by Adam Gopnik
In the Japanese vision of winter, in Japanese poetry, and above all in Japanese prints — particularly those of Utamaro, Hiroshige, and Hokusai — in the imagery of the “floating world,” there’s no notion that winter has in any way fallen from the hand of God, or is in any way evidence of cosmic organization. The Japanese idea of winter simply speaks of winter as simultaneously empty and full; the emptying out of nature by cold, it’s also the filling up of the world by wind and snow. Winter in the Japanese aesthetic is above all modish, it’s above all an occasion for sensibility, it’s a season that, in every sense, suggests not the enduring mysteries of “natural” meaning but the beautiful transience of creation — snow arrives, and then snow passes, just as a fashion does, or a love affair. This is not the peasant picturesque of the Swiss Alps and Quebec but stylish winter and stylish snow, more like the triangle-and-harp winter we also hear in Tchaikovsky.
That’s the spirit of winter that the Impressionists found in the Japanese prints that began to fill their eyes and studios in the 1870s and ’80s. When Sisley and Pissarro and especially Monet began to paint snow scenes in the 1870s and ’80s, they were full of spiritual content, yes, but spiritual content of another kind, very different from Friedrich’s stern sublime or Turner’s rhapsodic snow peaks. The spiritual content of haiku, of the floating world, is all the more piercing because it disappears. L’effet, the effect, is all, and that is what the Impressionists sought when, fleeing to the suburbs of the Seine every February as the first frosts fell on the Île-de-France, they turned to winter as a subject.
The other element that is present, that we see so clearly in Monet’s paintings of winter frost just outside Paris in the 1870s and ’80s, is a sudden new love of white. Monet gets from the Japanese print a new infatuation with pure white — not a white that’s laid down unvaryingly with single brushstrokes, but instead a white that is made up kaleidoscopically of tiny touches of prismatic colour. This is sweet winter at its sweetest, a winter so sweet that it loses the domestic tang of the picturesque and becomes entirely exquisite — not pretty but deeply, renewingly lovely. In the hands of Monet and Sisley and even the less gifted Pissarro, winter becomes another kind of spring, a spring for aesthetes who find April’s green too common, but providing the same emotional lift of hope, the same pleasure of serene, unfolding slowness: the slow weight of frost, the chromatic varnishing of snow on the boughs of the chestnut tree, the still dawn scene, the semi-frozen river.
It is the same idea of winter that we find in Debussy’s beautiful late-century piano piece “The Snow Is Falling.” Compare even Fanny Hensel’s solid, hotel salon musical idea of winter with it, and we sense at once a newly lyrical, gentle, and even childlike tone. One finds it in French symbolist poetry too, as in Remy de Gourmont’s likening of snow to a woman’s throat. Winter is whiteness above all, and winter is a woman:
Simone, la neige est blanche comme ton cou,
Simone, la neige est blanche comme tes genoux.
Simone, ta main est froide comme la neige,
Simone, ton cœur est froid comme la neige.
* * *
Simone, the snow is as white as your throat,
Simone, the snow is as white as your knees.
Simone, your hand is as cold as the snow,
Simone, your heart is as cold as the snow.
Winter is no longer the sinister Snow Queen but her city relative, the femme fatale in furs, the icy society lady whom you take to the suburbs for a passing assignation when, if you’re lucky, she (so to speak) falls. An irony that touches the edge of paradox is implicit. The first appearance of winter as a positive force in nineteenth-century European painting involved the rejection of the decadence and luxury of French culture. And yet by the end of the century the image of winter is reclaimed by just that French culture of luxury and reason and sophistication and sexuality, which takes you to your own neighbourhood, then ten miles outside Paris, to appreciate all the possible temporalities of the world. The infatuation with winter that began with a rejection of French reason returns as a new kind of exquisitism, starring Reason’s dancing stepdaughter, Sensibility.
I love those Impressionist pictures, and the irony of that circle closed. But it would be false not to see that the taste for extremes — for the exposure of the mysterious, the scrutiny of the hidden, the fascination with the huge and the little, the glacier and the eisblumen — is what gives the art of Romantic winter its charge and provides its richest legacy. We may love French lyrical winter, but the world’s mind was remade by the more spectacular and mystical northern kind. To really fix the Romantic legacy of winter in art, and what it gave us, we have to look at the sweetest of the sweet and the scariest of the scary, at winter at its biggest and winter at its smallest — and that we find, I think, in the imagery of icebergs and the photography of snowflakes that push us out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The great pictorial poet of the iceberg is a Canadian, Lawren Harris. He is, of course, best known as one of the Group of Seven, a cell of Canadian painters that coalesces in the early years of the twentieth century. It is exactly one of the last Romantic movements in Western art — that is, it is the last time when painters try to coalesce around a vision of landscape in order to give themselves and their audience a national identity, and the identity of Canadian painters was naturally tied up with the idea of the North, and of winter. Harris and Caspar David Friedrich would have understood each other perfectly. (Harris studied in Germany, and what, and how much, he might have known of early German Romantic painting is unclear.)
If one exempts Tom Thomson as a maverick, Harris is the most gifted of his generation by far. He turns to theosophy in 1923, a familiar move in those days. But where, say, the Russian painter Kandinsky leapt from Madame Blavatsky’s vague penumbra of mysticism immediately into abstraction, for a while at least the theosophical Harris remains doggedly aligned with the real world — only now the real world must be shown to pulsate and vibrate and glow with the presence of the higher spiritual force that lies beneath mere appearance. “Harris is rising into serene, uplifted planes, above the swirl into the holy places,” an admirer wrote.
Just how seriously he took its doctrines is hard to know. Did he really believe, for instance, as Madame Blavatsky did, that an imperishable “root race” of man had once lived on an astral plane at the North Pole, and that the lost continent of Hyperborea had sunk there too? And that both might still be beaming occult energies into the world from their cold grave? His pictures suggest that he might have. Icebergs that glow like mystical monoliths, icebergs that rise like ancient dolmens, icebergs that float in sinister array, and icebergs that glare accusingly at the painter. They are the artistic fruition of what began with the science of glaciology, this sense of icebergs as living, moving, ominous things that seem to have formed themselves, and whose mystery — the nine-tenths just glimpsed beneath the icy water — is their truth.
If it takes an effort of patriotic will to love his later, slightly dopey and derivative abstractions, Harris’s portraits of icebergs, which he painted after his one safe, touristic trip to the Arctic with A. Y. Jackson — not the world’s most comfortable voyage, but still far more Swiss than Scott’s — require no will at all to swoon over. If Icebergs: Davis Strait, of 1930, and Arctic Sketch IX, of the same year, have in their smooth, worked surface, without visible brushstrokes, a touch of mere scenery, they still have the weird, otherworldly light and strange, striated, layer-cake shapes that make all Harris’s icebergs exist in some haunted land between Walt Disney and C. S. Lewis’s White Witch. There is some schlock to them, but more that really is sublime. If his icebergs can sometimes have an unintentionally comic or cartoon-like effect — he paints them with movement lines and broken sunlight and spectres of eerie eeriness coming off them — and the occult Hyperborean energy can seem a bit hyper, if they sometimes seem to skate, so to speak,
on the edge of kitsch . . . Well, all successful Romantic mystics skate on the edge of kitsch; kitsch is just our shorthand for failed Romantic mysticism. Most often, they are truly sublime.
In this period people talk about icebergs as calving, giving birth, breaking up, appearing out of nowhere, most famously when an iceberg seems to sneak up behind the Titanic and stab it in the back with a stiletto. And Harris’s pictures exemplify the crucial psychological metaphor of the “animate iceberg,” the notion that an iceberg — only one-tenth visible while its real, submerged depth is mostly out of sight — is a portrait of our mind.
It’s in Harper’s magazine in 1906 that some students of the great psychologist John Dewey seem first to suggest the by now clichéd notion that the iceberg is a good representation of the human mind, since one-tenth is visible and nine-tenths is submerged. But one finds the same idea in William James’s statement in 1902 about religious mysticism, which rises from a “B-region” of the mind: “The B-region, then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded and unobserved.” Freud and the Freudians employed the iceberg analogy all the time, though Freud credited its origins to his predecessor Fechner; only ten percent of an iceberg, he insisted, is visible (representing the conscious) whereas the other ninety percent is beneath the water (representing the preconscious and unconscious). Where Freud and Fechner’s Germanic predecessors had looked for signs of the Designer’s hand in hoarfrost, the new psychology looked for images of the psyche’s shape in icebergs.
This move from theology to psychology is typical of the turn from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Instead of thinking about God’s hand extending down, you think of man’s mind radiating out. Harris’s iceberg is the perfect symbolic image of that idea of the psyche — Plan B from inner space. The long arc of Romantic winter takes us from a natural theology that was no longer credible to the “depth” psychology that replaced it. You can’t believe that God made an iceberg but you can believe the iceberg looks like your mind. And acts like it too: shining, strange, sneaky, hidden, gleaming to the eye but cold to the touch.
If the vast, scary iceberg becomes a sort of image of the über-soul, in the same period the tiny, sweet snowflake comes to represent the distinctiveness of the human personality. Looking at icebergs, we see a signal of a hidden dimension; looking at snowflakes, we see a principle of individuality. The snowflake comes to resonate in this way mostly through the work of a Yankee eccentric named Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley, the hero of the best movie Frank Capra never made.
Bentley was a Vermont semi-recluse who had an obsessive, beautiful, inexplicable devotion to snow and to snowflakes. In 1885, at the age of nineteen, he photographed his first snowflake, against a background made as dark as black velvet by long hours spent scraping emulsion from the negatives around the image of the snow crystal. His motives were artistic, like those of Audubon with his birds or Joseph Cornell with his boxes: on the one hand, an urge to document a hidden universe of form and feeling; on the other, some kind of fixation on a small and exquisite world that seemed blissfully different to the workaday world in which Bentley in Vermont, like Cornell in Queens, found himself. Both men were loners, perhaps not coincidentally, who cared for an ailing relative, Cornell for his brother and Bentley his mom. (There was also in both a slightly creepy, largely touching fascination with young girls and actresses. Along with his snowflakes, Bentley collected the smiles of silent-movie actresses, torn from fan magazines.)
Over his lifetime, Bentley took portraits of 5,381 snow crystals (to give them their proper scientific name; flakes are when the crystals clump together) and inserted into the world’s imagination the image of the stellate flower as the typical, the “iconic” snowflake — and he inserted, as well, the idea of the snowflakes’ quiddity, their uniqueness, their individuality. It is to Bentley that we owe the classic crystalline snowflake that we see in Christmas ornaments and cards, the kind that hangs above Fifth Avenue as well as the crossroads of a small Manitoba town: that beautiful symmetrical star shape, the flower of the snows.
But in truth, most snow crystals, it seems — as he knew and kept quiet about — are nothing like our hanging star-flower; they’re asymmetrical, irregular, bluntly geometric: typed as solid columns and simple prisms and simple needles, plain and blunt and misshapen as, well, people. The Fifth Avenue snowflakes are the rare ones, the diamonds in the snowflake pile. The discarded snowflakes look more like Serras and Duchamps; they’re as asymmetrical as Adolph Gottliebs and as jagged as Clyfford Stills. The beautiful radiating stellate flowers are as exceptional as, well, movie actresses and supermodels. They’re the Alessandra Ambrosios of snow crystals — long and lovely and rare.
Bentley was responding to an existing nineteenth-century aesthetic. Recall Ruskin in Switzerland and his laws of forms and you’ll remember that he insisted that stellate forms are the most beautiful of all forms in nature. So much so that even cruciform shapes, Ruskin wrote — the cross itself, despite its divine associations — are meagre beside the star. Bentley was not just responding to his own idiosyncratic tastes; he was expressing a common taste of his culture.
But a taste is what he was expressing. He deliberately left out, in his published records, the countless cases that he photographed at various times in his life of all the non-symmetrical, all the modernist, all the awkward, all the eccentric snowflakes. It was on the basis of that smaller class of snowflakes that he made the great generalization complementary to the notion that the iceberg was a representation of the human psyche: that the snowflake was the representation of the human soul, because each one was microscopically distinct, different from every other snowflake that had ever fallen.
So at this moment at the end of the nineteenth century we see a kind of coalescing between the Romantic fascination with scary winter, immense and large, and sweet winter, tiny and near at hand. The iceberg becomes representative of the ultimate common mystery of the mind — what you don’t see is what counts most — and the snowflake becomes a representation of the radical individualism of each person. We’re all ineluctably different. (That’s why the Starbucks chain keeps that sign up: “Friends Are Like Snowflakes: Beautiful and Different.”)
A long journey. A very long journey — this Romantic winter, this Winterreisse of the Romantics — but it seems to me, ironically, a wonderfully enlightened one: from winter as the national season of the northern man to winter as the place where we can realize the sublimity of each single snowflake. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, winter was massed together into one chilly and indistinct thing, a desert we crossed to get to spring. By the end people could resonate to an iceberg newly calved from a glacier, or to this single snowflake. Bentley’s snowflake, seen up close, is a homely sign of that sensitivity, that readiness to vibrate at improbable objects that is the essence of our experience of art.
Art is a way of expanding our resonances, civilization our way of resonating to those expansions. The Romantics transformed winter from a single, sharp sound heard out of doors to this bright, muffled chromatic keyboard of extended feeling, full of sharps and flat runs, diminished chords and pedal effects. It is certainly, as poets have said, a good thing to see the world in a grain of sand. But it’s an even better one, and more to the purposes of art, to see a single grain of sand in the whole world. Or a single snowflake. The Romantics saw their snowflakes, embraced their glaciers, and, remaking our minds, remade our world. A fearful desert had become a new province of the imagination.
Oh yes, what about those two metaphors? Have they survived their century? The submerged nine-tenths of the iceberg and those singular snowflakes? Well, we know now that those final discoveries of the Romantic imagination of winter are both touched with more than a little myth. The mysterious, sinister, stiletto-bearing iceberg that can stab ships in the back turns out, in fact,
to be largely imaginary. The nine-tenths of the iceberg sunk beneath the water simply follows a natural rule of physics and is not a peculiarity of glaciology. And far from having stuck a stiletto into the side of the Titanic, we now know that the iceberg in question merely crushed it, like an awkward adolescent boy at a dance, popping the rivets and stays of the great ship. The iceberg is neither the radio beacon of earth consciousness nor the white shark of the seas, but just a great big, overgrown ice cube, as innocent (and dumb) as ice cubes are. And, in parallel, we might say that though “iceberg psychology” and its notion of unconscious motives still haunt us, the coming of cognitive psychology has also taught us that the overt and explicit part of thought matters most. It’s the part of the iceberg you do see that sinks your psychic ship.
And snowflakes? Are they all unlike? And does that difference give us some natural evidence for individuality? It turns out that, as recently as 1988, a cloud scientist named Nancy Knight took a plane up into the clouds above Madison, Wisconsin, and there found two simple but identical snow crystals — hexagonal prisms, each as like the other as one Olsen twin is like the other. Snowflakes, it seems, are not only alike, they usually start out more or less the same. But if this notion threatens to be depressing — it was only the happy eye of nineteenth-century optimism that saw radical individuality there — one can in the end put a brighter spin on things. It turns out that, while it’s true that snowflakes often start out alike, it is their descent from the clouds into the world that makes them alter. (“As a snowflake falls, it tumbles through many different environments. So the snowflake that you see on the ground is deeply affected by the different temperatures, humidities, velocities, turbulences, etc., that it has experienced on the way,” Australian science writer Karl Kruszelnicki writes.) Their different shapes are all owed to their different paths downwards. So snowflakes actually start off all alike; it is experience that makes each one just different enough to be noticed.