Seeing Monet's Colors

 

Path Through the Wheat Fields at Pourville, Monet 1882

There is a sense I sometimes get when reading art history books that Monet is considered ever so slightly jejune nowadays.  Great tracts are devoted to Manet's pictorial rebellions and Cezanne's classical abstractions, but it is as though Monet is only worth mentioning but not expounding on at length.  He's just very pretty and appallingly popular.  It reminds me in an oblique way of the criticism Western academies leveled at landscape paintings: that pictures which lack intellectual or moral content are inferior, and that Monet, despite his contributions, was stuck at such a level all his days as the sole holdout of the original Impressionist approach.  Now, perhaps I admit my own level here, but I still favor him of all the original Impressionists, and I wish to speak somewhat on that point.

A couple of weekends ago I was wandering around Denver and decided to make the art museum my destination.  In mind I had an exhibit which I had already seen but which nonetheless drew me, an ongoing display of the museum's collection of 1800s art; to go again would be a treat, and makes me reflect that I ought to purchase an annual pass.  Among those on display, Monet's Path Through the Wheat Fields at Pourville (1882) had particularly drawn me.  I'm not one for artistic thrills but it held me in quiet appreciation for some time, and on leaving previously I had sought in vain for a decent-sized print to accent my apartment.  

However, this second visit was thwarted by COVID restrictions on the number of occupants, and I was about to leave when I had the impulse to wander into the gift shop.  I think I retained the somewhat silly notion that a print of Monet's Path would have emerged in the intervening weeks.  To nobody's surprise it had not.  After spending some time using the gift shop as a surrogate for an actual gallery, and reading enough of a book on landscape art (hence the reference above) to feel guilty enough that I ought to buy it, I was preparing to leave when I encountered the puzzles.  And there, in the middle of the offerings, was my picture in 1000-piece form.  Impulse won and it was purchased, the result being that my dining table has since been occupied enough to force me to eat around the edges.  A happily acceptable cost.  As of this writing I have sunk many hours into its assembly, but cannot brag of more than assembling the outline and middle strip, where the features of land and plant encircle the central sea.

When you stare at a painting, even a real one, you can only do so for so long.  I'm reminded of Clark's quip that he can only be enraptured by a painting about as long as he can enjoy the smell of a fresh orange - or about a couple of minutes.  After that the mind has to do something; it has to find some technique to examine, some historical detail with which to lend it context, just some intellectual program that is deeper than wallowing in sensation alone.  Part of my self-justification for purchasing the puzzle was that my efforts might have the same benefit, giving me something to do while tirelessly keeping my attention fixated on the image.  And there is a certain joy in discovering the mottled subtleties of color that differentiate one area from another, where the mind learns to recognize this thatched azure is not the same as that wispy cerulean.  It is remarkable how I often find myself reaching for a piece before I can say why, only to discover that it is indeed of the fit of some locale I had given upon working on some minutes before.  

If this were all, though, I would have considered my original half-formulated rationalization fulfilled.  But I have also got something I did not expect.  Previously I had noticed that after spending time with Impressionists the world looked somehow prettier.  It was a vague sense, but it was there.  Now, though, after some intensive effort with just this painting I had the most curious experience: stepping out onto my balcony after a few days of this I saw the clouds.  

Shot from my balcony (though not the one I saw that day)

 

 

 

I am an avid patronizer of clouds.  I step outside on more days than not to appreciate them, especially the effect the sunset has over the Rockies as the plains clouds encounter the uplifted terrain.  It is nothing new for me to go look at them in happiness.  But this was a bit different.  This was seeing them with proper attention, all the gradations and mixtures of color that had previously been lumped into one now expanded to read.  I found the same applied to the trees and hills as I drove on the highway, the individual yellows, grays, purples, and greens detaching themselves and each commanding attention.  It is as though my brain is looking for the pieces that would match those patches as well, except having learned that task for a menial purpose has discovered in it a far more rewarding utility.

I am reminded with some humor of my naive, and negative, reaction to Impressionism originally: it was abstract.  This wasn't what the world looked like, especially not what Monet painted.  The world was made up of things, and these jotty strokes were just too fanciful.  I've only learned later that my attitude ironically recapitulated the original reaction, and hence the name given in scorn to the movement.  But of course this name is the truth: it is the result of somebody who has not abstracted yet, who is painting things but is yet only in pursuit of their immediate visual impact.  It reminds me of this video on vision reconstruction and the curious similarity between the reconstructions and works by Turner.  There is a certain genius that was called forth in the 1800s by their intense need to cut through illusions and perceive what the world is really like, and Monet looked.  

This is the first time that "seeing the world in a new way" has held true for me in painting.  As a result of Monet's acuity I have been able to add something to my own faculties as well, something which is more than a passing appreciation of his paintings alone.  For that I am grateful, and now both vehemently agree and disagree with the statements I began with up top: Monet's paintings at their best do indeed contain some emptiness.

Fractals rhyme

From medium.com

One of my pastime thoughts is that if I ever learn enough to warrant it, I would want to teach a "Science for Art Majors" and an "Art for Science Majors" pair of classes, as I think that the separation of the two cultures has largely had an enervating effect on our society.  Science drives our worldview, but our artists being ignorant of it are unable to search for expression in a human fashion.  By comparison, our scientists continue with a course that is unaware of how much of the human experience must be accounted for - let alone the benefits that a liberal education bring, and the fact that scientists are increasingly called upon to act as advisors.

In any case, what follows is something of a fragmentary discussion I had with myself earlier, and would perhaps be a partial lecture or idea in one or both of such classes.  

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”

The famous Walter Pater quote.  Now paired with Rutherford:

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

I would like people to think about these two for a second, for even if one disagrees with the statements I believe they point toward something key in both endeavors.  

What is it that art is after?  Obviously asking such a sweeping question is perhaps presumptuous, and to offer an answer even more so.  However, I am going to try in order to frame the issue as I understand it.  In the end, art to me seems to be the human outlet for expression of experience, an outlet which by and large is able to bypass words because they are too limited.  It is one of those habits we fall into easily, that we think that our words are our ideas, and that our ideas are our experience or Reality (and when I say "idea" I mean it in the broadest sense of concept or symbol).  It is an error I believe even more reinforced by the ascendance of science, that if something cannot be put into words then it does not exist.  

Artists, then, are in the business of annealing these transitions.  For either giving us an insight into their ideas in a way that mere words could not, and, most aspirationally, seeking to perhaps even elevate us to a glimpse of that experience ourselves.  In this long struggle for expression, two trends appear (at least in the West, I cannot speak for elsewhere), which can be broadly termed the Classical and the Romantic.  The former favors form, clarity, and often immortality; the latter the particular, the obscure, and the fleeting.  It is a back and forth, where one approach is ascendant, then the other, and either taken to extremes is moribund.  Ultimately, though, it is about content of experience and finding a way to bring it out.

This, to me, is how I then understand Pater above.  Music is unsymbolic, and while symbols act as convenient vessels for experience (giving it form), ultimately they are all handmaidens (they cannot be the content).  

Scientists aspire in some sense to achieve the exact opposite.  If you read a scientific paper you will notice that the first person is never used and that often references to the researchers entirely omitted; it is as though the experiment ran itself, and that it does not matter who was there.  If art aspires to the state of music, science aspires to the state of physics, which in turn aspires to the state of math (or logic) wherein it is all form and no content.  It does not matter what is in the A's, B's, and C's of a syllogism, and it does not matter whether the object falling from the tower is a cannonball, a rock, or a person so long as one has one or two basic characterizing measurements of them (obviously I simplify the situation; perhaps I should say falling on the moon).  

Last semester I had the opportunity to read several papers about the growing field of "Systems Biology."  It is a curious thing, for as far as I can tell it is yet another sallying forth of the physics mindset into biology.  Its main proponents are indeed the chemists, the biophysicists, and the computer scientists.  It is their goal to find the essential qualities of the biological systems and interpret them as circuit diagrams, much in the same way that once one has figured out the functions of resistor, capacitor, and so forth the details about their composition do not matter, just their given values.  In this way, they believe, at long last biology can be brought into the realm of a proper, predictive science.

What I find particularly telling (and admittedly a bit humorous) is that it has a real hostility to being conflated with molecular biology, which has essentially pursued the same dream its entire history.  It's the vanity of small differences, that with the previous program of molecular biology failing to account for all of life and reduce it to a few pieces we can grasp, a new group has "broken off" and must differentiate itself while essentially doing the same thing, although setting its sights more broadly.

Now, I don't mock this endeavor, but I find it extremely interesting because in my experience biology lies at the tipping point of science.  Science wants to be the ultimate Classical endeavor, and in order to do so the universal must always be able to account for the particular.  Biology as a discipline has clearly yielded a sense of order, with some fields such as population genetics being both amenable to and incredibly informative with such approaches.  

Yet there are always the naturalists, the ecologists, the people who simply like being out in the field and appreciating each species for itself.  It's not that they despise theory or cannot understand it, but like some puff of Romantic spirit that finds itself in expression, they take umbrage with the idea that the diversity they relish is merely noise.  Also with the presumptuousness of people who sit behind desks all day dictating what it is the people in the field must be seeing. 

As such, biology has never quite submitted to the physics paradigm while not yet garnering the scorn that psychology and the social sciences have for their yet greater chaos.  We seem to at least be able to point to something.  So the question in biology goes unanswered: will we know everything when we learn all the principles or study all the organisms?  Is our knowledge to be found in the universal or the particular?  This is obviously somewhat a false dichotomy in practice, as indeed it is always a false dichotomy in practice, since we always need both to make sense of anything in a mysterious epistemological quandary.  But nonetheless, I find its expression in biology particularly illuminating, as both sides manage to be so compelling at once.

It reminds me of history in a way.  Grand theories of history have come and gone, most of them coming to rather swift ruin.  It has happened so much that nowadays it seems to me that historians have resigned themselves to a degree of stamp collecting, of studying only their particular system of events with little hope of applying it to another.  Yet despite it all, I can't help but think Twain has a point:

"History never repeats itself but it rhymes."

Nobody who takes time to study history can miss the immediate similarity of many circumstances to others, especially to one's own.  That is one of its great values is to learn from it; if everything was particular and nothing general, then history by definition would be a science without application.  So how to reconcile this with history's general inability to predict the future?  I don't have an answer, but I have a metaphor.

Fractals Rhyme

I think that everybody who gets a college education, or wants to be educated at least, ought to spend time learning about chaos and fractals.  I believe they offer a sort of avenue out of our conundrum, if we can somehow figure out how, because fractals rhyme too.

Looking at the image above, its self-similarity is self-evident.  You can't miss it.  Yet no part is identically that of any other; zooming in and in and in the same motifs repeat, but none of them are exact copies of any other.  It is the same with the the strange attractors, those multi-dimensional structures which confine the possibilities but due to sensitivity are useless for predicting its precise state long into the future.

I feel there is something here, a version of looking at the world that acknowledges order but admits sensitivity on the particulars.  That there are other forms of order other than the simple symmetry we easily recognize, the simple repetition we easily notice.  I haven't gotten the idea there yet, but just this piece has been enough to tantalize me since I first read about the subject years ago.

In any case, I end this essay with the same inconclusiveness so many others end with, feeling I have somehow said nothing with all my words.  There has to be a way to put the world back together.