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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September 21, 2008–January 5, 2009
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
between Fifth and Sixth avenues
212 718 9400

September 2 to December 6, 2008
Hunter College: The Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street and Lexington Avenue,  SW corner
212 772 4991

September 25 to November 15, 2008
Hunter College: Times Square Gallery
450 West 41st Street
between 9th and 10th avenues

Nightfall can inspire fascination with the starry sky, optimistic hopes for fulfilled sexual desire, or at least anticipation of  sleep. But it can also cause anxiety if you are lonely, which is why van Gogh described The Night Café (1988), at MoMA, as showing a place where “dark forces lurked and suppressed human passions could suddenly explode.” As Joachim Pissarro, the curator of the  MoMA show and co-curator (with Mara Hoberman and Julia Moreno) of the two-part Hunter show explains, the forty-some Hunter artists in effect answer the question: How would van Gogh respond to night were he to have available our sensibility and artistic media?

Van Gogh might enjoy the way that Vija Celmins, Jennifer Coates, Lauren Orchowski, and Pat Stein show the night sky, in their contemporary versions of The Starry Night (1889). And he could be fascinated with how such works as Gregory Crewdson’sUntitled (penitent girl) (2001-2002), which shows a young woman in her underwear facing someone (her mother perhaps)  in a suburban driveway, and Kohei Yoshiyuki’s 1970s photographs showing men watching nighttime sexual activity in Japan’s parks, all extend the social commentary of The Potato Eaters (1885). The worker in The Sower (1888) deserves comparison with the man in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1994-1999), who is kicking a can through the streets at night and in the gay nightclub in Love is all Around (2007), a video by Marc Swanson and Neil Gust. If Laurent Grasso’s Infinite Light (2006/2008) mounted on the college’s pedestrian bridges, which repeats the words “night for day” can be associated with the Enlightenment,  so too can Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon (1889). And Stan Douglas’s Every Building in 100 West Hastings (2001),  a long narrow image of a street in Vancouver,  is a photographic version of Terrace of a Café at Night (Place du Forum) (1888).

But none of these van Goghs show a person asleep,  like Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963), the film of his lover John Giorno, and no image seems ominous enough to match the title of Claude Lévéque’s neon La nuit pendant que vous dormez je détruis le monde (2007). Van Gogh did not depict ecological disaster, like Susan Crile in her Charred Earth (1994), an image of the oil wells set on fire by the retreating Iraqis. Nor in his nighttime images does he show such extreme light and darkness as in Grasso’s L’éclipse (2006), a video montage of a solar eclipse and sunset. In some ways, then, the ways  that night is experienced and represented in visual art have changed dramatically. Vera Lutter uses a camera obscura to create photographic negatives, 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, II: April 17, 2006 (2006) while Thomas Ruff deploys a night-vision enhancer to give an uncannily menacing feeling to the apartment building photographed in Nacht 2 I (1992). And yet, we can recognize real continuities between van Gogh’s world and ours, for his Wood Gatherers in the Snow(1884) presents a setting not entirely unlike that of Barney Kulok’s digital transparencyStillman Avenue, Queens, NY (2004).

Almost inevitably, the representation nighttime invokes political metaphors, as Kant’s seminal essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) recognizes. To become enlightened, to move into the well-lit world of reason, he explains, “all that is needed is freedom . . freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” After you walk into David Claerbout’s installation, when your eyes adjust to the nearly complete darkness, the photograph inNightscape Lightbox (second) (2002-2003) becomes visible. But how do we understand this metaphorical association between reason and light? In his Kantian reading of the origins of modernism, Clement Greenberg associated avant-garde art with  our capacity to become self-critically enlightened. Nowadays our post-historical art historians are more likely to appeal to the authority of Hegel and his successor, Marx.

But for Hegel, so Pissarro observes, night is disturbing because we see only the black sky, while by contrast for Kant, in looking at the stars we also find within ourselves an awareness  of the sublime moral law, which, Pissarro continues,  anticipates the way that night can liberate “pent-up drives . . . . from voyeurism to exhibitionism to the endless peripatetic cruising through bars and clubs of all kinds” that we see exhibited in these pictures. For Hegel, then, the absence of light at night marks absence, the absence of light meaning that the world has become invisible to our sight, but for Kant it is possible to respond to night in a more excited and positive way. In  drawing attention to the manifold continuities between van Gogh’s art world and ours, by identifying the ways that we need to think politically about the meaning of representations of night, these exhibitions offer very challenging speculation on our situation, suggesting that Kant has more to offer art writers right now than do Hegel and Marx. Making that journey at nighttime through central Manhattan from MoMA to the Hunter galleries, which are within easy walking distance, inevitably inspires many reflections about the subject of this extraordinary three-part exhibition.

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October 18, 2005–December 31, 2005

There are about 1,100 Van Gogh drawings in existence and this exhibition includes 113 of them. Art historians have spent many years analyzing the work of Van Gogh but he remains an enigma. How and why did he make some of the best drawings of the twentieth century? Different aspects of Van Gogh’s life factor into his graphic genius: his personalized religious response to natural forms, his devotion to the observed motif, his deep appreciation of literary naturalism and biblical allegory, and his early immersion in the world of art. Three of his uncles were art dealers and Van Gogh joined the business at the age of 16. He was a careful reader of art journals before he became an artist and he studied and owned a number of artist prints. His close analysis of artistic forms began early in life.

After he was dismissed from a temporary position as a lay evangelist in the Belgian coal-mining district of Borinage he turned his back on organized religion for good, but this did not dispel his profoundly contradictory religious impulses. Van Gogh was a minister’s son raised on the bible, taught the bible to schoolboys, interpreted it before congregations, and was a theology student up until 1878. Before making the transition from freelance preacher to full-time art maker Van Gogh was “homesick for the land of pictures.” From the late 70s until his death in 1890 he pursued art making with a quasi-religious fervor: “I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.”

Although he was adamantly against painting biblical narrative and purely imaginative compositions, and frowned upon his peers who did, he wanted his art to console viewers. Van Gogh believed that religiosity could only be genuinely expressed through a humble realism. He reread and greatly admired the books of the naturalists the Goncourt brothers and Emile Zola, atheistic spirits one and all. In his mind they made close observation of the material world, including the ugly parts, a morally superior act. Zola’s novels appear in more than one painting by Van Gogh, and the text of these novels focus on the textures of real environments, and not on allegory or fantasy. Recording the details of a place made for great art in Van Gogh’s mind. At the same time, as Van Gogh indicated in a number of his letters to his brother Theo, he projected his memories of passages and characters from books he had read onto his real world experiences. Reading clearly gave him solace and made his isolation tolerable. His imagination was more at ease in literary realms.

Formally speaking, the late drawings reveal that Van Gogh’s understanding of linear perspective allowed him to squeeze as much emotionality as possible out of each composition, whether he was drawing a complicated panoramic view or an empty corner of a walled in field of grass and hay. Outlining and graphic filling or what Robert Hughes called “a tapestry of microforms” replaced chiaroscuro in his late drawings. The unstable spatial relationships and consistent changing of direction of the dots, staccato strokes, and whorls, which all vary in size, make for a turbulent and unrelenting surface. What art historian Fritz Novotny called the “dynamism contained in the staccato rhythm of a broken flow of lines,” is present in almost all of the drawings made during the last few years of Van Gogh’s life.

In many of the drawings from 1888 and 1889, including Olive Trees, Montmajour, Rocks and Trees, Montmajour, Cottage Garden, and The Courtyard of the Hospital in Arles, Van Gogh perfectly balanced expressive and descriptive mark making. In the drawing Cottage Garden the limited number of marks Van Gogh used to create this compelling rendering of observed facts grace it with a seductive vibratory energy. He uses a variety of circles, curved lines, straight lines, and dots to delineate a frothy mass of flora and fauna, open sky with bright sunlight coursing through it, and fences and houses. By playing sparse areas off of busy areas in a breathtakingly rhythmic way he suggests a three dimensional space. Like a number of Impressionist painters Van Gogh loved to challenge himself by trying to render large patches of organic forms that avoid specificity and were constantly reconfigured by the elements, wind especially.

The Pointillists also clearly made their mark on Van Gogh but his use of stippling wasn’t an all over principle or part of a formalist doctrine, but was one of the graphic tools he had at his disposal, used to its fullest effects to delineate space, light, and surface texture. There is a reason why Picasso’s praise of Van Gogh was never qualified. Van Gogh’s uncanny graphic intensity was not simply the by-product of mental disease, expression run rampant. Van Gogh teaches us that a drawn line is not just a drawn line. He instilled his line with veracity and an energy that continues to elude classification. His graphic resources, stippling, cross hatching, a barrage of multi-directional slashes and whorls, were always contained in smartly delineated compositions, and Van Gogh also chose startlingly original subject matter, a lone pair of shoes, a dramatically sloping hole in the ground. His ability to frame wild expanses of plant life allowed him to avoid the pitfalls of horror vacui, present in so much outsider art.

By carefully modulating the direction, shape and size of a limited vocabulary of hand drawn marks, Van Gogh convincingly evoked a variety of textures and forms and vistas. He was masterful at playing dot and circular form off of line or slash and his nuanced and commanding outlines of forms are products of a finely tuned imagination. His outlines are vibrant summaries of forms that are thoroughly convincing and hold our attention without resorting to self conscious distortions. The drawings in this exhibition convince us to take up our pencils.

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