Imaginative responses to art can be scarce during bleak times. Unmediated responses are even less likely, thanks to the internet. A lot of contemporary discourse hinges on art-market trends, (e.g. Zombie Formalism), cultural analysis, and too little of the imaginative attention that can make talking about and looking at art more enjoyable. This aspect of enjoyability is what charms me about Swiss-born writer Robert Walser’s art writings, collected in a new book titled Looking at Pictures. The book was translated by the redoubtable Susan Bernofsky along with Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton. Walser’s art writings are playfully subjective, absurd, and they reveal a writer more engaged with pictures than artists and their educations or backgrounds. These musings, often not “about” the paintings, render art historical genre distinctions useless — at least while in the whimsical nowhereland of Walser’s vernacular.

Marcel Duchamp said “there are two kinds of artists: the artist who deals with society; and the other artist, the completely freelance artist, who has nothing to do with it.” The latter is how I’d characterize Robert Walser. But unlike the dadaists, he celebrates aesthetic values, with a distinctive rigor of discernment and impassioned description, in place of frigid academicism or conventions engaged to meet expectations. Walser’s work is on his terms, ones that in contemporaneous eyes seem childish and strange. It’s a strangeness not for the sake of cuteness, but to point out the strangeness already built into things and situations.

In 1910, Walser wrote that the “imagination that counts is not the external sort, it’s an inward one.” This is a good way into his art writings, done from 1902 till the end of his career in 1930, a few of which were never published. In Looking at Pictures, context can be tenuous, but that’s OK: we don’t come to this kind of book for news or intellectual rightness, much less the truth. I don’t recommend a total lack of critical context, art historical or otherwise. Rather, I find that certain of our earlier belletrists remind us how to look in new ways. Like Giorgio Vasari’s writings about the artists of his times, Walser’s characterizations of people and the art of the past show a depth of feeling and a surprising poetic consciousness.

His takes on paintings by Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Éduoard Manet, and his brother Karl Walser, among others, are often entirely irrelative to an art historical canon and can seem critically nascent; as Bernofsky and Christine Burgin point out, in Walser’s review titled “The Van Gogh Picture,” his intentions to compose a clear review are dashed by his having realized “that art criticism is not possible.” Walser goes on to add that “Not only is it impossible to say anything about the work — it is impossible even to begin to ’see’ it.”

One of my favorite parts of Looking at Pictures that had me doubled over, crying with laughter is Walser’s take on a tragicomedy, “The Brueghel Picture.” There’s nothing all that funny about Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Parable of the Blind (1616) — six blind men in a line stumble over one another — but Walser’s turn of phrase, his oblique point of view and illogical descriptive methodology relative to the painting’s subject, make seeing it now a different experience — as if the painting has transmogrified. Suddenly, each man in procession appears to be simultaneously guiding and jostling one another into his demise. The pit into which the men fall is now inevitable, irresistible, spellbinding each of these nincompoops: “Blind men are quarreling … people blindly hacking away at each other’s worthy, respect-worthy heads.” Walser adds, quite dumbly, that, “in a certain sense, all of us are blind, even though we have eyes to see.”

Elsewhere, Walser makes imaginary tableaus. His “analysis” of Rembrandt’s Saul and David (II) (1655–60) begins with a critique of power, a send-up of the contradictory state of a man having everything but “assailed by melancholia.” Walser leaps into a two-page fantastical scene wherein David’s harp plays a quoteworthy, aphoristic spectacle. One statement that “anger lacks greatness” is followed by the observation that “those in power must not forget that they are powerless, because they’re human. A thousand times more beautiful than living life is living for others.” These are worthy of the timeless wisdom of someone like Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō. “When we all have made peace with ourselves, no one will be left with an adversary,” Walser writes, presumably still gazing back at Saul and David.

Walser is at his best when he writes about the paintings of his brother Karl, as in his review of Portrait of a Lady (1902), a painting of a young woman reading in a park: “The green of the meadow is rich and warm, and speaks a romantic and adventurous language, and the whole cloudless picture inspires observant, quiet contemplation.” This gives insight into why, given his wont for flights of fancy in other of his prose forms, writing about art finds Walser at home. He ends with the assertion that “every living thing in the world should be happy,” and in case he hadn’t been clear enough, he punctuates it: “No one should be unhappy.”

A proletariat, son of a shopkeeper, Walser spent his later years in a mental institution (willful to the vicissitudes of modern society; no doctor was able to diagnose Walser as having any illness). He’d vow never to write again, resolved to live out the rest of his days so-called “mad,” obstinate to the end. “Everything I have neglected to say can be given voice by others” he wrote in 1926. 30 years later, some kids found Walser frozen dead on Christmas Day; he’d escaped from the hospital to wander. It’s not hard to imagine Walser looking at his world, then Switzerland, sufficed to take it in and appreciate it without having to describe it. Just like an artist, “He feels it, that’s all,” as Walser wrote in 1921, “and that’s how he finds it.”

Walser, Robert. Looking at Pictures. Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton (trans.) (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2015). ISBN: 9780811224246. 128 pages. $24.95

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Eight of nine paintings that had mysteriously gone missing in 1987 from Noortman Master Paintings, the gallery founded and run by Robert Noortman in Maastricht, The Netherlands, have turned up 22 years later, when they were snagged in a Dutch police sting operation. These missing paintings included La Clairière by Renoir, Bords de la Seine à Bougival by Pissarro, and Moneys by Jan Brueghel, the younger. A business executive from Dubai was trying to sell the paintings to the insurance company that had originally paid out 5 million guilders or over 2.9 million dollars to Robert Noortman after the initial disappearance of the paintings. Ben Zuidema, the private detective who was hired to investigate the missing paintings over two decades ago, was contacted by the Dubai business executive, who indicated that a person who was paid by Noortman to steal the paintings over twenty years prior had contacted him and wanted to broker a deal with the insurance company for the return of the paintings. Zuidema was offered 1 million Euros to assist in the transaction. Once Zuidema contacted investigators another sting operation was arranged and the paintings were recovered and three people were arrested. Noortman Master Paintings was acquired by Sotheby’s in 2006.

primary source: The National (Abu Dhabi)
3/10/2009

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June 27 to August 31

Zwirner & Wirth’s “Old School” explores a tantalizing mega-generational gap: the divide between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings and our postmodernist counterparts. Nearly thirty landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings by old masters and contemporary artists make for a fascinating mix, telling us a little about traditions of art and a great deal about current uses for them.

The paintings have been paired according to theme and style, on walls painted a rich shade of red. A 1630 panel of a wedding procession by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (son of the great painter) depicts self-absorbed throngs with the same busyness of detail as Hilary Harkness’s “Flipwreck” (2004)—though the latter’s shipwrecked women, in sexually masochistic poses and clothes, set an entirely different tone. Anj Smith’s small canvas from 2007 boasts much thicker textures than the adjacent painting of Saint Anthony by Jacob van Swanenburgh (c. 1571-1638), but both feature fanciful monsters in compositions of torn, turbulent forms. Michael Borremans’ conventionally skillful likeness of a young man from 2006 hangs next to an impressive, if facile, portrait from c. 1664 by Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen.

It should be said that most of the old master paintings demonstrate fine technique, but not the inventive brilliance of the greatest artists of their times. The Brueghel is a pale echo of his father’s extraordinary “Harvesters” at the Metropolitan Museum, and the van Everdingen shows an artist who clearly valued technical cleverness over a gravity of form; no part of the body—sleeves, hands, torso—rhythmically supports the flourish of the face. The masters of “Old School,” consequently, largely come off as quaintly dated foils for the postmodernists; it’s their quirks of style and subject matter that spark across the centuries.

Many of the contemporary artists appropriate these quirks with gusto. Richard Wathen’s “Once Removed” (2006) amplifies the vulgarity of the van Everdingen with eerie primness, depicting a mother and children—dressed as if sitting for a Gainsborough—with an almost amphibian coldness of color and detail. A still life attributed to the school of Caravaggio contains, along with fruit and melons, a grasshopper as fiercely detailed as an armored vehicle; next to it, Glenn Brown’s painting of a stringy mass amounts to a collection of such obsessive, unsettling details—in his case orifices, shriveled blossoms, and human and animal faces.

The exhibition does include a true masterpiece, a madonna and child by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553). In this panel, the angle of Mary’s head and hair exquisitely counterbalance the infant’s compact verticals. Colors and contours continuously press upon one another, so that points of detail—like the grapes clutched by mother and infant, or the child’s intricate foot—appear at the end of poignantly unwinding limbs and garments. A second panel attributed to this master’s studio is hardly less remarkable.

The Cranach tends to make the other old masters look dawdling, and the aims of most of the postmodernists…well, enigmatic. Figure paintings by Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik, from 2001 and 2003 respectively, provoke thoughts about social perceptions, but both are so weak in their arrangements of color next to the Cranach that it’s unclear whether they are consciously parodying a genre or simply unaware of painting’s potentials. The DayGlo colors of Djordje Ozbolt’s 2007 landscape jangle nonsensically, reducing his panel to a kind of flip commentary. Mr. Brown’s previously mentioned work, somewhat tedious in its subject, becomes utterly so in its scaleless, measureless design.

John Currin, on the other hand, is represented by one of his stronger works; a certain discipline of rhythm animates the forms of his indulgently surreal still life from 2001, giving weight to the gestures of a violin and lobster. Notable, too, is Julie Heffernan’s “Self Portrait as Tender Mercenary” (2006), which, despite some indiscriminate amassing of detail, sturdily locates a figure in a strange scene.

Overall, though, “Old School” most consistently gives an impression of postmodernism’s peculiar love/hate relationship with the masters. While the presentation of these venerable painters—in ornate frames, on stately red walls—suggests reverence, neither the contemporary work nor the installation itself shows much inclination to discriminate between their greater and lesser efforts.

The cure for this ambivalence should be simple enough. Our huge expectations of art derive from the achievements of Giotto, Titian and Rembrandt, not their lesser peers. Getting to know these artists—as individuals rather than makers of quirky, generic artifacts—eliminates any doubt about the possibilities and demands of painting. Or so one might think, though it’s a challenge too seldom engaged by the young painters in “Old School.”

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