As a teacher of the humanities, I believe in the enriching, educational and joyful value of art in our lives, and I believe that the various arts are paths to self-discovery. Art intensifies our lives by providing quality moments between the tick and tock of chronological time. Whether resonating with our desires and hopes; or giving us insights into our anxieties and nightmares; or providing sublime moments of splendor and beauty, art complements and intensifies our lives. We return to our everyday world more aware of what it is to be human. By deflecting us from tasks and suspending us from everyday concerns, the arts — music, theater, dance, cinema, literature — provide another kind of reality.
My focus today will be on painting and sculpture.
One of the great resources of the Cornell campus is the Johnson Museum of Art. I not only often visit with my wife, but I also find occasions within or outside classes to introduce my students to some of its treasures. The museum contains a world-class Asian collection as well as significant holdings in both American art beginning with the nineteenth Hudson River School and twentieth and twenty-first century European art.
As a bridge to our Johnson Art Museum and as an opportunity to share the lifetime pleasure that visiting museums and galleries has given me, I want to suggest how we might look at paintings and sculptures.
Take a first slow look and ask yourself what the most important aspects are of what you see. Ask yourself what kind of painting you are observing. Is it realistic — a portrait, a landscape, a narrative, a religious painting with a devotional purpose — or is it abstract with a focus on the paint itself, recognizable and odd shapes, and/or the process of painting? Or is the painting an illuminating distortion with aspects of both realism and abstraction?
Let us turn to sculpture. If possible, walk around a work of sculpture. Notice what materials the artist is using. Is it clay, stone, bronze or something else? Is the shape realistic or abstract, or as with Rodin, a combination of both? How does the size and texture shape our response?
To give yourself an opportunity for multiple responses, move around and look at a painting or sculpture from different perspectives, including moving closer and backing up and moving to both the left and right of your original view. Do not rush; the average person looks at the Mona Lisa for only 15 seconds.
Even during a museum visit of several hours, you will not be able to spend a half hour on each work. What I often do is look briefly at a room in a museum and choose one appealing work to concentrate on. Or if several paintings by a favorite artist are in a room, I might focus on that room. If you have visited a museum countless times, as I have the major museums in NYC (the Met, MoMA, Frick), you need not worry about missing something because you know there will be another visit.
With paintings, I first notice colors, lines, the thickness of the paint and whether and where the artist uses broad strokes or tiny dabs, perhaps how the artist layers the painting, maybe even like Rembrandt using a palette knife. Ask yourself how the painter is using those aspects to invite you to foreground some aspects of the work.
Paintings are sensuous, some more than others. You can learn to respond to the tactility of paint on canvas. Imagine touching a painting (but don’t do so in a museum). With such abstract artists as Jackson Pollock, we can experience the way the painter plays with the paint and imagine the actual process of painting. In Pollock’s case, he added paint to a canvas as it lay on the floor.
I am also cognizant of size. Looking at a small domestic by the Dutch painter Vermeer is not the same as looking at a large mythical or religious painting by the Venetian Veronese. An illuminating geometric Giacometti sculpture of a human is different from the geometric and angular shapes of a large abstract sculpture by Henry Moore.
Keep in mind that art in many cultures was created for religious purposes and that we often don’t know the individual artist. Understanding art means understanding different cultures and historical periods, something stressed by the splendid exhibit of early Buddhist Art at the Met: “Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE-400 CE.”
What is in front of you won’t change, even if, as you move around and learn more, your perception and understanding will. Unlike literature, which evolves through both the creator’s imagined time and the reader’s process of reading, painting and sculpture are frozen in time and space.
But often, unless the work is purely abstract, you can imagine the preceding backstory of what you see and the implications of what might happen next. If a painting has a mythological or religious theme, you may know the prior and succeeding narrative. If it is a landscape, you can consider how the setting looked in prior seasons or even in prior times and how it will look in the future. If the painting contains people, think about what they have been doing and what they will be doing. If the painting — or sculpture — is a portrait, you may speculate on what happened to create the figure before you. From his or her expression, gestures and garments, you may have some thoughts about what might happen next.
Think about the formal choices the artist has made to create the imagined world of the painting or sculpture and how those choices played a role in what ideas the artist was trying to show the viewers and what emotions the artist was trying to evoke. How did the artist create the cosmology of the artwork and how does she/he persuade us that what we are seeing matters? What are the key ideas of the imagined world at which we are looking?
Without ignoring the ideas and feelings that the work is trying to evoke and what choices the artist made to do so, think about the relationship of the work to your life. Think, too, about what the artist could have done differently and whether there is something overlooked or by our 2024 standards misunderstood. This may take the form of noticing in the work something sexist or racist or an indifference to class structures. Awareness of such issues depends on what we call the hermeneutics of suspicion or a resistant reading.
Often, while in a museum, you can access information on your phone, although I much prefer to read brief commentary on the wall next to the artwork. More substantial reading and a return to the work on a later occasion will intensify your experience. Supplementing what you know and see by reading the information provided on the museum walls or listening to museum audios is very much worth the time, but don’t let it replace your own experience.
I want to discuss two important works at the Johnson.
Dubuffet’s Scathing Anatomy of France
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) painted in 1948 “La Bouche en Croissant” (“Smiling Face”). We see a boy’s head and shoulders in a cramped, claustrophobic space. The work is not in the representative tradition of portrait paintings. In its simple evocation of facial parts created by finger painting and discordant colors, this work recalls the rudimentary techniques of children’s painting. “In my paintings,” Dubuffet wrote, “I wish to recover the vision of an average and ordinary man without using techniques beyond the grasp of an ordinary man.”
In fact, he mixes oil with such materials as mud, oil, glass, cement, sand and pebbles to produce caricatures of traditional art. In this painting, Dubuffet used impasto, which is a technique where paint is laid on an area of the surface thickly so that the brush or painting-knife creates a visible texture on the painting.
Dubuffet often playfully references a child’s world where carnivals, circuses and parades are important. He does this to emphasize the pretentiousness and failures of the adult world. He identified with outsider art produced by those untrained in the tradition of fine art: children, psychiatric patients and those imprisoned, including those arbitrarily imprisoned during the 1940-1944 German Occupation of France.
“La Bouche en Croissant” (“Smiling Face”) stands as a commentary on French behavior during the Occupation. Using scratches and slashes, Dubuffet wanted his art to partake of low culture. He called such work art brut (“raw art”), a term that he used to describe art such as graffiti or naïve art. He is forcefully commenting on France’s self- image — even after the collaboration during the German occupation and the complicity during the Holocaust — as Europe’s most advanced and cultivated culture and still the international capital of the Western art world, he depicts a grinning, seemingly oblivious child to remind his French countrymen that they behaved like helpless, obedient children after the Germans invaded France. When called upon to collaborate and adopt Nazi ideology, the French, as if they were obedient kindergarteners, submitted naively and thoughtlessly to the Germans.
Giacometti’s Modern Man at the Edge
Created in 1959-60, Alberto Giacometti’s (1901-1966) L’homme qui marche II, Walking Man II, cast in bronze with a rough unpolished texture that looks like paper-mache, represents how humanity has endured one catastrophe after another in the twentieth century. His emaciated, skeletal figure references Holocaust victims when the concentration and death camps were discovered by the Allies, the effects of the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians, and images of famines in Africa. With features distorted beyond recognition the tiny head shows how little control the suffering and anguished solitary figure, reduced almost to a shadow with so few distinguishing features, has over his fate. The absence of genitals poignantly demonstrates how even human desire and reproductive capacity have been affected.
At the same time the sculpture shows the determination of humankind to survive. The figure steps awkwardly forward with his back foot, barely bending his knee; nor does he have the physical ability to push strongly off his front foot. With arms close to his sides as if they barely had strength or mobility, he will walk, will endure no matter what resistance he encounters.
Conclusion
My mantra for painting and sculpture is the same as for literature, namely, “Always the text; always historicize.” As a formalist, I want to discover how form and content are inextricably related. I want to understand how the choices an artist makes determine meaning, even as I am aware of the difference between our world and the ontology and cosmology of an imagined world. The more time we spend in art museums and read about art, the better we can appreciate how objects of art can be understood within the context of the creative and cultural tradition of which they are a part.
Daniel R. Schwarz is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the College of Arts & Sciences. He is The Cornell Daily Sun’s 2023-2024 visiting columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
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