Literary Guide to Modern Painting at the National Gallery of Art

Brian Richardson

Enter the West Wing and go upstairs and to the left. Enter Gallery 93. Here we see two good specimens of mid-nineteenth century art, Troyen’s “The Approaching Storm” and Corot’s “Forest of Fontainbleu.” Each is classically composed, has a unified pallette, is presented entirely realistically and objectively, and is centered around a human drama. All these features, typical of Western art since the renaissance, will largely be done away with by 1915.

Go two rooms down to gallery 85 and enjoy the Monets. These paintings are supreme examples of impressionism, and focus on the appearance of scenes in different conditions of light, shadow or obscurity. Note especially how the same facade of the Rouen cathedral changes from the early morning light to that of twilight. Mallarmé sought to reproduce these qualities of light and movement in some of his verse. Concerning narrative, think of the impressionistic sequences in Conrad or Woolf where we first are given a subjective perception, and then are required to figure out its meaning. R. B. Kershner notes other similarities between Conrad and impressionist painters: “the fascination of light and darkness and their interplay, even at the expense of the representation of their ostensible subject; the interest in immediate perception, especially in difficult conditions; the interest in smoke, fog, and mist as an integral part of the subject’s representation.” Savor the many other impressionist works in adjacent galleries (and in the gallery of “Small French Paintings” next door on the ground floor of the East Wing.)

Another very important artist is Whistler, whose “Chelsea Wharf” (1875) is at the end of the wing in gallery 69. Like many of his scenes, the actual subject matter is difficult to discern; Whistler is clearly more interested in relations between shapes and colors than in representation itself. There are many great Whistlers across the Mall in the Freer Museum. Many Victorians were appalled at Whistler’s abstract treatments of nature—and the substantial prices he charged. Critic John Ruskin complained, “I have heard of Cockney impudence before, but never imagined a man would charge 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler was one of the models for the character of the painter Elstir in Proust’s novel.

Go back now to galley 89, and revel in the rich colors of the many Degas works. Look at “Four Dancers,” and see how the human figures are off to the side, and their faces partially or entirely obscured. (Or they may just be the same figure at four different times.) The human form is no longer the center of the work; they dancers become somewhat incidental in the painting, whose primary concerns are color, light, and texture. Think of the way the protagonist of To the Lighthouse dies halfway through the book, causing a similar asymmetry. Now look over to Toulouse-Lautrec’s “M. Lender Dancing the Bolero.” Human emotions here are intensely expressed; we see the varying degrees of decadence in the faces of the group, and note the tiredness beneath the makeup of the aging dancer. Such a presentation may remind you of similar ones in Jean Rhys.

In gallery 87, you see Seurat’s “Lighthouse at Honfleur,” his adaption and extension of impressionist technique to embrace new discoveries in optics which he called “pointillism.”

In gallery 91 there are several masterpieces by Cezanne. As you observe “Riverbank,” note how Cezanne uses large blocks of color (exactly the opposite of Seurat’s tiny points of different hues) and his tendency to depict nature in geometrical forms, a technique that will be radically extended by Picasso and, in a different way, by Leger. Looking at Cezanne, one may well think of the brilliant, complex, yet almost coldly formal symmetries of Flaubert or James Joyce. In November 1910, Bloomsbury member Roger Fry mounted the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London. He wrote an excellent study of Cezanne and was a close friend of Clive Bell, who was married to Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa, an experimental painter. Bloomsbury aesthetics was formulated in Bell’s treatise, Art. Woolf’s portrait of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse explored the consciousness of a painter searching to achieve distinct formal relations between color and shape. For a first person portrait of a rather less experimental painter, see Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth.

Gallery 84 contains two most suggestive self-portraits. Van Gogh’s seethes with barely restrained emotion, not only because of the unusual colors (the face is distinctly green) but also the thick, unmodulated swaths of paint. From here the road to expressionism is a short and direct one. For literary equivalents, consider Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

On the adjacent wall is Gauguin’s self-portrait. The head rests on two depthless planes of solid colors, while the disembodied hand holds a rather two dimensional snake. The subtleties of representing depth via gradations of shade are ignored in favor of powerful juxtapositions of basic colors in primal forms, techniques that Matisse would develop.

Go to the East Wing and see Matisse’s cut-outs in the East Wing. Follow the trajectory of modern art into the twentieth century as abstraction takes center stage, the two dimensional nature of the canvass is foregrounded, and the human form vanishes. In To the Lighthouse, William Bankes asks Lily Briscoe, the painter, to explain a triagular, purple shape; “It was Mrs Ramsey reading to James, she said. She knew his objection—that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness.”

Picasso’s cubist works (even in “Nude Woman”), continue to perform a represantational function, even if it is often barely recognizable and clearly subordinate to reconfiguring aspects of the represented object in new radically ways. There are many other early Matisses and Picassos at the Baltimore Museum of Art, some of which were once owned by Gertrude Stein. About Picasso, Stein wrote (in rather cubist prose): “This one was working. This one always had been working. This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellent thing, a very pretty thing. This one was certainly being one having something come out of him.”

In Kandinsky’s “Improvisation 31: Sea Battle," the representational function of painting is largely irrelevant. One can, with some effort, make out the masts and sails of the battling ships, but clearly the real action is in the play of colors, shapes, and tones. Kandinsky would soon leave representation behind altogether, producing only abstract paintings.

Mondrian’s work, here represented by “Diamond Painting in Red, Yellow, and Blue,” was an inspiration to many authors of the nouveau roman in their quest for a comparable type of narrative abstraction. About his work, Samuel Beckett once remarked, “No painting is more replete than Mondrian’s.”

Surrealism is represented by several works here, including Joan Miró’s “The Farm.” For a fictional narrative of a surrealist painter written in an appropriately skewed style, see Mina Loy’s novel Insel, edited by UM’s Elizabeth Arnold. Note also Magritte’s rather Pirandello-like play with representation, frame, and reality in “The Human Condition,” a fusion set forth both subtly and powerfully in John Banville’s superb novel Ghosts, some of whose characters may be figures in a painting. Modigliani is also represented here; in Jean Rhys’ novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), the protagonist describes one of his paintings in the following terms: “The picture is of a woman lying on a couch, a woman with a lovely, lovely body. . . . A sort of proud body, like an utterly lovely proud animal. And a face like a mask, but when you had looked at it a bit it was as if you were looking at a real woman, a live woman.”

At the lowest level of the East Wing you’ll find the space devoted to American Painting, 1900-1950. Look at the Feininger and more closely, Arshile Gorky’s “One Year the Milkweed.” Here again, we see the ostensible subject matter become almost unrecognizable as the relations between colors and forms dominate. Note the way the locations of the white masses, the oranges, and the green ovals balance each other; appreciate the violet patch at the top center. Think of Lily Briscoe thinking about the canvas she is painting: “The question being one of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows . . . . It was a question, she remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left.”

Enjoy Jackson Pollack’s magnificent “Number 1 (Lavender Mist)," which exhibits many of the same oscillations between order and randomness and design and accident found in the later work of Samuel Beckett, who was keenly interested in art, as his notes on several contemporary painters demonstrate. And take a good look at the Rothkos, especially “Number 9: White and Black on Wine.” Rothko was another inspiration for many of the creators of the nouveau roman.

For more modern art (especially Surrealism and other avant garde movements), walk across the Mall to the Hirshorn Museum. In 1929 DH Lawrence wrote, with characteristic bluster, “The modern theories of art make real pictures impossible. You only get these expositions, critical ventures in paint, and fantastic negations. And the bit of fantasy that may lie in the negation—as in a Dufy or a Chirico—is just the bit that has escaped theory and perhaps saves the picture.”

“A portrait, a painting? You cannot paint today as you painted yesterday. You cannot paint tomorrow as you paint today. A portrait, a painting? Do not paint it of yesterday’s rapt and rigid formula nor of yesterday’s day-after-tomorrow’s crisscross—jagged, geometric, prismatic. Paint It Today,” --HD (Hilda Dolittle).