Untouchable

In 1982, Pope John Paul II beatified Guido di Pietro, thus making the “angelic” in his better known nickname, Fra Angelico, official. Fra Angelico died February 18, 1455 with his legend already forming around him. Born around 1395, the height of Fra Angelico’s artistic afterlife came in the star treatment he received in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, in which Vasari proclaims Fra Angelico as possessing "a rare and perfect talent." Works such as Noli me Tangere (above, from 1440-1441), one of the many frescoes adorning the walls of the monastic cells of San Marco in Florence, show just how untouchable Fra Angelico was not only in terms of talent but also in terms of religious fervor. The newly resurrected Jesus turns to Mary Magdalene as she reaches to touch him to see if he’s real and tells her “Do not touch me.” Whereas Michelangelo and other artists of the Renaissance created works primarily for a wide audience, Fra Angelico created these frescoes for an audience of one, usually a solitary monk meditating on the mysteries of Christian miracles. The beautiful natural detail of the trees and greenery as well as the fidelity of the early morning sunshine flooding the scene would focus the mind of the worshipper, perhaps bathed in the same morning light rushing through his window.

If I could go back to Florence someday, I would make up for my greatest mistake during my trip there—not going to see the frescoes of San Marco. Like Rome, Florence offers so many artistic treasures that you could spend a lifetime there studying works such as Fra Angelico’s Transfiguration (above, from 1440-1441), another San Marco fresco. I admit that Fra Angelico’s works sank to the bottom of my “must see” list because they lack the bombast of so many other Renaissance works, which grab you with the intensity of their vision and their thrilling, celebratory humanism. Fra Angelico speaks in much softer tones. His Transfiguration gathers together all the usual suspects of the scene, but he resists crowding in too much of a heavenly host. Similarly, he fights back the urge to paint Jesus’ transfigured glory in Technicolor brilliance. Instead, he actually scales the scene back to a degree that the individual can perceive and apprehend more fully. The Transfiguration is all about overwhelming power, but Fra Angelico underwhelms in the name of understanding, lowering the volume to a level in which an individual could exist before the work for extended mediation.

According to tradition, the portrait of Saint Dominic in Saint Dominic Adoring the Crucifixion (above, from 1440-1441) is a self-portrait by Fra Angelico. This Crucifixion scene appears in a hallway of San Marco, near a staircase. The hallway provided more room for this vertical composition, which explains why it’s in a more public place than one of the meditational cells, but I wonder if Fra Angelico felt comfortable in putting his face “out there” in such a visible way. On the other hand, Fran Angelico had a reputation of being a deeply religious man, even among other monks. Vasari tells stories of Fra Angelico weeping as he painted scenes of Christ’s passion and death. Maybe this is the way Fra Angelico wanted later generations to see him—as a simple monk devoted to spreading the word of God. It took five centuries for Fra Angelico to amass enough verified miracles to reach beatification, but if the Catholic Church had looked closely upon his miraculous works of art, they would have sainted him almost immediately.

The Lonely Crowd

When he painted Subway (above) in 1950, George Tooker said, “I was thinking of a large modern city as a kind of limbo. The subway seemed a good place to represent a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself.” In Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe’s George Tooker, Tooker’s sense of alienation in modern life is seen from all angles—social, sexual, and religious. A shy, half-Hispanic, homosexual, devout Catholic with a Dorothy Day-esque thirst for social justice, Tooker remains an outsider in American society as much as an outsider in American art thanks to his tempera painting technique. As Cozzolino puts it in his essay, “Between Paradise and Purgatory: George Tooker’s Modern Icons,” “Tooker’s work posits that the absence of community, communication, empathy, or kindness is the source of, and path to, human suffering.” Through his works, Tooker tries to make us recognize that suffering and find a path out of it. Sociologist David Riesman’s 1950 work, The Lonely Crowd, argued that the loneliest individuals often exist surrounded by the masses in modern life. Tooker took that idea and created images that condensed the theory and the emotions surrounding it into a single, powerful vision. Like few other artists, Tooker holds a mirror to modern American life and shows us our true face.

Kafkaesque is the first word that often comes to mind when seeing Tooker’s Government Bureau (above, from 1956). Forced to endure bureaucratically generated waits for permits to renovate his Brooklyn home, Tooker transformed that experience into the menacing image of eyes peeping through tiny openings at the helpless seekers of information. The relentless duplication of pillars and crossbeams generates an ideal geometry of anxiety. “Tooker… employ[s] certain abstracting devices, including a stylized geometry and an elaborate use of pattern, to underscore the Kafkaesque menace of the spaces of officialdom conjured by his protest paintings,” Anna C. Chave writes in “Framing Imagery: At the Intersection of Geometry and the Social.” By presenting the mercilessness of such geometric prisons, Tooker protests against the antiorganicism of modern life stifling the free flow of individuality. Tooker appreciated the power of community thanks to his own experience of benefitting personally and socially from interaction with other artists such as Paul Cadmus and Jared French. Cadmus and French helped Tooker cope with his just-realized sexual orientation and opened up creative outlets through introductions to other artists, such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Cadmus’ brother-in-law, Lincoln Kirstein. “At a time when the young Tooker was struggling to accept his own sexual attraction to men,” writes Jonathan Weinberg in “Tooker and Company: Identity and Community in the Early Work,” “the relative openness with which Cadmus and his glamorous artist friends acknowledged and even celebrated their homosexuality must have been affirming.” Affirmed as a person and an artist, Tooker found the footing to stride forward in his unique style.

Like that other great modern American tempera painter, Andrew Wyeth, Tooker often takes memories and weaves them into his work, such as childhood memories of summer nights in the work In the Summerhouse (above, from 1958). The slowness of the tempera technique allows for the physical experience of reliving memory. “Watching George Tooker paint is excruciating,” writes Thomas H. Garver in “On the Art of George Tooker.” “Stroke, stroke, stroke, it goes on and on, yet to an observer almost nothing seems to be happening. Only the artist knows the glorious silent mantra that creates a work of art.” This communion with the personal past parallels a communion with the whole past of art history. “For Tooker,” Garver continues, “’Art comes from other art’—a phrase he credits to Thomas Aquinas—for no matter what the subject, the new paintings will be refracted by that ‘other art.’” The isolation chamber of the act of painting is simultaneously an echo chamber in which the influence of Quattrocento artists such as Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and, perhaps above all others, Piero della Francesca seems immediate despite centuries of distance. Filtering his personal life through the public art of history, Tooker moves away from overtly homosexual content in his early work towards a more universal language of isolation free of any specific alienating cause. As M. Melissa Wolfe writes in “George Tooker: A Biography,” “Other Social Realist painters of the time created works in order to compel change, but, whereas they generated protest at specific economic, class, or political conditions, Tooker’s works protest at the spiritual state that results from existing under such conditions.” It was after seeing the racial segregation and oppression of Selma in the 1960s that he “learned the meaning of the Greek word agape,” Tooker once said, taking that specific protest and making it universal and timeless.

In perhaps the most beautiful essay of the collection, Robert Cozzolino examines the role of religion in Tooker’s work, specifically the Catholicism Tooker converted to in 1976 after the death of his long-time partner William Christopher. In the 1996 self-portrait, Dark Angel (above), Tooker “celebrates belief and vocation through allusions to earlier devotional art and by imagining physical contact between a messenger of good and the mortal artist,” Cozzolino writes. “As a guardian figure, the angel is an anthropomorphic manifestation of resilient faith itself, a spiritual version of the artistic muse, which grants vision and rekindles creative force.” Tooker converts to Catholicism, but he also converts Catholicism itself into a form consistent with his sense of art’s place in society as an agent for creative change. Tooker’s religious works stand out among many other works throughout his career emphasizing the positive rather than diagnosing the negative. “In some of my paintings I am saying that ‘this is what we are forced to suffer in life,’” Tooker says, “while in other paintings I say, ‘this is what we should be.’ I oscillate between the earthly state and a concept of paradise.” A Stations of the Cross Tooker painted consisting solely of hand gestures rather than the full figure of Christ shows the depth of his religious reverence fitted perfectly to his aesthetic sensibility. “What distinguishes Tooker from his contemporaries,” Cozzolino concludes, “is the way he assimilates meaningful religious references into his work without revealing a particular source or committing to programmed iconography.” Tooker refreshes religious iconography while retaining the core meaning of what it is to be a person of faith.


George Tooker’s paintings continue to resonate with contemporary audiences because of the essentialism of his approach. Tooker claimed that he “conceived” Landscape with Figures (above, from 1965-1966) “with the victimization of our youth by the military-industrial complex and its servant advertising” during the Vietnam War era. Yet, Landscape with Figures, with its endless sea of heads trapped within too-familiar office cubicle walls, escapes the specificity of that original conception and achieves the status of icon in the “religion” of modern American existence. Cozzolino, Price, and Wolfe have assembled a marvelous catalogue and exhibition to display the continued relevance of one of America’s truly great modern artists. In his own quiet way, Tooker speaks volumes as to what the American way of life has become and offers a gentle, persuasive statement on a way of American life that can still one day be.


[Many thanks to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a review copy of Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe’s George Tooker.]

The Proper Study

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:…

Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

—From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope

“The size I am speaking about is the size of a man, or rather my own relation to my own decisions as to the best size a man can be,” Mark Rothko once said when trying to explain the bigger-than-life scale of so many of his paintings, including White Center (above, from 1950). “To this extent I am again a Renaissance man, for my pictures [are] a personal tape measure of my moral values.” In Rothko, edited by Oliver Wick, Rothko as Renaissance man, specifically an Italian Renaissance man, is reborn. Accompanying an exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Italy, last year, Rothko examines the link between Rothko the modern artist and the artists of the distant past, whom Rothko modeled his own art and career after. Writing of Rothko’s drawings patterned after Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Wick sees Rothko “[u]sing the Leonardo not as a direct model, but as an allusion and intellectual parallel” in order to “play… with an internalized image of man and human proportions.” “Do they negate each other, modern and classical?” Rothko once asked. Borrowing that line for the title of his essay, Wick definitively answers no. Wick sees Rothko longing for the good old days of the Renaissance when the artist could fulfill a vital role in society rather than lurk on the perimeter.

Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, picks up on Wick’s examination of Rothko the Renaissance man with his essay, “Mark Rothko’s The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies through an Italian Lens.” “Rothko places the artist/philosopher at the center of [his ideal] society,” Christopher says of his father, “as a leader in expression of truth and of synthesizing a gestalt understanding of the world around him or her.” Such social works as the Seagram Murals (one example above, from 1958) show how Rothko longed to connect with the public and publicize his thoughts on life through his art. In Rothko’s unfinished treatise on art, The Artist’s Reality, Rothko looked all the way back through Italian art history to Giotto to find a kindred spirit. “In Giotto’s painting [Rothko] saw an embodiment of his own modernist ideals: figures of real weight and substance, bold use of color that helped create the painting’s space rather than remaining subservient to it, and the creation of art that depicted its own reality rather than functioning as pastiche of the ‘reality’ presented to us by sight alone,” Christopher writes. In contrast, Michelangelo, although “visually stunning,” enslaves himself to perspective and the other visual trickery that “preoccupied” Renaissance artists. For Rothko, Christopher writes, “The artist’s role is that of the philosopher: to examine the world around him and express his understanding of the truth based on what he sees.” Michelangelo simply doesn’t express this “truth” for Rothko. da Vinci, however, fares better in that he recognizes the limitations of perspective and uses sfumato and chiaroscuro to restore the “subjective” over the slavishly scientific. Titian, Tintoretto, and the School of Venice stand as heroes for Rothko in “creating a new naturalism, a type of artwork that speaks to our unified experience of the world, not an appeal to our eyes through a collection of visual effects.” Christopher Rothko’s profound understanding of his father’s appreciation of the Italian masters not only sheds new light on Rothko’s painting but also provides a fascinating perspective on these past painters.

Rothko carried on his love affair with Italy and Italian art most of his adult life. First travelling to Italy in 1950 on a Fullbright Scholarship, Rothko filled his days with sightseeing and museum-going. In “Mark Rothko’s Three Italian Journeys,” Giovanni Carandente traces Rothko’s path through Italian art history during his 1950 visit and subsequent visits in 1959 and 1966. On his second and third visits, Rothko fell in love with the frescoes by Fra Angelico at the Convent at San Marco. “In the cells of the Florentine convent,” Carandente writes, “the evangelical episodes narrated on a wall for a single viewer to meditate upon became the optimum for a painter like Rothko.” Such an experience prompted Rothko to design the Rothko Chapel, a modern sacred space of private meditation. Again, the catalogue beautifully recreates how Rothko linked the work of these artists with his own mature work. As Wick points out, Rothko often claimed that his abstract works “liberated from representation and objective image, were profoundly charged with content, raising the question of a contradiction in terms of associating modern abstraction with classical art and its content.” The essays collected by Wick convincingly answer the question of the contradiction between Fra Angelico’s biblical scenes and Rothko’s blocks of color (as in Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple, above, from 1949) as both addressing a human need for bigger answers. Both artists arrive at salvation from vastly different visual paths but with an identical drive to justify the ways of god to mankind.

Perhaps the most fascinating essay in the collection is Jeffrey Weiss’ “Temps Mort: Rothko and Antonioni.” Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni visited Rothko’s studio in 1962 while touring for the United States opening of L'eclisse. “In the annals of existentialism as something like an international style during the rise of the Cold War,” Weiss writes, “there can be no more striking display of generational inheritance than this meeting.” For hours, Antonioni sat silently as Rothko paraded a succession of his works before him. Antonioni’s next film, Il deserto rosso, his first color film clearly draws on Rothko’s art for inspiration. Throughout, as Weiss points out, Antonioni uses frames and margins “as both an image and a compositional device,” as shown in the example of the film’s star, Monica Vitti, literally framed by Rothko-esque color (above). Even more importantly for Antonioni’s connection to Rothko is the use of “temps mort,” which Weiss defines as “the evacuation of a depicted space contained or cropped by the cinematic frame, a just-inhabited place that achieves formal presence—abstract, quasi-pictorial fullness—through a narrative absence that transpires before the beholder’s gaze.” Vitti may exist in a virtual Rothko in the example above, but when she walks out of that frame and the camera lingers on that space after her absence, that frame retains a special electric charge by her absence. Through such sequences, Antonioni duplicates the paradoxical union of presence within absence that makes Rothko’s art so simultaneously enigmatic and compelling. Weiss wonderfully explains and illustrates this subtle, yet powerful argument that might actually convert many who fail to “get” Rothko.

As much as Rothko loved Italy and its art, Italy loved Rothko back. Claudia Terenzi recounts the critical and popular reception of Rothko in Italy, which is remarkably prescient and informed. “It’s easy to say that he’s the painter of nothing, in order to denigrate his creation,” Italian critic Marco Valsecchi writes in 1962. “But it requires only a little more attention to see that nothing is, instead, filled with that spiritual essence one finds in the quiet, vertical pages of some baroque mystics.” Rothko (shown above in his studio with the Rothko Chapel murals in 1964) is the Seinfeld of abstract art—his works are about nothing, yet they touch on everything, from the minute to the grand. Oliver Wick and his fellow contributors compellingly argue for Rothko’s relevance through his philosophical if not stylistic links to Italian art’s greatest artists. Anyone who sees nothing in Rothko’s work should read Rothko and open their mind. Anyone who already sees something in Rothko’s paintings will read Rothko and discover yet another universe to be explored.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with a review copy of Rothko, edited by Oliver Wick.]

Father Figure

After studying painting for years with Cosimo Rosselli and briefly with Domenico Ghirlandaio, two of the four artists that first worked on the Sistine Chapel in 1480, Bartolommeo di Pagola del Fartorino found himself searching for something more in life than just art. The man better known today as Fra Bartolommeo found that meaning in the teachings of the Dominican priest Fra Girolamo Savonarola (above, in a portrait by Fra Bartolommeo from 1498). Born March 28, 1472, Fra Bartolommeo joined the Dominican order shortly after the charismatic Savonarola, who condemned the corruption of the Florentine government and the Catholic church and decadent worldliness in general, met his end by hanging and burning the same year that the above portrait was painted. The Latin inscription says “Portrait of the Prophet Jerome of Ferrara, sent by God.” Fra Bartolommeo was a true believer in the power of religion and of art and did his best to bring those two worlds together.

After joining the Dominican order in 1500, Fra Bartolommeo actually gave up painting for four years. However, Savonarola believed in the visual arts as serving a role as a poor man’s Bible to help him understand the meaning of God’s Word, so eventually Fra Bartolommeo followed Savonarola’s preachings and recommitted himself to religious scenes such as his moving Descent From the Cross (above, from 1515), in which his skill in rendering color and drapery come to the forefront. Raphael actually studied color and drapery under Fra Bartolommeo in 1507, in exchange for Raphael teaching his friar friend the intricacies of perspective. Raphael may have been more creative in his paintings, but something remains to be said of Fra Bartolommeo’s combination of workmanlike technique and sincere religious fervor.

One of Fra Bartolommeo’s most fascinating scenes is The Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena (above, from 1511). Saint Catherine was a tertiary of Fra Bartolommeo’s own Dominican order, giving her special significance for him. However, despite this connection and the prominence of her name in the title, we only see Saint Catherine’s back as she kneels before the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus raised upon a throne. Like Catherine, Fra Bartolommeo saw himself as a simple servant of a higher power, content to rest at the feet of glory. Fra Bartolommeo neither rises to the angelic status of Fra Angelico or descends to the tawdry reputation of Fra Filippo Lippi, but remains a bit of a cypher whose work is all we know of the man and priest, and perhaps all we need to know.

The Angelic One

Many sinners and few saints populate the halls of art history. Guido di Pietro, better known as Fra Angelico, died on this date in 1455. Born around 1395, Fra Angelico created some of the finest works of the early Italian Renaissance, setting the stage for later masterpieces. A direct line of influence can be drawn from Angelico’s pupil Benozzo Gozzoli to his pupil Ghirlandaio to his star pupil Michelangelo. Thus, Fra Angelico’s Day of Judgement (above, from 1432-1435, in San Marco, Florence) can be seen as one of the starting points for Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. Angelico’s Day of Judgment epitomizes the Sacred Conversations genre in which saints and angels gathered about figures such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary conversing and gesturing in a heavenly type of cocktail party. It’s easy to imagine Fra Angelico, who received beatification from Pope John Paul II in 1982, joining the crowd.

Vasari heaps praise on Fra Angelico like he does for few others in his Lives of the Artists. Only truly religious men, Vasari believed, could paint such scenes as Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation (above, from 1437-1446). “A talent so extraordinary and so supreme as that of Fra Giovanni could not and should not descend on any save a man of most holy life, for the reason that those who work at religious and holy subjects should be religious and holy men,” Vasari wrote. “For it is seen, when such works are executed by persons of little faith who have little esteem for religion, that they often arouse in men's minds evil appetites and licentious desires; whence there comes blame for the evil in their works, with praise for the art and ability that they show.” Of course, Filippo Lippi, as Robert Browning’s poem Fra Lippo Lippi attests, breaks that rule with gusto. Regardless of his personal qualities, I love Angelico’s Annunciation for the stylized architecture and the drapery and wings of the angel. Looking at Mary’s beautifully open face today, you know instantly how it won the good father the title of “the angelic one” almost instantly.

One of the many things I regret not seeing during my trip to Florence is Fra Angelico’s works at San Marco. With so many things to see in a short amount of time, you have to prioritize, and, sadly, he didn’t make the cut. It would have been wonderful to see such works as his painting of the Crucified Christ (above, detail, from 1437-1446) in person. “He never painted a Crucifix without the tears streaming down his cheeks,” Vasari says of Fra Angelico, and you can see that intensity in the painting above. I love the tiny details, especially the tufts of chest hair and underarm hair of the dying savior. Fra Angelico may have been “the angelic one,” but his painting humanized Christ and Christianity in a way that the later humanism of Michelangelo and the Renaissance would build upon. To make a bloodless, bodiless saint of Fra Angelico would be a disservice to the blood, sweat, and tears he shed in creating his art.