Not-so-puzzling Hiroshige

It's been some time since I wrote on puzzles.  It began with the Monet puzzle I purchased years ago on a whim, that serendipitous little choice that turned out to be so incredibly rewarding.  I've since kept it up as a minor habit; I'll never be an artist myself, and so not have an artist's eye for works, but as I alluded to in the original post the idea that I could learn from hours spent staring at puzzles has indeed paid off.

Take for instance two pieces that would seem at first quite disparate: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and Bouguereau's Childhood Idyll (1900):

 

The latter is a small favorite of mine from the Denver art museum; a bit standard and saccharine, but I like it nonetheless for the real sweetness it also contains.  Bouguereau was known for such works, an exemplar of the academic establishment at the time (Manet, on getting corrective lenses, was said to have taken them off and thrown them down, exclaiming with disgust, "Now I see the world like Bouguereau!").  Now, I knew that academic painting had its roots in the Renaissance tradition, but it was more trivia than working knowledge.  However, coming to the feet I made a bit of a connection: oh, this is what statuesque flesh in painting is:

Despite their relative tenderness, they have the same firmness of line, the same roundness of form, the same solidity, as Michelangelo's more muscle-bound creations.  Modern European painting started with the sculpture, ironically, and it didn't lose that sensibility until now.  The inherent sense that what I am seeing could just as effectively be created in the round is what defines this academic tradition, and why the first thing modernists did was dismantle the ability for their paintings to ever be viewed as anything real.  Which segues nicely into Hiroshige:

Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, 
No. 101 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1857)

I stumbled on the puzzle up top in the Columbus art museum.  It wasn't even in the museum itself (apparently it's in Brooklyn), but caught my eye because I hadn't assembled a puzzle in years due to graduate school and teaching.  It seemed like a good one to start with.  It also ended up being the easiest puzzle I had ever assembled.

When you read about the wave of Japonisme that swept Europe in the 1800s one of the things that is frequently mentioned in painting is the Japanese use of space.  More particularly, that the Japanese are prone to using large, flat areas of color, such that rather than model an object with light and shadow it is identified by its tone.  Again, something I "knew" but this absolutely proved it to me.  After spending time with it I can confidently state that every single object in the print has its own unique color.  The wood is one hue of orange, completely separate from the reddish-orange of the text regions or the burnt red of the sunset horizon.  The sky is white, blue, and deep navy, none of which can be confused for each other, let alone the white of the cat or the blue of the towel.  There is a green field and green flooring but I never once mistook them.  In short, every time I picked up a piece I knew immediately where in the puzzle it belonged.

More subtly, each color-object had its own "region".  That is, you could imagine a style in which each type of object has its own color - there could be multiple patches of sky or earth, for instance, occupying different regions of the work but united by their shared hue... but there aren't.  The closest are the paper walls on either side, but everything else not only has its own color it also occupies its own particular spot; the middle-distance yellow cottages are in one place, the brown roof of the closest hut in another, and you won't find any of them dotted in the distance signified by a shared color.  The result is a steady color advancement as you move across the print, like one of the many modern experiments with pure color bands.  A Rothko given form.  Not only did I know where pieces were found, but after the outline I assembled this puzzle sequentially from the bottom up, something I have never done before.  It was simply natural to do so.

And finally, underneath it all, it gives a hint as to the roots of the art.  The Europeans started with sculpture but the Asians started with calligraphy.  This image is as flat as paper.  Sure it has some perspectival elements thrown in, recently imported from the West at the time, but the writing on the side, contained in its flat blocks of color, is not at all out of place.  If this were a European painting those squares would have a sense of "floating" above the painting, and as such would clash with the intent of producing a window into another world.  Here, however, they are integrated into the design as much as any other element; the label is part of the painting.  The same is true of the black, decorated border on the left - this is not an attempt to recreate reality but an artistically-complete postcard.

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A strange aside that I wish to remark on.  As I have alluded to, I have been fond of many anime over the years, and of these none more than Gunslinger Girl.  I originally pirated the series and in that version the top and bottom had decorative bars:

I have always wondered about these.  I assumed they were part of the fansubs, because that's where they put their translation notes, but I have never seen any other fansub add space in this way.  The later official Funimation release removes them, so I thought perhaps that they were an artifact of aspect ratio or some such thing.  

But the more I compare them to the Hiroshige above, the more I wonder if they were actually part of the original.  It is hard to explain, but whenever I watch my newer release I miss them.  Like how Funimation rebalanced the sound so that the subtle background noise, as well as some of the finer touches of voice acting, are removed, perhaps they in their dullard way also thought the series would benefit from stripping it of its original "frame" as well.  It's hard to describe the effect they have, but despite the profound realism of the series it also ends with a sense that it is a story, a piece of something that is contained within something greater than that story.  As such, the artistic inheritance of borders was more than appropriate.  However, without access to the original airing, this remains devoted speculation.

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However, if there is no pretense at being reality, there is sure a pretense at being calligraphy.  Look at box of writing in the upper right: 

There is a conceit here: drips of ink in the red and blues.  This is a woodblock.  It was carved then pressed, not painted with a brush.  And yet included is the unmistakable pattern of seeping water, as though it had in fact been painted onto the final paper all along.  It is a masterful recreation of a slightly-botched original form.  How delightful!

The writing, too, echoes itself in the cat:

Of all the segments, these were the only two I confused: when I first picked up the piece that outlined the top of the hind leg with its curling line I thought for sure it belonged with the "no" in the text.  This sense of similarity overrode my later realization that there was clearly no region of white large enough between the drips.  The cat is composed of calligraphy.  It isn't a character, per se, but it could be the origins of one.  It makes one wonder how much the history of ideograms in Asia has influenced their art, if the impulse toward using as few strokes as possible to delineate an object comes not just from their philosophy but from the visceral sense that just as objects in the world have become distilled into simplified forms, visually inaccurate but richly meaningful, such is their essential nature when the writing reverts to representation.

Which brings me to a somewhat-paradoxical observation I have heard before, and that is that the Japanese adore Botticelli.  This was always a bit of a puzzle to me.  Why him and not other Europeans who also use the "wiry line of rectitude" (to quote William Blake) to outline their solid forms?  Thinking on this more I realize that this is because in Botticelli they do not actually do so.

At the museum was also a puzzle of the Birth of Venus.  I had considered purchasing it since I want to understand Botticelli better as well, but decided that I would rather work on Primavera instead for that project.  But while I was staring at the front of the box I noticed something: Botticelli's water is medieval.  It is flat.  The background does not have perspective but is instead simply behind her, a field of symbols.  The shell, too; its slightly awkward perspective always bothered me, but I can see now that, in part, this is due to the fundamentally symbolic feeling of Botticelli.  He isn't quite like the other Renaissance painters trying to reproduce reality.  He's trying to bring the solid visual reality of the Greco-Roman world into line with the ethereal, symbolic one of the Christian era.  As such the painting contains aspects of both, the result being that Venus is less an object than an icon.  One could imagine a world where in time a simplified ideogram of a woman standing on a shell became the "word" for creation springing forth, begetting more creation.  All it's missing are the bars on the side to indicate that it is a manuscript rather than a portrait:

Herman, Paul, and Jean de Limbourg
The Annunciation in The Belles Heures of Jean de France (1405–1408/1409)

 

Mary Cassatt

Baby's First Caress, Mary Cassatt (1891)

"The truth is that our value lies in feeling, in intuition, in our vision that is subtler than that of men and we can accomplish a great deal provided that affectation, pedantry, and sentimentalism do not come to spoil everything." - Berthe Morisot to Mary Cassatt

Over the last few years I have become immensely fond of books that focus on a single artist.  While there is something exhilarating in the grand sweep of an intellectual tradition, it has become a firm belief of mine that to truly understand any person of note you must have a chronology of their work, sampled across its various phases.  No great artist or thinker ever stands still, and neither an average nor their mature efforts alone will give a true accounting of their deepest nature.  And so it has become that I do not so much read novels as read authors, not so much view masterpiece paintings as masterful artists in their entirety.  I wish to benefit from their vision, not just admire its results.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) has been on my radar since attending an exhibit on American artists in France a few years ago at the Denver Art Museum.  She immediately stood out for pictures like the one that head this post: images of mothers and children together, portrayed in ways that were often not flattering yet very moving:

Mother and Child (c1890)

What may not stand out immediately to many viewers, but which struck me strongly, is that the children look right for once.  It takes some context to appreciate this.  Take this Madonna by Raphael for instance:

Madonna del Granduca, Raphael (1507)

It's one of his well-known masterpieces but the baby... it's just not quite right.  The chubbiness is well-observed but the attitude is not.  The placement of the hand is too firm, and the face too full of awareness, for it to be quite right; there is, in essence, a lack of the spontaneity and thoughtlessness that comprises the nature of a young child.  It is still the psychology of an adult scaled down.  It could be argued that much of this is intentional given the subject matter, but you'll find no better treatment in all of Western art; babies and young children may be accurately rendered, but even if they look like an approximation they don't feel like one.  This is where Cassatt shone to me, and after having become quite inured to this state of things over the years, seeing an artist blow this all away made me realize what had been lacking.  When a book on Cassatt showed up at my local used book store it swiftly joined my collection, and having read it I am of the opinion that she is truly the greatest artist in history at her niche, but that she was held back by her intentions rather than aided by them.

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First to start with context: Cassatt was an expat on a mission.  She was born in the US but moved to France early in her adult life.  This was in part due to America being an artistic backwater and in part because France was (a little more) tolerant of women with ambitions.  This latter aspect was a defining mark of her personality: she was a feminist, and felt a proper indignation at the expectation that she do nothing more with her life than make the existence of a husband's more pleasant (Cassatt never married).  Above everything, then, she was driven to show that she could perform at the highest levels, as well as any man could, and by extension to prove her and all women's worthiness to engage in art.  Take this mid-career piece:

In the Loge (1879)

It rather strikes me as a projection of herself as she wishes to be viewed: a serious, intelligent woman who is a consumer of the arts.  She is the focus of the painting not because of her appearance but because of her engagements.  It is with no small amount of spite that Cassatt includes a man comically posed in the background, peering at her through his eyeglasses; a buffoon who in his gawking does not appreciate the gravitas of this woman.

...and yet, I find myself put off by the picture.  It is a bit too posed, and in her emphatic depiction Cassatt has made her figure too "hard"; rather than being led to the vision I crash into it and capsize.  It is a case where I feel a painting has strayed from expression to manifesto.  That is, Cassatt is not so much painting what she deeply feels and believes, which is the wellspring for all great art, but merely what she has consciously decided upon and is trying to prove to us.  It reminds me of a line in Thomas Merton's autobiography, that "...my attitude and my desire of argument [at the time]... implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith... and attachment to my own opinion."  Cassatt is being combative, putting up a fine front for her contemporaries but in doing so hinting at a need in her character.  She is not so certain as she would like to project.

Now, during her time in Europe Cassatt did not merely stay in France.  She first went to Spain and was influenced greatly by the works she saw there, absorbing and reproducing some of their color and realism.  Later she also visited Italy and was swayed by some of the late Renaissance masters with their line and form.  But it is with the Impressionists that she is chiefly associated.  They were the avant garde in Paris at the time, the rule-breakers, the disruptors, the ones talking about freedom from the oppression of imitation and tradition.  It is obvious to see why she would be attracted to them.  As such, she also picked up their techniques and produced a few nice paintings in that style:

Poppies in a Field (1875)

I find this painting quite pleasant, more so in my book than this digital reproduction.  Cassatt has chosen one of the standard set pieces of the Impressionists, a flower field, that allows her to show off the style's strengths of bright light and flecks of color.  And yet, what is most delightful about the image is not the poppies but the child.  Rendered with remarkable simplicity, Cassatt has yet conveyed that simple squat of interest.  They've seen something on the ground and want to have a look at it, or are maybe just gathering some grass together for a bouquet.  It is rather the inverse of the usual Impressionist purpose: the flowers and their color are not the emphasis, but merely an encircling structure that directs our attention to the painting's true focus.  

Which, on the topic of Impressionism and style, we must now come to Degas.  Of all the unlikely pairings, Cassatt was attracted to Degas and was his protege until he died.  It is a bizarre match that I can somewhat understand yet still find completely baffling.  Degas was the most intellectual of the Impressionists and constructed his canvases with a Classical finality that many of the movement were actively working to shake off.  This seems to have appealed to Cassatt.  Yet I can tell you that if he was not downright misogynistic, his attitude toward women was not positive or even quite normal:

The Rehearsal on Stage, Degas (1874)

When I look at a Degas painting like the one above I can see how he has posed the figures, how he has used the female form as a wonderful tool to model the poses and their structure.  Yet they look ghoulish to me, without an inner light of life; the glow that a man would normally get from observing women dancing gracefully is lacking.  As he is famous for saying, his primary interest in painting was "rendering movement and painting pretty clothes"; the females themselves seem to offer not the slightest interest to his senses.  Or take one of his nudes:

The Tub, Degas (1886)

"Women can never forgive me. They hate me, they can feel that I 'm disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the states of animals cleaning themselves..."

The image and the statement concur: whatever his reasons for primarily painting the opposite sex it is not due to an overflow of positive sentiment.  Yet for some reason, this is the man that Cassatt's opinions were enthralled to.  And I do mean enthralled.  Take this story relayed by a mutual friend:

The story is that one day, in front of Degas, Miss Cassatt in assessing a well known painter of their acquaintance dared to say: "He lacks style."  At which Degas began to laugh, shrugging his shoulders as if to say: These meddling women who set themselves up as judges!  What do they know about style?

This made Miss Cassatt angry.  She went out and engaged a model who was extremely ugly, a servant-type of the most vulgar kind.  She had her pose in a robe next to her dressing-table, with her left hand at the nape of her neck holding her meagre tresses while she combed them with her right, in the manner of a woman preparing for bed.  The model is seen almost entirely in profile.  Her mouth hangs open.  Her expression is weary and stupid.

When Degas saw the painting, he wrote to Miss Cassatt: What drawing! What style!

And here it is:

Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886)

Once again, Cassatt needs to argue something, and the result is not conviction but petulance.  His comments enraged her and so she needed to show him that she did have a sense of style, doing so in Degas' own language by producing a Classical pose that would not look out of place on a Venus or undine.  But then Cassatt must also go further: and look how this motif can be done without the normal attractions of a female as well!  She can not just produce a stylish image but do so with an ugly girl, and so emancipate the judgement from any consideration other than that of picture making.  The author of my book tried valiantly to put this in the light of enlightened righteousness, but seeing these and other episodes crop up repeatedly rather gave the impression that Cassatt doth protest too much.  She can paint, there is no doubt about that, but she is still not painting from her core here.  Her uncertainty continues to try to prove itself.

Now, my intent with this is not to skewer Cassatt's character but to make sense of her artistic oddities.  While I mentioned above that she fell in with the Impressionists the truth is that she went through quite a few styles, before and after, such that to the end of her career she pursued new techniques to master.  Impressionism for her was a phase, a toolkit, but not a reason.  If I might make another demonstration of this, let us take one of my favorite paintings of Cassatt's:

Lydia at the Loom (c1881)

Here she has made ample use of the sketchiness which Impressionism was known for yet all it truly does is serve to focus our attention on the head.  Lydia was Cassatt's sister and she loved her dearly; when Lydia passed away (she had always been sickly), all painting ceased for at least a year.  So here is Lydia, just Lydia, observed with a sister's love, the person and the expression captured in painted memory.  The rest is window dressing, and concentrating too long on the lines of the loom or the lower parts of the dress detract from the impact rather than heighten it (though it should be noted that the loom does marvelously help structure the image, bracketing the area with the head and then sloping on the side with the shoulder).  Like with Poppies in a Field above, even if the style came from the Impressionists the motive for painting does not.  Cassatt was only with them because they were young rebels challenging the status quo, like she thought of herself, and she used their techniques to fit in with her social group and, as always, to show off that she could.  But she never did deeply adopt the reason for their art, and when it comes to Lydia's face, the part Cassatt cares about most, it is formed with a precision that is at odds with the rest of the image.

This, then, I feel, is the great weakness of much of Cassatt's art: her technique, her message, and her essence are not in alignment.  She was fundamentally divided within herself, and her motive for doing much of what she did appears to have been no more than a need to prove that she could.  It is as I once said of the anime series Hyouka:

What I was watching, despite the pretense otherwise, was not a story about talent and the growth pains of adolescence but KyoAni's [the animation studio] demonstration of its own prowess.  In other words, Hyouka isn't burning with a desire to say anything in particular, but it is passionate about saying it well.

When Cassatt was trying to show off, which she did an inordinate amount of the time, it was something of a waste.  Such an impulse can provide motivation, but I do not believe that it alone can bring forth great art, and with Cassatt always looking over her shoulder she was bound to produce many works of self-conscious mediocrity.  Yet even from the beginning when she let herself free to speak on that which she felt most tenderly, she excelled:

Reading La Figaro (1878)
(I had to take the picture from my book; the online versions are atrocious)

Here is Cassatt's mother reading the newspaper.  I feel like I am looking at my own mother; if not in exact appearance, yet nonetheless observed with a love for the wrinkles, the slight jowls, and the way the neck meets the chin in an older woman.  She's no longer beautiful in a traditional sense, but that is utterly swept aside in the face of what she means [1].  Or even take a more standard beauty:

Young Woman Sewing in the Garden (c1881)

It is of their maid, and what a lovely piece it is.  It immediately strikes one as being "right".  Our attention goes to the face, where it should be, and the structure underscores this with the colored triangle of the body clearly leading to it with the background forming a frame.  The lightness of the strokes in the folliage match the beautiful flow of her dress.  Everything is aligned and the painting is in harmony.  Even if it is helped along by the attractiveness of the girl, its appeal exists separate of this, and thereby embodies a far more mature statement than Girl Arranging Her Hair ever can.  This only happens when Cassatt forgets what she's trying to say and just speaks instead.  Which, if my examples have not made obvious, I believe is when she is portraying women in traditional, domestic scenes.

This seems to me to be the reason for the lack of alignment in so much of Cassatt's art.  Her ideal was to forge an image of women that was outside of the home, yet the gift she was given was an exquisite sensitivity to the traits of her own sex which have made them the cradle of society.  Indeed, one of the greatest insights I have gained from Cassatt is from how she conveys these other women.  In the history of art one predominantly finds women in two forms: the beauty and the hag.  But these are of course all painted by men, for men, and in the male mind "hot or not" is an innate distinction.  Cassatt's women are rendered with feeling, unlike Degas', but this feeling is not dependent upon their attractiveness:

The Dress Fitting (c1891)

Here the main woman is not a beauty, but she's not ugly either.  She just has human features, one of the many variations that one will find out there amongst the populace, with no impulse to massage them to an ideal (it is also in a consciously Japanese style, yet another thing Cassatt dabbled in, imitated effectively, but I don't believe ever got the essence of).  You can scroll back through all these images and see just how sincerely Cassatt has observed other women as people.  Which is why when she finally brought the women and children together late in her career she was able to draw on her full powers, but not before she overcame a few hurdles.

As Morisot warned her in the quote I used at the top, the danger of gentle, feminine feeling is sentimentality.  If Cassatt's women are tempered by a lack of male-like attraction, her womanly feeling toward children was at perilous risk of ruining the subject.  Take this work for instance:

At the Beach (1884)

It's the sort of painting that you'd put on a postcard for your grandma.  Cassatt has the pudgy little arms and face down, but there's nothing else to do but d'awww at the image (also again notice the shift between the loose background, which is merely an afterthought, and the more clearly-delineated subjects that Cassatt truly cares about).  Or this one, which is even more saccharine:

The Sisters (1885)

We've strayed into sticky-honey-sweet territory now, the girls staring up with a simultaneous impulse to convey cuteness, vulnerability, and affection.  It's everything you'd want out of little girls and when concentrated this way it just becomes gaggy.  Alone, children in Cassatt's hands are just too much of a trap.  But somewhere along the way she had the idea, probably against all of her conscious inclinations, to portray these children with their mothers, the ultimate expression of the female domestic role, and unfortunately for her ideology the result is extraordinarily meaningful:

Young Mother Sewing (1890)

Here is a woman observed as a person, just as she is, engaged in one of the many tasks which make up her life, and the child is no longer emotional flypaper.  Their relationship is immediately clear without pandering, and all the skills of composition and style that Cassatt had mastered serve a purpose [2].  Or, to link the header image again:

Baby's First Caress (1891)

Here is simply a mother with her child.  She is not particularly pretty and he is not particularly adorable.  The child does not gently caress the face but positively squishes his mother's lips and chin in his fumbling grasp.  But she doesn't mind, and even smiles a little bit, kissing that hand back because it is just so precious to her.  Nothing is mocked up and that is why it is perfect.  

This, to my mind, is something new in Western visual art: average motherhood as meaningful but not heroic.  There had been thousands of Madonna-and-Childs before Cassatt, of course, but these were necessarily so elevated as to be ideal.  Without a belief in the Great Christian Drama to support them, few of these paintings are humanly moving.  Which also resulted in a kind of tacit depreciation, for without the great drama motherhood fell far below the level of heroic meaning.  It was just something women did, for which we were fond of our mothers for, but which we were also to grow out of [3].  

"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs." - Far from the Madding Crowd

Ironically, the quote above was written by Thomas Hardy (a man), but I can't help but think it was expressed to him by a female acquaintance.  Underlying the male ideal of a meaningful life is a sense of what constitutes heroism.  Like with The Old Man and the Sea, at some point one must pit one's will against a formidable, perhaps impossible, goal, even to the point of sacrificing one's life, in an attempt to overcome that opposition and in turn surpass one's own limitations [4].  That is how a great life has been defined, and that is what motherhood has none of.  Struggle of course.  Effort of course.  Sacrifice to the highest degree.  But nothing of the combative, oppositional element that would give it the quality of traditional heroism.

There has of late been an attempt to address this by lionizing motherhood, calling it heroic, but I believe that this is a good intention misapplied.  It is still essentially playing by one sex's rules.  It is for this same reason that I dislike Wonder Woman: you don't truly demonstrate the value of the feminine by showing she can be just like the boys and beat up bad guys too.  That's hammering her into a particular mold, and in doing so admitting that you are still only thinking in those terms (give or take that outfit...).  

But whatever Cassatt's images of mothers and children are, they are not elevated and they are not heroic, and this is precisely what gives them their immense value.  She has captured the essence of the dynamic, its strength and its meaningfulness, without resorting to an outside standard.  Even above her remarkable portraits of other women, I believe this is what she will be remembered for.

Ultimately, I'm not sure Cassatt ever recognized the value of her achievement.  She kept on experimenting with new techniques until she eventually went blind from cataracts.  Perhaps she was never aware that she'd found her taproot, or perhaps she just kept searching because it was habit by then.  Perhaps she never did reconcile the image of herself that she projected with the reality:

The first is a self portrait (1878) and the second a portrait done of her by Degas (c1880-1884).   A calm, fashionable artist versus a nervous, slightly pinched, and extremely self-conscious woman.  She wanted the former, but was the latter (I find this portrait by Degas to be magnificent).  But this is once again said without criticism.  She set out to prove herself in the traditional way, and in the process did so in a manner that was new to Western art, even if she never did approve of it herself.  And for that I'm grateful for her and what she has added to our collective consciousness. 

The Conversation (1896)

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[1] But per her habits, Cassatt has also had to insert a mirror into her Reading Le Figaro.  Its presence is necessary for pictorial construction, but the choice of a reflective surface is a common contrivance that appears in several of her paintings as she shows off her ability to render different perspectives.  Yet, frankly, I didn't even notice it was a mirror the first few times; its nature is just that unimportant.  I love this painting, but I love it in spite of some of the things Cassatt put into it.

[2] The Young Mother Sewing serves as a great contrast to the Figaro in the footnote above.  Here the space behind the mother is a set of windows, but rather than try to show off how well she can render the perspective Cassatt has utilized them to clearly outline the mother's upper body (which as with the maid in the garden is supported by the blue triangle of her dress in a Classically stable composition).  The focus is in the right place, and if the visual reality suffers for it the painting gains.

[3] Writing this line I'm reminded of how Robert Louis Stevenson's books, which are really meditations on being male in various forms, inevitably involve the separation of the boy from his mother.  He needs to get out beyond her protection to engage with the world, endanger himself, but ultimately become a proper man.  

[4] Perhaps the best demonstration of the difference in perspective on this subject comes from a GoodReads review of The Old Man and the Sea:

Oh, my good lord in heaven. Cut your line, land your boat and go to McDonald's! Just as in the case of The Great Gatsby, I understand the book. Yes, I know it changed the way American writers write. I also understand that it celebrates the ridiculous American idea that you're only a REAL man if you've done something entirely purposeless, but really dangerous, in pursuit of making yourself look like the bull with the biggest sexual equipment. Get over it, already! Go home and clean out the refrigerator, or wash the curtains, or vacuum under the furniture. Pick your kids up from school or take your daughter bra shopping. THAT would impress me. Being too dumb to cut your fishing line? Not the mate I would pick...

The only bright spot about the book is if you think of it on a metaphorical level: there is a point at which ALL of us must grit our teeth and hold on in the face of despair. That is the definition of life. However, if that's the point, then the plot situation needs to be one of necessity (like the shipwreck in Life of Pi), instead of stubbornness. 

It is such an accidentally enlightening piece.  The author clearly doesn't get it, doesn't feel in the slightest the draw of the heroic impulse.  What's meaningful to her is something reliable, family-oriented, and quotidian.  Incidentally, I find both Old Man and the Sea and RLS's works to be interesting expressions of heroism dying in the modern world, the last gasps of what it means to be "a man" as the life of industrial suburbia crushes it beneath its workaday wheels.

The Clarity of Prehistoric Art

 

I've recently started in on another art compendium, The Visual Arts: A History, one of those start-to-finish histories that are an opportunity to not just see the art but learn how somebody who has a broad enough vision to write one of them thinks.  I owe an immense debt to the first one of these I read, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, because of the variety of interesting observations and subtle insights it offered into the topic.  It really was one of the best summers of my life, sitting outside in the shade of a tree in the morning, reading, transcribing snippets, and writing my responses to them.

Given that, this new one would certainly have a lot to live up to and I admit, it's not on the same level.  Part of it is the time difference; I read the 6th edition of Gardner's, published in 1975, and so it avoids much of what I consider degenerate in more recent art commentary.  This book being revised in 2009 is prone to milquetoast statements that seek to judge nothing and so, ultimately, say nothing.  These authors just don't have the same depth of sensibility.  However, it does have a few advantages, not the least of which is color pictures; I spent some time on my phone with Gardner's locating equivalents on the internet, only to have to peer at them on a 5.8" screen.  But the one relevant benefit here lies with the prehistoric art, for unlike many other aspects of art which I don't think our understanding has improved, and has often degenerated, our knowledge of prehistoric artifacts has only increased, and I was delighted at the collection.

First, let's start with one I had seen before, the Venus of Willendorf (c25,000 BC):

Now, I'd never given a second thought to this thing, my first reaction being that it was somewhat grotesque in its faceless paean to female features.  But one of the lines in the book forced me to take a second look:

The exaggerated rotundity of the body has a yielding fleshiness, felt rather than seen.

And I realized they're right.  This is a hunk of sandstone, and while I was preoccupied over the off-putting obesity I failed to appreciate that I, without any effort, had judged it as a perfect depiction of corpulent flesh.  That was actually the magic, that I'd forgotten what I was looking at in favor of what it depicted.  It got me, and while I'm still not attracted to it, I can it the credit it is due.  But I had no such reluctance with the next piece, the Venus of Brassempuoy (c22,000 BC):

I found myself just staring at this one.  It's beautiful.  Yes it is simple, but somehow it has elegance with its spherical head resting on an elongated neck, like the famous Nefertiti bust in Berlin (and far better to my eye than the Madonna with the Long Neck of Parmigianino).  The eyes are merely indents with hints of pupils bored in, but somehow the brows make it expressive, if not of a specific emotion then of a general disposition of confidence, even regality.  It's not hard to imagine her as some Mesopotamian queen, hair braided and flowing down the curvature of her neck.  Which that's the last thing: I can almost still sense the original shape of the ivory here.  Ivory is made of concentric layers, and the "skin" of her neck is one of them; she has that aspect that Michelangelo speaks of when he says he's just freeing a sculpture from the stone.  It's like a subtler version of the spearthrower from Montrastruc (c12,000 BC):

What a remarkable usage of the natural shape of the bone.  You can see what it once was, probably some leg bone with the haunches being the bone's trochanter and the head the ball-socket.

Some of this usage of natural form also extends to the cave art, like the Goddess of Laussel (c20,000 BC):

The rock naturally curves outward there, and while we can never know exactly what it looked like before the carving it's a reasonable guess that it had a form rather similar to what we see now.  It reminds you that ancient artists saw people and animals in the clouds and rocks and such too, and that one of the natural jumping off points is expanding on these initial impressions.  The book makes much of the potential symbolism, that the ram's horn appears to be a moon, and that it has 13 notches that correspond with the 13 phases of the moon, but I admit I have my reservations.  It's not that I don't want to attribute such relatively advanced symbolism to these people, it's that at least from where I stand I find the connection tenuous.  Fertility goddess?  Certainly; not hard to believe that given her proportions.  But advanced union of female cycle, lunar cycle, and annual cycle into a single integrated symbol?  I'd want more data before I credit that.

Which really gets back to an issue that has fascinated me for some time, and that is the eerie ability of primitive peoples to produce very compelling images with a relative sparsity of concepts.  I've already gushed over a few statues above, and the next few left me even more in awe:

On the top are carvings on the wall of Addaura Cave in Sicily (c8000 BC), the bottom is Matisse's The Dance (1910).  The early 20th century saw a real turn to "primitivism" as European art looked for other sources of inspiration, and in the process of this much of it involved the paring away of inessentials.  No more of the ultra-detailed academic art of the 1800s, we just want to depict the feel of something without the unnecessary bits.  Matisse wanted to convey the kind of stretching human bodies go through in motion, and in the process get at the essence of what it's like to move as a human.

But I dare say the cave art did it better.  The figures are even more clear than those in The Dance, with fewer distracting aspects, and while we're somewhat lost on the context (many are wearing masks, a few appear prone on the ground; why?) the postures are unmistakable.  It is complete economy of form.  Now, this is a far cry from most cave etchings, which struggle to render humans better than awkward stick figures, but the fact that this was accomplished so early is a testament to this artist and how such precise observation, even in the absence of anatomy, can produce compelling people.  And my respect only deepened:

Once again, on the top we have The Thinker and Sitting Woman of Hamangia (c4000-3500 BC) and on the bottom Henry Moore's The King and Queen (1952).  Like Matisse, Moore is trying to get at the essentials here.  Just a few details, a pose, and you get what you need to have a sense for these things.  Yet again here, I have to give the medal to the older work.  I still have to think just a little about Moore's statue while the ancient work is unmistakable.  The pensiveness is immediate and there is not the slightest hitch one has in appraising the forms.

Which is another profoundly interesting subject to me: these people on the left are on their way to being geometerized.  Their arms, legs, and necks are cylinders; bulged cylinders to give them life, but still cylinders.  The shoulders are wedges, and the heads a kind of rounded pyramid.  Yet it again all works.  And what's amazing is that these figures are ~4.5" tall without having the slightest sense that they would be out of place next to Moore's life-sized depictions.  In fact, as I've written this I've been reminded of another parallel, this time in painting with Picasso's Rites of Spring (1959):

It's the same sort of basic compellingness from only a few rounded shapes, although part of its import is the sense of depth that isn't required from a sculpture.

What I really learned from all this, ironically, was what modern art had been trying to do.  I knew in theory what it was practicing, in an abstract (hah) sort of way, but now with reference I could really see the goals when they were achieved even better.  It's like when a 19th century architect (I frustratingly have forgotten who) had been fighting against the bonds of Neo-Classicism and considered Greece and Rome "the enemy", but he eventually went to Athens and saw the Parthenon for himself and was amazed.  He realized this was what the moderns were attempting, and failing, to recapture, and after that he gained quite some more respect for the original.  While I don't think Matisse and Moore and Picasso are by any stretch failing to capture something, I think the originals did it better, and now I feel quite edified for learning about them.

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An addendum to this that came to me over the night:

I'm still working on appreciating Greek art.  I find this primitive art easy to appreciate in part because it requires so little context or concept.  It just is, and in looking at it the most important thing I need do is strip away my preconceptions rather than have any additional ideas.  In this way the prehistoric art, at its best, is a kind of perfection of an unadorned mind.

But Greek art is different.  There are ideas there, big ideas, subtle ideas.  It reminds me of Mill's admonition that everybody ought to learn Greek and Latin; not because he thought they were the end-all, but that he thought within their idiom they reached a kind of perfection that was inspiring by its mere existence.  In other words, it wasn't imitation that Mill wanted, for some of their sentiments are in fact rather limited (what's the good life?  For the Greeks it seems to mostly be poems about wine and symposia), but just knowledge that such peaks were out there.

It really leaves us with a conundrum, because as our thought has generally become more complex as it has added more and more to itself over the millennia, the ability of art to express a sum-total worldview perhaps becomes rarer.  I can get primitive art because there's nothing more to get than basic humanity, and perhaps one day I can get Greek art because of its type of formal perfection, but I still don't know what kind of art would fit us now...

2024.4.12 - Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

 

Six Symbioses

Today I went to a new exhibit at the local museum dedicated to a single Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra.  Overall I can't say I was much impressed, but it's worth expanding on that impression as well.

First, the good.  In her early career she did a variety of works inspired by biology, specifically human and plant anatomy.  Obviously I'm biased toward this topic, but even more I was in a position to appreciate it: I recognized what she was drawing, but not only did I recognize it I could also appreciate how she had accentuated it.  Take for instance this early 1986 trio called Fertile Days, Ovulations, and The Voyage:

These are depictions of real processes... but given a kind of accentuation and drama.  The first (my favorite), where the sperm are all converting on the egg to fertilize it, is dramatic without being inaccurate.  There's a tangible energy to it, that here at the start of a life, as it were, we can feel that something remarkable is happening.  The black and white with streaks also imparts a sense of both the electron micrograph and the cosmic, and in tying these impressions together it manages to impart human meaning without requiring the fantastical or mythological.

The second somewhat continues this, although with a structure that less implies movement than just capturing a moment where the egg moves down the fallopian tube on the right.  The third is in a slightly different style, but I think it uses it well with the darkening whorls in the middle imparting a cave-like darkness, a mysterious chasm, in the general shape of a fruitful tuber.

In all three of these my theme is the same: this is what scientific art should be like.  An artist has looked at these images of our new world, a world occurring at scales we cannot normally see and so do not have conventional symbols for, and bridged the gap to comprehensibility by giving the events a kind of meaning we can grasp.  And, most importantly, she has done so without resorting to direct anthropomorphization, which in my view is a death knell.  It is patently obvious that we do not live in a human world, and just as we cannot any longer take human-shaped gods seriously neither can we really feel that portraying the natural world as human is getting at its core.

Now, I would like to continue to praise her but it seems to me that after this early burst of ideas she lost some of that focus.  For instance, here's a piece from later:

The human head she draws is interesting, for it has the nose and lips of flesh but the back shape of a stripped and detached skull.  Add in the representation of the cavity for the brain (the title being, "The Brain of the Operation") along with the branching pattern of the nerves, and again it's clear that she has studied anatomy.  The overall impression is fairly lucid: here is a human, an embodied organic nature, like unto a fresh pepper.  It does give you a slightly fleshy feeling, doesn't it?

But what are all these other cartoon human heads doing?  This is where I feel it goes wrong.  The presence of the one head was already forced, but the rest strike me as excessive.  We're starting to wander from humanizing newer concepts into the older thought habit of correspondence.  "Humans are living things like peppers" becomes somehow transmuted into thinking that one has found a greater significance by being able to represent one of them by another.  Take for instance this yet later piece:

Los Hermafroditas (2023)

It's kinda Georgia O'Keefe-y.  We've got a cross-section of a uterus fused with that of a flower, a wavy border of broad ligament adorning the edges like the riffles in petals.  It's really quite clever, and I got a a kick out of standing in front of it and appreciating how she had merged the two images.

However, the heads show up again, as if interrupting to force the issue.  There's also the creeping oddity of the checkerboard pattern at the bottom; I don't even understand what that's about, and to my sensibilities its completely inorganic character clashes terribly with the rest of the image (I can't help but also note that although she has titled the work Hermaphrodite, she has illustrated a pistil, the female organ in flowers).  Something about this no longer has the same force or clarity as the older version, wandering into the human habit of just putting human parts on things because it feels natural.  This reaches an apex in the latest of her artworks:

Transformaciones (2023)

Now we've just got plants in humans, little flowers representing the fallopian tubes and veined pads the mammary fat (again, well-observed from an anatomical angle), but to me the force is just gone.  It's the same thing you see a thousand times over, the softheaded faux-primitive merging of human and plant into ideas of growth and life force.  In the meantime, her modern art conceits have just grown and the splotches of pattern, the detached and discolored leg, and the hole (?) in her palm just interrupt the sense of anything reasonable.  It's the same threadbare trick where confusing images, ones that surprise your optical system and force you to stop to reconsider the picture, are misconstrued as challenging or insightful; you have to pause and figure both of these things out, but one has substance and the other does not.  And I see nothing here, sorry.

This is really the summary of most of the exhibit, where the rest was composed of various semi-grotesque Latin American images, cobbles of human heads and skulls in various combinations that were just doodles, and a series of women-as-mountains.  The last to me were the height of the error; saying one identifies with the "The Earth Mother", and then drawing the landscape as though it were a human, is merely animism, perhaps our lowest form of thought and to me completely uninteresting.

However, because I really dislike ending on low notes, she did a few early (1993) landscapes which were free of this, and which I thought had their own charm:

Atacama Desert with its muted, earthy colors offset with pale turquoise, anchored in the center by an oddly evocative pyramidal mountain.

Atacama Landscape which continues the trend, but adds this expressive tree and accentuating objects, such that we are no longer staring from high above but now amongst it, peering beneath the bough to capture this image.

And finally Moon Valley which is getting pretty abstract, yet has a kind of melodiousness with the receding crescents that become fuller as they reach the sky.  I'm not sure what else to say about this except that in terms of simple color and organization it earns its keep from me.

So yeah, I really liked this woman's core.  I thought she had a great visual sense in many of these paintings, the background necessary to make some of her drawings feel relevant, but that over the decades she has been drawn off into worse and worse directions, and that both her thought and her art have suffered as a result.