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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October 10, 2015 to January 10, 2016
1219 SW Park Avenue (at SW Madison Street)
Portland, OR, 503 226 2811

“Cézanne’s was not a canvas, it was a landscape.”
-Frantz Jourdain

I recently went to the Portland Art Museum to look at “Seeing Nature,” a survey of “landscape masterworks” from the Paul Allen Family Collection. Passing through the Paradise: Fallen Fruit imbroglio at Portland Art Museum’s entrance makes this exhibition an even more pleasurable destination. The former’s tormented, though enjoyable, curatorial bent is a commentary on modern culture and our inheritance of its public spaces, through various paintings and sculptures of PAM’s permanent collection spanning several eras, abutted sans-info or contextual sequencing. Less the mélange than a remix, though extremely understated, sculptures are clustered on a plinth at center gallery, while paintings hang in crushes along the walls. A good thing about this concept is that it takes canonized works and forces the viewer to answer for themselves the question, “Why is this major?” It’s a contemporary idea not short on tradition. That it’s jumbled up isn’t a reproach, it’s the point of the piece — to raise questions by making a work of art out of past works. But “Seeing Nature”’s M.O. is something much simpler though still nuanced, and visiting both exhibitions makes for two different museum experiences. One way of presenting a collection isn’t more valuable than the other, but what happened during my visit made certain institutional implements seem worthy of their subsisting charms.

The Paul Allen Family collection, some of whose 39 works are seen here in public for the first time, is composed of quite a few French Impressionist works and an impressive, wide array of other works from the last 500 years. The exhibition’s supreme appeal seems to be its intention to give the sensory experience of landscape. However old-hat this may seem to be, it works. The show’s sequencing is uncomplicated, with ample wall space between works, allowing space for longer looking. Three large galleries hold the paintings with central seating in each for tired feet, long visits, Instagramming, etc., and the the walls are affixed with artworks in unexpected and titillating curations.

The first room features the glorified French works including five by Monet, as well as Paul Signac’s Morning Calm, Concarneau, Opus 219 (Larghetto) (1891) with a musical connection in Pointillist fragmentation, like musical notes coming together to form a number. Signac’s fragments, like other of the experimentally adventuresome paintings in this show, fully allow the viewer to put the optical illusion of sailboats off the coast of Brittany together retinally and with their imagination. Seeing Gustav Klimt’s experimental 1903 oil painting of a birch forest at Attersee, Birch Forest, I can’t help but laugh, picturing Klimt painting among the birches, holding up his opera glasses to distort and augment the sights. The close-up view of birches juxtaposed with spacial illusion of the rest of the forest is dizzying and totally pleasurable.

Still, the same question can be asked: Why are these paintings famous and why should I care? My favorite of the show, Henri Le Sidaner’s Serenade at Venice (1907), immediately sent me into a state of reverie and welled my eyes, which also happened when I saw Degas’ Café Singer (1879) in Chicago. What causes such a reaction? Light (paint) forming the impression of life (the singer’s red lips, the sun, or in Le Sidaner’s case, low nocturnal flameglow). Le Sidaner, “delicious rhapsodist of night,” replicates the feeling of gloaming at night by way of painted paper lanterns, the luxury of sightseeing, and music made possible by subtle chiaroscuro (without Baroque melodrama) in his 1905 painting of gondoliers on a Venetian lagoon.

One of the other two rooms is full of Modernist favorites like O’Keefe, Ruscha, Richter, Hockney, Magritte, and Ernst, many of which are stretches when it comes to landscape, raising the question: what is a landscape? Take for instance Ed Ruscha’s Premium Oil (1965), a painting that brings the landscape to its viewer in its absence. What Ruscha presents here is a large silhouetted building, with the landscape a mere suggestion left to the viewer’s imagination. One would be remiss to not mention David Hockney’s massive panoramic stunner in oil, The Grand Canyon (1998), a veritable contemporary Fauve take on the natural monument. It’s by turns flat, illusionistic, cartoony, and naturalistic.

The third room features the older of the paintings, with artworks that document a return to classical themes, myths, and architecture. Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1625 series, “The Five Senses,” involves the landscape combined with portraiture and still life, while Venice occupies the canvases of Turner, Canaletto, Manet, and Moran.

Returning to the first room to leave, I happened on Joan Kirsch, an art historian and docent giving a public tour. Knowing her wide frame of reference and clear, entertaining eloquence, I couldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Joan’s one of a kind who’s been around a while. She once told me that she used to rollerskate to the Met and then roll around the galleries looking at all the art. She and her group were at Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). I learned things that contextualized an already thrilling painting in ways that maybe wouldn’t happen without the mediated viewing of the guided tour. In Cézanne, this kind of viewing is absolutely helpful.

Knowing that Cézanne has probably influenced every painter since his death doesn’t lessen his works’ challenging aspects. In this and the hundreds of Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings Cézanne made, the natural landscape looks unnatural, larger than life, not at all like it does in situ. Cézanne’s structured, strange brush strokes (owing their slant to his left-handedness) reflect the painter’s emotional baggage, to paraphrase Joan. He painted his interpretation — what he wanted you to see, not what’s necessarily there. All this led to a conversation about why so much of the work in this exhibition was satisfying, and why we call this kind of work “great.” Cézanne (one of the first experimental painters of the Modern era), like so many of the artists in this exhibition, only wanted to give you part of the picture and so he left the rest for the viewer to discern or keep wondering about. “When you’re in a forest,” Joan explained, “you don’t even need to see the whole tiger. If you see his tail, you run.”

“Seeing Nature” will also travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and will conclude at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017.

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NOAH DILLON: So why did you choose this painting?

ERIC SUTPHIN: I chose it in part because it’s personal. When I was pretty young — before I ever had any kind of idea to be a critic or to write about art — I watched Simon Schama’s The Power of Art (2006), and he talked about this painting. He claimed that Manet had left this corner piece of sail completely bare and it was just raw canvas coming through, so that it was raw canvas doubling as the actual sail.

When I saw the painting in person I realized that’s not true — it’s painted. And that inaccuracy imprinted this painting in my mind. It made me suspicious that he never saw this painting in person, and that perhaps he was talking from a reproduction of the painting. It’s an interesting painting for a lot of reasons and it’s atypical of Impressionism. It’s actually one year after the Bouguereau painting I’d originally wanted to talk about.

I think it’s important that you chose this as a substitute, because even if you think this is atypical of Impressionism, that Bouguereau painting was his last before the Impressionists arrived and pushed him (and academic painting generally) aside in a big way.

Bouguereau was sort of the archetype of the enemy to the Impressionists. And almost 150 years later both artists are in the same museum. I felt a little embarrassed picking the Bouguereau, because there’s still a little baggage. Not that Boating feels particularly radical, but it shows how the field has expanded so that anything goes. And I can simultaneously get pleasure out of this and the other thing, but they’re so far out of context that both paintings mean something completely different from when they were done. And I think the Bouguereau is more complex than this painting, but I think that this painting, right now, has a lot of implications.

Standing here, looking at it, I realize there’s no horizon. That might not mean anything explicitly, but implicitly it must. I recently drafted a review of “The Forever Now” at MoMA, and I was easing my way into ideas introduced by Paul Virilio in Open Sky (2008), about the disappearance of the horizon and what that means. It’s complicated, but right now I’m realizing that this guy is, in a sense, backed into a corner. He has no privacy; a ubiquitous eye has invaded his personal space and he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the boat.

Or he could disappear into the amorphous, blue nothingness behind him.

The image is basically space-less, all foreground, with everything pushed to the front, on the surface. It’s completely immediate. There’s no pretense; there’s no allegory. That’s really the crux of the Impressionists’ objection to the academics and salon painters, was that it’s all allegory, and here there’s none of that.

In that regard, this upper right corner isn’t raw canvas, but it is just a grey space carved out there, which runs contrary to painting conventions. It’s an abstraction of the superficial framing of the image, along with the blue that you were talking about, which takes up most of the canvas. You’ve got the blue of the water, the blue of his hat, the blue of her dress — everything else is additional to that primacy. It also strikes me that, thinking about now, when everything is sort of up for grabs, in a similar way you’ve got this representational scene that these incidents of abstraction interrupt. They’re reflexive and disruptive, without appearing to call attention to themselves. That admixture of approaches has only become more open.

This is another reason I wanted to look at Boating: it’s a very severe painting. It’s all about the composition, about the negative shapes. And he’s framed it in such a way that every bit — even this little wedge of blue at the top right corner — becomes like a series of quadrilaterals. And then you see the portrait. That’s what the tension is — that the portrait is the center and you always come back to the guy’s face. But it’s ominous. He doesn’t want you looking at him; he’s tired of being looked at.

He’s responding to the painter. He’s not a sitter and he’s not someone in a scene, he’s got an indeterminate relationship to Manet.

And in the absence of allegory, you’re frozen there: the artist has stepped back, the painting’s finished, and it’s us. It’s uncanny in that sense that the face is so central to the painting, so we’re locked into a deadlock of looking at this person. His companion is almost there just for Manet to be playful when he paints her dress. I don’t know what that says about social relations between men and women in late 19th century painting, but it sounds like an opening to an uncomfortable issue. And while that’s important, it also seems tertiary to the composition and the sort of gridlock that the viewer gets into with the central figure. I think at first encounter there’s a sense of tranquility and you’re in this nebulous sea blue. But that slips away as you look at it, and you’re left with angles and the aggressive of his stare. And it becomes kind of uncomfortable.

There’s also the well-known affection the Impressionists had for Japanese prints but I think there are some compositional issues that are equally important here two things: it anticipates the camera view, the way Degas did, but also the disappearance of the horizon, which is maybe not so radical, but a fusion of eastern pictorial sense and with western developments in optical technology.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about this painting is that the rope was originally much farther left, buy was changed, leaving this pentimento. It’s a curiosity, to me, how that affects its appearance and how it’s read.

Well now it’s all I can see. The palimpsest of the movement of the rope is really weird, and the way that sort of imaginatively interacts with the scene. It becomes sort of like Cubist movement where you see two ropes simultaneously, like Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which inadvertently adds to the aggressiveness.

Is there a way in which this particular museum frames this painting for you? Or even where it is in the museum?

Well, in this room in particular it seems out of place, out of step with its time. It appears to belong to no time or era. Obviously it’s from a milieu and there’s a long tradition of these boat leisure scenes. But some of the other radical steps that Manet was making, pictorially, anticipate tactics that fully found their place 50 years later. It doesn’t really belong to its Impressionist counterparts, other than the handling of her dress and the fleeting quality of his brushstroke. But the rigidity of the composition feels very classical and it has this characteristic triangular golden ratio form. So in that sense it belongs to Bouguereau and the mannered history that preceded it.

How does this find itself in the writing you do and the art you’re attracted to? Or how does that relate to how or why you enjoy art?

I feel hopelessly pedestrian in choosing an Impressionist painting to talk about. So the question becomes how to talk about connecting this to contemporary concerns. I’ve been feeling depressed about a lot of contemporary art. But I’ve been looking at a lot of contemporary figurative work and I find it can be useful to think about that stuff in relation to strong figurative work such as this.

I’m always looking for a way to relate directly with a work of art: How does this work make me feel? What inside of me does the work incite? It connects to the things I’ve been thinking about with regard to contemporary vision. And these are all, for me, half-cooked ideas; I’m still working it out. This painting is not an end-all, be-all artwork for me. But it’s an important painting in a line of thinking I’m trying to explore with regard to how I take images, what I expect or what keeps me looking at something.

This painting feels rather stripped in a way, and I think our identification with some kind of subject, a human subject, is an important aspect of this painting. And it brings me into that by way of all of the vision games Manet’s playing. The Impressionists spent a lot of time, I think, considering vision. And sure it’s been explored, but I think it remains important. You brought that up when I was writing about “The Forever Now,” talking about light and surface, and you asked, “Isn’t that what the Impressionists were doing?” And that made me think, “You’re right, they were.” So maybe that’s what brought me back to this particular painting: the question of “What were they doing?” And I guess it comes back to the camera, which is just so… ugh.

[laughing]

But it’s interesting to see that problem as it was born and how it’s now complicated, in another way, by the prevalence of cameras and of photographic images.

When you spend a lot of time thinking about how contemporary vision is shifting as a result of the ubiquity of screens, lenses, cameras, all these things, it can feel a little scary, vertiginous. It’s a consolation to know that these guys were also at that same precipice. A significant difference between Bouguereau and Manet is the matter of vision and seeing. The two artists are representative of two types of seeing and a shift in the way that people perceive images. It’s not incidental: space like this becomes physiological, and by closing in on this scene Manet was both internalizing and depicting a new paradigm in perception.

That points back to the question of was Simon Schama looking at a photograph, or was he looking at the thing face to face?

I’ve looked at this painting at least 20 times, and the first time I saw it, I remembered the Schama video, which on the screen you could buy that it’s just raw canvas, and there was no way to verify or argue against it. It was there and I could see it, with an authority telling me that’s the case. That’s a fundamental issue for the authority the critic and their ethical responsibility. Somebody like Schama — who has television shows, who’s a populist and an entertainer — can make you see things: seeing is believing.

[laughing]

But I can go and look and see if they’ve done their due diligence. The disparity I experienced with the Schama video calls into question everything else I’ve ever seen. Do I have to see it in person before I buy it? I buy everything, I believe so much. I think we all do.

But so there’s this painting and in another room there’s another Manet painting: Lady with a Parrot (1866). It’s very gray and sort of claustrophobic, and it’s a little like two Manets: this is the Manet of the future, whereas that’s the Manet of the salon. So having this here you can see the work and corroborate it not only with its description, but with other works by the artist and by their contemporaries.
Eric Sutphin is a painter and writer based in New York City. Print and online publications include Art in America, artcritical.com, Painting is Dead, On Verge, American Artist Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. He has been a visiting critic at the Delaware College of Art and Design and The School of Visual Arts. Recent curatorial projects include “Detlef Aderhold: Null Komma Null,” “Berliner Liste” and “Rosemarie Beck: Paintings from the 60’s” at the National Arts Club. He is currently writing a biography of post-war American painter Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003). Eric received a BFA from Rutgers University: Mason Gross School of the Arts, and an MFA from The School of Visual arts in 2014.

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In 1967 Michel Foucault obtained a contract for a book on Manet, tentatively titled La Noir et la Surface. There’s no evidence to suggest that Foucault got far in the writing of the book, but something of its most general intended features is suggested by the contract and some remarks from Foucault’s writings in the 1960s.  Analogously to the treatment of ‘regimes’ of knowledge in his previous book Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things in English), Foucault would have treated European painting as a series of discrete regimes, where a regime is characterized by certain dominant rules: of the depiction of space; of light; of meaning; and of significance. Masaccio founded the ‘classical’ regime, which held sway until Manet. In his work on Magritte, Foucault was to write that the classical regime was governed by two principles: the unbridgeable distance between linguistic and pictorial representation; and the treatment of visual resemblance between items, say, between a visual work and a thing, as a representation, wherein the resembling mark represented, or failed to represent, the resembled thing. Contemporaneously, in a much quoted passage, Foucault claimed that Manet had done for painting what Flaubert had done for literature: where Flaubert’s work depended for its meaningfulness and semantic density upon libraries, Manet’s depended upon museums. It was not Manet’s particular references to Giorgione, Velásquez, and Goya as much as the sheer coexistence of their work in a single building that created the possibility of modern meanings.

One remnant of this project is now in English. The thin volume Manet and the Object of Painting is a translation of a lecture on Manet Foucault gave in Tunis in 1971. In it he argued that Manet made possible the painting of the twentieth century with the invention of the ‘picture-object’ (p. 31), or ‘painting-object’ (p. 79). Conceived and practiced as a painting-object, a painting is made and viewed “as materiality,” “as something coloured which clarifies an external light and in front of which, or about which, the viewer revolves.” (p. 31)

The conception of the painting-object has three major dimensions: the treatments of space, and of light, and the place of the viewer. Manet’s treatment of these, while opening new possibilities of painting, also rejects the different classical treatments.  Whereas, with the use of linear perspective, Masaccio forged a well-ordered pictorial space, illuminated by a single, intelligible source of light, and depicted as if from a single viewing point, Manet blocked spatial recession and emphasized verticals and horizontals echoing the actual shape of the canvas, introduced multiple sources of light (including the actual light illuminating the painting itself ) and created multiple viewpoints. Manet’s picture-object thus has a kind of internal heterogeneity unavailable to classical European painting. It also induces in the viewer a new kind of mobility and responsiveness: “The picture appears like a space in front of which and by rapport with which one can move around.” (p. 78)

Foucault offers brief analyses of thirteen works of Manet in explication of this claim. The works treated under ‘Space’ highlight a newly shallow depth traversed by horizontals and verticals: the larger lines of trees and stiff figures internally echo the edge of the support; the smaller axes, such as the filigree of distant crossing ships’ masts, are magnifications of the weave of the canvas. This yields brutally truncated accounts of the “Music in the Tuileries” and “The Execution of Maximilian.” Even briefer but more intriguing are Foucault’s remarks about the “Saint-Lazare Station”; after noting the “same tricks” of the horizontals and verticals, he suggests that the gaze of the girl into the painting and the governess outward are a play with the recto and verso of the canvas. The viewer can neither meet their gazes nor share in the objects of their looks. Foucault calls this a “game of invisibility” that Manet is playing, and here and throughout the lecture, in a strange irruption of language reminiscent of Georges Bataille, Foucault characterizes this game as “vicious, malicious, and cruel” (p. 55; see also pp. 49, 68, 79). ‘Light’ gives brief accounts of three works, with Foucault stressing Manet’s use of multiple sources of light, in particular one seemingly coming from the place of the viewing, depriving Victorine Meurent’s body of modeling in “Luncheon on the Grass” and “Olympia.” And finally in the “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” Foucault notes that these subversions of the Classical and characteristics of the painting-object result in a work that excludes “every stable and defined place where we locate the viewer.” This explains “the enchantment and malaise that one feels in looking at it.” Only here does Foucault integrate the different aspects of the modern regime. An analysis of “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” would likely have been the virtuoso culminating explication of the book, as it was to be a decade later for T. J. Clark in The Painter of Modern Life.

So Foucault presents Manet as the founder of the modern system of painting, a system that remained inchoate through the nineteenth century but regulates twentieth-century painting. Manet inaugurates, then the next century practices the conception of an artistic picture as a ‘painting-object’. It is surprising that neither Foucault’s thoughts about Manet and museums, nor the claim about the two founding principles of classical painting, are mentioned in the lecture. The conception of the painting-object bears some similarity with Richard Wollheim’s nearly contemporaneous lecture “The Work of Art as Object,” in which Wollheim claimed that the dominant conception of a modern artwork is as a material object. But whereas Wollheim thought that this conception allowed a new kind of modern psychology to be expressed in visual art, Foucault ruthlessly treats the modern work as lacking any psychology. The painting-object conception, according to Foucault, later develops into abstraction, which he seems to understand wholly implausibly as a kind of non-representational play with materiality. But there’s a hint in the lecture of a different trajectory for this conception; when Manet is described as “amus(ing) himself” (p. 54) by playing with conventions, the foreshadowing of Duchamp is unmistakable.

An inevitable question for a contemporary reader is whether Foucault adds some perspective and associated insight to recent accounts of Manet. Michael Fried’s account is so involved and idiosyncratic as to disallow quick comparisons, but Foucault roughly agrees with Clark in finding a major source of the enduring fascination with Manet’s major works in their calculated incoherence.  For Clark this incoherence is in the service of presenting and reflecting on modern life as unintelligible. For Foucault this unintelligibility is, so to speak, a structural feature, generated out of the need to negate individually the convergent treatments of space, light, and the viewer in classical painting. Foucault of course rejected the idea that there was some ‘purpose’ structuring a regime; though founded by events named ‘Masaccio’ or ‘Manet’, an artistic regime is not some consciousness writ large, but rather an anonymous set of models and constraints governing what can show up in public space and be taken seriously. Nonetheless, in an unfortunate analogy with the end of The Order of Things’ prediction of the coming end of ‘man’, Foucault here ends with the fantasy that the painting-object will be “the fundamental condition” (p. 79) of the end of representation itself. The insight into the structural heterogeneity of twentieth-century painting disappears into a failed prophecy. And given his concern to in a single lecture to analyze Manet’s work as founding a new regime, there’s very little detail or subtle observation to savor.

Later Foucault developed his genealogical method, which subordinated the earlier so-called archeological method to the orientation to more piecemeal changes in practices and towards the end of his life he became interested in the question of how people might shape their own lives as if they were, or could be, works of art. As part of this last concern Foucault returned to Baudelaire’s account of modern life, which Clark among others was to make central to the understanding of Manet. The turns in Foucault’s thought were always surprising, but it would have been no great surprise if he had returned in late life to Manet, and offered a very different account.

Michel Foucault, Nicolas Bourriaud (Introduction), Matthew Barr (Translator), Manet and the Object of Painting. (London: Tate Publishing, 2010.  First published, 2005. ISBN1854378457. 80pp. $29.95)

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November 17, 2006 to March 28, 2007

What to think of yet another in the procession of general surveys the Guggenheim has served up?  In 2000, the late, great Robert Rosenblum presented the 1900 show as an expansive index that mirrored our own pluralistic, institutionalized, post avant-garde era.   The current exhibition, of Spanish painting from El Greco to Picasso, includes a magnificent array of  paintings and again puts the onus on us, by questioning how historical painting is currently viewed.  Can we truly accept a portrait of the artist as a ravenous, time-traveling marauder who steals and cannibalizes the immediate and distant past in an attempt to break new ground?  In 2004 the Guggenheim answered affirmatively in the smaller-scaled, less ambitious exhibition, Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition, which charted Mapplethorpe’s course as he pillaged classical sources depicting the sexually objectified male nude.

This time, Guggenheim curator Carmen Gimenez unfurls Time, Truth and History –  El Greco to Picasso, a theme-based show positing that the historical avant-garde, as exemplified by Picasso and Gris, was fueled by Spanish painting and cultural memory from as far back as the 16th century. And that cubism is, as Gertrude Stein quipped, Spanish.  The same claim is made for surrealism here.

While Gimenez’ thematic strategy does project continuity of subject matter, such as still-life or women, throughout centuries of Spanish painting, it doesn’t support the idea of an inherent Spanishness in Modernism.  And although the nationalist agenda is a stretch, the exhibition is a refreshing and bracing challenge to the notion that the contemporary epoch of the last 100 or so years sprung from Picasso’s head in an immaculately conceived rupture with the past. The usual suspects and heirs exemplar from Barr’s and Berenson’s cannons are trotted out and extolled, but this time they not only kiss and make up but have a roll in the hay.  We are treated to a celebratory mix of painting that reveals 350 years of swirling influences, and the sheer enormity of the presentation allows for other conversations, about foreign influence and formal innovation, to happen between the paintings.

The advertisements in the subway for the show offer an introduction.  The copy reads “El Greco to Picasso,” beneath which are two portraits, presumably one by each artist.  The Picasso looks like a Picasso –  a man’s bespectacled head, sporting a ruff collar, twists in a cubo-surreal tug-of-war.  Juxtaposed is an exquisitely observed portrait of a man in a sumptuous ruff collar.  But contrary to the headline, the image is not in fact by El Greco, but by Velazquez.  This thwarted expectation underscores the curator’s unfortunate preference for thematic rather than formal comparison.  Happily, El Greco painted a ruff collar too, albeit a less flamboyant – and less photogenic – one, in his Portrait of a Man (1600), which is installed in the exhibition with the other two portraits. And the conversation here is clearly between El Greco and Picasso — decidedly two-way and thoroughly modern, although the traditionally buttery Velazquez can listen in.

Establishing an unadulterated Spanish line of painterly influence is ultimately compromised by the looming presence of the Italians.  By Caravaggio’s death in 1618, Velazquez had fully embraced the Lombard’s use of dramatic snapshot naturalism and concentrated detail set in a dark vacuum of space. Velazquez’s superb Peasants at the Table (1619) exhibits all these qualities.  Caravaggio’s influence was so pervasive that as late as (1660) even Murillo, who was known for his fondness for Raphael’s classical idealism, was employing the new naturalism in Four Figures On A Step.

Ribera, perhaps Caravaggio’s greatest admirer, had a particularly ravenous appetite for cannibalizing Italian sources.   In Apollo and Marsyas (1637), Ribera directly borrows from Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul in the treatment of Marsyas in the lower half of the painting.  And Marsyas’ facial expression is influenced by the Bamboccianti school in Rome of the 1620’s. Yet in the upper half of the painting, the rich color and loose paint handling of the sky, background figures and flowing drapery of Apollo, is an homage to late Titian.  It is a breathtaking combination of opposing influences. Yet somehow Ribera makes it all work beautifully.

Despite the overwhelming Italian influence on the major Spanish masters, some lesser known painters expressed a more distinctly Spanish aesthetic.  It is here that this remarkably expansive exhibition taps the intrinsic power of Spanish painting, the power to evoke with deafening silence a heightened psychological state of existential quietude and foreboding.   Spain’s long-term political and cultural isolation spawned a reflective, insulated environment that drove Spanish still-life painters to develop their own darkened stage-set.  Amazingly, the stark, reductive space and dramatically lit volumes associated with Caravaggio were concurrently used by the marvelous Spanish still-life painter Juan Sanchez Cotan as early as 1602.  It was Cotan, with his hard-boiled observation and simplified compositions, who deflected the influence of Dutch still life’s over-abundance.  Cotan’s paintings, along with those of his brilliant follower Juan Van Der Hamen, are installed here with Gris and Picasso. But the hyper-real bent of 17th century Spanish still life was part of a different trajectory from that of Cubism’s inter-planar agitation. Eschewing the use of overlap, Cotan often staged his objects like overdetermined ducks in a row, and to great effect.  Most of the museum goers prefer to hover around Cotan’s and Hamen’s glistening gems rather than the more demanding examples by Picasso or Gris.  The Spanish preference for spare, evocative still life finds expression in Salvator Dali’s precisely defined bread-basket table settings and blood-and-sand landscapes, the final and decidedly uncubist destination of Cotan’s trajectory.

The unnerving yet magical stage-set of 17th century Spanish still life may have affected Francisco de Zubaran as well. The small atrium off the Guggenheims lower ramp is filled with Zubaran’s haunting paintings and has never looked quite this good.  Interestingly, Zubaran, the master of the aura-drenched lone figure, could not breathe a sense of interpersonal dynamics into his figural groups.  Instead they remain isolated, and psychologically dissociated from each other as if they are objects inhabiting the strictly compartmentalized, separately ordered world of Spanish still life. (Zubaran’s own still lifes were entirely indebted to Cotan.) One example where this tendency toward alienation works to great advantage is in the sense of foreboding between Jesus and Mary in his House of Nazareth (1644), of which there is an equally splendid second version in Cleveland.

The bold expressions of individual Spanish genius from Las Meninas to Guernica are astonishing.  And Zubaran, with his unique vision, reductive impulse and expressive power, is still greatly underrated.  Zubaran’s remarkable use of white hadn’t been approached until Robert Ryman’s assessment in the late twentieth century.  And in the midst of continued national isolation, Goya emerges, presaging symbolism, expressionism, and late Guston , and surpasses every European painter in  penetrating  the human condition.  Manet certainly thought so when he modeled The Execution of Maximillian (1869) on Goya’s  The Third of May (1814).  And it is Manet who perfectly exemplifies the roving art-historical eye.  By single-handedly resurrecting El Greco and touting him along with Velazquez and Goya as a magnificent triumvirate, Manet changed the way we look at art history.  When Manet brazenly stole the figural group from Raimondi’s TheJudgment of Paris (1520), and inverted the identities of the flagrantly sexualized male nude and modestly poised female, for his seminal modern work Luncheon on the Grass some 350 years later, he showed how a modern artist could re-evaluate painting tradition, charting the way for Picasso and Matisse.  In the wake of Manet’s and Picasso’s connections with historicism it should not be startling how much Lucian Freud’s Leigh Bowery and Fernando Botero’s figures owe to Juan Carreno’s excellent full length portraits of “La Monstrua” (1680) in the Freaks section of the exhibition.  Carreno’s monumental sense of proportion, framing and scale are remarkably contemporary.

In spite of the specific themes and domestic schools of Spanish painting emphasized by the curators, international cross pollination of style within historical movements has a messy life of its own.  Ribera, though born in Spain, lived all his adult life in Naples and adopted Caravaggio’s practice of using live models.  And what of El Greco, born in Greece and active in both Spain and Italy?  His greatest influence is undoubtedly Tintoretto, whose compression of figure and ground, use of elongation and diaphanously sketchy painting technique can at times appear agitated to the point of seeming unfinished.  Of course this is something Tintoretto, El Greco, Cezanne and Picasso all have in common.  Does that make Cubism Italian?  Aren’t El Greco’s figures in Vision of St. John , on loan here from the Met, and Lacoon, at the National Gallery, the template for Matisse’sDance and Cezanne’s bathers?  Surely many of Cezanne’s paintings satisfy the defined criteria of analytical cubism.  Does the fact that Picasso spent the vast majority of his life and all his innovative years outside of Spain determine his artistic nationality? If not, El Greco is Greek.

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