Look, See

ART AS LIFE
The Matisse we never knew.
by PETER SCHJELDAHL

Henri Matisse, unlike the other greatest modern painter, Pablo Picasso, with whom he sits on a seesaw of esteem, hardly exists as a person in most people’s minds. One pictures a wary, bearded gent, owlish in glasses—perhaps with a touch of the pasha about him, from images of his last years in Vence, near Nice, in a house full of sumptuous fabrics, plants, freely flying birds, and comely young models. Many know that Matisse had something to do with the invention of Fauvism, and that he once declared, weirdly, that art should be like a good armchair. A few recall that, in 1908, he inspired the coinage of the term “cubism,” in disparagement of a movement that would eclipse his leading influence on the Parisian avant-garde, and that he relaxed by playing the violin. Beyond such bits and pieces, there is the art, whose glory was maintained and renewed in many phases until the artist’s death, in 1954: preternatural color, yielding line, boldness and subtlety, incessant surprise. Anyone who doesn’t love it must have a low opinion of joy. The short answer to the question of Matisse’s stubborn obscurity as a man is that he put everything interesting about himself into his work. The long answer, which is richly instructive, while ending in the same place, is given in Hilary Spurling’s zestful two-volume biography, “A Life of Henri Matisse.” The first volume, “The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years 1869-1908,” was published in 1998. The second, “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954” (Knopf; $40), completes the job of giving us a living individual, as familiar as someone we have long known, who regularly touched the spiritual core of Western modernity with a paintbrush.

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Image used without permission:
Henri Matisse. The Piano Lesson. Issy-les-Moulineaux, late summer 1916. Oil on canvas, 8' 1/2" x 6' 11 3/4" (245.1 x 212.7 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. © 2005 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As I've looked back through my treasure trove of photos taken in New York in May I keep wondering, "Hey, what happened to the picture I took of Barnett Newman's Concord at the Met?" I'm pretty sure I took a picture, or I meant to take a picture, or I thought I took a picture, or I got so caught up in looking at it that when I finally walked away from it I forgot to take a picture.

At the Met, as you look at close range past Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm you see Mark Rothko's No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow), 1958; Newman's Concord is just to the left of the Rothko. I'd been looking at the Pollock from all angles, trying not to let myself be distracted by Concord, being patient, giving a few key works my full attention. It's too easy to be pulled from one thing to another, abandoning prematurely what deserves some time and consideration. I wasn't too drawn to the Rothko. When I came upon Autumn Rhythm there was a large tour group in front of it, and I enjoyed watching them look at the painting, and listening to their tour guide speak Japanese, wondering what she was telling them about "Jack the Dripper." I waited for them to leave, and then I more or less had the painting to myself. And it was quite an experience.

Then I turned to look at Concord, and I was floored. And after about twenty minutes, finally leaving it, I turned away, forgetting to take a picture, kind of stunned by the painting, and feeling somewhat spacy let myself be sucked in by the mysterious shadows cast by some Judd boxes. After not looking at the boxes, but instead looking the shadows, and thinking about which part is the art here, the boxes, the light, or both, and thinking about how a painting has other apsects to it in its presentation that effect how we look at it, I turned a corner for another knockout punch: Warhol's Last Self Portrait and another Newman, Shimmer Bright, facing each other across a small gallery. I was so struck by this pairing that I spent another twenty minutes making notes, knowing I would write about this suddenly moving juxtaposition enhanced by the afterglow of experiencing Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, Newman's Concord, and the shadows from Judd's boxes. I did write Newman and Warhol: Duet at the Met, and as modest an essay as it is it was a wonderful exercise that opened for me a way to look at paintings a little more broadly, which is always a good thing, and which makes me I think to myself, "Why did it take me so long for that understanding to happen?" It's always a good thing.

But where was my picture of Concord? Not to be found. I looked several times- maybe I'd moved it somewhere. I kept looking, thinking that if I found it I'd be motivated to write about the painting, to get down a bunch of things swirling around in my head, things that I know will be difficult to say, and things that won't really get at the experience of seeing the painting. So instead I'll use an image of the painting from the Met site, and here goes.

Concord is about eight and a half feet high and four and a half feet wide. The ground or background is the color of a copper penny that's been soaking in water for a long time. This is one of the loosest of Newman's mature paintings; one clearly sees his brushstrokes, and you can tell that he covered the surface in three horizontal sections that roughly divide the painting in three bands- top, middle, and bottom. One can see the overlap of these sections where the paint darkens. One can see near the top of each of the three sections arcs of paint where Newman pulled the brush up and then pulled it back down. The brush is dragged, the paint is spread, and evidence of Newman's movement is visually evident and physically felt.

Newman's strokes create atmosphere, but the brush marks contain the atmosphere to the edges of this painting. This isn't atmosphere that continues off into infinity; it's atmosphere within this particular painting, an object, and the way this atmosphere is contained within this painting feels logical. The viewer isn't launched or pulled beyond this painting off into space. The atmosphere within this painting is specific to this scale and is complete.

Concord has two of Newman's zips- vertical bands running parallel from top to bottom, positioned near the middle of the painting each three inches wide and separated by about two inches or more. From a distance the two zips look like two painted bars, placed early in the paintings history, that have been submerged in the painting's atmosphere by strokes of the copper green from the step when Newman covers the background in three horizontal passes of arcing strokes.

But up close things change- each zip is made with three inch wide masking tape attached to the painting. A close look reveals that each zip is obviously physically apart from the canvas; the zips lay on top of the canvas, and they have the smoother texture of tape, rather than the texture of canvas fabric. This is collage, and only the second painting, I believe, in Newman's oeurve where the zip is made with tape, the first being his breakthrough painting of the same year, Onement. The same color of copper green use for the background is brushed onto the tape; although the manner in which the paint is brushed on the tape is different that how the background is painted, the effect is to integrate the two zips into the painting which allows them to be enclosed in a swirling atmosphere and alsostand apart from this atmosphere.

Standing close to the painting you see all of this as material- it's physical. But it's difficult to tell in exactly what order of steps Newman made this painting. Was the copper green background painted first, then the tape was applied, and then more green painted on the tape? Was the tape applied to the canvas first and then the green painted around and over the tape? Some combination of the two?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "concord" as, "1. a state of agreement, a simultaneous occurrence of two or more musical tones that produces an impression of agreeableness or resolution on a listener", and "2. agreement by stipulation, compact, or covenant", and Concord's dual zips and atmospheric field reify this definition in how the painting creates an inter-resonace with the viewer. But the painting also contains, even exudes dualities. The hard, straight quality of the tape and the atmospheric brushy background are structure and gesture, intellect and emotion, preconception and intuition, architecture and the body. The split between the two zips makes two equal halves; our body confronts and identifies with the two zips as two sides of our bodies, and the small opening between them is a space for human experience that is beyond the body- thought, memory, privacy, recognition, fear- and a place that we come out of, too, back to the surface of the painting, the surface of the zips, and out into the atmosphere.

Concord is a body. The zips are a structure, a spine, and the three horizontal bands of brush green are the body- head and shoulders, the torso, and legs. Just beyond human size, the painting envelopes us without overwhelming us, and our bodies know this painting. Almost like an old a murky mirror, Concord barely reflects back at us; instead it measures and holds us, reaffirms us, something more akin to how the scale of Classical Greek architecture is based on human proportion.

The more darkly painted left zip is easily read as in the shadow of the right zip, which has less paint on it. In this sense the painting, while physically symmetrical, isn't pictorially symmetrical. Newman has it both ways. He has stable composition without stasis. Reading the two zips as not being on the same plane turns our body, makes our left side lean in and our right side hold steady to the surface of the painting. That little movement moves us or throws us off balance, and the space between the two zips is activated in another way: the cause and effect relationship of one zip casting a shadow on another, similar to how not only tall buildings in an urban environment cast shadows on other buildings, but how light can bounce between buildings and one can see the space between buildings as a volume or a shape. But then near the top of each zip, where we might identify a head, and the two zips could be two eyes or two ears, the unpainted areas of tape are vitually equal in color, the painting flattens out again, and feels like the kind of shallow space more like we might feel how our own face is a plane from which we look out with our eyes. Symmetry returns.

It's natural when looking at Concord to think of architecture, the sky, telephone poles, twin stacks, two trees, two lanes of highway, even a pair of skis or the trail of skis left in snow. I saw all of this, juggling and hopping from one image to another and back again, and then leaving these images behind to simply see and feel the form and space Newman made for an experience that is both human-scaled and epic at the same time. Being in New York I couldn't help but being reminded by this painting of the World Trade Center towers, two tall spires reaching high into the air, nothing around like them, and now nothing at all. It was very moving, and inspiring to feel how contemporary Newman is. But it's also a testament to the strength, beauty, and intelligence of Concord that my seeing the twin towers was just one part of the experience, and that the painting provokes a range of experiences. With very simple means Newman's Concord is complex; his depiction is beautiful, mystersious, and real, and he provokes an experience that is slow, human, deep, and current.

Newman's Concord exists at several different levels, a variation on the multi-folded seeing-in that I described taking place in George Lawson's San Cai paintings a few months back: depiction (a painting, a picture showing something); representation (a place or event or feeling that is duplicated or provoked); abstraction (a selective, condensed, elaborated, or metaphorical embodiment); dialogic (a conversation takes place between the viewer and the painting, or the viewer and the painter, formed in language or physical reaction or emotion or memory- associations); and in objecthood (a flat surface, fabric, a chassis, tape, brush strokes).

This is all part of what I like about paintings, how my appreciation for Newman has recently deepened incredibly, and what I brought the very next day to MoMA when I saw Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis

I read Donald Kuspit's The Matrix of Sensations at lunch today over a plate of string beans and vegi-chicken with garlic sauce over brown rice. Unlike some people, I don't mind a little "insanely overwrought thinking about art" as long as I can follow the words, the sentences, and the thinking to an idea that feels tangible enough for my brain to process, grasp, and hold.

As a reminder, Kuspit's "radical" thesis is that:

...the period of avant-garde painting, which officially began with the so-called color patches of paint in Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens in 1862, and climaxed almost a century later in the dynamic tachisme of European art informale and American modernist painting, was a time of transition from traditional analogue art to postmodern digital art, that is, to an art grounded in codes rather than images.

Insanely overwrought thinking about art deserves insanely overwrought nitpicking. But before launching into that, I can't disagree with his final thought:

Digital architecture, digital painting and digital sculpture -- all premised on digital drawing using the "ingrained" algorithms of the computer -- are new modes of art with unexpected and still incompletely explored creative, esthetic and visionary potential.

OK, fine. Perhaps Mr. Kuspit finally just got one of those new computating machines and discovered the paint program. Cool. Wait until he discovers the internet!

It would be real helpful if Kuspit would define what he means by code- he never comes out and says it. He wavers between different uses of the word code: a system of rules; an alternate language that exists on its own or requires translation; or literally lines of code as written by a programmer. Strike One for failing to define terms and inconsistency.

He needs to support this statement, because plenty of people are going to disagree with the following, including me (emphasis mine):

The standard complaint against digital representation is that it loses the haptic quality of painted representation, thus making it less organic and intimate. Digital representation is supposedly more emotionally remote and intellectual than painted representation. But this is not necessarily so. The intensification of optical quality that digitalization brings with it more than compensates for the loss of the haptic dimension, all the more so because the digitalized sensation is in constant optical motion, generating an intimacy and vividness all its own.

So, lets all throw out our crayons, paper, paintbrushes, and scissors because optical intensity will compensate for my need to be touched. Let's see if that works with babies in orphanages who don't get held on a daily basis. As if the only way to my senses is through intense color and motion, as if my eyes can't assess and use real texture. Strike Two for futuristic forecasting of human affect. But is this supposed to matter- aren't we going to give up on images anyway and just involve ourselves in coding?

About a third of the way through Kuspit just about loses me with his opinion that

"Seurat’s pointillism makes him the first digital artist."

Uh, this is where I threw up my hands, or rather, my chopsticks. What about Byzantine mosaics, Tibetan sand paintings, Maori tatoos, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Celtic carvings, Aboriginal bark paintings, Lascaux cave paintings, Limoges enamel, needlepoint, lace, on and on? Isn't this all art based in code, the code being either a shared language and/or a system of rules that are shared and tweaked (whether or not the point of the rules is to represent something)? Does the fact that this isn't acknowledged have something to do with the fact that this list of art has, in some people's opinions (and I would argue otherwise) nothing to do with the development of Western art? OK, so what about Crivello? Or aspects of Vermeer? Strike Three.

Strike Four, and here the baseball analogy falls apart- the batter refuses to leave the batter's box and end this insanely overwrought thinking; is the following really true:

Before, the creation of material images was the primary goal of visual art, and the immaterial code that guided the process was regarded as secondary. Now, the creation of the code -- more broadly, the concept -- becomes the primary creative act. The image no longer exists in its own right, but now exists only to make the invisible code visible, whatever the material medium.

I'm not sure, just for starters, that Giotto, Uccello, Dürer, El Greco, Shitao, Hiroshige and so on would agree that "the creation of material images was the primary goal of visual art." Japser Johns won't agree, and neither will Matthew Barney. Georgia O'Keefe was a coder. Artists are always interested in the code. Bystanders, spectators, audiences, even intelligent ones, however, often just think artists are always trying to simply make representations. And coder artists, whoever they are, name your favorites- they're always going to be interested in some form of representation. Always. I'm just going to say Strike Five for the heck of it.

I could go on and on and on. A little more, but no more Strikes.

I have found this to be partially true, and also the reason for a lot of trivial image making:

There are more possibilities of freedom in digital art -- that is, the "mental elements" are "free[r] to enter into various combinations" and thus to be manipulated -- than in architecture, painting and sculpture.

But the ease of this doesn't necessarily equate with Art.

This is pure hogwash:

The most important aspect of digital art is that it makes the creative act -- creative functioning or the creative process -- explicit as it has never been before in any kind of art, indeed, in the entire history of art.

Explicit to whom? Is it really any more explicit than analog media? Does this begin to hedge towards the idea that the computer is making the art for the artist? No one outisde an individual's creative process is really going to know that individual's creative process, the many references and associations running through work, the various influences, passing thoughts, wishes and failures.

Somehow Art and manufacturing don't quite go together for me, but here goes:

The computer has enormously expanded creativity by allowing for a greater exploration of chance, and thus the creation of more complex esthetic "permutations" -- different combinations of identical elements -- than traditional art has ever created, indeed, allowed or even thought of. It has also given us a more efficient means of manufacturing art that never existed before.

Someone like Allan McCollum could really run with this. But I don't need every permutation of Peter Max or even Van Gogh. Warhol's Factory sort of tried to manufacture his work, but thankfully the (mis)touch of the hand and eye remained in the work.

This essay seems confused, as if the author hasn't quite worked out and supported his argument I agree with Tom Moody's assessment of Kuspit's examples of digital artists- not too impressive. And since one is talking about coding and painting wouldn't a mention of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenberg been appropriate?

It's late. I need to go to bed and catch up on my coding. But here's my final thought:

Criticism often feels like a game to determine what's new, what's dead, and what hasn't been identified yet. And in this game there are (temporary, economic, social, historical) winners and losers, there is a tendency to narrow a field down, to sort it out and separate things so they can be opposed, to declare some things that are quite differnet from each other as more or less important. In the art world it feels like a race to be ahead of others. But I want the new and I want the old. I want more of anything good. I want better digital art, and I want better analogue art. I want it all. I don't want a battlefield with this year's model left standing.

Let's not let criticism drive us away all the possibilites. I don't think at all that Kuspit is trying to do this (see his other Artnet essays for quite a range of topics), but others can use this essay for the battered old "painting is dead" argument. That's not an argument that I'm going to buy. Otherwise, Joseph Nechvatal, one of Kuspit's chosen artists, wouldn't be printing on canvas.

Searching for a Clyfford Still image, which I didn't find (September 1949 at the Albright Knox), led me to the Hirschorn Museum's excellent site, and eventually this image, which simply shows how beautifully de Kooning drew.

At first look past the red, because basically this is a monochrome, so to see his drawing look it all simply as drawn lines without worrying about the color. And look beyond the figure; don't think too hard about what this is, let's look at how this is.

Willem de Kooning, American, born Rotterdam, The Netherlands 1904-1997 Lobster Woman, (1965), Oil on tracing paper 18 7/8 x 23 7/8 in. (irreg.) (47.9 x 60.7 cm.) THE JOSEPH H. HIRSHHORN BEQUEST, 1981 (86.1351 ) Confession: the Hirshhorn web site pages have a script which prevent right-clicking on images to save or view URL; it's of course easy to get around by viewing the source of the page and scanning the HTML for the images source URL. I feel no guilt; my workaroud makes this post possible.

Instead, look at

• the variety of lines
• how they narrow and broaden
• how the ends taper or curve off or end more bluntly
• how lines do or don't touch
• how lines stack and overlap
• how line is used to make space and to make flat areas
• the area outside the figure, and the spaces created between the figure's external defining edges and the edges of the paper.

One sees a face, and arm held up across the chest, spikes of hair, a torso with ribs, a waist, hips, the pubic area, the beginning of legs. Is she holding a lobster? Is this someone who sells lobsters? Does her claw-like hand remind de Kooning of a lobster?

And now look at the red- it's a gorgeous cadmium medium, I think. Maybe it's a color de Kooning had at hand. Is the color red that of a boiled lobster? What is the temperature of this image?

Quite likely, knowing his working method, this is painted over a drawing, although it looks pretty direct and fresh. Since this is on tracing paper this could have been laid over another drawing and traced with a brush. This piece of tracing paper has bits of other work evident; maybe there's a partial drawing on the back, or he pressed it against a painting to make a monoprint, as he was known to do, or perhaps it is erased pastel. Whatever these smudges are they make a field for this red figure. This atmospheric field around the boldly, superbly, beautfully drawn figure gives the figure extra dimension, working with de Kooning's line to keep the figure from flatenning out and being iconic.

There could be something vaguely threatening or a little ferocious about this woman. It could also be that any figure caught stop-second in the middle of active work could look threatening. It really is too easy to apply the overly-used stamp of misogynist to de Kooning; his stance is more complex than that.

This photo was taken May 19, 2005 at NYMoMA:

On the left is A Tree Grows in Naples, 1960, and on the right is de Kooning's (infamous) Woman I, 1951-52. Much has been written about de Kooning's ferocious women, their gnashing teeth, the large breasts, the blonde hair, bright red mouths, etc., and how they are painted with a kind of violence or aggression. I want to address both of these points.

First off, de Kooning painted slowly. If you actually stand in front of the two paintings in the photo above, and follow his movements and how he built up his images, there are very few places where you can tell de Kooning painted in a fit. Look at the edges of his paint, the surfaces, the direction, and you can see that while different areas are painted at various speeds, de Kooning was never the Action Painter that, for example, Alfred Leslie emulated. In fact, few of the Abstract Expressionists moved at the speed that the lable Action Painter described. While the term may be little used now, the cliche of the inspired (or angry, or emotive) painter still persists.

Second, de Kooning's women make possible a whole range of attitudes that men, perhaps especially heterosexual men, can have towards women, whether mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives, strangers, or icons. The paintings are not simply about blond bombshells and perfect icons, manipulating vixens and fear of castration, or men's fantasies and sexism. Yes, they are about all of those, but they also include all of the opposites; they are about love and hate, adoration and idolization, beauty and horror, attraction and repulsion, intimacy and distance, comfort and fear, commitment and avoidance of commitment.

Woman takes the viewer through the whole range of a man'