For Whom the Bell Tolls

Perhaps the finest art video podcast I’ve seen so far was Alexander Nemerov’s 2007 Wyeth Lecture in American Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, titled “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939.” Of all the great American artists, Edward Hopper resists political readings more strongly than any other. Born July 22, 1882, Hopper seems untouched by events during his life, content simply to depict light as it falls on a wall, as he famously remarked countless times, or to give visual form to the alienation and loneliness of modern life, especially in twentieth century America. Nemerov breaks through Hopper’s apolitical wall and shows how works such as Ground Swell (above, from 1939) can also be read as America “listening” to the drums of war in Europe before entering the conflict. Just as the figures in Hopper’s painting listen to the buoy’s bell in a strange rapture, Americans glued themselves to the radio in 1939 for dispatches from Europe as Germany invaded country after country and England seemed the last line of defense. Even the seemingly reclusive Hopper (who was a closet Francophile) must have listened to the news and the stirring broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow during the London Blitz.

Once Nemerov breaks the seal of Hopper’s apoliticism, almost all of his works from that fateful year of 1939 take on a whole new meaning. Nemerov shows how even Hopper’s Bridle Path (above, from 1939), a realistic depiction of a riding path in New York City’s Central Park, may also be read as a resistance to enter the conflict, as symbolized by the horses’ resistance to enter the dark tunnel. As FDR inched America closer to closer to the brink of war with incremental gestures such as the Lend-Lease aid program to England, a large portion of the American public looked to pull back the reigns and not become involved in another European conflict. Pearl Harbor remained two years away, so Hopper here may be depicting this reticence. Whether Hopper himself shared in that reticence remains a mystery thanks to his sphinx-like silence on almost anything not directly related to art.

Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening (above, from 1939) serves as the third painting in Nemerov’s 1939 troika. Here, Hopper paints many of his familiar Hopper-esque motifs: a simple New England house, two people emotionally distanced from one another, all of it seemingly captured on the brink of action or just after. What makes this different, however, is the dog’s attentiveness to a distant sound. Just like the buoy bell tolling in Ground Swell, the dog and the people find themselves mesmerized by that distant sound. The tall grass envelopes the dog and the entire foreground, like a sea on land. Hopper may also hint at the “snake in the grass,” poised to strike from a hiding place, like the Pearl Harbor attack. Nemerov’s lecture beautifully illustrated the power of a talented critic to bring a whole new dimension to an artist we believe we know completely. Produced in conjunction with the 2007 exhibition Edward Hopper at the NGA, Nemerov’s lecture provided the perfect compliment to that career-spanning reevaluation.

The Magic Show

When Filippo Brunelleschi developed the scientific basis for one-point linear perspective in the early fifteenth century, he opened up an entire new world of visual effects for artists to amuse and uplift audiences. National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC examines that turning point in art in a seven-part video podcast series titled Empire of the Eye: The Magic of Illusion. Hosted by Al Roker, the series uses modern day computer graphics to illustrate the complexity and genius of effects achieved over 500 years ago.

Masaccio’s Trinity (above, from 1425), believed to be the first painting to make use of Brunelleschi’s ideas on perspective, stars in the first installment after the introduction to the series. Using three-dimensional computer modeling, the podcast literally enters into Masaccio’s painting inside Santa Maria Novella, Florence, as if it were an actual room rather than a flat painting. The filmmakers then closely examined the surface of the fresco itself to show the areas where Masaccio incised marks into the fresh plaster to help guide him in depicting the perspective. You can even see the braid marks of the rope Masaccio tensed and then plucked to create straight lines in the wet plaster. Using scholars’ theories on the sequence in which Masaccio painted the Trinity fresco (broken down into 28 separate but overlapping sections of plaster, known as “giornati” or “one day’s worth”), the filmmakers step back in time and recreate how the original fresco unfolded, as if you were back in fifteenth century Florence looking over Masaccio’s shoulder. You’ll wonder at the technological genius of Masaccio, barely in his twenties when the Trinity was painted, as much as at the computer graphics that help bring it back to life today.

The second installment of the series examines Donato Bramante’s forced perspective apse (above, from the 1480s) in the Church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro in Milan. When the physical limitations of a road behind the church limited an expansion to only a few feet, Bramante created the illusion of an apse that stretches much further behind the altar. Looking at the apse in person, you realize that it is actually a relief sculpture that extends only a few feet. What appears to be a deep ceiling vault is really a radically foreshortened sculpture of what the vault ceiling would look like. Such trickery not only maintained the balance and symmetry of the existing church but also allowed churchgoers to experience the feeling of transcendence the church fathers intended.

That lofty feeling gets loftier in an episode in which Baroque artists such as Andrea Pozzo blow the roof off of churches with illusionary frescoes such as the ceiling fresco for
Sant'Ignazio in Rome (above, from 1685). Pozzo carefully constructed the illusion of a ceiling three times higher than it actually was. Standing in the designated bull’s eye on the floor of the church, the filmmakers show the full impact of Pozzo’s illusion. Moving away from that sweet spot, they then show just how precise and fragile the whole effect is, where just a few steps in any direction create a vantage point in which the perspective begins to fail. (Steffi Roettgen’s Italian Frescoes: The Baroque Era, 1600-1800, reviewed here, examines Pozzo and his contemporaries in all their high-flying glory.)

When the church officials overseeing the building of Sant'Ignazio wanted a towering dome but didn’t want one that would block the light of their library, Pozzo and his bag of tricks came to the rescue in the form of a painted dome (above) that seemingly rose high above the church floor but in actuality was a flat ceiling surface. Such amazing, yet practical, solutions make the NGA’s series a joy to watch and a true eye-opener. I can’t wait for the last three episodes and hope that Piero della Francesca, one of my favorite Renaissance artists and a true magician of perspective, gets this amazing, modern treatment of his ancient techniques. The NGA’s fresh look at the now old technique of perspective reminds us of just how groundbreaking (and wall-breaking and ceiling-breaking) these works once were.

Burning Down the House

In the September 24, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Simon Schama, in his inimitable style, previews the J.M.W. Turner exhibition coming to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, next month. Schama examines Turner from the perspective of Turner’s nationalism, his dyed-in-the-wool Britishism, and how the exhibition brings that out. The story features my very favorite painting from the PMA’s permanent collection, The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834 (above), one of two paintings Turner painted of the even (both appear in the show). In The Burning, Schama sees the British people, lined up along the bridge to watch the conflagration, united in watching the corruption of the old establishment burn away. Turner clearly sides with the people, the true source of “the nation.”

Schama also examines the rollercoaster ride Turner’s reputation has taken since his own lifetime. “The reasons for both the sanctification and the denunciation were more or less the same: Turner’s preference for poetic atmospherics over narrative clarity, his infatuation with the operation of light rather than with the objects it illuminated,” Schama writes. “His love affair with gauzy obscurity, his resistance to customary definitions of contour and line, his shameless rejoicing in the mucky density of oils or in the wayward leaks and bleeds of watercolors—these were condemned as reprehensible self-indulgence.” Turner’s style irked his contemporaries, but modern eyes see Impressionism and Expressionism being born in Turner’s “reprehensible self-indulgence.” Schama, however, warns that “we do Turner no favors by pinning the tinny little medal of First Modernist on him.” The subject matter of his paintings, especially when that subject was England, always matters to Turner more than mere atmospheric effects. In his always entertaining and educating way, Schama shows how Turner cannot be reduced to merely a proto-Modernist or a relic of the past. Instead, Schama shows how Turner remains relevant in his hopeful, creatively energetic vision of a national people free of the jingoism of some other brands of nationalism that plague our world today.

(BTW, Schama’s take on Turner’s nationalism and innate Britishness dovetails nicely with the NGA’s podcast on Turner’s affinity for Shakespeare, which I reviewed here.)

Bard Brotherhood

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Juliet and her Nurse, 1836, oil on canvas; Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat

As part of the run-up to the October opening of the J.M.W. Turner exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the NGA features a fantastic podcast titled, “A Shakespearean Connection,” that brings together Michael Kahn, Artistic Director, Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, and NGA Senior Curator Franklin Kelly to discuss links between Turner and William Shakespeare. The grand opening of the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s new Harman Center for the Arts also in October makes this a double celebration of England in America. In the 14-minute discussion, Kahn and Kelly discuss how Turner consciously drew parallels between himself and Shakespeare, going so far as to adopt Shakespeare’s birthday of April 23rd as his own. Turner attempts to place himself on equal footing with the Bard, earning in later life the unofficial title of “the Shakespeare of Landscape.” In Juliet and her Nurse (above), Turner alludes to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet yet moves the scene from Verona to Venice, a liberty that drew the by-then standard Turner-esque critiques of “too fantastic” and “unreal.” These criticisms roused the young John Ruskin to write a letter to Turner offering to act in his defense, an offer Turner kindly refused. However, that act began a life-long championing of Turner by Ruskin that raised not only Turner but also Ruskin within the ranks of art history.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Snow Storm - Steam Boat off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author Was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich, 1842, oil on canvas; Tate, London, Bequeathed by the Artist, 1856

Kahn and Kelly later remark on Turner’s Snow Storm (above), in which Turner claims that he was aboard a steamboat named the Ariel in the middle of a snowstorm (a claim that has never been verified and is widely disbelieved). Kahn marvels at the painting as a “visual transcription of Ariel’s description of the storm” at the beginning of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “So theatrical, so evocative,” Kahn gushes. This later, nearly abstract painting contrasts beautifully with the more realistic, controlled Juliet and her Nurse. In this brief discussion, Kahn and Kelly neatly cut to the core of Turner’s Shakespearean qualities of breadth and depth. It’s a tasty appetizer for anyone planning on seeing the full-course Turner exhibit later this year at the NGA or next year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

[Many thanks to the NGA for the images from the Turner exhibit above.]

100-Year-Old Demoiselles

The MoMA opens today an exhibit celebrating the 100th anniversary of the creation of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (above). The old girls still look great.

I’ve talked before about how underwhelming an experience it was to finally see the Mona Lisa in the flesh. Great art gets great hype, which can be tough to cut through to see a work afresh and truly appreciate it. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles lived up to the hype, at least for me.

The size of the painting, which is almost 8 feet wide by 8 feet tall, impressed me first. Reading the dimensions in a book next to a reproduction and trying to imagine what it would look like rarely prepares you for seeing the real thing in front of you. Picasso clearly wanted these women to be seen on a grand scale. Combined with their similar subject matter, this epic scale draws the clearest connections to the Large Bathers paintings of Paul Cezanne, both the version at the PMA and that at the Barnes Foundation.

The content of the painting catalogues Picasso’s interests at the time. On the left (detail above), the stylized faces of the women are almost cubist in how he has broken them (as well as their bodies) up into flat planes. Picasso makes no attempt at realism. (The MoMA’s podcast of Les Demoiselles pointed out to me for the first time the strange nipplelessness of these females.) The faces resemble masks in their monotonous lifelessness, perhaps reflecting Picasso’s misogynistic view of the fungibility of women as he raced through mistress after mistress.

As you move across the painting from left to right, this monotony turns grotesque (detail above). The face of the woman sitting on the right appears to be a transitional stage, half human and half monster, but the face of the woman standing on the right completes the transformation to monstrosity. The image above shows the similarity between Picasso’s Demoiselle with the monstrous face and the African masks influencing his work at the time. Picasso incorporates African art into the work seamlessly, merging it with the Western concepts of cubism and Impressionism (via Cezanne) into something completely new. Les Demoiselles still delivers “the shock of the new” a century later.

Despite its disturbing imagery, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles remains one of the landmarks of modern art. It is the Mona of the MoMA and shouldn’t be missed on any visit there.

(UPDATE: Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York shares his thoughts on Les Demoiselles’ centennial.)

To Tell the Truth

The PMA recently released a new podcast of the April 12, 2007, conversation between South African artist William Kentridge and Michael Taylor, the museum's Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, titled “Alfred Jarry/Ubu and the Truth Commission.” (Kentridge’s unrelated Untitled [Man With Megaphone] is above.)

Taylor, who in an earlier podcast spoke on “Painting and ‘Pataphysics from Max Ernst to Thomas Chimes” from March 9, 2007, sees a direct line from Alfred Jarry’s use of his Ubu figure to comment on late 19th/early 20th century France bourgeois culture, to Max Ernst's use of Jarry’s Ubu to comment on 20th century fascism, to Kentridge’s use of Ubu to comment on the Truth Commission, the South African investigation into atrocities committed under apartheid.

Kentridge sees a fundamental paradox in the operation of the Truth Commission, in which those who had committed the atrocities would receive amnesty if they confessed everything. Only those who did not confess would be tried, thus creating a system encouraging truth at the expense of justice. Kentridge uses Jarry’s Ubu figure in etchings, plays, and short animated films to show how the “rapaciousness, greed, violence, [and] self pity” of Ubu was reproduced in real life in the endgame of the South African tragedy.

Just as Jarry felt that the most absurd images could be the most naturalistic, Kentridge finds the most grotesque images exposed by the Truth Commission to be the most emblematic, such as the before and after photos of a pig wearing booby-trapped exploding headphones (a test run for an assassination device successfully used on a political dissenter). Kentridge recreates the Truth Commission-generated race between the “photocopier” (those who wanted to confess and save themselves) and the “paper shredder” (those who wanted to destroy evidence) in one of his plays through the absurd figure of Niles the Crocodile, a living shredder of the evidence Ubu feeds him.

Jarry’s sense of the “complete seriousness of the activity of playing,” Kentridge says, and his belief that “you are played by the game, not you playing the game,” inspired Kentridge to modernize Ubu and his “absurd, fragmented” world to illuminate the world of his native South Africa.

With this great podcast, the PMA continues their excellent presentation of the Thomas Chimes Adventures in ‘Pataphysics exhibit. The depth and variety of the presentation of the works of Chimes and Alfred Jarry, and their continued relevance today, testifies to the excellent scholarship of Michael Taylor and the museum’s commitment to art education.

(One last little note for the great folks at the PMA who make these podcasts available and who have already heard me whine for more of them. During this conversation, two short films were shown in addition to a slide show. Is there any chance of ever doing video podcasts of these presentations as well? Aside from the obvious permission problem videos of art presents, I don’t see much of a difference between what you’re doing now and a video equivalent, especially for art not easily accessible or familiar to most people. I don’t personally have a video iPod, but it’s clearly the wave of the future. The PMA would really score points with the technorati if they were on the forefront of this wave.)

Revolution of the Spirit

I highly recommend the podcast lecture on "Diego Rivera and the Mexican Mural and Print Revolution" at the PMA site (from January 7, 2007). (Diego Rivera's mural in Mexico's National Palace is shown above.)

Jane Golden, the Director of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, begins the lecture with a heartfelt intoduction and sets the tone for the lecture thematically and emotionally. Ms. Golden's affection for the main speaker, Guadalupe Rivera Marín, Ph.D., Founder and Board Chair of the Diego Rivera Foundation, and the daughter of Diego Rivera, is clear. Even clearer is Ms. Golden's belief in the power of murals and public art to act as an agent for social change, a power at the heart of Diego Rivera's painting.

Dr. Rivera then discusses at length her father's work, particularly his desire to depict not only the drama of life but also its beauty. She describes her father's vision of an artist as a revolutionary figure not just of revolutions of politics or arms but more importantly of revoltions of the spirit.

One of the best laugh lines comes when Dr. Rivera speaks of her father's affiliation for strong women, which was perhaps the reason why he loved so many of them (including Frida Kahlo).

Dr. Rivera's self-admitted nervousness and difficulties with English and some sound level problems, perhaps caused when she gestured away from a unidirectional microphone, make it a little difficult to listen to, but this podcast certainly rewards the patience of the listener.

Unfortunately, with this podcast and the previous Thomas Chimes-related podcast, I have now exhausted the lectures available from the PMA site. If you are a member of the PMA and are interested in these podcasts, I encourage you to join the online community at the PMA site and ask for more lectures, perhaps including lectures from previous exhibits in years past. If you are a member of another museum in another city, I encourage you to make a similar approach to your local museum. The education and entertainment value of these lectures is too great to let them wallow away in storage in our digital age.

Chimes Exhibit Lecture Podcast

I just listened this morning to a podcast of the PMA's Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, Michael Taylor, discussing the influence of French Symbolist writer Alfred Jarry on twentieth-century artists such as Thomas Chimes (currently exhibited at the PMA), Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, George Rouault, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. (Taylor claims to have linked 300 artists to Jarry.) One of Thomas Chimes portraits of Jarry is above.

Taylor sees Jarry's tyrannical character Ubu as a landmark figure in modernist art and a precursor of the totalitarianism and dehumanizing mechanization of the 20th century. When Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin rose to power, Taylor claims that artists used the Ubu character as a symbol of the brutish wrongs of the age. Taylor's ability to link both art history and social history makes for a fascinating exploration of the implications of art on society and vice versa.

Taylor's lecture was delivered live at the PMA on March 9, 2007. The podcast is available free from the PMA site. (A lecture on Diego Rivera and the Mexican Mural and Print Revolution is also available.) With the ubiquity of iPods today, I just wish that more and more museums would make content like this available free online. Hearing this lecture has made me want to read Jarry's work (I confess that I've read none) and examine these artists he's influenced more closely. Museums should realize that a little taste like this can bring hungry patrons to their door very easily.