Newsday Syndicate, by Emily Genauer
Winning Work
For his 86th birthday, Franco gave Marc Chagall the present every artist dreams of, a museum of his own. The city of Nice, in whose vicinity he has made his home for many years, gave Chagall a present, too, the hilltop site overlooking the Mediterranean on which the handsome structure has been built, by the national government.
But Chagall gave France and Nice the best present of all, a magnificent collection of his paintings, watercolors, pastels, gouaches, drawings, tapestries, stained-glass windows and sculpture, all dealing with biblical themes. The new museum is, in fact, called Message Biblique.
Those who know Chagall's work and career well will think at once of a famous series of small paintings in gouache that he was commissioned to do more than 40 years ago to illustrate an edition of the Old Testament. Those works, executed by the artist after a special trip to what was then Palestine, are, of course, included in the exhibition.
What the museum makes clear is that Chagall has always painted the Bible. When he painted doves and donkeys and playful bears, he was painting the animals of Noah’s ark. When he painted lovers floating among flowers, he was painting Paradise. When he painted reclining nudes, he was painting the "Song of Songs." His bearded old men were rabbis in his native Vitebsk, Russia — but they were also the patriarchs of the Bible. His forever recurring winged figures were, of course, angels, just as his fish and crowing roosters were clearly, it seems now, symbols of the Nativity.
Chagall himself makes no distinctions. Seated in his garden at St. Paul de Vence, in the hills outside of Nice, recently, he said he has painted the Bible since his youth and has seen it always as the greatest source of poetry of all times. What the latest works, 17 large paintings and some 200 studies for them make brilliantly and touchingly certain is that he has also found in the Bible the "resonance" of great art.
The difference between his earliest works expressly made as Bible "illustrations," and his recent major oils on the same theme, is extremely interesting. The small restrained early works are greatly endearing. Many visitors at the opening of the new museum who had never seen them before were particularly taken with their great expressiveness secured with a muted palette and restrained detail. But they are, nevertheless, limited in their scope. Those earlier patriarchs of the Bible are aged Jews of the ghetto where Chagall was born. The new figures of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob have a grandeur and monumentality suggesting the fathers of the whole human race.
Other aspects of Chagall’s art are underscored by the museum and its permanent collection. Chagall's art has always seemed so fresh, so unstudied, so innocent, as if the themes he always painted virtually floated effortlessly out of the buoyant air to settle on his canvas. They did no floating and settling. Take for example just one detail in a single painting dealing with the "Song of Songs." It’s an embracing couple on the back of a winged horse flying over the world. There are in the museum show 12 sketches for that one detail. The sketches illustrate how Chagall studied and adjusted the drawing, the color, the background, the placement in space, the relationship of the passage to the rest of the composition. The final sketch in the series is, amusingly, a small study of Chagall himself at work painting this very passage.
Besides the grandeur of Chagall's vision in his late works, what is most exceptional is the radiance of his color. We have become familiar, over the past 30 years, with the freshness and charm of his palette. Now it is radiant, as if in his old age he has dropped all inhibitions, readied out to find his light and color not on a palette but in the intensity of the sun. The result is a sense of ecstasy and exaltation beyond anything to be found in his art before this.
Predictably, there will be visitors to the new museum who protest that all Chagalls are alike. But it is no less true of El Greco, with his attenuated, pulsing saints; of Giacometti, with his stick-thin bronze figures; of Mondrian with his rectangles, of Dubuffet, with his steam-rollered monsters; of practically all artists, excepting Rembrandt and just possibly Picasso.
Other artists whose work Chagall considers spiritual (as opposed to having expressly religious theme) will also be exhibited in the Chagall museum. Who does Chagall consider spiritual? Rouault, but not Matisse; Mondrian, but not Kandinsky. Of 19th Century artists, Courbet, though he is supposed to have said to critics who charged him with being an earthbound realist, "Show me an angel and I will paint one." Intent has no more to do with spirituality in art than theme, says Chagall. Spirituality lies in form, in plasticity, in purity. These are God-given.
These are words, and one may argue, as I did in Chagall’s garden, that "form" and "plasticity" are perceived through taste and sophistication, not the spirit. But sitting in the small wedge-shaped theater that is part of the new museum, suffused in the predominantly blue light issuing from three brilliant stained-glass windows Chagall designed for one wall of the auditorium, and listening to a chamber-music concert of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven presented on the museum's opening night, I watched the faces of the audience. Many of them were city officials of Nice with their families, joining the international art world gathered for the occasion. Definitions and discussion became pointless. Those present clearly were having a deeply spiritual experience.
The music, the windows, the great mosaic panel outside the angled wall of the white stone building, the blooming oleander trees and fragrant eucalyptus were the resonance of nature —and of art — which Chagall says is what the Bible is all about.
For years now serious connoisseurs of art, the historians, critics, museum directors and students, have looked down their noses at discussion of the personality problems, emotional ills, "anti-social" behavior, in short, at whatever might be called the "otherness" of artists.
The art was the thing, and, of course, historical research about it. That Van Gogh cut off his ear, that Leonardo might have been a homosexual, that Modigliani was a drug addict, that Caravaggio's brief career saw him perpetually involved with the police for his unbridled violence, were material for popular and, regrettably, too often cheap novelists. No one denied that the work is the man, and in the case of the artist, all of the man. It was simply that so many tales were myth, conjecture or simply impossible to prove that sophisticated emphasis centered on the aesthetic qualities of the works themselves.
Now there is a fascinating change, and I think the reason for it may lie in our own new break-away from conventional moral patterns. No longer are artists a race apart, their follies, foibles, neuroses, even licentiousness of no real consequence to the rest of us — all, clearly, paragons of behavior, because their contribution was so great. Today we recognize in ourselves the same impulses. It has become acceptable for the most respected historians (Dr. Rudolf and Margot Wittkower’s book, "Bom Under Saturn" is a splendid example) and for museum directors, as well, to examine at length the character and conduct of artists in relation to their work.
The latest and most appropriate instance of the new approach is to be seen in a brilliant exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called "The Prints of Edvard Munch," directed by Riva Castleman, the museum's print curator.
Now, the Norwegian Munch is no new figure to the New York soene. The Modern Museum presented a large show of his paintings almost a quarter of a century ago. The Guggenheim did one in 1965. His prints are always somewhere around. Forerunner of the German expressionists, a bridge figure between Redon, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Art Nouveau and contemporaries like the late Max Beckmann (Munch himself lived until 1944), he is famous for the mystical, messianic quality of his work; for the feverish and exalted treatment of blazing light that he could obtain with sinuous, serpentine line alone, for the anguish with which he portrayed the embattled relationship of the sexes. He was, in Berlin and Paris, the friend and contemporary of Ibsen, for whose plays he designed sets; Strindberg, Delius, Mallarme and other figures of the period loosely called "symbolist." We were aware they were a Bohemian lot, brooding and pessimistic, but maybe enjoying their "suffering" a little.
All this, and a few other personal facts, we knew. Now the museum gives us a different kind of show, accompanying the prints with photographs, letters, books and wall labels that flesh out the Munch picture fascinatingly, making not only his work clearer but his life closer as well.
For instance, we see now that our time and his were, in surprising ways, similar. A special section of the show, "Man and Woman," consisting primarily of prints being exhibited for the first time, demonstrates how obsessive the theme of man vs. woman had become at that time. We know it from Ibsen and Strindberg, of course, but here we see it, with a backup of photographs of the women in Munch's life, and in practically all the others' lives, too. Men and women alike drank excessively, took drugs "in order to expand their awareness," according to one wall label, moved from one. to the other in turn.
Study the exhibited documents, letters and labels carefully, and it becomes apparent that these charming Victorian-looking girls were, in effect, their time's equivalent of our groupies. A few, attempting to break the inhibiting bonds in which they felt bourgeois morality had imprisoned them, actually became prostitutes, we learn, in order to enjoy and understand the same freedom as men.
But it all ended so cornily. Always they pleaded for marriage; Tulla Larsen, especially, to whom Munch wrote in 1900, "You will understand my need for solitude — which is the regulator of my life. And you will defy it as you have done earlier — you must understand that it means murdering me..."
Tulla threatened to kill herself, and while trying to stop her, Munch got his own finger shot, which for a painter seemed most distressing of all. Another girl involved with several of the men did actually kill herself.
Munch, meanwhile, kept painting and making prints, writing, in a letter in the exhibit of those awful women who dominate submissive men (as in his print "The Vampire"), who rise in triumph ("Ashes"), while men are consumed by the sexual struggle. Except in youth, when the sexes meet on equal terms, "Man is the victim, not the hero," he said.
It is all marvelously absorbing, reading the documents, examining the prints as they grow ever stronger, bolder, more expressive until we get to the end, with Munch, the supposedly weak and tubercular Munch relentlessly pursued by, but avoiding permanent alliances with women, dying at the age of 80, famous, successful, rich — and still strong and very handsome.
A final thought. It is a fine coincidence that the Munch show opened while the Ferdinald Hodler exhibition is still on view at the Guggenheim Museum. Hodler was an expressionist, too, but, oh, the difference between the German and the Norwegian, with Hodler painting charades in which his themes are visualized by figures who are bad actors, and Munch, whose every whiplash line is itself a projection of passion and violence.
Among the thousands of words on Picasso’s life and art published since his death, I've found no reference to the time a dozen or so years ago when countless artists of stature throughout the world had, in effect, written him off. He was a historical figure holding no meaning for them whatever as a seminal force. In their work, the human body, the visible world and any sense of social participation or responsibility were less than inconsequential; they were impermissible. Their total conscious concern was with the means of art; not its meaning. Their models and mentors, of course, were Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky, Hans Hoffmann and the few others today recognized as the fathers of abstract expressionism.
That phase of art history is over. Everywhere new styles of painting and sculpture command attention, none more imperatively than a new, sharp realism. Picasso, who started as a realist and returned to that manner intermittently at his death was in again.
I’m not sure he knew he had been out — or, if he knew, cared. His own concern during much of the last two decades had been with works by the old masters, on which he painted endless variations. It almost seemed that he wanted to reestablish himself in the great tradition that had been virtually discarded by everybody — and himself, too, in his youth. Perhaps he saw this salvaging of the past as an extension of his own physical incorporation in his early work of so much else that had been discarded, like his children's battered toys or the sticks and stones he picked up on beaches. It was the beginning of what later came to be known as "found" sculpture.
My point is that Picasso, who had, especially in his cubist phase, revolutionized art as had no other artist in history, was no less responsible for the later developments that seemed to deny him his importance. To recognize the enormous extent of his direct influence, one has only to look at early works by artists who, in rebellion, shaped a totally new esthetic — men like Pollock, for instance, and David Smith, the sculpture who since his death has come to be counted as America's greatest in our time. They were, of course, children who abandoned their father to be able to find and assert themselves.
Picasso’s strength was so great that no one could function in his shadow. He was a mighty oak whose roots absorbed all nourishment in the surrounding soil and whose branches soaked up all available sun and ah. To avoid strangulation, his "children" had to move out of his range — or die. They had deliberately and painfully to evolve an expression that would not only avoid but actually deny everything he stood for.
What most of us forget Is that there was a first denial, even before this, in Paris. By the early '30s, when Picasso was still only about 50, a group of painters already saw him as a modem old master breathing hard down their necks. Although he himself had experimented imaginatively and richly with the caprice that was later to be known as surrealism, they saw fantasy as their only escape. Instead of using it, as Picasso did, as but one aspect of an art in which pictorial architecture and human meaning were almost always present, they built their whole expression on memory and hallucination. They painted dream landscapes peopled only with unidentifiable or illogical shapes. They were, most notable, Miro, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Andre Masson.
American painters at the beginning saw the surrealists' work as too languid, too effete to hold generative ideas for themselves. But World War II brought many surrealists to this country, to became fascinating, provocative factors on the New York scene. Then our own artists recognized in their work the road signs pointing to escape. And they followed them, adding their own vigor, energy, force and lack of inhibition to surrealism, thus shaping that uniquely American idiom, abstract expressionism.
Now, clearly, artists of a still younger and more atavistic generation are turning back to their grandfather, Picasso. This, too, is a familiar behavioral pattern — pop art and the new realism growing out of it project a need not only to paint recognizable images again but also to make social statements.
But here is where they stall differ from the giant whose shadow is so very long. Picasso didn’t satirize the existing scene, or concern himself with its trivia, no matter how frivolous individual works may be. He was, at every stage of his life, a prophet.
His cubist works done before World War I presaged a world that was falling apart and would never become whole again. In "Guernica" he was prophet of a doom that apparently will never lift.
It would seem to be required that every account of the art of Chaim Soutine begin with speculation on the role of Jews in modern art. It turns up, inevitably, in the very opening sentence of the catalog written by the chief curator of the Paris Museum of Modern Art, Jean Leymarie, for the ravishingly beautiful and deeply moving Soutine exhibition he has assembled in the Orangerie pavilion in the Tuiteries gardens.
What mysterious phenomenon, he asks, took place in the first decade of the 20th Century that brought a group of artists to Paris from Jewish ghettos all over Europe (chtettele is the odd way the Yiddish word for ghetto looks in the French text) — where there was no tradition in the visual arts at all, where images were in fact banned, where there was no available training and not even sympathetic understanding from bewildered and miserably poor families — and turned out to be among the supreme geniuses in the development of modern art?
He cites Modigliani, Chagall, Lipchitz and, of course, Soutine. I could have added others, like Pascin and Zadkine and, on a lesser but still imposing level, Kisling, Max Weber (who came to Paris by way of America), and, a couple of decades later, when apparently the phenomenon was still operative, artists like Rothko, Gottlieb, Nevelson, etc., etc., etc.
Well, look for no light on the question from me. I can speculate, too. I might suggest that for the young Jews who found their way to Paris, the impact of liberation lighted fires that burned the more fiercely after years of hardship and repression. Or maybe they, closely identified with tradition, were so profoundly affected by the great art they discovered in the Louvre (and Soutine seems especially to bear out this hypothesis) that they were brilliantly able to hold on to the timeless values of old masters even as they evolved their own highly personal and innovative vision. Maybe their tragic religious background and their experience of hunger and hostility, on the one side, and a compensatory and exalted acceptance of God and eternity on the other, explain their power.
And maybe the whole question is silly. The list of non-Jews who made it early on in the development of modern art, painters and sculptors who were or were not poor, who found or didn't find encouragement, who respected or rejected tradition, is too long to cite. Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee, Rouault, Mondrian, Brancusi. . . . It’s pointless continuing. The fact is that they all came together at a moment when Paris was paradise for young talents burning with creative ardor. According to the memoirs of his friend and dealer, Paris to Soutine was paradise just because "it was a place where he could sit on a park bench and not be ordered away by a policeman." The fact is that he could sit there, all right, but only if he paid the couple of sous the privilege cost.
Almost a quarter-century has passed since New York's Museum of Modern Art held a big Soutine show. Even those who have known Soutine's painting for decades were on the way to having their vision blurred, if not actually corrupted, by the obsessive concern of taste-makers with "new talent" and the favorites of the establishment.
I walked into the Orangerie show and found myself responding at first not to the paintings as paintings but to the shattering image they presented of a soul in torment. Instead of colors and forms I saw the self-destructive, death-obsessed, poverty-stricken figure driven by his private demons, and then, even after fame had begun to come, driven by the ravages of hunger, deprivation and exploitation to death before he was 50, after an unsuccessful operation for stomach ulcers. His extreme nervousness had been unquestionably aggravated by his years of terror living in a German-occupied French provincial city.
Soutine’s is a kind of painting which, after continued exhibition of cool, cerebral abstraction, of op and pop and even of that abstract-expressionism which once seemed so feverish (and has roots in Soutine), we have come to find embarrassing. Agony in art, yes. But conceal it, as Pollock did, in a labyrinth of thick, rich pigment and vortices of nonidentifiable forms. Soon we saw no feeling in Pollock at all, only a rich "curtain" of sensuous pigment and form. Always the desideratum for the museum people who chose our shows was bloodless, arm’s-length cool. Anything more revealing seemed somehow in bad taste, "illustrational." We were forgetting that art is passion, revealed and projected in ordered shapes, colors, lines. If it’s a passion only for technical means, it’s pretty thin stuff.
It isn’t as if Soutine cut himself open so we could examine his guts. He devised his own metaphors. He cut steers open, for instance. Hung carcasses were among his favorite themes (Rembrandt and Goya had done them before him). Four paintings of them are included in the Orangerie exhibit. The greatest of them, done in 1925, is not just a steer’s carcass. That expanse of blood-red pigment is an inferno, a glimpse into hell. He painted a still-life of herrings, with two forks. They’re not just forks. They’re the grasping claws of a starving man. He painted a tree on a hill above a village, bent over by a storm. What it is is a village and the whole world helpless in a holocaust. He painted a red staircase descending a village hill. It’s more like a river of blood, or a human spinal column and nervous cord.
He took many of his themes from old masters. The show includes several of Soutine's own versions of Rembrandt’s "Woman Bathing," and his "Girl at Half-Open Door." Courbet's "Burial at Ornans" (especially its foreground figure), is recalled by Soutine’s series of red-robed choir boys. His portrait of Miestchaninoff, a sculptor friend, is obviously inspired by Fouquet’s "Portrait of Charles VII," on the Louvre.
Soutine’s agony gave way in time to relative calm, perhaps as recognition and success came to him. Success? In 1923 Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the Argyrol king assembling the collection that would eventually be the Barnes Museum, in Meryon, Pa., one day bought 109 Soutine canvases from the artist for $3,000. Each of those pictures he got for $30 would today very easily bring more than $300,000.
The landscapes in which trees were uprooted by his brush grew relaxed. Houses stopped rocking. A girl lies on the grass along a tree-bordered stream. Children walk from school hand in hand along a country lane.
They’re calm as Van Gogh’s last landscape, painted in the field where, shortly after putting down his brush, he would shoot himself, is calm. Calm doesn’t imply lack of power or intensity. It’s simply that feeling, projected via the image of the visible world, doesn’t sink back into the canvas with time, so the result remains just an exercise in technical means, or an experience of sensuous response.
These can doubtless be very satisfying. But they’re not what great art is about. And that is what museum directors at home have been letting us forget.
Nudity and violence are the themes of several New York exhibitions, seemingly guaranteeing them popularity and predictability. Only It may not work out that way. They'll be popular, yes, but the response, possibly, will not be the predictable one.
The nudes are at the Metropolitan Museum, where a small but fine new show is called "Nudes in Landscapes," and at the Peris Galleries (1016 Madison Ave.), scene of a Jules Pascin survey dominated by the nudes for which he was best known.
Violence is examined in a group show called "Voices of Alarm," at the Lerner-Heller Gallery (789 Madison Ave.), and in a one-man show by the Spanish painter, Juan Genoves, at Marlborough's (41 E. 51st St.).
Consider the nudes, as a starter. What is new is our own attitude toward nudes, especially as seen in an erotic context. Porno films, massage parlors and our apparently epidemic loss of inhibitions have all contributed to the difference.
Pascin's nudes, for instance, have In the past been, if not embarrassing, then disconcerting as living-room decor. The artist was a singularly interesting, pathetic figure, Romanian-born, who spent time intermittently in New York beginning as early as 1914 and made his last visit two years before he hanged himself in 1930.
He was a drug addict and an alcoholic, and a frequenter of bordellos in his native Bucharest from the time he was 14. His first subjects were the women he found there, and he chose them, he said, because they were totally un-self-conscious.
It could be. Or maybe he was himself insecure with women, unless they were inferior. In any case he painted them in all their decadence, so that, despite his technical delicacy and subtlety, the results were unacceptable to many collectors and museums.
Nothing today appears to be unacceptable. The exhibition was sold out before it opened, to collectors understandably enchanted by a linear quality as incisive as it is seemingly casual, by color and texture as soft as pale flesh, by a man who in a curious and compassionate way saw his subjects as stupid and victimized where once they seem brazen and amoral.
The story at the Met is different. Is it possible to grow so blase that a Rubens nude whose yearning for Adonis can scarcely be contained in her rosy flesh or that a Courbet standing nude, all bulging belly and dimpled behind, can be viewed essentially as embodiments of the spiritual Platonic ideal of union between man and women? That’s how the Met would have us look at this show, and the interesting juxtapositions of the 16 paintings it includes do promote that approach. Images of the naked body have become so commonplace that one is ready, willing and pleased to meet them as a spur to reflections on philosophical concepts, as well as devices for displaying technical dexterity and compositional unity.
So, if you like, see Petrus Christus’ small gem, "Lamentation over Christ," as a brilliant way for the artist to use a body to establish a directional curve or as a metaphor for Christian belief. See Redon’s "Pandora’s Box" not as a nude carrying an almost invisible chest but as an expression of nude as another of nature’s blooms.
"Voices of Alarm," one of the two exhibits dealing with violence, consists of paintings and sculpture by contemporary artists who are not content to concentrate on formal problems or romantic or philosophical notions, or even social satire, but use their art to express their fury over the state of the world and even to call for action.
Theirs is an ancient and honorable tradition, although I can’t think of a single picture or sculpture, including Picasso’s great "Guernica," that ever stirred anybody to specific action, even if it contributed to a climate of discontent.
Eloquent expression of pain and compassion that an artist must disgorge is, of course, quite enough. And several such works are in the present show. Most successful among them, and furthest removed from mere caricature, are Ipoustegy’s metal sculpture of a trapped and fragmented head and May Stevens’ cool, sardonic double portrait of an unidentified man who may be an army officer, a political office-holder, a president, whatever.
Genoves, the subject of the second exhibit, had his first and only other American show, a great success, in 1967. He lives and works in Madrid, which is itself remarkable in that his pictures are a violent picturing of life in a Fascist state. The early pictures, all quite alike, suggest views through an airplane bombsight of crowds of tiny figures madly scattering for safety during an air raid. Essentially photographic in approach, they work because the tiny figures, hardly more than elongated dots, are still desperately human and their terror was almost palpable.
The new paintings dispense with crowds. A small group is led off by black-hatted sinister figures to jail, or perhaps to a firing line. Four men with raised hands stand waiting their turn to be interrogated. There's better painting here than in Genoves's earlier work, particularly in the placing of a few light-etched figures on a large, striated but mostly monochromatic field unpatterned except for the figures and their long, ominous shadows.