Art Eyewitness Book Review: Modern Art in Detail by Susie Hodge

Modern Art in Detail: 75 Masterpieces

by Susie Hodge

Thames & Hudson/336 pages/$39.95

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Works of art are frequently the objects of disagreement and controversy. In 1927, a polished bronze sculpture, entitled Bird in Space, achieved the status of Exhibit A in a celebrated legal case, Brancusi vs. the United States.

Bird in Space, or rather a marble version of the notorious bronze, also features prominently in a new book, Modern Art in Detail: 75 Masterpieces. As the title of her book proclaims, author Susie Hodge considers Brancusi's abstract depiction of a soaring bird a great work of art.  

Officers of the U.S. Customs in 1926 saw Bird in Space quiet differently. Or rather, they were unclear of what it was. When the wingless metal object was first brought into the United States, Customs Officers designated it as a "miscellaneous household good." The owner of Bird in Space, the noted photographer Edward Steichen, was thereby liable for the payment of a tariff duty of $240. Had it been listed as an “original” work of art, Bird in Space would have been allowed into the country duty free.

Steichen and Brancusi refused to accept the Customs Department ruling and filed suit.

The ensuing court case established the artistic status of Bird in Space beyond a doubt.  Had it been available, Hodge's enlightening analysis would have saved U.S. officialdom a lot of trouble. Yet, nearly a century later, we still need a book like Modern Art in Detail because controversy and avant-garde art still go along, "hand in hand."

Art in Detail by Susie Hodge (Thames & Hudson, 2016)

Modern Art in Detail: 75 Masterpieces is a worthy successor to Hodge's Art in Detail: 100  Masterpieces. Published in 2016, Art in Detail covered the wide expanse of art history beginning with Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes (1305) and extending to the present era.  Modern Art in Detail profiles some of the artists who appeared in the final chapters of the earlier book. But Hodge picks a new art work to be examined for those returning masters - Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Rene Magritte - so there is no repetition.

Hodge does repeat the same format used in Modern Art in Detail. Each artist is represented by a significant work of art, which is treated to incisive analysis, both for its topic and artistic technique. 

Hodge begins each chapter with a brief biographical essay of the artist in question, positioned next to a full-page (sometimes larger) illustration of their signature works of art. Despite the brevity of these bio sketches, Hodge manages to provide revealing details of the lives of these artists that explain much about their art.

Then, in the following pages, this work of art is divided into a number of framed "points of interest." Hodge focuses upon these, noting key factors ranging from contemporary events which influenced the artist to the choice of colors or materials used to create this masterpiece.

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897-98 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston     

Hodge's technique is exemplified by her analysis of Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We?  Where Are We Going? One of the treasures of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, this late Gauguin masterpiece was painted upon a rough piece of sackcloth. This, as Hodge notes, was all Gauguin could afford, living destitute in Tahiti.

Where Are We Going? needs to be read from right to left. Its theme is much more profound than a rejection of Western morality for a return to a natural lifestyle. This is a painting which charts the journey of life, in this world and beyond.

Paul Gauguin, Detail of Where Do We Come From?, 1897-98 

The ages of the women posed in the foreground of the painting represent the stages of life, from birth to the brink of death. The black and white dog entering the picture from the extreme right is believed to symbolize Gauguin.

Paul Gauguin, Detail of Where Do We Come From?, 1897-98

Hodge in her analysis of the striking blue idol points out that Gauguin positioned a goat and a cat near to the statue. These animals are believed to have a "sixth sense or a spirituality that humans have lost." 

Paul Gauguin, Detail of Where Do We Come From?, 1897-98

In the left-hand corner of the painting reads the three questions of the work's title, profound, mysterious and unanswerable. 

This insightful treatment of Gauguin's painting is repeated for each of the other seventy-four modern masterpieces. Whether you have seen these works in person or only on the pages of art books, Hodge always provides insightful commentary.

Paul Cézanne, Monte Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04

Philadelphia Museum of Art

In the case of of Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire, painted a few years after Where Are We Going?, Hodge pays close attention to Cezanne's brushstrokes. She notes that these "angled marks are methodical and rhythmic."  We can literally see Cezanne's focus "on the underlying structure  of the elements" of this pivotal work, setting the stage for Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, Juan Gris and other artists who would launch the Cubist Revolution. 

All of these Cubist masters receive their due in Hodge's book. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, painted in 1907, receives a thorough examination, as does Braque's The Portuguese. With these innovatory masterpieces, Cubism seemed poised to become the new "classicism" of Western art. But that of course did not happen. No school of art, no "ism" would define - or confine - Modernism into a single orthodoxy.

That one standard of ideology did not prevale was not for lack of trying. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, iconoclastic artists like Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin tried - and failed - to institute a new aesthetic order for Soviet Russia. 

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International,1919-20

Tatlin's Monument to the Third International was never built but served as a  model for starry-eyed nonsense like Lincoln Steffens' remark, "I have seen the future, and it works."

One can only be relieved that this Babel-scaled edifice was never constructed. Designed to be taller than the Eiffel Tower, with rotating rooms and a searchlight for beaming Communist slogans on to clouds above, this monstrosity would likely have collapsed, killing hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Today, Tatlin's prototype exists only in a model in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Tatlin subscribed to an ideological agenda called "Constructivism." It was but one of many artistic "brave new worlds" which came and went during the early decades of the twentieth century. Realism, pronounced dead or dying, somehow survived. In the hands of a true master like Edward Hopper, the existential meltdown of modern man was depicted with an intensity that even a Surrealist work by Salvador Dali could not match.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942

Art Institute of Chicago

Hopper's Nighthawks are separated from the darkened urban street by the plate glass window and the glow of fluorescent light. But inside the diner, within the seeming safety of the restaurant, each of the nocturnal wayfarers is locked in an invisible prison with walls composed of alienation, separation and despair.

Flash forward from 1942 to 1968. The walls of galvanized steel of Eva Hesse's Accession II replace the barriers of glass, glaring light and repressed emotion of Hopper's Nighthawks. Thousands of strands of thin rubber tubes bristle from within the metal box.The meaning of this enigmatic work, like so much of the art produced following World War II, is anyone's guess.

We have to think "inside the box" to find our answer. But what clues are there to guide us? This could be an inner sanctum, a padded cell or a Black Hole. Usually, Hesse's work is given a feminist interpretation. Hodge notes that Accession II "references the 'masculine' - the rigid geometric box and the 'feminine' - the flexible, soft tubing." 

Eva Hesse, Accession II, 1968

Detroit Institute of Arts

Hodge's explanation, while certainly plausible, is curiously limiting. Looking at this mystifying image, I recalled that Hesse created Accession II in the same year as Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001 - A Space Odyssey. Like the black monoliths that appear at different intervals in 2001, Accession II confronts us with the ideal of potential and possibility. It is a treasure for the future, a "miscellaneous household good" whose form and functions we have yet to fully comprehend.

Eva Hesse (1936-70) was an innovator in the way that she used "odds and ends" to create compelling, if difficult to comprehend, works of art. The legacy of her tragically short life and career, however, is mixed. Frankly, I find it difficult to accord the status of masterpiece to some of the "mixed media" works that have appeared in the years following Hesse's early death at the age of 34, from cancer. 

Is a stack of smashed TV sets like Nam June Paik's TV Cello (1971) a true work or art? Does a pretentious title, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), turn a dead Tiger Shark suspended in formaldehyde into a masterpiece? Can great art be "assembled" rather than created?

Hodge cannot be faulted in her analysis of these controversial works. And she certainly has the right to select art works that she deems as masterpieces for her book.

However,the failure to include classic works of photography among Hodge's array of masterpieces seems an unaccountable omission. Modern Art in Detail would have been enriched by the presence of Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz (1907) or Henri Cartier-Bresson's vertigo-inducing photo of a boy riding a bicycle through the winding street of a French town, Hyères, France (1932).

More to the point, analysis of such classic photos would have provided a foundation for understanding Bill Viola's provocative video, Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), one of the final works studied in Modern Art in Detail.

Bill Viola, Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), 2014

Tate Gallery, on loan to St. Paul's Cathedral, London

Viola's Martyrs is a searing indictment of humankind's inhumanity. It certainly deserves inclusion in Hodge's book. Yet, for all of its power, this video is artificial. It is a simulation rather than an act of creation or documentation.

Nick Ut's photo, Napalm Girl, comes immediately to mind when considering photography as a visceral rather than a virtual art form. This horrifying image of a Vietnamese child, Kim Phuc, set on fire by an incendiary bomb in 1972, deserves the status of masterpiece. It deserves to be studied in detail. It needs to be remembered, so that art does not decline into the production of glorified "selfies" and little else.

That is a heavy and perhaps unfair burden to place on Susie Hodge. After all, she has provided art lovers with two thoughtful books, Art in Detail and Modern Art in Detail. 

May we hope for a third book in Hodge's well-tried format, Classic Photography in Detail?Such a book would complement her already published volumes and create a trilogy of art books destined to enlighten and challenge art lovers for a long time to come.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.  Close-up images of Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Introductory Image: Modern Art in Detail: 75 Masterpieces, 2017 (cover) Image credit: Thames & Hudson 

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903) Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98. Oil on canvas. 139 x 374.5 cm (54 ¾ x 147 ½ in.) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA        

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) Monte Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04. Oil on canvas. 73 x 92 cm (28 ¾ x 36 ⅛ in.) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, USA

Vladimir Tatlin (Russian, 1885-1953) Monument to the Third International,1919-20. Model Wood, iron, and glass. 420 x 300 x 80 cm (165 ⅜ x 118 ⅛ x 31 ½ in.) Sovfoto/ UIG via Getty images

Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967) Nighthawks, 1942. Oil on canvas. 84 x 152.5 cm (33 ⅛ x 60 in.) Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA/Friends of American Art Collection/ Bridgeman images

Eve Hesse (American, 1936-70) Accession II, 1968. Galvanized steel and vinyl. 78 x 78 x 78 cm (30 ¾ x 30 ¾ x 30 ¾ in.)  Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan, USA. © The Estate of Eva Hesse Courtesy Hauser & Wirth  Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/ Bridgeman Images

Bill Viola (American, 1951- ) Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), 2014. Color high-definition video polyptych on four vertical plasma displays,, 7:15 minutes. Executive producer: Kira Perov. Performers: Norman Scott, Sarah Steben, Darrow Igus, John Hay. On loan to St Paul’s Cathedral, London, UK.  Gift to Tate by Bill Viola and Kira Perov, with support from donors. © Bill Viola Photo: Peter Mallet, courtesy Blain|Southern, London

Art Eyewitness Review: Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent Van Gogh to Emily Carr

Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent Van Gogh to Emily Carr

                                                                                                                       

Edited by Katherine Lochlan

Delmonico Books-Prestel/356 pages/$60

                      

Mystical Landscapes Exhibit

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto  

October 22, 2016 - January 29, 2017

Reviewed by Ed Voves

In September 1888, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, about his "tremendous need for, shall I say the word - for religion - so I go outside at night to paint the stars." 
This was the genesis of two of van Gogh's most famous paintings, The Starry Night over the Rhone, created at the time of his note to Theo, and the tumultuous, visionary Starry Night, painted less than a year later, in June 1889.

The Starry Night over the Rhone, from the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, is currently on display in a splendid exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Mystical Landscapes. The brilliant art and provocative ideas set forth in the exhibit are treated in an outstanding companion catalog, Mystical Landscapes: Vincent Van Gogh to Emily Carr.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night over the Rhone, 1888

Van Gogh's search for religion led him to paint the constellation, Ursa major - commonly referred to as the Big Dipper. Glimmering above the Rhone River as it flows through the city of Arles in southern France, the star-filled sky evoked a sense of promise and purpose. 

Van Gogh, full of plans for his "Studio of the South," painted this scene which reflected his hopes for the future. Only a few months later, tragic disputes with Paul Gauguin triggered a shattering nervous breakdown.

Mystical Landscapes at the Art Gallery of Ontario shows that van Gogh's yearning for "shall I say the word - for religion" was part of a cultural quest known as Symbolism. Beginning in the 1880's and continuing to the years immediately before World War II, Symbolism was a search for "meaning." Artists probed the human soul and reflected upon the spiritual environment in which they - and we - live.  

Symbolism as an art movement included such a diversity of styles that is easy to think of it as an idiosyncratic sideshow of Modern Art. Yet, Symbolism was regarded by most artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a serious and sincere response to the troubles and challenges of the Industrial Age.

The exhibit Mystical Landscapes was conceived by Katherine Lochlan, one of the leading curators of the Art Gallery of Ontario. In her poignant introduction to the exhibit catalog, Lochlan notes that she experienced a spiritual awakening during a visit to Ireland. This motivated her to begin planning Mystical Landscapes. 

Several of the team of scholars who assisted Lochlan are members of the clergy. Their essays provide insights of enduring value. Especially valuable are reflections on the need to approach art  - and life - from the point of view of humility and contemplation. John Franklin, who teaches theology at the University of Toronto, comments on mysticism:

This is the way of unknowing. At the heart of this invitation to unknowing is the fact that God is not an object of human knowing. All efforts to include God as simply one more object for our human knowledge bank ultimately fail because of the uniqueness of the divine. 

Comprehending these theological concepts sometimes entails concerted effort on the part of readers. Franklin's essay, for instance, provides a detailed contrast of the two paths of mysticism. Cataphatic, the positive, proactive form of mysticism, takes place when God's presence is closely felt. Apophatic mysticism occurs in the "absence" of God, during the Dark Night of the Soul.

Van Gogh's experience of cataphatic and apophatic mysticism is graphically depicted in his Starry Night paintings. Other artists experienced pain and tragedy, too, like Charles-Marie Dulac who died, aged 33 in 1898, from lead-poisoning which he had contracted early in life while working in the wall paper industry. The dying Dulac was inspired to create stunning works of art based upon the poem by St. Francis of Assisi, Cantacle of the Creatures.

The art works on view in Mystical Landscapes range in date from the 1880's to the 1930's. Yet this impressive exhibit and the superb catalog, jointly published by Delmonico Books and Prestel Publishing, is a tract for our times. Indeed, it will remain relevant for a very long time to come.

The late Victorian era and the first decades of the twentieth century were marked by a crisis of faith. The heartless creed of Social Darwinism became the new "gospel," preempting the place of the four Evangelists. The seeds of spiritual doubt were sown by philosophers like Ernest Renan (1823-1892) who praised the historical Jesus while demythologizing Christ.

Reacting against these developments, artists and poets looked for signs, symbols, testaments to God's presence in the universe. Some artists, like Maurice Denis, remained devout Christians. Denis depicted traditional Christian imagery like Christ's "agony in the garden." Denis, however, placed this sacred scene in a contemporary setting. Gethsemane in his 1918 painting has been relocated to Brittany where a small vessel sails perilously close to the rocky shoreline.

Maurice Denis, La Solitude de Christ, 1918

Brittany was an interesting locale for Denis' La Solitude de Christ. This remote province had been the site of the artist's colony of Pont Aven, founded during the 1880's. It was in Brittany that Paul Gauguin first shaped the religious orientation of Symbolism with three stunning works on view in Mystical Landscapes.

Vision after the Sermon (1888), The Yellow Christ (1889) and Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889) combine Christian iconography with personal, some might say blasphemous, elements. Gauguin placed his own features in each of these works: on a Breton priest, on a statue of the crucified Christ and finally on the face of the suffering, agonized Jesus. 
This identification appears to be scandalous but actually reflects a mystical experience where God and believer become one. 

Paul Gauguin, Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1889

In a brilliant essay in the exhibit catalog, Gauguin's three paintings are interpreted as a triptych, created in a similar way to medieval works by Hans Memling and other masters of religious art. The noted  scholar, Bobomila Welsh-Ovcharov, also makes a convincing case that these paintings reflect the stages of spiritual searching. 

These steps would feature in the seminal 1911 book by Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Underhill's five steps - Awakening of Self, Purgation of Self, Illumination, Dark Night of the Soul and Unitive Life  - appear again and again in the paintings on display in Mystical Landscapes. 

I have yet to visit Mystical Landscapes exhibit. But when I did see Gauguin's three Breton paintings at an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in 2011 the relation of these works to the stages of spiritual searching escaped me. Once the connection is grasped between the religious convictions of artists like Gauguin and the elements of their paintings, these works take on a whole new significance. They become "icons" in the true sense of the word.

Van Gogh found Gauguin's artistic approach to mysticism hard to accept. Van Gogh, raised a Protestant, believed  that spiritual encounters should be conveyed in "here and now" images not by "abstractions" as he described Gauguin's Breton paintings. While enduring a spiritual "Dark Night" at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, he painted his markedly different version of the Garden of Olives. Here, a cloud (representing the Holy Spirit) drifts over the olive trees, signifying God's presence in our lives.

Vincent van Gogh, The Olive Trees, 1889

At first glance, van Gogh's choice of terms to describe his painting is hard to grasp. His mysterious cloud is more of an abstraction than Gauguin's identification with the face of Jesus. In a moving letter to Emil Bernard, a fellow artist and mutual friend of Gauguin, van Gogh advised against painting "sterile metaphysical meditations that aren't up to bottling chaos, which is chaotic for the very reason that it won't fit into any glass of our caliber..."

As I noted earlier, I am familiar with Gauguin's Breton triptych and I studied van Gogh's 
Starry Night over the Rhone at a 2008 exhibit at MOMA. But Mystical Landscapes presents works by major artists rarely seen in exhibits in the United States. We are introduced to unfamiliar artists like Eugène Jansson, the Swedish painter who brilliantly evoked the Dark Night of the Soul in several paintings. 

Eugène Jansson, Dawn over Riddarfjarden, 1899

In an exhibit that emphasizes the way of unknowing, it is a very good thing when we are introduced to new artists or have our assumptions challenged about artists we thought we knew.

In the case of Claude Monet, an unexpected spiritual dimension is explored in the essay on his Nympheas, the fabled Water Lilies.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Nymphéas), 1907

Most accounts simply accept that Monet was an atheist. Lochlan notes that Monet worked on the huge panel paintings of the water lilies after prolonged periods of meditation. 

"Monet spent so much time in contemplation," Lochlan writes, "that he entered into a mystical state that he compared to a hypnotic trance."

Learning about the Canadian painters featured in Mystical Landscapes was also a revelation. The spiritual power of Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven and especially the astonishing Emily Carr is certainly worthy of more study - and further exhibits "south of the border."                                                                                                                          
The experience of these Canadian artists was shaped by many factors, a number of which linked them to the mystical experiences of Symbolist artists in Europe and the United States. Walt Whitman's poetry. Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental philosophy and military service in World War I were powerful factors. So too were the Theosophical writings of Madam Blavatsky which Lawren Harris fervently embraced. 

Ultimately, it was the Canadian landscape that lead Tom Thomson, Harris, Emily Carr and the others to approach God from the "way of unknowing." Vast, breathtakingly beautiful and still (relatively) undeveloped, Canada in the 1920's inspired these Canadian artists. 

Emily Carr, Sky (ciel), 1935-6

Writing in her journal, Emily Carr placed into words what she had visualized with brush and paint - the mystical landscape within all our souls. 

We are of the same substance for there is only one substance. God is all there is. There is one life, God life, that flows through all. He that formed me formed you. Oh Father of all raise my consciousness to that sense of oneness with the universal.

Mystical Landscapes will travel to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, in the spring of 2017. It will not, sadly, be making a stop-over in the U.S. But thanks to the wonderful catalog, I have profited immensely by journeying to this exhibition in spirit.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 
Images courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Introductory Image:                                                                                                         
Edvard Munch (Norwegian,1863-1944) The Sun,1910-13. Oil on canvas, 162 x 205 cm. Collection of the Munch Museum, Oslo. Image courtesy of Munch Museum 

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890) The Starry Night over the Rhone, 1888. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. Collection of Musée d’Orsay Image courtesy the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images 

Maurice Denis (French, 1870-1943) La Solitude de Christ, 1918. Oil on canvas, 88 x 136 cm. Private Collection 

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903) Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1889. Oil on canvas, 73 x 93 cm. Norton Museum of Art, Gift of Elizabeth C. Norton

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890) The Olive Trees,1889. Oil on canvas, 72.6 x 91.4 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest, 1998 
© The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 

Eugène Jansson (Swedish 1862-1915) Dawn over Riddarfjarden, 1899. Oil on canvas, 150 x 201 cm. Collection of Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde 

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) Water Lilies (Nymphéas), 1907. Oil on canvas, 80.98 x 92.07  cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Gift of Mrs. Harry C. Hanszen Courtesy Bridgeman Images 

Emily Carr (Canadian, 1871-1945) Sky (ciel), 1935-6. Oil on wove paper, 58.7 x 90.7 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Purchased, 1937