Art for art's sake: Leonardo, Constable, Turner

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well... back to blogging.

I got back from England on Thursday, late in the evening, and it's been a fairly busy couple of days since. And it doesn't help that I'm a bit jet lagged, certainly by this time of the night.

I'll get back to political blogging tomorrow, as I just don't have much to say tonight (and am too tired to think all that much), but I did want to post something, and I remembered recently that I haven't posted any art in a good long time. As some of you may remember, I used to break up the political posting with posts not just on music, mostly YouTube clips, but on art, a long-time passion of mine going back to childhood, not as an artist, as I seem to have little artistic talent of my own, but rather as a critic and historian. At Tufts way back when, I thought about double majoring in history and art history, but while I generally enjoyed the art history courses I took -- notably on expressionism and medieval illuminated manuscripts (both of which remain of great interest to me) -- I ended up shifting to political theory and becoming a Straussian (long story, some of which I've told here already).

Anyway, while in London last Friday, I went to the National Gallery, one of the world's greatest art museums. I'd been there many times before, but it had been several years since my last visit, and I wanted especially to see the Leonardo cartoon and the Turners and Constables, some of the most magnificent pieces in what is a truly magnificent collection. I usually comment on the art I post -- and you can find most of my past art posts here -- but for now I'll just let these stand as they are.

(Except to note that, to me, the Constable and Turner pieces, and the two artists generally, are deeply connected in terms of their relation to English social, political, and economic development in the 19th century. In a matter of just a couple of decades, the pastoral serenity of Constable's English countryside was overtaken by the technological dynamism of Turner's industrial modernity. Turner's train is literally speeding past, or through, Constable's hay wain, destroying it for good (or for evil). If you look closely at the Turner, you'll even notice a hare running for its life as the train bears down on it. The message is pretty clear. Now, Constable's England still exists, in a way. I was there, in the middle of it, out in the country between London and Oxford, but it is hardly what it once was, for better and for worse. In this particular work, Turner points the way to England's future, with Constable receding into the past, and it is that future that is the England of today, only much more so. It is a development that is common to much of the world, to all that has been touched by modern technology, with its high-speed transportation and high-speed everything, and so in these two works we see not just what is specifically English but what is increasingly universal in terms of the human condition.)

-- Leonardo da Vinci: The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist;

-- John Constable: The Hay Wain (1821); and

-- J.M.W. Turner: Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844).

For more information, click on the links. I wrote about The Hay Wain, one of my favourite paintings, in July 2007. You can find that post here.

Needless to say, viewing these masterworks on a computer screen hardly does them justice.

Scream thy Norwegian scream

By Michael J.W. Stickings

**********

Dear President Obama,

Please don't snub us. It will only deepen our existential malaise.

Depressedly yours,

The people of Norway

**********

This gives me an opportunity to post another work by one of my favourite painters, Edvard Munch -- as I did here, here, here, and here.

Here's the magnificent Ashes (1894), which, as you can see, is overflowing with existential despair.

Craziest Conservative of the Day: Bill Donohue

By Michael J.W. Stickings

For his "On Faith" guest piece in Monday's WaPo -- sorry, I'm a bit late getting to it.

WaPo should be ashamed of itself for publishing this extremist rant by a man who gives all faith, but especially Catholicism, a bad name. As TNR's Chris Orr put it, Donohue's piece is "really too vile even to mock," a truly "foul screed." Here, for your reading displeasure, is a taste:

Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity. They know, deep down, that what they are doing is wrong, and they shudder at the dreaded words, "Thou Shalt Not." But they continue with their death-style anyway.

*****

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they're too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

What's wrong with dog-walking? How is that part of our "death-style"? Whatever. Donohue lashes out with reckless, ignorant abandon at a variety of targets, including art and education -- indeed, he lashes out pretty much at the entirety of liberal modernity, at secularism broadly, though without much structure or focus, and certainly without intelligence.

Oh, here's another fantastic passage:

Catholics were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party; now the gay activists are in charge.

Gay activists like... Obama? Reid? Right, sure.

And another:

Secularists within Catholicism and Protestantism are so out of control that it makes one wonder how any serious-minded person would ever accuse these religions of being oppressive.

Right, because those "religions" (aren't they denominations -- isn't Christianity the religion?) aren't oppressive at all in keeping their deluded followers in a perpetual state of ignorance and submission.

 

Okay, enough. I've just mocked it despite its wall-to-wall vileness. But it deserves the mocking. As does Bill Donohue, bigot extraordinaire, our craziest, nastiest, most repugnant conservative of the day.

Amusing Photo of the Day: The toilet as art

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From The Globe and Mail: "Visitors take photographs of a waterfall made of recycled toilet bowls and urinals at a park in Foshan, China."

Actually, those aren't recycled toilet bowls and urinals, they are toilet bowls and urinals.

"The object of art," wrote Shakespeare, "is to give life a shape." Well, there you go.

The Indian Holi Festival (Festival of Colors)

Amazing Folded Money Heads !

The Art of Trash Shadows ?

Blogscream

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Apparently, this is Post #5,000 at The Reaction. And, well, the blog's come a long way since this, Post #1, way back on March 29, 2005.

What did I write about that week? Mostly about the deaths of Pope John Paul II and Terri Schiavo. And about the media.

And here we are now, a group blog with, if I may say so, some of the finest bloggers to be found anywhere. I want to thank them all again for all that they've done to make this blog what it is today. I certainly couldn't have done it without them.

And thank you, too, to all of you, our readers, as well as to all of my friends in the blogosphere. It's a genuine pleasure, and a richly rewarding experience, to be part of this community.

Anyway, on we go...

I'll get back to politics soon enough, but, as some of you may know, I also blog about art from time to time. And my favourite painter, one on whom I have blogged before (here, here, and here), is Edvard Munch. So why not just post The Scream here on the occasion of the 5,000th post?

Here it is, one of several versions of the masterpiece, this one at the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo:

There have been some excellent books written about Munch and The Scream, but I'd recommend these two:

-- Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, by Sue Prideaux

-- The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece, by Edward Dolnick.

An excellent collection of Munch's work can be found in Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul, published by New York's Museum of Modern Art.

I'd also recommend Peter Watkins's magnificant film, Edvard Munch. I'd rank it among the best films of all time.

Hunger for human connection

By Carol Gee

Genuine human interaction is something we seek out. Our species likes to connect with each other. We instinctively live together in homes, neighborhoods, tribes and nations. We naturally communicate with each other, even if we cannot understand the other's language.

If you can read this you are a human being. If you can read this [1] or [2], you could be a chimp. To read the rest of the post, you must learn the Word of the Day -- "poignant" -- from Yahoo! Thesaurus:

adjective

1. Exciting a deep, usually somber response: affecting, impressive, moving, stirring, touching.

The Internet provides wonderful opportunities to make virtual human connections with people all around the world, and Tom Friedman's idea that the world is flat is correct in this regard. Today's post is a little digest of poignancy collected from some blogosphere people with whom I have connected over the years:

• From Maud Newton, a wonderful literary blogger whom I've read for years, comes this link to poignant news -- "Marie Smith Jones, last native speaker of the Eyak language dies," and this about the future of languages, from Out of the Woods Now.


• From my virtual "neighbor" TxSharon of Bluedaze comes this very poignant helpful hint -- "How to get a human on the phone," with a link to gethuman 500 database.


• The writers at Firedognight have soul -- Suzanne mentioned "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera. It is among the most poignant pieces of music I know.


• Grant McCracken I have read for years. He is a talented anthropologist, who wrote this blogpost: "Lunch hour anthropology." It contains a link to an exhibit of photographs by Gus Powell, "Lunch Pictures," including several that are exquisitely poignant.
  

Virtual poignant experiences are not the same thing, obviously, as in-person touching encounters. We go to movies or the symphony or to a museum to be moved or stirred. But you can have the same experience if you will take the trouble to watch around you, as Grant describes in his lunch hour post. I am thinking of how touching it could be to really pay attention to the warm and tender ways moms or dads greet their toddlers as they pick them up from day care. Or you might watch a replay of the STS-122 shuttle crew saying goodbye yesterday to the little crew remaining at the International Space Station. Big brave male astronauts shed tears at the occasion, and it was perfectly appropriate to do so.

Today I have taken a vacation from ranting about FISA, and I am sure my regular readers will breathe a sigh of relief. I will return to ranting and bold headings tomorrow.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Edouard Manet: Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This past week marked the 176th anniversary of the birth of the great Edouard Manet. A realist in his early years, and later a close friend of (and inspiration to) the Impressionists, and something of an impressionist in his own right, however much he may have eschewed such artificial categories, Manet was one of the most brilliant and accomplished painters of the 19th century, and his work remains widely celebrated -- and justifiably so. He and his work -- and above all the masterpieces Olympia (1863) and Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863) -- were enormously influential, and he was a key forerunner both of Impressionism and of modernism generally.

From the very start of his career, as with The Absinthe Drinker (1958), Manet portrayed in his art the affairs both high and low of the people of his time, that is, he portrayed life as it was being lived from a detached yet intimate perspective -- like the great novelists who were his contemporaries, he was a keen observer of the world around him. He is noted in particular as a sort of chronicler of the lives of the mostly haute bourgeoisie -- their daily activities and especially their entertainments presented, as with such exemplary works as La Musique aux Tuileries (1862), The Balcony (1869), and Masked Ball at the Opera (1873) -- but he examined an impressively broad spectrum of French society, and in particular urban French society, as with Corner of a Café-Concert (1880), one of the essential works in the permanent collection of London's National Gallery. And there were his explicitly political and historical works, too, such as The Barricade (1871, another version here), the multiple versions of The Execution of Maximilien (1867-69), and a naval scene from the U.S. Civil War, The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama (1864).

My favourite of Manet's paintings is below, Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882). Consider the intricacy, the fascinating details -- such as the feet of a trapeze artist in the upper-left-hand corner -- the amusing fact that Manet signed his name on the beer bottle in the lower-left-hand corner, the uncertainty of perspective (is that a mirror behind the young woman?), and what attracts me the most, the look of melancholic introspection of the young woman behind the bar, a real woman named Suzon, staring into space, through and past the crazy Parisian world around her, an island unto herself -- or is it numbness?

For more, I recommend a piece by Jonathan Jones that appeared in The Guardian in 2000: "The dislocation of Suzon's world is deliberate. Paris is a hall of mirrors where Suzon floats helplessly, clinging to her bar... Manet captures the coolness, cruelty and glamour of modern life. This is one of the keystones of modern art." I'm not so sure she's clinging to her bar, her anchor in a sea that threatens to overwhelm her, and I'm not so sure she's floating helplessly. To me, she is lost in thought, in the world but not of it, working but, in her mind, elsewhere. It is the mystery of Suzon, as much as the Paris of Manet's time, that enraptures me.

Max Beckmann: Night (1918-19)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Below is one of the more disturbing images in the history of art, an expressionist masterpiece, Max Beckmann's Night, painted in 1918-19 and now on display at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Though a modernist, Beckmann (1884-1950) was something of a conservative early on, before the Great War (of which he was, like so many other artistic souls of the time, a delusional enthusiast), a member of the so-called Berlin Secession, an art association that opposed both state-sponsored traditionalism on one side and the more radical artistic movements of the time, such as the New Secession, on the other. What may now seem like splitting hairs was then cause for serious debate -- and this debate played out, among other places, in the pages of the magazine Pan in 1912, between Beckmann and Franz Marc, another giant of the expressionist movement.

You can find this debate reprinted in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long, an invaluable resource.

The basic question was this, as Marc put it: "[W]ho believes he is closer to the heart of nature, the Impressionists or today's moderns?" His response: "With all respect and deep love for the great Impressionists and plein-airists of the nineteenth century, we even believe that our current ideas of art have precedence in an older tradition and schooling just as much as any. Today we seek under the veil of appearances things hidden in nature that seem to us more important than the discoveries of the Impressionists."

In response, Beckmann referred to "this so-called new painting" as "wallpaper or a poster," hardly a compliment. Basically, it lacked "quality": "There is something that repeats itself in all good art. That is artistic sensuousness, bound up with artistic objectivity and the reality of the objects to be represented." Whereas Marc and "today's moderns" sought "things hidden in nature," and used their art to represent not so much outer reality as inner truth, Beckmann and the critics of the "new painting" promoted objectivity in terms of physical representation. Art must look like nature, Beckmann argued, and what is represented in art must look real. Not so, argued Marc, for there are truths that lie hidden beneath the surface.

At at time when art mattered -- socially, politically, historically -- this debate marked a dramatic confrontation of old and new. It meant something. Art may now spill over into the political world, or the political world may take notice of art from time to time, a controversy here and there, a sensationalized scandal now and then, but not for long, and nothing too serious -- but, generally, we have lost the sort of profound appreciation for art that drove not just artists like Marc and Beckmann but much of the world around them to engage in such spirited, and consequential, debates over the meaning and purpose of art.

**********

The Great War changed Beckmann, as it changed so many others. In April 1915, he wrote to his wife: "For me, war is a miracle, though rather an uncomfortable one. It's fodder for my art." Later that year, having witnessed the horrors of the trenches, the mass slaughter, he suffered a breakdown. And, as Dietmar Elger writes in Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art, his art changed: "After the war, Beckmann did not resume the theme of large-format anonymous scenes of mass destruction. Instead, he began to concentrate on the individual and his powerlessness and helplessness in view of a world full of desperation and violence."

This is the context for Night: "the violence of the streets has entered the home." Elger: "Three bailiffs have invaded a little attic room and are now harassing a peaceful, helpless family." A man strangled, his arm being broken. A woman raped, collapsed. A child grabbed, soon to be molested. A mysterious woman in read in the background, looking on. "Beckmann clearly transformed the little attic room into a stage where the mystery of all mankind is represented by the suffering and the violence that were carried into this family. He himself stated that the artistic purpose of this painting was to "give mankind a picture of their fate".

We are a long way here from objectivity, "quality," representational realism. This is the new Beckmann, the Beckmann scarred by the war, aware of the darker elements of the human condition, and prepared to represent those elements in his art, all that is hidden rather than all that lies on the surface.

Given the horrors of our own time, domestic and foreign, state-sponsored and otherwise, war and crime, terrorism, government surveillance, torture, and the like -- given its universal theme, a representation of the violence of the human condition -- Night remains a work of astonishing relevance.

**********

In 1937, the Nazis opened a Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. On display were about 650 works of art. About 20,000 people a day came to see it, and it went on to tour Germany and Austria from 1938 to 1941.

The purpose of the exhibition, according to the guidebook, was "to give a general insight, by means of original documents, into the dreadful final chapter of our cultural degeneration of the last decades before the great turning point." Hitler himself opened the exhibition, and, on the occasion, he said this: "From now on we will lead a relentless war of purification against the last elements of our cultural decay."

The exhibition included works by 112 artists.

Among them was Max Beckmann.

Tom Thomson: The West Wind (1916-17)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's Thanksgiving weekend in Canada -- it comes too early here, just as it comes too late in the U.S., but it's a wonderful time of the year regardless -- and though it's been unseasonably warm recently there is no doubt that fall is here and that winter is not far off. And, to me, perhaps no artist has captured the feel of this time of year quite like Tom Thomson did.

One of Canada greatest painters, Thomson lived from 1877 to 1917 and spent much of his time in northern Ontario, including, during the last several years of his life, Algonquin Park. As with some of the members of the famed Group of Seven, for which he was an inspiration and a precursor, his work reflected a profound appreciation for nature, and specifically for Canada's natural landscape, the landscape of trees and rivers and lakes and wild skies such as that of northern Ontario, the Canadian Shield, a beautifully stark landscape that is somehow essentially Canadian.

Thomson has been compared to Van Gogh and Cézanne, among others of the time, and rightly so. He was, like them, a Post-Impressionist -- thick paint, bright colours, assertive brushstrokes -- but also one influenced heavily by the Art Nouveau movement. The painting below is one of his most famous, a genuine masterpiece, a national treasure: The West Wind, painted during the winter of 1916-17, based on a sketch he had made the previous summer while working at Algonquin Park, and now in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario here in Toronto. It is, like the landscape of which it is a representation, essentially Canadian.

And it is the perfect painting to post this long weekend.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Franz Marc: Forms in Combat (1914)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

With the war ongoing in Iraq, with a U.S. war with Iran looming on the horizon, and with so many other wars, large and small, civil and not, raging around the world, this seemed like an appropriate image to post this Labo(u)r Day.

The great Expressionist Franz Marc, a key member of the Blaue Reiter group (a co-founder with Kandinsky, Macke, Jawlensky, and others), was perhaps best-known for his colourful and, in later years, proto-cubist studies of animals in nature, such as The Yellow Cow (1911), Cat on a Yellow Pillow (1912), and The Fate of the Animals (1913), as well as for magnificent studies of the natural world, such as Tyrol (1914). His early naturalism had already given way by 1913-14 to more complex compositions -- see his entry at Wikipedia Commons for more -- and by 1914 his style had become fully abstract, his work non-representational and anti-naturalist.

The image below is Forms in Combat, a powerful work from 1914 that anticipated the Great War that was then looming on the horizon and that would, later that year, engulf Europe. Marc himself was, at first, an enthusiast, like so many others, including some of Britain's more famous war poets: "This is the only way of cleaning out the Augean stable of Europe," Marc wrote in a letter to Kandinsky, "or is there a single person who does not wish this war might happen?"

Marc, a German, volunteered for the army. He was killed on March 4, 1916, at the age of 36.

Forms in Combat (or Fighting Forms) is in the collection of the Pinakothek der Moderne (museum of modern art) in Munich, the city of Marc's birth.

A New York Minute: Things To-Do Edition

By Creature

This wonder wall of Post-its did not exist yesterday. It's art, it's way cool, and the picture does not do it justice.



And here is my contribution to this massive To-Do list:



If you're in NYC and want to contribute to the wall it's on the corner of 6th Street and 1st Avenue in the East Village.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)

John Constable: The Hay Wain (1821)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There have many new posts by me and the co-bloggers in recent days, and on a variety of topics, including Krazy Kristol, Robert Gates, the Bush colonoscopy, how the rest of the world views America, the "Hypocrite in chief," the FIFA Under-20 World Cup, and, of course, Iraq and the Surge. Please scroll down to find them, or click here to go to the main page (if you're not there now).

In the meantime -- as I take a pause from Letters from Iwo Jima, a very good film and certainly much better than Flags of Our Fathers -- I thought I would post what I consider to be one of the most beautiful paintings of all, Constable's The Hay Wain. I remember it being one of my favourites when I first discovered art as a child, when art history become one of my true passions -- when I was in Grade 4, if I remember correctly, when I was nine. It was not long after that I took a liking to Constable, a liking that continues to this day.

It is the romanticism, I suppose, a deep sentimentality, for man and for nature. There is a stillness and a quiet to Constable's work, or at least to many of them, that acts as a sort of antidote to the mayhem of our time. That may be my English heritage speaking, but there is a universality to Constable's work that transports such resonance beyond time and place. To me, looking at Constable is like reading Wordsworth -- and especially "Tintern Abbey," from which these lines:

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

So here it is, The Hay Wain, one of the great masterpieces in the collection of The National Gallery in London. Looking at it on a computer screen does not do it justice.

Vincent van Gogh: Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Let's take a break from blogging about Iraq, Bush, and the Dems. (More on that, and on much else, soon enough.)

Although I consider Van Gogh to be wildly overrated and overexposed -- consider those ubiquitous sunflowers, for example, or those hugely popular stars and swirls -- there is no denying his influence on modern art, and specifically on expressionism, and there is also no denying the diversity of his work. Just as Monet was about more than waterlilies, so was Van Gogh about more than poster-friendly still lifes and self-portraits (and a famous ear). Consider the selection of his work here and here.

This painting -- Starry Night Over the Rhone -- is one of my favourite Van Goghs. It is similar to the more famous Starry Night -- yet I find it significantly more beautiful.

Edvard Munch: Friedrich Nietzsche (1906)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As some of you know, our distinguished co-blogger Heraclitus is writing his doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche. One of our former teachers at the University of Toronto once remarked that scholars, intentionally or not, often pick subjects that allow them to compensate for their own inadequacies or weaknesses. I will allow you to draw your own conclusions as to what the choice of Nietzsche's political thought as a dissertation topic might say about Heraclitus.

Anyway, here's Munch's portrait of Nietzsche, painted several years after the latter's death from a photograph in his Weimar archives. And here's Munch himself on his work: "As I have hinted I have chosen to repaint him in a monumental and decorative style... I have depicted him as the author of Zarathustra in his cave between the mountains. He stands on his balcony looking down into a deep valley, and over the mountains a radiant sun is rising -- One may think of the point where he talks about standing in the light but wishing to be in the dark -- but of many others as well."