The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting - Book Review

ANITA ALBUS

The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting Trans. Michael Robertson.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 386 pp., 20 color ills., 12 b/w. $35.00 paper

German artist and writer Anita Albus wants us to rediscover painting, by which she means the technique and subject matter of the great masters of the northern European tradition, from the 15th to the 17th century. Ultimately, she hopes, with The An of Arts (originally Die Kunst der Kunsle), to reinvigorate contemporary painting through a return to the specificity and materiality of the medium. In the process she points us toward the philosophical implications of a kind of painting that focuses the viewer's wonder on the natural world, that imagines the viewer "as part of the painting" (p. 11), and that, in doing so, conceives human beings as taking part in a larger natural cosmos. Albus has produced a world of rhapsodic detail, ranging from pigments to alchemy, tobacco to toads, tulipomania to the religious significance of mills. While contemporary painters may not hasten to heed her prescriptions, the rest of us can greatly benefit from her text. Those of us trained as art historians may need to relax a few of our scholarly reflexes to enjoy it, as it does not fall comfortably into the genre of art historical scholarship. But, especially for those interested in the period with which she deals, it can serve as a model for a different way of writing about art.

The Art of Arts is lushly written in short chapters that themselves seem designed to mimic the Netherlandish painting technique of layering transparent glazes to produce a light-infused three-dimensional world--an impression heightened by the tall, thin format of the book. Albus begins, logically enough, with Jan van Eyck and progresses to Rogier van der Weyden, Gerard David, Hans Memling, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Joachim Patinir, ending with the flower and landscape (and reptile and bug) painters Georg Flegel, Johannes Goedaert, and Otto Marseus van Schrieck. She is unafraid of mixing biography, iconography, cultural history, and the analysis of pigments. The index bristles with unexpected names--writers and artists from Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Proust to J. W. von Goethe, Vladimir Nabokov, Nicolas of Cusa, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), among others. This is in part due to Albus's claim that as painting has turned its back on the description of the phenomenal world, writers have taken up this task. "Why," she asks, "do the shades of Nabokov's unique universe...crystallize in the convex mirror of his art against the dark foil of life ...? Why does van Eyck's 'ample-jowled, fluff-haloed' Canon van der Paele come to life again in Nabokov's Pnin, painted in minute detail--'the knotty temple, the sad musing gaze, the folds and furrows of facial flesh ...'--when not a single contemporary painter ... is able to create the illusion of skin that breathes?" (p. 286). Aside from being a very fine writer, Albus is an artist and (though this does not necessarily follow) has little interest in scholarly conventions for their own sake. Nonetheless, she has produced a book that is painstakingly researched and amply footnoted. Albus is well aware, as she makes evident in subtle jabs at historicist dogma, of the scholarly conventions that she is flouting. She liberates herself from them through her implicit focus on what is useful to a painter today in the historical traditions through which she lovingly browses. This has the potential to lead to a certain amount of romanticization, which will not be to everyone's taste. Another way to describe it, though, is rich description mingled with provocative philosophical musing.

Albus is interested in rematerializing the way we look at painting, focusing our attention on its "material quality," which, she argues, must be "perceived as a living whole" (p. 12). She also wants to respiritualize its objects, specifically, though not exclusively, its natural objects--animals, birds, plants, landscape--to convey a sense of wonder in the living world of nature. Her discussion of natural pigments (and hand-produced "alchemical" ones) suggests that they represent a means of harmony with the natural world. She hints that the paintings she studies proposed more than just the now banal-sounding "harmony with nature" but, rather, a kind of sympathetic magic. This is the Neoplatonic philosophers' world of sympathetic vibrations, like those of stringed instruments responding to distant sounds, in which "shining articles reflect the glow of divine light" (p. 104). Her final chapter, "Of Lost Colors," details the special characteristics of pigments used by the old masters (and, she doesn't hesitate t o remind the reader, painstakingly pounded and mixed by their apprentices) to produce effects that, because they are the result of light striking irregular crystals, cannot be attained by versions of the same pigments mass-produced today, let alone by more common synthetic colors. Thus, not only the subject matter but also the very materials of painting were, for van Eyck and centuries of followers, in a deeper harmony with nature than we can grasp with today's materials.

Albus's descriptive gifts (the German text has been deftly translated by Michael Robertson) are especially apparent in her discussion of van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin and Marseus van Schrieck's Forest Floor. She also delves into the physiology of sight, medieval philosophy, botany, color theory, minerals, Mariolatry, monstrosities, the humors, early modern uses of tobacco, and the etymology of words like "cosmos," "pentimento," and "temple." Many of these excurses tell stories that will be familiar to professional art historians, especially those who study Renaissance and Baroque art. Nonetheless, Albus's willingness to range widely, paying little attention to disciplinary boundaries, is admirable (and worthy of imitation).

Among the authors from whom Albus takes inspiration are Nicolas of Cusa, the little-known Renaissance humanist and scholastic Charles de Bovelles, and one art historian in particular: Erwin Panofsky. She is interested in Cusa's emphasis on nature as natura naturans, nature in active process, which became an especially important concept in the Renaissance. Albus develops this idea further in discussing Altdorfer and Patinir and, in passing, Pieter Bruegel and the writings of natural scientist Agricola (Georg Bauer, all of whose names, in whatever language, mean "farmer"). For Cusa, Albus notes, "the precondition for the abundance of nature lies in what is restless, limited, changeable and composite" (p. 39). Art's highest calling is as a mirror of the wealth of sensations available in nature. Cusa describes perception and cognition through the metaphor of a cosmographer who "hold[s] open all his senses" (p. 45). It was by holding open all his senses that van Eyck painted (as she points out, van Eyck was also i n some sense a cosmographer, having produced a now-lost mappamundi).

Charles de Bovelles (or Bouelles), a late 15th- and early 16th-century philosopher who drew heavily on Cusa, provides Albus with further evidence for a worldview in which macrocosm and microcosm mirror each other, in which the natural world is infused with the spiritual. I am especially pleased that Albus makes the effort to rescue Bovelles from historical oblivion. However, she does not clearly distinguish his conformity with standard ideas of his time from his originality as an idiosyncratic thinker. He was both, and from the perspective of his usefulness to art history, it is not necessarily obvious in which way he is more interesting. Making the distinction is a job I wish Albus had done. In many ways, Bovelles's writings, like similar works by his contemporaries, are repetitive compilations of authoritative doctrines. In this respect, he is a perfectly adequate representative of a Zeitgeist. On the other hand, his innovative use of the medium of printing to present abstract mathematical charts of species and diagrams of intellect and sense perception are quite far removed from the glowing poetry of van Eyck--though they are weirdly interesting in their own right. (Bovelles's diagram of the five senses places the ear at the top of the hierarchy because the ears together produce the widest angle on the world of sense data--a view that resonates with the development of perspective by artists contemporary with Bovelles, but that results in a conclusion art historians might not appreciate!)

As far as Albus's passionate advocacy of Panofsky's theory of disguised symbolism goes, I am a bit uneasy with it--for reasons that relate to the question of the typical versus individual idiosyncrasy noted above. I think it fair to say that Panofsky saw disguised symbolism as a fragile Hegelian synthesis of realism and symbolism, forged by Jan van Eyck and limited historically and geographically to the Early Netherlandish tradition. As Albus progresses from van Eyck and his contemporaries and immediate followers, through Gerard David and Altdorfer, to the genre painters, the symbolism of her examples grows more and more disguised--by which mean elusive or even, possibly, strained. As Panofsky himself put it, when one begins with the assumption that "the method of disguised symbolism was applied to each and every object, man-made or natural" (an assumption I think still open to question), one cannot help posing the problem of how "to decide where the general, 'metaphorical' transfiguration of nature ends and actual, specific symbolism begins." (1) In other words, how do we separate our recognition of a worldview in which "all reality is saturated with meaning" (2) from our understanding of the specific iconographic agenda of an individual case before us? Albus's advocacy of symbolic readings is attractive, and her interpretations of the paintings themselves frequently convincing. Yet, in her laudable desire to present the reader with a beautiful surface, she may be concealing her own interpretative method more than scholarly readers will be comfortable with.

In one instance, I have a great deal of trouble discerning the "watercourses" that identify the building in Gerard David's forest landscape as a mill--the occasion for one of her extended discussions of symbolism--even in the prerestoration photographs in which it is supposed to be obvious. And is there a historical stage at which we may say that painters' and viewers' simple joy in depiction supersedes religious symbolism--and is that a problem? I fear it is all too easy to presuppose a spiritual emphasis that may not have been on the minds of contemporaries, or may have represented only a small part of the enjoyment of a picture. The story of tulipomania vividly illustrates the potential for inflation of meaning, the wrong kind of "investment" in the natural world, one that instrumentalizes it. On the other hand, Albus develops a persuasive discussion of Flegel's wine, strawberry, and tobacco still life as "a trompe-l'oeil of insatiable contemplation" that feeds "the mind rather than the body" (p. 233). She describes ideas about the four humors (black bile, choler, phlegm, and blood) and their attendant qualities (hot, dry, cold, and wet) and associated elements (fire, water, earth, and air) as they relate, in turn, to the particular natural objects represented in the still life. And she does not fail to complete her account of tulipomania with the tulip's fall from grace, as it lies collapsed and half wilted on the forest floor with an entourage of nocturnal reptiles in Marseus van Schrieck's canvas.

Albus's paratactic layering of short narrative segments may be a disadvantage to making a larger-scale narrative argument that would allow differentiation, even historical progression, among her examples. For instance, might it be argued that the development of the depiction of landscape (as a thing unto itself) went hand in hand with the increasing exploitation of the natural world? How seriously should we take Albus's apparently unconscious adoption of Panofsky's military metaphors--the "conquest" of the third dimension? How "other" is a landscape to its viewers; how distant from it, or connected to it, did painters and viewers feel at different points in history? Could it be that it is only when we are cut off from it that we have a sense of "the natural world"? Perhaps, in fact, the natural world is by definition precisely what we are cut off from--but in that case, might we prefer a more culturally specific definition? There is little room here for such questions--though I confess to feeling like a bit o f a spoilsport raising them, since there is much here that is utterly delightful.

Finally, Albus asks some of her more probing questions toward the end of the book. Her tone is very different in part 4, which she calls "View with Ten Lost Colors"--the "view" being, perhaps, her own polemic. In this section, she boldly states, "As long as painting turns its back on nature, it will never be able to regrow" (p. 289). In effect, this is her answer to the "whither painting?" question that has dogged art criticism, and art practice, from the early 20th century. Here, she is not afraid to be extremely blunt, condemning the contemporary art world--for not only the demands it places on artists, but also the fact that they succumb--as when she describes Mark Rothko's suicide as the result of an artist trying in vain to subvert the corrupt system from which he makes his livelihood:

Pure abstraction reflects the real abstraction of bucks, the "toads" of Marseus's painting, and the fate of the painter Mark Rothko illustrates the kind of snakes you have to swallow when the only standard of evaluation you use is the cash of the "rich bastards" against whom you think you are painting. (p. 274)

Albus laments the tyranny of false innovation. "Every producer," she writes, "is condemned by the absolutization of innovation to a lifetime of peddling the same old trick" (p. 276); here, for "innovation," read "branding" or "market niche." The connection she makes between the commodification of art and the loss of a relationship to nature is old-fashioned and yet, in the current context, fresh, and I like the implicit environmentalism in her call for a new appreciation of nature. But it is hard to see how this prescription translates into the present. I cannot disagree that much of contemporary art is sterile and soulless, yet I also see energy, inspiration, and diligent attention to detail in work that is not necessarily naturalistic in the traditional sense. Literary genres also have life cycles, and the novel, at present, is not necessarily any less exhausted than painting. It's hard to imagine that a reinvigorated painting practice would look just like van Eyck or Goedaert. In the end, I wish Albus had mentioned contemporary artists of whom she approves even slightly, some examples in which we might glimpse the wonder she describes so eloquently in writing of the past--even if only as through a glass darkly.

Notes

(1.) Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 142.

(2.) Ibid., 144.

COPYRIGHT 2002 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group