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.

Focus: James McNeill Whistler

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”- Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

An unimpressed Ruskin, after viewing Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold- The Falling Rocket (c. 1875), accused the painter of merely “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” with this unconvincing depiction of firework display amidst a foggy night sky. Whistler, duly exasperated, quickly sued the art critic for libel. In what followed as probably one of the most famous trials in the history of art- I doubt there were many - the defamed artist won the lawsuit, but it was only a pyrrhic victory. The artist was awarded a mere farthing in nominal damages- an even greater ignominy for one who squandered half of his fortune to reclaim his dignity and reputation. Whistler soon thereafter faced long years of bankruptcy.

Despite Ruskin’s overt incredulity of Whistler’s capacity as an artist, to any indiscriminate eye the artist’s singular talent is of little doubt. Throughout his career Whistler had been aiming for a perfect parallel and consonance between music and art, the two that seemingly so compatible with each other, but are in fact difficult to be coaxed into unequivocal affinity. Not many of us are capable of conceiving music with paintings, or vice versa. Our minds are usually so dull and unimaginative that we need everything to be transparently articulated so we can fully comprehend the meanings. How often are our interpretations informed by the title of the painting? Therefore I think Whistler’s entitling of his work was deliberate. Without indicating that such and such are “symphonies” or “arrangements,” it is very likely that the paintings are to be regarded as yet another depictions of ordinary lives and normal people.

The music in Whistler’s paintings are usually in mild tempo, gentle flow, very rarely is there any ripples; even in their most violent we feel that the volume is loud and strong but not overbearing. Occasionally, we hear silence. The water can be so still and unperturbed; the ruffles of a lady’s skirt so resistant to the sway of the power of winds. There underlies every piece of Whistler’s oeuvre a serene, elegant beauty.

In Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (1872-3), the colours of the lady’s dress and that of the background are almost identical. What one sees, at one moment, as a pleasing effect of tonal harmony, turns into an impression of dreary and unnerving the next. We sense a gradual and peculiar blending-in of the figure with its background. With her head slightly turns towards the viewers we see, written vividly on her face, that of unaccountable sadness and weariness. Elegance proves to be merely a semblance of life, beneath which banality locks up the lady’s soul to frost. She appears to be even more lifeless than the white blossoms, the presence of which she listlessly acknowledges. We are not looking at a portrait of Mrs. Leyland. We are looking at a still-life.

Whistler’s people are rarely in a good mood. In any frozen moment they often appear pensive and troubled. In Wapping (1861), we seem to see a precedent of Degas’s L’ Absinthe (1876). The men chat away, the woman looks on, unamused and detached. In the woman’s furrowed brows we read self-alienation, we discern her disenchantment with life frittering away in meaningless leisure. She suffers within herself a slow death, a barely perceptible process of decaying. Following her hand that tightens around the rail- some might want to interpret it as a silent call for help- there reveals a splendid view of harbor. The ships and water are bathed in yellow sunlight. All are a-flutter in preparation for a glorious day of sail. Again, there is a marked contrast between the liveliness of the background and the inanimation of the figures.

We cannot resist asking: what are plaguing those people? What is the cause of the nameless malaise? The tranquil beauty of Whistler’s paintings, engendering mostly from the prevailing use of pearl-like colours and elegant contours, is nonetheless undercut by a mounting feeling of gloominess. Time dutifully ticks by just as any other day. The lives of the people trudge on in the wake, only reluctantly. At any given moment how they wish the day could halt to a frozen point. Ruddiness would bleed out of the cheeks of those beautiful people. They are the phantoms, who roam the world like mists upon a lake.

In Nocturne: Blue and Gold- Old Battersea Bridge (1872-5), time is now the forbidding bridge that watches on whilst a lone figure, writ small, traverses through the water. Life is now weighing heavily upon the back of the person, but, unlike most of Whistler’s characters, he does not cravenly flee from responsibility by transforming into a frozen phantom. Death is beautiful but life is reality. To be alive is to hear that subtle palpitation of heart, however small the sound as comparing to the deafening howls of the river, the thunder, nature, and to know one’s significance to the world. The lone figure, hastening on to his destination, hears it all.