Marden, Bonnard, and Cezanne

This week I attended the Brice Marden retrospective at the MoMA and learned a lot about one of the most important artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The comments below draw on the paintings and on the interview with Marden recorded for the exhibition.

At first glance, the early works look as if they are going to be pretty boring. The first room in the retrospective brings one to works such as "Nebraska" -- apparently just gray paint on a quite large canvas. But as one examines the work its complexities start to arise. There are subtle changes here and there on the surface. If you stand up close to it, it is big enough that you can lose the sense of the frame and start to experience the painting in a most direct, and most exciting, way. Standing way back does nice things too, as the newly recognized "surface incidents" fade away and the whole interacts with the space around it.

It is called "Nebraska" because Marden really did draw his inspiration for it from driving around in that state. The great thing about Marden is that he draws from the real world and is faithful to it but not in any representational or metaphorical way. Instead, he renders what he sees in another key, in the play of color.

Marden insists on wedding what he calls "the image" and "the plane." In the interview he asks us to imagine placing a sheet of glass over a painting. That is the plane. The "image" is what we apprehend beneath the glass. In the Renaissance artists attempted to distance the image from the plane, using the techniques of perspective. But Marden aligns himself with painters in the tradition of Cezanne who brought the image up to the plane. In his "monochromatic" paintings, Marden was trying to complete that process, eschewing not only representation but anything else that stands in the way of our apprehending the painting as anything but a painted plane.

I suppose this would make for boring art were it not for Marden's continual discoverings of ways for a plane to bear paint. For example, the Grove Group comprises six of his "monochromatic" works. (I use the quotation marks because when one looks closely there is in fact a feast of color in them.) But in each work we see different ways to vary the colors of an olive grove. One of them has two registers, with a darker olive below and a lighter olive above. But when I say "olive" one must not think of some ready-made color from a paint store. Rather, Marden worked and worked on the two colors, continually changing and adjusting them until he had a pair of colors that convincingly arise out of and owe their existence to the colors of an olive grove without being simply a copy of those colors. Also very important, the two colors exist in relation to each other, commenting on and (in fact, given the way Marden goes about painting such a work) generating each other.

In later years, Marden turned to canvases with more of a variety of colors. This began with his study of Chinese calligraphy and poetry. He learned that some of the ancient poems are written in such a way that one can read them not only in the "normal" way (top to bottom, starting at the right edge) but also horizontally from right to left. The appeal of this to Marden at that point in his career was that by adopting something like the kind of lines used in Chinese calligraphy he could have varieties of color and gesture without sacrificing superficiality -- that is, the insistence that all a painting has to give its on its surface.

Up to today, line on ground continues to be Marden's basic method, though the nature of the lines have changed through the years. He now likes to use brushes that are very long, as much as three feet in length. He says these help compensate for the changes in visual acuity that come with age, but they also let him see his work as a whole even while he is creating it -- something impossible with a brush of normal length. The long brushes also mean he is not just painting with his wrist and fingers, but using his whole body and transferring its rhythms to the canvas.

Lots of contemporary artists are offered to the world as being in some sort of genius-demonstrating conflict with their environment -- with the money-grubbing masses, with whatever the last decade's artists were doing, et patati et patata. They make "statements" which are invariably rendered by critics or by themselves as being "about" the abstraction du jour. Always "this is a statement about X," never "this says Y." What a blessed relief to be in the hands of an artist whose aim is nothing more than to be an artist, one who has left statements and all kinds of representation far behind and who simply offers his painting as a gift, something that, being direct and unmediated, can be experienced directly and immediately by the whole person.

Now, what is especially exciting about this week in New York is that the Metropolitan has a terrific show of works that went through the hands of Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who brought Cezanne to the attention of the Paris art world and made him practically overnight into the cynosure of that world.

Before Cezanne, there was Bonnard, and the exhibition begins with some wonderful works from him and others in his circle. They anticipate Cezanne in working to merge the image into the plane and in using flat colors that are complementary in the organic, generative way that Marden's are.

An example is Bonnard's "Dinner at Vollard's (Vollard's Cellar)." It does use perspective, with a point of view from the foot of a dinner table at the head of which sits Vollard himself, but Bonnard uses this "representation" to explore variations of a color that I might compare to the old Crayola "flesh" crayon. The base from which the variants work is the color on the wall behind the sitters on the left. It generates and comments on the flesh colors of the those sitters, which in turn lead us to the pinks of the tablecloth. Contrasting and complementing this sequence of colors are a series of compositional incidents on the surface of the painting -- all in variants of a bluish gray, and all in the shape of vertical details: the wine bottle in Vollard's hand at the head of the table, three other bottles grouped near the foot of the table, details in the hat of one of the women on the left, the droopy mustache of one of the men on the left, and the eye of another. In a "realistic" work these details would be harder to notice and not really intended for direct perception: the more a represented bottle is like a real wine bottle, the less it can be like someone's droopy mustache. But by using swift, evocative strokes Bonnard is able to keep the ensemble of these details at the surface of our attention just as they are at the surface of the painting.

We see a similar merging of plane and image in what ought to be a preponderately perspectively work, Maurice Denis's "The Cook" (1893 oil on canvas). This work contemporizes Velasquez' "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary" (c. 1620): Jesus and the Magdalene are again in a room in the background, framed by a doorway; Martha is again assisted by a third woman older than herself. In Denis' version, Christ and Mary are medievalized, with the halo on Christ and the light around the two figures mimicking gold ground. One way Denis pushes us toward thinking of the painting as a flat plane rather than a representation of boxes of space is the pattern in the floor tiles. In the upper part of the painting they function representationally, providing perspective lines that cue the distance between Martha in the foreground and the Christ group in the background. But near the bottom edge of the painting, they seem to be paving the canvas itself, piling up vertically.

Another way Denis emphasize the planarity of the painting is the amazing development of a sequence of color variations on olive green. This sequence proceeds from the upper left of the painting to the lower right and is really independent of the subject matter. In the upper left corner the represented wall has on it a square of dark green paint, the master color that generates the olive greens that follow diagonally from it. These include the old woman's dress and most notably the three main olive tones of Martha's dress and apron, which occupy the largest expanse in the painting. Finally, in the lower right corner, the shadowing in Martha's hand is done in olive tones. There is a satisfying tension between the canvas as a narrative object, following a straight line up the center from Martha to the old woman to the Christ group, and the canvas as an exploration of color, following the diagonal described. (Incidentally, olive is the mother color in Marden's "Grove Group." The model for Martha is, not inappropriately, Marthe Maurier, the painter's wife.)

But the Cezannes in the Metropolitan show demonstrates what Marden meant about Cezanne's importance in the development of art that brings the image up to the plane. One example I enjoyed studying was his "Pastoral (Idyll)," oil on canvas from 1870. It's like a flatter version of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (1863), this time with three nudes and two men in clothes. The main male figure is one with the heavy black line that separates the foreground from the bay and sky behind. The joy of the painting is the pink flesh of the nudes. In terms of color, the pinks of their flesh repeat and vary in the topography and broad horizon line. Just as important, the swirling brush strokes that define the nudes also repeat, more or less mutedly, in other parts of the composition: the leaves in the upper left, the shirt on the man in the lower right, the reclining artist.

By the new century Cezanne has moved into all sorts of interesting explorations of color and brush stroke. His "Mont Sainte-Victoire" (oil on canvas, 1902-6) is arranged into many horizontal registers that lead back to a crag against the horizon, working with many variations of leaf-green and a creamy kind of sand-brown. Green are also strokes the main element in the sky, applied over a blue base. As in "Pastoral (Idyll)," Cezanne enforces a strong separation between ground and sky, in this case a thick blue line, fluid and movemented in an exciting contrast with the blocky strokes used above and below. In the horizontal registers that represent the nearer ground, the strokes are in orderly array, separate from each other, of equal length, vertical and rectilinear. In the crag, they are mostly diagonal, rising toward the peak; but again they are distinct from one another and in orderly array.

Cezanne's "Bathers" (oil on canvas, 1902-06) similarly uses side-by-side brush strokes, each the width of the brush, all in the same direction for the foliage, then another direction for the pool, etc. He will put a blue stroke beside a green. Each stroke in a given area has about the same length. Then only a few line strokes will say "tree" or "leaning woman" or "chevelure." The ground is light gray over lighter gray and is left uncovered where he wants to represent the bathers' skin mass and some of the literal ground.

Van Gogh was also featured in the Metropolitan show, but I hadn't enough time to give any of his canvases a really good look. His "Starry Night, Arles" uses the big, blobby strokes he is noted for. He will make that kind of stroke, then layer another color in a much thinner paint over areas of his thick strokes. But what takes one's breath is the glorious palette. Color is all.

State Fair (1933)

MoMA showed the 1933 State Fair last night as part of its retrospective of the films of Janet Gaynor, whose 100th birthday would have been this year. The film is not available on DVD or VHS, so this was a rare opportunity to see a remarkable film.

This is the pre-Rogers and Hammerstein version, with no music whatever except in the background of the fairground scenes and no Technicolor. What a blessing! There's far more real music and lyricism in any five minutes of this film than in all of the 1945 remake. Instead of relying on the songs to tell their story, the actors communicate by first of all believing in their characters, whom they never patronize.

One good example is the matter of the brandy in the mincemeat. In both versions, an early scene involves an disagreement between Abel and Melissa over whether the latter should put brandy in the mincemeat she is planning to submit for judging at the fair. Abel says yes, but Melissa is against strong drink. When she leaves the kitchen, Abel takes the brandy bottle from the cupboard and adds some to the mincemeat. Then he leaves, she returns, and she does the same. In 1945 Charles Winninger's perpetually bug-eyed Abel performs this business with exaggerated gestures, as if he were on a stage before an audience of thousands. He also seems to desperate to let us know that he himself understands what an empty head poor Abel is.

But Will Rogers, in the 1933 version, plays the same scene with understated simplicity. He's not afraid we'll mistake him for a simpleton, because he doesn't think his character is a simpleton, just a plain man who knows what judges at a country fair are going to like. And he doesn't have to wave his arms and bug his eyes, first because this happens to be a movie and secondly because he is a brilliant physical actor who can do his job with little movements that hardly seem like gestures at all.

In the same way, 1933's Louise Dresser far outshines 1945's Fay Bainter. In the scene where the mincemeat is judged Bainter plays manic-depressive as her chances of winning rise and fall, all gestures and expostulations. Dresser does it all with her eyes. She understands that her character's ingrained modesty is the anchor of her dignity, and that Melissa would never betray herself to the other contestants, so she stands in the front row and lets us alone see the clouds and sunshine pass over her face.

The whole film is like this, intimate with the viewer and trusting him or her to see the dignity in these characters. Even Blue Boy, Abel's beloved entry in the hog judging, benefits from Rogers's warm, empathetic approach to acting. In the Technicolor version, Abel's enthusiasm for Blue Boy makes him look like a complete fool, as most city audiences would indeed take a person to be if he got excited about a pig. But for Rogers, the empathetic actor, Abel is himself an empathetic man whose own self-respect is the source of his respect for Blue Boy, and he makes this clear both with dialogue and in his physical acting when with the animal.

This kind of intimacy earns the film our trust when it enters into its central questions about human love and its dangers. Margy, the daughter, falls in love at the fair with a local reporter who has to admit, though he loves her, that his past has been filled with empty affairs. Can she trust him? Instead of making the answer obvious, the film shares with us this aching secret: we don't know. We rarely know if love is going to work out, and if the wisest of us were asked to sit Margy down and explain things to her we wouldn't know what to say.

A lot of this intimacy has to do with camera work. The Internet Movie Database credits this to Hal Mohr, but someone else is credited on the screen. When I saw the name I grabbed my notepad to write it down, but unfortunately I see now that I wrote down "John Seitz," the name of a nineteenth-century merchant I once wrote about. I think the screen credited John something-else, but definitely not Hal Mohr. This is a pity, because someone deserves praise for the wonderful camera work and also for the lighting (which is uncredited both onscreen and at the IMDb).

At Fox in the early 30s there seems to have been a house style of photography that involved leaving plenty of space around the characters. This is a feature of all the early Gaynor pictures at Fox. This may have been due to economy, as many scenes in the other pictures use just one camera, panning left and right as characters enter and leave. Such a tactic would require keeping a certain distance from the actors. But in State Fair the distance speaks of the film's respect for the characters.

In one scene on the fourth morning of the fair, for example, Abel jokes to his son that he should pay his buddy room rent, since he's been sleeping at his place the last few nights. Abel does not know that this "buddy" is a woman, an entertainer from the side show. The camera holds back far enough for us to see Wayne standing behind his father, much discomfited, even while we see Abel's pleasure with his own joke, Melissa's blank unconcern, and the cozy home they have made of the tent they brought to the fairgrounds. No knowing cuts from one face to another, no elbow in our shoulder, just enough to make us laugh nervously and not know how to feel.

The film was released in January of 1933, which means it just barely made it before the intensification of censorship that was instituted later that year. Few pre-1933 movies have used their freedom of expression as eloquently, and as responsibly, as State Fair. Wayne falls in love with a woman who tells him from the start that she is "not wild, and not tame. I just do what I want, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody." She gets him into bed on the first night of the fair, and on the last day tells him it is over for good, hurting him plenty because he thought he was in love. The beauty is that we not only understand and sympathize with him, we understand her as well. This is a film with malice toward none.

A reviewer on IMDb says the movie is seen on "Fox" every once in a while. I guess he means the regular Fox broadcast network. Other than that, we may have to wait a long time for another opportunity to see this remarkable work.

Subway Art on New York's "R" Line

On June 26, 2006, Claire and I toured the art installations on the R subway line in New York, from Union Street in Brooklyn all the way through Manhattan to Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. Here are some photos, observations on the works, and notes on how to find them. The images below are small, but if you click on them you will see them in an adequately large format.

Union Street, Brooklyn: Emmett Wigglesworth, CommUnion, 1994



Where to see it: along both platforms

We weren't that impressed with this installation. Presumably Wigglesworth was drawing from the idea of "union" from the station's name and commenting on it by combining various "strands" into the one "cable." That seems too literal to me, and the umpteen iterations marching along both sides of the platform, though all different from each other, give the sense of same-old pretty fast.

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DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn: Stephen Johnson, DeKalb Improvisation, 2005



Where to see it: inside the station, just after you go through the turnstiles

This is just the thing for a station because no matter how many times you walk past it there will be something else to notice. It's big and splashy and has lots of references to Brooklyn, to the trains that stop here, to sports -- things it's good to think about as you dash to work.

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23rd Street, Manhattan: Keith Godard, Memories of Twenty-Third Street, 2002



Where to see it: along both platforms

Godard uses hats and small, indistinct labels to get folks who are waiting for the train in touch with the history just above them, in Madison Square. You look at a hat, then down at the label to see whose hat it is. Thus, the fancy hats of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit memorialize the architect of the original Madison Square Garden and his former mistress, whose husband shot White dead at a glittering Garden party in 1906. Great fun!

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28th Street, Manhattan: Mark Hadjipateras, City Dwellers (for Costas and Maro), 2002



Where to see it: along both platforms

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34th Street / Herald Square: Nicholas Pearson, Halo, 1991



This is a clever idea. White globes are placed far above the heads of subwaygoers, democratically giving each of them a halo, sort of. But after all these years they are not very white any more. They are caked with grime, and dust bunnies fill the folds in the surfaces.

Where to see it: inside the turnstiles of the 32nd/33rd Street entrance

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34th Street / Herald Square: David Provan, Yab-Yum, 1992



Provan's mobiles pose directly above the tracks, so when a train arrives or departs the resulting wind makes them whirl slowly. The graceful movements of the mobiles contrast with their physical "gravitas" -- thick plates and rods of heavy steel.

Where to see it: directly above the northbound F and V track (view them from the escalator)

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Times Square: Jack Beal, The Return of Spring / The Onset of Winter, 2001/2005



Where to see it: between the two exits for 41st Street and 7th Avenue (NW corner and SE corner)

This is a take on the Proserpina myth. On one wall we see Onset of Winter: Our heroine descends into the depths -- of a subway! The myth-makers of our modern age are a film crew, which has drawn the inevitable audience. Each person in the audience is literally illuminated and metaphorically transformed by the glow from the film crew's lights, a comment on our own individual relationship to today's myths and their heroines and heroes. This is perhaps best seen in the two boys watching in the foreground:



Even their dog seems ennobled by what is before him. On the facing wall we see the other side of the Proserpina myth, the return of Spring:



The darkness of the other image is supplanted by a sunlit scene in which Beal's Proserpina is posed to remind one of a figure from Botticelli's Primavera. There still is an underworld, but the workmen at the left need heavy equipment if they want to get to it.

Beal's treatment is not a satire. It does not diminish us moderns by setting us beside the grandeurs of the past, the way T. S. Eliot would. Rather, it makes New Yorkers seem at least as noble as the greats of yesteryear.

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Times Square: Toby Buonagurio, Times Square Times: 35 Times, 2005



Where to see it: at the 41st and Broadway entrance, or go from the uptown R train toward the 1 and 2 trains

Buonagurio's square ceramics celebrate the joys of Times Square. Here are a few of the 35:



Happy New Year



Seafood cookery



Subway living



The Theater District



Hot Dogs sold from carts



Tourists



... and feet, thousands and thousands of feet in shoes from every part of the world.

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Times Square: Jacob Lawrence, New York in Transit, 2001

We were not impressed, and I am not posting an image of this one.

Where to see it: between the uptown and downtown R train elevators, near the exit for the SE corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street

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Times Square: Roy Lichtenstein, Times Square Mural, 2000



Where to see it: from the bottom of the escalators at the entrance from the SE corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street

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Fifth Avenue / 59th Street, Manhattan: Ann Schaumberger



Where to see it: along both platforms and at the entrance from 59th and Central Park West

One of the exits from this station leads you to the Central Park Zoo, which is Schaumberger's theme. We can attest that the mosaics are a delight to grandchildren; others might find them a little too cute.

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36th Street, Queens: Owen Smith, An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders, 1998

We could not find it in the station. There were numerous blackened cut-out areas in the tiled walls. Perhaps the installation has been removed, leaving these areas?

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Jackson Heights / Roosevelt Avenue, Queens: Tom Patti, Passage, 2004



Where to see it: The whole station is a work of art, a thrill to behold both inside and out, with grand, sweeping spaces and intriguing colors. We are guessing that the specific work, "Passage" is only the colored inserts in the windows:



These are just one part of the wonderful effect of the whole atrium:

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Woodhaven Boulevard, Queens: Pablo Tauler, In Memory of the Lost Battalion, 1996

Last night the MoMA showed "Outstanding Films from International Festivals." One of the most original was Volker Shreiner's "Counter," in which we count down to 1 from, I think it was something like 275. For each number, we see a split-second from a familiar movie in which that number appears. It might be on a hotel-room door or a calendar behind the hero or the back of a bus, and so on. Fudging a little, the director starts with an actual countdown timer reading out the 275 (or whatever) number, and when he wasn't able to find a clip for a number he will go back to the countdown timer. But not that often.

Doing this says things about film. The countdown is a plot but not a story, engaging in a way that we don't usually think of film as engaging us. Hitchcock said that every movie is a chase, because the film goes into the projector and out of the projector in one long sequence. On the same reasoning, every movie is a countdown, and part of our sense of anticipation is for the closure at the end.

Another really good film shown last night was Toby MacDonald's "Heavy Metal Drummer," about a Moroccan boy who plays in a band with two friends and loves heavy metal. Trouble is, neither his two friends nor anyone in the family or neighborhood has anything but disdain for this heavy metal kind of drumming. It's a short film, and it concludes at a gig where the band is playing people-pleaser stuff and suddenly the boy breaks out into this tremendous loud riff that just stuns everyone. Very charming.

Also some science-fictiony stuff of no value whatever. Science fiction is to film as acid is to milk. Let in one drop, and you need to throw the whole thing out.