[Eight years ago next
month, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in mid-town Manhattan, just four
years after it reopened following an extensive renovation that added nearly one
third again as much space to the existing museum. Accompanied by my late mother and my frequent
theater companion (whose guests we were in reality), our purpose was to see two
new exhibits of artists Mom and I have always liked tremendously: Vincent van
Gogh (1853-1890) and Joan Miró
(1893-1983). I originally wrote this report, part of a
longer one covering other events as well (including Fritz
Scholder: Indian/Not Indian at the
National Museum of the American Indian in 2008, on which I blogged on 20 March
2011), on 10 December 2008, before I started ROT; I pulled it from my pre-blog archives because, first, I thought the
look back at one of my most pleasurable art experiences would be interesting in
its own right and, second, I’m working on a play report for next week and
haven’t finished anything suitable for posting this week. (Hey, sometimes necessity is just a
mother!)
I hope ROTters will agree with
my estimation and enjoy the time trip. ~Rick]
On Wednesday,
27 November 2008, the day before Thanksgiving, my friend Diana invited my
mother and me to join her as her guests at New York’s Museum of Modern Art,
where she had taken out a membership this year, so we wouldn’t have to stand on
line for Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night (21 September 2008-5 January
2009) and Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 (2 November 2008-12 January 2009).
We readily took her up on the gesture because both artists are favorites of
both my mom and me. (In fact, Vincent van Gogh is one of my all-time
favorite artists of any genre and any period.)
Fortunately
for us, the van Gogh show is small so we could manage both exhibits in one
go—with a lunch break in between as a respite. We’ve learned from
experience—we’re veteran gallery-hoppers from way back—that we can’t do two
large exhibits at a time without our legs and focus giving out. I love to
read all the wall panels, and most of the plaques with the individual pieces,
and that can draw out even a moderate-sized show to a two-hour walk.
(Sometimes the curatorial texts are more informative and interesting than other
times. The Dada show a few years back at the National Gallery of
Art and, later, MoMA, in 2006, reported on ROT
on 20 February 2010, was like a fascinating lesson in both cultural
history and world events and put the art in context; the van Gogh texts were
nearly valueless this time around.) Also, with works like the Dada pieces
and Miró’s, it’s interesting to see what media the artists used—those guys were
all such experimentalists that they had habits of using really odd
materials. Miró, for instance, includes a lot of tarpaper and sandpaper
in the works at MoMA and painted several works on exhibit on copper
or Masonite (either the rough side or the smooth side, depending on what
effect he was after). One of Miró’s assemblies includes a painted (blue)
chickpea!
We
started out at Colors of the Night, whose focus, as the title suggests,
is the nighttime paintings of the artist, starting, chronologically, with The Potato Eaters (1885).
The show, of course, included the gorgeous Starry
Night (1889, and the only painting I can think of that inspired a
rock ’n’ roll song: Don McLean’s 1971 “Vincent,” known as “Starry,
Starry Night”), possibly my favorite of all the paintings by van Gogh.
Covering both exterior scenes and interior scenes lit by gas or candles, some
dark and shadowy, like The
Potato Eaters, others artificially bright, like Dance Hall in Arles
(1888), the exhibit includes only 23 painting (plus 9 drawings and several
letters by the artist).
The
curators want to make the point that night was a special inspiration to van
Gogh (though we know that what attracted him to Arles and Provence was the
extreme brightness of the southern sun and the colors that virtually assaulted
him in that yellow light). I suppose there’s a legitimate argument to be
made for that point (if art needs an argument to justify an exhibit), but my
suspicion is that someone wanted to mount a van Gogh show and, there having
been so many just in recent years, that she or he decided there had to be
a “unique” perspective to justify a new exhibit. Anyway, that’s what it
looked like to me. Not that I care, of course. I’ll accept any
excuse to mount a van Gogh show; all I want to do is see the paintings.
And if The Starry Night’s
there, or his sunflowers, or some of his portraits, I don’t even need a
rationale.
This
is why I said that the explanatory texts are nearly worthless in this
show. The justification of the displays and the brief discussions of the
inspirations van Gogh had for painting some of the scenes (drawn, obviously,
from his letters to his brother and others, some of which are also on display
with the art) are often interesting on their own merits, but it isn’t really
helpful in appreciating the paintings, which are fully self-explanatory as far
as I’m concerned. (When it came to Miró, his art is so complex and
idiosyncratic—and he often had ulterior motives for his work—that the
curatorial texts are more revealing.)
The
letters, which I have read before, are remarkable in their own right
anyway. I don’t think there is a similar kind of documentation for any
other artist because van Gogh wrote his brother (especially), other family
members, and artist friends and colleagues detailed descriptions of some of the
paintings on which he was working or scenes he’d seen which he wanted to
paint. He wrote about their emotional reverberations as well as the
technical aspects, sometimes even including sketches of the painting he was
making. The letters also often included specific indications of the
colors van Gogh was working with or intended to use, and in some cases he has
labeled the sketch itself with the color designations he was
contemplating. Now, the pertinent letters, unlike the wall plaques (which
often quote from the letters), are fascinating commentary on the artist’s work;
but we don’t need a rationale to line up the letters with the paintings.
It
struck me as strained, too, that the exhibit of night scenes lumps outdoor
painting like The Starry
Night and the equally striking The
Starry Night over the Rhône (1888) with indoor scenes lit by gas or
candles, like Dance Hall in
Arles and Night
Cafe (1888), or even The
Potato Eaters, which is barely lit at all. The hour may have
been the same, but the techniques van Gogh used to create the impressions were
vastly different (especially the early work, The
Potato Eaters, one of the painter’s first paintings).
There
also seems to be a significant difference, in a painterly sense, between the
true night scenes, The Starry
Nights, and the twilight landscapes like The Stevedores in Arles
(1888) and Landscape with
Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon (1889), which have their own
fascination because not only are they depictions of evening over the Provençale
countryside, but they include workers at their labor, a subject that really did
occupy van Gogh both artistically and philosophically. (He believed that
artists were also laborers, just in the fields of culture. Artists,
farmers, and dockworkers were kin, and labor was an ennobling endeavor. The Potato Eaters was a
subject van Gogh chose not because of the nighttime lighting, but because they
were a family of farmers ending their work day with a meal in their
homestead. This was a subject worthy of art to van Gogh. At least
that’s how I understand the work.) Further, the difference between
depicting star- and moonlit night and rendering evening under the dying sun
seems as great to me as capturing night is from painting bright day under the
Provençale sun. It’s a little like comparing apples and oranges by saying
they’re both fruit!
By
the way, it’s not true that the explications were totally useless. I
learned (or was reminded, I don’t know) that when van Gogh painted his night
scenes, whether indoors or out, he used the available light at the scene and
painted live, as it were. It’s not so astonishing to picture the artist
sitting in a corner of the cafe with his easel and palette while the drinkers
and revelers enjoyed their evening. Others had done that, of course, most
notably Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). But to imagine the
strange, red-headed pastor’s son sitting in the peasant family’s little parlor
while they ate supper and drawing them, night after night for several evenings
as the text describes, is certainly an odd image. What must they have
been thinking of this odd duck? And to picture van Gogh standing on the
edge of town or down by the riverbank at night, peering at his canvas as he
tries to capture the stars twinkling above the town or the lights on the water
without even a lantern to help him discern the colors of the pigments on his
palette . . . well, it’s no wonder the Arlesians were sure this foreign artist
was a fou roux (“crazy redhead,”
Van Gogh’s nickname). But
what a fou roux!
(Antonin
Artaud, 1896-1948, by the way, insisted that van Gogh wasn’t nuts. In his
1947 piece Van Gogh: the Man Suicided by Society, Artaud asserted that it was all a conspiracy of the
establishment, especially the medical establishment, to keep him out of society
because he saw too clearly and told the truth. Of course, Artaud was nuts
himself, so from inside his head, van Gogh probably did seem perfectly rational.
If genius can look like insanity, it’s no great leap to figure that insanity
can look like genius, too. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.
Being neither insane—at least, I don’t think so—nor a genius—that one I’m
pretty sure of—what the hell would I know?)
Anyway,
aren’t we lucky van Gogh passed among us, tortured though he was, for however
brief a time. You can have your Sistine Chapel and your Mona Lisa . . .
give me The Starry Night
any time. (Really—give it to me. I’ll take it. No joke.
I will. I already use it as wallpaper on my computer’s desktop!)
After
our lunch break in the little MoMA Cafe 2, conveniently just outside the exit
from the van Gogh galleries, we went up to Joan Miró: Painting and
Anti-Painting 1927-1937. (This had been a week for exhibits of
opposites in art: Indian vs. Not Indian; Painting vs. Anti-Painting; and—by
implication—Night vs. Day. I just made all that up, of course; doesn’t
mean a damn thing!) Anyway, the Miró covers only ten years of his
long life but is a much bigger show than the van Gogh (whose whole
painting career lasted only ten years—though he produced around 900 paintings
and 1,100 drawings, most of them in the little over a year he spent in
Arles).
Painting
and Anti-Painting
explores 12 of Miró’s sustained series from the decade of ’27-’37, and includes
some 90 paintings, collages, objects, and drawings. It’s also a harder
show because, first, Miró, like Fritz Scholder, eschewed pretty pictures and
was deliberately working to “assassinate painting,” as he put it, and, second,
the 90-plus works in the exhibit, though they cover only ten years of the
artist’s prolific career, have an intellectual subtext. It is possible,
even desirable from my standpoint, to see the van Gogh show as a walk through a
selection of his work and just let the experience of the paintings affect you
however it will. But with the Miró work on display, even if you were
inclined to do only that—a much harder task, I submit, with this artist’s
work—you would miss a lot of the point of the exhibit, the experience.
Unless
you just don’t like van Gogh—and I don’t want to hear about it if you don’t!—it’s
hard not to enjoy, even revel in The
Colors of the Night, regardless of the curatorial gloss. First of
all, I find van Gogh’s work almost entirely emotional—and I think he painted
that way, too. He didn’t intellectualize or rationalize much—he was a
creature of feelings and senses. (I think, at base, Impressionism is
predominantly emotional: it’s a rendering of what the artist feels about a
subject, her or his reaction to it. Impressionists want to convey what
they felt, not what they saw. It’s more Stanislavsky than Brecht, if you
will.)
Miró
isn’t about what he feels so much as what he thinks—and what he wants you to
think. We may see that his impulses are destructive, as far as art is
concerned, but he has made rational choices about what to include in his art,
what materials to use, what to leave out. It’s not that Miró has no
passion or doesn’t display it—he’s no Vulcan with suppressed emotions—but he
decides rationally how he will convey his emotions as well as his thoughts and
ideas. This not only makes his work, especially when assembled in the
numbers of the MoMA show, hard to encounter, but very dense. A van Gogh
painting hits you pretty much all at once as soon as you see it. It’s a
gut response, reacting to the artist’s reaction. A Miró grows on
you, your response or understanding accumulates; knowing some background
or explication helps, too.
I
don’t need anyone to tell me what The
Starry Night means, but with Miró’s 1927 canvas titled Un Oiseau poursuit une abeille et la
baisse I needed some clues. First off, it is one of the few
pieces in the exhibition whose French title isn’t translated, which suggests
something. (The words are actually written across the canvas atop the
images Miró painted, suggesting that the words are important.) I looked
on the Internet to see if there was an “official” translation of the phrase,
and there really isn’t. One site said that the words are essentially
untranslatable into English (and another actually provided a translation that’s
wrong). So I went about translating it myself. The first part is
easy: “A bird pursues a bee and . . . .” At first I mistook the last two
words as a noun with the definite article: la
baisse means ‘the fall’ or ‘the drop.’ (What our stock market
has just gone through here was une
baisse.) In context, that doesn’t make much sense, though: “A
bird pursues a bee and the fall.” No synonym works any better. Then
I realized that the end of the phrase isn’t an article and a noun but a pronoun
and a verb; la
refers to une abeille.
As a verb, baisser
means ‘to drop,’ ‘to knock down,’ or words to that effect. So the phrase
now means, “A bird pursues a bee and knocks it down.” (The incorrect
translation on the ’Net was: “A bird pursues a bee and kisses it”; the
translator confused baiser,
‘to kiss,’ with baisser,
‘to knock down.’ Silly wabbit!)
Now,
the painting is extremely abstract—there’s no actual bird or bee on the
canvas—but it’s easily possible to see the blobs and splotches Miró painted as
representing such a picture. As long as you’re armed with the
interpretation of the words the artist put in the painting. You can also
certainly say that the painting bears no resemblance to a bird doing anything
at all to a bee—but the process is still intellectual in part. (A
Frenchman wouldn’t need to go through the translation tsuris, of course, but he’d
still have to do the interpreting and apply the text to the image and decide if
there’s any correlation.) This is the starkest example of what I mean,
but it’s emblematic, I think. And, at least for me, that’s why the Miró
show is more arduous than the van Gogh, which is more exhilarating. Not
that both aren’t worthy—just different cognitive experiences.
The
van Gogh exhibit is also a random excerpt of his work, taken from the whole
decade of his career. It may be a study of a certain technique—the
painting of night—though I dispute it’s cohesive enough to be that, but the
Miró is chronological and carefully arranged and selected so that it provides a
view of the process the artist went through to get from where he began in 1927
to where he ended in 1937. I could have started the van Gogh exhibit at
the end and gone backwards, or careened randomly from painting to painting and
had the same experience for the most part that I had going from start to
finish. If you don’t follow the Mirós in the order they are arranged, you
miss the progression, the changes the painter went through as he experimented
and developed new ideas. (This is particularly where the wall texts
help. Not only do they point out the variations in technique and
focus, they provide commentary from both Miró himself and contemporaries,
including critics and other artists.) What Painting and Anti-Painting
does is reveal the arc, the throughline, of one artist’s journey at a
significant point in his creative life. Aside from the art itself, which
can, of course, speak for itself, that’s a terrific perspective to have.
In
Miró’s case, what he was up to in this decade was tearing down and rebuilding
the art of painting. (I’m not sure he had intended to do the rebuilding—I
think it just happened despite his intentions.) The exhibit is arranged
into 12 groups of works, each set demonstrating one sortie in Miró’s
effort to “assassinate painting.” He approached this task as a sort of
anti-Grotowski of painting: whereas Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99) examined theater
and discarded what he determined was inessential, Miró examined painting and
began to expunge what was essential, including, first, paint itself—many of the
early works include bare spots of raw canvas—and even eliminating, as Holland
Cotter’s New York Times
review (“Miró, Serial Murderer of Artistic Conventions,” 31 October 2008) puts
it, the artist himself. (To continue the theatrical analogy, there’s
something Artaudian in Miró’s drive to destroy painting, just as Artaud wanted
to destroy theater.)
At
34, Miró had already established himself as an artist. He had succeeded
as a Surrealist, having moved to Paris in 1920 when the movement began,
and had also been influenced by Surrealism’s predecessor, Dadaism—a
resolutely anti-aesthetic cultural movement that grew out of the aftermath of
World War I and the devastations of mechanized war and the mechanized
society. Restless and endlessly inquisitive, Miró needed to move on to
something new, even radical (a trait he shared with his fellow Spaniard and
another influence, Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973), but there wasn’t anything on the
horizon, so he realized he’d have to invent it for himself and the first step,
he famously declared, was to erase what had gone before. The ten years
that followed were occupied by the painter’s efforts to overthrow the
established forms by whatever means he could imagine. His impulse to
change everything was exacerbated and informed by world events that overtook
him: the rise of fascism (in Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933) and the Spanish
Civil War in his native country (1936-39), the harbinger of another world
war.
It’s
little wonder, it seems to me, that an artist might renounce conventional
beauty in art—just as the Dadaists saw the destructiveness of machines and
technology and abandoned soothing aesthetics for more provocative
techniques. Oddly perhaps, both the Dadaists and Miró could still create
a kind of frightening and disquieting beauty—like the menacing splendor of a
lava flow or the chilling grace of a shark. In The Poetics, Aristotle said that
we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we would regard with disgust
if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us
pleasure; the same must be true of art in any form.
After
having discarded paint, the defining medium of the art of painting, Miró moved
on to eliminating painterly craft. In Spanish
Dancer I (1928), the artist assembled colored paper, sandpaper, and
a cut-out of a woman’s shoe on a wood panel. There’s not one image or
object which Miró created, nothing which required his artistic skill (or any
paint or pigment he applied to the collage). Later, Miró began to mangle
art history as well, with his deconstructions of old masters, as Dutch Interior I (1928),
the artist’s take on Hendrik Martensz Sorgh’s The Lutanist (1661), a painting
of a reclining woman being serenaded by a suitor, or La Fornarina (1929), a
seated nude portrait of Raphael’s lover, which both end up in Miró’s versions
as his familiar amoeba-like blobs in garish colors such as yellow, red, and
brown. In the end, Miró returned to painting (and his works after 1937
seem less angry and volatile), but in this developmental decade, the artist
engaged collage and assemblage and built art from unlikely found materials and
ready-mades.
[Mom
and I had always enjoyed van Gogh shows, but things didn’t always work out for
us. I went down to D.C. for the year-end
holidays in 1998 and my mother and I had planned to see the van Gogh exhibit at
the National Gallery of Art, Van Gogh's Van
Goghs (4 October 1998-3 January 1999),
but the show was so popular that Mother couldn’t get tickets—NGA, whose
admission is free, did issue tickets for entry to this exhibit to control
attendance—even after standing in line one afternoon in the hope of getting
lucky. In contrast, several years later,
Mom and I saw Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape (6 May-12 August 2012) at the NGA’s West Building. (I blogged on this show on 5 October 2012.)]
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