Like many I am an inveterate reader of obituaries and what I find most fascinating and enlightening about them is that there are so many persons who have made really important contributions to our knowledge and well being yet who have somehow managed to remain unknown to the general public. Often, I suspect, we tend to think that all the really important people are well covered by the press and the various media. Actually, this is hardly so. In fact, in a world of six billion, with 300 million in this country, it is hardly to be expected. As an example, I recently read of the death of John Golding, writer, painter, and critic and thought it was odd that I had never heard of him, or remembered him if I had. Despite the present number of writers on the subject of modern art, I would have thought that my recent focus on the work of Picasso would have made his name known to me.
John Golding’s first published work was the study, Cubism, a History and Analysis 1907-1914, which was written in the late 1950’s as his doctoral thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art; Anthony Blunt and Douglas Cooper were his professorial supervisors. It is considered the standard work on the subject. (Elsewhere Golding says that he does not understand cubism. Neither do I.) Over the years he has written on modern art for a number of publications, most notably for The New York Review of Books, which I have read from time to time, and those writings have been collected in the volume Visions of the Modern. In 1997 he presented a series of six evenings in the Mellon Lectures series at The National Gallery of Art and as it was on the subject of abstraction, an area that I am studying at the present, I decided to read his work.
As the Italians would say: Madonna! What a wonderful discovery! (Que bella cosa!) For a deep understanding of twentieth century art, one can discover few writers on the subject who have a greater scholarship, insight, and understanding. Mr. Golding has an easy and engaging writing style. His explanations are without art world intellectual pretense; he is eloquent and comprehensible and completely without obfuscation; he uses language to inform, not to impress.
When I compare what Mr. Golding has to say to what Kirk Varnedoe announced that he was going to say (speak for abstraction) and didn’t, scroll down to that entry, I was even perplexed as to why Kirk Varnedoe thought he had to speak for abstraction in the first place. Certainly he would have been aware of Golding’s work …Mr. Golding contributed an essay to Varnedoe’s 2002 exhibition Picasso/Matisse, and, as the Director of MOMA, he could have been expected to know any of the Mellon lectures which addressed modern art. Checking the index of the Varnedoe lectures I found no entry for John Golding.
In comparing the two series of lectures I believe the difference lies in their identification of the underpinnings of modern art. For Golding there is an intellectual, literary, tradition which has had an impact on society and culture. For Varnedoe, if I read him correctly, there is an impact of the society on the cultural life but there are more importantly various procedures from a set of formal values. In that regard I believe that Varnedoe continues in the line, the tradition if you will, of Alfred Barr, and I suppose by inference, William Rudin, his predecessors at MOMA. This philosophy is in accord with that of Nelson Rockefeller, art collector and an early Director and benefactor of MOMA, who did not like intellectual art or art that spoke of existential angst.
If these are indeed two distinctly different understandings of modern art I believe each has validity although I respond in a more positive way to Mr. Golding’s. But likely that has to do with my own education, background, and life experience. From my earlier interests in poetry and theatre I have a positive interest to art that has an affinity to the vegetation rituals although I am aware that such art often runs the risk of becoming merely illustration. Pollack’s Guardians of the Secret, a wonderful painting, is an excellent example. And while I can appreciate art that has as its concern the interplay and balance of the plastic elements, I am aware that it hovers above the canyon of intellectual nothingness, it runs the risk of quickly becoming a bore. The former evokes at the least the response: how interesting, while the latter too often engenders a …so what.
Paths to the Absolute is divided into six chapters, six monographs, one each for Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Pollack, and two chapters which elucidate the life and work of Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, and Clifford Still. Thus another difference with the Varnedoe lectures is that Golding keeps his focus on painting while Pictures of Nothing has an overview of painting, sculpture and environmental constructions.
The first three of these painters were Europeans who came to their maturity prior to World War II; the latter four are Americans who hit their stride after that global event. With the exception of Kandinsky all of these men were sent toward their final destination by the development of cubism. Hence knowledge of cubism, even if only a knowledge of its history, is a necessary step toward the understanding of modern art.
But a knowledge of cubism alone is insufficient for the greatest understanding. It is Mr. Golding’s premise that born into a world that had lost the certainty of a spiritual path, each of these artists devoted their careers to finding the right path. There are many Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century works which contributed to the strongly held perception that the social order as it had been known had ceased to be operative. Among those works were The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Karl Marx’ Capital, and, among others, Golding also names Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Henri Bergson.
The work that is generally cited as having had the most profound influence on society and the arts was Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra which contains the well quoted line: “…the people do not know that God is dead” meaning, as I understand it, that the Church no longer stands as the moral authority for western civilization. The dilemma this posed was played out in turn of the century French literature in the works of Paul Claudel, Andre Gide and Roger Martin du Gard. Claudel converted to Catholicism while Gide remained a steadfast atheist. In his journals Gide tells us that he trembled with fear each time he was visited by Claudel, terrified that his old friend might try for his conversion.
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is often cited, as it is here, as having had the most profound influence specifically on writers and artists …Shaw, Eliot, O’Neill, et al. Also inspired by Nietzsche’s works there followed in 1920 Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
Early in the twentieth century Freud’s works acknowledged the impasse, Civilization and its Discontents, a truly great title, but sought to provide a way forward. He identified the ego and the id, the conscious, the unconscious, and the super ego, He also identified the libido, the sexual energy that is the basis of all our energy, and with it the concept of the polymorphous perverse, which states that we are all bisexual and that we are sexually attracted to everyone and that conflict arises when we use our social skills to sublimate those impulses. (You can see how Freudian Picasso’s works can be understood to be.) Equally important to surrealism was Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
In addition there was Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, which brought to the table Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, the basis of Eliot’s Waste Land
World War I was also an important cultural moment: cubism precedes it and the modern art referenced here followed. As an additional influence we might also insert the work of Kurt Schwitters who took from the detritus of the old, dead, civilization the materials for making a new art.
Theosophy was a strong influence in the life and work of Mondrian and Kandinsky is designated here as the most religious of these painters. In reading these pages I was sorry that Golding appears not to have been familiar with the work of Suzanne Langer because I think her statement best describes his intent: Every culture has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that need has been manifest in magic and ritual, religion and art.
The two painters of this group who provoke in me the most positive response are Mondrian and Pollack. While I can admire what Golding here considers their spiritual purity, I am much more taken with their life long transition from a mastery of academic art toward a very personal idiom that has always the character of fine art. And I especially like it that having achieved a signature image that could not be borrowed by others without obvious plagiarism, they moved on to further explorations. It is for this same reason that I am so taken with Picasso…that always moving on …finding, exploring, exhausting, and moving on …that and perhaps the intellectual realization that we cannot know: every day our telescopes in earth orbit tell us that our suppositions about the universe are wrong. I am certain that our spiritual certainties are equally wrong and for that reason I always prefer Langer’s “symbolic experience”.
The chapter on Mondrian achieves the remarkable feat of humanizing the man. Even though I suspect that he was very much a difficult person…more intelligent than everyone else and impatient because further along in his quest for his goal, he seems here to have been a likeable person. I also appreciate that the whole of his career is taken into consideration not just the grids and minimal colors for which he is so well known. Over the years in one museum after the other I have seen a full range of his life’s work and I find all of it extremely satisfying.
The chapter on Pollack, always the tragic figure due to his compulsive self destruction, tragic because his talent and achievement were so great, is one of the great pieces of writing on the arts. Mr. Golding knows his subject thoroughly and he has the most profound admiration and respect for his achievement. While he recognizes the drip paintings as a great moment in western art he is also aware that those paintings were made in a rather brief period and that Pollack went on to make other paintings that came out of that moment. It is those last paintings of Pollack’s that I find so intriguing.
I am less impressed by the work of Malevich and Kandinsky. In my earliest days in New York I saw the exhibition of Kandinsky’s work at the newly opened Guggenheim Museum and I was very excited to discover that if I wanted to be a modern artist all I had to do was to learn the language he had created …red means this and blue means that …or to add to it the language of Malevich …triangles mean thus and such and many little squares mean something quite other. Seeing the Kandinsky exhibition a second time, fifty years later, 2009, I realized that during the interim I had come to think of this as merely a technique, a contrivance, and I had by then learned that contrivance is the antithesis of art.
This is not to say that I don’t enjoy seeing an occasional Kandinsky now and then …but certainly not in groups of two hundred…every fifty years is enough of that. And while I admire the writings of Moholy Nagy, Kepes, and Rudolph Arnheim, none of whom are mentioned at length by either Varnedoe or Golding, perhaps there is a third theory of modern art, I consider their ideas as suggestions for the use of the plastic elements in the construction of a painting not, as in Malevich, an end in itself.
Had I written these essays …or delivered them as lectures, I would have referenced the work of Schwitters rather than Malevich. Schwitters created a body of work almost every example of which has tremendous presence, a sense of rightness to it, and of such rich complexity as to demand the most intense scrutiny. He achieves excellence in works that are often only 8 by 10 inches. His works create a sense of symbolic experience the equal of Mondrian’s. But most specifically I would have chosen Schwitters because his work has been so influential: it is almost impossible to go into any gallery or museum in town or in the country and not see collage that references his example. Certainly his work represents a human something that wants to be acknowledged.
Because this survey stops in the mid 1950’s there is no mention of the revival of interest in Buddhism that entered into American intellectual life at that time. Seen from that perspective, modern American art has a completely different aspect.
After years of contemplation Buddha revealed his insights. All human life is suffering. All suffering comes from our attachments. If we can give up all of our attachments including our desire to experience sartori we will discover that we have always had it within ourselves.
When we explore the nature of our attachments we discover that life is Maya, illusion. This Philadelphia Chippendale chair that I prize so highly is a family heirloom given to me by my grandmother and given to her by her grandmother on her wedding day. While I cherish the object and its history Buddha would tell me that it is just a piece of wood in a specific configuration. Prior to this it was timber in a mill and prior to that it was a tree in a forest and prior of that it was light and air and nutrients in the soil. It is what it is and whatever color I give to it that is only the color that I give to it. That color is Maya.
Mr. Golding is a master of modern art scholarship and I certainly bow to his great knowledge. But I am sorry that he omits reference to the Buddhist tradition. I think it is wonderful that he sees in Barnet Newman’s zips the echo of the primeval artistic gesture. Not knowing about the primeval gesture I have only ever seen them as large monochromatic surfaces with a contrasting line. Knowing now about the primeval gesture, I see them as large monochromatic surfaces with a contrasting line.
I have sat in Rothko’s chapel at the Phillips Collection in Washington
As each of these three painters, I am including Still, came closer to the symbolic experience he wished to share with others the works themselves grew larger and larger until in the end they sometimes became room sized. It is that aspect of modern art …that Larger is More Important… that The Big Theme Needs a Big Canvas …that often turns me away from it. (Mondrian could say as much with 24 by 24 inches.) Most of us look at the majority of the art works we see in reproductions in books or prints, just as artists from the classical eras saw most art works in reproduction. Few of the great artists throughout history had the ability the average American housewife has to see so many thousands of world class art works face to face. Reduced to eight by ten or even three by five inches a work should give us a strong indication of its vital import through its visual presentation alone: conversely, imagining a huge art work in a museum as a postcard reproduction helps to balance its ambition against its performance. I have a small post card collection of Rembrandt self portraits on my bookshelf and every one of them has tremendous presence and impact. In his comments on Barnet Newman Mr. Golding cites his work, Uriel, 1955, as one he finds extremely successful. In fact it is used as the dust jacket of the book and, frankly, as an example of fine art, I find that it is perfectly successful as a dust jacket. When I see these enormous works dominating the walls of museums I am often reminded of my visit to the Louvre where I stood before David’s Coronation of Napoleon. I consider these modern works equally overwrought and equally silly.
In my comments on Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures I suggested that with the rise to dominance of the Chinese nation the cultural capital was likely to move there as well. In these Golding lectures I am compelled to mention China
The present socio/political reality in modern China is, according to many, merely a new manifestation of its dynastic tradition that extends in a somewhat unbroken line back six thousand years. What is most remarkable, to a Westerner, about this long history is that China China
Perhaps, here in the west, there is something we have yet to understand.
Maya. Hmmm.
Mr. Golding’s excellent book is available through internet book sellers. Strangely it is not available through the National Gallery Online Bookstore. Neither is there a list on the NGA web site listing all of the Mellon Lectures. This is a wonderful series of lectures that should have more public exposure. In the future I hope the deficiencies of the museum web site will be corrected.
John Golding’s writing in The New York Review of Books:
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