Mark-Making in Painting: Manet to Twombly

A close friend once confessed that she didn’t understand abstract art. Rather glibly, I said “it’s all about mark-making”—a remark she and her partner greeted with blank stares.

As I soon discovered, their befuddlement is widely shared, thus planting the seed for this blog.

Since every painting (or drawing) consists of marks made with some instrument in an artist’s hands, I had enough visual material for this post; I just needed to select from photographs I already had taken during my urban walks. I share some of these with you.

Not all paintings, of course, show visible marks (whether by brush or something else). Also, any brush mark may be rendered invisible through blending, by, for example, using a soft, sable brush while the paint is still wet. In such cases, the resulting form is not unlike those early Walt Disney movies in which a brush descends, touches a surface, color flows out like magic and leaves a pure form without a mark or blemish.

Look, for example, at this Renaissance painting by Giovanni Bellini. It contains no visible brush marks, not even in the large areas of the Virgin’s robe or the red curtain which separates her from the landscape.

Bellini was an early Italian master in the handling of oil paints, and this painting will do nicely to introduce us to four basic issues that remain applicable to Western painting for the next 500 years.

1: Because the Italians saw and studied classical Greek and Roman art, their human figures were properly proportioned and looked natural.

 

2: As in that sliver of background on the left (above), we see a familiar representation of deep space because Renaissance artists had invented linear perspective earlier in this century and, soon thereafter, aerial perspective. Thus, the naturalism of the human figure in the foreground was reinforced by the natural representation of space in the background.

3: Because of this, it was generally assumed that the painting itself was analogous to a window through which the viewer associated the foreground scene as well as its completely familiar landscape background with her/his own world.

4: For the next half-millennium of Western art, it was assumed that the Figure/Ground relationship in a painting is one in which the figure (and main subject matter) occupies the foreground, to which the background, and whatever the artist paints there, is subordinate.

 

 

Over the centuries, these assumptions will weaken and–most definitely–be challenged by 20th century artists, such Jackson Pollock or Hans Hofmann (shown above). But before we examine paintings like these, consisting of nothing but marks and devoid of any Figure/Ground relationships whatsoever, let’s return to the topic of mark-making and how painters between Bellini and Pollock employ it.

In contrast to the Bellini, an earlier Gothic painting such as that of Stefano da Verona depicts elongated, less-naturally proportioned figures, as well as a totally un-naturalistic ground. That ground is not even made of paint. It consists of gold leaf, burnished into the wooden panel prior to any paint application. The gold symbolizes a world that is divine, timeless, eternal.  Thus, the Figure/Ground relationship is totally different, and offers no connection to the natural world we inhabit.

 

Yet, that gold ground plays a role in our topic of mark-making. Look at this detail. The gold leaf has been tooled with a sharp instrument to form a decorative, all-over floral pattern. We also see even more prominent tooling defining the halo of Saint John Evangelist. Such tooling, of course, is a form of mark-making.

 

 

 

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s The Annunciation, is another Gothic painting, and one of the great works of earlier 14th century Siena. Its gold ground contains much bolder tooling. And in this case Lorenzetti also includes words. In the detail directly above, showing the Virgin’s mouth, chin and nose, we see the Archangel’s words apud Deum omne verbum, by which he is telling her “nothing is impossible for God’s word.” In the other detail (scroll up), we see part of her answer, which she aims upwards to Heaven: Ecce Ancilla Domini (“Here is God’s Maid”).

Remember these examples–tool marks which include words and letters–when we look at certain paintings of the 20th century–even though these earlier ones represent a symbolic form of mark-making whose religious meaning spoke powerfully to the medieval viewer, if not so much to us today.

 

 

Regardless of this difference, these medieval examples of mark-making prompt me to look at certain 20th-century paintings, by artists such as Picasso, or Lichtenstein, or Basquiat. Doing so might encourage us to reassess the general assumption that mark-making in the form of letters and words only starts with Cubism.

But I digress.

Let us slow down and consider at least a couple of paintings from the High Renaissance and Baroque periods. By this time, artists were much more familiar with, and skilled in, the handling of oil paint (a medium new to the 1480s of Giovanni Bellini). They applied their paint more freely than he had done, and sometimes disregarded traditional methods of blending.

 

 

In Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Finding of Moses, for example, we see the Pharaoh’s daughter (foreground left) and the nurse into whose care she leaves the rescued child (foreground right). We also see two secondary actions in the background (a hunt on the right and three figures approaching from the river bank). The detail shows not only the loosely-brushed highlights on a drapery fragment of the Pharaoh’s daughter (foreground), but even bolder and thicker brush marks on the central figure in the mid-ground.

Tintoretto was known for such looseness. His unblended brush-marks reveal the energy of his hand, and led to his being nicknamed Il Furioso. Although some criticized him for such liberties in mark-making, others admired him and accepted those marks because they were limited to subsidiary figures in mid-or-background.

 

 

 

Before seeing how mark-making expands and takes on new meaning in the nineteenth century, let’s look at two examples by Rembrandt. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any details of his Self Portrait of 1660, so its hard to see how much thick, impasto paint he uses to build highlights on his forehead and nose, nor how rough and unblended some of the paint is on the shaded side of his face. But we are able to see that those highlighted, curly hairs under his cap are made with individual sweeps of a thin but heavily-loaded brush–each a mark by itself.

 

 

 

More evident are the unblended marks in this detail from his Saint Bartholomew, whose hand holds the knife that eventually will serve to flay him. In this case, I never photographed the full painting, because this detail had totally captured my eye. Note the three large and two smaller, thick, white brush marks highlighting his exposed sleeve. Rembrandt has no interest in blending those white brush marks into the darker hollows of the pleated fabric. Even more revealing, however, is the flat brush mark that defines his index finger just before it disappears under the knife blade. This mark ignores the natural contour of his finger. For Rembrandt, the thumb above it will suffice to convey naturalism, but that first joint of the index finger is rendered as a pure, flat, abstract mark. And it can’t be in a more prominent place: foreground, front and center!

By the time we get to the 19th-century, mark-making becomes more varied, interesting, and meaningful, especially in the second-half of the century.

 

 

 

More than anyone else, it is Édouard Manet who rejects the highly-refined academic painters of his and previous centuries and opens the door to modernity. Charles Baudelaire called him le peintre de la vie moderne (“the painter of modern life”), and this small Café Concert speaks to that: a bourgeois gentleman sitting next to a working woman (both in the foreground)—how can two such socially different people be equally worthy of occupying the painting’s frontal plane?

Note also how shallow the background is; Manet almost always eschews deep space. Then, note how the gentleman’s face dissolves into a series of separate, diagonal brushstrokes—marks that enliven his glance to his left and are looser, even, than the brush marks that define the waitress behind him.

My favorite Manet for bold mark-making is his Woman in Riding Habit (1882) in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. In this portrait, Manet puts a vertical highlight on her tall, black top-hat, but not by applying white paint and then feathering its edges into the black on either side as any well-trained artist would have done. Instead, he paints the cylinder of the hat a solid black and then boldly scrapes off a section of black paint with his palette knife to make a perfect highlight: one, brazen, sweeping gesture, one long mark. I have no photograph of it, but you may look it up here.

 

If Manet reduced the space behind his foreground figures (which he tended to do), Claude Monet in his early Boulevard des Capucines plays fast-and-loose with Figure/Ground relationships. One might say that the entire painting is Ground. What we see is a deep space viewed from an upper floor. But then, on the far right edge, he depicts himself (most likely) and another looking down at the scene from an external balcony. Tucked off on the edge–as are those two figures–can we still call them the Figure to the Ground of the rest of the painting? Hardly!

Monet’s entire painting consists of loose, independent brush marks. All the figures are blurred, because no brush mark has been blended with any other (as would normally be the case to model a three-dimensional figure); all marks are independent. This, of course, is a good example of Impressionism—the use of loose brush marks to convey light, movement and atmosphere rather than to define solid forms. The Impressionist idea is that the viewer’s eye (and brain) will merge the independent, unblended dabs of color to capture a fleeting moment of light on form.

 

 

 

 

 

Such mark-making defines not merely a particular painter, but the entire movement we call Impressionism. And with Monet, those marks get bolder, and “messier,” and more heavily impastoed, as we can see in a later work such as Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight).

 

 

In the earliest Monet I selected, La Grenouillère, his brushstrokes are already separate and unblended as they capture the rippling water; but these marks are fat, lumbering strokes in contrast to the dynamism of his later, smaller, shimmering, brushwork.

 

…and then, of course, we come to everyone’s favorite Monet (at least in New York City): his Water Lilies. Sit in front of this painting for a while. Get lost. Become a tadpole, a goldfish. It’s all Figure. No, actually, it’s all Ground.

 

 

We are enveloped by individual, unblended brush marks, stretching (in three panels) for nearly forty-two feet. The mark-making is still Impressionist, although denser and with a much greater variety of brush strokes. Water Lilies either gives us no foreground (simply depicting a pool edge would have done this), or it is all foreground. It has no background. It ignores the idea of a Figure/Ground relationship.

For this reason, and because of its enormous scale, Monet has entered the world of abstraction. Even with the angled walls MoMA built for this painting, ones eyes cannot embrace its entire composition. How far must we step back in order to comfortably take in the entire work? All that commands our attention is detail–the myriad marks of his brush.

I happily lose myself in these details. Every visit is like seeing this painting anew. Interestingly, this is how I also respond to a mature Jackson Pollock. More on that later.

 

Impressionism and Pointillism are closely related by time and technique, even if art historians characterize the latter as one of several “Post-Impressionist” movements. Both reveal a surface textured by small, individual brush marks. Their chief difference lies in intention. In Pointillism, the individual mark normally consists of one, pure, unmixed color. A different color, perhaps complementary and equally unmixed, may be placed next to it. The Pointillist artist does not first blend his colors on the palette prior to loading the brush. The stated Pointillist ideal is that the viewer’s eye does all the color blending.

 

Scientific color theory lay behind Pointillism, which is why it is also sometimes called Divisionism. Given that its brush marks are usually smaller and applied in a more methodical, controlled manner, a Pointillist surface resembles mosaic. Because of this, Pointillist mark-making appears less expressive, less spontaneous.

 

In contrast to the swirling pond water of Monet’s Water Lilies, Georges Seurat’s River Seine appears current-less. In Seurat’s words, he wanted to “make something that was both modern and true;” his process for revealing (nature’s) truth was “not a question of mixing pigments but of placing small dots of pure color next to one another, so that the eye, from a distance, can blend them together.”

 

Paul Signac approaches his paintings similarly. He, too, embraces optical science: “The division of color… has nothing in common with the old methods of chiaroscuro or shadow. It is simply the division of the light.” He even makes the claim that “the artist must be the first to make use of science. It is this that enables him to see in nature and to reproduce it with the greatest possible accuracy.”

 

As stylistically similar and tesserae-like we may find the mark-making of these two paintings, we also detect a difference in the artists’ specific marks. Seurat’s marks are smaller, more circular dots of color; Signac’s are slightly larger and oblong. Still, all of their Pointillist paintings consist of individual, unblended marks.

 

Paul Cézanne is not only the major Post-Impressionist painter, but also often referred to as the father of modern art. Look at this unfinished painting, Study of Trees (La Route Tournante). With a few broken lines, he suggests a curving road. Other broken, vertical lines define tree trunks. All we see, other than that, are a few close-hatched marks in blue, green, and tan spread in a seemingly random manner. In several instances, a specific color hue occupies what appears in one place to be foreground, in another place, background. From this, we can conclude that whatever spatial depth exists is not being defined through aerial perspective.

Equally important is the realization that these are the artist’s first marks on his canvas. For centuries, traditional artists began each painting by first applying a thin layer of paint—called imprimatura—over the entire canvas, so creating a unified color base. Cézanne, instead, begins with seemingly random marks in several colors. Simply by disregarding the tradition of imprimatura, he gives new importance to his brush mark.

 

Now, look at a finished painting, one of his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. We see those same. hatched, planar brush marks, only now they fill the entire canvas.

 

 

Such a scene is familiar to us. We read its spatial depth–the mountain in the background, and some dark straight-edged lines defining what must be houses in the foreground. However, many (if not most) of the defining marks for mountain and for sky are larger than any mark in the foreground. This leads us to conclude that Cézanne’s space is no longer controlled by the geometry of linear perspective (which would demand that the more distant marks appear smaller).

And so, Cézanne’s brush-marks, both by size (background to foreground) and by their color intensity (background to foreground) challenged nearly 500 years of how painters represented spatial depth. After Cézanne, the flatness of the painted surface becomes a given for any artist embracing modernity…

 

…consider Picasso. His painting of these five Barcelona prostitutes, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, appears to have no background at all. These five women stand (one sits) on the frontal plane of the picture. Even the blue curtain behind them insinuates itself into that frontal plane. Every compositional element compresses forward, seeking to break the picture plane. Figure and Ground have become one.

Now, look at the marks Picasso employs to define his five nudes. He uses two dark lines, forming a right angle, to make a jutting shelf that is meant to be the breast of the woman on our far left. Two white arcs (curved marks) suffice to define the breast of her neighbor, while a square, half of which is shaded by dark parallel lines reads as breast for the far right nude who is standing. Then, instead of softly modelling the folds of the blue curtain, Picasso turns them into sharp facets, as if he were depicting shattered glass.

 

Just a few years after Les Demoiselles, Picasso and Braque will have “invented” Analytical Cubism, a style which shares certain features with that earlier painting. Still Life with a Bottle of Rum (above) looks like a painting that consists of nothing but separate marks. The stippling of a small brush tip that leaves marks much like Pointillism dominate the right side as well as the bottom half. Curved or straight lines that define an edge of a plane and create facets (or partial edges as we saw in Les Demoiselles…) can be found throughout. Knowing that this is a “Still Life,” we look for likely clues to objects: the sweeping arc at lower right suggests a round table top; just left of center in the lower half appears to be part of a stemmed tulip glass and one finger; on center and slightly above this glass, appear fragments of the rum bottle, its base a half circle tilted up but its neck aligned, more normally, as a vertical.

Besides showing objects from different view points, the overall stippling marks and the muted, neutral colors also challenge our ability to easily identify anything. This reinforces the idea of Simultaneity, the operative concept behind Analytical Cubism: objects are seen, simultaneously, from more than one point of view. The visual language of this form of Cubist mark-making explores multiple perspectives, deconstructs form and, of course, denies the long-held idea of the painting as a window into a shared reality.

And, finally, we have here one of the first examples of letters as mark-making since those tooled gold backgrounds of late medieval painting. The difference is that we don’t know what the letters–a partial L, an E, a T, and a fainter R–signify. Some suggest they stand for Céret, the town where Picasso painted this work. Others suggest they stands for the magazine, Le Torero, knowing Picasso’s love of bullfighting.

 

The Three Musicians (above) as well as Braque’s The Studio (below) are examples of Synthetic Cubism, which the painting of Picasso and Braque evolved into after 1912. In contrast to the complicated, fragmented multiple perspectives of the first Cubist phase, Synthetic Cubist paintings are simpler and more accessible. Picasso’s three figures–Pierrot, Harlequin, Monk (L to R)–are easily discerned. There is only one view. All are frontal. If parts of them overlap, color allows us to identify them and keep them separate.

The musicians stand before a table. Pierrot plays a clarinet, Harlequin a guitar, Monk holds sheet music. A dog lies between their legs, its tail raised up in the center. Harlequin’s right hand is set off by a small, white square, acting as the center point of the entire composition.

Every figure is flat and two-dimensional, each painted as if they were colored paper cutouts pasted to the canvas surface. In this lies the essence of Synthetic Cubism: Collage.  Both these works are all paint, but what this movement gave to future art was the concept of collage.

 

 

The idea of Collage involves incorporating non-art materials into a work of art, and we readily think of such materials as newspaper, photographs, fabric, or wallpaper. But anything that is not traditional pigment will suffice; and in this painting, Braque adds sand to his paint–clearly shown in this detail. Sand gives the painting surface a random texture, one that can’t be controlled like using impasto (thickened paint, as Rembrandt and Tintoretto did). The sand catches light, it casts shadows. It is another form of mark that breaks up or activates an area of color.

Kurt Schwitters, who founded a Dada group in Hanover, Germany the same year he made this painting, saw his art as challenging bourgeois sensibility, and no doubt “noble ladies” would likely shudder at a painting onto which the artist has collaged a funnel, a metal toy train, a broken wheel, a shipping receipt, and other scrap pieces. Schwitters called his work Merz (and he came by the name in a perfectly random way). Construction for Noble Ladies is definitely collage. But, given the amount and variety of collaged objects, we may also call it an assemblage in which the artist makes use of found objects.

 

I knew nothing about Joaquin Torres-García, but had to photograph this when I saw it because of its early date. It, too, is a collage–or better, Assemblage, consisting of nothing but wood scraps and nails. Torres-García was born in Uruguay, but lived in Spain, and France, and back to South America (and elsewhere). He knew Picasso, was influenced by Cubism as well as other movements such as (Russian) Constructivism and (Dutch) Neo-Plasticism, and he sought to wed these modern movements with the early art of his birth continent–Pre-Columbian and Inca art.

I’ll leave it to you to investigate his art. I just love the boldness and simplicity of this Construction with Curved Forms.

 

Having looked at Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Braque and other European modernists (as well as having skipped over quite a few important ones), we are ready to look at how their art was translated by American painters. I suspect that it is these American abstract artists whose paintings my friends most likely couldn’t comprehend.

Jackson Pollock’s Stenographic Figure precedes his famous “drip” paintings. It has some form of figure against a background, if we read the main figure as the tan-colored form sweeping left to right across the center and the background as the black oblong on the left and the blue ground. We also see at least three forms that end in hand-like or paw-like features, detached from, but likely belonging to, the figure.

We also see a swarm of linear, calligraphic marks in white, yellow and black. Some are just linear squiggles; others appear as numbers, like fragments of mathematical equations. They activate the entire canvas and could be considered akin to automatic reflexes of Pollock’s hand, but it would be a step too far to claim that these marks anticipate his later “drip” paintings.  However, when it was exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Spring Salon for Young Artists in May, 1943, Piet Mondrian was on the jury and he stated that Stenographic Figure was “the most exciting painting that I’ve seen in a long, long time, here or in Europe.”

 

Turning to Autumn Rhythm, we know how Jackson Pollock made these paintings. Haven’t we all seen a clip of the film Hans Namuth made in 1950 of Pollock standing over his canvas on the floor? And then, ever since Harold Rosenberg wrote his December 1952 essay in ARTnews magazine, we use the term he coined: Action Painting.

We know how Pollock painted these large canvases, on the floor so he could walk around all sides as well as step into the painting, using brushes like sticks, or using sticks, even using a turkey baster. As Rosenberg had stated, Pollock’s canvas had become “an arena in which to act.”

As early as 1947, Pollock was ready to abandon the staid, studio easel and embrace a modern world in which America (and New York) would replace Europe and France: “I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and the mural…the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural.”

We even know, from a recent study by a Brown University expert in fluid mechanics (Roberto Zenit) that Pollock “was actively avoiding ‘drips’ in favor of constant streams of paint.”

 

Being enamel, the paint easily pours, or drips, or spatters. We see dense layerings, interweaving of lines, places where the paint has pooled, and lines that sweep out beyond the canvas edges.

As with Monet’s Water Lilies, the best way to experience a mature Pollock like this is to get lost in it, up close. It’s like looking at the cosmos, nebulae, distant universes and galaxies. It brings one as close to infinity as anything I know.

In looking at Pollock and other action painters (like Kline or de Kooning), or what also would become known as “gestural abstraction,” we have come to accept Harold Rosenberg’s redefinition of art as an act rather than as an object. And with that, I invite you to get lost in these details

 

This painting has no Figure. It is all Ground. Even where the brush, or stick, or other implement stopped moving and the paint pooled (as we can see in the tan and white paint here), the entire painting is made up of line. Because it is all line, there is no modelling, no creation of solid, weight-bearing form in these works. It’s like drawing, and Pollock realized this when he said: “I approach painting in the same way one approaches drawing; that is, it’s direct. I don’t work from drawings.”

 

 

Janet Sobel was a Ukrainian who came to the United States with her family in 1908. She began painting at the age of 45 in 1937 and, although a self-taught artist, became known as “the artist who dripped paint before Jackson Pollock.”

The Milky Way is a dense and lush explosion of color–maybe lacquer, which she also used, although the label claims it is enamel paint. She would use such tools as an eye dropper, a pipette into which she would blow across the surface, and, so I have read, even a vacuum cleaner (possibly for those cloudy areas we can see). Her son described her mark-making by noting that the preparation of a ground would “trigger…[a] sudden conception [which] was matched by an equally rapid execution…she would pour the paint, tip the canvas, and blow the wet lacquer.”

Hans Hofmann came to New York in 1932, bringing with him a deep understanding of European modernism, particularly what he saw as the principles to be found in the work of Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, and the Cubists. He became an important art teacher for many American artists, including Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and even Robert de Niro, Sr.

Hofmann’s fundamental imperative was to respect the picture plane. As he wrote in 1932, “The entity of the picture plane must be preserved. This entity is its essential two-dimensionality.” To achieve this, abstraction was a necessity, as was a heavy and textured application of color, often as complementary hues (blue against orange, red against green). so evident in the details below.

 

 

 

In contradiction to Hofmann’s imperative of respecting the flatness of the picture plane, he also champions color as creating a form of optical (as opposed to illusionistic) space by leading the eye in as well as pulling it out, thus revealing different layers of depth. Color, in his words, “gives the painting its movement, its pulse.”

In this regard, everyone always talks of Hoffman’s concept of “push-pull,” but I find their analyses (and his theories) elusive at best.

So, let us just enjoy the dynamic quality of his mark-making as seen in the above details. In the top detail, the rough bristle marks of the green on the left contrast with the smooth flow of blue streaked with white. In the center detail, the thick, impasto buttons of yellow and blue-white float above that green like distant moons. In the bottom detail, a brush overloaded with a mixture of blue and white touches down on raw canvas, twirls in two directions before depositing its entire load below to the right. To me, these are like candies, or maybe a form of savory after-dinner mint.

 

The paintings of Hans Hofmann, or Pollock, or Franz Kline (see below), or (as here) in Willem de Kooning’s Easter Monday, all can be understood as gestural art. The word, gestural, implies that the painting represents or is a record of an action or movement idiosyncratic to the particular artist who made it.  Think of this as equivalent to the way we are able to recognize our friends by their walk or how they carry themselves, though they may be blocks away.

If we go back to Hofmann’s Deep within the Ravine, we might be tempted to associate it with a landscape. In fact, we may view it as a loose expansion of Cézanne’s marks that we saw in his Mont Sainte-Victoire. Quite different are de Kooning’s marks in Easter Monday. A different hand clearly made them; they are looser, messier, cacophonic, especially because of those intrusive black lines. The color is also more muted. If the Hofmann conjures up a landscape, this de Kooning conjures up an urban environment.

As if to corroborate this, de Kooning talks about his paintings (some of whose brushstrokes were made with house painting brushes) as follows: “I think of a painting as a wall that has been attacked, that has gone through certain stages. It’s like a wall that has been scraped down to the bone, then scraped over again… it’s like a city street, with all the layers of paper, dirt, paint… the whole thing gets repainted, repainted, until it gets really interesting.”

 

Doesn’t this detail resemble a scraped-down wall we might encounter as we walk through our city? That green paint, clearly mixed with a sand-like substance. And below, welling up through the thinly painted white, a ghost of a collaged newspaper. This detail, alone, contains at least six different types of marks.

 

And once again, here, we see a wide array of marks and two more fragments of newsprint emerging through the paint. In an interview in ARTnews of the same year this was painted, de Kooning said: “The idea of using newspapers and other scraps is just to get rid of a certain kind of imagery that would ‘stick.’ It’s like putting a piece of something on the canvas and saying, ‘Here is a little fact, now we’ll see if it survives or gets eaten up by the painting.’”

 

With Franz Kline (and Robert Motherwell, next) mark-making becomes even larger and bolder. As the Metropolitan Museum informs us in regard to Black, White, and Gray, Kline “typically began with a sketch, which he projected onto a wall…[to achieve] magnified abstract forms…replicated in paint.”

Kline was known to use house painting brushes, some up to eight inches wide. Obviously, his brush-marks are large. So, too, they are obviously gestural. Nevertheless, they are not instinctive or of the moment (as were Pollock’s). Kline planned them in advance, first sketching them on a much smaller scale on old phonebook pages before projecting and enlarging them.

 

In an interview of 1958 in ARTnews, Kline reifies his brush-mark as essential to his painting: “The brushstroke itself is the thing. It is not a representation of something, but the essence of the action itself.”

 

This painting, 7 1/2-feet wide, consists of three elongated ovals and three oblong posts which merge into something like a lintel at the top; all are black, set against a background that is mainly in white. It is one of over 150 similar images that Robert Motherwell painted from 1948 on into into the early 1970s. All shared this title, a reference to the Spanish Civil War in which Franco defeated the Spanish Republic to become dictator. In the painter’s words (a talk given at Smith College in 1963), “the Spanish Elegies are not ‘political’ but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot….the pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death, and their interrelation.”

Motherwell offers us two important insights into his bold mark-making of oblongs and ovals. The first refers to their scale, which separates him and his American colleagues from European painters: “The large format, at one blow, changed the century-long tendency of the French to domesticize modern painting…We replaced the nude girl…with a modern Stonehenge.” The second refers to the mark itself (and its tool):  “One of the great images, like Achilles’ shield, should be the housepainter’s brush…that makes the usual painter’s brush indeed picayune.”

Were there a space large enough, I would love to stand in its center, surrounded by twelve or fifteen Motherwell Elegies–a setting analogous to the Paris gallery of Durand-Ruel, where, in 1891, Monet insisted that 15 of his Haystack series must be exhibited together in one room, so as to be viewed all at once. To my knowledge, this has never been done with the Elegies. However, Motherwell did consider an ideal location in which to hang his paintings; he perceived them as partners to contemporary modernist American architecture: “Sometimes when I walk down Park Avenue and regard the handsome and clean-cut Lever Brothers building…I think to myself how the interior walls need the sensuality and moral integrity of modern painting.”

 

Mark Rothko is an Abstract Expressionist, as are the last five painters we looked at (Pollock to Motherwell). But where the latter were all gestural or action painters, Rothko was one of several artists known as a Color Field painter. The art critic, Clement Greenberg, who championed the color field painters, spoke generally of their approach to color as one “with only the subtlest variations of value if any at all, and spread over an absolutely, not merely relatively, large area.”

In White, Red on Yellow, Rothko has covered his entire canvas in yellow, over which a muted, white rectangle floats near the top and a more intensely-hued red rectangle hovers near the bottom. The edges of his rectangles are feathered and softened, consciously avoiding any hard-edged sharpness. Similarly, he applies each color in thin, diluted glazes so that the first applications literally stain and saturate into the canvas; subsequent layers, still thin, provide enough translucency to invite the covered layers to emerge. As an analogy, think of a partially-submerged object that appears to pulsate up and down as you peer into a murky lake.

 

Earlier, I suggested viewing Monet’s Water Lilies and Pollock’s mature “drip Paintings” from close-up in order for the viewer to see beyond the surface marks and experience something analogous to infinite space. Rothko also wished for his viewers to experience his work from very close, but for a different reason. He said close viewing would lead to “a sense of intimacy, awe, a transcendence of the individual.” Ideally, he hoped his viewers would have “the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”

Now, I am not inclined to meditation; and though I may stand before a Rothko painting and get lost for a while as I try to discern the layers of color and the very subtle variations of value in one of his colored rectangles, doing so won’t lead me to anything like a religious epiphany. For many others, it will; and this might explain why Rothko is that rare modern painter for whose work an entire chapel was designed (by Philip Johnson) and built in Houston, Texas in 1971.

 

Robert Rauschenberg is credited with turning American painting away from the personal mark-making of the Abstract Expressionists. In particular, he rejected their assertion that the brushwork of any Action Painter was an embodiment of that artist’s inner nature. Rauschenberg wanted art to embrace and reveal the real world, not his intrinsic state of mind. As ARTnews quoted him in 1961, “I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of a photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.”

Rauschenberg is not easily categorized, as art historian/critic Elizabeth Fullerton cautioned: “just when it looked as though Rauschenberg might be developing a signature style, he was off in another direction.” Some would say that he and Jasper Johns (see next) opened the door from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art; yet neither was truly a Pop Artist. For Rauschenberg, the name Neo-Dada may serve  best–particularly for a work like Canyon…

 

…but the name that Rauschenberg gave to Canyon and to similar pieces produced between 1954-1964 is Combine.

Just look at these details and read my (incomplete) list of materials in the captions. Besides paint, we find cardboard, metal, photographs (one of his young son), buttons (on a shirt cuff), a mirror, a pillow hanging at the bottom, and a taxidermied eagle mounted on and emerging from a box. He seems to have taken Picasso’s and Braque’s Analytical Cubism and Kurt Schwitters Merz(bild) to unusual extremes.

In actuality, though, the Combine was a more prosaic creation for him. It was a hybrid between painting and sculpture. It also a blended fine-art materials and the stuff of everyday life. To quote him, “I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.”

 

 

 

At first glance, we might be tempted to call Jasper Johns’ Watchman a Combine, but that term is exclusive to his friend Rauschenberg. Nevertheless, we have a painting on which “sculptural” objects are affixed: half of a dining room chair and a wax cast of a leg of the artist’s friend. Also, Johns did call this and similar pieces “painting playing the game of sculpture.”

But for the most part, the rest is painting. We see bold brush-marks and drips of paint cascading down the central section below the chair. We see stenciled letters R, Y, and B fading into the grey and black ground on the left side side. We see a sharp-edged oblong composed of the three colors: red, yellow, and blue on the right side of this painting.

 

That tri-colored oblong almost resembles a maritime signal flag, but why would the letters for its colors (R, Y, B) appear on the opposite side? Could Johns actually be alluding to the fact that Mark Rothko named many of his paintings by the colors of their oblongs and that his paintings were vertical canvases containing horizontal oblongs of a single color? Might Johns be making a veiled reference to Rothko in this work? Is he, maybe, pushing his “Rothko reference” off to the right edge of his canvas for a reason? I ask these questions only to wonder if Watchman is Johns’ response to the fact that, when Rothko walked into Johns’ first show at Leo Castelli in 1958, his only comment was: “We worked for years to get rid of all that.”

And, of course, this just might be the point. Paintings, for Rothko, were deeply personal and contained hidden meaning that had to be sussed out. Johns used instantly recognizable figures and objects which held no deep meaning, and here they tower over the references to Rothko and Abstract Expressionist brush-marks.

 

This portrait head of the artist Lucas Samaras falls into the category of Photo-Realism (or Super Realism), but no other Realist paints like Chuck Close. As other Photo-Realists, he  begins with a photograph, which he then blows up to the size of his canvas; but he first has covered the canvas with a grid of tiny squares. He then proceeds to fill each square with a selection of tones and colors that will–over a distance–match that particular area of his sitter’s face. This gives his painting the mosaic effect of tesserae, although with much more complicated and vibrant mark-making than what we saw in Pointillism.

Lucas I was painted the year before Close had a severe spinal artery collapse that left him paralyzed from the neck down. With physical therapy, he learned to paint again, strapping a brush to one wrist and using both hands to move it around on the canvas. But, given that, from childhood, he suffered from muscle weakness, dyslexia and prosopagnosia, or face blindness, his spinal stroke was just one more bump in his road of life.

 

In this detail, we can see the tesserae-like marks with which Close fills each grid, and we can clearly still recognize the nose and right eye of Lucas Samaras. Because of his prosopagnosia, his inability to recognize or differentiate between human faces, Close asks: “How do you make a big head? How do you make a nose? I’m not sure! But by breaking the image down into small units, I make each decision into a bite-size decision….And, eventually I have a painting.”

 

In this detail, we can actually see Close’s grid squares. We also can see his marks, and obviously, each mark in this enormous painting has been made with a small brush! Each square contains between one and four or five brushstrokes–sometimes of a single color or hue, but often of different colors.

To Close, “it’s paint on a pigment distributed across a flat surface,” and in a sense, he is making a series of hundreds of small paintings adjacent to each other. But, were he to fill all the squares of his grid the same way, he would get bored, so “I entertain myself by trying to do something in a kinda’ ass-backwards way,” he confesses.

Look at this painting’s unmodulated yellow depicting the protagonist’s hair and blouse or the green of the tree leaves. We haven’t seen that since our first example by Bellini. Then there is the dotted/tessellated ground, only too regular for either Pointillism or Chuck Close’s grid squares. Is Roy Lichtenstein making a stylistic amalgam of selected marks from past art? Of course not, you answer: This is Pop Art, and we are all familiar with this imagery from comic books and pulp magazines.

His dotted ground replicates the Ben-Day dots of mechanical printing (a late 19th century invention), which Lichtenstein imitates using perforated templates. In this way, his mark-making challenged the personal relationship between a type of brush-mark and a particular artist that identified so many Abstract Expressionists. It also questioned the separation of  fine art (considered elitist) from popular imagery (with its mass appeal).

Not unlike Rauschenberg and Johns, who sought to bring aspects of the real world into their art, Lichtenstein wanted his art to embody that world as well. In his words:

“We are living in a society that, to a large extent, is pop…It’s a new landscape for us…of billboards and neon signs…made up…of a desire to sell products. This is the landscape that I am interested in portraying. I’m also not only portraying it, but I’m working in the style of it.”

He continued in this vein by adamantly separating himself from past art styles: Not “thick-and-thin paint…the European sensibility…[but] flat areas of color…[against] Ben-Day dots…[that] become an industrialized texture rather than what we are familiar with as a paint texture…I’m really involved in…[creating] a modern industrial texture, and it’s not one that’s nostalgic, or that refers back to European painting or American painting up to now.”

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a fascinating, self-taught artist, a part of the Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980s. Tragically, he died in 1988 from a heroin overdose at the age of 27. Nevertheless, he left over 600 paintings and 1,500 drawings (less all the graffiti art that, of course, has long faded from Manhattan’s streets or has been painted over)–an estate still administered by his two sisters.

Glenn is a large painting, dominated by that enormous, flattened, two-dimensional, child-like head on the right. The rest of the painting consists of collaged photocopied sheets of drawings on which we see words, scribblings, and many more images.

 

This detail, showing three of his collaged sheets, includes a tower building in blue; another primitive, child-like head in black; a list of items under the heading “Lunar Rover;” and some other words and objects that seem random and unconnected. Whether we call them marks or something else, these forms and words are awkwardly rendered–their awkwardness  understandable when one sees a video of Basquiat clenching a pen or brush with closed fist.

The head in this detail and the enormous head to the right are common imagery for Basquiat. I would argue that neither represents Glenn, whoever that may be. The sole identification I have found for Glenn, in fact, is from MoMA, which claims him to be the East Village writer, Glenn O’Brien. This is understandable, in that they were friends and O’Brien was one of the writers and producers of a film titled Downtown 81, shot in 1980-81 and featuring Basquiat.

However, because this specific detail occupies the very center of the painting, it may well offer clues to who Glenn is–a very different Glenn. Among those clues are the following words: Oct. 1959; Stratosphere; High-Gain antenna; Low-Gain antenna; 16 mm camera; Lunar Rover.

On October 4, 1959, the USSR’s Luna 3 spacecraft sent back to earth the first photographs of the moon’s far side, thus winning Russia a significant leg in the “Space Race.”

The stratosphere, made up of the ozone layer, is the beginning of space for humans.

The first high-gain antenna tower was built in 1961 for the purpose of transmitting and receiving data from space.

Low-gain antennas were commonly used in early space launches, and were reliable fall-back modes of communication, even if less accurate.

A 16mm camera, of course, has many uses, but one was used to photograph John Glenn during his 1962 space flight.

Even the lunar module, a later product, was connected to John Glenn in that a NASA prototype rover was named “John.”

And so, I suggest that Basquiat’s Glenn more likely refers to John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth on the Friendship 7 mission, which launched on February 20, 1962.

 

 

I show you two more details of Glenn, primarily because I had them, but also because they offer another form of mark in those horizontal streaks of red and black, which Basquiat made using oil sticks. These streaks issue from the open mouth of the large head, as if it were spitting out angry comments, or possibly expelling a demon from inside. These are emotionally expressive marks, not marks that form objects.

 

Basquiat’s Glenn and Cy Twombly’s Dutch Interior are similar in size, but radically diverge in their visual effect. Glenn is static. It’s canvas, totally covered by that large painted head and those collaged photocopied sheets, seems claustrophobic. It lacks breathing room. Dutch Interior, in contrast, is dynamic. It’s various marks only cover half the canvas, enabling the unmarked, off-white ground to serve as an arena for action. I see that action as a diagonal trajectory, expanding from the lower left, up and out into the top right.

Think of the patterning of a shotgun blast, an overly-aggressive metaphor, perhaps, but it finds corroboration in a description by New York Times art critic, Roberta Smith: “His raw mark making could be seen as….graphic outbursts across vast surfaces.”

More on Twombly’s marks in a minute, but why Dutch Interior? The Metropolitan Museum tells us this is an “ode to seventeenth-century Dutch painting” and to Joan Miró who had made three Surrealist paintings in 1928 based on interior scenes by two of the genre masters of that “Golden Age,” Hendrick Sorgh and Jan Steen. So the title, Dutch Interior, is an indication of Twombly’s deep interest in Western culture and literature (from Ancient Greece on up); the same can be said for several other of his titles. None, however, offer the viewer a recognizable form.

 

What Twombly offers us instead are energetic marks and calligraphic scribbles that appear controlled and purposeful, even if (nearly) impossible to decipher. In this detail, we see two continuous slinky-like loops executed in oil stick with full arm motion; a (right) hand print in black paint; two number 8s in different media; what looks like a duck, lightly drawn in pencil; and more.

In the second detail, we see four fingers of a left hand, inserting itself in from the edge; finger lines in black paint; and another continuous loop.

In the third detail, we come back to that duck and; to its left, in pencil, a nude human rear end, enframed and labelled “detail” in script above; and a few marks of impastoed paint (in red and brown).

 

 

Let me leave you with the words of three major scholars who have studied Twombly with care. Museum Director and curator Suzanne Delehanty tells us that “the relationships among his words, erotic pictographs and globs of luscious paint are alogical and non-sequential.”

Art dealer John Bernard Myers, after enumerating Twombly’s many different marks, assures his reader that “It would be almost impossible for anyone else to imitate these surfaces and as difficult to fake them as forging another person’s handwriting would be.”

Kirk Varnedoe, art historian and chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, surely responded to many people simply through the title of an article he wrote while at MoMA: “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly.” It’s an article well-worth reading; look it up here, at your leisure.

 

CODA

 

Where Twombly’s painting offered no indication of an actual Dutch interior, Titus Kaphar made a complete copy of the Dutchman Franz Hals’ Family Group in a Landscape, 1645-48, in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. In a TED Talk of April 2017, Kaphar (a 2018 MacArthur Fellow) took a large brush, used it to mix some white lead paint with linseed oil, and, with slashing marks that might have even made Franz Kline shudder, he covered over the Dutch family members who commissioned this painting, leaving only their black servant boy.

Given the fact that it was done only eight years ago, Kaphar’s broad, white marks are obviously a commentary on racial discrimination, inequality and white supremacy. I’ll say no more and I encourage you to watch his TED Talk, which is fascinating and eloquent. It also will enlighten you on several important details that I leave out.

 

And finally, I end with what seems to have been a newly stretched canvas with only its thin layer of brown imprimatura waiting to be covered with marks. But the Italian-Argentine artist, Lucio Fontana, instead gives it the ultimate mark: a knife slash.

Fontana assures us that he was constructing, not destroying. With this gesture, he asserts that he wants “to open up space, create a new dimension…[and expand] beyond the confining plane of the picture.” His knife gash “destroyed painting as a receptacle of illusions.”

And so Fontana has ‘rescued’ us (and art) from the illusion of linear perspective, from the illusion of aerial perspective, and from the limiting idea of a painting being a window on to a familiar reality.