Yves Tanguy, Multiplication of the Arcs, 1954, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
During 1952 and 1953 Tanguy produced a marvelous series of drawings, but few paintings, in part because of ill health, in part because he and his wife traveled abroad to attend the openings of their solo exhibitions in Paris and Rome. (Tanguy also showed his pictures in Milan.) But back in Woodbury, to his vast relief, he began to work again, painting the fine The Mirage of Time, and the two sparkling little canvases, Saltimbanques and Where Are You? And during the final months of his life he completed what is almost certainly the greatest work of his entire, dedicated career -- Multiplication of the Arcs.
Isaw Tanguy in Woodbury several times when the Multiplication was in progress. He worked on the picture like one possessed, hurrying back to his studio after a brief lunch, whereas ordinarily he would have sat for hours, talking about literature and pictures (though never his own, unless stubbornly pressed) and the state of the world of art, with its chronic feuds and armistices, its developments and counter-developments. Clearly he sensed that the Multiplication was to be the summary of lifelong aims and preoccupations; he would arrive at the house at the end of the day exhausted by the long hours of unrelenting concentration. And what a cosmic image he achieved! The picture is sort of a boneyard of the world, its inexplicable objects gathered in fantastic profusion before a soft and brooding sky. The close gradations of light, tone and form are handled with such acumen that a pristine order evolves, whose poetic impact is more than likely to establish the picture as one of the masterworks in the art of our time.
From: James Thrall Soby, Yves Tanguy, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1955
Yves Tanguy, Indefinite Divisibility, 1942, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Untitled (Wind) 1928, Private collection
Yves Tanguy, Belomancie, 1927, Private collection
Kay Sage
Kay Sage Tanguy, I Saw Three Cities, 1944, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey
Man Ray, Portrait of Yves Tanguy, 1934
Reader note: Pre-occupied today as I am, I consider this a sort of downpayment on a more substantial appreciation of Yves Tanguy and his work. When I think about the various maxims about what makes art important and why we respond to art (we all know some; no need to repeat them here), I think back to my first encounters with Tanguy. No artist's words prescribed (Tanguy's titles were mostly suggested by friends), prompted or spoken. Hushed rapt attention (quickly turning to preoccupation and unrelenting concentration) silently ignited, focusing on a (sur)realer world. Married to the marvelous Kay Sage -- a stirring thought.
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.
For the last ten days or so, I have been crazy from the heat, sick as a dog, demented by details and generally inattentive. But all the while I’ve been planning to post a piece here, which I finally decided to call Major Minor, which is the name of a fine Peter Blegvad song that appears on his album, The Naked Shakespeare.
Originally, I had simply intended to write a short appreciation (because I am not a professional critic, that seemed to be the proper appellation for my projected effort) of the 20th century English novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton, who is probably best known for his successful stage plays Rope and Gaslight, both later made into famous, highly regarded motion pictures. Although I enjoy both plays (and think the recent transformation of “gaslight” into a verb is fascinating, if disturbing, language and behavior issue), I strongly prefer Hamilton’s novels (early to late, from Craven House through Unknown Assailant) and thought I would include in the post the section of Claud Cockburn’s memorable introduction to The Slaves of Solitude where he recalls Hamilton’s extraordinarily acute powers of physical and psychological observation, even in crowded settings like London pubs, which can overwhelm most people with their buzz and din, and his “bat’s wing ear” for dialogue. I also planned to include several selections from Hamilton’s work, including an excerpt from his remarkable, underrated early “graphic novel”, Impromptu In Moribundia (which illustrates Hamilton ability to raise and transform what might be viewed as tiresome political polemic into genuinely moving story-telling and art), and the short final section of Mr. Stimson and Mr. Gorse where we leave the story of Ernest Ralph Gorse (Hamilton describes his protagonist as “the worst man in the world” and creates a riveting portrait, sustained over a long haul, of a sociopath) proper, and are suddenly placed on a different plane of convincing, frightening prophecy, which has unfortunately proved to be a largely accurate picture of European and western life. Rounding the post out would be the inclusion of several charming “author photos”, including the one showing the great man’s drawing room in his flat at The Albany in London (also home to Lord Byron, William Gladstone, Raffles, Jack Worthing, Graham Greene, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Sir Kenneth Clark, Terrence Rattigan and Terence Stamp, among other notables).
In any event, on my way to “there” (“there” being the composition and publication of the post), I ran into the following quotation about Hamilton from the English critic D.J. Taylor:
“Every so often, though, the revulsion slips away and one is left with the joke or the sideways glance, the twitch upon the psychological thread that guarantees Hamilton a singular place as one of the great minor English novelists.”
The word and classifier “minor”, which I have seen applied untold numbers of times in various ways to artists I admire by critics I don’t, stopped me dead in my tracks. As it usually does, it made me angry for a while and arrested forward motion. I’m feeling better now and would like to say (as briefly as I can manage) that for some reason it appears that many of the artists I admire most are regularly classified as “minor”. Henry Green, who I consider to be the greatest English writer of the 20th century and an incomparable genius, has regularly been called minor. The extraordinary Ronald Firbank, author of Considering The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, a writer of peerless wit, facility and humanity (read Sorrow In Sunlight) – minor. Denton Welch, the brave, gimlet-eyed soul who achieved so much as a writer in his short life, ending with the masterpiece A Voice Through A Cloud, is generally considered minor. And Julian Maclaren-Ross, a short story writer, memoirist, critic, parodist and novelist of uncommon character and quality (and the only critic with the sense and integrity to praise Patrick Hamilton’s uniformly loathed conclusion to The Gorse Trilogy, Unknown Assailant) is , for some pitiable and misguided souls, an artist placed at the minor end of minor.
I believe (and recall being taught) that classification was a key intellectual step forward for mankind, through which we bring order to the chaos of our copious, but disheveled, direct observations of life, supposedly in a rational and effective pursuit of our desire to discern “first principles”. That being said, I haven’t encountered (as far as I can discern) the intellect, soul or any other aspect of Aristotle in critics who expel the word “minor” like a puny bullet, damning artists with faint praise in order to elevate themselves to a plane higher than their target. The practice reminds me of a remark I read the other day in a magazine article about the “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer: "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength”.
Critics apply this “major/minor” idiocy/fallacy to other arts also and I confess to having a consistent record of finding talent, value, genius and pleasure in “minor” figures across the spectrum, from the Greek poet Archilochus to the artists of the French rococo period, from the French painter Yves Tanguy to the American painter of small details, Vija Celmins, from the English expatriate songwriter and pataphysician Kevin Ayers to the American expatriate songwriter and cartoonist Peter Blegvad, both artists of surpassing talent whose “crime” against “major-ness” was simply never having had a big commercial hit.
(Notes to probably already bored readers:
1. I have decided to dispense with the fuller list and to give only the several examples cited above. I could go on and on. N.b. I am leaving The Kinks out of this.
2. I am a Quaker, which is, I suppose a “minor religion” in some people’s eyes, although such a conclusion would be inaccurate in any number of ways.
3. Peter Blegvad is the author of one of the world’s longest grammatically correct palindromes. “Peel’s foe not a set animal laminates a tone of sleep.” MINOR? I ask you.)
In conclusion, I would like to offer my “crazy from the heat” friends (and their parents in the case of Recipe 2 below) something delicious for relief from the high temperatures and stress of it all:
Recipe 1: Papaya-Banana Smoothie
1 cup milk
1/4 cup Greek yogurt
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 small ripe banana, peeled and sliced
1/2 large, ripe papaya, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 cup ice cubes
Combine the milk, yogurt, vanilla, banana, papaya and ice cubes in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour into a large glass.
Recipe 2: Mango-Yogurt-White Rum Smoothie
2 ripe mangoes, peeled, pitted and chopped
2 cups Greek yogurt
1/2 cup mango nectar
1/2 cup white rum
Crushed ice
2 to 4 tablespoons simple syrup, depending on sweetness of mangoes
Combine mango, yogurt, nectar, rum and a few cups of crushed ice in a blender and blend until smooth and frothy. Sweeten with simple syrup, if needed. Divide among 4 glasses and serve.
