"The aim of art is not to copy nature, but to express it. You are not a servile copyist, but a poet!"
-- Honore de Balzac
BENTONVILLE--In 1831, Honore De Balzac published the first version of a story, Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu ("The Unknown Masterpiece") he'd rework half a dozen times or more over the next 14 years. It was the story of a painter, a 17th-Century master named Frenhofer who was what we might today call "an artist's artist," in that while his work went largely unappreciated by the public, it disrupted the egos of his fellow painters, who looked upon it and felt "some understanding, vague though it was, of the ecstasy in which [Frenhofer] lived."
In early versions of the story, Frenhofer seems quite mad; but over the years, as Balzac rewrote and re-published the story, he became more and more a rational voice--a portrait of a credible artist, maybe even a veiled self-portrait.
The bones of the story remained the same: Two of Frenhofer's artist friends, the real-life painters Porbus (Frans Pourbus the younger) and Nicolas Poussin, visit his studio to view a portrait of a woman Frenhofer has finally finished after working in secret for more than 10 years. But when they finally see the canvas, all they experience is confusion--a "chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist."
After further inspection, they detect an exquisitely rendered foot emerging from beneath the "high wall of paint," but they are otherwise confounded by the painting. Porbus humors Frenhofer, exclaiming, "What joys lie there on this piece of canvas!" But Poussin warns Porbus that "sooner or later he will find out that there is nothing" on the canvas.
Sensing their disappointment, Frenhofer shows his friends out. When Porbus returns the next day to check on him, he learns Frenhofer burned his canvases and died during the night.
I think about Frenhofer sometimes when I go to art galleries, especially when there's a show of something other than overtly representational work. While the story isn't considered one of Balzac's major works and it's often overlooked by biographers, it has taken on great significance in the art world. Balzac's painter was a particular inspiration to Cezanne, who was given to proclaiming "Frenhofer, c'est moi," and to Picasso, who is said to have been so moved by the story that he moved to the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris where Pourbus' studio was supposedly located. (It was in the new studio that he painted Guernica.)
It's interesting to consider that Balzac wrote this story about a painter who sees things other artists cannot years before the idea of abstract art was codified in the 20th Century. While some of the work of Balzac's contemporary J. M. W. Turner read as a prelude to impressionism, Western art was still beholden to the logic of perspective, and the aim was to produce the illusion of visible reality. When James Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, an almost complete abstraction, was exhibited in London in 1877, it caused a scandal. Whistler ended up suing the art critic John Ruskin--a great champion of Turner--for libel after the critic accused Whistler of "ask[ing] two hundred guineas for throwing a pot of paint in the public's face." (Whistler won the case, but the court awarded him a single farthing--a little more than a thousandth of a pound--and his reputation suffered to the point that many collectors considered owning one of his works shameful.)
I take Balzac's fable as a cautionary tale about the hazards of making art, of risking the misapprehension of one's work not just by the public at large but by the people you most respect and admire. (Your colleagues, your teachers.) It's about the corrosive doubt that everyone who tries to connect with other hearts and minds must feel, the suspicion that you might be fraudulent or deranged, that the work into which you've poured your heart and soul amounts to nothing more than a dead mass of paint. That it's bad--or worse, ordinary--work.
I came to the Van Gogh to Rothko exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art seeking refuge from ordinary art; at the Bentonville Film Festival I'd seen too many family-friendly faith-based movies in too short a time and needed the shock afforded by Van Gogh to Rothko, an exhibit of 76 works by 73 big-name painters from the late 19th Century to the present including Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, Dali, Frida Kahlo and Warhol.
We planned to come here in early March when the exhibit was fresh, but the weather turned bad and other commitments got in the way, so we made it just under the wire. The exhibit, comprised of works from the collection of Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., will be up another week, until June 1.
In a way, it's interesting how familiar and comforting many of these paintings have become given how radical and controversial they might have seemed when they were first exhibited. A color field no longer confounds us, we can appreciate the complexity of minimalist monotone paintings, or the way Clyfford Still's predominantly black and yellow 1957-D No. 1 seems almost to throb with warm luminescence. In a way, we've tamed these beasts; strolling through the gallery is a little like thumbing through an art history text.
Yet even today, a great many people dismiss them as elaborate frauds perpetuated on the insecure rich by painters who couldn't draw. I can remember how unimpressed I was with Jackson Pollock until I stood in the presence of one of his major drip paintings.
The Pollock on display here is Convergence (1952), an enormous (95 inches by 157 inches) canvas which may be his most famous work, or at least the one that most clearly announces the artist's energy and sense of liberation. It's the sort of thing that cannot be appreciated in two dimensions; you really need to stand in front of it, close enough that it fills your field of vision, to understand its depths and hollows, its topography and textures. Is this the sort of mess that Porbus and Poussin perceived when they regarded Frenhofer's work?
In any case, it seems more a profound moment in human progress than a colossal hoax, but I suppose other reasonable hearts can disagree. I'm cool to most of Warhol's stuff, though I think I get it, and I've never gotten the fuss over Kahlo either. Perhaps that makes me a sort of Philistine, though I'd suggest that what's more important than appreciating a given piece is recognizing the human impulse to create, and the soft power of art to change the world.
What we ought to do is lay ourselves open to this sort of work, to put aside, best as we can, our political suspicions and private insecurities. We ought to believe in the possibility of magic, even if we can't make anything more of the riot before our eyes than slashes of color and scratchy lines. We ought to believe that Frenhofers exist, artists who genuinely see things we can't quite apprehend.
At least not yet.
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Editorial on 05/24/2015