Mythbusters

It’s a great romantic myth that great artists come out of nowhere and develop a truly “new” style that breaks all the rules and announces a brave, new world. When Clement Greenberg hailed Jackson Pollock as the next big thing that would cast off the oppressive chains of the past and lead the way to a whole new way of seeing, he bought into that myth entirely and invited the entire art world to join him. Born January 28, 1912, Pollock owed much of his art to a series of mentors and influences, like pretty much every other major artist in history. As America pulled itself out from under The Great Depression, Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Without that financial assistance, Pollock would never have continued as an artist and never painted works such as Moby-Dick (above, from 1943). Moby-Dick not only shows Pollock’s interest in Herman Melville but also the influence of David Alfaro Siqueiros, whom Pollock worked with in the 1930s. Siqueiros’ unique use of the liquid properties of paint as well as his independent spirit helped shape Pollock into the individualist he later became.

Another great influence on the young Pollock was Thomas Hart Benton. It’s hard to see how Benton, the pseudo-realist regionalist, could have influenced works such as Pollock’s Blue Poles (Number 11, 1952) (above, from 1952), but if you dig deeply, you can see the connections. Like Siqueiros, Benton displayed a fierce streak of independence and passed that trait on to his students, including Pollock. But even more importantly, Benton taught Pollock how to compose a painting. Many people who look at Pollock’s paintings deny that there is any structure, but there is, if you look closely. Blue Poles may have the most obvious structure of all. In his study of Pollock’s art, Kirk Varnedoe showed how Blue Poles mimics the compositions of many of Benton’s works, with the blue poles standing in for the figures that would strike poses in Benton’s historical murals. The drip technique certainly doesn’t come from Benton, but the underlying structure does.

Perhaps the most fascinating suggested influence on Pollock for me is that of Claude Monet. Monet’s late Water Lilies paintings, thanks to his severe cataracts, approach abstraction in their color and lines. Before even that late period, Monet’s Cathedral series took the face of a cathedral and almost dissolved it in different light effects. One of Pollock’s earliest drip paintings, titled Cathedral (above, from 1947), may pay homage to Monet in some sense. In Cathedral, Pollock layers paint in a very controlled and deliberate fashion, constructing the “cathedral” of paint with absolute control in a way that denies the myth of “Jack the Dripper” aimlessly flinging paint about and eventually calling it art. Monet’s art is all about the eye taking in light and color. Pollock took that lesson and extended it further, almost obliterating the ostensible subject in the pursuit of pure color and gesture. The wild ride of Abstract Expressionism seems light years away from the serenity of Impressionism, but inquiring minds can find connections in the great web of art history. Freed from the myth of magical individuality, Pollock can finally be seen as a great student of art history who set off on his own only after following the tracks of others.

Tales of the City

While reading James H. Rubin’s Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh, I came away with a much higher opinion of the art of Gustave Caillebotte. Born August 19, 1848, Caillebotte often suffers from an critical inferiority complex thanks to his dual role as patron of the Impressionists as well as being one of them. Rubin’s essential argument (which I’ll discuss more in depth when I post my review) centers around how the Impressionists embraced the trappings of modern life and progress rather than rejected them in a turn back to nature, which is the common narrative hung around the necks of the movement. No artist of the time embraced the post-Haussmann look of Paris as enthusiastically and strikingly as Caillebotte in such images as Paris Street, Rainy Day (above, from 1877). With almost photographic realism, Caillebotte sends the viewer’s eyes shooting down the long thoroughfares of the modernized Paris while simultaneously depicting the modern look of cosmopolitans as they walk in the rain. As Rubin points out, French Impressionism means leisure and nature to most people, but to many Impressionists it meant the world around them, especially the fast-paced, highly modern city of Paris.

With a nod towards Japonisme, Caillebotte used striking perspective and cropping to generate the sense of speed and movement in works such as Le Pont de l'Europe (above, from 1876). The powerful line of the bridge disappearing into space naturally pulls our attention into the distance. Against that rapid flow, the pedestrians walk towards us. The man addressing the young woman may actually be soliciting her, reflecting the sad reality of prostitution that plagued Paris and most modern cities at the time as women’s rights and options lagged behind the times. The man standing at the rail, covering his face as he looks below, may be contemplating suicide, reflecting the sad reality of fast financial success and ruin as unstable markets led many unstable souls to a bitter end. Adding to this multilayered snapshot of Parisian life, Caillebotte makes extraordinary use of the steel architecture of the bridge itself, finding a beauty in the intricacies of engineering that made such new bridges (and, thus, improved water travel and commerce) possible.

Kirk Varnedoe often praised Caillebotte for bringing a whole new perspective to the Impressionist oeuvre that other, more well-known artists did not. Works such as Boulevard Seen From Above (above, from 1880) show Caillebotte’s love of photography and its ability to capture familiar scenes from unique perspectives. During his lifetime, Caillebotte seemed more of a dilettante than a serious artist, due probably to the great family wealth that allowed him to purchase many of the great works of his friends and fellow artists, such as Degas, Renoir, and others. Little did I know when touring the Barnes Foundation that I was seeing most of Caillebotte’s personal collection, purchased by Dr. Albert C. Barnes after the artist’s death. Perhaps with a greater appreciation of the variety and diversity of the Impressionist movement through works such as Rubin’s, Caillebotte will finally find room to have a name for himself.

Composing Chaos

With the possible exception of Frida, Salma Hayek’s film of Frida Kahlo’s life and art, Ed Harris’ Pollock, his interpretation of the life and art of Jackson Pollock, may be the finest biopic of a painter ever done. Born January 28, 1912, Pollock lived the myth of the tortured artist, always playing up to the expectations the public had of the crazy artist dubbed by the press as “Jack the Dripper” for his unique abstract expressionist paintings created by dripping and splashing paint. Behind the wild life story and the caricature of the madman blindly flinging paint onto canvas, there is a core of composure beneath the chaos. In works such as Blue Poles Number 11, 1952 (above, from 1952), Pollock grounded the patterns of dripped color with the rhythmic series of horizontal blue lines (the “poles” of the title) using, as Kirk Varnedoe showed in his book on Pollock, a compositional pattern Pollock learned from the regionalist Thomas Hart Benton. In many ways, Pollock’s life careened out of control, thanks mainly to substance abuse and his unstable emotional life, but his art never was a creation of pure chance.

Like the poles that stabilize Blue Poles, Pollock’s marriage to fellow abstract expressionist Lee Krasner helped stabilize his life and allow him to enjoy some success. Works such as Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (above, from 1950) show the beautiful effects that Pollock’s technique could achieve. Advances in liquid paint made that technique possible, and Pollock’s time assisting David Alfaro Siqueiros helped open his eyes to that potential. Pollock’s drip paintings made such a paradigmatic leap in modern art that nobody really could follow in the same style. Anything else would be condemned as pure imitation. For a style so deceptively easy to the untrained eye, no school of Pollock formed around him. Such isolation only makes his art and his life more fascinating.

The performance aspect of Pollock’s painting continues to intrigue students of his art. Fortunately, Hans Namuth filmed Pollock at work, including innovative shots such as the one above in which Pollock painted on a sheet of glass as Namuth filmed from below, giving a sense of being within the painting as Pollock worked upon it. Unfortunately, such close scrutiny made the already self-conscious artist even more jittery and upset the delicate balance of his life. During his life, Pollock continually felt torn asunder by demands upon his work. The critic Clement Greenberg championed Pollock as the greatest painter of the age, the heir to the long legacy of Western art. Greenberg’s rival critic Harold Rosenberg, meanwhile, proposed Willem de Kooning as the top artist, attempting to generate a rivalry in the press between the artists that didn’t exist in real life between the two friends. Pollock even became the plaything of the United States government during the Cold War as they held his work up as an example of the freedom of American democracy in contrast to the repression of Russian Communism. All of these strains proved too much for Pollock, who lived too fast and died too young while drunk driving. Like James Dean, another icon of the period, it would be difficult to imagine Jackson Pollock living into old age, but it would have been nice to have had the chance.

The Patron Saint of Impressionism

Born into a wealthy family, Gustave Caillebotte put his wealth to good use, not only becoming a painter himself but helping promote the work of other painters who counted him as a friend and benefactor, buying their works as well as helping pay the rent of artists such as Monet. Caillebotte, the “Patron Saint of Impressionism,” was born on August 19, 1848. After studying law and fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, Caillebotte stumbled into painting under the wing of Leon Bonnat. In The Orange Trees (above), he paints his brother Martial Jr. and cousin Zoe enjoying the surroundings of his family’s home in Yerres, France around 1878.

Although Caillebotte surrounded himself with the Impressionists, he himself painted in a realistic style, specifically scenes of urban Paris, such as The Floor Scrapers (above). The interior of The Floor Scrapers resembles many of the ballet class interiors of Edgar Degas, a close friend of Caillebotte. The unique cropping of The Floor Scrapers shows the influence of photography, a hobby of Caillebotte’s, on his painting. The strong diagonals of the floorboards also indicate the influence of Japonisme, which impressed itself on so many late 19th century French artists.

Kirk Varnedoe praised Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (above) as one of the finest paintings of the 19th century for its innovative perspective and use of photographic cropping. Although his career was relatively short, Caillebotte painted a few works of lasting importance. Caillebotte’s dual role in art history as painter and patron once did his artistic reputation a disservice. (Varnedoe recounts that critical struggle here.) However, there is no denying Caillebotte’s importance to the Impressionist movement. When Caillebotte died in 1894, he left in his will (executed by his close friend Renoir) 68 paintings to the French government by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Manet, Pissarro, and Sisley. Amazingly, the French government refused many of them. Years later, many of them ended up in the Barnes Collection. With the perspective of years, Caillebotte’s role in the history of art, including his personal contribution to the making of art itself, has finally been recognized.

Drawing a Blank

When people who don’t know much about modern art point towards something and say “I can do that,” what they’re most likely pointing at is something either painted or influenced by Robert Ryman, infamous father of minimalist painting’s all-white works, such as the one seemingly befuddling a patron in the image above.

Ryman’s career in the visual arts began as a museum guard at the MOMA. His first major work was a single-color abstraction called Orange Painting, not much different than the single-color International Klein Blue works of Yves Klein, of course. But whereas Klein tried to engage the viewer with saturated fields of color, Ryman moved away from color and tried to find expression in nuance and minimal gesture.

Ryman’s Series #9 (White) appears above. Ryman’s mimimalism is so minimal that reproductions usually appear to be completely white. I chose the photo of the patron looking at a Ryman painting at the top specifically to avoid leading off with an apparently empty box. Series #9 (White), however, does have enough variance, especially in the receding corners and in the visible texture of the center, to give us something to hold on to intellectually. It’s this frustrating nature of his works that, unfortunately, has brought him scorn in mainstream culture.

Ryman’s influence is still felt today, however, in artists such as Quentin Morris, who bases his minimalism in black rather than white to explore African-American culture within the context of society as a whole. I don’t see any corresponding racial aspect in Ryman’s work, but that’s the strength of his minimalism—it allows each viewer to engage the work and discover something already within him or herself. Unfortunately, as much as critics such as Kirk Varnedoe try to defend these “pictures of nothing,” they will always remain exactly that for many people.

Why Cy

David Packwood’s post on Cy Twombly over at Art History Today (in response to Jonathan Jones' post at the Guardian calling Twombly’s art “the most powerful history painting of our time”) leads me to ask myself again an old question: Why don’t I “get” Cy Twombly?

Even Robert Hughes’ essay “The Graffiti of Loss” (via David Packwood) and Kirk Varnedoe’s retrospective fail to help me. Packwood, Jones, Hughes, and Varnedoe—all finer minds than mine, yet still can’t convince me that Twombly’s a great artist, or even (sigh) an artist at all. Not even Twombly’s father’s major league baseball pitching career, albeit for 1 month in 1921, warms up my coolness to his work.

At first, I thought that it might be Twombly’s use of oil crayons that turned me off. (I did disparagingly call him “crayon-wielding Cy Twombly” when writing of Jeff Koons.) Even pastels suffered under a misperception as a medium for children until they became popular in the late 19th century. Prejudice could be the answer, but I’d like to think that I’m aware enough of past prejudices to avoid perpetuating others, especially if I accept Twombly’s justification for using it as part of his naïve, primitive style, which I’m more than willing to do.

I’ve scratched off a failure to appreciate Twombly due to the inability of reproduction to do him justice, because I’ve spent time looking at Twomblys in the flesh at the PMA. Twombly’s suite of 10 paintings titled collectively as 50 Days at Illium occupy a room in the modern and contemporary art section all by themselves. I’ve walked through that room and studied the scribbles and graffiti-like marks, trying to understand all the fuss. (Twombly’s Shield of Achilles from the 50 Days at Ilium suite is above.) You’d think that the classical/literary allusions of his work would appeal to the bookish side of me, but that only seems to push me away by the too jarring juxtaposition of Twombly’s images and my personal concept of the classical world. When I look at Twombly’s shield of Achilles, I only see Twombly and not Twombly AND Achilles.

Unlike my dislike for rap music and country music, I actually have a relatively informed dislike for Twombly, but even this relatively informed response leaves me feeling that I’m missing something truly worthwhile.

Perhaps only time and effort will lead me to love Twombly. I remember first encountering the music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg and struggling to understand and appreciate them. Placing faith in the critics, I patiently opened myself up to their worlds and have loved them ever since. Maybe one day Cy and I will be buddies, too.

Selling Banality

In the April 23, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins profiles (not available online) one of my least favorite artists—Jeff Koons. (Koons’ life-sized ceramic statue of Michael Jackson and his pet chimp Bubbles is above. Groan with me, please.)

With the possible exception of crayon-wielding Cy Twombly, Jeff Koons qualifies as the most bafflingly “important” modern artist I know. The 1988 exhibit that made him a name was appropriately titled “Banality.” He’s been selling banality ever since. Tomkins quotes Kirk Varnedoe describing one of Koons’ other works as “one of those very rare hits at the exact center of the target” in its ability to fuse “a ton of contradictions (about the artist, about the time)… with shocking, deadpan economy into an unforgettable ingot.” I don’t presume to read the mind of the late, great Varnedoe, but I’m not sure if this “ingot” of the 1980s was necessarily a good thing in Varnedoe’s mind. Encapsulating the zeitgeist isn’t much of a feat when the zeitgeist sucks. Those of you who lived through the 1980s know what I mean. Think Flock of Seagulls.

Tomkins states that he “decided long ago that Koons believes what he says.” Even to need to make such a decision shows the fundamental problem of Koons’ art. Tomkins sees Koons’ mission as “reconciling ordinary people to their tastes and preferences,” quoting Koons own desire to “remove my own anxiety” as well as that of others to make “everything… so close” and “available.” The specific cultural problem of America is not too much anxiety but this relentless Koonsian desire to remove it rather than address it. Koons wants to be the king of denial, with media figures such as Anna Nicole Smith as his queen.

Is there any better barometer of American culture today than the ratio of the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death versus that of Kurt Vonnegut? As tragic as Smith’s death was, her place in our society was miniscule next to Vonnegut’s, who helped shape the spirit of the 1960s and continued to address the anxieties of today in his A Man Without a Country. How long before the apotheosis of Anna Nicole appears out of Koons’ studio? Andy Warhol took Marilyn Monroe’s image and made it into a mirror of our society’s subsurface flaws. Jeff Koons takes figures such as Michael Jackson (and one day, mark my words, Anna Nicole Smith) and lightly spackles over the cracks of our time, neither analyzing our problems and anxieties nor offering any solutions.