MARLOW MOSS

MARLOW MOSS: an article in The Guardian on 26 August 2014

The Guardian ‘G2’ on 26^th August included an article about the artist Marlow Moss. 

This is a brief summary of the article.

Marlow Moss

Marlow (born Marjorie) Moss was born in London in 1889: she died in Cornwall in 1958. 

Marlow was a child of prosperous Jewish parents, she studied at The Slade, she disappeared to Cornwall after a nervous breakdown, and she returned as a ‘crop-haired, jockey-clad lesbian’. 

In 1927 Moss moved to Paris and apprenticed herself to Fernand Leger.  Soon afterwards she saw her first Mondrian and transferred her allegiance to him.  The Swiss abstract painter Max Bill described a meeting with Moss and her partner Nettie Nijhoff – wife of the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff - at an opening of a Paris gallery in 1933.  He wrote that both were dressed in flat hats with broad brims: ‘they could have been Don Quixote and Sancha Panza’.  Bill pointed to two works on the wall and expressed gratitude that Mondrian had submitted them.  Moss replied that these were her paintings. 

In 1956 Michael Canney – newly-appointed as curator of Newlyn Art Gallery – met Marlow and perceived her as a ‘diminutive figure’ driving a pony and trap who ‘strode around in a rather alarming manner, tapping its leg with a riding crop’. 

Bill and Canney saw Moss as an oddity – and a footnote.  This reputation is shown by the current exhibition at Tate Britain to be unworthy of Marlow Moss.

Moss is shown to have been the only English artist who influenced Mondrian in his neoplasticism in 1931 / 32 – specifically in the use of double lines.   

In 1940 Moss talked her way onto a boat and escaped from the Netherlands to Cornwall.  Mondrian urged Moss to contact Ben Nicolson.  She wrote but he did not reply.  Moss is described as having kept herself apart from other artists resident in Cornwall in the 1950s.  Moss continued to work in abstraction, and she also moved into sculpture: she had two shows in London, in 1953 and 1958. 

An exhibition of Moss’ works is at Tate Britain from 29^th September to 2^2nd March.

SAMUEL BAK, BORN 12th AUGUST 1933

SAMUEL BAK, born 12^th August 1933

Lawrence L. Langer’s collection of essays Pre-empting the Holocaust [Yale University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-300-08268-1] includes Landscapes of Jewish Experience: The Holocaust Art of Samuel Bak.

Pre-empting the Holocaust

The first essay in Pre-empting the Holocaust is the text of a keynote address entitled  Pre-empting the Holocaust which was presented in 1996 at a Holocaust conference at the University of Notre Dame. 

In Pre-empting the Holocaust Langer expounds his theme which is to argue against the conviction held by many that the Holocaust contains a positive lesson for the present and the future. 

He writes about the tendency amongst those who have an interest in the Holocaust to understand and interpret the Holocaust within his or her pre-conceived worldview, and thus to use the Holocaust to justify and strengthen the value of that worldview.  Thus, an attempt to place the events of the Holocaust into an existing ‘ideal of moral reality, community responsibility or religious belief’ involves a ‘pre-empting’ of what one will find in studying the terrible events. 

Langer analyses three literary works – Tzvetan Todorov’s Facing the extreme – Moral life in the concentration camps [trans. Arthur Denner & Abigail Pollak (New York: Henry Holt, 1996]; Judy Chicago’s Holocaust Project – From Darkness into Light [New York: Viking, 1993]; and Frans Jozef van Beeck’s Two Kind Jewish Men: a sermon in memory of the  Shoah [Cross Currents 42 (Summer 1992)]. 

Langer states that Todorov argues that the Holocaust was little more than a drastic example of the conflict that takes place within all people and all societies: the conflict between ‘ordinary virtues’ and ‘ordinary vices’.  Todorov is wary of ‘literal memory’: the first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors.  He prefers instead ‘exemplary memory’ which involves ‘generalising from the particular and applying abstract principles to concrete offences’.  His aim is to draw universal lessons from the historical events of the Holocaust that can serve humankind for the future.   

Chicago is presented by Langer as another ‘exemplarist’.  Langer argues that, despite the virtues in Chicago’s work, her stated desire to present ‘ a window into an aspect of the unarticulated but universal experience of victimisation’ fails to do justice to the ‘particularity of the Holocaust as a historical event’.

Langer states that before he delivered his sermon, the Christian theologian van Beeck said that he had never previously written about the Holocaust and that he had hardly ever discussed the Holocaust with anybody.  Langer writes that van Beeck’s sermon is written in the style of Christian preaching and that it ‘testifies to the deficiency of certain language for analyzing the Holocaust when it is imposed on the topic with little consideration for its adequacy’. 

Langer can offer no ‘corrective vision’ to the tendency to ‘pre-empt the Holocaust’ other than ‘the opinion that the Holocaust experience challenges the redemptive value of all moral, community and religious systems of belief’.

Landscapes of Jewish Experience: The Holocaust Art of Samuel Bak

The essay Landscapes of Jewish Experience: The Holocaust Art of Samuel Bak was first published in Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings of Samuel Bak [University Press of New England, 1997].

The artist and the viewer of a painting need each other: with no-one to look at a painting the work of art is lifeless.  And so, as one looks at the Landscapes of Jewish Experience works of Samuel Bak, one is aware that within oneself emotions rise.  The landscapes are devoid of human presence, and yet, when looking at the paintings one strives to fill them with life.  There is no mortal life to be seen in these paintings but many are suffused with the haze of heat and smoke, and chimneys rise ominously across the barren scene. 

Bak has said that these works were painted to communicate the sense of the civilisation and culture that was destroyed.  And even though it is impossible to re-assemble that world, still, sense can be made of something that looks like it.  And the moment of destruction is always a part of each representation. 

Bak grew up in Vilna (now Vilnius) in what was then Poland: Vilna was one of the main European centres of Jewish learning.  In 1939 the city was transferred to Lithuania and in 1940 it was occupied by the USSR.  In 1941 Nazi Germany took the city and they began to extinguish Jewish life.  When the Soviet Union re-took the city in 1944, Bak and his mother were two of the few thousand Jews to survive of the 57,000 Jews in the city before 1941. 

Bak’s images let us enter a world that is beyond imagination.   It is characterised by broken elemental landscapes, ruined human edifices and habitations, some enigmatic semblance of a surviving Jewish culture, and an unsettling ambiguity as to whether hope or despair is dominant. 

Some works are so lacking in reference points for a landscape painting that they verge on the abstract or the surreal: they invert normal relative sizes or they combine figurative representation with symbolism.  Many works present large areas that portray inert materials such as rock or cut wood with a patterning that is almost hallucinatory in its detail and its expanse. 

Within the paintings Bak provokes a dialogue about the roots of Jewish meaning.  What sense is now to be made of the foundation of Israel – Genesis, Exodus and the Torah - after the Shoah – the Holocaust ?  The tablets of the Law are seen to be broken, adrift, possibly in the process of being re-made or maybe being withdrawn from humanity, or maybe crumbling to dust. 

Langer refers to the poet Nelly Sachs who explores similar themes.  Langer discusses the wider issue of the purpose of artistic creation that is based on the Holocaust: do we gain insight or do we find absence of meaning?  He argues that we are so led by Bak along paths of his own experience that we cannot help but find ourselves in a place that other genres of painting do not take us – a corrupted place of our shared humanity that leaves us even more uneasy before the divine. 

The last of the many of Bak’s works that Langer considers is The Sounds of Silence. 

Samuel Bak’s 81^st birthday was on 12^th August this year.

MARK ROTHKO: THE ARTIST’S REALITY

MARK ROTHKO: THE ARTIST’S REALITY

A podcast dated 29^th July 2014 by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC is entitled The Artist’s Reality – Philosophies of Art.

A manuscript by Mark Rothko that was probably written in 1940-41 was discovered and then published in 2005.  The manuscript is entitled The Artist’s Reality. 

The podcast by the National Gallery of Art is a recording of a lecture dated 11^th June 2005 given at the National Gallery of Art by Christopher Rothko – the son of Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970): http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/audio-video/audio/reality-rothko.html

This is a brief summary of the podcast.

Christopher Rothko had originally sought not to edit his father’s philosophical work, but he did eventually become the editor: he describes the chaotic text produced by his father’s ‘dyspeptic typewriter’.  But Christopher found himself seduced and drawn in by his father’s manuscript: his sister Kate urged him to take on the task and so ‘his fate was sealed’.

The paintings

Christopher Rothko assumes his audience is familiar with his father’s work and has a substantial interest in it.  He shows and describes one of his father’s 1954 paintings as ‘ethereal and coaxingly elusive’.  Another work of the same year is described as ‘especially harmonious and balanced, both in its composition and in the feeling that it exudes’.  A work from 1963 is described as ‘challenging - even defiant with its bright red against the more sombre blacks and browns’. 

Christopher Rothko shows and describes a portrait by his father of his mother – believed to be his first painting on canvas, a painting by his father from 1935 of the New York subway, and a portrait by him of 1939 which is one his last works done in a figurative style. 

Continuity

Christopher then sets out his purpose which is to show the continuity from his father’s figurative works to his abstract works.  He looks for ‘formal and compositional similarities’.  In his father’s earlier works he notes the dominance of the background over the foreground, the squaring off of the elements of the painting and the way in which the composition is brought forward to the frontal plane and in which it is broken into horizontal planes.  This is described as ‘ambiguity of space’.  He also shows continuity in his father’s ‘hazy, soft edges’.  And continuity is also shown in the use of colour: in ‘Rothko’s vibrant palette’.

The philosophies put forward by Rothko in The Artist’s Reality are argued to be viable as a means of showing the continuity between the artist’s earlier figurative and later abstract works.  The Artist’s Reality is described as ‘sloppily written, not terribly long, never finished and written ten years before Rothko became a well-known artist’, but it tells us a lot about the work he would produce. 

Rothko’s change in style whilst the manuscript was being written

Whilst the manuscript was being written, Rothko was working as an art teacher.  During this time – late 1930s to 1941 – Rothko’s style changed from figurative to a figurative surrealist approach and then a more abstract surrealist style in 1942.  (Later in the lecture this more abstract surrealist style is said to be represented by his 1945 work Rites of Lilith).    

The ‘multiforms’ started in 1946: these are pure abstraction with colour at the fore, but the forms have not yet coalesced into the familiar rectangles.  Rothko’s classic style, known as ‘sectional’ or ‘colour field’ began in 1949. 

We don’t know exactly when Rothko’s manuscript was written within the period of change from figurative painting to surrealism, and the process of writing would appear to have been integral with the changes of style.  It must be emphasised that the manuscript was written nearly ten years before the emergence of the abstract style for which Rothko is now best-known: we may ask whether the The Artist’s Reality may really have any applications to the paintings that are Rothko’s ‘signature style’ but Christopher Rothko asserts that the text is often ‘uncannily prophetic’ of the changes that are to come.

What does Rothko mean by abstraction?

The first quote that is given from The Artist’s Reality concerns Rothko’s views on abstraction.  It suggests that at the time of writing (1940?) Rothko has already disavowed figurative painting, though he is not at that time painting in an abstract style. 

So what does Rothko mean by abstraction?  Our lecturer argues that in Rothko's figurative style he paints ‘ideas of people’ and ‘human situations’ but with ‘little regard for visual reality’.  Rothko’s surrealist style is shown to portray figures in such a way that their purpose is primarily symbolic.  To show the strength of Rothko’s move towards abstraction our lecturer resorts to a maths lesson given by his father in The Artist’s Reality.  Using the method of an algebraic formula, Rothko asserts that the substitution of any symbol in a formula by a real object would ‘remove the whole relationship from the sphere of generality and place it into the particular’.  Real objects introduce qualities that would ‘confuse the absoluteness of our equations’.  Although Rothko had in mind Greek myths, the main point is about symbols: ‘the power of the general compared with the specific; the abstract compared with the concrete’. 

Thus art is not about the depiction of a particular scene but about the expression of an idea: the most powerful expression of an idea is an abstract one because it is not limited by time or culture.

Using appearance to demonstrate the reality of the world of ideas

A second quote makes clear Rothko’s espousal of abstraction.  He writes that abstract painters are the ‘objectivists’ of our age who use appearance to demonstrate the reality of the world of ideas.  Both kinds of artists are objectivists who are concerned with the world of appearances, ‘but one subjects ideas to appearance, and the other appearances to the world of ideas’. 

Rothko is not interested in showing us how things really look: he’s interested in showing how things look to express an idea.

A ‘quasi-scientific stripping away’

Rothko further writes that whilst all art actively engages with all the ideas in the contemporary environment, ‘modern art’ is of the age ‘that is preoccupied with the dissection of matter to arrive at the basis of its structural life, where all perceptible phenomena are being dissolved into their abstract components: art can do nothing else but to follow the same course in relation to the laws of art’.  Christopher Rothko argues that his father’s styles of figurative, surreal and abstract painting all show his desire to work only with line, form and colour – on a path that successively rejects line and form.  Christopher Rothko describes this as a ‘quasi-scientific stripping away’ that ultimately in the sectional style leaves only the action of brush and colour as the players that communicate with us’. 

All these goals are set out in 1940/41 in The Artist’s Reality, and Rothko worked towards these goals over the next 30 years.

Rothko was critical of modern art for lacking the warmth of human emotional engagement

But in his treatise Rothko also recognised that mere stripping down would result in emptiness.  Unlike the scientist, the artist cannot have separate truths, separate unities and separate fragments of the universe: the artist must ‘always resolve his fragments in man’s subjectivity’.  Rothko expresses his distress at the ‘atomisation’ that is prevalent about him: artificial separation and lack of inter-communication. 

Rothko asks ‘where in this does man’s experience lie?’ and suggests that the artist, like the philosopher and the poet, needs to resolve all the various laws and systems into one picture or, as Rothko put it, ‘a unity’.  He sees that the human element is missing: that human subjective experience must somehow be satisfied in a modern atomised world.  Rothko looks to communicate directly with our subjective world. 

Rothko then looks back to Leonardo de Vinci and the Venetian Renaissance painters.  He celebrates Leonardo’s ‘subjective quality of light’.  This lets the artist engage with ‘emotionality’, thus introducing humanity into the painting.  ‘It relates the representation of the individual emotionality in the terms of the universal emotions’.  The work of Rembrandt was the major inspiration for Rothko in this respect.

Rothko was critical of modern art for lacking the warmth of human emotional engagement: surrealism was cynical – tearing apart and not repairing.  For Rothko, light is a binding agent – the ‘instrument of the new unity’, and for Rothko it is colour that conveys and expresses light and emotionality.

The expressive possibilities of colour 

In The Artist’s Reality Rothko laments the detrimental effect of linear perspective on the representation of colour.  The recession of colour through various intervals of grey had been the artist’s primary concern: background colours are necessarily muted.  Following Matisse who maintains the same intensity of colour throughout a painting, Rothko  used colour to move activity in his sectional paintings to the frontal plane. 

Throughout his various style changes Rothko explored the expressive possibilities of colour.  In his sectional works colour is shown to have intrinsic qualities of suggesting recession and advancement.  Juxtaposition of colours stimulates movement, achieving ambiguity of space, depth and superimposition.

In his sectional paintings Rothko is both stripping away cultural and artistic clutter to get to the essential elements and achieving a sensual communication of human emotion. 

Abstract Expressionism

Christopher Rothko states that he has come to a new appreciation of the term Abstract Expressionism.  Rothko rejected the term but his son considers it an accurate description of his father’s works. 

In a question and answer session with the lecturer these subjects are included:

It’s not clear who were the philosophers who most influenced Rothko, but it’s most likely that these would have included: Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy in particular); Kierkegaard; and Classical philosophers and poets.

Rothko’s interest and abilities in mathematics and science.   Contemporary physics and the social sciences are mentioned in The Artist’s Reality.

Rothko’s collaboration with Barnett Newman and the extent to which there may have been a shared spiritual interest. 

Rothko would not have regarded himself, or his works, as ‘spiritual’, but he would probably have used the terms ‘the human spirit’ or ‘universal spirit’.

Rothko’s career as an art teacher of young children.

Rothko’s methods of preparation of his canvasses and the constituent elements of his paint.

The podcast was a post on Facebook on 5^th August 2014 by the Mark Rothko Facebook group that was a re-posting of  a re-post by Artas Artacdemysilva of Riga.

NICOLAS DE STAEL (1914 – 1955)

NICOLAS DE STAEL (1914 – 1955)

Guy Dumur’s artist monograph on Nicolas de Stael (G Dumur. De Stael. Crown.  1975.  ISBN 0-517-52611-5) http://www.amazon.com/Nicolas-Stael-Q-L-P-Art-Series/dp/0517526115 introduces the artist, sets out the course of his life and work, and reflects on his legacy.

A French painter

De Stael fled Russia with his parents at the age of 3 in 1918, and by the time he was 8 he was an orphan and adopted child of Russian émigrés in Belgium.  De Stael’s father had been an army officer and was the Governor of the Fortress of St.Peter & St.Paul at St.Petersburg. 

As an adult and as a painter de Stael understood himself to be in the tradition and culture of France.  It was in 1944/45 that de Stael’s style evolved into abstraction: de Stael was living in Nice under the Nazi occupation.  Dumur writes that in spite of the Cubist experience, the abstract trend in painting had not really caught on in France and that with the Nazi occupation things ‘became better and at the same time worse’.  Modernist painters had been condemned by the occupying power and some had been able to make their way to the USA.  Those that remained were ready to learn anew the tradition that the Nazis sought to extinguish.  A school of semi-figurative colourists was developing in Paris: Dumur concludes that ‘at the time that de Stael really began to paint – that is 1942 – many painters of his generation had already seen that the evolution of painting was bound to pass through Abstractionism’.  

An ontological artist wrestling with the angel

Dumur searches for the source of de Stael’s vocation.  He was ‘always too much the painter to be suspicious of the universe of words’.  ‘He seems to have hungered for all that life could immediately offer him, and what could be more powerful than the images offered by paintings?’

Dumur argues that de Stael’s death at his own hand in 1955 at the age of 41 is the key to understanding his life and work.  De Stael ‘wrestled with the angel’, as other artists have done, and as some – like de Stael - have lost their life in the process.   For Dumur, de Stael is an ‘ontological painter: one recognises his style at every moment in his short career – he painted with his whole being’.

From figurative art to abstraction, and back to figurative

By 1946 de Stael’s figurative style had given way to abstraction.  Dumur argues that this was a consequence of de Stael’s association with other artists in Nice at the time: Jean Deyrolle (cousin of his wife Jeannine), Alberto Magnelli, Sonia Delaunay and Jean Arp. 

Dumur describes de Stael’s style in 1943 as ‘one that is both precise and uncertain, which hesitated between the freedom of the artist and the decorative concerns which were encouraged by the innate good taste that never deserted Nicolas de Stael’.

Two Russian artists who ‘escorted de Stael on the way to abstraction’ were Vasily Kandinsky, who died in 1944, and Andre Lanskoy, the latter having had the most influence.  And de Stael befriended Georges Braque at this time, and this is considered by Dumur to be significant.  

By 1944 Dumur describes de Stael’s style as showing an ‘equilibrium between a personality which is looking to establish itself and the coldness of an art which must, by definition, be impersonal’. 

In 1945 de Stael writes to a friend about his desire to ‘seize on the truth’ and to let his paintings ‘live by conscious imperfection’. 

De Stael’s wife Jeannine died in 1946 due to complications of pregnancy, leaving de Stael the sole parent of their daughter.  De Steal was now living in poverty and grief.  Dumus writes that de Stael ‘could only resort to movement, chance and the void’.  His paintings show subjectivity, and they use sombre colours that ‘have their own serenity’: they have a ‘lyric continuity that cannot be confused with ‘Tachism’, ‘Dripping’ or the pictorial ‘acts’ of painters  who come after him ... we are still a long way from Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko, Georges Mathieu and Jackson Pollock’. 

In 1946 de Stael’s style had changed so that Dumur describes it as ‘having moved imperceptibly toward the glorification of pure painting’. 

In 1947 de Stael married Francoise Chapouton with whom he had a daughter and a son.  By 1950 de Stael’s style is ‘fully consolidated’. He was living and working in Paris: an abstract painter ‘entirely free from the exterior world’.  He had exhibitions in New York, Paris and London.

In the early 1950s de Stael moved back to the South of France and his works gradually became more figurative in style: landscapes and still life.    In 1950 he had written to a friend: ‘Always there is a subject, always’.  Dumus writes: ‘It could be that just when one thinks that Nicolas de Stael is turning his back on Abstractionism he plunges in deeper, that his painting becomes more mysterious’.

 From about 1952 onwards de Stael’s works became ‘an act of humility toward the sources of inspiration which up until then he would only allow as being in himself’. 

Dumus suggest that it was only at this time that de Stael achieved absolute originality.  He now wanted to go beyond the established understanding of abstraction and develop his own style:  ‘the return to the subject was still a way to carry on the struggle with the angel’. 

In late 1954 de Stael wrote to a friend describing the ‘sublime fragility’ of his works, despite their outward appearance of ‘violence and perpetual forces at play’, and he described the ‘atrocious feeling of vertigo’ that he suffered as he painted his large works.  He felt that too great a portion of his work as a painter was chance – a stroke of luck.

Nicolas de Stael died on 16^th March 1955.