Review: Jean Fautrier, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Sep. 27- Dec. 7, 2014

A sense of disquiet occasioning in the viewers exacerbated when they found themselves in an exhibition room that was almost unpeopled- quite normal I suppose for a Wednesday afternoon- and under the incessant, rigid vigilance of stiff-backed custodians, who seemed unnecessarily outnumbered for a show so small. Small-scale, though, there were at least 100 paintings waiting to be beholden, to be confronted by whomever that had no apprehension of what they were going to see. We felt our ignorance jeered upon, our forbearance sorely tested. The sights that passed through our eyes were atrocious, relentless, bewildering. Once we hastened out of the exit, still stunned with the horrors we could not yet comprehend, how we wished we hadn’t subjected ourselves to such ordeal, in a supposed-to-be glorious afternoon.

But we should have been cautious in advance of the ordeal, because this was a Jean Fautrier’s retrospective we were attending. Jean Fautrier, a French-born artist whose life was punctuated with calamitous events: two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Occupation, dedicated his artworks chiefly to the unique portrayals of pain and ugliness. The exhibition began with his early realism works, the result of his academic training is apparent, but from which influence there are telling signs that he was desperately trying to refrain. Fautrier had the license to rebel. There was this portrait of a concierge, her head was ill-formed and lumpy; she managed a smile that should be as innocent and genial as that on the face of an avuncular elder lady, but on closer inspection we sensed something sinister. One was reminded of that Grotesque Old Woman by Quentin Metsys. This mocked-up portrait by the Flemish master is doubtlessly more jocular; the comedy of the old woman’s overblown deformity encourages light-hearted laughter. Whereas with Fautrier’s we see no amusements. It seems almost as if Fautrier envisioned every human being to look exactly like that, like an old, gnarled tree.

No sooner did Fautrier disentangle from the throes of academicism than the style of paintings took a drastic turn towards abstraction. I lighted on a painting that was to leave in me an equal measure of shock and disturbance as those of the Hostages series. Skins of Rabbits depicts five dead rabbits dangling on a string, their skins torn clumsily from hind paws to heads. Anyone familiar with the tradition of bodegón will surely not consider the work an anomaly in Western Art, nor its luridness too appalling to scrutinise with great concentration. Lurid inevitably one did feel when one judged it for some time, and seemingly saw the trembling fingers of a pair of hands appearing through the forms of the rabbits’ legs. This still-life is not a celebration of food, but Death’s exultant dance.

As Fautrier was inclining towards abstract art, his long pent-up anger and grief burst through the stoical façade that rendered his early works so peculiarly constrained. It was almost of no surprise that Fautrier’s career culminated in the Hostages series. The depictions of victims’ heads- wrung, twisted, fractured, rent, tortured by pain- are rather more of a trenchant response to the horror of war than merely the documenting of personal experiences. Combining figurations with abstractions, the heads are not so unrecognisable as doughs of flesh- one could still dimly make out the physiognomy; the victims were not yet dusting away into oblivion. The affliction is keenly felt yet at times dubiously muted; the emotions ferocious but constrained. A rare beauty exuded from such gruesome aggression when, despite the disconcerting feeling occasioned in me when browsing through the series, I lingered for a while on Fautrier’s sculpture, Head of a Hostage, and fantasised that I saw some obscure face born out of the amorphous rock. Not until when I read Andre Malraux’s exhibition catalogue did I realise I was not entertaining a fantasy, but, according to Monsieur Malraux, the Head, which he singled out as the centerpiece of the series, did entail a hope of “incarnation.”

However I couldn’t help doubting, with one who witnessed and was forced to digest so many horrors and tragedies, Fautrier could still find beauty in ugliness. Maybe at one moment- and let’s imagine if that were the moment before Fautrier breathed his last- he finally realised what human nature was all about: that we are a self-torturing sort, we are born to be forgiving and reconciled with the idiotic conviction that every vice is permitted a chance of redemption. He was tortured not because he was unable to forget, but could never hate.

News: The original of Caravaggio’s “Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy” might be identified

The original version of Caravaggio’s “Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy,” at least eighteen copies of which are thought to exist, might be finally identified, according to the leading expert on the Baroque master.

After years of arduous quest in search for the real Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy, esteemed scholar and the president of Florence’s Roberto Longhi Art History Foundation, Mina Gregori, declared that she was confident of making an unerring verification of the original version after having studied it at length in a private European collection.

If true, such discovery would surely yield revolutionary importance in Western Art. The version that some experts have claimed as the likeliest original is in a private collection in Rome. Speaking to the Independent, Gregori evaded giving a definite answer as to whether the Rome version was the one she recently authenticated. The only promise she could guarantee was that, with her dogged pressing of the entreaty, the owners of the painting would have it available for public display hopefully in the near future.

So what proof did Gregori have that the painting was indisputably the authentic Caravaggio? She listed off several key characteristics of the painting that helped identify its provenance: “The creation of a body with varying tones, the intensity of the face. The strong wrists, crossed fingers and beautiful hair … the wonderful variations in light and colour.”

Further discovery of a handwritten note that attached to the back of the 103.5 x 91.5 cm painting bolstered its credibility as an original work. In the note, Cardinale Scipione Borghese of Rome, one of the important patrons of Caravaggio’s, was named the commissioner of the painting, which was believed to be conceived in the wake of the artist’s flight from Rome when he was embroiled in a brawl that resulted in him killing a young man.

It wasn’t the first time the name and art of Caravaggio have caused such furore in Western Art. The mystery surrounding the artist is so that some of his paintings have been frequently misattributed or mislabeled. Sothesby’s was recently sued over an alleged misattribution of a painting- The Cardsharps- to a follower of Caravaggio instead of the Italian artist himself. The family of Lancelot Thwaytes first secured the work for £140 in 1962 and sold it to an auction house five decades later in 2006. British collector Sir Denis Mahon, after acquiring the painting at the auction for £42,000, declared it to be an original and thus should be valued at least 10 million. A hearing of the case will be held at High Court on this coming Sunday.

• news source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/revolutionary-lost-caravaggio-painting-mary-magdalen-in-ecstasy-identified-9816900.html

Focus: Berenice Abbott

"What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity."- Berenice Abbott

There are heads. The display window is teeming with heads; pretty heads. Heads adorned with feathers, fancy wigs, hats. Heads with egg-shaped faces. Faces that are painted with kohl eyes, twirled eyelashes, and rouge lips. Some of the faces are half-concealed with masks; masks that are borrowed from a Venetian masquerade, or an Italian opera. The heads and faces that are so peculiarly beautiful that they can only belong to the mannequins’. The mannequins whose torsos are truncated, who are without bodies. 

Berenice Abbott was reputed for her photographic documentation of New York city. In those photographs Abbott demonstrates her ingenuity in taming the immobile objects. Architecture and various urban constructions are unlike people; they are stubborn and hardened; their dogged immobility is a silent refusal to collaborate with whomever ill-advised enough to approach them like a hunter approaching his prey. But Abbott was a visionary. She detected the animal spirit stirring within the stony heart of every building, and provoked it to burst out of its fossilised shell. Buildings were stimulated into life like animals finally waken from their interminable hibernation. Abbott would approach each of them sometimes with caution, as she hid in the alleyway and only managed to capture a glimpse of its magnificent presence, or aim high her camera when she tackled the towering figure with more boldness. And once she finally conquered the formidable monster like Saint George triumphing over a dragon, she stood atop her conquest and proudly surveying the view beneath her; she would notice the mass of pedestrians that were once bustling her by as she ventured into the heart of the urban forest were now rendered tiny like ants. There is nothing more exhilarating than assuming superiority over those that were once our equivalents.

Abbott’s role as a photographer can be described as a fearless hunter on a mission to hunt down all the peculiar species. But the weapon she used- her camera- was not one designed to inspire fear in the objects she captured. Her intention never seemed to be that of imprisoning into her photographs the city of New York. She was documenting New York without asserting too much authority over her subject matters. Abbott exhibited through her photographs that a good street photographer should always be an unobtrusive observer, ceding lights to the urban vista that is the sole star of the show.

But when it comes to the mannequins, I suppose that even the most preeminent of photographers can be so easily baffled. There is no task more difficult than dealing with something that is constantly in a twilight zone: the mannequins are lifeless dolls with lifelike physiognomy, can appear to be either lifeless or lifelike depending on how one perceives them. Abbott opted for no particular angle in approaching the mannequins, but chose to give them a full-on shot. The moment she pressed her shutter was the moment the mannequins seemed to come alive. Those beautiful faces all decided to violate the demands of their instructor by defiantly turning their heads away from the lens, each of them looking at different directions, responding apathetically of having their pictures taken. Just as the photographer might be miffed at having such recalcitrant prima donnas as her sitters, she unexpectedly succeeded in producing a memorable photograph- eerie, unnerving, menacing.

And not just the line between life and lifelessness, photography unwittingly blurs many more: that between fact and fiction, past and present, subject and object. The disappearance of the line between the subject and the object was precisely the core of Abbott’s photography. Of anything on which we normally attach no more importance than merely a passing notice (an object), through Abbott’s camera it becomes something of a peculiar value (a subject). But once we cherish that photograph as an invaluable work of art, Abbott promptly reminds us that the subject matter can be the most banal of object, which invariably, yet not so astoundingly, fails to leave imprints in our memories. The photographer demonstrates that subject and object can be interchangeable, like mannequins, as well as everything else.

Focus: Andrew Wyeth

"One generation abandons the enterprise of another like stranded vessels."- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Andrew Wyeth spoke through the voice of nature. Nature in its most pristine, the least verbose, still retaining that primitive simplicity only the pioneers would know. Wyeth preached the esoteric prophesy; he recounted the mythic tales of the wounded souls, the physically deformed. There is, in his paintings, a nostalgic value that renders his art peculiarly biblical. Modern civilisation is mostly and blissfully omitted; the main feature of the painting is often that of a vast frontier- equable, silent and sparsely peopled. The visionary power of Wyeth’s art is almost comparable to that of the religious paintings. One inexorably has his conscience tugged when seeing Wyeth’s paintings as though one were standing before an altarpiece of Jesus and Madonna.

Interestingly, as though testifying to the obsolescence of his art, Wyeth’s paintings were mostly executed in temperas. The medium confers on his work a feeling of dryness and chalkiness that perfectly evokes the profound spirit of America’s rural past. There is also a sense of flatness that renders the figures as if divested of substance, and would be remedied if the paintings were painted with oil. I wonder if this gave some critics the reason to suggest that Wyeth’s art vacillates between abstraction and realism but, as plenty of medieval altarpieces were as well based on tempera, do we also suppose that this want of three-dimensionality, to which such method of painting is conducive, betrays a tendency towards abstraction? Something seems seriously amiss with such statement that I cannot pinpoint. But I do not recall anyone referring to Giotto’s marvelous religious cycle as tending towards abstraction.

I was initiated into the art of Wyeth through Christina’s World (1948). In it a woman seems to be struggling her way towards the house on all fours. She is half-reclining on a tawny field; the meticulous attention on the details of the grass is superb, one can virtually and clearly discern each individual blade. A feeling of isolation and desertion reigns over this desolate piece. The woman is in reality one named Anna Christina Olson, who had suffered from a muscular deterioration that paralysed her lower body. Apparently Olson was an acquaintance of Wyeth, and the painter must have found her deformity to be peculiarly inspiring, the spectacle of her crawling across the field worth immortalising. Wyeth’s insistence on featuring the helpless Olson into his painting is, to say the least, unnerving. Such disturbing sight, however, whips up one’s sympathy with the woman- to be abandoned on a vast land, to battle on her own without assistance, to be assaulted by fear, apprehension, and unknown danger.

The “tawny field” was to become a leitmotif in Wyeth’s oeuvre. Prior to Christina’s World the presence of the “tawny field” already took central stage in Turkey Pond (1944), which depicts Walt Anderson, a friend of Wyeth, crossing the field towards the pond on the horizon. One hand tucked in the pocket and presumably walking in strides, Anderson exudes no redoubtable fear of the forbidding dominance of nature. Instead his manner bespeaks a proprietary confidence; not one blade of grass will have the impudence to bar his way. Nature is a wild animal already tamed.

Wyeth once underwent a major surgery to remove a portion of his lung.Trodden Weed (1951) was painted during the period of the painter’s convalescence. The painting displays a close-up of Wyeth’s feet, protected by a pair of worn boots, as they stand firmly on the ground, which is overrun with weeds. One senses both feet to be slightly trembling; the merest exertion of putting forth a step appears to be quite an arduous undertaking. In hope of regaining his energy, Wyeth was taking a stroll around Kuerner’s Hill in Chadds Ford, which the painter had frequented since he was young. Nature was his loyal companion, who welcomed Wyeth’s return with the comfort of old familiarity. But nature also hinted at a bleak respect of the painter’s mortality- the grass was trampled flat and smooth under Wyeth’s boots yet they still grew; such potency of resurgence was what the aging Wyeth was denied of.

The narratives of Wyeth’s paintings are deeply personal, yet reflective of a time when the relationship between mankind and nature was one of the least inimical of coexistence. There was no rivalry, no dogged desire of triumphing over the other, no corruption, and men were yet haughty and foolish enough to assume the utmost authority over all living things. Such nostalgia and spirit were, for Wyeth, ones that dwelled in the heart of the American soul.

Focus: Felix Vallotton

"He was there or not there: not there if I didn't see him."- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

One sees immediately from Felix Vallotton’s paintings that he must had been a gifted raconteur. The painter was possessed of the natural aptitude of unfolding and withholding the narrative flow at the most propitious timing. Mysteriousness emerges. The viewers are bound to be tantalised. Whilst most of Vallotton’s paintings are about the quotidian, the domestic, beneath them their pent-up energy seethes and trembles, threatening to explode at any moment. It isn’t just the quotidian that he depicted, but the interior dramas. Any reader of Ibsen’s or Strindberg’s plays will know that interior drama can be the most frenetic.

A woman leans towards a man, her hand entwines his body in show of sensuousness. She whispers into his ears something that the viewers are forbidden the right to privy to. But one has the eye to deduce, from the slightly wrinkled of the man’s nose and the slightly arched of his eyebrow, that the message she confides to him seems to be one that pricks his annoyance. Or is it? One quickly retracts on his original conjecture. Or could it be that the man is actually smiling, made amused by his lover’s sweet nothings. Or is it rather a hackneyed episode of the deceiver and the deceived, but is the latter always so blind to the trap he is about to fall into? Perhaps not so much as his face intimates his mistrust to the woman’s flattering words. Gradually one grows fretful of so many possible answers to an ever-unsolvable question, especially under the likelihood that not even one of them accurately squares with the painter’s real intention. Therefore, out of sheer frustration, one will declare that a painting like The Lie (1989) is “rather baffling.”

Vallotton died in 1925 and left a total of over 1700 paintings and 200 prints. With such a gross oeuvre it was rather difficult to maintain the consistent quality of each individual work. The tense feeling of emotional suspense in The Lie can stiffen into that of rigid formality in other paintings. Once Vallotton decided to simplify the contours of figures and skimp on the varying use of colours of his palette, the result can be so plausibly namby-pamby. This criticism is, however, not also targeting at those Japonist-inspired landscape paintings. Examples like Sunset (1913), with its compositional simplification, achieves an effect both pleasing and spiritual. An orange-red sun hangs at the centre of the painting. The sunbeam stretches vertically across the ocean, towards the viewers. What can the symbolic meaning be? The presence of God in the form of light? Or it denotes the fateful path every devout believer must embark upon to assume connection with the deities?

Vallotton’s later work, though exhibiting an obvious tendency towards abstraction, boasts the richest and the most suspenseful of dramas in its storytelling. Everything seems to be perfectly normal; nothing seems to be going on, whilst one suspects that something queer is indeed afoot. There is this painting that is dominated almost wholly with a bland, monotonous landscape: snow field, straight avenue, some houses that are hidden behind the heavy mists, a wobbly lamppost, and no more. A man is at the edge of the painting, hastening out of the frame. Going where? One never knows. But one can sense that he might be quite desperate to get out of this place, this deserted town that seems only frequented by the old spirits. Here lies the most ingenious aspect of Vallotton’s creativity: to keep ablaze the fire of intriguing drama even though the subject matter seems to revolve on the most dismal, the most desolate. He never gratified his viewers more than a glimpse of what they were most desirous of. And that is the key to the most masterful of storytelling in art.

Focus: Tintoretto

"Chaos, a rough and unordered mass."- Ovid, Metamorphoses

The art of Tintoretto aims to draw an unlikely equivalence between chaos and beauty. There seems always a commotion going on in his paintings. Robust bodies are confusedly tangled, insofar as one is usually convinced that the depictions are about wars, even when most of them are not. A sense of fieriness and ferocity is instantly felt, but that of airiness, which is a quality almost reserved for monumental paintings like Tintoretto’s, is glaringly absent. It is curious of how the painter had maintained, throughout his career, a predilection of conscientiously filling up every corner of the canvas, leaving barely any spaces void.

Such complexity of composition, however, does not render Tintoretto’s painting a frustrating imbroglio. There is an internal equilibrium within the constant motion. The crowdedness of the scene of The Last Supper (1592-94) is relieved somewhat by the ball of blaze above the table, and the halos that encircle the heads of Christ and the disciples, so that there is a marked contrast between light and shade (here the painter presents a very crude example of chiaroscuro). Tintoretto’s version is far removed from any typical depiction of the last supper. Besides the stock characters, the painter also included in the feast a handful of peasants, who are too preoccupied with their own affairs to notice anything amiss. Hovering on the top of the scene are the ghosts, bearing down on Jesus Christ as they are ready to summon his departing spirit. The people, the saints, the spirits- they are all present.

To be a viewer of Tintoretto’s work one is expected to happen on very few let-ups of the tumultuous dramas. The painter did not need to generate chaos to excite intense emotions. Even with a relatively sparsely populated painting like The Stealing of the Dead Body of St. Mark (1562-66), Tintoretto can still manage to build the tension towards boiling point. Again, there is this frenetic clutter of people in the foreground- three men struggling to smuggle away a dead body, the heaviness of which is telling. This is not the inert dead body one normally encounters; it retains a renewed vigour as if the soul is still holding tenaciously on the dying flesh. A storm is brewing- either Heavens is complicit with this ignoble affair, or the leaden sky is the portent of an imminent retribution.

Some said Tintoretto pioneered the most original style of Mannerism, others considered him a baroque artist ahead of his time. The unanimous opinion, however, is that there exists a perceptible gulf between Tintoretto’s art and that of the other Renaissance heavyweights. The painter eschewed sensuous beauty that is common with Renaissance paintings. Instead he exhibited with his paintings energy, force, violence, viciousness, and so forth in the most emphatic manner. Invariably, the subject matters are about wars, contests, the fall of the hero and the rise of the insidious. The victory is not always equivalent to a glorious feat. In St. Louis, St. George and the Princess(c. 1553), the princess effortlessly subdued the dragon, and is now sitting astride the beast and glancing at the saints, her eye speaks of unmitigated pride. The saints are noticeably mortified, with one of them throwing up his hands- why! You just killed a dragon! One can expect very soon the princess being severely admonished.

After surveying Tintoretto’s oeuvre I confess I derive from it no pleasant feelings. But I do not dismiss the truth that from time to time I find myself perversely drawn towards the sort of beauty that is almost the antithesis of the conventional type. This is evidenced by my abiding love for Caravaggio, most of whose paintings, however, prompted me to avert my glance on the first sight. But do I really take into consideration the importance of beauty when I’m looking at paintings by Tintoretto or Caravaggio? I ask myself. Maybe not so much as subscribing to what really matters, namely that some painters were not shy from revealing the least savoury details of a given event. For them art is virtually the exposure of the unvarnished truth.

Focus: Salvador Dali

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Salvador Dali stunk of undiluted narcissism, and yet he was unashamed. Any acquaintance of Dali’s could, without difficulty, rattle off a list of his pompous pronouncements. He was endlessly exalted, perennially proud; was said to wake up every morning “astonished at the sublime nature of every facet of hisexistence, to the point of wondering how anybody else could possibly survive without being him.” His self-aggrandizement was believed to be the last straw of his friendship and affinity with the Surrealists. Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, dubbed Dali the “Avida Dollars,” an anagram for his name, which means “eager for money.” Dali’s blatant pursuit of commercialism and fame was especially an anathema to his fellow Surrealists, who were noted for their ostensible indifference to anything considered voguish in the present cultural scene. Feeling piqued at Dali’s incessant waywardness and increasing popularity, the Surrealists ultimately terminated the artist’s involvement with the art movement.

In my opinion, the term “surreal” is never the most apposite to encapsulate Dali’s paintings. The idea of “surreal” entails something that is preternatural, something that is unfamiliar to our limited knowledge. Dali’s visionary world is, though at first glance grotesque, in fact oddly familiar. In Still Life Moving Fast (1956) Dali attempted to capture the swiftness of movement with his paintbrush. Every object is up in the air in disarray, but there seems to be an underlying rhythm that unites them all into a discordant symphony. There is the trickle of water that sprints out from the jar, traverses mid-air in swirls, and curves around the goblet as its journey ends. There is the apple and the cherry which, when triggered by the violent jerk, gather such momentum that leave in their wake blinding shafts of light. A knife floats dangerously up; its silhouette slants through the tablecloth in perfect symmetry with the blade. In view, the painting resembles Cezanne’s Still Life with Cherub (1895), both of which experiment with the possibility of freezing a flurry of succeeding movements. In kind, it recalls James Whistler’s pictorial transcription of music.

Dali hadn’t done what had not already been done before. His “dream-images” are rarely dreamlike. Most of the artworks assume an almost austere formality that seemed more likely to be done in sobriety and consciousness. Unlike his fellow Surrealists, Dali wasn’t one to undermine the value of traditional aesthetics. A large amount of his artistic output is dominated by religious and allegorical paintings. Dali’s treatment of religious themes is often branded the prototype of “kitsch,” again a label I’m incredulous of. For me, Dali’s interpretation of the Scripture seemed centering on a harmonious integration of the universe and the deities, something that Leonardo da Vinci would have resonate with. In his rendition of The Last Supper, the traditional setting of a walled-in refectory is substituted with a transparent dodecahedron. In it twelve apostles sit bowed to Christ, who points with His forefinger to a floating torso above him, seeming to hint at his own spirit, prefiguring the destiny of His life. With the descending of the light, invading into the transparent refectory on all sides, everything within is rendered peculiarly diaphanous- the food, the table, the robes of the apostles. Every one seems sooner to join with Christ on His ascendancy to Heaven. “Nothing lasts forever. Everything fades away,” a voice seems to say, booming from the rocks that stand immutably at the perceivable horizon.

Artworks that were produced during the height of Modernism were invariably set into the context of the advancement of technology. Viewers saw in the paintings various unnamable, ill-formed beasts like the monstrous, horrendous machines that marched menacingly towards them. Artists deftly exploited the fear and anxiety that were common to the age, and conferred on their artworks feelings of unease and callousness. Amongst them, however, Dali was never inclined to be as yet another tormentor. But he was unequivocally a prophet. He saw men extracted of their souls, their calcified skulls marooned on the deserts, the hollowed-out sockets providing ample spaces for other skulls to dwell in. In a particularly agonising sight, a man has his body twist and pull into an extremely grotesque shape. His face grimaced with excruciating pain. We feel vicariously his misery. We commiserate with his wretched condition. But we do not want to have a second glance of it.

If this is what living in the modern age entails, namely that people are increasingly distancing from each other without explicit reasons, that the ceaseless popping-up of new inventions will one day replace the renewal of our virtues, that one day, not in a very distant future, our spirit and our body will be separated and cast stranded on a desert created by our own hands. The seemingly fantastical visions that Dali created have an underlying message that is rather poignant. InCrucifixion (1954), Christ is suspended on a crucifix made by golden hypercubes. A woman at the bottom looks up at the imposing figure in a manner that most of us can certainly identify with when we are viewing a masterpiece: awed, transfixed, but always maintain a respectable distance with the work, always tend to ennoble it to an elevated state that is forever out of our reach. I see in every of Dali’s paintings a projection of his own self- extremely narcissistic, extremely self-vaunted, extremely mischievous, and yet extremely lonely and paranoid. To adapt the world to oneself means to build inside of one an unpopulated world, with himself as the only occupant. Dali lived in such a world.