I am perfectly aware that, in some instances, every species of obstruction will at first be thrust in the way of those who try to follow my advice, and, in others, that the change will be obeyed with reluctance. But determination and tact combined will, I think, overcome opposition after a time, and the very malcontents themselves will end by praising the newregime.
From: Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert (aka"Wyvern"), Culinary Jottings From Madras (5th edition, 1885).
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Duke and Duchess of Osuna and their Children, 1787-1788
This morning, in ArtDaily.org's "On a Day Like Today" feature, I read and noted that it was the one-hundred eighty-third anniversary of Francisco Goya's death in Bordeaux, France.
When I was growing up, my family (my mother, particularly) made a practice to honor death anniversaries, something my wife disagrees with.
Carolinemuch prefers marking the birthdays of the departed instead and I’m generally inclined to follow suit.
In Goya's case, however, since this morning's apprehension came up so suddenly, and because he's Goya (meaning a very great artist), I think making an exception today is entirely appropriate.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, La Leocadia o Una manola, 1819-23
Ifirst deeply experienced Goya's art in a Modern Painting survey course given by Professor Hedley Rhys during my sophomore year at Swarthmore College. The following year, in a Master Printmakers seminar taught by Professor Robert Walker, I was extremely fortunate by being given the opportunity to study and actually physically handle many of Goya’s graphic works (including Los Caprichos, The Disasters of War and others) at the Lessing Rosenwald Collection over the course of many Wednesday afternoons during 1973 and 1974.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Capricho 43. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, 1797.
I once read someone's comment describing Goya as the last of the Old Masters and the first modern artist. While one can (and people would) quibble that observation to death (these kinds of arguments can be fun and are occasionally elucidating), the remark also makes a good deal of sense also and resonates in the mind and eye. One definitely feels the tug of the pre-Industrial Revolution world looking back toward classical antiquity (and, frankly, much further back in time and consciousness) in Goya. But, as the Surrealists, among others, noticed, Goya powerful thought-images also seem quite contemporary in the way he depicts and seems to unravel deep human psychology in his portraiture and other works. The penetrating and lucid renderings of a jaundiced waking eye and of a bad-dreaming eye are always fully present-tense expressions of self. They seem as vivid as today and as imminent as tomorrow.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Bandit Killing a Woman, 1798
Discovering Goya coincided with the beginning of my own transformation from being primarily literary to visual in orientation, which was a necessary adaptation for someone trying to pursue a career in art history and the mental change that has probably afforded me the greatest pleasure in life. Somewhere along the way, I recall reading about Goya's mastery and control of the "gray" or neutral palette and how this allied him with earlier artists like Velasquez, Rembrandt and Chardin and later masters like Manet, Whistler and Juan Gris. I remember pondering this deeply and trying to discern where that perception led and how it might be applied, leading me to devise and spin for a period all sorts of foolish, expansive student theories that never affected or influenced anyone’s thinking but my own.
In the end, I became a lawyer (in the immortal words of The Ethiopians, "Everything Crash").
Goya remained Goya, something fine, great and immortal in the world.
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Mujeres riendo, 1819-1823
It's funny -- for the last couple of years I've thought of moving to Bordeaux. We shall see.
Commemorative plaque outside Goya's House, Bordeaux, France
Roman coin showing Emperor Caligula (ruled AD 37 -- AD 41) on face with figure of Vesta on reverse.
‘They are still selling.’
‘Then we must go on buying.’
‘There’s a limit, Mr Krogh.’
‘No limit.’
‘Where’s the money to come from?’
‘I’ve arranged that. The A.C.U. will lend the money.’
Frozen Stockholm
‘We shall need every penny they’ve got.’
‘You can have it.’
“But the A.C.U. They’ll have to pass their dividend. It’ll start a panic. This won’t be a single break. It’ll be like a sieve. You’ll have holes sprung in Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, everywhere.’
‘No, no,’ Krogh said, ‘you exaggerate. You live too much in the centre of things, Hall. I’m right out of it here. When once we’ve started the American company next week, we can do what we like with the market.’
‘But the A.C.U.?”
Earliest existing stock certificate, Sweden, 1288
‘We’re selling it. Batterson’s are buying. A million pounds down. That will fill any holes for a week, Hall. You’ve just got to go on buying.’
‘But the A.C.U. won’t have a farthing.’ He could hear the thin whistle of Hall’s breath far away in his room in Amsterdam.
‘They’ll be exactly what they are worth now. Only it’ll be in the form of shares in the Amsterdam company.’
The 28th page of Patrick Breen's diary (Donner Party member; departed Illinois for California, April 14, 1846), recording his observations in late February 1847, including 'Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt & eat him. I dont that she has done so yet, it is distressing.'
‘But you know we aren’t worth the money we’re spending.’ Krogh had no need of television when he spoke to Hall; they had been together so long he could associate every inflection with its accompanying action; the reproachful swinging leg, the doubting dangle of watch chain.
‘Yes, you are, Fred,’ Krogh said. He was quite happy again because he was dealing with figures, there was nothing he couldn’t do with them, there was nothing human about them. ‘You are worth everything. Our credit’s bound up with you. The A.C.U. is nothing. It has nothing to do with the main business. It’s an investment we are willing to sell. If you go, the I.G.S. goes.’
‘Yes, but in actual value…’
Frozen Amsterdam
'Three minutes are up,’ a voice said in German.
'There is no such thing,’ Krogh said, 'as actual value.’ He took up an ashtray and put it down again: E.K.
‘There’s only the price people are willing to pay.’
Francisco Goya, "The Shootings of May 3, 1808," 1814, Oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Text excerpted from Graham Greene, England Made Me. London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1935
Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait As A Desperate Man, 1843
Once, early in my funeral-going life, I asked my mother why people didn't bring cameras to funerals.
Those are not weak enough
But these are not as strong
That handful of buried men
Who understood their ground
Reviewing my last several days' posts here, I discern futile attempts to distract, distance and/or cheer myself up following last Saturday's killings in Tucson. Reading through the roll of the dead and injured and learning what has been discovered so far (with more details being reported every day) about Jared Lee Loughner's life, mind and motivations are both, obviously, horrifying enough, but what has made the Tucson experience so unexpectedly and searingly scarring has been the reflexive and visceral political reaction to the event.
Francisco Goya, Beautiful Teacher (From Los Caprichos), 1797-98
This can only be described as a pre-emptive, opportunistic political war initiated by national, state and local Democrat office holders and their media supporters (including so-called "social media" participants) at all levels against anyone who might disagree with their views about virtually anything at all. For the first time in my life (remembering, among other notable events, Chicago 1968, the Rodney King riots, my experiences as a prosecutor in Brooklyn, and the powerful and real Los Angeles/millenium movie Strange Days), the foregoing "liberal" (using the term in its current political, rather than its classic philosophical sense) cohort now includes an actual law enforcement complement in the figure of the feckless Pima County sheriff who failed to prevent what appears to have been an entirely foreseeable crime and who seems intent on undercutting its prosecution through his repeated intemperate and inappropriate self-serving public statements made to a compliant and sadly complicit news corps -- statements clearly calculated ab initio to draw public attention away from his own gross incompetence and to suborn scrutiny of his department's history and actions.
Handy cunning wrapped around a heavy lexicon
It's weak enough to do, but it went on and on
And started up -- that's how it all began
It put that ball of wax in gear and man it ran
The many ways in which all of these parties have contorted common sense and corrupted language by tying Loughner's psychotic acts to the speech, purported attitudes and an amorphous, fractious "atmosphere" supposedly generated by political opponents makes you think that crazy people occasionally do have something valuable to tell us and that the question Loughner posed to Rep. Giffords at their first meeting in 2007 (it was Giffords’ response, which Loughner thought deficient, that apparently was the proximate cause of his rage and these horrific events) -- "What is the use of government if words have no meaning?" -- makes some sort of odd sense.
My people raised me on pure superstition
The stars were put up there for us to wish upon
They brought me unconscious from over the water
I'm used to not knowing which side I'm on
This nightmare crescendoed at Wednesday evening's strange and dishonorable political rally in Arizona, culminating in the president's speech and the many, many standing ovations it received from the assembled “celebrants”, including the president's wife and members of his administration, all of whom could and should have behaved with a sense of sobriety befitting a memorial staged even prior to the funerals of some of Loughner’s victims.
Ad Reinhardt, Black Painting, 1960-66
News reporting to the contrary notwithstanding, the manner in which this event was conducted could not possibly have been spontaneous, accidental or unknown in advance to its featured actors. Things just don't happen that way in our tightly scripted and meticulously packaged media times. This was our own Truman Show and some of the play-by-play commentary I picked up on friends’ Facebook pages (e.g., “we’re crying in Cali”; “Thank you, Mr. President!”), contrasted with gratuitous, vicious, mostly anti-Sarah Palin remarks from some of these same individuals and/or consonant friends of theirs playing on the lower parts of the moral register, confirms this for me. I don't think I have ever read such a set of venomous statements directed toward a person not one of the writers knew personally, nor whose actions could possibly have affected any of them in a significant way previously unless, possibly, they were Alaska residents.
Francisco Goya, Those Specks of Dust (From Los Caprichos), 1797-98
It is one thing (and brainless enough) to keep getting one’s “hip ticket punched” by basing your political life around voting against Richard Nixon every four years (post-mortem!), but it is quite another to establish and support cults of personality and construct living hagiography. On this morning’s news I actually heard Rep. Giffords’ physician suggesting that the encouraging progress in the congresswoman's medical condition (appearing to open her eyes voluntarily, thank heavens) was somehow linked to the president’s visit to her and to his primetime address later that evening, which the doctor said was playing on her hospital room television.
Strange to tell it was cooler down in Hell
So mellow and relaxed
I've got to lease some place
Cheap with lots of space
And I’m never coming back
In response to my question regarding funerals, my mother explained both the private and the limited shared (but not publicly exploited) nature of grief and sketched for me the metes and bounds of modesty and propriety. State funerals aside, which perforce feature elements of pomp, circumstance and a public relations component, the simple and direct answer my mother gave me then still seems perfectly sensible and complete, and it has helped me through my own personal difficulties and allowed me to be a friend to others during theirs. The Tucson rally travesty and its attendant and ongoing press coverage makes one wish to adopt Senator Joseph Welch’s question to Senator Joseph McCarthy -- “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” -- and pose it to every principal and accomplice to these events.
One has to wonder how soon Together We Thrive t-shirts will be available on eBay?
Those are not weak enough
But these are not as strong
That handful of buried men
Who understood their ground
Handy cunning wrapped around a heavy lexicon
It's weak enough to do, but it went on and on and on.....
Francisco Goya, The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (From Los Caprichos), 1797-98
Not Weak Enough lyrics by Peter Blegvad
Note to readers: On a more cheerful subject (sort of), after a week of repeated viewings, I've come to really like Inception.
1/17/11 Note to readers: Together We Thrive t-shirts are now being sold on eBay.
A few days ago I came across a Graham Green quotation from The Power And The Glory(a novel I liked better when I reread it two summers ago than I did the first time through in high school), which apparently appears frequently in “wise thoughts” lists.
It reads:"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
Juan Gris
I wouldn't presume to speak for other people in this regard, but the statement definitely applies to me. In my case, the moment occurred in the fall of 1968, when I pulled the book Juan Gris by James Thrall Soby from the library shelf at The Gunnery in Washington, Connecticut. I have no idea why I decided to look at the book and I definitely hadn't planned on the encounter. Probably, I was just taking a study break and wandering around in the stacks.
But from the moment I began to look at the picture plates in the book and then to read Soby's text, things began to come into focus for me in ways they hadn’t previously.
Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912
I began to consider Cubist painting (which I was aware of but hadn't previously thought about a lot) very seriously, from its beginnings through the development of the Analytical and Synthetic phases. Its multi-valent visual and textural viewpoints and rich and appealing subject matter (to a young teenager, studio and café life seemed unbelievably appealing; descriptions of Cubist subjects as “restricted” seem as false to me now as they did then) made the world seem to me strong, logical, and lively -- a place of infinite possibility.
Juan Gris, The Open Window, 1921
Quickly and sequentially I made entrée into artistic movements related and unrelated to Cubism: contemporary ones like Cubist poetry (Apollinaire, Reverdy, Jacob) and successor ones like Dada, Surrealism (especially Marcel Duchamp's work), opening out into the rest of 20th century avant-garde visual art, music and dance. In fairly short order, I thought it was crucial to learn all about world art history from the beginning of recorded time to the present and what might be imagined beyond that.
Juan Gris, Jar, Bottle and Glass, 1911
Duchamp’s disciple John Cage taught me (in his writings) Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's maxim “the function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation”, which I adopted as a mental and aesthetic touchstone. That and Cage's “silent” piano composition 4’3", as well as Duchamp’s deceptive “career disappearing act” all provided an aesthetic viewpoint implying that art was both a physically “present” thing and event and a transcendent experience and that it was better for artists to be modest and as invisible as possible in their work.
John Cage, 4'33", 1952
This came to mind again this week when a friend posed the question whether it was possible “to express the absence of affect” in a work of art.
Trying to cope and deal with such an abstract thought (I’m a lawyer, not a philosopher), initially I found I needed to decide:
a) what, if any, difference there might be between “affectless”, which by all dictionary definitions suggests a psychological disorder, and the “absence of affect”;
b) how to recognize or at least give examples of the “invisible” quality I just alluded to; and
c) whether or not the simple volitional action of “expressing” something nullified the logical possibility of achieving “an absence of affect”.
(Thank heavens I am doing this outside an academic and/or commercial publishing context where I’m sure I’d be eviscerated for sloppy thinking, magical thinking, using incorrect terminology or all of the above, undoubtedly in violation of some political canon or social interdiction I’ve somehow missed or neglected to observe.)
All of which brought me back to Juan Gris, the pseudonym adopted by Jose Vittoriano Gonzales (1887-1927), the Spanish painter who along with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque is rightly considered one of the three greatest masters of Cubism. One of the things that immediately attracted me to Gris (apart from the fact that he is clearly a painter of genius) is his absence of affect. I see this quality in each of the works posted here and it is not a quality, incidentally, that I see in the work of his great friend Picasso, whose work, brilliant and rigorous as it can be, is much “hotter” and more gestural and expressionistic. Personally, I tended to gravitate toward the sort of cerebral quality I found in Gris, whose invented name, which translates as “John Grey” (reminding me of Henry Vincent Yorke’s similar adoption of the very plain “Henry Green” as a nom-de-plume) emphasizes that “non-affect” effect.
Juan Gris, Tablero de Ajedrez, 1917
Going backwards and forward in time, I detect and am attracted to this quality, which I tend to associate with honesty and piercing intelligence, in works by the Netherlandish painter Hans Memling (1430-94), the Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746-1828), the great French painter Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), the Dutch Neo-Plasticist, the brilliant surrealistYves Tanguy (1900-55), and surprisingly (some would probably say), in the more recent art (especially the portraiture) of Andy Warhol (1928-87).
Hans Memling, Portrait of A Man, 1470
Francisco Goya, Self-Portrait In Studio, 1795
Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, La Brioche, 1763
Naturally, as I developed, learned new things and saw more art, my so-called “focus” waxed and waned and things alternately made more and less sense depending on myriad factors. As my ability to look closely, and possibly see deeply, increased (I had some professional training; I spent time on this and made a real commitment for a while), I began increasingly to notice definite gestural, expressionist aspects in the “absence of affect” works I liked so much and thought were my favorites, as well as moments of intense focus and cerebral stillness in works that formerly seemed seemed wildly active.
Yves Tanguy, The Ribbon of Excess, 1932
Fernand Leger, The City, 1919
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 1, 1938-9
Consequently, what had previously been black-and-white antonyms adopted shades of gray coloring and I fell in love with all kinds of art my original aesthetic lens didn’t allow me to appreciate sufficiently, including the brilliant art of two of Gris' great friends, the unclassifiable (to me) Fernand Leger (1881-1955) and Henri Matisse (1869-1954), who from his earliest Fauvist days was hardly “gris” in his approach.
I relate all this because the Graham Greene quote that opened the piece really affected me when I re-encountered it and made me recall the moment when my personal door to the future opened. I wound up doing something professionally very different for a living than I ever thought I would, but I think I am still roughly the same person who was formed out of Juan Grisby James Thrall Soby.
