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.

Confused About Crusoe

 I recently finished Robinson Crusoe for the first time and I have been left... confused.  I'm going to track this train of thought from its beginning several months ago to where I stand today.

The Voyage Out There

Some while ago, I don't recall when, I was in a used bookstore with some spare store credit when I spied Kim by Rudyard Kipling on the shelves.  In the previous year I had been working my way through a scattered array of Nineteenth Century literature, with a large portion of my time devoted to George Eliot and with lesser to Thomas Hardy (I can't say I have the same regard for the latter as I do for the former).  So seeing another book on the shelf from that era, but admittedly knowing absolutely nothing about it other than, "Oh, I recognize that author" I got it for a few dollars.  

The result was much more satisfying than I had thought it would be.  Kipling was the Jungle Book guy, the one who patronized India for its exoticness while coining the phrase, "White man's burden."  But Kim completely destroys any simple caricature that those few pieces of information would impart.  Not only is it an almost overwhelming portrayal of India, imparting a full sense of the lively, sweating chaos that the subcontinent seems to consist of, but it conveys Kipling's deeply meditative view on how to unite the best of East and West within Kim's own soul (and Kipling's too, as he was raised in India).  The culmination of Kim's story, and Kim's quest, is not a physical adventure but a spiritual insight; the sudden coming to suchness after Kim's delirium combined with the transformation of the old lama from doddering fool to genuine master in our perception lets us know that there are depths to this world which we do not normally plumb, and which the East has perhaps more experience than us.  So whatever one thinks of Kipling's belief in the English Empire, it has to be balanced with the reminder that he was the man who also wrote these lines in The Buddha at Kamakura:

The grey-robed, gay-sashed butterflies
That flit beneath the Master’s eyes.
He is beyond the Mysteries
But loves them at Kamakura.

Informed by this direction, after Kim I moved on to some Robert Louis Stevenson.  I admit, I did so precisely to avoid thinking too much, as I was in a bad way back during Christmas Break in December.  Treasure Island, which promised an engaging adventure without being too challenging, seemed the perfect answer to my ills (I tried to also use The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a similar way, but while that has some humor in my shaky-state its darker aspects cut me to the quick).  It's really ironic in retrospect that I went from one author, who I had chalked up as a lightweight but discovered better, to another, in hopes that he would be a lightweight and who once again surprised me. 

As one of the introductions to my books noted, Stevenson is a master at creating the mental sense of a place with very few physical details; he need only remark on a few objects, a few rushed images, and we fill the rest in as we do our blind spot.  This skill, it was suggested, was not unrelated to the development of the state of his craft at the time, reacting to the extreme detail of the mid-century novel as well as the advance of photography.  That is, before the novelist had to be both writer and painter, for the reader was entranced not just by the events but the background and props that they were set in.  But just as painting began to suffer after the invention of the camera, the Western aspiration to perfect visual verisimilitude suddenly brought up against a device it could not match, so too was there a turn away from the objective external world in literature.  As such, Stevenson set his novels at a brisk pace, capturing only what the reader needed to know what it would feel like to be there, moving from action to action rather than thought to thought as his means of expression (and as such, his books have been some of the most amenable to being turned into movies).

However, as this same introduction (or perhaps another, I forget) noted, during much of the Twentieth Century Stevenson has been regarded as belonging to an inferior tradition of English literature.  Because he expressed himself through adventure rather than introversion, and so was more popular, he was regarded as falling far below those who placed their grappling with the meaning of life front and center (I am not sure why Austen was spared this critique).  Yet I must say that I find this reading of him unfair after having finished a sampling of his works (Treasure Island, The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, and Master of Ballantrae).  He doesn't telegraph to the modern reader his intent through neurotic introspection, but there is an issue which does occupy him, and which has faced certain writers since the Oresteia: how to be a good man in a civil society.

Beyond the adventure, Treasure Island is about Jim coming into manhood; with his father dead and soon leaving behind his mother (there are few women in Stevenson novels), Jim must chart the course himself without any guidance from these natural sources.  In the process he is put into a position where on one hand he has examples in Dr. Livesey, Squire Trelawney, and Captain Smollett, while on the other finds himself temptingly close to the immortal Long John Silver.  Frankly, Silver is the best character in the book, as well as my favorite character from the Stevenson I have read, and even knowing he was a rogue beforehand I could feel his charismatic pull.  There is something about him that Stevenson has captured, that while he ultimate condemns Silver because he lacks honor and loyalty, qualities which Stevenson holds in high esteem, there is no shortage of courage, self-possession, command of others, inventiveness, and ability to take the initiative either.  There is only that black spot of duplicity, and should it have not been revealed before Silver was ready Jim would have been easily convinced.  I think Stevenson finds himself in sympathy too, and though he uses Silver as a negative example the villain is still mercifully allowed to escape the gallows in the end.

Jekyll and Hyde continues this struggle along with the admiration of the darker half of masculine virtue.  At first I only admired the book's atmosphere, easily the best of his works that I read, oozing as it was London fog out of every page, but on reflection I realized that my first rejection of its simple split between Good and Evil in the Soul didn't grasp Stevenson's larger project.  It took at least another few books to reflect on it more, but the problem I realized was again much the same.  It wasn't that Jekyll was good and Hyde was evil.  In fact, Jekyll continues to be a multifarious person without Hyde.  Rather it is that Hyde embodies something in Jekyll that when turned loose without his guidance is utterly abominable... yet which is also undoubtedly energetic, powerful, and even virile (it seems to be alluded that Hyde was a regular patron of brothels).  As such, while Stevenson once again casts opprobrium on this villain, one can't end the novel without the feeling that Jekyll without Hyde was a flimsy person, and that so much of what made the former admirable had a curious, deep connection with the latter.

Kidnapped, coming next both in chronology and my own reading, and while predictably at first my impression was unfavorable it was also the novel where I finally began to realize what Stevenson was about, and ultimately grew to be my favorite of the four.  It was a return to a coming of age story, with young David replacing young Jim, but with the moral and narrative greatly deepened by the introduction of Alan Breck.  While Silver was simply a pirate, a warning that what may look like self-determined manliness can be dangerously self-serving and duplicitous, Alan Breck is much more difficult to judge.  It is not merely that he represents a negative contrast to David's civilized society but that he represents a different set of values altogether.  It was the Scottish Highlander in Stevenson, the one who scorned the placid lowlanders, the one who had contributed to Silver and Hyde, now finding himself brought into the flesh as a positive figure instead.  And when given a voice he had a lot to say.  Ingeniously hidden as simple banter and moments of action, David and Alan spar over what it means to be a good Christian, the place of loyalty and violence, and how much role honor ought to play in a man's life.  It is the first time that I felt like Stevenson failed to come to a conclusion.  Though there are repeated jabs at the "civilized" English readership of the book, Alan Breck is still a bit of a wild man and a fop.  David, and the reader, do not want to become him in the end... but unlike the previous foils, we've come to appreciate him too.  Again, Stevenson shows wisdom in where to end with the two main characters' parting, as all the rest is unimportant.

Finally, I have less to say about Master of Ballantrae, as honestly this book felt just too contrived.  The devil-may-care attitude Stevenson had used to force his plots through coincidence and circumstance fails him here; before they felt like natural accidents, here there was no right reason for James Durie to survive the duel or for Henry Durie's long slide into madness be consummated in a theatrical winter showdown in Canada.  Yet once again we do see the same pattern laid before us: James is a psychopath, but a literate, capable, courageous psychopath while Henry is a good man, but a plodding, uninspiring, somewhat pitiable good man.  But it just... doesn't quite work; James in particular fails the book, for he needed to be larger-than-life, like a malevolent Edmond Dantès, but had not the personal charm of Silver, the demonic stature of Hyde, or the redeeming affability of Alan Breck.  With this, Stevenson's last novel, I feel that he never really figured out how core problem to harmonize the two halves.  Unlike Delacroix who, in his final massacre, comes to admit that the Romantic barbarian has his limits, Stevenson seems in rebellion to his increasingly urbanized industrial world until the very end.

Finally The Island

This was a long preamble to get to the core of this essay, which is perhaps appropriate for Robinson Crusoe, but this is what has been on my mind.  Reading that Kipling and Stevenson came in the adventure tradition that had originated in English literature back with Defoe, I decided to break with my Nineteenth Century restriction and go further backward in search of the source.  

To start off, I must say I had no idea the book contained anything other than a desert island; it's the only part you ever hear about, but it ends up that Crusoe came from somewhere.  So much for spontaneous generation.  I think this surprise enhanced my enjoyment of these parts, moving as they did with a surprising swiftness yet keeping me engaged throughout.  It was reminiscent of the Stevenson comments I made above, that though almost no detail is given nonetheless the episodes stand out with plenty of vividness in my mind.  

However, they also left me confused based on what I knew of Defoe.  I intentionally avoid learning too much about an author before seeing what their novels have to say for themselves, but I did have a professor friend tell me that Defoe's beliefs were atypical for the time.  Yet as I read it seemed as though the adventures were almost overbearingly moralized, with every twist and turn of Crusoe's (mis)adventures used to pontificate about the God-enacted ramifications of his acts.  By the halfway point of the book, after Crusoe had reached the island, I was struggling, as I was not only disinterested in these thoughts but I guess my inner Boy Scout had withered too much to take joy in a story of survivalism for its own sake.  Then the natives arrived and the whole tenor and meaning of the book changed for me:

"...I was yet out of their Power, and they had really no Knowledge of me, and consequently no Design upon me; and therefore it could not be just for me to fall upon them. That this would justify the Conduct of the Spaniards in all their Barbarities practis'd in America, and where they destroy'd Millions of these People, who however they were Idolaters and Barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous Rites in their Customs, such as sacrificing human Bodies to their Idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent People; and that the rooting them out of the Country, is spoken of with the utmost Abhorrence and Detestation, by even the Spaniards themselves, at this Time; and by all other Christian Nations of Europe, as meer Butchery, a bloody and unnatural Piece of Cruelty, unjustifiable to either God or Man..."

At first I was uncertain what was happening as Crusoe was contemplating killing the cannibals for their acts.  It started out with good Christian moral superiority, but quickly gave way to reflection, and a rapid slide into reflecting on how terribly Europe had used the peoples of the New World.  Not only had I not expected such a thing in this book, I admit I had not expected such a thing from any book in 1718.  It made me realize that even with all my resisting of what I feel is the senseless devaluation of the European tradition I had still succumbed in some ways to the pervasive narrative that it is only in the last 50 years or so that any thoughts of this type had arisen.  The passage continues:

"...I was perfectly out of my Duty, when I was laying all my bloody Schemes for the Destruction of innocent Creatures, I mean innocent as to me: As to the Crimes they were guilty of towards one another, I had nothing to do with them; they were National, and I ought to leave them to the Justice of God, who is the Governour of Nations, and knows how by National Punishments to make a just Retribution for National Offenses..."

I have a note to myself underneath this quote in my phone, left there for the record: "Well, he started in a way that seemed reasonable, noting that there was a cultural difference to admit, and that they needed to also be seen in that light, but concludes Old Testament-style that God will judge the whole nation (what of the Spaniards above?)."  Yes, indeed, what of the Spaniards?

"This frequently gave me occasion to observe, and that with wonder, that however it had pleas'd God, in his Providence, and in the Government of the Works of his Hands, to take from so great a Part of the World of his Creatures, the best uses to which their Faculties, and the Powers of their Souls are adapted; yet that he has bestow'd upon them the same Powers, the same Reason, the same Affections, the same Sentiments of Kindness and Obligation, the same Passions and Resentments of Wrongs, the same Sense of Gratitude, Sincerity, Fidelity, and all the Capacities of doing Good, and receiving Good, that he has given to us; and that when he pleases to offer to them Occasions of exerting these, they are as ready, nay, more ready to apply them to the right Uses for which they were bestow'd, then we are; and this made me very melancholly sometimes, in reflecting as the several Occasions presented, how mean a Use we make of all these, even though we have these Powers enlighten'd by the Great Lamp of Instruction, the Spirit of God, and by the Knowledge of his Word, added to our Understanding; and why it has pleas'd God to hide the like saving Knowledge from so many Millions of Souls, who if I might judge by this poor Savage, would make a much better use of it than we did."

Now I was just off-balance due to what felt like a deck swaying underneath me between a curiously modern outlook and sudden retreats to traditional thought, because after this Crusoe (Defoe?) would go on to backtrack and affirm the inscrutability of the Almighty's plan which like Job we ought to be simply submit no matter how senseless and unjust it appeared.  This went on for a few pages until finally Crusoe and Friday got into religion:

"...I took it by another handle, and ask'd him who made the Sea, the ground we walk'd on, and the Hills, and Woods; he told me it was one old Benamuckee, that liv'd beyond all: He could describe nothing of this great Person, but that he was very old; much older he said than the Sea, or the Land; than the Moon, or the Stars: I asked him then, if this old Person had made all Things, why did not all Things worship him; he look'd very grave, and with a perfect Look of Innocence, said, All Things do say O to him: I ask'd him if the People who die in his Country went away any where; he said, yes, they all went to Benamuckee; then I ask'd him whether these they eat up went thither too, he said yes.

From these Things, I began to instruct him in the Knowledge of the true God..."

It was then that it clicked.  Reading it I saw the whole slew of parallels that had been created up to this point.  In nearly everything Crusoe had demonstrated an awe-inspiring degree of hypocritical behavior, accepted for the original readers because he was European.  He escapes from hated slavery under the Moors only to promptly treat Xury as a servant and sell him to the Portuguese captain (who is also held up as a bastion of Christian virtue).  He interacts reasonably with the natives of Africa who never offer him any harm, and indeed are generous with provisions, but later thinks nothing of signing up to be part of a team to enslave them as well.  On enslaving Friday he assumes with total superiority that it shall be Friday who learns English, who becomes Christian, and who will, in short, be civilized.  Even in the dialogues Crusoe titles himself "Master" not "Me" or "Crusoe" when talking.  It really is an amazing failure of Christian sentiment across the board, hidden in plain sight.  But the question remained: was this Crusoe or Defoe?

This is what the above paragraph finally pushed me into answering, and the point was that it was Crusoe, and the readers, being mocked.  The statement of all things saying "O" (prayer) to him was too broadminded a sentiment to be accidental; to a modern reader it veritably spoke of what we seem to have enshrined now.  And of course the "joke" about the eaters and the eaten going to the same place, a straight thrust at the harsh Christian dissonance between seeing all men as brothers and also believing that the rest of the world apparently went to hell after they were done being brothers.  Then Defoe just gets more and more brutal: 

"[Friday] listned with great Attention, and receiv'd with Pleasure the Notion of Jesus Christ being sent to redeem us, and of the Manner of making our Prayers to God, and his being able to hear us, even into Heaven; he told me one Day, that if our God could hear us up beyond the Sun, he must needs he a greater God than Benamuckee, who liv'd but a little way off, and yet could not hear, till they went up to the great Mountains where he dwelt, to speak to him; I ask'd him if he ever went thither, to speak to him; he said no, they never went that were young Men; none went thither but the old Men, who he call'd their Oowocakee, that is, as I made him explain it to me, their Religious, or Clergy, and that they went to say O, (so he called saying Prayers) and then came back, and told them what Benamuckee said: By this I observ'd, that there is Priestcraft, even amongst the most blinded ignorant Pagans in the World; and the Policy of making a secret Religion, in order to preserve the Veneration of the People to the Clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all Religions in the World, even among the most brutish and barbarous Savages.

I endeavour'd to clear up this Fraud..."

And continuing for another page:

"I found it was not so easie to imprint right Notions in his Mind about the Devil, as it was about the Being of a God...

But, says he again, if God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God no kill the Devil, so make him no more do wicked?

I was strangely surpriz'd at his Question, and after all tho' I was now an old Man, yet I was but a young Doctor, and ill enough qualified for a Causist, or a Solver of Difficulties: And at first I could not tell what to say, so I pretended not to hear him, and ask'd him what he said? But he was too earnest for an Answer to forget his Question; so that he repeated it in the very same broken Words, as above. By this time I had recovered my self a little, and I said, God will at last punish him severely; he is reserv'd for the Judgement, and is to be cast into the Bottomless-Pit, to dwell with everlasting Fire. This did not satisfie Friday, but he returns upon me, repeating my Words, RESERVE, AT LAST, me no understand; but, Why not kill the Devil now, not kill great ago? You may as well ask me, said I, Why God does not kill you and I, when we do wicked Things here that offend him? We are preserv'd to repent and be pardon'd: He muses a while at this; well, well, says he, mighty affectionately, that well; so you, I, Devil, all wicked, all preserve, repent, God pardon all. Here I was run down again by him to the last Degree, and it was a Testimony to me, how the meer Notions of Nature, though they will guide reasonable Creatures to the Knowledge of a God, and of a Worship or Homage due to the supreme Being, of God as the Consequence of our Nature; yet nothing but divine Revelation can form the Knowledge of Jesus Christ, and of a Redemption purchas'd for us, of a Mediator of the new Covenant, and of an Intercessor, at the Foot-stool of God's Throne; I say, nothing but a Revelation from Heaven, can form these in the Soul, and that therefore the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; I mean, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God promis'd for the Guide and Sanctifier of his People, are the absolutely necessary Instructors of the Souls of Men, in the saving Knowledge of God, and the Means of Salvation."

At this point I was straight grinning.  I don't find the modern criticism of Christianity interesting because it is tired and obvious, and usually undertaken with a distinct desire to feel superior to others and the past, but this was just funny.  Crusoe, after reflecting on how old men go up to mountains only to relate unlikely doctrines, admits himself he is an old man, and continues to observe with the best of irony that only through unreasonable methods that his own doctrine could exist.  But more than this, it is coupled with what I believe is a piece of Defoe's real Christian sympathies: that he can envision a God that even forgives the Devil, and how much deeper a sentiment that is than the cosmic us-vs-them drivel Crusoe is trying to feed Friday.  It made me reflect on the ship from the wreck, and how Crusoe admits that he would have had to "live as a savage" had he not had those trappings of civilization.  It is not a clear superiority anymore, and rather a reflection that we inherit what we have, and while that gave Europeans greater means in some ways has not so positioned them superior in all regards.

Again, this is an old discussion at this point, and while anti-Europeanism is running rampant in the university departments, the truth is that it is those very European-created institutions that helped bring about these realizations.  It just shocked me that, once again, here was somebody 300 years ago already making the same observations, but with far more wit and far less arrogance.

So where's my confusion?  My confusion lies in the rest of the book, for after what appeared to be a very elevated critique the rest of the book concludes with a shockingly traditional reward.  That is, having learned his lesson from his exile, Crusoe goes on to be rich and prosperous... by abusing his plantation full of slaves.  The moment that we've all been waiting for when he rejoins European civilization only to see it from the outside is entirely ignored and instead he re-acclimates with the greatest of ease.  Friday faithfully follows him, but almost disappears into the background (only to show up to sport with a wild bear for our amusement).  Crusoe calls himself "Job" and it appears that Defoe has taken this to heart... down to the part where it feels like the last bit of the story is tacked on by an outside agent who was not half as reflective as the primary author.  I don't seriously suggest this, of course, but it leaves me completely perplexed as to how Defoe's Puritan sentiments could so amazingly override the rest of his judgement after the insight he had demonstrated up to this point.  Which brings me to my own conclusion.

What a Long, Strange Voyage

I am finishing this essay here some weeks after completing the book and being part way through Moll Flanders (always need more than one book from an author to calibrate), and what I have come to the conclusion of is that Defoe doesn't have an answer... and neither does anyone else.

When I read Elliot and Hardy they both differed from the Christian norm of their times.  Elliot had her powerful moral sentiments that she was trying to square with a modern world, looking for where to find truth and value in an increasingly rationalistic outlook.  Hardy was happy to just declare there was no God.  But what they both shared was that their stories take place entirely in Europe, and though they may be critical it is a sort of criticality that is strongly shaped by looking at it from within.  There is no sense that they are really concerned with its implications for anywhere else.

By comparison, what I notice in Defoe, Stevenson, and Kipling is that they, in some sense, look at European civilization from without.  It's why they write adventure stories; it's not because they're just "popular" authors, but because adventures are the only way to bring the reader to a place they don't know and so make the fish realize it was always swimming in European/Western water.  We need to be in a place that we suddenly realize, viscerally, does not play by the rules that we are used to.  I suspect this is why I have felt that these writers are at times extraordinarily sharp - they are just so frustrated with the complacency of their peers, even the well-educated ones.  This trend would seem to fit my future reading as well: the same introduction that identified Defoe as a forerunner listed Conrad, London, and Hemingway as the successors.  All of them, once again, known for their adventures in faraway, strange places, and also often relegated to second-rate because of their choice of genre, as they puzzle over Europe from without.

Another aspect that I wonder about is the emphasis on details, or the lack thereof, and how this relates to the modern Western mind.  As I mentioned when Crusoe was going around places familiar to Europeans, locales for which they had set pieces, the description was sparing.  When he reached the island, though, it became soaked with detail, for having brought us to a fantastic place we now have to be made it is a believable perspective.  I have a deeper inkling that somehow this detail-orientation is necessary, a sort of wrestling with what is real.  Living just before the Enlightenment, Defoe it would seem is also thoroughly enmeshed in the growing empiricism of England.  Yet here Defoe wants to write a spiritual story, a sort of modern Pilgrim's Progress except with a lot more wrong turns.  And here we get to the confusion again... because I can't tell what in this book is metaphorical and what is not, and after some reading it appears everybody else is in the same boat.

My guess is that Defoe doesn't have it worked out himself.  The inconsistency of his message is neither caving into public pressure nor an excessively elaborate statement but simply that despite his leap to realizing that European man regarded all nations (and in Moll Flanders, all women) as his footstool, he is still operating off of a form of Christianity that needs a just God in a material world.  Defoe sees all of humanity as being worthy of salvation, and in no way inferior innately inferior to European man, but he doesn't know why the Europeans do have the upper hand.  There are physical facts that have become increasingly important and they are obscuring any way to clearly interpret the physical world in a spiritual manner.  Where's the punishment for cannibalism?  Where's the punishment for the Spaniards?  On a smaller scale, is getting a parrot that keeps repeating, "Poor Crusoe" representative of how early on he learned to pity himself with a voice in the back of his head (Crusoe remarks that he taught other parrots to speak, but none were as a faithful companion as this one)?  Or did Crusoe just get a parrot because they're on tropical islands procuring one is possible?  It's like there's a link between all this, that having left the Christian sphere, and no longer playing by its rules, Defoe in accurately describing the place does not know how to make it play by God's rules either.  The result is a half-baked parable, one that dearly wants to assert a rational-moral Christianity without the devil or other accessory doctrines, but cannot bring itself to reward Crusoe until he is back in Europe where such things hold once again.  Until then he can only describe what happens, having Crusoe draw lessons from it but unable to have them truly manifest outside the mind.

For now, I am reading Moll Flanders and will also try A Journal of the Plague Year, but given my general understanding of both I am not sure if they will aid me much in resolving this issue.  Does this combination of exotic locales, looking at Europe from without, and descriptive styles that are spare or detailed as the need to involve the viewer allows part of a trend?  I will simply have to keep it in mind, testing some of my expectations against these future authors as well to see if I have a good idea on my hands.

Until then, I'll wonder about parrots.

(p.s. I realized after writing this that Kim ends with an adventure for Kipling himself.  That is, while the bulk of the book is exotic enough to a European, the foray up toward Tibet is exotic even for Kipling, and the mental "sliding back into place" after he has come down from those heights is a very personal reflection too.)

Matisse and the Bull

Bull-Leaping Fresco - Knossos, 1449 B.C.

"But of course, in human terms, the star of the show here is this red-skinned figure in the middle, the daredevil acrobat, the toreador himself.  And he's depicted mid-leap, his hair is fluttering in the air.  There is a tremendous sense of buoyancy, of joyful movement and life as he spins through the air.  It makes me think of works of art created thousands of years later by Matisse: his paper cutouts of acrobats.  They both share what you might call the audacity of simplicity." - Alastair Sooke, Treasure of Ancient Greece

It always seems to happen this way with me: some stray line, a single comparison, has me seizing on a train of thoughts which unspool themselves into a string of ideas that have existed in my head for a while but now suddenly demand to be written down.  Here it is the comparison Alastair casually makes, that of Matisse with this 2nd millennium B.C. fresco.  I've noticed throughout his films that he likes these comparisons of ancient and modern art, and he is repeatedly drawn to saying, "It looks so modern" as almost a form of praise.  Or if not quite praise, supreme surprise that there isn't something more manifestly awkward and ancient about them.  These statements, however, never quite sit right with me because I find myself struggling with what I believe is a subtle error being committed.

"Chinese Horse" - Lascaux Caves, 13,000-15,000 B.C.

Pre and Trans

I haven't read any of Ken Wilbur myself, but I've been introduced to the idea of what he calls the Pre/Trans Fallacy, or the mistaking of what comes from before a convention or stage of thought to one that comes after it and breaks or surpasses it.  That is, at first glance both the Pre and the Trans seem to flaunt the rules one has come to know, but they do so from very different perspectives and ultimately with profoundly different levels of sophistication.

When you look at the most ancient of art there is a striking gap between the way in which animals are rendered and the way humans are.  The caves of Lascaux are one of the most famous examples, where there are pieces such as the Chinese Horse which appear to be so unbelievably well-executed in their modeling and texture that one would think they're the product of a great civilization (hence the title) rather than an unnamed prehistoric artist.  At the dawn of human art it appeared we already had what centuries of artists later struggled to create.  Picasso was so stunned by this that he could only say, "We have learned nothing" in response to this early accomplishment.

But then we come to the people and they are... wanting.  Not just wanting, almost comical in their simplicity.  All the naturalism has vanished to be replaced by stick figures without depth or detail.  If it weren't for the evidence that these caves were produced over some time and by many different individuals it would lead one to think there was a master and his dim-witted apprentice each assigned to a different role in the tableau.

Furthermore, this is not an isolated incident in ancient art.  While Egyptian figures are far more advanced they are also incredibly unrealistic in their schematic structure, and once again compare this with the animals surrounding them.  In a scene from the tomb chapel of Nebamun (18th Dynasty), the pelage of the cat is rendered with the finest of care and the birds identifiable to the species.  The people, however, are misshapen, with bodies facing side, shoulders facing front, face at ninety degrees, and a flounder eye staring right at us, unnaturally lined and enlarged.  There is absolutely none of the naturalistic handling again to be found in the humans themselves.

My suspicion is that the reason the animals are detailed and the people schematic is because of the role of conceptualization.  That is, so much of human thought is built upon social schemas; it is an issue I touched on before, and here I believe it returns again.  In the human universe, one of the most basic demarcations is Human and Non-Human.  If something is a Human it calls forth an entire array of behaviors and expectations, and it is remarkable how often we fall back on such explanations for everything from ancient gods of causality to invoking "human" rights for animals in the current era.  Because this distinction is so important, though, what we are interested in is the categorization and not the details.  We need to know what is Human and to do that we are looking for signs.  Let us return to the Egyptian figure.

How is it that the Egyptian image of a person can be so broken and yet so compelling?  The answer lies in the fact that it neatly highlights all the most important points of human appearance.  First, we are bipeds, and this gives us a distinctive appearance as we move compared to most animals; therefore, you want to portray the legs striding.  Second, we are erect with our shoulders projecting upward and arms hanging down; again, rather uncommon, and much more obvious in the frontal pose than in profile.  Third, the human facial profile is once again distinctive; we lack a long snout, muzzle, or bill and instead present a relatively flat surface with a protruding brow, nose, and lips.  Finally, humans communicate with their eyes.  We can pinpoint where other humans are looking almost immediately and direct eye contact is the clearest sign of awareness and recognition that this is another Human.  Added together, then, what this figure represents is not so much a naturalistic view of a person but an amalgamation of all the most effective angles from which to identify that what one is seeing is a Human.  That it possesses little realism bothers us not at all.

"Birdman" - Lascaux

I suspect that this is what is happening in the caves as well, except without the refinement of a great civilization's art style.  The animals are largely drawn as they appear [1], which in the process of transcribing the effects of curvature and light cause us to be surprised by the liveliness that they evoke.  But when a Human appears it seems halfway a placeholder, a comment that seems to say, "A Human Belongs Here."  These artists knew basically what form our species has but they have not yet become aware of their own feedforward, so to say.  The result is an awkward scratching that represents an as-yet unrefined conceptualization of what a Human is.

Nadia and Leonardo

Years ago in a book called Mapping the Mind I ran across an interesting story about a child idiot savant named Nadia.  She had an IQ of between 60 and 70 and exhibited severe autistic symptoms by age five.  Yet she also had surpassing artistic ability and was able to draw objects and scenes around her with uncanny accuracy.  The picture above is a comparison of her drawing of a horse (A) to one done by Leonardo da Vinci (B), accompanied in the book by the remark that her pictures were good enough to be hung in any art gallery.  Mapping the Mind was published in 2010 and the story had been around for some time before that so the question remains: why haven't we heard anything more about Nadia in the art world?  I believe the answer here is the same as above.

"This is not a brain."

Despite what we consider an incredible demonstration of skill, I suspect what is happening above is a profound deficiency in conceptualization.  Nadia likely has normal, or perhaps somewhat above normal, motor coordination and visual acuity.  If she didn't she couldn't reproduce things on paper so well.  But what she cannot do is decide what is important.  Normally when we look at something, we figure out what it is, and having done that we're satisfied; we just need to know what its place is in our mental model, and therefore how it relates to other things in the world.  The precise details can be dispensed with as a waste of processing power.  Or, rather, consciousness can dispense with them as it re-represents the functioning of lower systems.  Just like how fear is not precisely the output of the amygdala, our experience of vision is not precisely the output of our visual cortex.  We all have that experience now and then when we realize that we have been easily navigating and reacting to a situation which we hardly bothered to pay attention to.  If we think the details are important we'll attend to them but otherwise we'll let other systems handle it.  And while this may seem dubious evidence for multiple systems, the existence of blindsight, where people are unable to consciously see are nonetheless able to utilize visual information, should give one pause [2].  There is more than one representation of the world in our brain, and therefore more than one form of "seeing" - what we are able to verbally report on is only a single highly-rarified piece of it.

Which brings us to Leonardo.  Leonardo was a genius.  Not just any genius, but a genius among geniuses, so much so that half a millennium later he remains a household name.  His capacity for conceptualization had to be far beyond that of the average person's, investigating as he did art, mathematics, and the natural sciences with almost equal skill.  So what does it tell us that untrained Nadia appears to be able to do what Leonardo had to work his life to accomplish?  That conceptualization is a hindrance and that simpleton art represents the apex of human achievement?  Hardly.

The problem with Nadia, and with the Lascaux Caves, is that to the extent they are non-conceptual they are also non-generalizable.  In evolutionary terms, the point of conceptualization is to organize the world into meaningful patterns.  What is happening today can teach us about what will happen tomorrow only if we are able to group tomorrow into objects and events the same way as we do today; otherwise nothing is the same and we are continually lost.  The most basic nervous systems can learn to associate events, and the machinery present in organisms we usually regard as automatons, such as insects, are capable of remarkably advanced feats of generalization.  When it comes to humans, we have elevated this skill to a level unseen elsewhere on this planet; we don't just conceptualize to tomorrow, but everywhere in the universe and at all times past and future.  We are pattern-finders par excellence, and to do this we are unnaturally obsessed with what it is that makes up a thing and its qualities.  For if we can locate what is essential about something we can find that essential nature in other things, and therefore predict or even control them.

But what has Nadia drawn?  She has drawn a horse in full gallop... but she has not drawn her ideas of swiftness or strength or beauty.  All she has done is portray a particular horse at a particular moment with high fidelity and no archetypal insight [3].  If there is any power in it, that power lies in us, the viewers, who do see in her image the traits that we associate might associate with such an animal.  By comparison, Leonardo may have struggled to come to that same level of realism, but his gift was to be able to find in it an inner life without sacrificing exacting anatomy (he loathed Michelangelo's muscly, ill-proportioned humans).  He knew what every tendon and muscle did in that creature.  Such an artist doesn't just draw horses but expresses in the process his staggeringly powerful vision that the world possesses a rational, reasonable order which the mind can grasp, and that having done so all things will be seen in their proper proportion [4].

The Acrobats - Henri Matisse, 1952

Sketches

If you want to draw more accurately, turn the object you are sketching upside down.  Just try it some time.  It's amazing how just this small manipulation fools the brain; it stops immediately seeing the object as its previous classification and is forced to attend to it in detail.  The result is a drawing that often is better than what you could have produced if you had tried to draw from concept.

Riace Bronzes - 460-450BC

Returning to the top, then, while I see Alistair's comparison as an interesting one, I can't help but feel there is lost in it an understanding.  Visual accuracy is actually our birthright, as it were.  The painter of that Minoan fresco was a skilled artist of his time not because he was able to take a complex idea and distil it into a single image.  It's that he was, near the dawn of it all, able to reach up from just portraying the world and imbue his image with the flow and exhilaration leaping over a bull represents.  That it took another thousand years before the Greeks were able to produce art that captured essence without abandoning realism remains one of their crowning achievements, and it is to them that Leonardo owes his dream.

This is where Matisse was coming from.  Like all of us in the modern world he had a head stuffed full of concepts, of what things were, what they should be, and how they should be portrayed.  The accomplishment of he and many other artists in this era was to break through those conceptions and, in his case, demonstrate that it took but a few curves and colors to reproduce the essence in a way we thought only possible in detailed realism.  The horse was no longer a horse, but could it still be swift and powerful and beautiful?  I fear, though, that people are apt to confuse the two, worshipping the Pre as pure and natural when they should be respecting the Trans for its mature reflection on what the unencumbered saw but had not yet begun to understand.  

Footnotes:

Two reindeer - Font de Gaume, 17,000 B.C.

[1] I don't have have space in the essay to touch on this, but while the cave paintings have mastered certain effects they do also struggle with some portions of the organism.  Looking at the paintings you will notice that there are two sections in many of the animals which are treated in a strange way: the legs and the head.  This falls neatly into the discussion on human anatomy.  The artist knows they have four legs but frequently gets the proportions wrong trying to express this.  Similarly the head is one of the most distinctive parts of an animal, where the artist knows how a horse head looks versus that of a bison and so already goes in with a thought of a conical structure that interferes with detailing it as it truly is.  But the crowning "error" are the horns: in all the paintings the horns are never shown in profile.  Instead they are often like the Egyptian shoulders: seen from the front, because that spread is what is most distinctive.  And even if not a fully frontal view they nonetheless tend to fail the angles of the rest of the organism as the artist strives to represent this most defining visual aspect of the animal.

There is also a distinct schematism to the birds in the Nebamun painting as well: while the free-flying ones are rendered carefully, those in hand are given the standard Egyptian treatment of representing multiples.  They all adopt an identical pose and are stacked by a precise amount, such that we can clearly differentiate how many there are but in the process forcing them into the same stiff uniformity that stands out from the handling of the rest of the natural scene.

[2] A related demonstration of this is the well-known Müller-Lyer illusion.  Out of context it is interesting but not hard to convince yourself the lines are the same length.  In a given context the effect is amplified and it is hard to conceive that the two central lines are the same length.  But here's the kicker: try to "pick up" the lines length-wise with your fingers and you'll notice that despite their apparent differences your body knows exactly how far apart to grip.  What is going on?

Again, I suspect this has to do with conceptualization.  The portion of the brain that is in charge of navigating the world isn't trying to extract anything to do with relative size from the image.  It just wants to not bump into things, the same way that insects have specialized "looming" circuits that react whenever an object (i.e. a bird or other predator) appears to get bigger in their field of view.  However, our conscious experience of the situation is to try and figure out relationships and tendencies.  The arrow heads on the lines in isolation hint to us something about what is happening, perhaps movement, stretching, or location.  And when placed into the "three dimensional" setting that our visual systems are always dealing with, the context is so staggeringly important that it dominates our perception of length.  Yet underneath it all there is still the basic motor functions which are less concerned with this and continue to do their job.

[3] It makes me wonder: all these recountings of Nadia emphasize that she could draw the world around her but never note her ability to compose a scene she had not already observed.  It makes me wonder whether she could or if her imagination was purely limited to literal experience.

[4] This last comment is inspired by Kenneth Clark:

"But the Renaissance added to this [mathematical] tradition of design all sorts of philosophical notions, including the idea that these forms must be applicable to the human body.  That each, so to say, guaranteed the perfection of the other.  There are dozens of drawings and engravings to demonstrate this proposition, of which the most famous is by Leonardo da Vinci.  Mathematically I'm afraid it's really a cheat but aesthetically it has some meaning because the symmetry of the human body and the relation of one part of it to another do influence our sense of normal proportion.  And philosophically it contains the germ of an idea which might save us, if we could really believe it, that through proportion we can reconcile the two parts of our being - the physical and the intellectual."

It is a quote which has stuck with me for some time, as a dream that we once deeply believed but have now come to despair of.  Leonardo, too, seemed to run into limitations.  It seems that when rationality runs to its end and does not have anything greater than itself to believe in it becomes lost.  Leonardo begins to hint in his paintings that there is something unknown, and perhaps deeply disturbing, located just outside his paintings with how his figures point and smirk.  Inside this framed world there is order, outside of it there is...?  Well, in the end Leonardo drew pictures of cascading water, destroying everything in mindless, formless chaos that swept away the human pretension to know anything.