ART – Ramparts of Civilization

May 22, 2022May 22, 2022

22 December 1808

Public events sometimes exceed the real time shared experience to take on in retrospect a certain transcendent quality. As the event subsequently becomes elevated to an iconic cultural status, the number of people who actually were “there” and their memories of it, are exceeded by the ever larger group of people who over time tie the event so fundamentally to their life experience that they also become convinced they also were “there”. In our own life timelines, there are famous examples. “Woodstock” defined the sixties generation. The “Ice Bowl” mythologized the transcendence of a game into the very definition of Sport. The USA – USSR Olympic hockey upset almost overnight reversed the defeatist psyche of a world power and inexorably exposed the other from a veneer of irresistible force to one leading to eventual collapse. Events can define an era and announce a significant reordering of the traditional world into exciting, uncharted waters. December 22,1808 was such a night in Vienna of the Holy Roman Empire. The most amazing thing is almost anyone who was there to observe the kindling of a revolution had little idea that was exactly what just happened.

Ludwig Von Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany in 1770 and for the first twenty years of his life gave little indication the massive talent that was to emerge. He showed sufficient musical ability to overcome the relatively mediocre instruction he received initially from family and instructors, soon to be”discovered” and gain notoriety from local regents due to his growing performance ability on the clavichord. He was supported to go to Vienna to perform and develop, the city standing then as the capital of music with Mozart and Haydn. He had superficial interactions with Mozart, but somewhat more intense “mentoring” from Haydn, who found him obstinate and difficult and assumed he would not have the discipline to take advantage his talents even Haydn could clearly appreciate present in the young man.

Neither Haydn or Mozart, nor any sovereign in Europe, could comprehend the power of Aufklarung, or Enlightenment, changing the relationship of the growing population of educated people and their leaders. The first matches went off in America, but the ultimate explosion was the overthrow of the oblige estates of France and the entry of a revolutionary governance. Beethoven was at the periphery but felt the rush of energy. He began to perform music with individuality and edge, and was more than aggressive in making sure no one took advantage of his increasing command of composition. At the time, composers had severe limitations in making a living and protecting their intellectual property. The incomes were often at the whim of benefactors, and performances, outside of some operatic theaters, were usually in salons of the wealthy. The idea of artist copyright and intellectual property was foreign to the 19th century at the time of Beethoven’s ascendance. Once the creation ended in the hands of a publisher, control over further publishing, or by whom, including preventing “adjustments” to scores, were gone for good. Attaching a public premiere of works orienting to their publishing was, in Beethoven’s mind, a level of control that would confirm unique capabilities, secure some much needed independent income, and forever put his stamp on how the music would be appreciated or compared to others. By arranging an ‘Akademie’ or public performance of his works alone, performed by him and conducted by him, there would be no doubt who was responsible for his genius and vision. The event was scheduled for December 22, 1808, at the Theater and Der Wien in Vienna, and Beethoven looked to change the very dynamic of a composer from one who entertains, to one who transcends time and culture.

A veritable revolution in music had been proclaimed with Beethoven’s massive Third Symphony, first performed in 1804. Standing the music world on its head with the size of the orchestra, the length of the piece, and the complexity of the structure, Beethoven further devised the concept of theme foundationally securing the entire piece. Avoiding both the entertaining and the sacred classically used to safely appeal to the royal elite, the Third thundered forward on the heroic of the individual. Individuality and power attained from ones own capacities was a revolutionary and dangerous prospect to the world order. Initially, Beethoven dedicated the symphony to “Bonaparte”, as he saw the initial triumphs of Napoleon representing the heroic zenith of the Enlightenment ideal, only to become disenchanted as Napoleon became a driver of conquest and dominance and declared himself Emperor. He renamed the symphony “Eroica” to preserve the revolutionary status, while not glorifying the darker reality. What the Eroica Symphony did more than anything else was close the door on the Classical Era in music and herald the birth of the Romantic.

Many composers have achieved greatness only to forever frustratingly attempt and fail to reproduce the magical uniqueness of the vision. Beethoven’s so called middle period of composition rewrote the book on musical genius. In the crowded years of the first decade of the nineteenth century, Beethoven’s prodigious creativity simply put out the mark that every OTHER composer to follow him would try to live up to. The Akademie performance on December 22, 1808, presented, among other pieces, the world premiere of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and his Choral Fantasy, each a conceptual masterpiece that cemented Beethoven as the elite musical genius for all to compare. Two hundred and fourteen years later, the first three make or break any professional orchestra’s reputation and concert season. The fourth led eventually to th highest calling of symphonic expression, the Ninth Symphony and its Ode to Joy.

Typical for the times, neither the rapidly assembled orchestra for the Akademie performance nor its fiery and unforgiving, as well as progressively deaf, composer had any time or financial support for any serious review and rehearsal prior to performance. The night of the performance proved as confusing for the audience as well as the orchestra, as Beethoven himself drifted, jumped and bellowed in an effort to direct the performers through revolutionary music he could only hear in his head, and the performers could barely see on hastily scratched out scores barely illuminated in a dimly lit and unheated hall. Four and a half hours of complex, revolutionary musical creation took a back seat to confusion and downright audience exhaustion. Most reviews were derogatory. A few, however, recognized that what they had just witnessed could never be absorbed in one sitting, and the immensity of the achievements would declare itself over time.

The immensity of the achievements have declared themselves over time. Particularly the core three pieces changed music forever and will never grow old or fail to inspire.

The Fifth Symphony stands alone as the singular musical expression of classical music. The use of a motif, three short notes, followed by a longer note, “dadada daaah”, weaved brilliantly through four distinct movements, forever removed the need for a composition to express a creation upon a melody. Baser, human emotions and primordial forces, married by rhythm, propulse throughout and led future musicologists to define what Beethoven was expressing was “Fate, knocking on the Door”. It is unlikely that Beethoven himself felt the dot dot dot dash of the motif to be any specific realized expression of “Fate”, but he was clearly defining Struggle, Man’s inevitable battle, and eventual triumph, the core of his desire to reconcile the enlightened intellect and the forbidding romantic concept of the dark Unknowable.

The Fourth Piano Concerto may not be as accessible as the Fifth, but remains my favorite for its revolutionary character. There was little hint in Beethoven’s first three piano concertos that he was going to swerve so dramatically from the classical concerto relationship of the performer and the orchestra. Gone is the orchestra declaring the theme and the performer echoing and accompanying with synchronicity the alliance. Beethoven’s Fourth starts instead with the soloist individually projecting a tentative, dignified theme only to have the orchestra enter in another key and unrelated response. The two then joust through the first movement in unbalanced conversation reaching only at the very end a brief melodic truce. The second movement in five short minutes abandons all hope for unity. The soloist searches for dignity with greater and greater desperation, constantly interrupted by unfeeling orchestral demand for breaking of individuality, and imposed subservience. The clash grows until the soloist is left in a brief cadenza some of the most desperate, dissonant tones ever evoked prior to the twentieth century move away from tonality, and the listener is emptied and utterly exhausted – until Beethoven releases the suicidal tension and forgives, in the light Rondo conclusion. Some are disappointed in the conclusion , but Beethoven knew the emotion could not go lower without breaking the listener’s spirit forever, he had to turn away from the abyss. Expressed in the second movement, there may not be five greater minutes in music.

The Sixth Symphony was as far from the Fifth as one composer could possibly be while fulfilling the revolutionary whole. The Sixth, designed purposefully as an “impression” rather than a reproduction of a pastoral experience forecasted the massive nineteenth century conversion to the musical creation of imagery as tone poem. Scenery, brooks, sounds, and storms are not so much imitated as evoked. Beauty and nature as an experience is created with sound in a fashion that Bizet would attempt to emulate and Debussy would go beyond, but neither would exceed. As much as the Fifth would remove melodic constraint, the Sixth would inject musical color, and compositional rules were stretched and reoriented in such a fashion that the future composers feared challenging at the the risk of forever falling short.

The final piece, the Choral Fantasy, was hastily put together but was no less influential. Beethoven began to imagine the synthesis of composer, soloist, orchestra, and chorus into something greater than the coalescence and summation of its parts. The creative skeleton of olympian Ninth is there in its construct, and the eventual expressions of Wagner in leitmotif and “Gesamkunstwerk” or the total work of art. Beethoven knew what he was creating, but found the greater motif in the Ode to Joy to realize his vision 15 years later.

The three works, married to the vision of the fourth, performed in one sitting, left everyone else behind for good. Beethoven, in the shadow locally of Mozart and Haydn, was now the singular talent to which all other creative intellects would struggle to overcome. Sitting in Vienna, in the shadows of Beethoven’s immense accomplishment, left Franz Schubert to maintain his orchestral works in dresser drawers to avoid side to side comparison, leaving those magnificent creations to remain hidden until a later generation brought them to light. Composers subsequent to Beethoven feared ever putting forth a Ninth Symphony, to prevent their work defining composition being seen as a pale imitation.

Thankfully, Beethoven was never afraid of his own massive shadow, and continued to reach farther and farther out to the bounds of musical expression, despite becoming completely deaf and experiencing horrendous health challenges.

On the night of December 22, 1808, Beethoven put down his marker as one of humanity’s greatest creators, and each of those singular creations forever refresh our spirit and enrich us all.

August 19, 2018

JMW Turner – At Romanticism’s Edge

JMW Turner (1775-1851) lived the life of a radical genius. You know you are making an intense impression when two avowed art critics can look at your work , one critic seeing an artist that “most stirringly and truthfully measures the moods of nature“, the other that sees only “blots“. In 2016, I had the opportunity to visit the British Tate Museum in London and see Turner for myself, by the means he had requested his works to be seen — en masse in a comprehensive collection at a single site. Taken as a compendium of a lifetime of work, the radical genius shines through. As a collector of contemporary artists, it is no small coincidence that I am drawn to artists that acknowledge the foundational influence upon them of Turner’s unique color palate and his interpretation of the natural world as an unbounded sublimity.

Turner was born into a world of commoners and limited means, and he never rejected his birth circumstances, despite his fame at times reaching rockstar celebrity status. At every opportunity to set anchor in the quiet harbor of accepted technique and contemporary adulation, he sailed farther and farther out into unsafe, radical places. By the end of his life, his paintings bordered on swirling, indecipherable, impressionistic and existential art scape. He was happy to coexist in all intimations of the real, the ideal, and the surreal and make you as the observer uncomfortable in interpreting where the painting foundationally lived. Turner lived in very modern circumstances — a recluse, in non-traditional relationships, and combative academic worlds — but generally cared not a wit what others thought of his interpretation of his world. Regardless, his effect on art during his life and afterward was immense, and he remains a titan today.

JMW Turner typified the world of art that lived at the edge of Romanticism, the movement that returned to the concept of Nature as ungovernable and unconquerable, the modern rational, globalist world of the Enlightenment as antithetical to the individual’s need to absorb the sublime and emote in the language of feelings, rather than definitions. Turner saw Britain’s emergence in the 19th century as a dominant sea power as a perfect canvas for man’s intrepid spirit against the awesome power of nature. He repetitively told the apocryphal story that he had personally experienced his unique interpretations of nature’s chaos and color at sea by having requested himself to be lashed to a ship’s foremast in a violent storm. Whether that had ever truly occurred, his seascapes are embellished with rule breaking light, color, and chaos that suggest intimate knowledge of an unstable entanglement of water, wind, and foam in the deep ocean that speaks to a very personal, emotional viewpoint. Nature awesome scope and power is ever present, but man’s romantic need to risk all for a fulfilled life overlays the paintings.

Turner’s confidence never wavered as an artist. It is seen in his idealized self portrait in his twenties. He looks out on the world as a young man that will be an oracle not a passive recorder of the world around him. A classic portrait technique of its time, turner manages to imbue the dash and confidence of youth in the manner of a much earlier portrait, Albrecht Durer’s confident 1494 gaze directly at the viewer, suggesting the talent ready to emerge and take on the larger world.

In the first decade of the 19th century, Turner’s ascension to prominence mirrored Britain’s own. Europe was under titanic siege on land with the indomitable armies of Napoleon, but on the ocean, Britain showed the rest of the world the Napoleon was not omnipotent. At Trafalgar in 1805, the British fleet led by Lord Nelson crushed the larger French fleet in a massive sea battle that ended any hopes of Napoleon subduing Britain in the manner he had the rest of the continent. Instead it elevated Nelson to iconic status, and inspired Turner to reimagine the historic sea painting. Turner’s Trafalgar reenacts the battle’s series of events in a simultaneous projection, increasing the sense of tension, chaos, smoke and opacity that suggests a very intimate reconstruction, despite the painting’s immense 8 by 12 foot scope. The colors have begun to ‘turnerize’ with the sky pewters and ambers coexisting with the dark sea and isolated shafts of light.

The destructive nature of the sea fit Turner’s view of the encroachment of industrialization on the restless impulse of nature to resist. Sea and sky are progressively intermingling and the desperate calamity is highlighted centrally in a shaft of light massing the powerful waves, the broken ship and the desperate survivors clinging to life in a single maelstrom. Soon Turner’s vision progressively loosened itself of the need for specific detail, and he brought increased contrast between hazy contrasts and impressions of light and dense crimsons and onyx of both objects and sky.

The final dissolution of form to the emotive quality of color and shade dominated the final projection of Turner’s art. As the art world held to an academy of proportion, realism and comfort, Turner pushed completely off into the surreal, where edge, form and content are sublimated to the evoked emotion as expressed in color and light, presaging the twentieth century before the nineteenth was half over. Paintings such as Rain Steam and Speed-the Great Western Railway and Snow Storm are glassy sheens of color in which form is sublimated to the creative impulse of the artist to the point of near irredeemability.

Turner
Rain Steam and Speed – Great Western Railway 1844

The over 2000 images that Turner created can not possibly be given justice in an essay of a few paragraphs and images. Needless to say the importance of Turner is reflected in the need to see more and more of the work to try to gauge the artist’s creative journey as an unbounded romantic in a world of assimilation. Turner, much like Beethoven is revered for what every succeeding artist thought they saw in his work, and the sense of having to answer to it artistically. The bountiful diversity of artistic expression ever since owes much of its confident willingness to test boundaries on Turner’s willingness to leave the safe course behind.

A trip to England for the art lover must leverage time for the Turner experience. Perhaps, you will never see the world quite the same way again.

November 19, 2017November 20, 2017

P.A. Nisbet : The Neverchanging meets the Everchanging

The Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana is dedicated “to inspire an appreciation and understanding of the art, history and cultures of the American West and the indigenous peoples of North America”. Like several other distinguished American museums, such as the Gilcrease in Tulsa and the Autry in Los Angeles, the Eiteljorg presents the projection of America’s view of itself, both historical and mythic, as defined by the concept of “West”, most prominently illuminated through its landscapes. The vast open spaces, infinite sky and prismatic light lend themselves to constant reimaginations by contemporary talented artists who seek to evoke the majestic character of the physical world, and capture the “West” of the American mystique. This year, as an extension of its annual Quest of the West show, an exhibition of a consensus collection of the life work of P.A. Nisbet, 2016’s Quest Artist of Distinction, ran from September 8th to November 19th. I had the privilege of loaning one of the works for the show and seeing the exhibition in person. I have collected Nisbet paintings for twenty years, but to see the cumulative vision in one time and one place, made the sense of awe as fresh for me as the very first time.

The exhibition was titled “Light, Space and Power : the Art of P.A. Nisbet”. A curator for the Eiteljorg, Johanna Blume, framed the three components in Nisbet’s work as adding “a spiritual dimension. Light and Space work together to elevate landscapes to preternatural level. They reflect Nisbet’s own sense that the natural world is symbolic of an unknowable, sublime power.” My own familiarity to the artist’s work, and upon visualizing the accumulated works as a whole, lead me to add a fourth dimension , Time, that for me underlies the unique conceptualization of this most talented landscape painter. The recognition of Time, both the instantaneous and the inexorable, is ultimately the most human of characteristics applied by the greatest of landscape painters, for it is only through the projection of a human eye that the wistful recognition that what has just been experienced will never again be seen in the same way and with the same emotions. The artist himself recognizes this dominant dimension. The canyons, deserts, oceans and mountains that seem never changing, are, in the distance of time, ever changing. This human recognition brings an aching sentimentality to the most vast and impersonal of landscapes. An oblique critism of the art, that the human activity is rarely a component of any of the paintings except as a forlorn and indistinct figurine, belies the intensely human perspectives of these landscapes that indicate instead a critical humanity in the form of the viewer, who relays the etherial projection and emotions that can only be recorded in the solitary, by human eyes.

This understanding of time makes Nisbet, as evidenced in the exhibition, one the greatest American painters of unique visions of clouds and waves. Recognizing the time element of the everchanging interplay of wind and light on most elemental of landscape subjects, Nisbet’s clouds are in particular a tour de force in the projection of these familiar landscape components, and as such, have the power to carry an entire painting on their own. Each cloud, each wave, like a snowflake, starts with identical physics, only to mutate over time into a unique and never repeatable vision. In the above Light Storm , Taos, massive forces push simultaneously up and down like magnetic pilings, with brightly illuminated billowing cloudlets seeking the infinite sky and ominously dark pillars of water driving downward and eroding the immutable walls of the canyon. Taos Gorge has been painted time and again, but the perfect actionable verticality of the painting brings the

recognition that this immense power display was observed through human eyes, that recognized the etherial nature of the display and its brief existence in time.

Similar geometric tension exists in Collosus, where a road projects into a distant avenger that dares the viewer to risk the journey into a future of malaign portent, or reverse course and stay admidst sunlight.

In Elysian Fields, the power is muted as the human perspective is changed to a serene overviewer , and the once massive structures are now a benign, budding coral reef in a luminescent ocean of air.

The time element and human perspective is alive in the many visionary interpretations of water. In an early Nisbet creation, Tico’s Paradise, a fantastical. effulgent crashing wave meets a fecund landscape that speaks to Eden and the world prior to the fall of man. A more intense projection of water in Lava Falls brings a vitality and brilliance to moving water and light, with a characteristic Nisbet light motiff of streaming sunlight projecting through the wave crest. You can literally feel the wave mist striking the viewer’s face, with eyes squinting from the triad of gleaming sun, rushing water, and the immense joy felt of being in such a glorious space.

The Southern Sea goes full Turner with brilliantly executed shafts of light from a pewter and bronze sky that blast through the turgurous foam of massive wave caps, blown mist surging against the light with violent fury. Walls of deep blue, grey waves leave the viewer helpless against the scope of the dangerous seas. The artist lets you know he has seen such fury up close in very human terms, as only a human would attempt to exist at the junction of the typhoon above and the watery depths below. Not a bad metaphor for the often tumultous journey of human life itself.

The Grand Canyon is one of Nisbet primal painting joys where, for him, the neverchanging meets the everchanging like no where else on earth. Eons of stone carved by river and rain provide the greatest canvas for light mystique of any structure on earth. Nisbet is in an elite league of Grand Canyon painters that show their understanding of plein air vision on the many vistas of the canyon that all are familiar with, but Nisbet secures light effects that create epic drama

that only someone who has personal, intimate absorption over a life time can imbue. Morning on the Colorado is such a painting, with the mirror like shimmering river lying in the shadow of the canyon wall, projecting against the brilliant sun bleaching out the geologic colors and the layering shadows. Nisbet takes such conceptualization to its logical extreme in two non-exhibition Canyon paintings that are personal favorites of mine added for the discussion. Golden Temple and Breaking Storm , Grand Canyon present dramatic polar opposites of the time effects on light illuminating the never changing canyon geometry with vastly different light – the first, the flat light of the end of day creating almost impressionist light and shadow, the other a single beam of illumination tearing through the dense darkness of a massive storm to bring forward epic drama in minimalist color. Both in my mind are the mark of a master artist.

The recognition by the art world of both the unique contribution of an artist along with the understanding of how they fit in the lexicon of great generational painters is one of the higher forms of adulation. P.A. Nisbet is from a lineage of devotion to landscape and seascape painting that recalls Moran and Turner but does not copy them. He is a bit of a throwback to the craft of careful observation of nature, elevating his paintings beyond the often photographic familiarity of modern contempary landscapes or impressionist knockoffs. This is one serious student of his craft, who pushes himself to greater and greater personal clarity no matter what the subject of his works.

In ten thousand years, the ever changing light will be different, the never changing majestic canyons shifted and eroded, the seashores re-ordered, and the climate unknowable. But if humans were to survive the ten thousand years forward like they survived the ten thousand years that brought us to today, they would recognize the deeply profound cords of awe for our world and our place in it, that PA Nisbet has made a career of projecting through his work. And how lucky for us, so much more to come.

July 15, 2017July 17, 2017

Daniel Gerhartz: Reflecting Beauty, Seeking the Sublime

Detail from: To Cherish
Daniel Gerhartz 2017

When you are good friends with someone with immense talent, your perspective on their accomplishments is sometimes akin, like Icarus, to flying too close to the sun. Attracted by the brilliance, you can become blinded to the risk of loss of reflection on what is transpiring. My friend Daniel Gerhartz, like Daedalus, has carefully treaded the path between craftsmanship and inspiration to develop a prolific body of fine art. It has been balanced between classical technique and a spiritual core that, as quoted by Waaijman, “aims to recover the original shape of man.” The art world has already appreciated this careful balance, with awards, museum recognition, and popular acceptance. For the premier artist as craftsman, this is a very comfortable place to be. For an artist who is juxtaposed spiritually to the possibilities of the sublime, a parabola oriented toward the sun beckons. The evolution of good artists to greatness, to permanence, lies in the eerie tension created in risking the comfortable world, in search of the transcendent . The art of Daniel Gerhartz is on path towards recognition of the sublime.

Equally proficient in the art forms of landscape, still life, and portrait, the unifying thread of Gerhartz’s work is Beauty, and he is nonpareil in the human form. One of the great treatises on the concept of beauty is by Umberto Eco. He identifies the persistent need to extol beauty in all its forms as a distinctly western concept, and reflects as to how art particularly has recorded the changing view of what is deemed beautiful over the centuries. In his introduction Eco develops the close but distinct relationship between what is the Good and the Beautiful. Good is defined not only what we like, but what we should like to have for ourselves, as possession, that which stimulates our desire. Beauty permits us to appreciate it for what it is, immaterial of our capability to possess it. The Sublime lives in a plane of almost infinite beauty, creating as Schiller stated, a duality where the beauty is recognized as a component of a harmony experienced in the world of reason, but a corresponding negative tension felt by a pull toward the infinite that exists beyond sensible perception, creating a distinct emotion somewhere between a shudder and untrammeled rapture. It is in the Sublime that great representational artists congregate. Over time, Dan has recognized this historical theme, and learned to weave the various expressions of beauty into an ever more arresting and elevated body of work.

A Gerhartz artistic vision that is evolving is the juxtaposition of past representations of beauty as part of a mystical, dream like background relief of a classical still life. Beautifully rendered in “The Best of June”, the exquisite June blooms of peonies frame a distinct but reflected past expression of sublime beauty in the painting of Sir Frederic Leighton, “Flaming June” an arresting figure in repose existing in the world between languor and dreams.

Following his spiritual bent toward the mystical, inhabited in the earliest of Christian monasticism, the Desert Fathers of the 4th century, the parable of Abba Agathon is brought to life in a modern representation of timeless beauty found in selfless human action. The portrait of strength and spiritual clarity in the young man, the age and frailty of the reliant, old and crippled figure are expressively the technique of an engaged master of painting.

Experimenting with classical portrait on the iconic medium of gold leaf, the echoes of Degas are reverently expressed in a minimalist style backlighting a beautiful, very classical and very Gerhartz, elegantly realized ballet figure.

The silent and intimate evocation of human love of one sister for another, in portraiture almost as perfect in its tone, proportion, and immediate warmth as can be represented by oil paint, is expressed in Dan’s “To Cherish”. Strains of Mary Cassatt in coloration and composition remain modern and arresting — uniquely Gerhartz

With several decades of painting behind him, this painter is hitting a creative stride that even those like me, close to him for years, can see coming to full realization of his boundless talent. Modern representational painting has the enormous responsibility to recall , to build upon, not to copy, past expressions of great western art. We have been through a sullen century of artistic aversion to the timeless calling of human emotion and expressions of beauty that elevated the appreciation of the reason for human awareness and reflection. This aversion to life’s deeper calling is giving way slowly as modern society feels a progressive need to restore meaning to existence beyond simple material possession and security. This call to meaning has been the basis for western thought over the past two and a half millennia. We are wrapped in the need for human interaction, pulsed through creativity, love, courage, and tinged in passion for another. We at the same time inhabit a universe of immense scope, unknowable fate, beyond rational human insight, existing in the sublime realm of faith and spiritual awareness. The oncoming greatness as a painter expressing a conduit for those two worlds is Dan Gerhartz’s destiny. All that was, and all that can be artistically, is capably within the current brush strokes of a terrific American painter, Dan Gerhartz.

October 23, 2016

Ophelia’s Flowers

Ophelia John Everett Millais 1851-2 — Ophelia
John Everett Millais
1851-2

In a large rectangular room in the Tate Britain Museum, a modestly sized painting draws the eye among all others. A beautiful young woman floats in a stream surrounded by a dense, fecund growth, drifting silently down a quiet stream, surrounded by flowers of florid color and variety. But this is not a scene of serenity. A pall lights her features, her eyes see nothing but madness and impending death. Her hands are held in a pose of complete surrender, grasping but not feeling a bouquet of violets, nettles and daisies, which cascade into a floating pool of withered stems on her shimmering waterlogged gown. She is Ophelia, Hamlet’s scorned love, driven to madness and suicide by the dark Prince of Denmark. And Ophelia is the signature painting of John Everett Millais, that announced the arrival of a brotherhood of British artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites, heralding a full blown romantic movement in 19th century art.

In 1848, a group of young artists determined to shake the art world through a conviction that art had become statuary, overblown, and disconnected from the natural aesthetic of the world of creation. The group of seven – John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Frederick Stephens, Thomas Woolner, and James Collinson – declared their disdain for the accumulated artifice of contemporary art, and harkened back to a time prior to the revolution of art propelled by Raphael and his acolytes. For inspiration, they left the subject matter of fawning portraiture of royalty and idolatry, and defined a list they referred to as the “Immortals,” a disparate list of historical figures such as Jesus and King Arthur, diverse literary scions such as Shakespeare, Browning, Poe and Shelley. They set four basic rules for the Brotherhood of the Pre-Raphaelite. 1) To have genuine ideas to express 2) To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them 3) To hold sympathy with what was direct, serious and heartfelt in art prior to the Raphaelite school and, most importantly, 4) produce throughly good and beautiful paintings and statues. The sentinel evocation was Millais’ masterpiece of Ophelia, and the art world was stunned and even disturbed with what they saw. Prior romanticism was held privately between the pages of a book. Ophelia pulled the viewer into a world of intense feelings of pathos, pity, the world of mental derangement, and an intimate voyeurism that left many uncomfortable. In the age of Victoria, the public acknowledgement of baser human feelings and passions were not a socially acceptable norm. The popularity of what propelled from the seven artists suggests however, that the contemporary norms veiled a simmering intensity that had found a vehicle for expression.

The pre-Raphaelites formally cooperated only until 1854, then broke apart into various art directions. The intense romanticism of the paintings inspired a whole school of art and literature focused on the simple aesthetic of beauty as found in both human form and nature. In literature, the Aesthetic Movement emulated the artistic strokes through writers such as Oscar Wilde and stylized through physical crafts such as furniture and pottery, the so called “art for art’s sake” of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The painters Rossetti and Waterhouse expanded the art form into overarching portraiture of idealized human beauty that bordered on sensual in a time of contracted public emotional expressions. John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs extends the flower symbolism into the realm of the human sensual, with the pure water lily painted along side nymphs that symmetrically reflect the lily’s youthful beauty and purity,. They are colorized by the artist as a reflection of the lily in human form, peerlessly white skin, languid lines, but with a hint of danger as they, like the lily, float above a dark murk and intend a dangerous attraction for Hylas, who is mesmerized by their ethereal beauty. The flower allegory pulls the intense power of nature and its primordial instincts through the painting that prevent it from becoming a vehicle that could suggest leering without the balance.

Hylas and the Nymphs John William Waterhouse — Hylas and the Nymphs
John William Waterhouse

The focus on beauty as an artistic expression pushed into the twentieth century but became mired in excess and repetition that left the world ready for the bound away from realism through the light show of Impressionism and inevitably the distortion and evocativeness of the genius that was Picasso. Beauty, like flowers in bloom , appropriately is transient and comes against the harsh realities of life. Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet, presented an anti-hero to the world and evoked the pitiful fragility of beauty and innocence through the brief but unstable vision of Ophelia. John Everett Millais achieved the core of Shakespeare’s expression through his alliteration on canvas of Ophelia in a stirringly poetic and faithful representation of the tragedy of Ophelia, so masterfully evoked by Shakespeare through Queen Gertrude’s beautiful eulogistic soliloquy:

There is a willow that grows askant the brook, that shows his (hoar) leaves in the glassy stream. There with fantastic garlands did she make Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, That liberal shepards call a grosser name, but our maids do “dead man fingers” call them. There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds Clam’ring to hang, an envious silver broke, When down her weedy trophies and herself fell in the sleeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, and mermaid like awhile they bore her up, which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, as on incapable of her own distress. Or like a creature native and endued unto that element. But long it could not be till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.

There is a willow that grows askant the brook, that shows his leaves in the glassy stream. There with fantastic garlands did she make. John Everett Millais captured the moment for us all to glory in, the majesty and beauty of life, so fragile and so capable of madness and sorrow that comprise humanity.

One can see Ophelia and the many other masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelites at the Tate Britain Museum.

May 3, 2014May 3, 2014

Charles Fritz and the Corps of Discovery

"The Corps of Discovery Running the Columbia" Charles Fritz — “The Corps of Discovery Running the Columbia” Charles Fritz

"The River Rochejhone April 25, 1805" Charles Fritz — “The River Rochejhone April 25, 1805” Charles Fritz

On May 13th, 1804, 33 explorers led by Captain William Clark set out from a staging area known as Fort Dubois in the Indiana territory, left the Mississippi River into the mouth of Missouri River, picked up their expedition co-leader Captain Meriwether Lewis, and embarked on one of mankind’s great adventures into the unknown. Over the next two years, the expedition group, known as the Corps of Discovery, performed the spectacular feat of successfully transitioning through thousands of miles of undefined territory to the Pacific Ocean and back, losing but one member of the corps (to appendicitis), and created a brilliant record of accurate maps, scientific observations, and out and out artistic prose. The success of the expedition codified America’s reputation as a “can do” nation and changed her forever. This record, in its highest form found in the Journals of Lewis and Clark, have stimulated historians and artists alike to try to bring time and time again a modern reflection on the epic accomplishment.

In the world of art, many famous artists of the likes of Charles M. Russell have put their creative stamp on the highlights of the expedition. The land with its endless vistas have been material enough, but the Lewis and Clark Journals brought such perspective to the landscape that the many of the landscape impressions seem empty without the attempt to view them as the voyagers in the Corps of Discovery did. No one I suspect, however, took to the concept of recreating a visual Iliad for the journey to heart as did modern Western artist Charles Fritz.

Last year, I was introduced to Charles Fritz through a small painting I purchased at a gallery in Tucson. In discussing the excellent skillset of the artist, and the accuracy and devotion he showed to the subject matter, I was informed that Fritz had previously achieved an immeasurable artistic feat on a particular historical favorite event of mine, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. I ordered the book documenting the accomplishment, ” Charles Fritz: the Hundred Paintings Illustrating the Journals of Lewis and Clark” and spent hour upon hour in progressive awe of what Charles Fritz undertook and what he accomplished. In an effort of exceptional devotion to the accuracy of the journals and personally sighting each of the panoramas as the journals described Lewis and Clark experienced them, Fritz produced a comprehensive masterpiece that brings to life visually the entire voyage. Stimulated by a commission to paint a specific location described in the journals, Fritz determined with plenty of encouragement to devise a dramatically more substantial mission he had contemplated since his youth, a comprehensive artistic telling of the story of the complete expedition. Over seven years, and with no doubt personal hardship to his ongoing career as he determined to not sell individual paintings but instead show them in a comprehensive grouping, an authoritative collection of 72 paintings morphed into an initial traveling highly popular exhibition by 2005. The extent of the work in terms of originality, scope, and man-hours was huge, but the obsession hit Fritz, and with the support of a collector named Tim Peterson, the financial wherewithal to expand the scope to 100 paintings and fill in the story holes with the original creation was achieved by 2009.

The gift to us is a spectacular collection to the nation that birthed the Corps of Discovery and produced the men who achieved the adventure of many lifetimes. The art brings the intrepid explorers to life, and precisely places them in the historically accurate depictions and landscape. Yet this is not illustration, but true art, with the emotions and passions of the people, the drama of the events, and huge canvas of the landscapes come to life.

Portage Around the Great Falls - June, 2005 Charles fritz — Portage Around the Great Falls – June, 2005 Charles fritz

Fritz placed himself into the journals to create the drama of the works and in the landscapes he loved before they passed out of time in recognizable ways. He makes all of us feel the danger, the wonder, and the exhilaration Lewis and Clark, and their corps must have felt.

"The Arrival of Captain Lewis at the Great Falls of the Missouri June13, 2005" Charles Fritz — “The Arrival of Captain Lewis at the Great Falls of the Missouri June13, 2005” Charles Fritz

The journey stories from the funeral of Sergeant Floyd to the Mandan Village winter, the interactions with the Sioux, Blackfeet, and the corps own unofficial guide Sacajawea and Clark’s black slave York are all represented. The eye of the master artist and integrity to the historical truth are matchless. Fritz’s natural love of the West and to the traditions of American painting from Bingham to Remington, Moran to Russell come out in each individual masterpiece. The respect for the land and the indomitable spirit of the explorers who first saw it as unsullied paradise projects from each creation.

We are led by Charles Fritz’s epochal life work to the wonder of who we were and what we hoped to be, and maybe through the appreciation of the enormous effort of a man to his craft and to his country, what we perhaps yet, could still become.

Lewis and Clark - charles fritz — Lewis and Clark – charles fritz

December 16, 2012December 16, 2012

Lincoln

The historian in me couldn’t resist seeing the most recent cinematic effort to portray history, what I hoped to be a compelling presentation of one of my historical heroes, Abraham Lincoln. Historical dramas are the stuff of Hollywood. History offers spectacle and tension that epic moments are rife with, but, to the challenge of the screenwriter, the outcome is known to the audience. The tendency of the writer therefore is to bend history by inserting plot devices, conversations that never occurred, people that didn’t exist, to heighten the peril faced by the protagonists. History frequently takes a beating in a drama well told for effect.

Steven Spielberg faced just such a challenge in his current movie, Lincoln . The sweep and scale of the Civil War and Lincoln’s pivotal role in it has received more scholarly attention than perhaps any time in American history, and the role of President Lincoln has reached mythical status. The many faces of mythic Lincoln , Lincoln the Western Logsplitter, Lincoln the Emancipator, Lincoln the War Leader, and Lincoln the Shakespearean Martyr, play to our current image of this enigmatic historical figure. Spielberg was determined to humanize the Olympic stature of Lincoln, and decided to focus therefore on the interactions of Lincoln the man in a very small sliver of the Civil War saga, the role of the President in achieving the passage of the bill promoting a 13th amendment to the U.S Constitution, abolishing slavery and enforced servitude.

The movie therefore attempts to show us Lincoln , the human, at a moment requiring masterful political abilities. Necessarily, the typical background for animated a historical drama, dramatic action scenes, are riskily absent from this movie. The movie instead maintains a laser focus on the artillery like bombardment that Lincoln faced every day of his Presidency in the form of an overwhelming plethora of pressures. The scope of crushing forces attempting to suffocate his will are told to brutal effect. The President faces as a result of his actions to attempt to preserve the union a daily butcher’s bill of hundreds if not thousands of casualties that touch those immediately around him, in a war seemingly without end.. As if the God wanted to assure the personal understanding of such loss, He takes Lincoln’s little boy Will to fatal illness, plunging his already unstable wife Mary into a spiral of depression, self absorption, and irrational acts. He faces a majority in legislature that wants to destroy the South for its irretrievable sins of slavery and secession, making the elements of a potential re-union all but insurmountable, and a minority Democrat party that was never willing to make the elimination of slavery a priority of peace. He faces war profiteers, two faced cabinet men, deserters, and a thousand years of racial prejudice in daily battle.

All of these forces lead to the Lincoln we see in the image above – weary, aged, and introspective. The daily deluge seems impossible to tolerate, yet this man faces them with a grim determination that is absent from today’s politician, with an innate belief in the founding principles of the nation and an unalterable conviction in the role of Divine Providence. It takes a great actor to portray the human condition as it exists in a character, and Daniel Day Lewis achieves this in one of the great performances of our generation. Frankly, Lewis saves the movie from itself, as the scenes project a certain redundancy in Lincoln’s daily stresses and challenges, and script’s need to put constantly profound statements in the President’s mouth to propel the story forward. Perhaps for the first time, we see Lincoln the man, struggling with himself and his family, as he faces the need to finish the job he played a pivotal role in starting. This is no cartoon hero Lincoln. This is a man who seeks an end that will in some way provide some justice to the horrific, incalculable losses. Daniel Day Lewis brings this very special man to life in a unforgettable way.

As history, unfortunately, the movie takes some huge assumptions that cheapen the learning lessons of the film. Focusing on the politics of the Amendment abolishing slavery, the movie gives only thready information as to how men and woman at that time could hold such divergent views as to humanity. Rather than careful interpretations as to the intensity of people’s convictions at the time, we see men throwing bedrock philosophies overboard for a few dollars or a patronage position. African Americans on the President’s house staff in the movie are projected as fully politically aware and engaged, yet Frederick Douglas, a huge intellectual force effecting Lincoln’s way of thinking is essentially no where to be found. Thaddeus Stevens, a powerful abolitionist in the House, is given the key role in achieving the desired end of the bill, though there is no historical narrative that suggests that was the case. The South projects in the movie essentially only as a little seen foreign force, and the peace delegation injected in the movie comes off as cartoonish and delusional.

As educational and formative entertainment, it doesn’t seem to me the movie quite works as successfully as Spielberg’s other historical drama, Saving Private Ryan. The special performance of Daniel Day Lewis, however, in making the epic Lincoln someone we could recognize and understand as a human being, is enough to make the effort to see the movie through a worthy one. So little of our nation’s formative narrative is placed in front of our population nowadays that even a flawed attempt by Spielberg is a valued one. Maybe this we lead to some better efforts to combat the nation’s ignorance on how we got here, and where we are going.

October 20, 2012

Re-Acquainting with our National Treasures – the Museums

The national capital of the United States is not only the citadel of governance for the world’s most powerful democracy, it is also the repository for an incredible diversity of treasures of art, science, culture, and history. The city itself was designed as a jewel of urban expression by the famed architect Pierre L’Enfant, presented in 1792 as an ideal of a world class city laid out on a marshy elevation north and east of the Potomac River, at a time when most of the country’s population was hundreds of miles away from the District of Columbia’s wilderness. French born, L’Enfant was every bit a revolutionary American, who had served as an engineer under Washington, was wounded in the war, suffered with him and the troops at Valley Forge, and later was present for the general’s ultimate victory over Cornwallis. He saw the fledgling nation as a eventual world power and saw no fantasy in designing a world power’s capital stage, with massive boulevards, epic public buildings, and beautiful gardens and squares. The capital he left us is every bit the work of art, and on its grounds contains treasures of incalculable value and diversity.

Prominent on the National Mall are its magnificent art museums, among so many I would humbly like to highlight two great art repositories, the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery. The Corcoran Gallery sits at the west end of the mall juxtaposed to the White House grounds and contains a spectacular display of great American artists of the country’s expansive beginnings. The great portrait artist of the revolutionary period, Gilbert Stuart, is best known for capturing the strength and humanity of our nation’s fathers, no more prominently displayed then in the wonderful Washington portrait of the president seen above. Excellent representations of the American wilderness glorifying American exceptionalism with religious overtones, as a chosen land, abound the walls in great works by Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. Bierstadt’s Corcoran Peak reminded Americans that the Rockies were every bit as epic as the Alps. Church’s Niagara captured the epic scope of the great falls and reflected the pristine beauty and power of the American wilderness as representative of the country’s power and inexorable drive. The ultimate in scale, imagery, and symbolism of America’s special connection with its pristine, savage wilderness is Bierstadt’s Last of the Buffalo, an homage to a disappearing innocence when the horizon, and the bounty was limitless.The Corcoran collection extends into other great examples of American painting genius such as Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Whistler, but does not neglect European masters such as Gainsborough and Rembrandt. It would be the premier display of artistic greatness were it not for the overwhelming spectacle of the collection on the opposite end of the Mall, the National Gallery of Art.

The National Gallery of Art defies a proper adjective for its bounty in fantastic art. Thousands of absolute masterpieces line the walls from the brilliance of American Winslow Homer to three exquisite Vermeers. The very majesty of the collection may be in the Mellon family’s greatest gift to the nation, Leonardo DaVinci’s Ginevra de Benci , a painting in my mind every bit as special and beautiful as the Mona Lisa herself. The National Gallery had in 1995 maybe the most spectacularly popular art exhibition in history in providing in one place the entire collected works of Johannes Vermeer, and the representations present currently of this enigmatic Dutch master are worth an hour alone of contemplation. The play of light in its complexity on the every day female subject exemplified in Vermeer’s classic, A Woman Holding a Balance, knows no equal in art. The Americans are also spectacularly represented with the early portraitists such as Copley and Stuart, the chroniclers of American life like Caleb Bingham and James Whistler, and bookended by the brilliant 19th and early 20th century work of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. Homer’s Breezing Up displays common American courage and fortitude in the everyday lives of Americans against the violent environment of the sea. Homer framed America in quiet dignity overwhelmingly influenced by his absorption of the selfless examples of everyday Americans caught up in the brutality of the Civil War yet able to rise above it, and it showed in every subsequent painting. Singer Sargent was a modern painter caught in a 19th century traditionalism that eventually exploded out of his portrait work into emotionally tense works such as Street in Venice where a young woman catches the not so innocent stares of young men with a latent sexuality more appropriate for the 20th century than the Victorian principles ruling the nineteenth. Singer Sargent dissolves the puritan impulse forever in the languid Repose, the subject cascading over the boudoir couch in satin finery, her mind distant to the presence of the artist studying her.

The bounty that is the National Gallery continues over six centuries of European and American art, from Giotto to Gauguin , Raphael to Rembrandt. Though absorbed for hours over each visage like a boy in the candy shop unable to choose, I still managed to focus on a few artists I have been anxious to see in person. One in particular that brought particular pleasure was J.M.W. Turner, the well known 19th century English painter with extraordinary gifts. An artist who grew out of the romantic stylings of Byron and Beethoven to presage the luminescence and abstraction of Impressionism, Turner imparts a special emotional longing from the viewer. In Keelmen Heaving In Coals By Moonlight, an intense impressionistic lightshow is brought to bear with the furious red glow of the coals juxtaposed on the pewter metallic moonlight, and ghostly ships appearing and disappearing out of the mist. Fantastic. The art alone would take a lifetime to see and absorb it all, but the Smithsonian collection along the Mall is of equal import and diversity in treasure. From Natural History to American History, the Museum of the American Indian, Arts and Industries, and the Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian spans the American experience. The visual highlight for me on this trip is the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The entry alone, contains three epic giants in the history of flight – the Wright Brothers Flyer, the Spirit of St Louis, and Apollo 11 – from the first controlled flight to man’s conquering of the ocean by air, forever shrinking the planet, to escaping earth to land on another celestial globe. All in the same room and all within 66 years. For whatever reason, I feel the most connectiveness with the little monoplane that carried Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic in 1927. This was no decade long monumental commitment of a nation to achieve a goal. This was a 24 year old postal service pilot, who rigged a design out of a small American entrepreneurial aircraft company, had them build the craft over a few months, flight tested it by flying it cross country to break the record at that time for solo transcontinental flight, and on the same mission hopped over the Atlantic in 33 consecutive solo flight hours with no backup, no escape plan, and no previous indication of success for such an undertaking. This spectacular little plane would go on to achieve thousands of hours of flight, but the first one is seared in our memory, and our national mythology.The museum has superb examples of passenger service flight, from the original passenger carrier the Ford Tri-motor to the workhorse of the mid-century the DC-3 to the modern Boeing 747. It shows in close up fashion the story of combat craft from the Sopwith Camel of World War I to the German Messerschmidts, Japanese Zeroes and American P-51 Mustangs of the Second. The history of rocketry is noted with Minuteman missiles and V-2 rockets, as well as the critical contribution of Russian aerospace from Sputnik to Soyuz. The journey is endless from Tomahawk cruise missiles to Saturn V engines, LEM lunar landers to Space Ship One, the first private service passenger ship to space. Its a visual feast for the air afffectionato and the perfect bookend to the museum extravaganza on the National Mall.

This brief survey does not scratch remotely all that there is to explore in the national repositories celebrating our civilization’s watershed achievements. each venue offers days of study and a lifetime of reading. Consider the story of the electric light bulb or the electric guitar, the harvesting of hydroelectric power, the prayers of the Navajo, the invention and outgrowth of the gasoline engine, the crafts of the native Americans and those who suffered in servitude, the portraits of all the nation’s chief executives, the dresses of the First Ladies. On and on and on in magnificent promotion of what it means to struggle, to seek, to conquer, to create, and ultimately to triumph in the never ending celebration of life well lived.

July 8, 2012

The World Reacquaints with a Dark Genius

This past week brought forth an announcement that perhaps as many as 100 artworks not previously known correctly credited to the Lombardy painter Caravaggio were discovered in Sforza castle in Milan. Italian experts suggest the implied cumulative value of the find may approach a billion dollars. A two year study of the works have led to the conclusion that the hand of Caravaggio crafted the works while under the tutelage of Simone Peterzano, and the potential authentication of a vast new store of masterwork from this critical artist would be a sensational discovery. Few works survive from this conflicted master, but his place in converting art from a distant emotionless perspective to the spectacle of human passion and drama on canvas is not disputed. Through this find, we may be able to see with more clarity into the means by which history was permeated by this dark genius.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived towards the end of the 16th century, a time dominated by religious art and patrons looking to fill the spectacular new churches of the height of the Renaissance. Art was bound at that time by the concept of Mannerism, a cool, restrained projection of idealized humanity with a tendency to occlude emotion, flatten light, and soften perspective. As Renaissance evolved into the Baroque, a new determination to play with light and evoke drama began to take hold, with the use of a technique known as chiaroscuro, providing perspective of of action and depth by the utilization of illuminated light, heightening the tension between light and darkness . The ultimate master of this perspective proved to be a belligerent and unstable artist from Lombardy, Caravaggio, who brought the violence and passion from his personal life into his creations. The zenith of chiaroscuro was achieved by Caravaggio in a technique known as Tenebrism, in which dark and light abutted with little hesitation or gradation, magnifying the intensity of the subject matter and the emotion of the scene. As with the painting that fronts this blog, David is seen as if suddenly entering from the dark into firelight, his confident grasp allowing the projection of the fire’s illumination on his grotesque prize. Religious scenes had been painted before, but not with such immediacy and direct human reflection. This was not so much an exalted religious figure as it was a human event raised to religious fervor through the use of dramatic lighting. The illumination was not of a simple candle but rather a white hot intensity that leads each viewer to be both in awe as well as in foreboding. Caravaggio had initiated a style that would influence great painters of the immediate next generation such as Rembrandt and Rubens with such force that it is has been said that Caravaggio may have been the first modern painter.

Caravaggio instilled the passions and fever of his own life into his work. A brawling, difficult man accused of multiple infractions against authority and charged with at least one alleged murder, this was no shrinking violet who projected into such a short 39 year life. Yet, great artists seemed comfortable with him, and his reputation in his life despite his fractious behavior was a shooting comet. He never wanted for commissions and has left us with spectacles of art that dynamize the viewer and leave him or her wanting for more Caravaggio. Shafts of blazon light directed by the deity call St Matthew to his mission and direct an ordinary man among other men to an extraordinary calling. My favorite Caravaggio is the masterpiece of the Conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, driven off his steed and blinded but the brilliant light of his God, the complete illumination of his form against the darkness evoking the Holy Spirit at work – as if the light source was internal as well as external. No mere mortality is at work in Caravaggio. This is the clash between light and darkness, evil and overwhelming good, damnation and eternal salvation, external violence and internal ecstasy that Caravaggio saw around him in the struggles of life.

The unique perspective of Caravaggio was the recognition that every day life was full of drama and that humanity was as conflicted as his own life journey. If indeed the discovered works prove to be authentically Caravaggio, we may have almost doubled the known available projection of Caravaggio’s immense talent to the human story. Such a find, indeed.

January 8, 2012

A Genius Shows Us Everyday Life

A relatively obscure local artist in his lifetime, whose entire known catalogue of artwork may encompass 36 paintings, has become an absolute modern superstar draw in any retrospective containing even one of his works. The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University in England is only the latest gallery to experience the enormous public passion and wonderment associated with Johannes Vermeer. A collection of paintings focused on women in domestic scenes in the Netherlands of the 17th century is crowned by four masterpieces of Vermeer including The Lacemaker pictured above, on loan from the Louvre in France. The tens of thousands that are crowding the exhibit are appreciating in person what most of us because of the minuscule opportunities to see Vermeer collections will never get to see – the chance to view several examples at once of one of the great creative geniuses of western civilization.

The most spectacular example of the Vermeer effect was the once in a lifetime 1995-1996 Washington DC National Gallery of Art exhibition of 21 of Vermeer’s 36 known paintings that resulted in miles long waiting lines and near hysteria for the artist that painted almost exclusively everyday people in repose before a window illuminated by daylight. Each rare Vermeer example of 17th century Dutch life encompasses a magic concoction of light, perspective, and composition that makes the simplest scene epic and immortal. The recognition of what was achieved by the man from Delft is the reason why Vermeer’s reputation in the world of art has grown to such immense status.

Johannes Vermeer was born on October 31, 1632, in Delft, Netherlands and lived his entire life of 43 years in the same city. His father owned an inn in the town square but was additionally known as a highly skilled silkweaver. The growing prosperity of the burgeoning middle class of craftsmen and businessmen in the Spanish Province Of the Netherlands led to a heightened interest in culture and with it art of Dutch artists. A true golden age of Dutch art including masters such as Rembrandt, Jan Lievens, and Frans Hals developed as wealthy patriotic men of the recently protestant Netherlands wished to view examples of Dutch culture and everyday life in their homes. Vermeer’s father recognized the opportunity and initiated an art dealership which his son eventually took on, becoming an outlet for his own work. It is not clear if Vermeer received specific instruction, but art had become an outlet for an explosion in cultural expression and the opportunities for numerous learning venues were probably available through his father’s business. His compositional style was what was popular at the time, genre and portraiture painting, placing people in their daily activities. But Johannes Vermeer was like no other of his time,though, in talent, though it would remain an obscure regional secret during his lifetime due to his extremely small output, and reality that essentially one benefactor, Pieter Van Ruijven, purchased the majority of his work, preventing dissemination. Vermeer, to his detriment during his lifetime, was a very slow, meticulous painter and constructionist, and at the height of his craft produced at the rate of two or three paintings a year.

But what creation. Vermeer managed to suspend time into an eternal vortex, taking waves of light and bouncing them in complex glows off walls, objects, and people that added immense definition and warmth to simple daylight illumination. The etherial effects of light elevated the subjects into a more sustained profound dignity of presence. The simple acts of pouring milk, sewing, or just quiet contemplation became in Vermeer’s paintings exemplary actions. Painting no longer had to be about heroic or religious subjects to be epic or spiritual. Living life and participating in its activities through Vermeer achieved a status once attributed only to saints and princes. It is impossible to view a Vermeer and not feel the simple pride and attraction to being human. Vermeer celebrated this richness of culture through the prolific and luxurious use of costly pigment paints, such as the very expensive ultramarine blue pigment made from lapus stone that dominates his painting color pallets, likely placing a significant financial burden on the family. The richness of color blasts through the natural light of the day, suffusing the subjects in an incomparable tonal warmth that few other artists have achieved. The symphony of color is perfectly accented by a spectacular understanding of light and shadow, that combined with Vermeer’s preternatural sense of composition draws the viewer into the perfect point of definition of each painting, a very modern sense of perspective at a time when the internal light was muted, interrupted only by the occasional candle. Not a single detail of the painting is ignored to create the sense of the whole, using everything in the painting to reflect upon everything else, resulting in works though small in size, worthy of hours of contemplation just to take it all in.

The use of expensive pigments, camara obscura for perspective, and meticulous, unhurried constructions reveal in Vermeer a self awareness of his talent. However economically damaging, his perfectionism did not allow a rushed product, and only those that are self aware would continually sacrifice their economic success for their personal satisfaction in achievement. The Dutch Republic, freeing itself of its Spanish overlords, found itself in constant conflict with its neighbors jealous of its upstart nature and economic vitality. The effect on the Dutch economy of constant conflict was suffocating and was particularly destructive to the resources needed to support a non-essential like art. Vermeer struggled mightily with debt, and the pressures of it may have led to his demise at 43. His tiny art output, however has had profound effect on the art world and secondarily on western culture itself. No one has ever managed to approach Vermeer’s achievement of portraying the act of being human as a condition of sacred, poetic beauty. Everybody who has ever gazed upon a Vermeer knows it in their heart.