JOHN ZEAMAN

Modernism

Balthus

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The French artist Balthus, who died in 2001, is an unusual figure in 20th century art.  He proved that a painter could work in the old-master tradition and still be unmistakably modern.

At the same time, he raised eyebrows with paintings of girls in erotic and voyeuristic poses. Even in in our permissive culture, that is still a powerful taboo.  Yet, there is nothing pornographic here.  Sometimes the subjects are nude or partly so, but the mood is mostly psychological. They are early adolescents, somnambulant, dreamy, and awakening to their own sexuality – a legitimate artistic subject.

In a sign that some of the shock factor may be wearing off, the Metropolitan Museum has mounted a wonderful show playfully titled “Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations.”

It draws on the early decades of the artist’s career, with 34 paintings from the mid-1930s to the 1950s.  For Balthus fans, there’s a special treat in a suite of ink drawings made when the artist was a precocious 11-year-old.  The 40 drawings, long thought lost, chronicle his adventures with a stray cat he called Mitsou.

He was born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908.  He grew up in Paris within a cultured and artistic family – his father was an art historian, his mother a painter.  His mother’s lover was the great German poet Rene Rilke, who became a surrogate father to the budding artist after Balthus’s parents separated.

Like the masters of the past, Balthus wanted to paint the light streaming in the window, the blush and the roundness of a woman’s cheek, the mood of a cat. But to get attention in the 1930s, amid the surrealists and the expressionists, he had to be edgy, willing to push into secret pockets of human desire.

One gallery is devoted entirely to paintings of Therese Blanchard.  She was 11 at the outset of the series, a serious-looking girl with chiseled features. By the time she is 13 she looks bored or moody, or is in some off-balance position that suggests the awkwardness of adolescence.   In “Therese,” she is twisted around in a chair, legs crossed, like a woman in conversation at a cocktail party.

This is the birth of Balthus’s archetype, the child-woman.  The nymphet in the “The Golden Days” looks like a character in a dream.   She reclines on a chaise, her bodice slipping off one shoulder, her shapely legs exposed. Underscoring the mood of overheated passions is a man at the fireplace, stoking an already blazing fire.

The model for “Girl in Green and Red” was said to be Balthus’s wife, who was in her thirties, but looks about 15 years younger, here.  She assumes the pose of a Tarot-card magician, a cape draped over one shoulder, an array of objects in front of her on the table, the painting imbued with an enticing sense of mystery.

And always the cats, peering out of the bottom or the corners of pictures with knowing or sphinxlike faces.  In “The Game of Patience,” a girl leans intently over a game of solitaire while a cat beneath the table pokes at a ball with similar concentration.

Balthus identified with felines, titling his long-legged self-portrait  “The King of Cats.”  Later, in a fanciful painting made for a restaurant, he is a man-cat sitting down to eat a fish propelled onto his plate by a rainbow.

In “Nude with Cat,” a girl in a chair stretches back to play with a happy cat.  The girl’s uncoiled body forms a diagonal that reaches nearly from one corner of the canvas to another.  You know she will snap back in a moment. Balthus was brilliant at this kind of composition. He knew how to impart static scenes with a sense of movement and impending action.

There’s even pleasure to be had in the pebbly surfaces of Balthus’s paintings.  The bumps along the contours of figures lend a tactile sense to the image – you can feel the artist dragging his brush along that curve again and again.  The effect also makes the light in the pictures seem almost granular, a magical dusting along the edges of things.

Balthus stalked the viewer like a cat does its prey.  He used everything at his disposal to draw the viewer in, to endow his paintings with beauty, mystery, and psychological depth.  He was not so different from many other artists – or filmmakers, or writers – today who use sex to get attention. What made him different was that, beyond the sex, he had so many other gifts to offer.

 

Picasso Black and White

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Color was always secondary in Picasso’s art.  His radical reinventions of painting had to do with twisting forms, flattening space and rearranging people’s faces and limbs. “Color weakens,” he is reported to have said, which explains why such a competitive artist would have ceded that ground to colorists like Matisse and Chagall.

Up until now, however, no curator has thought to make an issue of this.  Picasso’s works are generally organized by his styles: analytic cubism, synthetic cubism, neoclassicism, surrealism and so on.

Now, in “Picasso Black and White,” the Guggenheim Museum has plucked work from all phases of his career to make the case that Picasso was deeply monochromatic.

Curator Carmen Giménez even commandeers works from the so-called Blue Period to get her point across. A melancholy painting like “Woman Ironing,” may take some of its mood from the pervasive blue tint, but the painting is monochromatic nonetheless (blue functions as black), and, as print versions of this and other Blue Period works show, the conversion to pure black and white takes little if anything away from the picture.

Cubism in its early, analytical days was often strongly monochromatic. Part of its effect came from the reduction of forms to geometry.  You can see Picasso working this out in such drawings as the 1909 “Head of a Man,” in which the face is broken down into neat planes with sharp edges.

Likewise, in more complicated compositions such as “Accordionist,” the cubist distortions of space are achieved by graphic means – with lines and monochromatic shading.  Picasso shattered the image, then shaded the edges of the reassembled shards to bend them back into space.  The mind keeps trying to read the cues for a third dimension, but it never opens up. Despite all those little shaded edges, the composition remains as flat as a scattered deck of cards.  Adding a lot of color would have turned an elegant paradox into chaos.

In the sensitively rendered head of “Man with a Pipe,” you see Picasso has emerged from the cubist maze into his neo-classical period, and with his all his powers of draftsmanship intact.

Picasso’s best-known black-and-white work is undoubtedly “Guernica,” his reaction to the bombing of a Basque village by fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War.  The mural explodes outward with images of suffering animals and people in a crumbling structure.  That painting, which hung in the Museum of Modern Art for many years, stays in Spain now, but it is represented here by a study of a horse’s head thrown back in agony.

The use of black-and-white is at once funereal and somber while also referencing newspaper photos of the period.  He used a similar style in “Charnel House,” which was painted in 1945, when news of the death camps began to filter through Europe. The painting utilizes the same flatish, cubist space as Guernica, but differs, in that it seems unfinished, the lines fading into thin air. It’s as if the truth in this case was too horrific to render in a mere painting.

Giménez, who, like Picasso, is Spanish, points out the important part that black played in the works of such Spanish painters as El Greco, José de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, and, especially, Francisco de Goya, whose black period was rife with nightmarish images.

The strongest works of this show are from the 30s and 40s, a time when Picasso was finished with all his formal experimenting and could use his powers of distortion in an almost playful way.  You see it in portraits of his lovers, Dora Maar or Marie-Therese Walter.  Sometimes their eyes bunch up on one side of their nose, other times they lean back into a crossfire of cubist lines.  These effects might be jarring, but the use of black-and-white bestows a simplicity and purity that makes them easier to digest.

 

 

Ferdinand Hodler

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Chances are you’ve never heard of the symbolist-expressionist painter Ferdinand Hodler.  Partly that’s because he spent his career in Switzerland  — a reasonable enough thing to do, given that he was Swiss ­– but history tends to favor those artists from major art centers.

Before you start thinking “minor,” however, imagine Hodler – whose works are at Neue Galerie – as a fine wine, kept out of sight in the cellar for all these many years and now uncorked for an audience who can appreciate it for the first time. It’s the opposite situation over at the Museum of Modern Art where Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” – an overexposed painting if there ever was one – is currently on loan and viewers have to cope with too much familiarity rather than too little.

Hodler, born in 1853, had a solid reputation in early 20th Century Europe.   He exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Munich and other European cultural centers, but was most at home among the expressionist artists of the Vienna Secession, whose leading lights, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, praised his work and credited him as an influence.

In the company of those Neue Galerie demigods,  Hodler can seem a bit conservative.  You’ll find none of Schiele’s bold sexual themes, or Klimt’s decorative gold-leaf-and-mosaic passages.

Hodler was the opposite in temperament, more the hedgehog than the fox, enamored of strategies like repetition and theme-and-variation with which he hoped to get some sense of eternity into his work.

His “View to Infinity” is laid out like an ancient frieze. Five women are posed like modern dancers of the time (think Isadora Duncan), barefoot in floor-length free-flowing robes, arms extended so that their hands almost touch. You’re supposed to imagine their artsy chorus line continuing beyond the sides of the canvas into, as it were, Hodler’s “Infinity.”

This idea works better, I think, in his panoramic landscapes of the Swiss Alps.  Here, he seems a Van Gogh expressionist, summoning up mountainous volumes with thrusting planes of ultramarine, laying down pastures and fields with swift strokes of ochre and green and dotting a ridge with grazing cattle.  In most landscapes like this, the tops of the mountains are rendered palely insubstantial to show their greater distance. But Hodler sometimes does the reverse and puts a mist-filled ravine in the foreground, so that the abyss seems to be swallowing the substantial mountain behind it.

In his last two years, Hodler painted broad horizontal landscapes in which mountains, lakes and foreground shore are reduced to elegant horizontals that do seem to stretch into infinity. They are heartbreaking sunsets, rendered in just a few colors – lemon yellow skies against purplish mountain ranges, alpine lakes reflecting the sky. In some, a line of curvy-necked swans line the canvas’s bottom, looking like a caption in hieroglyphs.

Hodler was at his most playful in his self-portraits. Photographs show that he usually painted himself looking younger than he was. He liked mugging it up, with eyebrows raised in mock surprise or eyes narrowed in the penetrating gaze of a hypnotist.

Hodler had an interesting personal life.  He had several wives and several mistresses, all of whom he painted. The love of his life was Valentine Gode-Darel, with whom he had a child in 1913. That same year he and his wife, Berthe moved into an elegant apartment furnished by the famous Josef Hoffman, some pieces of which are exhibited in the show.

When Gode-Darel developed cancer, Hodler chronicled her two-year decline in painful series of paintings and drawings that seems part devotional act, part morbid compulsion. They fill an entire gallery, here.  In the earliest, she holds their daughter Paulette on her lap.  Gradually, she is shown becoming more emaciated, her head sinking back into the pillow, her arms growing thinner, her mouth gaping open, until you see her dead, laid out in her clothes, so skeletal that she looks seven feet tall.

Hodler died of a lung ailment three years later, in 1918, the year of the great influenza pandemic that claimed the lives of Klimt and Schiele.  After Hodler’s death, his widow, Berthe, adopted the daughter he had had with Valentine.

Hodler’s reputation never flagged in Switzerland, but his paintings never became as well-known in this country as others from the Viennese Secession. This, the first New York museum show to focus on his late work, aims to remedy that somewhat.

Vuillard

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Self portrait

Edouard Vuillard is an easy painter to love.  His intimate interiors are jigsaw puzzles in which all the elements – the faces, tabletops, curtains, rugs, windows and doorways – fit together into a gorgeous pattern.  Like the cubists, he broke up reality and reassembled it, but unlike the cubists, the results were never jarring or sharp-edged.

He was the charming modernist.  He is often paired with Pierre Bonnard, with whom he came of age artistically in the 1890s. For awhile their works were quite similar, but they branched apart around 1910. Vuillard’s work became more realistic and conventional. Bonnard stayed the modernist course.

Most exhibits and art books on Vuillard tend to shy away from the late work.  But he lived till 1940 and that’s a lot of art to ignore.

In  “Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940,” the Jewish Museum takes a different tack. The emphasis here is on social history – Vuillard’s involvement with the avant-garde cultural milieu of Paris at the time, a scene in which Jewish collectors, gallerists, publishers and theater impresarios apparently played an important part.

Marcelle Aron

Vuillard was Catholic, but he belonged to a group in the 1890s called the Nabis (rhymes with hobbies) which included some Jewish artists and others, like Vuillard, who wore long beards. The group’s name comes from the Hebrew word for prophet or visionary.

In this exhibit, the five decades of Vuillard’s career are given equal weight, which gives a much fuller picture of Vuillard, the man. For example, Vuillard’s early work, which often features his mother and sisters with whom he lived, might give the impression that he was a mama’s boy.  But women played a big part in his life.

In fact, he seems to have had a habit of getting involved with the wives of important benefactors.  The first was Misia Natanson, who played the muse (and portrait subject), for a number of important artists, including Bonnard, Felix Vallotton and Pierre Renoir. Misia’s husband, Thadée, from a family of Polish-Jewish bankers, was a founder and publisher of the cutting-edge cultural journal, La Revue Blanche.

In one painting, Thadée can be seen at as his large wooden desk in a warm, lamp-lit interior.  In another of the magazine offices, the critic Felix Feneon can be seen comically hunched over his desk, his nose practically touching the paper he writes on.

Lucie Hessel

The Natansons were Vuillard’s entry into society and helped to get him into the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune gallery. In another witty picture, you see the sharply dressed art dealers Gaston and Josse Bernheim, one of whom perches rakishly on the arm of a chair. By this time, the Natansons had divorced, and Vuillard was adopted by the third partner in the gallery, Jos Hessel and his wife Lucie.

Lucie became Vuillard’s adored confidante and lover. She appears in more pictures than any other subject, from the lyrical and slightly blurry “Madame Hessel at the Seashore” of 1904, in which she slumps dreamily next to a window, to the formal 1924 portrait in which she is gray haired and sits in a matronly pose in her painting-lined living room.

Vuillard by this time was up to his ears in the culture of wealth and privilege.   The former Nabi and painter of stage sets and playbills for avant-garde theater, became a society portrait painter. The subjects of these paintings, you gather, didn’t want their faces blurred into the wallpaper as just another piece of the modernist pattern. The paintings still have Vuillard’s great color sense and love of rich, complex interiors, but they are no longer daringly flat, abstracted compositions. The entire last gallery is devoted to paintings he made at the Hessel’s chateau near Versailles. Everything came to end in 1940 with Vuillard’s death and the Nazi occupation of Paris, which brought a tragic end to a cultural milieu that had nurtured so much art, theater and literature.

Diego Rivera

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“Agrarian Leader Zapata,”

There was no “Occupy Wall Street” movement when the Museum of Modern Art began planning an exhibit to commemorate the 80th anniversary of its Diego Rivera retrospective, and yet the timing now seems prescient.  Who better to evoke the feelings of the dispossessed than the great Mexican muralist?

“Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art” is a small, but unusual exhibit.  The five central pieces are of a format – portable fresco murals – that was perfected for the original exhibit in 1931. There are interesting technical things to learn about this, but this is not nearly as interesting as the show’s story line, especially in light of the current dialogue about social class and power.

What seems so startling today is that an avowed communist artist whose work was not really very “modernist” would be given a show at MoMA and welcomed by the city’s upper-class cultural elite during the depths of the Great Depression.

A little background: Mexican muralism emerged in the 1920s in the wake of a bloody, decade-long revolution that brought a Marxist-dominated government to power.  Under the direction of education minister José Vasconcelos, public buildings were adorned with murals that taught socialist ideals and celebrated Mexico’s pre-colonial indigenous culture.

The movement brought international fame to Rivera and its two other major figures:  José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.   In 1931, MoMA was a fledgling institution that had only given one other artist a one-person show – Henri Matisse.  Matisse, of course, embodied the kind of art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic that MoMA was founded on and still represents today.

Rivera had been part of the Paris avant-garde in the early 20th century and was a cubist from 1913 to 1917.  But his later mural style drew more on the frescoes of Renaissance Italy than on the examples of Picasso and Matisse.

They may have been propaganda, but in the hands of a genius like Rivera, they were also great art. The problem of how to do a show on site-specific works, was solved by having Rivera paint portable frescoes on steel-reinforced concrete-and-plaster panels. The first five he did are a kind of shorthand course in the Mexican struggle for liberation.

In “Indian Warrior,” an Aztec warrior wearing a jaguar costume stabs an armored conquistador in the throat with a stone knife.  “Agrarian Leader Zapata,” an icon of the museum’s permanent collection, is a saint-like depiction of revolutionary Emiliano Zapata restraining a white horse, a dead landowner at his feet.

Two from this original group – “Sugar Cane,” which shows the abuse of farm laborers under colonial rule and the even-more searing “Liberation of the Peon,” which shows rebel soldiers cutting down a beaten laborer from a whipping post–are represented here by large drawings.

The last in this sequence, “The Uprising,” shows angry labor protesters clashing with soldiers in which the central figure is a mother with a baby on her hip.

After the opening, Rivera added three more murals that transferred the class-struggle narrative from Mexico to Depression-era New York.  The most controversial of these, “Frozen Assets,” is a fanciful cross-sectional view of New York’s skyscrapers.  Below the composite skyline can be seen an army of homeless construction workers sleeping on the floor of a warehouse, while below that, a woman sits in a bank vault inspecting the contents of her safe-deposit box.

Rivera and his wife Frieda Kahlo took New York City by storm.  They were interviewed and feted everywhere they went.  But there were obvious tensions in the communist artist’s relationship with the power elite, which came to a head in the notorious incident involving the mural he was commissioned to paint for Rockefeller Center in 1933.

Rivera ran afoul of the Rockefellers when he included the head of Vladimir Lenin in  “Man at the Crossroads.” Among the memorabilia on view from this project is a letter from Nelson Rockefeller asking Rivera to paint out the image. He refused, and the mural was covered, then destroyed.

This didn’t stop the work of the Mexican muralists from having an enduring impact on American art. It became the chief inspiration for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) mural program that employed so many artists during the Depression.

 

 

Lyonel Feininger

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There are only a handful of serious painters who can be described as “funny.”  Honore Daumier was one. Paul Klee was another.  Then there is Lyonel Feininger.

Many people know the name, but not the work, which is understandable, since there hasn’t been a full-scale Feininger retrospective in this country in 45 years.  Now, the Whitney Museum has mounted an excellent show that confirms what a funny and versatile artist Feininger was.  What other serious artist can you name who also did a comic strip?

Feininger (1871-1956) spanned two cultures.  Born and raised in New York City, he moved to Germany at age 16 to study the violin.  Instead, he became a caricaturist and political cartoonist and eventually a member of the German-expressionist groups Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Die Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).  He was the first professor appointed at the Bauhaus – Germany’s influential school of modern design – at its founding in 1919. In the late 1930s, after a half-century in Germany, he fled the Nazis and came back to his native New York.

Although he’s often classified as a German artist, the Whitney claims him as an American, which makes perfect sense when you see his Chicago Tribune comic strips.  What was more American than the funnies?  “The Kin-der-Kids” and “Wee Willie Winkie’s World,” commanded full-page color spreads.  Like Winsor McKay’s “Little Nemo” and George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” a few years later, they were artsy and highbrow amusements – witty, but also sensitively drawn and colored.

The strips were short lived, but Feininger brought the comics spirit with him when he began making real paintings in 1907.  These folksy compositions of Old Worldish city streets are the first works you see in the show and they make an indelible impression.  Seeing these, it’s easy to understand why many histories don’t even mention Feininger in connection with Die Brucke and Die Blaue Reiter. He took the same liberties with vivid color and primitive design as artists like Kandinsky, but left out the emotional tension and violent imagery.

One twilight painting shows Parisians strolling mauve streets past blue buildings.  But the people look like cartoonish circus characters – the fat man, the midget, the man on stilts. Others are of bicycle riders, fishermen, trumpeters and street cleaners.  In all, he plays games with scale, enlarging foreground figures into giants that span the height of the canvas.

Beginning in about 1919, Feininger’s compositions begin to acquire the sharp edges and angled planes of cubism.  Marc Chagall made a similar blend of cubism and folkish fantasy, but with Feininger, the cubist system gradually pushed the fantasy out.   In fact, it pushes the figures out of the picture, too, and the viewer is left with bare cityscapes marked by sharp shadows and beams of light.  In the 1930s, the views are out over piers and shorelines.  Feininger plays with the reflections and atmosphere of water in scenes of sunsets, storm clouds, sailboats, and steamer ships.

These can be lovely.  But if you squint at some of them, the cubist details drop away, revealing a scene that can be disappointingly close to reality. A few paintings exhibit the old whimsy, as in a 1940 canvas of Manhattan at night, in which the cockeyed skyscrapers play the same jolly role as the odd-shaped people once did.

The playfulness that once went into the paintings was channeled into small painted woodcarvings of figures, trains, bridges and houses that he made from the 1920s into the 1940s as decorative amusements.

Painters, even funny ones, are entitled to conclude their careers with visions that are serene and ethereal  And it’s hard to find fault with an artist like Feininger, who could do just about anything he wanted to do. In addition to being a painter, he was a skillful photographer and a musical composer.

But there were legions of cubists in the 20th century and few if any other painters who, like Feininger, could blend high art and low art – expressionism and caricature – into pictures that were both funny and beautiful.