The Morgan: Part II.
The claim is often made that American museums are teaching institutions and with their lectures and talks that accompany each of their special exhibitions that can be understood as a somewhat apt description. Unfortunately those talks and lectures are too often only anecdotal material about the artist or his models. Very few museums in either their lectures or their catalogues discuss at length or in detail an artist’s technique or his method of using the various media. (That is regrettable as an artist is a master of his craft before he can be a fine artist.) I often find that much more could be done in this area to inform the general public and to make the public more curious than it presents itself as being, thereby increasing its knowledge and further whetting its appetite for the fine arts in general. As I have said many times before; we have fine arts institutions in this country but we do not have a fine arts culture. By giving us only cursory information, museums are partially to blame for that.
This small exhibition is an excellent example of my meaning. According to the web site there is only one scheduled gallery talk. That’s a real shame. But there is a greater missed opportunity: several letters written by Ingres are displayed in the center vitrine. As the print is so small as to be illegible and because Ingres is not regarded as a man of “letters” I think a far more valuable set of information could have been provided elucidating the term: “Graphite”.
All but one of these sixteen drawings are designated as Graphite and ten of them are portraits using the full or three quarter figure. Each of these is a contour drawing in which the edges of forms are recorded at the point where they recede from the eye. Each contour line is reported with great specificity. Each carefully made line has the same width, weight, and tonal value as all of the other lines. It is only in the faces that stumping has been employed to suggest highlight and shadow so that only the faces create the perception of dimensional form. There is no shadowing around the figures to suggest that they are standing out from or sinking into the surface of the paper: these drawings are very specifically on the surface. (I love the existential clarity of that.) Each of these was intended as a finished art work and they are the kind of portraits that were made passé by the invention of photography. They are as well the works that inspired both Matisse and Picasso, both of whom created finished works in a similar linear method. But in the case of Picasso his linear drawings are often denoted as “Pencil”.
In 1560 deposits of the finest grade of European graphite was found in Cumberland England Europe into the artists’ tool boxes, eventually replacing silver or other metal points. However, with the constant warfare between States, this material was often difficult to obtain. In 1795, the Frenchman, M. Conte, formulated controlled blends of materials and invented the Conte pencil. By the time Ingres began his career there were many superb drawings in this new medium.
Because I study art and because I draw I avail myself of books that discuss the artists and their materials and so I somewhat know the history of graphite. My comments arise because when I am in galleries I hear one woman say to her companion: “What is graphite?” To which I hear the reply: “I don’t know, but these look like they were made with a pencil.” To them, as to most people, a pencil in whatever form is a “lead” pencil. Not to make too fine a point of it, I think if museum goers had a better understanding of materials and their history it would enhance the point of view of the curators: in this instance, this period in France
The technical questions this exhibition raises are these: did Ingres use a wooden pencil as we know it or did he use what we call a mechanical pencil. If he used a wooden pencil I think he would have had to sharpen his point after every line had been made in order to control the uniformity of the lines. With a mechanical pencil with a specific grade of material, hard to soft, and a variety of diameters in the various rods, less sharpening would have been required had the stylist been held in the same way for the whole making of the drawing. Knowing the exact marking device he used would tell us about the speed at which he worked, just as the size of the format has to do with the place where he worked …in his lap or at his table. Knowing the nature of the craft he had to master would enhance the appreciation of these drawings and we want to know that because he is so present in the making of these drawings.
As it stands they look as if they had simply been gently laid down onto the paper. As a connoisseur and a would-be fellow artist my question is this: How did he do that!
All of the art works in this exhibition are on view on the museum web site and so I see no reason to comment on any but one of them individually. I can report that all of Ingres drawings are perfectly centered on the pages, (I don’t know if that was on purpose or if the paper was trimmed once the drawing was completed), but as all of the figures are drawn to the same scale, I assume that they were specifically placed on the sheet…and well placed they are. When you first see them on the web site they look extremely pale as if overexposed but if you zoom in to see details there is truer representation of their tonal values.
But I do want to comment about the drawing Odalisque and Slave. At 13 by 18 inches and rendered in graphite, black and white chalk, and with gray and brown wash, this work appears at first as if it were an example of photo realism if not a photograph. This is enhanced because there are no drawn lines in this work; the only lines are the direction of the dynamics and the implied axis of the various planes. Yet on closer inspection it can be seen that it is indeed a drawing. That difference is worthy of contemplation: because everything is so perfectly rendered, what about it makes it different from a photograph?
Seeing this drawing brought to my mind a number of questions about photography and drawings. Were the original photographs in black and white because the film could only record the tonal values of the light striking the plate or were they made black and white specifically to suggest drawings such as this one. For instance, in his earliest explorations Fox Talbot attempted to print photographs with inks creating in essence a new drawing medium. Color photography was available in the early 1900’s but was rarely employed by photographers until much later.
But, further, how is it that drawings in black and white, such as this one, and photographs when they first appeared, were so acceptable to the public that saw the world around them in color? Why is it that some movie buffs prefer films in black and white as being more “real”? I wondered if it might have to do with the insight of psychologists that we do not dream in color. Is an art work analogous to a dream, to those strong, sudden images that command our attention? If so that might then explain our acceptance of oil paintings in which the skin tones are rarely flesh colored but rendered instead in the color key of the whole painting. Finally, is it because when we look at fine art works we do not expect to see “reality”, as if we were looking through a window, but rather that we expect an interpretation of the physical world made an aesthetic distance away from us? Is that an inherently human understanding of art works, of made “pictures”, or have we learned that over the generations? (Perhaps I should reread Suzanne Langer’s writings on art as symbolic experience.)
But perhaps it is not the starkness of the image but the content that suggests the image as the dream. Confronting us is a sensuous, sexually available female, a maid lost in song, a guard/eunuch whose attention as well is elsewhere, and an implied observer whose helmet is sitting at the woman’s feet. It is common, I suspect, to regard something like this as merely a bizarre example of a la mode orientalism of the day. But generations of artists have been compelled to repeat and to reinterpret this situation and this pose. Which aspect of this drawing, the subject or the technique, has the stronger impact on us and gives it its dream state?
Ingres’ work is very tight, remarkably tight. And I was reminded here of a time in one of my art classes when the exasperated instructor shook his head and said to me: “We all know that you can work tight: we are waiting to see if you are going to step into the 20th Century someday soon and draw loose.” Well, eventually I did, but my true inclination and admiration is always for the way of Ingres. And in that way I am very much like Picasso. …and, yes, in only that way!!
The Morgan web page:
Whenever I visit the Met Museum
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