Art Thoughts, Week 24 -- Hals and Mortality

(Dear readers; this essay was to appear Friday afternoon; unfortunately the internet was down all that day, so you're getting it late. This week will supply another installment however.)

Dutch Burgher, Frans Hals, Dutch (c. 1580—1666), 1643, oil on canvas, BF 262.

Eyes are difficult to paint accurately; take it from someone who has tried, and often failed. The eyes (and even more so the eye socket) have so many thin strands of varied strata; such numerous tone and color changes – not to mention being known as “windows to the soul” – that they are likely the hardest thing on a human to paint. Nevertheless, Hals has painted a pair of extremely engaging eyes; dark eyes that are at turn inviting, comforting, imploring.

The eyes are also where the viewer’s eyes are first drawn to in a portrait. Any divergence from this tendency indicates a Herculean effort on the portrait painter’s part – it’s just too natural. Our own primary mode of gathering information is highly magnetized towards portrayals of another’s same portals. Depending on the met gaze’s intensity, focus, aloofness or even intimidation, we may quickly turn away, but the eye is still an enormous draw in art, especially in portraits.

And this is a portrait – but of whom exactly has been lost. Quite possibly, Hals was paid by this Dutch burgher (Dutch citizen) to have his portrait done. Even though we’ve lost his name, there are many more things (and most of them more important) to be learned about him. After the eyes, other features become noticeable: the gently rakish angle of his hat sitting on a slightly tilted head, and how that angle plays with his emerging arm below; the coarse, painterly way Hals has depicted his beard hairs and hands like two little patches of Lucian Freud; the delicate lay of his gauzy collar. All this is interesting, and could command a separate essay. But the most obvious, and what exists as a parallel element to the intensity of his eyes, is his gold pocket watch. These two seem to be sidling up into a joint message. What of the imploring in his eyes and face may be found in the watch? What of the open and obviously-readable watch is related to his eyes?

There is a tradition in the painting of portraits called momento mori, where an object or element in the painting shares the message of sure mortality; of what Franklin called the only sure thing besides taxation. Eventually, the burgher might be saying to us, we all will die, you included; in fact, I’ve gone on before and want you to think seriously about this fact, reforming your life if necessary. Accordingly, in Pennsylvania German culture, the idea takes form in a more emboldening phrase: “O edel Herz, bedenk dein End” (O noble heart, consider your end).

Momento mori usually takes shape in one of several iconic objects: a candle; skull; wilting flower; clock and so on. Here the choice is interesting – a gold watch, such as only the wealthy could have afforded. With the intricacy and skill involved in hand-making such a diminutive timepiece, it’s clear that this burgher was a man of means. This risks clouding our reception of his message. Is he warning us of the deluding snare that riches may become, or is this blatant ostentatiousness clothed in a false morality? In other words, is he really concerned, or just showing off? Perhaps we should give his eyes the benefit of the doubt, and not be tempted to ascribe the gold watch too much persuasive clout. Let’s postulate the burgher had overcome the sirens of wealth in his lifetime, and is now reaching out through the fog with clarity; inviting us to live Socrate’s “considered life”.

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Art Thoughts, Week 10 -- Picasso and Self-Awareness

(above: an image of the actual painting discussed! Wow!)

Figures with a Goat, Pablo Picasso (French, 1881—1973), 1906, oil on canvas, BF 250.


Very, very often the thing which annoys me most about art writing is when an otherwise erudite author gives in to flights of speculation, whether on meaning, intent, content, context or otherwise. The examples of this tendency I find especially egregious are the psychological and psychosexual, ala Freud. I tend to want hard, formalistic proof.

All that being said, please throw a grain of salt my way, as I am going to delve into that very place with a Picasso painting at the Barnes Foundation, Figures with a Goat. Picasso’s potency (in sundry ways) is well known, even documented. When he did this picture, he was twenty-five, and probably as virile as he would ever be, and thus to imbue his production with that light shouldn’t be unreasonable – its content was undoubtedly linked to his sexual urges, as any well-balanced artist’s might be. And he painted this picture while on an enjoyable trip with a female companion – wouldn’t it be unlikely that he not be influenced by hormones, as well as the light, space, texture and form around him?

The paintings from this period, of which this is one, have been called Rose – as well as Flesh – Period paintings. Fresh, young humanity is displayed here, replete in a rainbow of pinks, scarlets and madders. There are three characters in this scene: a pre-pubescent, statuesque girl; a younger and less demure boy with a water pot on his head, and a ram of dubious intent. Behind them is a simple, draped backdrop, looking almost like the shallow set for a modernist play. This type of uniform pink could suggest several things: youth, freshness, innocence. (It also could be coquettish, but it is too early for that here.) The value of the paint in this picture is fairly consistent and almost monochromatically pink. It varies in a few distinct spots, however: the head, hair and upper arms of the girl; the head and water pot of the boy, and less so, in the ram’s head and horns. What this deepening of the pink into madder rose suggests is a warming or ripening of sorts; an area of maturation or growth, or emerging consciousness and self-awareness. Taking the proposition of latent sexuality, the girl’s darkening head signifies her being on the brink of mentally realizing her blossoming sexual allure; for the boy, the darkened water pot signifies his developing realization of his sexual capability and desire, and his body as both its vessel and eventually, tool. Both of them, by bodily evidence, are still underdeveloped sexually, however they are moving into a limnal sort of sexual realization.

But what of the goat? He is a more mysterious character. Goats, possibly because of their long sessions of heat called ruts, have long been used to symbolize carnality, virility and temptation. Here the goat seems to be of the ilk of those animals with a particularly omniscient bent, which are sometimes seen in human scenes in art and literature, and have more insight into the human condition than even those involved. The goat provides our aside in this play; through his gaze we are told what the girl and boy cannot see; that they are maturing sexually, and will soon pry open a Pandora’s Box of complexity along with it. Thus, their Rose period will end, and a harder and more flawed, but richer, and more aware life will emerge for them.

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Art Thoughts, Week 4 – Cezanne & Contrast

Bathers at Rest, Paul Cezanne (French, 1839—1906), 1876-77, oil on canvas, BF 906.

I’ll begin with two suppositions, which will soon connect. One: Dr. Albert Barnes supposedly included “bad” (in his estimation) paintings by genius artists, mostly for didactic purposes; i.e. to perhaps illustrate the difficulties – and the interrelatedness – of not only seeing art well, but also making it well. And two: Paul Cezanne, the master of Aix-en-Provence, supposedly made two major types of paintings; en plein air, and studio. I don’t know the history of Barnes’s opinions on Bathers at Rest, but it is, in some ways, not the most beautiful painting by Cezanne. And in some other ways, it is a really wonderful picture (shown above; an unfortunately dark version).

Remember those compare-contrast papers from grade school? This painting is a study in compare and contrast; a studio painting in the true sense (studious). But most comparisons end up being contrasts. Each of the four figures is striking a different pose: stretching; supine on the grass; forward, arms akimbo; leaning against a rock. Another contrast is found in the marked variety of trees: some feathery and frond-like; others straight and spindly; one even suggestive of a spreading chestnut. These two contrasting groups seem almost like illustrations from a guidebook to tree forms, and a study book of figure drawing.

Another dominant contrast is that of dark and light. The light primarily emanates from the background – on the mountain, valley and river in roughly the center of the painting – while the rest is in shadow. The only protrusion of light into the foreground’s shade is a small triangle and a thin bar of lemon-lime colored grass, the very edge of the background’s light draped over the closer knoll.

Color too, is influenced by this bent towards contrast. The warmest of them are clustered around the painting’s center: warm bricks and terra-cottas under the spreading tree and in the central figure’s limbs and skin; Provencal reds and salmons in the valley behind the bathers. Besides the lemon-lime shafts of light which anchor the foreground to the background, the rest of the colors all around this warm core gradually grow cooler and cooler. These warm colors form a type of hub around which the cooling day rotates, connecting the heat in the figures directly to the heat from the sky and rocks. In fact, a line of light begins in the sky – a central cloud dabbed lightly with cadmium orange – and falls to the mountain’s edge, continuing through the valley and underneath the spreading tree, and then jumping the river to the triangle and bar of limey light. It then moves to the human element, in the central figure’s hands and thighs, until the very tip of the warmness in his toe touches the water at the very bottom of the canvas. Thus we’ve returned, in a way, to the warm sky: the reflection is the sky’s doppelganger.

A painting which I’m always reminded of when looking at this Cezanne, is The Mountain, (pictured here) by the Polish/French painter Balthus. In it we also have varied figures; contrasts of light and dark, cool and warm; a definite cut of light near the center of the painting. But while Balthus, as usual, is deep into his Prussian psyche, Cezanne is simply struggling to get outside his craft, while stuck inside on a rainy day – (despite what Dr. Barnes – or Freud – might try to persuade us of otherwise).

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