In search of Watteau

THE NEW YORK SUN
September 17, 2008

In Search of Watteau
By JAMES PANERO

A review of Jed Perl's 'Antoine's Alphabet' (Knopf)

Who is your favorite painter? Jed Perl, the art critic for the New Republic, responds: "Whenever I'm asked to name my favorite painter I reply, without a moment's hesitation: 'Watteau.'"

Come again? Watteau? A confection of the ancien regime, Jean-Antoine Watteau was born in 1684 and lived a mere 36 years, dying in 1721, the master of the fête gallant and the portraitist of the commedia dell'arte. It's not the answer you might expect to come out of a tough-minded critic on the contemporary scene.

But "Antoine's Alphabet" (Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages, $25.95), a brief, deeply felt follow-up to "New Art City," Mr. Perl's muscular account of the New York art world at mid-century, defies expectations. "I may be perceived as being somewhat sardonic," Mr. Perl writes in his introduction, "or ironic, or even impish when I say that Watteau is my favorite painter, as if I were trying to mock the question, or were hiding my true feelings behind a dandyish façade."

Far from retreating from reality, however, Mr. Perl finds engagement with the present moment through Watteau. "This artist who said hardly anything about his paintings and struck most of his friends as something of a mystery man took as his essential subject the invention of self-consciousness, the struggle to feel fully alive." While this critic who rails against the commercialism of the contemporary art world makes no mention of today's art politics, one cannot help but see a counter-example in the fancy-free Watteau to the predetermined art that now fuels record sales at Sotheby's and is bought up by the oligarchs of Beijing, Moscow, and New York as cynical investments.

In its best sense, Mr. Perl sees the birth of the modern in Watteau's figures awakening to their own imperfections. "Watteau's young people seem to want, above all else, to feel at ease, somewhat at ease, in an uneasy world," he writes. In work such as Watteau's famous painting of "Gilles," the contemplative clown, Mr. Perl finds "doubts," though they are "clothed in the commedia dell'arte lightness of an improvisation or a folly." He calls Watteau "The man who practically invented the bohemian imagination." In his aesthetic wanderlust, his reveries of vagabond performers, Watteau did not follow the dictates of the church or a rich clientele, but pursued art for art's sake, the prototypical modernist.

"Antoine's Alphabet" is not a generic appreciation, or a typical brief history. Mr. Perl presents his volume as a primer, arranged as an alphabet: A is for actors, Anthony, and Art-for-Art's-Sake; B is for Backs, Beardsley, and Beginnings, and so on. "The power of certain great paintings," Mr. Perl writes, "no matter how much self-conscious craft the artist brings to the work, is the quality of a daydream, an orchestration of elements whose meaning remains ambiguous or contradictory." Mr. Perl follows the same daydreaming impulse in the footloose presentation of his book. Each definition examines an aspect of Watteau while also offering a meditation on the Watteau-esque — a glint of history, an inspiring theme, a personal rumination. For example, we get:

Beginnings: So much begins with intense yet fragmentary experiences. At the start of a friendship or a love affair there may be some acute recognition, some striking sliver of experience, although initially it's impossible to know where this will go, if indeed it will go anywhere. ...

Cappricio: Watteau is recklessly capricious, a weaver of arabesques who embraces the grotesque, not in the sense of gothic horrors but in the sense of curious divagations and transmutations.

My favorite is "Enough: One day in his studio, D said to me: 'I've always had enough. I'm tall enough, I'm good-looking enough. I have enough money.'" Enough said.

The literary games on display might, in the hands of another writer, come off as an indulgence, but here they serve a clear purpose: They not only describe the mood of an artist, but they let us inhabit his sensibility. The book speaks in the serendipitous language of Watteau's canvases — serendipitous, additionally, because we know very little about Watteau outside of his work. "At the time of his death," Mr. Perl writes, "Watteau was a famous figure in Paris, with his share of devoted friends. The nuggets of reliable information about his life, however, are few and far between, so that every attempt to construct a biography from what scattered facts there are appears bound to fail."

Mr. Perl is not the first to take an unorthodox approach to his history of this artist. Watteau's most successful biography, Mr. Perl recounts, came out of a fictionalized memoir by Walter Pater called "A Prince of Court Painters," which was published in 1885, and which, "in assembling and readjusting some of the facts of the artist's life ... constructs a fable about Watteau that is truer to what we feel when we're looking at his paintings and drawings than a more straightforward account could possibly be." In his story, Pater "imagines himself as a part of the eighteenth-century Pater family that actually knew Watteau."

Mr. Perl here does something of the same, going one step further. Rather than merely imaging himself an associate of Watteau, he becomes a Watteau in print. So am I crazy to see a resemblance between the portrait of Watteau drawn by François Boucher, reproduced in the book, and the photo of Mr. Perl on the dust jacket? Mr. Perl constructs his book around the arabesque, the daydream, and the fragment. "Much of the fragment's fascination has to do with its delicious air of possibility," he writes, "for a fragment provokes a partial experience that can leave us with a heightened awareness of what we are missing."

Many of those "experiences" are personal for Mr. Perl. But that does not mean they are artful dodges. Rather, Watteau allows this trenchant thinker — arguably our best art critic writing today — to show, for once, his own hand. We see the painted ceiling of his boyhood home in Brooklyn, and are given a manifesto of his desires in paint: "What I really want from art is a variety of qualities, a multiplicity of qualities, a kaleidoscope of qualities, the unpredictability of qualities, qualities that are as varied as the artists who create the works of art."

In its oddity, the book gambles and wins. I hope that "Antoine's Alphabet" will become a cult classic among artists, a call to caprice, in the way that Dave Hickey's "Air Guitar," a critic's libertarian riff, gave license to a generation of artists to forego politics for the rapture of the marketplace. In this capricious cross-pollination of history and memoir, Jed Perl does not merely show us how to live. Like Watteau, he illuminates the struggle to feel fully alive.

Mr. Panero is the managing editor of the New Criterion.

Hudson River Schooled

Jacob Collins, founder of the Hudson River School for Landscape, on location in Hunter, New York, August 7, 2008

THE NEW CRITERION
SEPTEMBER 2008

Hudson River Schooled
by James Panero

On Jacob Collins's Hudson River School for Landscape.

Anyone who suspects that nineteenth-century American art has less to teach us than twentieth-century modernism should take a drive up the winding road of Route 23A, up Kaaterskill Clove in the eastern escarpment of the Catskill Mountains. Here in the town of Hunter, New York, a group of young artists is studying the nineteenth-century traditions of the Hudson River School by walking in the footsteps of the original American masters.

In the summer months, Hunter can be a desolate modern town—a weedy ski village in downtrodden Greene County trying to survive the heat while waiting for snow. Ten years ago, an organization called the Catskill Mountain Foundation saw a need to turn this area into more than just a seasonal resort, so the Foundation bought up real estate downtown and set about building an arts program, offering the traditionalist painter and teacher Jacob Collins the use of the Foundation’s buildings for a summer painting school.

This donation became the beginning of Collins’s Hudson River School for Landscape. Dedicated to reviving nineteenth-century landscape technique by “modeling itself after the artistic, social and spiritual values of the Hudson River School painters,” Collins wrote in his mission statement, his school aimed to “bring together the reawakening enthusiasm for the old American painters.” Ideally, he says, his student artists “and their beautiful representations of nature will help to lead the culture back to a stronger connection to the landscape.” This year Collins offered five-week summer fellowships for two dozen painters to live together in Hunter and paint in the surrounding countryside. The school term ran from July 17 through August 22. I dropped in during one mid-session weekend.

Over 180 years before my visit, the painter Thomas Cole went by ship up the Hudson from New York City and disembarked at West Point. He traveled into the Catskill Mountains to paint the terrain around which I was staying, becoming the inspiration for all artists who followed and the ultimate reason for my trip. Cole’s show of Catskill landscapes was a smash when he exhibited in New York in 1826. Widely publicized in the New York Evening Post, Cole’s three paintings included his image of the falls at Kaaterskill, still flowing just down the road from present-day Hunter.

In his History of the American People, Paul Johnson calls Cole, “the first painter to appreciate the immensity of the opportunities offered by the scale and variety of the American landscape.” His Falls at Kaaterskill were likewise “the first American masterpiece of landscape art.” Cole’s achievements sparked an entire movement of landscape painting and opened up the Catskills, in particular the area around Kaaterskill, to a wave of artists. Palenville, at the base of the gorge of Kaaterskill Clove, became America’s first art colony. Lavish hotels went up along the mountaintops around The Clove. A year after Cole’s death, in 1849, Asher B. Durand dedicated perhaps the most famous American landscape painting, Kindred Spirits, to his colleague by depicting Cole and William Cullen Bryant, the poet and editor of the Post, standing on a promontory overlooking Kaaterskill. (In a lowpoint for New York’s artistic patrimony, this painting, in the collection of the New York Public Library for over a century, was sold in 2005 for $35 million to the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton of Arkansas.)

At the time of Cole’s initial trip in 1825, the changing wilderness of New York State was very much on the American mind. Emerson’s Transcendentalism was still more than a decade off, but the idea of a natural theology, as articulated by William Paley at the turn of the century, had instilled a new reverence for the natural world. Meanwhile, the Erie Canal, the technological marvel that tamed the West by connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, was built between 1817 and 1825. The rough landscape of rural New York took a literary turn in these years as well. In 1819, Washington Irving located his popular story of Rip Van Winkle in the Catskill Mountains, and four years later James Fenimore Cooper published his colonial story of the Catskill woodsman Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers—one of Cole’s reference books for his trip.

“This is the birthplace, the origin,” Collins said to me when I found him in early August, painting a sky study in an overgrown parking lot off Hunter’s Main Street. Like his students, Collins paints from eight in the morning until sunset, seven days a week when he is in town, building up a portfolio of studies that he will assemble into complete landscapes back in the studio.

After the daytime painting hours are over, the Hudson River School for Landscape turns into a commune and a summer camp. The students in each cabin prepare meals for their housemates. The bonhomie of the school is not lost on Collins, who wants to revive the camaraderie of the Hudson River School. After dinner on the evening I visited, the students laid out the day’s work for a critique that quickly turned technical. “So what would you do, Jacob?” asked Josh, a student, of his latest forest scene. “I would put something in front of it,” said Collins. Then: “When you have a white sky, you can drop the value one step.”

After the crits, Collins introduced George O’Hanlon, the owner of a paint company called Natural Pigments, who came in from California to give a talk. Collins runs a regular evening lecture series for his students, and on the day I visited O’Hanlon delivered a PowerPoint presentation on “The Secrets of the Old Masters.” His talk lasted from nine to eleven-thirty in the evening, but Collins’s students showed little sign of wear as O’Hanlon moved from the chemistry of pigments to the nuances of linseed oil. (His secret of the Old Masters had to do, in part, with the viscous properties of natural pigment versus the homogenized consistency of modern oil paints).

The next morning, a number of the students made the half-mile hike up Kaaterskill Falls. At 260 feet, the two-drop falls of Kaaterskill are the highest in New York. They are also as breathtaking as the day Cole first saw them. Cole’s dark autumn scene of the double cascades, with a mammoth boulder resting in the falls’ upper amphitheater, is both an accurate depiction of the topography and an awesome image of an untamed wilderness—a tiny, lone figure can be seen among the straggly trees and the black rocks.

Have Collins’s students been able to approach the majesty of Cole’s great image? Their successes will depend on the final paintings that, like Cole, they work up in the studio from studies in the field. But I am concerned that these students, with their small, scrupulous studies of rocks and stumps, may be missing the forest for the trees of genuine Hudson River School landscape. In his mission statement, Collins maintains, “It is through extensive and real engagement that the artist learns to capture the spirit of the landscape. The many hundreds of hours spent out in the sun and the wind, scrupulously studying nature, transform the artist. It was by this experience that the old masters of the landscape realized their art. And it is how we hope to realize ours.”

Pragmatism informed by observation is laudable, but during my visit I came to wonder if “extensive and real engagement” was truly enough to “capture the spirit of the landscape.” Collins’s students may be learning the vocabulary of the Hudson River School, but I saw little evidence that they are being taught how to speak it. Collins’s students are young, mainly in their twenties. They are the products of an art world that shouts but has little to say. So the silence offered by Collins’s draftsman drills, developed in his schools in New York and carried over to landscape, is itself a form of rebellion, a release that looks for depth in the details of leaves and bark. But this must only be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The original Hudson River School was full of secrets—perhaps more than any other movement in American art. So the prospect of a genuine revival giving way to false profundities couched in technique is a serious concern. The original Hudson River School artists did not go into the wilderness to paint illustrations of the natural world. They went to paint the God they saw manifest in the natural world. “It’s the best piece of work that I’ve met with in the woods,” Natty Bumppo says of Kaaterskill Falls in Cooper’s story, “and none know how often the hand of God is seen in the wilderness, but them that rove it for a man’s life.”

Can there be a Hudson River School revival without the revival of God? This is the question that Collins and his students must confront. Their studies, no matter how precise, may never come together as a whole without an underlying philosophy that goes beyond mere proficiency. In a small exhibition I saw of last year’s student work, I found a landscape by Mikel Olazabal, River in Hunter, NY, to be the most accomplished but also the most problematic painting of the show. After viewing it, I walked across the street and down to the riverbank where, along an old foundation, I found the exact spot on which his image was based. Olazabal’s landscape was highly proficient, full of happy thoughts, but it struck me as altogether wrong. With flowers peeking through the rocks and every leaf on every tree glittering in the sun, his buffed-up interpretation was an idealized illustration of rural renewal, mood communicated through mood lighting.

I don’t want to suggest that landscape painters need to seek out ugliness over beauty, but if an artist believes a landscape evinces God, as the original Hudson River School painters surely did, then an artist should not improve on it without cause, or he risks descending into sentimentality.

On the day I visited, the waters of Schoharie Creek had been redirected through plastic pipes around a construction site upstream, so that the dried-out riverbed gave off a sooty odor. I am not sure this unsightly mess would be right on its own for treatment in paint, but when I think back to the best landscape painting of the nineteenth century—and the art of such modern interpreters as Rackstraw Downes—great work is defined by the intersection of industry, agriculture, and wilderness: the tamed farmland in contrast with the rugged forest in The Oxbow by Thomas Cole, or the railroad and tree stumps populating George Inness’s verdant images of the Lackawanna.

For the Hudson River School painter, the entire landscape was part of God’s world. Such thoughts, of course, rarely infiltrate modern belief. “And what remains when disbelief has gone?” asks Philip Larkin in his poem “Church Going”: “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,/ A shape less recognizable each week,/ A purpose more obscure.” To understand the Hudson River School today, Collins’s students must learn to see themselves as seminarians as well as painters. They otherwise risk becoming the mere technicians of grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, and sky. Deep in the Catskill wilderness, they may be in a house of God, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got religion.

'Nature and Nurture'

ART & ANTIQUES
September 2008

Nature and Nurture
By James Panero

Fresh from success in Venice, Arte Povera sculptor Giuseppe Penone is poised to gain wider recognition.

You would never expect a movement called Arte Povera to produce rich art. But Giuseppe Penone, a standardbearer of the “poor” Italian school that came of age in the 1960s, has always thrived on contradiction. This soft-spoken, unassuming sculptor has become one of Italy’s best living artists by producing sensuous work that explores the relationship between nature and man. Arte Povera has already achieved recognition in its native country as one of the great modernist movements, with a sensibility that cuts against the Futurism of the prewar years. Now it’s time for the art world beyond Italy, and particularly in the United States, to turn its attention to this artist and the enduring movement he represents.

In the opening lines of the Georgics, the Roman poet Virgil wondered, “What makes the cornfields smile?” Penone has been asking the same question since he first manipulated the trees and vines around his home into his earliest work. Born in 1947 on a farm in Garessio Borgo Ponte—an ancient village in the Vall’ Organa region, near Turin in the Ligurian Alps—Penone has systematically transformed his agricultural inheritance into an artistic legacy. His farm, which was purchased by his family in 1881 and began as a vineyard with potatoes and wheat sown between rows of grape vines, was his primary inspiration.

Penone’s principles and dedication to his materials have only deepened over 40 years of work. At the 2007 Venice Biennale, his installations in Italy’s new national pavilion came as a revelation to those who made the pilgrimage to the show on the far reaches of the Arsenale. Penone’s sculptures stood out as the most visceral objects in the sprawling international exhibition. He molded cowhide into the texture of tree bark and suspended the results from the walls. He applied marble to the floors and carved the stone in such a way that the veins showed in high relief. He took milled beams and chipped away at the wood grain, revealing the former trees and branches contained within. He carved out a trough from the oldest growth of a wood block and filled the void with sap, the pool of liquid giving the entire room an aromatic fragrance. “I think people were really surprised by Venice,” says New York dealer Marian Goodman, who is mounting an exhibition by Penone at her gallery this month. “He got an enormous response. They had never seen a really big piece of Penone’s before.”

“Leather is like skin,” Penone says from his home in San Raffaele Cimena, a town outside Turin, explaining one aspect of the Venice installation. “The tree becomes like an animal when it is covered by the leather. In a way, the work suggests there is no reality that is completely definite— human, mineral and vegetal. But human can become vegetal, vegetal can become mineral, mineral can become human.” According to Goodman, the artist “always has this idea that things in nature exist in many forms.”

Penone’s understanding of natural materials is informed by rural Italian life. “Perhaps 40 years ago they produced wine,” he says of the village where he lives and works. “Now it is wild because people leave the land to work in the city. It is quite interesting to live there because we are in contact with nature, but it is also very close to the town.”

His practice of reviving the natural properties of processed materials— the grain of a tree from milled wood or the veins of marble from dressed stone— expresses the anti-industrial bent of Arte Povera. In the “Italian miracle” of the 1950s and early 1960s, the northern part of the country witnessed a rapid industrialization that contrasted sharply with its traditional land-based culture. A recession during the mid-1960s cast these differences in sharper relief. In 1967, writer Germano Celant coined the term “Arte Povera” to describe the young artists who were starting to look back to Italy’s preindustrial past. Feeling impoverished by science and progress, they took up poor materials. In her recent survey Arte Povera (Phaidon Press, 2005), curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev attributes the movement’s “references to a preindustrial agrarian civilization and a harmonious, Arcadian world of craft-based economy” to “the contradictions of a perhaps too rapid postwar industrialization.”

During the same time period in the United States, Earth artists, conceptualists and minimalists found themselves responding to similar cultural and economic circumstances, but they developed a more dystopian vision underscored by their use of industrial materials. The Italian Povera artists—notably Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis and Mario and Marisa Merz—shared Penone’s desire to work directly with nature. Mario Merz created sculptures by using the branches of a tree as a mold for wax; Pino Pascali’s Canali di irrigazione, a sculpture made of earth and water, made reference to primitive agricultural constructions.

“Arte Povera is one of the most enduring groups of sculptures of the last half of the 20th century,” says Goodman. “American museums have been slow to give credit to bodies of work that come from other countries, and Americans are very partial to painting. It’s our loss that sculpture isn’t perceived on the same level.” American museums should take notice. Beginning in 2001, an exhibition of early Arte Povera, originating at Tate Modern in London, traveled to Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., but the last major New York exhibition took place more than 20 years ago, at P.S.1. Rumors have circulated ever since that the Museum of Modern Art would organize a retrospective show. As the work of its most energetic artist ripens to perfection, the achievements of Arte Povera should not be allowed to wither on the vine.