"The One in Yellow"

Has anyone seen an oil painting created in the last 75 years or so that made them fall into a swoon upon first viewing it on a gallery or museum wall?  I certainly haven’t.  And I’m not talking here about just getting dizzy on an empty stomach in the rarefied atmosphere of a sanctified environment. 

Maybe some people really do go limp when they view, for example, a Clyfford Still abstraction in a largely ignored gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted solely to his canvases of monumental scale, the only required “technique” for this genre.  I suspect that such a collapse would not be from aesthetic overload, but from fatigue caused by all the mental gymnastics needed to explain to the ignorant public what the brush marks on the canvas signify and why the man is considered a creative genius.

But I’m sure most of us, painters and non-painters alike, have had deeply emotional encounters with one or more oil paintings created from the early Renaissance to the mid-1930s, when things really started to fall apart for the sensual side of painting, with the emergence of abstract art, well-meaning but chunky social realism, and the increasingly pervasive influence of photography, which taught the public, and many artists, to see the world through the lens of a camera.

Gustave Moreau,The Young Man and Death,1865,Fogg Art Museum,Harvard

Fantin-Latour,Self Portrait,1860,Fogg Art Museum,Harvard

Artists who encounter works by one of their favorite painters for the first time, by chance or on purpose, are particularly susceptible to these “sneak attacks” on their unconscious minds.  One of my painter friends was in a gallery at Harvard’s Fogg Museum that contained works by two of her favorites, Gustave Moreau and Fantin-Latour.  She recalls being mesmerized and feeling faint in front of the Symbolist painter Moreau’s “The Young Man and Death.”  She then caught a glimpse of a Fantin self-portrait and cried out, “Oh God, catch me, I feel like I’m going to pass out.”  Her painter’s soul was responding to the palpable feeling of light enveloping the gorgeous flesh of the young man in Moreau’s painting, which so perfectly renders the light effect many of us are longing to achieve in our own work.  Masterful painters who come close to infusing their paintings with the actual light of the world are the ones who can inspire such emotion from fellow members of the human race.  

Edward Hopper,Gas,1940,Museum of Modern Art, New York

 Corot,The Banks of the Seine at Conflans,1865-70,Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

I’ve had quite a few close encounters of that kind myself since I began studying painting for good in 1978.  Before then, however, I confess that I didn’t pay much attention to the great paintings found in museums and galleries.  Like most people, I was preoccupied with other work and play, and only a couple of paintings left any lasting impression.  The first painting I recall being emotionally drawn to was Edward Hopper’s 1940 painting “Gas” in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  The painting strongly evoked the cool twilight air of a gas station in the middle of nowhere, which is where I grew up.  Another painting that had a similarly evocative effect on me in my pre-painting days was Corot’s “The Banks of the Seine at Conflans” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When I began studying painting on a serious level, though, the most evocative, soul-stirring works, the kind that have made me giddy with delight upon seeing them in person, have been those done by the great figurative painters -- Titian, Caravaggio, Guido Reni (the great Guido), Bronzino, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyke, Velasquez, Vigee le Brun, Sargent, Zorn, Boldini, Manet, Mary Cassatt, Kroyer, Sorolla, Repin, Kramskoi, Serov,  some early 20^th Century American and European realists and impressionists – the list from the old days goes on and on.  All of the painters I admire most were masters of the craft of painting, and also masters at creating the illusion of life on canvas – the thing that means more to me than anything else in painting and is my ever-elusive goal in my own work. 

Edmund Tarbell,The Breakfast Room,1903,Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Near the end of his life, the painter Edmund Tarbell (1862-1938) gave voice to my own feelings when he said to Ives Gammell , the painter, teacher and astute chronicler of the Boston School of painters, “Well, here’s hoping I can make one that really looks like it before I’m through.” 

A painting by a fellow Boston artist, William McGregor Paxton (1869-1941), provided one of the most epiphinous moments in my art-viewing life.  Paxton was an outstanding draughtsman, both by native talent and by training in Gerome’s atelier in late 19^th Century Paris. He was also a fabulous colorist, inspired by the plein air discoveries made by the French Impressionists.

I have a wonderful monograph on Paxton published in conjunction with an exhibit of his work sponsored by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1978-79 and edited by Ellen Wardwell Lee.  In a biographical essay in the book, Gammell (1893-1981), who was a student of Paxton, relates the story of another student that illustrates Paxton’s devotion to the accurate portrayal of the beautiful color found in nature.  He writes that Paxton told the student his picture wasn’t very good, but the Renaissance colorist Titian “never painted anything as true in color as that picture of yours…if Titian walked in here now he would examine that canvas very, very carefully and then would go back to his studio and paint a picture finer than any he had previously painted, very likely finer than any picture ever painted.”

William McGregor Paxton,The One in Yellow,1916,Private Collection

It so happened that I serendipitously came face-to-face some 25 years ago with just such a picture, and it was one created by Paxton himself, in 1916.  It is one of the finest figure paintings I have ever seen.  I was on one of my regular tours of the midtown galleries and walked into the Berry-Hill Galleries, then located on Fifth Avenue between 57^th and 58^th Streets.  I turned a corner off the reception area and there it was, “The One in Yellow.”  I gasped audibly and babbled unintelligibly to the gallery manager, “When, where, how, wow!”  

I had fallen in love with the painting after seeing it in reproduction, and never expected to see it in person because it has been privately held over the years.  I was bowled over by the strikingly beautiful color in the painting, more intense than in any figure painting I have seen before or since.  And the slightly stylized, rhythmic drawing of the elegantly posed model was perfection itself.  I continue to bless my good fortune for having this gorgeous painting ascend, like “Brigadoon,” for me alone to enjoy for “one brief, shining moment.”  Praise be to the Lord!