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John Singer Sargent, Miss Helen Dunham, 1892
48.5 by 37.5 in., Private Collection
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Sir William Orpen, Early Morning, Yvonne Aubicq, 1922
36 by 34 in., Private Collection, Melbourne,
Australia
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During the mid-1980s, at a time when I was passionately
attuned to painting’s siren call, I went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art with
a friend a few Sunday afternoons to look at the European and American paintings. But I grew increasingly annoyed with his
company and stopped going to the museum with him altogether because he was
constantly pointing out how “badly” certain things like hands were painted in
many of the Renaissance masterpieces on display. I’ve always felt such observations were
pointless because painting in those days was not under the evil influence of
photography, which has conditioned the public to expect figurative art to look
photographic. When painting was king of
the visual arts, the public was conditioned to seeing varying stylistic
interpretations of the human form as the art developed from Giotto to the 19th
Century. I can enjoy the craftsmanship
exhibited in paintings done in the various periods of art history without
subjecting it to contemporary standards for drawing and painting the natural
world.
Renoir must have felt the same way. He was admiring an Old Master painting at the
Louvre one day when a fellow painter pointed out some detail that was rather poorly
executed, just as my friend used to do.
Renoir was taken aback that someone would comment critically on such an
insignificant detail in such a great work of art. “Who would have ever thought of such a
thing,” he said, or words to that effect.
The Boston
painter William McGregor Paxton, who apparently had a keen analytical mind for
painting, felt a little differently. His
biographer and former student, R. H. Ives Gammell, takes note of a 1921 letter written
by Paxton to a student traveling in Europe. Paxton wrote, “Don’t let the old masters
overawe you, and don’t get cheeky with them either. Most of them had something or they wouldn’t
be Old Masters. Look at them as you would
look at your friends’ work; find the faults and praise the qualities. There is no reason for a different standard
of criticism than the one you use for your contemporaries. You may lose some pleasure by finding how the
wires are pulled, but think of the pleasure you can give others if you can
learn how it’s done.” In that same
letter, Paxton states that “the artist’s task is to create emotion rather than
to be moved. No doubt one who has never
felt emotion is incapable of communicating it to others, but most of us have
felt it, and few of us can pass it on.”
So much for my simple-minded, inarticulate enthusiasms about
the paintings I love. Well, I do study
the way the subject was rendered and the paint was handled to achieve certain
effects, but for the most part I just revel in the wonder of it all like any
art lover would.
I personally have a special affection for the opposing views
of Renoir, whose life story was so engagingly portrayed in the biography
written by his son Jean Renoir, the celebrated film director. It was the first artist’s biography I had
ever read and made a lasting impression on me.
The son recalls many of Renoir’s opinions about painting, including his belief
that a true work of art must first be “indescribable” and second “inimitable.” Renoir advised painters to “Go and see what
others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be
trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would
do would have any character.”
From my lowly vantage point, I believe that flawless craftsmanship
by itself throughout every square inch of a canvas, without such “extras” as exquisite
color or exceptional design, can actually decrease the chances that one’s
painting will convey emotion. There has
to be some mystery to engage the viewer emotionally. A lot of artists hold that view. “Regularity,
order, desire for perfection destroy art,” said Renoir. “Irregularity is the basis of all art.”
Some painters still make a conscious decision to emphasize
certain details around the center of interest in their paintings and downplay
or suggest subordinate details, believing that is the best way to convey on
canvas some of the emotion that drew them to paint their subjects in the first
place. Many painters from past
generations worked in this manner.
When painting alla prima and with great feeling, unconscious
paint handling curiosities can sneak into a picture. They can readily be overlooked or ignored by
viewers because the paintings are so powerfully executed and visually exciting
overall. For example, we sometimes see subliminal
images in the work of bravura painters like John Singer Sargent when they
rapidly paint clouds, seascapes, landscape debris and the folds in draperies,
for example. I think a lot of painters are
too conscious of such hidden images and tend to rework into placidity an otherwise
exciting passage of alla prima painting because the folds clearly resembled the
two eyes and a nose of a human face. I
know that’s something I have been too conscious of in my paintings.
But what if one of your favorite artists creates a painting
that contains some detail that just bugs you no end, regardless of whether it
was the result of an accident or put there on purpose. Can the presumed flaw be ignored in light of
all the great work in the rest of the painting?
I had no problem coming to terms with one odd, but obviously
intended detail in Sargent’s gorgeous painting from 1892 of Miss Helen Dunham. When I was admiring it at the big Sargent
exhibit at the Whitney Museum
some years ago, a stranger standing next to me commented, “Did you notice the
way Sargent painted the nostril?” I
hadn’t noticed before, but it was painted in an obvious rectangular shape, a
perfect parallelogram, actually, with no serious effort by Sargent to modify
its edges.
Curious. But it isn’t something you would notice at a
normal viewing distance, so I can still enjoy the overall beauty of this
portrait. Sargent was gaining in
confidence and skill as the world’s premier portrait artist by the early 1890s
and probably decided to boldly paint the shape of the nostril exactly as it
first struck him, perhaps in keeping with his belief that a successful portrait
was a bit of a caricature anyway.
Certainly a trivial matter.
The William Orpen painting of his French mistress Yvonne
Aubicq, with whom he had a 10-year relationship, is a different story. When I
first saw the reproduction of “Early Morning,” I was blown away. Here was the most compelling painting of a
nude I have ever seen. This was no Bouguereau
nymph posing sweetly with cherubs and a water jug. This was no Boucher or Fragonard beauty all fleshly
dimpled and coyly seductive. This was no
“Naked Maja” posing forthrightly for Goya on a settee. This was, in fact, a painting of a nude unlike
any ever painted in the history of painting.
This was the real deal -- an honest-to-goodness attractive naked woman
in an entirely believable life situation with all the accessories deployed to
perfection as she has her morning coffee after a night of whatever. “Early
Morning” is an incredible tour de force of naturalistic painting.
The painting was included in a 2005 exhibit of Orpen’s
paintings at The Imperial War Museum in London
titled “William Orpen: Politics, Sex and Death.” Bunny Smedly, a Cambridge-educated historian,
posted an essay about the exhibit on a British scholarly website called The
Social Affairs Unit on March 7, 2005. She really “got it right” with her insightful
comments regarding this painting. Here’s
a sample of her fervent “adults only” review of this picture:
“Yvonne Aubicq -- still young, still with a tiny bit of lovely
puppy-fat and delightfully rosy skin -- naked in bed, a robe thrown away
somewhere, those letters disregarded…her little breasts painted by someone who
understood their weight and orientation at more than a technical level, the
centrifugal nature of the composition ever and again drawing this nude back
from being a studio confection toward being what it is, which is a painting of
a naked girl, legs folded, viewed from above, finished with her breakfast,
ready for sex? It’s a description of
lust, pure and simple…if Orpen had been able to claim any stylistic
descendants, this painting would be reckoned a masterpiece. As he can’t, it’s a freak. It doesn’t fit anywhere…it may quite possibly
be Orpen’s greatest painting.”
Oh, was I ever thunderstruck by this painting and Ms.
Smedley’s keen understanding of it. Then
when I calmed down I noticed some minor aberration in the painting that is just
an insane anomaly. I can’t figure it
out. What the heck is that thing
protruding behind and above her right elbow that I have pointed to in the
detail of the painting?
I asked my good friend Michelle Golias, an excellent
painter who is better at analyzing paintings than I am, to take a look at the
painting and give me her objective assessment about this apparent blemish. She suggested that Yvonne might have had a midriff bulge which Orpen put in and then decided he would take out later by painting the background cloth over it, but missed going back to it, as he might have been painting all over the canvas continually, rather than finishing one section at a time. That's possible.
But for gosh sakes, upon my obsessive close examination of the reproduction of the painting, that passage looks like the tip of a breast in profile, painted with soft edges that clearly separate
it from the flesh behind it. Michelle agreed it looks a little like that. Whatever
was this great painter thinking of to allow this mysterious projectile to disturb the
contour of her figure? Did he turn an
old canvas around and paint the current picture over another nude painting? How is it possible he didn’t see this “whatever
it may be,” considering how closely he observed all the other elements in the picture,
like the beautifully painted silver coffeepot?
Did he think removing it would destroy the freshness of the paint
handling? Was it some inside joke between himself and his fiery mistress that he
left for all to ponder over? Would the mystery be solved if I saw the original painting? Orpen, what’s
going on?
It’s the kind of curious, inexplicable blemish that can
really disturb one’s appreciation of an otherwise fantastic painting. How I wish it wasn’t there.
