The Tonal Van Gogh

Autumn Landscape with Four Trees, Vincent van Gogh, 1885

Earlier in his career, Vincent van Gogh experimented with the styles of his time, including Impressionism, capturing light and movement with swift, unfussy brushstrokes, and a kind of tonalism, perhaps based on the earth-tone palette of his homeland's "old masters," restricting his colors to just a few related hues and exploring a range of midtones, lights, and darks within them.

Autumn Landscape allowed van Gogh to explore dynamic rhythms not only at the level of the image but on the surface of the painting. The bold, directional way he laid strokes of tone-related color on the sky creates a horizontal rolling "s" motion that hints at the future dynamism in Starry Night.

Just considering the use of line, the sky's undulations are gently counterpointed by the hilly ground. But the vital energy in this painting comes from the contrary directions that the paint takes throughout the whole.

Van Gogh juxtaposes horizontal brushstrokes in the foreground and vertical strokes in the vegetation around the tree trunks and background trees. He mixes the two in the dominant tree's foliage at the composition's center to create a vivid burst of leaves and branches that supports a strong sense of motion in the curvature of the trees toward the left.

In the landscape below, van Gogh uses the same techniques in a more modest application while brightening the intensity ("chroma") of the colors.

Although he's often associated in the public mind with wild, bright colors, he primarily used color expressively - to create emotion-charged visions of his world.

Shoes, Vincent van Gogh, 1888

In the process, he often used what I would consider a tonal approach to convey a subtle, muted complexity and a somber, poetic mood.

weekend update

Nostalgia for the Infinite, first in a new series of sky paintings.

Spitzweg: The Poor Poet

Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet, 1839

German chemist-turned-artist Carl Spitzweg loved living in high places. Moving into an apartment in Munich in 1833, he wrote, "The view is magnificent ... all around a vast mountain chain of roofs, studded with chimneys and attic windows like castles and ruins ... and the sky so close - it is unrivaled."

If not for the fallen snow, such a view would be visible from his Poor Poet's window, which provides the only source of light in this painting's chilly little garret.

Much like today, it was possible to earn a living as a painter in 19th century Munich but not as a poet. The tophat hanging conspicuously on the stone-cold stovepipe says two things: the man goes about as a regular, law-abiding royalist, and his chosen profession keeps his stove so cold he can hang his hat on it as he huddles under the blankets, an umbrella secured to the beams to fend off any drips from the snow melting on the roof.

The image speaks to a perennial wish - to withdraw from the world's ever-increasing bustle into our own private dream-space through the magic of art.

There's amusing irony in the disparity between the visible book title "Gradus ad Parnassum," with its suggestion of conveyance to the airy home of the Muses (the mythical Mount Parnassus) and the poet's actual circumstances.

Many assume the poet is using his fingers to count syllables. A note on one of the preliminary sketches left by the artist mentions a flea - I prefer to think the man has paused in his pursuit of poesy to squash the life out of an offending member of this bothersome tribe.

We owe much of this painting's popularity to its constant reproduction as the perfect embodiment of the genre painting of the Biedermeier era - pictures crafted for the homes of the growing middle class that (still) shine a gently satirical light on reality.

Spitzweg's also the one who gave us one of our best beloved images of the hopeless reader - The Book-Worm.

With all this talk of poetry and reading, I'd like to share a poem that New Hampshire poet, puppeteer, and photographer Andrew Periale says took a little inspiration from reading my post on Ariadne, Theseus, the Minotaur, and King Minos's labyrinth. It's still in draft form, but he's graciously allowed me to post it as is:

Ripe

Who placed my hand in October

While my head loitered in July?

your body was a surprise, a farm stand

on some where-the-hell road, offering harvest

while I battle hornworm and

obsess over still green tomatoes

perfect, round, leaves with no spots

or yellowing, I thought I loved them

then you offered me a brandywine—

flesh soft and pink in its uneven, undulating skin

a voice calls from deep niche of lizard brain

home it moans at last and I look back at

neat rows of muscular zucchini, tanned, hard peaches,

see an angular labyrinth of my own design

you take my hand, massaging a hoof back to fingers,

offer me respite among impossibly huge pumpkins

and I feel the great horns shrink back into my skull

You are weed and toad, spider and chaos

But what smells, what flavor! Blind! I shout, I’ve—

Snatch a bouquet of basil and sink to one knee

Forever tumbling out of my mouth

Like fruit from a cornucopia

Much joy in ripe, you gush, but not forever

You’ll learn to conserve, save seed,

I survey the tables deep in jam jars, pickles

Time capsules, I think, these are diaries, histories.

piles of peppers, red and blue potatoes, patty pans

pleasure in the eating, yes, but full of seed, You, too,

She murmurs, you are full of future, let us put some by

And grabs my hand and leads me to the house

Ripe, I think, so sweet and fleeting, as a “v” of geese

With fanfare angles south ahead of cold Canadian air

Orpheus: The Artist as Poet

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861

At first glance, Corot's light-infused Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861) immortalizes the joyful emergence of Orpheus and Eurydice from the Underworld and their return to the breezy trees and light of living nature, which at this moment has never seemed so beautiful and precious. But wait - according to the Orpheus myth, they never made it back!

And sure enough, when we look again, we see the figures emerging from the mist in the background, their shadowy forms reflected in the quiet pool in the painting's mid-ground. These are surely shades, spirits of the dead. Orpheus and Eurydice, then, are still in Hades, just beginning their long (and doomed) journey back toward the land of the living, a journey that will end in ruin - though you'd never know it looking at Corot's lush, illuminated foliage, water, and hills.

Artists and poets have long used the Greek myth of Orpheus as a metaphor for aspects of the artist's life and creative processes.

In the classical myth as the Roman poet Ovid told it, Orpheus, the archetypal singer/poet, descended into the Underworld to rescue his bride, Eurydice, whom the Lord of the Underworld, Hades, had snatched away from the land of the living on their wedding day. Hermes told Orpheus he could go down to get her back but that he mustn't turn around to look at her until they were all the way out.

George Frederic Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice, c. 1870

Unfortunately, Orpheus turns to make sure she's still behind him, only to see her already insubstantial shade receding forever into the darkness below. Having now lost Eurydice twice, Orpheus concedes in despair that death has won. George Frederic Watts painted several different versions, both horizontal and vertical, of the relatively melodramatic moment when Orpheus understands his fate and desperately clings to the drooping, pallid corpse of his bride.

George Frederic Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice, c. 1873

Around the same time, the world's last great sculptor (ahem) Auguste Rodin, sculpted Orpheus and Eurydice half-emerging from the raw stone of his chunk of marble. The two figures seem at once to swoon with desire, lassitude, and inertia, as the cthonic forces of Hades impede their full ascent into airy daylight.

Auguste Rodin, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1877-98

Although here, because of the myth's outcome, it seems especially appropriate, Rodin often left ragged stone around his figures. It's part of the Modern, expressive character of his art, and it causes the figures to emerge from the stone (rather than being "carved from" it). It's also a metaphor for the Michaelangeloesque idea of the artist as creator-god who, through supreme spiritual (and physical!) effort, wrests beauty from primal chaos.

And the Orpheus myth echoes the same idea: The poet's song subdues nature. "Such was the grove of trees the poet gathered round him, and he sat in the midst of a crowd, of animals and birds," Ovid says. And when he mourns, so does the world itself. Ovid again: "the poet of Thrace, with [mournful] songs like these, drew to himself the trees, the souls of wild beasts, and the very stones that followed him."

So Orpheus spends the rest of his grief-stricken days singing about Eurydice and her loss, until a group of women intoxicated by their ecstatic worship of Dionysus come upon him and tear him apart in their frenzy. The last time we see him in in Ovid, some nymphs have discovered his decapitated head floating down their river, still singing in the melancholy tones that made him famous.

John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900

Our favorite French Symbolists, Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, both envisioned Orpheus's head placed upon the symbol of his musical power - his lyre.

Gustave Moreau, Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus on a Lyre, 1865

For Redon, the singer's disembodied head may serve as a symbolic embodiment of the painter himself. If so, in Redon's pastel, the figure emerges from a timeless, semi-abstract setting that we can see as both matter and spirit at once: clouds, mountain, river, flowers, stars, and mysterious light. Orpheus has become a stand-in for the otherworldly, mystical nature of the act of artistic creation.

Odilon Redon, Orpheus, c. 1903

With this in mind, recall Corot: his Orpheus lives at the moment when he still believes he will triumphantly lead the girl into broad daylight. Head intact, he lifts his lyre in victory, albeit premature. His body language says, "Onward and upward!" It's significant that, unlike the front-and-center characters in Watts, Redon, and Moreau, Corot's Orpheus and Eurydice are relatively small figures integrated into the overall landscape that makes up the true subject of the picture. Corot's depiction of the mythic symbol of art leads inexorably to a gorgeous landscape. After all, for Corot painting landscapes and happiness were one and the same.

I like to read Corot's version of the myth, devoid of any hint of a dark side, as a declaration of his creed: the modern artist must reinvent art as a celebration of this life, of the world as it appeals to our senses, seeking out the beautiful moments, however brief, that life interposes between the inevitable tragedies and disasters.

G. F. Watts: Twilight of the Gods

G. F. Watts, The Minotaur, 1896

George Frederick Watts (1817 – 1904) painted The Minotaur late in his career.

He was the son of a poor piano tuner who died when the artist was a child. His paintings became increasingly personal, intimate, and somewhat dark as time went on.

G. F. Watts, Hope, 1884

The Minotaur was a monster, half man and half bull, whom the fabled Greek king Minos imprisoned in a cunningly designed maze on the island of Crete. Scholars believe that the pre-Hellenic culture that thrived there furnished the basis for the myth of Atlantis.

Some have seen in Watts's Minotaur an embodiment of "the greed and lust associated with modern civilisations" (Tate Museum). But I have always responded to the dreamy sense of melancholy in the creature's gaze over the ramparts of the maze toward an indistinct horizon in the distance.

It's the only painting I know that portrays the mythical being with pathos. Watts's inclusion of the minotaur's eyelashes and his blank, slack-jawed expression humanize the beast, and because its back is turned toward us, we are invited to occupy his position and point of view.

G.F. Watts, Endymion

Watts's late paintings are decidedly Symbolist, devoted to classical allusion and, finally, to expressive, nearly abstract visions of universal forces oscillating between a Darwinian understanding of human nature and a mystical yearning for spiritual fulfillment. As Odilon Redon said of his own works, they "inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.”

G.F. Watts, The Sower of Systems, 1902

In this Watts was a quintessential artist of Victorian England - and a kindred spirit for travelers in the twilight borderlands of modernity.

Imagining Atlantis

The Fall of Atlantis, by Monsu Desiderio, c. 1600s

We continue today with more imaginative visions and obscure histories!

Compared to artistic visions of the seven ancient wonders of the world, depictions of the lost city of Atlantis are rather rare. The one above comes from a somewhat obscure 17th century tradition known the capriccio - fantastical and often grotesque works that went outside the bounds of tradition and allowed artists to give their imaginations free reign.

Art historians long considered Monsu Desiderio to have been a pseudonym for two or three different artists who collaborated on such pre-surrealist fantasies. However, the following comes from artist John Coulhart's Web journal:

“Enigma” or “mystery” are the words usually associated with “Desiderio” (or even “Monsù Desiderio”), due to years of misattribution that made two obscure painters of the same period with similar styles appear to be a single artist. Until some fifty years ago, the identity of François de Nomé (ca. 1593–after 1634) was hidden by confusion with another contemporary painter from the Lorraine, Didier Barra (called “Monsù Desiderio”), whose work was at times disturbingly similar. In the 1930s, when the Surrealists were searching for forerunners, there was a revival of interest in Nomé, a painter most noted for fantastic architectures, eerily lit night scenes of the ruins of cities, and of catastrophic visions. He has continued to fascinate the modern mind for fifty years

You can read the rest here.

As a side note, my great grandfather, Ronald Alexander Edumnd Strath, aka Dr. A. E. Strath-Gordon, who was a spy for the British government and a lecturer on comparative mythology and the Great Pyramid, among other things, was one of the early searchers for the lost Atlantis. True story.

The Colossus of Rhodes: Visions of a Vanished Wonder

The Colossus of Rhodes (1914) by the Spanish painter Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840-1924).

One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Colossus of Rhodes was a giant bronze statue of the Greek sun god Helios that towered over the busy harbor of the ancient Greek island of Rhodes.

The painting above by Degrain is an example of "history" painting - a staple of old-world art, in this case an imagined scene from mythology. An earthquake destroyed the Colossus in 226 BC, just over 50 years after it was built - so artists over the years have used their imaginations to picture how it might have looked.

Certainly it was big - at 107 feet high, it was the largest statue in the ancient world. A full-grown man couldn't get his arms around one of the fallen thumbs. The Oracle of Delphi advised against rebuilding it, so the pieces remained where they fell, visible all the way from the ships in the harbor, for the next 800 years, until the bronze was finally melted down and used elsewhere. That hasn't stopped artists from depicting it in the most delightful ways ever since.

"The brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land..." was a figment of the medieval imagination. It's been proved that something that big could never have straddled the harbor.

Stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen said he used his memory of one these engravings, reproduced in a childhood book of classical mythology, when modeling a climactic moment for his bronze giant Talus in the film Jason and the Argonauts - a film near and dear to art historians, classicists, and fans of mythology, imaginative literature and fantasy cinema everywhere.