Hybrid Model: Hong Kong, Art, and Deterritorialization

When Frank Welsh wrote his outstanding one-volume history of Hong Kong, he titled it “A Borrowed Place.” In I Like Hong Kong… Art and Deterritorialization, Frank Vigneron, an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, continues that theme of borrowings, but places it at the center of the dynamic culture and art world of that tiny island that thrives at the crossroads of commerce and communication. “Does a Hong Kong cultural identity really stem from the cliché of ‘East meets West,’ which has been strongly attached to the idea most people have had of Hong Kong for decades, or is it exclusively the product of a Chinese background only masked by British colonization?” Vigneron asks, only to answer “neither!” Instead, Vigneron builds a compelling philosophical case that Hong Kong is a model case of true hybridization in which cultural elements lose their territorial context, that is, they become “deterritorialized.” Both a description of Hong Kong’s contemporary art scene and a manifesto for how that artwork could provide a solution to the world’s global tensions, I Like Hong Kong… promises, and delivers. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Hybrid Model."

[Image: Cindy Ng Sio-Ieng. Ink 9852. Digital photography. 70 x 50 cm. 2010.]

[Many thanks to The Chinese University Press for providing me with a review copy of Frank Vigneron’s I Like Hong Kong… Art and Deterritorialization.]

Passion Play

Working as a teenager as apprentice to a glass painter and restorer, Georges Rouault came face to face daily with beautiful stained glass windows showing scenes of the life of Christ. Born May 27, 1871 to a poor, pious Parisian family, Rouault’s faith was always strong, but it was his friendship with the philosopher Jacques Maritain that drove Rouault to commit himself to painting primarily religious subjects. Rouault’s The Flagellation (above, from 1915) shows the lingering influence of stained glass window design in the cloisonnist dark lines separating the fields of color. Christ stands at the pillory in the center of the work to take the blows of the soldiers. World War I raged as Rouault painted this scene of suffering, which may allude to Europe’s self-flagellation in the name of nationalism. It is interesting that Rouault’s works concentrate almost exclusively on the passion and death of Christ, with no images that I know of depicting the triumph of the Resurrection. Rouault identified with agony more than ecstacy, saying once, “The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.” Perhaps Rouault allowed himself a moment of “silent joy” upon completing The Flagellation, but the emphasis was definitely on the silence.

In 1920, Rouault painted The Crucifixion (above) in the same stained-glass style with the same contorted limbs. The Fauves claim Rouault as one of their own for his bold use of color. The Expressionists count him among their ranks for Rouault’s tortured rendition of the human body, usually Christ’s. Certainly Emil Nolde’s 1912 Prophet equals the religious fervor and Expressionist angst of Rouault’s religious works. I find it fascinating that Rouault paints Jesus in The Crucifixion without a beard, whereas other works show the familiar bearded face. Michelangelo chose to paint the Savior of The Last Judgment as a beardless youth to allude to the Greek ideal, casting Christ as a new Apollo bringing light into the world. I’m not sure that Rouault shared Michelangelo’s same faith in humanism, especially in 1920, when the aftershocks of the Great War continued to be felt throughout Europe. Maybe Rouault paints Jesus here as the beardless youth to stand for the whole generation of beardless European youth that met their end in the trenches and fields of wartime folly.

Before Rouault turned his attention to Christ-centered paintings, he painted series of works showing clowns, kings, and prostitutes as a way of commenting on the sad state of modern society. In Christ Mocked by Soldiers (above, from 1932) Rouault shows Jesus at the moment he is forced to play the clown king for the amusement of the soldiers, who crown him with thorns and place a reed “scepter” in his hands. In Christ Mocked by Soldiers, Rouault mocks the world itself, which he sees as prostituting itself for material things at the expense of its soul. “The richness of the world, all artificial pleasures,” Rouault lamented, “have the taste of sickness and give off a smell of death in the face of certain spiritual possessions.” By 1932, Rouault may have recognized, as did many others, the degenerating situation in the world that would eventually lead up to World War II. Rouault returns to the image of the bearded Christ here to emphasize the weariness of age rather than the innocence of youth of The Crucifixion. In his sixties himself, Rouault grew weary of the world and its self-destructive ways. Shortly before his death in 1958, Rouault destroyed three hundred of his own paintings, which would be worth a fortune today, as if to place them on his own funeral pyre and out of the reach of the materialists who valued them in currency instead of, as he did, in Christianity.

Authority Figures

The most fascinating and infuriating aspect of Salvador Dali is that you never really knew when he was kidding. Born May 11, 1904, Dali would say or do anything to provoke. On one level, he was a provocateur who could expose the hypocrisies of civilization. On a different level, where he wasn’t kidding, he could seem almost monstrous in his embrace of the unthinkable. For many critics, even when Dali was alive, Dali suffered from a fascism problem. Did Dali really admire fascist leaders, or was it all a big, decades-long joke? Either way, Dali’s examination of political strongmen goes a long way back, beginning perhaps with Partial Hallucination: Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano (above, from 1931). Like Warhol would do much later with Mao, Dali repeats Vladimir Lenin’s likeness until it loses all effect or actually becomes oppressive in effect. It all depends on how you see it, or think the artist sees it. By placing Lenin on a piano, Dali may suggest that Lenin’s policies were instrumental in making Russia an international powerhouse, as if a strong Russia could never have been orchestrated otherwise. Thanks to the rulelessness of Surrealism, however, Dali slips and slides away from any conclusive answers that could get him in trouble.

Dali’s fellow Surrealists surely didn’t think he was joking. André Breton accused Dali of defending Adolf Hitler as “enigmatic” rather than murderously insane or some other, more accurate description. Dalí’s The Enigma of Hitler (above, from 1938) embodies the artist’s strangely convoluted approach to Hitler around this time. Dali took the Surrealist apolitical credo to mean that even a Hitler could not be denounced. Breton and the other Surrealists expelled Dali from their ranks after a 1934 “trial.” Even after World War II, Dali flirted with fascism in the person of Francisco Franco, fascist leader of Spain. Dali would sometimes talk or write of the master-slave dynamic, casting himself in one role or the other and sometimes both. Philosophers from Hegel to Foucault have probed the depths of the master-slave relationship, often delving into the sexual component that Dali certainly injected into his discourse on the concept. Did Dali’s fascination with fascism come from some need for a master to enslave him? Or was Dali just playing at slavery before turning the whole thing on its head in the end, as he sometimes did, and declaring himself the master by virtue of his artistic talent? We just don’t know.


In the late 1960s, many intellectuals made a cultural hero of the Chinese leader Mao. Such a heroic vision came long before the atrocities Mao committed against his own people were known in the West. When a book of poems by Mao was to be printed in English, Dali created a series of prints to accompany them, including Bust of Mao (above, from 1968). Dali’s “bust,” of course, is anything but a bust, literally decapitating the head of the Chinese Communist Party. Like Lenin, Hitler, Franco, and other strongmen before him, Mao fostered a cult of personality around himself thinking that his personal charisma could keep his movement together. Oddly, Dali’s decapitation of Mao short-circuits the leader’s charismatic power. Faceless, Mao is just an empty suit. I’d like to think that Dali’s Bust of Mao says that Dali recognizes the emptiness of Mao’s cult of personality and, by extension, all cults of personality throughout time. I want to think that, but I just can’t be sure. Dali himself used personal charm to draw followers to himself. The magnetism of his magical artwork amplified his person to near-mythic status. Like Lenin, Hitler, Franco, and Mao, Dali can be identified by a single name. I love Dali’s art and mystique. I just wish he didn’t keep such bad company.

Words Fail

Since 1977, Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, four hundred stainless-steel poles arranged in a one mile by one kilometer grid in a remote section of New Mexico, has served as the mysteriously elusive Moby-Dick of modern American art. De Maria limits access to the site itself, requiring visitors to stay overnight and forgo all means of communication with the outside world during their time there. De Maria also fiercely fights against the proliferation of images of The Lightning Field and has refused to offer interpretations of his work. Into that void steps Kenneth Baker, whose book, titled simply The Lightning Field (above), breaks the silence surrounding De Maria installation but also reinforces De Maria’s idea that words and interpretations always fall short of reproducing the physical experiencing of the work itself. Words fail over and over for Baker, who is still forced to use them despite realizing their ineffectuality. The Lightning Field “silences the incessant prattle of consciousness,” Baker writes, but he rises from that silence to speak of the paradoxical power of De Maria’s work to inspire inner and outer explorations in those who open themselves up completely to the experience. Visiting and revisiting The Lightning Field over a span of three decades, Baker guides us through the grid while emphasizing the need for each of us to serve as our own guide.

Baker was first invited to write on The Lightning Field in 1977, but De Maria rejected that essay as “too descriptive” and it remained unpublished until now. Baker’s initial reactions, indeed too descriptive for De Maria’s taste, help orient us inside the field while disorienting us enough to think we are truly “there.” “The constant message of TV and of publicity generally is that vicarious experience is real experience,” Baker writes. “But reading this essay is not having an experience of The Lightning Field, nor is writing it.” Baker beautifully conveys the inexplicable indifference of The Lightning Field to interpretation. “The Lightning Field’s spectacle is so detailed and so disinterested in its existence as ‘art’ that I know it will outstrip my ability to describe it,” Baker admits candidly, throwing in the towel in a spirit more of triumph than defeat. As Lynne Cooke writes in her preface, “Too often everything the theorist does succeeds only in becoming, for the novice, part of the educational package into which the object is subsumed.” Baker as critic admits the deadening effect of criticism, allowing the work and his sensory appreciation to live again.

The second essay by Baker collects impressions gathered from visits to The Lightning Field from 1994 through 2007. Like T.J. Clark in The Sight of Death, Clark’s compendium of repeated exposure to two paintings by Poussin (which I reviewed here), Baker allows us access to the mind of a deep thinker of art engaging imaginatively a work of art over a period of time, permitting us to witness the evolution of an idea. Unlike Clark, however, Baker refuses to take an authoritarian stance. Clark imaginatively enters Poussin’s paintings, but Baker stands outside The Lightning Field imaginatively, knowing that “entering” is always an self-deluding illusion. This difference comes across most strikingly in both authors’ approach to the events of 9/11 in relation to the art before them. Clark never overtly claims healing powers for Poussin, but it remains a subtext of the entire book. Baker comes right out and denies art and, specifically, The Lightning Field status as restorative sites. After 9/11, “many people conversant with the arts turn[ed] to them for consolation,” Baker writes, “The Lightning Field offers none. This confirms its importance.” As much as we reach out to The Lightning Field (or any art) for meaning, it will never reach back.

Baker excels in describing this alien and alienating nature of The Lightning Field. “The Lightning Field activates one’s submerged sense of the philosophical dislocations the past millennium has effected,” Baker muses. “After Copernicus, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Einstein—and some might wish to add Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida—humanity can no longer locate itself at the center of anything.” Baker shamelessly drops names as shorthand for complex philosophical ideas like a trail of breadcrumbs as he ventures deeper and deeper into the dark forest of the implications of modernity’s solipsism, which he feels “may be the defining sensation of subjectivity in our time.” Baker forges a difficult path to follow, but he’s well worth keeping up with, sprinkling references to comedian Steven Wright and novelist William S. Burroughs, among others, to keep things interesting. “The mind of anyone who spends enough time alone at The Lightning Field may drift to similar extremes,” Baker warns, “all the way to wondering how we ever made a world of what we experience.” Baker’s meandering, like that of a digital age Thoreau, brings us to the very origin of knowledge, a call for all sleepers to awake and question what and how we know.

“[B]y its very openness—indeed, vulnerability—to interpretation, the work raises the ultimate critical quandary: What can be shared?” Baker asks in the end. The solution he offers is to embrace the ambiguity. “Only when we claim ambiguity as our element, and let ourselves be openly delighted, fascinated, or beleaguered by it,” he believes, “can we accept our position: in the middle of nowhere, in the cosmological and philosophical senses.” Thus, Baker puts a positive spin on a modern version of Keats’ "Negative Capability," free of all Romantic baggage. Like The Lightning Field itself, Kenneth Baker’s The Lightning Field is a mind-altering experience, opening up a cosmos of possibility that is both invigorating and terrifying simultaneously. For all his talk of disorientation and decentering, Baker in The Lightning Field places you firmly at the center of the big questions of art and interpretation.

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Kenneth Baker’s The Lightning Field.]

[NOTE: In the spirit of De Maria and this book, which contains only one photo of The Lightning Field, I’ve resisted the temptation to include images of the work with my review. You can find them on the web, if so inclined. If you want to follow in Baker’s footsteps and see the real thing, however, you can find the details here.]

Eye Spy

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Eaters, 1981. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1981.

At just around five feet in height, Barbara Crane has a height advantage over most other photographers. Crane makes herself inconspicuous and captures people at their most vulnerable, unguarded, and real moments, such as in Eaters (above, from 1981). The Amon Carter Museum’s current exhibition Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision displays this period of Crane’s long, protean career as well as many others. The catalogue, which features an introduction by Kenneth C. Burkhart and essays by John Rohrbach and Abigail Foerstner, brings Crane into clear focus not only as a visionary photographer but also as a groundbreaking woman photographer breaking into the boys club of modern photography while raising three children, who actually posed for her as her thesis subjects for 35 cents an hour. “It took me years—really years, way into adulthood to say I was an artist,” Crane confesses. In 1970, Crane began a two-year project of photographing people passing through a doorway, which became the series known as People of the North Portal. “Brought together, the images deliver a vivid sense of place and activity,” Rohrbach writes in his essay, “Seeing Life Differently,” “the repetitious dance of life walking out of a public doorway and into the street, given a nostalgic twist through hairstyle and clothing.” Crane’s still photography captures the movement and vitality of life with all its change and randomness. Crane herself has never stopped moving artistically over five decades of creating.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Human Forms, 1964–65. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1964–65.

Crane’s Human Forms series (above, from 1964-1965) shows the influence of Edward Weston’s nudes but also just how different Crane’s approach to photography evolved from the work of Weston and others. Weston skirted the edges of abstraction with his nudes, but they always remained recognizably human. Crane, contrastingly, pushes the recognizable to the point of abstraction to make us see it anew. “Crane’s goal,” Rohrbach believes, “has been to critique our subservience to photographic realism and to suggest that we have fallen into a bad habit of giving undue preference to that part of photography’s magical language.” Writing specifically of Crane’s nude studies, Rohrbach writes that “[e]ach body almost dissolves, becoming a sinuous river flowing across a snowy landscape.” The gentle lyricism and natural sense of flow of Crane’s nudes departs drastically from Weston’s almost sculptural, static nudes. Such works beautifully capture the philosophical difference between Crane’s “challenging vision” and the vision of her contemporaries. Crane achieves what Rohrbach calls an “unnerving disconnect” that breaks old associations and forces us to reconnect with what we see before us.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Neon Cowboy, 1969. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1969.

Crane jumps from subject to subject throughout her career, always seeking something new to cast askew and make new. In a series of collaged photographs involving neon lights, Crane “juxtapos[es] neon lights over faces like ceremonial urban masks,” writes Foerstner in her essay, “On the Path to the Perfect Photograph.” In Neon Cowboy (above, from 1969), Crane superimposes a grid of neon cowboy signs over a series of male nudes. Rohrbach connects Crane’s use of series to the influence of John Cage’s music celebrating the artistic potential of chance. Although the neon sign does not move, the male model beneath does, sometimes wearing the neon like a mask and sometimes pulling away, revealing the hollow “mask-ness” of the sign. Rohrbach also makes a fascinating connection between Crane and the philosopher- semiotician Roland Barthes. Contrasting Crane with Lee Friedlander, who sees photography as seeing rather than making, Rohrbach calls Crane “a linguist at heart, in love with photographs as signs rather than signifiers.” Such philosophical depth adds a whole new dimension to what seem to be Crane’s simple pictures of people, buildings, neon signs, etc. “Crane taps the everyday world for the tumultuous undercurrents of unifying themes: chance, accident, chaos, contradiction and mystery playing out before our eyes,” Foerstner concurs.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Coloma to Covert: Fleshy Fungi, 1990. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1990.

After years of photographing the urban landscape and its inhabitants, Crane went “back to nature” in the 1990s with her Coloma to Covert series. Crane brings her “unnerving disconnect” to such subjects as mushrooms in Fleshy Fungi (above, from 1990), rendering them more alien than earthly. Stretching her images into panoramic scrolls, diptychs, and triptychs, Crane not only mimics the Chinese scroll in style but in substance. “The images recall the pared-down vocabulary of haiku poetry,” Rohrbach writes. “Crane’s world may be alien, but it is remarkably inviting.” In other photographs consisting mainly of out-of-focus leaves, Crane makes “[t]he eye, desperate to find a foothold, fall ever deeper into the chasm of crystal-sharp trees beyond,” writes Foerstner. Whereas someone such as Ansel Adams, a friend of Crane’s, used mountains to speak of infinity, Crane uses the minutiae of nature to open up a universe. Flipping through the 265 beautifully reproduced plates of the catalogue, you get a true sense both of the versatility of Barbara Crane as she shifts from subject to subject and of her unchanging faith in what Burkhart calls in his introduction, “the serendipity of happenstance.”

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Schisms, 2001. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 2001.

The Amon Carter Museum’s exhibition and catalogue may help win a place for Barbara Crane and her art in the hearts of the mainstream public. Crane’s art is both uniquely accessible while remaining uncompromisingly modern in its theoretical underpinnings. Crane continues to expand her repertoire by embracing the latest innovations in digital photography and computerized manipulations. Perhaps more than ever, the reality Crane photographs will find itself remolded in her spiritual likeness. Crane’s story is more than just a feminist success story, but it is certainly that as well. Faced with the reality of a male-dominated, realist-centered medium, Barbara Crane changed the rules of the game and continues to ask us to play along.


[Many thanks to the Amon Carter Museum for providing me with a review copy of Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision, with an introduction by Kenneth C. Burkhart and essays by John Rohrbach and Abigail Foerstner, and for the images above from the exhibition.]

Flesh for Fantasy

When William Blake calls you an influence, you know your art is unique. Henry Fuseli, born Johann Heinrich Füssli on February 7, 1741 in Zurich, Switzerland, left his greatest impression on the art world of England. Fuseli’s best-known painting, The Nightmare (above, from 1781), contains all the typical hallmarks of the Fuseli style—macabre, nightmarish subject matter; wonderfully rich colors and textures; and almost Michelangelo-esquely expressive nudes or near-nudes. The woman in The Nightmare wears a dress so shear that she might as well be nude. Fuseli remains significant today not only because of the psychological impact and beautiful technique of the works but also for his place in the early days of the Romantic art movement that would sweep across nineteenth-century Europe and echo through Western art ever since. Friend to figures such as pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (whose portrait he painted), her husband, writer and philosopher William Godwin, scientist Joseph Priestley, philosopher Erasmus Darwin, and essayist Thomas Paine, Fuseli helped stage the nightmare of European royalty that Romanticism became in its revolutionary form.

A friend with a much greater appreciation of the fantasy art world recently clued me onto amazing artists such as Michael Parkes and Jeffrey Catherine Jones, whom my friend called “a feminine Frank Frazetta.” I remember buying Conan the Barbarian magazines as a kid and staring at the incredible Frazetta fantasy art (and not just because of Red Sonja). In many ways, Fuseli is the Frazetta of his time, illustrating many classic works of fiction in an imaginative style beyond the works themselves. Working in England, Fuseli couldn’t avoid illustrating the works of William Shakespeare and contributed to a famous Shakespeare Gallery of the time. Fuseli later opened his own gallery featuring his illustrations of John Milton, which were just as amazing as his Shakespeare-inspired paintings but not as commercially successful. I’ve always been drawn to Fuseli’s depictions of Homer’s Iliad, such as Sleep and Death Carrying Away Sarpedon of Lycia (above, from 1803). Sarpedon, a mortal son of Zeus, dies while fighting for the Trojans at the hands of Patroclus. Zeus morns the death of his son and showers the Trojans with bloody raindrops as his tears before asking Sleep and Death to carry Sarpedon’s corpse away. If the Iliad is the original sword and sorcerer tale, then Fuseli is the original Frazetta. The amazing foreshortening of Sarpedon’s lifeless leg brings to mind the finest of the Renaissance draftsmen.

Death and the afterlife may have held a special significance for Fuseli. Before becoming a painter, Fuseli studied to become a priest, even taking orders before having to flee his native Switzerland and become a nomadic writer and artist. Sir Joshua Reynolds, ironically Blake’s antithesis, recognized Fuseli’s talent early on and encouraged him to study art full time, which led Fuseli to make a pilgrimage to Italy and learn from the works of the Renaissance masters. In works such as The Apotheosis of Penelope Boothby (above, from 1792), we see the Renaissance religious sensibility translated by Fuseli into the late Romantic idiom. The angel could easily have fallen from a sixteenth century altarpiece, but the woman clearly rises from the late eighteenth century. Fuseli channels his religious fervor into artistic fervor, making a god of imagery to generate a fantasy of a better place in a world that sometimes seemed godless. I don’t know how strong a believer Fuseli was, but I believe in the power of his images to build entire worlds that seem strangely possible.

Imported Goods

I’ve always found it fascinating how the first quintessentially “American” school of thought—Transcendentalism—borrowed heavily from non-American sources. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and others drew heavily from Eastern mysticism, Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Of course, all things quintessentially American came from somewhere else, the “mutt” leader of the world. Even Thomas Cole, the lead member of Transcendentalist-tinged Hudson River School, the first American art movement, came from England. Born February 1, 1801 in Lancashire, England, Cole was 17 years old when he first came to America, moving about with his family until finally formally learning painting at the PAFA in 1825. Soon after, Cole set out on his career of painting spiritually moving landscapes of American scenes of New England and the Catskill Mountains of New York. Yet, Cole resists the label of a purely “American” painter. Cole always painted some version of paradise, sometimes literally as in The Garden of Eden (above, from 1828). Regardless of location, the perfect landscape always existed in a timeless, locationless place in his imagination.

Cole spent several years in the early 1830s and early 1840s living in England and Italy. In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that landscape painters are shaped in part by the landscape before them. In other words, the local growth of the American scene provides different materials than the forests of England or Europe, which then influence the work of the artist. Cole saw enough of these different landscapes that they eventually mingled into the “idea” of a landscape over time. A good Transcendentalist, Cole transcended the mundane facts of the landscape and struck at the spirit of the woods. Cole’s L'Allegro (Italian Sunset) (above, from 1845) borrows a title from the British poet John Milton and sets itself in Italy, but the idealized light and pastoral sensibility come entirely from the amalgamation in Cole’s head and heart. The liveliness of the upbeat figures in the foreground contrasts sharply with the deathly stillness of the classical ruins far in the distance. Cole painted series such as The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life as overt allegories, but for him every landscape was an allegory.

Cole also painted Milton’s pendant poem to L’Allegro, Il Penseroso (above, from 1845). The prone, pensive figure before the religious ruin in the foreground resembles one of the figures seen dancing in L’Allegro. Like Milton, Cole wants to offer both sides of the human emotional coin. The ancient-looking icon is pure Old World, but the abundance of greenery speaks more of the still-virginal American forests of Cole’s day. Cole perfectly combines the wisdom of the ages of Western Civilization with the fresh perspective of the rising American experiment. Again, this combination is, paradoxically, exactly what makes it so “American” in nature. Cole’s Europeanism resembles Milton’s classicism in that both take the lessons of yesterday to construct new meanings for their own age, and ours. Never a slave to realism, Cole painted more realistic landscapes by delving into his soul and the souls of other thinkers and artists and assembling a landscape more of meaning and memory than just trees and grass.

The Archaeology of Knowledge

Francis Bacon, Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot's 'Sweeney Agonistes' (1967). Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm each. Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1972. © Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2008.

As much as one wonders at the paintings reproduced in Francis Bacon (edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens), the catalogue to the Tate Britain exhibition celebrating the centennial of the birth of the painter Francis Bacon, perhaps even more fascinating are the photographs of Bacon’s studio, which has become as much a shrine as an archaeological dig site for fans and scholars since the artist’s death in 1992. “The veil of myth has become attached to the discarded photographs, loose leaves and books, boxes and scraps of clothing,” Gale and Stephens write in their essay, “On the Margin of the Impossible,” of what they call a “composting of detritus.” In many ways, Bacon’s studio served as a physical analogue for the workings of his mind, which could pull together disparate elements across different fields and arrive at works such as Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot's “Sweeney Agonistes” (above, from 1967). In this catalogue, Gale and Stephens gather together essays that pick up “these fragments” Bacon “shored against” his “ruins,” to borrow a phrase from Eliot’s The Waste Land, and try to piece together into understandable form an artist always greater than the sum of his parts. “I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them,” Bacon once famously said, “like a snail, leaving a trail of human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.” This catalogue and exhibition follow hot on the trail of Bacon’s humanity—the sublime, the tragic, and, yes, the sometimes slimy.


Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body (1949). Oil on canvas, 147.0 x 134.2 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Purchased 1953. © Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2008.

Martin Harrison tackles the issue of Bacon’s take on art history in his essay, “Bacon’s Paintings.” “Francis Bacon’s relationship with art of the past was dynamic, if complicated,” Harrison writes with great understatement. Bacon openly admired works by Honore Daumier, El Greco, and a host of others. Not only did Bacon lean heavily upon Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X in creating Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), but he also saw Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus as instrumental in his development. “If you don’t understand the Rokeby Venus you won’t understand my paintings,” Bacon claimed, thinking perhaps of works such as Study from the Human Body (above, from 1949). As Harrison points out, Bacon embraced the old masters more as he gained fame and actually distanced himself from more modern influences he once praised, such as Henri Matisse and Chaim Soutine. Bacon consciously scripted how art history would see him. “Bacon professed to be indifferent to the interpretations attached to his paintings,” Harrison asserts, “yet he suppressed texts of which he disapproved.” As Victoria Walsh writes in her essay, “Real Imagination Is Technical Imagination,” “Bacon created his own translator in David Sylvester,” the British art critic who eventually became Bacon’s confidant and semi-official critical outlet. The 16 years that now stretch between today and Bacon’s death provide the necessary space for these critics to step away from Bacon’s looming presence in the art world in life to more clearly see his work in death.


Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). Oil on board, 95 x 73.5 each. © Tate.

Although critics early on recognized Bacon’s debt to the movies in his works, that connection remains a fascinating source of new insights on the artist. David Alan Mellor’s “Film, Fantasy, History in Francis Bacon” traces Bacon’s love of film back to the very beginning of the modern cinema, when the 13-year-old Bacon saw D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) in 1922. Bacon studied the work of all the great early directors, including Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, and Sergei Eisenstein. The artistry of these directors challenged the other visual arts to keep up. “Film had stolen something of the vitality and the powers of disclosure of painting,” Mellor writes, “it could transcribe history.” Bacon looked to steal back the magic of painting from film. Mellor connects many of Bacon’s works to specific film moments. Critics have long analyzed Bacon’s repeated use of the “screaming nurse” from the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, but Mellor points out the connection between the triptych technique of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (above, from 1944) and the cinematic triptych technique used by Abel Gance in the climax of his 1927 masterpiece, Napoléon. Bacon clearly internalized many of the images he saw flicker before him over the years, and Mellor digs into that past to resurrect lost influences such as Gance, one of the many great silent film directors who have nearly disappeared thanks to the physical disappearance of their films.


Francis Bacon, Triptych—In Memory of George Dyer (1971). Oil on canvas support, each: 1980 x 1475 mm painting. Fondation Beyeler, Basel. © Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2008

In his essay “Comparative Strangers,” Simon Ofield touches upon the issue of Bacon’s homosexuality and his art. Researching the men’s magazines and bodybuilding magazines that Bacon mined for visual inspiration, Ofield sees these magazines as “making connections between photographic images and certain (and uncertain) knowledges of social, sexual and aesthetic practices and pleasures.” Such publications served as “places where desire took shape—sites of production and seduction,” Ofield writes. Bacon allegedly indulged in the bad-boy fantasy, most famously in his tragic relationship with petty criminal George Dyer, subject of Triptych—In Memory of George Dyer (above, 1971), painted after Dyer’s suicide. Dyer’s tribute goes beyond pure homosexual love and incorporates Bacon’s interest in painting from photography, as he had used snapshots of his former lover in painting the piece. Bacon saw the world through photos, Gale and Stephens suggest, “as if, by viewing photographs, one inevitably reviewed reality more intensely.” The blurring of candid snapshots caused by motion also involved Bacon’s beloved idea of chance. In the Dyer triptych above and many other works, Bacon “harness[es] chance gestures,” believing that “chance is not simply an artistic strategy but a fundamental part of an attitude to life,” Gale and Stephens write. Placing faith in chance rather than some idea of god, Bacon “sought to express what it was to live in a world without God, a state of existence that was merely transitory without reason or afterlife.” Stealing a page from Nietzsche, Bacon found a way to be an optimist in a world constantly aware of its own death.

Francis Bacon, Study of a Nude (1952-1953). Oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, University of East Anglia. © Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2008.

Bacon once called the sum of his work, “The History of Europe in My Lifetime.” The twentieth century’s long parade of inhumanity that marched past Bacon’s view fed his visual imagination as it shaped his soul (if he acknowledged the existence of one). “I think of myself as a kind of pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed,” Bacon once revealed. This wide-ranging catalogue and exhibition de-pulverize much of what Bacon digested and recreate the artist as a young man, before fame formed the brand name of “Francis Bacon” and he began to shape his own legacy by force of sheer will. Bacon’s style, sexuality, and subject matter will certainly dissuade and attract viewers, but the reality of his work demands some response from each of us who know that the history of his lifetime found in his works is the history of our own, or at least the history of what shapes our world today. Like a fine team of archaeologists, Gale and Stephens dug deep into the subject of Francis Bacon and exhumed not only the artist but the man and mind behind the art.

[Many thanks to Tate Britain for providing me with a review copy of Francis Bacon (edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens) and for the images above from the exhibition.]

The Uses of Enchantment

Of all the things that we don’t know about Johannes Vermeer, the date of his birth seems inconsequential. Baptized October 31, 1632, Vermeer lived a quiet life devoted to his art, earned the respect of his fellow artists, and probably had no clue of the influence his work would have centuries later. A popular novel and a popular film based on that novel have made Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (above, from 1665) almost as unrecoverable as an actual painting as the Mona Lisa itself, the grand dame of overexposure. If it were possible to look at Girl with a Pearl Earring with fresh eyes, you might see again the incredibly warm expression in the young woman’s eyes or the heartbreaking brilliance of the highlight on the pearl earring, perhaps the single most famous highlight in Western art today. Modern audiences consume Vermeer like any other commodity, barely chewing and tasting the full flavor of his art before greedily swallowing. More than any other artist, Vermeer seems a creation of a time other than his own, an artist who had to wait more than two centuries to rise to the top echelon of the art history ranks. If you asked someone on the street in the 1700s if they’d ever heard of Vermeer, you’d get a blank stare back. Today, speak Vermeer’s name and you’re most likely to hear something like, “That movie with Scarlett Johansson!”


It’s truly amazing how varied the influence of Vermeer’s painting has been. Vermeer seems almost written into our cultural DNA today. When I first saw the film Black Narcissus and that beautiful opening scene of the nun standing in the light by a window, I had a flashback to Vermeer’s Woman with a Water Jug (above, from 1660-1662). My suspicion was confirmed later when I read that the filmmakers consciously copied Vermeer in that scene and alluded to him and other artists throughout the film. In Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (my review here), Ruth Bernard Yeazell explains how Marcel Proust obsessed about the tiny details and intricacy of Vermeer’s painting and saw such tiny works as a template for his mammoth exploration of minutiae, À la recherche du temps perdu. Yeazell doesn’t get into the finer points of Proust’s commandeering of the philosophy of Henri Bergson in the context of Vermeer, but you can see how that philosopher’s idea of the plasticity of time finds concrete form in Vermeer’s paintings, which seem suspended in time across the centuries, and how Proust easily connected the artist and the philosopher in his writing.


Of course, not every lover of Vermeer has been so refined and philosophical. One of the largest paintings Vermeer ever painted, The Allegory of Painting (above, from 1666-1667), remained in Vermeer’s possession until his death, leading many to believe it was one of his favorites. The view of the artist’s back tantalizes us with an almost self-portrait. When Vermeer shot to the top of the charts in the art world, the Nazis began their plot to rule the globe. As European countries fell before the Nazi war machine, Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering competed to acquire the greatest art treasures, with Goering stepping aside for the boss in most cases. Hitler “bought” The Allegory of Painting after The Netherlands surrendered and crowed over the latest prize for his growing collection. Fortunately, the painting survived the war and allied forces recovered it from the salt mine it which it had been hidden for safety. Amazingly, Austria still owns the painting thanks to a court ruling that the Dutch seller agreed to sell to Hitler “voluntarily.” From Proust to Hitler to Scarlett Johansson, love of Vermeer’s art has made strange bedfellows over the course of the last century and will undoubtedly lead to even stranger tales as we continue to fill in the blanks of Vermeer’s life story with strange stories of our own.