Category Archives: fine arts

Cezanne’s portait of Gustave Geffroy

In “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses Paul Cézanne’s portrait of the critic Paul Geffroy (1895-6), which led me to some congruent reflections.

Merleau-Ponty notes that the table “stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture.” In a photograph of M. Geffroy, the table’s edges would form parallel lines that would meet at one point, and the whole object would be more foreshortened. That is how an artist who followed what we call “scientific perspective” would depict the table. Why does Cézanne show it otherwise?

Imagine that you actually stood before Paul Geffroy in his study. You would not instantly see the whole scene. Your eye might settle on your host’s face, then jump to the intriguing statuette next to him. The shelves would at first form a vague pattern in the background. Objects for which you have names, such as books, would appear outlined, as borders filled with color. On the other hand, areas of the fireplace or wall would blend into other areas.

You would know that you could move forward toward M. Geffroy, in which case the table would begin to move below you. Just as you see a flying ball as something moving–not as a round zone of color surrounded by other colors–so you might see the table as something that could shift if you moved your body forward.

A photograph of this real-world scene would be a representation of it, very useful for knowing how M. Geffroy looked in his study, and possibly an attractive object in its own right. But the photo would not represent anyone’s experience of the scene. Instead, it would be something that you could experience, rather like the scene itself, by letting your eye move around it, identifying objects of interest, and gradually adding information. You would experience the photograph somewhat differently from the actual scene because you would know that everything was fixed and your body could not move into the space.

A representation of this scene using perspective’s “laws” would make the image useful for certain purposes–for instance, for estimating the size of the table. Michael Baxandall (1978) argued that Renaissance perspective originated in a commercial culture in which patrons enjoyed estimating the size, weight, and value of objects represented in paintings.

But other systems have different benefits. Here is a print in which Toyoharu Kunichika (1835-1900) uses European perspective for the upper floor and a traditional Chinese system (with lines that remain parallel and objects placed higher if they are further away) for the lower floor. As Toshidama writes, this combination is useful for allowing us to see as many people and events as possible.

Print by Toyoharu Kunichika from Toshidama Japanese Prints

Perspective does not tell us how the world is–not in any simple way. The moon is not actually the size of a window, although it is represented as such in a perspectival picture (East Asian or European). Perspective is a way of representing how we experience the world. And in that respect, it is partial and sometimes even misleading. It overlooks that for us, important things seem bolder; objects can look soft, cold or painful as well as large or small; and some things appear in motion or likely to move, while others seem fixed. We can see a whole subject (such as a French intellectual in his study) and parts of it (his beard), at once and as connected to each other.

Merleau-Ponty writes:

Gustave Geoffrey’s [sic] table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and in which they tend toward the geometric perspective. This is also what happens with colors. Pink upon gray paper colors the background green. Academic painting shows the background as gray, assuming that the picture will produce the same effect of contrast as the real object. Impressionist painting uses green in the background in order to achieve a contrast as brilliant as that of objects in nature. Doesn’t this falsify the color relationship? It would if it stopped there, but the painter’s task is to modify all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics of a real color. Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.

The deeper point is that a science of nature is not a science of human experience. Third-person descriptions or models of physical reality are not accounts of how we experience things. And even when we are presented with a scientific description, it is something that we experience. For instance, we actively interpret a photograph or a diagram; we do not automatically imprint all of its pixels. And we listen to a person lecture about science; we do not simply absorb the content.

There are truths that can be expressed in third-person form–for example, that human eyes and brains work in certain ways. But there are also truths about how we experience everything, including scientific claims.

And Cézanne is a scientist of experience.

Quotations from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964); image by Paul Cézanne, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The image on the Mus?e d’Orsay’s website suggests a warmer palette, but I don’t know whether it’s open-source. I also refer to Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy : A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1978).

Rilke, The Grownup

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The Grownup

All this stood on her and was the world
And stood on her with everything, fear and grace,
As trees stand, growing and straight,
All image and imageless like the Ark. 
And solemnly, as if placed on a people.

And she endured it, bore it--
The flying, escaping, distant,
The immense, not yet learned--
Calm as a woman bearing water
In a full jug. Right in the midst of the game,
Transforming and preparing for something else,
The first white veil, gently gliding,

Fell over her open face
Almost opaque and never lifting again
And somehow to all your questions
Only vaguely offering an answer:
In you, you who has been a child, in you. 

        — Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Peter Levine)

The original poem, “Die Erwachsene” from New Poems (1907), is here. The title is the ordinary German word for “adult,” but etymologically, it means “one who has accomplished growth.” Rilke invents a word in his final line, “Kindgewesene,” which I translate here as “one who has been a child.” All of us (even the youngest) are both things at once.

The first lines describe a female person in the past tense. Every reading that I have seen presumes that she is a child, but that is not explicit, and the poem’s title names an adult.

She is with something. The phrase “all this” or “this all” (das alles) suggests that the narrator is referring to everything we perceive, the world. It exceeds representative language–being immense and fleeting–yet it has a heavy weight, which she bears calmly. It is likened to a tree and to the Ark of the Covenant. Trees do not intend anything; they simply grow. The Biblical Ark incorporated golden images of cherubim (Ex. 25:18), but it also contained the written prohibition against graven images, so that it was ganz Bild und bildlos–“all image and imageless.” A tree, the Ark, and perhaps a child are alike in that they have meanings for us but do not intend meanings.

At a specific moment, in the middle of an absorbing activity (a Spiel or game), a second object enters, a veil that descends permanently over this person’s face. Until now, she has seemed oblivious or absorbed in her context, but now there are things that are concealed from her, and vice-versa.

This veil–not the girl or woman–responds unclearly to “your” questions. With this evocation of “you,” there is another person in the poem: presumably, Rilke’s adult reader. The poem advises “you” to look for answers not through a veil but within yourself as someone who has been a child.

We might think of time as a series of instants, of which the present is merely one. That is how the time of clocks and calendars works: a system with which we analyze and control aspects of nature. One year we are children; another, we are grown. But consciousness is not simply located in the present. What we experience at any given moment is a set of meaningful objects that have various durations and histories, often extending into the future as well back into the remembered past. Like the objects that we experience, our selves have histories and hopes. Sometimes we are aware of the kind of time that clocks measure, and sometimes we are absorbed in an activity (bis mitten unterm Spiel) when a sudden change occurs.

Put another way: I am not merely an organism located at a time and a place but also a person who has been a child, who has grown, and who feels the weight of things “not yet learned.” The good and bad things that matter–both fear and grace–extend in time and carry me backward and ahead.

Kant deduced from the fact that we experience objects with duration that there must be a lasting self, but his deduction yielded an “I” that was invisible, simple, and identical for all who reason. As Merleau-Ponty writes, Kant’s argument “rids the world of its opacity and its transcendence. … There is nothing hidden behind … faces and gestures, no domain to which I have no access, merely a little shadow [the self] which owes its very existence to the light” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, xiii).

Looking inward, we should instead find a self that is complicated, dynamic, elusive, and situated. Rilke explores opacity and transcendence in this poem, which is about having both a past and a present.

Quotation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (Routledge, 2002). The Rilke translation is mine and misses the tight rhythm and rhyme-scheme of the original. See also: Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall“; phenomenology of nostalgia; Kieran Setiya on midlife; three great paintings in dialogue (addressing Rilke’s 5th Duino Elegy); and the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s “Lines Above Tintern Abbey“.

one supple line

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According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than a quarter of a million Americans work professionally as graphic designers. Each designer produces many images, many of which are reproduced widely. Of course, other countries also have designers and commercial artists. Thanks to them all, we are awash in billions of images: illustrations, logos, advertisements, cartoons, explanations, warnings, decorations, and more.

Coming after modernism, today’s designers often produce abstracted images of real-world objects, highly simplified for impact and legibility. I assume that we can interpret such images because of conventions that we learn, plus the natural inclination of the human eye and brain to match patterns to observed realities (Gombrich 1961).

I illustrate this post not with a contemporary graphic image but with a painting by the noble courtier Konoe Nobutada (1565-1614) entitled “Meditating Daruma.” Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, who probably lived about one thousand years before Nobutada and is credited with introducing Chan Buddhism to China. In turn, Chan evolved into Japanese Zen.

One of the main stories about Bodhidharma tells that the Emperor Wu of Liang asked this barbarian monk how much merit he had earned for his generous support of Buddhism. Bodhidharma said “none,” because the emperor had acted with worldly intent. The monk then meditated in front of a wall for nine years. I assume this is what he is doing in this painting. The text says: “Quietness and emptiness are enough to pass through life without error.”

I would submit that this image is very fine. I tried copying it freehand, and every version that I made was worse than Nobutada’s. Thus the image passed Leon Batista Alberti’s test of beauty (“nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse”). However, I was the one conducting the test. I can easily imagine that many of the professional graphic artists working today could reproduce it perfectly, or indeed rival it.

In the process of trying to copy this painting, I discovered that each of my outlines of a hooded figure looked like a person who was staring into the distance, albeit at a different distant point each time I drew it. Although Bodhidharma is often depicted as irascible, here we cannot see his expression, and his back conveys peace.

The design of a meditating monk is simple, and today we are surrounded with highly effective simplified designs; but I find this one far more moving that most others. The reason is its source. This is not a logo for some modern business. Instead, it is an object that is about four centuries old (from long before the deluge of mechanically reproducible images), made by an artist who pioneered a new form of Zen art. The simplification here is his invention, not a prevailing style.

In his discussion of Nobutada, Stephen Addiss writes, “Ignoring the colorful and delicate style of court artists of his day, he brushed simple ink paintings of Zen avatars on coarse, sometimes recycled paper. Like his new style of calligraphy, these paintings were revolutionary” (Addiss 1989, p. 23).

Furthermore, by representing Daruma in meditation, this artist presented an aspirational self-portrait. Although Nobutada was a rich courtier rather than a monk, he must have performed sitting meditation, or at least honored it. Thus the image is a trace of a real person’s life, which, in turn, was inspired by the person he depicts.

We might consider that art, in general, has these two dimensions. One is the form of the object as perceived by human beings, with our naturally evolved eyes and brains. We tend to match the form to objects in our environment. The other is the story of the object’s origin within a larger historical context. Here, for example, we see a single line that conjures the idea of person wrapped in a robe, and we also see also an artifact of Konoe Nobutada, of early 17th-century Japan, and of the Zen tradition extending back for a thousand years. The provenance of the painting not only raises its monetary value but also makes it more genuinely moving than a contemporary image would be.

This idea–an abstract and universal concept is also the outcome of a human act–seems resonant with Buddhism. Although Bodhidharma is quasi-mythical, he has long been associated with the Lankavatara Sutra. That text begins with the standard formula, “Thus I have heard,” and it purports to be a recollection of the actual Buddha by his disciple Ananda (he of the perfect memory). But it can’t possibly be historical, or told by Ananda, or written by Bodhidharma. Its authorship is a fiction excused by the thesis that it conveys: namely, that “There is no one who speaks, nor is there anyone who hears. Lord of Lanka, everything in the world is like an illusion.”

Sources: Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1961); Stehen Addiss, The Art of Zen (Echo Point, 1989); The Lankavatara Sutra, translated by Red Pine (Counterpoint, 2013). The digital image and translation of the Chinese verse come from the Mountain Cloud Zen center. See also Verdant mountains usually walk; the sublime and other people; Ito Jakuchu at the National Gallery; on inhabiting earth with inaccessibly beautiful things; and (from 2004), aesthetics and history.

Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing

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My family and I are going briefly to the Netherlands soon. In preparation, I reviewed Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), which has helped me to think about pictures since I first encountered this book in the 1990s.

Alpers’ theory is subtler than my summary, but a good way to introduce it might be to consider two paintings (neither of them discussed by Alpers).

First, an Annunciation by Fra Angelico from 15th-century Florence:

This image conveys a story (Luke 1:26-38). The important questions for the viewer are what is happening and what that signifies. (In this case, the significance is cosmic, since the the Incarnation is underway.) The characters are central; other objects function like scenery and props for these protagonists.

The frame is like a window or a proscenium arch that allows us to look into a defined space. We are assumed to stand or kneel in front of the frame, looking toward the vanishing point right above Mary’s head. Each object is clearly outlined–probably first drawn, then colored in. The artist has analyzed reality in terms of these outlines. For instance, the building is a perfect rectangle; the arches are half-circles. And the bodies of the angel and woman are meaningful shapes, since humans were created in the image of God. By showing the true shape of important objects and people, the artist conveys truths of theology, geometry, and other worthy subjects.

Now compare a View of Egmond aan Zee by Salomon van Ruisdael.

This work also shows a few people in a context. But now we might imagine that we always have a visual field that changes as we move our eyes, our heads, and our locations in space. We can’t even tell the shape of our current visual field because it moves as we try to look at the edges. This picture is like a finite rectangle that has been snipped out of the whole field at a certain moment and hung on the wall. It is formed not of outlines but of brushstrokes. It was probably not drawn but composed with paint.

Van Ruisdael surely had aesthetic reasons for what he included and where he placed these objects, enjoying the location of the bluff, the darker cloud, and the church tower. But he hid his own contrivance by allowing the frame to interrupt the landscape and clouds. We do not imagine that the frame is something real, like a window, but just the edge of the image.

It is not clear where the viewer is located, partly because there are hardly any objects with sharp edges that would allow us to infer a vanishing point. We might be looking gently down on the scene, or we might not occupy any single location. Similarly, a map presents the earth as it would be seen from no particular point, without foreshortening. The Dutch were fascinated by maps and excellent at mapmaking.

All the objects are interesting; the eye does not necessarily settle on anything in particular but moves across the canvas. Everything is bathed in the same light and air. Something is happening–a group moves toward the town–but the painting is not a meaningful story, and the best question is not “What does their activity signify?”

Alpers thinks the purpose of this second work is to describe the reality that the viewer already knows, because the viewer delights both in the physical world and in the art of description. Other critics have supposed that appreciation of the natural world is spiritual, based on the idea of a creator.

Here, “art” has its original, Latin sense, which encompasses what we would call science as well as painting. A Dutch person would buy a van Ruisdael for the same reason that he would look through van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, Christiaan Huygens’ telescope, a lens ground by Spinoza, or at a map. He wanted to learn more about how things look.

Alpers identifies the first model with Italy and the second with the North, especially the Netherlands, but she resists a simple dichotomy. The two “schools” were in close contact from the 1400s on. Major artists intuitively understood the differences, and some (such as Michelangelo) wrote explicitly about them. Unsurprisingly, some of the most interesting artists disrupted the dichotomy in original ways. Alpers discusses Rembrandt as an example and mentions some Southern cases that are beyond the scope of her book about Dutch art: Titian, Caravaggio, and Velazquez.

The two models are heuristics for understanding a wide range of European painting, but great artists have challenged it.

Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

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One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- Wallace Stevens (1921)

After the first stanza, it’s reasonable to think: I should have a wintry mind so that I can regard this winter landscape appreciatively. I should be appropriately attuned to what I observe, especially if it is nature. I should be worthy of what I experience.

We are used to people who admonish us: “Little we see in Nature that is ours” (Wordworth). Before we can have “glimpses that would make [us] less forlorn,” we must change ourselves. Legions of religious thinkers have also urged us to make ourselves worthy of glimpses of the divine. As the Psalmist says, “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?”

This theory of the poem can survive the second stanza, where being “cold a long time” plays the role of having “a mind of winter,” and the objects are junipers with ice instead of pines with snow. It seems as if we should be cold like the trees. We may even feel a tinge of regret if we are too comfortable to regard nature’s austere beauty.

But this theory collapses in the third stanza, with the word “not.” It seems that we can regard a snowy landscape with or without a mind that resembles it. Only if the mind is not wintry and cold can we perceive misery. If we hear misery in the winter wind, we do not have a wintry mind.

Wintry mind + junipers shagged with ice = no sensation of misery
Non-wintry mind + junipers shagged with ice = sensation of misery

I, for one, assume that I ought to be able to feel suffering in nature. That would be an indication of my sensitivity, a virtue that poems often recommend.

Now I am beginning to wonder if I should avoid having a wintry mind and being cold for a long time. After all, the dead are the ones who are coldest for the longest. They are the ones without compassion.

Reading on (through the single sentence of this poem), we learn that the sound that could make us think of misery is a wind that blows “for the listener.” Does it have a purpose, an intention? Does it want to instruct us about misery–or about something else?

Before it concludes, the poem’s single sentence refutes such anthropomorphism. The land can’t think or talk. The poem instructs us that the listener (a “he”) is nothing; he only sees what the objective world offers, and he perceives nothing that actually is.

There isn’t misery in “the sound of a few leaves,” nor is there misery in the beholder (a listener and viewer), but there is misery–as well as “distant glitter”–in the experience, unless one is dead. The poem is a representation of the relationship between the mind and object (which, together, make a “snow man”).

One must have the wintry mind of an abstract modernist not to hear sadness in this.

[After I wrote this, I searched my own blog and found a response to the same poem that I’d written in 2012: the tree and the rock. See also: Wallace Stevens’ idea of order; and the fetter; Cuttings.]