Showing posts tagged modernism
Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Jay Bernstein writes: Every abstract painting is, or so Pollock is insisting, a dissolved collage — the fragments dissolved into paint-stuff (which is literally what happens perceptually in Full Fathom Five with its inventory of button, matches, key, pennies, etc., physically embedded in the paint but dissolved, utterly, in the abstract perceptual swirl). And every collage is an abstract painting in the making since the fragmentation of the world to which the collage points will continue leaving fragments and even less than fragments, perhaps just “stuff,” like paint itself. And both on this account are forms or modes of melancholia, melancholia become form, become art. And this would make sense just in case our only access to material meaning, the materiality of the sign, were art, the art we call modernist. View high resolution

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Jay Bernstein writes:

Every abstract painting is, or so Pollock is insisting, a dissolved collage — the fragments dissolved into paint-stuff (which is literally what happens perceptually in Full Fathom Five with its inventory of button, matches, key, pennies, etc., physically embedded in the paint but dissolved, utterly, in the abstract perceptual swirl). And every collage is an abstract painting in the making since the fragmentation of the world to which the collage points will continue leaving fragments and even less than fragments, perhaps just “stuff,” like paint itself. And both on this account are forms or modes of melancholia, melancholia become form, become art. And this would make sense just in case our only access to material meaning, the materiality of the sign, were art, the art we call modernist.
Chaim Soutine, Flayed Rabbit, 1924 (Barnes Collection). Jay Bernstein writes: If these works are bearers of conviction, then what is left of nature to be affirmed is only its ruination as what cannot be — artistically or aesthetically — forged or faked or sentimentalized. But the role and stand-in for base nature in painting is paint matter; hence painting that fully acknowledges paint matter acknowledges painting (and so culture) as an inflection of nature, fully of it and only meaningful thereby. Soutine takes painting to the limit of intelligibility, to the very place at which meaningfulness must collapse if culture (and so meaning) is the great and autonomous and wholly human enterprise we believe it to be and ruins it; all the pathos of the human emerges from the wholly inhuman: gelatinous stuff configured. View high resolution

Chaim Soutine, Flayed Rabbit, 1924 (Barnes Collection).

Jay Bernstein writes:

If these works are bearers of conviction, then what is left of nature to be affirmed is only its ruination as what cannot be — artistically or aesthetically — forged or faked or sentimentalized. But the role and stand-in for base nature in painting is paint matter; hence painting that fully acknowledges paint matter acknowledges painting (and so culture) as an inflection of nature, fully of it and only meaningful thereby. Soutine takes painting to the limit of intelligibility, to the very place at which meaningfulness must collapse if culture (and so meaning) is the great and autonomous and wholly human enterprise we believe it to be and ruins it; all the pathos of the human emerges from the wholly inhuman: gelatinous stuff configured.
Chaim Soutine, Still Life with Herrings, 1916 . Jay Bernstein writes: What Soutine discovers or uncovers as the secret of paint-on-canvas is its derivation from and affinity with embodiment and nature: the painted image is a configuration of meaning that arises solely through the configuration of matter, meaning arising as essentially this material/natural stuff configured. The mystery of painting that Soutine reveals is not that meaning can arise from color and line alone (both of which are all too human), but that what arises in that way is matter through and through, the germ or ooze in the ghost. If paint-on-canvas is sublimed, sublimated embodiment, and if now painting has only paint-on-canvas with which to forge meaning for itself and so be meaningful, a source of conviction and connectedness to the world, then, if these paintings work and are authentic (not kitsch or rhetorical or melodramatic or naive), it is the semblance of life, the life of the gelatinous stuff, that appears vital, quivering and alive, and through which I (we) discover my (our) mortification — and in repressing base nature we have denied ourselves as part of it so that what survives and remains alive, or at least is necessary for there to be lives, is ironically what we have found lowest (what Greenberg cannot bear about Soutine or about himself). View high resolution

Chaim Soutine, Still Life with Herrings, 1916 .

Jay Bernstein writes:

What Soutine discovers or uncovers as the secret of paint-on-canvas is its derivation from and affinity with embodiment and nature: the painted image is a configuration of meaning that arises solely through the configuration of matter, meaning arising as essentially this material/natural stuff configured. The mystery of painting that Soutine reveals is not that meaning can arise from color and line alone (both of which are all too human), but that what arises in that way is matter through and through, the germ or ooze in the ghost. If paint-on-canvas is sublimed, sublimated embodiment, and if now painting has only paint-on-canvas with which to forge meaning for itself and so be meaningful, a source of conviction and connectedness to the world, then, if these paintings work and are authentic (not kitsch or rhetorical or melodramatic or naive), it is the semblance of life, the life of the gelatinous stuff, that appears vital, quivering and alive, and through which I (we) discover my (our) mortification — and in repressing base nature we have denied ourselves as part of it so that what survives and remains alive, or at least is necessary for there to be lives, is ironically what we have found lowest (what Greenberg cannot bear about Soutine or about himself).
Chaim Soutine, View of Céret, 1922 (The Baltimore Museum of Art). Jay Bernstein writes: The “heatedness,” or writhing, of these paintings indeed does not let them sit decoratively. For Greenberg their failure of closure means, finally, that they are not “altogether retinal,” and hence not altogether painting. The opposite of unity is not heterogeneity, though, as one would suppose, but “agitation” and lack of “quietness.” For Greenberg these images are not dead enough; they lack “reassuring unity,” indeed attack it. The Céret landscapes insist on their furious record of decay as alone what can or should gain our assent: to assent to a fuller image would be to deny what history had already done to image and object; to assent to less would be to pretend that the threat was not mortal. Soutine transforms the pleasure of the beautiful into our humiliation (a gasp of horror) before its disappearing. View high resolution

Chaim Soutine, View of Céret, 1922 (The Baltimore Museum of Art).

Jay Bernstein writes:

The “heatedness,” or writhing, of these paintings indeed does not let them sit decoratively. For Greenberg their failure of closure means, finally, that they are not “altogether retinal,” and hence not altogether painting. The opposite of unity is not heterogeneity, though, as one would suppose, but “agitation” and lack of “quietness.” For Greenberg these images are not dead enough; they lack “reassuring unity,” indeed attack it. The Céret landscapes insist on their furious record of decay as alone what can or should gain our assent: to assent to a fuller image would be to deny what history had already done to image and object; to assent to less would be to pretend that the threat was not mortal. Soutine transforms the pleasure of the beautiful into our humiliation (a gasp of horror) before its disappearing.
Chaim Soutine, Self-Portrait, 1918 (The Henry Photo and Rose Pearlman Foundation). Jay Bernstein writes: Since a pictured face is not a face, then even qua representation it must not be what it represents and is in its representing something else. Hence rather than thinking of there being an oscillation between paint and representation, the brush stroke that can also be seen as a flower, Soutine’s distortions — the grotesquely large ears, the fervid red uniforms that seem to be choking or swallowing their inhabitants, mouths that appear to be moving across the faces of the persons whose mouths they are, or, in the Self-Portrait, “his impossible red lips pushed forward toward the picture plane” — have the effect of generating a new minimal level of visual meaning that even at the level of representation holds together, fuses, or makes visibly simultaneous the representation, the lips, and their being just, only, emphatically paint matter. Achieving this fusion requires both a lowering and a lifting: nothing must “mean” by virtue of what it is (what it represents), but solely by virtue of its being painting.

Chaim Soutine, Self-Portrait, 1918 (The Henry Photo and Rose Pearlman Foundation).

Jay Bernstein writes:

Since a pictured face is not a face, then even qua representation it must not be what it represents and is in its representing something else. Hence rather than thinking of there being an oscillation between paint and representation, the brush stroke that can also be seen as a flower, Soutine’s distortions — the grotesquely large ears, the fervid red uniforms that seem to be choking or swallowing their inhabitants, mouths that appear to be moving across the faces of the persons whose mouths they are, or, in the Self-Portrait, “his impossible red lips pushed forward toward the picture plane” — have the effect of generating a new minimal level of visual meaning that even at the level of representation holds together, fuses, or makes visibly simultaneous the representation, the lips, and their being just, only, emphatically paint matter. Achieving this fusion requires both a lowering and a lifting: nothing must “mean” by virtue of what it is (what it represents), but solely by virtue of its being painting.
Chaim Soutine, Carcass of Beef, 1925 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York). Jay Bernstein writes: It is as if in painting his dead cow, horse, and ox carcasses, corpses of turkey, rabbit, and skate, the decomposition of the represented object offered no resistance to the painterly practice of decomposing, abstracting, flattening, and rendering into paint matter its image; that is, it is as if the negations that constitute the practice of modernist painting were just the process of decay of the organic into the inorganic in paint. In finally coming to the still lifes, Soutine found a subject matter in which his painterly violence to the image — anticipating in large and small much of what was to follow — was the form of fidelity required to the object, and by extension to the tradition. The integrity of the embryonic/decomposing organism, the paint-image carcass, say, is the condition of painterly meaning, of painting being a form of conviction and connection to the world. The capture of decomposing flesh, all that is left of nature, is the decomposing image. View high resolution

Chaim Soutine, Carcass of Beef, 1925 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York).

Jay Bernstein writes:

It is as if in painting his dead cow, horse, and ox carcasses, corpses of turkey, rabbit, and skate, the decomposition of the represented object offered no resistance to the painterly practice of decomposing, abstracting, flattening, and rendering into paint matter its image; that is, it is as if the negations that constitute the practice of modernist painting were just the process of decay of the organic into the inorganic in paint. In finally coming to the still lifes, Soutine found a subject matter in which his painterly violence to the image — anticipating in large and small much of what was to follow — was the form of fidelity required to the object, and by extension to the tradition. The integrity of the embryonic/decomposing organism, the paint-image carcass, say, is the condition of painterly meaning, of painting being a form of conviction and connection to the world. The capture of decomposing flesh, all that is left of nature, is the decomposing image.
Ulysses and his Dog, illustration from the 1905 Riverside Press edition of The Odyssey, translated by William Cullen Bryant (The McCune Collection). In Homer’s poem, Odysseus returns home to find it has been overtaken by men in pursuit of his wife. His dog Argos is sleeping, old and neglected, on a pile of cow manure. Argos wakes and recognises his master, but is too weak to stand and greet him; he dies as Odysseus prepares his attack. Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags, and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody’s body. View high resolution

Ulysses and his Dog, illustration from the 1905 Riverside Press edition of The Odyssey, translated by William Cullen Bryant (The McCune Collection). In Homer’s poem, Odysseus returns home to find it has been overtaken by men in pursuit of his wife. His dog Argos is sleeping, old and neglected, on a pile of cow manure. Argos wakes and recognises his master, but is too weak to stand and greet him; he dies as Odysseus prepares his attack.

Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags, and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.

Wassily Kandinsky, Sketch for Picture XVI (The Great Gate of Kiev), 1924. Extract from “Proteus,” the third episode from Ulysses: Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. View high resolution

Wassily Kandinsky, Sketch for Picture XVI (The Great Gate of Kiev), 1924.

Extract from “Proteus,” the third episode from Ulysses:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Photograph of the Sandycove Mortello tower in which Joyce lived for a week in 1904. The opening paragraphs from Ulysses: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: — Introibo ad altare Dei. Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely: — Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit. Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak. View high resolution

Photograph of the Sandycove Mortello tower in which Joyce lived for a week in 1904.

The opening paragraphs from Ulysses:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

— Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

— Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Franz von Stuck, Tilla Durieux as Circe, 1913 (Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin). Extract from “Circe,” the episode from Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom appears to hallucinate in a brothel: (The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress enters. She is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed, with orangetainted nostrils. She has lace pendant beryl eardrops.) BELLA: My word! I’m all of a mucksweat. (She glances around her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her lace fan winnows wind towards her heated face, neck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.) THE FAN: (Flirting quickly, then slowly) Married, I see. BLOOM: Yes… Partly, I have mislaid. THE FAN: (Half opening, then closing) And the missus is master. Petticoat government. BLOOM: (Looks down with a sheepish grin) That is so. THE FAN: (Folding together, rests against her eardrop) Have you forgotten me? BLOOM: Yes. No. THE FAN: (Folded akimbo against her waist) Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now we? (Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.) BLOOM: (Wincing) Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women love. THE FAN: (Tapping) We have met. You are mine. It is fate. Bloom: (Cowed) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. A dog’s spittle, as you probably… (He winces) Ah! View high resolution

Franz von Stuck, Tilla Durieux as Circe, 1913 (Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin).

Extract from “Circe,” the episode from Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom appears to hallucinate in a brothel:

(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress enters. She is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed, with orangetainted nostrils. She has lace pendant beryl eardrops.)

BELLA: My word! I’m all of a mucksweat.

(She glances around her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her lace fan winnows wind towards her heated face, neck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)

THE FAN: (Flirting quickly, then slowly) Married, I see.

BLOOM: Yes… Partly, I have mislaid.

THE FAN: (Half opening, then closing) And the missus is master. Petticoat government.

BLOOM: (Looks down with a sheepish grin) That is so.

THE FAN: (Folding together, rests against her eardrop) Have you forgotten me?

BLOOM: Yes. No.

THE FAN: (Folded akimbo against her waist) Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now we?

(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)

BLOOM: (Wincing) Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women love.

THE FAN: (Tapping) We have met. You are mine. It is fate.

Bloom: (Cowed) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. A dog’s spittle, as you probably… (He winces) Ah!