tears - not too tiny to paint

 

Is it with a hint of disapproval that Friedländer thus describes the manner of Bernard van Orley  (painter in Brussels around 1520) : 

"Schmerz und Klage  sind mit der dem Zeitgeschmäck zusagenden Sentimentalität in gerunzelten Stirnen und geöffneten Mündern ausgedrückt. (1)"

But not a word about the tears (2) – which I am staring at, fascinated.

The gestures & cries of lamentations are universal – these days the media are full of them.       

People are shown crying, for sure, but their tears? Their tears are too silent, too tiny for TV.

 

Not too tiny to be painted though, at least not for the old masters, who never disdained detail.     

And so, across generations, one can find consolation in tiny blobs of paint, more permanent than we are, preserving things as fleeting as a tear rolling down a nose.

notes

(1) "Pain and lamenting are expressed, according to the sentimental taste of the time, through wrinkled foreheads and open mouths."  (Friedländer -  Altniederländische Malerei VIII)

(2) Orley could of course draw on a rich heritage - notably on the work of Rogier van der Weyden, who painted "the most beautiful tears in our art history" (Leen Huet - "Mijn België")

(3) apologies for the dark photos - painting tears may be feasible, photographing them is yet another matter. Especially in a the dimmed light of a museum room, and with Orley's dark/light "to heigthen pathos and to facilitate his own job" "Das Pathos dadurch steigernd verhüllt er mit Dunkelheit Schwächen der Form und erleichtert sich die Arbeit."

a longing for landscapes

[delayed posting about an able-bodied flânerie 2 months ago ]

“the lost fable speech of painting”

It was on a gloomy November Sunday, almost 20 years ago, that an American writer (1) made me curious about 16th Century Flemish landscape painters.
His description conveyed a sense of drama – the dramas of a lost fable speech of painting (2) , of the forgotten lives of minor masters (3) , of the human calamities hidden in fabulous landscapes.
“the occasional pastoral arrangement with , somewhere in the background, the chance catastrophe – the painted town in the nonchalant process of being lost “. (4)

I set out to discover these landscapes in the local Belgian museums and fell in love with their hues of brown and green and blue, with their scraggy rocky landscapes, but most of all with their shimmering blue-white panoramas of ports & oceans & faraway mountain rims.
“foreground in brown, submerged sea-green middlescape, and background of serene mineral-and-linseed blue (5), wandering out of the available frame and off the edge of the visible spectrum”

Lovely little panels... , containing the widest of world vistas while meticulously recording the smallest of details. Panels inviting the spectator to follow the sinuous paths winding through hills and pastures, populated with brave little figures on their perilous way through the world. Or landscapes featuring some Holy family on their Flight to Egypt, or a penitent Saint Jerome, a Magdalene in ecstasy, a Saint Anthony being tempted (yet again) (6) , or a Saint Christopher crossing the river and succumbing under the weight of the slender Jesus child on his shoulder.

And yet, hidden in the coulisses of the landscape, there are also the calamities to behold – such as a massacre of innocent children in an otherwise peaceful pasture somewhere further on. Or take those hellish panels plunged in deep red, with in the back the extravagantly burning cities of Sodom & Gomorrah , while in the foreground the survivors walk on almost leisurely, accompanied by angels on their righteous path. (7)

“a journey of discovery, full of varied interest”

So it was with quite some excitement that I took the train to Lille, on a November Friday (an ‘all souls day’ with raging clouds in turbulent skies), to go and see the “Flemish Landscape Fables” exhibit bringing together hundreds of these fascinating paintings.
Established critique has it that the exhibit shows too many paintings and lacks a single clear story – well, perhaps ... but I for one enjoyed the meandering wandering in the labyrinth of pictures which the curators had created - quite happy to discover hitherto obscure painters and paintings.
A Kerstiaen de Keuninck for instance (the sheer alliterative & rhyming qualities of that name!) who specialised (with relish, apparently) in catastrophes, especially those involving fire. Or the many startling nocturnal paintings – with a mastery of clair-obscur and of drama that felt almost baroque ( e.g; an amazing nocturnal “Fall of Lucifer” by Herri met de Bles).

True bliss I found in the contemplation of Joachim Patinir’s little panels – with their vast layered landscapes stretching all the way into the far-off distance of blue oceans and white skies. “Patinier surveys the land from the mountain peaks” and thus offers “naive delight in the sheer quantity of the area surveyed” (8) and “a journey of discovery [...] full of varied interest”, as Friedländer puts it.
However, I don’t feel Patinir gets his rightful due from Friedländer. While admitting Patinir was unique in making landscape “resound [...] with [...] pathos” Friedländer dismisses this as “idyllic sentiment”.

In doing so he misses out on (9) the near ‘transcendent’ escapism that Patinir’s paintings offer , with their aura of distance, both spiritual and physical. His paintings are magnificently “centrifugal” (10) - leaving behind this world - inciting the eyes and the mind to take flight , or rather, to set sail with one of the those meticulously painted, ‘expensive delicate’ ships that sail on Patinir’s oceans.

from metallurgy mines to Babel

But pending my definitive blissful sailing away into Patinir’s shimmering blue vistas, I (have to) remain interested in the more earthly doings of this world.
And so I revelled with astonished curiosity in the completely unexpected depictions by Herri met de Bles of ... metallurgy mine activity, with highly realistic details of mine-pits and furnaces . The catalogue mentions it is the faithfully painted translation of a poem by a Nicolas Bourbon, “ Ferraria” , which thoroughly explains the best practice technological processes for metals exploitation and treatment. Just as Virgil incorporated lengthy discourses about agricultural technique in his Georgics... (11)

Speaking about 'Landscape' and 'Progress' and 'Human Hubris' ... then Bruegel and the Tower of Babel cannot be far off!

And indeed, in all its curatorial wisdom the Lille museum organized , alongside the ancient “Flemish landscape fables” a “contemporary exhibition on the theme of the most famous of architectural allegories in art history : the Tower of Babel.”
Going by the innumerable paraphrases throughout the ages, this 16th century painting by Bruegel is a very powerful image indeed .... of a very powerful myth. A myth with two faces: on the one hand the classical tale of overconfident human civilisation & technical progress punished by jealous gods and on the other hand the fall from grace from a single original language into a Babylonian confusion of tongues. (12)

landscape fables indeed

Most art works in the Babel-exhibition do present a rather grim view of our globalised, (post-) industrial and digitalized ways.
Dystopias abound, some of them more horrifying than the most hellish of Boschian hells. Other works disconcert by their shrewd turning upside down of the poetics of classical landscape painting.

And as landscape painting traditions go, few are more poetic than the Asian landscape scrolls . So it is with an anticipation of melancholy beauty that the visitor approaches the apparently misty phantom landscapes of the young Chinese artist, Yang Yongliang. Only to discover that on closer inspection the mountains are a jumble of concrete high-rises, the spruces are in fact pylons and the clouds are obviously nothing but billowing smoke.

Ah, ... landscape fables indeed. .. Lost fables, while perhaps “all the attention once lavished on the past [is] now requisitioned by the unrealized future?” (13)

But I have “no better response to looming contemporarity”(14) than to return to my Patinier-panel and to gaze once more into the bluish shimmering distance...

Fabulous Notes
(1) Richard Powers – The Gold Bug Variations
(2) “The fablespeech of pictures was doomed by the creeping success of new prose” [...] “Paint enjoys its last few years in the lost kingdom of parable before its exile. Years when the eye for the last time, alarmed by the discovery of what actually lies outside the window, still has half a retina full of the afterimage of pre-existent places.” Richard Powers
(3) Herri Met de Bles (v.1500-v.1560) , supposedly a cousin and disciple of Joachim Patinir (Dinant v. 1480 – Antwerp v. 1524) , one of the first ‘dedicated’ landscape painters, of whom not that much is known either (except that Dürer admired him a lot)
(4) Cfr Richard Powers + from the “Flemish Landscape fables “ catalogue: a very Nordic worldview “[...] in which the insouciance of daily activity can run alongside drama” +again Richard Powers (paraphrasing Auden ) “About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters. Even the minor ones. Even met de Bles, or Blesse. With the blaze. Or wound.”
(5) Sylvie Germain : “[Patinir]a peint avec du silence, avec la transparence de l’air, avec la luminosité de l’espace, et avec l’âme du Bleu même”. “Le ciel, toujours immense, est la source de l’éblouissante lactation qui baigne les lointains de ses tableaux”
(6) Being tempted by odd arrangements of hideous monstrosities and luscious women (are creepy monsters and seductive women supposed to be equally scary for a tempted male?)
(7) Righteous path...righteous path, I was abhorred by the story of “Job and his daughters”. Having escaped from the fire, Job’s wife turned into a column of salt, beholding from a distance Sodom&Gomorra’s hellish demise. Job himself and his daughters walked merrily on, accompanied by an angel. At night, Job gets drunk and incestuously proposes to his daughters. The old testament story quite repulsively presents this as “blameless Job being seduced by his scheming daughters” .
(8) This was for Europeans also the time of the great geographical explorations and discoveries – cf Colombus
(9) Friedländer: “The moment we take Gerard David and Jerome Bosch in consideration Patenier’s achievement appears limited. We cannot credit the first landscape painter with a single new discovery but we can discern in him a prophetic intuition of the value of this new field of art, which he cultivated which such devotion. Not only did Patenier make landscape predominant, he made it resound and – within the limits of descriptive landscape – imbued it with idyllic sentiment and pathos that touches our emotions. “
(10) From the “Fables du paysage flamand” catalogue, an essay by Patrick Le Chanu: the Italian “centripetal” approach versus the Flemish “centrifugal” approach – “”la peinture italienne présente souvent, aux antipodes de la vision nordique, un univers centripète dans lequel le monde qui nous entoure et la nature sont comme mis au service d’une concentration de l’attention du spectateur sur les personages. “[...]”Au Nord, c’est Joachim Patinir [dans l’oeuvre duquel] le paysage envahit encore un peu plus les tableaux, repoussant les personages de l’histoire sacrée au plan median et les plongeant en son sein. [...] cette innovation [...] exprime le triomphe d’une vision éclatée et centrifuge de la place de l’être [...]”l
(11) It does not seem that today’s painters and poets would so joyfully engage in expounding technological or agricultural processes... They’d rather question technical progress and its discontents.
(12) And the interpretation of this myth is not politically neutral, not even (or especially) these days! Some stress the “Babylonian confusion” as a divine punishment and hence imply that too much diversity is a curse. And others maintain that it is precisely “la pénsée unique” (The Single Discourse) which brings on all misery (while the multifarious flourishing of cultures is a blessing) . In any case, this confusion of tongues looks in fact rather agreeable in one of the art works on show in Lille : a tower of Babel built up from books, lots of books from many places & in many languages.
(13) Fables , escapism ... – perhaps even a Herri met de Bles was already irrelevant in his own time in the Netherlands. With his Northern pastures and rocks and seas .... when Columbus had already set foot in America.... when great discoveries were being made. And all those penitent saints with their apocryphal legends when in Wittenberg Luther had already launched his austere reformation... This is how Richard Powers captures the contradictions for a landscape painter in the Netherlands of that time : “All the attention once lavished on the past was now requisitioned by the unrealized future” “Me and my Antwerp master: no better response to looming contemporarity than to set up on a distant hill and catch the conflagration in oils”
 

The Brussels Museum of Fine Arts Revisited

“It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to ‘sea’ as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ‘ship’” (1)

< now please replace ‘sea’ and ‘ship’ by ‘ art museums’(2)>

Yeah, “whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth”, I take to an art museum. So on that particularly damned “damp, drizzly” Saturday morning in August, without much ado I quietly cycled to the Brussels Royal Museum of Fine Arts, mounted its wide stairs flanked by pompous pillars, drew my wrinkled museum pass and discreetly mixed in with scattered groups of visitors.

The Brussels Royal Museum of Fine Arts is obviously not the Louvre and I still remember overhearing, oh over 10 years ago, the disparaging remarks made by some Dutch tourists, who chiefly found fault with the museum’s outdated set-up, reminiscent of “former eastern bloc poverty ”, its last refurbishing dating from the 70s or so. Since then, however, the Brussels museum people (despite meagre funding) did catch up on trendy museum marketing principles: renovating parts of the building, adding a stylish ‘brasserie’ and an up-to-date bookshop , reshuffling the collections and dedicating a whole museum-within-a-museum to the crowd-attracting Magritte.
But I myself, of course, go on cherishing the museum’s vestiges of obsoleteness wherever I can still spot them (those 70s false ceilings, those worn carpets, the fake wood panelling, ...). It’s especially the inadvertent overlap of ill-matched successive styles that does me in: 20th century shabbiness combined with the lingering bourgeois grandeur of a 19th century museum.

And on a sombre rainy day, when the lights in the museum are up, and when through the windows you can catch glimpses of shadowy people struggling with umbrellas, on such a day it is not hard to imagine the bustling bourgeois city Brussels still was in the 1930s.
Neither is it hard to imagine W.H. Auden wandering about in these museum rooms on a December day in 1938, brooding about the human position of suffering while standing in front of Breughel’s Icarus (3) , “how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster”. Today, handy signs direct you to the popular room with the Bruegel paintings. And though the Icarus painting is in fact no longer considered an authentic Bruegel, many visitors still pause in front of it, some of them perhaps reading an Auden sentence quoted in their guide, others searching for Icarus’ tiny “white legs disappearing into the green water” (they are so tiny & tucked away in a corner of the painting, these floundering legs, that you could easily miss them).

There were a lot of Italian visitors last Saturday, flocking together in the rooms with the Flemish Primitives (where they can see, amongst others, two heart rending, pathetic pietas by Van Der Weyden ; an Annunciation by the elusive Master of Flémalle, set in a claustrophobic but enchantingly domestic room ; Dierik Bout’s harsh rendering of a cruel scene of justice ; an oddly still pieta by Petrus Christus, with those figures in frozen postures of grief, standing somewhat forlornly in a vast landscape ; and of course the smooth devotion of Memling’s portraits.

Do Italian art lovers nowadays still admire these Flemish paintings as they reportedly did in the 15th century? According to my friend J. (writer & art historian, carrying a Belgian passport ill matched with his rather Southern ‘elective affinities’ honed during long stays in Italy) Italians are mostly bemused now by the Flemish primitives, struggling with what they see as stiffness and lack of fluidity & volume, failing to fully grasp the sensuality of the typical early Netherlandish sense of atmosphere and of titillating texture.
Be that as it may, my fellow Italian visitors that Saturday were looking intently and slowly, earnestly consulting their guidebooks, whispering appreciatively to each other.

As to me, I got fascinated that day by the quite distinct sensibilities of two Madonna paintings done by Quinten Metsys (1466-1529). Quinten Metsys... ! (4) At times perhaps the most Italian of early Netherlandish painters...
In any case a painter who, without renouncing the Flemish heritage, in some of his paintings fully seems to master the Italian renaissance lessons of well modelled volumes and pleasing compositions. He’s also a painter with a finely honed sensitivity, able to render compassuinately a wide range of emotions, without veering into the somewhat pedant and contorted mannerism of slightly later Netherlandish generations of painters.

Take these two Madonna’s for instance, each appealing to our sensibilities in such a different way. There is that majestic Madonna, seated on an elaborate gothic throne, with the regally draped folds of her robe filling almost the entire picture plane (though in the back, at both sides, you do get a peak at the world outside) . Her expression is serious & sad, (though there’ s a tad of sulkiness too, perhaps in keeping with the slightly aloof appearance of a rich, beautiful girl?). She ‘s absorbed in her reading, no doubt taking in ominous tidings – the little Jesus sitting on her lap is reading too, it seems (or is he just watching the pictures? ) – with a concentrated & knowing look far beyond his age. And yet, it’s such a touchingly small child too, with those little hands, so cute in his white shirt, ah and with a little foot peeping out of the folds of his mother’s stately dress.

And then there’s that other Madonna-painting, so soft and immediately pleasing in both colours and subject , with that warm & intimate rapport between mother & son, with so joyous and domestic a scene (including the humble bread & apple, the homely knife on a plain table cloth).
Two Madonna’s by the same painter, what could be potentially more boring ... and yet (for those who want to see) each painting presents us with a wholly distinct palette of human feeling & sensibility.

How many people have already stood in front of these Madonna’s, rapt with delighted attention ... ? How many meditating faithful Christians? How many agnostic art lovers? (um, & how many bored tourists or students?) How many generations of frivolous dilettantes, earnest connoisseurs and erudite art historians?
In any case, Max J. Friedländer (5) - one of the most insightful and intuitive art historians/connoisseurs I have come across in my, admittedly limited, readings – must have looked quite intently at many of Metsys’ Madonna’s. Leaving us with precise, evocative descriptions, precious crystals of human perceptiveness that manage to capture in a few laconic phrases the full, complex richness of the many sensitivities at play in these paintings.

And isn’t that why we look at paintings : because they are testimonials of human experience which spectators throughout the ages can share and relive, because they offer a “concentrated timelessness”(6) in an otherwise constantly changing and even threatening world.
And isn’t that what is so appealing about these ancient art museums – that the sheer richness of their art collections is proof of a "lasting collective human obsession” (paraphrasing again Leen Huet)(6) .
Thus art museums offer at least some sort of reassurance for the transient & isolated individuals we otherwise are - and some sort of escape too, from our own duller selves, whenever “we grow grim about the mouth” .

 
neatly numbered (though quite lopsided) notes & quotes
(1) Herman Melville Moby Dick
(2) (taking personal note of the fact that dear C. would of course much rather keep the quote as such, duly salvaging all ships and seas)
(3)
W.H. Auden “Musée des Beaux Arts”
(4) Quinten Metsys (a.ka. Quentin Matsys or Quentin Massys) In fact I don’t quite understand why Metsys (who showed such individuality and mastery in a wide range of genres, from realistic caricatures over moving Madonna’s to religious altarpieces and humanist portraits)is not more widely acclaimed. Why for instance was Mabuse (Jan Gossaert/Gennnin Gossart) recently entitled to a major London ‘solo’-exhibition, and not Metsys? + taking note (4) as an opportunity to apologize for the drab quality of the pics (of the 2 clandestinely taken pictures on the spot and of the rather disappointing reproductions found on the web)
(5) Max J. Friedländer Early Netherlandish Painting Volume VII Quentin Massys - some of my favourite Friedländer quotes about various Metsys madonnas:
“the emotional pitch lacks the depth and gravity that give weight to the Brussels panels. The Virgin’s head is rather doll-like – smug and aloof. The child is amiable and insignificant. The whole painting is innocuous and festive, but without the imprint of sorrow that none of Quentin’s other Madonna’s altogether lack”
“[...] the Virgin’s expression is grave, noble and sorrowful, but here it is a bit more sullen and homespun, not quite so proud and a trifle weary. The child, covered to the toes in a long white shift, perches in somewhat uncertain posture on the mother’s arm, an expression of almost animal-like gravity on his face.”
“The intimacy of the kiss is at odds with any air of solemnity, as are the still life details, the delicacies shown on the table in the foreground in orderly array and painstaking, almost over realistic technique.”
And yet another one: “Mother and child move in triumphant freedom, in the spirit of the renaissance.”
And, finally, a quote to confound those who might think Matsys or Friedländer are only about cloyingly sentimental Madonna’s (the following quote refers to Metsys’ Antwerp Altarpiece of the Lamentation) :
“The master eagerly seizes upon opportunities to bemuse the viewer with a show of splendour and a depiction of orgiastic cruelty. The lofty sorrow and many-voiced harmony of lamentation in the centre panel are framed on either side by evil instinct.”
(6)
a passage from Leen Huet’s novel “Eenoog”, describing a visit to the Uffizi - “op een plek als deze zou het verleidelijk zijn om schilderijen beter gezelschap te vinden dan mensen. […] Het gaat om hun tijdloosheid, hun concentratie. Achter een paar kleurvakken zit de ervaring van een heel leven. Ervaring die ik lees. En ik ben niet de enige die er zo over denkt, alleen een langdurige collectieve obsessie kan tot dit soort overvloedig gevulde ruimtes leiden” -
a hesitant, unauthorized translation : “in a place such as this it would be tempting to prefer the company of paintings to that of human beings […]. It’s about their timelessness, their concentration. Behind a few coloured planes there is the experience of a whole life. An experience I am reading. And I am not the only one who thinks about it like that, only a lasting collective obsession can produce lavishly filled rooms such as these”

“we guess as we read, we create; it all starts with an initial mistake” (1)

This is a confession. I am guilty of a wrongful appropriation. For over a year I have unjustly enlisted a borrowed phrase as a private talisman to ward off distress. It was an error of projection and a sad case of not finishing reading a sentence.

But let’s put you to the test, dear reader. Let’s see whether you are as tempted as I was to project stoic acceptance into this phrase:

“People who have ceased to hope that they will be fully understood express themselves with something of the torment of the deaf mute” (2)

What kept on echoing in my mind was “people who have ceased to hope” - and I thought of it as people who have wisely shed unrealistic expectations and who therefore would no longer be anguished about being (mis)understood. Stoically consoling, somehow.
But I had completely ignored the subsequent “torment of the deaf mute” (3)…. I had not understood that “ceasing to hope” does not equal “ceasing to need” … And so I had blithely skipped the essential, tormented part of the phrase.

Let me warn you that I’m wrongfully appropriating again: the above are not my own coffee-cup and glass of water. I just found them like that, left behind on a café-table. I myself am a stolid tea-drinker, not a sophisticated, wired espresso-sipper. But somehow an espresso-cup seemed more glamorously melancholic than a sensible tea-mug, and hence also more suited to illustrate this post. (4)

Trying to get more words into the footnotes than in the main body of text
(1) Proust - La fugitive : « “On devine en lisant, on crée; tout part d’une erreur initiale […] Une bonne partie de ce que nous croyons, et jusque dans les conclusions dernières c’est ainsi, avec un entêtement et une bonne foi égale, vient d’une première méprise sur les prémisses »
(2) The art historian Max J. Friedlaënder when describing the portraits painted by Quinten Metsys (Flemish 16th C painter)
(3) I’m all the more not to be forgiven for ignoring the second part of that sentence, since one of my favorite books is “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson Mc Cullers. A poignant account of the appeal a deaf mute exerts on a set of lonely people in a small village in the American south. Each of them turns to the deaf-mute to express their hopes and anguishes – his silent smiling seen as proof of his understanding. (Whereas the deaf-mute in reality is rather politely puzzled by the emotional gushes of those people and in his turn ardently communicates in sign-language with the only other deaf mute in town, who is a simpleton addicted to sweets)
(4) a puzzling difference in image really, the one between tea- and coffee- drinking.