A Chance Meeting

Browsing through some upscale gallery websites recently, I started feeling like someone at a gourmet restaurant receiving course after course of delicious rarities. Inundated with a surfeit of gorgeous imagery, I was wondering how one proceeds as an artist beyond simply adding to the already immense smorgasbord of gorgeousness, when I stumbled on this work by minor 19th century German artist, Johann Jungblut.

Johan Jungblut, Gathering on a Frozen Waterway, 1890

Gathering on a Frozen Waterway stopped me, because the vision of humanity that it conveys is one that I myself feel deeply. It doesn't matter that Jungblut was and is obscure, nor that I've never been in Bruges in January hunkering down against the wind in a beaver-fur hat. I respond immediately to the tableaux, which places small anonymous figures (as I read them in this setting, representative of the human) between a larger expanse of reflective, impenetrable ice, under a wide, dense sky diffusing what light there is through a crystalline, icy atmosphere. This, Jungblut seems to imply, is the condition of humanity on this earth.

Jungblut seems to have painted practically the same painting over and over again: people gathering (often walking home) amid snow and frozen rivers beneath a low horizon with the orb of obscured sun or moon central to the composition.

I just want to say to him, "Yes, my friend, I know what you mean."

Johan Jungblut was a solitary figure who lived alone; he made frequent trips to Holland to paint, specialising in Winter scenes infused with tranquil light. Today the museums of Brooklyn and Mayence (in France) display his work. (bio from a gallery Website)

John Henry Twachtman - Atmospheric Mastery

John H. Twachtman, Winter Harmony, 1890-1900

American painter John Henry Twachtman created this sumptuous composition of gauzy grays, pinks, blues, and rust-colored leaves on the 17-acre home he bought for his wife in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1890 after landing a commercial illustration gig with Scribner's and a teaching position at the Art Students League.

On display at Washington D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, this painting pulses with the muted polyphony of warm and cool colors enveloped in almost palpable atmosphere.

Twachtman is usually categorized as an American Impressionist and Tonalist painter. The publication of several catalogues and books on his life and work published during the 1990s built upon a 1966 retrospective that saved him from obscurity. Since 1987, a gallery owner and dealer of Tonalist and Barbizon paintings, Ira Spanierman, has been spearheading a catalogue raisonee listing his collected works. Spanierman has posted a nice bio of the painter and a random assortment of images online.

Twachtman's Winter Harmony employs a circular composition to keep the eye moving throughout. But that's not what earned this painting its more or less permanent place in history. The entire thing is a luminous riot of alternating currents - familiar scenery and an extraordinary scene, warm and cool colors, rounded horizontal and straight vertical lines, all playing counterpoint to each other within the larger, circular composition that keeps the eye moving and jumping all over the canvas until the naked lyrical miracle of the thing near knocks you out (!)

Detail, Winter Harmony, John H. Twachtman, 1890-1900

Twachtman isn't about classical finish. Just look at the way he's "roughed in" the colors and lines here! He's after freshness, energy, and spontaneity, and he gets it, but it's tempered by a straightforward lyricism that's largely the result of how he's "keyed" the painting (in terms of the predominance of relative lights and darks) by pulling the values closer to neutral and to each other throughout.

A painting of a wooded interior covered in snow and ice can be awfully cold, considering the tendency of the untrained eye to register such a setting's predominance of cool colors like blue, bluish-white, black, white, and gray. But Twachtman forestalls any of this with an infusion of hazy reds and russets in tones and proportions that indeed "harmonize" with the misty blue-grays and viridians.

At the center of everything, even the purple icy stream warms to a reddish ochre as it joins with the snow-lumped banks.

This is vibrant work. In person, it provoked an old feeling of mine that arises from time to time. It happens when I'm confronted by a work of art of such beauty that I can almost see it flickering between ideality and the real. Sorry if that sounds too mystical. It's a nameless, somehow simultaneously jubilant and melancholy feeling that has something to do with being in the presence of humanity's potential for understanding and achievement despite the brutal indifference of nature and the relentless force of time.

Bruce Crane, winter radiance

Bruce Crane stands out as one of the most sensitive and ethereal of the American Tonalist painters who saw themselves as carrying the torch of the American landscape tradition after the demise of the 19th century Hudson River School style. Crane helped found a colony of landscape painters at Lyme Connecticut. Most active as a community during the first decades of the 20th century, they blent Barbizon and Impressionist sensibilities toward a fresh, evocative re-visioning of the American landscape.

His landscapes are spare, poetic meditations steeped in atmosphere. Painting into the 1920s, he increasingly suffused his arrangements of natural elements with a golden radiance suggestive of a spiritual sensibility. His subject is usually common scenery - everyday scraps of nature: pastures gone to seed, tall, thin scraggly trees, collapsing rock walls, fences, and stumps. But he wonderfully half-dissolves his forms in the airy atmosphere he builds around them (for all their subjects' gauziness, these paintings's surfaces are quite thick with substantial layers of paint).

Like so many of the Tonalists who followed in George Inness's footsteps, Crane spent time in Europe where he was awed by the compositions and moods of Barbizon painting. Inness, it seems, had articulated a vision of nature very like Crane's some years before.

The above painting is by Crane. In mood, tone, and even somewhat in composition it recalls a well-known Inness depicting a lone figure making its way through scrappy snow on Christmas Eve (below).

Another Inness in which Crane could have found inspiration for his own work.

I'll return to Crane another day to really get into some of his most interesting later work.

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.

What mad pursuit?

I stumbled upon this ancient marble relief while poking around in the online collection of the Museum of Fine Art (Boston). They've catalogued the entire collection, near as I can tell. The only problem is that it's difficult to find and not easy to navigate. You can take your chances on it here.

I have yet to get the background on this Greco-Roman carving. It made me think immediately of Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats. I loved the poem as a teenager (he had me at "still unravished bride of quietness") mainly because I believed its message of the universal value of art that outlives our smallness and mortality to be "a friend to man."

I didn't realize that, as the poem moves around its subject (the carvings on the "Attic shape" of the Grecian urn), Keats is describing a fairly common subject of Greek vase relief-carving. The images that inspired Keats's musings about art come from a pagan celebration scene very much like this one, a haunting "leaf-fringed legend ... of deities or mortals, or of both" that leaves us asking, "What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"

Maybe we can never know the final "truth" about a work of art - or anything else, for that matter - but compelling creative works console us with their timeless presence, for we know they too arise from unknowing - and yet they're their own "answer," and at times may even persuade us of the beauty of our predicament.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats

from Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1820

Chauncy Ryder: "the poetic aspect of nature"

The Long Trail, Chauncy Foster Ryder, 1934

A largely forgotten master landscape painter created this large oil on display at the Currier Museum in Manchester, NH in 1934.

You won't find Chauncy Foster Ryder in any of the standard art history books. But thanks to the Web's incredible ability to share information, you can acquaint yourself completely with him here.

Bear Creek, Chauncy Foster Ryder, undated

Ryder's style corresponds to that of other pre-WWII, post-Impressionist landscape painters of New England who are better known, but still relatively obscure, such as John Enneking, Charles Hawthorne, and John F. Carlson. As one writer saw it in 1978, Ryder painted with intuitive feeling in pursuit of "the poetic aspect of nature."

A close look at the brushwork on The Long Trail reveals the semi-abstract, exaggerated impressionism of this style. Their paint handling brought a renewing approach to the landscape tradition t a time when modernist abstraction dominated painting, and representations of nature seemed predictable and passe.

Detail, The Long Trail

As the curator of one of his current fans, Child's Gallery points out, Chauncy drew favor for "the way his landscapes engaged the aesthetic of the abstract without presenting abstract subject matter, in a time when the general public was unsure about how to approach truly abstract art."

I'd call the paint handling gestural rather than impressionistic.

Chauncy himself seems to have lived a life devoted to his art, encouraged by a supportive wife who was willing to sell everything they owned and move to Europe so he could train in France. Below is his academy painting. Depicting wary onlookers eyeing the detritus of a shipwreck, it shows that he had no problem adapting his style and subject matter to the prevailing tastes of the day.

Chauncy F. Ryder, What the Sea Gives Up, Paris Salon of 1907

And here is a visual analysis of the composition of the Currier painting that reveals some of why it works so well. In addition to the careful design, which creates a vigorous rhythm of criss-crossing vertical and horizontal lines, the center of the painting draws attention as the warmest region (in terms of warm and cool color) within an interesting alteration of warm and cool colors.

Compositional geometry of The Long Trail

The status and interpretations of Ryder's work raises a couple questions for me. What does it mean that Ryder's work was forgotten (or almost) in favor of the more experimental, perhaps more adventurous and "progressive" of the modernists and abstract expressionists of his time? Is characterizing his approach as "poetic" an apology for his lack of innovation? Was he just not "going far enough" when he put one foot in the abstract expressionist camp but stuck to "safe" familiar and appealing subjects when the general public was "unsure about how to approach truly abstract art?" Can the "poetic" quality be separated from the quasi-abstraction to legitimate his paintings in their own right? Any thoughts?

The Shimmering Still Lifes of LaFarge

Flowers in A Persian Porcelain Water Bowl, 1861

John LaFarge had the kind of restless innovator's talent that drives someone from obsession to obsession.

LaFarge (1835-1910) broke ground in color theory, stained glass (he invented opalescent glass), illustration, printing (he pioneered the huge influence of Japanese silk screens on American artists), criticism, landscape painting (some of his near-abstract sky-scapes look downright postmodern to me - how radical they must have seemed in 1874)...

I don't think anyone has done the scholarship needed to catalogue and make available the extent of the work of this multi-talented and very influential figure. But it's clear that he surrendered to his own individualistic muse, seizing upon things he loved in various media and synthesizing them into new forms.

LaFarge's Flowers in Flowers in A Persian Porcelain Water Bowl is unusual for its delicate overall tonal color effect - it's like we're viewing the whole scene through an opalescent, diaphanous gauze.

Boston's Gardner Museum has a landscape (a snowy New England barn roof jutting up under a high, cerulean sky) by LaFarge but they don't allow photographs, and sadly the work isn't included in their "masterpieces of the collection" catalogue. So we'll have to content ourselves for now with this gorgeous still life and this part-random spray of petals, leaves, and blossoms that goes by the name Apple Blossoms.

Apple Blossoms, oil on wood, 1878

Apple Blossoms shows the synthesis of Japanese printmaking and North American subject matter. It lives by virtue of its shallow yet lively semi-abstraction.

This painting's flattened patterning of background petals, leaves, lights, and shadows, forms a variegated skein of color and texture over which LaFarge floats the pink and white flowers presumably still on the branch. Rather like Matisse (b. 1869) would later, LaFarge here successfully poises the painting halfway between naturalistic representation and decorative abstraction.

Hats off to an American innovator who rightly followed his muse across the boundary lines and who I'm sure one day will be far better known than he is now.