Eugene Delacroix, "The Death of Sardanapalus" (1827)

History is punctuated with moments of chaos and beauty. Seemingly antitheses by nature, in aesthetics there are myriads examples of how these two manage to converge in single works and enter a pleasing balance. Amongst them there is Tintoretto, a consummate devotee of violence and drama, whose bewildering depictions of many biblical episodes redefine the meaning of “chaos” as a synonym to sheer “epicness” or “monumentality.” Rarely does his pictorial crowdedness amount to an unrelenting sense of knottiness; as fastidious as is his exactitude on the minutiae, Tintoretto never failed to see the forest for the trees. Every single brushstroke and colour he applied onto the paintings was sure to be conducive to an immediate effect of harmony and order.

In the early 19^th century France entered Eugene Delacroix, an exponent of what would come to be known as French Romanticism. Most of Delacroix’s renowned works of large-scale historical scenes were considered a scourge to the genteel nouveau riche, whose aesthetic sensibility for decades had been informed by the surreally immaculate, luminous beauty of the Neoclassicist paintings. Delacroix’s stand a marked contrast to such obsessive pursuit of the implausible ideal. In keeping with the tradition of past masters, especially those of the High Renaissance, the French romanticist was unafraid of probing the underside of beauty- predominantly, the violence and the chaos, both of which are the mainstays of the making of history.

One of the keys of rendering the depictions of war scenes less of a clunky, tangled affair is to suffuse them with a feeling of rhythmic movement. As such the edge of intensity is rounded and the phenomenon of drama more readily registered. In Delacroix’s most famous, Liberty Leading the People, the rhythm can be distinctly felt in the goddess’s ruffled garb, the furled flag and the general inclination of the ensemble towards the right foreground. This is juxtaposed with the deathly stillness of the wounded figures, piling up beneath the feet of the advanced crowd. The fighters are putting up a stout defense regardless of the toll; their swiftness of movement is a sure sign of their optimism; from above their heads clouds are beginning the disperse; victory is imminent.

Delacroix also tackled eroticism. There is something dangerous in explicating sexual matters in a displayed work- every of its viewers is made an enforced voyeur of the carnal pleasure; art is reasonably capitalised as a vehicle for the forbidden fruits. It is hardly unprecedented, though, that high art should be the unlikely agent of bridging the chasm between the superior and the low- nudity, from time immemorial, has been generally regarded as an idyllic, innocuous element especially amongst the divinities. Yet an intentionally detailed depiction of an orgiastic bacchanal can easily put to test the society’s instinctually squeamish reception of sex in art.

Delacroix’s erotic paintings are a response, or a counter-response, to those that water down their graphic contents in pandering to the straitlaced public. The Death of Sardanapalus is based on a scene from the eponymous play of Lord Byron, a personal favourite of Delacroix, that tells of Sardanapalus, king of Assyria, ordering a massacre of his concubines when learned of his military defeat. The French romanticist is as ruthless as the notorious Greek king in conceiving in grisly details the great disorder and horror that accompany the bloody carnage. The use of bright colours is especially instrumental in spelling out the violence- those red divans look eerily as if smeared with the bloods of the youthful harlots. As its dominant feature a nude prostrates herself on the divan in supplication for the king’s mercy; her gesture offers an agonising sight of doldrums amidst the rippling chaos.

Charles Baudelaire aptly summarises Delacroix’s legacy as one who was “passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.” Delacroix’s unparalleled representations of historical events proved only a meteoric happening as, after his death, there were Manet and the Impressionists; serenity, though in a much different guise, would again hold sway as the dominant mood.

Edouard Manet, Boy Blowing Bubbles (1867)

1867 was a fateful year for Édouard Manet in that his art, hitherto idyllic and placid, shifted drastically to the moods of poignancy and relentlessness. Two deaths signaled the change: his old friend and enduring champion, Charles Baudelaire, and the tragic emperor Maximilian I, who was executed by the Juaristas after a failed foreign initiative in the Mexico empire. The seminal work, Execution of Emperor Maximilian, would not see its completion until two years later, as Manet’s progress and insistence on a faithful portrayal were incessantly impeded by the inaccurate accounts of the event. The intervening period yielded a result that continued this preoccupation with grief: in the weeks followed Baudelaire’s death Manet summoned his godson, Leon Koella, to blow soap bubbles in his studio on the Rue Guyot.

The soap bubble, with its brittle form and enchanting presence, has been a popular subject of the vanitas, a genre that serves to remind of the futility and transience of earthly life. In paintings, the soap bubble’s especial appeal amongst children is underscored; most of these innocent and endearing evocations of childhood fun, however, belie an allegorical message of delicate lives “nipped in the buds.” Though it wasn’t known if an “implication of death” was the precise end Manet sought to arrive at with his painting, Boy Blowing Bubbles, with its overall sombre effect, poses as a modern example of memento mori.

Boy Blowing Bubbles is a perfect indication of Manet’s unorthodox artistry. The boy, dressed in a beige sweatshirt, is set off against a stark background. The dearth of a more nuanced colouration contributes to a curious deflatedness of the figure, rendering the result more like a cut-out than a painting. There is every reason to suppose that the boy is less a human being and more of a petering-out spectral. First there is the vacuous expression, caused possibly by the tedious posing session that every of Manet’s sitter was obliged to undergo, that creates a shuddering sense of disinterestedness that contrasts sharply with an activity (blowing bubbles) that is bound to produce joy. Secondly, if observe closely the painting, one can notice immediately the crudity and uncertainty of brushstroke, which makes the outlines of the forms, to use a term that may seem anachronistic in this context, “pixelated” and blurry to a degree that, like a decrepit sandcastle, a sudden wind can shatter the whole thing into flying dusts.

It is hardly an unprecedented instance to amplify the horror of thememento mori by deliberately rendering the personage a ghostly figure. Hieronymus Bosch’s Death and Miser is a gruesome case in point: the miser, before choosing whether he should succumb to the temptations of Evil or embrace the salvation of God, looks uncannily a growing resemblance of the former with his livid skin and shrunken frame. This seal of fate is as final as the underlying message is potent and definitive: if you decide to nurture a miserly love for earthly goods, you will soon be joined by the devils before having a chance to reverse the wrong path.

As a portrait Boy Blowing Bubbles manifests how strikingly remote Manet was from his fellow Impressionists. A notable affinity with the past can be felt, reverting less to the style of Manet’s artistic heroes, Velazquez or Goya, and more to that of the earlier period: the Early Netherlandish. There is the similar inscrutable impassiveness of the figure’s mien and a marked sense of solemnity enhanced by the restrained nature of the composition. Like the Flemish master Jan van Eyck, Manet is versed in the trick of how to mystify and awe his viewers.

Charles Gleyre, Lost Illusions (1865-67)

Amongst many of his reflective musings, the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time once meditates on the eternal majesty of the moon. Conceiving of a wane moon in an afternoon sky as an actress who, not wanting to attract notice, dresses in ordinary clothes and mingles with the audience as she watches a play from the wing, the narrator marvels at the ineffaceable beauty of nature that, even in its most obscure and lustreless state, one is hard not to notice its reigning presence, shimmering from afar. He is thus reminded of a landscape painting by Charles Gleyre, in which the figures are silhouetted against a sky illumined by a silver sickle.

A composite of realism in methods and mysticism in themes is what characterises Gleyre’s individual style. Having travelled extensively for some time the countries of eastern Mediterranean, there runs through his paintings a streak of oriental influence that conveys an ennobling quality of numinousness. Lost Illusions (1865-67) depicts a vision Gleyre had once he was reminiscing on the banks of Nile; it seems a wistful leave-taking of life: an aging artist watches as a bark sails away with his youthful illusions. The moon, that symbol of the twilight years of life, leaves the brooding artist intentionally in the gloom, casting its soft, luminous light instead on the imagined figures. This is the sort of painting that implies the opposite of what is presented: the dimming of light and, at length, the encroachment of darkness.

The treatment of light can sometimes determine the focal point of a painting. Renaissance’s introduction of chiaroscuro reverts to the medieval tradition that conceives of light as a fundamental component from which all the essentials of art derived. Colours and lines, amongst many others, cannot take forms if without the infusion of light. The strong contrast between light and dark underlines the three-dimensionality of an object; it is a means through which an artwork is invigorated to life. Victor Hugo once rightfully said that “to love beauty is to seek for light.” Such pursuit of ideal beauty in the Renaissance entails an unwavering devotion to God and His Providence. Regardless of how dreadful the conditions- natural disaster, war, pestilence or the removal of trusty guidance- that luminosity of faith, however vague, never diminishes from the hearts of the devotee. But this is not to suppose that the Renaissance regarded darkness as a wholly sinister force. In their sense of what constituted a harmonious world, all natural objects were of the same consequence, with not a single one taking precedence over the others. The equilibrium of the universe was maintained by a host of conflicting elements.

Sometimes in theatre, the premature departure of a character has on the audience an even more indelible impression than those present can contrive. The role is made a star precisely because of its absence, leaving a colossal void that not even a succession of gripping melodramas can fill. But the audience can still feel his presence hovering, lingering, and lurking like an invisible moon in the sky. Gerard de Nerval once likened a mired nation to a world plunged in smothering darkness- “Perhaps God is dead,” he said. But is God ever dead? For Proust, not even the absence of moon can eclipse its light.

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way, the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.”

The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19^th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stokes, for scientific knowledge of the phenomena. As such, Turner’s sketchbooks are full of detailed records and drawings of Vesuvius, on the strength of which he was said to make his bewildering depiction of the erupting volcano. In it, the shimmering colours and the brisk brushwork culminate in a glorious symphony that possesses of a quality of, what Yeats would call, the “terrible beauty.” Turner succeeds in embodying with this painting the “thickness” of art, a virtue the grandmother in Swann’s determines as a supremacy exclusive to high art, distinguishing it from other vulgar, banal commodities that clutter up our daily existence.

Of what is vulgar and what is beautiful can be measured in various ways. As early as the 13^th century Italy, philosophers were already suggesting the volatile nature of beauty. Modifying on the old conception that beauty is only permitted if according with the dictates of moral goodness, Thomas Aquinas asserted: “The good is that towards the possession of which an appetite tends.” What is good depends on what one’s appetite decides, i.e. what one desires of, a sentiment that should be governed solely by one’s individual self, without the unduly interference from outward influence. Though not saying if beauty also encompasses aspects that are not morally acceptable, many would later interpret Aquinas’s argument as premonitory of a new trend of thought, that of “the beauty of ugliness.”

Not exactly an ugly painting but neither is it traditionally beautiful, Turner’s Vesuvius Erupting (1817) is a perfect example of creating beauty whilst sacrificing the old ideals. The figures are sketchy, the brushstrokes are rough, the colours go pell-mell as if they were spurted onto the canvas from a tube- and yet the result is spontaneous and, not many would disagree, captivating. History has testified to the well-exercised lesson that no value is definitive or immutable; even a canonic work is obliged to undergo the tests of every succeeding age to justify its uniqueness.

Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks (1495-1508)

Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, the version that is displayed in London’s National Gallery, is one of those paintings that do not seize your notice at first blush, but- once you stare at them long enough- seep into your consciousness by degrees, engendering in you a peculiar sensation that no other sort can possibly surpass. In the painting, the divine figures are huddled together against a rocky background. Virgin Mary, situates in the centre of the pyramidal ensemble, raises a hand above the head of the Child and stretches another to pull in slightly Saint John the Baptist, who is in the painting also an infant. It is this assertion of authority that is proper to all exemplary parents- a combination of grace and supremacy- that left in me an indelible mark, evoking the exact sort of persona I’m always aspiring to become- not just as a mother but a distinct character that I’d like be remembered by- in the near, possible future. “A practice of the power of gentleness” is my summation for the painting- with conscientious effort and reasonable ability, prowess is attainable; to enter into the realm of the truly powerful one is required first to master the art of poise and patience- the two qualities that are often regarded the decisive factors of one’s success or fall- and ultimately one is metamorphosed into a tree, with a void in its core or sometimes a stone. The few of them who sustain all manner of pain and trials- whilst still abiding by the dictates of their admirable virtues- throughout a prolonged period of suffering might ascend finally to the stage of the divine. All mothers are in the league of the divinity.

Landscape Art and Frederic Edwin Church

Landscape art can be elusive. In any art exhibition that aggregates paintings from a variety of genres, those with the subjects of clouds, mountains, trees, forests, river, ocean etc. are very likely the least interesting ones for the most ignorant of gallery-goers, who might, however, still notice the vivid colours and the superb brushworks before hastening on towards the more popular showstoppers. Colours and brushworks- the only attributes those viewers can recall of the paintings that quickly become no more than a passing memory, almost negligible in their perceived role of acting as a foil to the more notable masterpieces.

Our instinctive apathy towards landscape painting might be partly ascribed to the general ignorance of Nature. History testifies to how precious little do we know of the nature we’ve inhabited, how frequently such wanting of knowledge abets the selfish ones to gratify their avarice at the expense of the harmony amidst all living souls. Every voice in Nature is unanimous in pleading for mercy, but men heed not. Modern civilisation destroys totally the tenuous bond we still share with our Mother Nature. There is hardly a plot of land extant on earth that is not smeared with the footprints of humankind. The nature we know now is far removed from the paradisiac kingdom of yore- the purity is irrevocably corrupted, the beauty ruthlessly tainted.

Possession comes in various forms. Photography, in many ways, proffers an advisable means of possessing nature whilst leaving it intact and unharmed. Viewing for the first time a framed photograph of Mount Everest must be one of peculiar excitement. People are no longer obliged to go through an extremely hazardous, toiling expedition on the sole purpose of catching a glimpse of the mountain’s formidable presence. They can now enjoy the beautiful spectacle in an exhibition hall, or even in their drawing room. The incontestable verisimilitude between Mount Everest and that in a well-produced photograph- though, of course, the mountain is considerably smaller in scale- gives the ownership of the artwork an undertone of meaning not dissimilar to the possessiveness of a greedy entrepreneur. Moreover, by imprisoning the mountain with his camera the photographer guarantees its immortality. Such possessiveness thus smells faintly of narcissism.

The advent of photography, regardless of how it is possibly the only art form that successfully blurs the boundary between art and reality, undermines somewhat the novelty and innocence that are inherent in its more archaic counterparts. In regard to the portrayals of nature especially, photography is no match for painting.

My hitherto ignorance for landscape painting was to change when I first lighted on the paintings of Frederic Edwin Church. As a pupil of the renowned American landscape painter Thomas Cole, Church became one of the leading figures of the Hudson River School, a mid-19^th century art movement founded by Cole, whose portrayals of American wilderness were profoundly influenced by the idealised vision of Romantic landscape art. Like many landscape painters of his contemporary and the succeeding generation, Cole had a penchant for the synthesis of nature and allegory. Church diverged from his teacher by giving the allegorical themes a wide berth and restricting his entire oeuvre to the depictions of nature. This decisive break from the norm was arguably one of the reasons Church was criticised for lacking an imaginative and spiritual flair in his handling of subject.

But is the aforesaid a justifiable verdict of Church’s paintings? There is an unwritten law for every novice reader of landscape painting to always delve into the tiniest detail and facts, regardless of how inconsequential they might be comparing to the whole. In The Heart of the Andes (1859) it is the little grave on the lower left of the painting. Not much effort will be needed in ferreting out this tiny feature as the sun kindles the grave to a gentle, noticeable glow. In the vicinity of the grave is a small waterfall which is almost transmuted into a cloud of white fume as it plunges into the water. The water is so emphatically rendered that we can virtually hear its rumbling roar. Our eyes then skim through the birch trees, the rocky plains, the magnificent mountains, and the snow-capped mountains in the far distance. Who said Church’s art was bland and unspiritual? Unlike any typical landscape painting, the pivot of Church’s is neither the mountains nor the trees nor the plains. Rather, it is that little grave- a gem embedded within the hovering nature, a lull against the excited hubbub. These harmonious juxtapositions of contrasts stimulate the painting to life.

Nature can have its dramatic moments. Church made sure he always had the dark palette ready when he encountered one of Nature’s shrewish tempers. The volcanic eruption is always an apt subject for the landscape painters to demonstrate their proficiency in tackling a more theatrical theme with a more monumental scale. English painter John Martin recognised a correlation between volcanoes and the stories in Revelation. His many depictions of the erupting volcanoes are to be seen as a retelling of the Revelation tales set in a growingly industralised England, which is swamped by the boiling magma of human destructions. Whilst Martin’s vision was bleak and unrelenting, Church could not seem to rid himself off the Romantic influence that is implicit in a majority of his works. In Cotopaxi (1862) the spectacle of a volcanic eruption has the same beauty as a flaming sunset. Curiously, a sun can be perceived dwelling upon the horizon, distinguishing itself out of an expanding throng of black smoke. In common with the little grave in Heart of Andes, Church was wont to create a pleasing sense of quietude amidst the chaos. I see the painting not so much a bravura of unmitigated horror as that of Martin’s. Instead, I see the fluid brushwork, the soft nuances of colours, the brilliant interplay of light and shade, and the hint of a possible hope glimmering in sheer desolateness.

Church’s laudable effort in preserving the purity of nature did not, however, make his landscape paintings any less elusive. There are, within his sprawling oeuvre, works that one knows not how to make of, but can only admire the more obvious features like forms and colours.Scene in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica (1865) belongs to this sort of paintings. One struggles to no avail in grasping at a more precise and critical appraisal of the painting without yielding to a merry-go-around of banal enumeration of facts like the dangerously steep mountain ridges, a wide spectrum of green from yellow-green to forest-green, the ingenious lighting effect that helps create the distance-diminished detail...

Landscape paintings are an acquired taste but their importance is by no means any inferior to those of other subjects. Their elusiveness is the very incentive that spurs us on to keep looking.

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.