Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York

I. The Book

Alexander Nemerov (a professor at Stanford University) has written a series of biographical episodes about the art and life of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). Frankenthaler was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist and founder of Colour-field Painting (Post-Painterly Abstraction). Nemerov has taken 11 dates, one per year from 1950 to 1960, to write about. These are entrances into different parts of the artist’s life, situating the chapters around specific events. This works adequately. Nemerov has to be flexible about what to include and how much the significance the day has to the chapter, but the framework is secondary to content.  

The 1950s were a decade in which Frankenthaler achieved an astronomical rise in prominence. When the account begins, Frankenthaler was a young painter, a recent graduate, searching for a unique style and place. She had graduated in 1949 from Bennington College, Vermont. Frankenthaler came from a wealthy upper-class Jewish family from New York. Her father had been a New York State Supreme Court justice. His unexpected death in 1940 left the family of a wife and three young girls grieving but financially secure.  

Frankenthaler participated in the 1951 exhibition at a venue on Ninth Street. Only in retrospect was it seen as ground breaking. Frankenthaler became close to Grace Hartigan, who exhibited in that show. More important for Frankenthaler was her first solo exhibition in November of that year. By that time she had already started an affair with Clement Greenberg. Much her elder, Greenberg was the most influential critic of the era. His backing had not exactly made Pollock the most famous (or notorious) painter in America, but his support had certainly seen both Pollock and Greenberg’s stars rise. Frankenthaler met Pollock and his wife Krasner via Greenberg. By this time, Pollock and Krasner lived on Long Island. Greenberg and Frankenthaler went out to visit them. Frankenthaler took much from Pollock. He was an example of a great and serious painter. His art was exhilarating. She viewed Pollock’s 1950 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, which contained Pollock’s greatest drip paintings, and this transformed her idea of what painting could be.

On 26 October 1952, Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea. It was painted on raw canvas and unstretched, as Pollock painted. Frankenthaler diluted her paint so that it soaked and stained, rather than remained where poured. This diffuseness was radical. It was lyrical and sensuous. It was different from gestural painting of Pollock and the tight, impermeable surfaces of Malevich and Mondrian. This is seen as the starting point for the Colour-field Painting. Friedel Dzubas, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski and others were excited by the painting as saw potential in that art. Others would soon follow. For the first time in history, two occurrences had taken place: a woman had founded a major art movement and a style had been established on a single identifiable day.

On 27 July 1953, Frankenthaler visited the Prado, seeking cultural release from domestic frustrations. Her encounter with Tintoretto and painters of the Spanish Golden Age led her to tackle larger canvases, referring back to art history. On 12 August 1956, Frankenthaler was in Paris with Krasner when the news reached them that Pollock had been killed in a car crash. Frankenthaler did her best to comfort Krasner as she made funeral and travel arrangements by telephone. Following Pollock’s lengthy deterioration into a violent angry drunk, his death ended up freeing both Krasner and Frankenthaler. As Nemerov puts it, “Whatever personal feelings it occasioned, Pollock’s death was also a release. That fall Helen’s paintings became freer, more improvisational, more brazenly indifferent to protocols of “finish.” Some new joy came with the master’s demise; some liberation, inseperable from the pall, fueled her work.”

On 1 August 1958 Frankenthaler and Motherwell were on their honeymoon in Spain and visited the caves of Altamira.  On 16 July they had visited the caves of Lascaux. This was Frankenthaler’s second pilgrimage to the Altamira caves. That had been with a crowd. This time, she and her husband were alone, having bribed the keeper to allow them in during the lunch break. Viewing the paintings by candlelight, surrounded by darkness and silence, the couple wondered at the paintings of bison, horses and deer that had once inhabited ancient Spain. For two painters strongly committed to the primal power of painting and dedicated to paint as a medium, it was a profound experience. Both later made reference to the experience in statements and art.

The year 1959 was a stressful one for Frankenthaler and Motherwell. They took custody of Motherwell’s two young children from his ex-wife, due to her break down. Frankenthaler was at first anxious and disconcerted by the responsibilities of being a stepmother. However, the couple adjusted, had enough money for a nanny and the children grew to trust and like Frankenthaler. It was a bittersweet moment when the girls returned to their mother two years later. Frankenthaler would have no children of her own. Frankenthaler’s 1960 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, brought a curtain down on the 1950s and her youth. By this time, Pop, Happenings and Conceptual art was in the wings. Politics would drive a wedge between the student artists and the grand Abstract Expressionists. Over barely two decades, Abstract Expressionism would rise, freeze and fade, its practitioners turned into bankable Old Masters in late middle age.    

The book is a brisk read, written in a direct style but informed by a solid grounding in 1950s American culture and the New York School. Nemerov’s familiarity with the biography and art of his subject (and of others in her milieu) is evident. The thorough footnotes will help students and scholars track down sources; the illustrations – colour images of art, photographs of the artist at work and socialising – fill out the narrative. This book will be welcomed by fans of the painter and anyone interested in the New York School.

II. Frankenthaler as “a woman artist”

Discussions about Frankenthaler and the circumstances of women artists is complex. She was a talented painter who made original art – started a new school of painting – and was acclaimed by her peers. On that level, she is a success story, a self-actualised woman artist in a time when there were few top-level female artists. Yet her close connections to critic Clement Greenberg, artist Robert Motherwell and curator Bryan Robertson leave open the inference that her prominence was assisted by these men. If we examine interpretations of Krasner’s career, we find authors and associates suggesting Krasner’s marriage to Pollock impeded her during his lifetime (making her a supernumerary, causing people to view her art as relational to Pollock’s, reducing her productivity) and assisted her after his lifetime (proceeds from the Pollock estate making her financially secure, dealers interested in Pollock’s art treating Krasner’s art favourably in order to win access to his art). Yet Frankenthaler was already part of the New York Abstract Expressionist scene before her relationship with Greenberg. She was already exhibiting and selling art before the affair started. Greenberg may have increased the attention given her art before 1953 (the year Mountains and Sea was first exhibited), but it was in that year that Frankenthaler earned her reputation and had artist followers. It is difficult to see how her romantic connections translated into measurable career advantages, certainly after 1953.

It seems inevitable that an artist as original and driven as Frankenthaler would have broken through in the way she did, even without the encouragement of influential male partners. Greenberg was not a great champion of women artists as a whole. It is possible that the main boost he provided to Frankenthaler was forming a strong social bond with Pollock and Krasner and thereby allowing Frankenthaler to see their art first hand and discuss techniques, material and ideas with two of the most advanced artists in the scene. She admitted that seeing Pollock’s art was a seminal experience for her as a fellow painter. In that sense, Greenberg’s assistance was to help her develop her art, not to advantage her public career.

Frankenthaler’s signature style of staining was seen by some critics and artists as distinctly feminine. The style tended to conform to assumptions about womanly delicacy, as did the lack of evidence of raw physical energy or cultivated athletic dexterity, as found in the art of Pollock and Kline. The paintings contained blooming optical sensations and enveloping expanses rather than staccato brushwork or whipped drips. There were the inferences of woman as producer of fluids, passive, unfirm, labile, unpredictable, unfocused, avatar of untrammelled nature. Such talk betrayed the assumptions of the commentator more than it identified any trait in the painter. Woman as dyer of cloth, maker of decoration and laundress were the cultural shadows flickering through the minds of some in the 1950s and 1960s who saw photographs of Frankenthaler. These same viewers had seen Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of Pollock at work, the comparisons were somewhere between boxer and farmer; Pollock was described as a cowboy spinning lariats of paint instead of a lasso.

Frankenthaler’s art was well regarded – especially by the art cognoscenti of Manhattan, Long Island and Provincetown – possibly in part because it was seen as a (incidentally feminine) variant of an existing (incidentally largely masculine) discipline. It was an offshoot or evolution. In stylistic terms, this is correct. Colour-field Painting was developed by Abstract Expressionist painters, in their search to expand their formal range and technical capacities. The inference that it was secondary and subsequent, was one that artists and critics at the time were aware of and it did frame discussions. It is ironic that the first style inescapably founded by a female artist was one that was considered primarily as a development or continuation of a pre-existing school of painting. Even as a leader, Frankenthaler was seen at a secondary rank, as the head of a group which was behind a vanguard. This is a touch unfair whilst being accurate. Frankenthaler was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist and Colour-field Painting did develop from that existing movement.      

This book does present a good overview of how Frankenthaler’s art was received by contemporaries, though the author is limited by his biographical focus. This book is a suitable entry point for those wishing to investigate this subject in more depth.

Alexander Nemerov, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, Penguin Press, 2021, hardback, 269pp + xviii, illus., $28, ISBN 978 0 525 56018 0

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

The Ancients on Farming

How to be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land is the latest addition to the Princeton classics library. It gathers writings by different authors. Editor and translator M.D. Usher writes, “A unifying element is provided for in the choice of selections, which focus on Greek and Roman attitudes, dispositions, and reflections on what it means to live, work, and think in a landscape.” He has focused on general arguments and discussions of the benefits of country life, as opposed to any technical information, which is to be found in instruction manuals written by the ancients. As more and more people notice the deracinating effects of urban life – crime, alienation, stress, lack of privacy, absence of trust – so the interest in rural life burgeons.

The authors selected are Hesiod, Plato, Lucretius, Varro, Horace, Longus, Columella, Pliny the Elder and others, including anonymous authors. Verse is mostly rendered as prose, though the original text is presented in metre. Short introductions and notes help to explain oblique references or backstories to these excerpts.

Hesiod writes of nature not waiting for man and that the imperatives of weather, season and growing cycle act as foe to sloth. He notes that competitive spirit pits farmer to match or exceed his neighbour, quoting the proverb, “Potter vies with potter, carpenters with their kin;/beggar rivals beggar, and bard begrudges bard.” Although he does counsel amity between neighbours. On frittering away one’s energy on distractions, Hesiod enjoins his brother:

Take these matters to heart. Do not let the Strife that delights in evil keep your heart from work while you attend hearings and gawk at disputes at assembly. If a man does not have a good year’s livelihood stored indoors, harvested in due season – Demeter’s grain, what the Earth brings forth – he has little concern for disputes and assemblies. Once you’ve sated yourself on that, go right ahead and advance your disputes and conflicts in your quest to acquire another man’s goods.

Elsewhere, Hesiod tells of eternal truths, that are just.

For such [righteous] people, the Earth produces life aplenty: in the mountains, the oak produces acorns on its branches, and bees in its trunk; their woolly sheep are weighed down, heavy with fleeces; their wives birth children that resemble their parents, and they thrive with good things all of their days. They do not embark upon ships: rather, the grain-giving land produces their crops.

Note Hesiod’s implicit criticism of itinerant merchants seeking foreign goods (the travelling traders) and his suggestion about the unfaithfulness of individuals living outside of nature’s allotted roles, which are implicitly good because they work. A man in harmony with nature prospers; his wife bears his children; he has no need to travel or trade abroad. It is the city life and foreign travel that lead to strife and imbalance between men, between husband and wife and between man and nature.   

Plato suggests (in his The Republic) how a city is organised by specialists in each field serving the community as a whole, working more efficiently and co-operatively. Virgil’s Georgics are the greatest surviving idyllic (or bucolic) odes of the Romans. His presentation of the farmer’s lot is partial. “Meanwhile, his sweet children hang upon his neck for kisses. His household is wholesome and guards its integrity. His cows come into milk with udders full, and the goat-kids grapple with one another, horns opposed, on the cheerful lea. The farmer himself observes a holiday, sprawled on the grass.” Later, Virgil has his Bacchanalian farmers throwing javelins and wrestling each other.

Horace locates the content farmer as his own man, far from controlling external influences. “Happy is he who, far away from financial affairs, works his ancestral lands, using oxen he owns, as did people of old, wholly debt-free.” He avoids war, the sea and the wiles of politicians. For the ancients, the farmer is a natural aristocrat. (Musonius Rufus declared farming was a pursuit conducive to philosophical reflection.) The farmer is detached from the mob; he is steward of the land. He must distain the vagaries of man to work at the pace of nature. He labours and his family and slaves labour beside him. He protects and feeds others in return for their loyalty and diligence. He is not elected and is deposed only when he fails in his duties as steward and provider, according to natural law. He raises his sons to follow the wisdom he learned from his father. The sons inherit because they are trained to inherit and to farm, forming a sacred chain of tradition.

Columella execrates the rise of the gentleman farmer, who owns a large farm that depends upon slave labour. The absent landlord loses touch with the reality of plants, animals and tasks entrusted to employees. He notes that the industrious wife of previous eras, who shared in the farmer’s wealth and contributed to the standing of the farmstead and the family, had fallen into indolence and luxury when the farmer becomes wealthy. “These days, however, most women are awash in luxury and idleness to such an extent that they don’t deem even the supervision of wool-making a worthy endeavor and find home-spun garments loathsome. Perversely, the clothes that please them most are those that cost a fortune, amounting almost to the value of a whole estate.”

Once again, we encounter an academic fretting over gender bias and slavery in ancient sources. One would have thought that as historians, selectors would welcome and preserve the differences of the ages recorded in ancients’ words, rather than offering propitiatory apologias. One suspects that selectors are more worried about the grumbling of progressive professors than any outcry by general readers, the latter of whom do not expect the past to mirror the concerns of today’s elites. M.D. Usher has nothing to apologise for and the ancients need no apologies proffered on their behalf. The ancients had – astonishingly – different biases to those of modern academics. Selectors and translators, let the authors speak frankly and credit readers with the judgment to evaluate their own responses to the ancients.    

Princeton University Press does us all a good service by publishing these selections and keeping the classics alive for us. How to be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land is a highly enjoyable selection and will be avidly read by idealistic communalists and traditional conservatives leaving for the countryside – and by all of us who wish they could do the same.  

Various, M.D. Usher (trans., intro.), How to be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land, Princeton University Press, 2021, hardback, cloth spine, 272pp, Greek/Latin/English text, $16.95/£12.99, ISBN 978 0 691 21174 9

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

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Hans Purrmann

A recent addition to Hirmer’s Great Masters of Art series is a short book on German Modernist Hans Purrmann (1880-1966). Purrmann was born in Speyer, Rhineland-Palatinate. He was trained in decorative art and took courses at the Applied Arts School, Karlsruhe, before going to study painting at Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (1897-1905). All of this gave him great craft skills and sensitivity towards colour. He had an affinity for Munich Impressionism. Park in Svinar (1903) is close to Max Liebermann’s Impressionism and Seated Nude (“Polish Equestrienne”) (1905) follows Lovis Corinth’s expressive diagonal brushwork and lush painterliness. The former is a dazzling tour de force depiction of shadow and dappling sunlight effects. Painting as pleasure-giving is never far from Purrmann’s thinking. Purrmann also respected Max Slevogt.

While in Munich, Purrmann developed an admiration for Cézanne. He immersed himself in the power of colour and the cultivation of facture, as means to vitalise painting. He moved to Paris in 1905 and the following year commenced studying in the studio of Henri Matisse. The master proved a major influence; so much so, that Purrmann is often called “the German Matisse”. It did not help Purrmann’s standing as an independent painter the fact that he vigorously promoted Matisse’s paintings in Germany. His combination of bluish greens and viridian – and his preference for blocks of unmodulated, unshaded colour – was developed at this time.

Purrmann could be classed as a late-period Fauve. His paintings from 1905 onwards share characteristics with those of Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain, as well as Matisse. The energy of Purrmann’s early Fauve paintings is akin to Vlaminck’s. The hot-coloured landscapes are a blend of Derain and Cézanne.

The painter admitted that he painted that which he enjoyed looking at and being around – sunny gardens, interiors of his handsome home, family members, nude models. Purrmann’s sumptuous interiors – juxtaposing reds and oranges against saturated greens and blue – of 1917-8 display his feeling for colour. The richness of the colour, restrained brushwork and deft use of detailing in compositions that exaggerate forms and spaces without reaching levels of unreality are highly satisfying and typical of Purrmann. That also demonstrates Purrmann’s weakness in comparison to Matisse. He is too restrained and too genteel to take up the risks that Matisse undertook. His art is gorgeous but genteel; it is the gentility of a consummate craftsman rather than the rawness and risk of genius.

Interestingly, Purrmann’s art was classed as degenerate by the Nazis and included in the 1937 exhibition. The content of his art was unobjectionable, had it been painted in a realist or mild Impressionist manner, but his style was tied to the unapologetic Modernism. This led to him being perceived as belonging to a subversive group (or tendency). The author admits he cannot explain how this condemned artist came to be appointed director of Villa Romana, Florence, a German-owned villa used for artist residencies. Purmann held the position from 1935 until 1943, the breakdown of the Fascist government during the pressure of Allied invasion and German occupation. (That summer his wife died in Munich after a long illness.) In 1939, the “Italian branch of the Nazi Party” wrote to the German Embassy in Rome, calling Purrmann a “proponent of an altogether un-German concept of art”. Purrmann was known to have assisted dissident artists and writers during his time there.

Purrmann’s painting during his years in Florence feature the villa and display the artist’s appreciation for his surroundings. The views of rooms, including glimpses of the garden and trees beyond the balcony, recall Matisse’s Nice and Cannes paintings. After the war, Purrmann settled in Lugano, Switzerland. His studio had a spectacular mountain view. His art did not develop much in later years; it did not need to. He continued painting after 1959, when he was confined to a wheelchair by a stroke. His dedication to pleasure was richly rewarded in his last decades by increasing acclaim and financial security. In 1955, his art was selected for the first Documenta exhibition in Cassel, chosen in part by the German curators because Purrmann was seen as untainted by Naziism, Modernist in character and representative of the taste and artists of France. Purrmann was, for Germans burdened by war-guilt, an embodiment of “the good German artist”: cosmopolitan in outlook and association.

Purrmann’s painting is definitely worth becoming acquainted with, especially if one is a fan of the Fauves or early Matisse. It is highly accomplished and enjoyable. Wagner’s book is the perfect introduction. The book contains a general essay, a thorough chronology and a handful of documents from Purrmann, alongside colour illustrations. The illustrations are well chosen and large enough. Recommended for all fans of Matisse, Modernist painting and German art.

Christoph Wagner, Hans Purrmann, Hirmer, 2021, hardback, 80pp, 55 col. illus., £9.95, ISBN 978 3 7774 3679 1

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

Aristotle on Innovation

It is said that the Greeks were reluctant to innovate. The prime example given is the steam engine (aeolipile) of Hero of Alexandria. It was a steam turbine, where steam from a boiler was fed into a ball on pivots; the ball had vents for the steam, the ejection of which caused the ball to rotate. It was treated as a novelty and a feat of ingenuity but never used by the Greeks to do any practical function. Yet, when we look at the architecture and art, we can see small constant refinement in methods and tools. The changes in language and ideas over the centuries show curiosity and openness, even if the technology remained fairly stable. While scientific and philosophical ideas developed rapidly in Greece, we find evidence that innovation is different from science. Innovation is tinkering; it is the spotting of certain phenomenon and characteristics of materials or mechanisms and adapting and combining those into new machines or procedures.

The question of change applies in all fields. Innovation in the field of weaponry can allow a city to defeat another. Innovation in agriculture may lead to better harvests or the cultivation of previously unproductive land. Innovation in the way a city is governed can lead to discord and instability. Innovation in religion may lead to heresy and collapse in faithful observance. Change in itself is neither good nor bad though it may do good or bad.     

In the latest selection from the classics, published by Princeton, Armand D’Angour has selected, translated and introduced texts by Aristotle (384-322 BC), Athenaeus of Naucratis (c. C150-250 AD) and Diodorus Siculus (c. 90-30 BC).

Diodorus is quoted on Dionysius of Syracuse assembling a uniform army and attracting armourers of the highest ability. Aristotle is quoted on the subject of change, criticising the proto-socialism of Socrates and authoritarianism of Plato. He suggests that citizens be able to own personal property and guard the privacy of their families, allowing that some common property (such as land) may be shared to mutual benefit. Aristotle sets out the foundations of liberalism: “A state is not made up only of many people, but of a variety of kinds of people; a state cannot simply be constituted of similar individuals. It’s not like an alliance, whose usefulness depends simply on numbers, not on different kinds, of men.” He refutes common ownership of everything but leaves open the door to a fragmented society, where factions compete for power and favour. This extract from Aristotle’s Politics (book 2) will make interesting reading for those interested in finding a balance between common good and private autonomy.  

The most famous anecdote from Greece is of Archimedes solving the problem of how to calculate the amount of gold used in the creation of a crown. The complexity of the form (and the possibility of hollows) meant that it was difficult to ascertain how much gold had been used in the object and whether it had been adulterated with other metals. Archimedes sank into his bath and saw his body displaced water and he realised that displacement and weight could be used to determine the mass of the crown. This could then be compared to the weight of pure gold of an established volume – to be multiplied up to the volume of the crown. Any discrepancy would indicate the use of non-gold in the crown, thus revealing any deceit on the maker’s part. Comprehending the solution, Archimedes arose from the bath, yelling “Eureka!” (Gr: I have it!).

Archimedes was a naval architect. From Moschion (via Athenaeus) comes an account of Archimedes designing the Syracusia, a warship for Hieron Syracuse. “Hieron arranged for wooden pegs, belly timbers, rib timbers, and whatever material was needed for other uses come partly from Italy and partly from Sicily. He procured esparto from Spain for cables, hemp and pitch from Rhone valley, and other necessary materials from many different places.” He outlines the elaborate construction, including bronze rivets, later sheathed in lead to protect them from corrosion. Archimedes used a windlass of his own design to get the ship into the sea. The huge vessel had space for multiple levels of oarsmen, a garden, library, gymnasium, a fish tank and temple with a stone floor. The ship was a warship, and had battlements, watchtowers, grappling hooks and a baluster. An Archimedes screw was the bilge pump. Hieron gave Syracusia as a gift to Ptolemy II of Alexandria. It was the only voyage it made.   

Diodoros describes the innovative tactics that allowed the Thebans to defeat the mightiest army in Greece at the Battle of Leuctra. Due to general Epaminondas’s uneven distribution of forces in his line, the Spartan phalanx was twisted – one side advancing fast and the others held back. Out of position, the Spartans were attacked from behind, breaking their formation. “Epaminondas’s corps pursued those fleeing, cutting down in large numbers any who resisted, and gained for themselves a most glorious victory. For since they had engaged the strongest of the Greeks and, though fielding a smaller force, had miraculously overcome many times their number, they won a great reputation for their heroism. The highest praises were accorded to the general Epaminondas, who chiefly by his own valor and by his brilliant strategy had defeated in battle the hitherto invincible leaders of Hellas.”

The short introductions are handy guides and the choice provides a broad range of aspects to innovation. The quoted texts are given in English and the original Greek; the other material is in English only.

Aristotle, Armand D’Angour (trans., ed.), How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking, Princeton University Press, 2021, hardcover cloth spine, 138pp + xxi, Greek/English text, $16.95/£12.99, ISBN 978 069 121 3736

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To view my books and art visit www.alexanderadams.art

“Getting Creative with History”

“From the first charcoal drawings on cave walls, to Rachel Whiteread’s Turner Prize-winning cast of a house interior, Creation attempts to chart the nature of artistic creativity worldwide. It is a comparative anthropological study of what creativity means within a differing but constant construct: society. The book offers a chronological survey of fine art, applied art and architecture, in that order of emphasis. We visit the highlights of major civilisations, respectively the Sumerians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, Olmec, Mayans, Aztecs, Greek, Romans, Indians and others. Then we return to Europe for the majority of the remainder of the book.

“Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation — tracing the course of European culture from ancient Greece to the 20th century — was considered an encyclopaedic achievement. This is by some measure even more ambitious. Curator and cultural historian John-Paul Stonard takes us to ancient China, the lost civilisations of Central America and modern and prehistoric Africa, whilst also featuring art of Western societies from the medieval to modern era. Surely, Stonard is setting himself up for failure….”

John-Paul Stonard, Creation: Art Since The Beginning, Bloomsbury, 2021, hardback, 464pp, fully illus., £30, ISBN 978 1 4088 7968 9

Read the full review here: https://thecritic.co.uk/getting-creative-with-history/

Van Gogh’s Finale

[Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows (1890), oil on canvas, 51 x 103cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam]

The esteemed art historian and journalist Martin Bailey – noted for his expertise on Van Gogh – has completed his trilogy of books on Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers & The Artist’s Rise to Fame succeeds Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence and Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum. This final book examines the last few weeks of the artist’s life. It was an intensely productive period, during which the artist completed 70 paintings in 70 days.

When Van Gogh was recovering slowly in the asylum in Saint Rémy, he was in need of a place to stay when he departed. It was Pissarro who recommended to Theo Van Gogh as a suitable place Auvers-sur-Oise. Pissasso had stayed in Pontoise, near the village, and knew the local doctor, Paul Gachet. Gachet was an amateur artist and printmaker and had an interest in assisting artists. On 16 May 1890 Van Gogh took the train from Saint-Rémy to Paris to see Theo, Jo and their baby son. After staying a few days in Paris, visiting art exhibitions, meeting people and buying art supplies (on Theo’s money), Van Gogh travelled to Auvers-sur-Oise, met Dr Gachet and took up lodgings at Auberge Ravoux. The Ravoux’s café and lodging house was officially “Café de la Mairie”. Van Gogh’s attic room was small, with only a skylight for natural light, although he could use a storeroom for materials and finished pictures. The cost of bed and board was 3.50 francs.

Bailey describes Gachet’s peculiar collection: Florentine stained glass, Impressionist paintings, human skulls and casts of the decapitated heads of executed prisoners. The dark rooms crammed with furniture, books and curios made a strong impression on visitors. He painted the doctor’s portrait, complete with yellow-jacketed novels and a sprig of foxgloves, grown as a medicine; the doctor appears melancholy and detached. (Van Gogh considered him a strange character.) He also painted his garden at least twice, one including the doctor’s daughter. Another painting of Maguerite Gachet at a piano used a canvas typically used for landscape. The double-square format (1:2 proportion, 50 x 100 cm) was one that Van Gogh took up as a tribute to Daubigny, whose favourite format it had been for landscapes. Daubigny lived in Auvers and had died in 1878. Daubigny’s widow still lived in his house when Van Gogh stayed in the village.  

Bailey includes vintage photographs and postcards of places and people in Auvers that Van Gogh knew or painted. The many illustrations – all well-chosen – make reading a fast experience, which is quite appropriate given the hectic pace of the subject’s last weeks. He was painting so fast that he ran out of canvases and had to use a tea towel to paint on. One of the reasons Van Gogh did not sell paintings was that he was willing to give them away. Gachet did not have to pay for his “26 Van Gogh paintings, 14 drawings, 3 prints and a letter with a drawing.” The Van Goghs and almost 50 paintings by Cézannes and Pissarros owned by Gachet would be valued today at over a billion dollars.  

In artistic terms, it is hard to pinpoint anything characteristic of the Auvers period outside of an increase in green hues and a slightly darker tonality, due to the cloudier northern climate. He took as subjects picturesque rural cottages, gardens, wheatfields and the local church. Ears of Wheat (1890), with the absence of horizon or sky and the repeated marks and patterning filling the picture plane, verges on abstraction. There were flower paintings (perhaps on rainy days, when painting outside was impossible) and portraits.

Although it is a common misconception that Van Gogh’s last painting was Wheatfield with Crows (1890) – probably because of the iconic scene in the biopic Lust for Life (1956). His last completed painting was of tree roots. It recalls his curious paintings of caves. The caves and roots both seem to frame portals to the underworld. Only in 2020 was the spot identified. It was depicted in the vintage postcard of a bank next to a road close to the artist’s lodging.

[Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Tree Roots (1890), oil on canvas, 50 x 100 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam]

The standard account of Van Gogh’s suicide was that he left his lodgings late in the evening of 27 July (“just after 7pm”) and walked towards the chateau. Standing by the walls, isolated, he shot himself through the chest – a fatal wound. Finding himself still alive, he managed to walk back to his lodging. When the Ravouxs realised he was injured, they summoned a local doctor and Dr Gachet. Theo was summoned from Paris. He arrived in time to comfort the painter in his last hours. He died in the early hours of 29 July. Bailey recounts the touching scenes from the hasty funeral on the following day.  

Bailey investigates the question of the artist’s death. In 2011 the Smith-Naifeh biography of Van Gogh presented an alternative story about that fateful 27 July 1890. They recount that late in life, René Secrétan, who was a schoolboy who visited Auvers in 1890 and had known the painter. Secrétan said that he had borrowed the pistol from the owner of the Auberge Ravoux (where the painter was staying) in order to play cowboys and Indians. He had seen the painter painting near the walls of the chateau. He had tussled with the painter – whom he often taunted – and the gun went off. Van Gogh had staggered back to Auberge Ravoux and had refused to implicate the boy, intimating that it was the result of a suicidal act.

Bailey is sceptical. He points out that Secrétan did not say the gun went off in scuffle but that Van Gogh took the gun – then killing himself, on purpose or by accident. “The very limited forensic evidence about the wound has so far failed to resolve the debate.” He gives five reasons for favouring suicide as a cause of death: “suicidal tendencies, Cor’s death and Wil’s depression, Theo’s problems, Vincent’s last words, everyone at the time believed it was suicide”. Van Gogh had self-harmed (the famous ear-slashing attack in December 1888 caused such blood los that he almost died) and contemplated suicide before. Van Gogh’s brother Cor committed suicide in South Africa in 1900 and his sister Wil suffered complete mental collapse in 1902, subsequently diagnosed as dementia (possibly schizophrenia); so, there was serious mental instability in the family. Van Gogh was under the impression his brother was on the verge of quitting his job (or being fired) – imperilling not only Theo’s own livelihood but also Van Gogh’s soul source of income. Actually, the crisis had been averted, but Theo had inexplicably failed to mention this to his brother. Van Gogh, in his last hours, seemed resolved to die, never saying anything otherwise. Theo, Gachet, Ravoux, the police and the painter’s friends all believed the shooting was a deliberate suicide. On balance, Bailey’s defence of the suicide theory is more persuasive than the Smith-Naifeh accident/manslaughter theory.

Barely had Van Gogh been buried when Theo attempted a posthumous exhibition, eventually settling on a display in his Parisian apartment. He was quickly overtaken by tertiary syphilis, dying less than six months after his brother. Bailey wonders whether or not by the May 1890 meeting Theo had known his condition and fate (syphilis was then untreatable and usually fatal) and whether or not information had been transmitted to Van Gogh, effectively warning him that his sole income was threatened. I suspect not. Considering how generally frank the brothers were, it seems letters would have contained explicit references or allusions. Knowing Van Gogh’s precarious emotional, health and financial situation, I believe that Theo did know (or suspect his condition) but chose to conceal that grisly news from Van Gogh and Jo.

The story of Van Gogh’s rise to fame is well known and often recounted but (as with every account) there are new details. Bailey suggests that the reason there are few mentions in the Van Gogh correspondence of press articles about Van Gogh in his lifetime is that he was unaware of some of the pieces. This seems very surprising, considering Theo’s central position in avant-garde art in Paris. Even more remarkably Gachet never wrote anything substantial on Van Gogh, despite his intentions. His notes (both memoirs and any medical notes) were destroyed or lost. The publication of the letters (in 1914), in tandem with a number of group and solo exhibitions, brought Van Gogh to worldwide fame by the early 1920s. By then, the Expressionists had already mined Van Gogh for the emotionally expressive use of colour, brushwork and exaggeration.

[Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Garden in Auvers (1890), oil on canvas, 64 x 80 cm, private collection, France]

Bailey discusses the trade in fakes and the problems of attribution – there are waves of attribution and deattribution, as experts seek to assert their taste and knowledge. There is kudos in being scrupulously rigorous in exclusion and in being perspicuously open-minded. He includes a gallery of shame, comprising four book covers featuring fake Van Goghs. He provides examples of paintings that have been denounced only to be reinstated. Garden in Auvers is one painting that is seen as atypically decorative and was hobbled by doubts, making it difficult to sell. Now authenticated by the Van Gogh Museum, the painting is commonly accepted. He also discounts the famous myth that a Japanese businessman (Ryoei Saito) with cremated with his Portrait of Doctor Gachet (1890) – a black joke, apparently.   

Bailey makes a judicious, informative and passionate companion for those of us seeking to understand Van Gogh’s last days. Bailey’s masterful familiarity with artist, art and artistic and social setting pays off. The text is effortlessly readable, thoughtful and well-sourced. The images are rich and rewarding. Highly recommended.

Martin Bailey, Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers & The Artist’s Rise to Fame, Frances Lincoln, 21 September 2021, hardback, 240pp, fully illus., £25/$40, ISBN 978 0 7112 5700 0

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

“Museums Deconstructed by Degrees”

Photo by Shvets Anna on Pexels.com

“Colchester and Ipswich Museums held a video conference event on the subject of decolonisation and democratisation. The organisers invited two activist historians to give talks. The organisers revealed their view by staging the event, as well as in their choice of speakers. Heritage organisations are run by managerial leftist elites, who dislike compromised artefacts and resent the populations they serve.

As part of the event, a video talk was given by Tristram Hunt, Director of The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) on the September 29th. He spoke positively about adapting museum presentations to target “new communities”. When asked about the possibility of laws allowing mass deaccessioning of artefacts, he stepped carefully and pointed out that this would require an Act of Parliament. He also avoided fully endorsing a question that advocated making audiences uncomfortable – a reframing of the “no white comfort” slogan of BLM – calling it “a very great question”, saying: “I get the point and I think that intellectual challenge and feeling uncomfortable about some of these histories is part of what we should do but I think at the same time don’t lose sight of the fact that we’ve trusted institutions to make that happen.”…”

Read the full article here: https://www.bournbrookmag.com/home/museums-deconstructed-by-degrees

(c) 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit: www.alexanderadams.art

Sacred Chola bronzes

[Image: Uma, “Capital style; ca. 900, bronze, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Cora Timken Burnett, 1956.]

The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855–1280 is the “first book to situate the sacred and sensuous bronze statues from India’s Chola dynasty in social context”. This book is an attempt to synthesise art historical and connoisseurial appreciation of temple bronzes of the Chola dynasty (855-1279) but also to consider the social, economic and religious significance of the bronzes. The Chola dynasty flourished in South and South-Eastern India and northern Sri Lanka; its influence expanded over of the territory of Bengal and Malaysia. Its art is considered by some to be the Indian renaissance. Author Vidya Dehejia, professor of Indian and South Asian art at Columbia University, claims that this book a first full attempt to cover the breadth of the reception and production of the famed temple bronzes.

Dehejia faced certain hurdles in preparing this handsome book. Firstly, not all of the bronzes are either documented or even listed. Secondly, getting reliable data on the bronzes is difficult, not least because – as sacred objects – access to them is limited and photography of some is forbidden. Thus, even making an overall assessment of the estimated 3,700 statues over hundreds of holy sites is a task so large that it will require further even more work. One question the author raises is where did roughly 153 tons of copper used to cast the statues come from, considering there are no copper deposits in the Cholas region? She thinks that evidence of copper mines in Sri Lanka probably indicates trade or conquest prompted Chola expansion to Sri Lanka. Additionally, the pearl fisheries of Sri Lanka were greatly valued by Chola kings.  

These devotional works were fitted with fixings for carrying poles and – in temples – are routinely clothed, daubed with substances and have offerings applied. Years’ worth of accretion of incense, ointments and soot have patinated the statues that are kept in situ in temples. Some statues have been removed to museums (in India and worldwide, especially Great Britain and the USA). The author explains the subjects of the statues, which are of gods and goddesses (mainly Shiva, Uma, Skanda, Vishnu, Kali, Ganesha) and saints. Included are plentiful photographs of statues dressed in their holy-day finery, showing how worshippers have seen these statues for over a thousand years. In the Valuvur temple in Nagapattinam, the brahmins put a diamond-studded foot cover on the raised foot of dancing Shiva.   

As Dehejia explains, the original sculpture that be modelled in a mixture of wax, resin and oil. This is then coated with plaster, surrounded by sand and molten bronze poured in, which replaces the original model entirely. This makes the Chola bronze solid, not hollow as the lost-wax method generates. “All Chola bronzes are the product of this direct lost-wax process in which the mold must be broken to release the image. There is no mold left for reuse, so each Chola bronze is a singular piece that may not be replicated in any mechanical fashion.” Statues are sometimes worn smooth by the touch of priests. Periodically, worn details would be cut back in by sculptors. Some statues and laws on copper plates have been unearthed in recent years, offering further knowledge of the period. In 1310 an invading army of Muslims was pillaging temples for valuable materials, so priests in the region buried their statues and the threat of defilement and destruction lasted until 1378. The hiding places of the bronzes and valuables was secret information. It seems that not all of the bronzes were recovered at the time.

Dehejia notes that the earliest of Chola bronzes (c. 855/860) display remarkable accomplishment. “No evidence exists of hesitant beginnings. Where did this Master come from? Where is his other work? Might it emerge from an underground burial site? Since the entire art of processional bronzes was in its infancy, we must assume that the artist who created this couple [Shiva and Uma] in the mid-ninth century trained as a sculptor in a wood- or stone-carving workshop. The markedly flattened form of the images that is strikingly evident in side view is noteworthy; it is almost as if the figures were extracted from a bas relief in stone or wood.”

[Image: Shiva as Wondrous Dancer, ca. 970, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,
Purchase-Charles Lang Freer Endowment and funds provided by Margaret and George Haldeman.]

The domination of Shiva worship outstrips worship of other deities. “[…] of the 311 temples in the extended Kaveri delta (the present-day districts Tiruchirappalli, Thanjavur, and Nagapattinam), 295 honor god Shiva, while only 16 are dedicated to god Vishnu.” It seems that the sinuous lithe forms of dancing Shiva (Shiva as Lord of the Dance, often with four arms) in bronze statues came from Chola Shiva worship and accelerated the preference for Shiva over other gods.

The tapering torso, smooth chest, wide shoulders and elongated face is typical of Shiva and some of the other male statues. The figure type of the women is famous: the wide hips, sloping shoulders, elongated torso, narrow waist and large bust (sometimes exposed). The men exude strength and grace; the women are fecund and youthful. Faces of gods are generally serene. Sometimes figures are accompanied by smaller companions, children and animals. These sometimes support the main figures structurally, as do other forms, such as halos of fire (aureole) and mandalas. Deferral to elegance over verisimilitude is apparent, with some poses being improbable or impossible.

The stone carvings are considered and amply illustrated. The author sees many parallels between the stone and bronzes. The stone (the type is not described) is weathered when exposed to the elements and thus the bronzes are better examples of the sculpture of the period. Most of the bronzes are kept inside the temples. The weathering and alteration of inscriptions in stone walls – sometimes so extensive that they cover all the ground-level walls, alcoves and pilasters – has made reading dedications and instructions difficult. Also written on the walls are donations made by the devout.  

Dehejia discusses the co-existence of Tamil Hindus and Sinhalese Buddhists on Sri Lanka. The Cholas were Hindus but understood the value of patronage of Buddhist temples as well as supporting the Tamil merchants’ Hindu temples. Apparently, the sculptors also made Buddhas and Dehejia compares holy statues of Hindu and Buddhist subjects and finds many stylistic and technical points of overlap.

An overview of the classes of individuals who founded the temples is assessed by Dehejia, following the known inscriptions in Sanskrit and Tamil. She concludes that women donors frequently donated statues of Uma. Artists in this period are anonymous. There has been an effort to discern separate masters in certain places and eras, in order to permit an artist-centred appreciation of sacred art, as is possible in modern Europe. Dehejia tentatively assigns specific statues to certain single unnamed masters.

The standard of the art is excellent. The grace of the figures and skill of the artists are comparable to art of any era and region. The stylised and hieratical character of the bronzes can make them look to the uninitiated as led by formalist concerns, but Dehejia explains the subtle psychology expressed in certain groups – for example, the shyness of Uma before her wedding and protective but insistent guidance of her protector. The restrained expressions belie the distinct characterisations of individual gods.

“Today, many small Chola-era temples, including Vadakkalathur, Tandantottam, and Tiruvilakudi, have no bronzes at all. In the light of the smuggling that, unfortunately, has accompanied the thriving art market in India and overseas, all bronzes from many temples have been removed to safe-houses, referred as “Icon Centers”. […] When sequestered in Icon Centers, these exquisite bronzes with deep religious significance and aesthetic reputation are not available to priests, to devotees, or to art lovers, thereby deptiving the bronzes of their many consequential levels of meaning.”

Dehejia’s book does much to illuminate the meaning and importance of the holy statues of the Cholas. The illustrations are generally very good, the level of information is appropriate for the educated non-Hindu reader. The appendices, notes and glossary make the book a self-contained reference work on the subject. Highly recommended.

The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855–1280 is part of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts National Gallery of Art, Washington Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts Bollingen Series XXXV: 65.

Vidya Dehejia, The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855–1280, Princeton University Press, 2021, hardback, 336pp, 242 col./3 mono illus., $75/£58, ISBN 9780691202594

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

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