A Beautiful Mind

What makes something we see pleasing to our eyes? Is beauty always in the eye of the beholder, or is there something common to the human mind that says, “This is art”? Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics, a new exhibition at The Walters Art Museum, brings together science and art to answer these questions by turning an art gallery into a laboratory, with art patrons the willing participants. Please visit Picture This at Big Think to read more of "A Beautiful Mind."

[Image: Jean Arp, La dame de Delos (The Woman of Delos), 1959, plaster, 14 5/8 x 18 7/8 x 9 ½ inches, Adler & Conkright Fine Art, New York.]

[Many thanks to The Walters Art Museum for providing the image above from Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics, which runs from January 23 through April 11, 2010.]

Saving Silence

"We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds," Jean Arp once said. Born September 16, 1887, the French Arp (who called himself Hans when speaking German) joined forces with like-minded artists during the dark days of World War I and helped form the Dada and Surrealist movements, which wanted to take the twisted reason of “power-mad gangsters” embroiling the world in armed conflict and replace it with the playful, unconscious world of chance. Arp’s Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance) (above, from 1916-1917) belongs to a series of collages he did by allegedly dropping torn bits of paper onto a larger sheet and pasting them wherever chance led them. By placing his imagination completely out of the picture, Arp sought to reproduce the random effects of nature. This collage seems to composed to be done purely by chance, but the spirit of Arp’s enterprise—literally a dream to save the world—still holds true.

Arp loved to mimic nature in his abstractions, creating biomorphic figures such as Head and Shell (above, from 1933). Arp’s polished brass Head and Shell suggests natural forms without accurately reproducing them. Arp claimed that he only titled such works after deciding there was nothing left to change after allowing his unconscious mind to play with the forms. Like Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth, among many others, copied Arp’s flirtation with natural forms in their paintings and sculptures. "Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb," Arp later said, again echoing the Surrealist/Dada line that art flowed organically from the unconscious rather than the conscious mind, which always looked to shape (and often misshape) the world. There’s always a great sense of movement in Arp’s sculptures, which often seem to be growing before your eyes, as if they had just emerged from a shell and were looking for their mother.

Arp fled France as the Nazis advanced and sat out World War II in Zurich, Switzerland. Years later, Arp looked back on those sad days and lamented the fate of humanity. "Soon silence will have passed into legend,” Arp believed. “Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation." With works such as Human Concretion (above, from 1935), Arp hoped to cement the importance of thought and right reasoning to the survival of the human race. While Arp’s earliest works represented an escape from thought, or at least the twisted thought of those hungering for power, his later works emphasize the need to find a quiet place within and find the meaning of life for ourselves, away from the cacophony of media and technological progress. What would Arp make of today’s world of gadgets, all of which fill the world with noise and drown out our inner voices? He’d probably put a finger to his lips, point to one of his sculptures, and whisper quietly, “Look, and learn.”

Through Thick and Thin

Before World War II, Nicolas de Stael painted mainly representational works. When hostilities erupted, de Stael responded to reality with greater and greater abstraction. Born January 5, 1914, de Stael met Jean Arp and Sonia and Robert Delaunay in the South of France in 1941 and followed their example in creating his first abstract paintings. de Stael painted Marathon (above) in 1948, but it represents much of his early work in the thick application of impasto. Like the Abstract Expressionists in America, de Stael’s paints in an athletic, physical style that naturally drew him to paint several sports scenes. The struggle of the straining marathoner mirrors the struggles de Stael encountered in finding acceptance and monetary success. Two years before he painted Marathon, de Stael’s wife died from malnutrition.

de Stael first found success in his abstract works based on recognizable landscapes, such as his Mount Sainte-Victorie (above, from 1954). To paint the same mountain that Cezanne made famous took a lot of courage, which de Stael certainly had. de Stael painted often with a palette knife, thickly working the paint onto the surface, similar to the technique of Chaim Soutine. Although de Stael knew and befriended Georges Braque, one of the founders of Cubism, I find it hard to see much influence in his work. de Stael’s unique blend of different influences, many of which concentrated on the use of color to express emotion, adds up to a school unto itself in many ways. This stylistic isolation found a counterpart in de Stael’s personal life, as depression forced him to pull away from his artistic peers. Many see de Stael’s work as a forerunner of Color field painting, which I agree with if you place his work next to that of Hans Hofmann, who also served as an inspiration to the Color Field artists but never truly became one of them.

de Stael finally succumbed to the worst elements of his depression in 1955 and took his own life by leaping from the balcony of his eleventh story studio. Blue Reclining Nude (above, from 1955) remained as one of his final works, a bold simplification of the human form that harks back to Picasso’s Blue Period and looks forward to the Color Field artists, again, in its use of broad areas of color composed of thinly applied paint. The artist who began working with such a heavy hand ended with a lighter touch. Sadly, nothing could lighten his heavy heart.

Automatic Artist

Jean Arp, one of the founders of Dada and early Surrealist, was born September 16, 1887. Painter, collagist, sculptor, and poet, Arp may be best known for his automatism, in which he allowed the rules of chance to create his works, especially his collages in which he would allow pieces of torn paper to fall upon a sheet and he would glue them in place exactly in the pattern in which they fell. Works such as Before My Birth (above), from 1914, show Arp’s dependence on unconscious forces to compose his works.

I’ve always found Arp’s sculpture to be the most interesting aspect of his art. Works such as the beautifully gleaming Classical Sculpture (above) compare favorably with those of fellow abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Henry Moore saw Arp’s works and modeled his own approach to the human figure after Arp’s. Arp gets at the essence of the figure in his sculptures, reducing the figure to its simplest components. In his poetry, Arp showed a similar gift for getting at “the roots” of a subject, as in his poem “The Air Is a Root”:

The air is a root.
The stones are filled with tenderness. bravo.
bravo. the stones are filled with air.
the stones are watery branches.
on the stones replacing the mouth
grows the skeleton of a leaf. bravo.
A stone voice face to face and foot to foot
with a stone glance.
the stones are tormented like flesh
the stones are clouds for their second
nature dances to them on their third nose.
bravo. bravo.
when the stones scratch themselves, nails grow
on the roots. bravo. bravo.
the stones woke to eat the exact
hour

Arp always seems to stand between two extremes. Born in the Alsace region of France, Arp spoke both French and German and was known as “Hans” by Germans and as “Jean” by the French. Multiple early schools of avant garde modernism claim him as their own. Despite ties to other modernists such as Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters, Arp always maintained his own unique style. As great as Arp’s greatest works are, they always seem to me to be fragments, as truncated as his limbless Pyrenees Torso (above). Flying by autopilot throughout his artistic career, Arp never seemed to arrive at any destination of achievement. Of course, he would probably respond that it was the journey itself that mattered, the mind in flight more vital than the results on the ground.