Albert Pinkham Ryder and the "ceaseless melody of the northern line"

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlit Cove, 1890

Albert Pinkham Ryder is one of several great 19th century American artists yet to become familiar to the general public at large.

There are many reasons for Ryder's low profile, not the least of which is that his work has imploded over time; his already scant number of paintings have seriously deteriorated because of his heedlessness to sound oil painting technique. Living like a hermit in a tiny, squalid New York apartment through the late 1800s, Ryder would evolve his paintings over decades, heaping layer upon wet layer on his canvases and liberally using bitumen (a distant cousin of road tar, apparently), which, apparently, puckers, warps, and discolors over time.

Rock star American art historian Barbara Novak devotes a chapter to Ryder in her very readable American Painting of the Nineteenth Century. She identifies Ryder as a visionary "in search of the impossible and the unattainable," who used painting as a visual language to express ideas and internal states of consciousness rather than "empathy with nature" like the Impressionists and many previous American landscapists did so well. As Novak says, Ryder might have said, along with Paul Klee, "Art does not render the visible, but makes visible."

What does it make visible? In Ryder's art, Novak identifies two types of religious experience. On the one hand (in agitated canvases depicting storms, churning waters, Biblical mayhem, gothic episodes from imagination, and operatic and literary works like Macbeth), it becomes a visual metaphor for the self caught up in "a dizzying religious experience" signified by the intense animation of nature (as in van Gogh). In "Lord Ullin's Daughter," the opposing diagonals (of clouds, cliffs, and crashing waves) create a tension that Ryder further ratchets up with sharp edged triangles and counter movements from all directions, though the eye keeps coming back to the storm-tossed figure, a stand-in for the viewer.

Ryder, Lord Ullin's Daughter, 1905

Very much on the other hand (most clearly, in depictions of isolated boats silhouetted in an "abstract void" of Ryder's own invention), his art makes visible "a serene, almost Oriental absorption of the self into cosmos, an annihilation of the self." This Buddhistic dissolution of the self had a strong American precedent in New England Transcendentalism (and think of Melville for the chaos) and in "those painters who erased their own artistic presence in the attempt to realize the life of things," as Novak writes.

Here the forms flow into around each other in gentler, rhythmic patterns, the flatness of the picture plane serving to augment the design's quieter, primarily horizontal movements. Here Ryder subdues anecdotal detail in favor of mood.  

Surely for Ryder, these two forms of self-transcendence, the self's absorption in primal chaos and its dissolution into a oneness with the cosmos, are two sides of the same coin. But here's what's really interesting. These two strains in Ryder and American art and thought, we might call them the Sublime and the Transcendental, reemerged unabated in the 20th century, though rarely in one single artist. The chaos is there in the Abstract Expressionists who channeled untamed forces of nature, such as de Kooning,

Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1948

Joan Mitchell,

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, c. 1950

and Jackson Pollock (who named both Melville and Ryder as influences),

Jackson Pollock, Silver over Black, White, Yellow, and Red, 1948

Jackson Pollock, Moby Dick, 1943

and on the other hand, painters who quieted the self into Buddhistic non-existence, such as Rothko, 

Mark Rothko, Black in Deep Red, 1948

and subsequent colorists and abstractionists such as Frankenthaler,

Hellen Frankenthaler, Madame Matisse, 1983

Morris Lewis

Morris Lewis, Blue Veil, 1958

and Agnes Martin.

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 2004

I see this as an America artistic and spiritual heritage, albeit one that, judging from what I've seen of late, contemporary and especially conceptual art since Pop and Duchamp mostly rejects.

Ryder would have loved abstract expressionism. "The artist should fear to become the slave of detail," Ryder cautioned. "He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. What avails a storm cloud accurate in form and color if the storm is not therein?" Pollock echoed those words when he explained, "I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them."

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, 1888-91

Ryder worked on his painting Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens from 1888 to 1891. It's based on a scene from Wagner's operatic "Ring" cycle, but the back story's not important. Just look at the thing! As Ryder said, "the storm is within." In terms of line, these fluid, twilit forms of light and dark spin everything into motion. From the towering, undulating tree branches to the mythical hero stunned by the appearance of the wily water-spirits, it's a vision of man and nature in archetypal, everlasting turmoil. Okay, its hard to see on a jpeg smaller than a credit card, but who else had painted the fragility and resistance, the archetypal uncertainty of the human condition with such directness? Only the towering greats, El Greco, Goya, Turner, and Michelangelo (especially of the Last Judgment) come to mind. Of Ryder's Siegfried Novak enthuses, "The insistent rhythms... are fixed into the 'good Gestalt' of the perfect design. Siegfried belongs, like El Greco's View of Toledo, to that small group of masterpieces that stamp themselves on our minds with instantaneous - indeed, almost violent - authority." (p. 218)

Novak traces the painterly lineage of the Gothic sensibility in evidence here to what German art historian Worringer, whose ideas supported early 20th century abstraction, called the "ceaseless melody of the northern line," the "whorling, convoluted rhythms that worked their way into Baroque religious art 

Bernini, The Rape of Proserpina, 1622

and ultimately through the expansive forms of Rubens," 

Rubens, Allegory on the Blessings of Peace, 1630

into the romantic color and florid mis-en-scenes of Delacroix, 

Delacroix, Sardanoupolus, 1827

and the sublime, off-kilter light of Turner and beyond. 

J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm, Steamboat off a Harbor, 1842

"It was this sensibility," novak writes, intensified emotionally, that informed the Expressionism of Munich and the German artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his Gothic visionary aspect, 'Ryder shared this sensibility.'"

Who knows what God knows?

His hand He never shows,

Yet miracles with less are wrought,

Even with a thought.

-A. P. Ryder

Abstract Musings

Tomorrow evening in my weekly Tuesday evening painting workshop we’ll be pushing paint around with the goal of creating what I'd like to call delocalized beauty. 

Delocalized (adj.): 1. To remove from a native or usual locality; 2. To broaden the range or scope of.

Modern art generally dispenses with the conventionally beautiful as unreal, uncourageous, outdated, superficial, sentimental, and an impediment to doing what modern art is supposed to do: Wake people up. Beauty as Western art has known it flees from tough-guy talk like that.

So we'll use a floral theme to try to get the jump on it.  We are going to let go of figuration (the element of image) and paint the feeling of appreciating flowers rather than painting the flowers themselves. 

My own abstract floral, "All the Sweet Tints," a 14" x 30 " floral abstract (the allusion is to a garden, actually)

“I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them," said Jackson Pollock.

Is abstract art, then, about feeling? Were the abstract expressionists like Pollock just painting their feelings? No, they were also hurling themselves against a wall that Pablo Picasso had built right in middle of Western Art. After Cubism, where could "important" painting go? 

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943

They discovered new territories and how to get there; their work further widened the definition of art's possibilities, insisting, like the Cubists and the post-Impressionists and the Impressionists before them, that art could and should accommodate more than the conventionally beautiful and the serene, making room for big ideas about civilization, time, eternity, powerful forces of natural energy, and the relationship between the human psyche and the universe at large. Most art history books talk about all this in terms of the formal pictorial elements and the history of Western art, giving ordinary viewers of art very little to go on. 

The Swan, Ryan Cobourn, from a series incorporating classical mythology

How can we, tomorrow night, credibly present the feeling of seeing flowers without painting the flowers? 

I like Brooklyn painter Ryan Cobourn's answer. In this essay/interview he discusses the WHY of what he does and also incidentally hints at the how (I think you learn more from getting the "why" of what artists do than you do from the "how" in any case.)

I like what he says about illusionistic painting (realism) vs. what he does when he removes the representational image but leaves in shapes and colors that, to him, are associated with and suggest - allude to - the subject.


"In abstract painting you don’t have illusion—like illusion of space—but you have allusion. Allusion is way more interesting to me than anything else.” - Ryan Cobourn

This distinction strikes me as analogous to that between prose (illusion) and poetry (allusion). It’s what I like about Eric Aho’s recent landscapes too.

For me, paintings like these have an extra dimension of pathos and significance; because of how they're painted, they also allude to the act of painting itself - the very human need to explore perception and our relationship to nature by scratching our little images out on the wall of history.

I also think the work of a different Ryan, Ryan Coleman, has something relevant to say about our purposes this week (abstraction with floral motif). 

Season of Light, Ryan Coleman

Untitled (Commission for the Ritz-Carleton Wash. D.C.)

This painterly work is lush with the colors, textures, and above all the feelings associated with flowers and plant life - all without painting an image of a single leaf or petal. 

Perhaps you think some of this contemporary work doesn’t get much beyond the "Ab/Ex" guys, de Kooning, Pollock or Frankenthaller… 

.... should that matter? No, you say? Perhaps you’re very right. Just as it wouldn't matter if you're painting landscapes and not "going beyond" Aldro Hibbard. Yet, this was very important to the Ab/Ex guys - they did what they did specifically to "get beyond" the precedents set by the artists that immediately preceded them. Can we have it both ways?

To me, most of these paintings work just as well as much of what I see out there and in many cases much better. What do you think? 

Ryan Coleman, Limey

A lot of people, even painters, look at art like this and, because it puzzles them since it doesn't look like or do what they assume art is supposed to, they say “meh - my kid could do that.” But painting effective abstract art is probably more difficult than painting realistically; it demands that the artist approach all of the basic tools and techniques of painting with a super high degree of knowledge and sensitivity to their inherent properties and their raw emotional value.

At any rate, learning something of the language of abstraction cannot but help you as a painter, for I firmly believe you DO need both, the language of realism and that of abstraction, in your toolbox.

I also believe it’s not that some folks just “know what they like,” as they say, but rather that, in many cases, they really just like what they know. The general public didn’t really understand or like the French Impressionists as they do now until after at least 1950. By analogy, that would put the beginning of mainstream appreciation for abstract expressionism at about 2035. I'm convinced that we're well on our way.

Ryan Coleman

An Exercise in Expressiveness

I recently had a chance to try out some new exercises with two different groups of painters in classes on Cape Cod and at Star Island. The site of a practically untouched 1870s hotel, Star Island is part of the Isles of Shoals, a group of rocky yet beautiful and timeless islands lying 10 miles off the New Hampshire coast.

A painting of mine of the cliff known as
"Miss Underhill's Chair" on Star Island

In one exercise, the challenge was to paint a wholly expressive, abstract interpretation of the environment. The exercise started with a meditative walk in which we tried to be wholly present and to soak up impressions and "notice what we noticed" - a flash of color, the sweep of a cloud, the jut of rock or a root.

Next we returned to the studio and purposely did not paint anything that looked like the location. Armed only with our fresh impressions and memories, we specifically painted not what we saw but what we felt - not our ideas about what the physical place looked like but non-objective, expressive corollaries of the sensations we received from being there.

The point was not to make a masterpiece but to tap into something genuine. Even if the painting "failed" as traditional Western art, it would succeed in its truth and each artist's painting would truly be his or her own.

As it turned out, many of these paintings were not only expressive but also extraordinarily "good" paintings - exciting and surprising works conveying palpable moods and unique perspectives.

Finding and expressing one's heart's truth in painting is a mysterious, blindfolded affair; so much of it comes from parts of us that are inaccessible to rational thought. But we can control what we don't do - we can refuse the rational mind's insistence on what makes a "good composition," we can get around the rule of thirds, the rules of perspective, color theory and proportion.

I think it's probably a good idea sometimes to slip out the back door of the expected and the received and see what happens. 

Monumental Simplicity: Nicolas de Stael

At first glance, I saw only a stony wall of dull, fragmented paint.

Nicolas de Stael, Fugue, 1951-1952 (detail)

But look again, something said.

Nicolas de Stael, Fugue, 1951-1952 (approx. 31"x39")

Then I saw the bright yellow band of color spanning the center, like light emanating through the "chinks" in the "wall" from some concealed paradise beyond. The epiphany of the yellow paint revealed the warm orange I could now see soaking the entire work, with greatest concentration on the top half, where it's both an underlayer and a glaze atop the neutral blue-gray marks.

Nicolas de Stael, Fugue  (detail)

A stabilizing band of joined gray-blue "bricks" at the bottom of the painting parallels the central yellow band; it makes a horizontal "L" shape that mirrors another horizontal "L" at the top (orange-gray vs. blue-gray again), and these two book-ending "L's" snugly contain the whole.

de Stael's Fugue with notations

The central yellow band is counterpointed by three clusters of whitish shapes (mostly, imperfect squares) ranged in pyramid fashion around the center; other shapes (at this point they're more like musical notes than anything else) fill out the composition, alternating between harmonious variety and repetition of color, size and shape. The roughly handled, layered impasto, with its insistence on the materiality of the paint itself, creates of the painting an emphatically "made thing" that nonetheless looks raw and utterly "natural" - that is, without a whiff of rational calculation. It's an intricate dance between order and disorder, harmonized (like any good painting) by subtle choices of design, color, value, and line.

Given a chance, this "wall" of paint becomes as complex, unexpected, and lively as jazz. Now the title, "Fugue," a kind of musical composition in which a theme is taken up and counterpointed by two or more voices in growing complexity, seems fitting. 

Nicolas de Stael, Rue de Gauguet, approx. 78x94 inches.
One of de Stael's largest paintings, this work is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Russian-born Nicolas de Stael (1914-1955) is a lesser-known artist today because he pioneered a radical, expressive, European form of abstraction in the worst possible place at the worst possible time: Paris in the 1940s and '50s, when the titanic achievements of Pollock, Rothko, Kline, de Kooning, Mitchell and their peers in the same realm ostensibly established the ascendency of New York/America over Paris/Europe as the epicenter of avant-garde art. 

Red on Red: de Stael, installation view.

De Stael was born into Russian aristocracy just as the revolution overthrew the country; he was orphaned in exile and spent much of his adult life in serious poverty before collectors began paying big money for his art. It wasn't lack of financial success but something deeper that led him to abandon his growing family, isolate himself in a spot on the Mediterranean French coast with a view onto a military compound, and hurl himself to his death on the rocks at the age of 41.

The abstractions like "Fugue" above originate in paintings by the earlier Modern geometric abstractionists like Braque, Mondrian and others. 

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1935

Mondrian was working out a new idealism in painting, where beauty in art could be reduced (abstracted) to its most essential and stable elements (here, the primary colors, white, black, and horizontal and vertical lines)  - an essentially spiritual quest not unlike Pythagoras's or Plato's to uncover ideal mathematical forms  - the basic "Truths" behind the shifting, multifarious world of appearances. 

Much more of a colorist (and more an existentialist than an idealist) de Stael also seeks and finds lofty harmonies and truths, but he includes the world - which for him also means the hand of the artist. He too seeks philosophical bedrock but without denying the sloppiness and even the ugliness of reality as it confronts us.

Nicolas de Stael, Le Parc de Sceaux, 1952, approx. 63x44 inches.

The color harmonies in "Fugue" and "Le Parc de Sceaux" above seem to pay homage to Corot's lyrical late palette; de Stael was steeped in classical and contemporary painting: Ucello, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van der Meer, de Koninck; and only then Matisse, Cezanne, Soutaine, Picasso, Leger, and above all Braque. “I am now getting to know, seeing and copying, Titian, El Greco, the beautiful Primitives, the last of Bellinis, Mantegna, Antonella da Messina, all of them," he wrote to a friend, "and wish for only one thing: to be able to study them for as long as possible.” 

Nicolas de Stael, Bouttailes (Bottles)

His work, though at first glance chaotic, is a complete absorption and synthesis of the history of painting and always balances original, spontaneous expression with the classical principles of harmony, balance, and restraint; it's always carefully patterned in line and color, harmonious and balanced, and it's made strange to us by its unusual unification of extremes of rough hand-hewnness and refinement - just like the man and his life.

Nicolas de Stael, Ciel (Sky)

His later work saw a return to figuration, and it's credited with advancing a European style of abstract expressionism called "Abstraction Lyrique," or Lyrical Abstraction for its sensuous, poetic interpretations of subject matter taken from the natural world as well as its overt painterly beauty.

Nicolas de Stael, Marine (coastal scene). That midnight blue of the sky!

These works take painting down to its primal elements. De Stael shows us painting as a tool for perceiving the essential reality of things. He strips painting to its most basic building blocks - handmade, expressive line and paint and color - without ever losing touch with its classical principles. 

A landscape by de Stael - lyrical and poetic.

De Stael dug deeply into a series of dozens of works capturing his experience of the raw, elemental nature of colorful bodies clashing against bodies, digging into the earth and each other that is soccer (footbal in France). 

Nicolas de Stael - Le Parc de Prince, 1952

Of these paintings, he wrote to a friend excitedly, "Between sky and earth, on grass that is either red or blue, there whirls a ton of muscle in complete disregard for self with, against all sensibilities, a great sense of presence. What joy! What joy!"

Nicolas de Stael, c. 1953

He kind of approached Modernism like a Rodin: monumental works visibly hewn from the raw material of perceptual reality, the final "meaning" of which is their very testimony to the human effort to use what blunt instruments we have been given to wrestle unprecedented beauty and meaning from the complexity of existence.

In color sense and approach, de Stael puts one in mind (and may help some make sense of) the kind of abstract/observational work one encounters in contemporary perceptual painters such as Ken Kewley.

Ken Kewley, Things Behind the Pines

Thanks, MFA, for getting de Stael back into the conversation.

Exuberant Abstraction

The great American expat painter John Singer Sargent officially closed his portrait studio in 1907. He'd worked hard to become the most sought-after portrait painter for the United States elite, and he was now a wealthy man who could do as he pleased.

A few months later, he was in paradise: living in warmth and leisure on the tiny unspoiled Spanish island of Majorca in the Mediterranean Sea.

His pent-up energy for the life and forms of nature expressed itself in rich, expressive studies of the life among the island's ancient terraced hills and sunny, spice-scented grottos.

The paintings work so well, I think, because of their underlying abstract designs. But the brushwork too veers toward abstraction. In his on-location plein-air studies, his brush was most vigorous and unguarded. His quickened sense of freedom and the brilliant, thriving pulse of natural life led to an expression of unfettered informality not present in his salon pictures or his formal portraits.

Pomegranates, Majorca (1908)

In Pomegranates, Majorca (1908), Sargent celebrates the explosion of gleaming leaves and ripe fruit glowing against the deeper shades of the tree limbs and moist sandy soil. I think he chose the palette for these studies to match at once the earthiness and the airy sea-light of the island.

The painting below, Valdemosa, Marjorca: Thistles and Herbage on a Hillside (c. 1908) hangs with masterpieces of American landscape painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

In person, it struck me as possessing an ecstatic energy such as one finds in the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock.

John Singer Sargent, Veldemosa, Majorca: Thistles and Herbage on a Hillside (1908)

Here's what great painters do: Sargent doesn't just paint the sandy roots and loping branches - he paints an abstract design that expresses an abiding quality - the natural wildness and energy he sensed in it.

In this close-up you can see that the surface of the painting has more than just the "unfinished" sketch-like quality of an Impressionist painting. Rather, he uses every brushstroke expressively. Each stroke contributes a line or a mass that nominally delineates a branch, a leaf, or a root but primarily contributes to the overall feeling he wants to express.

Detail: John Singer Sargent, Veldemosa, Majorca: Thistles and Herbage on a Hillside (1908)

Nor is this just loose painting. These lines are intentionally energetic. Sargent becomes a conduit for the haphazard energy inherent in natural design. Jackson Pollock was the painter who took this method to its logical conclusion, thus contributing an entirely new page to the history of painting.

Here's a comparison. On the right is a detail from Sargent's Majorca painting. On the left is a detail from Pollock's Lavender Mist, also in the National Gallery.

Besides the density of the web of lines, the real main difference, as I see it, is that while Sargent used the forms and colors of nature as his springboard, Pollock just dispensed with the representational role of painting completely in order to maximize the expressive qualities of the medium itself. "I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them," he said in 1947.

Standing in front of either painting is an electrifying experience: both artists shock us with the sheer exuberance one can wring from paint on canvas.