Survey and AP Level Art History: René Magritte

René Magritte was not particularly skilled at rendering. The anatomy of his figures is a little bit awkward. His rendering of light and shadow are slightly inaccurate and clearly not done from observation. 

To the untrained eye, for example someone who doesn’t know all the rules having to do with traditional painting, his paintings are satisfactory but not completely realistic. Magritte’s paintings are clear and understandable representations of things that he is rendering, for example an apple looks like an apple, and a pipe looks like a pipe. 

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If you were to compare Magritte’s paintings to earlier artists, such as Jacques Louis David’s painting of Madame Recamier, David’s paintings are more realistic and convincing.  A viewer might even think that David is a more skillful painter in his rendering of light and shadow, his handling of paint and brushwork and the accuracy of color.  Even when compared to the paintings to a peer of his, Salvador Dali, René Magritte’s paintings come in a close second in terms of how believable they are. 

However, compared to some other Surrealists such as Frida Kahlo, and Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte’s work appears to be more realistic than these others. The reasons why I bring this up is not to detract from René Magritte’s reputation as an artist but rather to reinforce the idea that René Magritte’s paintings are more about the content or subject matter of surrealism than they are about the traditions of making beautiful or realistic oil paintings.  So why didn’t Magritte learn to paint like David and or Dali?  The answer is that it wasn’t important to his art.  

Here’s why:

It’s kind of important to note that artists like Marcel Duchamp and his contemporaries were not very concerned with artistic technique. These artists, which is very common at the beginning of the 20th century, were more concerned with the meanings behind their paintings than they were with the paintings being a pleasing aesthetic experience. The concepts behind artistic work were more important to many of the early 20th century artists than the actual “look” of the paintings.

In contrast to this, the Impressionists from the middle of the 19th century were very concerned with how their paintings looked but not very concerned with what the paintings represented. The Impressionists were interested in depicting optical effects of color and colored light. Their work was considered groundbreaking and broke with earlier traditions by focusing on the physical characteristics of the paintings and especially with the experience of seeing things and giving the viewer an impression of that view. In contrast to the Impressionists since they had already dealt with color and physical properties of painting as the subject matter painters of the early 20th century began to focus more on concepts and ideas expressed by their art.

René Magritte lived during the time that psychoanalytic theory was the giving to be developed. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung developed theories of how the human mind was constructed and the importance of dreaming and the symbols that happened in the unconscious or dreaming mind. Many of the “movements” and styles of art were heavily influenced by the development of the science of psychology and artists attempted to work with these theories in their paintings.  In this way, the subject matter of most surrealist art is the human mind and how it worked.

Another reason why Magritte wasn’t that interested in rendering or exacting realism is probably because he trained initially as a commercial artist and most of his work was designed to be printed rather than the one-of-a-kind original works of art. Some sources about Magritte discuss in making posters and children’s books. In every way, Magritte’s first concern with either his commercial art or his so-called “fine art” Magritte was interested in communicating ideas first and making beautiful images second. So the elements of form for most early 20th century artists are less important than the ideas that motivate making the work of art and this is especially true for René Magritte. 

One of the things that comes together and probably helped agreed to focus and communicate his ideas about psychology more clearly is the use of captions and text in the commercial posters and books he designed and illustrated. In fact, even though Magritte was selling his work he wasn’t selling enough of his fine art to stop making commercial art until 1927. This probably accounts for his use of text or words in his fine art paintings.

In order to understand the subject matter of Magritte’s paintings you have to first understand one of the first concepts developed by Sigmund Freud about how the human mind works. Freud coined the term “cognitive dissonance.” A simple definition of cognitive dissonance is the ability of a person to hold to ideas in their mind that are in opposition to each other at the same moment. For example, authors sometimes referred to the “Willing suspension of disbelief.” What this means is that when were watching a play or a movie or reading a book even though we know the book is not realistic or the images are not believable we willingly believe they are in order to enjoy the work. Freud thought that this was particularly interesting that we are able to understand the difference between fiction and reality. Furthermore, Freud and Magritte probably would agree that this ability of the human mind to hold onto the idea of reality when we are engaging with the work of fiction or illusion is interesting.

In this painting, roughly translated from the French as “the treachery of images,” for us it would probably the best translated as “paintings are not the same thing as reality.” In this painting, which Magritte made over and over again throughout his life, we see the image or an illustration representing a tobacco pipe, underneath the illustration or illusion of a pipe we see the words “this is not a pipe.” In French. Basically, Magritte is captioning his picture in the picture. The caption is telling you not to believe that this is a real pipe but just a representation of a pipe. These are two opposing ideas, because a lot of times when we look at a picture we want to accept the idea that what we see in front of us is a real thing and we don’t bother with acknowledging the idea that it’s just an illusion or a fake representation of something from the real world.

Empire of Light, 1950 by Rene Magritte

Magritte likes to do this in many of his paintings. He provides us with a premise or an idea that something is convincing or accurate and then he provides another kind of idea in the painting that’s the opposite of what we see. For example, Magritte will show us a street at night but the sky above it is a daytime sky. We know that it’s a street at night because we see a street light and lights in Windows and on lamp posts but, we couldn’t see these lights with a daytime sky like that. So basically, René Magritte is always making paintings that deal with the fact that humans are capable of understanding that what they are looking at is not the real thing but our imaginations allow us to pretend that it is.

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Inspiration

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Cary Grant and Randolph Scott c.1930's

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Survey and AP Level Art History: Romanesque and Gothic Architecture

Form: Cathedrals, in general, were made completely of stone for permanence. The construction of the cathedral, although derived from the basilican plan, is a non-uniform shape.  The addition of the transept and the bays in the apse tend to make the shape fairly irregular.

Structurally, the Gothic Cathedrals differed with their use of huge soaring structures known as 'flying buttresses'. These beautiful structures did for the Gothic Cathedrals what rounded and barrel vaults did for Romanesque churches, supported them, except they were located outside the church. They provided  a sort of exoskeleton (made of stone) for the structure as well as lending a visual sense of fragility and beauty to the look of the church, though in reality they are quite strong. Made of iron rods with stone and concrete encasing them, these buttresses are the main support as well as the main source of architectural beauty for these massive buildings.

As well as sculpture and architecture, the Gothic cathedrals brought about the advent of the 'Rose' style stained glass window. These are enormous glass window n the shape of a 'rose' and found on the facade of the Gothic cathedrals. It is supposed to represent purity, like a rose, and is symbolic of the Virgin Mary. True to Gothic symbolism and the Jesus motif, a rose also has thorns on the stem, which can also be representative of the crown of thorns worn by Jesus as he walked through the streets bearing the cross towards his crucifixion.

Iconography: Quatrefoils at the base of the cathedral serve a didactic purpose.  The quatrefoils each tell stories. The exterior serves a didactic purpose (teaches about Christianity). According to Stokstad, quatrefoils contain relief sculptures that greet worshippers as they enter the cathedral and are used to tell biblical or morality based stories. These usually focus on the themes of Good vs. Evil, the lives of the saints, biblical allegories as well as seasons of the months.

Context: Construction of cathedrals, such as Amiens' Notre Dame, were a labor of love that went on for decades and sometimes centuries.  Often entire generations of families would be at work on the cathedrals as an expression of transgenerational love for god.

The purpose of Gothic Cathedrals was to make the worshiper feel as thought they were truly in the presence of God. The high, imposing ceilings, awe-inspiring stained glass windows and enormous buttresses dwarfed the worshipers as they entered the building and inspired a sense of awe.They were also monuments to the power of the monarchy of the time and were central fixtures in the urban centers. In this time period, much of daily life revolved around religion and a strict adherence to the will of the laity as well as the ruling monarch. This was the time of the crusades and a widespread religious fervor.

Interior of Amiens Cathedral

  The main two design innovations evinced in Gothic architecture are the perfection and use of the ribbed groin vault and the use of flying buttresses.  Groin vaults needed massive walls to support the side stress created by them. In order to compensate for this and relieve some of the outward thrust of the traditional barrel vaults that one observes in Romanesque architecture, pointed arches were introduced.  These arches change some of the outward thrust to downward thrust.  The pointed arch also allowed for more flexibility in terms of the space that the arch could span. Flying buttresses absorbed the rest of the force generated by the arches.  Flying buttresses are essentially an exoskeleton which take a great deal of the stress off of the inner walls and allow them to be built taller and thinner and with large openings for stained glass windows. 

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Survey and AP Level Art History: Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns in Context 

Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are inextricably linked by art historians. Most likely Johns and Rauschenberg were lovers. We know that they lived in the same building and socialize with each other extensively, we also know that Rauschenberg made some comments about his relationship to Jasper Johns which is pretty strong evidence that they were.

They also shared the context of knowing the same performance artists, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and they also worked together doing projects, such as window displays in New York City. Like the abstract expressionists, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline, we know that Johns and Rauschenberg socialized and hung out in the New York art scene of the 1950s. Most likely being in the right place at the right time contributed largely to all the artists above. It seems very likely that Rauschenberg also helped to further Johns career by introducing him to his gallery.

Many of the artist who lived in New York during the 1950s sought to make their reputations by coming up with a new type of art or technique for making art. For example, Robert Rauschenberg, used found objects and combine them together to make his “combines” that are a kind of sculptural collage. Andy Warhol also borrowed images that he changed and printed on canvas and wooden boxes. Both Rauschenberg and Warhol were major players in the style that developed at that time called “Pop Art.” The movement of Pop Art is slightly different than what the abstract expressionists were doing because the abstract expressionists were making paintings that really didn’t have a subject. As in the case of Jackson Pollock, the act of painting was called by critics “action painting.” The process of making the art was an active process that had to do with gesture and movement and very little to do with any type of representation. Pop Art is kind of an opposite to this.

The so-called pop artists of the 1950s into the 1960s often took a strategy lifted from the DADA artists such as Hannah Hoch and Marcel Duchamp. Most notably Duchamp and Hoch would take printed images and collage them into works of art. Duchamp even took things like a urinal from a bathroom and placed it on a pedestal in a gallery. This strategy was known by Duchamp as the “ready-made,” in which you would take something from one context, such as the urinal, and by placing it in a gallery he would “recontextualize it,” which is a kind of buzzword in art history, and transform it into art by changing how it was presented. For Marcel Duchamp it was kind of a joke, however, it became a kind of gold standard in terms of how to think about art and the role of artists. The pop artists of the 1950s use this strategy of taking ready-made for preprinted things from mainstream or commercial culture and changing its meaning. Also kind of joke, but, when artists like Warhol did it with his famous painted Brillo boxes, critics described it as a criticism of American consumer culture. Essentially then pop art criticizes the art world and consumerism in the modern world of the 1950s.

In the case of Jasper Johns, several of his works reappropriate or borrow symbols from mainstream culture and are used in a way that might change the symbols meaning. For example, Johns uses targets and flags in his work. I’ll discuss how John’s use of flags and targets might be interpreted but first it’s important to understand some things about how the paintings were made and the materials used.

In most of Johns more famous works he used traditional artist’s materials from much earlier periods. In these two paintings Johns uses a type of paint called encaustic. Encaustic paint is a type of paint that was used as far back as in ancient Greece as well as during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Encaustic is basically a medium in which pigments are added to melted wax and applied to the canvas or some other support, such as a wooden board, and when it hardens it becomes a paint layer with the particles of pigment suspended in the translucent wax.

Johns also used found stuff, especially newspaper, underneath the encaustic layers. This is kind of a combination of using Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made strategy combined with ancient or Renaissance techniques. This is important because it’s one of the things that historians have used to interpret what Jasper Johns paintings might mean. In one of the paintings, which is very close to the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines”, Johns uses some plaster casts of faces and places them within boxes above the canvas painted with a target.

Analyzing the symbolism or meaning behind Jasper Johns works is kind of hard because he didn’t explain his work in any real depth. This is also kind of strategy that many artists use to make the viewer engaged with the work. In some ways one could view it as being a not very genuine way of making the work more interesting because it’s not clear what the work is about. There are various interpretations of why many of the artists from the 20th century would not or did not explain their work and you can look at the various theories or ideas by art critics and art historians that explain why they believe this is so. It is usually a matter of opinion rather than fact. What we do know about Jasper Johns is that he said he had a dream in which she saw a flag and the next day he decided to paint it.

The formal elements such as the use of encaustic medium in Jasper Johns paintings of the American flag has been theorized as being a type of “anachronistic” or out of time kind of element. In the same way that René Magritte used the words “this is not a pipe,” underneath an image of a pipe to create a kind of confusion or cognitive dissonance about what the painting is, for example, art historians often say about Magritte’s painting that it’s not a pipe it’s a painting of a pipe, and that’s why Magritte titled the painting “The Treachery of Images.” Henri Matisse, said something similar about one of his paintings. When Matisse was confronted by someone looking at his painting in which they said something along the lines of, “that’s not a woman!” Matisse replied, “it’s not a woman it’s a painting of a woman.”

When Jasper Johns paints the American flag it’s not an actual flag, it’s a painting of a flag. In this way, he is really representing or making us think about whether or not a painting of the flag is the same as an actual flag. It’s also possible that Jasper Johns was trying to make us think about what the American flag means to us as well and or to him. By using some old-fashioned techniques such as encaustic he’s also probably making a reference to how we think about things in terms of art history and the traditions presented by art history. I phrase these things as probabilities because we haven’t been able to really get evidence from Jasper Johns as to his intentions. Most students of art history then count on the interpretations of their professors or art critics to make sense of what the painting is supposed to mean to Jasper Johns and to the audience that viewed it.

detail of flag painting showing newspaper under the encaustic

Another element that adds to the interpretation of what Jasper Johns flag paintings mean is that underneath the encaustic are layers of newspaper from that time. Several of my professors and other art historians have suggested that Johns was deliberately including the layers of newspaper as a way to suggest the history or culture behind or underneath the flag almost as if the painting was an archaeological dig.

Given the interpretations better the most popular by critics and art historians, usually Jasper Johns flag paintings are interpreted as a type of symbol of America and the things that lurk underneath the surface of American culture. Again, this is not what Jasper Johns said this is how art critics and art historians have interpreted the flag paintings.

Extrapolating from this, the target paintings can be seen in a similar way. Since we don’t know what Jasper Johns intention was historians have suggested that Jasper Johns was a closeted gay man felt like a target. The layers of newspaper underneath the target again become a sort of archaeological dig into American culture and society and the small closets with plaster faces embedded in them could represent Jasper Johns feelings of being a targeted gay man who is in the closet. Again, these are extrapolations and interpretations suggested by others and not necessarily verified by Jasper Johns himself.