9 COLLISIONS
Mark Alice Durant
There is a kind of white that is more than white. . . there is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it and that is almost everything. . . there is a kind of white that is not created by bleach but that itself is a bleach. —David Batchelor
Po r t r a i t Serpent Putti
Red G h os t
Yellow Orange
Ruff
Green Do u b t
Digital Black Camera
Paralytic
Christmas Pagan Blue
Warrior Indigo Halo
Terrain
Window
Violet
White
F l a t n e ss Flower
Fist
If you take the commuter train from Baltimore to Washington D.C., you observe passing fragments of third world America. Blocks of boarded-up brick row homes, entire neighborhoods without a single tree, kids playing in rubble-strewn lots. It’s a horrible clichÊ at this point yet one cannot help but feel a tug of despair. The color palette is dominated by browns and grays; graffiti provides occasional splashes of primaries. As the train gains momentum, the strips of weeds bracketing the tracks blur into a river of dusty green. Clusters of wild yarrow appear like misplaced constellations among the rusting detritus by the side of the tracks. I am on my way to the National Gallery of Art. Secreted away in my satchel are eight small artist books created by twenty-first-century photographic artists. Each book is an independent work based upon a color: Andrey Bogush / Yellow; Robert Canali / Green; Dillon DeWaters / Indigo; Nicholas Gottlund / Violet; Inka and Niclas / Blue; Brea Souders / Orange; and Penelope Umbrico / Black. I want to see what happens, what kind of words and ideas might be generated in bringing these contemporary images into proximity, to collide them, as it were, with historical paintings. I have no agenda, no list of potential interactions; I only plan to climb the grand staircase that faces the National Mall, pass under the oculus, and begin wandering in search of productive encounters.
Orange—Serpent—Camera Because of a snake, I have an inclination to begin with Brea Souders. Her book is a dance of photographic fragments, of negatives and positive transparencies, some of which are gathered in patterns while others float in a limbo of white, as if ejected into decontextualizing ether. I assume she took a sharp blade or scissors to the precious intermediaries of analog photography, defying photography’s fundamental rule to do no harm to the clarity, transparency, and integrity of the picture frame. The first image is a fin-shaped shard of a white-haired man with his eyes closed. The black edge of the film crops the top of his head, an arrow points to the number three. Perhaps he is dead, or dreaming of a mate to assuage his loneliness. Assorted photographic slivers act as partial windows to moments of quietude and abandon: a dress hangs on a clothesline at night, children swing on an amusement park ride. When the fragments cohere in physical structures, they lose their ability to act as photographic windows to the world; instead they clot in abstract shapes that suggest the power of magnetism or of bees swarming. In the exact center of her book is a slice of a woman with the thinnest of green snakes balancing between her elegant fingers. Of course I think of Eve, the compromised mother of us all. So with casual purpose I wander the galleries in search of Eden. In Gallery 33 I approach a dramatic example of Enlightenment-inspired classicism, The Rebuke of Adam and Eve, painted by Domenichino in 1626. God is ushered into the frame in an oyster-shaped scoop of red by five putti. He points accusatorily in his rebuke of Adam, who in turn gestures toward Eve, who desperately tries to direct responsibility to the serpent slithering below her right hand. This arc of incrimination emanates in celestial blue before descending through the lesser beings and ending in the shamefulness of earthen browns. The lion and the lamb look on in alarm as if they also understand that their peaceful kingdom is about to end abruptly. I have always understood the Expulsion from Eden to be about the curse of self-consciousness. Adam and Eve are punished with an awareness of their own bodies; they internalize an external gaze and understand themselves as image. This ancient motif has found a perfect manifestation in photography, a medium that has, in effect, created a seemingly infinite archive of duplicates. Roland Barthes complained about feelings of inauthenticity whenever a camera was trained on him. This alienation from the self, exacerbated by photography, may be a manifestation of our ongoing expulsion. We are always seeking return, but momentary respite might be found in Brea Souders’ jewel-like splinters of a shattered paradise.
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Domenichino Italian, 1581–1641 The Rebuke of Adam and Eve, 1626 Oil on canvas Overall: 121.9 x 172.1 cm (48 x 67 3/4 in.) Framed: 158.3 x 204.8 x 7.9 cm (62 5/16 x 80 5/8 x 3 1/8 in.) Patrons’ Permanent Fund National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Black—Ghost—Putti In 1624, Nicholas Poussin moved from Paris to Rome, where he would remain for the rest of his life. He studied briefly in the workshop of Domenichino. His painting The Assumption of the Virgin, found in Gallery 36, illustrates the Catholic dogma that at the moment of her death, the Virgin Mary was “assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” White petals rain down from the putti’s pink and pudgy hands upon the cool marble bed / crypt from which she has risen. It was these glints of white, symbols of life bestowed upon the dead, that led me to think about Penelope Umbrico’s images of blobs of light reflected in dark glass. Umbrico’s book opens with the words “flashes that have the character of ghosts.” The photographs appear to be unintentional self-portraits of people photographing their televisions in order to sell on eBay. While the original purpose for these images was utilitarian, appropriated and cropped by Umbrico, they become a dark-humored sequence of ersatz apparitions. Starbursts of pixelated light reveal shadowy presences in t-shirts and shorts. The television-as-portal to a malicious spirit world became a familiar trope with Stephen Spielberg’s film Poltergeist. But with Spielberg one is always redeemed. What do we see when we look deeply into our dead screens? Do we experience a contemporary manifestation of the abyss that Nietzche warned us about? Here the evil is more banal as Umbrico flattens the melodrama to an accidental phenomenology. Can evil be banal? Hannah Arendt thought so. In Umbrico’s dark interiors, our spectral selves stare back at us, doubling our oblivion. We are the abyss. Poussin’s painting is exemplary of the eternal reward for a life of purity, but since none of us can compare to the status of Virgin Mother of God, we settle for less than a full-bodied assumption into heaven, staying behind in our compromised lives, mostly glued to our screens. Umbrico’s color is black, but black is the necessary matrix in which the apparitional light may visit. Her images suggest a netherworld of hesitant spectres. We might try to light up our habitat with stroboscopic efforts, but we only catch partial reflections of ourselves in the dusky purgatory of dead screens. The kitschy excess of Poussin’s putti-driven ascent into heaven’s cumulous glory is countered with a claustrophobic laugh, a nihilist’s joke.
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Nicolas Poussin French, 1594–1665 The Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1630/1632 Oil on canvas Overall: 134.4 x 98.1 cm (52 15/16 x 38 5/8 in.) Framed: 171.8 x 135.3 x 13.7 cm (67 5/8 x 53 1/4 x 5 3/8 in.) Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Red—Ruff—Portrait Before photography, only the very wealthy could have a visual record of themselves and their families. Photography democratized portraiture. The most fundamental photographic act is to simply point at something and record it; a person stands in front of a camera and the shutter is released. This can be done mechanically or with focused intention. This occurs millions of times a day. Is the image intended for a passport or is a great portraitist like Sander or Avedon behind the camera? Hannah Whitaker presents thirty-six repeating portraits of the same young woman. She is a nameless, generic white girl from sometime in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. Dressed for bed or for the beach, she stands casually yet awkwardly in red shorts, her hand placed on her slightly thrusting hip as if to say in an ironic mumble, “I am ready for my close-up.” She anchors a variety of optical and invasive effects that interrupt the transparency of the photograph. Fading, geometric patterns, orbs of light, and other treatments dance around the figure like a repertoire of instability, yet she remains steady in her humble affectlessness. Is this portrait of an anonymous young woman supposed to reveal something or is it simply a support structure for formal investigation? Is she insignificant or have we stopped believing in the value of portraiture? At 60 inches tall and perched high on a wall in Gallery 42, Peter Paul Rubens’ 1606 portrait of Marchesa Brigada Spinola Doria is imposing in scale and presence. Nothing about it is humble. The Marchesa, twenty-two years old when the portrait was completed, was a member of a powerful Genoa banking family. Her entire body is enfolded in satin, brocade, lace, and jewels; her head pops out of the elaborate ruff like a priceless tart. An intricate ruff such as this would have required a wire support structure and generous applications of starch to keep the linen rigidly formal. A bolt of red drapery flames behind, theatrically separating her from the monochromatic classical backdrop. Everything about this portrait speaks to elevated singularity, a world where name and position determined almost every aspect of one’s life. Is human identity largely historically contingent? If time were spliced could these two women share a meal? Would they walk arm in arm by the sea, speaking of ethics and politics? Could they communicate across the abyss of time and class? And what about Peter Paul Rubens and Hannah Whitaker—could they find commonality in their artistic ambitions? Would they exchange stories of compromised patronage or struggles in the studio with stubborn materials? Does anything connect their practice beyond the vague term artist?
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Sir Peter Paul Rubens Flemish, 1577–1640 Marchesa Brigida Spinola Doria, 1606 Oil on canvas Overall: 152.5 x 99 cm (60 1/16 x 39 in.) Framed: 188 x 134.6 x 10.8 cm (74 x 53 x 4 1/4 in.) Samuel H. Kress Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Green—Paralytic—Christmas Robert Canali’s book on green opens with its complement, a rudimentary still life of a red developing tray propped up at one end, photographed on a red backdrop. The next double-page spread opposes fields of cyan and yellow. Each turn of the page reveals another reference to the fundamentals of photographic processes and materials. All of the images float on blue-lined graph paper as if the book were a notebook of observations about photography illustrated solely by photographs. There are examples of stock photographic genres such as flower arrangements, product shots, and pretty blond women. Mysteriously repeating is an image of a panther chameleon, a native of Madagascar that enjoys 360-degree vision. One might deduce that the chameleon’s rainbow-patterned skin is a test of a film’s color capacity. Yet more is hinted at: despite its minor role in human affairs, the chameleon is more than just a colorful object or exotic pet. With its independently rotating eyes swiveling like animated miniature volcanoes, the chameleon’s vision exceeds human sight; it sees us better than we see it. Leonardo Da Vinci understood the power of complementary colors hundreds of years before Isaac Newton designed the color wheel to illustrate the phenomenon. Red and green make a particularly vivid opposition, hence traffic lights. When you order enchiladas in New Mexico and you want both red and green salsa, you say, “Christmas.” Red / green color blindness results from a defect in the spectral sensitivity in the cones of the eye and affects a significant minority of people. Canali is one of those people and evident in his work is a kind of esoteric eye exam and an investigation into what revelations might be found in limitation. In Gallery 41 hangs an unusually animated painting titled The Healing of the Paralytic painted by an unknown Netherlandish artist ca. 1560-1590. It depicts a scene from the New Testament in the fishing village of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, where a paralyzed man seeking a miracle is lowered with ropes from an upstairs room to appear amongst a crowd thronging around Jesus. According to Mark 2:5–12, Jesus declared, “Child, your sins are forgiven. . . . I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go home.” Scriptural scholars find this moment significant in that Jesus is in fact declaring his status as God since only God can forgive sins, and he does so by conflating physical and spiritual healing. In the background we can observe the scene sketched as if dissipating in time. Jesus gestures down toward the man in his bed. Four thin lines representing the lowering ropes are scratched into the panel. The foreground is dominated by the powerful figure of the restored man striding away from his previously corrupted state. He wears a vibrant red jacket and bends under the weight of his green bed. This opposition of red and green is a dynamic manifestation of the duality of strength and challenge. He is cured, yet he must move into the future burdened by his past. We may not know the name of the cured man, or the name of the artist who rendered him so vividly, yet in his awkward bundle we can almost feel the weight of our own restrictions.
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c a n a l i Netherlandish 16th Century The Healing of the Paralytic, c. 1560/1590 Oil on panel Overall: 107.8 x 76 cm (42 7/16 x 29 15/16 in.) Framed: 136.5 x 109.8 cm (53 3/4 x 43 1/4 in.) Chester Dale Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Blue—Pagan—Terrain In memory, color comes alive, and for me it is only blue. Candy Land blue, my mother’s tight, baby blue cashmere sweater stretching over her shapeliness like a movie star poster, blue popsicles that taste like summer skies, the blue sparkle drum set that Johnnie Palumbo played in his basement when we were imitating the Beatles. In third grade science class I was told the sky was blue because God made it that way. And as if to offer an alternative view of existence, an unexplainable crystalline sapphire light pulsed outside my bedroom window one winter night when I was twelve. What is the difference between a vision and a hallucination, memory and delusion? In many of our personal and collective stories they are virtually indistinguishable. Kandinsky described blue as a heavenly color that echoes a grief that is “hardly human.” We pilgrimage to extreme environments to induce metaphysical progeny. The desert is a proscenium for the spiritually imaginative. At the edge of the ocean you can invert the horizon; sea becomes sky and clouds float beneath your feet. Climb the mountaintop to discover infinity of mountaintops. Plant your flag on a glacier as it incrementally reduces to liquid, which in turn will evaporate toward the atmosphere; arctic molecules will eventually scatter blue light above the Amazon. The imagery of Inka and Niclas exists in some in-between dimension where vision and hallucination overlap, a space where primary color gives way to the secondary and tertiary. Somehow their picture seem religious—no, mystical—like pagan manifestations of the alien miraculous. Colors appear in apparitional form. Landscapes lit by temporary suns flare phosphorescent long enough to perceive a solitary penguin. Ghostly evanescence spritzes over the surf and phantom dust devils lick the sunset-reddened horizon. Stripped twigs and knotted branches appear by a silvery ocean or on rough promontory like a primitive Caspar David Friedrich figure. Standing in front of Saint John in the Desert by Domenico Veneziano, I was again struck by the abstract strangeness of the Gothic-style landscape featuring pale and faceted mountains, canyons, and cliffs more surreal than any rendered by Dali. Saint John has arrived in the desert having renounced his life of luxury in favor of solitude, celibacy, and prayer; he disrobes and discards a velvet cloak to take up a hair shirt that will provide little warmth and even less comfort. Painted ca. 1445, Veneziano struggles to reconcile the newly resuscitated aesthetic ideals of (pagan) classicism with restrictive church doctrine. Essentially, he creates an opportunity to portray the fully-nude body of an idealized young man and Christianizes the scene by adorning him with a spherical gold halo. The two-dimensional quality of this early Renaissance work contributes to its otherworldliness. Every feature— including the oddly scaled white rubble, the serpentine aquamarine stream, the cartoonish shrubbery, and the crenellated peaks—is fitted together as if collaged from disparate terrains. Like the penguin in Inka and Niclas’ environments, Saint John may as well be the lone inhabitant of this barren and uncanny world.
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Domenico Veneziano Italian, c. 1410–1461 Saint John in the Desert, c. 1445/1450 Tempera on panel Overall: 28.4 x 31.8 cm (11 3/16 x 12 1/2 in.) Framed: 40.6 x 44.1 x 5.1 cm (16 x 17 3/8 x 2 in.) Samuel H. Kress Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Indigo—Warrior—Halo Almost 400 years later, Théodore Géricault straddled a different historical and philosophical divide, between the Neoclassicism of his training and an approach that would later be called Romanticism. The Neoclassical sensibility sought balance, order, and rationality, while the Romantic cultivated strong emotion, awe, terror, and melancholy. Emblematic of this shift in sensibility was Géricault’s German contemporary, Caspar David Friedrich, who declared “the artist’s feeling is his law.” Géricault’s Nude Warrior with a Spear was painted in 1816 when the artist was twenty-five years old and exhibits traces of both styles. Like Veneziano, Géricault’s lone figure is an idealized nude young man in a landscape; his sinewy body rests upon a dark green bolt of cloth as he faces a distant and seemingly barren landscape. The Romanticism creeping into the work is manifested in its moody subjectivity and a dark, brushy palette. The warrior has his head turned away from us; are his eyes open or shut? We cannot see what he sees. Is it an internal or external landscape that preoccupies him? Art historians have interpreted Géricault’s painting, like his masterwork, The Raft of the Medusa, completed three years later, to be a political allegory on the tragic waste of Napoleonic military excess. Born during the tumult the French Revolution, Géricault was attuned to political injustice and was making preparatory drawings for paintings about the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade when he died of tuberculosis at thirty-two. Dillon DeWaters opens his book with a haunting image of what is presumably a young man, buried deep in shadow. Something about his posture suggests a self-proclaimed warrior, or at least someone prepared for violence. A thin halo of indigo crests the top of his head and a slice of scarlet seeps around from the back of his torso. His hands are menacingly sheathed in leather driving gloves. Poised ambiguously somewhere between a fashion photograph and a teaser for a slasher film, DeWaters’ photograph, made 100 years after Géricault’s painting, is thoroughly contemporary. What follows this brooding sentinel is a sequence of seemingly unrelated images: a paper light in shades of cyan; a frayed rope split in the spectrum of CMYK; a prismatic sun; a series of monochromatic skulls that recall Warhol; a prosthetic ear; a triangular wedge of granite layered with a transparent yellow that separates it from the rest of the wall; closing with another young man standing in the indigo darkness. This time the man turns away and a scrim of black zigs and indigo zags shimmer between camera and figure. We see the back of his head and the straps of a mask he is wearing, returning our minds to a creepy association with cinematic homicidal maniacs. DeWaters has stated that he shuts his eyes to see, a Romantic notion if there ever was one.
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Théodore Géricault French, 1791–1824 Nude Warrior with a Spear, c. 1816 Oil on canvas Overall: 93.6 x 75.5 cm (36 7/8 x 29 3/4 in.) Framed: 118.4 x 101.6 cm (46 5/8 x 40 in.) Chester Dale Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Violet—Window—Flatness Nineteenth-century Romanticism was soon replaced by Naturalism. French artists, inspired by an 1824 exhibition in Paris of paintings by the English artist John Constable, prompted legions to escape stuffy studios and take to fields and mountains to paint en plein air. Abandoning the elevated idealism of Neoclassicism and the subjective exaggerations of Romanticism in favor of direct observation of nature, this movement, a precursor to Impressionism, became known as the Barbizon School. Jules Coignet was a minor but sturdy practitioner of this approach and in his 1837 View of Bozen with a Painter we have an example of the beginnings of a soon-tobe-popular genre—a painting of an artist painting in a landscape. At the time Bozen (now Balzano), a small village in the Tyrolean Alps, was part of the Austrian Empire. The painter has his back to us, his undivided concentration focused on the shifting of the quality of light illuminating the village and the violet-tinted peaks in the distance. A white umbrella diffuses the direct sun falling upon his canvas. This painting embodies and illustrates a stubborn popular idea of what a painter is and does; but for most contemporary artists it is an antiquated, even laughable, model. From Abstraction to Conceptualism, twentieth-century artists as diverse as Malevich, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Ad Reinhart, Sol Lewitt, and Hannah Darboven— to name a few—have shunned direct observation, and made art in which the subject is partially or fully concerned with the materials, process, and presentation of the artwork itself. The Renaissance window has been shattered and reconsidered; representation is no longer simply a challenge of mimesis (if it ever was). Nicholas Gottlund is a printmaker and his book of Violet is a series of photographs of his own work, process, and studio that have become near-abstractions via extreme contrast. Some of the tools and techniques of printmaking are well over 1,000 years old yet it remains surprisingly generative and supple as a contemporary medium. Whether it is woodblock, stone, copper plate, silkscreen, or digital output, the artist can create multiple iterations of an idea, changing an image in response to itself. The landscape en plein air is a distant memory in Gottlund’s imagery where traces of studio doorways, packages of printmaking materials, surfaces, and sites for working all gather to obliquely refer to and interfere with the idea of art as window to the real world.
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Jules Coignet French, 1798–1860 View of Bozen with a Painter, 1837 Oil on paper on canvas Overall: 31 x 39 cm (12 3/16 x 15 3/8 in.) Framed: 43.8 x 51.4 x 5.1 cm (17 1/4 x 20 1/4 x 2 in.) Gift of Mrs. John Jay Ide in memory of Mr. and Mrs. William Henry Donner National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Yellow—Digital—Doubt Analog photography involves film sensitivities, exposure calculation, the mixing and temperature control of chemical solutions, development times, and agitation. Adjusting the quality of the image might require contrast filters, burning, dodging, changing dilutions, dialing color corrections, and even blowing hot breath on areas of the print to encourage more detail in the highlights. No one who has watched an image appear magically in the development tray can deny its alchemical appeal. Each step— taking the photograph, developing the film, printing the picture—involves not really knowing how it will turn out. It is a pilgrimage of deferred delights. Photography helped liberate painting from the bondage of likeness and now, in opposition to its entire history, much of contemporary photography exhibits, at best, a divided loyalty toward representing the world in a familiar manner. Since its earliest days there has always been experimentation and abstraction in photography, but the power, accessibility, and ease of digital tools has facilitated a generational aesthetic shift away from the photograph as indexical window to the photograph as an image that may start in the camera but is processed, sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly, but always thoroughly, by the computer. The tools of Photoshop are explored by Andrey Bogush in images that consist of photographic information layered with digital effects produced by clone stamping, sampling in color swatch, soft brush, eraser, pattern, and others. His imagery has an unsettled or unresolved quality, as if the photograph has lost its definition or certainty, and now exists in a state of permanent disorientation. A double-page spread in the middle of the book displays a large, yellow rectangle blocking what appears to be a hazy sky. Kandinsky associated yellow with “violent, raving lunacy.” Here yellow is impenetrable, a declaration of nothing but a resistant self, while the spacious celestial sky is relegated to a pale frame around the edges. The last image in his series presents a digitally manipulated six-fingered hand; a thin trickle of blood darkens the pricked forefinger. Hovering like an apparition in front of the mutant appendage is a Photoshop color swatch. The bleeding finger evokes Doubting Thomas, who needed to touch Christ’s wounds in order to have his faith confirmed. Christ allowed the insertion of the doubtful fingers but decried empirical need and praised those who could believe without proof. Skeptics’ fingers poked and prodded the corpus of photography for the better part of the twentieth century. For many photographers, the dance between belief and doubt produced a kind of dialectical faith, a compromised, shifting, yet workable duality. Barthes wrote that the gravity of photography was born of its relation to time, that a photograph could reveal an unnoticed detail of the everyday to astonish us. He termed it punctum, which is a puncture or wound that provoked, stirred, and animated the soul of the viewer. In the digital world, has Barthes’ concept become a historical curiosity? If so, then let us lament.
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Andrea Solario Italian, active 1495–1524 Lamentation, c. 1505–1507 Oil on panel Overall: 168.6 x 152 cm (66 3/8 x 59 13/16 in.) Framed: 201.3 x 184.8 x 11.4 cm (79 1/4 x 72 3/4 x 4 1/2 in.) Samuel H. Kress Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
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Frédéric Bazille French, 1841–1870 Young Woman with Peonies, 1870 Oil on canvas Overall: 60 x 75 cm (23 5/8 x 29 1/2 in.) Framed: 83.8 x 99.4 x 7.6 cm (33 x 39 1/8 x 3 in.) Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
White—Flower—Fist I only notice color in exceptional cases: a red dress in a field of denim; a yellow car in the parking lot; catching the gaze of someone with green eyes; early morning skies. I am not sure what I think of color, if anything. I am a color agnostic. When I hear or read of some theory of color or emotional equivalent, it is like listening to someone talk about his or her religious faith; I am fascinated but I don’t believe it. I have always preferred drawing to painting and have worn monochrome when the rainbow was available, although I have never examined why this might be. Perhaps I am an unwitting co-conspirator in what David Batchelor argues so persuasively in Chromophobia—that there is a philosophical prejudice in the West that associates color with the inchoate, the emotional, the feminine, and the savage, as if the history of civilization begins with primitive ornamentation and moves erratically but inevitably toward an unadorned and refined higher realm. If, as John Gage has written, any semiotics of color must be historically contingent, it would be nearly impossible to think about color in contemporary America and not consider race. Two weeks ago, white police officers killed another unarmed black teenager. In a malicious display of institutional power over black bodies, Michael Brown was left where he fell, in full view of his neighbors, friends, and family, viscous red streaming from the six bullet holes that brought him down. Meanwhile, as if there were any ambiguity at all about the message, arguments virulently ensued. There are very few representations of non-white bodies in the National Gallery of Art. Darker skins appear here and there, minor characters sprinkled lightly in crowded religious scenes or bucolic evocations of exotic locales. Rarely are they rendered as individuals with names, titles, or social importance. A qualified exception is Frédéric Bazille’s 1870 painting Young Woman with Peonies. While the anonymous woman is apparently not worthy of identification, she is at least represented as a fully sentient being. Bazille is paying a humble tribute to Manet, whom he greatly admired. Manet’s Olympia was famously scandalous for its representation of unashamed female sexuality and the unsettling presence of her black servant unwrapping a gift of flowers at the foot of the bed. Art historians write of Olympia’s frontal nudity and direct gaze as a challenge to male power and the presumption of possession, but few speak to the asymmetry of power between the two women, between the “colors” of humanity. Bazille’s flower seller poses a more complicated question than Olympia. She is neither servant nor courtesan; she is a working woman. In exchange for coin, she provides bouquets to (white) men who will offer these scented seductions to wives or mistresses. In her right hand she holds the bounty of abundant nature but her expression belies the serenity of a summer garden. I sense a moment of ambivalent hesitation; is she withdrawing her offer? The painting hints at an unsettled interiority and commands that we pay attention to her gaze, to the tired fire in her eyes. Maybe she has the power to telescope her vision to the present day because although she is framed by floral exuberance, her hand clenches the stems so tightly that it becomes an incipient fist.
9 col l isions Mark Al ice Dur ant
P ubl ished in c onjunction with Conveyor Magazine, Issue No. 5 Spectre // Spectrum Edition of 300 ﾂｩ 2014 Conveyor Editions 窶帰ll Images Courtesy the National Gallery, Washington D.C. Printed and Bound at Conveyor Arts, USA