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Thursday, December 28
ANDREW WYETH AND THE SILENT CINEMA
by
Lloydville
on Thu 28 Dec 2006 12:28 AM PST
[Renee Adoree and John Gilbert in King Vidor's The Big Parade]
Reading an excerpt from David Michaelis's biography of N. C. Wyeth in an
old Vanity Fair I came across an interesting passage. Writing about
N. C.'s son Andrew, Michaelis says:
"Andy's conception of army life had been formed by years of soaking up The Big Parade, King Vidor's silent classic about three enlisted men
in WWI, which N. C. had taken him to see as an eight-year old boy.
'This film,' Andrew later explained, 'got into my bloodstream.'
Eventually he came to own a copy and would screen it four or five times
a year all through his adult life. Forever linked to his deepest
feelings about his father, certain frames of the film would form,
without his realizing it, the basis for some of the most important
images in his art."
As an adult Andrew Wyeth eventually wrote a fan letter to King Vidor and the two men
met towards the end of Vidor's life. Vidor made a short film
about the encounter, the last film he ever made. In the film
Wyeth remarks that when friends said they didn't understand why he kept
on watching The Big Parade after seeing it 180 times -- literally
-- he replied, "You don't understand my paintings, either."
Two things struck me about this.
Firstly, it's fascinating that a great artist like Wyeth, used to
consciously analyzing visual images, should have created works which were unconsciously
influenced by shots in a silent film. I think this speaks to the
powerful ways cinematic images, particularly from silent films, can work
on all of us unconsciously.
[A scene from Napoleon's campaign in Egypt by Jean-Leon Gerome]
Secondly, I've always been struck by the influence of 19th-Century
academic painting on movies. The former were centrally concerned with
using spatial effects for dramatic and emotional purposes (again often
experienced in subliminal ways.) Movies, because they had greater
aesthetic resources in this area -- i. e. movement in space by both
subject and camera -- almost instantly spelled the end of academic
painting as a popular visual art form, and drove modern painters into
greater and greater abstraction.
The formal connections between 19th-Century academic painting and
movies is a subject that has hardly been hinted at in cinema studies to
date.
[Book illustration by N. C. Wyeth]
N. C. Wyeth kept the "cinematic" narrative-based academic style alive in
his book illustrations (as did Norman Rockwell in his magazine
illustrations) and N. C.'s son Andrew has been almost alone in keeping
elements of this style alive within the circles of modern "high art", by
making the narrative element more ambiguous and blending the dramatic
representation of space (which is crucial to his work) with a more
pronounced abstraction of design.
In Andrew Wyeth's obsession with The Big Parade we have a concrete example of the transmission of these oddly overlooked
aesthetic connections.
[Trodden Weeds, 1951 tempera -- © Andrew Wyeth]
Monday, December 18
WATTEAU
by
Lloydville
on Mon 18 Dec 2006 05:20 AM PST
The
most erotic oil painting I ever saw -- the only one that ever made me .
. . tense (as my friend Kevin Jarre used to put it) -- was by
Jean-Antoine Watteau, the 18th-Century French painter. It was a small,
uncelebrated work in a big show of Watteau's paintings at the National
Gallery in Washington in the 80s. It showed a half-clad women sitting
on the edge of a bed, seen from behind. Its focus was on the line of
her neck and back -- the luminosity of her flesh drew one into the
space of the painting as one might be drawn towards touching the woman.
Watteau
was the poet of women's backs and necks -- of the half-clad female
form. In his portraits of women it is always the inclination of the
body which suggests a sexual, an erotic mood. What's startling about
his women is that they do not seem to be posing for men, but responding
to inner passions -- in a manner that is vexing but never teasing.
Watteau's whole world is invested with this delicate current of inward
pleasure, of the small gestures, even in social gatherings, which
resonate with sensuality, with foreshadowings of physical abandon.
There
is no repression in this -- just a kind of delicate, subtle foreplay.
It has the aura of an exquisite, complicated game. It is theater --
both preposterous and sublime. Watteau was interested in the theater,
as well as in civilized flirtation, and seemed to see a link between
them -- but there is a great sadness in his theatrical paintings. His
Italian Comedy players, his Pierrots and Harlequins, have a goofy kind
of despair -- tragic eyes. In this his vision achieves its grandeur and
gravity -- as he concedes that the sweetest things of life, than which
there is nothing sweeter than the line of a woman's throat, are mortal,
will fade, will die, as passion expends itself in satisfaction.
What
arouses one about Watteau's portraits of women is what makes one grieve
over them -- what makes one see oneself in his bewildered stage lovers
and suitors. He is a profound artist, sweet and thrilling and mournful
all at once.
Friday, December 15
THE TAKING OF CHRIST
by
Lloydville
on Fri 15 Dec 2006 01:47 PM PST
Look at this image. Just look at it.
It was painted, in 1602, by Caravaggio -- at least, that's the current
wisdom. It was long thought to be a copy of a lost Caravaggio original
made by a follower or pupil, but in the 90s an art historian made a
convincing case for the attribution to the master himself.
Formally, it's a dazzling work. The figures occupy a shallow space but
the picture still produces a strong impression of depth because of the
stereometric modelling of the light, the way the figures block and seem
to jostle each
other even in the confined space and the way the centurion's armor
jumps out at us like a physical assault. It has, finally, the
plastic quality of a relief sculpture.
Caravaggio has placed himself among the dramatis personae here, as the
bearded figure on the right holding the lantern. This reinforces a
sense of the immediacy of the dramatic situation depicted, as
though it were an incident the artist himself witnessed and recorded
faithfully out of some urgent compulsion.
I personally would trade almost all the painting done in the 20th Century for this one work. Wouldn't you?
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