Francis V. O'Connor

Index
(Find by Searching Key Word. Most recent at top)

11. Why I Do Not Like Matisse (At MoMA through October 2110)
(August 15, 2010)

10. Charles Burchfield's Watercolors and Drawings at the Whitney Museum (June through October 17, 2010)
(July 1, 2010)

9. The Publication of The Mural in America
(March 17, 2010)

8. Charles Seliger (1926-2009): An Appreciation
(October 3, 2009)

7. New Archetypes
(September 15, 2009)

6. Dreamwork: An Exhibition
(May 12, 2009)

5. The Emancipation of Abraham Lincoln
(May 1, 2009)

4. A New-Found Portrait of Shakespeare
(March 15, 2009)

3. The Pantheism of Gerard Manley Hopkins
(March 6, 2009)

2. Our Poet-In-Chief
(January 20, 2009)

1. What Happened to O’Connor’s Page?
(November 2008)

<<<•••>>>

(August 15, 2010)
11. Why I Do Not like Matisse (At MoMA through October 2010 )

As a card-carrying historian of modern art, I am expected to like Henri Matisse because everyone else has ordained him a founding master of modern art. The same goes for Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp. This does not mean I disliked the current pedagogic Matisse exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913 to 1917. It presented the artist’s earliest major works, and took pains to demonstrate with physical evidence how Matisse got his paintings to look as the do. All that was very informative. It would be facile if not facetious to say that he did not know when to stop — but I fear that is pretty much what usually happened, with, to this eye, problematic results.

The fundamental problem here is reduction, not abstraction. The difference is important. To abstract is to “take away” inessentials in order to emphasize what is important in the work. To reduce is to delete essentials until what is left is a mere ghost of the original image. Thus Mondrian and his Neoplasticism takes everything seen — including portraits — down to a carefully crafted grid of black lines and primary colors. Similarly, Duchamp demands that the artist “reduce, reduce, reduce,” until nothing much is left but the feeling — a notion foreign to his personality. His descending nude of c. 1913, which made his reputation by being insulted by the president of the United States, was not typical of his later works, which, like the notorious Urinal, are so ephemeral and inexplicable, that they are mere curiosities — especially as reproductions peddled from a suitcase. Granted the many permutations of modernism reflecting cultural fads, not all of this works any better than Gertrude Stein’s — and to an extent, James Joyce’s — muddling of the English language while trying to be verbal Cubists. The bottom line here is that modernism gave us abstraction to get at the heart of matters in all fields of the arts and sciences; those who took that gift to the extremes of reductionism in art, simply got nowhere — and leave us with often meaningless scraps of blatant egoism. And that explains the blatant egoism of contemporary art to this day. Lest this statement seem extreme, note that through August, MoMA is presenting an exhibition of noise titled Bruce Nauman: Days. It consists of square white speakers hung from the ceiling emitting inchoate noise — and was first heard at the last Venice Biennial.

If you are annoyed by now, read on.

The first Matisse I ever saw was his Backs (c. 1908ff), in MoMA’s Garden. I was just a kid, and it made me wonder why the fourth relief was supposed to be better than the first. Later, I began to wonder if this guy really liked women — despite their ubiquity in his work and biography. As for a model that visually explained abstraction, I later discovered Picasso’s variations on a bull — that were happily on view in MoMA’s Picasso: Themes and Variations exhibition. Here was a fine comparison of what happens when Matisse reduces a woman to a figment, and Picasso emphasizes a bull’s essentials in a series of lithographic states [1945-46].

This notion of emphasis vs. deletion was certainly in play when viewing his Bathers by a River (c. 1909-1917). Thanks to modern imaging technology we can now, with the help of an early color sketch, and separations out of the various palimpsests of its creation, see how the early sketch got to be reduced to the final surface we now see. This reveals the same thing as the Backs: A relentless campaign to reduce four figures to hieratic slabs with female characteristics. This writer cannot imagine why any of this matters — given the dismal result.

Indeed, the five women depicted bathing in a river have been reduced to four. The river has vanished and been replaced with a vertical slab of black — with a gratuitously curious snake at the bottom. The woman at the left is standing in jungle-like vegetation. The composite woman “standing” in the river looks like a quadruple amputee. And the two bathers to the left are faceless and possess a zombie-like calmness. These are connected with arbitrary curved lines that may be interpreted as a displaced river of sorts. In short, what was first a joyous escapade at a river is now a odd composition reduced to an eerie absence of giggles.

On a nearby wall is another large painting of similar stylistic aspect, The Piano Lesson (1916). Since I have always hated the sight of this work for personal reasons having to do with my own fraught piano lessons as a boy, I shall leave it to Peter Schjeldahl, who claims it his favorite Matisse, to articulate its artistic virtues. [“The Road to Nice," The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, pp. 70-72.]

The vertical erosion of quality in Matisse could also be discerned in its horizontal erosion on the walls of this exhibition. For instance, his splendid Bowl of Oranges (1916) showed up the aesthetic futility of three other similar compositions to its left. Similarly, his elegant Portrait Of Sarah Stein (1916) put to shame most of his other portraits in this show, that seem mere caricatures. On the other hand, his Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg (1914), with its curious loops around the central figure offered a visual interpretation of the sitter’s vitality that transcended her demure pose. If these works worked as art, then I must declare Composition (1915) worst in show. It had no redeeming characteristics and has the misfortune today to look like a rough map of Somalia.

But to get back to Matisse’s Bathers by a River, this work stands with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as a bad painting that is a great document of the groping intentions of the early modernist painters to grasp a new vision of art.

Back in 2002, when my old O’Connor’s Page was flourishing [see Blog No. 1 below], I published Commentary No. 14 “Reframing The Musterpiece: Concerning the Archival Fate of Works of Art.” Here are its major points:

<< Looking back over the 20th Century’s painting, and what takes pride of place in the various collections of “modern” art by which we know and come to define what happened, it seems time to start making a few serious revisions. Among the many masterpieces of modern painting, it is time to muster out of the received canon those works which are more documentary than artistic — those works which stood as experimental breakthroughs into new ways of seeing and doing art, but which, truth to tell, are artistic disaster areas (aka: bad paintings) when viewed objectively from beyond their century . . . In order to demonstrate what I mean— permit me to offer up, in a focused spirit of prophylactic provocation, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Matisse’s Dance, and Duchamp’s The Large Glass /​ The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. . . . As we start a new century, it is necessary to look back and to begin discriminating between the good and bad “icons” of modern art and to separate out the Musterpieces from the Masterpieces. Implicit in this task is the presumption that a work of art ought to display a certain achieved unity of vision and craft, and works that do not ought not to be presented as such achievements to a public that has enough trouble understanding the real masterpieces. >> [Full Commentary 14 available on request.]

So: From this point of view, Matisse’s Bathers by a River is a Musterpiece — a document of the artist’s oeuvre that ought to be mustered off to the stacks for those interested in such meticulous chronicling of his career and methods. It has little to offer the viewer, much to offer the student, and no aesthetic legacy to inspire the future.

Curiously, the splendid exhibition at the Whitney of Charles Burchfield’s work [see below at No. 10], had a slight similarity to this one at MoMA, in that it offers a deep insight into the artist’s working methods. And as he proceeds to enlarge his early paintings, they become better and better. So pedagogic exhibitions are to be welcomed — as MoMA’s Matisse show is to be welcomed. But in its case what is offered is often best put out of sight; what the Whitney reveals forever deserves public walls.


July 1, 2010
10. Charles Burchfield’s Watercolors And Drawings At The Whitney Museum (June through October 17, 2010)

This not-to-be-missed exhibition was one of the best I have ever seen that gave the viewer both the opportunity to view a retrospective of a great artist’s key works, and explicit information about the processes of drawing and collage by which he created them. The exhibition was organized by the artist, Robert Gober, together with the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo — and given the outrageous title: “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield.” Whether or not Robert Gober is responsible for the title (he is a contemporary sculptor most famous for human legs sticking out of the baseboards of walls), he is sensitive to Burchfield’s creative process, which is revealingly documented in this exhibition.

Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), was a born nature mystic thrust into an urban culture that was not open to persons who see things different. Indeed, such persons tend to doubt themselves because they do not fit in. Burchfield is an excellent example of this. Some of his earliest drawings — c. 1917 — are of paranoid aspect: images that he calls “conventions,” although utterly unconventional while being downright weird. He obviously saw too much in nature that he was not intellectually prepared to articulate except through the rationalized lens of his birth-culture. His early watercolors, however, display a dynamic vitalism whose numinosity is thrilling to behold. He both sees and hears the life-emitting force within vegetation — as in his The Insect Chorus (1917) — and finds radical forms with which to represent its murmuring radiance — which transcends the “heat waves” in the dumb title with which someone is trying to sell the show condescendingly to the public.

Burchfield’s career as an artist can be divided into three periods. The first, from c. 1916 through 1918 and his induction into the military, saw the first-flowering in art of his mystical vision. From 1919 to 1943 he turned toward more practical pursuits, like marriage, raising a large family, and working in a wallpaper factory. Later in the 1930s, he turned toward an “urban regionalism” that is redeemed by his sense of design and a deft tonalism — and at times compromised by Halloweenish attempts at houses with faces. But after 1943, his early sense of the “inscape” of things — to use Gerard Manley Hopkins appropriate phrase [see Blog No. 3 below] — led him to re-work a number of his 1917 watercolors by enlarging them with extra sheets.

The exhibition offered four surprises.

First a display of the eerie “convention” drawings with the artist’s commentaries about them. One wonders why these motifs carry such weight with Burchhfield. But that is a psychodynamic study for someone else to undertake.

Second, a large room covered with wallpaper recreated from one of his designs, contained a number of his “urban-realist” tonal paintings. One notes especially his Ice Glare (1933), that shows a street of houses in winter subtly illuminated by light reflecting off snow. Given that the wallpaper was tasteful and its elements elegantly repetitive, it complemented rather than overwhelmed the room’s paintings of mostly houses, and implied what they might have looked like inside. (The last time I saw this device used at the Whitney, in Andy Warhol memorial retrospective, a vast gallery was papered with his “Cow” wallpaper that managed to eclipse visually the works hanging upon it – which in that case didn’t much matter.)

Third, another large gallery was devoted to his marvelous “doodles,” that constituted a fascinating inventory of his motifs for natural forms and their aural and visual emanations as he perceived them. This gallery also indicated that even when being an urban realist and wall-paper designer, he was still reprising his old visions — still obsessed with that early honest seeing — still aware that he had to get back to nature’s interiority.

Finally, there were galleries devoted to his expansions of work from c. 1917-1918 into vaster vistas — and demonstrated first how he achieved this — and then the result. There, paintings such as Song of the Telegraph (1917-1952), The Sphinx of the Milky Way (1946), and The Coming of Spring (1917-43), allowed the show to blossom into an almost indescribable beauty best evoked by the first stanza of Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances.”

La nature et un temple où de vivant piliers
laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regard familiers.

Baudelaire’s poem underlines the two competing aspects of Burchfield’s greatest art: the inevitability of turning nature into a church [un temple], and the confusing yet familiar if disconcerting language nature’s speaks [confuses paroles /​ des regard familiers].

It is the tragedy of Western mysticism that its greatest seers could not escape religion’s processing of the spiritual. Thus we find Emanuel Swedenborg founding a “church” that looks very like the Lutheranism of his day. All too many of Burchfield’s last watercolors, such as The Four Seasons (1949-60) depict his much-developed conventions organized about naves approaching altars! The motif, being familiar, justifies its forests of symbols (and is light-years more precise than “heat waves”). But it betrays the numinous purity of the artist’s vision.

QUESTON: How does one recognize the numinous in art? ANSWER: By spontaneously empathizing with its facture while ignoring its subject matter.

Just as you can sometimes feel a great singer’s tones forming in your own throat during a concert or opera, the way a painting is formed — of the artist’s “conventions,” as it were — the way the artist’s hand can be followed visually on the surface of the work. This affords a certain participatory experience that make you and the artist as one. You enter into the spirit in which it was made — and Kandinsky’s brushstrokes, or Pollock’s poured lines, or Burchfield resonantly radiant foliage — make you feel part of its act of creation.

For instance, looking at a Cézanne or Monet is a different experience from looking at a Van Gogh. With the Impressionists, their precise dabs of color, or pre-Cubist slabs of form, can be understood and admired intellectually – but they hardly invite emulation emotionally. On the other hand, those marshaled strokes of paint or ink in a work by Vincent, lead you into the facture of the work — into the manu-facturing of the work — in a way that make you one with it and participating within the emotional/​mystical aura that created it.

The numinous inspires us because we identify with its universality — and perhaps helps us to recognize transcendent moments we may have had but never noticed with specificity for want of defining experience. Everything else merely impresses, or induces interest. At the Burchfield exhibition, the installation impressed, and the artist’s methods were of the greatest interest. But it is his vision of nature that inspired.

Note: While I do not agree completely with John I. H. Baur that Burchfield was a “pantheist,” his essay on, “The Last Pantheist: A Historical Perspective,” in his The Inlander: Life and Work of Charles Burchfield, 1893-1967 (University of Delaware Press, 1982, pp. 257-63), is a fine summary of American attitudes toward the spiritual in natural phenomena.

(March 17, 2010)
9. The Publication of The Mural in America.
After some thirty years, The Mural in America: Wall Painting in the United States from Prehistrory to the Present is published and available as a website.
Go to: http:/​/​www.muralinamerica.com/​
The purpose of this electronic publication is to make available to scholars, students, muralists, artists and the general public — at no charge — the text of a book that fills a gap in our understanding of the development of American art and culture. Being readable, citable, searchable and augmentable, my ambition is that it shall grow over the years — and inspire more scholarly research in the field of the American mural that this book opens up for the first time.

With this publication, I top off a nearly 45-year-long career as an art historian. Previously I have, with eight books and over one hundred published essays, documented the Abstract Expressionist artist, Jackson Pollock, opened up the field of the New Deal art projects with my early research and publications, established the utility of psychodynamic theory as a vehicle for the interpretation of art — and now have presented a survey of American wall painting.

NOTE that this book is not an “E-book” to be downloaded into a hand-held mechanism like a Kindle or iPad. It is a website that is a book, handsomely designed by Steve Kennedy (who can be reached at << skennedy@somewhereinamerica.com >> ) to offer in itself, with emphasis on its being readable, searchable, citable and augmentable, all the services of a published monograph.

My The Mural in America, is divided into nine parts:
Part One - The Mural as an Art Form
Part Two - Native American Murals
Part Three - Colonial and Early American Murals
Part Four - The Murals of the United States Capitol
Part Five - The Academic Mural Movement
Part Six - The Transition to Modernism
Part Seven - The 1930s Mural Movement
Part Eight - The Mural as Private Act and Public Art
Part Nine - The Community Mural Movement and Postmodernism
Each Part contains a varying number of Chapters (38 in all) divided into numerous Subheads, is illustrated with about 300 reproductions and 100 site diagrams, and concludes with an selected bibliography of about 1,500 references. Electronic publication permits the book to be used in three ways. It can be read scrolling down Part by Part, it can be consulted with the aid of an analytic index and/​or table of contents, and it can be searched globally for all references to a specific artist or general idea. Over time, it will also be open to the addition of new textural and bibliographic material. Its Appendix contains a valuable generational chronology of American muralists from ca. 1750 to the present.

The writing of this book has been difficult, since there is virtually no literature on the major muralists and their walls. What literature there is often uneven and dated. It is my hope that this publication will prompt scholars and their students to start a massive research endeavor about wall paintings. Indeed, every item with three black dots [•••] after it in the text ought to prompt some scholar's monograph, and his or her students' M.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations.

Writers of biographies and art books will find many important artists and mural locations in need of documentation, monographs — and maybe even novels.

Go to: http:/​/​www.muralinamerica.com/​

(October 3, 2009)
8. Charles Seliger (1926-2009): An Appreciation
My dear friend, the artist Charles Seliger, died on October 1st of a stroke at the age of 83. He was the last artistically active link to the Abstract Expressionist generation of artists who emerged in the 1940s, and an extraordinary person. He was the subject of my last book — which is entioned elsewhere on this website — and in which you can find the details of his career.

I learned of Charles’s death while watching on PBS the fifth episode of Ken Burn’s “Our National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” — a rather tedious trek through the parks’ history that made me think on several occasions of Charles, his love of nature, his life-long expression of that love in his work, and his sharp, critical sensibility. I was looking forward to talking to him about the series when it was over.

The talking heads narrating Burn’s documentary — the best part of which were the splendid views of our continent’s natural wonders — struggled to express why Nature was important and why it is so affecting. From the eloquent spirituality of John Muir’s politically effective rhetoric to the practical virtues of middle-class recreation, nothing was said that rose much above the commonplace. Yes, the Grand Canyon is awesome; a stand of redwoods is cathedral-like; experiencing volcanic phenomena at Yellowstone is good for the soul, visiting a national park is like “coming home,” etc. Indeed, Burns managed by default to teach us that encountering Nature’s numinosity cannot be verbalized — only experienced.

Charles, the most erudite of the artists of his generation, knew this. When I first got to know him and his very small paintings, I was amazed by the extent of his awareness of literature, natural history and science. Indeed, I first learned about fractal theory from him, and was fascinated by this window into identifying and explaining the fundamental structures of nature — invisible to the eye but available to the mind — in all their varieties of replication.

Charles employed such knowledge intuitively, and in his nanoworld of imagery, emphasized Nature’s processes rather than its appearances. He understood that it was the essentially invisible activities in genetics, germination, cell division, flow patterns, skeletal structures, erosion, time’s patience and the varieties of scale’s message — not to mention the hard paradoxes of wildness — that matter most in our experience of Nature.

Charles found ways to help us to experience these imperceptible, numinous events with paint on a few square inches of surface. For him, finding a smaller brush or a device that made a tinier dot, was an event. In doing so, he left us a concentrated legacy of what is sublime in Nature — and how our awareness of the invisible in the visible can let us share in its confirming, vital presence.

When a young man dies, we mourn curtailed potential; when an old man like Charles dies at 83, especially a great artist who was painting up to the end, we can only rejoice in such a life. This is the time to be sad for ourselves at such a loss; but he has left us all good reason to be happy with the lifetime of numinous art that survives him.


(September 15, 2009)
7. New Archetypes
The current issue of the C. G. Jung’s Foundation’s Quadrant (Vol. XXXIX, No. 2, Summer, 2009, pp. 9-17), contains my essay “Archetypal Numinosity,” which suggests that Jung’s list of archetypes of the collective unconscious might be expanded to contain the Gene, the Fractal, and the Internet. The following poem outlines what the essay develops in a more explanatory and documented manner:

THREE ARCHETYPES

1. The Gene
A sunset’s splendor elevates the soul,
then fades away. A gene’s intrinsic spell
is permanent, possesses agency
across generations of life. It is a legacy
from past into future, has a story to tell
of how we are an ever-changing whole.
It is not beautiful, holds no supremacy
but for our continuity’s efficiency.

The numinous is known perennial--
to always be beyond any betrayal
of time, or linkage to a futile goal.
Genes radiate a subtle urgency
of how our wholeness initiates portrayal
in something recent yet immemorial.

2. The Fractal
The tree ramifies from out its seed,
its tiny algorithm, until displayed
upon the sky from that small origin
as a complexity devouring the sun.
Its pattern, ever more finely arrayed,
never fails its species in its deed.
A deep intentionality has spun
a life with which, perforce, we are kin.

The fractal is an idea with agency,
describing what the genes ordain to say
in grosser forms out of a being’s need.
They let us see the seething chaos win
out in its own order, just as we play
our games of chance within contingency

3. The Internet
Some archetypes live; others are thought.
Still others are objects of our groping craft–
prototypes of what we would achieve
in an ideal oneness we’d rather see alive.
But only first connect–manage the draft
first--the clumsy outline of what ought
to be a heritage toward which to strive–
to desire–to seize–to ultimately retrieve.

We yearn for universal unity–
while most prefer their own locality.
And so, like forcing blossoms, we’ve bought
into a tool with which we can conceive
what we can’t contrive in dumb reality:
an archetype of full community.


(May 12, 2009)
6. Dreamwork : An Exhibition
Dreams evolve in three stages. First there is the event observed when sleeping. Second is the dreamer’s effort to transcribe (and inevitably interpret) the observed event into words -- or as in this exhibition -- images. Third comes the dreamer’s free associations with the event under the guidance of a psychotherapist. Freud called this three-part process “dreamwork,” The curators of this exhibition, Steven Poser and Frederika Stjame, describe these second-stage efforts to image dreams “not merely illustrations of the dreams but enactments of the dreamwork.”

The paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs in this show, held at The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS - May 12-June 27, 2009 - see below for contact info), are stylistically various and aesthetically. Nevertheless, these works offer much food for thought about the idea of an “unconscious,” and the processes available for making its contents manifest. Three works provide an insight into such unconscious content.

Ken Morgan’s “My Room #2” (2004 - ink on paper, 12 x 9 inches), which the curators have deftly chosen as their show’s logo, displays three walls of a room with a black floor. The left wall has two small, open doors, the far wall one such door, and the right wall none. Dominating the work is a white form within which are small squares, circles, and dashes that connects to the first three doors. It could be interpreted as a) a pinball machine game, b) a road map, and c) a human body -- this last being the most evocative in respect to unconscious content. It has six appendages sprouting from a long central “body.” In the right corner are two short ones that could be eyes on stalks indicating a head. To their left is a long “arm” that leads to the first door in the left wall. At the far end of the body two “legs” touch the two other doors. Another, much shorter appendage emerges from between them and touches the bottom of the right wall, where there is no door. There is no right “arm.” While this work is open to a variety of interpretations, the title limits this splayed humanoid image notionally to its creator, and situations of reaching out and sexual frustration adduce unconscious frustration.

Noa Bornstein’s sculpture, “Dream of the White and Black Bird” (2007 - bronze and wood, 57 x 29 x 3 inches), depicts two wing-like shapes on a staff. It is installed in front of Barbara Stout’s drawing “Night Flight’ (2009, ink and watercolor on paper, 8 x 6 inches), which reveals a bird-like figure flying off a pedestal. Its body is a winged bowl and its head leads up from the bowl with two sets of eyes and two horns emerging from a frazzle of hair. Flight is a primordial aspiration of humans for transcendence -- which is why so many spiritual beings (like angels) have wings. A standard-issue dream is that of flying. Bornstein work is hieratic and formal; something to bang on the floor for order at a convention of psychoanalysts. Stout’s is a bit ditzy -- as if something guilty is to be happily escaped. Only more third stage work with the instigating dreams would reveal the unconscious etiology.

When I first noticed Maria Taveras’ statue, “Serpent Handling Woman” (2007 - bonded bronze, 19 x 12.5 x 6 inches), I saw it as the most stylistically conservative object in the show: a beautiful young woman kneeling amid the coils of a python and holding its head and its tail in her hands. My art historian’s internal slide projector (I was born pre-Powerpoint), conjured Edvard Munch’s painting, “Puberty” (1894-95) -- a portrait of a young woman, sitting naked on her bed, her hands between her knees, in a state of amazed terror at the dawning of her sexuality. Taveras’s elegantly-crafted young woman had a similar expression of innocent amazement.

Then the artist gave me a statement about the sculpture that dramatically changed such a Freudian interpretation. It turned out that Taveras is in the final stages of certification as a Jungian analyst, and that the work was one of a number of dreams (ultimately turned into sculptures) she had had after visiting the Jung Institute in Zurich twenty years ago -- all featuring women and serpents -- and that in some of these dreams and in others later, the serpents were winged, or were coming out of her mouth. (For images of her sculptures -- including “Serpent Handling Woman,” and more information about her and her practice, go to:
<< http://www.jungiantherapy.com/ >> )

There is perhaps no symbol more multivalent than the snake, that on one level seems so threatening (and often is), that shuffles off its coil of skin yearly, whose image has become entwined on the caduceus of Hermes (now the universal sign of healing), and whose winged format is familiar in the Mexican god, Quetzalcoatl -- to give just a few examples of an image capable of innumerable amplifications. Note that this work’s title, “Serpent Handling Woman,” has the woman in the power of the serpent -- so my Freudian perception was not all that wrong. But from a Jungian perspective, such a symbol-complex would not deal just with sexuality, but with the woman’s evolving relation to nature, and the serpent’s relation to far-reaching ideas such as flying (as already mentioned), and uniquely female phenomena of fecundity, such as periodicity and parturition.

But Maria Taveras was the only artist present to offer a stage three insight into her work -- and her approach to creativity -- by augmenting the show’s catalogue with her own statement concerning her “active imagination” -- to use the Jungian term for what the Freudians would call “free association” and the Surrealists “psychic automatism.” Indeed, these three historical methods of engendering images that can be amplified by psychodynamic approaches to the unconscious, have often seemed to me the only legitimate way to make a true work of art. Contemporary stuff has lost its sense of the numinous for an avid taste for numismatics; in truth it has lost its soul, as any trip down the permanent collection galleries a the Museum of Modern Art will demonstrate. So a little show like this,, under the auspices of CMPS and our more adventurous soul-healers, is to be welcomed.

CMPS is located at 16 West 10th Street, New York, NY 10011. Check ahead for hours at 212-260-7050, or go to cmps@​cmps.edu, and www.cmps.edu. The show closes June 27, 2009.

For a review of CMPS’s first show, “Presence,” in 2007 on O’Connor’s Page, make contact at FVOC@​aol.com, and ask for a PDF of Review 105.

REPLIES > FVOC@​aol.com

(May 1, 2009)
5. The Emancipation of Abraham Lincoln
This spring is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1809, and the re-dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., with its imposing statue of the enthroned president by Daniel Chester French, will be celebrated. These two events will be underscored by the re-dedication of the Lincoln Memorial by President Barack Obama. When it was first dedicated in 1922, the emphasis was on Lincoln as preserver of the Union, and only secondarily on his freeing the slaves -- although the memorial contains murals by the academic artist, Jules Guerin, that commemorate both. But even in 1922, African Americans were not exactly free. Indeed, the Negroes attending were segregated in a special section off to the side and out of sight. Not even Dr. Robert Moton, who was to speak that day, and who had succeeded Booker T. Washington, as the second president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, was permitted to sit among the dignitaries with president Warren Harding, on the Memorial’s steps. This time, an African American presides at the re-dedication, and everything Abraham Lincoln lived and died for will be vindicated.

It is well known that Lincoln passionately hated slavery and, for a politician, took the very unpopular position of being against it. As a result of that stance, the Civil War began while he was still President-Elect -- that is between November 1860 and March 1861. Earlier, of course, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he articulated his rejection of slavery, and there is ample documentation from his entire career that this had been his consistent position. On his travels as a circuit-riding lawyer, he had seen examples of how slaves were treated, and writers often attribute these observations of gross cruelty as the reason. But this aversion to slavery went deeper: Abraham Lincoln hated slavery because he had been a slave.

Professor Michael Burlingame, in his The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln [University of Illinois Press, 1994], gives us a sad picture of Lincoln’s early manhood. After his father, Thomas Lincoln’s first wife, Nancy Hanks, died when Lincoln was eight years old, he married Sarah Bush Johnston, and lived as a farmer. He forced his oldest son to work as a farm-hand until he “came of age” at twenty-one. This was the law in his locality, and he enforced it, even refusing to educate his son and objecting to him reading. It was only his step-mother who protected him and encouraged his self-education. Within a year of turning twenty-one, Lincoln left his father’s farm, found some training as a lawyer, and in later years cannily traded on his log cabin home and early poverty to get himself elected and popular. That he did not bother to attend his father’s funeral in 1851, and seldom mentioned him later, is not surprising -- nor can his determination to free the slaves.

It is surprising that this simple, causative fact in Lincoln’s early life is never mentioned. Indeed, Burlingame’s psychobiography is unpopular because he is not exactly gentle with his portrayal of Mary Lincoln erratic behavior, or because of his reliance on documentation she herself condemned and suppressed. I suppose some people think that when a man gets himself deified in his own temple at the west end of the Washington mall, he is not supposed to have had an inner life -- or suffer early traumas that formed his thinking and actions later. Romanticizing him is fine; analyzing him is to somehow degrade the family. But when you have been enslaved by your own father for a dozen or so years, the rage builds up to such a crescendo that, after finding exactly the right political moment, you free yourself by freeing everybody else similarly abused.

NOTE: Professor Burlingame, who took his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1971, and who is now the Sadowski Professor of History Emeritus at Connecticut College, at has just published his definitive study: Abraham Lincoln: A Life. [Two Volumes, Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.]
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March 15, 2009
4. A New-Found Portrait of Shakespeare
One of the reasons I do not cancel my subscription to The New York Times, whose front page normally contains all the news fit to be announced by the media the night before, is that you never know what novelty will appear that is of substantial interest the next morning. So it was that on March 10, 2009, there was, just under the fold, a somewhat unfamiliar face of the English playwright, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), newly found in the private collection of an Anglo-Irish family named Cobbe, and adjudged by the experts to be the source of several more familiar copies. [For these go to Google Images, “Shakespeare’s Portraits.”]

Being a professional art historian, I shall accept my colleagues verdict that the Cobbe portrait dates, on the basis of stylistic and physical evidence, about 1610, during the Bard’s lifetime, and that its provenance plausibly goes back to his patron, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). Indeed, this connection is strengthened by the fact that the painting bears at the top the Latin inscription “Principum amicitias” -- a quotation from the Roman poet, Horace (68-8 BC) -- which means roughly “first among friends,” and is from an ode for a playwright.

The differences between this portrait, however, and the old, familiar ones (none of which can plausibly be dated during the Bard’s lifetime), are striking. The Cobbe shows roughly the same face, but with an only slightly receding head of hair, an elaborate lace ruff and a rich doublet; the old ones a bald head and nondescript ruffs and doublets. One surmises that it shows the middle-aged Shakespeare, commissioned by Southampton and displaying some finery he had bestowed on the poet, or the actor had borrowed from the costume department of a playhouse.

[Google "Shakespeare Portrait - Cobbe" and "Shakespeare Portrait - Sanders"]

The key here, to my eye, is that the Cobbe at about age 46 most resembles what is known as the Sanders portrait, that is inscribed 1603 at age 39. This one shows an even younger man, simply dressed, with a hairline somewhat fuller than the new portrait, which has a more receding hairline. Both show the same full head of hair to the top and sides. The rest of the possible portraits, presumably created after the Bard’s death in 1616, all show him quite bald with hair down the sides. If they were created based on the first two life portraits and the recollections of his friends after his death, the baldness would suggest how they recalled him at the end of his life. The two plausible life portraits -- the Sanders and the Cobb -- show him at the height of his career -- between roughly Hamlet (c. 1602) and The Tempest.(c. 1610-11). Further, the two portraits show a smirking man growing up into a serious man; you cannot forge that.

Of all the books I have read over the years about Shakespeare, the best in the scope of its radical thinking is by the English poet, Ted Hughes. His Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being [Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992], offers a universal theory of the poems and plays that amounts to a massive psycho-biography -- which is as much a portrait of the Bard as it is a key to the inner complexity of his works (and perhaps even the author himself in respect to Sylvia Path). Essentially, Hughes points to the creative nexus found in any historical situation where there is a profound ideological split. Here between, Roman Catholicism and English Protestantism and the atrocious conflict between them under Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I that lasted most of Shakespeare’s lifetime. Where such dichotomies exists -- as we of a certain age might have noticed in the “New Age” era -- there is a tendency for esoteric metaphysics to find a place among the intelligencia, providing a spiritual alternative for those who could not accept the politically acceptable religions. [Detour: the Chandos portrait in London’s National Portrait Gallery, shows the Bard with a ring in his ear, and was much appreciated by the New Agers who somehow saw the Elizabethan age as very much like theirs!]

The equivalent in the Bard’s day, of the Eastern metaphysics back in the 1960s, was what Hughes calls “Occult Neoplatonism.” He is quite successful in demonstrating this in the late plays such as The Tempest, and there is evidence that Southampton, his patron and his circle, was much given to its gnostic fascinations. The earl had just been freed of the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth when she died in 1603, and a relationship that Hughes sees as more of convenience than homoerotic intimacy in the late 1590s, may well have flourished on the level of a shared philosophy in the period between 1602 and 1610 when Shakespeare’s last and greatest plays were written and which the two life portraits discussed here frame.

Does it matter what Shakespeare looked like? The day after the Times published the Cobbe portrait, Verlyn Klinkenborg, writing in its “Editorial Notebook,” stated that “his work needs no biography at all.” This is true in an absolute sense -- as it is also true of Homer (who in my judgment was a school of Greek bards just as Asclepius was a school of Greek shamans). But it is also important to know how the great achieved their goals so we can understand how to assess and achieve ours. The more we know about major artists, the less we tend to idealize them and the more we can learn about ourselves. Further, in a world where almost everything now is a virtual experience -- something that conveys an effect but not the fact, like a performance of Hamlet in modern dress on TV -- the more actuality we can grasp of those long gone, and how they did what they did, the better.

For instance, the ideological dichotomy at the Reformation’s heart, that was so much the atmosphere in which Shakespeare created his poems and plays, was one between a fundamentalism about good works (Luther against indulgences), and a libertarianism about faith in deity and one’s own spirituality (with Luther’s vernacular Bible to read the scriptures for yourself). As Hughes points out over and over in different ways within his massive interpretation of Shakespeare, it was this conflict or “equation,” between the retribution of an all-powerful Nature (as in the poem “Venus and Adonis,”, and the violation of social mores in “The Rape of Lucretia,” that empowers the plays and reflects the cultural matrix in which they were brought forth. Hughes emphasizes the psychosexual aspects here, but there is also the overriding conflict between the dogmatic authoritarianism of Rome and the more pastoral tenor of patriarchal Protestantism. I think something of this dichotomy is found in the simple Sanders portrait of a youngish man aware of his genius, and the haughty portrait of the serious man of substance aware of the powers shaping him -- the polarity in Shakespeare that, here coalescing before our eyes, enriches the parity found in the plays created between these portraits.
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March 6, 2009
3. The Pantheism of Gerard Manley Hopkins

It is easy to write a hagiography of this late 19th century poet and Jesuit priest, and Paul Mariani has done so honorably enough in his Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (Viking, 2008). A professor at Boston College -- a Jesuit institution -- he has managed this by keeping religiously to the primary documentation so that his sins of omission can the best be attributed to his subject and not to his speculations (as his treatment of Digby Dolben, with whom Hopkins was for a time infatuated, attests). Fair enough. The result is a fascinating conflation of almost everything Hopkins wrote about himself in diaries, letters, and notes on his spiritual exercises and retreats, and for his confessor -- and the resulting poetry. This has its value in showing the intimate relation between the poet’s individuality and his verbal creations which provided his singularity’s only outlet.

The vehicle for Hopkins’s singular vision is the world around him. He is by any measure, a nature mystic. And as anyone versed in the history of Christianity knows, that is not a safe position to take, since it is an easy step away from the divine creation to the divinity of the creation -- which is not to be tolerated in a system that sees nature as evil. At least with Hopkins, his Order saw in general the eccentric, and did not let him advance beyond being a parish priest or university professor. And it is clear that when posted to ugly, polluted places like Liverpool or Dublin, he was profoundly unhappy --- and even wrote an occasional environmental poem, as we would say today. He was also deeply disturbed by natural evil, and his first major poem as a Jesuit, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875) implicitly implicates God in the waste of lives -- especially those of five German nuns fleeing persecution in their homeland. And he ends his next to last poem in cautious rebellion against God himself, addressing Him as “Sir” and asking Him to “send my roots rain” -- as if he were a tree!

Knowing when he joined the Jesuits after his conversion from Anglicanism, that he was surrendering his individuality, he destroyed all his early poems (except for a few in the possession of others). Seven or so years later, when the Deutschland sank, his then superior, noting his concern about the disaster, suggested he write a poem (he was known for occasioned poems in Latin). He then proceeded to take this permission for granted for the rest of his life. He had to. The only release from the strictures of his vocation was the freeing of his exceptionality in a poem of unique verbal character and musicality -- with the help of his impressive philological erudition.

That meant, on the technical level of prosody, a rhythm sprung of strict syllable counts -- where the stresses were on the key words and everything else elided. Thus Hopkins (with the stressed vowels capitalized):

But wE drEam we are rOoted in Earth -- Dust!

Compared with typical lines from his contemporary, Tennyson: And bEating Up thro’ All the bItter wOrld, /​ LIke fOuntains Of sweet wAter in the sEa

Hopkins keeps to a more natural, condensed discourse, whereas Tennyson beats out his time on a metronome as, indeed, Shakespeare and Milton do in their sonnets.

Hopkins is also noted for his concepts of “inscape” and “instress.” By the former, he refers to the intriguingly intrinsic unity of a natural object; by the latter, what informs its interior armature. These ideas were supported by the mediaeval Duns Scotus, and as W. H. Gardner says in introducing Hopkins’s poems: “This theologian seemed to give him a sanction for doing as a Christian poet what, as a Jesuit priest, he could not possibly do, that is, assert his individuality” [p. xxiv, Penguin, 1953].

Mariani reports that Hopkins died at 44, murmuring over and over, “I am so happy.” That the instress of his faith was his consolation is possible; he had utilized the same concepts rationalizing the Incarnation in the Eucharist. On the other hand, that his poetry kept him sane identifying with the oneness he had discovered by communing with the natural inscape of things, is probable. Indeed, I have yet to come across a mystic in any culture who does not worship nature.
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11. Why I Do Not like Matisse (At MoMA through October 2010 )

As a card-carrying historian of modern art, I am expected to like Henri Matisse because everyone else has ordained him a founding master of modern art. The same goes for Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp. This does not mean I disliked the current pedagogic Matisse exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913 to 1917. It presented the artist’s earliest major works, and took pains to demonstrate with physical evidence how Matisse got his paintings to look as the do. All that was very informative. It would be facile if not facetious to say that he did not know when to stop — but I fear that is pretty much what usually happened, with, to this eye, problematic results.

The fundamental problem here is reduction, not abstraction. The difference is important. To abstract is to “take away” inessentials in order to emphasize what is important in the work. To reduce is to delete essentials until what is left is a mere ghost of the original image. Thus Mondrian and his Neoplasticism takes everything seen — including portraits — down to a carefully crafted grid of black lines and primary colors. Similarly, Duchamp demands that the artist “reduce, reduce, reduce,” until nothing much is left but the feeling — a notion foreign to his personality. His descending nude of c. 1913, which made his reputation by being insulted by the president of the United States, was not typical of his later works, which, like the notorious Urinal, are so ephemeral and inexplicable, that they are mere curiosities — especially as reproductions peddled from a suitcase. Granted the many permutations of modernism reflecting cultural fads, not all of this works any better than Gertrude Stein’s — and to an extent, James Joyce’s — muddling of the English language while trying to be verbal Cubists. The bottom line here is that modernism gave us abstraction to get at the heart of matters in all fields of the arts and sciences; those who took that gift to the extremes of reductionism in art, simply got nowhere — and leave us with often meaningless scraps of blatant egoism. And that explains the blatant egoism of contemporary art to this day. Lest this statement seem extreme, note that through August, MoMA is presenting an exhibition of noise titled Bruce Nauman: Days. It consists of square white speakers hung from the ceiling emitting inchoate noise — and was first heard at the last Venice Biennial.

If you are annoyed by now, read on.

The first Matisse I ever saw was his Backs (c. 1908ff), in MoMA’s Garden. I was just a kid, and it made me wonder why the fourth relief was supposed to be better than the first. Later, I began to wonder if this guy really liked women — despite their ubiquity in his work and biography. As for a model that visually explained abstraction, I later discovered Picasso’s variations on a bull — that were happily on view in MoMA’s Picasso: Themes and Variations exhibition. Here was a fine comparison of what happens when Matisse reduces a woman to a figment, and Picasso emphasizes a bull’s essentials in a series of lithographic states [1945-46].

This notion of emphasis vs. deletion was certainly in play when viewing his (c. 1909-1917). Thanks to modern imaging technology we can now, with the help of an early color sketch, and separations out of the various palimpsests of its creation, see how the early sketch got to be reduced to the final surface we now see. This reveals the same thing as the Backs
Indeed, the five women depicted bathing in a river have been reduced to four. The river has vanished and been replaced with a vertical slab of black — with a gratuitously curious snake at the bottom. The woman at the left is standing in jungle-like vegetation. The composite woman “standing” in the river looks like a quadruple amputee. And the two bathers to the left are faceless and possess a zombie-like calmness. These are connected with arbitrary curved lines that may be interpreted as a displaced river of sorts. In short, what was first a joyous escapade at a river is now a odd composition reduced to an eerie absence of giggles.

On a nearby wall is another large painting of similar stylistic aspect, The Piano Lesson (1916). Since I have always hated the sight of this work for personal reasons having to do with my own fraught piano lessons as a boy, I shall leave it to Peter Schjeldahl, who claims it his favorite Matisse, to articulate its artistic virtues. [“The Road to Nice, The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, pp. 70-72.]

The vertical erosion of quality in Matisse could also be discerned in its horizontal erosion on the walls of this exhibition. For instance, his splendid Bowl of Oranges (1916) showed up the aesthetic futility of three other similar compositions to its left. Similarly, his elegant Portrait Of Sarah Stein (1916) put to shame most of his other portraits in this show, that seem mere caricatures. On the other hand, his Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg (1914), with its curious loops around the central figure offered a visual interpretation of the sitter’s vitality that transcended her demure pose. If these works worked as art, then I must declare Composition (1915) worst in show. It had no redeeming characteristics and has the misfortune today to look like a rough map of Somalia.

But to get back to Matisse’s Bathers by a River, this work stands with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Back in 2002, when my old O’Connor’s Page was flourishing [see Blog No. 1 below], I published Commentary No. 14 “Reframing The Musterpiece: Concerning the Archival Fate of Works of Art.” Here are its major points:

<< Looking back over the 20th Century’s painting, and what takes pride of place in the various collections of “modern” art by which we know and come to define what happened, it seems time to start making a few serious revisions. Among the many masterpieces of modern painting, it is time to muster out of the received canon those works which are more documentary than artistic — those works which stood as experimental breakthroughs into new ways of seeing and doing art, but which, truth to tell, are artistic disaster areas (aka: bad paintings) when viewed objectively from beyond their century . . . In order to demonstrate what I mean— permit me to offer up, in a focused spirit of prophylactic provocation, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Matisse’s Dance, and Duchamp’s The Large Glass /​ The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. . . . As we start a new century, it is necessary to look back and to begin discriminating between the good and bad “icons” of modern art and to separate out the Musterpieces from the Masterpieces. Implicit in this task is the presumption that a work of art ought to display a certain achieved unity of vision and craft, and works that do not ought not to be presented as such achievements to a public that has enough trouble understanding the real masterpieces. >> [Full Commentary 14 available on request.]

So: From this point of view, Matisse’s Bathers by a River is a Musterpiece — a document of the artist’s oeuvre that ought to be mustered off to the stacks for those interested in such meticulous chronicling of his career and methods. It has little to offer the viewer, much to offer the student, and no aesthetic legacy to inspire the future.

Curiously, the splendid exhibition at the Whitney of Charles Burchfield’s work [see below at No. 10], had a slight similarity to this one at MoMA, in that it offers a deep insight into the artist’s working methods. And as he proceeds to enlarge his early paintings, they become better and better. So pedagogic exhibitions are to be welcomed — as MoMA’s Matisse show is to be welcomed. But in its case what is offered is often best put out of sight; what the Whitney reveals forever deserves public walls.