art ongoing: Luis Melendez, Master of the Spanish Still Life, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Luis Melendez, Master of the Spanish Still Life, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

One of my favorite paintings is the self portrait of this artist which I first saw at the Louvre in 1986. This is a sensitive and slightly handsome young man executed in a mastery of the portrait style of that era, 1746, the year Goya was born. Filling the lower right hand quadrant of the painting, the young man holds up to the viewer an academic charcoal drawing of a male nude. At the time I first saw it I was studying life drawing in New York and the inclusion of this figure drawing would have appealed to my personal interests. But I have also had a life long fascination with tromp l’oeil painting and so I was thrilled to find a painting with a tromp l’oeil drawing. From a certain distance it is almost impossible to accept the drawing as anything other than a work on paper. (On closer view it can be seen that the painting’s varnish has yellowed slightly and that the paint surface has crackled. Oh, well!)

Adding to the charm of the drawing is the clearly indicated horizontal fold across the center width of the paper, with beautifully stated, but subtle, highlight and shadow, and the curled left side of the paper which casts an oblique shadow over the body of the drawing. In the great hallway just outside this gallery there are two charcoal male nudes by John Singer Sargent which can be used for ready reference of Melendez’ mastery of the tromp l’oeil drawing.

As a portrait in a particular style there is a wealth of detail that is absolutely thrilling; the subtle indication of pattern in the dark ground, the lace work on his cuffs, and in the play of light over the surface of his sensitive nails and fingertips: his nails have the luster of pearls. But the most exciting passage in this painting, which this exhibition allows us to see close up as if face to face with the man, is the artist’s eyes; looking into his eyes is like looking into the eyes of a living person; truly they are the windows into his soul. I love painting and drawing, in any style, whose only raison d’être is the artist’s statement: I did this because I can do it and I can do it better than anyone else. And I equally love it when a person of great accomplishment is appropriately arrogant in regard to his talent. Bravo, Senor Melendez!

But the exhibition is not about his mastery of portraiture or charcoal drawing, it is about his mastery of the tromp l’oeil still life: Americans would be more familiar with the work of Harnet, Peto, and the many Brothers Peale. Melendez studied at the Spanish Academy, where his father was a professor …one is reminded of the young Picasso and his father. Unfortunately the father fell out of favor and was removed from his position and in the process the son was expelled. Afterward Melendez made four appeals to the crown to gain the position of court painter. Except for a series of still life decorations, included in this exhibition, he was never granted official status. He died in a state of poverty and relatively unknown.

Little more is known about him. It is not known when his paintings were made or for whom. And the curious thing about the paintings seen here is that they all appear to have issued from the same time…there is no early, middle or late development in the work …it is all of a piece. Melendez was taught a technique, he mastered that technique, and apparently he painted in exactly that technique for the whole of his life. Again I was reminded of the young Picasso, who, having mastered a technique, threw it off in an effort to take Western art into a new era yet with constant references to what it had gone before.

As a rule I dislike the work of artists who achieve a signature style and then spend the rest of their lives knocking out work for the marketplace in that same manner …Stuart Davis and Mark Rothko come immediately to mind. But I do make exceptions and Melendez has always been one of them made palatable because there are so few of his works (there are thirty in this exhibition). They are few and far between in museums. And that is to the good: one has a limited patience for admiring repetitive work especially paintings in which we see each juicy seed of a pomegranate and very especially paintings in which we see a half dozen pomegranates split open to display their thousands of luscious seeds: he does go to extremes! In fact, there is a real affinity here to the compulsiveness of outsider art.

These are wonderful paintings each with a carefully made composition built around objects such as serving vessels of pottery, glass, copper and silver, with thoughtful arrangements of the fruits, a flawless balance of colors, of light and shadow, in fact a mastery of light and shadow, and suffused overall by that wonderful golden Spanish light. Despite the politics and the peccadilloes from which he must have suffered, each painting indicates his persistent declaration of his love of the nurturing fruits of the earth and of his irrepressible desire to paint. I am a strong believer that the desire to paint is as inherently human as the desire to sing and to dance. Through it all Melendez painted. And how! Bravo!

On the museum web site page the link to the Boston Globe review has five or six photographs of the paintings.
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=8517

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The Aesthetic

The Aesthetic.
I was trained as a set designer and I have studied life drawing at The Art Student’s League and NYU. I lived and worked in New York City for nearly thirty years. Recently I have felt that I needed to develop a better working criterion for looking at art works. Over the years three books have been very important to me and so I have used them to hone my understanding: The Art in Painting, by Alfred Barnes, of the Barnes Foundation; Problems in Art, by Susanne Langer, the American philosopher; and the essay, Kitsch and Modern Art, by Clement Greenberg, the American art critic.

Alfred Barnes promotes his belief that the appreciation of art can be taught just as science can be taught…through methodology. In the introduction to his book there is a long paragraph that sets forth his premise. But I think that a shorter version in the Barnes Foundation literature is sufficient here: “One cannot understand art by walking through a museum anymore than he can master surgery by walking though a hospital.” Barnes insists that the observer has to work as hard to understand an artwork as the artist did to create it. He begins the educational approach by naming the three plastic elements of painting: color, line, and form. Each of these is visible on the surface and each has as well a sub textural presence: color is the actual color seen but a painting has as well a tenor, a color overall. Line is a visible line but within a painting a line carries the eye. The painting has a vertical, a horizontal, or a diagonal line. Form is the visible evidence of geometric forms but it is also the summation of the totality of the work. He suggests that the person who wants to understand an artwork must begin with an understanding of the way color has been used because color is the first thing we see in a painting.

In her work Susanne Langer states that every culture has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that that need has been manifest in magic and ritual, religion and art. It is her view that the artist produces an artwork in order to express his feelings about something. When his mastery of craft allows him to have insights during the creation of the work at hand, that gives that particular work significant meaning. Those two elements, if brought together, result in the creation of an artwork. My disagreement with her concerns her preference for the use of the word “feeling”. There seems to be too much misunderstanding of “feeling” in looking at artwork. Too many persons are of the conviction now that the artist is expressing his emotions…I felt like such and such and so I painted this in this way to express myself, my emotions. I prefer to use the word “sentiments” in the same sense that Flaubert used it in his novel, A Sentimental Education. His novel was not about the developing melancholy (the emotional state) of a particular person but about that person’s forming a sensate understanding of the world in which he lives and as an aid for his adult life.

Where Langer uses the word feeling, Barnes states that an artist creates art because he has an added “interest”. He describes this as a compelling interest. I prefer to define it as a profound interest. Certainly an interest in any subject or effort is unlikely to produce major artworks unless it is more than an interest and more than compelling. I think profound is the right word. Very likely we refer to an artist or craftsman as a dilettante when we examine the complete works and find little that has sustained him other than his cursory interests or appeals to our own. And it is in the merely casual interest that we discover the distinction made by Clement Greenberg between kitsch and modern art. He defines kitsch as that which is pre digested for us, that which is easily digested, and he defines art as that which we may not always grasp at first sight but which creates a lingering iconic memory that we find resonating in our mind. It is that which resonates that causes us to go back, to return to the source and to look with greater attention at particular works. Eventually, through study and through opening ourselves to the experience, we may come to recognize these as the artworks.

This, then, became my criterion for viewing art works; that which we study is the artist’s mastery of craft, his expression of a profound interest, his insights which have come to him during the creation of the particular work that resonates with us, and in his decisive expression of “something”. In each artwork there is that which is “expressed”. In looking at every art work the observer “experiences” something. Thus there are two questions raised by every artwork: What is expressed? What is experienced? When the observer resolves this question with an understanding of the artist’s work and his intention, a communication between artist and observer has been effected. From this perspective it can be understood that an artwork is not merely an object placed on a wall before the observer but an experience to be shared.
By stating that I have devised a system for looking at artworks I should add that I do not use this system to the exclusion of opening myself up to another experience. Early in my adult life I was made aware that Aristotle’s Poetics was written long after the Greek tragedies it describes were written. The Poetics is the record of his response and efforts toward understanding of those deeply moving works. I firmly believe that first and foremost an observer of art should allow the work to communicate with him. It is when the work is presented with museum credentials or appears authentic and one does not hear what it says that one could fall back on a system for analyzing it and achieving understanding.

art ongoing

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Luis Melendez, Master of the Spanish Still Life, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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