Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

            This is a wonderful collection of drawings and paintings. They represent an overview of the cubist years and the various forms in which it was manifest. And the works of Picasso and Braque specifically have a wonderful quality of elegance; they can be looked at again and again not for their historical importance but for the aesthetic pleasure of being with them.

            Leo Stein, who did not like cubism, once took Picasso aside and said that he thought cubism was merely decorative and that Picasso was surrendering his talent to his desire to be famous. Despite the fact that Picasso began to give more serious thought to the work Leo Stein stopped collecting it. Photographs in the exhibition show this collection as it was installed in the Lauder Uptown residence, and in the catalog in other Upper Eastside residences, and we can see that Leo Stein had a point: this work lends itself extremely well to decorating of the most elegant kind.

            Elegance is an interesting quality. It is hard to define although one recognizes it when he sees it. Many modern architects make beautiful and handsome buildings but only a few of them make elegant buildings, Cesar Pelli foremost among them. At The Met Thomas Hoving took the old, gray, dusty storage bin and turned it into a department store. Philippe deMontebello gave the whole of it a wonderfully elegant patina, boosting it from the aura of Macy’s to that of Neiman Marcus. Elegance in this sense has to do with an attention to detail and the use of the finest materials. But it can also be seen in the slap dash finish of a Matisse painting; sometimes it’s just an attitude.

            Seeing this elegant collection in this elegant setting made me aware of the silent presence of the person who always presented himself as the picture of elegance: D.H. Kahnweiler. It is to Kanhweiler that we owe our knowledge of the history of cubism. At the age of twenty three, practically still a boy, Kahnweiler hooked up with Braque and Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck and eventually Picasso. And when Braque and Picasso began working together exchanging ideas on the making of the art of their time Kahnweiler cleverly stepped in and offered them a weekly stipend in exchange for first refusal on their week’s output. As the works were brought to him he catalogued and dated and photographed each one of them. He maintained this practice for the whole of his working life.

            Later, while sitting out WWI in Switzerland he was able to write, from memory, the story of cubism as he had known it. Braque and Picasso, who had talked at length on a daily basis during that period, 1909-1914, insisted years later that they had said things only to one another that neither of them would ever remember. Kahnweiler had not been privy to every word of this. Thus what cubism “means” is still open to discussion …as the literature so aptly demonstrates.

 Resuming his gallery in Paris after the war Kahnweiler found that his two stars had, because of economic necessity, moved on to other dealers. Later, he was able to be involved in some ways with Picasso, but never again with Braque. He also still had the company of Juan Gris and after his death in the twenties he wrote the authoritative Juan Gris monograph. He picked up as well some of the other young artists of the day, among them Fernand Leger.

            It was Kahnweiler who stated that cubism, in its purist form, was defined by the work of four artists: Braque, Picasso, Gris, and Leger. We need to remember that Kahnweiler was a businessman, a very astute businessman I understand, and that all four of these artists were represented in his gallery. Douglas Cooper used that definition as the basis for forming his collection of cubist paintings. When he died and his works were to be distributed on the market place, Leonard Lauder was one of the first persons called to select works for his own much admired collection. Now the interesting story here is that when he started collecting art in the early 1960’s, Mr. Lauder claims that he was a working man making only ten thousand dollars a year. In the late 1980’s, after selecting the works he wanted from the Cooper collection, he confesses in the catalogue that he had had to borrow twenty two million dollars to pay for it. That’s a hefty loan to which a “working man” was able to encumber himself. Having never been asked to buy into a major art collection I don’t know if my credit was ever that good. But possibly it was: I too was a working man.

            This explains why this collection is limited to the work of these four artists…from Kahnweiler to Cooper to Lauder. And if I express myself as having reservations I mean exempting specifically Juan Gris and Leger. As far as I am concerned cubism will always be only Picasso and Braque and everyone else is just an interested bystander or a hanger on or as is sometimes said, a salon cubist. I have always felt that Gris, however nice a guy he might have been, was too eager to be understood and too eager to be complimented. He was a good copyist with the ability to mimic what his betters were doing: there is a wonderful pencil drawing here of Madam Cézanne in a Red Armchair, the Boston portrait, with a slightly exaggerated geometricizing that is another good example of that ability.  In addition he had Kahnweiler to promote his career. While some of his paintings are interesting they are never as good as those of the two main players’. At his best, Still Life, Table, 1914…the collage series with blue …he is just …very good. By contrast other artists also tried the cubist vernacular …Diego Rivera, Matisse, Mondrian, Jackson Pollock …but only in order to get inside of it and find their own way out.

            In regard to Leger he illustrates Kahnweiler’s short comings. After losing Picasso and Braque to World War I, Kahnweiler never again had artists in his gallery who were world class artists the likes of that first pair. And so what one has to reluctantly admit, being deeply indebted to him for his record keeping, is that Kahnweiler was lucky at one point to be in the right place at the right time, but that he was never again quite so lucky.

            Was Leo Stein right? Is cubism merely decorative?

            There are many books on cubism and the majority of them are only concerned with its history and chronology. In them there is much polite argument as to which painting was actually painted before or after certain other paintings. Most of these books read like the contre temps of art world insiders. And what is so surprising is that many of these authors will admit somewhere in their discourse that they do not understand cubism. (There is probably no other subject about which so many writers write books claiming their ignorance.) The best book, because he had access to all the Picasso drawings at MOMA and the Picasso Museum in Paris, is by Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, 2003. (He is the author of one of the essays in this catalogue as well.) Step by step he helps us to understand what Braque and Picasso were doing, from a technical standpoint, its formal development, on an almost day to day basis. And in the final chapter of his book he gives us an intellectual history of nineteenth century perceptual psychology and nineteenth century theories of language, synecdoche, etc. While this latter part is interesting I don’t know that it is necessary for the understanding of cubism.

            Like all paintings a cubist work is a visual experience. And while the intellectual or possible intellectual underpinnings are interesting they bear the same relationship to cubism as Aristotle’s Poetic did to Greek tragedy: the art was not created as an illustration of the philosophy; the philosophy offers only a partial explanation of the art.

            Cubism is often hailed as a revolutionary moment in art. It was not; it was a transitional period. No matter the style or school of painting each painting has three plastic elements: color, line, and form, or, and I think this was an insight for Braque and Picasso …shape. In a flat painting form is represented by shape. Various devices are employed to suggest that the shape is modeled, that it is a form. Thus every painting that employs those devices creates a dual perception: the perception of surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. Cézanne’s use of that dichotomy created in his works a vibration that gave his paintings the sense of being alive. Braque and Picasso followed suit.

Painting in the west has a history of over two thousand years. Through the Late Gothic period and into the Renaissance paintings were made in studios and they depicted religious or mythological or historical scenes. Over time linear perspective became more strictly adhered to. Eventually painters worked from live models and made sketches of actual places. Then in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries absolute verisimilitude, mimesis, came into vogue…just as photography rendered it obsolete. The Impressionists turned away from the well made academic painting, but they continued to be the eye that records. Cézanne, removing linear and aerial perspective from his work came to realize that with the dual perception created by a painting, a painting became other than a window with a view; the painting was an autonomous entity. In addition, to create a more visceral response to the objects depicted, he began to distort the objects…that visceral response making them feel more real than if they had been perfectly drawn and carefully painted. He displaced elements within the painting: if a chair rail ran behind a table, he might place it higher on one side of an object than on the other. This created a pictorial dynamic.

Shortly after his death the interview with Emile Bernard was published in which Cézanne advised painters to look for the cube, the sphere and the cone. Working independently Picasso and Braque began to make paintings in which the geometry of objects was emphasized. It was in response to these village landscapes with little square houses that the expression “little cubes” was first uttered. Eventually Braque and Picasso met, agreed to work together, and they became known as “The Cubists”…although soon thereafter neither of them made any more paintings like those first proto-cubist works. Thus we can understand that “Cubism” is a poor name for what followed and that it in no way describes or explains that work.

Cubism reclaimed painting as a studio activity. Taking the cue from Cézanne’s motif, the reason for making a painting, the subject was located in the here and now …no more history, religion or mythology …and was seen (deconstructed) as its three plastic elements. Making a clean break from Les Fauves, they minimized color and emphasized line and shape (form). They used all the techniques of picture making …grids, scaffolds, paysage, hatching, cross hatching, etc. and incorporated it into the finished presentation. From the ethnographic arts they used simplification, synecdoche, and scarification. There was nothing new here except the results of using the traditional in a different way. By including everything in the finished presentation they sought to be more “honest”.  

As regards the subject the parts might be subjected to displacement and distortion: a piece of it might be seen here another there if it enhanced the pictorial dynamic. Just as Cézanne wanted to see how far he could go with the modulation of color before he lost the identity of the object, so Picasso and Braque wanted to see how far they could go with distortion and displacement of the form before losing that identity. In this process, where the decisions are made by the artist as a part of his feeling or thinking self, rather than conforming to what the academy insisted one must do about that which sat in front of him, the artist reclaimed the position as the creative force.

It is often said that cubism is an art form in which multiple views of the subject are presented simultaneously. While this does happen from time to time in some of the works, it is not what cubism is about. Rudolph Arnheim wrote that if cubism was only about multiple views there would have been no reason to invent cubist sculpture. Cubist sculpture came about because Picasso wanted to see one of his drawings in three dimensions. It was a drawing in which he had “pierced the closed form” as Kahnweiler noted, showing us the outside and the inside, the scaffolding that held it up and the layers of planes from front to back and side to side.

In the period known as analytic cubism Picasso and Braque chose an arbitrary “look” and each committed himself to working in that style just as if they were attending class in an academy. Each adhered to the discipline. Hence their works look alike, just as academic nudes all look to have been made by the same hand. And thus it can be seen that the work is purely a visual experience. It does not really “mean” anything. It was, it is, play, the making of art with the plastic elements. It begins with Cézanne’s achievement, paintings that are a step away from verisimilitude, away from making a “picture” of something, and takes them another step away...to making a painting. If it works as a painting it doesn’t have to mean something.

In synthetic cubism all of the elements were treated independently …color independent of form, line independent of color, shape independent of color or line…and greatly reduced to their simplest being. A piece of wallpaper glued to the ground was simply a flat piece of paper on a flat ground: flat being the key. This has nothing to do with Hippolyte Taine, Saussure, Einstein’s Theory of relativity, X-rays, modern psychology, silent movies, etc. etc. etc: it was simply a way of showing us what art is: a flat piece of paper on a flat ground: if the drawing of a man was included it was a drawing: it was glaringly honest art rather than the deceit of mimesis. (This is not a pipe.) I suspect that the insistence on intellectual underpinnings is an effort by various writers to give cubism depth and heft because without “meaning” it could simply be …arbitrary.

In the various modes of cubism, proto-cubism, analytic, and synthetic, each of the paintings in the Lauder Collection has in common the look of being finished. That is because the artists who made them, knowing how to make paintings, knew, even though paintings like these had never existed before, knew when they were finished. In the same way Cézanne’s portrait, Madam Cézanne in the Conservatory, MMA, has a sense of being finished even though there are areas of the ground not covered with paint and areas where the paint is more thinly applied than it is in other places. There is nothing more that can be done to that painting without marring it. Following Cézanne’s example, Cubism gave artists permission to know their business and to make their own decisions.

The problem with some of the cubist art and especially the art that followed the cubist lead is that building a work out of the plastic elements too often can result in work that is indeed purely arbitrary …this could be black or it could be white, it could be blue or red …one could use the eye or the glasses or just the mustache. If there is no artist’s passion in the art making, and in all of Picasso and Braque there is much passion for making art, the felt arbitrariness of the presentation engenders a sense of indifference in the viewer…art is no longer a shared experience, a call for community, it is just something to pass the time that results in …decoration.

Many if not all of these paintings have been seen before …almost all of them have been used to illustrate the various books on cubism and have been seen in cubist exhibitions. This raises the question: are these good paintings or just familiar paintings? Perhaps we won’t know until after they have stood the test of time…if even then.

In later years Kahnweiler described cubism as lyrical painting in that it is the lyricism of form …or perhaps he meant …Shape. Certainly we can see that that is true in the work that Georges Braque made after World War I and for the rest of his life. For Picasso there is the lyrical as well, but there was always something “darker” in his cubism, as if, as The Creator, he sat at the well spring of the creative moment. Whereas Braque had an aptitude for the decorative flourish, Picasso was always pure primitive. And thus, eventually, the two of them, just those two, working from different places came to a parting of the ways. And the cubist era was at an end.

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/cubism-leonard-a-lauder-collection

Madam Cezanne, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

This exhibition operates on two levels. One: it brings to our attention the wife of the painter Paul Cézanne, and through a closer study in twenty four of the twenty nine portraits he made of her, it wants to see if we cannot arrive at a better understanding of her character, her personhood, which, for the most part, has been left blank or has been distorted by the subjectivity in the biographical data. Two: as these portraits …and many, many sketches…were made over an almost thirty year period this is a wonderful opportunity for a focused study of the artist’s development, the maturing of his technique or “style” if you will. The catalogue has a chapter on his painting technique and one on his drawing and his materials. They are extremely well researched and invaluable.

            The Cézanne’s met in 1869 when Hortense Fiquet was nineteen, Paul Cezanne thirty. She might have been his model, the record is unclear. In 1872 their son Paul was born. In 1886 they were married in the presence of the Cézanne family in Aix. We seem not to know if her father was present at either the civil or the religious ceremonies. He was living at the time of the marriage. (Her mother had died when she was four.) Nor do we seem to know if he knew about or had an opinion of the relationship…the catalogue essays have little to say about her side of the family…perhaps the record is silent as well.  

            The reason most commonly given in the biographies for the Cézanne’s not marrying is that his father was an authoritative head of the house, a patriarch of the clan, an autocrat of the breakfast table, a banker who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and who likely got his opinions from the newspapers. In the portrait that Cezanne did of his father he is doing just that: reading the newspaper, a conservative scandal sheet. The father, begrudgingly, and after much encouragement from the mother, had agreed to support his son with a meager income whilst he mastered the craft and the art of painting. (This arrangement was maintained for twenty five years.) Paul feared and perhaps the mother concurred that should the father find out about Hortense the stipend would be cut off.

            We are left to assume that the father’s potential displeasure with his son’s having a mistress was another example of his frugality: he would support a son but not a son and his mistress. Or perhaps it was his sense of moral indignation   …the family was Catholic. If so hypocrisy would be a better name for it as he was known to have availed himself of the charms of the household staff. When he did learn the truth his response was anticlimactic…as if he mused to himself: Like father like son. But the impact might have been lessened by the reality that this had been a relationship of seventeen years and, more importantly, by the pleasant discovery of his only grandson and male heir.

            Once married and as the wife of the man who almost immediately became the head of the household upon his father’s subsequent death, Hortense was never warmly welcomed into the family fold. The biographical record has assumed that this had something to do with the character of Hortense …that she was dull, cold, and aloof, or the character of the mother and the sister who were also dull, cold, and aloof. (As is so commonly said, a man always marries his mother.) But in all likelihood it might have had something to do with the mores of the times. As those of us who have read our Proust know, in turn of the century France a man was expected to have a mistress, and allowed to have children with her, but one did not marry his mistress. Just ask Charles Swan. It is even possible that this social prohibition has entered into and colored the biographical accounts of others.

            The most common characteristic of the Cezanne marriage is that Paul and Hortense rarely lived together, or for very long periods when they did. This seems not to have been an issue for either of them. Apparently there are no documents in the archives that explain it, but it can readily be assumed that because he was so difficult and on many occasions socially inept, at times bordering on serious emotional disturbance, the respite was a necessity for her. As she was not an artist and seems to have had no interest in art or much else other than the fashions of the day, separation worked for him as well. It has also been reported elsewhere that Cézanne was extremely shy around women and especially in the presence of nude models. Perhaps having found someone who would share his bed once, he was content to have mated for life. Perhaps she was one of those women who in giving herself to a man gave herself for her lifetime. At the same time he was Catholic, perhaps she was as well, and monogamy can be considered by some as a sacrament despite its legal status. Whatever the reasons they shared a relationship of over thirty years which could be described as respectful and, in its own way, loving. A very good indication of this interpretation would be the father-son relationship between Paul and Paul fils.

            It has been a common experience throughout my lifetime to have known or to have heard of a separated or divorced couple wherein the wife has turned against the husband with such bitterness and anger that she has demanded that her children too vilify and abandon their father. (As in “Hell hath no fury…”). In the biographical record Cézanne has always been pictured as a loving, doting father to his son, albeit often from a distance, and his son has always been reported to have shown his father obedience, respect, and love. It has always seemed obvious to me that this attitude on the part of the son was likely the result of his mother’s example.

            I was surprised in reading the catalogue to see the remarks made by Roger Fry to the effect that the son Paul was nothing but a little bourgeois. (I have read these remarks elsewhere.) This could hardly have been news. When one looks over the above cast of characters one sees nothing but little groupings of bourgeoisies on both sides of the divide. (Thus my surprise that the remark, dismissive of Paul fils, has been repeated: it wasn’t his fault.) That Paul Cezanne père was born into, reared, and lived the whole of his adult life in this milieu and that he was able to discover, nurture, develop, and realize his genius is the noteworthy biographical detail. How does that happen!

            That she posed for her husband would indicate that this activity had a degree of pleasure for Madam Cézanne. Under Freud’s pleasure/pain principle …we do those things that give us pleasure, we avoid those things that give us pain…the length of the circumstantial evidence is a sufficient explanation.

             In order to be a good model one has to enjoy being looked at. Many, many people dislike being looked at and it might never be apparent to them until someone asks them to pose. If a person does not like being looked at it is almost impossible to draw them. It is as if the pencil, the marking device, comes under the control of the model’s will. On the other hand, if the person likes being seen, if he finds modeling a pleasant experience, the pencil flies over the surface of the paper. In fact the best models are exhibitionists. That Madam Cézanne posed for her husband over and over again can only be understood as something very pleasing to her, although so long as the record is silent, we will never know why. By contrast, how many portraits did he make of his son, who we know from the record disliked posing …very much.

            The human personality is as multifaceted as a rose cut diamond. With such a large number of portraits one might think that it would be easy to deduce the personality of the sitter. Unfortunately ascertaining the personality of this woman through these portraits is not an easy task. Not very many of them are actually finished and in most of them Cézanne was making a painting with a figure which is something distinctively different from a study focused on the character of the sitter. The mistake that has been made in the biographies is to lose sight of that and to interpret something in a way that had not been intended. In these paintings this woman has no more personality than any of Renoir’s laundresses or Degas’ little ballerinas, nor was she intended to have. In his essay The Apples of Cézanne Meyer Schapiro argues against the belief that Cezanne’s paintings were only about painting. He claims for the apples a mythic status that inspired the artist to take up his brushes over and over again. Indeed that might well be true of apples but the paintings are first and foremost paintings and every painting is first and foremost about painting: before stepping away from his work every artist must look one last time to ascertain that this one will survive the scrutiny of his peers and his patrons.

            In only one of these paintings do we have a sense of the personality of Madame Cézanne and of the artist’s feelings for her: Madam Cézanne in the Conservatory, Plate 28. In this finished portrait …but unfinished painting… the details and verisimilitude fade away from the centered face. Surrounded as she is by suggestions of growing things we might be tempted to say, a la Schapiro, that this is Ceres, mother earth. And she is indeed kind and benevolent and nurturing and eternally young. (She was forty one and looked twenty.) It is uncanny how closely Cézanne transferred those qualities from the drawing he had made earlier, Plate 40. Uncanny in that nothing seems to have been lost in the longer process, a process wherein Cézanne often made changes constantly as he worked a canvass to completion. It is one of the very late portraits, 1893, and so it is possible that Cézanne, who was always mindful of making museum paintings, see Cézanne’s Card Players, MMA 2011,set out specifically here to make a museum portrait revealing the character of the subject that could pass scrutiny in that genre. In fact it might have come to his attention that there was a void in his work: almost all of his portraits were of men. But it might also be true that he saw something in this portrait sketch, something symbolic, that he wanted to preserve,

            Otherwise the best example of Madam Cézanne’s personality in this exhibition is the letter she wrote to her friend Madam Choquet. It could convince you of the validity of handwriting analysis. In the letter Madam Cézanne is all charm and friendliness and she seems a fine, mature, worldly woman anyone would be happy to meet. But it is her penmanship in the letter that is so revealing. This is the hand writing of a person who was trained, perhaps in public school, to write in script and to write well, in fact, very well. Every letter is well shaped and legible and of the nineteenth century letters I have seen, this is perhaps one of the most beautifully executed. The writer obviously took great pride in that talent. And even in her middle years she continued to perform for the approval of her mentors. (At The Morgan I once tried to read the cramped, tiny, illegible hand of Ingres. I couldn’t.)

Despite our desire to know her, or the museum’s desire to make us want to know her, because the evidence remains so scanty I think we should probably accept the insight of Karl Jaspers in his early book, Psychology, in which he states that a person cannot be known: each of us is an experience in the process of becoming; when we die, the only thing that remains of us is the subjective memory others have of us. Attempting to ascertain her personality from these portraits is probably just as subjective: very likely each person can find one portrait he likes better than the others and, having read the biographies, will be ready to proclaim that this one is the real Madam Cézanne. I think, given the scanty evidence that the Cezanne’s were a good, if not a qualified good, couple who found some measure of peace and happiness together, as we love him because of his work so should we love her as having been kind and loving to him …whenever and to whatever degree that was.

In regard to the development of Cézanne’s technique …style…there is really only very clear cut evidence here of what we have already known: that Cézanne was a colorist, that he abhorred areas of solid color, that he sought relentlessly to define form, that he developed a canvas all at once (balancing colors and tonal values), and that he would redraw and restate contour lines. This is not to say that what is presented here is tiresome. On the contrary. It is well presented here in a succession of finished and partially finished works and preliminary sketches.

How was he able to maintain his interest in what the rest of us would consider a laborious and tedious process? Plates 12 and 23 show that from the white ground up he applied his patches of color building the forms through the modulation of color. One might have thought that he would have started with a solid color that defined the shapes and then filled them in in order to state the forms. Apparently not. Through his method there is no sense of each form until much later in the process. I’m not sure that many people have the patience for that kind of slow development. Nor that they would have the courage to sit in front of a blank white ground eager to go through the process all over again. What was Cézanne’s profound interest? What drove him?

By contrast, in his drawings we see the same technique being practiced for thirty some years with hardly any stylistic change at all. In the catalogue we see an early academic study, so we know he could draw differently if he chose to do so. I think this display of similar drawings helps us to understand why Cézanne was a painter’s painter. Certainly he was not a draftsman, in the manner of Rembrandt or Picasso. His drawing is hardly more than a tool, a means for him to find the right presentation of his motif. In fact in all of my years of museum going, now in excess of fifty some years, these are the first of his drawings that I think I have ever seen. I have seen one or two etchings which were of no interest to me at all. I have seen many started but unfinished watercolors. I might have seen an isolated drawing here and there …but I don’t remember them. And it was a complete surprise to me that the Morgan Library owns one of his notebooks. I thought I knew their inventory well enough to have known that.

Thus the high point of this exhibition for me is the chance to see this group of drawings. In all of them Madam Cézanne seems to be softer, more tender, and obviously someone he cared for very much, someone to whom he had made a commitment of couplehood. She seems almost the same age over that long number of years. Would this imply that she had a symbolic meaning for him? That she was his anima, his feminine self? Seen in the company of the paintings for which they are sometimes the preliminaries they give me a far greater insight into his achievement than simply a repetition of paintings. That all of this is occasioned by the presentation of his work with Madam Cézanne and the questions this raises about their feelings for one another, even though those questions are unanswered and will never be answered, this meditation on that facet of his personality deepens my interest in him as a person.

Lest I ignore it: whenever I am in Boston I make it a point to visit their Cézanne; Madam Cézanne in a Red Armchair. I think the stripes in her skirt are one of the great moments in western painting. I was in Boston a few weeks ago (scroll down for those comments) and was sad not to have been able to see her, but not all that sad as I knew I was coming here and could pay my respects at that time. On every visit to the Met I pay my respects to Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory, an unfinished painting to which nothing could be added. Had he painted nothing other than these two portraits he would still be considered one of our greatest painters and certainly my favorite.

I have to say that I disliked the venue for this exhibition, in what appears to be the overlarge lobby of the addition housing the Robert Lehman Collection. This is a lovely modern architectural environment designed by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. But it is too much an architectural statement to host an intimate special exhibition such as this. The space is too broken up. It would have been much nicer to have had all of the work visible from one vantage point, to have had an insistent presence of the subject, rather than having it obscured by piers and voids …with the drawings in a dark nook off to the side. While this might work for the Lehman Collection …usually featuring a magnificent Ingres portrait in oils that dominates the entire wing… it doesn’t work for this exhibition.

Fifty six years ago when I first started going to the Met this space was a much smaller room with a bay window overlooking the park. And it had a specific function: it was a smoking lounge. Even though I love modern architecture I have always been sorry that it was replaced. However; there are the front steps now for a quick gasp of fresh air.

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/madame-cezanne

Goya Order and Disorder at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

            Goya always signed himself “Goya, Pinturo” - “Goya, Painter”. And well he should have; he was the Painter to the King. In his official capacity he painted many portraits of the royal family, the members of the court and their families, members of the government and their families, and members of the church. He painted cartoons for tapestries to decorate the royal residences, and on his own he painted still lifes and historic paintings expressing his rage at the times in which he lived. Despite this great output I have always known him primarily as a print maker an activity that seems to have occupied a large part of his late years. And indeed the prints, the aquatint prints, are magnificent…no artist ever loved black so much or worked so well with it as did Goya. He made the claim that he could make you see any color in a black and white drawing.

            One reason for this distorted image, I suspect, is that one doesn’t see many Goya Paintings here in the USA. Having lived in NYC for over 50 years I am of course familiar with The Duchess of Alba from the Hispanic Society. I have seen some of the portraits at the Metropolitan Museum but which ones I could not say, I have seen the Self Portrait with Dr. Arrieta in Minneapolis, and at the McNay Museum in San Antonio I saw the remnant of a painting from the Meadows Museum at SMU featuring eight or so students of a professor (since cut away) and considered it probably the greatest painting ever depicting the adolescent male. I went to Houston a few years ago to see paintings from The Prado and while I did see many paintings I only remember seeing Goya prints. (They were superb!).In the last few years I have visited over 100 American art museums and where it concerns Goya the results are always the same.

            Another reason may be that there don’t seem to be many iconic masterpieces …The Third of May and the Naked Maja come to mind …but a greater number of iconic images from prints come to mind more than from paintings. I did see The Last Works of Goya at the Frick Museum some years back and I was tremendously inspired by it, inspired to draw…I left the museum and went directly to an art supply store and bought a box of conte crayons and went home and made black, black, black portraits of my pottery collection. But even though there were paintings, portraits, in that exhibition, I do not remember them. They did not create a strong lasting impression.

            Why, then, do the paintings not stand out, why do so few of them resonate or become iconic in the mind? In a way I suppose it is because so many of them are portraits of persons long gone and of no interest to us nowadays. They were Spanish persons and I suspect that Americans know less about Spain than of any other European country. (And at that they probably know more than they want to know.) These are certainly really fine portraits …Maria Antonia Gonzaga, Antonia Zarate y Aguirre, and Maria Luisa de Borbon and the two old ladies, “Time (Old Women)”, well past both their prime and their bedtime!  In all of his work the execution of the paintings is remarkable: while they have the surface appearance of paintings and a lively energy that results from the way of their having been made, there is at the same time no sense that these had actually been “made”…so natural and right do they appear to be. What the painter has done is so well done as to escape our notice.

            This is not to say that they are so photographically correct. Quite the contrary. Few painters are as honestly “painterly” as is Goya …a brush loaded with dark chrome yellow dragged over the subject’s chest suggests a gold chain, a brush load of vermillion reads, even up close, as a red ribbon. Eyes thickly outlined in vermillion read as perfectly natural.

            This is especially true of the still lifes: the subjects here are so “wrought” in paint, with little or no regard for the finess of the setting in which they will be exhibited. They are what they are: and they are so indicative of the artist’s state of mind when they were made as to suggest that they were the inspiration for the much later Expressionist movement. Compare these to the two meticulous tromp l’oeil Melendez still life paintings in the corridor outside the Scarf Center. Goya and Melendez …two great painters each brilliant in a different way.

            I think it might be that the paintings, the portraits, made for clients, are, aside from their masterly execution, nothing more than great portraits…and unfortunately the world is full of great portraits. But the prints and the drawings …and Goya is the only artist whose prints I like better than his drawings …the prints are engrossing because of their finish and because they tell a story. Picasso explained why he made so many etchings by saying that he was always telling himself stories. Goya seems to have been telling us stories and they were stories that had to be told.

            What the exhibition does present beautifully but which is hardly commented on is the opportunity to address a very common problem in painting: what is fine art painting and what is mere decoration? There are many oil sketches in the exhibition and many cartoons (full size) to be turned into tapestries. Many of the tapestries are included. In these the world is orderly and calm and The People presented as if living an Edenic Idle. Hanging between them are the aforementioned still lifes with dead rabbits and dead fish looking very, very dead indeed. Clearly the tapestries with their superficial present, their happy people, their lively colors, and their sunny days are nothing more than decoration. But what is it about the dead fish and dead rabbits that elevates those paintings to the realm of fine art. Looking from one to the other, from still life to sketch to cartoon to tapestry and back again, what can we learn from this wonderful juxtaposition of paintings about the art of painting? It’s all right there in front of us. And what other paintings in this exhibition achieve the same stature?

            As for the curators’ perspective, Order and Disorder, I can understand it as an attempt to make Goya more accessible, to make him more popular with the general public. But I suspect it will be unsuccessful. Goya lived in such harsh and troubled times …The Spanish Inquisition, the Peninsular War, the swing of the political pendulum because of changes of regime, and amongst such a wide array of public faces   …royalty, aristocrats, soldiers, merchants, commoners, peasants, harlots, and madmen… and he had such personal losses during his lifetime …his many children, his wife, his hearing, his health… that the choice is a logical one but without much resonance here. Didn’t we know all this before we arrived at the museum?  Was not enough made of it to make the theme seem newly insightful?

Or is there something too very Spanish in this work, let’s say the ever present Spanish Tragedy aspect of life’s peccadilloes, that we also get in abundance with Picasso, that puts the appeal of the work beyond our desire for comprehension because of our cultural prejudices.

Despite the events of the day or of the prolonged events of many days Goya was a person in the king’s employ who had a job to do and who got the job done come what may. He left a huge body of work, truly excellent work, work that he loved making, and he worked until the very end. That body of work puts him in the company of Shakespeare …he had a profound experience of life and of all those around him. It seems that to Goya it was beside the point if life was orderly or chaotic; there was work to do and he got it done. He went with the flow…and shared with us all his experiences in perfectly comprehensible feelings and images.

If our American lack of appreciation for his achievement is a fault, the fault lies not in the stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves.

http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/goya

Hollywood Glamour Fashion and Jewelry from the Silver Screen Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

It had been my intention to see this exhibition once and then perhaps only briefly, thinking that it probably did not have the importance of the major Goya Exhibition downstairs. Instead I have now seen it three times. (I recently spent two full days in the museum: one ticket covers two visits and I am not one to waste an opportunity.) Not having checked my calendar when I made my plans I was unaware until I arrived at the museum that my first visit fell on Armistice Day. The bad news here is that it seems everyone in Boston with small children considered the holiday the ideal time to take their toddlers on a cultural jaunt. To my way of thinking there is nothing more disturbing in a museum than precocious toddlers demanding their parents’ undivided attention, unless it is the squeaky wheel of a stroller. In my experience the Boston MFA is the only museum in the country, nay the world, where the presence of loud toddlers is encouraged. I could go on…however…despite the attending commotion, I had my planned visit. Nice.

            Late in the morning of the second day, I decided to run back upstairs to see this again hoping that things might have calmed down. This time I found that a tour was just beginning for a large group of interested women. Having seen the video on the museum web page, I realized that one of the two curators, Michelle Finamore, was the tour leader. So I used my talents for blending in. Thus there was some good back-story about the making of this exhibition.

            There are sixteen gowns in the exhibition, a vitrine with some gorgeous jewelry that was either worn by the stars in films or was owned by them. (Apparently Gloria Swanson almost always used her own stuff in her films, none of it cheap). There are some lighting sketches and dress design sketches, five movie star portraits by Edward Steichen, including the well known Garbo with her hands over her head pressing her skull, and a film loop playing scenes from the various films so that we can see not only what the dresses look like up close and on the screen but how they hang on the body and how they move. In keeping with the period of the gowns chosen, the 30’s and 40’s, the palette of the exhibition is in shades of gray (silver)  nicely showing off the gowns that are gold, beige, silver, black, white and gray. There is one in yellow.

Distinct from mere costumes, these garments are what was meant in the film credits as “Gowns by…” It was Hollywood’s attempt to influence fashion and apparently no expense was spared. Edith Head described this era as one of luxury before there was budgets and economy and the museum does a good job of incorporating that into the design of the exhibition.

Ms Finamore told us that it had been assumed that this would be an easy exhibition to put together: get on the phone, get a few loans, fit them to the manikins et voila! an exhibition. Instead it was a project of ongoing headaches. Many of the items had been in storage for many, many years and needed serious refreshing. Some of them had not been well cared for. The lame gowns had areas of tarnish. The sheer gown worn in the film by Joan Crawford was missing its undergarment and one had to be made. And so the repairs were made, more cleaning than had been anticipated was done, etc. etc. etc.

In the end it is an excellent presentation and if I had not been told of the backstage problems I would not have guessed. Irene for Greer Garson, Robert Kallosh for Norma Shearer, Schiaparelli for Mae West, Howard Greer, Rene Hubert for Gloria Swanson, Adrian for Harlow, Crawford, and Garbo,  Travis Banton for Dietrich, Lombard, and Anna Mae Wong, And Edith Head for Betty Hutton and Betty Grable.

This last item, last also in that it was at the top of the curving stairway used as the setting, was a real surprise for me. I know Betty Grable from having grown up on her Fox musicals and in my early New York days seeing her in the art house revivals of RKO films. I had not known that she once starred in a Paramount picture and that she had been dressed by Edith Head. And a gorgeous gown it is…the curator said that in repairing it she was able to study it and see that it was one of the most beautifully constructed dresses she had ever seen. (It is the gold lame with the crossed fabric over the bodice and around the neck.) Whereas at RKO Betty was a featured chorine, dancing at one time with Edward Everret Horton, and at Fox the wholesome replacement for Alice Faye, generally dressed in a rather chaste manner (with the exception of Shimmy Like My Sister Kate), at Paramount she was draped to display a really gorgeous, sexy female body. Shakespeare was right, clothes do make the man, or in this case… A gown such as this in an exhibition gives us the opportunity to see the details that went into creating a commodity …the star …and to understand how a consistently presented image made it seem to be true.

Yes, image. Downstairs in the Scarf Center as one enters the museum, the room is lined with 16 or so movie star photographs by Yosef Karsh, shown in conjunction with this exhibition. Karsh went to Hollywood a couple of times but he never liked the work he did there. He prided himself on capturing a subject’s true personality and he always felt that the Hollywood stars had been trained to never let their hair down: they were always image, never persons. (But even though he never liked the photographs he had them printed, sold them, and gave them to collections. But that is another story, also about celebrity.)

There are two gowns in the collection by Coco Chanel, one worn by Ina Clair, privately owned but not, I believe, worn in a film. One is your basic little black Chanel dress trimmed in tons of jewels. (This required devising a means of support for the fabric for this showing.) Despite this Chanel was considered too subdued for Hollywood and so she never made inroads there.

At the end of the tour during Q’s and A’s, I asked how the gowns had been made to fit on what seemed to be contemporary, standard department store manikins. They made it appear as if each of these women had been six feet tall whereas in reality most of them were very, very small. The curator agreed, reminding us that Mae West hardly cleared four foot ten. (A pair of her high platform shoes are in one of the virtrines.) As she had the actresses’ measurements all of the manikins had had to be altered, some of them having to have their legs shortened. Still, some of the manikins were on tip toe as if they had been intended to have been shown in very high heels, and some of the hems were four to six inches off the floor whereas on screen they might have “puddled” or been lifted as one walked across the room.

And I could see some of the alterations, trims and paddings that had been done. Recently I watched all of the Jean Harlow films from Netflix …I had hardly ever seen her in anything other than Dinner at Eight. What shocked me, having seen her in so many bias cut form fitting satin gowns from the front, in Dinner and in stills, was that seeing her in the round in various movies she was discovered to have very large buttocks …unusually so, almost as if she wore a bustle. Sure enough her manikin here had been padded out in just that area to make the dress behave as designed. From my thirty years in the NYC film industry I know that the camera never lies and so one has to be very, very careful about what is put in front of it. On film cheap dime store jewelry will look like cheap dime store jewelry…thus Gloria used the real thing. On the other hand the camera cannot always be placed to erase a fact and Harlow’s “dairy air”, as they say in Wisconsin, has been immortalized in celluloid.

Later in the day as I was making my way out of the museum I passed by the gallery again and seeing that it was empty I went inside for a moment of quite inspection.

Often I think too much is made of Hollywood …this one was Great! … that one was A Genuis! And much of that kind of talk is in regard to forgettable films much like those referenced in this exhibition. Yet there have been really fine contributions worthy of our further consideration …designers, composers, cinematographers, still photographers …other than Karsh. By digging through stacks of material, as has been done here, things that perhaps we should not forget have been reclaimed.

However; over my fifty years of museum going I have become increasingly aware of the dumbing down of our cultural heritage, that lessened divide between high and low art, fine art and pop art. Granted a museum might be expected to have a collection of historically important costumes and to display those once in a while. But when the Alexander McQueen fashion exhibition becomes the largest audience drawing event in the history of the Metropolitan Museum, forcing (?) them to stay open until midnight to accommodate the crowds, we might begin to ask if this is fair to Goya downstairs, to Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, or Degas …or to us, the public. Doesn’t an extremely successful exhibition devoted to what we wear to parties indicate that we are a rather more than shallow society?

The danger is that we are a conformist society. And nothing shows this better than our museums. From one coast to the other they all look alike, they all have expansions by the same coterie of modern architects, they all show similar work by the same 37 modern artists in exactly the same configurations…the Museum of Modern Art “Style”. Few regional artists are shown unless they have national reputations, i.e. The Boston Museum of Fine Art shows John Singer Sergeant but has downsized its Paul Revere and Copley displays in the new American wing. I would much rather see exhibitions in museums that say this is how we do things here in Boston, in Massachusetts, in Philadelphia, etc. than to see copy cat displays of things that I could see anywhere. If asked I probably would have said that I had never expected to see a display of Hollywood artifacts in Boston. (Karsh learned photography in Boston and educated himself at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Public Library: his inclusion here is appropriately regional.) That this exhibition, however, is in Boston speaks, I fear, to the times, the conformist times, in which we live.

This is not to say that it is not a good exhibition. It’s just that somehow it wasn’t “right”. I had the same response at LACMA when I saw an exhibition of American furniture and it was all Philadelphia and Boston Chippendale. What did the people of early Los Angeles sit on? Why not find out and show that?  In our museums we have to rediscover our regional roots: without the regional we denigrate our history. Those should be the easy exhibitions. On the other hand, it’s work: who said it had to be easy?

On the museum web page there is a nice video about the exhibition and at the bottom of the page there are five or so reviews that have additional material regarding The Stars and many more photographs.

http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/hollywood-glamour