Tess's paintings - the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum

I am looking at Thomas Hardy: The World of His Novels (2013, Frances Lincoln Limited) by J. B. Bullen, an English Professor at Royal Holloway University of London.  Looking at much more than reading, since the book features many images, mostly Bullen’s own photos showing the correspondences between Hardy’s fantasy world and what for the sake of argument I will call the real world.  For example, here is the real Cross-in-Hand pillar, “desolate and silent,” “the site of a miracle, or murder, or both” (Ch. 44), from a public photo, not Bullen’s.  An essential book for planning your walking tour of Wessex.  Don’t lose your boots.

Much of Tess of the d’Urbervilles chapter is spent on a different kind of image, as Bullen works through references to a number of J. M. W. Turner paintings; some are speculation, some are sure things.  It is all tied into the sun theme.  I knew it.  I noticed the sun motif too late.

Tess is full of paintings.  In a comment, Trednyas Days points to a good example:

Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence.  (Ch. 13)

Those are some calm pheasants.  Hardy could be inventing the entire scene, but its explicitly allegorical nature makes me suspect he has a painting in mind.  Perhaps something he saw in Belgium.

I noticed the narrator twice referring to Belgian painters, a surprising theme.  In Chapter 16, he describes the Valley of the Dairies as “speckled as thickly with them [cows] as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers,” and in Chapter 39, in one of the oddest lines in the novel, the disillusionment of Angel Clare is described in terms of painting:

Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a study by Van Beers.

“Ghastly” is an interesting word to trace through Tess, but I’ll stick with the paintings.  Antoine Wiertz, judging by his most famous painting, was the greatest painter of the 19th century, but do not be too hasty – he was more typically terrible.  I have pulled a detail from the mammoth The Greeks and the Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus which may be the kind of thing on Hardy’s mind.  The harmless Jan van Beers (“a minor Belgian painter,” the Norton editor deadpans in a footnote) is more of a puzzle.  Maybe this is a leer?

Angel Clare’s understanding of Italian art is pretty narrow, I’ll say that.

What puzzles me most about the explicit use (Turner is never named) of the Flemish and Belgian painters is what readers of Tess made of them.  Were Van Alsloot and Van Beers commonly understood references?  Did readers think “Oh, like Wiertz, what a shocking view of life”?  I know that today’s readers, the ones who love Tess, have looked up these artists and can answer my questions about them.  But how about the late Victorian readers?  I need another book.

He took care of his son and didn’t even try to prove to him how beautiful these things were - Stifter's utopia

With all of my attention on Indian Summer’s Rose House and its Idealist host, I have neglected the narrator Heinrich’s winter quarters, with his family, with his father.  Heinrich spends the spring, summer, and fall in the mountains or at Rose House, making discoveries about nature and art, his Bildung moving along at a steady pace.  Every time he returns home to Vienna, he makes further discoveries in his own home.

For example:

My father had paintings by Titian, Guido Reni, Paul Veronese, Annibale Caracci, Dominichino, Salvator Rosa, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Albrecht Durer, both Holbeins, Lucas Cranach, Van Dyck, Rembrandt [all right, that’s enough].  We went from one to the other, admiring each one, placing many of them on the easel, discussing each.  My heart was filled with joy.  (260)

A Titian, you don’t say.  Remember that the path for Heinrich has been: science leads to the direct study of nature which leads to drawing which leads to painting, and at the same time there is the study of marble, all of which culminates into the sudden discovery of the beauty of a Classical Greek sculpture, which in turn leads to an appreciation for the host’s collection of Old Master paintings.  Back home, when he enters his father’s art gallery, he “is utterly astonished,” understandably.  I mentioned the Titian?  Previously, Heinrich, had been undeveloped, unprepared to even see his father’s paintings:

A strangely profound sensation came into my soul.  That was my great and indescribable love for my father.  He owned these precious things, his heart was devoted to them; his son had simply passed them without giving them any notice at all; yet Father hadn’t withheld even a fraction of his affection from his son; he sacrificed himself, he had been sacrificing himself for most of his life, he took care of his son and didn’t even try to prove to him how beautiful these things were.  (258)

This is a strange passage, a strange response.  That “sacrifice” is the father’s long hours working as a merchant, obviously a successful one (“Forced into business of the most boring type or perhaps having entered it of his own volition since he conducted it with such order, integrity, tenacity, and devotion,” 263).

Even if I think of Indian Summer as an exemplary novel, like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, not necessarily a guide to my own behavior but an ideal example, I begin at this point to wonder exactly what Adalbert Stifter expects his reader to do.  Neither my own family nor my fortuitously discovered mentor have collections of Old Master paintings or Greek carvings (the father also has a drawer of Classical carved stones), and Heinrich has both.  No wonder his Bildung is so smooth.  But what about my Bildung?  I am in trouble, I am afraid.

Stifter creates a utopia in Indian Summer.  Next I will try to figure out exactly what kind.

Zombie Rubens and his army of fat women - this is in Villette, really

Rubens might be a mummy, though, or a ghost. It's in Chapter 23, "Vashti." Lucy Snowe is watching a play, and is enraptured by the actress. She compares this great artist, whose craft, like Lucy's, is based on deception, to the Cleopatra painting that she attacked in Chapter 19.* Compares is not quite right - she imagines that the actress cuts Cleopatra in half with a sword:

"Place now the Cleopatra, or any other slug, before her as an obstacle, and see her cut through the pulpy mass as the scimitar of Saladin clove the down cushion."

And then (a portrait of Rubens and his wife is included to aid visualization):

"Let Paul Peter Rubens wake from the dead, let him rise out of his cerements, and bring into this presence all the army of his fat women; the magian power or prophet-virtue gifting that slight rod of Moses, could, at one waft, release and re-mingle a sea spell-parted, whelming the heavy host with the down-rush of overthrown sea-ramparts."

That end is a tangle, really crazy, but comprehensible. The scene is specific, and easily imagined: zombie Rubens and his army of fat women are for some reason pursuing Moses (the actress) across the parted Red Sea; he (she), of course, reverses the spell and drowns them all.** This is actually one of several puzzling references to Moses at this point in Villette.

Lucy Snowe's vivid imagination is one of the treats of Villette, a mix of the weirdest Biblical and classical and folkloric references. It's obviously Charlotte Brontë's as well, but Lucy so seldom sounds like Jane Eyre. Lucy-the-author's taste for personifying abstractions is part of this. In a single paragraph in Chapter 16, she gives us Life, Death, Grief, Fate, Adversity, and Destiny. The abstractions are not completely abstract - Destiny has "stone eye-balls," for example. Lucy brings them to life. Her extended debate with "[t]his hag" Reason, "always envenomed as a step-mother" in Chapter 21 is central. Lucy submits to Reason, but worships Feeling. Or so she says. Before allowing Lucy Snowe to submit to you, hire a food-taster.

* Her description of the painting is worthy of Mark Twain, a scream. "She was, indeed, extremely well fed," and so on.

** So Rubens is probably not a ghost. Ghosts are incorporeal and can't be washed away. Or can they?

In which I gush over Phaidon art books

The heavy white volumes Phaidon publishes in their Art and Ideas series are, physically, among my favorite books. The pages are stiff, thick, and unusually white, as if they were enamelled. The font (Bitstream Amerigo) is solid and plump, and the standard type is a sort of half boldface, while quotations are in regular type. Pagination and chapter titles are along the right and left edges of the page, not on top. The images are numbered and clearly labeled; captions always include date, dimensions, and location. Margins and line spacing are generous. A very appealing design.

The images - they are the real attraction. I would add "obviously," but art monographs are usually stingier than I want. Not this series - the Phaidon Chagall has 228 images in 330 pages, mostly the artist's paintings, but with some photographs and works by other artists mixed in:

I clipped off the right edge when I scanned the page, but you get the idea. The photo is of Marc Chagall with the legendary Yiddish actor Shlomo Mikhoels, who is also in the painting, doing the splits while playing his fiddle for the appreciative green cow. He was such a great threat to the Soviet state that Stalin, in 1948, personally ordered his murder. I've wandered from my point.

Looking at the catalog page, I see that I have now read 12 of the 32 volumes published so far. I'll rank them, most interesting to least.

Early Christian and Byzantine Art, John Lowden, page after page of marvels
Neoclassicism, David Irwin
David, Simon Lee
Rembrandt, Mariët Westerman

Jacques-Louis David is actually one of my least favorite painters, but this account of his work and life, tangled up with the French Revolution, is close to thrilling. His paintings, technical facility aside, are all context, so this is the way to see them. Rembrandt's life, by contrast, is almost event-free; the book is rather a gentle investigation of a supremely creative mind.

Romanticism, David Blayney Brown
Goya, Sarah Symmons
Egyptian Art, Jaromir Malek
Friedrich, William Vaughan
Turner, Barry Venning
Chagall, Monica Bohm-Duchen
Islamic Art, Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair
Hogarth, Mark Hallett

The problems with the last two are essentially conceptual. Islamic Art is strained by its need for coverage, while Hogarth treats Hogarth's work more as sociological and historical evidence than as art. In both cases, the approach is understandable, but these books aren't as much fun as some of the others. You would be justified in not believing how much fun Neoclassicism or Early Christian and Byzanine Art is, I understand, but I insist, they're great stuff.

As collections of images, though, they're all amazing. One sample from Islamic Art:

Note the attractive use of white space around the 8th century ewer.
There may well be better-written or better-argued books on every one of these subjects, but I've never found such an impressive combination of images and text. And then there are the pages, and the font, and so on. They don't make such good public transit books - a bit too heavy.

This was plenty gushy. Phaidon should send me some free books. Just post them to the address at the bottom of the site. Hmm, it doesn't seem to be there. Off to the right somewhere? No? I seem to have misplaced my address. Well, if it were the case that Wuthering Expectations had an address, Phaidon should send books to it.

In which I tear myself from the study of mummifed cats to look at Marc Chagall images

I had a wonderful, really excellent, absolutely top notch week on the Yiddish writer S. Ansky planned. But a comment from Neil of the dangerous* Adventures in the Print Trade derailed me, so I'll have to postpone that. Perhaps I will finish S. Ansky week before I devote my life to the study of mummified cats and their importation to England. At some point, I plan to become the world's first full-time mummified cat blogger. But that's in the future.

Wandering around in the secondary work on Yiddish literature, the name of Marc Chagall kept coming up, for obvious enough reasons. At some point, it occurred to me that I didn't really know much about Chagall. Didn't like him much, either, for what that's worth. At a later point, it occurred to me that I could read a book about him. That's my solution to everything.

Ignorant and slothful, I turned where I always do, to the Phaidon "Arts and Ideas" series, Chagall by Monica Bohm-Duchen. There are certainly plenty of other Chagall biographies. Physically, the Phaidon books are marvels, some of my favorites, so I always go there first, and usually last. The Bohm-Duchen book is fine; I certainly learned a lot.

I had no idea that Chagall had such a strong literary connection. The image up and to the left, is Literature itself, somehow, an allegorical image for a theater (there is also Music and Dance). I've adopted this as my Amateur Reader icon, even though it becomes so small that no one can tell what it is.

Beisdes befriending every other French poet and writing poetry himself, Chagall made illustrations for Dead Souls, the Hebrew Bible, the Fables of La Fontaine, the memoir of I. L. Peretz - and I'm forgetting some. The only ones that I've looked at with any real attention are the Bible prints, because they're easily available, in a Dover reprint of the French magazine that originally published them. In 1956 and again in 1960, you could just go to the newstand, I guess, and buy a magazine containing nothing but original Chagall prints. And, financially, you should have. On the right, we see Job in despair. Don't worry, Job, God will give you new cattle. As for your sons, ahem, well, you'll get sons, too, just as good as the other ones.

In theory, I should be the most interested in Chagall's illustrations for Dead Souls, since I admire that novel so much. But I'm missing something. I mean, see left. That's certainly Chagall - is it Gogol? These images all strike me the same way. However interesting they may be, I find it hard to see how they serve the text. Maybe the personality of the artist is too strong for the task. Or maybe if I read an illustrated version of the novel, all would be clear.

Now, over on the right, Chichikov packing his trunk - that's certainly in the right spirit. Chichikov really is that round, and the view of our non-hero is appropriate. Chagall knew the book well, at least.

All right, it's late, so I should stop. And the mummified cats are calling, calling, calling.

* Why dangerous? Because everything he puts on the website is for sale here. If the dollar were a little stronger...

Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece - confused masses of color and a multitude of fantastical lines

A curious thing has happened to Balzac's story The Unknown Masterpiece (1831). The meaning of the story has been completely transformed, hijacked, by later writers and artists. It now does something that Balzac could hardly have guessed.

The story is set in 17th century Paris, and the protagonist is the young Nicolas Poussin, just beginning his career. It's the only Balzac story I know of set at that time, and the only one starring an actual person. The (non-actual) painter Frenhofer, a great master, has been working on a single painting for ten years; no one has ever seen it. There's some plotty stuff about whether Poussin will allow his girlfriend to pose nude for Frenhofer, and whether the girlfriend will do it. Finally, she does, and Frenhofer finishes his painting, and Poussin and his friend Porbus get to see it. Frankly, nothing interesting has happened so far. Then:

"The two painters left the old man to his ecstasy, and tried to ascertain whether the light that fell full upon the canvas had in some way neutralized all the effect for them. They moved to the right and left of the picture; they they came in front, bending down and standing upright by turns...

'The old lansquenet is laughing at us,' said Poussin, coming once more toward the supposed picture. 'I can see nothing there but confused masses of color and a multitude of fantastical lines that go to make a dead wall of paint.'

'We are mistaken, look!' said Porbus.

In a corner of the canvas as they came nearer, they distinguished a bare foot emerging from the chaos of color, half-tints and vague shadows that made up a dim, formless fog. Its living beauty held them spellbound. This fragment that had escaped an incomprehensible, slow, and gradual destruction seemed to them like the Parian marble torso of some Venus emerging from the ashes of a ruined town."

Confused masses of color, half-tints and vague shadows, with a form somehow underneath - who does this sound like to you? Willem de Kooning? Kandinsky? Toulouse-Lautrec? If it reminds you somehow of Cézanne, at least one great artist agrees with you - Paul Cézanne. "Frenhofer, c'est moi!" he supposedly declared, between sobs, when his art dealer mentioned Balzac's story. Picasso, weirdly, also claimed to identify with Frenhofer.

We now read Balzac's story with a frame of reference that he could not have had. In 1831, there was no such thing as abstract art, no such thing as Impressionism. I have to struggle a little to try to get back to whatever meaning Balzac was going for. Balzac saw Frenhofer's labors as a complete failure, I'm pretty sure, a pointless and destructive obsession over perfection. Watching the other painters look at his canvas, Frenhofer suddenly sees what they see:

"Frenhofer looked for a moment at his picture, and staggered back.

'Nothing! nothing! After ten years of work...'

He sat down and wept."

The Unknown Masterpiece is not much of a story, really. But there's an idea in it, an idea that I'm pretty sure was not Balzac's, that is rich enough to have kept this story alive and inspired later artists and writers. Henry James either parodied this story in "The Madonna of the Future," or pushed it to its logical conclusion. It's been so long since I read it that I don't remember which. Maybe both. I understand that there's a Zola novel that also makes use of The Unknown Masterpiece. And then there's the Jacques Rivette modernization, La Belle Noiseuse, a four (!) hour movie that mostly consists of alternating shots of a nude Emmanuele Béart, and closeups of the hand of the artist who draws her.

Maybe this is a good place to mention another Balzac story about a painter, Pierre Grassou (1840). This one is about a hack painter who becomes wildly successful. It's mean, and funny, almost a joke with a punchline. Balzac doesn't like the agonized Frenhofers, but he doesn't like the hack Grassous either. The proper way to be an artist is to be like Honoré de Balzac.

My quotes are from an Volume 22 of an antique collected Balzac, no translator specified. If possible, try to get the NYRB edition, or at least take a look at Arthur Danto's introduction (pdf).

all the canvas that ever suffered from French brushes

Lest I give the idea that 19th century aesthetic theory is all heavy lifting and Schopenhauer, here's John Ruskin, telling a joke:

"The other day at Bruges, while I was endeavoring to set down in my note-book something of the ineffable expression of the Madonna in the Cathedral, a French amateur came up to me, to inquire if I had seen the modern French pictures in a neighboring church. I had not, but felt little inclined to leave my marble for all the canvas that ever suffered from French brushes. My apathy was attacked with gradually increasing energy of praise. Rubens never executed - Titian never coloured anything like them. I thought this highly probable, and still sat quiet."

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, I.I.v, "Of Ideas of Truth"

Well, I think it's funny. Ruskin's comic relief certainly helps a person move through Modern Painters. I don't want to exaggerate - there may be a joke every 20 pages or so. The long sections "On Leaf Beauty" and "On Cloud Beauty" may be hilarious, but I'm not counting on it.

Still, a joke here and there beats none at all.

Gogol's The Portrait - Was this also a dream?

Nikolai Gogol's The Portrait (1842, though there’s an earlier version as well) is about the mysyterious effect of a portrait on two artists. In one case, talent is corrupted, in the other, exalted. Whenever I come across a story about a painter, or composer, or whatnot, I assume that the author is really working out his ideas about writing. It's what Gogol is doing here, anyway.

A young, brilliant, impoverished painter buys a strange, compelling portrait. Through an obscure circumstance - a ghost? a prophetic dream? - the portrait leads the artist to a great sum of money. Will it surprise anyone to learn that this leads to new problems?

So goes part one. The sequel, or prequel, returns to the beginning but pushes the same ideas to an entirely different conclusion.

Gogol's prose sparkles. At the picture shop:

"A winter scene with white trees, an absolutely red sunset that looked like the glow of a conflagration, a Flemish peasant with a pipe and a broken arm, more like a turkey cock in frills than a human being – such were usually their subjects." (252)

And here's the same sunset again, but real this time:

"The red glow of sunset still lingered over half the sky; the houses which faced the sunset were faintly illuminated by its warm light, while the cold blue light of the moon grew more powerful. More and more the artist began to glance at the sky, which was shimmering in a faint, translucent, uncertain light, and almost at the same moment there burst from his mouth the words, 'What a delicate tone!' and the words, 'Damn it! How upsetting!'” (256)

And that moon returns in the great dream scene. The man in the portrait come to life and reveal a secret. Then that the dream is followed by another dream, and then another - a vertiginous scene.

Gogol is writing at a high level here. Was anyone else writing with as sure a hand at this time (early 1840s)? And this isn’t even Gogol at his best – see tomorrow for that.

References are to the University of Chicago Press Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol.

Also posted at the Russian Reading Challenge.