Читать книгу 149 Paintings You Really Need to See in North America - Julian Porter - Страница 8

Chapter 1

Boston, Massachusetts

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Isabella Gardner was a fascinating character. When she was exposed to the art and architecture in Venice, Paris, and the rest of Europe, she fell in love with it. She had a refreshing ability to study all cultures. She had energy with a capital “E.”

Her husband was wealthy and so she could buy many of the great works she loved. Bernard Berenson, the great artistic guru and acquirer, scouted Europe for her. Once she had acquired a substantial collection, she decided that a museum was needed to house it. She herself supervised the building of the Gardner Museum, following it brick by brick. She stood over the stonemasons, plasterers, and carpenters. She came up with the idea of an internal courtyard touched with Tiepolo pink. She bought all the arches, pillars, railings, columns, and sculptures, and applied them to the walls and filled the courtyard. It was all her own scheme.

The result is a building with a Venetian courtyard suffused with plants, framed by Venetian windows, arches, balustrades, and loggias. On the grounds, there are Roman statuary, sarcophagi, and a cloister walk with Romanesque figures and leafy capitols on top of the cloister columns.

This is an eccentric collection, but how lucky Boston is to have it.

1. The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple (c. 1320)

Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) (1267–1337)

Giotto (Giotto di Bondone), The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple, c. 1320

Tempera and gold on wood, 35.2 x 43.6 cm

Purchase, 1900 (P30w9)

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Photo credit: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum / Bridgeman Images

How rare to be able to sit in a chair right next to a small Giotto, done in about 1320. I’ve never been able to do this except in the eccentric Gardner mansion’s elegant curio setting. There it is, 18 in x 12 in, all gold backdrop on a small side table. It’s fun to be so snug with the beginning of the Renaissance.

Giotto propelled Western art beyond the gold stylized figures that were more ornaments than people. With Giotto, the human figure developed a solidity and a personality.

Here it is, all at once, a little squiggly Christ pulling Simeon’s beard (see Luke 2:27–38, a devout man yearning for a saviour of Israel), yet straining with a child’s telltale reach for his mother. Anna sits like a prophetess on the right, old, haggard, grey of face, accentuated by a green-yellow gown — the pain of age. Behind the Virgin Mother is Joseph, eyeing it all with intensity and focus, the carpenter’s eye.

In the middle of the altar, a hanging vestment, all white, a patterned abstract, taking up a large space. This is the most modern abstract painting possible — lines, tiny squares, and white. Not far from this to Rothko.

This would have been part of a larger altar piece.

Giotto created wonderful art but he himself was not a pretty man. Neither, it seems, were any of his eight children attractive. When Dante first saw the children’s faces, he said, “My friend, you make such handsome figures for others — why do you make such plain ones for yourself?”

Giotto responded, “I paint by day but I procreate at night in the dark.”

2. El Jaleo (The Ruckus) (1882)

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)

John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo (The Ruckus), 1882

Oil on canvas, 232 x 348 cm

Gift from T. Jefferson Coolidge, 1914 (P7s1)

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Photo credit: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum / Bridgeman Images

Isabella Gardner coveted Sargent’s El Jaleo .

Painted in 1882, shortly after the premiere of Bizet’s Carmen of 1875, which tells the story of a proud gypsy woman torn between an army officer and a toreador. The painting shows a gypsy dancer by herself in front of a musical band. It was first exhibited with the title Dance of the Gypsies.

The setting for this painting obsessed Isabella Gardner. In the end, she set it behind a Moorish arch, so you see it as if it were a performance on a lighted stage — the setting is theatrical in effect. She placed a mirror to the left, slightly angled, but set so it repeats the image. It is difficult to describe what this mirror does, but I think it creates a sense of motion, lightens the picture, and accentuates three dimensions. The frame is perhaps narrower on the bottom than the top. It appears that way and yet you’re not sure. You sit on an ancient stone ledge before blue tiles behind Mexican wall tile and your eye runs to the cement under the painting, the identical colour of the floor at the bottom of the painting.

Sargent was theatre. A gypsy in an Andalusian tavern outside of Seville in full stomp. Her white gown, so unexpected, so eye-catching, so oddly formal, frames the staccato of the feet. The arch of her left forearm, the sexual authority of the pointed wrist and finger, the shadow billowing up from her black lacy blouse, the full throat of the fifth man on the left — leaning back hhheeyyyaahh — you’re there.

You sit in a hall of sarcophagi, medieval statues from Bordeaux, capitols from France, blue tiles before you — what a setting!

My guess is that this is the best marriage of architecture and a painting in America, rivalled only, perhaps, by the van der Weyden in Philadelphia, which I describe later.

3. Europa (1559–62)

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1488–1576)

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Europa, c. 1559–62

Oil on canvas, 178 x 205 cm

Purchase, 1896 (P26e1)

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Photo credit: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum / Bridgeman Images

Titian painted six “poesies,” love poems based on divine love from Greek mythology and Roman sources. He relied on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The paintings were all for Philip II of Spain.

Aretino had persuaded Titian to court Philip as a patron. He was, after all, head of the world’s largest empire in the sixteenth century.

This story has Jupiter cruising in the sky, he sees the lovely Phoenician princess, Europa, near a herd of cows. Down he goes and changes into a bull. Europa had been picking flowers, went over to the bull, and yes, she stroked him and mounted him. Seems logical. At this point, Jupiter the bull zooms off and reaches Crete. There he satisfies his lust and gives rise to Europe.

From the union, Minos, the most ancient of European civilizations, will be born on the island of Crete. Her brother, Cadmus, the inventor of writing, searched for her and founded the city of Thebes. This is the birth of civilization.

Well, it is a myth.

Ovid’s tale paints the bull’s nature as calm, stating “his forehead was not lowered for attack nor was there fury in his open eyes.” The bull’s expression was one of “love and peace.”

There is an argument by some that this painting eroticizes rape, that Europa’s facial expression is sexually explicit and bears “a look of ecstasy.”

The title of the work was originally Europa . The word rape was not added until fifty years after Titian’s death. Rape, or ratto, had a different meaning at the time of the painting, though; it meant abduction, to seize or take away by force.

However, in the myth, Europa did not fight the bull to stay with her father. While fearful, she did not resist. She was just another of Jupiter’s sexual conquests, the number of which is beyond counting. Leda, Danae, Callesto, Aphrodite, and Demeter were all the recipients of Jupiter’s lust.

The painting itself — how to appraise it in light of some of these arguments?

I’m relieved that it’s not clear at all that Europa is enjoying this ride! She’s holding on to Jupiter’s horn, or she’d slide down to the serpents below. She is gloriously plump, as ideal women were in those days. The cupid is chunky — no dieting here.

The bull’s eye is, I must agree, engrossing — if a bull’s eye can be said to have a personality then here’s one for you. Perhaps you might think that it’s only a muley-eyed bull, but the bull does seem to have an eye looking forward, an eye that conveys the message, “This is going to be fun!”

What do I feel seeing this? Hard to put into words. The bull is improbably gorgeous. Europa’s legs, breast, and throat are part of a lush symphony. A writhing crimson scarf ties into the soft pink sky reflecting the cherubs. It has the look of a painting that might have been created by Tchaikovsky. It is a bit hard to see the detail of the pink sky and fish below.

The Gardner was robbed early on the morning of March 18, 1990, by two men pretending to be policemen. They tied up the only two attendants, art students, and stole six pictures in about eighty-one minutes. One glorious Vermeer — The Concert , and he had only perhaps thirty-six in his total output — and a Rembrandt. They missed this painting in the next room.

A Seated Scribe (1479–81)

Gentile Bellini (1429–1507)

Gentile Bellini,

A Seated Scribe, 1479–81

Pen in brown ink with watercolour and gold on paper, 18.2 x 14 x 2.6 cm

Purchase, 1907 (P15e8)

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Photo credit: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum / Bridgeman Images

Sometimes you stumble upon a little painting that enthrals, just enthrals — often a fluke, a curious reaction, but nevertheless a real passion erupts.

Such is this, a pen and ink drawing (18 cm x 14 cm), created in a type of heavy watercolour (known as gouache).

A Seated Scribe is attributed to Gentile Bellini, though some authorities suggest that Costanzo da Ferrara from Naples is the artist. I think this is nonsense. I’ve looked at Costanzo’s stuff and Bellini’s. Gentile Bellini is so romantic that it must be his, just must be. Trust me on this.

Gentile Bellini was from a family of Venetian painters. His father, Jacopo, was famous for his use of oil paint. His brother, Giovanni, did the portrait of Doge Loredan (National Gallery, London), one of the greatest portraits of all time, and the Frick’s Saint Francis in the Desert .

Not many of Bellini’s works remain since many were large canvases that were hung in buildings that later burned. However, we know that in 1479 he was considered the most prestigious painter in Venice.

Such was his fame that when warfare between Venice and the Ottoman Empire stopped in 1479 and Venice negotiated a peace treaty with Sultan Mehmed II of Constantinople, Bellini was sent as an emissary of Venice to Constantinople for eighteen months to help cultivate good cultural relations.

Bellini was successful in Constantinople, partially because of his ability to draw patterns and lines, so important to the Eastern mind. So it was that Bellini found himself commissioned to paint Mehmed, who wanted to have his portrait done, an odd ambition for a Muslim Turk in 1480. There would be few such works, however, since the cultural thawing didn’t last beyond Mehmed. His successor considered representations of the human figure to be un-Islamic.

As well as his portrait of Mehmed, Bellini also created this work. Here is a young member of the Ottoman Court. He wears a navy caftan woven with gold, bright silks on his arms and neck (a striking mauve or light eggplant collar), and in the meringue folds of his turban, a ribbed red taj — the head gear worn during Mehmed’s reign. There is a touch of peach fuzz on his upper lip.

I love the gentleness of this, the delicacy of line, the ornate carpet of a caftan, the meringue of the turban, the crinkles of the magenta sleeves, the faraway look of the sitter, the exotic flimmer of it all. It lifts a parchment image from a golden manuscript and creates a whispered image. Look at the scrolls of material at his back seat — it is a blueprint for Frank Gehry’s architecture!

The sleeves remind me of Rembrandt’s caramel sleeves in his Jewish Bride in the Rijksmuseum, but this was created long before that painting. Think of this: 1480 is the time. Look at the caftan, gold patches, the white-grey designs, a ghostly image. This is 190 years before Vermeer and his patterns of thicker and more patchy rugs. It’s amazing — 190 years!

For those interested, there is a good novel, The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin, about a Constantinople eunuch and detective being sent to Venice in 1840 to recover the vanished portrait of Mehmed.

Museum of Fine Arts

4. Moonlit Landscape (1819)

Washington Allston (1779–1843)

Washington Allston, Moonlit Landscape , 1819

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

Years ago, I bought a very inexpensive but evocative, black-and-white, roughly hewn oil on board painting, called After Allston . Years later, I was in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and there it was, “the” Allston itself, tucked off in a little side gallery with other American Romantics. The full moonlight shimmering on the water under the little bridge — romantic indeed!

Washington Allston saw poetry and painting as a means of self-expression. After studies at Harvard and in New England, he sojourned abroad, meeting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of “Kubla Khan” (“For he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise”) fame. The results of which must be the lyricism in Allston’s work. On his return to the United States, Allston focused on landscape, as seen here in Moonlit Landscape .

Moonlit Landscape depicts a journey made possible by the ambient light, although at what stage, we don’t know. Who are these travellers? Are they randomly meeting? The ambiguity, often found in Allston’s work, is tantalizing. From classical landscape, Allston frequently used the same motifs: discernable figures in the foreground, water as a focal point, and mountains.

Such a pleasing work, a joy for the eye. Sadly, other Allstons are hard to find, but Coast Scene on the Mediterranean is on display at the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina.

5. Watson and the Shark (1778)

John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778

Oil on canvas, 183.5 x 229.6 cm

Gift of Mrs. George von Lengerke Meyer (89.481)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

This painting is glitzy and has all the crunch and snap of Jaws , the film about a shark off the coast of Cape Cod that terrorized unsuspecting bathers, which scared the bejeepers out of me. It is by an American of average ability who went to London and became a star. London had just celebrated the unveiling of Benjamin West’s Death of Wolfe (1771, National Gallery of Canada), which tapped into the national mood of glorifying heroic messages and anticipated Romanticism by pushing melodramatic subjects of death struggling in light and shade.

At first, the work seems a striking painting, and you are drawn again and again to the teeth of the shark, the white of the body, the pose of the jabbing lad leaning over the bow, but then, after looking at the painting many times, it may become an attractive comic strip. But the flash of the shark’s teeth doesn’t go away.

It is based on a true story. Brook Watson, a cabin boy on a ship moored in Havana Harbor, was attacked by a shark and lost a leg — true. Also true, Brook Watson, with one leg, became lord mayor of London! The newspapers reported the incident at the time and the painting hit the spot.

For the rest of his career, Copley did portraits, but he never whiffed such acclaim again. He became depressed and never returned to his native United States. His name does live on, though — Copley Square in Boston is named after him.

6. Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli (c. 1865)

Edgar Degas (1834–1917)

Edgar Degas, Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, c. 1865

Oil on canvas, 116.5 x 88.3 cm

Gift of Robert Treat Paine II, 1931 (31.33)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

Because of his poor eyesight — he suffered from photophobia, a sensitivity to light — Degas was not drafted for the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Indeed, such was his sensitivity to light, he said to Monet when reviewing the latter’s water lily paintings, “Let me get out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my eyes.”

Unable to enjoy the works of his contemporaries in their well-lit studios or the brilliant galleries in which they showed, Degas was even more at a disadvantage outdoors. As a result, he painted indoors, in a vast gloomy room. He often spoke disparagingly of the outdoor work of the other Impressionists. “If I were the government, I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on artists who paint landscapes from nature. Oh, I don’t mean to kill anyone; just a little dose of bird-shot now and then as a warning.”

Despite the disadvantages from which he suffered, Degas had huge talent and a particularly magnificent way of capturing French superiority and aloofness. This is a portrait of Degas’s sister, Thérèse, who married her first cousin, Edmondo Morbilli, who lived in Naples. They visited Paris in 1865 after the loss of an expected child in 1864. Apparently, the marriage was not a happy one and the contrast of the two sets a mysterious mood. Is she strong enough for this certain officious force? Is her hand on his shoulder restraint, affection, or a gesture of hope? Is she resigned?

Degas kept this picture in his home until his death fifty years later.

The painting was done at a time when Degas was examining the portraiture of sixteenth-century Italian artists, such as Bronzino.

When I see it for the fourth time, this is what I see: The colours are to be savoured. A pale slate blue runs into mustard olive — a clash; the slate blue behind the wife, the mustard behind the husband. The flittering sheets of vertical blue, a midnight northern lights, the lovely lightness of the blouse, the hint of a smile on her face, yet pancake makeup — all elation is stamped out.

Look at the know-it-all mouth of the husband. You’ve met this type before, smarter than you, meaner, quicker, a cold fish, yet her hand rests on his shoulder.

Is it possible there isn’t the apparent estrangement seen at first view? Is it a hand of pure affection? I hope so.

I like this portrait. I tire of his ballerinas and fatigued washerwomen.

7. Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609)

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (1541–1614)

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, 1609

Oil on canvas, 112.1 x 86.1 cm

Isaac Sweetser Fund (04.234)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

This is a surprising El Greco.

The subject was Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a monk of the Trinitarian Order, also known for his skills as a poet and orator. He was a close friend of El Greco.

Hortensio was pleased with the portrait. He wrote a sonnet praising it.

O Greek divine! We wonder not that in thy works

The imagery surpasses actual being

But rather that, while thou art spared the life that’s due

Unto thy brush should e’er withdraw to Heaven

The sun does not reflect his rays in his own sphere

As brightly as thy canvases …

Whew!

In Malcolm Rogers’s Director’s Choice,1 he says, “Peravicino’s tunic, occupying the centre of the painting, suggests the importance of the subject’s life as a monk and how Christianity forms the very core of his existence.”

And indeed, seventeenth-century Spain was a deeply religious place. However, sitting here in the twenty-first century, all of that seems somewhat absurd — perhaps because I’ve never been exposed to such a fervour. So when I look at this painting, I have to wonder: Is this a portrait of a religious figure or is it a portrait of an aesthete who is merely wearing the clothes of a monk?

The definition of aesthete is “one who professes a special appreciation of the beautiful and endeavours to carry his ideas into practice.” In truth, to me the sitter looks to be a flighty, off-the-wall actor whose brilliant insecurities are hidden by the monk’s costume and the trappings of the Bible. It seems to me that we have here a nervous theatre director in the wings. Or a slightly crazed writer who thinks unconventional thoughts.

H.W. Janson, in his famous History of Art — the staple when I was a kid — says, “Yet the mood is one of neither reverie nor withdrawal. Paravicino’s frail, expressive hands and the pallid face, with its sensitive mouth and burning eyes, convey a spiritual ardor of compelling intensity. Such, we like to think, were the saints of the Counter Reformation — mystics and intellectuals at the same time.”2

This shows you that when El Greco was good (he assigned much to assistants), his portraiture could hold its own with Titian.

8. The Dead Christ with Angels (c. 1524–27)

Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo)

(1494–1540)

Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo), The Dead Christ with Angels, c. 1524–27

Oil on panel, 133.4 x 104.1 cm

Charles Potter Kling Fund (58.527)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

Imagine if you were a painter just after Raphael, Leonardo — what would you do? What could you create to surpass the greats? How could you outdraw Raphael? You couldn’t. Hence artists had to try other trails.

There were touches of elongated lines in the last paintings of Michelangelo, a style the Mannerists pursued, producing more willowy figures, more elongated forms. Mannerists spread from Tintoretto to El Greco and more pronounced ones: Parmigianino, Pontormo, and Rosso Fiorentino. He painted The Descent from the Cross in Volterra, Italy, which hinted at the birth of acrylic paints, electric colours, and jolting forms. Here are acid colours — unreal, garish hues — a revolt against the balance ideal of the High Renaissance.

There is a painting of this rare master in America! The Dead Christ has the elongated drape of the Mannerist painting. Christ is dead but oddly relaxed. Christ’s body here is carved, a coffee-coloured marble soon for a resurrection. A tiny hand feeling his chest wound, so tentative and tender. His face lightly whiskered, grey lips, a sense of sleep.

Note Christ’s long-boned thigh and his ballerina toes. See the young, pretty angels, all kissy-kissy, spring-coiled tresses, wings meant for flight. More whispering nothings than grieving beings. But what pretty blouses!

So much for his paintings; what of the man? Fiorentino’s life is larded with apocryphal stories.

He falsely accused a friend of stealing hundreds of ducats from him — this according to Vasari, who would have known him. When the accused was found innocent, he sued Rosso for libel. Rosso, too stubborn to eat his words, took poison “rather than be punished by others.”

He was vain, proud of his red hair, and with a fine presence, which he enhanced by keeping a tame ape.

I am a little too old for this.

9. Susie (1988)

Lucian Freud (1992–2011)

Lucian Freud, Susie, 1988

Oil on canvas, 27.3 x 22.2 cm

Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Collection (2003.37)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

What a singular, staggering artist! What depth, what evocation of the human form and spirit is found in his paintings. Susie resonates with raw purpose, shattering our expectations of artistic representation. Lucian Freud became best known for his unabashed use of nudity and his grotesque portraits, but it would be a waste of feeling, betray a hardness, not to see the beauty in this face.

Grandson of Sigmund, Freud moved to London while still very young, after living for only a few years in Germany. During his studies, his talent for portraits and the human figure became apparent to his teachers, but it was not until after the Second World War that he became a full-time painter. The war sparked his need to paint the harsh reality of these postwar conditions. He distinguished himself from his contemporaries through his lifelike portraits, often using his friends as models, and nudity, this of the non-erotic kind.

In his mature phase, Freud used different types of paint brushes, saturating them in heavier and thicker paint. Although he continued to experiment as an artist, Freud never abandoned his mundane but generally bright colours. In The Man with the Blue Scarf , art critic Martin Gayford deconstructs his experience as a sitter for a Freud portrait.3 The resultant piece captures the fullness of the man with vibrancy and verve. If you get the opportunity to see the work, examine the brilliance of the blue. Breathtaking!

Still later, Freud was introduced to Leigh Bowery, a performance artist of whom he painted an entire nude series. As it transpired, Freud painted many nudes, including many nudes of women. Freud eschewed painting perfection or the “ideal” woman, however. Instead, he created heavily impastoed, very real paintings that forged an air of beauty. The figures he painted were consistently “real” figures. In his nude painting of the English supermodel Kate Moss, for example, she has a rounded belly and wider legs and darker hair than one usually sees in her fashion photographs.

The fact that Freud didn’t glamourize his subjects does not mean that he was misanthropic. Rather, he wanted to portray the real, not the fanciful. Susie is a powerful example of Freud’s talent in portraiture and one could spend hours plumbing the depths of that visage.

One of the greatest figurative painters of the last half-century, Freud died in 2011.

10. Where Do We Come From? What Are We?

Where Are We Going? (1897–98)

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897–98

Oil on canvas, 139.1 x 374.6 cm

Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund (36.270)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

At some point in your artistic journey, you must come to terms with Gauguin. I find him complex and somewhat disturbing. I like best his pastoral rural scenes of Brittany farmers with white caps harvesting wheat. But he is best known for his Tahitian works. He lived there from 1891 to 1893 and fell in love with the place.

He wrote to Theo van Gogh on November 20, 1889:

You know I have Indian blood, Inca blood in me, and it’s reflected in everything I do. It’s the basis of my personality. I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on savagery.

Gauguin was a complicated man. He was an avid self-publicist yet claimed to loathe the society in which he promoted himself. He gave many press interviews about his work, his desire for seclusion, and his contempt for Europe, yet he strove for its approval and its money. Even in Tahiti you need money.

In 1897, he was profoundly depressed. One of his daughters had died and his Danish wife had stopped writing him. He felt death was imminent. He worked on what he viewed as his last and largest painting (4.5 m x 1.70 m) at the end of 1897 and finished it in January 1898. By his account, when he finished this huge painting he went into the hills to kill himself with arsenic. He tried it, but did not take enough. He survived six more years.

Well, what of his painting?

In his work, Gauguin always strove for simplicity, using large sections of strong colour, virtually no shadows, and giving the figures in his paintings boundaries almost as strongly defined as those found in the panels of a stained-glass window. No real depth — just patterns.

This work fits with that pattern. At first it is painfully flat. Sit down, take a deep breath, slow down, this will be work. In this broad, rough, sack-cloth of a canvas there is a gentle sweep of mellow blue with hints of thunder. To the right, three bodies representing life — relaxing, maybe curious, perhaps drifting. The body in the middle, perhaps an Adam reaching for the apple, spelling death. But Gauguin believed in mystery and that “colour which like music is a matter of vibrations reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature, colour being enigmatic in itself, we use it to give the musical sensations that flow from it.”

The complaint was put to him, “There is nothing in the work that reveals to us the meaning of the allegory.”

He replied, “Well, my dream cannot be apprehended, it requires no allegory; being a musical poem; it needs no libretto, the essential quality of a work consists precisely in what is not expressed.” Indeed, the canvas does have a musical feel, a strumming, a vibrato. The sweep of the blues, the green, the off-citron yellow are like parts of a musical Beethoven cello riff.

Gauguin’s comments help one to understand the painting. The Buddha-like figure is make-believe; the moon goddess Hina, based on Asian prototypes.

The old lady on the left is death. Gauguin says, “This woman appears to accept everything, to resign herself to her thoughts. She completes the story! At her feet, a strange white bird holding a lizard in its claws.”

Gauguin agitated over the painting’s reception at home. He repainted parts of it separately and sent them to Paris for sale.

The avant-garde critics praised it. Critics today are mostly appreciative of it. Sister Wendy — a nun and famous author of thirty-five art books — thinks this a triumph.

The work is certainly a challenge to what went before. Gauguin’s sweeping statement may apply, “Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” Strange, three disturbed personalities created new forms of art: Cézanne — Cubism; Van Gogh — Expressionism; Gaugin — Primitivism, the Fauves.

11. The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882)

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)

John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882

Oil on canvas, 221.9 x 222.6 cm

Gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Julia Overing Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Florence D. Boit in memory of their father, Edward Darley Boit, 1919 (19.124)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

Sargent is not mentioned in some of the art books that survey highlights. I’m not sure why — perhaps because he was a “popular” painter, bridging the gap between the Old Masters and Impressionism. He spent much of his youth in Europe. His first success was in the Paris Salon in 1879. That year he spent weeks copying Velázquez’s Las Meninas in the Prado. A friend of Monet, whom he admired, Sargent didn’t do Impressionism, however. His painting is lush, in the tradition of Delacroix. He spanned generations of art styles, starting in 1878, finishing in 1925. His works had a sense of flamboyant theatre. Henry James, another friend, said of him that “he was a knock down insolence of talent.”

Hard-working, prolific, and charming, Sargent made his money from painting the nouveau riche. He conveyed assurance with his fluid paint reflecting the confident well-dressed rich.

This large portrait (7 ft x 7 ft) of the four daughters of Edward Darley Boit is so striking that you stop dead before it. The painting — its dark shadows, the gleam of the vase, and the smear of the white pinafore dresses — is lush, a feast that stays with you for at least a week after your museum visit.

It is reminiscent of Las Meninas . Each child seems oddly isolated in this dark cavern of a room — almost a tomb — with the two Japanese vases. Yet the carpet, the sitting four-year-old child’s warmth, and the red screen set off the lushness and the sheer feeling of the starched white pinafores.

The four girls look like a difficult lot. Are these precocious children destined for original lives or an over-coddled disaster? Perhaps they intuit that the vases, vases that Boit, an art collector, took with him wherever he travelled, may have been more important than they are.

The eldest hides about the vase, not really in view, but relatively blank; the standing girl on the left is precocity itself; and the youngest sits just looking. Sister Wendy feels it is a portrait of a dysfunctional family.

In 2010, the Prado in Madrid exhibited this next to Las Meninas . It was quite a sight as Sargent’s painting stood up to the mighty Prado’s treasure.

What happened to these girls? A recent book, Sargent’s Daughters: A Biography of a Painting by Erica Hirshler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, tells us.

The parents: Mary Louisa Cushing, an heiress, and Edward Boit, a “courtly” lawyer, simply retired. They lived in Boston and Paris. He stopped his law practice and pursued watercolours with success. There is a watercolour of Venice by Boit (1911) in the Boston Museum.

None of the four daughters married. The eldest, Florence, with her back to the vase, rebelled and didn’t revel in the social whirl that the mother loved. “Florie” took up golf and lived with a cousin. Jane, the standing girl on the right, required nursing care in Paris. Mary Louisa (standing left) and Julia (the youngest — four years old) returned to Newport from Paris after many years. Julia was a good amateur watercolourist. In 1919, the four women gave the painting to the Museum of Fine Arts in memory of their father.

And Sargent? He declined a knighthood from Britain because he was an American citizen. At sixty-nine, he died successful and single. At death, he was reading Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique.

12. Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and

Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840

Oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm

Henry Lillie Pierce Fund (99.22)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

I always look at Turner because he has an endless capacity to surprise. You cannot figure out the timing of his paintings as there wasn’t a logical sequence. He was doing things before the Impressionists had even thought of such innovations.

The slave ship, Zong, en route from Guinea to Jamaica in 1781, threw overboard sick and dying slaves so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance money available only for slaves “lost at sea.”

The owners of the Zong sued the ship’s underwriters for the value of 132 Africans, thrown overboard because the ship became short of water. They argued that to save the healthy, the ill had to be killed. The trial was before a jury in 1873, which found that the underwriters had to pay £30 for each slave.

There was an appeal to the King’s Bench before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and two others. Mansfield had been an attorney general. He was a foremost debater, a rival to William Pitt. As chief justice, he was a creator of English commercial law and was noted for his finding that slavery was “so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it.”

No doubt the ship owners lied. It was cheaper for them to kill the slaves and claim insurance — as simple as that. There appeared to be evidence that, although the ship was off course, there was water. The appeal makes for uncomfortable reading. One counsel said regarding slaves as property (see Gregson v. Gilbert (1873), 3 Douglas’ King’s Bench Reports 232 at 629):

It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property. This therefore, was a throwing overboard of goods, and of part to save the residue. The question is, first, whether any necessity existed for that act.

The underwriters argued:

The truth was, that finding they should have a bad market for their slaves, they took these means of transferring the loss from the owners to the underwriter. Many instances have occurred of slaves dying for want of provisions but no attempt was ever made to bring such a loss within the policy. There is no instance in which the mortality of slaves falls upon the underwriters, except in the cases of perils of the sea and of enemies.

Lord Mansfield in his reasons ordering a new trial said:

There is no evidence of the ship being foul and leaky, and that certainly was not the cause of the delay. There is weight, also, in the circumstances of the throwing overboard of the negroes after the rain (if the fact be so) for which, upon the evidence, there appears to have been no necessity.

There is no report on the new trial, but this case probably led to the passing of a statute prohibiting the insuring of slaves against any loss or damage except “the perils of the sea, piracy, insurrection, capture, barratry, and destruction by fire; and providing that no loss or damage shall be recoverable on account of the mortality of slaves by natural death or ill treatment or against loss by throwing overboard on any account whatsoever.”

What is barratry, you ask? It is “fraud or gross negligence on the part of the master of the ship to the prejudice of the owners.”

Look closely at this fire of a painting. In front of the floundering ship, shackled legs and hands rise. A sun, engulfed in pink and red, sets over this grave of water.

Mark Twain, ever the acerbic art commentator, described it as “a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”

John Ruskin’s father bought this painting for him in 1844. The acknowledged Victorian critic placed it at the end of his bed so it would be the first thing he would see when he woke up in the morning. He said of it, “… the noblest sea that Turner had ever painted and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man.”

There is an interesting dialogue set out in the 2014 Late Turner — Painting Set Free, Tate Britain London Exhibition , which includes this painting. Turner advised a young artist, “Keep your corners quiet. Centre your interest. And always remember that as you can never reach the brilliancy of nature, you need never be afraid to put your brightest light next to your deepest shadow in the centre.”4 In this painting, there is a white form in the centre, perhaps an angel bursting forth, arm raised, descending in judgment of the massacre of the slaves below.

Turner attached to this painting a couplet from the poem The Fallacies of Hope :

Hope, hope, fallacious hope,

Where is thy marker now?

Ruskin, the foremost English art critic of his day, was a booster of Turner. And then something happened around 1846 and he turned against Turner, saying one of his pictures was “indicative of mental disease.”

Luis de Góngora y Argote (1622)

Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)

(1599–1660)

Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez), Luis de Góngora y Argote, 1622

Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 40.6 cm

Maria Antoinette Evans Fund (32.79)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images

There are not many Velázquez paintings in the Americas, but there’s an extraordinarily good one here, painted when he was very young, only on the cusp of success, in 1622. It’s a portrait of Luis de Góngora, the greatest Spanish poet of the time.

Góngora came to Madrid to court fame and clients. He oozed his way through a grovelling time, creating enemies and self-hatred. The young Velázquez cottoned on to the bitterness in skeptical eyes and pursed mouth. The head shows intelligence, the downturned lips mirror disappointment.

Góngora’s sonnet to El Greco captures his florid style:

Inscription for El Greco’s Tomb

O pilgrim, this enduring enclosure,

Of shining porphyry in gracious form,

Denies the world the most subtle brush

That ever gave wood soul, or canvas life.

His name deserving a greater voice

Than rises from the clarions of fame,

Ennobles this field of sombre marble;

Revere it; before you go your way.

Here lies El Greco; Nature inherited

His art; Art his skill; Iris his colours,

Phoebus his light — else Morpheus his shade —

May this urn, despite its solid nature,

Drink tears, and whatever odours ooze

From the Sabean tree’s funereal bark.

Cervantes was an admirer.

Góngora, however, also had enemies. He feuded with Francisco de Quevedo, a rival poet. Quevedo knew how to hand it out, attacking Góngora’s large nose and accusing him of sodomy, a capital offence. Góngora’s card-playing led to his ruin. Francisco de Quevedo bought his house so he could evict him.

It was not until his portrait of Innocent X in 1650 that Velázquez again turned a merciless eye on a sitter.

149 Paintings You Really Need to See in North America

Подняться наверх