“On seeing Giorgione’s style,” wrote Giorgio Vasari, “Titian abandoned that of Bellini, although he had long practiced it, and imitated Giorgione so well that in a short time his works were taken for Giorgione’s.” So Vasari, the sixteenth-century Italian artist, historian, and critic, chronicled the aesthetic formation of that period’s great colorist, the Venetian painter Titian. Titian, who trained under both Bellini and Giorgione, learned their styles well enough to seamlessly complete paintings begun by both artists. Then he went on to forge his own acclaimed style in which drawing was absorbed into color. Working thus from his teachers toward his own sensibility, Titian seems to have derived a new art from old.
“Encounters: New Art from Old” was the theme of a striking exhibition at Great Britain’s National Gallery in the summer and early fall of 2000. The exhibition catalogue offers the reader 24 beautifully illustrated essays, each focusing on a prominent contemporary artist who has created a new work of art based upon a chosen work from the National Gallery’s collection. All 24 artists, whether sculptors, painters, or even video artists, have elected to base their work on the most traditional form of traditional art: easel paintings.
Clearly the exhibition and the catalogue alike were calculated to provoke, to challenge received opinion. Haven’t we been told that contemporary art is by definition contemptuous of tradition? And isn’t the greatness of an artist measured by the extent to which he asserts his originality, breaking with the past? On these and other matters, including the relationship between art and technology, Encounters has much to teach us. As Thomas A . Clark is quoted in one of the essays, “Innovation is startling and beautiful not because it gives rise to a new poetry, which would be incomprehensible, but when it is an old poetry made new.” Yet for the most part these artists do not themselves work in the tradition with which they have chosen to dialogue. What then constitutes tradition, and how can these artists be situated in it?
Video artist Bill Viola chose a painting by Hieronymus Bosch (1474-1516) as inspiration for his new work. Viola, a creator of large video installations where moving screens as well as images, and intense sound as well as sight, forcefully engage the viewer, has been looking carefully at paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Viola believes the transformation of art that took place during that period, driven by the techniques of Renaissance perspective and printing, anticipated the equally transforming technological developments in the arts today. Further, he draws a connection between the social, religious, and political upheavals of that time and our own. Thus he treats the painting by Bosch as a “visual template” from which he constructs his own moving pictures. Viola employed the same strategy in his 1995 work, The Greeting, which was closely based on Jacopo da Pontormo’s sixteenth-century painting, The Visitation. Viola’s electronic medium, and our experience of it, is vastly different from Pontormo’s technique of painting, but even so an uncanny similarity between the images remains. “I don’t believe in originality in art,” says Viola. “I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We’re always borrowing.”
Viola’s intention to make something new through borrowing from the old is laden with concern for the essence of creative ingenuity and has little to do with sentimental longing for the past. Viola uses the template of the past, not to resuscitate it, but as a springboard for innovation.
From Viola we may gain insight into a regular pattern in artistic innovation based on past models. Was this pattern, for example, alive in early Christian borrowing from traditional Roman architectural models? Imperial basilicas and the atriums of Roman domestic houses were architectural templates for the emerging church in the fourth century. A fourth-century church, with its atrium and long-columned nave, is an appropriation of the domus and basilica traditions, but it is also something that they are not. It is an entirely new form of building serving a new religious need. Which counted for more in the minds of fourth-century Christians—the ingenious and palpable difference in its new church plan, or the building’s heritage in the Roman tradition?
Traditions are not easily dismissed, for they are more than idea and appearance, they are systems that work. Tradition is a means through which certain kinds of things can happen. Tradition, in both a broad and narrow sense, is very much about how you get certain things done. Thus, to accept or reject a tradition is to accept or reject a tradition’s techniques. Annie Dillard tells a story of how in working-class France, when an apprentice might get hurt or tired, those with experience in the trade would say, “It is the trade entering his body.” Similarly, intimacy with tradition is a matter of bringing tradition into one’s bones; it requires of us a kind of embodiment if we are to make anything out of it.
It is one thing to admire the past, but it is more difficult to embody the methods and techniques of the past. This may be because technological advance—indicated by the claim of a general distinction such as “toolmaker,” or identification with any one of a series of titles leading from “stone” to “bronze” to “iron” to the “industrial” and beyond to the “information age”—has been taken, in Westernized cultures, as the symbol of self-defining achievement. Much of each generation’s self-esteem is tied to just how it gets certain things done; for many, the techniques of the present define not only the moment itself but the person as well.
Encounters is full of examples of artists who seek to use tradition while avoiding the retardaire stigma of past artistic technology. Writing about the British painter Patrick Caulfield and his artistic response to a seventeenth-century painting by Francisco de Zurbaran, Richard Morphet admits that Zurbaran no doubt would find Caulfield’s blunt and simplified quotation of his work offensive. Caulfield’s approach is to transpose Zurbaran’s naturalistic painting of a cup of water on a silver plate into Caulfield’s own painting, Hemingway never ate here. Caulfield’s painting is highly schematic; through color-charged planes it suggests an interior space, perhaps a tapas bar, with a small table on which floats Zurbaran’s cup and saucer. Morphet wonders if this transposition of Zurbaran’s naturalism into Caulfield’s abstraction, which has a tongue-in-cheek feel, could be read simultaneously as admiration and as irony.
Another artist, Richard Hamilton, offers a computer-generated response to the seventeenth-century Dutch painter of church interiors, Peter Saenredam. Hamilton, like Caulfield, avoids the physical mechanics of past art technique and focuses instead on process as a conceptual problem. “Hamilton wished, in emulating Saenredam,” writes Morphet,
to follow so far as possible the same sequence of procedure preparatory to painting. These were to measure the building; to make perspective drawings from the elevations; to make studies on paper, observing colour and texture and recording information on lighting; and finally to paint the picture using the data thus accumulated. He also wished to follow Saenredam in using the most advanced technical assistance available at the time; in his case this was computer technology.
So, Hamilton worked with a photograph of an interior scene at the National Gallery that he scanned, and then used his computer to distort, until it reflected the ethos of Saenredam’s The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem.
Technology apparently is the means by which Hamilton defines his world and sets himself apart from Saenredam, but it is also the means through which he intends, conceptually, to join Saenredam in dialogue. “The idea that you’re competing with Oldenburg or Warhol. … these judgments are quite absurd. You are really competing with Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Poussin. … That’s the kind of time span that art is all about,” Hamilton says.
Like Hamilton, the majority of artists featured in Encounters take a conceptual approach to the artists and tradition they choose. Ian Finlay responds to Claude Lorrain, not with paint or even visual imagery per se, but with 12 simple words etched on a piece of glass. Anselm Kiefer responds to Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way with his own Light Trap, a large painting that, as reproduced in Encounters, looks something like a constellation map. “Kiefer has never been interested in the emotionalism of spontaneous gesture and exaggerated colour. … his work is actually closer in its aims and strategies to conceptual art,” essayist Keith Hartley says. “What attracted Kiefer to [Tintoretto’s] painting was the linking of the creation of stars, of our universe, with human procreation, the mirroring of the macrocosm in the microcosm.” To such ideas Anselm Kiefer can relate, though the material appearance of Tintoretto’s artistry does not particularly elicit a response in kind from him.
Every artist in Encounters is aware of the range of intellectual issues represented by the technological distance between the past and the present, but not every artist takes this awareness as an inducement to join a merely conceptual artistic conversation. Some artists seem to care as much for the body as the mind, and so emphasize the body’s role in engaging the art of the past.
Leon Kossoff is one of several artists of this sort. He made prints and drawings after three paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, The Brazen Serpent, Judgment of Paris, and Minerva Protects Pax from Mars. Kossoff’s strategy, bringing mind and body together, develops as he stands before a work of art and draws it: “From the earliest days when I scribbled from the Rembrandts in the Mond Room,” Kossoff says, “my attitude to these works has always been to teach myself to draw from them, and, by repeated visits, to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind.” Kossoff’s work admits an overriding visual orientation to the art he draws from, and essayist Morphet picks up on this: “Through the concentration of a process of mark-making that depends on the complex of shapes he is looking at. … Kossoff seeks to see the original painting from inside and to be able thus to find a structure that is both true to his experience of it and has the quality of being something seen as if for the first time.”
In this visual and physical orientation to the art of the past, Kossoff is joined by other painters represented in Encounters, including Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Paula Rego, Antoni Tapies, Cy Twombly, and sculptor Anthony Caro. In the works of each of these artists we sense that the connection between the genius of the past and present resides in the senses and emanates from them to emerge in the mind as idea or concept. Lucian Freud, who painted two pictures, each called After Chardin, has long been a student of paintings in the National Gallery. Working at night, before Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress in the gallery itself, Freud seems to be engaged in weaving his own hand into Chardin’s. Looking at either of the After Chardin paintings, we can imagine Freud physically following the patterns of Chardin’s painterly brushstrokes, but the result is clearly a Freud. He expressed his attitude about this kind of work in relation to Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), a picture he painted in 1983. “I intended first to make a copy of it,” he said. “Then I thought, why don’t I do one of my own?”
One may thus be tempted to separate the artists presented in Encounters into two groups, the conceptualists and the sensualists, one group engaging the past through the mind, the other through the body. But this oversimplifies the processes of each group and fails to account for some artists in Encounters who clearly tread both paths.
David Hockney, who responded to Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ portrait, Jacques Marquet, baron de Montbreton de Norvins, is a case in point. Hockney is unique in this group of artists in that his work has been inspired by research into and recovery of the actual technique of his chosen artist.
Hockney’s theory about Ingres’ working method (expounded at length in his recently published book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters) is controversial. He claims Ingres achieved his deadeye precision of line through the use of a camera lucida, an optical device that projected the image of Ingres’ sitter onto his drawing page. Ingres’ drawing sheets show no signs of erasure, no questioning of judgment, no fault in the coordination of hand to eye. How else, asks Hockney, without the aid of an optical device, could Ingres ever have been absolutely right about every line he drew?
Ingres experts tend to look askance at Hockney’s assertions, but everyone is impressed with the practical intelligence Hockney has brought to understanding Ingres. What’s more, Hockney’s research has driven him into a whirlwind of artistic exploration, now with his own camera lucida. For the “Encounters” show, Hockney used this device to produce Twelve Portraits after Ingres in a Uniform Style. Each is a portrait of a uniformed security guard at the National Gallery. Hockney’s drawings, like Ingres’s, are hardly photographic, and like Patrick Caulfield, Hockney juxtaposes, with some irony, naturalistic drawing with more abstract distortion, but one gets the feeling that Hockney is not tongue-in-cheek here. He seems to have discovered and integrated into his working method something from the past that makes sense in the present. In this way Hockney seems, of all the artists presented in Encounters, to have accomplished the feat of producing a body of work based on the past that is genuine to his own artistic sensibilities, without guile.
With the introduction of the word “guile” we must consider one last artist from this collection, whose work has always seemed to contain a cunning duplicity. The American painter Jasper Johns, whose Catenary (Manet-Degas) takes as its point of departure Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, gives us a response to the art of the past which is stunning in both its conceptual and physical strength and presence. Manet’s Execution now exists in fragmented form. It is composed of four separate pieces of the original work that came into the hands of the artist Degas, who glued them into a larger blank rectangle in the respective places they must have occupied in Manet’s original composition. (We know what the original looked like through drawings and a print that Manet also produced of the same subject.) As it stands, fragmented and partially lost, Manet’s Execution represents a compelling metaphor for the entire project of an encounter with the art of the past. Enter Jasper Johns, who—as essayist Marco Livingstone suggests—creates “less a transcription of the Manet than a reformulation of it in his own language.”
It is the thoroughness and consistency with which Johns’s language engulfs the Manet that impresses me. Johns has long been concerned in his work with perceptual enigmas and the relationship of the literal to the figurative. His longtime fascination with the relationship of artistic mark-making to the tools and methods by which artists make these marks has led to the literal inclusion in his works of a whole series of likely and unlikely devices upon which artistic works may depend. These have included measuring devices, sweeping brooms, painting stretchers glued face inward to his canvases, maps, stenciled numerals and letters, coffee cups, silverware, towels, three-dimensional casts of human body fragments, and quotations of other art works, to name only a few.
In the Manet, Johns has found opportunity for something of a mini-summa of his entire outlook. Johns deals with the conserved pieces and the lost segments of Manet’s Execution as if they constituted a map showing both charted and uncharted areas. He transposes the shapes of the pieces onto his own rectangle in outline and then proceeds to add layer upon layer of luxuriously worked paint over them until, in the uniformity of an overall gray color, the outlines are only vaguely discernible. The subject of execution, and the lostness of the whole painting, have a poignancy that takes in all our negotiations with the art of the past. Such encounters always compel us to acknowledge that some things have simply been lost, while others that are found still remain aloof, as if in a fog.
Just off the surface of the painting, hanging from the upper right corner and draped across to the lower left corner, Johns has suspended a string. The arc of this string is called a “catenary,” the natural curve of a uniform line suspended between two points. On one hand, this catenary imitates a gentle curve in Manet’s composition leading diagonally down from the point of a gun in the upper right corner and through the tips of swords hanging on the executioners’ belts. In this way it commemorates an abstract piece of poetry, an inadvertent and elegant surprise that emerges even while an execution is taking place. On the other hand, insofar as the string is “real” and the painting an “illusion,” the string, which takes its shape due to the force of gravity, represents the order of nature into which human agency seeks both through executions and art works to intrude. Stenciled in outline along the bottom edge of the painting are the words, “CATENARYMANETDEGASJJOHNS1999.” This suggests that the artists themselves may be the catenary, the line that sweeps before the executions and all the other subjects that fill the paintings that become the history of art.
Johns, as did Bill Viola, uses the art of the past as a “visual template” through which to make something new. “One can’t just make something new because one wants to,” Johns says. We sense here a humble dependency that was so absent in the rhetoric of high modernism. Some readers will notice the lack of reference to the Transcendent in the essays contained in Encounters. Indeed there is little, if any, discussion of the role of muses, gods, or God in this book. Rather the artists and essayists analyze their circumstances empirically and, in the presence of so much art, conclude that art itself has been their major inspiration.
This could be interpreted as a rejection of the Transcendent, but it could also be seen as a kind of modesty. For some artists, an identification with the art of the past will always be a form of aggrandizement and a matching of titanic originary forces against the world. But Encounters presents enough artists working innovatively, while borrowing from tradition, to suggest that the overreaching assertions of originality that marked some exponents of modernism have faded away. As Bill Viola put it, “We are always borrowing. I think it’s a beautiful, wonderful thing.”
Joel Sheesley is a painter and professor of art at Wheaton College.
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