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.
