New Forms: Early European Abstraction at Yale

Kurt Schwitters, Relief with Red Segment, 1927

It was such a pleasure to recently visit the newly expanded galleries at the Yale University Art Gallery, discovering one treasure after another. I wrote about the gallery dedicated to Mesoamerican art here; last year I wrote about their collection of African art, which was already on view, and about a small selection of their earlier European paintings, focusing on Angels and Demons. On this trip I was thrilled to see Yale's outstanding collection of early 20th century European abstract painting, a vividly fertile period of new ideas, enlarging the meanings and techniques of painting. Last year the Museum of Modern Art mounted a grand exhibition on the early years of abstraction, Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925, which I wrote about here. Seeing the paintings at Yale reminded me how exciting the work of this period is.

Kurt Schwitters, Merz 1003 (Peacock's Tail), 1924

I find myself falling into clichés when thinking of the three Schwitters works I've reproduced here, like they "knocked my socks off"! When I think of Kurt Schwitters it's his poetic small collages; I was not at all familiar with these larger assemblages, dynamic in form, rich in color.

Kurt Schwitters, Oval Construction, 1925

The three dimensional aspects of these pieces, whether subtle as in Merz 1003, or dramatically volumetric as in Oval Construction, add energy and presence; they almost make me want to run up to my work room and start making constructions. Very inspiring.

Suzanne Duchamp, Accordion Masterpiece, 1921

I thought that this work had a similarity to the Schwitters, both in structure and in its use of unusual materials, here silver leaf. The shimmering silver in Duchamp's painting made a form that was hard to pin down: it moved about with the light, forward and back, a secular halo.

Juan Gris, Newspaper and Fruit Dish, 1916

This Gris has a wonderful stacking of forms and rich color contrasts. Not all early abstraction was non-objective; the cubists brought us a new way of seeing the world. I remember that at a large Picasso retrospective at MoMA years ago, we could see him step close to the edge to leap into non-objective painting, but then drawing back. Since I too am tied to images of the world in my paintings, I like to have the example of Picasso to think of, who after all is a great painter. 

Fernand Leger, Composition No. VII, 1925

I love the layering of shapes in this Leger, the contrast of the large curving forms of the vase with the stacked straight lines. It has a little humor to it: a magazine? on a table with a vase? everything flipped to its characteristic view, a very modern still life. 

Paul Klee, Joyful Mountain Landscape, 1929

I'm not much of a Paul Klee fan, finding his work too sweet for my taste, but I liked the angled planes of this painting, and the interesting color relationships.

Carl Buchheister, Red and Green Steps, 1925

Back to the non-objective, my true love of this period, here is a painting by an artist I had not known. A serious, yet somehow joyful collection of squares. They are joined by colored rectangles of different sizes and transparencies, and red semi-circles adding bounce. The squares seem illumined against the dark ground.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, G5, 1926

Moholy-Nagy combines geometric elements in a way that seems simple, but to balance the subtle tensions of thick line and thin, round and straight form, transparent and opaque paint, acute and gentle diagonals, is not easy.

Theo van Doesburg, Simultaneous Composition, 1929

Simultaneous Composition could probably be mistaken for a work by Mondrian. van Doesburg and Mondrian were friends for a time, both participating in the group de Stijl that van Doesburg had founded in 1917. But, one thing I think that Mondrian did not do was have lines overlap shapes, as the lines do here, so that the linear grid looks as though it is in front of the color shapes, giving the painting a quality of movement.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Blue, Black, and Light Blue, 1929

Mondrian's paintings are still; they have classic form derived from essentials. I always have a feeling of the universal when looking quietly at a Mondrian painting, like a glimpse into Plato's ideal forms.

Piet Mondrian, Fox Trot A, 1930

This painting is almost empty, but its three lines on a white diamond are miraculously expressive. They quietly animate a space that now seems boundless rather than contained. Mondrian, and the other painters I've shown, began the 20th century with an enormous outpouring of original forms, which painters have built on over the years.

Buds: Unfolding Gifts

It is still early spring here in northern Vermont, with most trees still bare of leaves and daffodils and forsythia the only flowers blooming. But there's evidence of beauty to come as buds on trees and shrubs swell, disclosing hints of what they contain. The elegant structure of a lilac bud opens to show tiny violet spheres.

The long leaves surrounding the tightly gathered rounds of the Nannyberry bud look as though they might start spinning and fly away.

The American Cranberry, Viburnum trilobum, has a much frillier package, with lacy leaf-ends folded over the flower bud.

A deep rich burgundy sprouts from a honeysuckle stem, soon to be new green leaves.

The narrow buds on the apple trees promise leaves but not blossoms; this is their year of rest.

Furled green leaf buds are a soft contrast to the thorns on a Rosa rugosa cane.

I love looking out my back windows at this time of year to see the knobby buds on the White ash tree, dotting the tree with their dark protuberances. Looking more closely, I see rounds of flower buds cupped by opening scales, looking a little bit like the lilac bud. These different small packages are promises of new life, of the rebirth that comes with Spring.

A New Painting: "Yellow Rectangle, Green Cylinder"

Yellow Rectangle, Green Cylinder, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in. 

While working on this painting I had to constantly keep in mind the relationship between the two named elements: the yellow rectangle at the upper left and the vertical cylinder catching light. I thought I'd finished the painting three times, and twice I went back and reworked the colors of those two features (never mind painting and wiping off and repainting the large area of shadowed green: too dark, too light, too warm, etc). The tricky part of the two main characters was their balance: I wanted the cylinder to be a forceful presence but at first the yellow was too intense and the green not intense enough, leading to the painting being dominated by the yellow shape. So I darkened the yellow and made it a less intense color and intensified the green, which I thought looked great. But a day later I realized that the dull yellow was too dull; it had lost all vibrancy and life. I went in again with a more intense yellow. Because egg tempera is translucent, the color layers affect each other: that layer of intense yellow over the darker, more tertiary yellow brought to it enough brilliance, but not too much, to create a better balance with the cool intense green. 

This is just to say that paintings that appear quite simple (to me too) are often quite a challenge. And it was almost as much work to get a decent photo on this blog; I uploaded many variations before settling on this as close enough but not quite. Ah well.....

Spinach Wonton

The spinach I recently planted in the garden has just begun to germinate. It'll be a while before it's large enough to pick, but I still have plenty of last season's spinach in the freezer. This dish is a great treat for me, a little Asian taste in the Northeast Kingdom, and pretty simple to prepare. 

I was going to try to make my own dough, but then got lazy and bought a package of wonton skins. The following recipe, which came with a package of wonton skins, fills about 50 pieces, as many as are in a package. 

1 Tbs vegetable oil

1 clove of garlic, minced (or more, to taste; I used 2 big ones)

2 small carrots, finely chopped

1 medium onion, minced

2 cups chopped cooked spinach, which is around 12 oz.

3 Tbs sesame seeds

Saute the onion till golden, then add other ingredients and cook for about 5 minutes.

Combine in the bowl with the following ingredients:

1 egg

1/2 cup bread crumbs

1 teas freshly grated ginger (I added more since I love ginger)

1 Tbs sherry 

3 Tbs soy sauce

Put a heaping teaspoon of the filling at the top of the wonton skin as shown above. Moisten the edges with water, fold into a triangle, making sure the edges are sealed, and then overlap the two corners. 

To cook, glaze a frying pan with vegetable oil, heat it, and place wontons in pan. Cook until the bottoms are lightly browned, then add 1/2 cup of water, cover, and cook at a simmer for 10 minutes. Most of the water will have boiled off and the noodle dough will have become transparent, as in the first photo. I like these with more soy sauce, but I'm sure they are good with other condiments.

The wontons will freeze very well, so if you're not cooking all of them, tray freeze and then pack into a bag. You can cook them without defrosting.

Enjoy!

Robert Mangold: Shape, Line, Light

Framed Square, blue; acrylic and black pencil on canvas.

Over many years, Robert Mangold's concerns in his paintings have stayed constant: upon a colored shape––rectangle, triangle, curve, column, or irregular figure, with two or more canvases abutting (scroll down for examples here)––lines, curved or straight, are drawn in pencil. In his recent show at Pace Gallery, Mangold developed a theme he had only touched on before: a shape within a shape, leaving an empty center. The paintings, body-sized, have a beautiful presence: classical, calm, lyrical.

Framed Square, blue detail

The translucent paint handling brings light into the paintings, as does the empty center. The lines in the works are not solely the drawn pencil lines, but also the straight, deep lines formed by joined canvases.

Framed Square, lemon yellow; acrylic and black pencil on canvas.

Lines flow in a balanced, elegant curve from corner to edge, moving outward and inward in a continuous loop. The curves change the character of the square and trapezoidal canvases; their minimalism becomes poetic.

Framed Square, lemon yellow detail

If you click to enlarge this detail, you'll see that there was uncertainty and shifting in the placement of the lines. The final painting feels very assured.

Square with Open Circle II, 2011; acrylic and black pencil on canvas.

The lines also push a balanced image, a centered open shape, into movement, as though it is caught in a net and being tugged along. In this work a single diagonal line creates a different tension.

Framed Square with Open Center III, 2013; acrylic and black pencil on canvas.

With two diagonals crossing the square, there is a greater sense of balance, even with the uneven circular lines.

Framed Square with Open Center II, 2013; acrylic and black pencil on canvas.

I enjoy looking from one painting to the next, to see how Mangold uses his lines to touch edges, bulge outward, cross each other; following the lines' flow becomes something of a visual puzzle. I am also interested in how the different colors change the mood and space of each painting. They could be metaphors for weather conditions giving rise to varying kinds of light: the soft light of fog, the bright intense light of midday sun, the half-light of dusk or dawn.

Angled Ring I, 2011; acrylic and black pencil on canvas.

Not all the paintings had their inner shapes centered; here the large circle is pushing against the leftward point.

Framed Rectangle; acrylic and black pencil on canvas.

 With a long rectangle, the lines become waves, softening the hard edges of the painting.

Installation at Pace Gallery

It seems to me that Mangold must think of Matisse in his use of line and color, and the light contained within a color. His paintings are luminous and open, and embrace the gracefulness found within geometry.

A New Textile: "Construction (Red Circle and Bars) "

Construction (Red Circle and Bars), hand dyed wool on linen, 19 x 18 in. 

When I was working on the studies for this new piece, I was thinking of and looking at Malevich's Suprematist works, with their simple geometric forms moving and overlapping on a light ground....

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1915; oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 14 in. 

...such as this painting. Maybe some day I'll play with overlapping forms, but for now, I am hooking separate pieces that I then sew together. I mixed colors that were a less saturated and duller than bright primary or secondary colors. I wanted a softer effect rather than a brilliant one. One thing I regret: once I had the work sewn together, I felt that it could have used a red line at the bottom of the green rectangle; it would have unified the work a little better. It's something I couldn't see until the work was done and it was too late to change it. Oh well, the best laid plans.....

Construction (Red Circle and Bars) detail

"The Great Beauty": "...roots are important"

The camera flows through the city of Rome, watching a woman with a sculpture, a man washing his hands in a fountain, a group of tourists, one of whom faints after joyously photographing this grand view.

There are also sounds: The Great Beauty opens with the booming of a cannon, then the ringing of church bells. We then hear a haunting, incredibly beautiful chorus of women's voices, a theme that returns through the movie. With a little research I found that the music is John Taverner's The Lamb, which you can hear at the link. The words come from a poem by William Blake, a religious poem referring to Christ as the innocent lamb. This ethereal music, this hymn to innocence, is a strong counterpoint to the raucous goings on throughout the film.

For we go from the sublime to the pounding rhythm of rock at a huge dancing party, a very sexy coming together of bodies.

It is at this wild party, on his terrace overlooking the Coliseum, that we first see Jep Gambardella, the "king of high society", the heart of this film. I have to admit falling in love with this mobile face, that of the actor Toni Servillo, whose expressions of amused detachment, of kindness, of irony, of love, are mesmerizing. Paolo Sorrentino, the director of The Great Beauty, has created an homage to Rome, to memory, and to the great Federico Fellini.

Early in the movie, we see a sequence of images through a fence, of young innocent girls, of the beauty of nature, of Jep separated from these things. He is the consummate flaneur, the stroller, the "passionate spectator" as Baudelaire described it. Jep's wry, quizzical expression separates him from surrounding life. He is a man who wrote one brilliant novel when he was young and never wrote another; when asked why, he never explains. But one person tells him that it was clear that he was very much in love when he wrote it.

We slowly discover that there is a great deal of hidden emotion in Jep's life: the husband of his first and only love, a lost love, the love who inspired his novel, comes to him with the news that she has died, and he grieves. This image of curving staircases with the two men who loved Eliza bowed together is to me a picture of understated grief.

After lecturing a new love (a love he never thought he'd find again....and who died, also leaving him as Eliza did) that one should never cry at a funeral because it would be upstaging the family, Jep breaks down in tears carrying the coffin of a good friend. He sees the dissipation and meaninglessness of his life and that of his friends, but he also feels great affection for them. After tearing a woman friend to shreds, in a way forced to do so by her insistent arrogance, he remarks:

We're fond of you.....with a life in tatters like the rest of us. So instead of lecturing us you should look at us with affection. We're all on the brink of despair. We can only look each other in the face, keep each other company, kid each other a bit. 

And then there's art. Earlier in the film Jep goes to see a performance piece and tries to interview the artist (he writes for a culture magazine). She refuses to describe what she means by "vibrations" that she receives in her work, and we can feel his amused disdain. At a large party (there are lots of parties in this movie, all peopled with the rich) a young girl is forced to perform a painting ("she's making millions"), the ultimate degradation of art into spectacle. Jep then goes to see an exhibition of photographs, hundreds of photos mounted in the arches of an old building. When the photographer was a boy, his father began taking a picture of him every day, and he continued the practice when his father died. We see him as a boy, a teenager, a young adult, into maturity. Here is life, fleeting, changing; here is memory and loss. Jep is very moved by the photographs and it is a joy watching his mobile features express tenderness and sorrow.

After presenting all the cynicism and wasted lives of Rome's high society, Sorrentino introduces a Mother Theresa-like character, Sister Maria, a sainted 107 year old woman who worked with the poor in Africa. I was inclined to think her presence was going to be one to be mocked, a false saint, but instead she was a quiet rebuke to the religious around her, especially the Cardinal, said to be in line for Pope, who could only talk about recipes for duck. When explaining why she would not do an interview with Jep, she said:

I took a vow of poverty. And you don't talk about poverty, you live it.

In the one magic realism moment of the film, in early morning, Jep's balcony (Sister Maria had slept on his floor after a dinner party) was filled with flamingoes. The sister said that she knew the Christian names of all these birds, and I believed her. She had read and loved Jep's novel, and when she asked him why he never wrote another, he finally gave an answer:

I was looking for the great beauty but I never found it.

Then asking him if he knew why she only ate roots, she turns to him and says:

Because roots are important. 

Then she smiled and with a gentle exhalation, blew the birds on their way.

I was tempted to end the post there, but Sister Maria's mention of roots takes Jep back to the foundation of his art: his love for Eliza. Is all art based on nostalgia, the "longing for home"? the longing for roots, and the power of memory, to move us to invent, to engage the imagination? the longing to grab hold of fleeting life? I found Jep's final speech very moving, though I know not everyone would feel that way; it is emotional and distant both, direct and also ironic; are we to believe the "blah, blah, blah" or the feeling coming through? And do we see art as a "trick"?

This is how it always ends: in death.
But first there was life hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah. Everything's settled to the bottom beneath the hubbub and noise. The silence and the emotion, the excitement and the fear....The fleeting and sporadic flashes of beauty....amid the wretched squalor and human misery––all buried beneath the awkward predicament of existing in this world, blah, blah, blah.
What lies beyond, lies beyond. That is not my concern. Therefore....let this novel begin. After all, it's just a trick...yes, just a trick.

At Yale: Characters of Mesoamerica

Head of Macuilxochitl (God of Pleasure, Games, and Music), Mexico, Gulf coast, Aztec, ca.1500; ceramic

In a small gallery at the entrance to the newly, wonderfully, expanded Yale University Art Gallery is their collection of the Art of the Ancient Americas. I walked into the gallery to have a quick glimpse before going upstairs to the painting collections, but I was stopped short by this beautifully rendered head. The sensitivity of its modeling is arresting, and the fanciful headdress added what to my eye was whimsy alongside realism. The power of this work encouraged me to look more closely at the rest of the collection on view.

Deities Emerging from Flowers, Mexico, Jaina style, Maya, ca. 600-900; ceramic with pigment.

What I saw were many marvelous ceramic objects, and I focused on those that were figurative. These two small pieces are charming and contradictory: coming out of flowers, things we think of as fresh and youthful, are these two elderly visages. The label describes them as two men, but there are distinctive breasts on the second figure. It is supposed that they were "sewn to the clothing or headdress of a high-ranking individual".

Miniature Hacha, Mexico, Gulf coast, Veracruz, ca. 600-900; stone with traces of pigment

This fierce individual reminds me somewhat of Leonardo's drawings of grotesque heads. In Spanish, hacha is an axe.

Ballplayer, Mexico, Veracruz, ca. 250-400; ceramic with added pigment.

The collection includes many small figures of ballplayers, even a small model of a game, seen behind this figure to his left. This little guy is so wonderful, with his mustache (?) and decorative body accoutrements, including the sausage rows of hair.

Ballplayers, Mexico, Jaina Island, Guaymil, Maya, ca. 550-950; ceramic with traces of paint.

It's really interesting to try to figure out what the bird-shaped belts do in a ball game. It seems that the game must have been decorative and full of ritual. There's such a simple solidity to the limbs of these figures, while the faces have some of the same delicate sensitivity as that of the head that opens this post.

Seated Woman with a Child, Mexico, Campeche, Maya, Jaina style, ca. 600-900; ceramic with added pigment.

Not all the figures depicted were male. Here a woman with a gorgeous headdress cradles a baby at her breast.

Seated Woman, Maya, Jaina style, ca.600-900; ceramic with blue pigment.

A necklace of large rounded beads graces the bare shoulders of a seated woman. I find it interesting that so much care is taken in creating a naturalistic face while the lower body is crudely roughed in.

Standing Male Figure, Mexico, Campeche, Maya, Jaina style, ca. 600-900; ceramic with added pigment.

There is no description of the figure above, but I wonder if it is meant to be a warrior with its clothing that looks like armor and carrying what looks like a shield.

Standing Captives, Mexico, Campeche, Maya, Jaina style, ca. 600-900; ceramic with traces of pigment.

I learned from the label on these pieces that nudity usually "signals the humiliation of the war captive". It also says the female "may also represent one of the Maize god's attendants, who may be depicted nude". So many suppositions make us more aware of how much is conjecture when trying to understand ancient cultures. A little understanding can help with appreciation, but I also have to admit to sometimes not caring about context at all; I love the work for its pure aesthetic qualities. In these figures, the way they are solidly grounded, the limbs full and strong, the shoulders square, is very satisfying.

Carved Bone with a Man and an Inscription, Mexico, northern Yucatan or Jaina island, Maya, 

ca. 800-1000; bone (human femur)

Coming to a piece like this, however, is difficult and confusing. The carving, described as a scepter, is elegant, with beautiful flowing lines, but.....it is a human bone! So, I did some googling to find other instances of the use of the human skeleton as ritual or other objects, which I did find: this site shows ritual Buddhist cups made from skulls, and bones made into musical instruments and weapons. This is a clear instance of how we can never have a pure aesthetic experience because we carry our own cultural biases with us, which we tend to think of as neutral. With my limited understanding, I found so many of the objects on display in this collection full of vivid life, beautifully described.