Season’s Bleatings: The War on Christmas Starts at the Smithsonian

The signs of the holiday season are upon us: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, twinkling lights, overdecorated malls, and now, finally, the annual conservative cri de Coeur—The War on Christmas! This year, the battle begins at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which has played host to the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture since October 30^th. An intrepid conservative reporter finally stumbled upon (or disingenuously timed coverage of) the exhibition this past week and fired the first shot in 2010’s War on Christmas by taking aim at the late David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly.” Somehow a show centered on difference and desire in American portraiture has become a “Christmas show,” as conservatives take umbrage with Wojnarowicz’s imagery of a crucified Jesus Christ covered in ants (a still from the film is shown above). So, let’s all gather under the tree and let the Season’s Bleatings begin. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Season's Bleatings."

Left at the Altar

To make the grand churches of medieval Europe even grander, and to focus the altar as the true center stage, the greatest artists created works on commission to celebrate those holy spaces. Along with Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden created some of the greatest religious images of the Netherlandish school between his birth sometime in 1399 and his death on June 18, 1464. Weyden’s Deposition (above, from 1435) captures the imagination in several ways. First of all, its sheer size (over six feet tall and nearly 8 feet wide) dominates the altar area. Secondly, the colors of the nearly life-sized figures’ garments strike us with their brilliance almost six centuries after they were first applied. Finally, our eye begins to unravel the fugue of movement enacted by the figures. Each figure plays out some small narrative that adds up to the total effect. Christ and his mother, the Virgin Mary, seem to fall in tandem—he clothed in only his marble-like skin and her in a brilliant blue gown of intricate folds. Saint John pulls Mary to the left while Joseph of Arimethaea pulls the dead Jesus off to the right, perhaps echoing the act of the protective doors of the altarpiece opening to reveal this central scene. The action is as high keyed as the color, but there’s no sense of frenzy. Rather, everything seems carefully orchestrated, like different voices all singing at once in a scene from an opera. Or, more aptly for the time, each character “sings” a theme in the great polyphony of action just like the polyphonic music played in the cathedral around it.

The Deposition is the earliest work attributed to Weyden, who would have been in his mid-30s at the time. No work can be conclusively linked to Weyden through documentation. Only traditions tell us that he painted The Deposition and other works, such as the Crucifixion Triptych (above, from 1445). The common theme that drives art historians to attribute such works to Weyden is the signature color, energy, and composition. Weyden unifies all three pieces of the triptych by extending the landscape left and right, although the central scene can easily stand on its own. Mary Magdalene, on the left, and Saint Veronica, on the right, literally stand in the wings, painted on the reverse of the doors normally left closed to protect the central crucifixion panel. The Crucifixion Triptych is less crowded than The Deposition, but there is still a great sense of balance within the interplay of the figures. Christ physically and theologically centers the work, while the women in the wings balance one another out as if they were standing upon a great scale with the cross itself as a fulcrum. My favorite part of this work is the dark little angels in the distance, flitting in the air like musical notes and rhyming with the ends of Christ’s loincloth dancing in the breeze. Again, Weyden demonstrates great musicality in this work, but, in contrast to the active contrapuntal themes of The Deposition, we “hear” here a more restrained, somber adagio.


In The Last Judgment Polyptych (above, from 1446-1452), Weyden uses the multiple doors to visually drag us down to Hell or rise with us to Heaven. We begin in the center, where the risen Christ sits in judgment. Moving to the right, we progress deeper and deeper into the darker ranges of Hell itself. Unlike, say, in the works of Hieronymus Bosch, who paints after Weyden, we see little of Hell’s horrors here. Moving to the left, however, we ascend to the realm of the elect. Weyden elects to accentuate the positive in this depiction of the Last Judgment, which would literally unfold before the eyes of viewers as the doors of the fifteen panels were opened one after another. Weyden painted this polyptych for a chapel for a large hall for the poor and the sick. Just as Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece inspired patients suffering from skin diseases to bear their burden like Christ bore his cross, Weyden’s Last Judgment inspired patients to accept their suffering as the path to greater glory in Heaven. I like to think of the great unfolding of the multiple panels of this polyptych as an unfolding of the church’s “arms” to embrace these unfortunate souls who found little reward on Earth. In this installment of the “soundtrack” of Weyden’s art, you might hear a joyful chorus doing their best to be angelic in singing a song of praise and, through that praise, consolation for humanity.

Outcast

Of the many problems that I had with Raul Ruiz’s 2006 film Klimt (reviewed here), which starred John Malkovich as Gustav Klimt, perhaps the biggest obstacle to my enjoyment was the portrayal of Egon Schiele by Nikolai Kinski, son of the great German actor Klaus Kinski. Nikolai plays Schiele like Klimt’s Renfield, following the lead of the character from the original Bela Lugosi Dracula film. I’m going to give Nikolai the benefit of a doubt and assume that he was following the director’s wishes to channel Peter Lorre, since the rest of the film suffers from equally poor actors’ motivations. Born June 12, 1890, Schiele has always suffered from the stigma of being an outsider. Self-portraits such as the 1912 one above don’t help his case. Many people accept these self-portraits at face value. Nikolai Kinski almost seems to mimic the self-portraits, especially with the continual eccentric hand poses, as if that’s how Schiele went around all day. Because of his liberated views towards sexuality and intense artistic style, Schiele found himself an outcast in his day, accepted by only a handful of kindred spirits such as Klimt. But even today, almost a century after Schiele’s death, he remains an outcast in the art world, an oddity of such remarkable power that we almost can’t seem to look at him directly.

Schiele was an oddball, don’t get me wrong. The drawing of Gerti Schiele in a Plaid Gown (above, from 1909) is remarkably beautiful, but when you learn that Gerti was Schiele’s teenage sister, it’s hard not to get a creepy feeling. Perhaps I’m revealing my own prudishness, but Schiele pushed the sexual envelope well into the danger zone, landing himself in jail on one occasion after watching a judge burn his artwork right there in the courtroom. The violence Schiele does to the human body in his depiction of it reminds me of how Matthias Grünewald tortured the body of Christ in his Isenheim Altarpiece. Grunewald served as a Germanic artistic hero for many German and Austrian artists at the beginning of the twentieth century—a “modern” artist painting five hundred years before them. Like his contemporaries, the Expressionists, Schiele enacts upon the human form the same violence he sees besetting humanity as part of the modern condition. Yet, Schiele resists painting pure angst. The plaid gown barely covering Gerti’s lower half is beautiful in design and execution. Schiele saw past the angst and recognized the beauty of life. It was this vision that allowed him to see past conventional mores and depict the beauty in body and soul of his young sister.

Who knows what direction Schiele would have gone had not the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic took his life at 28 years of age just days after claiming his wife Edith’s life. Living with Edith brought love and stability to Schiele’s life for perhaps the first time, despite the call of World War I. Edith gave Egon someone and something to return to. Schiele’s Embrace (above, from 1917) epitomizes the romanticism of this final stage of his career. To achieve a bird’s eye view in this work and others, Schiele sometimes mounted a ladder when sketching from live models. In Embrace, it is as if heaven itself looked down upon the lovers and gave its blessing. The sheets upon which they lay radiate out like a sun. The folds crackle with the energy of the couple’s passion. Many people read disease or death in how Schiele portrays the human body, but I see a plastic type of electricity flowing through the limbs. Arms and legs become conduits for power they can’t contain. When Edith died, it was as if life had pulled the plug on Schiele. He lost all will to fight on without her. For the three days he waited for death to reunite him with his love, Schiele sketched Edith from memory, as if he could resurrect her through art itself.