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.

Rediscovering Norman McLaren

Recently I ran across a copy of Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren’s 1971 short film, Synchromy, which took me back to my early career when I was teaching art and English to middle school and high school students. Film study, in my mind, always exists in the dual worlds of images and words—and color, sound, movement, and all the rest. But McLaren’s film animations, most entirely wordless, are firmly anchored in the visual, kinesthetic, and musical arts.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the National Film Board of Canada, which supported McLaren’s work for many years and allowed him to give us a wealth of stunning films that are, by turns, lively, thought-provoking, celebratory, and meditative. McLaren’s animation techniques are perhaps as intriguing as his images. At various times he used animations that included a mixture of moving and still photographs, as in the Oscar-winning 1952 allegorical film, Neighbors. Other films, such as Synchromy, are Modern artworks in motion. The visuals of this particular film evoke the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman, both contemporaries of McLaren. And McLaren also drew directly on film (see photo).

As innovative as the visuals are McLaren’s soundtracks, many of which he composed. Particularly haunting is the music of his 1968 Pas de deux, which stands in contrast to the jazzy electronic beeps and blips of Synchromy.

Scottish-born McLaren (b. 1914) emigrated from Britain to the United States in 1939 and then moved to Canada in 1941. He was most active from the mid-1930s until his death in 1987 at age 72. In McLaren’s view, “Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.”

Introducing students to McLaren’s studies in movement and music in the 1970s and 1980s was like opening the curtains on a wonderful art world for the first time, a delight as much for me as a teacher as for my students. I suspect that for many students that would be just as true today, more than twenty years after McLaren’s death.