The Importance of Attention

One of my continuing thoughts is the issue of analyzing people en masse, the way Asimov imagined history could be calculated using the equivalent of gas laws, and the relative unpredictability of individuals.  Or, you could say an issue of free will.  Even without invoking nonlinear dynamics it seems to me odd that we can learn so much about how people operate by exploring the basest of mental-biological operations while acknowledging that we yet seem capable of moving... if not beyond them, at least in a pattern that is not easily predicted by them.

In fact, there is that element of... how to put it... unpredictability in the behavior of interesting people.  Maybe that's a tautology, that what makes them interesting is their unpredictability, but I don't think so.  It seems to me a byproduct of something deeper, and I have some inkling that it is attention.

Most of our lives are lived on automatic.  I say this without scorn but simple observation, for given the limited resources of our brain it must be.  The myriad of behaviors and activities we must engage in, from handling objects to constructing sentences to the ordering of actions, are best handled by subroutines.  No need to distract us.  Yet I think there is the seduction of convenience here, that we not only delegate these routine matters but almost all matters.  It is as though we are riding a bicycle and are not just content to automatically keep our balance but allow our reflexive responses to divots in the road also determine the greater course.  With ease of action comes habit.  Or perhaps we were never paying attention in the first place.

One of the recurring themes in meditation is attention.  It can either be focusing it on a single object or flexibly allowing it to move across all experience without hindrance, but it still comes back to refining this skill.  I'm reminded of how in Bones of the Master, the monk Tsung Tsai says (jokes, really, because he is delightful) that attention is his superpower.  There is something in this, something that allows for a life that is more than reaction.  It is like it allows for proper action, but what proper action consists of is something of a wisdom-mystery to me still.

Attention, of our mental faculties, seems most linked to consciousness.  If you aren't paying attention you don't seem to be conscious of something, even if in fact you find out you knew it later.  How you can know something but not be conscious of it seems like a paradox, but highlights to me that, again, most of the mind seems to work perfectly fine without our awareness of it.  It is blind sight writ large in our lives, where we mistake our ability to observe the outcome and make sense of it to be the same as initiating it.

I circle around the issue, but it comes back to this feeling that attention somehow seems to be supra-added to our experience, something that curiously is not necessary or sufficient for our functioning yet when brought to bear can elevate it.  That's what makes people most interesting, what makes them unpredictable because they are more than an 80-billion-neuron patellar reflex, is that somehow their attention is turned on.  Turned on themselves, turned on the world, and turned crucially on the border between the two.  When this happens they can behave in ways that are not available to the same system lacking such an infusion.  

I wonder if there is any evolutionary benefit to this.  I recall reading that even flies have attention, but that can be accounted for by the "limited processing" theory mentioned above.  Why would paring down information create more possibilities?  It makes me fear that there may be some semantic confusion involved, such as either a false identification of two things or a weak connection between a very basic and highly derived version of the same phenomenon.  It's as though attention in humans is being fed into a super-system, the general form of learning meta-cognition that is so fashionable nowadays in education.  And then, at that point, the whole system can be shaped in a way which is beneficial.

We still don't know what consciousness is nor have we made a single advance that would differentiate the hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness from the one that the brain merely receives consciousness like a radio.  If the latter, I wonder if it is not absurd to postulate as others have that there is such a thing as a consciousness field that our neurological systems have tapped into, to great evolutionary benefit.  The greater the complexity of the system the "more" consciousness can capture, but also the greater that consciousness can have an effect; more levers at its disposal, if you will.  Clearly I don't know and this is speculation, but at times it seems to suggest to me a coherent framework in which to view all this.

Thank you for your attention.

Statens Museum for Kunst - Part 1

Karel du Jardin, 1663
Boy blowing soap bubbles. Allegory on the brevity of life

I recently had the chance to visit Copenhagen and Amsterdam for the first time, and of course that means new museums.  Following on my previous post on the Portland Art Museum, which not only was a delightful exercise in writing but helped draw out of me thoughts I did not know I had, I want to continue this habit, starting with a two-part on one of my favorites of the trip, the Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK) in Copenhagen.

European Art from 1300-1800

Jacob Biltius, 1670
Dead waterfowl and a huntsman's net
(Frame is part of the painting)

Trompe l'oeil

The shadow cast by the palette is fake (compare
with the real shadow from the cut out)

I love seeing the "special effects" of previous eras.  In this case it is the trompe l'oeil, or a painting that tricks the viewer into confusing it as real by exploiting the then-new technology of naturalistic perspective painting.  I can't say I find any of them great pieces of art, designed to be parlor pieces and conversation starters for guests, but they are delightful in their own little way as a reminder that people have always made clever use of the tools at hand.

The primary collection at the SMK was by the Flemish painter Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, a favorite of the Danish royal family whose collection formed the basis for the museum.  Aside from the run-of-the-mill letterboard impersonations, he had a few particularly fun works.  One was a painting of the back of a painting on the floor (seen in the corner of the picture to the right), done so convincingly that I was fooled just as intended.  Another was a painting of a full easel with all its accompaniments, cut out so as to look like the real thing.  The picture doesn't convey how well it accomplishes this, as when entering the room your first thought is to wonder why the museum thought to put this easel display in the corner.  It's like those nature videos that zoom in on the camouflaged animal; it's obvious when pointed out, but without warning you're thoroughly fooled.

My favorite of them all was, appropriately enough, a false favorite.  While I was visiting there was a special exhibit concerning the Baroque, with an emphasis on how that era captured its sense of change and rhetoric in its art [1].  At the end was Giljbrechts' Trompe l'oeil with Studio Wall and Vanitas Still Life, a two-for-one demonstration of not only the visual tricks but the dominant message of the era.  But when I first saw it, I mistook the intent: I saw the peeling corner of the painting-within-a-painting not as a newly-finished piece being removed but a sign of curling age.  In other words, I thought it was a statement that even the memento mori is temporary, a self-referential reflection that even the issue of life and death passes away.  For a moment I was slightly elevated by the thought... but on reading the accompanying plaque I had my mistake rectified, and was left to wonder on how to credit a piece of art for an experience it did not intend.

Portion of portrait of Yrsselius
(see below)

Reubens

Rubens paints men better than women.  I admit I had always wondered about his fame, because I found nothing he painted appealing.  He had no spiritual power, and the full force of Baroque emotionalism seemed to have inflicted itself on him, to the point that his historical and mythological paintings appeared to me so much a mass of contorted flesh.  The women in particular... at least Ingres and Renoir, who also have a habit of not knowing when to stop with the girls, could hit some genuine high notes.  Rubens was a clean miss despite how large he painted his targets.  All this skepticism felt quite summed, and vindicated, when I read J.S. Mill's feelings earlier this year:

"Who would not prefer one 'Virgin and Child' of Raphael to all the pictures which Rubens, with his fat, frouzy Dutch Venuses, ever painted? -though Rubens, besides excellent almost everyone in his mastery over the mechanical parts of his art, often shows real genius in grouping his figures, the peculiar problem of historical painting.  But then, who, except a mere student of drawing and coloring, ever cared to look twice at any of the figures themselves?" - Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties

This seemed like a satisfactory place to leave the subject: that perhaps some greater appreciation awaited my gaining a greater comprehension of technical details, but otherwise I wouldn't seek him out [2].  But at the SMK they had paintings containing what I had never seen from him: male portraits. What a contrast!  His Franciscan Friar (unfortunately high up on the wall) is startling in its frank conveyance of the sitter's character.  No theatrics, just a clear observation of a not-so-spiritual member of the cloth, Rubens' feeling for fat now put to good use in the rolls under his subject's chin.  It reminded me of the Italian sculptures of their churchmen that were also on display: under the influence of Roman verism, one could be quite forgiven for mistaking Bellini's pope for a mafia don.

Though it would not be true to characterize Rubens as critical of religion, as his portrait of abbot Matthaeus Yrsselius shows.  The painting as a whole isn't quite the best.  The crosier and miter are utterly unconvincing, occupying the same non-space which also contains the incorporeal coat of arms, and there is little enough to guide the eye over the expanse of white ferraiolo that fills most of the frame.  But these details only come to light on further examination because it is once again the flesh that dominates a Rubens.  The head and hands are two islands of perfect study in the aged human form, capturing in full the meandering vein at the temple and the concentric wrinkles that date his fingers like tree rings.  Even the expression is one I could linger on for some time, one that contained enough solemnity to be convincing but did not devolve into a sappy caricature of devotion.  Is the wateriness around the eyes rheumy old age or emotion?  That it quite comes to neither seems to me a fine balance that speaks to how subtly Rubens could paint expression when he wanted.  It ends up, I just saw all the wrong Rubens.

Matthias Grünewald, c1516
The Isenheim Altarpiece

German Artists

If my impression of Rubens was adjusted, however, my feeling toward the German artists was cemented.  Years ago now I saw The Isenheim Altarpiece by Grünewald in a book and my immediate sense was: this came out of a dark place.  This isn't grand suffering like the Italians would portray it, or even the blood-spattered relish the Spanish seem to take in their martyrs, but a screeching, screaming human torment portrayed against a black abyss of a world.  Abandon all hope, ye who dwell here.  Since then I have reflected that I have never found any truly moving Christian art coming from Germany.  It is as though an imagination capable of that kind of darkness is hampered in its capacity for joyous exaltation, and I suspect that much of this finds its roots in an attitude that refuses idealization.

First, let us start with the most obvious: Bosch.  If there is an artist who has more luridly cataloged human perversity, I don't want to know of him (although Goya may come close).  The SMK did not have any paintings by him, but there was one listed as being by his "successor" and you could have convinced me it was an original.  Here we have a Biblical scene of Christ driving traders from the temple, but despite his centrality Christ looks rather bored.  Or I should say unconvincingly benevolent, because one only has to gaze around him to see an invective against human sickness and stupidity.  The merchants leave in an orderly way, the old money changer still clutching his moneybag, while a man at the head of the train points off-canvas, as though to say, "We'll just go set up shop over there instead."  No lesson learned here.  And the the only person who seems to be affected has a look of baffled idiocy, as though it's not possible to teach these dolts, just drive them around like livestock.

Which that's what the rest of the sick and the wretched appear as.  Even if there is intended a moralizing against the rich trading while the poor suffer outside, it fails in the face of a thoroughly unsympathetic portrayal of those masses.  Shuffling, crawling, and half-naked, the myriad of pathetic incidents is overwhelming but not moving; they wouldn't know divinity if it walked up and beat them. There is nothing here that would inspire divinity to suffer and die for their sake, and it is left up to the statue on the right to sum it into a single image: a donkey-headed devil sitting on a pedestal of human asses. 

Next is Lucas Cranach the Elder.  I admit, I associate him with two things: Martin Luther and nubile girls (what a combination).  The museum had an example of his Martin Luther portraits, and it held up well enough, but it was really the latter topic that seemed to delight him the most.

There was one of his many Judgement of Parises, a series whose primary function appears to be an opportunity of illustrating the female figure from the front, behind, and at an angle all in the same painting, and therefore asks the viewer as much as Paris, "Which of these excites you the most?"[3]  However, I did not take a picture of this one as it was far from the best example, but his nearby Venus with Cupid Stealing Honey will do just as well.

From the outset it is obvious that the focus is on Venus; the associated story of Cupid is really a rationalizing excuse, and even his own mother isn't paying attention to him in this painting.  The moral of the story, that just as small bees can inflict great pain in exchange for a small delight, so too can falling in love swiftly turn to heartache, seems particularly flat when Venus herself is beckoning us.  Cranach really does have a sense for the female form, and though it is more Gothically ovoid than we are used to he still makes it compelling.

Yet when it comes to his Madonnas and saints, it all fails him.  Like with Bosch's Christ above, the closest Cranach seems to be able to approach divine serenity in his faces is something akin to sleepy boredom.  Perhaps that's just what he saw on all the faces of people at church when people wanted to look interested.  While I do believe it is fair to admit my own suspicions that I am not perfectly qualified to interpret his expressions, given that his Venus above appears to smirk rather than invite to me (the same sort of expression that appears on Gothic Madonnas), I truly struggle to find any pathos in this painting.  Cranach just has no idea what morally perfect people look like.

I would end Cranach there (and it would certainly be better writing) but there is one more painting I feel must be included if just to make the point: Christ Blessing the Children.  

It is the most compelling religious painting I have ever seen from him.  His Jesus here does have a believable expression toward the child he holds.  But it's almost as though that sufferance relies on the chaos of the rest of the painting, which has a truly accurate depiction of what the scene would have been like: one girl obnoxiously pulling on his robe, another being dragged by her mother for her own good, and a baby being fed while waiting in line just so Cranach can sneak a boob in.  Yet it works because unlike adults, children can be pardoned for their fleshly ignorance, and so Cranach can at least envision forgiveness for them.  It's the exception that proves the rule, that only when people can be reconciled without being perfected can these Germans artists depict unconditional love.

Finally, there is Pieter Bruegel the Elder.  While the museum did not have much by him, and he is not even German, I feel the need to include him as an example of the Northern mindset before commercial success.  

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565
The Harvesters (at The Met)

What he is justly known for are his landscapes littered with people going about their lives.  It is the closest I feel the West has ever approached the Taoist style of painting, where despite acknowledging a kind of supra-human immensity of the world, Bruegel still finds that people have a place in it.  That they are particularized, engaging in the often-difficult tasks appropriate to time and season, adds to the effect that this is not Arcadia but a real lived experience.  No idealization is required to make us just what we are, and having achieved this Bruegel extends a sort of all-embracing sympathy to humanity that cannot be found in the above paintings.

Yet Bruegel was a fierce moralist as well, and when given license to his unfettered imagination something truly awful crawls out in The Strife between Carnival and Lent.  Gone is the gay covering of The Peasant Dance, leaving us only with an image of concentrated revulsion.  Carnival, the time before the religious holiday, is no well-earned joy but a fat imbecile, gorged on his cravings, using approaching holiness as an excuse to indulge rather than prepare.  And Lent... when she arrives the painting does not get one wit less profane.  Practically toothless, she yet attaches herself like a leech, making little impression on her victim.  It is as though Bruegel has reimagined the Furies, except so decrepit that they cannot even exact revenge and so have no future as life-giving Eumenides.  They can only watch as each year the religious calendar is debased as reliably as the crops are harvested and the peasants skate on the ice.

...

Dürer, 1526

There is a line in The Brothers Karamazov where an old doctor recounts that, "The more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular."  This seems to me the dilemma of the German artists.  In every aspect they are resistant to idealization; they must portray what is before their eyes, and when it comes to human beings that disgusts them physically and morally.  It is a reminder that Christianity was an import to the North, a non-native species forcibly transplanted from the light-filled Mediterranean to a more hostile climate [4].  Like how Dürer was forced to abandon his attempts to draw the human body after the Classical style and invent his own schema anew, the long centuries of the Middle Ages were not just about spreading Christianity to the North but attempting to find within it solutions to the needs of these new converts.  I'm not sure it ever entirely succeeded in Germany:

"There lives no man upon earth who can give a final judgment upon what the most beautiful shape of a man may be; God only knows that... 'Good' and 'better' in respect of beauty are not easy to discern, for it would be quite possible to make two different figures, neither conforming with the other, one stouter, the other thinner, and yet we might scarce be able to judge which of the two excelled in beauty." - Dürer

This is for the physical shape, but in the Mediterranean nude the shape was the soul, and a frank observation of humans cannot help but conclude that we are all deformed.  Without idealization, without the belief in a Perfect Man that somehow exists beyond the senses but within us, the hopeful aspect of Christianity could never take root.  All that was left was gargoyles and damnation, and a Protestant Reformation that believed only in grace and not in works.  

At the end here, I want to indulge a bit in speculation at the edge of my knowledge.  Returning to Grünewald's altarpiece, when it is folded open it reveals Christ risen.  Except this is no human Christ but a supernatural specter who does not belong to the same plane as the rocks and soldiers below him.  It makes me wonder whether this attitude, this inability to reconcile grotesque matter with ideal spirit, is what prefigured German Idealism: one can never find true perfection in the world so one must see through it to get at what is transcendently Real.  It is not the senses but the light of the mind that will perceive the true order, for while Christ broken on the cross is a believable human reality one will never locate Christ Divine among us with the eyes.  It was not until they started over, fashioning in sublime Romanticism that same archaic worship of the power of nature and of great men that seems to be the origin of so much religion, that they had something they could call their own.[5]

Antidote

Originally I had intended to conclude the first half there, but despite its power I do not like to leave darkness as the last word in my posts.  Instead, I want to counteract it with pathos.

This painting, The Holy Family, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1613), hardly qualifies as a religious painting.  At least, I felt that any thought of theology merely got in the way of what otherwise is an exquisite application of Baroque emotion.  Something awful is happening, a displacement that has afflicted so many throughout history, and though the child turns to the mother she has no comfort to give in return.  In this moment they are linked in sorrow.  Yet something in the painting is not despairing; perhaps it is the knowledge that this flight is not the end in the original and that greater things are to come, an optimism latent in the beauty of the bodies, the clothes, and the fruit.  Pain can not only be acknowledged but dignified when seen in its place.  This is what Christianity offered: the possibility of seeing one's own suffering reflected in the central story of the world, and so an acknowledgement that one is part of it too.

----

Footnotes:

Museum handout with rhetorical forms

[1] Originally I had planned a large section on this special exhibit, but I found that despite my good intentions it was dull because, truthfully, I found little of it moving, and my best writing comes from responding to the art rather than recounting its historical value.  The header image of this article is a nice example: it was the flagship painting for the exhibition but despite the explanation of what it meant I didn't like it any more than before.  However, I do want to expand on the delightful fact I learned: Baroque art was copying oratory.  

Rhetoric had been considered one of the fine arts since Greece but painting and sculpture had not.  After all, rhetoric could move people, and it was seen not just in the vulgar way we view it as convincing people, but as the power to move and elevate them as well.  To put the spirit of the speaker into the crowd.  When after the Renaissance painters and sculptors were seen increasingly as artists, they naturally copied the model that they had.  As a result, Baroque art is full of posed theatrics, but they are often precisely-defined theatrics that had come down from the tradition of the body language of oratory.  When combined with the renewed emphasis on the transitoriness of the world and religion as the counter, we yield Baroque art: emotional and full of motion, wobbling along the fine line between sincere feeling and exuberant sentimentality.

[2] Since writing this I have read through part of Kenneth Clark's The Nude and been rather backhanded by my idol (who almost seems to be responding to Mill's quote):

"Why do we burn with indignation when we hear people who believe themselves to have good taste dismissing Rubens as a painter of fat naked women and even applying the epithet 'vulgar'?  What is it, in addition to sheer pictorial skill, that makes his nudes noble and life-giving creations?"

It causes me to realize, as I hope to touch on in a future post, how much my own temperament is like Mill's: dutiful, moralizing, and as a result Puritanical even without a religion.  I simply do not have that same unblemished delight in the life of the flesh, and it reliably causes me to prefer Rembrandt to Rubens, Rome to Venice, and, frankly, almost anything to the playfully erotic French Baroque and Rococo.  As a result, Clark's interpretation of Rubens, that he was a soul who saw the bounteous good of God's world in the fertility of his well-provisioned women, is one that is perhaps forever closed to my enjoyment.  But my appreciation of his men here does give me some pause that if he is so capable in a realm I do comprehend, I perhaps just don't understand his message elsewhere.

[3] It is worth noting that Cranach's trios seem to fall into the mold of the Three Graces, a motif of a triplet of nude women that had been used since antiquity.  However, that usually has an alternating front-back-front with interlocked arms, whereas Cranach never does such a thing with his goddesses.

[4] In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell writes:

"The success of Bacchus in Greece is not surprising.  Like all communities that have been civilized quickly, the Greeks, or at least a certain proportion of them, developed a love of the primitive, and a hankering after a more instinctive and passionate way of life than that sanctioned by current morals."

I have a feeling that this is applicable to the Germanic tribes as well.

[5] Later in the trip at the EYE film museum in Amsterdam I toured an exhibit on Werner Herzog.  Several monitors had clips from his movies playing and when writing this piece I was reminded of one from Burden of Dreams:

"Taking a close look around us there is a some sort of a harmony.  It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.  And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly-pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel.  A cheap novel.  And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication.  Overwhelming growth.  And overwhelming lack of order.  Even the stars up here in the sky here look like a mess.  There is no harmony in the universe, we have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it.  But, when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle.  It is not that I hate it.  I love it.  I love it very much.  But I love it against my better judgment." (link)

Underlines mine, for Herzog comes after the Darwinian disillusionment.  Extracting these highlighted sentences, one can still see the same sentiments: pathetic ill-formed humans in a world defined by its chaos and brutality, and a longing after a type of primitiveness that throws off the shackles of suburban mediocrity.

PAM, Right in the Kisser

This last week while in Portland for a scientific conference I had the opportunity to go to the Portland Art Museum (PAM).  I've been making it a habit to visit the local galleries when I can, because after my initial foray into art where I set out to "appreciate" the greats I discovered it was rather the small works that often stayed with me.  As young artists are warned, figures like Raphael and Michelangelo are often initially disappointing because their subtlety and complexity take time and maturity to absorb.  I find myself in the same circumstance, and so in a happily natural progression I will let those come when they will.

However, there was definitely a gremlin at work against me.  Coming into town on Sunday I discovered too late that the museum was closed Monday and Tuesday, only for my conference to start Wednesday.  As soon as the last talk concluded on Saturday I was out the door and on a bus to the museum, only to discover after paying for entry that 3/5ths of it was under renovation, leaving just a special exhibit on Guillermo del Toro (a figure who I admit I feel is just a bit twisted like Goya, except with no true bite) and part of the1800s through modern art collection.  Knowing this beforehand I probably would not have gone, but I wished to convince myself I had not wasted $22 and so devoted my time to examining what offerings I could find.  

The following are my various musing, without an attempt at overall thesis, produced here because having nobody to expend their energy on at the time.  Now they are ripe for expression here, and it is through writing that I discover what it is I believe anyway.

Starting with the Older

Coming into the gallery there is a Rodin titled La Defense, or The Call to Arms from 1879.  I've seen plenty of photographs I believe this is the first time I’ve seen one of his works in person and truthfully I’m not sure what to do with it.  There was the characteristic knobby modelling of the bodies with the imprint of his fingers, creating twisting forms that never seem happy or healthy to me.  Especially here, for I am struck with indecision.  I would have thought given the title that it was intended to be heroic, like an homage to the marbles around the Arc de Triomphe.  Instead, the angel above seems… deranged, the soulless holes of the mouth and eyes conveying a primitive warcry that has no higher attributes of honor or ideal.  The wing, too, bent up top clips its majesty, preventing the spread from being awe-inspiring as one would expect.  This poor soul below is watching a banshee rise from a grave and evoke forward over his shoulder, leaving him unable to do anything but follow, already dying.

The problem is that on doing further reading I found that this was, indeed, a commemoration of the French defense of Paris against the Prussians.  If this is the case then I tremendously misinterpret it; the death is noble and the wing bent merely to give the composition its cuboidal stability in space.  Perhaps this reveals the gulf between then and now, for we're too aware what such triumphal nationalism can lead to and to see it so exuberantly expressed is a harbinger of what terrible things are to come.

In the background of the above picture one can see a Van Gogh cart, which is as despairing as anything he paints, and a Monet waterlily, one of the countless that seem to have found their way into every art collection in the world, but neither engaged me.  Instead I found myself spending quite some time in front of this Renoir, The Seine at Argenteuil (1874).  Renoir has usually been one of my least-favorite Impressionists; his social scenes, though I can admire them as art, are not something I enjoy due to a strange bias against the holiday garb of the time, and his “bovine” female nudes (to quote an art book I once read) always struck me as awful.  This picture is perhaps "safe," but I admit that it is also what I believe Impressionism is best suited to to evoking: the play of light and water, a clear atmosphere, and mundane objects that are made more beautiful for having been painted.  Here it is the gleaming white canvas sail that draws the eye without dominating it, and in topic, structure, and even location I am reminded of the Caillebotte back at the Denver Art Museum.  I always draw pleasure from seeing how the hulls and yardarms compose the order of the painting, and so too here, the similarity of the subject underlining the similarity of the trick.

Next to and surrounding the Renoir were a few Childe Hassam paintings, which functioned as a microcosm for how the Impressionistic style can be applied and overapplied.  Let us start with the lesser example, his Duke Street, Newport (1901).  Here we see an American enthusiastically copying the French in portraying an everyday city… but this city is just not enough.  Aside from what feels to be a simple perspective error of the road, unable to decide if it is receding or twisting backward up a hill, there is a hole here that was not filled.  There is no energy in the people, nor is there any real delight in the trees which fill the upper canvas.  Like a Viscount Lepic that has been robbed of its motion, the girls cross the street eternally under unbalanced boughs, and while the composition would seem to point us toward the bottom left for an answer but there is nothing there to give us a response

Contrast this with the marvelous Isle of Shoals (1907).  The whole thing shimmers, and shimmers in an appropriate way.  It is a rare case where rock dominates an Impressionistic painting and does not look out of place.  The flecked underwater shelf is magnified by the short brushstrokes, the crests in the water and the variegated stone underneath finding a consonance in the treatment; just as how in nature the waves and rock are united in their mechanical effects on each other, ripples causing dunes causing ripples, here they arise from the same process as well.  Then, remarkably, the cliff rising behind this flux feels solid; not monumental or awe-inspiring, but a confident resting place for the eyes between sojourns down into the surf.  The more I look at it, the more I am convinced of a real geology.  I am struggling to find the right expression for it, but despite knowing this is merely paint the flecked suggestions here are enough to make me believe it arose from a real process and has its own history that I could learn by studying.  It’s not just any rock, it’s this rock, this cliff, brought into being.  That it is finally contained with a gentle jagged edge of green one side and blue on the other keeps it from monochrome dullness and out of everything I saw this day this would be the picture I would choose for my home.

Nearby in the same collection is a Pissarro, The Red House (1873).  Normally I find quite some delight in him but here I am... bored.  Despite the name, the composition points firmly to the lone tree.  It's an idyllic sort of oak, and would not stand out as part of a composition, but our attention is hammered home by the flanking houses and the line between the field and grass that is as straight as a table edge.  In fact, now that I say it, it does curiously share the same guiding-isolating structure that gives Leonardo's The Last Supper its focus on Christ, down to the location of the dividing parallels on the canvas.  But here the subject is not exalted enough to warrant such a treatment, falling somewhat short of being divinity embodied at one of the most dramatic moments of Christian history.

To leap ahead, it is like the series of paintings in another gallery by David Rosenak.  I found myself utterly despairing of these creations.  They are paintings designed to look as much like black-and-white vintage photographs, down to displaying the warping effects of a panning camera over a scene.  There is nothing here.  There isn’t even the sort of despairing emptiness one might find in an Edward Hopper contemplating the same scene.  It’s just an absence of anything, good or bad, a prosaic modern view out his window touched up to look like a bygone era saying nothing of either.  While I would not want to tarnish the Pissarro so much by too close a comparison, I nonetheless had myself thinking of lines I had read recently in Whistler’s The “Ten O’Clock” Lecture where he observes that, “Seldom does Nature succeed in producing a picture.”  There has to be something more, for trees or Chevies.

Returning to the past, I passed a few pleasant minutes in front of Montreuil, The Citadel (1911) by Maurice Utrillo.  It isn't great, but it is an easy painting to stare at.  However, the longer I looked the more I became displeased with the façade of the citadel itself.  It feels like it belongs to that of a toy house, too geometric and undetailed, especially when placed next to that delightful right wall that perfectly recapitulates the speckled green of moss infiltrating limestone.  Even the gate on the left has a certain quaintness to it, but the central tunnel swallows up the figures and the center of the painting cannot hold.

Another patchwork piece was Portrait of Countess Zecheny (ca. 1885-1890) by Franz Seraph von Lenbach.  As above, I find the painting overall rather pretty in a basic way, a dull vibrancy to the colors that brings the furrowed brown and bright blue of her hair together with the featherlike dress and its blue frontispiece below.  But the eyes.  What strikes one most in person is that despite all this effort to move toward the ethereal, less-finished style, the eyes remain completely classical.  One can move closer or further away and watch the rest gain and lose their identity depending on the level of focus, but like the haunted portrait that follows your moves the eyes remain steadfastly etched.  I can’t say this is to the painting’s credit, but it is an odd effect that I had some enjoyment in puzzling out.

Break

I realize part way through writing this that I am aping Kenneth Clark, whose autobiography I am reading at this moment.  I cannot match his natural eloquence but I still find in the general tenor of my paragraphs an echo of his own, especially with the inclination to try and make the endings epigrammatic (how successful I am I will let the reader decide).  While this is a natural habit of mine it is enhanced at this moment along with the general front of confidence in my opinions.  It is as though in proximity to his own related aestheticism my own is kindled, and I speak with a conviction about my own artistic response that I would not regularly muster.

Returning to the artworks themselves, from hereon out they will become increasingly modern.  Let us take this Blomman på heden (Flower of the Moor, 1902) by August Strindberg as a turning point.  Not as new as some of the above pieces, yet sufficiently gobbed with paint that one can say confidently we’re after Van Gogh.  Yet I must say that Van Gogh has never appealed to me, at least in the replications and the few of his lesser works I’ve seen in museums; I might be too inherently optimistic to share in his intense pathological despair, and what impressions I may gain from afar may be quite insufficient to convey him anyway.  

However, I do not suffer the same here.  While the sky is certainly ominous, there is nonetheless that beautiful mid-storm light that sometimes comes when the sun shines from below the clouds.  Like a lighthouse over a turbulent sea, the white flower rises above the thicket to capture it and allay any real worry; I cannot feel oppressed by this painting even if the clouds and brambles would threaten to sink me otherwise.

By comparison, I took a picture of Oannes et le Sphinx (1910) by Odilon Redon precisely because of the ghastly face.  The more I look at this painting the less I quite know how the parts work.  I cannot shake the impression that Oannes appears as a butterfly rather than the half-fish, half-man emissary of wisdom from Babylonian mythology.  Which only brings up a question as to what the title of the painting even suggests.  A meeting of two ancient representations of knowledge?  If so, they do not seem at all benevolent; the Sphinx has an eldritch horror mouth on its side and Oannes seems second cousin to Quetzalcoatl, ready to feed on the next Aztec blood sacrifice.  But really, it is just that face.  There is a condensed ancient malice in it that I find morbidly appealing, made all the more effective by the bright colors in its corona, decadent finery on this risen corpse, and I think it is perhaps wise to not try to ask any more questions of either of them.

I had another prolonged conversation with Frühe Stunde (Early Morning, 1935) by Karl Hofer.  When I looked at this piece I spent most of my time scrutinizing the woman rather than the Putin-istic man.  I was initially put off by the left side, a sort of square geometry that feels misaligned with the rest, but was ultimately won over by the delicate solidity of her upper body.  She has, to paraphrase Eliot, the look of a woman who is looked at, appreciated.  She is truly lovely.  My attention was only secondarily given to the man, who I noticed did not seem as admiring of her as I was but thought little of it.  

Later in the giftshop I picked up a book on the PAM offerings and happened to flip to this painting, where in it offered a historical context: terrible things are coming in Germany in 1935, and Hofer contemplates what this will visit on the beautiful things that sleep under the care of those who will soon betray them.  This reading is also supported by the sleeping dog, where loyalty and fidelity have failed their watch.  At first I was resistant to this interpretation, as I often find such direct symbolic readings dull, but after a few days I find myself agreeing that one cannot write off the man as harmlessly expressionless as I had hoped.

Now we reach the abstract and I enter my personal terra incognita.  I do not know what this thing is, this Figuration G. XXI (1962) of Gerhard Wind.  I guess that’s not the question in such a work, but nonetheless I found myself trying to fit it to a factory or, better, an oil rig.  Hard lines and angles with gaps, an unbalanced structure that looks like it ought to fall over.  Unquestionably industrial.  I have not presented these artworks in the order in which I encountered them, and this was one of the first I saw during the day.  Why I was compelled to take a photo of it I am still uncertain, and unlike above I find that my writing here has not revealed anything further.  It is not pleasant to me, it does not mean anything I can divine, yet here I am trying to puzzle something out; perhaps its time has not yet come.

The next two pieces I have a less mysterious lack of regard for.  One is Noble Regard (1989) by Jules Olitski and the other Torn Cloud Painting (1975) by Joe Goode.  The first is not properly conveyed at all by a photograph, for it is as three dimensional as the Sahara, and that is really its charm.  But only its charm.  I can’t see it as anything more than a pleasant visual impression, and while it would be a nice wallpaper I can’t respect it.  This same criticism applies to the second.  Is it clever?  Yes!  It is actually quite an effective little trick, the way the artist has ripped the paper to well-mirror the patches of blue sky through a cloud (though looking at the photograph I see yet again that it fails to capture the effect so prominent in person).  But that is where it ends as well and without the hint of the title I might have missed it entirely.

It reminds me of a common complaint I have with 20th century art.  While much of it is extremely advanced, a reply to a reply to a reply of an artistic conversation coming to its long end, there remains nonetheless a whole corpus that is just too… basic for me to feel as though it ought to be considered art proper.  Even sweeping aside all the bad works produced under the fervor of manifesto rather than aesthetic perception, the remaining are often just visual experiments or parlor tricks.  Noble Regard demonstrates for us a single effect; I cannot see how it evokes anything more complex than our appreciation for sinuous lines in semi-regularity.  Similarly, Torn Cloud Painting is a demonstration of a technique at best, an addition to our toolkit that awaits a meaningful integration into a greater whole, but until then languishes as a curiosity.

I say this, but then I am forced to retreat before the Rothko-esque Untitled (1969) by Jake Berthot, and admit that in art as in science, sometimes it is the apparently banal experiments that offer new avenues.  When I read back over my art history notes, my encounters with Rothko have been… uneven.  My first reaction is pure dismissiveness, asserting that calling a few color swatches "art" is fatuous nonsense.  My second reaction is perturbed perplexity, wondering how it is possible these works can have the effect they are reputed to have.  Now here, a third reaction, is one of a slight understanding.  

Of all the artworks I discuss here, those of pure colorists do the most poorly out of context.  Online the picture is just a dull blue-teal box.  In real life it is tired.  The stained edges around the central rectangle give a sense of viewing, as though through a window, except that in abstract it is nothing that is viewed except the entire emotional tone of experience.  I am frustrated because I cannot use my photographs to reelicit the viewing in the original; they can only remind me of what I thought I ought to write down later.  As the best art writing is always produced when reliving the perception, the attention kept focused by the need to appraise what is going on inside, I can only bemoan that I am approximating a memory.  So to end with a contemplation instead: color came into its own late in Western art, late like music, and that perhaps this is not a coincidence. We're concrete creatures reliant on particulars to hook concepts and so it is a long development before color and and music may deliver on the promise of an unsymbolic evocation of human experience.  I await seeing Rothko in person before speculating any further.

As for this monolith, the Dual Form (1965) by Barbara Hepworth, it sent me down a different line of thought.  The name is from its composition of a second flange to the one seen, the two placed at an angle and fused along one edge.  As I gazed on it I was reminded of how the new has managed to come around to the old, but without the same charms.  If this had been produced by a paleolithic tribe I would have been impressed, not because of the technical achievement but because there is a sort of elegance to it that one could see deserved worship.  It has a presence. But coming as it does now it seems too simple a thought to be worth noting, something I would admire more if it were the design for coinage to be looped through the center than a monument to be admired.  We can't really believe in it and so can only evoke the ghost of belief past.  I guess this isn’t really a different line of thought than above, just arising in a different guise, as I once again try to tease apart as I have before.

Finally, I am ending with a peculiar painting, Le Petit Pâtissier (The Little Pastry Cook, ca. 1921) by Chaïm Soutine.  It doesn’t belong here chronologically or thematically, but like the Figuration G above I just don’t know what to do about it.  The thing is, I look at it and my first thought is, “I shouldn’t like this (because I know I don't like things like this).”  And I don’t really like it.  After staring at it briefly I walked away.  Then I came back and stared at it some more.  Left, came back, and eventually took a picture.  It reminds me uncomfortably of all the Expressionist paintings that I find chilling and abhorrent, the deformed humans hinting at a diseased perception that I wish no part in.  But there is nothing threatening about this painting; there is a genuineness in the chef’s smile that is mirrored in the fondness of the title.  

Beyond this, I didn’t know how to express it, but there is a rhythm to it.  The elongated left leg that my conscious mind finds disreputable nonetheless caused me to look at it again and again, feeling it was somehow the extension of a larger pattern.  This is perhaps what I meant above with Noble Regard: the pattern alone was insufficient, but when the same is embedded in a representation they become more than the sum of their parts.  Dwelling on it, I have a sudden glimpse of what made up the genius of the Greeks, except their pattern was more geometrically golden than this.  The undulations here express something, but what it is I do not yet know.

Worth writing down

What to do with all this?  I started writing with a belief that I had gotten little from my visit to PAM and end seeing that I got far more.  As is evidenced by the year-long gap since my last post, I have not been intellectually active in this region for some time (although more than the total silence would indicate), and it is a joy to feel these circuits which have lain dormant to come back alive when called upon.  There is a freehand freedom I enjoy when writing these, knowing I know little yet finding validity in the process when undertaken in good faith.  If anything, it is the opportunity to relive it more deeply, since one can only stare at a painting for so long before it becomes tedious but with an intellectual focus the energy can be maintained for a much longer period of time.  I just hope in the editing I did not lose the germ I had when I put the first draft down.

Which makes me reflect on how it is worth not getting in the way of one's own deeper sentiments.  Like with the chef painting, it's too easy to think our way out of what we know to be true just because we can't explain it immediately.  While this can fall into self-indulgent rationalization, I think when handled with care it is one of the most important skills to have, since it is certainly not the conscious mind that comes up with our greatest thoughts.  But this is why we write things down, I guess, to give us a chance to hear ourselves.