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Home , Klaus Perls, Outsider art, Wilhelm Uhde

1 L a c k o f i r o n y

Note: you are reading an excerpt from: James Elkins, “Failure in Twentieth-Century ” (unpublished MS) Revised 9.2001

This page was originally posted on: www.jameselkins.com

Send all comments to: [email protected] Part Two – 2 – 3: Lack of irony

I cannot tell you who told me or in what footnote it sat hidden. This and other disjecta membra, the abused here drawn together with pain for their further dis- memberment, I offer to the presiding judge of our , self-pleasured Ironia. — Geoffrey Hill1

There are only a few times I have laughed out loud in an art gallery. When I saw Hofbauer’s Poutnik (Pilgrim, 1905) in the Veletriní Palác, Prague, I took in the rounded grassy hillside topped by a prehistoric dolmen, and I noticed the little fire burning in its passageway. I saw the bowed figure in the purple cape walking slowly up toward the dolmen. He looked intent on his druidical mysteries. That would have been enough, but then I focused on what was behind just behind him: a black panther, following along like an overfed housecat. That is when I laughed—it was just too much. Hofbauer (1869-1944) was the same generation as Frantisek Kupka (1871- 1951), and the two of them shared a humorlessness that has vanished from more recent Czech painting: but that fact doesn’t help me see druids (or religion, or painting) as Hofbauer did. I also laughed (though not so loudly) at the Bulgarian painter Boris Georgiev (1888-1962), who painted Eternal Road (1925, National Museum of Art, Sofia), where a semi-nude hero rests, adopting Hippolyte Flandrin’s famous pose, on a clifftop in an exotic arctic panorama that looks like a Fredrick Church composition painted by Puvis de Chavannes. Impossible peaks tower above him. Far below, ships out to sea (though one crashes on a rock), past the ruins of unnamed Part Two – 3 – 3: Lack of irony civilizations from an ancient past. The sun sets, bathing the cold in a warm light. In his Wanderer and His Sister (1919), the hero (as always, a self-portrait) strides through another part of his lost world, accompanied by the ghost of his dead sister. This time the technique is excruciatingly tender, as if he were painting his neurasthenia. It doesn’t help to know Georgiev spent much of his life wandering the world and mourning his dead sister. Time and again, looking at a painting and trying to distill the essence of its unacceptableness, I’ve come back to lack of irony. Many other faults can be overlooked, or swept away by compensating strengths, but it can be hard to reconcile serious twentieth-century painting with deep unyielding seriousness. If irony is taken generously—say, as an awareness that painting is painting, and not religion or politics itself—then there is a chance that irony might be our leading criterion for success: at least that’s what promts me to put it in this first chapter. [ passage omitted ]

Dead seriousness

How, then, can a work fail to be ironic, aside from taking up subjects like the Holocaust or swearing allegience to the concept of the avant-garde? One way is by staying deadly serious when it is unnecessary. I don’t mean to make that sound as if it is difficult. One of the most absurdly self- involved of the end of the century, the Norwegian Odd Nerdrum, sees nothing silly about painting himself in Rembrandt’s clothing, in a pastiche of Rembrandt’s style. ’s self-portraits tend to be vehicles for convincing the viewer of the artist’s serious purpose, which the viewer might not have doubted to begin with. Nerdrum also paints himself strolling through that are manifestly demonstrations of his own imagination. Courbet inaugurated the pompous-artist-in-the- landscape genre with Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, and Nerdrum is only carrying on a dubious that also includes such dubious precedents as Boris Georgiev’s self-portraits as a wandering genius.2 Part Two – 4 – 3: Lack of irony

There has never been a lack of dead-serious people. In Wolfgang Wegener’s dour Blue Hours—Horse Market in Havelberg the world is almost empty, with a few shriveled forms and a wobbly car. His effort to conjure the sad and comical atmosphere of the horse market led him to muffle what he saw under a heavy blanket of damp atmospheric paint.3 Giselbert Hoke makes wide landscapes with scratchy little houses, like withered remnants of things Saul Steinberg might have drawn.4 The scenes look serious to my eye, but they wouldn’t if she had let herself draw her houses and ships a little bigger—then they would have been cartoony. Hoke owes her seriousness to Klee’s scribbly little forms and semi-abstract landscapes. Dado’s screaming melted carcasses look like Yves Tanguy’s landscapes scattered with Otto Dix’s mangled soldiers.5 Plain old dead seriousness is a common condition, and many painters and other artists have it like the common cold. At least I haven’t been able to see a pattern in its comings and goings. After all, dead seriousness (or at least piousness, or minimally earnestness or straightforward unironic purposefulness) was the normal condition of premodern art. The Old Master galleries of museums are filled with works of unrelieved seriousness, and it is only in the twentieth century that unserious, ironic works have been able to find places in the mainstream of artmaking. There are many scattered cases of ironic meanings in earlier , but they are marginal: Italian cassoni depicting lighthearted classical , Dutch tavern scenes with rollicking peasants, the odd optical trick or bit of cleverness.6 Seriousness of the species I’m describing only became a fault in the last hundred years. Irony, as Geoffrey Hill says, is our unhappy but witty idol. [ passage omitted ]

Serious political art

In Bucharest there is a group called the Grupul Pentru Dialog, formed to sustain public awareness of Nicolae Ceausescu’s reign in the face of increasing apathy. In 1999 their headquarters had a one-room exhibition space with videos of Ceausescu’s broadcasts from the 1970s and 1980s. Two walls had books from the Ceausescu era, and one wall was decorated with Part Two – 5 – 3: Lack of irony enlargements of the Romanian TV guide, listing the day’s propaganda. The whole display could have been mistaken for an American installation piece lampooning the false happiness of 1950s America, but in the foyer I saw a very different kind of reminder of Ceaucescu’s regime: a painting called Hommage (Omagiu, 1978) by an artist named Eftimie Modalca.7 It depicts Ceausescu surrounded by happy workers and signs of flourishing industry. During Ceausescu’s reign a number of artists began painting such things, and when Ceausescu was executed they disappeared into other jobs. On the same visit I talked my way into one of the public auctions of Ceausescu’s property. There I saw more of the same, including a tapestry featuring a portrait of Ceausescu surrounded by workers. The auction catalogue for the day I visited lists about a thousand items, from a china vase with Nicolae and Elena’s portraits, to a minature throne “symbolizing the historical continuity and state activity of the Romanians, with sculptures representing Dacians, Romans, and great leaders in Romanian history, along with the portrait of Nicolae Ceausescu” (starting bid $2,600).8 Plate [ ] reproduces a painting auctioned in August 1999: Stephen the Great leans out of a painting and clinks glasses with Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Apparently the portraits of the Ceausescus are taken from a photograph, because Nicolae looks out of the picture as if he’s acknowledging a crowd. I wonder if it is even possible to begin to gloss such a painting adequately. The disparity between what appears as emptyheaded cowardice on the artist’s part (but which may well be an equally vacuous adulation) and the horrors of Ceausescu’s regime seems just too great. Serious political art mostly is done outside the avant-garde, and sometimes outside the . There is an interesting museum in , a little off the beaten track, called the Vietnam Veteran’s Art Collection.9 The paintings there are almost all politically oriented. Some were done during the war, and others were done after the soldiers returned to America. The collection is run by several veterans, and they are deeply committed to the political messages of the work. Between every couple of paintings or sculptures are real munitions: anti-aircraft guns, field radios, Part Two – 6 – 3: Lack of irony

Kalishnikovs. The museum demonstrates better than and I know just how hard it is to get politics to stick to . The paintings range from Pop to neoexpressionism, and their politics varies just as widely: but whatever they have to say about the war runs off their artistic content like water off a duck’s back. One painting uses a collage style dervied from Rauschenberg to tell a patriotic story: but Rauschenberg’s put collage to very ambiguous purposes, and despite claims made by some historians he did not use collage to tell straightforward stories the way the Vietnam veteran does.10 The work in the museum is therefore a misunderstanding of Pop collage—which wouldn’t necessarily matter except that it means viewers cannot bring any of the meanings and strategies of Pop collage to bear in understanding the work’s message. Pop collage was a response to the obvious meanings of advertising, and to the high pretensions of cubist collage. It was an ambiguating project from the beginning. None of that is relevant in the case of the veteran’s collage, so the message he wanted to send about the Vietnam war has no connection to the medium he chose. The work is compelling but it is not modernist. The artists in the Vietnam Veteran’s Art Collection paid a high artistic price for their choice of modernist styles, because the works’ political

11 messages undermine their ambition to participate in the art world.

In the art markets of Europe and America, painting that is directly political has tended to have a short half-life. None of the paintings in the Vietnam Veteran’s Art Collection could be sold in the gallery district in Chicago, and in many cases I imagine the artists wouldn’t mind. The student revolutions of the 1960s produced several misguided attempts to make serious political painting. The Spanish group Crónica de la Realidad, active in the mid-60s, was one of several such movements. In 1964, two of the artists, Manuel Valdés (b. 1942) and Rafael Solbes (b. 1940), exhibited as the Equipo Crónica; they made pastiches of different art styles, intending to satirize the art market. In one painting, policemen done in paint-by-numbers style carry off a demonstrator who is painted like one of Dubuffet’s figures. In another, some tough comic-book soldiers huddle together in a Tanguy landscape (plate ). Behind them are some figures by Magritte, and the upraised hand from Dalí’s Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonitions of the Civil War.12 The Part Two – 7 – 3: Lack of irony wilder Equipo Crónica work, with more figures and allusions, is like Erró’s compulsive wall-sized collages. The simpler work, which has two or three elements per picture, is like Warhol’s; but the random art historical allusions and the comic-book approach to reportage rob the pictures of the political force they were meant to have. Similar attempts at topicality were made in in the 1960s by Gérard Fromanger, Jacques Monory, and Erró.13 Monory has also made large, mono- and bichrome paintings mixing whimsy with politics. He swerves unpredicably from seriousness to silliness: one picture features a line of penguins marching under a swarm of Mickey Mouse balloons; another is flattened landscape of Hiroshima; a third is collage of chimpanzees and fighter jets.14 Warhol’s reportage also gave rise to ultra-serious political paintings, for instance Peter Sorge’s (b. 1937) multiple images, one of which shows (clockwise from top left) a man squinting into a camera viewfinder, soldiers pressing a bound man head-first into a kettle, two hands pressing on buttocks, a man with his nose blown off, and a blow-up sex doll with detachable vagina. Sorge’s canvases could be like Salle’s, but they’re stripped of irony. One series juxtaposes pornographic images (not idealized, like Salle’s but real-life, complete with wrinkles) and piles of bones from death camps.15 In a statement in 1972, Sorge said he wanted people to take the time to let the images of the popular press sink in—no escape, no humor, no branching depths of meaning.16 Although it would be difficult to survey the century, I find that the 1960s were a locus of serious political art. Perhaps Pop seemed adaptable; there may be other reasons. In any case, the dead seriousness continued, in decreasing quantity, into the 1970s. In 1977, an exhibition at the set out to revive and continue of the work of a little-known pupil of Jacques- Louis David’s, named Fançois Topino-Lebrun, who was guillotined during the Revolution. Most of the painting in that exhibit was strongly political—a continuation, the painters felt, of the spirit of the Revolution—and some was satiric, more in the spirit of 1968 than 1800.17 Vladimir Velickovic painted a headless corpse, taken from Holbein’s Dead Christ, and set it in a steely blue-black interior. The only colors in the painting are red and blue.18 The attempt to revive Topino-Lebrun Part Two – 8 – 3: Lack of irony and the spirit of politically engaged painting was short-lived because politics and art don’t mix as they did in David’s generation. Late twentieth-century artists who continued to make serious political works tend to be both critically and geographically marginal. Ruper Garcia’s work, for example, resembles Alex Katz’s, and it might command more attention than it does if it weren’t for dead-serious paintings like Vincent and Picasso that posterize familiar images to no good purpose (see plate ).19 Artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer can make political statements and still be accepted in the art world partly because they are ironic, enigmatic, and puzzlingly ambiguous. When Kruger says A Picture is Worth More than a Thousand Words (1987), for instance, it is not clear whether she means it, or even who is speaking. There are as many ways to embrace irony as there are painters. Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Anselm Kiefer can also be diffuse, in their different ways: their meanings are fogged in, obscured by abstraction, private meanings, and irrecoverable personal references. Richter’s Misty Self-Portrait (1990) could be an emblem of the lack of self-disclosure: a large splash of paint comes down the middle of the picture and hides the artist’s face. Kiefer can also choose irony over sincerity: Dem unbekannten Maler (To the Unknown Painter, 1983) performs a similar gesture, and there are many other instances. Like most painters who try to mix their politics with their painting, Ida Applebroog vacillates. She paints some pictures that have a clear moral and political drive, and others that are whimsical domestic scenes with no certain purpose. Her complaints about the world, as Arthur Danto says, are “dyspeptic,” and idiosyncratic enough to save them from being slogans.20 For similar reasons, an exhibition called Propos d’artistes contre le racisme (1990) could be counted a success, because very few of the artists put overt slogans into their art. The abstract painter Jean Miotte contributed an acrylic with the words “Contre le RACISME” scrawled into a field of black; but most works in the show were coy or noncommittal on a subject—speaking out against racism—that, I assume, they would all have endorsed if they had been asked for verbal statements instead of artworks.21 Part Two – 9 – 3: Lack of irony

The more blatant the message, the less successful the art. Vive le tabagisme is the title of a painting by Gérard Tisserand, depicting a cartoony man and woman smoking. The smoke curls, and spreads, and fills the room. The figures are dumbly outlined, but the smoke is carefully done, in the scumbled manner associated with gestural abstraction. Without the figures and the title, the painting could easily be a passable abstraction. But it’s a political cartoon, married to gestural abstraction. Vive la tabagisme is perilously close to a single message, a one-liner about the dangers—or, I suppose, the unpleasantness—of smoking. Tisserand isn’t a well-known painter, and when I happened to see this painting in a gallery in , it was surrounded by pictures by other artists that would also no find places in major at magazines. The messages were simply too obvious, too lacking in irony. Successful politically inclined painting has to be ambiguous, and in that respect Richter’s slippery images are exemplary. In Crow’s account, an artwork can potentially be of interest whenever it manages to rethink the balance between mass culture and high art. Crow’s interest is sparked by works that at least initially rebuff historians and critics. Artists like Sherrie Levine and Gordon Matta-Clark have remained invisible to the general populations of Europe and America, but they have pushed the avant-garde forward. The larger political world, the one with countries and economies and wars, is only distantly visible in such art. The condition of serious art at the end of the twentieth century demanded a high degree of alienation, which restricted effective artmaking to a very small avant-garde and to the people that bought and sold its products. One reason Crow’s notion of “common culture” is so difficult to pin down is that it isn’t really a “common” culture as much as a élite intellectual culture. The larger common culture, the one that still remembers the Guernica, is out of reach of avant-garde art. Yet in Crow’s account, which I find persuasive, it is the small portion of the art world that is both intellectual and committed to a certain avant-garde that can still make effective, serious political art. This is not to say that following the particular trajectory of conceptual and minimal art that leads past Levine and Matta-Clark is a sure-fire way to make interesting political painting. Work Part Two – 10 – 3: Lack of irony has something direct to say about politics, society, gender, or ethnicity on the one hand, and about painting itself on the other, is virtually assured of failure. If it succeeds it does so by luck. Normally, unambiguous political meaning is poison. But every once in a while, in some of the most interesting circumstances, work appears that is simultaneously about politics and the avant-garde. John Berger, who wrote on the Success and Failure of Picasso, was amazed at the Guernica, and having recently re-read his book I’m convinced he does not have the faintest idea how Picasso worked it all out. I hope it is clear I am not arguing that ironic political art has some built-in advantage. Scott Tyler and David Nelson, the art students I mentioned earlier, were deeply ironic: one with serious intent, the other flippantly. There are any number of examples where artists have taken refuge in ironized meaning to avoid head-on collisions with political truths. Kristián Frey’s August 1968 in the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, is within the typical range.22 The title pins the work to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, but the painting offers little more. It mimics a wall defaced by graffiti, and it gets its cues from Cy Twombly and Antonio [ ] Tapies. The word “ALLES” can be read in one place, and the artist’s own name in another. For no particular reason, everything else is illegible. Is it pacifist to be so evasive? Frey makes it look as if he is proposing it is not possible to put brute political facts into painting. The painting is as successful as its ambiguations, and it is certainly saved by them. But it also fails each moment it is evasive about serious politics. Frey chose to boost the art content at the expense of the politicial meaning. The Vietnam veternas painted their experiences at the expense of their art. Success still demands opacity. I don’t know any escape from the negative spin of acceleratingly insupportable coyness.

Serious religious art

Religious painting is another enormous problem, just as large and entirely different in its dynamics. In general twentieth-century artists and movements have suffered when they have come Part Two – 11 – 3: Lack of irony too close to serious religiosity, though they have sometimes benefitted by being critical of established religions. Maurice Denis’s chapel in Saint Germain-en-Laye is not a failed work, or even a bad one: but it is, I think, impossible to be convinced that its gentle and humourless piety is also important art (plate ). Denis’s circle of friends—represented in the museum adjoining the chapel—included painters who were both weak and quite serious: Paul Elie Ranson, Maurice Marinot, Mögens Ballin, Ker Xavier Roussel, Paul Serusier.23 From them I’d single out René Piot, whose fresco Requiescat (1906) is an attempt at monumentality that ends up being an unintentional exposition of négritude. It’s a massively serious painting, but what kills it is Piot’s obliviousness to the question of race—a blindness abetted by his earnest religiosity.24 The chapel itself is bright, but not overly so, and full of unforced pedanticism. It only becomes fanatical once, in Denis’s own self-portrait, which the curators keep in the chapel: Denis wears a monk’s habit, and stares at us as if we were in need of forgiveness or even conversion. (I wonder how Catholic visitors think of that portrait. In 1998 it was perched discreetly on an easel set in a side-aisle.) If Denis’s trajectory in the histories of does not include his chapel, and the reason is principally its earnest piety. Denis is a touchstone for early modern religious painting because his later work is so entirely forgotten by . It would be possible to write a book of serious twentieth-century art that is also religious—it would include Matisse’s [ ], the Rothko Chapel, Newman’s Stations of the Cross, perhaps Kiefer’s meditations on negative theology, even Alfred Manessier’s work25 —but it would be an odd book, excentric to the interests of modernism or postmodernism. Wouldn’t such a book risk being either the next entry on the specialist’s shelf of minor themes (Robert Rosenblum’s book on Dogs in Art, James Yood’s [ ]26 )? Or worse, a contribution to the general “image culture” of religious imagery? David Morgan, a scholar of twentieth-century popular religious imagery, proposes is time to abandon the élitist notion that devotional images should be kept separate from fine art.27 Yet I wonder if the division isn’t deeper than viewers’ Part Two – 12 – 3: Lack of irony religious affinities or aristocratic assumptions: I wonder if it doesn’t reach into the structure of art criticism itself. Consider for example Henri Le Chénier, who paints Depositions and Cruficixions in a style that looks like a bad student’s version of Francis Bacon.28 In one canvas Jesus is lying on the ground, nailed to the cross. The sky is a flat blue, the ground flat black, the cross two stripes of green and blue. Jesus’s legs are not yet nailed, and they are twisted and broken as Beckmann might have painted them. Jesus has two faces smeared onto one head, in the fashion of a time-lapse double exposure: four eyes, two noses, and two foreheads. In a way what I’ve just said about Le Chénier’s painting does not even make sense, because it is art criticism applied to an object that is so far from the concerns of style and history that it draws upon. A similarly Baconesque Crucifixion (1990) by the New Zealand artist Barry Squire has Jesus ripped and torn like a combination of an early Bacon and the steroidally muscled creature called “The Thing” from the comic book The Fantastic Four. Surely, though, it is not right to take Squire to task for his particular mixture of styles. His own artist’s statement is miles away from such concerns. “I painted Christ,” he says, “because I needed to see him, and what he saw, while on Golgotha. I could never know his suffering, but somehow deep in my heart I felt that my expresisons of his image through paint and canvas could empower me with my own view to survival.”29 Clearly artists like Squire and Le Chénier are not playing the same game as the historians and critics who work with names like Bacon, Grünewald, or The Thing: another way of that Morgan’s hope of ignoring low-high distinctions can only work if criticism and history are set aside in favor of religious meanings. Le Chénier and Squire are using art—in a way that can only seem entirely misguided and deeply irrelevant—to say something about religion. There’s a symmetry here, which prevents the “high” and “low” from commingling: just as it isn’t possible for a critic or historian to suppress disbelief at the distorted uses to which people like Bacon have been put, so it isn’t possible for Squire or De Chénier to paint unless their extra-artistic motives are strong enough to eclipse whatever sense of history or criticism them might acquire. “Sometimes it is hard to Part Two – 13 – 3: Lack of irony criticize, one wants only to chronicle,” as Randal Jarrell once said. These paintings are “like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them.” They don’t ask to be judged by alien criteria. I found Squire’s painting in a special issue of the National Catholic Reporter dedicated to the finalists in the international competition to paint Jesus for the millennium. The editors received entries from 1,004 artists in 19 countries. Sister Wendy Beckett chose the winner, Janet McKenzie’s Jesus of the People. The painting is of a young Black Jesus. His halo is flanked on the left by a yin-yang symbol, and on the right by a feather, symbolic (so the artist says) of the Native American Great Spirit. McKenzie also says that even though the figure is male, the model for his body was a woman, so it’s a feminist and multicultural Jesus. The painting is technically competent—McKenzie was trained at the ultra-conservative Art Students League in New York—and has a brooding and sad feeling about it. Sister Wendy says perceptively that “he draws the darkness of our lack of love” over his white robe, “holding it to himself, prepared to transform all sorrows if we let him.”30 Jesus of the People was an interesting choice, because it has the highest quotient of fine-art qualities: a mastered and appropriate technique, a unified style (in this case, a turn-of-the century stained-glass style, as in some Toulouse-Lautrec), a message fully integrated into its medium. It nearly competes as fine art, except that it’s a bit simple and nearly one hundred years behind the times. Other paintings in the issue of the National Catholic Reporter are unredeemable as art: they’re laughable as art at the same instant they’re successful as religious images for a certain public. The sheer diversity of misuses is hard to put in words. Storm troopers grab Jesus in Gethsemane; there’s Jesus as a Poor, Black, Death Row Inmate; Jesus as a young man in a button-down white shirt, standing at someone’s doorstep and flashing a big smile; a Golub-style canvas of Jesus in Central America, being brutalized by police; Jesus as a rock star, backlit against cumulus clouds, dressed in a coat with the flags of all nations; a sincere Jesus (who looks strangely like Stephen King) as a news anchor on TV; Jesus as a shadowy figure reaching out of a TV set. Part Two – 14 – 3: Lack of irony

Sister Wendy’s pick for second place is also an image with a high art content: Yeshua, a faux-icon inscribed with archaic Hebrew. The epitome of these entries for me is Michelle Karam’s I am For You, a downhome Jesus from Texas (plate ). (It’s also appropriate because it’s a bookend to the century: the publicity appeared between Christmas 1999 and January 1, 2000.) In an interview in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Karam describes how the image came to her in pieces.31 The figure is based on a homeless man. The eyes are her husband’s, and so is the top of the nose; but the bottom of the nose is her daughter’s. The hair and ears are Karam’s own. His body is her father’s. His beard is a priest’s. His baseball cap is inscribed with a verse from Isaiah, inspired by her brother-in-law. She found the dead-end road by driving around her hometown of Texarkana, “prayerfully looking for the perfect place to photograph for inspiration.” She chose a spot on Lelia Street, Texarkana, which has a one-way sign “symbolizing one’s need to stop an accept Christ as… the only one true way to God.” All these puzzle-pieces are not art: they’re confessional bits from Karam’s own life outside of art. “It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done—or rather, for anything that has been done to them.” (Jarrell again.) They are, in the end, “beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.”32 I propose Karam’s painting and her explanation of it as a limiting case. Of course other entries in the Jesus 2000 contest have varying degrees of ambition in relation to fine art. There is, for example, the host of angel painters represented in galleries throughout the world. (They could be the subject of a separate chapter.) One of the more popular, Graciela Rodo Boulanger, paints Ben Shahn-style angels and little children.33 They have puffy peach faces and little brown button eyes, and they’re dressed in multicolor playtime clothes. Their wings are in bright poster-paint checkerboard patterns. They are terminally cute and childish, but not wholly oblivious of art. Reams of angel painting is like this: it has an awareness of fine art, but the allusions and responses to mainstream art are so intermittent, so insouciant, so broken by misunderstandings, that it stands or Part Two – 15 – 3: Lack of irony falls mainly on its piety. Religious painting of this sort is like the furthest dark planets of the solar system, barely under the influence of the sun’s gravity. It may seem this argument hinges on the idea that religious artists don’t, or can’t, think of their work as fine art. Yet the same case can be made even more forcefully of the New Age religious art that begame ubiquitous at the end of the century—and of what Clark calls “the self-satisfied Leftist claptrap about ‘art as substitute religion’.”34 Christian Silvain’s I Am Also Eternal like the Belly of a Woman… (1980) for instance, gives us a huge nude woman, veiled, floating in the air above some wintry trees.35 Her hair dangles down over the treetops, and suspended from it like a gaudy ornament is a head of Jesus. The dangling head is at the center of a huge spider web, which ensnares it, the woman, and the trees. The picture is pole-faced and creepy—it looks as if Jesus is the saviour of a land of male fantasies and frozen spider webs. This isn’t just an illustration of a painter using art as a tool to get at religious meanings (“to see him, and what he saw, while on Golgotha”) but a construction of religious meaning through art—through spiderwebs and giant nude women with eternal bellies. New Age painting, meaning overtly religious and spiritual painting that does not follow orthodox iconographic models, was a substantial fraction of all art production at century’s end. (Just as it was a good chunk of all book publishing in America, as witness the sheer number of “spiritual” and New Age publishers.) As a practice it sometimes knows what painting is, and tries to find new religious meaning through, or in, the art. The criticism that endorses it is mostly exhibition puffs, but also some academic work (for instance Suzi Gablik’s).36 And this isn’t even to mention the vast numbers of artworks that are made by artists who would disavow words like “religion” and even “spirituality” but who use their art with the same inward dedication, and the same hope of transcendental meaning, as religious art used to be taken. That kind of “religious painting” was utterly ubiquitous in post-war Europe and America, and could easily be expanded—Bleckner, Ruscha, Rothenberg, Scully—to embrace practically any painter from post- onward. I’ll stay away from that subject here because it’s the great lurking iceberg of Part Two – 16 – 3: Lack of irony late twentieth-century painting. No one can quite see its outlines, and no one knows quite what to call it. If the talk is confined, as I think it has to be, to painting that avows a “spiritual” or New Age agenda, or says that religion can be re-imagined as art, then we are dealing with a practice that is even harder to work into art history than earnest mainstream religious art like Le Chénier’s. “Spiritual” painting, as I’ll call it, misunderstands painting much more egregiously than people like Le Chénier who want only to re-imagine religion through art. Clark’s rough judgment about the “self-satisfied Leftist claptrap” of taking art as “substitute religion” is part of a different context. The more careful the historian, the less they’ll say openly about religion. The sentence comes up in the chapter on Pollock, at the end of a discussion of Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness” from the Phenomenology of Mind. Perhaps, Clark says, the unhappy consciousness is a way that the claptrap “might be reworked so as to have some critical purchase. Partly this book is an attempt to do that. To investigate why God is Not Cast Down.” The title, God is Not Cast Down, is a book written by Malevich, which Clark had discussed in an earlier chapter. But these few sentences are all he is willing to say. Roughly, he means that modernism is constituted by its entrapment in Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness”: a state in which the consciousness of utter contingency—full dependence on the conditions at hand—is tortured by the awareness of the unchangeable nature of thought. The duality of all thinking is something that the unhappy consciousness cannot accept or comprehend. It wants to surrender its condition and relinquish the dilemma, and it can do so in part by “the positive moment of practicing what it does not understand.”37 Clark glosses that such moments of surrender, in which the unhappy consciousness turns itself into something objective outside itself, are “those of the modern forms of religion.” And that those forms, in turn, are “extended and amplified by those of art.” That, and not the easy claim that art is religion, or the even easier one that art can depict religion, is how serious modernism like Pollock’s can be said to have a religious meaning. It is an Part Two – 17 – 3: Lack of irony attempt to practice something that the artist and public do not understand, to build something that can stand for the most immediate dilemmas of self-awareness. Clark is brave, I think, to bring this subject up at all, because the word “religion” is a toxin in serious talk about art. He also is right to let the matter drop immediately, and to keep his discussion of Hegel so tightly roped in that it is practically opaque. (Readers of Hegel can find more in the passage than Clark admits, but I wonder if they can find more in painting.38 ) Anything religious in twentieth-century painting is either (a) immured in the notion that art is a set of tools that can be used to capture religion in a picture, (b) committed to the hope that painting is a magical vehicle that can reimagine religion for a new age, or (c) sworn to silence about religion, precisely because it is so committed to keeping faith with history and painting. In the first group: Karam, McKenzie, and the Denis of the chapel in Saint Germain-en-Laye. In the second: Silvain and innumerable New Age experiments. The third: the few artists like Pollock, who can be spoken of, however briefly, as religious in Clark’s sense. Many artists nearly central in twentieth- century painting are dogged by their closeness to the second group, or the first—they’re perpetually under suspicion. Rothko, Newman, and even Matisse have that insoluble problem as part of their historical reception. Truly ambitious painting like Pollock’s—and this is my closing paradox—is at once religious and serious. But his seriousness admits paradox, and is pierced by the impossibility of ordinary representation.

Naïfs, faux-naïfs, would-be faux-naïfs

Outsider art is another species of unironic painting. A naïve painter is expected to be earnest, or at least simple and pure—and honest, and straightforward, and guileless. (Rousseau is never far off in the discourse on outsider art.) Ironies would destroy the painter’s naïveté. An outsider artist, in Roger Cardinal’s definition, should create an obsessively imagined world, a place where the laws of normal reality are overturned, and such a place can hardly be the knowing, controlled creation of a player in the art world. Part Two – 18 – 3: Lack of irony

Yet ironically, there are virtually no artists who have worked entirely outside the western art world. There’s always some hint of influence, some sign that the hermetically sealed artist has broken the seal and peeped outside. Bits of Picasso somehow find their way into Appalachian outsider art, pieces of German into art by mental patients, social into folk sculptures in Hungary and Russia. Hence the dilemma: outsider art is an oxymoron, and its naïveté is seldom as pure as it appears. Recently the term “self-taught” has been used as a substitute for “naïve” or “outsider,” but it only defers the problem. The critic proposes we drop the word “outsider” altogether, and just ask for a “level of artistry and power” as we would for any kind of art.39 That’s a reasonable approach, although it can’t be adequate for an art world that still desires something outside itself. Because verifiably outsider art has always been rare, museums and galleries settle for mixed examples. second-generation outsider artists, who are incrementally more aware of modern art. The Halifax Gallery of Art exhibits several generations of local Canadian painters and sculptors. The earliest pieces are the oddest, and the most free from knowledge of the art world. The newest pieces, which are contemporary, look like Red Grooms or Dubuffet.40 The gallery shows them all: first-, second-, and third-generation painters who are naïve, semi-naïve, and not-so-naïve. Semi-naïve artists have been discovered ever since the 1910s. In Chicago, one of the most prominent is (1892-1972), whose pallid murals of soldiers—they have a weird similarity to Puvis de Chavanne’s wall paintings—derive from mid-century comic books and popular magazines.41 He had paranoid fantasies, but he was not cut off from contemporaneous art—on the contrary, his work is the same distance from commercial comics as Robert Crumb’s, but in a different direction.42 In addition to naïfs and semi-naïfs (and semi-demi-naïfs, and so on), there are false naïfs. was a semi-naïf, by which I mean he believed in the purity and honesty of what he did, and at the same time he was influenced by parts of the art world.43 The same can’t always be said for the tidal waves of naïve artists who followed him: painters such as Louis Vivin (1861- Part Two – 19 – 3: Lack of irony

1936), André Bauchant (1873-1958), Camille Bombois (1883-1970, an artist discovered by Wilhelm Uhde), and Séraphine Louis (1864-1942, another Uhde discovery—this time his cleaning lady). Some of them knew they were playing the role of naïfs, and all were steeped in modern art as well as popular illustration.44 Bombois is a wooden Balthus: the same obsessions, “direct and lusty in the Rabelaisian tradition,” but with oaken limbs substitued for fleshy ones.45 What happened on Montmartre happened slightly later in other cities and countries. Dubuffet’s collection of Art Brut, now housed in , includes a number of artists who were versed in modernism: Aloïse, Gaston Duf, Auguste Forestier, and Jeanne Tripier.46 The American and European vogue for Grandma Moses also peaked in the 1940s and 1950s.47 Beginning sometime around 1980—the date is hard to fix—artists trained in art schools found they could will themselves to become naïve. Their naïveté was of a different order than artists who worked largely, if not completely, outside the western artworld (the first kind), or from those who worked their way into the art world from outside (the second kind). This third kind of outsider art begins inside, and tries to force its way back outside. An exhibition in Taipei, called “Dix-sept naïfs de Taiwan,” shows the depths of dissimulation that are now commonplace.48 The seventeen artists in the Taipei show struggle, in different ways, to adulterate their art world styles until they look genuinely emotional and culturally authentic. One artist ends up painting a crude Chagall, another an unskilled Dufy or Utrillo, and a third makes bad Chinese social realist painting (awkwardly drawn farmers happily sowing a field). A fourth offers a cross betwen Matisse’s early figural style, as in the Danse, and an especially ungainly Keith Haring. Even styles that are already crude are made cruder: there were also paintings in the show done in the style of Dubuffet, but an even more premeditatedly childlike. Given Taipei’s commerce with the West, I expect viewers of the exhibit recognized Dubuffet, Chagall, Matisse, Dufy, Utrillo, and some of the other painters that the Taiwanese artists took as models; presumably such viewers would also have seen the game that was being played. The new generation of faux-naïfs are faux in that they aren’t really naïve; and they are also faux Part Two – 20 – 3: Lack of irony because they don’t declare they are dissimulating their naïveté. Yet these doubly-dissimulating artists are also, for the most part, entirely sincere. Some of the Taiwanese painters are interested in emulating the cultural purity they see in the aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan. In recent years there has been growing awareness of Taiwan’s indigenous cultures (a museum has recently opened, dedicated to their cultures). The surviving tribes do not make art work that can compete in the world art market, and so modern Taiwanese artists who want to purge their painting of modern western influences sometimes take up naïve painting as a second-best solution. An extreme case of this third kind of naïve art, the insider who makes himself into an outsider, is François Burland (b. 1958). At first glance, the work looks African (plate ). But are those African figures? The figure’s helmet looks faintly Greek, and the centipede behind him, Australian. It is suspicious, too, how the archer overlaps him so neatly, more as a westerner might do than an artist from Central Australia.49 A gallery flier for a show in of his paintings in 1999 confirms those doubts. It says he is inspired by “mythological , mixing antique sources with modern literature and ethnology, references to the holy grail, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the of Perseus, Celtic mythology and influences of American Indians and the Aborigines of Australia.”50 At the same time, his work is marketed as outsider art, and so the flier also calls what he does “involuntary”—as if he couldn’t help painting as he does. A second flier, which was distributed at the same show, says outsider art doesn’t “self-consciously follow any tradition,” and that, as Cardinal said in 1972, its artists are “innocent of pictorial influences and perfectly untutored.”51 It is a sign of the state of naïve art that a painter like Burland can be accepted as an outsider artist, even though he is neither naïve nor an outsider. In fact he is a consummate insider: he was born in Lausanne, and lives in Chexbres, and takes his outsider influences from books and exhibits. His compositions are partly from African and Aboriginal sources, but they are sold to an art market used to flat patterned figures by A. R. Penck and Keith Haring. Burland’s work does not fail on account of its false naïveté, because that in itself is an interesting trait. It fails because it is too Part Two – 21 – 3: Lack of irony straightforward and earnest. (It is also Eurocentric. Is there a difference in sympathy or understanding between Burland’s representation of African sources and Picasso’s?) Ultimately, outsider art is a form of , because it is a voyeuristic look into a world that is considered exotic. Often that world is without political power: children’s drawings, Taiwanese aboriginal art, and the world of laborers in Nova Scotia and Paris are all examples. Picasso’s appropriations of African and Oceanic art had their orientalist side, as Thomas McEvilley has brilliantly demonstrated; and European painters continue to be tempted to mimic “authentic” tribal art of various kinds.52 The mixtures are endless. François Millon, for example, is a French artist who has worked in the Ivory Coast; he produces large, often beautiful canvases that mingle tribal motifs with a painterly style derived in part from Dubuffet.53 Naïfs, semi-naïfs, semi-demi-naïfs, whether they are exotic or cosmopolitan like Dubuffet, all share an earnest reverence for purity that is entirely incompatible with irony. That is why naïve art is a component of twentieth-century painting, but not a central achievement. Local and non- western “naïve” artists served as catalysts for twentieth-century painting, as did the “discoveries” of the art of the insane and of children’s art. Naïve art showed Picasso what could be done: but Henri Rousseau is a footnote to Picasso. That is why, in the most stringent assessment, Dubuffet is a minor artist. [ section omitted ] * There are five steps, I think, from stolid seriousness to the most intangible irony.54 First is the moment when wit is absolutely unknown, and the world is a serious place. The paintings are entrenched and heartfelt, and there isn’t anything in sight that isn’t taken absolutely seriously. My examples of political, religious, and computer art belong to this first moment, and so to a lesser degree does most of post-classical painting. Rooms of old master paintings are normally quite serious, and it’s only in the twentieth-century galleries that irony becomes pervasive. I seems to me that we are living through this phenomenon, and we may be too close to see it very clearly. Geoffrey Part Two – 22 – 3: Lack of irony

Hill and others may be right in proclaiming irony as our muse (see the epigraph to this chapter): time will tell. After the first moment of uniform seriousness, there is a second moment, in which something that has been taken seriously seems not quite right. I think, for instance, of Duchamp’s attempt to paint in futurist and cubist styles: they’re serious attempts, but the results are a little off. Slowly Duchamp edged them away from cubo- and into a mode that was more his own, and more ironically detached from the original cubists. A third moment may follow, when the unfocused irony becomes focused satire. That happens in Duchamp’s Tu m’, which is a kind of razor-sharp parody of nauralism and illusionistic painting. In a fourth moment, the ironies and parodies begin undermine painting’s more serious purposes, leading to a fifth condition when it is no longer possible to take anything seriously or to make a straightforward statement. I think of Duchamp’s later works that way, because many of them are witty but unfocused, as if it were no longer possible to think about anything without instantly also seeing how it could be punctued. Unfocused irony, parody, and lightheartedness is one of the century’s defining characteristics. It is nascent in synthetic and , and fully present from onward. Toward the end of the century it flowered in cartoon art and graffiti art, from Roy Lichtenstein to Keith Haring and Jiri Dokoupil.55 I haven’t traced it in this book because to much of it is a sign—however provisional—of success. Irony in all its forms, and especially in its lightest or most elusive ones, seemed right for much of the second half of the century. The five-step sequence is an ideal structure; actual twentieth-century careers swung back and forth across the possibilities. But the unmoving point, the place where the pendulum will always come to rest, is the avant-garde. It is crucial that Duchamp never made light of the idea of the avant- garde itself. If Ironia is the “presiding judge of our art,” she has no purchase on the concept of the avant-garde. Part Two – 23 – 3: Lack of irony

Notes to Part II, Chapter 1

1 Hill, The Triumph of Love (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), canto CIII, p. 53. 2 Rouzha Marinska, The 1920s in Bulgarian Art [in Bulgarian] (Sofia: The Open Society, 1996), 99-104; the painting I am describing is illustrated on p. 99. 3 Klaus Weidner, Wolfgang Wegener (: Henschenverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1988),no. 24. 4 Giselbert Hoke: Italien, Spanien, Peru… Neue Landschaften von G. H. (Graz: Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum, 1985). 5 Pierre Bettencourt, Dado: Buffon naturalise (Paris: Éditions de la Difference, 1988); [ff stack 759.4 D121b] Dado, l’Exaspération du trait (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1981). [4 736.4 D12d] 6 This is argued at length in my “Uccello, Duchamp: [ ]. 7 The painting is dated 21 January 1978, and inscribed “Brasov.” 8 Administration of State Patrimony and Protocol A.R., Auction of the Goods Previously Belonging to Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu, auctions 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 12 October 1999, translation modified.

11 A solution adopted by some veterans is to minimize the art content, and simply use the medium to convey the message. That strategy is close to the Guerrilla Girls’s use of posters and images lifted from fine art. See Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, By the Guerrilla Girls (Whoever They Really Are), with an essay by Whitney Chadwick (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995); The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (New York: Penguin, 1998). 12 Equipo Crónica (Madrid: Galería Joana Mordó, 1972); Equipo Crónica, 1965- 1981 (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1989). [pamphlet P 22117 for photo] 13 Erró is discussed in chapter 10. For Monory, in addition to the source cited below, see Jean- Christophe Bailly, Monory (Paris: Maeght, 1979); La Voleuse, edited by Marcelin Pleynet (Paris: Galerie Lelong, 1987); and Monory: Noir, edited by Jean-Christophe Bailly (Paris: Galerie Lelong, 1991). 14 These are illustrated in Monory, Toxique (Paris: Arc, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1984). 15 Peter Sorge (Berlin: Galerie Poll, 1985); also Drei Berliner: Werner Berges, Fritz Köthe, Peter Sorge (Milan: Galleria d’Arte Vinciana, 1972). 16 Prinzip Realismus (Berlin: Reiter-Druck, 1972), n.p. 17 [Homàge à François Topino-Lebrun], exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977). 18 [Vladimir Velickovic] [Try B 759.9497 V43e—for 1977 Pompidou Topino-Lebrun exh.] 19 The Art of Rupert Garcia, A Survey Exhibition, text by Ramón Favela (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1986). 20 Danto, “Moral Dyspepsia,” in Ida Applebroog: Nothing Personal, Paintings 1987-1997, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: Corcoran Art Gallery, 1997). [ÖÖ Corcoran ref.] 21 Propos d’artistes contre le racisme, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Enrico Navarra, 1990). 22 [Kristián Frey (b. 1929)] 23 Paul Elie Ranson: du Symbolisme a l’, edited by Agnes Dellanoy et al. (Saint- Germain-en-Laye: Musée Départemental Maurice Denis “Le Prieure,” 1997); [B 759.4 R212p] Maurice Marinot, Peintre et verrier, edited by Michel Hoog et al. (Zurich: Museum Bellerive, 1990); [B 748.294 M33m] Lucie Cousturier, K.-X. Roussel (Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1927); Ker- Part Two – 24 – 3: Lack of irony

Xavier Roussel, 1867-1944: Gemälde, Handzeichnungen, Druckgraphik (Bremen: Kunsthalle, 1965); [B 759.4 R863b] Gisela Gotte, Ker-Xavier Roussel, 1867-1944: Untersuchungen zu seiner Entwicklung, vor allem zum Verhältnis Frühwerk-Spätwerk (Bremen : [s.n.], 1982). For [Paul Serusier, and especially René Piot see] 24 [René Piot] 25 [Alfred Manessier] 26 Rosenbum, Dogs in Art ([ ]); Yood, [ ]. [Other speciality books?] 27 Morgan, [book on popular religious imagery] 28 Max Fullenbaum, “Le Chénier, le chemin de croix,” Univers des 14 (March 1996): 32-4. 29 Jesus 2000, special issue of the National Catholic Reporter, December 24, 1999, edited by Michael Farrell, p. 21. 30 Jesus 2000, 7. 31 Jesus 2000, 22; Greg Bischof, “Artist Depicts Christ for New Millennium,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, January 1, 2000, D11. 32 See the epigraph to Part II, chapter 10. 33 Graciela Rodo Boulanger, Musique des Anges (S.l.: s.n., 1998). 34 Clark, Farewell, 329. 35 [Christian Silvain] For an illustration see Connaissance des Art 341 (July 1980): inside back cover. 36 Suzi Gablik, [ ]. 37 Clark, Farewell, 329, quoting Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Arnold Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 127, 137. 39 Smith, “Redefining A Style As It Catches On,” The New York Times, January 22, 1999, B35. 40 [Halifax gallery, on naïve artists] 41 Henry Darger: The Unreality of Being (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1996); John MacGregor, Henry J. Darger: Dans les royaumes de l’irréel (Lausanne: Collection de l’art brut, 1996). 42 Compare R. Crumb Retrospective (New York,: Alexander Gallery, 1993); The Life and Times of R. Crumb, edited by Monte Beauchamp (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998). 43 An important exhibit in America was Henri Rousseau, edited by Daniel Catton Rich (New York: , 1942); in this context see also Maurice Garçon, Le douanier Rousseau, accusé naïf (Paris: Quatre Chemins-editart, 1953). 44 See first Wilhelm Uhde, Five Primitive Masters, translated by Ralph Thompson (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1949); also Inauguration de la Salle Wilhelm Uhde: Rousseau, Seraphine, Bauchant, Bombois, Vivin, Peyronnet, edited by Anne Devroye-Stilz (Nice: Direction des Musées de Nice, 1988); Vivin, with essays by Dina Vierny, Wilhelm Uhde, and (Paris: Galerie Dina Vierny, 1980); and Maximilien Gauthier, Andre Bauchant (Paris: Éditions du Chene, 1943). 45 Klaus Perls, in Camille Bombois: Femmes et Filles (New York: Perls Galleries, 1969), n.p.; see also Camille Bombois, 1883-1970: Memorial Exhibition (New York: Perls Galleries, 1970). 46 e art brut: dalle collezioni della Fondazione Solomon R. Guggenheim, di Pierre Matisse e dalla Collection de l’art brut, Losanna (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1986); Michel Thevoz, Art brut, foreword by Jean Dubuffet, translated from the French by James Emmons (New York: Rizzoli, 1976); Jacqueline Porret-Forel, Aloyse (Paris: Compagnie de l’art brut, 1948); Allen Weiss, Shattered Forms: Art brut, Phantasms, Modernism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). 47 Among the many exhibition catalogues, see Grandma Moses (New York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1957), which has excerpts from German and British newspaper reviews. 48 Six-sept naïfs de Taiwan, exh. cat. (Taipei: Museum of Modern Art, May 1998). 49 [African sources for Burland] Part Two – 25 – 3: Lack of irony

50 Anon., “François Burland,” Xeroxed flier, Judy A. Saslow Gallery, Chicago, January 1999, n.p. 51 Anon., “What is Outsider Art?” Xeroxed flier, Judy A. Saslow Gallery, Chicago, January 1999, n.p. For Roger Cardinal and the definition of outsider art, see Cardinal, Outsider Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972); The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, edited by Michael D. Hall, Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr., and Roger Cardinal (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); and Outsiders: An Exhibition of Art brut, introduction by Roger Cardinal (: Das Kunsthaus, 1988). 52 Thomas McEvilley, “Who Told Thou That Thou Was’t Naked?” Artforum [ ] 53 Tatouart: François Millon (Paris: Linehart et Cie, 1992). 54 “Uccello, Duchamp, [ ] 55 For Dokoupil in this context see Dokoupil: Arbeiten, 1981-1984 (Essen: Landesmuseum, 1984). [Haring, Lichtenstein, cartoon art, graffiti]