Cézanne at the Courtauld

Paul Cézanne, The Card Players, 1890-92 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

I was in London last week and lucky enough to find time to pop into the Courtauld Gallery in order to see their exhibition on “Cézanne’s Card Players“. The exhibition focuses on a series of paintings made by Paul Cézanne of peasant card players and pipe smokers. The paintings are themselves tremendous  - astonishing in many respects – and they speak powerfully to the very business of painting a particular form of life. As T.J. Clark has recently noted in the London Review of Books:

[Cézanne's peasants] are not producing ‘themselves’ for the painter-viewer. Which is to say, they come to portraiture from a world – from a class position – just a little outside the genre’s suppositions and implicit bargains. That is the point. They are awkward, resplendent, self-possessed men. Working men, enduring the attention of the odd son of a dead banker (who paid well). They are, it now seems possible to see, monuments to a specific way of life – to another kind of balance between inwardness and exteriority – but we are treated to that monumentality precisely because the ambition to ‘represent the peasant’ was utterly foreign to Cézanne’s cast of mind (December 2, 2010).

For Clark, language, in the end, misses the point. It is practically impossible to find appropriate words for this form of picturing. Maybe it is better to simply look.

From Extreme Realism to Traumatic Cartography

In between archival trips and transcriptions I was lucky enough to catch a couple of excellent exhibitions on Friday. This year’s Berlin Biennale, entitled “what is waiting out there”, adopts a deliberately politicised stance toward the relationship between artistic practice and reality. We are told in the pamphlet that accompanies the show that the “works presented in the show reject the tendency – increasingly observable in art – to turn away from reality and towards art-immanent and formal problems. They counter this tendency by insisting on a stringent view of our present and its reality.” These are laudable and ambitious commitments and speak to the urgency of trying to make sense of (and sensible) the contours of the world in which we now live. While I haven’t had a chance to catch all of the work in the show yet, I did go see a selection of preparatory drawings and gouaches by the nineteenth-century German painter Adolph Menzel that are currently on display in the Alte Nationalgalerie under the title “Menzel’s Extreme Realism.” This section of the biennale has been curated by the well-known American art historian and critic Michael Fried and, in many respects, magnifies concerns that Fried explored in his wonderful book on Menzel, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteen-Century Berlin. Fried’s recent foray into contemporary art photography has not been without its critics and his return to the work of Menzel is a return to more familiar territory. As Fried suggests in the accompanying notes to the show, Menzel’s “extreme realism” is less about the accurate depiction of reality than the creation of an “intensely empathic vision of reality.”  The significance of Menzel’s dazzling draughtsmanship lies, if we believe Fried, in its ability to establish an almost “physical connection” with reality producing it rather than simply reproducing it. The 31 drawings selected by Fried are displayed (bravely it must be said) in a single-line hang and focus on a range of topics from detailed renderings of fallen solidiers to the crumpled folds and bulges of an unmade bed (far far more compelling in my view than that other unmade bed). Menzel produced thousands of such drawings and Fried’s carefully curated show offers us a glimpse into Menzel’s remarkable talent and technique. If these are works that seek to embody the Real (and a particular sense of being in and of the world), they also provide a much needed historical counterweight to more recent artistic attempts to grasp the complexities of the world.

Later the same day, I attended the award ceremony for the  Käthe Kollwitz Preis at the Akademie der Künste. As I noted in an earlier post, the annual prize recognises the wide-ranging contribution of an artist to the fine arts and this year’s winner is the Lebanese-born Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. The ceremony was followed by the opening of an exhibition of Hatoum’s work in the Akademie der Künste. The ceremony was packed as was the exhibition so it was rather difficult to fully take in the work on display. The show included some of Hatoum’s earlier performance and video-based work including Roadworks (1985) and Measures of Distance (1988). Much has already been made of these pieces and I don’t wish to dwell on them here. What was of particular interest to me was the subtle use of mapping methods by the artist across a range of media. This can be seen for example in 3-D Cities (2008-2010) in which the artist adds a third dimension to conventional cartographic representations of Baghdad, Kabul, and Beirut. More specifically, Hatoum has made a series of concentric cuts into the maps of these cities. One is thus confronted with a series of metaphorical bomb craters that remind the viewer of the literal violence visited upon these sites. Cartographic abstraction is transformed into a landscape of traumatic remembrance.

Other works that draw on a cartographic motif include Baluchi (2008) in which the missing piles of an ‘oriental’ rug have been fashioned into a world map and Projection(2006) in which a similar map is produced using a version of pulp painting involving abacá fruit and cotton. The large-scale Globe (2007) uses, in turn, massive steel supports that run along longitude and latitude lines to create a work that not only reminds us of the geometric abstractions of cartography but places us in direct physical relationship to them. Globe anatomises a particular mode of address where outer and inner worlds – which is to say the world of the beholder and that which is foreign or outside of that world  - are brought into subtle confrontation. The nature of that confrontation is a running theme in the show at the Akademie der Künste and I will need to return on a quiet afternoon to properly take it all in.

Polaroid Landscapes… again

One eye sees, the other feels.

-Paul Klee

 

I’ve been finding it hard getting the Tarkovsky polaroids out of my mind over the past few days. Quiet moments between writing sessions find me flipping through them. I spent most of the afternoon sitting in Lee Rosy’s trying to put pen to paper…

My point of departure is an interview published at the back of Bright, Bright Days with the art historian Boris Groys. He describes the effect of the polaroids as one of “documentary romanticism.” For Groys, these are images that speak to the romanticism of a Caspar David Friedrich painting while attending to the documentary impulse of the photographic medium. Here’s Groys’s gloss: “It’s like a combination of Chekhov and Caspar David Friedrich – a kind of cottage-life with a bit of the decadent Russian aristocracy. These images are nostalgic, but not for the Soviet culture of the Russia that he left. Rather, they’re nostalgia for Russia before the Revolution” (2008: 124).

While there is something to recommend in these views, I don’t think they get the full measure of the signficant aesthetic claims at stake in the polaroids. That they ‘imagine’ a kind of intimate utopian refuge amidst the “collective space” of the Soviet Union is hardly remarkable. They were, after all, intended for private consumption. I would like to pursue another line of flight, however, and read them alongside the recent work of the philosopher Jay Bernstein. 

Bernstein has written extensively on German philosophy and Critical Theory in its various incarnations and afterlives (see especially his magnificent Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics) and his first sustained foray into modernist art, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, tracks these concerns as they find concrete form across the range of modernist artistic production. The argument draws on a now familiar story involving “the disenchantment of nature” (Santner, 2009: 286) under the sign of an advancing modernity. As Eric Santner has recently noted in a re-reading of Bernstein:

“‘Disenchantment’ signifies here a process that delegitimates our experience of ourselves and our being-in-the-world as vulnerable and dependent beings, disqualifies the dimension of emphatic experience in which sentient embodiment, the felt-fact of aliveness, still bears a normative significance in relation to the object world and other human subjects” (2009: 286). 

Santner also seizes on a passage in Bernstein where he focuses on “what has been excised from the everyday” which is to say “the emotional significance of sensory encounter, sensory experience as constitutive of conviction and connection to the world of things” (Bernstein, 2006: 3). These are, I realize, dense opaque passages. What Santner is, I think, interested in working through are the affordances that Bernstein makes for reclaiming “lost forms of human vitality and animation” (2009: 284). If this has been for Bernstein at least, a defining characteristic of modernist art,  I’m especially interested myself in the degree to which the kind of picture-making we find in Tarkovsky’s polaroids can plausibly be understood as an exercise in capturing and holding onto a form of sensuous particularity. Whatever claims to modernism are at stake here, I do think it is possible to explore these images as scenes of “significant sensory encounter” (Bernstein, 2006: 7) that are capable of relaying both the felt materiality of the polaroids as well as the dense sensuous textures that are conveyed in the images whether they are portraits and scenes of everyday life or atmospheric landscape compositions. Taken together these images represent a significant contribution to advanced photographic practice and, if anything, only further radicalize the kind of demands that they put on the way in which photographs are meant to be seen.

Picasso’s Geography

“We have art so that we may not perish by the truth” 

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

 

Another day and another café. This time Schwarz-Sauer on Kastanienallee. Bjork is playing in the background. The album is Homogenic. ‘Joga’ and ‘Unravel’ have never sounded more hopeful and uplifting. But they also take me, to use Bjork’s own phrasing, to other ‘emotional landscapes’. It was only later that I sat down and returned to the world of Picasso which had been occupying my thoughts for the past few days…

In between trips to archives and conducting interviews, I’ve been listening to podcasts of T.J. Clark’s spellbinding lectures on Pablo Picasso that took place in the spring at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (click here for the podcasts). Collectively titled  ”Painting and Truth”, the series of lectures take the work of Picasso in the 1920s as a starting point and culminate in a lecture on Guernica. Other large-scale works that feature in the series include the 1924 Still Life: Mandolin and Guitar in the Guggenheim, The Three Dancers in the Tate, Painter and his Model which is in Tehran and the 1929 Nude Standing by the Sea (in the Met). 

Broadly speaking, the lectures question what it might mean to paint in a world after ‘truth’? What happens, Clark asks, when the test of truth is no longer painting’s axiomatic point of departure? Or when painting is no longer continuous or equivalent with the world at large? These are understandably difficult and portentous concerns and Clark has Nietzsche squarely in mind here. Indeed, Nietzsche figures prominently throughout the lectures as a kind of touchstone for a new painterly matrix that begins to take shape for Picasso in the mid-1920s before finding full and precarious form in Guernica. 

The lectures are far too rich to do justice to here. What interests me in particular as a cultural geographer is Clark’s sensitivity to the new spatiality that subtends Picasso’s work at this point of time. As he notes, “my story is…about space.” And this is a story that can be summarized  in the following (cruelly abbreviated) manner:

1) That ‘Modernity’ (or at least one version of it) had finally put the painterly preoccupation with representing truth under terminal pressure and that we see this registered in Picasso’s complicated return to cubism in the mid-1920s. Where cubism had earlier stood for “exacitude,” it now slowly and painfully left the “contained” space of the studio and entered into the public domain. 

2) That Picasso’s longstanding preoccupation with what Clark refers to as “room-space” is pushed to its limits. A certain bourgeois form of “secure interiority” (and Walter Benjamin’s wonderful comments on the 19th century bourgeois interior would make a wonderful foil here) comes to an end in these painterly experiments. 

3) That the new phenomenology that finds dazzling form in Picasso’s work at this juncture depends on a re-imagining of space. Picasso, so Clark argues, is trying to construct a space that is somehow open to the outside. But if Clark talks about the rendering of a space that has achieved a “new kind of proximity,” he is also at pains to highlight the grounded ordinariness of its materialism. This is nowhere more the case (and at such a scale) than in Guernica where the darkside of Modernity is grappled with and even stared back at in a way that prompted Picasso to bid farewell to the space of cubism. But in doing so, Picasso also ultimately retained a preoccupation with the body in all its visceral and fragile facticity. While the erotics of these concerns have been well rehearsed by Picasso scholars, Clark also rightly points to the significance of Guernica in registering the disappearance of one “form of life” just as the horrors of it successor came all too violently into view.

The lectures are a veritable tour-de-force and if we take Stephen Kern’s wonderful 1983 book on The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 as a point of reference, there is still much to be written regarding the spatial history of the 1920s and 1930s. Clark’s lectures offer only one  - albeit tremendously rich – glimpse into the stakes involved in writing such a history.

Gallery Addendum

Further to my very brief comments on a couple of permanent exhibitions here in Berlin, I’m reminded of the art historian T.J. Clark’s stunning set of reflections on Matisse published last year in the London Review of Books. Clark’s Matisse is one characterised by a modernism of extremes and paradoxes. As he ultimately concludes: 

“Modernism is paradox. It is dialectics. It is an art that continually, relentlessly proposes that human qualities, which once were implicit and embedded in the texture of experience – qualities of intensity, depth, directness, vividness – are on the verge of extinction. They have been outlawed, or, worse still, vulgarised and commodified, so that everywhere miniaturised and compressed kitsch images of them whirl by in the ether of information, as background to buying and selling. Modern art is an act of dialectical retrieval, in what it sees as desperate circumstances. The human will only be found again, it says, by pressing on towards the human’s opposite. Depth will be found in flatness, and spontaneity conjured out of cold technique. Absolute openness and vulnerability can only be discovered through a process of rigorous masking and formality” (August 14, 2008). 

These are deep and pressing concerns and I can’t help but think that the very simplicity we find in so much of Klee’s work (as noted in my earlier post) trades in a similar form of “dialectical retrieval” and is, as such, testimony to the complex texture of experience lauded by Clark.