Three Takes on 20th Century Art

A recent vacation swing through Wisconsin and back by way of Chicago offered an opportunity to visit three art institutions, each with a focused exhibit worth seeing.

In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, I encountered a retrospective titled “Arts/Industry: Collaboration and Revelation,” highlighting the 40th anniversary of a program involving mainly ceramic artists and the large Kohler Company, known for its innovative kitchen and bathroom fittings and fixtures. Having lived in Sheboygan from 1970 to 1991, I recognized a few of the early works on view. The program has produced an astonishing variety of ceramic arts, through artists in residence at the factory.

In Milwaukee, the featured exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum was “Kandinsky: A Retrospective,” featuring paintings and other works by Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) from the large collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The works on view span 1900 to 1944, from Kandinsky’s experimentation with Art Nouveau through the Bauhaus years and culminating with his flirtations with Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. (Fragment I for Composition VII from 1913 is shown above.)

Finally, at the Chicago Art Institute, I was happy to visit “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” billed as the “first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on the breakthrough years of René Magritte” (1898-1967), a Surrealist responsible for some of the 20th Century’s most engaging images. From works on paper that first gained him recognition in Brussels, the exhibit moves forward through the Paris years when he was in contact with fellow Surrealists, such as André Breton, Salvador Dali, and Joan Miró. The exhibit concludes with works made in London and Brussels between 1937 and 1938, including the iconic Time Transfixed, in which a train engine emerges from a fireplace.

All three exhibits showcase aspects of 20th Century Modernism, from the eclectic mix of artists’ ceramic works in a 40-year show spanning late Modernism to Postmodernism, to Kandinsky’s experiments in Art Nouveau and Abstract Expressionism, and finally to Magritte’s emergence from early Impressionistic works to his solid place in Surrealism. A vacation that includes such an abundance of visual images is truly a marvel of coincidence.

Why I Paint

Detail from a recent painting.

My walls are full—some might say overfull—of paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs. Many of the paintings are my own. I rarely sell one, though I give one away now and then when I think it won’t be taken amiss. I certainly don’t need to paint any more paintings, and I don’t think I’m much good at painting in any case. So why do I paint?

The easy answer is that I still enjoy it—when I don’t hate it. Painting challenges me. I never seem to be able to create the image in my head on canvas, but I’m often pleasantly surprised by what does appear. And if I’m not pleased, I can paint over it. A good number of my paintings have other, less successful works lurking beneath the surface. I like pushing paint around. Attacking a canvas is a visceral aesthetic. Often I do so to the accompaniment of rock music played loudly. Painting can be a total-body workout, feet shuffling like a boxer’s, hands slashing paint, mind running this way and that, contemplating moves like a chess player.

Mid-19th century, the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French art and therefore art writ large. The Académie was the embalmer of traditional painting standards: historical, religious, and mythological subjects, portraits, all carefully idealized realism in somber colors and no visible brush strokes.

Then along came the Impressionists, who liked color and everyday scenes—and visible brush strokes. Perhaps they also rebelled against the Académie because at mid-19th century the advent of photography was threatening to make realistic painting obsolete. Once freed from the constraints of the Salon, painting boarded a speeding train toward Modernism, which pervaded the 20th century. That was the train I got on about a half-century ago.

I’ve never entirely settled on a style of painting. The images I create veer toward Modernity but are as likely to be sidetracked by Impressionism. Put two of my paintings side by side and one might wonder whether they were created by different artists. My only defense is that, yes, they probably were. Each time I load a brush and approach a canvas, I am someone a little bit different from the person who last painted in my shoes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” I make no judgment about whether I am foolish; I only know that I am not consistent. At least, not in painting. But I like doing it anyway. It’s good exercise.

Personal Impressionism

After a restless, uncomfortable night of disturbed sleep, and after a breakfast of coffee and a bagel in a favorite eatery, I decided that a solitary stroll on the campus of Indiana University might bring a centering peace that would sustain me during the day ahead. It has been a long, hot summer, and early mornings are the only time of day that brings relief from the heat wave.

For some reason, I can’t say exactly why, I decided to walk around without my eyeglasses, perhaps simply because I needed to see the world in a different way, a way less troubled by the details of existence, of reality. What I discovered was a form of personal Impressionism.

Shapes, though recognizable, took on new dimensions. As positive space became less distinct, negative space asserted itself: fragments of blue sky among the leaves and branches of trees, shadows punctuated by sunlit stones or shrubs. I found myself reaching out to touch the rough bark of trees and to feel the texture of leaves. Instead of seeing individual flowers, I saw masses of color and visual texture. I stopped, literally, to smell the roses on a primrose bush.

Those of us who wear corrective lenses are fortunate to be able to tap this personal Impressionism at will. As visual acuity differs among individuals, I suppose we all create a singular view, as distinct from one another as the works of Renoir are from, say, those of Monet. And yet, there also are commonalities in that our less than perfect vision renders something less than perfect reality: an impression. And because it is an impression, it enables us to see reality in a different—and in my case, refreshing—way.

It was with a sense of peace and renewal that I walked back to my car. There, I put my glasses back on. After all, safe driving requires attention to reality. But my remembrance of the images of my personal Impressionism lingered agreeably.