Bamboo

by William Boyd

  But it is Bonnard’s domestic interiors that remain the quintessential Bonnardian subject, a form of “intimisme,” as the genre is so called, that he made his own. These pictures are in fact highly sophisticated and respond to the most stringent analysis (indeed this is where it can be convincingly established that Bonnard directly inspired Matisse). Yet for all their artistry, their bold coloration, their “flatness,” their use of a form of faux-naïf style, they exert an appeal that extends beyond the painterly. Bonnard’s interiors are pictures that we should and do unashamedly love because—effortlessly, inevitably—they conjure up and provoke memories, experiences and associations of ideas that we can all share and verify. The opening lines of Wallace Stevens’s great poem “Sunday Morning” summon up exactly this ambience and these universal emotions:

  Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

  Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

  And the green freedom of a cockatoo…

  Stevens’s poem could be the text behind any number of Bonnard’s magical pictures—and “magic” is the right word, I feel. Trying to analyse one’s response to these luminous, quotidian, yet timeless images is almost redundant, a waste of effort. As Vladimir Nabokov observed: art of this order is experienced in the nape of the neck. They are intimate, they are domestic, there is not much sturm und drang about them, but Bonnard’s paintings—very much like Edward Hopper’s, I would claim—possess an allure that is almost defiantly anti-intellectual—to their eternal and enduring credit. William Blake offered to show us the world in a grain of sand; Bonnard chooses to show us the world in a sunlit breakfast room, with a coffee pot on a gingham tablecloth, and a view through wind-stirred curtains of a green, dew-drenched garden with a distant glimpse of the sea beyond … Who is to say which is the more valid and enticing?

  1998

  Georges Braque

  The Late Works

  Braque and Picasso. Picasso and Braque. The two names will be for ever yoked together in the history of twentieth-century art—a fact that is, curiously, to Braque’s detriment. Picasso’s reputation is so refulgent that his partner in what was the greatest revolution in painting since the Renaissance is inevitably somewhat obscured. Braque is the Shelley to Picasso’s Keats; the Gene Kelly to Picasso’s Fred Astaire; the McCartney to Picasso’s Lennon. The comparisons are not wholly facetious—they illustrate a genuine anomaly that often arises in the vexed and complex question of Reputation. The work that Braque accomplished after Cubism is, broadly speaking, almost unknown. The odd image of a bird, a still life or two may linger in the memory. But, outside the circles of connoisseurship, who is familiar with the great sequence of studio interiors painted through the late forties and the fifties? Or the small, charged, late landscapes whose intensity rivals that of Van Gogh? This superb show at the Royal Academy should, at the least, do something to rectify that ignorance; at best it will reconfirm Braque as an artist of the very first rank, with a character and adamantine integrity that are unique.

  The show concentrates on the work of the last two decades of Braque’s life (he died in 1963) but it is worth considering Cubism as a starting point. In the few years after 1909, as Picasso and Braque simultaneously assaulted the north face of pictorial representation. It is fair to say that each had his period as trailblazer, but it can be fairly convincingly argued that it was Braque who made the most significant contribution, that Picasso seized on ideas that Braque introduced—papier collé, woodgraining techniques, the introduction of lettering, say—and gave them his own special spin. What this show makes absolutely clear, however, is that the revolution they both inaugurated in those few momentous years provided the aesthetic that was to drive Braque’s work from then on until the end of his life. Picasso returned in 1918 to classical figuration, but for Braque the essential Cubist principles of representation—the still life the dominant subject, use of multi-view perspective, the “celebration” of two dimensionality, analysis of space and relationship between objects within that frame—remained his artistic touchstones. They were elaborated, transformed and developed with a dogged consistency throughout the work that followed in the decades after the end of the First World War and Cubism’s great phase.

  This doggedness, this singlemindedness in Braque reminds me of another genius and near contemporary, Paul Klee. Like Braque, Klee spent his life perfecting and refining his art with a concentration and devotion that is almost heroic. It is their attitude of mind that is similar rather than their output (though both were amongst the century’s greatest colourists). Intriguingly, they both found a form of epiphanic serenity in that fervent and solitary focus. Braque said in an interview late in his life that “objects don’t exist for me except insofar as a rapport exists between them or between them and me. When one attains this harmony one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence … Life then becomes a perpetual revelation.” Klee wrote in his journal: “Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient … the world [is] my subject even though it [is] not the visible world.”

  The genuineness of this sort of transcendence is only established by the quality of the work that it produces. There is a profound beauty in Braque’s canvases as well as a distinct gravitas. This last note is often struck by the extraordinary way he uses black—a facility matched only by Matisse. Black becomes, paradoxically, a rich colour amidst the other hues. In a painting such as Le Chaudron the canvas is almost 50 percent black. But its sombreness is offset by the palest of blues and lemony creams. I cannot think of any other artist who can modulate such extremes of colour tone with such seductively harmonious results.

  Towards the end of his life Braque’s work came full circle. His career started as a Fauvist—with vivid, astonishing landscapes—and his final period sees him quit the interiors he so loved—the secular cathedral of the artist’s studio—returning to en plein air representation. These small, often horizontally elongated landscapes of extreme simplicity are loaded with powerful emotion. Heavy with impasto, frequently painted with a palette knife rather than a brush, the paintings of flat Normandy fields or beach scenes carry an astonishing freight of foreboding, and memento mori—though it is hard exactly to pinpoint why. Unlike Van Gogh’s tormented cypresses or swirling skies there is no one element here that can be designated disturbing. But disturb they do, with remarkable force, but in a way that is stoical rather than demented, resigned rather than terrified or despairing. As a coda to a life’s work of remarkable consistency and artistic excellence they serve to underwrite both this artist’s greatness and his humility.

  1997

  Claude Monet

  Bathers at La Grenouillère

  Picasso, it is intriguing to note, did not like Monet’s work, particularly the famous water lily sequences, the Nymphéas, painted towards the end of his life. He found it insubstantial, flimsy, perhaps even pretentious. Picasso was clearly reacting against Monet in order to find and determine a place for his own work, to create a taste by which he might be appreciated (just as Monet and the other Impressionists had reacted against the confining Beaux-Arts classicism that preceded them).

  Of course, it is possible, if you are determined to be prejudiced, to be “against” almost anything, however universally admired, and, if one adopts Picasso’s standpoint and considers his own contribution to twentieth-century art, one can understand the thrust of his reservations. For a painter obsessed with structure and physicality the suggestibility and sheer airiness of Impressionism, with its concentration on the fleeting and iridescent, might indeed make it seem somewhat incorporeal and vacuous. However, I have always thought that Monet’s painting Bathers at La Grenouillère can stand as a particularly redoubtable response to this line of attack.

  First of all, while the painting seems to be prototypically Impressionist in subject matter, two factors make it less obviously generic. First it is a painting of shadow rather than sunlight—deep shadow too, its dominant tones are blues, browns and greens, not yellows, lemo
ns or creams—and, second, it is anything but ethereal in treatment. Although more than half the painting is water it is rendered with a solidity and plasticity that, I dare say, Cézanne would have been proud of. True, the painting is a sketch, a study, presumably for a larger more “finished” painting that was never completed, and the boldness of the individual brushstrokes might not have survived in anything more worked up, but the thick smears of paint, the broad slashes of impasto recall the uncompromising way the Fauves applied pigment to their canvases—and Fauvism was still three decades or so away from 1869 when Monet’s painting was executed. That such thick, dark oil paint can look like rippling light-freckled water is part of the individual magic of this painting; and that a palette so subdued, so positively sombre, can summon up all the luminous ambience of a riverine scene is testimony to a talent and a painterliness that are remarkable. Even a pusillanimous Picasso might have had grudgingly to concede that, sometimes, Monet could do no wrong.

  1998

  Edward Hopper

  Notes Towards a Definition of Edward Hopper

  1. In December 1946 Edward Hopper showed a picture in the Whitney Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. The show was reviewed by Clement Greenberg—champion of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism—and he had this to say: “A special category of art should be devised for the kind of thing Hopper does. He is not a painter in the full sense; his means are second hand, shabby and impersonal … Hopper’s painting is essentially photography and it is literary in the way the best photography is … Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.” Greenberg’s facile nonsense is almost entertaining here—a fine example, as Chekhov saw it, of the critic as horse-fly bothering the quietly labouring artist—“buzzing,” Chekhov called the irritating noise, as if the critic were saying: “See, I can buzz too, buzz about anything.” But in the midst of Greenberg’s self-satisfied buzzing he is actually on to something. Hopper is, as anybody can see who has looked closely at the body of his work, a superb painter. He was also an excellent draughtsman, a dramatically innovative etcher and a watercolourist of fantastic ability. Compared to Jackson Pollock, for example—whose draughtsmanship is awesomely inept—Hopper’s talent is out of sight. Hopper was such a good painter that he deliberately decided to make his paintings look as if he were a bad painter.

  2. There is a Hopper chalk drawing of his wife, Jo Nevinson Hopper, sitting on a bed, her knees raised with her arms loosely folded around them. It is a study for the painting Morning Sun (1952). The figure is surrounded by little scribbled notes that Hopper has written to himself. “Legs cooler than arms,” “cool reflections from sheets,” “cool blue-gray shadows,” “very light reflected light,” “warm shadows in ear,” “thighs cooler,” “light against wall shadow,” “brownish warm against cool,” “cool half-tone,” and so on. Light, cool, shadow: conceivably the absolute verbal reduction of a Hopper painting. But on this small drawing there are over twenty such memoranda: powerful evidence of the acuteness of his eye, his awareness of minute nuance. The painting itself is of a woman in a pink peignoir sitting on a sheeted bed staring out of a window on to a truncated cityscape. Only the top of a small terraced row of brownstones is visible and above them is a large expanse of washed-out blue sky. Through the open window morning sunlight streams, casting a wide panel of light on the featureless wall to the side of the bed and illuminating the pensive woman. Yet the finished painting is virtually without detail, its illusionary three-dimensionality (its depth-of-field) more notional than precise, giving the picture its trademark Hopperian stage-scenery feel.

  3. A few random facts. Edward Hopper was an avid reader: according to his wife he “drank print.” He suffered from “chronic boredom” which often prevented him from working. He was also six feet five inches tall. Hopper was born in 1882 so by the time he left art school in 1905 he would have been fully grown. In the early twentieth century a man who was six foot five would be regarded as freakishly tall. For a self-conscious, shy individual such marked loftiness would have a significant effect on one’s comportment, on one’s self-consciousness and one’s attitude to fellow human beings. Some of Hopper’s reclusive, taciturn nature must be due to this fact: nobody likes to be stared at in the street, after all. Few artists have spoken less about their work but it’s significant, I think, that Hopper painted a picture of an isolated multi-storeyed apartment building and entitled it for a while as a “self-portrait.” He also strongly identified himself with the lighthouses he painted so often.

  4. As a young man Hopper made three trips to Europe. In 1906/7 he spent some time in Paris (from October to August) and also visited London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. In 1909 he spent another four months in Paris (April-July). In 1910 he went to Paris, Madrid and Toledo during a short trip that began in May and ended on 1 July. When he returned to New York in 1910 it marked the end of his transatlantic voyages and he never left the USA (apart from the odd trip to Mexico) again. All in all he spent just over a year in Europe, most of it in Paris, but he was also drawn to Spain. Paris is a beautiful and memorable city and while he was there Hopper painted in what might be termed a recognizable post-Impressionist style. Yet his most remarkable painting of this early period is Soir Bleu (1914). A painted clown, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, sits on a cafe terrace attracting no curious stares from the other recognizably French drinkers around him. An American in Paris? A portrait of the artist? Whether it is or not, this painting is linked to the mature style both in mood and method. Hopper was a late developer: he sold his first painting at the age of thirty-one. His name was made with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933. He developed his visual style and manner in his early forties and for the next four decades nothing really changed.

  Hopper died in 1967 when he was two months short of his eighty-fifth birthday. He was born in a small town called Nyack some forty miles up the Hudson River from New York and almost all his life was lived in Manhattan (in Greenwich Village) or in Truro in Cape Cod. In his eighty-five years he spent approximately fifteen months in Europe, showing, after 1910, no serious inclination to return there. In these circumstances, to try to position him as somehow European in spirit takes tendentious effort. It would be more appropriate to reconfigure Augie March’s proud boast: “I am American, Nyack-born.” It seems the natural claim for Edward Hopper.

  5. Hopper liked to paint buildings. The more angled the sunlight, at the beginning or the end of the day, the more obvious the building’s form and decoration—entablatures, friezes and architraves were picked out and defined by the longer shadows. His many watercolours of houses and Cape Cod street scenes are testimony to this straightforward aesthetic delight. In the composition it is the blockiness and mass of the houses that attract him and he uses the pigment as if it is poster paint, with a bold impasto effect that almost seems to fight against the medium. In his oils, however, buildings take on vaguer, more symbolic freight—their isolation in the landscape being the resonating feature. Unlike the water-colours, these buildings are not rendered with an architect’s knowing eye: they become simpler, cruder and sometimes the perspective of their walls and roof planes is deliberately slightly skewed.

  6. Hopper was a realist, squarely positioned in the capacious and all-embracing tradition of figuration. But to claim, as Clement Greenberg does, that his work is “photographic” in some way is absurd. In his poem “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” Philip Larkin precisely describes what a photograph does:

  But o, photography! As no art is,

  Faithful and disappointing! That records

  Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,

  And will not censor blemishes …

  “As no art is,/Faithful and disappointing” (my emphasis). Gail Levin, Hopper’s exemplary biographer, first wrote about him in a small book called Hopper’s Places (1985) where she juxtaposes, w
ith as much exactitude as possible, photographs of the houses, landscapes and buildings with Hopper’s finished paintings. The book is a brilliant elucidation of Hopper’s working practice: it tells you so much about his purpose and ambition for his paintings and at the same time provides the most succinct and telling refutation of the photographic comparison. Hopper’s discerning, transforming eye—his stern aesthetic of simplification and reduction (Levin calls it: “his relentless parsimony of exclusions”)—is everywhere in evidence. Being “faithful” to what he sees is the last thing on his mind.

  7. Our intellect is hard-wired to seek explanations and understanding. As the critic Frank Kermode commented, “We are programmed to prefer fulfilment to disappointment; the closed to the open.” When you look at a Hopper painting, particularly his peopled paintings, the urge to supply a narrative, to link a causal chain together, to place the image into a context—to “close” the picture—is very powerful. But all serious artists know that in reality life isn’t like that: at best we can interpret, not explain, and our interpretation will be subjective, not final. The plots in our lives never thin, they relentlessly thicken. There are any number of possible interpretations of Nighthawks for example, each one of them perfectly valid. Hopper knew that because he was painting realistic people in realistic settings—hotel lobbies, motel rooms, apartment buildings—the viewer would instinctively and inevitably attempt an interpretation of what they were doing there and what was going on. But to signal the impossibility of arriving at a true explanation he chose the blandest of titles: Office at Night, Office in a Small City, Automat. A rare exception to this rule is the late painting Excursion into Philosophy (1959)—a very un-Hopperian title. This painting, soused in sexual conflict, repression and disappointment prompted Jo Hopper to write to a friend: “It may be that Edward won’t stand for naming the new picture ‘Excursion into Philosophy.’ You know E. Hopper. He’ll call it ‘Sunlight on the Floor’ or something equally non-committal. But ‘Excursion into Philosophy’ is its true name, that’s how he referred to it himself & I grabbed right on to it as perfect.” Hopper knew exactly what he was doing with his scenes of isolated and alienated people and what emotions and feelings would be aroused by them but his titles were deliberately chosen to defeat the idea of any final interpretation. His great paintings remain fully “open.”