Until later,

Maureen Mullarkey

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Kenneth Kirsch, "Gone Fishing"

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Duccio, "The Epiphany" (14th C.)

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The rabbi does not celebrate Christmas nor accept the Christian belief structure. But he does recognize in the Christian observance of Christmas “one of the factors that help maintain the religious character of our society-in which Jews, too, with their own beliefs and practices, and with their very lives, have a considerable stake.”

Speaking of himself in the third person, he writes:

What really intrigues him is the fact that millions of his non-Jewish fellow human beings are celebrating the birthday of a Jewish child. And they are doing so by extolling the values of peace and good will. All the more misplaced, he thinks, are the efforts by some supposedly Jewish organizations to arouse, through their battles against Christmas symbols in public places, the ill will and resentment of Christians—at the very time when the Christian religion, more than at other times of the year, inspires its followers with irenic and philanthropic sentiments.

Sober attention is given to historic reasons for Jewish suspicion toward Christian expressions of good will. Christianity, after all, has not been an unmixed blessing for Jews. Nevertheless:

. . . what we are really dealing with in this annual battle against public Christian observance is not so much a “Jewish” attack on that observance as it is a secularist one—with some of the prominent secularists identifying themselves as Jews. They are the same people who fight non-denominational prayers in public schools, the use of public school facilities for meetings of high school religious-interest groups, and state support of private schools. They fight with equal vigor the attempts by other Jewish groups to have Jewish religious symbols exhibited alongside the Christian ones, such as the efforts of the Chabad (Lubavitch) group of Orthodox Jews to place a Hanukkah candelabrum on the public square when a Christmas tree is put up there, which would be a fitting demonstration of America’s religious pluralism. They are, in other words, not singling out Christianity. They are against the public manifestation of religion per se-even (or perhaps particularly) against the public manifestation of the religion of their own ancestors.

The invocation of the First Amendment as authority for the campaign against the public display of any and all religious symbols seems to involve the demand that the state “establish” the religion of Secularism as the official religion of the United States-which would, to say the least, be a rather curious use of the First Amendment. But even if one were to grant, for argument’s sake, that the lawyers employed by the American Jewish Congress, the (Reform) Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and similar organizations have established the “true” meaning of the First Amendment, i.e., that the amendment really and truly rules out the public display of a crèche or a Hanukkah candelabrum, one would still be entitled to wonder what those organizations hope to gain by stirring up animosities every winter.

. . . Life in the medieval Christian world-in which, by the way, we no longer happen to live-certainly was no bed of roses for the Jews. But Jews fared infinitely worse in those modern societies from which the God of Abraham and of Jesus had been banished. If Jews cannot forget the Middle Ages, they owe it to themselves to remember the most recent past, too. One could argue, therefore, that the very self-interest of the Jews is at stake in preventing the United States from becoming a totally godless society.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing. And, above all, Merry Christmas.

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© Maureen Mullarkey

That brings me to my point, which is simply that some of the finest writers on art are not art historians. Sensibility—informed by scholarship but separate from it—is key to art writing. Persons of extraordinary sensibility are no more prevalent in art historical precincts than they are anywhere else. Enter Robert Kiely, distinguished scholar of modern literature (Professor Emeritus, Harvard)  and a lively critic. His Blessed and Beautiful: Picturing the Saints (Yale University Press, 2010) is a learned, readable, richly illustrated text. Fluent in every sense, both readable, eloquent and agile in its insights.

Fra Angelico, "Jesus Apearing to the Magdalene" (1440-41), Convent of San Marco, Florence

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Particularly appealing is his survey of the historical progress of Mary Magdalen, through scripture, pious commentary and popular imagery. Next to Jesus of Nazareth, the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, no other figure in pantheon of Christian iconography has earned no much, and so variable, attention. Kiely manages to make a believable human being emerge out of the sources, scriptural and artistic. This is his reflection on Cell 1, San Marco:

Since Mary Magdalene and especially the scene with Jesus in the garden outside his tomb were fraught with various and contradictory interpretations, it is fascinating to see how painters “read” Noli me tangere. In decorating the cells of the Dominican monastery of San Marco in Florence, Fra Angelico and his assistants chose the encounter as the subject for cell number one. In this depiction (designed by Fra Angelico but probably painted by his assistant Benozzo Gozzoli in 1440), Jesus—who the Gospel says was mistaken by Mary for a gardener—carries a hoe; he could be saying to Mary that he has “work” to do and cannot stop to chat. If so, the artist managed to endow this matter-of-fact moment with a magnificent spiritual serenity. Mary is not weeping or visibly shaken by the sight of Jesus. She kneels in dignified reverence and her gesture is a refined combination of greeting and prayer. She is neither forward nor humble, but rather balanced in an attitude of recognition, regard, and self-composure. Despite the fact that his linen wrapping is supposed to have been left in the tomb, Jesus is fully clothed in stainless white robes, and the position of his feet suggests that he is already beginning his ascent to heaven. He looks at Mary with regal kindness; his hoe could be a scepter or standard. There is no sign of displeasure or suppressed desire. Indeed, the elegant postures and pleasant exchange of looks suggests a minuet in which each partner knows his and her role. This is not a shocking or disturbing scene in which Mary overreacts but a quiet beginning of a heavenly dance.

Titian’s vision of the scene—the Magdalene meets the risen Christ, mistaking him for a gardener—is of a different temper altogether.

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Titian, "Noli Me Tangere" (c. 1514), The National Gallery, London

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Once again, the scene suggests a dance, but here Jesus appears to play the role of the female partner, elegantly curtsying while modestly attempting to cover himself and avoid the touch of the woman kneeling as if she is making a proposal (or proposition). Mary is literally forward in the painting; her expression is imploring; her long hair and gorgeous red cloak are reminders of her former life of luxury. John’s Gospel does not specify how or where Mary intended to touch Jesus, but painters cannot avoid the details. Titian leaves little doubt that, whatever her intentions, Mary was coming very close to the Lord’s genitals. This is clearly what Titian’s Jesus fears, as his gesture indicates. The painting lends an obviously erotic element to the episode.

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Agnolo Bronzino, "Noli Me Tangere" (1561), Louvre, Paris

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Kiely is equally adept at describing Bronzino’s weaving together of physical beauty and sexual potential in the altarpiece for the Church of Santo Spirito, in Florence:

Whereas in the Fra Angelico and the Titian the atmosphere is peaceful and private, the figures relatively calm and dignified, in Bronzino’s painting (above) the mood is theatrical, even melodramatic. Both Jesus and Mary Magdalene appear aroused, although in different ways, and they are not alone. There is an audience. Not only are there women and an angel still at the tomb in the background (perhaps representing an earlier moment in the story), but two women also hover near the leading players, gesturing, smiling, and whispering as if spying on and gossiping about the encounter.

True, the figures are twisting and turning in a way reminiscent of Michelangelo, but not everything can be blamed on Michelangelo. In more than one way, the positions of Jesus and Magdalene are the reverse of traditional depictions of the event, including a sketch by Michelangelo. A particularly young and beautiful Jesus approaches from the left (the usual entrance point of Magdalene). His red locks, delicate features, and glowing white skin seem to have borrowed some of the attributes of the repentant sinner with whom he exchanges tender looks. He appears to be running toward, not away from, Magdalene; the odd but graceful twist of his torso suggests a “turning away” that looks very much like a thrusting forward. Mary too is on the run, so much so that if both keep going (as the dynamic of their movement shows they must) they will surely collide. Although Mary’s posture and gestures are wild, she is modestly attired in sober colors and her expression is one of adoration rather than of what Calvin called “stupid excitement.”

Jesus, the “gardener,” has evidently been a good gardener. He carries a shovel, not a hoe, and from the earth behind the two friends lovely flowers bloom. In the background even the tomb is “alive” with possibility: on the right is the dark door of the sepulcher leading nowhere and on the left is an arch opening onto the soft and gorgeous hills of a landscape like paradise. Bronzino shows the Resurrection as a scene of questions, opportunities, pleasures, and risks, all in motion, like life, just as the artist or his patron, an old man facing his own death, might have liked to recall it.

Just lovely. Try to imagine Michael Fried or one of his wanna-be acolytes bringing the painting to live as Kiely does. I have a few caveats of my own in his treatment of certain subjects, but they are no bar to a full-throated recommendation. Overall, Blessed and Beautiful is a ravishing book, its prose as vivid as the paintings it chooses for reflection.

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© 2011 Maureen Mullarkey

Caravaggio, "Conversion of St. Paul"

Nevertheless, Niyazi’s book shelf holds many fine things, as you already know if you have visited his site. So, without more ado, his acknowledgments appear below:

Damisch, H. A childhood memory by Piero della Francesca. [Goodman, J. Trans]. Stanford University Press. 2007

Freedberg, SJ. Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting. Belknap Press. 1986

Freedberg, SJ. Painting in Italy 1500-1600 (3rd Edition) Yale University Press. 1996

Fried, M.  Art and Objecthood – Essays and Reviews. University of Chicago Press.  1998

Fried, M. The Moment of Caravaggio. Princeton University Press. 2010.

Fried, M. Thoughts on the Caravaggisti. The Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art. National Gallery of Art, Washington 2010

Hall, MB. The Sacred Image on the Age of Art. Yale University Press .  2011

Nagel, A. The Controversy of Renaissance Art. University of Chicago Press. 2011.

Rowland, I. From Heaven and Arcadia. The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance. New York Review Books. 2008

Shearman. J. Only Connect…Art and the spectator in Renaissance Italy. Princeton University Press. 1994

Spranzi, M.  The Art of Dialectic between Dialogue and Rhetoric -The Aristotelian Tradition. John Benjamins Publishing Company 2011

Missing from the list is Walter Friedländer’s 1969 Caravaggio Studies. That text is so fundamental that it is hardly necessary to mention it. Still, there is value in adding it on—just in case. It applies here, in part because Friedländer was a native German speaker. Yet he language of his discussion of Caravaggio is more accessible, kinder to the ear and to his subject, than anything ever penned by Fried. He discusses the works with great empathy:

Caravaggio represented the Conversion of St. Paul with the same kind of sober observation, with the same close sensuous grasp of the factual and the tangible, which St. Ignatius would have demanded from the imagination of the exercant. In composition, too, the space is strictly limited and precisely measurable. The miraculous light is powerfully visualized without the indication of an ethereal source., and the celestial voice can almost be heard by the spectator, even without the image of Christ who utters it—exactly as it would be heard by the exercant in his overstimulated imagination. . . . Caravaggio’s representation of the mystery in completely human terms corresponds closely in spirit to the contemplation of the mysteries in the Exercitia [Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises]; both make the supernatural tangible and understandable to man’s spiritual intelligence with the help of the senses.

In the end, Fried is really not necessary.

© 2011 Maureen Mullarkey

CARAVAGGIO AND HIS FOLLOWERS IN ROME has arrived at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Those unable to experience the majesty of the Baroque in person are left to ponder the substantial catalogue recently published by Yale University Press.

Featuring essays by exhibition organizers and notable scholars of the Baroque, Michael Fried’s contribution,  Notes Toward a Caravaggisti Pictorial Poetics, will be seen by some as riding on the critical success of his 2010 study The Moment of Caravaggio. That work on the Caravaggisti was first delivered as a lecture at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The current essay mirrors Fried’s 2010 volume, which drew on a series of lectures from 2002.

As  explored previously by Studio Matters, initiation with Michael Fried can be a jarring experience. That there is a resonant, perhaps even profound message in his work is undeniable; yet its mode of delivery can be hard going for readers more accustomed to an historiographic approach to art.

It is interesting, albeit challenging, to read an art historian who seems to persistently refuse to write in an art historical mode. Those familiar with the cognitive sciences and the history of rhetorical dialogue will see much that is familiar in Fried’s approach. Fried came to art history from a background in art criticism; nevertheless, whether his esoteric approach to art writing is suitable for such a catalogue is a matter for debate.

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Valentin de Boulogne "Fortune Teller"

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Noting Fried’s use of language, the textual antics of humanist rhetoricians come to mind,  particularly the work of Sperone Speroni and his Dialogo della Rhetorica (1542) and Apologia de dialogi (1574). These commentaries on dialogue and rhetoric are fascinating journeys into a tradition with origins in antiquity. As Speroni deftly summates:

Through the confrontation over some topic, the one uses his reasons to strike the opinions of the other, not unlike the iron to the stone or the stone to the iron. This occurs through dispute, and although the sought truth will not spring out openly and entirely, we shall inevitably witness some of its sparks, because truth by its nature always shines.

That Fried employs just such a technique is perhaps where his training as an art historian is most clearly evident. Art history, as a discipline, is replete with underlining past contributions that gel with an author’s own take or crossing out those that do not. From the outset, Fried outlines his mission: a search to clarify something missed by predecessors. Referring to Valentin de Boulogne’s 1628 Fortune Teller in the Louvre:

The overall impression – I am seeking to express a consensus among Valentin’s commentators – is that of an anthology of stock figures, motifs and anecdotes (to use a loaded term which I shall disparage shortly) somewhat crammed together in a shallow, minimally articulated space.

That Fried seeks to draw attention to wonderful things often ignored by other art historians is probably his greatest strength. With Valentin specifically, he goes on:

Valentin is a superb colourist, his touch is invariably strong, his figures have remarkable  realistic and naturalistic “presence” ; in short, one is aware of his pictorial gifts virtually in every brushstroke.

Response to Fried’s methodology has been mixed. Praised (and occasionally derided) by critics with a literary bent, the appeal of his work to researchers and students is less tangible. Part of an art historian’s primary role is to mediate between the physical object and historical evidence, and to present a synthesis palatable for instructional use. Consequently, the target audience becomes a key consideration. Are these collations for other scholars, students, the public or all of the above? A work like Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of The Artists has proven enduringly popular because it is relevant to artists, scholars and the interested public alike.

While Fried readily acknowledges previous works that look at the role of artists and spectators in early modern art, his language signifies that he sees something new and unprecedented in Caravaggio.  Those familiar with the work of Hubert Damisch, Marcia Hall, John Shearman and Alexander Nagel, among others, will be aware of this subjective approach to early modern art. Yet these works are arguably easier to navigate; they are prefaced by an historical context that elaborates the dynamic between artist and patron.

In both The Moment of Caravaggio, and the catalogue essay, Fried seems to focus almost entirely on the object, calling for contemplation of internal mechanisms to explain the stylistic developments of the period.  The inevitable question hence arises: can an art historian write about the 17th century in a manner that places little emphasis on the history of the period?

Where other essays in the catalogue use archival transcripts, Fried describes the pictures themselves, plus others  like them.  This seems to be the key difference between the modes of art history at play. That one approach is more viable than the other is relevant to the beholder’s aims. Readers who enjoy musing on the creative process may find something interesting in Fried’s approach. Others, adept at plumbing text for glimpses of the past may find a lot of Fried’s content unsatisfying.

There is an historical thread to Fried’s arguments on the evolution of the picture gallery, and subsequently the nature of the gallery picture. In an earlier section of the catalogue, Sandra Richards explores Caravaggio’s Roman Collectors. While not a symbiosis of any sort, her essay provides historical counterpoint to Fried’s more internal contemplation.  Yet, even Fried’s commentary on this process could most certainly have benefitted from placing this period in starker contrast to the famous private galleries and pictures of previous eras.

Readers familiar with the art, history or literature of the Baroque period will invariably reflect on what  is award-winningly new about Fried’s conclusions (apart, that is, from the jargon he adds to Baroque studies).  Fried insists that Caravaggio—and subsequently his followers—invented a new type of artistic language which, while present in glimpses in previous eras, fully blossomed under the Lombard Master. To support his claims, Fried shies away from the voluminous archival records of the day. There is no quoted epistle from a Cardinal to the painter confessing  the work’s revelatory nature (Though they perhaps exist, as other essays reveal).  The closest we get to this from Fried is the famous comment ascribed to Poussin: that Caravaggio sought to destroy painting. The comment largely referred to his methodology, and to a degree to his subject matter.

From the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance—particularly in the guise of works now known as ‘mystery painting’—the relationship between patron and artist transcended the traditions observed in devotional works before that time.  Artworks became baubles of wealth, embodiments of devotion, intellectual status and ego. Contemporary records tell us of learned men puzzling over the iconographical constructs of artists from van Eyck to Titian.

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Jan van Eyck, "The Arnolfini Portrait" (1434)

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The end of this mode of ‘mystery painting’ is often linked with the publication of emblem books, such as Alciato’s Emblematum Liber (1531) and the later Iconologia (1593) by Cesare Ripa. These books effectively revealed the visual code previously used by writers and artisans. It has been argued that their distribution in print took the fizz out of the mystery painting genre.

Stripped of a complex symbolic language and often confined by edicts such as those by the Council of Trent, later artists came to rely more heavily on optical factors to draw attention to their work. Hence, drawing from dynamic predecessors such as Tintoretto and adopting the play of light on sculpture, Caravaggio’s signature style makes sense as a natural stylistic progression of these forces.

Yet to read The Moment of Caravaggio or his catalogue chapter, Fried seems to insist that his historical myopia is a gift that allows him to introduce a new layer of jargon into a discipline already replete with the detritus of centuries of verbose banter in several languages. His essay on pictorial poetics is littered with particular words graced with quotation marks to indicate that Fried has anointed them to transcend their natural meaning. “Address” and “presence,” in particular—even “into” and “be”—are elevated in this fashion. The success of this approach is dependent on how willing the reader is to acquiesce to Fried’s modus operandi:

By now I hope it will not seem tendentious to suggest that the combined effect in these and similar paintings of the depiction of absorbed states of mind and body and of the sense of temporal protraction or dilation that goes with those states also serves the end of the pictorial “presence” ; the effect, one might say, is of a sustained density of being that is more than simply physical.

That Fried is enamoured of rhetoric is obvious. He often seems to be adrift in his own musings, almost oblivious to his audience. While this may add to the romance of his approach to art history, one can contest its relevance in a catalogue volume also intended for public consumption.

A brief note should also be made about Fried’s piece in the context of the catalogue as a whole.  One could argue a successful catalogue is one which captures the aesthetic and historical significance of the period in question and does this in a manner that is useful for educators, artists and general visitors to the exhibition. In all of the other essays, from commentators such as Museum director David Franklin, and Caravaggio experts  Sebastian Schütze and Rossella Vodret, the voice of the writer is relayed through historical records, or an exploration of depicted themes.  In Fried’s section even his most ardent admirers will notice the stark juxtaposition of his approach. The words “I” and “my” never appear more frequently in the entire catalogue than in his chapter.

There are of course valuable segments in Fried’s presentation.  When he puts his descriptive skills into capturing the works, his writing can charm. Witness the way his description of a work by a somewhat obscure Caravaggio follower, Valentin de Boulogne, brings it into sharp focus:

Between the two principal figures and a few feet beyond them a boy sits at a table covered with an oriental carpet, his left elbow resting on the table as he supports his head with the back of his left hand ; he too looks neither at the gypsy and her client nor at the viewer, but instead gazes off towards his right….behind the gypsy a shady character in a cloak and hat carefully extracts – that is to say steals – a chicken from the pocket or sack at her side.

If Fried could be similarly concise with his thematic content,  he could go a long way toward achieving some of the greatness of Sydney J. Freedberg, to whom he often pays homage. (Fried has been both a student and junior colleague of Freedberg at Harvard) Freedberg, whatever his foibles may have been, was a superlative communicator on Early Modern art. His most well known  Painting in Italy 1500-1600 is still a landmark text on the topic. Freedberg’s contribution to the Baroque, particularly Circa 1600 – A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting, is perhaps the germinal seed of Fried’s endeavour. And it is easily a more approachable text.

That Fried will have an enduring legacy in art history is not in question; whether his approach to the Baroque will radiate an influence beyond his own publications remains to be seen. Fried has since returned to subjects perhaps more suited to his approach, with his new book Four Honest Outlaws, a look at the work of four contemporary artists.

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Note:

Hasan Niyazi is an independent arts writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He first fell in love with Early Modern art and history after finding a copy of Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts on the ground at age 9. He explores the interface of art history and the information age at his blog, Three Pipe Problem.  He is also currently working on an online open educational resource (OER) dedicated to Raphael studies and tweets as @3pipenet.

He wishes to thank Benjamin Harvey for his assistance and advice.

An overview of the entire catalogue, Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome, by Monica Bowen, is available at the art history blog, Alberti’s Window.

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Enter Blake Gopnik, brother of Adam and former art critic of The Washington Post. His October 21st posting on The Daily Beast seizes on one of the photographs of the murdered Gaddafi and juxtaposes it with Hans Holbein the Younger’s great Dead Christ. It is a brilliant visual pairing. What goes wrong is the commentary.

An art historian by training, Gopnik is intimate with Western art’s two millennia of immersion in the Christ story. He just does not have it quite right. Eager to establish his own unbelief (“I am the most convinced of atheists . . . “), he is content with a sentimental dilution of the meaning of what Holbein depicted. He skips across the surface of the Christian story to offer a superficially interesting, but skewed reflection on the meaning of it all.

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He starts off nicely, noting the photos as a variety of porn, but slips quickly into a sentimental reflection on the meaning of the juxtapositon:

To my Christian-trained eyes, there’s huge pathos in these images, regardless of the monster they show. Since the Middle Ages at least, Western image-making has had the sight of greatness, cast down and bloodied, right at its heart.

Greatness cast down? The phrase suggests an equivalence between Muammar Gaddafi, in death, and the executed Jesus of Nazareth.

[Our Western eyes] see those photos of Gaddafi, alive and suffering and then as a blasted corpse, and head straight to the crucifixion scenes that are the bedrock of our visual culture. Some Christians would say that this is one of the gifts that their religion and its art give them: That they can understand the suffering of Christ as standing for the suffering that anyone else could ever endure. Even in the case of someone as evil as Gaddafi, say Christians, we profit from being able to see a piece of suffering humanity in him, because what he’s enduring was also endured by God’s son.

That has it a tad jumbled. The Christ story tells of a man—Son of God—who submitted to torture and death unjustly imposed. He was an innocent. His suffering, as Christians believe, was redemptive, a sacrifice freely chosen. In theological terms as Holbein understood them, his dead Christ is the lamb slaughtered in atonement for man’s sins. The death depicted was an act of reconciliation and salvation. Holbein renders the final event of Jesus’ life—his death and the beginnings of bodily putrefaction—as an historical happening. The image mattered to Holbein’s audience because they recognized these events to be also divine mysteries, the harrowing prelude to resurrection. And to the promise of eternal life.

No glory whatever awaits Gaddafi, rightly called a “gilded idol” by Gopnik. He means well, certainly, but his column dissolves into a faulty analogy that serves mainly to remind us of Gopnik’s own tender soul. And the maudlin hash that secular culture commentators are apt to make when they mount the pupit.

We can be glad that Gopnik is sensitive to suffering humanity. But an art historian really ought to have sharper grasp of the meaning of the imagery his profession asks him to know. Without that, our scholar-pundit simply contributes to the religiously impoverished journalism that is one of the chief determinants of a shallow popular culture.

Note: Reader Declan Kane emails to state that the point of Western crucifixion scenes is to reveal to the viewer the reality of a suffering God. Gopnik—well meaning but ignorant—reverses and, so doing, falsifies the very imagery he discusses.

Well said, Declan. Thank you.

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© 2011 Maureen Mullarkey

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O’Reilly brings to art an intuitive regard for man’s sense of place. It is a sensibility that makes the locks on the Union Street Bridge, spanning Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a significant aspect of home. Under her eye, urban details can as easily approach the wellsprings of serenity as a Douglas fir on Long Island’s North Fork, where O’Reilly spends her weekends.

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Elizabeth O'Reilly, "Red Truck, Reflected" (2011)

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This, her eighth solo exhibition at George Billis Gallery, marks a return to pure painting after working in collage—painting’s alter ego—for several years. Her willingness to move between means, to exchange an expected one for another, indicates a restless concern for getting it right. Mastery is rooted in self-possession no less than in technique. The trajectory of O’Reilly’s successive exhibitions points to a painter striving to possess herself in her art in order to suit her means of expression to her own temperament.

It is her ability to work gracefully and persuasively within the sharp-edged constraints of cut-paper collage that best distinguishes her from her mentor, Lois Dodd. Both share the same beneficent light that is so generous with color, eliminating the harsh tones and discordances that trap lesser representational painters.  Both are adept at the free, fluid brushwork necessitated by working en plein air.

Elizabeth O'Reilly, "Sunset at Carroll Street" (2011)

Those similarities between them serve to emphasize an unfashionable truth: that tradition—fertile inheritance—is the bedrock on which individual achievement is built.  O’Reilly has not followed Dodd into fey or whimsical motifs. The character of her creative endowment does not permit it. For the last few years she has been altering her means instead of her subjects. Her adventures in collage prove fruitful in the recent painting.

Green Triangle, Union Street (2011) is a beguiling instance of the carry-over into oil of the tightening and clarifying of forms that knifed paper makes obligatory. The triangle of the title is simply a shaft of light falling across a faded green, industrial building that fills the upper right quadrant of the canvas. The immediate foreground is empty of everything but light. The void recedes into the distance, broken dramatically by the verticals of a traffic light and the arms of a canal crossing barrier. Bright candy cane stripes on the moveable arms provide patterned, complementary relief to the subdued tones of the surrounding architecture and a loose tangle of street greenery . Low-slung, the featured building is a fitting synecdoche of a neighborhood erected on marshy ground that cannot sustain the weight of tall construction. Coloration, graceful yet still convincing, raises what could have been a dingey scene into an homage to quotidian places.

O’Reilly’s gift for rendering is everywhere apparent. In that regard, the exhibition offers substantial nourishment to other painters. My own preferences tilt in favor of the collages. Composed from cunningly shaped and toned segments of watercolor wash, they strike the eye as paintings first. Sunset at Carroll Street (2011) is a small glory of darkling washes punctuated by pale strips of dying natural light and dots of street lamps emerging from mottled gloom. Red Truck, Reflected (2011) is another lovely performance. Deft, limpid reflections of a parked truck in the moving water of the Gowanus are at once faithful to reality yet wholly abstract.

Elizabeth O’Reilly at George Billis Gallery, 521 West 26th St., 212-645-2621.This review appeared first in CityArts, October 14, 2011.

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©2011 Maureen Mullarkey

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Peter Johann Geiger, Christopher Columbus, Discoverer of America (1886)

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The consummate historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in his Pulitzer Prize winning Admiral of the Ocean Sea, describes Columbus this way:

Christopher Columbus, Discoverer of the New World, was first and foremost a sailor. Born and reared in Genoa, one of the oldest European seafaring communities, as a youth he made several voyages in the Mediterranean, where the greatest mariners of antiquity were bred. At the age of twenty-four, by a lucky chance he was thrown into Lisbon, center of European oceanic enterprise; and there, while employed partly in making charts and partly on long voyages under the Portuguese flag, he conceived the great enterprise that few but a sailor could have executed. That enterprise was simply to reach “The Indies”–Eastern Asia— by sailing west. It took him about ten years to gain support for this idea, and he never did execute it, because a vast continent stood in the way. America was discovered by Columbus purely by accident and was named for a man who had nothing to do with it. We now honor Columbus for something that he never intended to do, and never knew he had done. Yet we are right in so honoring him, because no other sailor had the persistence, the knowledge and the sheer guts to sail thousands of miles into the unknown ocean until he found land.

This was the most spectacular and most far-reaching geographical discovery in recorded human history.

One of the greatest seamen of all time, he was also an interesting man who lived in interesting times:

Born at the crossroads between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he showed the qualities of both eras. He had the firm religious faith, the a priori reasoning, and the close communion the Unseen typical of the early Christian centuries. Yet he also had the scientific curiosity, the zest for life, the feeling for beauty and the striving for novelty that we associate with the advancement of learning.

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Posthumous portrait of Columbus (16th C.)

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That is the paperback précis of a more nuanced passage that appears in the original 2-volume biography. His era, as Morison told it, bears a certain similarity to our own. Note the second sentence:

At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .

Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”

Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.

Note: A reader writes to tell me that I neglected to give the full citation for Geiger’s painting. The portrait of Columbus is a detail from Allegory of the Territories, an extended work celebrating the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558). It hangs in a small castle museum in Trieste.

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On show is a collaborative series of 31 collages by then-eighth graders at the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side. During the autumn of 2001, the youngsters attended an exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s narrative collages at the Whitney. The exhibition came packaged with a battery of lesson plans, timelines and web resources designed for the classroom. Kids set to work tapping their inner Lawrence by illustrating the story of 9/11 as they—and their classroom mentors— experienced it. The result is an oddly truncated exercise in sanitized storytelling that sacrifices historical understanding to a bien pensant avoidance of the obvious. Call it a pious commitment to denial.

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"American flags appeared everywhere" (2001)

A full quarter of the panels—8 out of 31—preen themselves on the sly implication that America is just one more rogue state. There is no mention of Al Queda or enemy assault. Instead, cartoon marines head to Afghanistan. Bombs drop on Afghanistan. A soldier lectures on “bad” Arabs while his off-stage audience claps. People start “using the flag as a symbol of war.” One panel growls: “War was glorified and commercialized.” Such wording hardly came unprompted from the mouths of babes who seem never to have heard the word jihad. The caption is as vague and reductive as the image that carries it. In context, the censure applies not to fanatics who shout “Allahu Akbar” in bloody ecstasy but to America.

That and similarly weighted captions do nothing to increase understanding of 9/11. Viewers are simply expected to applaud the program for its enlightened refusal to see evil anywhere but at home where “mosques were burned” and “Muslims were dehumanized.” And “some Arab-Americans were even murdered.” (That one is especially grotesque, given that—then, as now—Jews are the preferred target of bias crimes.) In a perverse inversion of sympathy, the tragic splendor of victimhood accrues to Muslims, not to annihilated New Yorkers.

Art is not discursive; it cannot be argued with. Children’s art is particularly insulated from criticism. Adolescent distortions of fact—or raw execution— earn a pass on the ground of expression. No one can to bring to bear Lawrence’s achievement on childish simulations. The exhibition’s patchwork of Individual panels adopt bright color, simplistic shapes, occasional cartoony touches—visual tropes lazily associated with frankness. Each unit in this untrained ensemble offers the artless vivacity that mothers admire on refrigerator doors across the fruited plain. That is very nice for Mom. But it has scant relation to the products of a cultivated hand: Lawrence’s compositional complexity and graphic subtlety. More significantly, the project is sorely impoverished as acknowledgment of the massacre of innocents.

Right-thinking, not art, is the point here. Collage provides a pretext for commentary emblematic of the distance between political posture and observable reality. But we cannot blame the eighth graders. Their recorded experience was filtered through the sanctimony of their elders and edited to the point of mendacity.

Viewed through the unripe eyes of Calhoun’s thirteen year olds, the collapse of the Twin Towers might have been a natural disaster. Captions tell us that the “The loss was sudden and great;” “Smoke and dust were everywhere”  and “The streets were empty.” For all the project’s pretense to chronicle, nothing indicates why. “People donated blood”. So? Blood drives are commonplace. What distinguished this one from others? “The people were afraid.” But of what?

Yes, “people still miss the Twin Towers.” But why are they gone? Did they just fall down of their own accord? Might their destruction have had something to do with the lethal ideology of Islamist jihadists? Or with Islam’s theological imperative toward war with the infidel and the religiously sanctioned violence of classic Islamic jurisprudence? The display keeps mum on the critical matter of responsibility.

Yes, “smoke and dust were everywhere” but what caused it? No hint appears that it came from burning skyscrapers in which 3,000 civilians were slaughtered. What was the instrument of mass murder? The Calhoun class noticed military fighter jets flying over the city but missed the two commercial jets hijacked by the Koran-inspired assassins. No one seems to know a shred of Islam’s long history, dating from the 7th century, of lust for conquest.

The Calhoun community—as DC Moore refers to it—believes in original sin. But only America carries the stain.

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© Maureen Mullarkey

Note: This review appeared first in CityArts, September 14, 2011, under the title “Children of the Towers.”

Next Note: Choire Sicha, writing in The Awl, called this a “really mean” review about the art of eighth graders. Does Mr. Sicha know how to read?

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Francois Louis Bocion, "A Man Fishing" (19th C.)

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Though not necessarily in the ordinary way. The ancient story Tobias and the Angel comes a bit closer to the mark. Often considered biblical, it is not. The Book of Tobit is part of the Apocrypha, a narrative collection rejected by the early Church Fathers. Nonetheless, it has prompted some marvelous painting.

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Jacopo Vignalli, "Tobias & the Angel" (17th C. Italian)

The tale begins with Tobit, who defies a law that forbids burying murdered Jews. (There is analogy to Antigone here. It lies in an individual’s defiance of an inhumane law that refuses burial and, thereby, disparages the dead.) Tobit is punished for his insurrection by being blinded by birds. The sightless father, no longer able to travel, sends his son Tobias to a faraway town to collect a debt due him. Along the way, a stranger befriends Tobias and guides him to the town.

Anonymous Puerto Rican folk sculpture (c. 1850-1925)

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Along the way, the pair kill and dissect a huge fish. Tobias does not yet know his protector and companion is the angel Raphael. But under the angel’s guidance, a poultice is made of the fish’s guts that later restores the father’s eyesight. And—as anything angelically devised should—dispels a demon. Meanwhile, the angel guides Tobias across the Tigris to safety.

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Andrea del Verrocchio, "Tobias & the Angel" (c. 1470-75)

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Verrocchio’s version, with Tobias a young boy and the fish a mere trifle, is the best-known version. But there are so many. Tobias grows older in some and the fish can be quite ferocious at times:

Peter Lastman, "Tobias & the Angel" (early 17th C.)

For reasons of my own, it is the fish I am after. A fish with salutary healing powers. An aquatic miracle worker and demon-slayer—one that grills up nicely, like a fresh sardine.  Nevertheless, I would gladly settle for an angel as evocative of divine command as this fine Florentine one:

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"Tobias & the Angel" (17th C.)

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© 2011 Maureen Mullarkey