The Truth Is Always Grey

THE TRUTH IS ALWAYS GREY THE TRUTH IS ALWAYS GREY A HISTORY OF MODERNIST PAINTING FRANCES GUERIN University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Frontispiece: Gerhard Richter, Eight Grey, 500 × 270 × 50 cm each. Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Installation view, 10 November 2002– 3 January 2003. Enameled glass and steel photograph by Mathias Schormann. Copyright Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association. A portion of chapter 4 was previously published in “Searching in Grey: Cy Twombly’s Untitled Paintings,” in Die Farbe Grau, ed. Magdalena Bushart and Gregor Wedekind (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016). Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0044-1 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0045-8 (pb) A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 23 22 21 20 19 18 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In memory Georgia Fee (1951– 2012) You cannot say that it is light or dark. It is a color or non- color that I identify with. I don’t believe in absolutes. The truth is always gray. — Anselm Kiefer, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth CONTENTS IntroductIon The Color Grey 1 1. What Is Grey Painting? Tracing a Historical Trajectory 21 2. Visualizing Modern Life Photography’s Influence on Nineteenth- Century Grey Painting 67 3. Grey Abstraction Form and Function in American Postwar Painting 109 4. Beyond Modernist Abstraction The Social Significance of Grey Painting 159 5. Reinvention and Perpetuation The Possibility of Grey for Gerhard Richter 215 EpIloguE The Irresolution of Grey 277 AcknowlEdgmEnts 285 notEs 287 IndEx 325 INTRODUCTION THE COLOR GREY Whether all grow black, or all grow bright, or all remain grey, it is grey we need, to begin with, because of what it is, and of what it can do, made of bright and black, able to shed the former, or the latter, and be the latter or the former alone. But perhaps I am the prey, on the subject of grey, in the grey, to delusions. — Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable In August 1888 Vincent van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother Theo from Arles in which he described the café where he was sitting through a rainbow of colors. The brilliance in his description mir- rors his excitement for his environment. He is particularly enthralled by the seemingly infinite palette of greys in which the scene before him is painted. It is, he pronounces, “pure Velásquez.” He takes care to communicate the exact hue of grey of the walls; they are grey all over: The floor is of grey bitumen like a street pavement, grey paper on the walls, green blinds always drawn, a big green curtain in front of the door which is always open, to stop the dust coming in. So it already has a Velásquez grey— like in the “Spinning Women”— and even the very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight through a blind, like the one that slants across Velásquez’s picture, is not wanting. Little tables of course, with white cloths. And behind this room in Velásquez grey you see the old kitchen, as clean as a 1 2 INTRODUCTION Dutch kitchen, with floor of bright red bricks, green vegetables, oak chest, the kitchen range with shining brass things and blue and white tiles, and the big fire a clear orange. And then there are two women waitresses, both in grey, a little like that picture of Prevost’s you have in your place—you could compare it point for point. In the kitchen, an old woman and a short, fat servant also in grey, black, white. I don’t know if I describe it clearly enough for you, but it’s here, and it’s pure Velásquez.1 Van Gogh is inspired by this scene and he starts painting. The array of greys and their complement to what are usually referred to as chro- matic colors— red, orange, green— does not conform to the conventional image in and of grey. There is nothing somber or melancholy or drab about this café in Arles. On the contrary, grey gives the scene its energy, and Van Gogh the inspiration to paint, via his reminder of the masterpieces of Velázquez, and, further on in the letter, those of Vermeer. Subsequently, Van Gogh opens out this scene in grey, sug- gesting a use of grey in painting to represent the simplicity, comfort, and warmth of his life in the provincial town. Simultaneously, Van Gogh’s description suggests that painting or painted representation is the only way to describe the infinite array of greys that otherwise escapes our attention when we look at the world with the naked eye. Language does not have the breadth or precision to describe the nuances in grey that are so effortlessly envisioned in painting. Van Gogh expresses through discussion of Velázquez’s Las hilan- deras / The Spinners (ca. 1657) what for him is the familiarity and warmth of grey. Van Gogh’s enthusiasm for a world painted in grey reveals his engagement with and exploration of a color that has not only been a preferred medium and color for centuries of artists but likewise is the reiterated preoccupation of some of the most highly regarded twentieth- century modernist and postmodernist painters. These include artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and, in the postwar period, Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, or their European counterparts such as Anselm Kiefer, Luc Tuymans, and Gerhard Richter. These artists don’t quote Van Gogh, or even Velázquez, as INTRODUCTION 3 influences. Nevertheless, their grey paintings are connected to a tradi- tion of works that have privileged grey as the medium for exploration and expression of the concerns of painting over centuries. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Van Gogh’s image is his disregard for and eventual inversion of conventional assumptions about grey. Even more striking is the fact that this same repudiation is everywhere present in the grey paintings of the twentieth century, as well as those of earlier centuries. Van Gogh’s successful attempt not only to put colors into words, but also to use textual translations of color to paint the scene, to capture its tone, and its temperature in writing for his brother, is to be acknowledged. For Van Gogh has a confidence in grey, and, in turn, its translation into words that goes against the grain of conventional philosophical wisdom about color in general and grey in particular. I argue that the same confidence that radiates from Van Gogh’s letter to his brother infuses nineteenth- century painting and plays a key role in the articulation of the painted aesthetic of early modernism. This fascination with and exploration of grey continues into the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the modernist shift toward abstraction in analytical cubism. In turn, it reaches its most vivid depiction in postwar modernist abstraction in the United States. For Van Gogh, grey is a color. Grey is legitimate, it is provocative, and it has the capacity to generate warmth, excitement, and creativity. Van Gogh was not the only one in his historical moment to espouse the aesthetic qualities of grey. Forty years earlier, Charles Baudelaire celebrated the grey of a Delacroix painting at the Salon of 1845: “The painting is grey . grey like nature, grey like the summer air when the sunlight at dusk falls trembling on each object.”2 For Baudelaire, the delicacy, luminescence, and lightness of the air as it is rendered in paint are made possible by the fact that Delacroix’s palette is grey. According to Baudelaire, Delacroix was one of the great painters, in a league with Leonardo and Michelangelo, and his painting was in the vanguard because it was on the cusp between Renaissance and modernist painting. After the Salon of 1845, numerous paintings continued to express the inspiration Van Gogh experienced in the café in Arles and the excitement Baudelaire found in the shimmer of Delacroix’s grey palette. 4 INTRODUCTION What happened to change the critical reception and, more broadly, the public perception of grey? Gradually, throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, grey loses its appeal. Until, in the aftermath of World War II, a writer such as Theodor Adorno condemns the color. For Adorno, grey is the boredom of the capitalist world; it is in need of negation and color through music, for example.3 Most interesting, for Adorno, grey is one- dimensional and superficial, in keeping with his vision of capitalist commodifi- cation and his newly industrialized world. When he says grey must be negated, this is because he understands grey to feed the false ide- alism of a world without thought and substantive meaning. This, for Adorno, is the ultimate rejection.4 Adorno is not alone in this searing critique of grey among writ- ers and thinkers of his generation, particularly those who come of age or reach their most profound insights around the time of World War II.

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