Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still and Willem De Kooning at MoMA

Barnett Newman, The Voice, 1950

Barnett Newman’s The Voice, 1950: an all “white” field, a zip on the right hand side of a huge canvas. The accompanying text plate in Abstract Expressionism at MoMA tells me this painting is about the flatness of the canvas, the anonymity of the paint, the absence of the artist. To be exact, this is the kind of painting that “downplayed the signs of the artist’s hand.” My experience of The Voice could not be more diametrically opposed to the one I am guided to have of this, one of Newman’s most vulnerable paintings. I become lost in the movement of “white” paint, which is really an intense and undulating array of off-whites in various shades, densities, hues. The zip as the unmistakeable signature of an artist that is everywhere present on this canvas, a canvas that is anything but anonymous, is the only thing that stops me. The zip is like a fence that pulls me back as I fall reverently into the expanse of paint and color that simultaneously becomes more than a surface. I cannot get past the fence, the zip, I can’t jump it, I can’t break it, I can’t move beyond or even along it. Steadfast, and yet somehow uncertain, overwhelming the right hand side of the canvas despite its complete understatement, the zip works to thrust me and my attention back to the center of the painting.

Other visitors took photos of The Voice, though I wondered why. As you can see from the image above, in reproduction, there is nothing much to see. Everything in The Voice happens as I stand before it, in person, over time, just like the (presumably human) voice of its title. In time, the white becomes too bright, it reflects the light and the after images become overwhelming, the glare is blinding. To compensate, I am pulled in towards the canvas, to examine the movements of the paint, its viscosity, the cracks on the painted surface which remind me of aged skin, or more likely, the tiny red branches of an irritated eye. And up close I see the strokes of the brush, horizontal and vertical, revealing that the “white” might just be white afterall. I see that it is only in the handling of the paint by this anything but anonymous painter that monochrome is transformed into an array of rich, variations of white, cream, off-white, dirty white, and so on. There is the virtuosity of The Voice.

Franz Kline, Chief, 1950

I have spent years looking at paintings by Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and so last week I chose to spen time with Clyfford Still, 1944-N No. 2, 1944 and 1951-T No. 3, 1951. I don’t think I have ever really understood Clyfford Still’s paintings perhaps because I am not American. I am always reminded that Still’s relationship to paint on the canvas is American, vehemently and decisively American. I wonder what this means? While I know enough about Newman to take issue with the text plate, when it comes to the paintings of Clyfford Still, I am less arrogant and more inclined to believe what I am told to think and to see. Still’s are apparently paintings for the new world, they are paintings that express the expanse and the possibility at the horizon of that expanse. It’s true, Europe knows nothing of expansiveness and the possibility of change is much harder in coming. And so, I can see, maybe these paintings are quintessentially American afterall.

Clyfford Still, 1944-N No. 2, 1944

A swathe of black spreads out over the surface of 1944-N No. 2: though of course it is not really a swathe, but a highly worked over and worked up, meticulously crafted surface of layer upon layer of variegated black paint. This halting, yet deep, intense black surface creates both a space of liberation, but also of doom, the unknown. And then at the edges and in the cracks that emerge in this vast wilderness of black, comes the color, the brown the red, as if looking out from a cave into the possibility of color and light, life and future existence at the edge of the world. Ironically, even though the room of Barnett Newman’s paintings precedes Still’s in the Abstract Expressionism exhibition, the possibility and the future in 1944 would pave the way for Newman, for Rothko, even for Pollock. Not only did they all explore color and its effect on perception, its relationship to other colors, but they were the progenitors of an American obsession with the dynamic relationship between the surface of the canvas and the necessity for a frame. We see this “problem” or relationship resolved by Newman in his trademark language of the zip, a problem that is first imagined by Still in those red and brown interventions into an all black color field. 

I am still thinking about Clyfford Still’s work as quintessentially American, and I wonder who is the American who engages with this work? Who is it painted for? Who is this so-called American who has such a relationship with the landscape? A relationship that is colored by such force and energy, a relationship that sees few limits as possibility opens up inside and across the sumptuous surface in black. Perhaps the one Still imagines is characterized by the self-reliance and physical drive of the American spirit – an energy I don’t see anywhere in Europe?

Willem De Kooning, Woman I, 1950

There were other paintings that stopped me for a time. Philip Guston’s gray paintings for example, but my interest in them is of a different kind. I loved the de Koonings for their color, for the plasticity of the world as he sees it, a world that is angry, filled with insanity, loneliness, isolation, and the fractured selves of the modern world. It is a world so radically different from the infinite expansiveness of Still’s American dream. De Kooning is American, but as we know, he was born in the Netherlands, and so his paintings are framed. Inside de Kooning’s frames, the great European traditions of portraiture infuse the power of Woman I, 1950. And the European exploration of color — inspite of De Kooning’s rendering color strange and artificial—is all over paintings such as A Tree in Naples, 1960, together with their homage to Cubism and other early twentieth century European movements. Simultaneously, on his canvases, figure and ground are in such battle with each other, wrestling with an intensity that creates motion and that familiar forthright energy of what it means to be American. 

Abstract Expressionism at MoMA

Abstract Expressionism at MoMA

When MoMA first opened its dramatic new building by Yoshio Taniguchi, a new hanging of the collection, and most of all, new entry fee of $20 in 2004, I was curious to see if the world would think it a place worth visiting. I don’t think I have ever seen such hoards of people at a museum: last week MoMA felt more like a football stadium in Germany than home to modern American art. Clearly, the makeover has achieved its desired goals. With a week in New York, and that week being when everyone else had a week in New York, I didn’t have the luxury of visiting the Abstract Expressionism exhibition at a quieter time, and so I dived into the masses and soldiered forward to some of America’s greatest paintings with heads in my way, surrounded by tourists absurdly posing for the camera in imitation of the paintings, and screaming babies. I didn’t stop long, I couldn’t, given the theme park conditions. However, even in these less than desirable viewing conditions, I chose a few select paintings to stand before, and to pay homage to extraordinary images that, in spite of the challenges in viewing them, are still somehow able to envision the world from a perspective I had not yet considered. This, even though, none of the paintings was I seeing for the first time.

I will not say much about the exhibition itself, as I was not entirely convinced by MoMA’s apparently undiscerning attribution of “Abstract Expressionism” to the entire corpus of American art of the 1950s, from Rothko, to Pollock, to Newman, and even to Harry Callahan’s photographs, to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. Each of these artists would rail against the categorization of Abstract Expressionist, a resistance that does not, in itself disqualify the attribution. However, in the case of these masterpieces, I do find it more productive to see them as working on canvases that are unique, yet somehow connected to the explorations of each other. To call them Abstract Expressionist is to elide most of what is exciting, and to dull all that is breathtaking about these paintings.

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 108, 1965-67

I will say, however, that the exhibition is mindboggling. It is mindboggling for the sheer number (and size) of the works on display, but unlike every other blockbuster, all of the work is taken from MoMA’s permanent collection. And so we walk from a room full of Warhols to a room of Newmans to a room of Pollocks with de Koonings, Klines, Motherwells generously scattered throughout. Where else, but MoMA? If for no other reason, seeing the enormity of the museum's postwar American art collection on display like this, is an incredible experience. And beyond the scale of the exhibition, even though I have been visiting MoMA and looking at these paintings for nearly 20 years now, to be in their presence once more, to be reminded how much they are now a part of who I am, provides such pleasure that the crowds cease to exist and the frustrations of MoMA dissipate. Everytime I see these paintings, I am made a more humble, wiser, more compassionate person.

And because I have too much to say about the paintings, because they are worthy of more than a cursory glance, you can read more in the next blog!

Raul Ruiz, Mysteries of Lisbon, 2010

At four and a half hours, Ruiz’ version of Mysteries of Lisbon, an adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1852 novel, might be called epic. But given that there are no heroes here, no heroic deeds or events, no masters, no grand historical claims, it doesn’t really sustain such an ordinary assignation. In fact, the film is constantly working against the possibility of grandeur or mastery, opting instead for a sprawling and undulating narrative filled with infinite twists and turns that makes it, ultimately, elusive. This is a film in which the conventions of story telling are used to do rail against the epic.

The film opens with the story of a young, presumably orphaned boy in a monastery school being sketched by an Englishwoman. We never see her again, and the film never explains what she was doing sketching his portrait in the first place. She doesn’t, afterall, seem to be important, but her portrait of the boy is one of the handful of objects he holds onto throughout his life. He hangs it on the wall of every room he inhabits thereafter, irrespective of how long or short the stay. The boy also places a maquette of a theater given him by his mother, and a wooden ball given him by the priest who runs the boys’ school on the dresser of every room he occupies. These three objects are about all young Pedro, or João, as he is also known, and we alike, get to hold onto in a film that flows between past and present, between countries, epochs and generations, unpredictably. Voices, images, characters and places are fluid, and constantly changing through camerawork that equally often breaks the rules of continuity filmmaking. Throughout, Ruiz uses very conventional narrative, story telling strategies, but he confuses them through inventive camerawork that will be familiar to connoisseurs of his films. The flashback, for example, is abundant, but not signaled as such. Rather across edits the film moves with ease through times, spaces, character identities. The camera will track through 360 degrees and as the circle closes, the character seen at the beginning of the tracking shot will appear in a different costume, younger or older than originally. Or if a conventional flashback is signaled, for example through dialogue, the voice of the teller will change in the flashback, so it might in fact be someone else's memory, but we do not know whose. Alternatively, the character in the flashback looks so completely different that we do not immediately believe him to be the one speaking in voiceover narration.

Like Three Crowns of a Sailor (1983), everyone in Mysteries of Lisbon has a story, and everyone must tell his or her story. But it is through listening to someone else's story, not telling his or her own, that each character will discover and define who he or she is. And this search for an identity is in the end, what the film is about. Everyone is in pursuit of who they are, who their parents were, how they got to be where they are. And as they don costumes and names as easily as they change identities, social classes and pick up with the next lover, finding a stable identity is never achieved. As the priest becomes a soldier, he then goes back within his story as a soldier, to tell an anecdote that reveals he was also a gentleman after he was a soldier. While he is a soldier we also learn how he comes by a gypsy outfit that he dons in a plot to save the boy Pedro's life from a killer who then becomes a count, that is, after he is a pirate. And then the same priest goes to another monestary where he meets his father who, in turn, goes back in time to tell his own story which is, of course, the story of the priest himself. So not only do the characters transform themselves across this wandering narrative, as they tell their story, they also mutate into either a protagonist in the listener's story, or they assume the story of the listener him or herself. 

As I say, the lyrical unfolding of stories within stories, in which identities shift in and out of different times and places, across continents is all nourished by the sumptuous camera work familiar to Ruiz's films. As well as the magical 360 degree pans, we see shadows and reflections on surfaces that do not exist, impossible views from under the floor as if through a glass ceiling. And when he is not tricking us, the image is exquisite. In one such moment, filled with irony and beauty, two lovers discover they have been found out by the woman’s husband, they presume. How did he find out, the man, who ends up being the priest's father, asks genuinely perplexed. And as he asks, the shot is framed, masked vertically, we are led to believe by curtains behind which a servant watches the lovers' triste. The curtains gently pulled back, not only reveal the scene, but they place us in the privileged position of voyeur, from behind the curtains. And in the distance, on the other side of the room, through glass doors that open out onto a garden, we see a solitary servant standing, watching, everything. And so the layering of foreground, middle ground and background, through windows, doors and curtains, creates a game of deceit and discovery that so counters the lovers' conversation that their naïvety becomes stupidity. All this, in a single frame. 

There are, as might be expected, an infinity of themes, subplots, morals and meanings. For example, money changes hands constantly, however, having money is not so important. On the one hand, what is important is not to accept money that does not belong to you. Pedro's mother is offered a fortune by her unfaithful husband, a count. She chooses not to accept the money, and thereby impoverishes her son and hence hinders his entry into the monastery school. She dies a solitary death of the plague in a convent, and sees her son only once, through the grate of the convent. And yet, he was the reason for which she lived in the first place. She claims to retain her honour by not accepting the money because her husband had kept her locked up and  had betrayed her for an affair that produced the illegitimate son in the first place. This, despite the fact she had already had the child before they were married! On the other hand, this does not mean that to have money is a bad thing. Indeed, those who are redeemed are those with the money: the assassin who the priest – then a gypsy – pays off to ensure he does not kill the boy – is redeemed in his life of luxury and social elevation. As is the count, who, on his deathbed offers his fortune to Pedro's mother, his wife. Money, like everyone and everything else in Mysteries of Lisbon, is also fluid and unpredictable in the values it carries within it, and the meanings given it by the film.