Good Morning Jacob

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 7 December

Good Morning Jacob…

The rate of technological change we experience as individuals can give us the impression that humanity’s lot steadily improves.  Growth in scientific knowledge generally improves the quality of life by most people’s estimate.  Whether humanity has similarly progressed in the realms of politics, philosophy and the arts is something passionately argued.  These are areas guided as much by the human heart as they are by intellect.  Yet a convincing argument can be made that governance has benefitted from the development of democratic institutions; mankind is more compassionate when the inviolable rights of the individual are honored; and the visual arts has broadened its impact with the development of perspective, photography and motion pictures.  Who would argue we are better served if we turn back the clock and give up any of these developments?

Nicolas Poussin:  Orpheus and Eurydice - 1651

Nicolas Poussin’s 1651 painting, Orpheus and Eurydice, skillfully renders the illusion of a three dimensional world though painted onto a flat surface.  It takes full advantage of techniques developed by Renaissance artists, using single-point perspective as well as the lesser appreciated atmospheric perspective – acknowledging colors appear less saturated the further they are from the viewer.  The use of chiaroscuro, the treatment of light and shade, makes for a persuasive depiction of form.  Poussin provides a window onto his world, a civilization that celebrates the power of human reason to overcome age-old obstacles to mankind’s progress.  This approach was powerful during the Age of Enlightenment because it was a refreshing, inspirational view of mankind’s condition.  This expression by the masters of 16^th century art became a convention that dictated the style of Western art for nearly three hundred years.  By the 19^th century these methods were considered stale theater by artists demanding more personal expression; with its emphasis on creativity, sensuality, and immediate, authentic emotion.

Claude Monet:  Water Lillies - 1914

The Impressionists of the late 19^th century created a new palette suited to portraying their spontaneous reaction to what their eye caught before them.  They moved their easels to the bright outdoors from their isolated studio and became enchanted with a landscape bathed with sunlight.  The shimmering light, the ever-changing tone and mood as the sun traveled across the sky, was intoxicating.  Impressionist painters like Monet abandoned most all considerations in order to capture light’s elusive effervescence.    

Vincent Van Gogh:  The Sower - 1888

The Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh employed the Impressionist’s vivid colors to dramatically externalize his personal sympathies upon the landscape.  These works of the period burst forth with a passion that was suddenly free from deadening constraints.  The energies of youth radiated onto unvisited avenues with newly minted unimagined forms of creativity.  It was inevitable that someone substantial would eventually call a halt to the excesses and attempt to reinstate something of the traditional.

Paul Cezanne:  Houses at L'Estaque - 1880

Paul Cezanne felt Impressionism had abandoned much that was still essential to Western art.  The romance with color had pushed a reverence for form nearly out of the picture.  It was time to reestablish structure.  There was legitimate need for the illusion of substance, providing dimension on the flat painted surface.  Without dimension there is no dynamics.  Painting becomes a simple decorative design.  But the dark contrasts of chiaroscuro were out.  Cezanne would instead employ contrasting cool and warm colors to give a sense of depth and dimension.  His experiments would result in a fresh, recasting of Western art with a clean, simplified geometric look.  Detail was gone.  Verisimilitude:  sacrificed in favor of the sensual brushworking of oils onto canvas.  After all, we’re not making reality here.  We’re doing paint.

Chokwe Mask

 The colonialist ambitions of Europe exposed artists of Western civilization to new approaches of expressing the human form and psychology in art.  These mysterious, exotic masks and sculptures were exciting; powerful images, direct in their appeal and intuitive in their creation.  Flesh need not appear as flesh.  The head can be any assemblage of eyes, mouth and nose.  Extremes of imagination work to dramatize a human essence that is otherwise near impossible to portray.  About this same time Western thought is shaken with new ideas of the intellect.  Freud publishes his Interpretations of Dreams in 1900.  We are confronted with evidence that our minds remain basically instinctual and sexual desire permeates our everyday lives.  In that same year Max Planck’s revelations on the indeterminate nature of physical matter, his theory of Quantum Mechanics, undermines our Newtonian certitude.  Five years later Einstein releases his Special Theory of Relativity.  The conclusions are revolutionary.  Matter is a form of energy.  Space and time are related, not separate and distinct.  What time it is depends on where you are in the universe and how fast you are going.  We don’t all experience the same reality.

Pablo Picasso:  Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Art is not created in a vacuum.  Artists may be made subliminally aware of dynamics that shift great civilizations like tectonic plates on a suddenly agitated molten sea.  Take a look at Picasso’s iconic statement of 1907.  No single 20^th century painting portrays the unhinging of Western society from its traditional mooring like this bizarre portrayal of the women of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.  We are here confronted by the nude women of a brothel.  Our anticipation of erotic pleasure is instead replaced with feelings of dread and anxiety.  Picasso has presented us with an indeterminate reality.  The love and tenderness we normally associate with femininity is replaced with judgmental stares and insinuations of barbaric acts.  Picasso bids good-bye to our long, confident love affair with the Enlightenment.  We are now cut adrift in a cold, uncertain world.

As it turns out the Twentieth Century was a time of both unparalleled human catastrophe and scientific progress.  Despite two global wars our civilizations rose to unprecedented heights in economic prosperity and technological development.  The art of the Western world has pursued numerous avenues of creative exploration, including cubism and various forms of abstraction.  Painters in oil have brought new approaches to representational art with works by artists ranging in vision from Lucian Freud to Francis Bacon.  Movies are all the rage and photography has democratized art.

Can we say these revolutionary strides in the visual arts demonstrate progress over the last couple of centuries?  Or is it reasonable to conclude, as did Picasso, that art has a timeless quality – it expresses an immutable human essence – traits not subject to alteration by scientific advancement.  Maybe the craft of art is more likened to the nature of a love shared by two people for one another.  Couples of long ago fell in love by the warmth of a fire, beneath the inky night stars.  Today they express their love sharing a bed, each with a smart phone in hand or casually browsing their iPad.  In each instance the need for love is maintained but its expression is determined by the nature of its context.

Love,

          Dad

Good Morning Jack

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 30 November

Cezanne:  Mount Sainte Victoirie

Good Morning Jack…

You know you are in Florida when you see a flock of Ibis, about the size of a large family reunion at Thanksgiving, using their long curved bills to pick off tiny animal life that lives amidst the leaves of a thick lawn.  They moved methodically as a tight mass, pausing once they’d reached the yard’s end, then crossing the street in their stately manner and to resume feeding as a group once they had reached a neighbor’s yard.  Overhead was a clear sky, free of clouds, one like you’d likely see most any summer day over the Mojave Desert, but something a bit rare in this tropical part of the country.  This is one image I feel my mind will retain of Thanksgiving 2014.

I saw a Cezanne at the art museum in St. Petersburg while I was here.  There were also a few impressionist paintings by Monet and one by Renoir.  They had a pleasant topicality – one like you’d expect to find on a postcard displayed on a revolving rack in the museum’s gift shop.  The Gauguin exhibited in the same room somehow didn’t leave an impression on me and it slipped my mind to examine it more closely as I had intended to do later before leaving.  Maybe it was because of my mood.  I wasn't interested in art, brilliantly resolved.  Isn’t that a marvelous rendering of a scene’s mood?   Yes, probably; I didn’t care. 

No, it was the Cezanne I really came to see.  I knew that as a fact before I even stepped inside the museum.  Cezanne was the name that struck me among those listed on a brochure I had picked up at a motel.  I didn’t know what picture it was I would view.  I would have been happy to find one of his iconic Mount Sainte Victoire paintings exhibited.  After all, they seemed a logical precursor to Braque’s and Picasso’s experiments with Cubist vision.  It would have been an experience somewhat on the order of seeing a Van Gogh sunflowers in vase painting.  Yes, I actually once saw a Van Gogh.  It was everything I thought it would be.  The paint was so thick.  It gave me the impression of being rapidly applied.  He had such conviction, such passion.  Truly he was someone fully living the moment.

Actually, I did once have the opportunity to view a Van Gogh but I didn’t bother.  There was such a mob of people around the painting.  I hated the celebrity aspect of the moment.  Of course, if Vincent has been there to autograph my program I would have thought otherwise.  As a matter of fact I ran across Van Gogh at the National Gallery in Washington D.C.  I was embarrassed asking him to sign my program but he did.  The intensity in the man was quite remarkable.  He was so white- knuckle taught I believe he shook just standing in front of me.

I’ve seen Van Gogh posters and pictures of his paintings in books.  Who hasn’t?  Until a couple of days ago that is all I could say about Cezanne, as well.  Now that I’ve seen a particular Cezanne I can say the experience viewing a reproduced image is not the same.  The print version is too general in scope.  The intent is to provide a pictorial whole.  The details of the artist’s investigation are lost.  The Cezanne painting I viewed was not one I’ve ever seen.  It was a canvas broken up with vertical trunks of trees and surrounding foliage.  As such, it didn’t make for a likely postcard.  There was no narrative to the picture.  It wasn’t about a particular place or the depiction of a scene illustrating the enchanting light of a specific time of day.  There wasn’t anything noteworthy of this view of trees.  They were simply a prop to be investigated much like a mandolin might be viewed in a cubist representation.  The subject matter had more to do with the internal processing of Cezanne – how he analyzed what he was seeing.  It was a fully completed painting but it presented itself more like a study.  It was going beyond one’s ultimate findings and viewing the research that was the basis leading to the final product. 

The painting is for me a demonstration of the eye and mind working together to present something suggesting our external reality.  It’s not like the picture of a clock giving us the time of day.  Maybe it’s more like viewing a transparent clock enabling us to understand how the clock arrives at portraying a particular time.  How is Cezanne’s analytical approach different from Seurat’s use of assembled dots of color to provide us with a recognizable visual image?  Seurat seems intrigued with the scientific approach.  His method is based on formula.  His technique is methodical, almost something I might characterize as mechanical – emulating the action of a camera and the subsequent processing of exposed film.  While Seurat is constructing an image from fundamental primary colors, Cezanne is deconstructing the image. 

The impressionist relies on his sensual experience to provide a rendition particular to him of his subject.  Cezanne’s approach is less formalized than Seurat’s and less sensual than the spontaneous colors of the Impressionists.  He has more concern for rendering shape, depth and solidity through the use of a less saturated palette.  This set him apart from Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, Seurat and Van Gogh – enraptured so much with color that they paid small attention to form.  Cezanne analyzed form then depicted structures often as simple geometric shapes, like cubes and cones.  His fascination with the nature of structure drew the attention of artists that made up the next great artistic wave, notably Picasso but also Kandinsky, an artist better known for his pioneering efforts into pure abstraction.

I sat on a bench a short distance from the Cezanne in front of me.  Small fields of color combined with adjoining fields of color to produce a patch of paint.  These patches in turn interacted with adjacent patches to create illusions of depth and form, warmth, coolness, and solidity.  There was a narration here, but not about a summer day or a picnic by the lake.  It was the story of a particular artist’s eye probing and of a mind analyzing what is revealed to it.  The image appears dispassionate because it lacks a familiar emotional focus.  Yet this painting is art because it is a testament – not of scientifically based fact but of one’s curious, loving reach for something tangible beyond one’s own limited self.

Love,

          Dad