ONE
The Musee d'Orsay.
The cavernous expanse of Paris’ Musée d’Orsay is one of the world’s most pleasurable places to see art. Even with the 5th floor Impressionist Galleries undergoing the first full-scale renovation since its 1986 opening, this must-see collection of 19th century French art housed in a once long closed railway station and one time site of Orson Welles’ film, The Trial, dazzles the visitor with one iconic painting after another. And even with masses of newly itinerant Chinese tourists, weighed down with kilos of digital cameras, cruising the galleries (and unlike the Louvre, with photography mercifully interdit in the collection), the vaulted ceiling with its bright but diffused skylights invites you to stroll as if you were in an Impressionist’s plein air park.
While I was standing in front of George Seurat’s large pointillist painting Le Cirque, an almost precursor to Pop Art in its brightly colored, flat, cartoon-like surface, a family wandered in front of me, breaking my sight line and concentration. The family’s child, a boy of about 8 years, stopped, even as the others continued on, clearly captivated by the painting. Like much of Seurat’s work it is easy to get lost in the surface riot of thousands of colored paint dots that somehow cohere into a magical canvas that never fails to command the attention of children. (Even the frame is painted by the artist.) Seeing that his son had come to a stop and had broken the stream-like flow of visitors who never seem to actually pause and look at more than an attribution label, the father headed back and grabbed his son’s arm. Then he said, “Come on, Josh, we have a poster of that one at home.”
“Le Cirque” by George Seurat.
A poster at home? We all have posters at home, in one way or another. We are swamped with them, reproductions of artworks from every corner of the globe we can imagine, and if not actual posters, then books, videos or easily available internet sites to download them, just as I do for these essays. We can print almost any image we can think of. The very ubiquity of reproductions of the world’s storehouses of painting, sculpture and photography have turned most iconic images into cultural “everydays”, even clichés, duplicated, reworked, manipulated, imitated in other media as commercial selling devices— to the extent that when we actually see one of these signature works in person, we are not even certain what we are looking at or how to break through all the previous iterations we have seen, to somehow see the work itself with fresh eyes, even if we are in fact seeing it for the first time.
The day before my visit to the Musée d’Orsay, I had toured the Louvre collections, starting with its now accepted pyramid entryway by I.M. Pei.
I.M.Pei Entry Courtyard of the Louvre Museum.
The Louvre does allow cameras in the galleries and the constant shuffling around of shutterbugs makes it almost impossible to concentrate on a single work. Why the hell would I be in a major Paris museum in mid-July, anyway? Well, it was not to encounter this, though clearly I did:
That dark speck on the back wall is the “Mona Lisa.”
In the adjacent Grande Gallery of the Denon Wing of Italian paintings, any number of other great Leonardos attract scant attention as the crowds press toward Gallery Six, home to the bullet-proof encased Mona Lisa, personal video cameras running constantly in an endless Louvre length tracking shot, eyes locked on the flip screens as they pass the ranks of quatro and cinque cento paintings.
Just what is going on here with the father tugging his son away from the Seurat, and with the Lourdes-like pilgrimage to worship the eternally enigmatic smile of “La Giaconda”? Then, a few hours later, I walked through the beautifully displayed Classical Greek galleries. Most of the visitors here appeared to be Japanese. As I approached the timeless beauty of the armless Venus de Milo at the head of the gallery, I spotted a plaque thanking the generous contribution of Japanese NHK Television toward the galleries’ refurbishing.
The centerpiece of the newly refurbished Greek Galleries.
Clearly, back at home in Japan, NHK had made no secret of its awarding of this endowment to the Louvre, and millions of Japanese TV viewers knew all about it. Of course, TV being the great culture purveyor that it is, they now had to see the results for themselves.
Most of us are fortunate enough to see art in a more intimate (hopefully) encounter than this annual mid-summer stampede, and indeed there are niches in both the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay where you can quietly study masterpieces. I retreated to one of those out of the way corners at the d’Orsay, behind a massive Courbet painting, The Artist’s Studio, and tried to sort out in my own distracted head, not the masterful paintings and sculptures I had been seeing—but the mindset of this insistent, almost manic, stream of people who seemed hell-bent on looking at, or at least in the direction of, everything.
“The Painter's Studio” by Gustave Courbet.
What if—what if, in fact, many of them were not really seeing the art at all but just casually looking? Not seeing, not because of the crowds, although that was powerfully distracting, but because they already in a sense felt that they knew these paintings and sculptures? In life, when we meet a fellow human for the first time we study the face, the posture, listen to the voice, try to “read” the person, and make initial impressions about his character, try to sort out from the start how we may relate to this person. As we get to know someone this close examination most often falls away and we become more comfortable, even casual in their company, less prone to scrutiny. Or, conversely, once seen carefully, we decide to give that person a wide berth. Do we possibly look at paintings and sculptures in a similar way?
I was staying at a small hotel on the Île St. Louis, the smaller of the two “islands” splitting the Seine as it flows through Paris. The north end of the Île St. Louis yields a great back view of Notre Dame and its flying buttresses.
Notre Dame, a pigeon eyed view from the Ile St. Louis.
Every day I walked past Notre Dame along one side or the other, leaving and returning to my hotel. As I passed, hundreds of tourists were snapping photos of this great edifice. There is a real sense of delight in standing beside one of the West’s most famous buildings and having your picture taken, or as I had done myself, taking a quick snap to send to Carol on the morning of my arrival — to say “Hey, I’m in Paris.” But after having made a few photos or video pans most tourists move on, not unlike the procession of pilgrims in the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay.
Sitting behind the great Courbet canvas of The Artist’s Studio in d’Orsay I began to reflect on what exactly I was encountering here. Tourists were coming from the four corners of the globe to have a personal experience of viewing great art and architecture, yet many of them seemed oddly detached when actually standing in front of that very art. Simple travel fatigue? Data overload? Or something more ominous? I know that most guidebooks have a kind of hit-list of must see art. The actual experience of seeing that great museums like the Louvre contain an almost inexhaustible number of masterpieces well beyond the scope of any well-intentioned guidebook, can leave you with a kind of mind-blitz. But what is the effect, say, of stopping in front of one of Monet’s “Haystacks” if you have seen it and a dozen of its companions in a Monet art monograph, or in a TV documentary, or as a poster you had during your student days, hanging in your dorm room ? Excitement at finally seeing it in real life? Or a kind of déjà vu ennui?
“Haystacks: The End of Summer” by Claude Monet.
In an essay from last January I examined six of these wonderful paintings that are at the Art Institute of Chicago and how they never fail to delight me anew:
John’s Bailiwick: Claude Monet’s “Haystacks” in Chicago blog entry
TWO
Standing behind the Courbet painting, I began to recall bits of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay from 1936, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin’s overlay of Marxism may compromise his work for many of today’s readers, but his prescient thoughts about how the Capitalist (read “commercial”) perspective affects our ability to experience art, still resonates, perhaps even more than he could then have foreseen. Much of the essay is actually a critique of the movies rather than painting or photography. But two simple sentences he uses cut to the quick of how many of us today experience art:
“ …that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.… . By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique experience.”
In our efforts to become cultured citizens of society we study art and fit it into its place in political and social history, a role that often removes the art itself from its real intent — the unique creative expression of the artist or artists, even if the work were done “for hire” as was the case for much of the religious art that fills these museums today. There may be a kind of unintentional contextualization of the work itself that is antecedent in our minds to our actual viewing of it. What and how much prior information and judgment do we bring to that initial encounter, a kind of prepackaged internal discourse? Is it difficult to truly see the art we are looking at, at this very moment, because we are already pre-disposed to experience it in a certain way? Are the very tools that are meant to prepare us to engage with art also a kind of impediment to actually doing so? Or, conversely, are we somewhat indifferent to this “contextualization” because we have swallowed the pill of “art for art’s sake,” that the art itself is freestanding beyond the ken of any set of historical conditions?
My own first encounter with “art history” as a formal exegesis was when I was a student in Innsbruck while on a junior year abroad program. I was auditing a university art history class in an effort to expand my German vocabulary. The course was a deeply focused seminar on Surrealism and I was in way over my head, not only in the use of German art critical cant but in just what the hell Surrealism is. But instead of running through a cavalcade of famous paintings by the movement’s major artists, the professor showed us about a dozen slides at each class session and examined each work from multiple perspectives. What I brought away from the course as a gift from this marvelous teacher was a methodical way of looking at art. Even though I struggled with the art terms in German, the passion with which he moved his pointer over the image, the focusing of our eyes on detail after detail, then pulling back for an overview, informed an approach that has remained with me to this day.
I am not very sanguine that this approach is any way close to the way many of us today are experiencing art. Watching so many young people sort of briefly pause or stutter-step past works they recognize or not even cruise past ones they don’t, makes me wonder about just how pervasive this errant way of looking may be. Are the very media that are purveyors of cultural material also contributing to our becoming inured to the experience of art? Is it easy for us to look at art, but difficult to really see it? Is it so tough to break through the accretions of familiarity created by reproductive media, in order to have a real experience? And if one wants to extrapolate wider, does this sense of instant familiarity dampen or even occlude our ability to experience the external world itself, the real world? Does the world we live in become a kind of simulacrum of what we have seen already in film or on television, the principal media that occupy ever more of our waking hours? Think of the cliché of the tourist who visits the Grand Canyon or “Old Faithful” at Yellowstone Park, recording the experience with a hastily taken video, and whose principal experience of it will emerge only in watching the video on his TV back home.
THREE
How do we create an “authentic experience” of art, or of the world itself, and of our fellow humans in an age when so much experience, art and life, is commodified? It’s not easy. Benjamin wrote of the “aura” of art. He elaborated by saying:
“The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol.”
On the surface, this may be true. But if this view is also the limiting element of how we experience art, then there is no significant point to studying it. But, if art is an expression of universal as well as local impulses, then our focus on its particular ethos may enrich our experience, even though it does not define or limit it. Art should be a witness of and a testament to our shared humanity and to its diversity. The very particulars of time and place that may deepen our appreciation of art demand a lot of work, not a casual walk-by. On the wall adjacent to Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio is another even more important canvas in the history of 19th Century painting. It is his A Burial at Ornans. Both of these paintings are about 10 x 20 feet in size, larger than many movie screens, a fact that creates a totally different in person viewing experience than studying any poster-sized reproduction or a blog-sized one like this.
“The Burial at Ornans” by Gustave Courbet.
As I looked toward this painting, a group of about 30 English school children were sitting on the floor as a museum guide explained to them in close detail why this great work is one of the masterpieces of Western art. Its apotheosis of the common man rendered on a heroic scale had previously been reserved mainly for documenting religious and royal events. The young people were riveted both by the richly detailed story narrated by the guide and by the sheer overwhelming scale and presence of the painting. You can read a museum commentary about it here:
A critical consensus builds around certain works of art, ever shifting and subject to re-evaluation—but nonetheless, one that becomes a kind of “canon.” And it is this canon with its hierarchy of value that is presented to us as part of our cultural education. As I stood in the space behind Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio I saw another painting, completely hidden from view unless you, too, had walked behind the Courbet canvas. It was set against the museum’s Seine sidewall. In the 15 or so minutes that I stood there examining this huge work, about 13 by 18 feet, only two people entered the area. This “academic” painting titled Divina Tragedia (an allusion to Dante’s great poem) by mid-nineteenth century Salon painter Paul Chenavard, is one of the losers of art history.
“Divina Tragedia” by Paul Chenavard.
Maligned at the time of its completion by both fellow academics and insurgent critic-poet Charles Baudelaire, it had been set aside early after its creation, only rediscovered by the Musée du Luxembourg in 1974. The d’Orsay website describes its fate:
Echoes of great Renaissance frescoes and Baroque ceiling murals pervade this painting. It is a totally Academy style work created as a dying gasp of the Old Order during the heart of the plein air and Impressionist revolutions. Its fleshly, heroic ambitions do seem in certain ways to be all of two hundred years out of date. Yet I was riveted by it. Every bit of the critical pre-conditioning I brought to this painting seemed to call out for its dismissal—yet the work was executed with such technical and aesthetic perfection, even to the choice of a pastel-like near grisaille rendering of tone and texture, that I found myself overwhelmed by it. Here are several closer details:
“Divina Tragedia” (detail).
“Divina Tragedia” (detail).
I stood there for a long time in a kind of art-critical feedback loop thinking about why so many people could walk casually past some of the world’s most revered masterpieces and why I could be way-layed by a painting hanging in this gallery, put there mainly as an example of the kind of painting the Courbet Realist revolution had decimated. How does one begin to answer these kinds of questions? Perhaps, it’s a simple matter of “à chacun son goût.” What is important, finally, is that we each have to decide for ourselves what is meaningful. And we can really only do that if we make the effort to engage the art on its own terms, in its own place.
On my way out of the d’Orsay I realized I had missed seeing the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte whose great Paris Street: Rainy Day is one of the highlights of the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and, along with the Monet Haystacks, a must see whenever I am in Chicago.
“Paris Street: Rainy Day” by Gustave Caillebotte.
This painting has been described by some as “a major painting by a minor painter,” an art critical condescension that has annoyed me since I saw a major retrospective of Caillebotte’s work years ago at LACMA. D’Orsay has my favorite painting of the entire early modernist movement, a medium sized canvas by this sometimes putative “amateur.” It is called “The Floor Scrapers.”
“The Floor Scrapers” by Gustave Caillebotte.
I saw several paintings by this enigmatic artist that day — but not the “Floor Scrapers.” This painting has been one of my own pleasures for decades, since I first saw it in the Jeu de Paume back when the d’Orsay was still an abandoned railway station. I can’t call it a guilty pleasure exactly, because it is so highly regarded — by some. But why did I not see it today at the d’Orsay? Did I simply miss it? Or has some curator or art historian seen it as a future Divina Tragedia, no longer a part of the “canon”?
It is exactly this kind of painting that is waiting for an eager eight-year-old child to find, take to his eyes and heart — and hopefully with an equally curious dad or mom in tow, stop and see it together—even if they already have a poster of it at home.
As always, please share your thoughts and comments. Click the “comment” icon at the top of the posting.
Perhaps overburden minds in high paced world become less sensitive, people encounter art with somewhat polluted perception and children are more pure and more susceptible. It takes a special state of mind to acknowledge and experience beauty, perhaps there should be more courses of art appreciation. It is not difficult to see art it is not easy to open one’s mind, pre-disposition is a big barrier.
This particular subject hits home with me. I’m on vacation in Maine and I continually witness the tourists with their digital cameras documenting the moment, but not experiencing it. My wife vacationed here many times as a child, so we mix with the locals fairly easily, and they don’t walk around with digital cameras to experience the day. I’ve thought that this is indeed a simulacrum of their experience here — it is not real until seen on a screen (of any size). What a sad comment this relay of reality is. What is real? What is art? What is a real artistic experience?
This was an enjoyable post. As a religious art junkie, I was particularly taken by your comments about the interpretations of “The Burial at Ornans” by Gustave Courbet and “Divina Tragedia” by Paul Chenavard. While I think I understood your comment that the works moved beyond religiousity, I beg to differ. I found the “The Burial at Ornans” to be a grand reinforcement of religious respect from ordinary people, but with regard to being mesmerized by “Divina Tragedia”, a work past its time, I can humbly agree. I’d never seen the later but now long to do so just as you have shared.
I once asked a friend of mine if he’d ever been to Paris and he actually said: “Well, I’ve been to the Paris in Vegas…that was a lot like Paris.”
I think “looking yet not seeing” is actually one of the tenets of postmodernism (as I recall from my, ahem, college philosophy days – Baudrillard, y’know). It’s like the Vegas Strip: Y’want Paris? It’s there. New York? They’ve got it. Venice? Yeah — The Venetian! None of it’s real of course, but in this postmodern era of ours, the notion of “real” is so subjective and generally mistrusted that the simulacrum has basically supplanted the real across the board.
I mean, we’ve all by now heard someone refer to Skype as having a “face to face conversation” right? You get to that point as a civilization, it’s no wonder we go to the Louvre to snap an iPhoto of the Mona Lisa and move on.
What is missed by not seeing the original piece? The Artist. A painting is so much less about the overall image, and so much more about the emotion, and personality of the artist…What is different about photography (no less an art form , but one much more about the image and choices) is the physicality of painting. The strength of the stroke.The build up of paint to a sculptural level. The Incredible amounts of personal decisions that go into every square inch..Yes the Image is there and you can see that in a poster just fine. However you can never experience the sex, breath, emotion, heart of the painter/creator
A quote came to my mind when I was reading this excellent essay. Max Frisch wrote over 55 years ago (well, let me try and translate the quote first – a process which in itself is a sort of “mechanical reproduction”, as the aura and authenticity of the creation is lost when replacing the original words with intelligible ones):
“We never experienced the very most of our personal conception of the world with our own eyes, or more precisely: likely with our own eyes, but not there and then – we are seers from a distance, hearers from a distance, knowers from a distance.”
Among the many nuances lost in translation are – besides the unique philosophical term “Weltbild” – the author’s play on words. “Fernseher”, translated by me in this context as “seers from a distance” (but also plausibly translatable as “seers into the distance”), most notably in its original German language denotes the bare bone “television set”. Looking back in time, the quote seems almost naïve by comparison with today’s endless and instant availability of information. It’s astonishing to witness how far the invention of the wheel has gotten us.
The most deplorable attitude towards art, and even worse, towards your own children, is that essentially the message is: “You’re better off owning a cheap reproduced piece of it than study the original source in depth”. Little Josh from your tale “knew” the image, or rather, “knew of” the piece of art and wanted to experience it. To explore the secret behind the brush strokes, visible to him for the first time, sensing a direct connection to the artist’s hand that once touched that very canvas there and then. The empirical involvement, the direct contact of the one-on-one encounter has the power of disclosing a truth to the observer that has no match. It becomes illumination, creating a silent dialogue and carving a groove into the wax of our memories. It becomes personal. And anthropologically speaking, the communal viewing and sharing of any spiritual experience ultimately reverberates through the ages in temples of all kind, cinema not excluded. Are facebook and twitter really the next temple?
The same day I read this essay, I stumbled upon this article (on my iPhone, I must admit). In essence, it illustrates the same predicament: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html?scp=1&sq=plagiarism&st=cse
I’m including the original Max Frisch quote from his novel “Stiller” for the personal pleasure of hopefully not only the visiting scholar to Innsbruck of so many years ago: “Das allermeiste in unserem persönlichen Weltbild haben wir nie mit eigenen Augen erfahren, genauer: wohl mit eigenen Augen, doch nicht an Ort und Stelle; wir sind Fernseher, Fernhörer, Fernwisser.” (Stiller, Max Frisch)
I fear, and am afraid, that all of us are guilty in this day and age, of reliving the moment rather than living it. In the hustle to move along in life, I have found myself hastily taking a digital photo (with a phone, no less!) of something that I would have preferred to have stayed and become a part of; however, not having time, the reliving of the experience later would have to suffice.
Visiting the museums you name in your excellent essay, as well as others like the Uffizi in Italy, was a life altering experience for me. I well remember standing transfixed before works of art. Even though many I knew from reproductions in books and, yes, even posters, the reality of the artists time and labor to create something that spoke to the heart, and could also affect the glands, was so compellingly transformative, that I returned over and over to witness them again, until I had to depart.
I’m afraid, that culturally, we have become those who make lists. People go to see, but not to experience, as an example, see the myriad books that are lists of things to see before you die, etc. The joy is that there will always be something that will captivate a mind and soul to see and thus expand that one’s horizon beyond the commonplace.
Thank you John for your thoughts about our increasingly fragmented and “fast-art” way of interacting (or actually, not interacting) with art. Your experiences in Paris reminded me of the Radiohead song “The Tourist” (“…hey man, slow down…”) which, if I remember correctly, was inspired by tourists taking pictures of the Mona Lisa without actually looking at it. They could say they’d seen the Mona Lisa, but, of course, they hadn’t really seen it, instead had only glanced at it through the lens of a camera.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between chronos time (clock / chronological time) and kairos time (destined / significant / opportune time) and it seems to me that, at its best, our experience of art is kairos experience, when time, in a way, slows and something of meaning and depth is transmitted between the painting and the viewer. But that means slowing down and allowing time for the painting to work on us. If instead we see a visit to the museum as chronos experience we try to fit in “seeing” as many paintings as we can, but without allowing the time for the paintings to connect with us and to work on us, and because of this we emerge unchanged by the experience.
There is also, I feel, something somewhat passive about chronos experience of art. Kairos requires a willingness to look deeply, for us to bring ourselves to the experience, and also an openness to what the picture has to communicate to us at that particular moment of our lives. This is an active, not a passive, way of seeing and it is a way of seeing that may be being eroded by the consumerist nature of western society. But an active way of looking is something that is worth cultivating, both in ourselves and in the society around us. These thoughtful and fascinating essays make a contribution to that, so once again, John, thank you for them.
I have come across your blog by accident and want to say thank you John Bailey for your thoughtful observations.
I am an artist from Australia and have also stopped and questioned why an eight year old can be distracted by an artwork when their parents are so content with second or third generation digital images with no concept of scale, surface, actual colour or experience of an artist’s brush strock.
I have also just been to see an impressionist block buster (for want of another word) at the Australian National Gallery and was taken by the deep sense of light in Monet’s Haystacks and it was a given that I had to spend ‘real time’ to appreciate Monet’s ability to really feel light.
I was standing next to a woman who asked ‘why bother’ and could only feel a loss for her, to be so damaged that there was need to see the ‘blockbuster’ but to have no appreciation. It was as if she was waiting for the Terminator to come out blazing from behind the haystack.
Have most viewers lost all appreciation for the simplicity of the strock of a brush or has cinema, television or the PSP robbed us of being still within a captured moment or is it just the tryanny of this century that has made so many fearful of staying still long enough to let some little magic seep in.
I also feel that we are so bombarded with such amazing technical renditions of so many writers and directors imaginations through film, animation and the technology of video games that expression is taken for granted, we want it 3D or virtual and the simplicity of a painting is as dull as dishwater, it doesn’t move – for goodness sake. To have to stand still and let the eye move around a canvas to let there be some connection between the retina and the heart to express emotion or something as amazing as the reflection of light is a big ask.
There is a beautiful photograph of Paul Klee drawing at the kitchen table next to his child who is in a high chair playing and in the room behind both of them is the mother playing the piano, I like to keep that image close to me. It makes me appreciate that children are the real teachers and if we can can keep the music and the need to investigate with our hands our minds should stay a little open so that we can still the real wonders in the world.