Art Thoughts, Week 25 -- Pascin & Craft

Southern Scene, Jules Pascin, (American and Bulgarian, active in France, 1885—1930), 1915, oil on canvas, BF 194.

Most of us, at one time or another, were taught to draw by breaking what we were seeing down into individual shapes – triangles, squares, circles, cylinders, pyramids, rectangles and so on. This way, we were told, anything could be drawn; we could parse anything intellectually, visually rebuild it, then smooth off the edges: literally 2D sculpture as drawing. But this is not the only way of drawing, by any means. Instead, for example, one could use an unbroken line which caresses and undulates around an object, becoming a spatial, quivering depiction. Or, a drawing could be done completely in shaded patches, overlapping in different directions like so many screens or webs that eventually pile up into a specific shape or space.

Pascin, at least in many of his exterior scenes, used a decidedly drawing-based style of painting, what I’d call line-and-wash, reminiscent of Kandinsky’s painting style. But overall, the particular shape which Pascin preferred using to construct or craft his compositions was the almond, or mandorla, shape. It can be found in the arching trunks of shade trees; the spindly legs of the horse’s and people’s limbs; and the foreshortened wagon wheels. It’s significant here that the almond shape is reminiscent of another iconic shape: the simple leaf. And in some ways, the manner in which Pascin has crafted his picture is akin to a pile of multi-colored leaves; all laying on top of, next to or overlapping one another; influencing and casting color and light between each other. And like leaves, which in a sudden gust of wind could blow away and completely rearrange, so it seems could the repeated elements in this painting.

And, as most artists eventually realize, that is about as concrete as a space – and light within that space – will ever get. Each moment brings change; everything from the most infinitesimal to the grippingly enormous, and they are all interconnected. Those who choose the exquisite torture of trying to depict these changes are constantly on the chase, like a dog after its own tail. (Thus the appeal of making up one’s own environment, with its more controlled set of variables – though this is just as elusive…how many of us have actually been successful in recreating the exact picture we began with in our mind?) There are, of course, significant numbers of these moments that do get successfully wrangled down; otherwise we’d have no artworks to speak of. But still, the space and forms are tenuous in Southern Scene – the feel is similar to a photograph in which shapes are blurred because there was movement during the exposure. Things in this painting fade in and out; there is air and room between elements, largely defined by color changes – much how a Fauvian Matisse feels. The leaf pile thus is able to breathe; to live.

This might be indicative of where and when this painting was made – likely out of doors, and on a sunny, breezy day. The crucial thing to realize though is that Pascin made deliberate choices about how he was going to craft his depiction, and because of those choices – the almonds; the dappled light; the breezy shapes – the painting feels wonderfully fresh. We know intellectually that this is a painting of a scene, not the scene itself. But still, we are somehow startled that it does not suddenly, despite being a resplendent butterfly pinned to a card, flutter its delicate wings and fly off.

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Art Thoughts, Week 6 – Glackens & Style

(Dear readers: apologies are due; this post is a week late, and the previous one still has no image. I had, admittedly, a great deal of trouble finding ANYTHING that looked vaguely like that painting...I'll put something up there, but if you want the real scoop, come see it at the Barnes. And since the post below is technically last week's, I'll be looking at and thinking about another painting towards the end of the week. Hey, it's only Wednesday!!)

Self-portrait (Portrait of the Artist), William James Glackens, American, 1870—1938, 1908, oil on canvas, BF 105.

How does a painting like this come about? Perhaps one afternoon Glackens arrived home; removed his hat and, liking the eccentricity of his hair, sat down in front of a mirror to do a self-portrait; arriving at a picture which would end up in the collection of his long-time friend, Dr. Albert Barnes. Regardless, Glackens as sitter has an extremely interesting loft to his hair in this painting, what my family would call a strubbelkopf, throwing Pennsylvania German phrases around as we do.

There are several things about this portrait which show Glackens’ hand, if you will – signature elements that turn up in much of his work. One is the radical shift in modeling styles that can be found, for example, in the area between his collar and his jowl. The collar follows the style of almost the entire painting – the background, his jacket, even his hair to some extent: extremely choppy and slathered, and at spots thickly knifed on. Immediately adjacent to this meaty paint is the softly toned, smooth, plastic surface of his neck; a world away from the tempestuous brushwork of most of the painting. It’s as if Leon Kosoff has suddenly begun painting over a color photograph. This is a contrast found in many of Glackens’ paintings which contributes to a fairly shallow focus in the painting, similar to the very shallow focus popular in magazine photography a few years back. His face is the only part of the painting that seems still, focused and deliberated over; the rest fuzzes into the background. (Of course, this is a bias; we know well enough that even the sloppiest paint can be deliberated over for hours.)

Another stylistic signpost is the juxtaposition of sharply contrasted reds and greens. This was a favorite practice of Glackens which can be seen, without exception as far as I know, in all of his portraits at the Barnes Foundation. Again, in the self-portrait’s colors, as in the contrasting surfaces, there is a definite minority/majority relationship. Deep alizarin, brick and umbers dominate; there are less blues, cadmium-type reds, and scant green. The greens, in fact, are relegated solely to the angles of his face (and an emerald dollop for a tie-pin) where they interact wonderfully with the roses and raspberries that are on opposing facets of the face. When seen from across the room, this contrast makes for a surprisingly-alive skin surface. In some of his portraits, Glackens played up the decorative differences in these colors, and there they seem more Fauve, but here it is for the sake of a purer realism.

The final element which could be pointed out as being a particular of Glackens – this time to his personality, not to continuity of his style, necessarily – is the marked differences between sides of his face. In this portrait, he is thirty-eight years old. While viewing the painting, I held a hand over the right side of the face: an impression of someone in the vigor of their early thirties was there…I then covered the left side, and immediately got the impression of a man ten or fifteen years older, disintegrating into the background. Did Glackens realize this possibly telling detail? Probably not; we don’t often give the artist the benefit of the doubt on these psychological issues: speaking as an artist, we don’t often consider these – or these particular – things. Critics have a way of placing a filter of themselves over an artwork, then having trouble seeing past it. The question does hang, though, and remains a good signifier for other particulars of Glackens' painting: he is nothing if not precociously aware.

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Art Thoughts, Week 2 – Matisse & Material

View of the Sea, Collioure (La Mer vue de Collioure), Henri Matisse (French, 1869 – 1954), 1906, oil on canvas, BF 73.

Matisse, the most famous son of a dingy northern French mining and textile-manufacturing area, was a lover of textiles. In many of his paintings, his handling of paint mimics the basic materials of weaving. A foundation of compositional threads were laid down, and the colors stitched in, around and between the pentimenti. There is not necessarily any loss of perspective or depth in most Matisse paintings; it is just accomplished by color and value rather than DaVincian sfumato, or smokiness. In fact Mattise’s aesthetic is more like a camera: all parts from finger’s distance to infinity is in the same focus. All things remain on the surface, like a tapestry flung across our view.

This beauty of a Fauve painting (shown, this time, above) has a very circular core. The winsome, willowy tree wraps around the canvas from the right to left, and lightly cascades olive-colored leaves near the top, creating a canopy over the village nestled bowl-like on the shore, which, sandwiched by the sea and sky, cuts through the painting’s center.

There is something of Wayne Thiebaud in the Fauve works of Matisse...or rather, there is something of Matisse in Thiebaud. The colors of Fauvism – a moniker that means “wild beasts”, and given, like many memorable names are, in mocking and jest, thus sticking forever – are normally thought of as being acidic, caustic; sardonic even. But here they are merely decadent, perhaps foretelling Matisse’s eventual, more mature bent, and thereby reminding me of the venerable Californian Thiebaud. The colors make the sweet-tooth salivate a bit: cotton candy pinks; watermelon and key lime; mangoes and lemon chiffon; blackberries and strawberries with cream – all these sweets can be found in this painting; an Easter basket for sure.

But there is some seriousness here: as with many Matisse paintings, there is a definite “there-ness”– a sense that this could be nowhere or anywhere else but here at this moment – along with a certain incoherency. That is, it is simultaneously a place – Collioure – but at the same time a thoroughly unique “Matisse-ified” Collioure. Along with the place, another significant presence in the painting is brushes. In every corner, no attempt is made to mask the artifice. It is a painting of Collioure, not Collioure itself – not even a picture of it, really. This is the epitome of abstractness; even more than the work of someone most often associated with modernist abstraction such as Jackson Pollock. Pure abstractness is slight and subtle, a comedic twisting of reality; Pollock is an overt and brutal representation of an icy ideal. Modernism has not, in bucolic Collioure, become tainted yet.

And yet, so much of it comes down to the materiality of the painting. It is a picture, but it is a picture made of materials; of stuff. Matisse treats the painting exactly as what it is painted on: a fabric. In this, he was confident. With the experimental calligraphy of his brights and filberts, he has woven us not only – in retrospect – a diminutive early masterpiece, but also somehow more importantly, a sweet memory of 1906 south France.

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