landscape painting's referentiality with scrawled handwriting.

That is to say, despite the "meta" aspects of this work, the images carry resonance in themselves, beyond their ostensible purpose as pointers toward a conceptual formulation. And yet, because of the installation's stacked, "surround-sound" arrangement, one views the images from an unsettling point that suggests both distance and proximity. Fatigues works as splendid draughtsmanship, evocative referentiality, political statement, and postmodern conceptualism all at the same time. 

I find the whole thing fascinating for its boldness and depth of thought, its strangeness and its scale, and above all for its unlikely re-invigoration of the experience of landscape in the grand manner.

There's a page with clear, higher-res images of the entire installation right here.

A Wave

Crashing waves by Winslow Homer, c. 1900

Though he was a master at depicting the stormy Maine coast, Winslow Homer was far from the first to seize upon crashing ocean waves as a subject for painting. 

Most conspicuous among his forbears in the "Crash! Boom! Bang!" genre is Gustave Courbet, the French painter credited with leading the Realist movement in mid-19th-century France. 

Waves by Gustave Courbet, c. 1870

Courbet himself encountered the motif in Japanese prints, the newly widespread availability of which was hugely influential in the development of Western painting.

Gustave Courbet, The Wave, 1869

From about 1869 on, Courbet painted numerous versions of vigorously breaking waves employing a similar close-up-viewpoint, composition, and handling while painting on the Normandy coast. The following from Scotland’s National Gallery summarizes the series:

“Courbet was fascinated by the power of the sea. He spent the summer of 1869 at Etretat on the Normandy coast and painted several pictures of waves breaking on the shore. The small scale of his canvas did not inhibit his ability to convey the vast expanse of stormy sky and sea. Courbet applied paint thickly using vigorous brush and palette knife strokes which complement the forceful surge of the wave. The motif of the single wave was inspired by Japanese color prints which were widely available in Paris in the 1860s.”- National Gallery, Scotland. 

Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, colored woodblock print, 1829-1830

Many connoisseurs of painting consider Frederick Judd Waugh the American master of the motif. Waugh composed spectacular and beautiful renditions of the rocky shore.

   

An annoyingly awesome and beautiful seascape by Frederick Waugh

A blog over here neatly presents Waugh's advice and admonitions about painting the sea. But Waugh's paintings usually don't have the kind of dire and glowering existential overtones that Homer's do. In the latter's marines, you feel really at the mercy of larger forces.

Yet Another Incredible Seascape by Frederick Waugh.

In Waugh's you just stand back with your mouth hanging open and realize there's not much point anymore in painting lovingly realistic seascapes that celebrate the Romantic force and beauty of the rocky shore. Really, what else is left to say? 

So you move on. 

Liu Guosong, Chinese, b. 1931, High Landscape II, 20th century, Hanging scroll, ink on paper, Image: 130.81 x 75.88 cm

Weatherbeaten - Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer, The Artist's Studio in Afternoon Fog, 1894

Winslow Homer was an illustrator who moved to Prouts Neck, Maine and became an artist. 

As of this fall, Homer's studio in Scarborough, Maine has been meticulously restored and is open to the public for guided tours.

Meanwhile, there's a once-in-a-lifetime show of Homer's late marine paintings at the Portland Museum of Art through December, 2012. Homer forever changed American painting with these existential, up-close renderings of the violently sea-battered shore near Portland, Maine.

Winslow Homer, Eastern Point, 1900

Homer's unflinching images of unsentimentalized natural forces carried landscape painting past the majestic "views" of the Hudson River Style, the aqueous mysticism of Tonalism, and the anecdotal narratives of illustration. 

One could argue that these works succeed in establishing a new degree of relevance for perceptually based landscape painting on the eve of Modernism's arrival in America. It's possible to feel in these paintings a kindred sense of grappling with impersonal forces indifferent to humanity that one finds in post-war abstraction and even some of the abstract expressionists.

The anchor image for the Portland show is a painting that's been titled "Weatherbeaten," although Homer himself gave it the title "Storm Beaten" when it left his studio.

Weatherbeaten, by Winslow Homer, 1894

It's not just the absence of figures or even the force of the crashing wave in Weatherbeaten that gives this painting its haunting power. It's how Homer bars our way in with that thick, blunt slab of boulder jammed up horizontally against the picture plane. It's also the angle of the exploding wave against the diagonally converging stones that would seem to slide ponderously from left to right, smashing into the smaller opposed stones in the righthand corner, were it not that Homer has invested them all with so much weight and inertia.

Homer's understated colors comprise a symphonic poem of cool and warmer grays, and the high degree of contrast in the values punches up the dramatic volume. Close examination of the surface finds Homer describing a surprisingly varied catalogue of different kinds of sea-spray, mist, and foam. Homer's wave crash doesn't just explode vertically; it puts the canvas in motion by showing how strongly the stormy wind is sweeping from left to right.

Weatherbeaten's dynamic tension.

The theme of the painting's underlying abstract design is tension. Visual elements pull in contradictory directions, horizontally from left to right and vertically from down to up. Lines slide, slam, lift, jolt and collide, converging on a center neither rock nor water but over-spilling whiteness (foam) from which two tiny dark masses (stone) struggle to assert themselves. Beneath its surface, Weatherbeaten rhythmically enacts the clash of Titanic forces for which the ocean's ceaseless hammering against the rocks is the archetypal enactment.

It's the Sublime of Church and Thomas Cole's wilderness paintings finally free of the trappings of European Romanticism. These paintings confront the viewer with a landscape no longer tenable as a symbol of the transcendental divine or otherworldly. This is realism pulled up hard against a wall of broken rock and cold, shattering ocean - a hard, material confrontation with insensible matter.

Homer's Prout's Neck studio is open in the spring and fall only, and tours have to be booked in advance. Consisting of some 35 oils and watercolors on loan from all over America and the world, the Portland Museum of Art's "Weatherbeaten, Winslow Homer and Maine" stays up until Dec. 30, 2012.

Don't miss Sebastian Smee's review of the exhibition in the Boston Globe.

Three Watercolors by John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent, Mountain Fire, c. 1905. Watercolor.

I love paintings that seem to purposely waver between representation and abstraction. It's as if the artist's restraint in letting go of precise, hyper-realistic details helps make the underlying abstract design more visible. 

John Singer Sargent, Gourds, c. 1907. Watercolor. 

In these watercolors by John Singer Sargent we witness a great artist's joy in finding temporary release from the high-pressure precision of society portrait work. Sargent turned portraiture into a very lucrative "rock star" caliber career, but it was a golden cage he found increasingly odious.

In his watercolors, painted largely for their own sake, he seems to respond directly and exuberantly to the qualities of dazzling light, vivacious line, and vibrant warm-cool color combinations. I've written before about the powerful abstract qualities of his work.

John Singer Sargent, White Ships, 1908. Watercolor

I'm becoming ever more convinced that, regardless of subject, a painting's success depends upon just two things: abstract design and the color relationships that form a part of it. That goes for Rembrandt's Old Testament narratives, Rothko's color-field paintings, Sargent's portraits, as well as his ecstatic, energy-charged landscapes in watercolor and oil.

Still Life with Key

"The essence of art is sensitivity. How does one retain the freshness of sensitivity? Answer: By working without worry, freely. How does one work freely? By possessing a technique which permits one to work spontaneously: it is necessary, therefore, to possess the elements of this technique. Meditation in front of the works of the masters puts one in possession of the eternal rules of art. Once these rules are learned there is nothing left but to know how to apply them to one's own temperament."

-Andre Lhote 1923

Bruce Crane - Quiet Complex Simplicity

The Harvest Moon, by Bruce Crane, c. 1900

A student of mine sent in this autumnal landscape by Bruce Crane. As a prime example of 19th-early 20th century Tonalism, this lovely painting employs soft lines and a minimally limited palette in the service of delicate, subtlely modulated tones to produce an achingly lyrical, melancholy mood, an almost musical harmony of light, color, shape, and line.

The composition, as well as the atmospheric tonality, owes a rather large debt to George Inness.

George Inness, Moonlight, Tarpon Springs Florida, 1892

In both of the paintings above, the horizontal canvas is divided into four quadrants, three of which are blocked-in, atmospheric masses and the fourth of which is open sky crossed by two vertical trees (in both cases, one is dominant and one subordinate, one straight and one curvy). The foreground is in relative shadow and the middle ground gets a stripe of moonlight from one side of the canvas to the other.

Inness used some variation of this composition in many of his most evocative paintings (including one of my very favorites, Summer at Montclair, 1891). He placed spiritual significance on the geometrical arrangements of his landscapes and didn't hesitate to bring the four quadrants together in the exact center of the canvas, balancing out the resulting symmetry with the asymmetrical arrangement of masses and lines, as he did above in Tarpon Springs.

Crane uses some bared rocks and a patch of grass to mark the central dividing line of his landscape, but he raises the horizon line into golden mean/rule-of-thirds territory. Upping the contrast of the image shows that what seems at first to be a straightforward vertical arrangement contains significant "orthogonal dynamism" (High-Falutin for diagonals), achieved not with obvious lines nor color, but with subtle variations in the tonal values. (Hence, Tonalism)

Photoshop reveals the subtle diagonals that bring a sense of movement and life to an otherwise stripy composition. 

Note that, except for the moon, the brightest values appear on the two middle-to-background trees silhouetted against the background shrubbery. Inness placed most of the action in the middleground too, but here Crane, in the absence of figures, uses that technique to draw our eyes even deeper into the painting.

First, the eye strikes the main pair of trees in shadow at the center. It quickly glances along the exposed rock to the more brightly lit pair of trees in the back (which deliver a strong performance for supposedly supporting players). From there the gaze lands on the luminous disk of the rising moon, which Crane has floated quietly in a glowing web of pale violet and orange that's as true as any painting I've seen to the delicate atmospheric color tones of evening in New England.

Islands Oceanic

This month I am out upon the Isles of Shoals as often as possible. It's a series of rocky, windswept islands nine or so miles off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire: Rhythmic surf, whitewashed wooden structures, tenacious sea-roses, bleached and battered stone. 

Nineteenth-century painters and men-and-women-of-letters once gathered for "salons" here, particularly upon Appledore Island, where poet Celia Thaxter lived. Thaxter wrote enduring descriptive essays about the life and history of the islands. It was she who convinced Frederick C. Hassam to add the archaic "e" to his middle name ("Child") in the manner of Byron's Childe Harold.

Childe (1859-1935), as everyone indeed called him, was an early American adopter of the methods of the French Impressionists. He rejected conventional academic training and technique in the manner of another frequent visitor to the island, the very influential Boston artist and teacher William Morris Hunt. I've written extensively about Hunt's Francophile influence on American art here.

"Seeing big" and expressing sensations directly is going to be a significant part of a workshop I'm leading on the Isles of Shoals next month. I will be exhibiting some 15-20 new paintings of the Isles of Shoals at the Portsmouth Discovery Center this August.

Childe Hassam, watercolor, the Isles of Shoals

Sometimes Hassam seems to paint the morning light striking the veins of quartz and feldspar that form the jagged island coasts as though responding in paint to Celia Thaxter's prose: 

"The sea is rosy, and the sky; the line of land is radiant; the scattered sails glow with the delicious color that touches so tenderly the bare, bleak rocks. These are lovelier than sky or sea or distant sails, or graceful gulls' wings reddened with the dawn; nothing takes color so beautifully as the bleached granite; the shadows are delicate, and the fine, hard outlines are glorified and softened beneath the fresh first blush of sunrise." ("Among the Isles of Shoals," 1875).

Childe Hassam, oil, The Isles of Shoals

My own challenge is to forget Hassam's work but to remember his achievement and to take him at his word: "Subjects suggest to me a color scheme and I just paint." 

"An artist should paint his own time and treat nature as he feels it," he said, "not repeat the same stupidities of his predecessors." In Hassam's case, I think we'd have to substitute "successes" for "stupidities." But the sense of what he says rings true, and the implications for the practice of painting are huge.

Above: painting friends Mary Graham, Donald Jurney, and Todd Bonita joined me on a recent painting trip to Star Island, Isles of Shoals. The lot of us painting out there looked more 1912 than 2012.

As I take it, lived courageously the act of painting sometimes leads to moments of fuller being. That's what I'm really chasing on the Shoals. In the words of one of Hassam's truest successors, Robert Henri, "what we need is more sense of the wonder of life, and less of the business of making a picture."

John Henry Twachtman, Reckless Visionary

John Henry Twachtman, Gloucester Harbor Scene, c. 1901

Twachtman's sense of design is utterly masterful. On a recent trip to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, I sat for a while in front of the above painting and sketched it as a way of plumbing its mysteries. Deceptively simple, the interlocking geometric shapes, the subtle, asymmetrical arrangement of values, the vibrating colors - as with a lot of paintings I respond to, I experienced the whole thing gathering itself into a marvelous representation then threatening to collapse into random marks of colored paint only to gather itself once again into a representation on the verge of disintegration. 

John Henry Twachtman (1853 – 1902) was among a group of American Impressionists called The Ten who boycotted the commercial art market at the end of the 19th century. A restless experimenter, he pledged no allegiance to a single style. He was among the most original, modern, and poetic of his peers, either unwilling or unable to interest buyers in derivative or simply pretty images. His devotion to his personal vision brought him strong admiration from fellow artists, who deemed him a 'painter's painter' ahead of of his time.  

Twachtman, Edge of the Emerald Pool at Yellowstone

Few 19th century landscape artists were as willing or able to disregard convention and devote themselves to such a personal brand of Impressionism, not to mention such beautiful and radically simplified renderings of spontaneous experience. Look at the rich, boldly abstract color pattern in that Emerald Pool above! 


In Along the Fence (below), Twachtman takes a similar minimalist approach to big ideas. Here the treatment of humble subject matter, ennobled by a perfect degree of detail and a dignified composition, expresses the profound significance of the simplest dusty corner of the inhabited word. Twachtman's eye has singled out an anonymous series of warped, nailed-up boards mired in muddy earth-tones that, soaked as they are in generations of human presence, tell a strangely rich tale of human history expressed in the simplest imaginable terms. 


Thoreau said "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." By virtue of everything it leaves out, Along the Fence is an absolute treasure. 

Twachtman, Along the Fence

Here is Arques-la-Bataille, which some consider one of his greatest masterpieces. 

John Henry Twachtman, Arques-la-Bataille, 1885

As Linda Crank points out, there's a quiet circular composition underlying the whole: 


"First, the bold block of dark grass at center bottom commands the eye. Then the smaller clump to the middle left causes it to travel to the middle left. From there a variety of smaller shrubbery and grasses propel the vision around to the right in a circular motion. Strong horizontal lines emphasize the calmness of the foggy morning." 


Many of Twachtman's works, including Arques-la-Bataille, turn their backs on the established canon of Western aesthetics. Instead, they can often exhibit the sort of subtlety one finds in a Japanese garden, where objects are arranged in such a way as to relate at once to the random quality of "design" in nature and to our human hunger for the sense of a harmonious whole. I love the fresh, un-cliched design of the darks and lights in this tonalist piece:

Although I admit to having made pilgrimages to Gloucester, Rockport and similar locales, in this case, for me there's little mystique to where Twachtman painted. It's his absolute sincerity, his depth of thought and feeling, and his faithfulness to his responses to the immediate subject that make him great.


Twachtman's great paintings balance representation and abstraction in a very poetic, and at once very modern and classically restrained manner. His later works such as the Gloucester Harbour pictures above and below anticipate a style of painting that wouldn' t become popular until long after European Modernism came to America in 1911. One could do worse than to spend a day at the feet of such a master.

Twachtman, Goucester Harbor