PREFACE:
HOW TO LOOK AT A PAINTING
On a recent visit to New York’s Guggenheim Museum, I paused on the ground floor at the foot of that great spiral ramp and looked up to watch the summer tourists slowly circling down. Most of them proceeded like casual window shoppers on Fifth Avenue, rarely stopping for more than a minute before any of the works on display. A good Pollock, a lovely Rothko, intriguing Cubist canvases by Picasso and Braque, all were passed by like so many designer shoes in a boutique window. Standing there, I suddenly thought that Frank Lloyd Wright was more of a visionary than even he, in his infinite egomania, might have realized. For the Guggenheim, built to Wright’s design almost fifty years ago, is a perfect example of exactly what is wrong with art museums (and museum-going) at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Guggenheim is a cool modern machine for making money with art. Like a carnival sideshow, it’s designed to catch the eyes of passersby, lure them inside, take their money (an outrageous $15 per person), spirit them to the top in elevators and then move them back down, via a conveniently sloping floor, to the exit (next to the gift shop’s hoard of overpriced junk). It is built for circulation, not meditation; indeed, it actively discourages meditation. Whenever I stop on the ramp to study a painting, I feel the slight tug of gravity like a cop in an old movie telling me, "Keep it movin’, buddy." The Guggenheim is an anti-art museum. Dynamic where it should be static, it encourages a conception of the museum as something to go through rather than someplace to go to, and it encourages visitors to stroll past great paintings rather than to stop, linger, look and think.
The Guggenheim is the most obvious offender, but this emphasis on traffic flow and commerce over aesthetic experience seems to have infected all the world’s major art museums. A few blocks south at the Met, the corridors are increasingly colonized by satellite gift shops and mall-like kiosks, and I can always tell I’m near the end of a Met exhibition when I hear the ka-ching of cash registers. The most visible and harmful symptom of the commercial disease, however, is the recent worldwide outbreak of audioguides. Go to any major exhibition or stand in front of any very well-known painting and you probably won’t be able to hear your own thoughts over the annoying, out-of-synch burble of other people’s audioguides. For many museum-goers today, holding a speaker to your ear and listening to someone else’s (often obvious or inane) thoughts about a work of art has become a required part of the experience. I remember a man at a Philip Guston exhibition who lowered his audioguide, pointed at a painting and called to his companion, "Did you hear this one?" Today, it seems, paintings are meant to be heard, not seen. It is as if the information spoken by a disembodied authoritative voice is of equal or greater importance than the artwork itself, as if the voice in your ear trumps the painting in front of your eyes.
All of this would be acceptable, I suppose, if audioguides truly enhanced the user’s experience, genuinely deepened his understanding and appreciation of a work of art. But unfortunately, like the Guggenheim’s sloping floor, audioguides are more about circulation than meditation. They move people through museums: enter a gallery, press a button, hear an overview, move as directed to painting number one, hear a few minutes of information about it, move directly to painting number two, listen to more information, proceed to the next gallery, and so on until you arrive at the gift shop. In this way, audioguides (and most human tourguides, a vanishing breed) provide a pseudo-experience. The visitor spends too much money and too little time at an art museum and leaves thinking he has actually seen something when in fact he hasn’t spent enough time before any single work to even begin to engage with it. The thoughts electronically whispered in his ear have relieved him of the duty of thinking for himself, and an experience that could have led him into the oceanic depths of his soul has been reduced to the equivalent of a few hours spent splashing around in a kiddie pool.
Compounding this triple threat of commercialization (of the museum), mechanization (of the experience) and roboticization (of the visitor) is the overcrowding produced by much-hyped "blockbuster" exhibitions. After several years of traveling to these shows I’ve concluded that they are probably the very worst way to see art. The Chicago Art Institute’s 2001 Van Gogh and Gauguin show was so crowded that it was sometimes difficult to get within six feet of some of the paintings. Even worse was the situation at the Met’s 2003 exhibition of drawings by Leonardo. Several of these very small works (some only a few inches square) were completely concealed by crowds of crouching visitors straining to hear their audioguides. And even when I did finally elbow my way to the artwork, the heat and jostling of the crowded room made my body so uncomfortable that my mind could not profitably concentrate on art.
Only the very greatest (and largest) works of art can overcome a crowded room. When Vermeer’s Artist’s Studio was loaned to the Met in 2001, even the large crowds drawn by the exhibition (and the huge ones attracted by a Jackie Kennedy dress show just down the hall) could not diminish the painting’s awesome yet delicate power. At the same exhibition, though, the Met’s small, perfect Woman with a Water Pitcher was usually hidden behind a wall of visitors. In Paris hundreds of multi-lingual Louvre-goers passing through the gallery do not detract from the experience of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, but the nearby Mona Lisa is notoriously unviewable. Constantly mobbed, La Gioconda is like a movie star hounded by paparazzi, looking out through shaded glass at the flashbulb-popping world.
Given these institutional handicaps, how are we–mere members of the general public with no backstage passes to the art show–to look at paintings? How can we authentically experience art?
Well, first of all: PUT THAT AUDIOGUIDE DOWN! Or better yet, never pick it up. You may think that the voice in your ear is there to help you, but in fact it’s only distracting you. Everything you need to understand a painting is either on the canvas in front of your eyes or on the shelves of your local library. At any good public library in the U.S. you can probably find the same books from which Mr. Disembodied Voice has extracted his tidbits of trivia, and upon reading them you might find that Mr. D.V. is either repeating apocrypha or interpreting the facts incorrectly. Understanding art does require homework (in some cases, a lot of it), but all the reading should serve only to deepen the experience of viewing. Looking long and closely at the canvas is the main thing. Let the work inspire you to think your own thoughts about it.
The ideal conditions for experiencing art are silence, solitude and time. Fortunately, the most important of these is time, for the other two are rarely found in public collections. Even when there are no other visitors in a given room, voices–and the cries of children–carry amazingly well in the museum’s hush, and there’s always going to be a security guard walking or sitting or (as I saw once at the Toledo, Ohio museum) sleeping in the gallery. So, given relative quiet and the absence of crowds, the most important thing is to take our time. I like to begin at a comfortable viewing distance where the entire work and all of its parts are visible. After considering the content and composition at this distance, I gradually move forward, eventually getting as close to the canvas as possible to examine the brushwork and surface texture in various passages. Stepping back, I watch as the individual brushstrokes merge into areas of form and color (in works by the great "painterly" painters–Titian, Velasquez, Rubens, Goya, Manet–this can be the most magical aspect of viewing the painting), and then I move very far back and look at the work from across the room or even from the next room before slowly approaching it again.
This process of moving back and forth, looking and thinking (and, in my case, taking notes) can continue until the painting or the viewer is exhausted. It could conceivably take anywhere from a few minutes (with a mediocre painting) to a few hours. With the best works of art, the process never really ends. After a couple of hours of sustained viewing and thinking, I tend to cry uncle and go to lunch or dinner with the knowledge that however much I’ve seen in the painting today, tomorrow will show me more.
For me, this quality of elusiveness, this ultimate difficulty, is one of the defining factors of greatness in art. Great art is inexhaustible. However valiantly we may struggle to enclose a great work in our prefabricated ideological structures (Marxist, Feminist, Freudian, Foucaultian, Derridean), it will always elude interpretive capture. Ingmar Bergman’s masterful film Persona, for example, can be understood as dramatizing Foucault’s concept of power relations in the medical sciences, but such a reductive allegorization raises more questions than it answers: what about the film’s Brechtian alienation devices that constantly provoke our disbelief, reminding us that we’re watching a movie, an artificial construction? How does Foucault’s thought explain the indelible power of some of the film’s images? Great art always outthinks us; it’s always far ahead. A century after the advent of Modernism we are still trying to catch up with James Joyce and Alban Berg and Pablo Picasso, still trying to understand Ulysses and Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. The fact that we still call these works–contemporaries of the Wright bi-plane, the Model T and the Edison phonograph–"modern" art reflects how far ahead they still are. Great works obstinately refuse to take their seats in the wax museum of the past. They remain in front of us, and their mysteries beckon us on.
The essays in this book joyously accept both the essential mystery and the multiplicity of meaning in great art. My critical approach is pragmatic and pluralistic, using any interpretive strategy that might elucidate the work’s mysteries. I like to think of my method as "aesthetic criticism," and I trace its lineage back to the great nineteenth-century English critic and aesthete Walter Pater. In the Preface to The Renaissance Pater writes, "What is important...is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects,"1 and he suggests that the aesthetic critic ask the following questions while studying a work of art: "What is this song or picture...to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?"2 Derided as mere "impressionism" by later generations of critics, Pater’s method is in fact an anti-dogmatic and powerfully subjective way to explore the depths of a work of art. Since we can only experience art (or anything else, for that matter) through our senses and perceptions, the most direct and authentic way to experience any work is to stand before it and try to be as aware as possible of all our perceptions: every sight, every thought, every stray fact, every random, passing idea. By thus moving into ourselves, into the matrix of perception, we are also moving as deeply as we can into the art object. We can feel the work’s power: its great beauty, its intimations of terror, its sublime intermingling of both. Our subjectivity, our inwardness, touches the inwardness of the work, and from this union understanding is born.
This book is the fruit of several years spent looking at and thinking about great works of art. It is the product of a personal obsession with painting, old and new, that has taken me from the regional museums of the American Midwest to the art palaces of New York and London to the literal palaces and palazzi of Paris and Rome. (To keep the book from ballooning to an unworkable length, I decided to concentrate on paintings from American collections, going outside the country only when no American museum possessed a work of equal interest and excellence.) On these aesthetic pilgrimages, I have stood in ecstatic awe before the late works of Turner and Rembrandt, I have dug into the dark mysteries of Pollock and de Kooning, and I have felt the pure joy of Matisse and Miro. I have been terrified by Titian and surprised by Cézanne, disturbed by Picasso and delighted by Vermeer. And after all these varied experiences, to the question of how to look at a painting I have a single answer: Look closely and for as long as you can.
NOTES
1. Pater, Renaissance, xxx.
2. Ibid., xxix.