Honoring the Picture Plane: Sophistry in Action

"Honoring the picture plane" was a big deal when I was in art school, though the idea has lost some of its punch in Postmodern times. The gist of it was, since a canvas is normally a flat, two-dimensional object upon which things are painted, its nature is violated by attempting to depict three-dimensional things on it. More simply put: flat painting surfaces demand flat depictions.

What interests me nowadays is how seriously this was taken by intelligent people. My sophomore-year undergraduate art history course cast a deterministic process for Western art where the ultimate, end-of-history was abstract art as currently practiced by highly publicized New York City painters. I'm pretty sure our instructor, a senior staffer at the university's art museum, was largely influenced by Clement Greenberg (1909-1994).

The Greenberg Wikipedia link just cited has a sub-link to something called medium specificity, a fancy term for picture plane honoring that I hadn't been aware of.

Tom Wolfe in his often-hilarious way dealt with the business of flatness and abstraction in his 1975 book "The Painted Word." In it, he features the influence of important New York art critics, including Greenberg.

Here is a taste of Greenberg's writing from "The Role of Nature on Modern Painting," Partisan Review, January 1949. He was discussing the rise and importance of Cubism, but the passage below includes some of his thinking regarding flatness.

"By dint of their efforts to discover pictorially the structure of objects, of bodies, in nature, Picasso and Braque had come -- almost abruptly, it would seem -- to a new realization of, and a new respect for, the nature of the picture plane itself as a material object; and they came to the further realization that only by transposing the internal logic by which objects are organized in nature could aesthetic form be given to the irreducible flatness which defined the picture plane in its inviolable quality as a material object. This flatness became the final, all-powerful premise of the art of painting, and the experience of nature could be transposed into it only by analogy, not by imitative reproduction. Thus the painter abandoned his interest in the concrete appearance, for example, of a glass and tried instead to approximate by analogy the way in which nature had married the straight contours that defined the glass vertically to the curved ones that defined it laterally. Nature no longer offered appearances to imitate, but principles to parallel."

This is sophistry. Its premise and conclusion are that flat painting surfaces are determinative.

They are not. Great artists can and do whatever suits them on those innocent flat surfaces. They can paint flat color areas, they can create illusions of three-dimensionality, they can even go the collage route by pasting foreign objects on the canvas or board. Greenberg and his followers were placing art in a straightjacket through use of an arbitrary premise from which constrictive deductions were made.

Let's look at some examples.

Gallery

Number 1 - by Jackson Pollock - 1949
Greenberg was a huge Pollock fan, yet here was Pollock painting actual layers of colors atop a flat canvas.

Untitled - by Piet Mondrian
Mondrian, on the other hand, for many years painted very flat, not-curving images using only black, white and the three primary colors. Can't get more basic than that.

School of Athens - by Raphael - 1511
One-point perspective began appearing in Western painting in the early 1400s. "One point" refers to a single vanishing point, found here between the two figures framed by the most distant arch. Artists in Raphael's time were thrilled at this means of showing depth on a flat surface.  Eventually, two-point and three-point perspectives were discovered.

Canyon Green - by Franz Bischoff - c. 1915-25
Another way to portray distance is called "atmospheric perspective" which involves the greying-out of increasingly distant objects caused by particulate matter in the air.

Lady of Shalott - by John W. Waterhouse - 1888
Here Waterhouse uses both linear (mostly regarding the boat) and atmospheric perspective.

Ajax and Cassandra - by Solomon J. Solomon - 1886
The background pedestal has linear perspective. The figures are given three-dimensionality by use of light and shade to suggest their surface modeling.

Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère - by Édouard Manet - 1882
Manet's paintings often had a flatter look, though the small figures reflected in the mirror behind the barmaid diminish in size with distance, just as Raphael's did in "Athens."

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne - c. 1903
Cézanne attempted to reconcile depicting a 3-D world on a 2-D canvas with crude, though influential, results.

Church of the Minorities II - by Lyonel Feininger - 1926
Feininger was influenced by Cubism, but only superficially. Note the one-point perspective and the atmospherics in this painting.

Variation #1 in Orange - by David Leffel
An impressive, comparatively recent painting making zero use of Greenberg's ideas.

Wyndham Lewis' Excellent Modernist Portraits

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) divided his career between art and writing, winning esteem and controversy in both fields, but not a lot of money. By his late 50s he was undergoing serious bladder operations. Not long after, a growing pituitary tumor degraded his optic nerves to the point that in 1951 he announced that he had gone blind. Myself having had a vision scare recently, I have an inkling of the horror he must have experienced. (It turns out that a tentative diagnosis of macular degeneration was false, and my problem was almost entirely fixed by surgery.)

As for his art, Lewis was a vocal modernist in traditional England, promoting Vorticism, a form of Cubism around the time of the outbreak of the Great War. This was in part through his own works and also via his publication "Blast." More biographical information can be found here.

For this post, I'm setting aside his Vorticist work to focus on his portraiture. This was highlighted in a 2008 exhibit at London's National Portrait Gallery.

Early in his career Lewis considered himself a modernist, one of those self-anointeds who were to remake just about everything, including art. But by the late 1930s he conceded that things weren't working out as intended. And as early as 1919, Lewis' portrait drawings were an interesting blend of modernist simplification and accurate portrayal. His subjects' appearances and personalities show strongly in part because simplification was only lightly applied and tended to be dominated by his sure control of line. This ability resulted in drawings that usually outshone his painted portraits.

Gallery

Ezra Pound - 1919
Lewis and the poet were good friends when this drawing was made.

James Joyce - 1921
Lewis did several portrait drawings of Joyce.

Edith Sitwell - 1921
His drawings of Sitwell eventually led to a painted portrait that I included in this post (scroll down).

Girl Seated (Gladys Anne Hoskins) - 1922
Lewis married Hoskins in 1930. She was called "Froanna" by then, but mostly remained in the background while Lewis was alive.

Augustus John - 1932
Portrait of a fellow portrait artist.

Dorothy Alexander (Lady Harmsworth) - 1932

Dame Edith Evans - 1932

Rebecca West - 1932
Lewis and West were miles apart politically, but got along personally.

Girl Reading (Froanna) - 1936

Froanna - 1937

T.S. Eliot - 1938
This, and his portrait of Sitwell, are perhaps Lewis' best-known portrait paintings.

Miss Close - 1939
I'm not sure who the sitter is, but include this because it was painted only a few years before he realized that he was starting to go blind.  Lewis continued to paint while he was able, but quality began to fall away.

Lewis Mumford, Art Critic

To my mind, Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was a good example of a "public intellectual" -- an admittedly slippery term -- of the 1925-1965 variety. You can do a Google search on the label, but for my present purposes I'll define the concept as a person not always equipped with college degrees and not employed by a college or university who thinks about matters important to society and writes influential articles regarding his take on such matters.

Mumford's Wikipedia entry is here and that of the Dictionary of Art Historians here. Although his interests were wide-ranging, he is probably best known for his commentaries on architecture and urban planning. He wrote books on those subjects that were considered important in his day and he served as architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine for three decades.

What I hadn't known until recently was that for six years (1932-37) he also wrote an occasional New Yorker column dealing with what he found in art museums and galleries. These pieces have been gathered into this book. Reading those old columns was like being transported to another world -- a world whose residues I encountered growing up and whose art I'm currently trying to make sense of with respect to a self-imposed writing project.

Besides spouting off opinions as a critic must, Mumford was obliged to write in a casual, digressive mode that New Yorker editor Harold Ross felt epitomized New York City's sophistication in those days. And New York City was indeed the center of intellectual and creative ferment in the United States. So Mumford tried to visit as many important museum exhibits and gallery shows as he could, mentioning what he liked and disliked as well as sometimes commenting on what (and who) he felt was missing.

What did Mumford like? Just about anything associated with John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. He was also favorably disposed to the idea of an American Art, something in the air for many years that became a big 1930s topic. For instance, he liked several of the Ashcan School artists of the early 1900s. But he didn't care for art that contained a whiff of patriotism and therefore wasn't entirely fond of American Regionalism in the form of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, etc. He liked the paintings of communist-sympathizing William Gropper and Joe Jones and favored modernism over conservative, traditional, bourgeois-oriented art even though recognizing that not all of it measured up.

He had a reasonably good knowledge of 19th century art and thought Albert Pinkham Ryder was really good, Winslow Homer pretty good and Jules Bastien-Lepage and his ilk hardly worthy of mentioning in passing. At least he mentioned Batien-Lepage who at the time was well on his way to becoming a non-person so far as art history was concerned.

Mumford was not receptive to Surrealism at first, but wrote a column basically supportive of it not long before dropping his art criticism job. As for other Europeans, he liked Renoir (aside from his middle, non-impressionist period), Maurice Utrillo (whose reputation was high in those days) and Picasso's early modernist work (though not so much his post Great War exploration of heavy, classically-derived forms).

My general take on Mumford's art criticism is that he was a little too smugly a proponent of the "advanced" artistic theories and fashions of his day -- more a cheerleader than someone with a deeper, more strongly based critical sense. But if he had taken the latter tack (assuming he was capable), I wonder if he ever would have gotten his New Yorker gig.

New Heinlein Biography

Twenty-two years after his death and nearly eight years after the death of his wife who launched the project, the first volume of a two-part official biography of Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88) has been published.

Fine print -- Learning Curve 1907-1948 ... In Dialogue with His Century. Amazon link here.


Heinlein was a major light in what has been called science fiction's golden age, when the field crawled from the pulp magazine side of the cultural tracks to mainstream "slick" publications. This transformation was marked by the appearance of a Heinlein story in the Saturday Evening Post. A lengthy summary of Heinlein's career can be found in this Wikipedia entry.

I got hooked on his "juveniles" a few years after they first appeared on the shelves of the local library. I was especially taken by "Rocket Ship Galileo" and "Red Planet." I also liked a number of his books and short story collections that appeared before the mid-1960s. (A Heinlein bibliography is here.) The later books that I tackled didn't hold my interest and I failed to finish them.

As for the new biography, I found it interesting and finished off its nearly 500 pages in short order. I agree with early Amazon reader reviews that the author gives every appearance of being fair-minded, delivering warts as well as favorable information in his coverage of Heinlein's life up to his marriage to Virginia in 1948.

I never delved deeply into Heinlein's life, so I was surprised to learn that he grew up holding prairie socialist beliefs and, during the mid-to-late 1930 was very active in the left side of Democrat politics. Apparently he never liked Communism and opposed Red efforts to hijack his faction of the party in California. He also was a world-government fan.

Author William Patterson, Jr. suggests in a footnote that Heinlein didn't change his political view all that much in life; presumably this will be dealt with in Volume II. I'm inclined to think Heinlein held on to certain core beliefs and changed his overt politics as political parties changed their stripes. (An example of stripe-changing is Democrats moving from Harry Truman's robust defense policies to today's reluctance to fight under almost any circumstance.)

One thing I would have liked to have found would be capsule synopses for each story and book mentioned in the text. No reviews, literary criticisms or that kind of thing. Just a paragraph or two outlining the plot. I needed this because I've either never read the material or read it so many years ago that I've forgotten most of the plots and characters.