The Scariest Picture

THE SCARIEST PICTURE

Toward the end of last October, it seemed to me I saw one of the most frightening pictures in art.  Granted once or twice, forgetting it was near Halloween, I had been startled by young retail clerks looking up from their counters in zombie make up. I was unnerved in the “Spirit” store by their dominant display theme of undead babies. But in any case, I was struck by 2.5 x 3.75 inch 1640 etching by Rembrandt shown above (click to enlarge all pictures), that was at the San Francisco Legion of Honor in the exhibition “Masterworks of Dutch and Flemish Paintings from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection.“

It is a reticent picture of vulnerability, made more affecting by its realism. This puppy is not “our” puppy, a bundle of warm fur made to be hugged, or a performer of tricks. It is too deeply animal for that. (Compare it to the irresistibly tactile painting by Gerard Dou also in the show, said to be made after Rembrandt’s etching.)

Still, Rembrandt’s little dog calls out for our protection. Given nature’s determined confidence, it is supremely unaware of its own fragility, accentuated by being new to the world, and further by being asleep.

Young as it is now with its delicate ears and wrinkled face, the puppy’s mastiff-heavy skull and compact muscular body point to its future. Growing up under its master’s care, we trust the dog will live out its vigorous days happily and in full. A half-conscious anxiety for its well being lingers in the background though, as we watch it slumbering: given all efforts to protect it from the many dangers of life, from falling objects to microbes to unkind neglect, Rembrandt’s recognition of the puppy’s separate life suggests that chance and its ultimate fate remain beyond our reach.

I don’t think Rembrandt was a connoisseur of mortality as one writer put it, but as with Shakespeare, the awareness of mortality is always there. In Rembrandt’s work, as he gets older, its shadow deepens with his ever increasing sympathy for his subjects, whether they are participating in an anatomy lesson or featured in a sketch from his neighborhood. Rembrandt lived 63 years. “The Puppy” was made when he was 34.

Can a little etching of animal vulnerability be more frightening in the end than a selection of pictures famous for their disturbing power  – say Munch’s “The Scream,”  “St Anthony’s Temptation by Demons in the Desert,” by Grunewald, a gargoyle from Notre Dame in Paris, and “Saturn Devouring his Children,” by Goya?

 

        

These images are truly the stuff of nightmares. But given our knowledge of life and stories, each of these works, while delivering a shock, implies a way out. While we flee from the visions they create inside our heads, there does always seem to be one more corridor to turn down, one more door to force open which could lead to escape.

Munch’s apoplexy of anxiety might be helped by a gifted therapist and the best medication, or (to be flippant) a year in the South of France. The pitiless gargoyle could lose in a battle with armed angels. St Anthony can resort to prayer and the mental discipline honed through his years meditating in the desert, to stave off the madness that the demons threaten. Saturn will not extend his reign indefinitely by devouring his children. Zeus will trick him, and a new generation will survive to take succession, including those already eaten. In any case, the Titan’s eyes betray a horrified awareness that his lust for power is turning him from a principle of nature (albeit wild) into a monster. His more Hellenic victim will prevail.

But there is no way out of the Rembrandt, no enemy to defeat, no threat to defuse. Its puppy condition is our human condition. The ultimate danger surrounding the dog doesn’t inspire adrenaline but acceptance, of which a dose of human fear is naturally a part.

Our instinctive unease regarding its safety is subsumed in our impulse to treasure Rembrandt’s wonderfully observed puppy. But this tender etching, which at first seems as calm as quiet sleep, is absorbingly complex. From an artist who was as incapable of false comfort as he was gifted at communicating compassion, it might still rightfully scare you, depending on when you look at it.

Bellini’s “St. Francis” in Spring

Even though it was last summer when it was “re-presented,” after cleaning and research, at its home at the Frick Museum in NY, it is a wonderful painting to look at in springtime: Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert.” A friend recently returned from a trip to Italy where she visited Assisi, and we were talking about this painting. Although I had seen it numerous times before, the last time I saw this work, Bellini’s unique concept finally dawned on my slow-working brain. I had been so enamored earlier of the natural details of the painting, the “liquid” blue rocks and the privileged view of the monk’s private retreat in the rich Italian landscape, I had missed the radical argument Bellini was making.

The subject of the painting is a matter of debate. Is St. Francis receiving the stigmata? He certainly has the wounds in the painting. Or is it some time later, is he singing his Canticle of the Sun? The scene seems to have elements of both events but doesn’t appear to depict either one exactly.

We’re so used to getting our emotional insights from actors in motion, in movies or on tv, it is good to look at a still painted figure, whose gesture is so rich and complex that is bears repeated looking and revisiting. St. Francis has stepped out of his meditation cell, as if called. Something fundamental is happening; he has left his sandals behind. Barefoot, he steps forward, as if to offer himself, or to sing on a stage, but as he does so, he is also thrust backwards. His mouth is open, but is speechless. His head is raised by what he sees, but you could say that while looking up his head is also slightly bowed in humility. His arms and hands are apart and tilted upwards, the better to absorb and contain the message he is receiving.  It is a wonderful depiction of this religious moment. And there is the remarkable surrounding scene. No wonder many people consider this one of the greatest Rennaisance paintings in the US.

As if this were not enough, Bellini did something very new with his 1480 St. Francis, something essential to the painting.

St. Francis is traditionally shown receiving his stigmata in the form of heavenly or unearthly beams of light coming from an angel, as in the earlier paintings by the Master of San Francesco Bardi, 1250, and by the more naturalistic Giotto, 1300 (click to enlarge, as with the painting on top):

         

But Bellini’s St. Francis is receiving his revelation not from beyond, but from within this world, from and through the life giving light of the sun. Bellini’s painting lets us see and feel what we know about St. Francis: In between the Dark Ages with its view of the world as a snare of temptation and evil, and the Enlightenment picture of creation as an intricate machine running on orderly laws, was St. Francis, trusting in nature as a good and beautiful place, embracing as his “brothers” and “sisters” the sun, water, wind and animals. Bellini’s painted light, subtly highlighting the saint while warming the world around him, brings both the day and interior illumination together as parts of one gift.

Seurat: Between the Dots

POST-IMPRESSIONISTS AT THE DEYOUNG MUSEUM IN SAN FRANCISCO   PART I

The deYoung Museum in San Francisco is now showing Part II of its ambitious exhibition of paintings loaned from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. This exhibition focuses on the Post-Impressionists and features paintings by Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Cezanne and Gauguin. It also offers a broad look at Pointillism, Gauguin’s numerous followers, the Symbolist movement and the Nabis. It’s a substantial amount to take in no matter how familiar some of the works may be.

Great art allows you to (actually) stop thinking about yourself for a substantial length of time. Ah, what bliss. Not just to escape, but to think and feel without your Self as the center of reference . The tyrannical guard dog we carry around inside that looks after us, but also continually gnaws away at the bone of ourselves, gets time off in the company of these deeply visual, searching works.

Like the preceeding deYoung show, “The Birth of Impressionism,” this exhibition has a story to tell. The achievement of Impressionism, the depiction in paint of the fleeting affects of natural light, set up questions that the Post-Impressionist painters felt compelled to address. Once the solid appearance of objects began to waver under changing light, and once visual perception itself took center stage, how could you reintroduce structure back into painting? how could you use a highly personal viewpoint to explore the inner as well as the outer world?

The Post-Impressionist Cezanne voiced the ambition of his peers to make of Impressionism “something solid and durable like the art of museums.” He retained the Impressionist feeling of transparent, light color, but created a sense of permanence in his paintings, like his hero Poussin. He built his works one stroke at a time, each stroke a small plane of color, inspired by his subject but altered by the demands of the painting’s composition.

The Impressionists themselves felt the pressure of the questions posed by their own artistic successes. While Cezanne’s prismatic approach could capture even flickering reflections in enduring crystalline compositions

Monet (who lived until 1925) was drawn increasingly to the looser but no less unifying structure of liquid. After painting all manner of water subjects throughout the years, he focussed his attention towards the end of life on his water gardens Giverney. Looking for a less transient expression, Pisarro became a Pointellist. Renoir in his later Rubenesque nudes, his paint still in love with women, focussed more on their form than the variable light falling on them.

What about the shift from visual sensation to inner expression? Impressionists explored this also. Degas who brightened his palette by tuning his eye to the real world rather than the Old Masters, heightened his use of color further in his later paintings. His “Dancers” bathed in blue light and his “Bather” immersed in Venetian brick red, while exploring psychologically charged gestures, mine associations of a particular hue, like musical compositions in a specific key.

Monet’s “Train Station at St Lazare” and “Tuleries Gardens” seen in the last deYoung show offered the emotional experience of colors and color combinations in themselves, connected to a specific subject or not.  

But to return to the main story of this exhibition: with the tools of the “New Painting” at hand, the urge to look beyond the historical, literary and religious subjects favored by the Academy, and the use of a new language of color, the Post-Impressionists utilized flattened form, patterned compositions, chunky paint application, spiritual and religious subjects. They reflected on their own reactions and responses in their art .

The Post-Impressionists in this show were highly trained inheritors of a long tradition, and yet free from that tradition, and from Impressionism itself. The variety and quality of works in this exhibition illustrate that freedom grounded in tradition is an explosive recipe for creativity. We are still rocked by the shock waves of the “Big Bang” of the Renaissance, where intellectual liberation was rooted in the spiritual traditions of the Middle Ages. Freedom born of freedom is something quite different, where creativity can be haunted by anxiety (think Picasso).

In the exhibition layout at the DeYoung, the tipping point between the classic examples of Impressionism at the beginning of the show and the rooms of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin and others later on, turns on a wall of small oil studies made by Seurat.

 

These little panels were made in 1883-4 as Seurat was working out ideas for his famous “La Grande Jatte,” and the large painting “The Models” in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. In this row of works that progresses from a softly painted portrait of a boy to a fully Pointellist depiction of a seated nude from the back, you can see the shift that was taking place in painting in Paris. You can see it in a single panel:

..It’s as if you are watching the metamorphosis of a fleeting but tangible scene into a permanent and indefinable one. It is a depiction of the light of a particular time of day, of the charm of the imperfectly seen distant horizon, the contrast of flesh and water. And at the same time it is as if the human forms are retreating before our eyes to a more permanent sphere, where silence reigns and where movements are dictated by a strict purpose. Seurat was drawn to Egyptian art, its rhythm and stasis. The main figure in this panel, a closely observed adolescent in mid-stride, seems to have paused on his way towards becoming a silhouette in a ritual, not totally unlike an Egyptian figure on a wall relief.

The grandfather of transformation in Western art is the Roman poet Ovid, whose stories of men and gods, aptly titled “Metamorphosis,” inspired European painters for centuries. A Renaissance painting by Tintoretto shows Ariadne transported aloft from her unhappy human sphere upon marrying the god Bacchus. Her crown has become a ring of stars that we still see in the night sky as the Corona Borealis. 

A sculpture by Bernini shows Daphne turning into a laurel tree, just in time to escape the erotic designs of Apollo.

While Tintoretto and Bernini’s works depict a transformation from the personal into the natural order through the dramatic actions of their humanistic figures. Seurat articulates an increasing abstraction and stillness.

In the two years previous to the color studies at the deYoung, Seurat restricted his explorations exclusively to black and white, mostly in works of conte crayon on paper. In three drawings from these years (not in the show) we can see his mind at work as he applied himself to the challenges posed by Impressionism.

“The Harvester” of 1983 captures a working gesture but already feels calm and monumental in its underlying arrangement of shapes and tonal values. A drawing from a year later, of a rural scene including sheets or blankets on a clothesline, shows his subsequent method. Seurat describes form almost without using any outlines, but through ‘clouds’ of marks instead (click on image to see a larger view), while utilizing the blank paper as both white objects and light. It take some effort to make out the objects in the palpable twilight that envelopes the scene. This is a remarkable drawing style for someone whose favorite artists were said to be Holbein and Ingres, both masters of line. In the later drawing of a young girl, we have arrived at a very mysterious place indeed.

Our subject has started to become or inhabit geometric shapes: curves, angles, rectangles and trapezoids, the building blocks of mathematics which Plato considered eternal. While on the one hand this drawing is an accurate rendition of a well-dressed girl in hazy sunlight, on the other, its subject seems to regard us from within a misty atmosphere both intimate and remote. Seurat is hand-in-hand here with the Symbolists shown later in the exhibition, in his preoccupation with the dreamlike and the ineffable. Part of the excitement of this drawing though is that as abstract as the girl is, she also is more real and particular  -we “know” what she is like-  than the more “realistic” “Harvester.” If you enjoy these drawings of Seurat’s but are not familiar with them, run don’t walk to see even one of them, or to a good book about them. Their combination of nuanced tone, abstract form and observation has led them to be described as “the most beautiful painter’s drawings in existence.”

The color studies we’re looking at began where the black and white drawings leave off.  A kind of Symbolist portrait of the boy whose painted areas lack clear definition, leads to Impressionist brush strokes, which become smaller uniform marks, which then become little dots.

Seurat, whom his friends called “the notary” for his orderly ways, liked to emphasize his rational system, his “method.” In his Pointellist works he almost always used 11 colors, each used in the same order, one at a time, over the entire canvas surface. He was fascinated by new color theory regarding colors mixing in the eye, afterimages of colors, and the interactions of complemenaries. His technical path in painting to a more permanent expression was to break apart all appearances into individual dots, and to reorganize the dots back into stable forms.  – Given his attraction to science, if Seurat’s Pointellism has some relation to atomic theory, it also nods to the later Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics! which notes that the location of tiny particles cannot be predicted.

In looking at a detail of a painting in the show by Signac, Seurat’s companion Pointellist, we see a figure described by spots of color.

The woman’s arm and hand, and the background environment are described with dots and dashes of paint which blend together visually at a distance. But in looking at the study of the nude back by Seurat, the dots seem to be unpredictably everywhere or anywhere, doing different things.

They are not necessarily “on” the object or its outlines, but might denote the air in front of the nude, the color of her skin, or the the light bouncing off it, the ambient atmosphere, color or mood of the room. Yet the object, the nude, is there, in its majestic calm and intimate dignity.

Here, a few years after his black and white studies, Seurat has moved beyond the mystery of a Symbolist mood, from twilight to day. The flat playing card geometry is now full of life, a witty version of a pear hanging on a branch. This is solid form with the vivacious excitement of Impressionist light. It is a sensitive observation of a real person, and a sculptural statement that exudes light and color. Despite his “method” and its aura of systematic order, Seurat is a poet in paint. All this, before his untimely death at 31.

 

Seurat’s short career had a substantial impact on his Post-Impressionist peers. Looking back from the present moment, with the advent of computer technology with its bits and bytes, and the relationship of much art to digital photography, Seurat almost seems to be casting a longer shadow than Cezanne. Cezanne explored the dismantling of conventional imagery. Seurat’s short career focussed on putting it back together once it was broken apart.

Wayne Thiebaud’s non-Pop art

In watching a recent interview with Wayne Thiebaud, I was surprised to hear him say, with a look of tactful understatement, that he wasn’t really a fan of Pop Art.  This seemed a provocative comment. His work is thought of as part of the Pop Art phenomenon. He paints brightly colored toys and pinball machines, uniform displays of pies and other prepared foods yearning to be purchased. There are branded cereal boxes, cheap candies and racks of loud ties –  a deliberate look at slices of popular or commercial American culture. Pop Art has to do with a dive back into the world after the esoteric searching of Abstract Expressionism, with an ironic embrace of “low”commercial art, comics and design (perhaps with envy of its impact and energy). Or on a more complicated level, in Warhol, a passive/aggressive critique of popular culture, and at the same time a seductive invitation, enlivening and depressing by turns, to bask without guilt in our participation in it. Thiebaud’s look at the common objects we buy and use is decidedly different. For one thing, it is funnier and more affectionate. But  that is not all.

In a recent show of his still life and figure charcoal drawings at Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco, this drawing of a radio and coffee can was the first work on view. (see images of the whole show under exhibitions at http://www.paulthiebaudgallery.com/)

This rather somber look at a couple of objects is deceptively plain. There is humor in the observation of a quite stylish if inexpensive radio – oh, those clean almost streamlined edges, and the up-to-the-minute inclusion of a cassette player, the user-friendly switches on top – this is a cool radio, braced for competition in the marketplace. But in the end, it is the simple usefulness of its design that impresses. There is the Morandi-like (an artist Thiebaud admires) relationship between the larger and smaller object – the radio like a parent or mentor to the coffee can. Thiebaud creates a sophisticated arrangement of values. The MJB can is dark on the left, and as we read the drawing to the right from there, we alternate between dark and light chapters, interlocking and proportionate. More wit – the antenna and the shadows of the objects just touch the borders of the paper. If you think about it – coffee and music and news – here is a little tabletop microcosm of civilization, of humanity stimulating itself and exploring the world.

But seeing this time capsule of the once desirable radio and the MJB coffee can – I’m old enough to remember the constant duelling ads on TV for different brands of coffee – I didn’t think of waves of advertising or the American miracle of affordable products for everyone. I was reminded instead of a meditation exercise that a lot of people may have tried, the one with the raisin.

We think of raisins as a source of quick energy. You down a small box of them on a hike, and wash it down with a gulp of water.  Perfect. The meditation exercise is altogether different. It slows down time and expands perception. You quiet yourself as you hold a single raisin in your hand. You smell it. You look at it; you think about it. What is a raisin. What does this one really look like. How long did it take the sun to create those wrinkles. Where did the grape grow. Who worked to plant and pick it. To transport and box it, to display and sell it. Imagine the life of this one raisin. Then of course you get to eat it. Not before just putting it in your mouth though. Your mouth waters. You nibble it. You eat slowly. You remember when this specific sweetness (long before $7 slices of uber-chocolate cake) was a treat that transformed your childhood brain with delight. Minutes have gone by with this one raisin. You are crushed by gratitude and wonder.

Not to take this too far, but something like that occurred to me with the MJB coffee can.

Thiebaud spent lots of time and attention on it, and its presentation isn’t superficial. -What were the morning thoughts in the room when this can was opened and the smell of coffee filled the air; what happened to whom in the home during the time this can sat on the shelf. Who planted the beans and where. Who designed that classic coffee can shape which makes it so useful for other purposes. Who invented that MJB logo (Theibaud was a commercial artist himself).  Like other good still lifes, this one asks, what is the nature of Being  (what are we when we’re still?) and especially, what is Time (as Gauguin asked in his famous title, “where are we going?”) in which being is embedded. Thiebaud is so far here from an ironic critique or ironic celebration of mass produced culture. In this art experience (he’s quite a wizard, it’s just smudges on paper), time slows and meanders; Thiebaud presents objects with a dignity that is ignored, perhaps necessarily, as we rush onward to do what we have to do. These common things, worthy of prolonged consideration despite their widespread commercial manufacture, were made by us and for us, and have ended up with a mysterious life of their own.

The artists officially considered ‘Pop’ can’t be lumped together exactly, but Thiebaud has such a unique combination of warm humor and unembarrassed seriousness that he is on another track altogether. He isn’t afraid of putting traditional art making, the drawing, the values, the rendering, the color, before ideas. His relationship with commercial artists and designers – he acknowledges several as teachers and mentors – is one of respect. That’s radical.

‘The Birth of Impressionism’ at the deYoung Museum

Without a major art museum in San Francisco, and the steady stream of quality traveling exhibitions that such institutions present, the recent ‘Birth of Impressionism’ show at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, of paintings on loan from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, was an event to be savored by us locals. Not a “blockbuster” but an outstanding show that we were fortunate to have –  it taught while it displayed the art; it was duly crowded but not mobbed. The show did a very good job of fleshing out the story of how Impressionism emerged in opposition to official Salon art, inspired by earlier realists and forced to create its own venues to garner the attention it deserved. It gave a sense of the communal energies involved – the cafe life that threw artists together on a regular basis. It highlighted the intense relationship of two of the most brilliant minds of the period, Manet and Mallarme, who met nightly to exchange ideas for 10 years. There were enough show-stopping paintings to make it spectacular enough, but many works were not particularly famous, just good examples to illuminate the narrative being presented.

As noted in the wall texts, ‘Impressionism’ is a broad term if you consider the wide range of work associated with that label, and forget for a moment the homogenized picture that emerges from the ever-present reproductions of a small number of works.

After a selection of more conventional paintings

seeing a room of Manets is a shock.                                                             

Could it be said that Manet saved the art of painting? He said it was his sincerity that caused his rejection by the salon. As remarkable as the salon favorites can be, that is the crux – the emotions projected by them veer towards unreality. A religious image full of false sentiment is presented as pious. Indulgent fantasy is presented as myth. Manet diverted painting from continuing down this path, and the later Impressionists acknowledged him as their leader though he never exhibited with them.

It is a truism that Manet is the beginning of the modern. His forward-looking approach makes a even a revolutionary like Courbet seem more like an old master  than a contemporary painter. He ‘blew the lid off ‘ of painting in paris by grasping the present moment as an arena for art. For him finding an historical subject meant looking at telling current events. He transposed compositions painted by the old masters into contemporary Paris. His people often look back at you; they occupy the same space as you, breath the air you breath. He peeled away the veneer of varnish typical of the salon: his art is not of timeless truths preserved in amber, but fragments of present time, freshly painted in colors that play directly on the eye . The canvases still look wet.  His pleasure in painting was exceptional, even among great painters. We americans (hedonistic puritans?) may have a hard time believing that that degree of pleasure can co-exist with demanding intellectual content. Despite his deftness and mock superficiality (an affront to the false profundity of the salon) his perceptions of imperfect people are lasting and moving. Standing in front of the Fifer is like emerging from a plunge in an alpine lake: your circulation is buzzing and your eyes are washed clean. Now you can see how vivid reality really is.

Monet pursued something quite different. Looking at this landscape, it occurred to me that there is ‘nothing’ there. No thing. No figure, no ground. I looked at the water thinking, ah, there is the water underneath the reflection of the tree. But there is no water. There is no tree either, just the blue-green light that we see where the tree presumably is.

And down where the water also presumably is (the painting doesn’t exactly care one way or another), this blue and green reflected light plays on the reflected light from the sky, interrupted by flecks of light from clouds and  hills and rooftops. Only light is painted here, and the light is not truly grounded in anything or on anything, it is just there where we see it. And we sense it is constantly changing though there is just unmoving pigment in front of our eyes.

None of the other Impressionists painted like this, only light, into light. They painted things immersed in light or caressed by light or changing in light. This is something else, a world of relativity, of vision that delights at a very high level while posing very challenging questions about the fluid nature of realty.

if Monet painted nothing, Degas painted everything.

Degas’ work is visually dazzling, but while his eye, and ours, are mesmerized by the beauty of color and line that he sees, his mind is churning with social observation and physical analyses. It takes some time before you see what is going on in front of you – is this a charming view of the magic and color of ballet behind the scenes? or is it a picture of a roomful of all-too-young girls, many distracted, many having to work and please their families without alot of options open to them. One girl has her moment in front of the ballet teacher. a good job. many others are unflatteringly seen – Degas is not generally polite in his observations – scratching their back, bored, adjusting their shoulder strap, hanging out.

Degas is humane to observe all this – he’s not alone in a field or by the seine looking at clouds – but he can be remarkably dry, sharp in his view of his fellow creatures, while immersed in a controlled intoxication of seeing. He is fascinated by the aspirations of art and the near lack of its realization in the real world. He is fascinated by the ‘art workers’, the way time weighs on the hours of their day and how awkward their movements are when they are not achieving Dance.

Is that a mother in the background consoling her daughter for today’s poor performance?

‘Whistler’s Mother’ does draw crowds; in reproduction or parody it’s everywhere.

It’s intriguing to spend time with it to think about why. The title provides a start: it is really two paintings in one, neither one by itself would have become the icon this one is. “Arrangement in Gray and Black, the Artist’s Mother” – each “half” of the painting is so well done; together “they” make a literally unforgettable painting.

There is a penetrating portrait of a puritanical, or at least a strict Protestant, New Englander, an American archetype, by an outstanding portrait painter with a uniquely sympathetic viewpoint. Then there is a very sophisticated aesthetic orchestration of shapes and values by a very gifted 2-dimensional arranger. Here Whistler approaches the asian masters he admired.

Which fascinates us more, the mother (consciously) or the luminous complex gray negative space (subliminally) surrounding her?   Our subject is seen from the side, dressed in black and white, subtly modulated black on black and translucent loosely brushed white, which tells of her sobriety and restraint. But at the same time it makes her into a pattern which is integrated into the shapes surrounding her. On the wall is another work of Whistler’s, a Nocturne, all muted grays and vague outlines. While nothing could seem more clear in our minds than that memorable silhouette of Whistler’s mother sitting on her chair, looking at the painting, we see almost no hard lines at all, even in the still cloak and wooden chair legs.

Her fingers are made of mostly of one fluid stroke of oil paint each. We might expect the lace to be suggested, but it is remarkable how softly the face is painted also.

Her expression, strict but in no way hard, is beautifully described in areas of adjacent colors loosely laid in. Whistler’s pursuit of poetic visual beauty and his mother’s seriousness make an unlikely but wonderful combination in this painting. It’s a reflection of the mutual regard these two very different people had for each other during her long stay with him in London.

Impressionism is quintessentially French, like Edith Piaf or coq au vin. what would an impressionist be like who was a jew, raised in the Danish Virgin iIslands and who ran away from home to Caracas to pursue art before coming to Paris?  That would be Camille Pissarro.

For me, critics, historians and the art audience undervalue him.

Pissarro was a student of Corot and Courbet and a mentor of Cezanne, Seurat and Gauguin. In art, allegiances are rarely so broad. Pissarro represents a kind of  balance that goes largely uncelebrated now – we are fascinated by extremes. Among so many painters of the countryside, he truly cared for rural workers, but does not push their case. He is sensitive to light but does not isolate it. He is brilliant at creating structure, but doesn’t emphasize form at the expense of feeling and color. He uses lots of neutral pigments in his colorful translations of light. Cezanne wrote in a letter to his older colleague, “You are perfectly right to speak of grey, for grey alone reigns in nature, but it is terrifyingly hard to get it.”. His work shares formal qualities with Courbet, Cezanne,  Monet, Seurat, Renoir. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish that it is his work at first glance:

He did not create a signature style, yet the combination of all the elements of his work, none asserted at the expense of others, make his art more compelling and meaningful to me than Cezanne, whom i love,  for example. It has taken me quite a while to arrive at this heresy!

His self-portrait really speaks, a reticent arrangement of paint, both colorful and tonal, a balance of  psychological scrutiny and art as art.

The 2nd half of this exhibition of loans from the d’Orsay, focussing on the Post-Impressionists, has just opened at the deYoung. I think this show may be even more remarkable, and I hope the paintings will be visible behind and between the visitors. There are very good books of each exhibition.

The artworks pictured above are: Delaunay “Diana.”  Bouguereau “Venus.”  Manet “Woman with Fans,” “Clemenceau,” “Madame Manet,” “Fifer.”  Monet “The Seine at Vetheuil.”  Degas “The Dancing Lesson.”  Whistler “Arrangement in Gray and Black, the Artist’s Mother.”  Pissarro; Pissarro and Cezanne.  Pissarro ” Hoarfrost,” “Harvest at Montfoucault,” “Small Bridge, Pontoise,” and “Self-Portrait.”