Art Eyewitness Book Review: Velázquez: Las Meninas and the Late Royal Portraits

                           

Velázquez, Las Meninas and the Late Royal Portraits

Edited by Javier Portús     

       

Thames & Hudson /176 pages/$50

 

 Reviewed by Ed Voves

On the night of December 24, 1734, a disastrous fire struck the Royal Alcázar, one of the palaces of the Spanish monarchy. The Alcázar was a rambling, time-worn structure which had originally been a Moorish castle. It was also the site where much of the vast and unrivaled art collection of the Spanish kings was displayed. Works by Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyke and the great masters of the Spanish School graced its walls. Almost all of the 500 paintings in the Alcázar were burned to cinders.

With desperate courage, members of the Alcázar staff battled the flames and managed to save several of the paintings. These were cut from their frames and flung out windows before they were consumed in the inferno.


One of the paintings that was rescued was Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez (1599-1660).

Las Meninas is now recognized as the greatest Spanish work of art of all time. It is the subject of a superb, if somewhat somber, book just published by Thames & Hudson.

Why the down note for a painting that survived "a near-run thing," to borrow a favorite phrase of the Duke of Wellington?

Velázquez's masterpiece records a fleeting moment of court life during the reign of King Philip IV (1605-1665). Las Meninas was created just at the point when the bankrupt, battle-weary Spanish Empire began its long retreat from global power. That's not what Velázquez intended of course. But Las Meninas, painted in 1656, was Velázquez's final masterpiece and the last great achievement of Spain's Golden Age.

Life is brief, even for empires. Art is long.

Velázquez, Las Meninas and the Late Royal Portraits is a companion volume to the recent exhibition at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Don't expect this exhibit to make a world tour. Spain does not lend Las Meninas and for good reason. One brush with oblivion is enough.

The present volume is certainly a worthy consolation prize. The scale and fidelity of the lavish color illustrations are outstanding. The caliber of the art historians who supplied the insightful commentary is exceptionally high as well. The team of art scholars includes Javier Portús, the head of the Prado's Department of Spanish Painting, pre-1700. In terms of Velázquez scholarship, this is the mountain top.

The exhibit and the companion book focus on Velázquez and two other Spanish court painters, Juan MartÍnez del Mazo and Juan Carreño de Miranda. Mazo and Carreño attempted to carry on the brilliant school of portraiture which Velázquez perfected. Both were skillful and accomplished artists but neither possessed the extraordinary talent and perception of Velázquez. Mazo, Velázquez's son-in-law, occasionally approached the great master's workmanship but largely, as we shall see, at the expense of his own originality.

The sobering aspect of Velázquez, Las Meninas and the Late Royal Portraits relates to the fact that these magnificent paintings record the passing of Spanish cultural vitality, as well as of the political hegemony of the Spanish monarchy. Despite the incredible artistry of Las Meninas and the praiseworthy efforts of Mazo and Carreño, the decline of Spain could not be disguised.

The Spanish royal family was a branch of the Hapsburgs of Austria and the frequent intermarriage of the two households came close to being incestuous. Philip IV married a French princess, Isabel de Borbón, in an attempt to bring "new blood" to the Spanish Habsburgs. Although the marriage was a happy one, France under the leadership of Cardinal Richelieu, blind-sided Spain by supporting the Protestant powers arrayed against it in the Thirty Years War.

In 1643, the marriage of Philip IV and Isabel suffered a staggering loss of the kind that haunted all the monarchies of Europe. Crown Prince Baltasar Carlos, a lively and intelligent boy whom Velázquez painted on several occasions, died from small pox. He was the only son of Philip IV and Queen Isabel, who followed her son to the grave a year later.

Diego Velázquez, Philip IV

Philip IV faced the extinction of the Spanish line of the Hapsburgs. In an ill-fated move, he married his 15-year old niece, Mariana, of the Austrian Hapsburgs. Mariana had been betrothed to Baltasar Carlos. Philip was a decent man, though an ineffectual king, and the marriage in 1649 was not as perverse as it might seem. But the desired male heir was slow in coming.

Velázquez played a role in this dynastic marriage-brokering. A number of his portraits of the Spanish Hapsburgs, Baltasar Carlos and Philip, were sent to their Austrian relatives to help with the match-making. As a result, art museums in Vienna are relatively well-supplied with Velázquez paintings, where other art collections - except in Spain - are fortunate to own one. Even the Metropolitan Museum in New York had to pay a prince's ransom in 1971 to acquire Velázquez’s portrait of his Moorish servant, Juan de Pareja, now one of the jewels of the Met's collection.

Velázquez painted so many royal portraits in this late stage of his career that he risked the criticism of jealous rivals that he could "only paint heads." This had been a charge made early in his career and Velázquez had worked diligently to disprove it. But the call of duty required him to paint portraits. Velázquez created astonishing likenesses of Philip IV, with his upswept moustaches and sad, uncertain eyes, and Mariana, the young queen looking amazingly like Philip's surviving daughter from his first marriage , Maria Teresa.

Studio of Velázquez, Queen Mariana of Austria

Eventually, children were born to Philip and Mariana. Velázquez painted the new son and heir, Felipe Prospero, in a stunning portrait in 1659. Velázquez depicted the infant prince wearing protective amulets and a badger's foot to safeguard him from harm. Felipe Prospero's brief life ended in 1661, a year after Velázquez died.

It was the daughter of Philip and Mariana, the Infanta Margarita, who was immortalized in Las Meninas. Accompanied by her maids-of-honor or meninas and court retainers, notably two dwarves, Margarita is illuminated by light from a nearby window. The angelic young princess turns her gaze from a canvas being painted by Velázquez and looks directly at her parents, unseen except as reflections in a distant mirror. She is also looking at us.

In terms of this review, further comment on this immortal painting is better directed to a smaller version long thought to be a preparatory study of Las Meninas. Javier Portús makes a very convincing case that it is a study after Velázquez.

Juan Bautista MartÍnez del Mazo, Las Meninas

With trenchant detective work, Portús maintains that this heavily-painted work was done by Velázquez's son in law, Juan MartÍnez del Mazo (16 -1667). Only Mazo would have had the degree of access to the original of Las Meninas around 1660 to paint such an accurate copy. This is indeed an accomplished copy of Las Meninas. From the standpoint of Mazo's creative individualism, however, it is too good.

Mazo spent the rest of his life trying to paint like Velázquez rather than cultivating his own considerable talents and a unique style. Mazo came close in several works to achieving an artistic breakthrough, notably The Painter's Family. This is a charming group portrait of his children, born of two different wives, who are united on the canvas in loving familiarity.

Mazo proceeded to ruin the unity of The Painter's Family by including a smaller, separate scene in the upper right hand corner. This shows himself painting a portrait of the Infanta Margarita. Velázquez had used this technique with mixed effects early in his career, whereby figures in the foreground are contrasted with a background depiction of another incident, usually from sacred scripture. The danger lies in the distraction and confusion caused by the background scene. Often this appears to be a painting hanging on a wall rather than part of the action taking place in the pictorial space. This, sadly, is the case for Mazo’s The Painter's Family.

One should not censure Mazo too severely for this. He was attempting to safeguard the legacy of his father-in-law. Mazo was acting like a good Spaniard, too, trying to hold together the disintegrating "Golden Age" of Spain. By the 1660's, Spain’s political hegemony was beyond salvation. Sadly, that decade would also see the last ripples of the astonishing wave of creativity that had surged forth in 1605 with The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha and crested in 1656 with Las Meninas.

Juan Carreño de Miranda (1614-1685,) whose paintings figure prominently in the later part of the book, faced an even more impossible task than Mazo. Carreño's style was less painterly than Mazo's, but also more vigorous and better focused. Carreño, however, had to present Philip IV's surviving heir, Charles II, in a regal and commanding manner - a daunting task.

When Philip IV and Queen Mariana finally had a son who lived, the dangerous inbreeding of the Hapsburgs produced its predictable result. "Feeble-minded" Charles II came to the throne as a young child in 1665 and ruled to 1700. Sickly and mentally unstable, his personal traits matched those of Spain, the "sick man of Europe."

Carreño was called upon to create portraits of Charles II, depicting him as a "Planet King." This had been the proud title of earlier Spanish monarchs. It was an impossible task and Carreño failed despite dedicated effort. Velázquez himself would likely have done little better.

Spain collapsed as a great power and Velázquez's reputation went into an eclipse as well. He was rediscovered by Édouard Manet in 1860. Manet grasped the degree of mastery that Velázquez brought to his painting. Las Meninas and the other surviving masterpieces of Velázquez were works of art that provided exactly the kind of inspiration that Manet needed.

In the hands of Manet, Edgar Degas, John Singer Sergent and other "New Painters," the Spanish-style of the mid-nineteenth century triumphed over the neo-classicism of French Salon art. Velázquez's reputation soared and he was deemed the "first Impressionist." Careful study of his brushstrokes does indeed confirm Velazquez's pioneering use of modernist technique. As the eighteenth century Spanish writer, Antonio Palomino, had noted about Velazquez's brushwork , "one cannot understand it if standing too close, but from a distance it is a miracle."

Velázquez, Las Meninas and the Late Royal Portraits will de-mystify the creative process of Velázquez. But Palomino is certainly correct about Las Meninas. This iconic painting, that so nearly perished in the flames of the Alcázar, was and always will be a miracle of art.

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

Images Courtesy of Thames & Hudson
Introductory Image: Velázquez: Las Meninas and the Late Royal Portraits 2014 (Cover)

Diego Velázquez, Philip IV, ca. 1654. Oil on canvas, 69 x 56 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, P1185. (Photo credit: Archivo Fotográfico del Museo Nacional del Prado).

Studio of Velázquez, Queen Mariana of Austria, ca. 1652-1653. Oil on canvas, 209 x 125 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Peintures, RF 1941-31. (Photo credit: Paris, Agence Photographique de la RMN © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux.)

Juan Bautista MartÍnez del Mazo, Las Meninas, ca. 1660. Oil on canvas, 142 x 122 cm. Kingston Lacy, The Bankes Collection (The National Trust), 1257140. (Photo credit: Swindon, National Trust Images.)

Picasso Prints and Flash Photography Exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Picasso Prints: Myths, Minotaurs and Muses

Artificial Light: Flash Photography in the Twentieth Century

May 24- August 3, 2014

 

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Great art always speaks for itself. A notable work of art - whatever the medium - is a unique and timeless assertion of each artist's creative insight.

 Art exhibitions showcase the individual contributions of artists. Exhibits also show trace common themes and the ways that innovative or over-looked forms of creative expression are utilized by artists to "speak" for art in new ways.

Two thoughtful and eclectic exhibits at the Philadelphia Museum of Art address the process whereby an artistic medium, unappreciated or seldom studied by art scholars, can reveal profound truths and unforgettable imagery. Artificial Light: Flash Photography in the Twentieth Century and Picasso Prints: Myths, Minotaurs and Muses also complement each other by drawing attention to a human value often undervalued today: compassion.

Why compassion? Flash photography often has an opposite effect, of invading someone's life in a sudden assault of paralyzing, probing light. Some of the photos in the exhibit, like Harold Edgerton’s Tumblers (1942), evoke a clinical, dispassionate perspective, namely that of science.  Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which inspired many of Picasso's prints, is not a notably compassionate work.  Pablo Picasso, himself, was more known for his personal passions than concern for those around him.

Yet many of the art works in Artificial Light and Picasso Prints powerfully evoke the need for human empathy.

A photo by Mark Cohen, on display in Artificial Light, is a good starting point. Now based in Philadelphia after many years in Wilkes-Barre, PA, Cohen specializes in what he describes as "intrusive" street-photography.

Mark Cohen, Untitled (Girls' Faces Flashed in Bus Window)

In Cohen's 1973 photo, Untitled (Girls' Faces Flashed in Bus Window), we see exactly what the title says - and something more. The reflection of Cohen's flash replicates the effect of human breath on a window, in this case of the smiling, vivacious young woman beaming at us from inside the bus. This effect makes the young woman the active party in the photo. She is the beholder, her breath marking her presence as she reaches out to us, with an open-handed act of friendship.

Of course, this startling detail is just a trick of the camera and the young woman's waved hand little more than a spontaneous gesture. But in that fleeting moment, her eyes meet ours and the artificial barriers between human beings melt away.

Lewis Hine (1874-1940) aimed to bridge the dividing gulf between people too, but his photo process was a bit more deliberate.

Hine, the great Progressive-era photographer, documented the plight of child workers, immigrants and hard-luck outcasts with a large format camera. Hine's night-time photography carried on the work of an earlier social activist, Jacob Riis, one of the first to experiment with flash photography. Hine's Midnight at the Bowery Mission Breadline, 1909, on display in the exhibit, is a superb example of the psychological awareness that he brought to his work.

Hine was a master of giving artful form to awful reality. Many of his famous photos of immigrant mothers and children directly borrowed poses from Raphael's Renaissance Madonnas. When he photographed a young, barefoot factory girl from Vermont, Addie Card, in front of the cotton-spinning loom of the North Pownal Cotton Mill, Hine was surely aware of the country lasses painted over a century earlier by Thomas Gainsborough.

With aesthetically acceptable photos like these, Hine was able to deliver a shocking glimpse of the harshness of life in a format that would not cause the viewer to immediately wince and look away. In his nighttime pictures, however, Hine had to use the flash to illuminate the scene, a dangerous and unforgiving technique at that time. Hine ignited magnesium powder to light the scene. This gave little or no opportunity to arrange the subjects to conform to preconceived notions of fine art. The flash photo would have to stand or fall on whether it caught and held this specific moment of time.

 

Lewis W. Hine, Midnight at the Bowery Mission Breadline

 

Midnight at the Bowery Mission Breadline certainly succeeded in capturing the raw, social-Darwinian brutalities of pre-World War I America. This group portrait is all the more powerful for the wide range of ages of the picture's subjects, with a touch of intriguing mystery. Who are these men trying to hold hunger at bay with a free cup of coffee and a slice of bread? Hobos? Laid-off factory workers? Immigrants just arrived from Ellis Island?

Hine's Breadline protagonists have the defeated faces of wartime POWs. Their varying expressions recall Winslow Homer's Prisoners from the Front. But these hungry men are not defeated "enemy" soldiers. They are fellow-Americans. They stare at us through the lens of Hine's camera. And since their clothes are so non-descript, so lacking in period details - except for the rounded derby hat of the second man from the left - these men might well be from the "brother can you spare a dime" 1930's or from our own time. They could be us, just as the beaming, smiling Girls' Faces Flashed in a Bus Window could be ours too, on a better, happier day.

These two pictures are indicative of the way that flash photos help us to reach beyond the "us vs. them" divide that separates human beings. We can embrace the "other" in other people more readily because of the enhanced spontaneity of the photograph taken with a flash camera. And in doing so, we can get in touch with the "other" in ourselves.

Nicholas Nixon's West Springfield, Massachusetts extends this embrace to other species, indeed to all of nature. Nixon is one of the most sensitive photographers of the contemporary era. His photos of AIDS patients and dying elderly people are haunting portraits, entirely free of cloying sentimentality.

Here, an affectionate hand is extended to a sleeping calf. Nixon captured an endearing image of innocent new life - and of human empathy. The calf, however, is not pet, not a puppy or kitten who will be showered with affection and treats. The calf, when it matures, is fated to serve the material needs of people, producing milk or meat for the dinner table. It is unsettling to look at this photo, taken in 1978, and reflect that this beautiful animal is long since dead, unremembered but for this memorable image.

Nicholas Nixon, West Springfield, Massachusetts

mages of cattle are comparatively rare in art, but in the ancient Mediterranean world religious cults flourished where bulls were worshipped or ritually slaughtered. We see echoes of these practices in the second of the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibits, Picasso Prints: Myths, Minotaurs and Muses.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who created mythology-themed prints during the first half of the 1930's, focused on the legend of the Minotaur. This became a dominant motif in Picasso's art, partly in response to his own tumultuous life, but also expressing his anguish over the Spanish Civil War which began in 1936.

Picasso's creative genius was so caught-up in the revolutionary atmosphere of pre-World War I Paris that his imagination remained little affected by ancient art until a 1917 visit to Italy. The "return to order" urged by Jean Cocteau a year later further directed him toward classical antiquity. When the great art dealer, Ambrose Vollard, commissioned Picasso to illustrate the mythological stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it appeared to be a perfect match of artist and subject.

A different destiny awaited the Vollard Suite and the great etching and engraving, Minotauromachy, created in 1935. These classically-inspired works mirror Picasso's bitter disputes at that time with his wife, Olga Khokhlova and his young mistress and model, Marie-Thérèse Walter. The violence in many of these prints also reflects the savage Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936.

Marie-Thérèse Walter, idolized by Picasso for her classical beauty, appears in most of these prints. We see her Grecian profile as she gazes down at Picasso's alter ego, the Minotaur. Picasso identified with this bull-headed "monster" and later, toward the end of his life, he declared, "If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur."

Pablo Picasso, Sleeping Minotaur Watched by a Woman

In a 1933 print, Sleeping Minotaur Watched by a Woman, Picasso presents the Minotaur as a weary, exhausted creature rather than a dangerous predator. Indeed, the face of the sleeping Minotaur, behind the delicate curtain, is surprisingly like that of the calf in West Springfield, Massachusetts!

A year later, Picasso shows a young girl with the facial features of Marie-Thérèse guiding a blinded, suffering Minotaur.  The print is filled with dense, cryptic images, the tortured Minotaur reflecting his own inner turmoil.

These images climax with the 1935 print, Minotauromachy or "Minotaur fight." All of the elements here relate to Picasso's explosive conflict with his wife and Marie-Thérèse.  Olga Khokhlova discovered the relationship between Picasso and Marie-Thérèse, who was pregnant with his child. Picasso's handling of the situation was notably insensitive to both wife and mistress and a short time later he commenced a new liaison, with Dora Marr.

 

Pablo Picasso,  Minotauromachy

The elements of Minotauromachy, however, shortly reappeared in another work that would yield a great deal of credit to Picasso. The face of Marie-Thérèse with outstretched hand holding a light, the anguished rearing horse, the great bull's head, the crumpled, dying figure holding a sword - all would emerge again in Guernica!

Minotauromachy and the prints of the Vollard Suite, by the strange alchemy that is art, paved the way to Picasso's greatest painting. It is a process that we can see at work in the flash photos and classically inspired prints of these fine exhibits at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: the dross of daily life transformed into the gold of compassionate creativity.

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

Images Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Blind Minotaur Guided by a Girl at Night, 1934. Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, Spanish, 1881 - 1973. Aquatint, scraper, and drypoint, Plate: 9 11/16 x 13 11/16 inches (24.6 x 34.8 cm), Sheet: 13 x 15 15/16 inches (33 x 40.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 Untitled (Girls' Faces Flashed in Bus Window), 1973. Mark Cohen, American, born 1943. Gelatin silver print, Image: 11 13/16 x 17 5/8 inches (30 x 44.8 cm), Sheet: 15 7/8 x 19 13/16 inches (40.3 x 50.3 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art

 Midnight at the Bowery Mission Breadline, 1909. Lewis W. Hine, American, 1874   1940. Gelatin silver print, Sheet: 4 9/16 x 5 7/8 inches (116 x 149 mm) Mount: 11 15/16 x 9 13/16 inches (30.3 x 24.9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1997.

 West Springfield, Massachusetts, 1978. Nicholas Nixon, American, born 1947. Gelatin silver print, Image: 7 11/16 x 9 11/16 inches (19.5 x 24.6 cm) Sheet: 8 x 9 15/16 inches (20.3 x 25.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro.

 Sleeping Minotaur Watched by a Woman, 1933. Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, Spanish, 1881 - 1973. Etching, Plate: 7 9/16 x 10 9/16 inches (19.2 x 26.8 cm), Sheet: 12 1/8 x 17 1/16 inches (30.8 x 43.3 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 Minotauromachy, 1935. Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, Spanish, 1881 - 1973. Etching and engraving (seventh state of seven), Plate: 19 9/16 x 27 3/8 inches (49.7 x 69.5 cm), Sheet: 22 5/16 x 30 3/8 inches (56.7 x 77.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

Art Eyewitness Essay/Review: Romantic Geography, Sublime Landscapes

Romantic Geography, in Search of the Sublime Landscape
By Yi-Fu Tuan

University of Wisconsin Press/205 pages/$24.95

Reviewed by Ed Voves

"I'm sick of Portraits," declared Thomas Gainsborough in a 1769 letter to his friend, William Jackson, "and wish very much to take my viol-da gamba and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag-end of life in quietness and ease."

After finding fame and fortune painting the handsome, haughty faces of Lord So-and-So and Lady So-and-So, Gainsborough (1727-1788) yearned to escape to Nature. The refuge from the cut-throat world of London society that Gainsborough so earnestly wished for was one he never found.

Gainsborough did get to paint "landskips," lots of them in fact, vistas of England as Arcadia.

Thomas Gainsborough, Mountain Landscape with Bridge

Gainsborough, alas, never sold many of his "landskips." The artistic revolution that established the supremacy of landscape painting over portraiture did not take place within Gainsborough's lifetime. But a year after Gainsborough died in 1788, a seismic political shift occurred that opened the gates to a climate of creative endeavor we call Romanticism.

In 1789, the French Revolution began. It was a new age marked by the clash of competing values, the rhetoric of the "Rights of Man" vs the "Terror." The distinguished scholar, Dr. Yi-Fu Tuan, calls such opposites "polarized values."


Dr. Yi-fu Tuan, one of the world's great geographers, believes that the vision and sense of adventure of Romanticism are needed today. In his new book, Romantic Geography, Dr. Tuan looks beyond the narrow focus of geography in the twenty-first century, geared as it is to studying micro-environments. His aim is to rekindle the risk-taking approach that characterized the sciences - and art - during that daring, dangerous time.

Romanticism actually began in the decade before the French Revolution and continued until the follow-up revolts throughout Europe in 1848. Although Dr. Tuan has many profound insights to offer into the period, he only mentions William Blake among the Romantic era artists. Romantic Geography, none-the-less, is a brilliant book, with much to offer to the study of landscape art.

William Blake, The Great Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun

In terms of art history, Romantic Geography provides a key to understanding why Romanticism is such a vital component of human experience and why it developed in the West rather than in Asia.

Asian landscape art long predated that of Western Europe and has many impressive and inspiring attributes. Yet, landscape painting in the West, especially in the Romantic era, sparked the great revolution of Modern Art. Why did this pivotal turning point not occur in China where so many other innovations originated?

As Dr. Tuan notes, the spirit of the "quest" was well-established in Europe, dating back to the Middle Ages, indeed to Jason and Odysseus among the ancient Greeks. This daring spirit took on different guises, "good" when it came to searching for the Holy Grail or campaigns of social justice such as the abolition of slavery. Quests could also be rapacious "holy" wars like the Crusades or heedless plundering of the earth's resources.

A different mindset developed in the East. Dr. Tuan writes that in Asia, especially China, there was a deep-seated aversion to nomadic movement. Wandering Buddhist monks were honored, but the hordes of Huns and Mongols beyond the Great Wall were a different matter.

"In China, a recurrent theme in historical writing is the conflict between farmers and nomads, culture and barbarism," Dr. Tuan notes. "Chinese poetry, where it touches the steppe and desert, is filled with desolation, melancholy and death."

Western art and culture sometimes depicted wilderness regions in a negative light too. But where the Chinese sought harmony as the highest ideal, restless impulses frequently led Europeans to regard a "desert experience" as a means of strengthening one's moral fiber.

A comparison of art from the 1600's offers revealing insights about the roots of the Romantic era. Vision combined with wanderlust to propel the great revolutions, beginning in Western Europe, that have shaped our world.

In 1644, the Ming Empire of China collapsed in a dreadful conflagration of crop failure, rioting and foreign invasion. The last Ming emperor, Chongzhen, who ruled 1627-1644, was a tyrant who purged his government of capable officials and generals. He replaced them with "yes-men" whose ineptitude led to famine and military defeat. Despite Chongzhen's malign rule, most of China's educated class, steeped in Confucian ideals, maintained their loyalty. They were horrified when the emperor hung himself in the imperial garden, as Manchu invaders from the north stormed the Great Wall.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed a major exhibition back in 2011, The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China: Masterpieces of Ming Loyalist Art from the Chih Lo Lou Collection. The exhibit detailed the response through art of China's cultured elite to these disastrous events. A remnant of the nation's scholars and officials, called Ming Loyalists, tried to maintain the Ming government in southern China. When that failed, they created enduring art works preserving the culture and cosmology of the vanished Ming social order.

　

 

Zhang Feng, Landscapes

Artists like Gong Xian, Shitao, and Zhang Feng were known as yimin or "left-over" subjects. Their landscape paintings and poetry proclaimed both their pro-Ming convictions and the ideals of eternal China which would outlast any invader.

The vast geographic scope and minute human scale in these yimin works is in keeping with the traditions of Chinese art. More disturbingly, there is a total absence of people in many of these landscapes, as in the incomparable series by Gong Xian (1619-1689).

Gong Xian, Ink Landscapes with Poems

The deserted landscape is a coded message of support for the vanished Ming dynasty. It is also a fundamental revelation of the emotional state of the Ming Loyalists. The patriotism of the Ming Loyalists was courageously expressed but eventually subsumed by the wistful, elegiac nuances in their art works. These are almost devoid of the kind of determination that will spark successful wartime resistance. Like the French in 1940, the Ming Loyalists were psychologically defeated even before the Manchu invasion began.

At the very same time that Ming China was in turmoil, the kingdoms of Europe were convulsed by the Thirty Years War, 1618-1648. One of the most destructive conflicts in human history, the Thirty Years War oppressed the minds and spirits of scholars and artists in Europe as the Ming collapse did to their counterparts in China.

Chief among them was Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), the greatest artist of his day. Rubens painted a number of passionate allegorical works extolling reconciliation and peace. When these were ignored, Rubens retired in 1635 to his estate of Het Steen in Flanders. He spent the last five years of his life, the "fag end" as Gainsborough expressed it, painting landscapes.

Ruben's landscapes are some of the greatest of the seventeenth century. They are not "dreamscapes" like Gainsborough's or Zhang Feng's. Rubens evoked realism, vigor and in some cases horror, as in this hunting scene in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The noble stag is drawing the pack of hunting dogs away from the deer in the foreground. But the stag will surely be set-upon by the dogs and savagely hacked to pieces.

Peter Paul Rubens, A Forest at Dawn with a Deer Hunt

The heightened emotionalism of Rubens' picture is the key to the Romantic art that followed nearly two centuries later. At its highest pitch - the Sublime - Romantic art reveled in horror, in depictions of violence, moody evocations of ominous or fateful events. And underpinning the sense of dread called forth by the Sublime was the hope that a New Age - a better one - would arise from the wreckage of the old.

Dr. Tuan reflects that Romanticism "inclines toward extremes in feeling, imagining and thinking." This super-charged atmosphere generates what Dr. Tuan refers to as dissonance. In this "trial by error" process, human beings struggle toward transcendence by courting possible disaster in the quest for new insights and innovations.

One of the classic paintings of the Romantic era is a perfect illustration of dissonance in action. The human future is here gripped in the begrimed, calloused hands of the stevedores or keelmen in J.M.W. Turner's Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight.

J.M.W. Turner, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight

This 1835 painting documents the backbreaking process of loading coal from the mines of England's Tyneside region onto square-rigged sailing ships that will take it to the factories of Manchester or London. The dissonance – the drudgery and danger - of the keelmen's lives created the means for rapid change and rising standards of living that were a feature of the Industrial Revolution.

Another Romantic-era landscape, George Innes' Lackawanna Valley, picks up this theme.

In 1856, George Inness was commissioned to paint a view of the new depot of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. By contract, Inness was tasked with giving a central place to the "roundhouse," the circular building where locomotives, passenger and freight cars were serviced for their next run. The roundhouse was not even completed as Inness set to work depicting the railroad yard and surrounding valley.

Inness’ painting was initially known as The First Roundhouse of the D. L. and W. R. R. at Scranton. The owners of the D. L. and W. R. R., however, were less than pleased. After a discrete interval, they sold the painting which eventually found its way into the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

George Inness, The Lackwanna Valley

It does not take long to figure out what rattled the composure of the D. L. and W. R. R. bosses. When examining Inness’ painting, what strikes the eye – and holds it – is the field of tree stumps. The rail barons wanted the looker to focus on their big, impressive roundhouse or the puffing locomotive. That might be what the reclining figure in the foreground is looking at, but what we see are the missing trees, hewn down to build the Scranton rail depot.

Americans who first viewed Inness’ painting likely saw the missing trees too. Even amid the railroad mania of the mid-nineteenth century, alarm was beginning to mount regarding the effect on the natural environment of the rapid industrialization of the United States.

Inness could have side-stepped the issue and pleased the railroad owners by not including the tree stumps. Artists, however, must be people of integrity and Inness remained true to his vision.
 Inness also remained true to the spirit of the Sublime. The full impact of his uncompromising depiction of The Lackawanna Valley can be appreciated by comparison with a photograph of the Scranton rail yard taken about a half-century later. The tree stumps are gone but so is the rest of Nature!

Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad yards, Scranton, PA, c.1900

The Romantic Age thus left a mixed legacy to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

How we respond to this ecological crisis will determine our future. Dr. Tuan recognizes the importance of stewardship of the earth. But he calls for bold, Romantic-style initiative, not the reclusive scholarship of the Ming Loyalists.
"Humans cannot just want to chew the cud on fertile land and live contentedly," Dr. Tuan writes. "They are, after all, children of God, not cattle."

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved

Images Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. , the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Library of Congress and the University of Wisconsin Press.

Introductory Image: Romantic Geography, in Search of the Sublime Landscape, 2014 (Cover)

Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727 - 1788) Mountain Landscape with Bridge, c. 1783/1784 Medium: oil on canvas. Dimensions: overall: 113 x 133.4 cm (44 1/2 x 52 1/2 in.) framed: 146.7 x 167.6 cm (57 3/4 x 66 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Andrew W. Mellon Collection. 1937.1.107

William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Great Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, 1805 Medium: pen and ink with watercolor over graphite. Dimensions: 40.8 x 33.7cm (16 1/16 x 13 1/4 in.) support: 55.2 x 44.3 cm (21 3/4 x 17 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Rosenwald Collection
 
Zhang Feng, (Chinese, active ca. 1628–1662) Landscapes, dated 1644. Medium: Album of twelve paintings; ink and color on paper. Dimensions: Each leaf: 6 1/16 x 9 in. (15.4 x 22.9 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Credit Line: Edward Elliott Family Collection, Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1987. Accession Number: 1987.408.2a–n

Gong Xian (Chinese, 1619–1689) Ink Landscapes with Poems, dated 1688. Medium: Album of sixteen paintings; ink on paper. Dimensions: 10 3/4 x 16 1/8 in. (27.3 x 41 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Credit Line: Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1981 Accession Number: 1981.4.1a–o

Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640 ) A Forest at Dawn with a Deer Hunt, ca. 1635. Medium: Oil on wood. Dimensions: 24 1/4 x 35 1/2 in. (61.5 x 90.2 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, The Annenberg Foundation, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, Michel David-Weill, The Dillon Fund, Henry J. and Drue Heinz Foundation, Lola Kramarsky, Annette de la Renta, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, The Vincent Astor Foundation, and Peter J. Sharp Gifts; special funds, gifts, and other gifts and bequests, by exchange, 1990. Accession Number 1990.196

Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775 - 1851) Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, 1835. Medium: oil on canvas. Dimensions: overall: 92.3 x 122.8 cm (36 5/16 x 48 3/8 in.) framed: 127.6 x 158.1 x 14 cm (50 1/4 x 62 1/4 x 5 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Widener Collection 1942.9.86

George Inness (American, 1825 - 1894) The Lackawanna Valley, c. 1856.
Medium: oil on canvas. Dimensions: overall: 86 x 127.5 cm (33 7/8 x 50 3/16 in.) framed: 120.3 x 161.6 x 15.2 cm (47 3/8 x 63 5/8 x 6 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Gift of Mrs. Huttleston Rogers 1945.4.1

Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad yards, Scranton, PA. Detroit Publishing Co., publisher. Detroit Publishing, Co. Date Created/Published: between 1900-1910. Medium: 2 negatives : glass ; 8 x 10 in. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-det-4a18925. Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication. Gift of State Historical Society of Colorado; 1949. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Art Eyewitness Book Review: The Self-Portrait by James Hall

The Self-Portrait, a Cultural History

By James Hall

                                                                                                                           

Thames & Hudson/288 pages/$35

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Self-portraiture is an artistic genre that is dominated by the works of a few towering figures of genius. Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo - there is no escaping their presence, front and center on this stage of art history.

James Hall's new book documents the history of how this "mighty fistful" came to crowd lesser - or at least less egotistical - figures to the sidelines. But the more we look at self-portraits, the centrality of the "greats" diminishes and fascinating insights into human nature emerge. Hall shows that the creation of self-portraits is a deep-rooted aspect of the creative impulse.

Of equal importance, self-portraits reveal as much about the "times" of the artists as about their lives.

The genesis of self-portraiture, as we know it, begins in the Middle Ages with monastic drawings which confound the idea that this genre deals with chest-swelling promotion. With trenchant insight, Hall examines the composition of works like St. Dunstan - Self-Portrait Worshipping Christ to show that the roots of self-portrait painting lie in Christian humility.

St Dunstan, Self-Portrait Worshipping Christ

The depiction of a diminutive St. Dunstan kneeling before a monumental Christ figure so completely embodies the worldview of Medieval Europe that it is strange that it is not better known. Created around the year 950, in the characteristic "wiry" outline drawing of Anglo-Saxon England, it is evidently an autograph work by St. Dunstan. An accomplished goldsmith, Dunstan climbed the ladder of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to become the Archbishop of Canterbury in 959. You would never guess at his rank around the time it was drawn. Dunstan was then Abbot of Glastonbury, one of the most prestigious and mystical sites in the British isles, with a history reaching back to the lost age of King Arthur. Yet, Dunstan abases himself at the feet of Jesus.

In other works from the Middle Ages, red-haired Father Rufilius of Weissenau depicted himself illustrating the letter R in a twelfth century book about the Christian saints - while grappling with a menacing serpent, symbolical of temptation. Another twelfth century drawing shows an artist monk, Hildebertus, throwing a sponge at a mouse that is gnawing on his lunch. These medieval self-portraitists manifested a redeeming sense of their self-awareness and humanity.

There was not a tinge of self-abasement in Albrecht Durer (14 - 1528). Durer's self-portraits are the signature works of self-portraiture, along with Rembrandt's. One can read numerous meanings into Durer's depictions of himself and volumes have been written doing so. Hall is more circumspect than most commentators, many of whom see Durer's self-portraits as revelatory documents of mirror-gazing Renaissance individualism.

On a tactical level, Hall brilliantly demolishes the belief that new technology during the 1400's propelled widespread use of flat crystal mirrors. Instead of having to polish steel mirrors or puzzle out one's features in small concave mirrors, like that in the famous Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, more time could be spent narcissistically gazing upon oneself.

Hall conclusively brushes aside that fable. Flat mirrors were an innovation of the early 1700's and remained extremely expensive for decades to come.

Likewise, the notion that full-scale self-portraits like Durer's or Raphael's were products of extreme egotism is debatable. Artists like Durer and Raphael were no longer monks or artisans. They were entrepreneurs and gentlemen who had to project an image of success to drum-up business. Hall quotes a letter from Durer during a visit to Venice to his patron back in Nuremberg: "How I shall freeze after this (Venetian) sun. Here I am a gentleman, at home only a parasite."

Albrecht Durer, Self-Portrait

Durer's frontal self-portrait is a disturbing work, the identification with Christ edging towards messianic self-delusion. Prior to this painting, portraits or self-portraits were done either in profile or three-quarters view like the earlier one of Durer above. Only Christ was painted face-on so that faithful Christians could contemplate him as they had religious icons during the Middle Ages. Was Durer taking a step too far or was this picture a pious identification with Jesus, especially given the cult of the youthful Christ which was in vogue around 1500?

Hall cogently argues against giving too much religious significance to Durer's "full-frontal." He contends that it was more likely a work of clever self-promotion. Whatever interpretation one makes for the self-portraits of great Renaissance painters like Durer, there is no doubt that Hall scores a significant point in one of the major premises of his book. Hall contends that around the time that artists were posturing as heroes during the early 1500s, a countervailing trend arose of the self-portrait as self-mockery.

Hall sees these "mock-heroic" self-portraits as a form of penance. Whether Michelangelo's (presumed) self-portrait as a flayed skin held by St. Bartholomew in the Last Judgment is indeed a self-portrait has yet to be documented. The last half of the 1500's was a bizarre time, the era of Mannerism and melancholia. So perhaps this rather ludicrous image (which rather looks like a Halloween costume) is a self-portrait of Michelangelo. If so, it is an inside joke as well as self-mockery.

With Caravaggio, we are on indisputable ground that his Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus is self-mockery. Even more riveting is Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, painted after he had killed a man in a sword-fight in Rome in 1606. Caravaggio presented this painting to his patron, Cardinal Borghese, no doubt asking pardon for the crime.

The severed head of Goliath definitely bears the likeness of Caravaggio, worn-out by his tempestuous, dissipated life-style. But is the youthful David in this picture likewise a self-portrait? Does this stunning work of art depict the conflict of virtue against vice that rages within each individual human soul

 Caravaggio, Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus

Once again, there is no documented "right or wrong" answer to these speculations. Hall does prove that a conflict raged within the artistic soul of most of the great artists of the West, which they attempted to answer in their self-portraits. The "choice of Hercules" of making a decision between virtue and vice, of creating heroic art or commercially lucrative work, oppressed the minds and spirits of many like Sir Joshua Reynolds. Hall writes that this "traumatic and complex" psychodrama was resolved in the way that Reynolds depicted himself in his self-portraits.

So too did Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch and Frida Kahlo. Hall writes insightfully about them all.

I wish that Hall had also included the great nineteenth century master of Russian art, Ilya Repin (1844-1930), in his narrative. Repin created several outstanding self-portraits, the most notable being Double Portrait of Natalia Nordman and Ilya Repin (1903). In this memorable work, Repin places himself in shadow, his common-law wife in sunlight. Unfortunately, almost all of Repin's paintings are in Russian museums and are seldom displayed in the West.

Hall also writes with brilliance about the contemporary self-portrait. But it is to be wondered if many artists today, so completely absorbed in the "self", are creating actual portraits of themselves.

Is Tracey Emin's tent creation, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95, a self-portrait? Are the figures cast from Antony Gormley's body - at first by his wife - truly self-portraits? Or do these works aim, as Hall concludes about Gormley's Another Place, to conceal as much as to reveal?

Perhaps the answer to these enigmatic contemporary art works is that they seek to raise questions about human identity - not to supply definitive answers.

That indeed is the over-arching effect of self-portraits down through the ages. We can now appreciate this thanks to Hall's perceptive study. Whether it is the prostrate body of St. Dunstan before a towering Jesus or the tormented Edvard Munch's Self-Portrait in Hell, self-portraits are ultimately not depictions of the artists' bodies but rather are portals to their souls.

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

Images Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Introductory Image: The Self-Portrait, A Cultural History, 2014 (Cover)

St. Dunstan, Self-Portrait Worshipping Christ, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. F. 4. 32

Albrecht Durer, Self-Portrait, 52 cm x 41 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Caravaggio, Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus, 67 x 53 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome