Special Forces: Is Specialization Killing Art Today?

The 18^th century French Neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres played the violin well enough to hold his own with “Sold His Soul to the Devil” good musicians such as Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt. Ingres took that intimate knowledge of music to add a different kind of beauty to works such as The Turkish Bath (from 1862; shown above). That little piece of trivia came to mind as I read an interview with The Moderna Museet’s new director, Daniel Birnbaum, in the October 2010 issue of The Art Newspaper. “Specialization is a problem of our time,” Birnbaum complained in response to a question regarding his interest in literature and philosophy as well as art. “There are many artists who work in different fields. A big museum such as the Moderna can tear down the walls between art and literature, for example, and I want to try such things.” What is the cost of specialization today, when art schools prepare artists who may know the techniques of their discipline but little else? How do we get back to the “good old days” of Ingres? Have artists today sold their souls to art schools at the risk of never being “true” artists? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Special Forces."

Brotherly Love

Before you even open Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, edited by Katherine Lochman and Carol Jacobi, you know that this is a different kind of art history book. The faux Victorian exterior design and endpapers transport you back to that time and prepare you to see the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and others through their eyes and not through the distorting lens of a century and a half of critique, including the help (and sometimes harm) of fellow Victorian John Ruskin’s writings. In his 1905 book, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt railed against depictions of Rossetti as the clear leader of the group, calling himself the “true” Pre-Raphaelite adhering to the original tenets of the Brotherhood. “The book ends with an attack on decadence [i.e., French Impressionism and Modernism in general] and an expression of anxiety about the downfall of the noble British artistic tradition,” Carole Silver writes in her essay, “Visions and Revisions.” In a painting such as Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry on the Eve of Saint Agnes (above, from 1848), taking a scene from Keats’ poem The Eve of Saint Agnes, Hunt rewrites Keats’ lines to emphasize his moralizing mission. In casting the fleeing lovers as moral rather than the drunken partiers, “Dreams are compared with truth, appetite to love, social rules and rituals to personal freedom,” Carol Jacobi writes in “Pre-Raphaelite Rebellion: Brotherly Love.” As Jacobi puts it, the Pre-Raphaelites arose from “[s]tylistic innovation… generated by a shared interest in vision that was part of a timely and sophisticated inquiry into the nature of subjectivity… artists, poets, and critics alike debated the predicament of the individual in modern circumstance and the role of art in a material age.” This collection sets out to show how Hunt and his “brothers” set out to save the world through art by reaching back to the “Pre-Raphaelite,” pre-corrupted age of morality that the materialism of their society had left behind.

The most concrete example of Hunt’s personal mission to spread the word remains The Light of the World (above, the second, 1854 version). In “The Light of the World: Mission and Message,” Jonathan Mane-Wheck retraces the steps of the most traveled artwork in history, seen by more than seven million people on a 1905 tour of the British Empire, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Mane-Wheck sees modern distaste for Hunt’s Light originating in confusion between the work itself and the “kitsch industry” surrounding and, in many ways, stemming from it. Hunt paints Christ holding a lantern and knocking on a door—an embodiment of opportunity knocking, in this case the opportunity to embrace salvation. Hunt himself, however, rejected harsh dogma. “Possessing a more synthetic, universalist concept of religion,” Mane-Wheck asserts, Hunt “was open to Judaism and Islam.” In fact, when Hunt created a smaller version of his Light in 1854, he modified the lamp with a star and crescent as a nod to Islam “to show the breadth of the Christian system, which takes in other systems,” Hunt told an interviewer at the time. Unfortunately, over time, Hunt’s personal intentions have been clouded not only by a religious intolerance he did not practice, but also by political appropriation. “In its journey across the globe,” Mane-Wheck writes, “The Light of the World had become an icon of British Imperial Protestantism.” Hunt certainly believed in the nobility of British art and its power to save, but may have been uneasy in his Christ being “drafted” in the battle for colonization.

In “Textile Background: Cloth and Costume,” Linda Parry examines Hunt’s life-long relationship with fabrics and costume and how that experience played out in his painting. Both Hunt’s father and grandfather worked in the London textile industry. Hunt grew up in a home just above the textile works and even worked in the industry for two years before devoting himself to art. The drawings of the clothing designers were among the first artworks Hunt saw firsthand. This world of color and textures easily translated into the opulence of such works as The Finding of the Savior in the Temple (above, from 1860)—Hunt’s retelling of the story of the young Christ found lecturing in the temple. Many of the rich colors in Hunt’s painting copy newly developed dyes of the 1850s. (Joyce H. Townsend and Jennifer Poulin discuss elsewhere Hunt’s painstaking approach to pigments to the point of pointing out defects to the manufacturers.) Photographs of costumes Hunt designed for his models accompanying Parry’s essay as testimony not only to Hunt’s love of fashion, but also of his exacting brand of realism. Thanks to his travels in the Middle East and the Holy Land, Hunt developed a taste for exotic dress that he satisfied with costumes for himself, which allowed him to feel closer to the religious subjects centuries in the past that he painted in the Victorian present.

It is Hunt’s relentless search for fidelity in his depiction of matters of faith that truly sets him apart from his Pre-Raphaelite brethren. As a pilgrim in the Holy Land, Hunt identified with the plight of the Jewish people to the point of becoming an outspoken Zionist in support of the founding of a Jewish state. As Nicholas Tromans explains in “Palestine: Picture of Prophecy,” Hunt “saw himself as a kind of avant-garde Christian intellectual, looking confidently (on the whole) to the future of an ever-changing world in which a divine centre nevertheless held steady.” Neither Darwinism nor Zionism could shake Hunt’s faith. In fact, Hunt saw a continuity not only between the symbolic typology of Judaism and of Christianity but also between, as Tromans puts it, “divine revelation and modern science.” Hunt’s humanism spurs him to paint works such as The Shadow of Death (above, from 1871), which combines the realism of Hunt’s research in the Middle East with the symbolism of the cross-like shadow in the rear that horrifies the Virgin Mary. In fact, Hunt’s humanism as played out in the realistic depiction of Christ as carpenter stretching his limbs drew criticism for being too real and ignoring the divine side of the savior. In his religion, his politics, and his art, Hunt refused to draw the same lines of distinction that others did. Tromans paints a picture of Hunt the Zionist as a Victorian Bono. “Like a rock star of today seeking to shame politicians into acting on African poverty,” Tromans writes, not naming names, “Hunt’s credibility to speak [on a Jewish state] lay paradoxically exactly in his political inexperience and overt individualism.” I couldn’t help smiling at Tromans comparison, which cast Hunt, the “stodgy” “pious” Victorian in a whole new light. I almost immediately put amber, wraparound sunglasses on Hunt in my mind’s eye.

Carole Silver sums up the whole Hunt (above in his Self-Portrait of 1867) nicely: “Today we see him as a man of his era, replete with its visions and blindnesses, at times a rebel, at others deeply conventional, intensely nationalistic and filled with British imperialist ideology, yet capable of great religious and ethnic tolerance, at times patriarchal, at others somewhat radical in view of relations between the sexes.” As much recent research on the Victorian era suggests, the Victorians were never as “Victorian” as we believe them to be. They were as inconsistent, intolerant, and individualistic as any other age but perhaps slightly more conscious of the modern turn towards materialism and away from the spiritual to the point of wanting to reverse the course. In his 1867 Self-Portrait, Hunt paints himself as painter-prophet adorned in the richly colored dress of a Middle Eastern wise man while holding a palette full of colors with which he could paint his next tale of moral instruction. Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision wipes away much of the false imagery of intervening discourse and takes us back to the source, lighting the path back to The Light of the World and other works to illuminate their original intent, which is invariably more interesting than the conventional wisdom handed down to us. The Victorians stood on the brink of the modern life that we continue to deal with today. William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood tried to turn back the clock to the fundamentals of life and art that they believed would make the future brighter and better.

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, edited by Katherine Lochman and Carol Jacobi.]

Maneaters

The idea of the “maneater” or, as the French would say, femme fatale is one of the oldest tropes in Western civilization, going all the way back to Samson’s Delilah in the Bible and further back into the darkness before recorded time. Much of the look of the modern maneater comes from the brush of the most sensual member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Born May 12, 1828, Rossetti founded the PRB with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt and followed the religious and moralizing trend of the Brotherhood at the beginning. However, Rossetti drifted more and more to the carnal over the spiritual, especially after the death of his one-time model, fellow-artist, wife, and everlasting muse Elizabeth Siddal. A year after Lizzie’s death, Rossetti began painting Beata Beatrix (above, from 1864-1870), which casts his departed wife as Beatrice Portinari from Dante Alighieri's poem La Vita Nuova. Dante Alighieri held Beatrice up as the epitome of purity, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti seems to follow suit, but there are hints that Siddal as Beatrice isn’t as snow white. The dove that brings flowers isn’t the conventional white of purity but rather the red of passion. Rossetti ostensibly shows the moment when Beatrice dies and experiences the rapture of the divine embrace, but like Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, the difference between an expression of religious thrill and that of sexual orgasm is clearly blurred. As discussed in Jay A. Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (my review here), Edvard Munch recognized this dual nature in Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and translated it into his Madonna. Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix perfectly embodies the In Freudian idea of the Madonna-whore complex decades before Freud himself coined the term.



After the death of Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti struggled to find firm footing in her personal life, even as his artistic career blossomed. Rossetti careened among a traffic jam of mistresses, experiencing his fair share of total wrecks. One of those mistresses, Fanny Cornforth, served as the model for Lady Lilith (above, from 1868). Mythology paints Lilith as a strong, usually destructive female force and sometimes even as the first wife of the first man, Adam. Rather than mythologize the scene, Rossetti paints his Lilith in contemporary clothing. Fanny’s Lilith lounges in her bedclothes rather than the corseted garb of Victorian days and contemplates her pouty lips in a mirror. Fast forward a century, and Lady Lilith becomes Sharon Stone crossing her legs in Basic Instinct. Rosetti accompanied Lady Lilith with Sonnet LXXVIII, entitled "Body's Beauty," from his book of poetry The House of Life:

Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

The long hair Lilith dithers with in the painting becomes literally a noose that strangles unfortunate men in the poem. Whereas Beata Beatrix was equal parts Madonna and whore, Lady Lilith is pure harlot of the black widow variety.

It’s easy to see Rossetti as an embittered chauvinist in his portrayals of his maneaters. Just as the dangerous Lilith is also the strong woman of Lilith Fair fame, Rossetti’s femme fatales are also copies in some respect of the highly accomplished Lizzie Siddal, the supermodel of Pre-Raphaelitism that added a sister to the Brotherhood. With Venus Verticordia (above, from 1863-1868), Rossetti maintains the sense of danger while simultaneously exposing the full power of womanhood. As with Lady Lilith, Rossetti appended a sonnet to Venus Verticordia:

She hath the apple in her hand for thee,

Yet almost in her heart would hold it back;

She muses, with her eyes upon the track

Of that which in thy spirit they can see.

Haply, 'Behold, he is at peace,' saith she;'

Alas! the apple for his lips, - the dart

That follows its brief sweetness to his heart,

-The wandering of his feet perpetually.'

A little space her glance is still and coy;

But if she gets the fruit that works her spell,

Those eyes shall flame as for her Phrygian boy.

Then shall her bird's strained throat woe foretell,

And as far seas moan as a single shell,

And her grove glow with love-lit fires of Troy.

Rossetti mixes the message of menace found in the poem by adding natural touches to the painting. The arrow and apple of doom remain in the painting, but the lack of clothes (hence, all trappings of civilization) and addition of flowers portray Venus as Mother Nature, and you don’t fool with Mother Nature. Rossetti painted the face of Venus from one of his model-mistresses, Alexa Wilding, but he painted the body from a tall nanny that he happened to pass in the street. Only a woman who literally stood head and shoulders above the crowd would fit the bill for this painting. Rossetti painted all three of these maneaters around the same time, showing how he moved back and forth in his view of the subject—a complex and complexing concept that consumed him as he created the most unforgettable images and poems of his career.

The Mad Munch

When most people hear the name Edvard Munch, the immediately see The Scream in the mind’s eye, as if it were Munch’s own face crying out in front of a blood-red sky. All biography of Munch seems to be psychobiography. Comparing Munch’s reception with that of Claude Monet, Jay A. Clarke in his Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth writes, “Munch’s typecasting as an unbalanced genius has encouraged historians to consider his work as emotional biography, whereas that of the more ‘stable’ Monet has been viewed formally, as so many layers of paint.” In his book accompanying the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition of the same name, Clarke not only recovers the lost history of how Munch became Munch, but also shows the role that Munch himself played in creating that persona. Munch “was perpetually considering his legacy and, wanting to be perceived as a true original, did his best to expunge suggestions that he might have had artistic models of his own,” Clarke argues. “Munch anxiety of influence reaches at once back in time and into the future, on him as the center and from him to the margins, manifesting itself in ways political, psychological, social, and most of all visual.” Munch’s highly Impressionistic Rue Lafaette (above, from 1891), a direct quotation of a work by Gustave Caillebotte’s A Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann, is just one of the many traces Munch and complicit critics covered over in his personal mythmaking that Clarke uncovers to recover a fuller picture of the complete artist who was Edvard Munch.

Munch seems to transcend category because he belonged, however fleetingly, to so many of them: Impressionism, Naturalism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, etc. Throwing all of these influences into his melting pot, Munch cooked up his special blend of personal vision. Munch “recast epics and existing mythic vocabularies in his own idiom,” Clarke explains, “and while these sources are not always obvious, they are a subtle visual presence.” For example, Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan Street (above, from 1892) marries the Impressionist street scene with a Norwegian subject while also adding the new Symbolist touches Munch may have seen in James Ensor’s work. In a separate section, titled “Individual Works: Tracing Influence from [Anna] Ancher to [Anders] Zorn,” Clarke encyclopedically and alphabetically lays out not only the names of artists who may have inspired Munch in some way but also the specific works that Munch might have seen and those works by Munch that may have developed from them. Familiar and obvious names such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne stand next to less familiar Scandinavian influences such as Eilif Peterssen and Frits Thaulow. Seeing how Munch’s Madonna took shape in Munch’s mind following encounters with Franz von Stuck’s Sin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix doesn’t diminish Munch’s accomplishment in the least. In fact, it makes it seem even more amazing as he navigated such visually cluttered waters while charting a course of his own. Unfortunately, the demands of the time were for true originality, and Munch would do anything to meet those demands.

After bumping up against influence after influence, including a nationalist Norwegian movement that longed to claim Munch among its own, Munch’s “art was neither French nor Norwegian, neither Impressionist nor Symbolist—the autonomous stance he took was calculated, defiant but very much of the moment,” Clark writes. “The ‘insane’ Munch… was a product—one introduced both by hostile and friendly critics and later packaged and presented by the artist and his early biographers in a very deliberate way.” In his Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette (above, from 1895), Munch paints himself as he wishes his to be seen—a bohemian artist smoking like all the “cool kids” whose very image is a murky, instable thing that threatens to fall apart. As his unstable reputation grew, Munch played to that audience, giving them exactly what they wanted. Yet, Clarke argues, “while [Munch] wore his strangeness and insanity like a mantle in the wider world, he inhabited quite a different person in private.” Munch knew which works would spark controversy and which wouldn’t and carefully orchestrated exhibitions of his work to fulfill the expectations of the viewing public. Even when Munch finally sought professional help during the famous mental breakdown of 1908, he personally took care of the business side of his art. Art historians love to sever artists from all ties to the real world, but Clarke’s study restores those ties and recovers Munch the shrewd businessman and curator of his own oeuvre. Some may turn away from the idea of a great artist concerned with filthy lucre, but I personally enjoyed the way Clarke deconstructs the myth of Munch to resurrect Munch the man in control of his world despite the very real personal anguish that played a part, but not an exclusive part, in his art.

Clarke really focuses on Munch the marketer in his exploration of Munch’s printmaking. In the same year as Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette, Munch created a print titled Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (above, from 1895). The murkiness is gone, replaced by a deathly black void behind Munch’s disembodied head. A skeletal arm rests below the face, while Munch’s name appears above in tombstone-style script, completing the Halloween-like calling card. Munch knew that macabre sold well and ventured into printmaking to expand his product to markets different from those who could buy expensive oil paintings. “Munch carefully and strategically anticipated market trends and absorbed other artists’ technical tricks while simultaneously elaborating and expanding his own repertoire of images,” Clarke concludes. Munch used different printmaking processes, colored papers, colored inks, the different grains of wood, and even developed jigsaw-like assembled blocks to print multicolored prints all in the name of creating new, must-have images for the collector. As Clarke shows, even when Munch seems his weirdest in terms of subject matter, he always remains within some contemporary trope, such as Munch’s recasting of Rodin’s The Kiss as his print The Kiss.


As much as possible, Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch allows us to see the “sunny side” of Munch, in works such as Munch’s The Sun (above, from 1911-1916), part of his Oslo University Aula decorations. Munch intended for his work to show the whole gamut of human experience, from birth to death with all the love and angst between. Munch’s mythmaking has effectively erased much of the more hopeful side of his work, leaving us with only half of the total picture, and the dark half at that. The Sun represents just one of many late scenes of regeneration, specifically the idea of heliotherapy en vogue at the time. After “taking the cure” at a spa, Munch grew fascinated by the idea of regeneration and recreation of the self by different means. In Becoming Edvard Munch, Clarke cures the diseased popular caricature of the “mad” Munch and recreates the living artist as a thinking visionary always in control of his art regardless of the madness marketed in the art itself.

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Jay A. Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth.]

Banished Angel

When Oscar Wilde wrote his long 1895 letter from prison, De Profundis, to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, he mourned for all that he had lost to bankruptcy, including art by Simeon Solomon, one of the last of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Born October 9, 1840, Solomon knew what Wilde was going through, having himself been arrested for his homosexuality in 1873. The fallout from that scandal threw him from the upper echelon of the art world and forced Solomon to work in poverty for the last thirty years of his life. Before the arrest, Solomon flirted with danger in such homoerotic works as Love in Autumn (above, from 1866), which shows a scantily clad angel with flaming red hair banished from an unseen Eden in the background. The chill winds blowing the angel’s drapery around may symbolize the chilly reception Solomon knew his sexuality would bring once the secret was out. Solomon cultivated an outlandish personal style that set him apart even in the flamboyant circle of artists surrounding Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Often wearing Oriental dress and allowing his red hair to grow excessively long (like the angel’s), Solomon drew all eyes to himself and painted a bull’s eye for the authorities.

In addition to his sexuality, Solomon’s Jewish faith set him apart from the rest of the Pre-Raphaelite circle in England. While artists such as Edward Burne-Jones relied heavily on Christian imagery, Solomon instead looked to more classical Greek and Roman models. Those ancient cultures and their tolerance of homosexual behavior may have offered a safe haven for Solomon as well. In a watercolor painted before his 1873 arrest, Solomon paints Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (above, from 1864). In this painting, the famed lesbian poet Sappho embraces another female poet Erinna. It took a lot of daring to paint such a subject, which surely make suspicious viewers even more suspicious. Putting aside the subject matter, however, you can see the wonderful draftsmanship and approach to the human figure that made Solomon a rising star and drew the praise of the Pre-Raphaelites while he was still just a student.

Alcoholism ravaged Solomon after the scandal. He died in 1905 from complications related to his addiction. Solomon lived in such poverty that he often couldn’t find the money to buy canvas to paint on. Rumor has it that Solomon actually painted on the street in charcoal at one point, hoping that passers-by would drop a coin into his cup. One of the rare oil paintings of Solomon’s late period, The Moon and Sleep (above, from 1894), shows Endymion visited by Luna in the Greek myth turned into Romantic verse by Keats. Although Luna is female and Endymion is male, Keats’ poem’s homoerotic overtones made it a code word for “the love that dare not speak its name” in Wilde’s England. Luna and Endymion both share long, reddish hair, perhaps symbolizing the female and male elements in Solomon’s soul. Yet, Endymion sleeps and he and Luna never connect, just as Solomon himself never connected with the intolerant age that banished him and his art literally to the streets.