Northwestern Art Review | Issue 18: Vision by Northwestern Art Review

NAR

ISSUE 18 | WINTER 2018

NAR 2017-2018

STAFF Bradley Smith Carolyn Twersky Catherine Malloy Charlotte Tauss Chloe Gardner Emily Kappes Helen Murphy Idil Kara Jacob Stern Katie Rothstein Lizzie Zhang Luke Cimarusti Maria Agudelo Maria Arias Mary Hawley Nadia Ennab Natalie Pertsovsky Nicole Skakun Ridley Rochell Sena Oktem Zoe Detweiler

NAR | 2

Letter from the President Dear Reader, When reading submissions for our Winter Journal, the NAR team became fascinated with the theme vision, and its many facets. In a time when looking to the future seems to be a way many of us are dealing with the present, it was interesting to see how many academic papers examined and applied this idea. As defined by The Merriam-Webster dictionary, vision is the act or power of seeing or imagining. Needless to say, the definition provides a lot of space for interpretation. Whether it be Pope Alexander VII’s vision to make Rome a city for both visitors and citizens alike, or Thomas Cole’s vision for the Hudson River School’s place in American landscape painting, the term is uniquely defined by each piece in our 2018 Winter Journal. We hope you appreciate the essays, for editing and compiling process was truly a pleasure. As always, we would like to acknowledge all of the hard work done by our incredible Print Editor in Chief, Nicole Fallert, and our exceptionally talented Director of Design, Emily Hollingworth. Thank you to my engaged NAR team, for all of the work put into reading, sorting, and compiling our submissions. The journal has taken a village -- enjoy! Kelsey Malone President

NAR | 3

Letter from the Editor Hello NARnians! Welcome to our Winter 2018 issue! You are probably staring at this on your computer screen while simultaneously checking social media or eating or watching Queer Eye. All of these are things I have done this winter. There’s a permanent motion to this wintry season, and I never feel as though I can do one task at a time. When doing a million things at once, it’s difficult to pick one idea to focus on. This issue’s theme “vision” was inspired by the way our featured writers explore space, perception, and intention. They look beyond the noise. From traditional art pieces, such as Manet’s Gypsy with a Cigarette, to contemporary works like Christ and The Lamb by Jeff Koons, each piece explored in this journal discusses how an artists achieved his or her vision. For me, these articles gave me the ability to focus on just one idea with both artist and writer. I’d like to thank our President Kelsey Malone and our Director of Design Emily Hollingworth, especially. I encourage you to turn off your notifications as you read through this issue. Take your time, have some tea. Let these pieces provide you vision. Nicole Fallert Print Editor In Chief

NAR | 4

In the Issue 6

ISRAELI MUSEUM ARCHITECTURE: YAD VASHEM VS. THE MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE Jesse Baldinger | Northwestern ‘19

LOOKING(,) AT THE BEACH: GAZE AND REPRESENTATION

FRANCESCA WOODMAN: THE BODY’S INNER FORCE

Lois Biggs | Northwestern ‘20 Laura Feigen | Stanford ‘18

LICHTENSTEIN’S RESTATEMENTS OF FINE ART Zhirui Guan | Yale ‘19

THE LEGENDS OF ANTHROPOPHAGY

A GOLDEN “RELIC” FOR THE AGES: ACCEPTANCE, APPROPRIATION AND SACRISTY IN CHRIST AND THE LAMB

Emily Hollingworth | Northwestern ‘19

Emily Kappes | Northwestern ‘18

THE GHOST OF LOUIS: NUMBER 64’S IMPERFECT NATURAL BEAUTY AND THE ARTIST’S RECEDING HAND Justin Ross Muchnick | Stanford ‘18

FAMILY TIES, URBAN PLANNING, MODERNIZATION: POPE ALEXANDER VII’S PIAZZA DEL POPOLO Katie Rothstein | Northwestern University ‘19

THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL AND THE ENTITLED MODERN GAZE Kathleen Voight | Yale ‘19

GYPSY WITH A CIGARETTE: MANET’S BOHEMIAN MYTH 49 Jianing Zhao | Princeton ‘20

NAR | 5

ISRAELI MUSEUM ARCHITECTURE: YAD VASHEM VS. THE MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE Jessie Baldinger | Northwestern University ‘19

useum architecture is an integral part of Israel’s nation-building and international reputation. It informs the perspectives of both Israelis and Western tourists who visit them, and gives Israeli causes the chance to be elevated to the national arena through exhibitions and awards. The Museum of Tolerance and Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust Museum), represent two contrasting architectural and museological approaches to selective politicization of place. Ranciere writes, “But there is a preliminary matter of justice: How do you recognize that the person who is mouthing a voice in front of you is discussing matters of justice rather than expressing his or her private pain?” (Ranciere, 3). In this way, Israeli museums of history and society vacillate between claiming to “discuss matters of justice” and “express private pain” wherever it is convenient for the promotion of its narrative. Yad Vashem is located on Mount Herzl, just west of Jerusalem. The museum itself is shaped like a triangular prism, made of concrete, situated as if wedged through the hill, with a thin skylight running across the very top. One end is sealed off with concrete, while the other is filled in with glass doors that lead to a kind of portico overlooking Jerusalem, where the two diagonal faces of the triangular prism seem to peel outward. Visitors enter on the dark side, and proceed through exhibits that wind around the inside of the structure, guided by painted footprints instructing their path, towards the light end, when they go outside and take in the spectacular view. The triangular shape of the structure reinforces the heaviness of the concrete material from which it is made, and the skylight softens the harshness of the shape and material. According to Oppenheimer, “Rather than create NAR | 6

a dark museum, the architect and his collaborators let the content of the exhibits communicate the terror of the Holocaust” (Oppenheimer, 114). However, the employment of the theme of constriction followed by release, a popular convention of contemporary architecture does not shy away from the politicization of space. The heaviness and confinement within the museum, followed by the release of the open terrace and view of modern day Jerusalem, allegorizes the mythos of the inextricable link between the horrors of the holocaust and the “liberation” that came with the creation of the state of Israel. The Museum of Tolerance takes two visual forms, and both are significant for this paper’s argument: the first, Frank Gehry’s proposed design, which was never built; second, the design by the Israeli architecture firm, Chyutin Architects, which is currently being erected. Gehry’s design looked like many other buildings by the architect, with his signature metallic curves, ebbs and flows of post-modernist expression. There are multiple towers of various amorphous shapes, with many pockets of windows to let light in during the day and out at night. Saree Makdisi furiously observes that many of these towers, with their tiered shapes extending upward, resemble Israeli settlement architecture (Makdisi, 538). The Chyutin design, for which the architects won the commission in a contest, is drastically different. A much sleeker design consisting of straight lines and flat faces made of concrete to form one cohesive unit, as opposed to Gehry’s multiple towers. Employing a similar aesthetic to Yad Vashem, the new design utilizes concrete and glass to create a sculptural but streamlined structure. The whole building appears to be floating, with very view and barely visible vertical supports. However, in addi

tion to the floating upper level and the exposed courtyard in its shadow, there is also an underground level of classrooms, lecture halls, and exhibits. The whole complex gives off a solid, serene aura. Regardless of their similarities and differences in form, both museums share an important aspect of their locations: both sites are connected in some way to cemeteries, but deal with them in the most opposite ways, which serve to highlight the selectivity in politicizing place. Yad Vashem’s proximity to a cemetery was a very conscious decision. Also located on Mount Herzl, and integrated into the guided navigation of Yad Vashem, is an important Israeli military cemetery, which gave the hill the alternative name “Har HaZikaron,” or “the Hill of Remembrance.” The importance given to “memory” when dealing with the Holocaust is widespread. The theme weaves its way into most exhibits within the museum, most notably in the aptly titled “Hall of Remembrance.” Memory is also given much weight in Israel’s customs of honoring their military dead, giving their Memorial Day the same name as the hill through which Yad Vashem passes: Yom HaZikaron (The Day of Remembrance). The placement of Yad Vashem on this hill seeks to establish a direct connection using spatial relationship between the loss of Jewish life during the Holocaust and the loss of Israeli life in military conflicts. There is another significant, more subtle aspect of this spatial relationship, and that is the narrative that the Jewish people deserve the state of Israel because of the persecution endured during the Holocaust. Oppenheimer writes, “The building, by Moshe Safdie, FAIA, expresses in eloquent architectural shorthand the nation’s raison d’être” (Oppenheimer, 113). One reason that this narrative of the State of Israel as a reward for enduring the Holocaust is dangerous because it so clearly invokes a biblical claim to the land of Israel. The idea of exodus from a land of persecution and bondage to a sovereign state in the land of Israel is one pulled directly out of the second of the five books of Moses. Yad Vashem leans into this narrative not only with its architectural themes of compression and release, and by using the Israeli landscape as that release, but also by choosing Mount Herzl as its

location. The mountain gets its name because it holds the grave of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. His writings in the late 1800’s inspired the movement for sovereignty of a Jewish state in the land of Israel, and although he died long before the state was established, his remains were brought to Israel and reburied on the hill where the Holocaust museum and the Israeli Military Cemetery would come to be built. This story mirrors almost exactly that of Joseph, who died long before the people of Israel were free from Egypt, but whose remains were carried through the desert as the Jews made their way to The Promised Land. This historicizing of modern day events to mirror biblical ones, in concert with, as Ranciere would put it, “expressing his or her private pain” through the joint memory of lives lost in the Holocaust and in war points to Yad Vashem’s extremely effective effort to use the tragedies of the Holocaust to justify a Jewish state in Palestine. In contrast to the reverent thought put into the location and execution of the Holocaust Museum, the sponsoring foundation of the Museum of Tolerance, the Wiesenthal Center, exhibited what seemed to be a willful ignorance of the context of the space which the project would occupy. Shortly after the building process began, it was revealed that the site existed on top of a Muslim cemetery. This did not halt the process. Makdisi notes that human remains were removed and thrown away without care (Makdisi, 520). Contrast this to the reverence given spatially to the Israeli cemetery by Yad Vashem on Har Herzl. In Frank Gehry’s response to Makdisi’s brutally critical article, he writes, “The fact that there was an existing parking garage, already built, seemed to validate the idea that this site did not have a sacred character” (Gehry, 561). This defense only serves to bolster Makdisi’s argument. The parking lot was one of many every day invasions into Muslim spaces; the municipal builders of the parking lot felt no qualms about paving over a Muslim cemetery. The proposal to place a Museum of Tolerance of top of said invasion is exactly what Makdisi calls an “erasure of erasure” Gehry is using a previous injustice to justify an unfair and insensitive appropriation of space. While the new design may look more like Yad NAR | 7

Vashem, in practice it takes a completely opposite approach. Instead of engaging meaningfully with its surroundings to bolster its message, it deliberately, and literally disconnects from them. By physically raising itself off the ground, the museum detaches itself from the controversial ground on which it stands. This is symptomatic of Israeli institutions such as museums invoking history to connect it with the present when that is convenient and supportive of Israel’s interests, and claiming a distance and irrelevance for histories that defy its desired dominant narrative, such as the inconvenient location of an ancient Muslim cemetery. Another point of connection between the two institutions is their relationship to the arena of global contemporary architecture. Yad Vashem’s website boasts of its “world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie” (“Architecture”). Safdie was born in Israel, but educated and given awards in Canada, making his work at Yad Vashem of interest to architecture aficionados and granting globally recognized legitimacy and weight to the museum. Yad Vashem also includes a series of films by Stephen Spielberg of interviews with Holocaust survivors. The involvement of a huge name like Spielberg deepens the global connections of the museum. Additionally, the museum boasts a long list of famous visitors, foreign politicians, religious leaders, and celebrities. The Museum of Tolerance tried to draw itself into the global sphere to escape its contentious physical surroundings because of Gehry’s distinctive style. Makdisi notes this, writing:

“His [Gehry’s] design will draw the site out of and away from the speciﬁcities of the local context. The site of Ma’man Allah cemetery will now be much closer (in a sense) to Bilbao and Los Angeles than to, say, the Mount of Olives on the other side of Jerusalem. The logic of separation in play in the museum plan will be made complete by this last stage of removal from local context and the ground occupied” (Makdisi, 542). NAR | 8

Gehry’s presence on the project naturally drew a lot of international attention, and with that attention came criticism of the choice of location, with Makdisi at the forefront of that argument. There were protests and boycotts, and a lot of negative press. It follows, therefore, that the Museum committee would choose a more low-profile, local architecture firm from a commission contest. However, the design of the second proposal is much more in tune with global contemporary architecture trends. It’s openness, sleekness, and truth in material is much more in line with global contemporary architectural trends, and more similar to other contemporary buildings in Jerusalem. This effort to blend the Museum into its modern surroundings, while still ignoring its historical foundations indicates the selectivity of thought in the design process, and an effort to establish a legitimacy that justifies the existence of both the museum and of Israel. Another shared aspect of these architectural projects is their use of concrete. Zvi Efrat points out that concrete carries with it poignant themes in contemporary Israeli architecture. He quotes Israeli architect Ram Karmi: “For us, concrete was the Israeli material. Concrete gave a sense of stability: once you implant it in place, nobody can move it” (Efrat, 392). The use of this material in Yad Vashem is very straightforward: the entire Mount Herzl complex is an effort to establish the Holocaust as a justification for the future of the Jewish people in Israel as a matter of fleeing persecution and seeking security, by making the memory of the Holocaust permanent. In the Museum of Tolerance, this thematic view of the material is even more sinister. The Museum is literally overtaking a Muslim sacred space, and the use of concrete because it looks and is permanent and immovable is, to put it bluntly, offensive. Efrat’s further exploration of the use of concrete in Israeli architecture yielded the following synthesis: “concrete architecture is personified as a ‘daring and unequivocal expression,’ ‘projecting the real character,’ ‘not surrendering to mediocrity and anonymity’—as if this style alone could stand for the emergent notion of Israeliness” (Efrat, 394). The notion of concrete as representing truth in material, and as a symbol of Israeliness means casting Israel as

Makdisi’s assertion of Israeli architecture as “erasure of erasures.” Another important aspect of concrete that represents a fundamentally Israeli material is its connection with the concrete wall dividing Israel and its territories. The wall has become a symbol of Israeli occupation. Asserting concrete as a specifically Israeli building material means to accept the wall and everything it stands for as Israeli as well. Of course, the wall was not a piece of art, or anything aesthetic like the architecture of Yad Vashem or the proposed design for the Museum of Tolerance. However, whatever its intentions, the wall is an object in space created by people, and as such it has aesthetic properties, which do not exist by accident. Concrete was chosen for the wall for obvious reasons: it’s cheap, it can be manufactured completely in Israel, and it is durable. While these seem like logical, practical reasons for choosing material, they are also the reasons that concrete has come to symbolize Israeli nationalist architecture. Museum architecture in Israel represents an art form under the influence of countless political and aesthetic forces: Israeli nationalism, global contemporary trends, land disputes, tourism, occupation, and many more. As a medium, it enables us to see Israeli institutions and the American Jewish Foundations that fund them attempting to justify Israel’s very existence and its occupation of Palestine. The contrast between the message of Yad Vashem and the message of the Museum of Tolerance proposes a very clear perspective of the selectivity of memory of tragedy. Yad Vashem says that because the Jewish people were subjected to the Holocaust, they deserve a country in which they can live peacefully, and in doing so, equates opponents of Israel, who fought the soldiers buried on Mount Herzl, with the Nazis, who killed the people remembered in Yad Vashem. The Museum of Tolerance, on the other hand, encourages the loss of memory of the tragedy of the Palestinian people losing their land, suggesting “tolerance” as an answer to the problem, as opposed to justice. This distinction is important because it illustrates how Israel is completely in control of the narrative, with access to the funds and institutions necessary to build museums and monuments. The selective politicization and aesthet-

icizing of place and memory in these two museums illustrate the belief that the tragedies the Jewish people endured entitle them to a sovereign state in the land of Israel, but despite the tragedies that the Palestinian people endured, they are expected to be content with “tolerance.”

CITATIONS “Architecture.” Yadvashem.org. Yad Vashem. Web. 2 June 2017. “Chyutin Architects.” Chyutin.com. Chyutin Architects. Web. 02 June 2017. Dean, Andra Oppenheimer. “Moshe Safdie Offers a Memorial Journey through the Depths of a Jerusalem Hillside with His Yad Vashem History Museum.” Architectural Record, vol. 193, no. 7, July 2005, pp. 113-119. Efrat, Zvi, Colomina, Beatriz, Weizman, Eyal, Frampton, Kenneth, and Gandelsonas, Mario. The Object of Zionism: Architecture of Statehood in Israel, 1948–1973 (2014): ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Web. Freiman, Ziva. “Shoring up the Center. (Israel’s International Symposium on Public Buildings).” Progressive Architecture 74.4 (1993): 84. Web. Gehry, Frank. “I Response to Saree Makdisi’s The Architecture of Erasure.” Critical Inquiry 36.3 (2010): 560-62. Web. Makdisi, Saree. “The Architecture of Erasure.” Critical Inquiry 36.3 (2010): 519-59. Web. Niztnan-Shiftan, Alona. “On Concrete and Stone: Shifts and Conflicts in Israeli Architecture.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments 21.1 (2009): 51-66. Web. Rancière, Jacques. “The Politics of Aesthetics Roundtable.” Center for Research Architecture. 6 May 2006.

NAR | 9

UNTITLED, 2007 RICHARD MISRACH

NAR | 10

LOOKING(,) AT THE BEACH: GAZE AND REPRESENTATION Lois Biggs | Northwestern University ‘20

ust weeks after the 9/11 attacks, photographer Richard Misrach sits on the balcony of a high-rise Hawaiian hotel. He remembers his proximity to the Pentagon when the news broke. He remembers the long drive to retrieve his son, an NYU student, from New York. He remembers ash falling from the sky as he passed the city’s blockades. Vulnerability to the unthinkable. Now he looks down at the beachgoers below, at swimsuits and sleepers and the spaces between blankets. He pulls out his camera. Do they sense his gaze? Do they fear it? On September 15, 2007, Richard Misrach’s On the Beach opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition’s untitled photographs, some as large as six by ten feet, swallowed up the museum’s photography gallery and drew viewers into familiar scenes made strange. Vacationers rest on towels, dwarfed by crinkles of sand. A couple holds each other close on an empty beach. Groups of swimmers wade in turquoise-blue water–we can’t tell if they’ve moving towards the shore or out to sea. Misrach, a pioneer of color photography and large-format camera work, is known for exploring the relationship between humans and place. His longest-running project, Desert Cantos, traces nearly 40 years of resource extraction and environmental degradation in the American desert, and his 2012 book Petrochemical America, a collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff, maps the entropic ecologies of the southern Mississippi River. In contrast, On the Beach is hyperlocal and ambiguous. Named for a 1957 novel and 1959 film about nuclear apocalypse, the series of 22 photographs examines a beach and its visitors from the omniscient perspective of Misrach’s hotel balcony, “[reminding] us of the fragility and relative unimportance of humanity in the face of seemingly infinite nature.”1 Not only does On the Beach recall the sublime, it suggests that rather than a place where visitors watch and are watched by 1

“Richard Misrach: On the Beach,” Art Institute of Chicago, 2007, accessed December 2, 2017, http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/richard-misrach-beach.

one another, the 21st century beach is a place where they are watched altogether. By reimagining maritime panoramas and beachside vacations through an isolating, voyeuristic lens, the series reflects contemporary anxieties about mass surveillance and the potentiality of apocalypse. The photographs in On the Beach depict familiar, pleasantly-connoted activities like swimming, sunbathing, and socializing. Why are they so unsettling to look at? Subject matter and historical context aside, their technique and composition contribute to a sense of dread and aesthetic of detachment. Most of the photographs contain human figures who are either positioned in the center of the frame, breaking the rule of thirds, or are camouflaged by waves and patterns in the sand. By both singling them out and depicting their insignificance, Misrach underscores the beachgoers’ isolation and vulnerability. Meanwhile, none of the 22 photographs look up towards a horizon. If, as technical guides to photography suggest, “horizontal lines provide a sense of calm,” the photographer aims to provide the opposite, disorienting viewers through the absence of a grounding principle.2 We’re encouraged to position ourselves alongside the human swimmers and sunbathers, to rethink our comfortable relationship with oceans and shorelines. However, On the Beach’s lack of a horizon has not only technical but theoretical implications, and its commentary extends beyond human-place interactions and into a critique of the 21st century gaze. Theorist and photographer Allan Sekula examines the rise of oceanic panoramas in his 1995 photo-essay Fish Story. The representation of maritime space in panoramic form, he explains, arose during pre-industrial capitalism, originated in 17th century Dutch paintings, and influenced the development of maritime tourism. Because they portray a complete 2

Todd Vorenkamp, “Using Leading Lines and Horizon Lines in Photographic Composition,” B & H Foto & Electronics Corp., 2016, , accessed December 2, 2017, https://www.bhphotovideo. com/explora/photography/tips-and-solutions/using-leading-lines-and-horizon-lines-photographic-composition.

NAR | 11

THE MONK BY THE SEA, 1808-10 DAVID FRIEDRICH scene while “[acknowledging and desiring] a greater extension beyond the frame,” panoramas inspire paradoxical senses of satisfaction and greed.1 In some cases, they inspire paranoia. Citing The English Fleet at Anchor off Den Helder, a Dutch drawing of British warships, Sekula argues that because “expansive panoramic space is always haunted by the threat of collapse or counter-expansion,” panoramas are often militarized.2 As industry continued to develop through the 20th century, transforming oceanic transportation and military technology, maritime depictions shifted from unity to fragmentation, from “the panorama to the detail.”3 Modernist artists like Alfred Stieglitz were fascinated by close-up scenes of transatlantic travel, and military strategy came to rely less on large-scale perspective and more on technicalities of “vast statistico-economic grids.”4 If pre-industrial capitalism is characterized by the panorama and modernity by the detail, what characterizes depictions of the ocean today? While it retains a lineage of mil3

Sekula, Allan. Fish Story. S.L.: Richter, 1996, 43. Ibid., 47. 3 Ibid., 106. 4 Ibid., 107. 2

NAR | 12

itary paranoia, On the Beach forsakes the horizontal grounding of panoramas and the intimacy of details, suggesting a voyeuristic 21st century means of representing maritime space. A brief history of shorelines and perspective in the popular imagination, beginning with Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea and ending with Kirkland’s “Coastal Shades of Blue” decor collection, can contextualize this shift. In The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History, historian John R. Gillis describes a romantic rediscovery of the sea at the beginning of the 19th century. As the Industrial Revolution took off, people began to seek a sense of sublimity in untouched wild spaces–at first in forests and mountains, but later in beaches and oceans. “The awesome power of the sea, when witnessed from the safety of land, was a powerful emotional and mental stimulant,” states Gillis.5 Maritime art and rejuvenating beachside spas grew in popularity, horizons and flood tides became widespread metaphors for life and rebirth, and as Sekula implies, coastlines gained nationalistic and military significance. Meanwhile, the historical role and function of 5

Gillis, John R. The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 131.

the sea became obscured as outsiders took to the shore in search of romantic contemplation, a trend that will continue throughout the next two centuries. This “sea change” is apparent in The Monk by the Sea, painted between 1808 and 1810. In the oil painting, the titular monk stands on a sandy shore, his back turned away from the viewer and his hand resting on his chin in a contemplative pose. The dark sea and sky before him take up the majority of canvas space, emphasizing human smallness in contrast to sublime nature, and aside from scattered whitecaps, Friedrich provides no depth cues or contextual details. German writer Heinrich von Kleist famously stated that “since in [the painting’s] monotony and boundlessness it has no foreground except the frame, when viewing it, it is as if one’s eyelids had been cut away.”1 Viewers’ experience of The Monk by the Sea reflects the intense sea-gazing experience of the monk himself. Like Misrach’s photographs, the painting’s dramatic tension stems from a human interaction with a shoreline. However, like Sekula’s panorama, it’s grounded by a horizon line and prioritizes scene over details. The beach is still a place where one stands back and watches the ocean, a designation that changes in the work of late-19th century Belgian painter James Ensor, where the beach becomes a place to watch and be watched. Ensor is closely linked with expressionism and surrealism, and while his early plein air paintings are sparse, his later paintings are known for their grotesque, comedic, and often chaotic qualities. Two beach paintings, one created in 1882 and one in 1890, reflect Ensor’s stylistic development and, on a broader level, the rise of the beach as a social site. The first, On the Beach, depicts a cluster of well-dressed people at the seashore. The scene is somber and tentative– while the subjects lay down, more at ease than Friedrich’s monk, they position themselves next to a wooden house and far from the shoreline. Hats and parasols protect them from the elements, and while their experience is shared, their backs are turned away from the viewer and towards a distant yet well-defined horizon. Ensor’s 1890 sketch The Baths at Ostend couldn’t be more different. By the end of the 19th century, beaches had become popular vacation destinations, “places beyond the boundaries of quotidian life dedicated to the pursuit of health and leisure.”2 Rather than spec8 Harries, Karsten. The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cam-

bridge: MIT Press, 1997, 162. 9 Blei, Daniela. “Inventing the Beach: The Unnatural History of a Natural Place.” Smithsonian.com. June 23, 2016. Accessed

tacles themselves, the ocean and shoreline were now backgrounds to a spectacle–this is clear in The Baths at Ostend, which portrays the Belgian coastal city’s vibrant beach. Swimmers bask in the waves, visitors wander the shoreline and watch the swimmers, and an anthropomorphic sun watches everyone, smiling down on the celebratory scene. While Misrach’s On the Beach is, like The Baths at Ostend, set in a busy tourist destination, the photographer emphasizes distance between beachgoers and notes interest in how “people group up and leave a sort of comfortable space around them.”3 In contrast, Ensor’s painting collapses the space between subjects, emphasizing the intimacy of their interactions and their comfort level with the shoreline. Figures kiss and whisper and stare at each other, all with a sense of glee. While the horizon was an anchoring point in The Monk by the Sea and Ensor’s On the Beach, here it shrinks to a small sliver of the canvas, overwhelmed by human-to-human interactions. The Baths at Ostend reflects Sekula’s argument that maritime modernity is characterized by a shift from the panorama to the detail. As the beach continued to grow in popularity throughout the 20th century, social interactions like those depicted in Ensor’s painting took precedence over the environment itself. Coastal populations have increased by 30% over the last 30 years, and today, beachside properties are among the most valuable in the world.4 The family beach house is a status icon and source of pop nostalgia, serving as inspiration for blockbusters and songs and “life is better at the beach” doormats. Gillis explores this phenomenon in The Human Shore, arguing that “coastal has ceased to be a single geographical location and has become a free-floating symbol to be appropriated for a host of commercial and social purposes.”5 The rise of resorts and tourist destinations detached the beach from history and rendered it timeless, a blank slate that soon took on sociocultural significance. As the shore became a place where upper class families could escape modernity, Gillis argues, “life there took on an increasingly ritualized quality. . . the beach served as a performance space for February 18, 2018, 4. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ inventing-beach-unnatural-history-natural-place-180959538/. 3 Fletcher, Kenneth R. “Richard Misrach’s Ominous Beach Photographs.” Smithsonian.com. August 01, 2008. Accessed February 18, 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ richard-misrachs-ominous-beach-photographs-979981/. 4 Blei, “Inventing the Beach: The Unnatural History of a Natural Place,” 4. 5 Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History, 161.

NAR | 13

sentimental rites of family solidarity.”1 Vacationers united on beaches and in beach houses in order “to reconstitute themselves and live up to their idealized version of themselves.”2 One alternative to panoramas and details arose with the spread of maritime consumer culture–decontextualized images of the sea intended to backdrop these “rites of family solidarity.” For example, American retailer Kirkland’s Coastal Shades of Blue Collection promises to turn any house into a beach house regardless of proximity to “the gently lapping waves of the ocean.”3 The collection’s 344 items feature “subtle nods to coastal icons” and range from $10 “distressed” white starfish ornaments to $360 seashell-covered storage trunks.4 Here, the so-called coastal icons are completely isolated from place and ecology, revealing how components of the shoreline are, like shorelines themselves, repurposed for human pleasure. Misrach’s On the Beach reverses this process, isolating human figures and zooming out to introduce another, more ominous way of looking at our relationship with oceans. Disappearing horizons, shifting contexts, and military gazes inform and set apart the striking photographs. If as Michael Taussig claims, “the sea is no longer a place to be inhabited but a place to be contemplated,” the horizon is often the object of human contemplation (Gillis 156).5 We see this in Dutch maritime sketches, in Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea, and in Ensor’s early paintings of the shore, where subjects gaze towards a distant horizon that suggests possibilities beyond the painting’s scope. However, the horizon shrunk in prominence between 17th century wars and 20th century tourist development, and in On the Beach, it’s completely absent from the frame. Where his predecessors leave space to acknowledge an outside world Misrach does not, creating an unnerving sense of seclusion he intensifies by digitally removing figures from the sand. Today, beach tourism eclipses beach ecologies, and as Gillis argues, we visit the shore to perform social rituals. Misrach’s subjects, vacationers in Hawaii, partake in these familiar rituals, rituals Misrach’s perspective makes strange through decontextualization. A napping couple embraces in 1

Ibid., 152. Ibid. 3 “Coastal Shades of Blue.” Kirkland’s. Accessed December 2, 2017. http://www.kirklands.com/content.jsp?pageName=ShadesOfBlue. 4 Ibid. 5 Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History, 156. 2

NAR | 14

one photograph’s dead center, surrounded by sand and surf. Are they the last people on Earth? Directly under the camera’s line of sight, their bodies appear vulnerable. Vulnerable to what, exactly? In the series’ titular inspiration, a 1957 novel and 1959 film, nuclear fallout from WWIII ravages the Northern Hemisphere and spreads across the globe. A group of survivors cluster in the Southern hemisphere, where they await inevitable death and spend their final days relaxing on Australian beaches. By naming On the Beach after these works Misrach turns an innocuous phrase into a portentous one, and encourages viewers to read the photographs’ contents through an apocalyptic lens. Comfortable scenes and motions, like embraces, become desperate. On the Beach’s isolation and apocalyptic elements beg another, broader question: who’s behind the camera? In Fish Story Sekula links pre-industrial panoramas with paranoia before arguing that, as military technology developed, details took precedence over these panoramas. In a paranoid yet increasingly networked world where surveillance is omnipresent, Misrach’s work represents a postmodern blending of the panorama and the detail. Each photograph depicts a vast expanse of beach and ocean, but if viewers look closely enough, subjects’ bodies, emotions, and personal relationships are laid bare. This new maritime gaze looks down, is rooted in voyeurism, and by excluding the horizon, excludes potential futures. “Frozen in time in billions of photographs,” says Gillis, “the seaside is where we consign our precious dreams and our most frightening nightmares.”6 Whether experienced as hinterlands or blank slates or sites of pilgrimage, beaches capture the human imagination. Not only does On the Beach present a new way of visualizing maritime space, it plays with this imagination, reflecting dreams, nightmares, and uncomfortable realities. Today we’re haunted by the sky, by drone strikes and nuclear conflicts and air pollution. On October 1st, a shooter in Las Vegas shooter killed 59 people from a 32nd-story hotel room. In the face of threats from above, perhaps we’ll seek solace on the beach just as Misrach did after 9/11. However, 22 large-format photographs make clear that our places of retreat are no longer places of refuge.

Ibid., 157.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN: THE BODY’S INNER FORCE Laura Feigen | Stanford University ‘18

n reference to her photographs, Francesca Woodman once wrote, “I show you what you do not see—the body’s inner force. You cannot see me from where I look at my self.”1 This statement encapsulates one of the central aesthetic concerns in Woodman’s art, that of the presentation, performance, and perception of the female self. Drawing parallels between her series A Woman. A Mirror. A Woman is a Mirror for a Man c. 1975-78 and her Self Deceit series c.1978-79, this paper will discuss how Woodman’s use of mirror, reflection, and her own body in her photographic oeuvre renegotiate the role of the female figure to be between an eroticized subject and fetish object in Surrealist photography. Though Woodman was primarily active during the 1970s, her work with self-portraiture, fantastical representations of the body, and depictions of the absence of the body, expand the exploration begun during Surrealism to express female subjectivity2 through hybridization, fetishism, and displacement of self. Indeed, the use and over-use of accessories in her photographs, alludes to fetishism, in that they simultaneously appropriate the Surrealist fetish and act as an ironic critique of Surrealist fetishism. Existing scholarship on Woodman is relatively limited. Created between 1972-1981, Woodman’s prolific oeuvre (she produced almost 800 images in her lifetime) is bookended by her beginnings as a prodigy photographer at age 13 and suicide at age 22. For this reason, scholarship has often interpreted her work as biographical revelation—analyzing her photographs as if their sustained engagement with humor, drama, and the grotesque offers a visual confession of a troubled psyche. Thus, finding the distorted, ethereal aesthetic of many of her photographs to function as a macaFrancesca Woodman. Journal entry, 1973. Excerpt in Townsend, Chris. Francesca Woodman Scattered in Time and Space. p. 243 2 “Francesca Woodman Reconsidered: A Conversation with George Baker, Ann Daly, Nancy Davenport, Laura Larson, and Margaret Sundell.” In Art Journal, V.62 No. 2, published by College Art Association Summer 2003. 1

bre invocation of the self that both foreshadows her premature death and becomes augmented by it. Departing from such discourse, this paper seeks to locate Woodman within the Surrealist tradition she was both inspired by, and critical of, in order to discuss how she employed bodily contortion—whether through motion, erasure, or reflection—to reconfigure the place of the female figure within Surrealist style photography. Inhabiting her photographs as an often fragmented, distorted and amorphous female form gesticulating behind, within, or next to various props, Woodman not only troubles our notion of what it means to be photographed—of the relationship between sitter and photographer—but also questions the dichotomy between self-portrait and still-life. Probing the boundary between inanimate and animate, observer and observed, arranged and self-display, Woodman’s photographic ingenuity lies in its ability to, as she said, create: “a language for people to see the everyday things that I also see...and show them something different...Simply the other side.” It is this other side, this paper argues, where Woodman carves out an entirely new place for the female figure within Surrealist photography, as something at once human and ephemeral, subject and object. While a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s, Woodman described herself as an artist in line with the surrealist baroque aesthetic, rather than with the American gothic with which she was might be more readily be linked.3 Although Woodman worked several decades after the age of Surrealism, her frequent use of mirrors, distortion, shadows, hands, and animals construct uncanny dreamscapes reminiscent of those created by photographers such as Hans Bellmer and Man Ray.4 Although the works of Hans Bellmer inspired Woodman’s methodology and photographic compositions, her photographs do not retain their same fetishized objectification and 3

Katharine Conley, Surrealist Ghostliness, p. 153 Pedicini, Isabella. Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Between Flesh and Film. p. 27 4

NAR | 15

dismemberment of the female body. As can be seen in her photograph Horizontal c. 1976 in comparison to Bellmer’s photograph Unica Bound c. 1958, instead of being a dormant sexualized object of desire or abuse, Woodman is responsible for her compositional and bodily manipulations. Where Bellmer’s composition derives from his bound doll photographs and a pedophilic romanticism of the doll as fetish object,1 Woodman seems to problematize the fetishism of the female body. In Horizontal, Woodman joins the glove as a form of fetish object with the deformation of the body in order to explore the disparate ways the female form can be registered. While the glove, like Bellmer’s doll, aligns with the surrealist obsession for the erotic aesthetic that could be imposed upon found and irrational objects, Woodman seems to employ the glove in a way that is more ironic than possessed of a titillating fascination. Dangling between her fingers, the glove rests upon her pelvis, simultaneously concealing and symbolizing the female genitalia. By covering her crotch with a striped glove, she uses the glove to simultaneously parody Bellmer’s fetish of the bound female form and create her own aesthetic object: a fetish of herself. By exploring this notion of fetishizing, Woodman renegotiates the female subject through a Surrealist rhetoric. Indeed, her “refusal of distinction between the self and the world of objects,” notes Townsend, “subverts the ideological structures of the gaze it uses.”2 By embracing the male surrealist vision of the female form as an efficient vehicle for transformative experience, she eludes the demeaning associations of being reduced entirely to the body.3 Indeed, Woodman’s radical approach to corporeal realities, the way in which she is the catalyst of her own photographic manipulation, render her, as female subject, an active agent in the creation of her own presentation, instead of a passive surface on which aesthetic determinations are inscribed. According to her father, Woodman had fallen in love with Dada and Surrealism by the time she was eleven years old.4 It was no surprise then that, when she came to Rome, she found herself drawn to Libreria Maldoror—a bookshop specializing in historical avant-garde and surrealist literature, as well as 1

Bellmer, Hans. “Birth of the Doll” in Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall, Inc., 1970), 63 2 Townsend, Chris. p. 61 3 Conley, Katharine. p. 156 4 Ibid. p. 128

NAR | 16

a meeting place for artists, which she’d visit on her way from her apartment in Rome to the school in the Palazzo Cenci. Here, she read André Breton’s 1928 novel, Nadja, and other surrealist texts.5 It was during this period that she created Self Deceit, a series of photographs showing the enigmatic interplay between a mirror and her naked body. In these photographs Woodman takes Man Ray and Breton’s employment of the static female object and turns it on its head by imbuing her subject, herself, with an incessant, restless movement. Indeed, weaving in front, behind, and around the mirror—as if both looking for and hiding from her own reflection—Woodman engages in an energetic pantomime wherein she and the mirror become one with each other and the room’s stark walls and floors. Wielding the mirror as if it were an extension of herself, Woodman’s series Self Deceit demonstrates the sculptural nature of her oeuvre: how the dramatic tension of her ivory contortion becomes one with metallic sheen of the mirror, the dimensionality of their union augmented by the mirror’s reflective surface, as if its portrayal of the room beyond seeks to place them in the round. Highlighting the tendency of Woodman’s female figures to be between subject and object, human and prop, the interplay, here, between Woodman’s body and the mirror reveals the space between absolutes. Neither objectified portrait nor static still-life, Woodman, in Self Deceit, opens a space for the female form to move between boundaries, between reflection and reflected, seen and unseen, real and the imagined, subject and object, woman and mirror. It is in this liminal space where Woodman, the alchemist conjuring her spinning mystic visions, finds the height of her expression. Forging bulge against hollow, shadow against light, and distortion against clarity, Woodman exposes us to the feline contour of gesticulation: ultimately releasing “the body’s inner force.” 6 Indeed, providing a vivid, visual collision between sculptural, moving bodies and the flat expanse of mirror, the series Self Deceit brings into discussion the interaction between body, frame, and space within her work. Here, the clash between masses and volumes, and the antagonistic movements of bodies within the frame, charge her photographs with a dramatic tension whose effect also implicitly traces the cultural codes attached 5

La Libreria Maldoror also had a gallery in the basement for smaller exhibitions, and Woodman exhibited her photographs there in March 1978. 6 Ibid. 1978

to the female body. This method of movement seems to derive, or extend, from a series she made a year or two earlier entitled A Woman. A Mirror. A Woman is a Mirror for a Man. Created during her time at RISD, the series A Woman. A Mirror. A Woman is a Mirror for a Man demonstrates Woodman’s experimentation with the optical effect of reflection. Positioning herself between a pane of glass and a large mirror, Woodman toys with the boundary between transparency and opacity, the acuteness of vision through glass versus its distortion through reflection. Resisting confinement through movement whilst still containing herself within a glass pane, Woodman seems to nestle herself within a compendium of frames: the crisp lines of the glass pane, mirror, window, photograph edges, and, finally, the viewer’s own gaze emanating out from her body like gentle ripples in a pond. Framed even further by the dark saturation of an overhanging shadow, Woodman’s body becomes only visible by way of the sun’s rays falling through the open window, making her body glow white against the inky shadow as if she were a lunar crescent and it were the night sky. Looking directly at her reflection only once, as in her series Self Deceit, Woodman sculpts her composition through her interaction with the reflexive properties of the pane of glass and the mirror: twisting herself between the two objects, standing up in front of them with her cat, placing them on top of each other, or pressing herself against them as if trying infuse herself into their crystalline surface. The last photo of the sequence is particularly poetic and elegant, depicting her laying down with her back beside the mirror, leaning her head against it as though it were the shoulder of a loved one. In this sequence, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the visual tension between her, the part of her body pressed flat by the glass, and the body parts that fall outside the frame: her head, fingers, and toes. In these images, her movements, and the glare of light on the glass, blur the contours of her body, making it appear only as a distortion. Positioning herself between the pane of glass and the framed mirror behind her, Woodman seems intent on rejecting the gaze of the viewer; an ironic attempt considering she is hiding behind a transparent surface. Indeed, though one is able to see the ivory curve of her figure through the pane of glass, Woodman’s incessant movement makes her appear only as a blur, an enigmatic ghost suspended in the bright rectangle of sunshine pouring through the window.

Beautiful and mysterious, Woodman, here, takes to an extreme art history’s conventional reduction of the female body as a sight meant to give pleasure to an outside viewer. Indeed, while some of the images, most specifically figure 4, may have drawn a parallel to Titian’s Venus of Urbino, or a similar image—in the way her body lies diagonally across the plane of the picture, almost inviting the viewer to gaze upon her figure—her positioning of the glass in front of her body, and the way she hides her head in the crook of her neck, seems almost to repel the viewer’s admiring gaze. Instead of gazing coyly, invitingly, from the picture, as does Titian’s Venus, Woodman rejects this role as objectified female by hiding her face in the shadows cast by the mirror and behind the pane of glass. In this way, Woodman successfully distances herself from the viewer and makes any allusion one may have drawn to Venus of Urbino, or a similar work, slightly moot. The photographs in both her series A Woman. A Mirror. A Woman is a Mirror for a Man and Self Deceit seem, at first, to trouble an economy of the gaze that puts the female body on display so as to offer visual pleasure to the observer.1 These photographs go beyond dividing the image of the female self into a male viewer and female object for in addition to staging both her reflection in the mirror and the body there reflected, the photo also incorporates a third element: the imprint behind the glass and the play of shadows on the skin of the artist. Woodman’s negotiation of herself within these images introduces a new form of female subjectivity wherein, by making herself the object of the work, she not only implicates the tradition of a male photographer objectifying the female subject, but she also gives identity and voice to the traditionally anonymous, or passive, female form. In these series, both the figure in front of the mirror and her reflection in the mirror are blurred, distorted, fragmented: a fleeting appearance that refuses to remain fixed. There is a power in her movement, a poignant sense of action that varies from photograph to photograph. In the series Self Deceit, the way Woodman’s warped body explores the figure’s relationship to reflection draws a parallel to the traditional feminine vanitas motif. 2 Doing so, however, in order to perform the ways by which the female self might literally fade into an image. Self Deceit #1 is the only image from the Self Deceit series in which the mirror reflects 1 2

Townsend, Chris. Francesca Woodman, p. 51 Ibid, 20

NAR | 17

Woodman’s body. Crawling out from behind a corner, Woodman slinks along the floor like a female Narcissus1 to peer curiously, almost admiringly, at the gentle curve of her visage. In other pictures, she uses this mirror to conceal her face, sits on it, or, due to the long exposure, appears next to it like a ghost. Snaking around the mirror, instead of appearing in it, the visual interplay Woodman constructs between the smooth reflective surface, the roughly plastered room, and her own flesh creates an almost uncanny dream in which the female form actually “hides from itself.”2 By eluding her own reflection, or a still representation of her countenance, in almost every frame, these photographs self-consciously deny the viewer the sight of an intact feminine beauty. Similar to A Woman. A Mirror. A Woman is a Mirror for a Man., the Self Deceit series is a distinct succession of images in which the shifting positions of her blurred body act as links connecting one image to the next. The inherent seriality each image embodies suggests that to capture the female appearance in an image means splitting it into different embodied images. What emerges from this fragmentation is not a unified image of an idealized femininity, but rather the destructive consequences of any desire to capture a woman’s appearance in a pleasurable way. Although the woman in these photographs has appropriated the male gaze, she uses it to explore a plethora of possibilities by which, with the help of perpetual movement and transformation, she might escape being collapsed into one single, static image. These observations raise a question posed by Bronfen: “At whose self-deception are these poses aimed?”3 In both A Woman. A Mirror. A Woman is a Mirror for a Man and Self Deceit, Woodman extends the space of her composition by positioning the mirrors to reveal something we could never see directly. The outof-field, what is beyond the scope of our own gaze, is brought into the field of perception by the mirror. In Self Deceit, where Woodman is crawling past a mirror set on the floor, the mirror allows us to see the half of 1

Bronfen, Leaving an Imprint: Francesca Woodman’s Photographic Tableaux Vivants, in Francesca Woodman, ed. Gabriele Schor and Elisabeth Bronfen p.19 2 1978 letter to gallery worker Ugo Ferranti, Woodman explained that this series was intended to visualize a situation in which a human figure actually “hides from itself.” Excerpt in Townsend, Chris. Francesca Woodman Scattered in Time and Space. London and New York: Phaidan Press Limited, 2006. p. 242 3 Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Leaving an Imprint: Francesca Woodman’s Photographic Tableaux Vivants,” in Francesca Woodman, ed. Gabriele Schor and Elisabeth Bronfen, p. 21

NAR | 18

the room that is behind the camera. Veering towards empty space, the reflection in the mirror is of absence. Woodman’s composition thus subtly elucidates a type of female agency in that she is both the subject being viewed from the camera lens and the one surveying the scene before her. In employing the mirror to expand the depth of the photographic landscape, Woodman complicates the notion of her photographs as renegotiations of the subjectivity of the female subject. While this renegotiation operates on a platform of self-portraiture and self-objectification, Self Deceit #7 overturns the notion that it is always Woodman photographing herself and, therefore, subjecting herself to her own fetishistic whims. Indeed, while the mirror gazes out to reflect the white plaster room, it also captures the legs of someone standing behind the camera’s tripod. Though it is unclear whether the figure is male or female, it interrupts the purity of Woodman’s photographs as being an exploration of the female figure through self-performance. In this instance, Woodman seems to become only subject, performing before the camera and the viewer. While Woodman probably asked this figure to help her position the camera,4 for as both subject and photographer it could be difficult to always time the shudder of her camera perfectly, it is interesting to note that it is in this photograph in the sequence where Woodman appears most blurry. Spasming next to the mirror like a human tornado, Woodman performs directly for the camera and the viewer in a self-conscious way that seems to both position her as objectified subject and compositional mastermind. Indeed, despite Woodman’s employment of this figure as photographer, her photographs still seem to give the female subject her own voice. She is still the female acting upon herself within the image, encountering herself within the reflections, as opposed to the fetishistic impulse of the photographer acting upon the female subject such as in the works of Hans Bellmer. Moreover, where the works of Bellmer are meticulously arranged before the camera, Woodman’s compositions are more spontaneous. Her twisting gesticulations are as much a rejection of being compressed into a static object as a demonstration of her methodological fascination with automatism. An avid reader of André Breton,5 Woodman was fascinated by the intellectual correlation between 4

Woodman would sometimes employ her friends as either photographer or as subject. 5 Pedicini, Isabella, p. 56

SELF DECEIT, 1977-78 FRANCESCA WOODMAN

NAR | 19

HORIZONTAL, PROVIDENCE RHODE ISLAND, 1976 FRANCESCA WOODMAN

the mechanical recording of psychic automation and the automation of the camera. More than this, she was captivated by the way text could be used as a type of prop for complicating the way the female subject is read, or presented, in a composition. Similar to the way in which the mirror allowed for an enigmatic play with reflection, allowing Woodman to experiment with the direction and deflection of the viewer’s gaze, so too did text provide a way of reconfiguring the presentation of the female form. Playing with textual metaphor in the same way she played with the mirror. In discussing the ways in which these photographs renegotiate the female subject within Surrealist photography, it is impossible to ignore the question of whether there is an explicitly feminist polemic to Woodman’s work. To be sure, her consistent use of the female form as a starting point for her photographs—as a surface on which we can project our gaze and desires—has inspired feminist interpretations and attempts to locate her in that tradition. The art historian and feminist Abigail Solomon-Godeau, who published in Woodman’s first exhibition catalog from 1986, asserts that one cannot know if Woodman had knowledge of or any relationship to contemporary feminist theory, but her preoccupation with the body, the dichotomy of subject-object, and female iconography encourage feminist readings. Her argument carries through to an article put forth by The Guardian entitled “Searching for the real Francesca Woodman.” Here, the author, Rachel Cooke, quotes Woodman’s NAR | 20

UNICA BOUND, 1958 HANS BELLMER

parents when they say that fans and critics alike tend to ignore the humor in their daughter’s work, and often attach to her name a feminism she would not have recognized. They say, “You can reinterpret her pictures, if that’s your point of view, but we don’t think that was there. Everybody was tied in knots about politics in the 70s, but she wasn’t interested.”1 This sentiment is echoed in the research of Corey Keller, a curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In her book Francesca Woodman (2013) she says “[Woodman was] not interested in images of women in general, for example, and even when the subject of the photograph is not herself physically, one always has the sense it is about her psychically.”2 Unlike the Woodmans and Kelley, however, her friend Betsy, like Solomon-Godeau, argues that Francesca was political. In her essay To Tell the Truth in the book Francesca Woodman she says “Francesca felt guilty that she wasn’t a ‘real’ feminist, even though of course she was, simply because she was a woman who took herself and her work seriously.”3 As Woodman herself never proclaimed herself a feminist or political activist, it seems most productive to discuss her not as a feminist artist, but as an artist who gives a voice, a type of new independence, to the female subject. 1

Cooke, Rachel. “Searching for the Real Francesca Woodman.” The Guardian. 2 Keller, Corey. Francesca Woodman. p. 176 3 Berne, Betsy. To Tell the Truth in the book Francesca Woodman. p.91

Similar to Hannah Wilke, Woodman uses her own nudity as a tool throughout her work. As can be seen in both her series A Woman. A Mirror. A Woman is a Mirror for a Man and Self Deceit, she is the agent objectifying herself before the camera. Since the 1960s, Wilke has been concerned, as she states, “with the creation of a formal imagery that is specially female...Its content has always related to my own body and feelings, reflecting pleasure as well as pain, the ambiguity and complexity of emotions.”1 The interest in the female form, the tendency to explore it through one’s own body, is a technique that both Woodman and Wilke have in common. Indeed, Woodman, like Wilke, articulates a type of female subjectivity in which the female is not presented as a static object of sexualized desire, but rather as an enigmatic, energetic figure possessed of her own agency. As can be seen in a comparison between Woodman’s series A Woman. A Mirror. A Woman is a Mirror for a Man, Self Deceit #1, and Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series c. 1974-82, both women employ the notions of reflection and encounter: the encounter between artist and camera, the visual reflection not only between Woodman and her reflection in the mirror, but the artists’ self reflection, their meditation, on how to move their own bodies, how to play, how to explore the world they create with their cameras. To be sure, both women have a quality of childish play in their work that contrasts with the drama invoked within their bodily performances.2 In Wilke’s S.O.S. series, Wilke enacted a variety of male and female roles, aided by props such as hats, ties, and aprons. As both artist and model, she cunningly ornamented her upper torso with dainty vulvas sculpted from chewing gum. Her sensitivity toward language and the interaction of words and images is evident in the highly referential title of the work, which alludes to Third World scarring rites, the negative aspects of stardom, and an emergency plea for assistance.3 While Woodman’s work is not as overtly politically driven, the delicacy in which she positions her own nude body in front of the camera “dispute[s] male sovereignty”4 in much the same way. It is through the collapsing of subject object 1

Rosen, Randy. Making their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream 1970-85. p. 135 2 Moore, Sabra. Openings A Memoir from the Women’s Art Movement, New York City 1970-1992. p. 86 3 Rosen, Randy. Making their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream 1970-85. P. 135 4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 7

with artist photographer in her photographs that Woodman is able to redefine what it means for a female to be the central subject of a work of art. To be sure, within the world Woodman creates in her photographs, one is always acutely aware that it is her performing as herself in front of the camera. While Woodman said that she was usually the subject for her works because she was “always available,”5 one can’t help but notice that photography, for her, was more than just an art form. It was a connection to her sense of self, a way for her to not only explore the uncanniness of the world around her, but to explore the inner world of her own being. Indeed, experimenting and playing with Surrealist fictions and props, her performances are not driven by a character, but rather by her own desire for the thrill of self exploration. In this way, the persona is always an interpretation of the self. Attaining an almost fragile magic, Woodman’s expression at the intersection of subject and object, human and prop demonstrate the way in which her work tries to take control of the way in which women are presented in the world and how women choose to represent themselves. To be sure, as infinite as Woodman’s re-figurations of the traditional self-portrait and the female nude may be, their interventions to art-historical and Surrealist genres all have one thing in common: she is the photographer incessantly engendering and exploring the disappearance of her own image. Possessed of an inherent duality, Woodman’s photographs renegotiate the female subject as one that is both subject and photographer, object and artist, performer and viewer.

CITATIONS Bellmer, Hans. “Birth of the Doll” in Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall, Inc., 1970) Berne, Betsy. “To Tell the Truth,” in Francesca Woodman, ed. Gabriele Schor and Elisabeth Bronfen et al. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers Inc), 89. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Leaving an Imprint: Francesca Woodman’s Photographic Tableaux Vivants,” in Francesca Wood- man, ed. Gabriele Schor and Elisabeth Bronfen et al. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers Inc), 11. Casetti, Giuseppe. Bonito Oliva, Achille. “Catalogo con testi di Giuseppe Casetti e Achille Bonito Oliva.” For Fran- cesca Woodman: Winter Cooking. Il museo del louvre di Roma: October 2015. http://www.ilmuseodellouvre. com/tag- prodotto/francesca-woodman/ 5

Davison, Peter. “Girl Seeeming to Disappear.” Atlantic Monthly (May 2000):108-111

NAR | 21

S.O.S. STARIFICATION OBJECT SERIES HANNAH WILKE

Cooke, Rachel. “Searching for the real Francesca Woodman.” The Guardian. Accessed February 1, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/ searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman Danto, Arthur C. “Darkness Visible,” The Nation, November 15, 2004. Davison, Peter. “Girl Seeeming to Disappear.” Atlantic Monthly (May 2000):108-111 De Beuvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Clas sics, 1949. Francesca Woodman Reconsidered: A Conversation with George Baker, Ann Daly, Nancy Davenport,Laura Larson, and Margaret Sundell.” In Art Journal, V.62 No. 2, pub lished by College Art Association, Summer 2003. Deepwell, Katy. New Feminist Art Criticism. Manchester: Man chester University Press, 1995. Gabhart, Ann. Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work. Welles ley MA: Wellesley College Museum and Hunter College Art Gallery, 1986. Keller, Corey. Francesca Woodman. San Francisco: Distributed Art Publishers Inc, 2013. Moore, Sabra. Openings A Memoir from the Women’s Art Move ment, New York City 1970-1992. New York: New Village Press, 2016. Pedicini, Isabella. Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Be tween Flesh and Film. Roma: Contrasto, 2012.

NAR | 22

Rosen, Randy. Making their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream 1970-85. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Body Double,” in Francesca Wood man, ed. Gabriele Schor and Elisabeth Bronfen et al. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers Inc), 73. Söntgen, Beate. “ ‘I show you what you do not see’ Francesca Woodman’s Force,” in Francesca Woodman, ed. Gabri ele Schor and Elisabeth Bronfen et al. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers Inc), 63. Sundell, Margaret. “Francesca Woodman Reconsidered.” Art Journal 62.2 (Summer 2003) Tellgren, Anna. Palm, Anna-Karin. Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel, Stockholm: Kooning Books, 2016.

LICHTENSTEIN’S RESTATEMENTS OF FINE ART Zhirui Guan | Yale University ‘19

oy Lichtenstein is a careful reader of signs. In his art he quotes universally recognizable masterpieces of fine art that history has deemed original, valuable, and worthy of representing established social norms and artistic approaches. The emphatically systematic execution of his quotations1, however, simulate machine-like impersonality through meticulous human labor. “I am nominally copying,” says the artist, “but I am really restating the copied thing in other terms.”2 In the Rouen Cathedrals series ]and Red and White Brushstrokes, Lichtenstein puts into question both Impressionism’s alleged commitment to nature and Abstract Expressionism’s purported pursuit of the spontaneous artistic brilliance. Examining these two paintings along with George Washington, I am convinced that it is Lichtenstein’s central project to critique the commercial origin of the iconicity branded to certain works of fine art—works that no longer carry meaning through their formal qualities, but through their symbolic value acquired in time. To understand Lichtenstein’s interpretation of the Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, the historical stature of the original painting as well as the ideological currents in the early and mid-20th century merits attention. In the 1930s, Stuart’s portrait of Washington was designated—by the George Washington Bicentennial Commission as well as the news press—as the “official” image of the founding father of America.3 Despite the existence of a more faithful likeness captured by sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon in a 1785 bust, “the American people” obviously favored 1

Lawrence Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein: (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), 109-110. 2 Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, 106. 3 Greenhalgh, Adam. ““Not a Man but a God”: The Apotheosis of Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington.” Winterthur Portfolio 41, no. 4 (2007): 275-277.

Stuart’s portrayal of a less humanized, more saint-like Washington.4 Serving in difficult times as a reminder of what made America great, lithograph reproductions of the portrait were widely distributed and used in national celebrations and commemorations, helping to affirm the founding values of the nation. This transformation of the Washington portrait into a national “cult object”5 in the 30s gave Lichtenstein grounds in the 60s not to be interested in its artistic craftsmanship, but in its role as a sign. George Washington (1962), based on a lithograph reproduction of the Stuart portrait in a Hungarian newspaper,6 by the nature of its genesis, involves multiple layers of reproduction and appropriation that makes what Lichtenstein is quoting no longer Stuart’s 1797 painting itself, but what’s left of it after a series of reproductions—a logo. While retaining the three-quarter view of the sitter, he positions Washington in a tighter frame. Thus, even though the two paintings are of roughly the same size, in Lichtenstein’s version, Washington’s face takes up more canvas space and commands added visual attention. What in the original portrait was left blank—the rest of Washington’s clothes, and the left part of the dark background—because Stuart did not finish it during his seating with the president, is completely ignored in Lichtenstein’s work. The Pop artist zooms into the finished and established part of the portrait, the part already known to the national and international public as an invariable emblem of American pride. In the painting, Lichtenstein foregoes naturalism for stylization, underlining the sign-like nature of 4

Greenhalgh, “Not a Man but a God”, 275. Ibid. 6 Sidra Stich, Made in U.S.A: An Americanization in Modern Art, The ‘50s & ‘60s: (Berkeley: Univ. Art Museum Univ. of California, 1987), 34. 5

NAR | 23

GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1962 ROY LICHTENSTEIN

NAR | 24

the image by extracting only the geometric essence of the subject, and quite literally discarding its “flesh and bones”. Nowhere to be seen is Stuart’s realistic rendering of Washington’s face and clothes. Instead, harsh contours and dark, flat shadows delineate the president’s solemn, bewigged head. The stable source of light which gave Stuart’s Washington a mellow, warm glow has exploded into stark whiteness, as if coming from a fluorescent light bulb. Likewise, shadows on Washington’s face on the right side of Lichtenstein’s painting end abruptly without any gradations of tone or variations in shape, cutting a straight line in the viewer’s perceptual field. The only element in the painting that comes close to being visually transitional are the Ben Day dots. In the background area where the blaring whiteness “fades” into dark surroundings, black dots which are uncompromisingly uniform in tone and size are used. Such a deliberately failed attempt at realistic light-to-dark transition only intensifies the highly stylized character of George Washington and makes it more of a logo than a portrayal of a man. In addition to making evident the ossification of a sign, Ben Day dots and flat color planes give George Washington an appearance of printed images like ads or newspaper illustrations. While the latter are associated with the aloofness of machine reproduction, in reality Lichtenstein simulated this mechanical quality laboriously with a paint brush.1 As a result, the viewer is able to perceive a parallel between Lichtenstein’s painting method and the formation of the quoted sign. To be specific, conditioning the public to believe that an icon is what America’s founding father actually looked like has been a historically calculated project carried out through standardized rituals, which are not dissimilar to Lichtenstein’s step-by-step protocol in drawing static colors and Ben Day Dots. That is to say, Lichtenstein demonstrates the “mechanization of vision”2 by dramatizing the emergence of a sign through formal techniques, making us conscious of how the power of a venerated icon is established—via ideological inculcation facilitated by systematic repro1

Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, 106. David Joselit, American Art Since 1945: (United Kingdom: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 82. 2

duction, Ben Day dot by Ben Day dot. Apart from works that gained a significance in the national and civic sphere, the realm of textbook/ academic art history offers an abundance of canonical paintings whose prima facie value has been eclipsed by their iconic importance. “It’s an industrial way of making Impressionism.”3 Says Lichtenstein of his Rouen Cathedral paintings, a series of restatements based on Claude Monet’s mega-famous series that many critics think exemplify Impressionism’s au-plein-air documentary approach to its subjects4. Decades after the series was completed, it encountered major backlash from critics who became increasingly enamored by abstract art, and who claimed that painting the same view of the cathedral façade more than twenty times was a sign of Monet’s lack of subjective artistic genius—the kind of inventive power that drove Pollock to swing paint on his studio floor.5 In Rouen Cathedral I, II, however, Lichtenstein undoes the criticism Monet’s works received. What popular opinion has labelled with creative incompetence is rehabilitated by Lichtenstein as a work of art with deeper psychic dimensions that mechanical duplications of it fail to convey. To be specific, Rouen Cathedral I and II continue to employ Ben Day dots to mimic a mechanically manufactured veneer, but also strive self-consciously to establish visual affinities with its 19th-century predecessor. Unlike in George Washington, where the dots feign abortive attempts at realism, in Rouen Cathedral I, II they become agents of both color and form, directly taking part in the quoted image. In 1892, the French master intensely observed transient natural conditions, then depicted in his signature staccato brushstrokes the momentary miracles of light on the immutable cathedral façade.6 Lichtenstein, 60 years later, however, drastically reduced Monet’s original color palette, offering us a binarized vision devoid of flickering Impressionist subtleties. Using a mixture of yellow-dots-on-white and 3

Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, 53. George H. Hamilton, Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral: (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 5-7. 5 Hamilton, Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral, 5-7. 6 Hamilton, Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral, 3-4. 4

NAR | 25

ROUEN CATHEDRAL I, II, III, IV, V. 1968-69, ROY LICHTENSTEIN

white-dots-on-yellow, Rouen Cathedral I sometimes allows dots to thicken and congregate into larger planes, and occasionally obliges the opposite to happen. For instance, in the center of the painting, white structural lines of the cathedral’s Neo-Gothic portal dissolve into dots on the adjacent yellow ground, which in turn lose their structural function, but focus on creating a rhythmic, brick-like texture. Moreover, the uneven size of and distance between the dots make Rouen Cathedral I noticeably different from a real newspaper image using Ben Day dots; because in the latter, printed illustrations would exhibit uniformly sized and spaced dots. The unevenness of the Rouen Cathedral dots can therefore be interpreted as either Lichtenstein’s calculatedly failing reproduction of mechanized dots, or mechanized dots’ jarringly eager imitation of Monet’s personal hand. To hyperbolize and make visually evident the way viewers perceive a famous and hackneyed work of art—namely, through reproduction and readily packaged art criticism that often discourage the viewer’s original vision—Lichtenstein has indeed created an “industrial” Monet. Doggedly methodical in his own techniques—making a detailed pencil sketch first, then projecting them onto a larger canvas using an opaque projector1—the Pop artist’s method of making the Rouen Cathedral series could not be more differ-

ent from Monet’s. Before the first drop of paint is put on canvas, Lichtenstein already has in mind what the finished work will look like. Monet, on the other hand, unlike what many accused him (and other Impressionists) of, was not single-mindedly copying nature in quick “impressions”. Since in essence the façade of the Rouen Cathedral did not change at night or by day, in twilight or with dawn’s golden glow, what Monet was putting on canvas was more than atmospheric change, but more importantly his own psychical responses to that change.2 The museum-going public’s dogmatic adherence to the convenient Impressionist-as-copier-of-nature tale, and subsequent omission to judiciously appreciate Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings are precisely what Lichtenstein forces his viewers to realize. Clearly, Rouen Cathedral II is based on a different painting from Rouen Cathedral I, for this time a small portion of the sky is shown at the top of the painting; and while colors continue to be binarized, the distribution of red dots and red color planes tells us that in the original Monet painting, natural light entered from a different direction, indicating changed weather or another time of day. Furthermore, although the morphing of dots to lines still exists, in Rouen Cathedral II there are considerably more red dots than there are yellow ones, with less yellow-colored areas fading into dots

Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, 110.

NAR | 26

Hamilton, Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral, 19.

than red-colored areas. Observed closely, the image is likely to disintegrate into an abstract mist of patterns, eluding the viewer who clings on to the view of the cathedral façade, which can only be retrieved if one takes a step back, and let the human eye mix the “mechanical dots” in much the same way it mixed Monet’s speckled paint 60 years earlier. Hence, by superficially contrasting Monet’s human hand but really recruiting the same visual device, Lichtenstein sensationalizes the extent to which the public has expediently marked and sealed Monet’s paintings. The modern viewer wonders what is lost in reproductions that can only materialize when one stands face-to-face with a Rouen Cathedral by Monet—both viewer and painting in the flesh, with mechanized stereotypes tucked away. Quoting Monet after Impressionism had been iconized by the audience and critics of fine art, Lichtenstein goes on to find subject matter in Abstract Expressionism’s commodified altar of geniuses. He took from the oeuvre of De Kooning and Pollock their most typical and recognizable gesture: the brushstroke. During the postwar period, painting practice of the New York School was characterized by personal and performative expression through which artists like De Kooning constructed well-known images of themselves as romantic geniuses suffering from creative and psychic angst.1 In turn, the marks they made on canvas were the best representation and advertisement of such persona. Lichtenstein satirizes the transformation of the Abstract Expressionist gesture into commercial icons in Red and White Brushstrokes. “It is a symbol of something it isn’t,” says Lichtenstein of the quoted expressionist brushstroke, “and that is part of the irony I’m interested in.”2 Within the crisply shiny surface of the brushstrokes, he makes sure, lies the irony of attributing meaning and personality to emotive gestures. First, Red and White Brushstrokes singles out and monumentalizes what in reality are small units that make up a large Abstract Expressionist painting, for example, De Kooning’s Women, Sag Harbor. Making two individual brushstrokes the sole subject of the image is a bold gesture—pun intended—laden with

compositional bravura not unlike that of the Abstract Expressionists themselves. In addition, instead of evoking specific brushstrokes in a particular painting, Lichtenstein quotes a general type, the paragon of the Abstract Expressionist manner. He first works out the design on a miniature scale in paint, then puts down as pencil sketches that would later be projected onto a larger canvas. The act of creating an original design for a restatement of fine art marks a departure from his direct quotations such as George Washington and the Rouen Cathedral series. However, perhaps an original array of brushstrokes is the only “proper way”3 of simulating the emotive grandiloquence of the Abstract Expressionists. With both subject matter and composition quintessentially De-Kooning-esque, Lichtenstein infuses the brushstrokes with a comical banality that is nothing akin to the New York school’s assertion of impromptu passion. Thick swirls of paint that form a protruding impasto and call attention to their own materiality in a De Kooning painting are depicted by Lichtenstein with a smooth, clean surface that fails to remind us of the artist’s human presence; dark contour lines that delineate the borders of the brushstrokes are unabashedly literal in their depiction of the wriggling marks made by hairs on a brush. And quite to the opposite of real layered paint, the slight overlap between the red and white brushstrokes reads as strenuous satire of three-dimensional space. For despite being conspicuously sleek and flat, the overlapping brushstrokes profess to contain layered depth. Furthermore, instead of fading into less substance as the brush drags across the canvas—as actual paint would—the tails of the red brushstroke simply get thinner. There exists no variation in saturation or tone, nor any slimming of contour lines to indicate genuinely the brushstroke’s three-dimensional presence. Finally, with a blue-dots-on-white background flaunting the painted surface’s own two-dimensionality and lively pretension of mechanical reproduction, the stage is set for a parody of abstract painting. Unnaturally magnified and absurdly trapped on a flat plane, the brushstrokes refuse to be invested with the

Joselit, American Art Since 1945, 33. Mark Trottenberg. “Roy Lichtenstein: Tokyo Brushstrokes.” Kanopy Streaming, 29:36. 2015.

1 2

Dave Hickey, Roy Lichtenstein Brushstrokes: Four Decades: (New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2001), 11.

NAR | 27

kind of meaning and mystique generally ascribed to Abstract Expressionist gestures. Like George Washington and the Rouen Cathedral series, Red and White Brushstrokes proclaims the hypocrisy and flimsiness of the constructed icon, as well as the mode of vision, either artistic or historic, these icons grew out of. What do we really see, questions Lichtenstein, in Stuart’s Washington portrait—a stern-looking man in a wig? The president? Or a desirable symbol of society’s own device? Undoubtedly, he points out through a mesmerizing sea of Ben Day dots, that what viewers neglect to see in Rouen Cathedral is Monet’s intent on examining both his subject self and the natural environment, dappling on canvas as he tenderly and fervently did under Normandy’s slender gothic towers. Whilst appraising Lichtenstein’s quotations of fine art as instruments of dissent against iconicity in the cultural and creative spheres, one shouldn’t forget that the criticism in these quotations possess persuasive force to a large extent because Lichtenstein himself is well-versed the history and practices of fine art—academic and avant-garde. Decades later, needless to say, his paintings are regarded as ingenious and seminal achievements themselves worthy of being written into textbooks. In 1973’s Artist’s Studio—Look Mickey, Lichtenstein quotes his own 1961 painting Look Mickey,1 realizing upon retrospection that the iconic status his own works have earned in time. To study a Lichtenstein restatement of fine art is therefore to be aware of the inevitable human scheme that derives value and significance from time-credited forms. Lichtenstein was mindful of this scheme in the 1960s when icons began to assert an unprecedented importance in quotidian life, we today should also be alert to how active we are in forging such a mechanism, and how deep we are submerged in one.

Sara Doris, “Roy Lichtenstein’s Retromodernism,” American Art 28, no.2:(Summer 2014), 99.

NAR | 28

RED AND WHITE BRUSHSTROKES, 1966 ROY LICHTENSTEIN

CITATIONS Alloway, Lawrence. Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983. Doris, Sara. “Roy Lichtenstein’s Retromodernism.” American Art 28, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 88- 105. Art & Architecture Source, EBSCOhost (accessed April 12, 2017). Greenhalgh, Adam. ““Not a Man but a God”: The Apotheosis of Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington.” Winterthur Portfolio 41, no. 4 (2007): 269-304. doi:10.1086/523020. Hamilton, George Heard. Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral. London: Oxford University Press, 1960. Hickey, Dave. Roy Lichtenstein Brushstrokes: Four Decades. New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2001. Joselit, David. American Art Since 1945. United King dom: Thames & Hudson, 2003. Stich, Sidra. Made in U.S.A: An Americanization in Modern Art, the ‘50s & ‘60s. Berkeley: Univ. Art Museum Univ. of California, 1987. Trottenberg, Mark. “Roy Lichtenstein: Tokyo Brush strokes.” Kanopy Streaming, 29:36. 2015. https://yale.kanopystreaming.com/video/ roy-lichtenstein-tokyo-brushstrokes

THE LEGENDS OF ANTHROPOPHAGY Emily Hollingworth | Northwestern University ‘19

arsila Do Amaral was a prominent Brazilian artist best known for her principal role in the movement of Antropofagía, or Anthropophagy. This movement was grounded in the concept of artistic cannibalization of European modernist art aesthetics that is then recontextualized and exported as “exotic” in order to challenge the perception of Brazilian art in Europe. In this essay, I will examine how Tarsila cannibalized the work of Constantin Brancusi using the examples of Brancusi’s Leda (1920) and Tarsila’s A Cuca (1924). In 1923, Tarsila traveled to Paris and was introduced to several modernists including Constantin Brancusi. Tarsila learned from his works by visiting his studio, and her interaction with Brancusi led to regurgitations of his style seen in her work. Specifically, she employed a similar reduction of form to simple shapes and colors which results in visual simplification of the subject of the work. Both Brancusi and Tarsila create smooth, rounded forms that play with light in an aesthetically similar way. Tarsila sent a letter to her family about her new friend Brancusi writing, “you cannot imagine how much I learned from talking to this man. He…lives holed up in his studio, like some apostle…making a true religion of his art.”1 It seems that Brancusi had a significant impact on Tarsila, and this letter supports the claim that Tarsila was influenced by Brancusi’s artwork. Brancusi was a well-known sculptor in France at the time. His work was simplistic not only in shape, but also in subject matter. In each work of art, he usually used one material, one color, and depicted only one object, concept, or narrative. An example of Brancusi’s reduction of form is Stephanie D’Alessandro, “A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy,” Tarsila Do Amaral Inventing Modern Art in Brazil. 1

his sculpture, Leda (1920). This piece is inspired by a Greek myth that tells the story of Zeus seducing a beautiful woman named Leda by turning himself into a swan.2 Brancusi explains “[he] never could imagine a male being turned into a swan, impossible, but a woman, yes, quite easily.”3 Therefore, the swan is named “Leda” rather than “Zeus,” as the story would suggest. The sculpture does, in fact, have feminine qualities. The work is made of smooth white stone that is graceful and elegant, yet strong. The body of the abstracted swan is egg-shaped with a narrowing at one end to signify the tail, and a widening at the other to suggest the breast of the bird. Connected to the body is a rounded triangular shape that implies a neck, head, and beak at each point of the triangle. Although the contour of the object resembles a swan, there is nothing explicit that denotes this as a bird. Each element has been simplified and abstracted down to its most basic form. Brancusi carved all his work by hand and used found objects like wood or stone because he did not have enough money for materials.4 The meticulous work that went into each one of his sculptures emphasizes the labor that went in to making the artwork. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was increased labor deskilling and mass production due to industrialization. Including such simplistic forms such as Leda in an art exhibit draws attention to the maker and implicitly encourages the viewer to consider the labor that went into products made around them outside the gallery and what is keeping those objects from being considered as art. “Leda, c. 1920,” The Art Institute of Chicago, accessed November 17, 2017, http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/79382. 3 “Leda, c. 1920,” The Art Institute of Chicago 4 Hal Foster et al., “Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism,” (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016). 2

NAR | 29

A CUCA,1924 TARSILA DO AMARAL

The entire surface of the sculpture is smooth and soft, yet it rests on a rough platform made of cement. This material contrast emphasizes even more the gracefulness of the swan. As the viewer walks around Leda, they see the shadows change and the light hit the swan from various angles. This play of light mixed with the rounded shape on a flat surface emulates a swan in water. These rounded shapes can be found in much of Brancusi’s other work such as The Beginning of the World (1920) and Sculpture for the Blind (1920). Tarsila emulates this rounded quality of Brancusi’s work in each of the figures and objects in A Cuca which was painted in 1924—one year after she visited Brancusi’s studio in France. Tarsila depicts subjects in her work by using gradient shades of paint that begin with a dark outline of the figure that fades NAR | 30

into a lighter shade in the middle. This technique denotes roundness and mimics the way Brancusi’s sculptures reflect light. A Cuca depicts four creatures surrounded by vegetation, the largest of which is an orange beast on the left of the image. The creature’s large, shining eyes, and the small green frog looking up it, resemble the egg shape that is seen in Brancusi’s works previously mentioned. Furthermore, the beast’s head is reminiscent of the shape of body of the swan depicted in Leda. The combination of the vivid colors, mystical creatures, and abstracted forms transports the viewer to a fantasy land that was somewhat fetishized in Europe. Europeans saw Tarsila’s work as exotic, and they were infatuated with how Brazil was portrayed. Tarsila played into this fetish by framing A Cuca in a deliberately ‘primitive’ style using wood that was carved

to look like snake skin.1 The contrast of the brightly colored image and the organic wooden frame highlight the way Tarsila is playing with the expectations of exoticism Europeans have of Brazilian culture. A Cuca, like Leda, depicts a character from a Brazilian myth that was commonly told to children to encourage them to go to bed. The image itself is painted in bright colors and simple shapes that are easy to read which emulates a children’s story book. “A Cuca” is a mythical creature in the form of a disgusting crocodile woman who will punish children who are disobedient.2 The now popularized Brazilian myth originates from the Portuguese legend of “coca,” the dragon.3 This myth was brought to the region when Portugal colonized Brazil in the 16th century.4 Although the myth originates from a European source, “cuca” in Brazil’s indigenous language, Tupi, means “to swallow something with a single gulp.”5 Tarsila, as a Brazilian woman, would have been fully aware of this translation and its implications as it relates to Anthropophagy. She uses this once Portuguese myth to create something she can export as “Brazilian.” Additionally, by painting this subject with the style of Brancusi in mind, Tarsila is cannibalizing not only the Portuguese culture, but also the European modernist art aesthetics that are seen Brancusi’s works. The fact that the word “cuca” means “swallow” is yet another layer of ingestion that builds upon to this concept of Anthropophagy. Tarsila, though she learned from Brancusi, had a fundamentally different style than the sculptor. Tarsila used bright colors, hard lines, and often painted crowded compositions, whereas Brancusi worked with a monochromatic color palate and ultra-simplified forms. However, there are clear similarities to draw between the two artists. After meeting Brancusi, 1

Michele Greet, “Devouring Surrealism: Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu,” Papers of Surrealism, no. 11 (Spring 2015). 2 “The Legend of the Cuca,” Transparent.com Blogs, accessed November 17, 2017, https://blogs.transparent.com/portuguese/ the-legend-of-the-cuca/. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

Tarsila reframed his technique of reduction of form in her works by incorporating them into the structure of her figures. She ingested the roundedness and quality of light from viewing Brancusi’s work and regurgitated something that, in Europe, was seen as “exotic” and consequently laid the foundation for the movement of Anthropophagy.

LEDA, 1920 CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

CITATIONS D’Alessandro, Stephanie. “A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy.” Tarsila Do Amaral Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, 38-51. Foster, Hal, Rosalind E. Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, B. H. D. Buchloh, and David Joselit. “Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism.” London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. Greet, Michele. “Devouring Surrealism: Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu.” Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11 (Spring 2015). Accessed November 7, 2017. “Leda, c. 1920.” The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed November 17, 2017. http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/ artwork/79382. “The Legend of the Cuca.” Transparent.com Blogs. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://blogs.transparent.com/portuguese/the-legend-of-the-cuca/.

NAR | 31

CHRIST AND THE LAMB, 1988 JEFF KOONS

NAR | 32

A GOLDEN “RELIC” FOR THE AGES: ACCEPTANCE, APPROPRIATION AND SACRISTY IN CHRIST AND THE LAMB Emily Kappes | Northwestern University ‘18

t isn’t exactly polarizing to say that Jeff Koons’ art demands attention; from statements like Hanging Heart (Celebration Series; 1994-2006), to smaller works, like Poodle (Made in Heaven Series; 1991), these works captivate. Even in a museum space, th works announce their presence; in The Art Institute of Chicago, three of his works – Woman in Tub, Bourgeois Bust (Jeff and Ilona), and Christ and The Lamb – share a space with contemporary greats, including works by Murakami and Hirst, yet somehow these three pieces shine as the highlights. Part of Koons’ magic lies in his ability to appropriate ideas – material, social, political – of “the past”, and cast these elements for a more “modern” taste. One particular work that demonstrates this translation is Christ and the Lamb, a work from Koons’ 1988 Banality series, and the focus of this essay. This essay will explore how – and, more deeply, why – Christ and the Lamb not only borrows elements of Christian iconographic practices and Baroque design, but fuses these two elements together , a dichotomy that ultimately explores the relationship between religion, kitsch and acceptance in relation to the rest of the Banality series. Obviously, Banality is rooted in Koons’ own experiences in childhood; he even describes some of these pieces as autobiographical. However, Banality goes beyond an “autobiographical” viewpoint.1 What this essay will attempt to illuminate is the relationship between the new and the old in Christ and the Lamb; the appropriation of “the Jeff Koons and Theodora Vischer. Jeff Koons (Hatje Cantz: 2012), 89. 1

past” – religion, the class system, materials – for the present; a mass audience. This argument will extend to other pieces in the series, including the Christ-like treatment of the “pop star” figure in a work from the same series, Michael Jackson and Bubbles. More generally, though, the essay will tackle why the Banality series is not only a commentary on our contemporary culture and consumption, but also a commentary on ideas surrounding acceptance in today’s America. Completed as three separate editions plus one AP in 1988, Christ and the Lamb abstracts a more traditional representation of Christ, resulting in an elaborate, almost garish display of modern iconography; the mirrored surfaces and gilded wooden framework outlines what appears to be a Christ figure, defined loosely by both the shape of the work itself, and by the association of the work’s materiality with traditional Christian elements of display. It is not difficult to identify Christ’s head, a roughly circular piece of mirror at the top of the work accented with a Rococo-style flourish of robust, golden curvatures. Upon moving downwards, however, the body of the work loses definite shape; there are protrusions – accented again by the gilded frame – that suggest an elbow, or a knee, but it becomes unclear what definitely represents Christ’s own figure, and what represents that of the lamb. This haziness is important in the works depiction of religion, which will be discussed later. The work is also quite large, measuring at 200.7 x 139.7 x 17.8 cm. This notable size forces one to interact withthe work on a fundamentally personal scale; it demands not only recognition from the viewer, but NAR | 33

contemplation. Before analyzing Christ and the Lamb thematically, it is important to understand its placement within Koons’ career and artistic development. The idea of “the series” remains a fundamental practice of Koons; this conceptual practice “provides a panorama of [Koons’] artistic concept,” according to Sam Keller and Theodora Vischer.1 The artist completed Christ and The Lamb as a part of his 1988 series, Banality. If one could separate and compartmentalize Koons’ amalgamation of series into singular identities and viewpoints, Banality represented the importance of acceptance; the desire to view one’s identity and past as perfection.2 The series was not so much a departure from judgment and classist ideologies than it was recognition of all tastes. To achieve this message, as suggested in Ingrid Sischy’s essay, Jeff Koons’ World, Koons challenged ideas surrounding this acceptance through combining and interchanging vehicles of taste and kitsch; confusing representations of “high” with representations of “the low”. In Naked, Koons used porcelain to fabricate a kitsch display of friendship between two young children; in Ushering in Banality, he used polychromed wood to again display a childlike, base scene. Koons found this dichotomy ripe for exploration, especially with regards to elements of his past. “In Banality,” Koons explained in a 2003 interview, “I was looking at mass imagery and at my environment. For Ushering in Banality, I saw a postcard of a kid pushing a pig. I saw it as autobiographical, since I come from Pennsylvania. It did not matter to me if people enjoyed the work or accepted it, but I really felt that God was on my side.”3 Can it be said, then, that Banality was purely a serendipitous accident in representation that ultimately resulted this deeper dichotomy of semiotics? Hardly. In the eyes of Sischy, and even the artist himself, this choice of duality was far from accidental. “The ubiquitous criticism of this work as kitsch played into Sam Keller and Theodora Vischer. “Forward and Acknowledgements.” In Jeff Koons (Hatje Cantz: 2012), 7. 2 Ibid. 3 Koons and Vischer, “Jeff Koons,” 89. 5 Ingrid Sischy. “Jeff Koons’ World.” in Jeff Koons (Taschen: 2009), 13. 6 Koons, Jeff Koons, 252 1

NAR | 34

Koons’ very point,” Sischy argues. “He created the objects precisely because of their power to represent collective taste, and he wanted them to be catalysts for self-acceptance. “I was asking people to give in to their past, to let go of their guilt and shame,” [Koons] remembers.4 Moreover, Koons didn’t just create Banality to represent his own past, but the cultural past of a larger public. “Everything here [in Banality] is a metaphor for the viewer’s cultural guilt and shame,” Koons explained. “Art can be a horrible discriminator. It can be used either to be uplifting and to give self-empowerment, or to debase people and disempower them. And on the tightrope in between, there is one’s cultural history. These images are aspects from my own, but everybody’s cultural history is perfect, it can’t be anything other than what it is – it is absolute perfection.”5 That is not to say that every work produced for Banality utilizes this duality; Christ and the Lamb is among few works that do not directly contain elements of kitsch in its punch line. Instead, the work finds potency through its use of religious iconography. Material elements also mattered quite a lot to the success of Banality. Koons acknowledged the significance of two primary mediums– porcelain, and wood – in a 2012 interview with Theodora Vischer. Porcelain, in the eyes of Koons, represented social mobility – or, more specifically, the democratization of the medium as a result of changing social conditions. “Porcelain used to come from the king’s kitchen,” explains Koons, “and only if you were of nobility you had porcelain. But in the present-day world, all of us can have porcelain; it’s become democratized, and we can all own a little porcelain dish.” In contrast, Koons used wood to emphasize the spiritual nature of a work; this choice obviously indirectly influences the intended message of our featured work. “They say [wood] continues to live after being cut, that it’s a living material,” Koons explained to Vischer. “The churches always used wood. I was trying to express these aspects of the social world and of the internal becoming external, by bringing internal, biological life into 4

Koons and Vischer, “Jeff Koons,” 89. Ingrid Sischy. “Jeff Koons’ World.” in Jeff Koons (Taschen: 2009), 13. 5

different external areas.”1 This intersection of materiality with cultural significance becomes salient when dealing with more specific works, including Christ and the Lamb. One can even extend this survey of materiality through references to – and impact of – influences of the Baroque and Rococo style. This influence may very well be a result of Koons’ brief residency in Munich, where he found influence in Baroque and Rococo churches.2 In many forms, ideas propagated by Baroque and Rococo period artwork echo similar sentiments – and forms of communicating these sentiments - as Banality. In his essay, For Eternity, Eckhard Schneider explores the salience of the Baroque style, arguing that, “...with its golden splendor, its decorative opulence, and its luxurious promise of a supernatural realm, the Baroque afforded the public, by way of a sublime form of compensation; a spiritual experience.”3 Expanding his argument to Banality, Schneider argued that the sort of artistic style and grandeur affiliated with these periods seduced Koons, impacting his own way of thinking about and producing artwork. “Koons applied this thought to his Banality series with meticulous rigor,” Schneider argued, “creating figures made of colorfully glazed porcelain and carved wood, sumptuously gilded and decorated with kitsch colorfulness [...] Koons was sweetening the transition from the banal to the sacred for the beholder, with a well-achieved synthesis of overwhelming splendor and resonance with personal taste.”4 It was within this symphony of taste, kitsch and Baroque influence that Koons found a place for his series. How then, given this extensive understanding of Banality, do we specifically view Christ and the Lamb through this lens of “collective taste” established by its associated series? And what themes exist in the work itself? As mentioned previously, themes of acceptance find great importance within the series. 1

Koons, Jeff Koons, 252. Theodora Vischer. “Dialogues on Self-Acceptance: Jeff Koons about Himself and his Work From Conversations with the Artist, New York, Early February 2012, Part I.” in Jeff Koons (Hatje Cantz: 2012), 25. 3 Eckhard Schneider. “For Eternity.” in Jeff Koons (Taschen: 2009), 48. 4 Schneider, “For Eternity,” 48. 2

But it is ideas surrounding religion and sacristy that hold a particular level of salience in Christ and the Lamb. In Alexander Nagel’s essay, Objects That Are Only Boundaries, the author explores how traditional Christian relics find success in their democratization of sacristy. With relics, “anything might be touched by God, recognized as such, and acquire a halo of real gold.”5 Nagel attributes the success of The Church not by their ability to preach humility, but their success in, “making humble things glitter.”6 And, by no coincidence, that’s exactly what Christ and the Lamb does. When one addresses Christ and the Lamb, they are met with both a sumptuous display of gilded framework, and a reflection of themselves. The polychromed wood found in Christ and the Lamb is clearly a nod to traditional decorative techniques found in churches, and, more specifically, relics, but the ability to see oneself in what is supposed to be a representation of Christ entirely reduces the omnipresent power of the Christ figure. We see ourselves in one of the most sacred iconographies of Christianity; it is both humbling, and empowering. More importantly, it is not intended to debase the value of Christianity, but rather to just place the viewer within this religious canon. Koons simply wants to recognize Christianity in the work and its “gleaming presence”.7 Perhaps it is fair to say, then, that Koons intended for Christ and the Lamb to be viewed as a contemporary relic. Or, more abstractly, he intended for the work to masquerade as one. Of course, the work itself is not sacred; it is a contemporary representation of Christ, not an actual relic. As mentioned previously, the work does not attempt to delineate Christ’s figure; rather, Christ and the Lamb is a vague outline of larger, religious iconography. This is entirely purposeful. The work is not necessarily about the accuracy of religion here; Koons is choosing to represent Christ with this level of ambiguity to avoid overshadowing other points of reference, like the mirrored surface, and its larger placement in Banality as a whole. More specifically, in creating a sense of ambiguity around 5

Ibid. Alexander Nagel. “Objects That Are Only Boundaries,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 244. 7 Nagel, “Objects That Are Only Boundaries,” 244. 6

NAR | 35

the subject itself, Christ and the Lamb successfully reflects the spiritual alongside contemporary kitsch and popular culture; it becomes a relic that not only can represent and comment on spirituality and religion, but consumer culture as well. Yet, despite these contemporary social and consumer interjections projected onto the work by Koons himself, Christ and the Lamb continues to accomplish what many relics do: it relieves. It supports. And it does so without judgment. Interviews with Koons only confirm this intended message to be accurate. “At the core I would have some figures, theological figures, to make people feel a sense of spiritual support, that is okay to give in to what you respond to,” explained Koons.1 Works like St. Jean the Baptist, or Buster Keaton, only furthered this message of spiritual support as established by Christ and The Lamb. Beyond traditional iconography, Koons also projected this idea of sacristy onto more contemporary figures, developing them into contemporary relics for contemporary audiences. One such figure is Michael Jackson in Koons’ piece, Michael Jackson and Bubbles. In multiple interviews, Koons admitted to admiring the singer; so much so, in fact, that if he could be one other living person, it would be Michael Jackson.2 The work itself, according to Scott Rothkopf, “captured all this,” – the fame, ghoulish fall, and talent of the musician – “with a synthetic brilliance, casting the duo as a pieta for an age when pop stars inspire truly religious fervor.”3 This representation of a popular figure as a contemporary Pietà so beautifully illustrates and solidifies the forces used in Christ in the Lamb, and in the rest of the Banality series: the appropriation of “the past” – religion, iconography, and materials – for the present, with the hopes of inspiring acceptance in its audience. This fervent examination of Christ and the Lamb, and, more broadly, Banality, summons larger questions pertaining to the environment in which the Keller and Vischer, “Forward and Acknowledgements,” 7. Vischer, “Dialogues on Self-Acceptance: Jeff Koons about Himself and his Work From Conversations with the Artist, New York, Early February 2012, Part I,” 24. 3 Scott Rothkopf. “No Limits.” In Jeff Koons (Taschen: 2009), 22. 16 Rothkopf, “No Limits,” 22. 1 2

NAR | 36

work itself was produced in; can it be inferred that Koons’ accurately reflects the extent to which one can find acceptance in the climate that constitutes contemporary America? Or, is the series more of a cry for change and acceptance in a tense political, cultural and social environment? One could argue it is both; a promising gleam of acceptance, and an indication of a larger social problem, simultaneously. Koons’ works very much address and challenge the human experience; yet, without the context of other works, and even other series, they lose their potency. Individual works are important, yet they require the other works in a series, and even beyond that, the other works in the rest of his career – to fully convey their meaning. Acknowledging the previously established canon of ideas surrounding this experience only enriches the meaning of the series – and the specific work itself. In the case of Christ and the Lamb, Koons’ thoughts on Banality help develop an understanding for how the artist wishes to view the human experience. But, with the introduction of thematic reasoning and ideas behind his 1986 series, Luxury and Degradation, thematic elements and the meanings behind both Christ and the Lamb and Banality are enriched. In his interview with Theodora Vischer, Koons discussed this introduction of acceptance in Banality as a response to the refusal of accepting one’s own identity, a habit he saw while completing Luxury and Degradation. “When I did the Luxury and Degradation series, I was always looking at ads, and I noticed that, with regard to the thing people responded to in advertising, they often neither accepted themselves nor their own class. In the Banality show I was just trying to say that whatever you respond to is perfect, that your history and your own cultural background are perfect.”4 The focus towards acceptance in Banality is omnipresent; but it would be folly not to acknowledge the eeriness of this acceptance within the context of its subject matter. If one is meant to see acceptance of one’s past in these works, to what extent are there limits? To conclude, this essay explored how – and, Vischer,” Dialogues on Self-Acceptance: Jeff Koons about Himself and his Work From Conversations with the Artist, New York, Early February 2012, Part I,” 24. 4

MICHAEL JACKSON AND BUBBLES, 1988 JEFF KOONS

more deeply, why – Christ and the Lamb not only borrows elements of Christian iconographic practices and Baroque design, but fuses these two elements together into a representation of a pseudo-relic. This strange dichotomy ultimately explores the relationship between religion, kitsch and acceptance in relation to the rest of the Banality series. Moreover, by discussing the relationship between the new and the old in Christ and the Lamb; the appropriation of “the past” – religion, the class system, materials – for the present, the nature of Christ in the Lamb within the context of Banality reveals itself; how the work, and, more broadly, the series, is not only a commentary on our contemporary culture and consumption, but also a commentary on ideas surrounding acceptance in today’s America.

CITATIONS Keller, Sam and Theodora Vischer. “Forward and Acknowledge ments.” Jeff Koons. pp 7-8. Hatje Cantz. Print. Koons, Jeff, and Theodora Vischer. Jeff Koons. Riehen/Basel, Switzerland: Hatje Cantz, 2012.89. Print. Koons, Jeff, Hans Werner, Katy Holzwarth, Ingrid Sischy, Katy Siegel, and Schneider Eckhard Jeff Koons / Edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth; with Texts by Katy Siegel, Ingrid Sischy, Eckhard Schneider; and Statements by Jeff Koons. Köln: Taschen, 2009. Print. Nagel, Alexander. “Objects That Are Only Boundaries.” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective. pp 244. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014. Print. Rothkopf, Scott. “No Limits.” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective. pp 22. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014. Print. Sischy, Ingrid. “Jeff Koons’ World.” Jeff Koons. pp 13. Köln: Taschen, 2009. Print. Schneider, Eckhard. “For Eternity.” Jeff Koons. pp 48. Köln: Taschen, 2009. Print. Vischer, Theodora. “Dialogues on Self-Acceptance: Jeff Koons about Himself and his Work From Conversations with the Artist, New York, Early February 2012, Part I.” Jeff Koons. pp. 11-36. Hatje Cantz, 2012. Print.

NAR | 37

THE GHOST OF LOUIS: NUMBER 64’S IMPERFECT NATURAL BEAUTY AND THE ARTIST’S RECEDING HAND

Justin Ross Muchnick | Stanford Universtiy ‘18

he 1950s saw an American art movement dominated by the gestural. Harold Rosenberg waxed lyrical about de Kooning’s emphatic actions in the arena that was the canvas, while Hans Namuth captured in his photographs the strenuous exertion of Pollock, arched forward in an athletic stance as he showered down paint from an industrial brush in his outstretched arm. Elsewhere, Clyfford Still applied aggressive, indecipherable shards of pigment with a palette knife, and Robert Motherwell created towering, testicular odes to the late Spanish Republic. And yet, in the wake of this grand forcefulness and amidst this pulsating energy, Morris Louis rose to prominence. While many of his canvases were still of the colossal scale of some of these other 1950s abstract expressionists, his pictures themselves make contact with life in a very different way. In Number 64, on display at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Morris Louis exhibits the quiet, unpolished perfection of natural beauty and in doing so allows his presence to recede into ghostliness as nature speaks for itself. The earthen, brown-blue-green tones of Number 64 flow in arching cascades down the canvas. Or they sprout gracefully up from the darkened and heavier pools at the canvas’ bottom. Or they emanate from the warmer, flickering yellow seeds in the bottom center and center-right. This picture challenges viewers who try to evaluate the movement of paint across its canvas. There seems to be a clear verticality to its structure, but then there are the rolling, horizontal, hill-like formations at the top of the canvas. The picture gains a quality of flatness from Louis’ technique NAR | 38

of staining pigment directly onto the unprimed canvas, yet the canvas still feels so richly layered. Delicate pinks and blue-greens peek out from behind the veil in the upper right, and full, robust dark olive-browns wash up and down the left side. Number 64, like so many of Louis’ expertly-handled veils from 1958 and 1959, defies cursory description and assumes a quality of complex, transcendent, natural—but somehow controlled—beauty. This picture is post-painterly, and viewers can almost feel Louis’ artistic hand recede to allow the properties of the paint itself speak to them like the quietly awe-inspiring grace of the natural world would. Louis, in essence, uses his utter control and mastery of his mode of painting to make viewers forget the he even exists as an entity. Instead of noticing the craftsmanship or genius of the artist, viewers are transfixed by the timeless, unpolished perfection writ large before them. On a surface level, this phenomenon is likely tied to Number 64’s blending of earthy hues. The amorphous fluidity of the various ochers, umbers, hazels, and chestnut browns evoke wet, soft soil; the muted blues and greens of the patch in the bottom-center-right lick and lap like the gentle currents of a small stream. Additionally, though, Number 64’s reverence for the natural canvas enhances the effect of Louis’ receding hand. The veil shape that serves as the picture’s central focus is bordered on three sides by bare canvas, but this blankness does not read as some pedestrian, ignoble margin. On the contrary, it shows respect for that which is untouched by man. To understand this sentiment most fully, one can look to Number 64’s corners: they are all bare. The top two

NUMBER 64, 1958 MORRIS LOUIS

PENDULUM, 1954 MORRIS LOUIS

NAR | 39

ONEMENT, I, 1948, BARNETT NEWMAN

are clearly left unstained, and the colorful veil tapers off just inches before reaching the bottom two. These corners are not pulsating, electrically-charged pockets of energy; they are not like those of the sublime pictures of Jackson Pollock’s transcendent 1947 suite. Instead, they are a celebration of naked, naturalistic sensibilities. They suggest that the force that sustains Number 64, the force that pins it in place and holds it up, is the force of pristine natural perfection. No man’s hand can spoil what it has not touched, and likewise no human intervention has refashioned the power of the natural canvas. And even in the places where paint interacts with canvas in Number 64, it seeks not to overpower in the way man would but to coexist like natural organisms do. Because the pigment is stained into the canvas, as opposed to layered atop it, the veil of Number 64 maintains the coarse cloth texture of unprimed canvas. Small frays and snags abound, on both the stained and unstained parts of the canvas. The pigment does not attempt to hide the canvas’ imperfections; rather, it celebrates them. The stained canvas still retains elements of its original, untouched state—even when paint touches it. NAR | 40

TAPER AND SPREAD, 1959 MORRIS LOUIS

And while both the color palette and the bare, unprimed canvas point similarly to Number 64’s natural beauty, visitors to the Anderson Collection can most significantly perceive the post-painterly imperfect perfections of this work through the contrast provided by another Louis hanging nearby. If museum-goers turn ninety degrees to their right from Number 64, they see Louis’ 1954 work entitled Pendulum. An earlier attempt at Louis’ distinct staining technique, Pendulum does not quite capture the same natural properties of quiet presence, quiet grace. The picture hints at these ideas, with its simultaneously depthless and multilayered composition and its mystically red-green-purple earthen tones, but it does not exactly step outside the bounds of time to envelop a viewer in infinite natural beauty. Though Pendulum is still markedly post-painterly and does not begin to approach the gestural action painting of de Kooning or Pollock, it is still conscious of, even embracing, the fact that it is a product of an artist at work. The paint seems more applied to the canvas, rather than flowing down it. Especially along the top third of the canvas, flecks of black paint are spattered—though not close

to the degree of one of Pollock’s drip paintings and not in a way that Rosenberg would mark as “action painting,” certainly still in a not entirely organic manner. This work strives for the natural perfection Louis will achieve later on in his career, yet it is self-aware enough to understand that it is not wholly natural. As a pendulum itself is a manmade tool that harnesses the gravitational force of nature to carry out its function, Pendulum is a manmade picture that has harnessed gravity to allow Louis to pour pigment on the canvas. Pendulum is distinctly manmade, but it is a synthesis of natural power and the ideas of man. It is against this backdrop that Number 64’s natural presence takes shape more fully. The artist here has succeeded in removing himself, leaving viewers face-to-face with an embodiment of simple natural grace. And yet, the story is not quite so straightforward. While almost all trace of Louis’ hand at work has been erased, the artist has indeed left a fascinating, deeply personal, and human mark on this canvas. In the precise center of Number 64, something that could perhaps be described as a long smudge mark streaks vertically down the canvas. Another less pronounced, less textured, but still undeniably present smudge trails down the center-right. Interestingly, although Louis was prone to roll and fold larger paintings such as those in his “unfurled” series, the marks on Number 64 were not likely the result of Louis’ folding of the canvas. While he had to position his larger “unfurled” canvases creatively in his dining room-turned-studio, veils such as Number 64 (measuring about twelve and one-third feet by seven and two-thirds feet) actually fit—albeit snugly—in his makeshift workspace.1 The marks on Number 64 are in fact a result of the two vertical braces, one in the center and one about three feet to the right, on one of the work stretchers atop which Louis was known to place his paintings.2 In total, fifty-seven of Louis’ 1958-59 veils feature these stretcher marks.3 Although these marks might not exactly qualify as “painterly” in the gestural sense 1

Diane Upright, “The Technique of Morris Louis,” in Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings (New York: Abrams, 1985), reproduced online by the Maryland Institute College of Art. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

of the term, they are made by a piece of equipment used to aid a painter in his craft, so these streaks on Number 64 seem at first glance a failure of Louis to fully remove himself: the blatantly streaked canvas prevents the artist’s touch from fully fading away. But obviously, these marks cannot simply be unavoidable flaws that an unsatisfied Louis was forced to deal with; this much can be inferred from Louis’ serious demeanor in his artistic endeavors. According to art historian Michael Fried, Louis “continually destroyed large numbers of pictures that failed to satisfy him,”4 so if Louis disliked the idea of a streaked canvas, no streaked Louis canvases would exist. Nevertheless, while these streaks were presumably not a resigned concession by Louis, the question remains as to why he would include them. And in fact, one might attempt to find an answer by reading these streaks not as the residue of the artist’s hand but as another attempt to make contact with the intrinsic beauty of nature. The center streak feels bumpy, with its uneven gradations of weight, and evokes the texture of spinal column with distinct but connected vertebrae. It serves also as a figurative backbone of the picture, offering a sense of bilateral symmetry found in the natural world and allowing color and shape to extend, radiate, and fall outward from it. To a lesser extent, the fainter off-center streak serves the same purpose for the right side of the picture. The fact that there is not a third streak bisecting the left side seems to deny the viewer any sense of too-precise, manmade order. Instead of feeling artificially transected or subdivided, instead of feeling like a grid, the painting gains a sensation of natural unevenness even as these perfectly vertical lines streak down the canvas. Moreover, these vertical streaks seem to be an allusion to Barnett Newman’s famous zips, with Louis strongly misreading the awe-inspiring presence of Newman’s zips in order to affirm the natural, post-painterly quality of his own streaks. From a historical standpoint, it is clear that Louis was acutely familiar with Newman’s work. In fact, Louis’ first 4

Michael Fried, “Blue Veil by Morris Louis,” in Acquisitions (Fogg Art Museum) No. 1965 (Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard Univeristy, 1965), 177.

NAR | 41

show of his 1958-59 veil series was held at the New York-based art dealer and gallery French & Company in April 1959, the very same space where, just months prior, Barnett Newman had exhibited his work after a decade-long hiatus from New York shows.1 Though in this sense Louis’ veils literally followed Newman’s work, the contrast between Louis’ streaks and Newman’s zips reveals the essence of Number 64. The zip of Newman’s Onement, I, for example, is a heavy, painterly gesture, applied by a palette knife as the picture’s top layer, carrying an electrifying and crystallizing sense of “right here, right now.” The streaks on Number 64, however, are subtle, silently graceful, made from depressions in the canvas from behind. Just as Louis himself is a ghost who, though deeply intertwined with the creation of his work, has seen his hand recede from the canvas even as his spirit inhabits it, so too are his streaks ghostly. They exist behind the canvas, a spectral remnant of those stretcher braces that supported the painting in its creation. Unlike Onement, I’s zip—a final coating to the painting, a product of addition—Number 64’s streaks are more characteristic of subtraction, a representation of the artist’s ability to escape that which he has created. Though they may remind viewers that Number 64 is on the most literal level a manmade object, in doing so it could be argued that the streaks allow the picture to exist as a gateway into the natural world. They are Louis’ signature, a signature reduced to a ghostly apparition, a signature that perhaps paradoxically prioritizes the painting over the artist. To better understand the significance of these streaks, it would be helpful to turn to one other Louis painting. In late 1959, Louis painted a picture entitled Taper and Spread. Now in the collection of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, this painting pares Louis’ message about the natural, understated streak down to its simplest and most elegant. Between large fields of black and orange lie two streak-like bands, not quite vertical but rather gently undulating. These streaks are actually just bare canvas, formed by the complete absence of stained pigment, 1

Diane Upright, “The Emergence of Morris Louis,” in Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings (New York: Abrams, 1985), reproduced online by the Maryland Institute College of Art.

NAR | 42

and they complement the natural, ghostly, subtractive effect of Number 64’s streaks. They are imperfectly natural, with their gradual non-vertical ebb and flow calling to mind images of a winding creek or a serene set of rolling ocean waves. And they are also a ghostly signature, a testament to the infinite creative power of natural nothingness. They are nothing, they are ghostly, naked canvas, yet they simultaneously offer a subtle window into the imperfect beauty of nature. And this effect, though achieved through quite different means, echoes that of Number 64’s spectral backbones. Thus, Number 64 enables viewers to gaze into the beautiful and inherently flawed visage of nature while the painter’s ghostly apparition lingers quietly behind the canvas. In an age of painterly gesture, Louis’ grandest gesticulation is one of noiseless removal. And, somewhat enigmatically, this act of deference is what allows his presence to wholly inhabit the recesses of the unprimed canvas. In submitting to nature, has he become synonymous with it? In silencing himself, has he attained immortality? After all, nature is infinite, and ghosts are for eternity.

CITATIONS Fried, Michael. “Blue Veil by Morris Louis.” In Acquisitions (Fogg Art Museum) No. 1965, 177-181. Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1965. Upright, Diane. “The Emergence of Morris Louis.” In Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, 9-34. New York: Abrams, 1985. Reproduced online by the Maryland Institute College of Art, http://morrislouis.org/morrislouis/page/emergence_of_morris_louis. “The Technique of Morris Louis.” In Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, 49-58. New York: Abrams, 1985. Reproduced online by the Maryland Institute College of Art, http:// morrislouis.org/morrislouis/page/technique_of_morris_louis.

FAMILY TIES, URBAN PLANNING, MODERNIZATION: POPE ALEXANDER VII’S PIAZZA DEL POPOLO Katie Rothstein | Northwestern University ‘19

onsignor Fabio Chigi always harbored a passion for architecture and urban development. As early as 1628, Fabio Chigi was involved in the restoration of a chapel at the site of Santa Maria della Pace (Krautheimer 1985, 47). The chapel was originally patronized by Agostino Chigi, Fabio’s ancestor, in 1514 (Krautheimer 1985, 47). Fabio Chigi was also involved in the restoration of Santa Maria del Popolo, where Agostino is buried. When Monsignor Fabio Chigi became Pope Alexander VII in 1655, he pushed for further restoration of Santa Maria del Popolo. The church sits in the Piazza del Popolo, and one of Alexander’s most important achievements as pope and urban planner was the beautification of this piazza. The re-planned Piazza del Popolo and eventual addition of churches Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria di Monte Santo to the piazza were influenced by Alexander’s family ties, desire to plan Rome as a modern city and other contemporary architecture. From the outset, as pope, Alexander sought to make Rome beautiful and accessible for visitors and citizens alike. He was obsessed with the city, the widening of streets and the creation of piazzas (Krautheimer 1985, 81). He cultivated “teatro” in public spaces in the city, animating the space like a stage: “the building itself is the main actor and performs the grand show to be admired by the spectators” (Krautheimer 1985, 6). Alexander kept tight control over building projects during his reign and “all such architectural enterprises he considered his own as much as his architects’ creations” (Krautheimer 1985, 78). In terms of urban planning, he believed that “public squares…are an ornament to the city, aside from filling a public need in the traffic system of a modern

mid-seventeenth century cityscape” (Krautheimer 1985, 47). This belief showed Alexander’s forward-thinking attitude in urban planning and design— he had almost daily contact with the maestri de strade (Krautheimer 1985, 77). The public spaces created during Alexander’s reign were intended “both to fill very urgent practical needs and to present a grand show to the visitor” (Krautheimer 1985, 47). The Piazza del Popolo, as it stood when Alexander became pope, was enclosed on one end by the Porta del Popolo, the gate of Rome welcoming travelers entering from the north. The gate was redesigned by Bernini for the arrival of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1655, fashioned with the inscription “to a happy and fortunate entry, 1655” and the Chigi family symbols (Krautheimer 1985, 120). This is an interesting moment of interaction between the papacy and European nobles. It is particularly notable that Pope Alexander did not plaster his family name explicitly over the gates as other popes did, instead opting for more subdued pictorial references to the gate’s patronage. The square opens before the visitor after the gate, with the Santa Maria del Popolo church and chapels on the left if entering from the north. In the center of the square stands an obelisk, placed in 1589. The square is framed on the south side where the streets split into three: Via del Babuino to the left, Via del Corso through the center and Via del Ripetta veering right. The splitting of these three streets on the south end of the square left behind two unequal “wedges” of land that frame and enclose the square. It was the beautification of the land on these two “wedges” that spurred the larger project of churches later (Krautheimer 1985, 120). In the end, NAR | 43

however, the churches that resulted were not as important to Alexander as the shape of the piazza (Krautheimer 1985, 124). The original intention of the project around 1656, as shown in a drawing that survives from the Vatican Library, was to make the land on the wedges “well-suited to carry porticoes” and clean up the square (Krautheimer 1985, 120). Twin churches came into the picture as early as 1656, and by 1661, Carlo Rainaldi’s approved papal chirograph that survives in the Archivo di Stato in Rome showed the site planned with the intention of placing twin churches on the wedges of land (Krautheimer 1985, 121). As the architect in charge of the site, Rainaldi’s first task was to equalize the irregularities of the site and give the appearance of symmetry (Wittkower and Connors, 1999 104). According to Wittkower, the drawing from the Vatican Library was presumably Rainaldi planning in pencil and attempting to work out the problem of the unequal width of the wedges by making them concave and equal in length. Rainaldi’s original plan called for two symmetrical Greek cross plans, where the “difference in the diameters of the two buildings could be equalized by transepts and chapels slightly unequal in depth, while the domes of both churches would be equal in size, which was essential for a symmetrical impression” (Wittkower 1937, 253). However, in order to make the domes of the churches as large as possible, the Greek cross plan had to be abandoned so that a circle dome would could extend over all of the available space (Wittkower 1937, 253). Yet this plan would have made it obvious that the site of Santa Maria di Monte Santo was much narrower than that of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, rendering the domes visibly different in size (Wittkower 1937, 253). In the end, the dome of Santa Maria di Monte Santo was placed over an elongated oval so that the two domes would appear symmetrical from the square (Wittkower 1937, 253). The plan of Santa Maria dei Miracoli would remain a circle (Wittkower 1937, 253). The façades of the churches as designed by Rainaldi and approved by Alexander in the papal chirograph of 1661 were not carried out as shown. Rainaldi’s original approved design showed a dodecahedron-shaped building with a temple front and a pedNAR | 44

iment backed by an attic. The sharp, geometric edges of the building as drawn in this plan were emphasized by the way entablature traced the columns around the sharp corners. There appear to be entrances or temple fronts on each side of the building, not just the front. Because of the angles of the dodecahedron shape, these doors would have let visitors out of the building at an angle and into the street, an exit path that would have made sense given the oblique streets and shape of the wedges. The ribs of the dome in this plan are traced all the way down the dome, ending in buttresses in the shape of volutes, with statues placed at the base of each volute. Other projects in Rome at the time no doubt influenced the eventual change in the design of the twin façades. Santa Maria della Pace, mentioned above as the location where a Chigi ancestor is buried in a chapel, is considered by Krautheimer to be Alexander’s first major “showpiece” of the papacy. It was named “Pace” in honor of Alexander’s mission to create peace between Spain and France. The church was restored and new façade designed by Pietro da Cortona in 1656. The construction began in the spring of 1657 and was completed by December 1659. It would have been completed before Rainalidi’s first design for the churches in Piazza del Popolo was approved in 1661. Just as in the Piazza del Popolo, the project involved the widening of the piazza in front of the church in order to improve street traffic for the increasing presence of coaches. The new façade transformed the building. Cortona added symmetrical side flanks to the existing building, going so far as to build the façade outward past where the building ended to keep the appearance of symmetry. On one side windows and the apse of the existing church work into Cortona’s new façade, while the other side, although the same in appearance, has no walls behind it and functions as a passageway to the other side of the street. Just as Rainaldi was restricted in the “wedge” sites of the twin churches at Piazza del Popolo, Cortona was restricted by an existing cloister designed by Bramante, the chapel designed by Raphael where Agostino Chigi is buried, and the need to widen streets crowding the area (Krautheimer 1985, 47).

Another important contemporary building to consider is Santa Maria in Campitelli in Rome. This building showcases a similarity of the interior and plan to Santa Maria dei Miracoli, as seen in Wittkower’s rendering (Wittkower 1999, 102). Also designed by Rainaldi and built between 1658 and 1674, the building’ plan was unique in Baroque Rome. Not quite a Greek-cross plan, Rainaldi again had to be inventive with the design because of a constricted site. The placement of chapels in Santa Maria in Campitelli and the rhythm of the chapel size moving from small to large back to small appears like an elongated version of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. The last contemporary example to consider is the Piazza San Pietro, designed by Bernini and completed between 1656 and 1667. In keeping with his “teatro” agenda, Alexander pushed to have the piazza completed during his reign. In the piazza, Bernini created a trapezoidal forecourt in front of Carlo Maderno’s façade. The Piazza San Pietro was the beginning of end of the journey to Rome for pilgrims. Visitors were funneled between Bernini’s three-hundred column travertine portico “arms” into the church to see the tomb of Saint Peter. The Piazza San Pietro offers an interesting contrast when compared with the Piazza del Popolo, as the Piazza San Pietro marked the end of the pilgrim’s journey while the Piazza del Popolo marked the beginning for travelers coming from the north. The Piazza del Popolo is a reverse funnel that dumps the visitor into an open square with three city streets, while the Piazza san Pietro is the opposite funnel, beginning with a wide opening at the end of three city streets and then narrowing to guide the visitor into the church of St. Peter’s. The design for the churches in Piazza del Popolo was not carried out as approved by Alexander in 1661. This may be in part due to Carlo Fontana, a young architect who worked with both Bernini and Rainaldi. Around 1662, Alexander is said to have found Rainaldi’s original design too “High Baroque” (Krautheimer 1985, 122). A drawing survives by Carlo Fontana in the Vatican Library, likely carried out around 1662 after the official approval of Rainaldi’s plan. It shows a design for the twin churches that brings elements of Bernini and classicism to Rainaldi’s

design (Krautheimer 1985, 123). The main difference between Fontana’s drawing and Rainaldi’s original plan is the shift from a pediment against a high attic to a free-standing pediment (Wittkower and Connors 1999, 105). Although Rainaldi remained in charge of the project, Bernini altered and influenced Rainaldi’s original design (Wittkower and Connors 1999, 105). Construction of the left church, Santa Maria di Monte Santo, was turned over to Bernini, while Rainaldi remained in charge of Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Wittkower and Connors 1999, 105). It makes sense that Rainaldi would have been influenced by Bernini and Fontana to update the plan of his original design for the twin churches in the Piazza del Popolo. The original plan has elements similar to the façade of Santa Maria della Pace—a broken pediment, Corinthian pilasters stacking up to columns, and aedicule shape—that are particularly High Baroque. Alexander himself may have been ready for a more forward-thinking design, moving away from something like Santa Maria della Pace and toward more classical designs. For Alexander, however, the churches in the Piazza del Popolo were not as important—they were hardly begun in his lifetime. Rather, it was the shape of the Piazza del Popolo that was his important project (Krautheimer 1985, 124). The way the streets were woven into the piazza signaled a new type of urban planning (Wittkower and Connors 1999, 107), and Alexander ultimately achieved his goal of creating an area that made it feel as though the visitor was “taking in the successive views as from a theatre pit” (Krautheimer 1985, 124).

CITATIONS Krautheimer, Richard. The Rome of Alexander VII: 1655-1667. Princeton (N.J.): Princeton University Press, 1985. Wittkower, Rudolf. “Carlo Rainaldi and the Roman Architecture of the Full Baroque.” The Art Bulletin 19, no. 2 (June 1937): 242-313. Wittkower, Rudolf, and Joseph Connors. The High Baroque: 1625-1675. 6th ed. Vol. 2 of Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750. London: Yale Univ. Press, 1999.

NAR | 45

THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL AND THE ENTITLED MODERN GAZE Kathleen Voight | Yale

he Hudson River School was a loosely adjoined collection of artists working in New York during the mid-19th century, whose work focused on the landscapes of America. The evolution of this artist coalition developed ways of looking at and representing land that came to exemplify approaches and attitudes towards natural spaces in the wake of American modernity. I am interested in examining the ways in which these forms of looking intersect with ideas of possession, ownership, and entitlement, as well as with the colonial gaze. Thomas Cole, regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, in his “Essay on American Scenery,” describes the beauty of a landscape that belongs specifically to the (male) American who beholds it. He writes, “…It is his own land; its beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity – all are his” (Cole 27). In this statement Cole asserts that, even before he has reproduced an image of that which he looks at, the act of looking in itself initiates some feeling of ownership. Gazing out on the “untouched” land, the (male) American assumes entitlement to it purely as a result of his unaffected gaze. Although Cole wrote “Essay on American Scenery” to encourage appreciation for and attentiveness to the natural world, in assuming beauty and contemplation are the most important of the offerings it provides, he disregards that for native people these spaces were more than just an escape from the “meager utilitarianism” of the rapidly urbanizing modern world (Cole 29). By looking at the land in terms of its profits, even those within the currency of sublimity or joy rather than financial gain, the artists of the Hudson River School impressed the colonial gaze upon the landscape of America. The land is sensationalized and idealized. The original occupants are regarded as less than human, “unnatural” impositions that are excluded NAR | 46

from the representations of American wilderness. Cole refers to native inhabitants of this land, only briefly, as “savage beasts” who peopled the gloom of the primeval forests generations ago (Cole 30). Art historian Alan Wallach describes this new mode of looking that characterized the Hudson River School as the “scopic regime of modernity.” This phrase implies the comprehensiveness of the gaze, which extends onto all that is visible and is emphasized by the increased size of the Hudson River School paintings. Simultaneously, it also implies the imposition of the gaze, and the mapping on of modern ideas to a space distinct from that of their creation. The “scopic regime of modernity” struggles to understand these landscapes within its pre-existing framework of what natural spaces were believed to be. The painters of the Hudson River School reinforce conceptions of wilderness as a pure, unpopulated, eternally unchanging source of divine contemplation and false nostalgia for a natural world that never existed. The implications of the “scopic regime of modernity” are further emphasized by Albert Biome’s use of the phrase “magisterial gaze,” which emphasizes a detached, authoritarian means of looking that connotes power over the land (Wallach 79). This form of modern looking is not the passive, unbiased appreciation of the natural world that Cole hoped for, but that that is undoubtedly already wound up in the social and political agendas of its time. Wallach points out features of the allegory of Manifest Destiny and features of panoramic viewing within Frederic Church’s Niagara (Wallach 83). Although he discusses these features independently, it appears that they are more closely linked than is initially obvious. Manifest Destiny is a furthering of the entitlement associated with this new form of looking. In attempting to access the truly complete panoramic

NIAGRA, 1857 FREDERIC CHURCH

view, the entire expanse of land from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean was surveyed and studied. In the process of laying eyes upon each area of the land, these spaces subsequently came into the possession of the American government. All that could be seen (possessed), was seen (possessed). In this, Manifest Destiny exemplifies this mode of seeing that is inextricably linked to the entitlement to that which one sees. The visual possession of land in Hudson River School paintings is furthered emphasized by techniques artists employed to depict a larger scene and to heighten the panoramic illusion. The viewer is often situated at a vantage point that allows for expansive viewing. Furthermore, Cole’s technique of further tilting the horizon line downward positions the viewer in such a way that they gaze down at the land below them. In this, the viewer assumes a place of power above the land they preside over. Inevitably, not only the artist, but also each viewer who assumes this position, takes on the “magisterial gaze.” The act of looking at the painting repeats the act of the artist looking at the physical landscape during the course of the painting’s creation. In this, the viewer of the painting assumes ownership over the land, just as the viewer of the physical landscape does. Thomas Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery” and the works of the Hudson River School raise further questions on the politics of looking, both in reference

to landscapes and otherwise. These questions include but are not limited to: How do dynamics of the modern gaze continue to reinforce systems of power? How does the ability to look continue to manifest as a privilege? How does looking out at expanses of land continue to be reserved for those who are in positions of power? And finally, how do we look at landscape paintings without recreating the narratives in which they were created?

CITATIONS Cole, Thomas, “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), The Native Landscape Reader, ed. Robert E. Grese (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 27-36. Wallach, Alan, “Accounting for the Panoramic in Hudson River School Landscape Painting,” in New World: Creating an American Art, ed. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (Germany: Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hirmer Verlag, 2007), 78-89. Exhibition catalog.

NAR | 47

GYPSY WITH A CIGARETTE, UNDATED Ã&#x2030;DUARD MANET

NAR | 48

GYPSY WITH A CIGARETTE: MANET’S BOHEMIAN MYTH Jianing Zhao | Princeton University ‘20

reated by Eduard Manet around 1862 though never shown in his lifetime,1 Gypsy with a Cigarette is a medium-sized figure painting depicting a dark-skinned, exotically-dressed, cigarette-smoking woman standing in the middle of the foreground, one arm leaning against a black horse, the other hand on her waist, while the background consists of several cropped horse and an open blue sky. This painting was titled Femme mexicaine when first shown as part of Manet’s posthumous inventory in 1883, La bohémienne when sold in 1884, Indienne fumant une cigarette when sold by Degas in 1918.2 As its motif evokes Les Gitanos, a larger, later destroyed painting by Manet, it is generally recognized that this painting was created during the same time period. The gaze, pose and costume of the woman, as well as her relationship with the horses in the background, represents her as both seductive and sexually autonomous, simultaneously an epitome of a marginalized yet resilient people and an exotified other, who manifested the artist’s identification with a mythicized idea of the bohemian. One of the most intriguing aspect of this painting is the duality of the woman’s gaze. If we split the picture into two halves through the vertical line of the woman’s nose, we notice salient differences. The right side of her face is basked in sunlight, as its colors are of a lighter shade. Her right eye gazes intensely at the viewer, with a directness that establishes both intimacy and distance. On the other hand, the left side of her face is in relative darkness, and her left eye seems to look through rather than at the viewer, exuding a dreamy indolence. This dichotomy is mirrored in her body language: the assertive pose of her right hand on the waist is countered by the more passive and relaxed 1

Mario Bois and Edouard Manet, Manet Tauromachies Et Autres Thèmes Espagnols (Paris: Plume, 1994), 78. 2 Eric Darragon, Manet (Paris: Citadelles, 1991), 107.

position of her left arm, on which her head rests. Critics have remarked that the subjects of Manet’s paintings often have a deadpan expression, and that what they are staring at so intently yet vacantly, one feels, is not the artist, but a camera (given that Manet was an expert amateur photographer).3 In this case, however, the subtlety of the subject’s gaze contributes to the complexity of her character, which is reinforced by her body language. Her hand positions evoke archetypal 19th century Odalisque paintings, forming an “S” shape that underlines her sensuality, but at the same time the pose is very balanced, exuding a sense of power and independence. The cigarette she is smoking defies social convention at the time, and adds an additional touch of rebelliousness to her image. Similar to how Manet’s Olympia, playing a twist on the classical nude, simultaneously invites (with nudity) and rejects (with straight gaze and hand positions) the viewer, the gypsy woman here is also seductive but not seducing, sexualized while defying the sexualization. Her costume reinforces this duality, and problematizes another aspect of her identity: her gypsy status. As her chest portion is painted with particularly bright colors – white and orange in sharp contrast with surrounding areas of grimy grey shades – sandwiched between a black collar and a black belt, we see an emphasis on her sexuality. Her chest-waist proportion, exaggerated by the puffiness of the blouse and the tightness of the belt, is also highly idealized. Some contemporary paintings depict gypsies in a similar fashion (wide sleeves, loose clothing, slim waist), such as Gustave Doré’s A Gypsy Dancing the Zorongo (fig. 4) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Gypsy Girl with Mandolin, which features costume relatively similar to that in Gypsy with a Cigarette, if one looks at only 3

John Richardson and Kathleen Adler, Manet [New enlarged ed.] (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Phaidon, 1982), 16.

NAR | 49

style and not color. This type of gypsies in 19th century French paintings is a combination of the representational and the fantastical, as the artists took the image of the other and aestheticized it. Manet is known to have a fascination towards women’s costumes,1 especially exotic ones, and often paints women in various ethnic dresses from Oriental to Spanish. In fact, Spain is considered the most noticeable source for Manet’s paintings through the 1860s;2 critics even called him “a Parisian Spaniard.”3 Some art historians have dated this painting based on comparisons with Spanish dancers whom Manet saw perform at the Paris Hippodrome in 1862.4 It is a feasible theory, because the same year, Manet painted a portrait of Lola de Valence, the première danseuse at Hippodrome,5 and depicted her wearing a costume with similar elements of billowy sleeves and slim waistline, and similar use of vibrant colors. Baudelaire described Lola as “un bijou rose et noir,”6 a classic dichotomy of femininity reminiscent of the duality of the gaze in Gypsy with a Cigarette. Manet’s Spanish-themes paintings received critiques for his aggressive use of color: “Imagine Goya transferred to Mexico, turned savage in the pampas and smearing canvases with crushed cochineal, and you have Monsieur Manet!”7 In Gypsy with a Cigarette, we can also see Manet’s reference to Goya, in particular to his The Clothed Maja from 1800. The light on the white cloth covering Maja’s chest in contrast with her dark-colored sleeves, her idealized chest-waist proportion, and the position of her left hand, all appear in Manet’s 1

Antonin Proust, “Manet’s Attitude to Women’s Clothes,” in Éduard Manet: Souvenirs (1913), ed. Theresa Gronberg, Manet: A Retrospective (New York: H.L. Levin Associates, 1988), 272. 2 James Henry Rubin and Édouard Manet, Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 45. 3 Paul Mantz, “Manet, a Parisian Spaniard,” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts (April 1, 1863), ed. Theresa Gronberg, Manet: A Retrospective (New York: H.L. Levin Associates, 1988), 52. 4 “Gypsy with a Cigarette,” Princeton University Art Museum, December 13, 2017, http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/ objects/32381. 5 Robert Rey, Manet (New York: Crown Publishers, 1962), 26. 6 Charles Baudelaire, “Lola de Valence,” in Les Épaves (1866), ed. Theresa Gronberg, Manet: A Retrospective (New York: H.L. Levin Associates, 1988), 73. 7 Pierre Schneider, The World of Manet, 1832-1883 (New York: Time-Life Books, 1968), 23.

NAR | 50

treatment of the gypsy woman on canvas. Since Goya’s The Clothed Maja mostly aims to seduce, inviting the viewer to unwrap her into The Naked Maja, this comparison accentuates the sexualization of the exotic in Manet’s Gypsy with a Cigarette. This dichotomy is also suggested by the black and white horses in the background. While white horses evoke the trope of princess fairy tales, black horses more often connote wilderness, as opposed to cultivation. There is a long literary and cultural tradition in the western world of describing women as horses, to be ridden and subdued by men. In fact, Manet’s friend Degas who bought this painting loved horses, seeing them as “living machinery…that moved in marvelous patterns,” and considered women also as “wonderful pieces of mechanism” that move with grace.8 The contrived association of this confident if not rebellious woman with wild back horses both dehumanizes her as an object of the patriarchal desire (to tame the horse and her) and gives her a sense of agency, because by leaning on the horse, she is assuming control over the this potentially dangerous animal. This agency derives from both her womanhood and her gypsy identity. The way Manet presents the horses in this painting is unconventional: not only does the woman’s body overlap significantly with multiple horses, making it unclear whether these horses are saddled or if they could run away (thereby further showing off the woman’s power over them), there is also extreme cropping. Like Degas, Manet systematically discards the “rules” of picture-making.9 Here, by flattening the forms of the horses, Manet collapses the three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional surface, emphasizing the vibrant colors of the picture and the centrality of the woman as an exotified figure. It’s unlikely that a solitary woman would be traveling with multiple horses; by cropping out the rest of the group, including possible and more horses, Manet underlines her independence. The flattening of space also exemplifies the influence of Japanese prints on his work. As the founder of Society Jing-Lar, Manet brought togeth 8

Jacques Mathey, Graphisme de Manet (Paris, 1961), 178. Vivien Perutz, Edouard Manet (Lewisburg [Pa.]: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 180. 9

er collectors and historians interested in Japan.1 The exotic serves as his source of inspiration, both in terms of content and of form. What exactly is Manet’s relationship with the gypsies, then? By 1862, Manet moved his studio to near the wasteland of “La Petite Pologne” where much of the Parisian gypsy population camped since the July Monarchy. Baron Haussmann’s renovation projects have razed the small factories and decrepit tenements on the wasteland to make way for a boulevard, an event which further displaced these already marginal people.2 For Les Gitanos paintings, Manet employed gypsies who lived on the wastelands as his models, to be painted in his studio3. If Gypsy with a Cigarette was from around the same time, Manet presumably also painted her in his atelier, having her wear a costume and adding the background afterwards. On the one hand, Manet’s painting captures some of the unfazed resilience of the gypsy population as epitomized by this single, defiantly smoking woman, a sense of pride rather than a plea for pity despite their cramped living environment and social marginalization. On the other hand, the modeling and in-door painting process (as opposed to en plein air as a candid scene) adds more artificiality than realism to this piece of work. With the exotifying costume and the vibrant colors - especially the predominant use of primary colors (red, yellow and blue) to convey a primitivism of the subject, Manet transforms the gypsy’s image into an avant-garde myth, a symbol of nonconformity. As the founding tenet of Western modernism, the notion of the artist as an outcast bohemian was particularly resonant with Manet.4 Living in an area close to the gypsies and having been rejected by the Salon of 1859, Manet identifies with the mythicized spirit of the bohemian, in which the antithetical notions of mobility and fatality, of primitivism and aristocracy, were

held in tension5. Therefore, in Gypsy with a Cigarette, we see a multitude of dualities, including the simultaneous self-assurance and vulnerability of the artist himself.

CITATIONS

Adler, Kathleen. Manet. Oxford: Phaidon, 1986. Baudelaire, Charles. “Lola de Valence.” In Les Épaves. 1866. Edited by Theresa Gronberg. Manet: A Retrospective. New York: H.L. Levin Associates, 1988. Bois, Mario., and Edouard Manet. Manet Tauromachies et Autres Thèmes Espagnols. Paris: Plume, 1994. Brown, Marilyn, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist In Nineteenth-Century France. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985. Cachin, Françoise. Manet. [Paris]: Chêne, 1990. Darragon, Eric. Manet. Paris: Citadelles, 1991. “Gypsy with a Cigarette.” Princeton University Art Museum. December 13, 2017. http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/ collections/objects/32381. Mallarmé, Stéphane, and Isabella Checcaglini. Édouard Manet. Mont-de-Marsan [France]: Atelier des brisants, 2006. Mantz, Paul. “Manet, a Parisian Spaniard.” In Gazette des BeauxArts. April 1, 1863. Edited by Theresa Gronberg. Manet: A Retrospective. New York: H.L. Levin Associates, 1988. Mathey, Jacques. Graphisme de Manet. Paris, 1961. Perutz, Vivien. Edouard Manet. Lewisburg [Pa.]: Bucknell Uni versity Press, 1993. Proust, Antonin. “Manet’s Attitude to Women’s Clothes.” In Éduard Manet: Souvenirs. 1913. Edited by The resa Gronberg. Manet: A Retrospective. New York: H.L. Levin Associates, 1988. Rey, Robert. Manet. New York: Crown Publishers, 1962. Richardson, John, 1924-., and Kathleen Adler. Manet. [New enlarged ed.] Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Phaidon, 1982. Rubin, James Henry., and Édouard Manet. Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Schneider, Pierre, The World of Manet, 1832-1883. New York: Time-Life Books, 1968.

James Henry Rubin and Édouard Manet, Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 139. 2 Marilyn Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985), 76. 3 Stéphane Mallarmé and Isabella Checcaglini, Édouard Manet (Mont-de-Marsan [France]: Atelier des brisants, 2006), 15. 4 Marilyn Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985), 34.

Marilyn Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France 75.

NAR | 51

“AN ARTIST IS NOT PAID FOR HIS LABOR BUT FOR HIS VISION” - JAMES WHISTLER