Giles Hohnen

From newyorker.com: How We Look When We Look at a Painting

Among the abounding fascinations of Frederick Wiseman’s “National Gallery,” a three-hour documentary about the museum on London’s Trafalgar Square, is a leitmotif of lingering shots of solitary viewers of paintings. Looking at art may be the most unguarded action that we perform in public. We aren’t aware of...

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 http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/frederick-wiseman-national-gallery-looking-painting

Allen Jones RA at the Royal Academy of Arts

 

Detail from Allen Jones's work Interesting Journey, 1962. Photograph: Royal Academy

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/allen-jones-ra

Pictures of Icarus, Barry Schwabsky

 

The Fall of Icarus (1943), by Henri Matisse

 

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)
Pictures of Icarus
Barry Schwabsky | October 21, 2014


The prototypical craftsman, the exemplary artisan, the
shrewd inventor: this was Daedalus. Having contrived for the Cretan Queen
Pasiphaë the simulacrum of a cow in which she could conceal herself so
that the white bull of the sun would mate with her, he then designed the
labyrinth inhabited by her monstrous offspring, the Minotaur. An Athenian,
Daedalus longed for home but was forbidden to leave Crete, so, Ovid said,
“to new arts his cunning thought applies, / And to improve the work of
Nature tries.” Thinking “for sure the air is free,” he
fashioned a pair of wings out of wax and feathers. After taking them for a
successful test flight, he made a set for his son Icarus. We know the sad
result: with youthful impetuousness, Icarus flew too high. As he neared the
sun, the wax melted and the wings disintegrated. “Down to the sea he
tumbled from on high, / And found his Fate.”
Ever since, Icarus has represented failed ambition. It may be a compliment
to call someone a high flier, but the implication is always that a fall is
yet to come. Thinking of the story in relation to the arts, it might be
considered a cautionary tale about what Harold Bloom called “the
anxiety of influence”: for any artist, trying to surpass the
achievement of a great precursor may lead to letdown and, perhaps, to
becoming a master of what Alexander Pope dubbed “bathos,” or
“the art of sinking.” Yet Romantic and modern poets have been
ever tempted by the fate of Icarus. I’m not thinking about those who
have literally drowned themselves, like Hart Crane or (presumably) Weldon
Kees, but rather those like Giacomo Leopardi, who saw poetry as the product
of thought as it “drowns in immensity,” or Stéphane
Mallarmé, for whom a poem might be “some splashing below of
water as if to / disperse the empty act.”
Mallarmé was an inspiration for Henri Matisse, who illustrated an
edition of his Poésies in 1932. Only later, however, did
Matisse represent the theme of Icarus, and in a radical departure from the
airy elegance of the etchings he did for Mallarmé’s poems.
“It was in the summer of 1943, the darkest point of that whole
period,” as Louis Aragon would later write, “that he made an
Icarus.”
Summoned from the depths of wartime, this Icarus is not the earliest work
in “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs,” the grand-scale exhibition on
view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through February 8, but it
is a crucial one. Matisse had used the cutout method—painting sheets of
paper in gouache, then making cutouts pasted or pinned together—in the
1930s, but only to produce studies of things like stage curtains or book
covers. The Fall of Icarus is different because it was made with no
specific project in mind, though it inspired Matisse’s book project
Jazz; it stands behind not only the book’s eighth plate,
Icarus, but also its first one, The Clown. In 1943, Matisse
was more inclined to make cutouts because, for an artist in his 70s who was
physically challenged, the process was less taxing than oil painting. But it
was precisely Matisse’s dissatisfaction with the book that led him to
realize that the cutouts could be ends in themselves.
I was lucky enough to have been able to see the exhibition last spring in
London, where it was shown at Tate Modern. Yet I felt a little let down by
it. Maybe I’d become too convinced in advance that the cutouts are one
of those sublime instances in which an artist miraculously succeeds in
transforming his art in old age, making “late works which crown a
lifetime of aesthetic endeavor” in “harmony and resolution”
(the words are Edward Said’s).Walking away from the Tate, I
couldn’t help but feel that Matisse’s extraordinary late-life
reinvention had come at a high cost: it had opened up a new imaginative world
to him, but only through the loss of what, to the very end of his life, he
believed was the source of his art—its relation to experienced reality.
The true artist, he maintained, “assimilates the external world within
himself,” and so he criticized abstract artists for losing a
“criterion of observation.” Even in the nearly pure abstract
forms of his cutouts, however, Matisse never abandoned figurative imagery; a
gastropod can be made out—albeit just barely—in the 1953
masterpiece he titled The Snail, which many another artist would
have been happy to dub Composition With Rectangles. But most of the
cutouts are unattached to any model outside the artist’s imagination or
memory.
Even a minor canvas from Matisse’s much-derided Nice period in the
1920s better evokes our all-too-human flesh, and the claims of gravity upon
it, than many of the most ambitious and (on their own terms) most successful
of these cutouts. I began to wonder if I didn’t agree with Dominique
Fourcade, who wrote that the cutouts amounted to “a new departure, so
radically modern…it effectively cut [Matisse] off from his own past as
well as from the past of painting,” but that even in terms of his
longed-for synthesis of drawing and color, they “are not, in this
respect, the best part of his work.” Could Matisse have been an elderly
Icarus, taking an unexpected fall?
* * *
After I saw the show again in New York, my doubts dissolved. Perhaps for
the artist (or only me?), it was merely a problem of switching gears. In
1951, Matisse declared that “from the Joie de vivre—I
was thirty-five then—to this cutout—I am now eighty-two—I
have remained the same…because all this time I have searched for the
same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.” Yet for
all his modesty, Matisse had to make a great leap to get from making even a
relatively late painting—say, the somber, dignified Still Life With
Shell (1940), which was shown in London but unfortunately not
here—to the cutouts that began pouring out of him in 1946. In New York,
there is a cutout study for the Still Life, lighter and more
ebullient than the painting itself. But unlike his later works in this mode,
all of the still-life elements—the pitcher, coffee pot, cup, green
apples and seashell—have clearly been observed from life; they have
been first drawn and then cut, rather than drawn in the act of cutting, as
Matisse would later do, and they have internal rendered detail that is rare
in the later cutouts (an exception being the magnificent standing nude,
Zulma, from 1950).
What made me suspicious of the cutouts in London is precisely what seemed
so inspiring about them in New York: the sense that Matisse had tried to free
himself from gravity. I could see more clearly that, miraculously, he’d
succeeded. “You have no idea how, during the cutout paper period, the
sensation of flight which emanated from me helped me better to adjust my hand
when it used the scissors,” he once said. “It’s rather
difficult to explain. It’s a kind of linear and graphic equivalence to
the sensation of flight.” I had wanted to see the artist as a kind of
Antaeus, who needed to keep his feet on the ground to maintain his strength.
But what Matisse lost in earthiness, he gained by taking on the fluidity of
air and water. You might say that he rewrote the myth of the ingenuous youth
who flies too high, turning him into a wily old man who survives his plunge
to the fluid element, finding under its surface a “cosmic space in
which I was as unconscious of any walls as a fish in the sea.” That
oceanic space is not the one to be found in the exhibition’s
centerpiece, however: the newly restored Swimming Pool (1952), which
was not shown in London. Although it is Matisse’s largest work in this
medium—or the longest, at any rate—it maintains the domestic
scale appropriate to its original situation, in his dining room. Many smaller
cutouts, with their floating algaelike forms set in a space with no clear
sense of orientation, actually communicate a stronger sense of the deep. And
while critical consensus would have it that the expansion of scale made
Matisse’s cutout method possible—a movement beyond the limits of
easel painting—the smallest and simplest cutouts are often just as
powerful as the largest and most elaborate ones.
“Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” is as uplifting an exhibition as
you’re likely to see for some time. But its sense of elation is
inextricable from a sense of risk. In The New York Times, Holland
Cotter called it a “victory-lap show,” which seems exactly wrong
to me. No one takes a victory lap in the darkest moments of a war, after a
debilitating operation he thought he might not survive. The success of the
endeavor being celebrated at MoMA should not disguise the desperation with
which it was undertaken.
* * *
There were also cutouts of a sort on view at the Marian Goodman Gallery
downtown—part of a show of new work (all made this year) by the Mexican
artist Gabriel Orozco. His cutouts are made of thin pieces of plywood, not
paper, and they eschew Matisse’s glorious color, but they evoke the
feeling of flight just as handily, dancing as they do across the gallery
walls. And so they should, because these flat sculptures turned out to be a
flock of a dozen boomerangs, each matched up with a portion or two of the
matrix from which it’s been jigsawed. The title—Inner
Cuts—alludes to the seam between the pieces of plywood, and what
this gap reveals is the basic distinction between an intended form and the
space around it: an awareness that “negative space” is just as
active in defining the image as the form it surrounds.
The boomerangs have smoothly rounded V-like forms; sometimes the angle is
acute, sometimes obtuse. The adjacent forms are irregular; sometimes one of
the edges is straight, but mostly their curves seem to suggest that other
forms—perhaps other boomerangs—have been cut from the same
plywood piece. A curious detail is that, while the edges of the leftover
forms have been kept raw, the edges of the boomerangs themselves have been
smoothed away to achieve the necessary aerodynamic profile. But this is not
the difference between finished and unfinished; it a difference between
greater and lesser degrees of unfinishedness, for a completely finished
boomerang would be smoother still, and probably painted or at least
varnished. Why did the artist—especially one who makes boomerangs for
his own recreation—decide to leave these ones unfinished? It may be a
moot question, because Orozco is working with the basic formal issue that
inaugurated modernism: the dispute over “finish” that separated
Manet from his academic contemporaries. He is gently reminding us that every
form is a broken-off fragment that connects to other fragments, whereas a
completely finished object urges us to forget this.
Two of Orozco’s unfinished boomerangs have the name
“IKARUS” scribbled on them in graphite. Did they fall to earth
instead of returning to the thrower’s hand? Someone with a better
understanding of boomerang design than I have might make a guess. Still, I
can’t help thinking that it indicates a desire to cultivate the risk of
a flight that ends in failure—the important thing is to cheat gravity
for a while, to get airborne.
By contrast, Orozco’s paintings have often seemed too slick, closed
off and deadened by their immaculate finish. The critic Roberta Smith once
charged his paintings with “an oppressive sense of contrived, rather
mindless industriousness” that makes them “handsome yet generic
blue-chip art products,” and I usually agree with this judgment. Yet at
Marian Goodman, Orozco’s paintings took on a new sense of freedom. All
of them are based on the geometry of overlapping circles. Three of them,
titled Inner Sections, have white grounds on which Orozco has filled
in some of the curved slivers created with red or blue tempera or gold leaf;
the odd little shapes swarm around one another like flocks of birds. In the
others, called Inner Sequence, the artist has created a surface of
plaster that he’s shrouded in densely atmospheric passages of charcoal,
while incising his circular geometries into the plaster. Their swirling,
shadowy spaces are easy—and rewarding—to get lost in.
* * *
For Matisse and Orozco, Icarus is a passing reference, albeit a telling
one. The story was at the heart of the Irish artist Isabel Nolan’s
exhibition at Manhattan’s Sean Kelly Gallery, “An answer about
the sky,” which includes a prose meditation on the Icarus myth printed
on six framed pages hung among her paintings and sculpture, and a long wool
rug—more than twenty feet—that hangs from one wall onto the
gallery floor. (All but one of the works are dated 2014.) Yet the tragic boy
who “flailed and sank towards the sea’s slow surface,” as
Nolan writes, is not her paintings’ focus; the human form does not
figure in them. However, one might feel Icarus’ fall embodied in
Harbinger, a pentagonal stained-glass window cantilevered off the
wall in a red-painted steel frame; it seems to plunge into the room like a
falling star. The paintings, however, are all about the sun. “Metaphors
of divinity, enlightenment, revelation, power, or goodness do not expose or
explain the immense truth of the Sun,” Nolan writes. “The Sun
embodies the pending heat death of the Universe.” In other words, the
sun represents everything in relation to which we inevitably fall
short—and then it falls short too. If Harbinger suggests a
fall, it must be significant that the luminous forms within its five straight
sides are circular like the sun; maybe for Nolan, Icarus and the sun are
really one and the same.
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This failing sun may be the one that appears in several of Nolan’s
paintings: a luminous orb looks as if it’s melting, its sizzling
Turneresque hues pouring down like rain. I can’t help think that Nolan
has used water-based oil paint, and sometimes watercolor as well, in order to
emphasize that the sun’s hot, dry light must somehow be already akin to
the fluid medium into which the high flier is fated to fall. The same intense
palette can be found in the carpet piece, The emptied room: A rug for the
20th century. On the wall, the colors cohere into an architectural study
of archways receding into the distance, but on the floor it’s as if the
same hues had disintegrated into so many separate puddles.
The sculptures here include three open-formed biomorphic abstractions made
of plaster and jesmonite, on metal armatures. They have a skeletal look, a
little like such early Giacometti sculptures as Woman With Her Throat
Cut (1932). Yet they also evoke some sort of botanical or other natural
growth. Are these the corals that were made not of the father’s but of
the son’s bones? While the tale of Icarus set the tone for this show, I
don’t think Nolan intended it to account for every detail. She herself
points out that artworks are never “wholly in control of their own
meaning or ends.” Another sculpture, There will be time no
longer, seems altogether indifferent to whatever literary meaning one
might be inclined to lend it: a kind of large, three-dimensional scribble or
curlicue of steel sheathed in bright red wool, it suggests a path of
movement, certainly—but in which direction? Down, like Icarus into the
sea? Or is it an ascension, like his first hopeful leap toward the eye of
heaven?
If the story of Icarus still has meaning for artists today, it might be
that the boundary between failure and success, disaster and triumph, can be
ambiguous. From the wreckage of a miscarried effort, some other attempt may
succeed; but that one will be subject to breakdown, too. More inexorable than
any god is the second law of thermodynamics; as Nolan puts it, “Entropy
is bureaucratically indifferent to yearning, pain or repair.”
But the story of Icarus resonates in yet another way. The scene in which
Daedalus fastens the wings to his son’s arms—“But
fix’d with trembling hands; and as he speaks, / The tears roul gently
down his aged cheeks. / Then kiss’d, and in his arms embrac’d him
fast”—might be of a father in Ecuador giving his child over to
coyotes for the hard journey north, or another in Libya readying his boy for
the treacherous journey by sea to Sicily. The name of the young Malian whose
body was discovered in the wheel well of a US Air Force cargo plane in
Ramstein, Germany, last summer is still unknown. Surprising as it might be
that Icarus remains a guiding myth for art, let’s not forget that
beyond the gallery walls, where human beings are trying their best to make
their way across borders—to “mark the pathless way” between
one land and another—there are far more like Icarus than we can
count.



Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/184185/pictures-icarus

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