Born Again: Beading the World Anew with Liza Lou

“You fall backward and you’re moved by the spirit of God and you get up and go forth and you’re a different person,” artist Liza Lou says in an interview of her “born again” Christian upbringing. “Later, as an artist, I realized I was redeeming objects with my material. There was the process of applying beads with tweezers, a very careful and attentive act—and then over time, the transformation; a kind of hallucinogenic quality, like the object was ‘saved’ or spirit-filled.” In Liza Lou, the first monograph examining the artist’s career, we see how Lou takes the craft of beading to a mind-boggling and soul-expanding extreme in works such as Man (from 2002; shown above), in which a man falls backward in epiphanal ecstasy with a dove, the classic symbol of the Holy Spirit, emerging from his mouth—all done as a fiberglass sculpture festooned with glittering glass beads. Through over 200 color photographs showing in fine detail the meticulous magic of Lou’s beads and a series of thought-provoking essays, Liza Lou will have you seeing and believing that this sometimes ugly world can be born again in beauty. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Born Again."

[Image: Liza Lou. Man, 2002. Glass beads on fiberglass. 68 x 71 x 16 inches (172.7 x 180.3 x 40.6 cm).]

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with the image above and a review copy of Liza Lou, with text by Eleanor Heartney, Lawrence Weschler, Arthur Lubow, and Peter Schjeldahl.]

Every Move You Make: Stalking Patrons at the Museum

I always used to laugh at people who ignored the lyrics to “Every Breath You Take” by The Police and thought it was a lovely love song. If it’s about love at all, it’s about obsessive love—creepy, obsessive love that watches you through the windows late at night as you sleep. Stalking, however meant, always seems wrong. That song popped into my head when I read Isaac Arnsdorf’s piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Museum Is Watching You: Galleries Quietly Study What People Like, or Skip, to Decide What Hangs Where.” In the never-ending effort to make museums more successful in reaching the public (and reaching the public’s wallet), museums are now taking marketing to the next level by literally standing behind viewers and recording their every move. Like the lover in the song’s lyrics, museums now watch “every move you make” in hopes of cracking the code of what you want to see and how you want to see. But is building the better museum this way really best for the art world and the public? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Every Move You Make."

Blinded Me With Science

Claude Monet, Haystacks, Hoarfrost Effect, 1891, oil on canvas, 65 × 92 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

—From “The Tables Turned” by William Wordsworth

Science and art have always warily stood apart while keeping close. As Wordsworth lamented, we often “murder to dissect” when we take a living, creative act and place it under the microscopic eye of hard, cold science. Heavenly magic crashes to the level of earthbound fact. In Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists, Iris Schaefer, Katja Lewerentz, and Caroline von Saint-Georgecall upon science not to bury Impressionism under analysis but to use science to foster greater understanding and appreciation of it. Schaefer et al paint the Impressionists themselves as a band of intuitive scientists. “Looking back,” they write, “how Monet and many of his contemporaries succeeded in realizing scientific and above all optical laws so comprehensively in their paintings, despite the fact that in the 19th century these laws were only just being scientifically recognized and researched, is oe of the most exciting issues.” When Monet paints Haystacks, Hoarfrost Effect (above, from 1891), one of his many studies of haystacks under different weather and light conditions, he acts like a scientist gathering data in pursuit of a theory. Similarly, van Gogh kept a box full of colored yarn that he used to study color contrasts before realizing them in paint. We associate Impressionism with feeling and emotion, yet the artists themselves often acted in a consciously premeditated way when painting. Rather than murder to dissect, Painting Light dissects to give these works new life.

Henri-Edmond Cross, Landscape in Provence, 1898, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 81.2 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

Schaefer et al see Monet et al anticipating scientific findings in the field of optics and color perception. Many of the scientific findings are made years before, but remain in the domain of specialists until the Impressionists help pull them into the mainstream. Once in the mainstream, however, it is the Neoimpressionists, especially Pointillists such as Georges-Pierre Seurat, Paul Signac, and Henri-Edmond Cross (whose Landscape in Provence, from 1898, appears above), who consciously take scientific findings and try to apply techniques in paint to take advantage of those findings. Joining theory with practice, the Pointillists “indisputably eliminated the disadvantage of subtractive, that is dark and dull-looking, color mixtures, through the use of pure colorism” and “attain a hitherto unprecedented luminosity,” the authors effuse. Rather than physically mix the colors on canvas via paint, the Pointillists facilitate the natural process of the human eye to mix colors optically. The human eye literally wants to connect the colored dots, so Seurat and others take advantage of that desire to achieve effects impossible with paint alone.

Gustave Caillebotte, Boats and Shed on the Bank of the Seine, 1891, oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

I confess to skimming through technical sections of most exhbition catalogues. The scientific rigor appeals to my rational side and the infrared and x-ray images lend of patina of hard science to the “soft” methodology of art criticism, yet I often find little purpose to all the gadgetry, as if someone wanted to “blind me with science” rather than open my eyes to something new in the art thanks to new technology. Painting Light makes the most of technological know-how and never loses sight of the big picture of bringing new insights to the well-worn tale of Impressionism. Schaefer et al cogently discuss the importance of color merchants in the lives of the Impressionists. Good suppliers of paint were pure gold to these artists. Art supply merchants such as Pere Tanguay and Paul Durand-Ruel not only appear in portraits by the Impressionists but also became their earliest dealers. Painting Light reveals how new innovations in tube paint, brushes, and pre-stretched canvas all helped make possible the image of the Impressionist as a wildly gesturing artist working in the open air and bound only by the borders of his imagination. “Even today, many pictures of the Impressionists display a bravura which would have been unthinkable without the flat-bound bristle brush,” the authors conclude. They also explain the financial realities of the time in which these artists needed to economize where possible when sales flagged. Thanks to infrared light, we can see the pentimenti beneath Gustave Caillebotte’s Boats and Shed on the Bank of the Seine (above, from 1891) showing the failed first attempt at painting the boats. Realizing that he had painted the boats too large, Caillebotte turned the canvas upside down, painted a skyover the first boats, and tried again, saving himself the cost of the canvas. Tales such as this bring a human element to the Impressionists many studies lack.

Gustave Caillebotte, Laundry Drying on the Bank of the Seine, circa 1892, oil on canvas, 105.5 × 150.5 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

In another Caillebotte painting, Laundry Drying on the Bank of the Seine (above, circa 1892), the authors point out a poplar bud embedded in the paint—proof that the artist stood close enough to the poplars shown in the painting to have them physically seed the work itself. With their move to the outside, the Impressionists continued the work of the Barbizon School and “irrevocably eliminated the dominance of the completed work over the sketch,” the authors believe. Schaefer et al discuss in full the pleasures and perils of painting en plein air, which range from sand finding its way into seascapes to Cezanne’s death in 1906 days after being surprised by a sudden storm when working far from home. Again, the physicality of these artists working with materials and under certain conditions comes across boldly in a way that most books fail to do. The authors even bemoan the practice of reproducing paintings without frames, which they see as part of the author’s intent. After reading Painting Light, you’ll never look at an Impressionist work in a museum the same way again.

Gustave Courbet, Château de Chillon, 1873, oil on canvas, 54.1 × 65.3 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

Painting Light contains countless insights and dispels many cherished myths, such as the myth that a “true” Impressionist work was done outdoors. Gustave Courbet’s recognizably Impressionist Château de Chillon (above, from 1873) was painted from a photograph, smashing that myth resoundingly. The most common myth shattered, however, remains the idea that we see these works today as the artists intended. Time has altered many of these colors, sometimes thanks to the inexpensive paints used by impoverished artists showing why they were inexpensive over time. Sections of a van Gogh protected by the frame from light reveal a brilliant red that once covered the entire work, thus throwing into doubt all conclusions made about his use of color in that work and all others. Examples of works cut or cropped or even “completed” by another hand will make you wonder just how much of your favorite Impressionist painting is actually by the artist. Painting Light brings these works back to life and shows us through science that everything we thought we knew about these works and these artists should be open to question. Painting Light makes art scientists of us all.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with a review copy of Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists by Iris Schaefer, Katja Lewerentz, and Caroline von Saint-George. (C) Painting Light by Iris Schaefer, et al., Skira, 2009.]

Artist of the Floating World

One of the hardest tasks for any art historian is to take something very familiar and make it seem remarkably new. It seems like Claude Monet’s Water Lilies appear in every museum, on every Impressionist calendar, and as every art-related kitsch item imaginable. Jean Dominique Rey and Denis Rouart’s Monet: Water Lilies, The Complete Series not only brings together all 251 Water Lilies paintings and related works in one book, but also provides a fresh approach to these oh-too-familiar images. Rey and Rouart succeed in recovering the revolutionary aspect of Monet’s strikingly new way of seeing and painting. Works such as Monet’s Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond (above, from 1920) regain their individuality in Rey and Rouart’s treatment. Just as Monet obsessively recorded every nuance of water lilies floating in a pond and the surroundings of that pond, Rey and Rouart meticulously pull apart Monet’s methods and link his unique form of madness with contemporary ideas, adding up to a book that not only delights the eye with reproductions but challenges the mind to reassess the comfortable old furniture that the name “Monet” has become.

In his essay, titled “Appearances and Reflections,” Rouart follows the evolution of Monet as a painter of series. Touching upon Monet’s series examining Poplars, Haystacks, London Parliament , and Rouen Cathedral, Rouart shows how Monet resisted a rigorously scientific approach. “[T]hough deeply committed,” Rouart writes, “Monet’s visual explorations never took on a scientific bent, since he was determined to refer solely to his own sensation, unhampered by any preexistent theory or idea.” In contrast to artists such as Cezanne and Seurat, Monet never shackles himself to a theory, thus freeing himself to follow his visual imagination wherever it led. “Utterly intent on painting whatever afforde him visual pleasure,” Rouart writes, Monet’s “oeuvre is a lengthy exposition of his adoration of the world around him and of life.” Thanks to the comprehensiveness of the book’s collection of images, we can follow Monet’s eye as it roams over the years, fixating on different aspects in different periods, such as Monet’s Water-Lilies (above, from 1917) which shows a period in which Monet concentrated heavily on just lilies floating in water, with almost no frame of reference of grass, trees, or sky. “Fully grown, the various levels of this ensemble of aquatic and land plants constituted a veritable microcosm,” Rouart writes of Monet’s roving eye, “around which all his more or less mythical dreams of an earthly paradise might coalesce.” If Blake could see eternity in a grain of sand, Monet could see it in an ordinary pond.

Rey’s essay, “Mirrors of Time,” Monet becomes the Einstein of painting and his Water Lilies become physical exercises in space-time theory. “In the ten years between 1890 and 1900, Monet modified the dominant emphasis of painting, shifting it from space to time,” Rey writes. “To produce this ‘space-time,’ Monet collapsed the distances between volumes, atomizing them so as to restore the continuity of nature, that fluid movement of the universe from which volume, a mental projection onto the space of the canvas, had estranged his art.” Rey brings this high-flying theory back to earth by connecting Monet’s painting to the impact of the early cinema. Monet’s Morning (left panel shown above), part of the 1920-1926 panoramic series painted specifically for the Musée de l'Orangerie, in Rey’s exposition becomes a cinematic tour de force. In Morning, “elements indexing perspective, instead of receding towards a central point, veer off slightly towards the right… The whole piece—a genuine and indeed masterly ‘dissolve’—is thus conceived as the living unity, subtle and varied, of the successive movements of a symphony.” Andre Masson called the room holding Monet’s Orangerie works “the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.” Rey’s bold ideas and creative connections recover the relevance of Monet’s art and shatter the misperception of Monet as a painter of pretty, thoughtless paintings and nothing else.

For Rouart, Monet’s greatest triumph comes at his greatest moment of struggle when dealing with double cataracts and the surgical aftermath that led Monet to produce such nearly abstract works as The Japanese Bridge (above, from 1918-1924). “Monet’s fidelity to whatever he perceived through his visual organ, even when this was defective” never falters, Rouart writes, which leads Roualt to refuse to call Monet an abstract artist but rather a “tachist.” Monet always works from his own perception of nature and never strays into pure, selfish imagination. Rey, however, uses these late works to link Monet to the abstract artists of the 1950s. “I’m doing pure late Monets,” she quotes Sam Francis. Pollock’s Cathedral, an early drip painting, becomes an homage to the Cathedrals of Monet. “Borrowing and coexistence here concern the processes, the freedom, the lyricism,” Rey writes of the affinity of the 1950s set for Monet, who had become a second-stringer in art history books to Cezanne up until that time. Even Marc Chagall confessed a hatred for Monet until the 1950s, when he suddenly rediscovered Monet as “the Michelangelo of our time.” Half a century later, that revolutionary freshness and relevance is recovered in Rey and Rouart’s essays.

Monet: Water Lilies, The Complete Series brings together not only great essays (beautifully translated by David Radzinowicz) and great reproductions, but also includes startling photos of the man himself (above) with his paintings and enjoying the pond and garden he designed as his personal painting grounds. Special praise should go to the book designer who decided to reproduce the Orangerie panoramic paintings as triple gatefolds. Those mammoths have never received such proper treatment before. The interplay between the text and the images never gets bogged down in references and figure numbers, allowing both to wash over your mind and heart as Monet would have wished. After reading Monet: Water Lilies, The Complete Series you will never look at Monet’s paintings, Monet the artist, or your world the same way again.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with a review copy of Jean Dominique Rey and Denis Rouart’s Monet: Water Lilies, The Complete Series.]

Connecting the Dots

As we gathered ourselves to leave after watching Wall-E on Alex’s first trip to a movie theater, I looked up during the credits just in time to see an homage to Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (above, from 1884-1886). Seurat’s placid park scene has become one of those comfortable pieces of cultural furniture, like the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David. Born December 2, 1859, Seurat would probably be quite dismayed by such a development. As James H. Rubin argued in Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (reviewed here), Seurat and his friend Paul Signac developed pointillism as a more scientific style to mimic technological progress when Impressionism had grown too mainstream and failed to address the changing industrial world or the populist leftist politics emerging with the rise of the modern middle class. It’s impossible today to understand just how much a revolution in the sense of rebellion Seurat’s paintings and style was at the time. The optical theories upon which Seurat based his carefully placed dots (Sunday Afternoon took over two years to finish) seem commonplace today, but at the time challenged cherished ideas of how we perceive the world. As hard as it is to believe now, Seurat was a rebel.

Two years after finishing Sunday Afternoon, Seurat painted The Sideshow (above, from 1888). Moving inside from the bright light of the day, Seurat paints a scene lit only by gas footlights. The brilliance of his outdoor scene gives was to the murky half darkness of the stage upon which the performers caper. In The Sideshow, Seurat not only breaks down color into tiny pieces but reduces the scene and the people in it into simple shapes. The musician at the center morphs into a triangle resting on top of a rectangle, with a lighter-colored circle for a face. Seurat creates an overall impression of cold, inhuman, mechanized precision, as if the background and the characters were stamped out in metal by an assembly line. If Sunday Afternoon shows the mixing (or lack of) between the socioeconomic classes, The Sideshow shows how popular, lowbrow entertainment belongs solely to the lower classes and how such diversions may have a deadening effect on their minds, growing as murky as the dim lights around them.


Of course, it’s easy to go overboard on the cultural and socioeconomic content of Seurat’s work. The first thing that comes to my mind when seeing Seurat’s Le Port de Gravelines (above, from 1890) is not the role of the shipping industry in late nineteenth century France but the beauty of the sweeping curve of the bank as it hugs the blue water while the powder blue sky echoes above. Seurat seems comfortable today because his style is irresistibly sensual. Like Cameron in that scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, we can’t believe the magic trick of all those dots evolving into a recognizable face. Sadly, Seurat died in 1891 at the age of thirty-one, just a year after finishing Le Port de Gravelines. Like so many other young rebels, Seurat never had the chance to grow old and, perhaps, change his spots. Reassembling what Seurat first meant by his work is as daunting a challenge as guessing how he himself would have connected those dots decades later.