Sketches of Change

...Our social existence, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which we fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a wholly different work, and one that is possibly more important than what we had originally planned. The Guermantes Way, Part II Chapter 2

There is a scene in a Woody Allen movie, though which one I do not remember, in which a character explains that he may not do well in life but he does in art. I always though reality was over-rated and that the story is much better if you revise it slightly, sometimes for others, sometimes for yourself. There are friends who weave through my life, each time we are each altered. Joys from the past now seem juvenile. Current pursuits will dull, or maybe with practice become helpful habits.

I spent part of the past few months working on ideas that I thought were only useful to the moment and the task at hand. Recently I am beginning to see how I might allow that work to become a part of a necessary step in a project that had seemed totally separate. The papers come back out of the filing cabinet to be reshuffled on my desk and on my computer.

Sometimes the task seems more daunting than Vermeer suggests in his The Artist in his Studio of 1665. I often have to come at the work sideways, disturbed by it slightly as Rembrandt appears to be in his The Artist in His Studio, c 1629.

However it feels, life only appears fixed. I find myself in new situations only to realize they are oddly familiar, and that this time I can alter the color, dynamic, of an aspect because I know better, or simply because I am curious. Why not treat life as a picture to return to and reconsider? Why not sketch something new from the material at hand? Or, take an old thing and refine it? Whatever happens, no matter how intimidating, there is at least the exciting possibility that it will offer something more important, produced more wisely, than before.

Tricks

"I went up to one of them," he began, "just to see how it was done. I stuck my nose into it. Well it's just not true! Impossible to say whether it was done with glue, with rubies, with soap, with sunshine, with leaven, with cack!"
...
"It looks as though it was done with nothing at all," resumed the painter. "No more chance of discovering the trick than there is in the 'Night Watch' or the 'Female Regents,' and technically it's even better than Rembrandt or Hals. It's all there–but really, I swear it."
I would not want to be too much like Proust's grotesque Mme Verdurin in adoring Night Watch, so I will leave her and that painting to look at Hals' 1664 Women Regents at the Men's Almshouse. This is precisely the sort of group portrait that I despised on museum visits as a little girl, not understanding why anyone would paint such a group of sour, dour, unpleasant and undoubtedly demanding old ladies. Now, however, despite what else there is to say about them I can look at their hands or their repressed smiles that slip through their efforts to submerge feeling.

Elstir was not at the time much respected in Mme Verdurin's group when he makes the comment about another artist's work which he has seen that day, who has died recently. Tricks, he says, he was looking for. He will in due course, learn those tricks, make up his own, leave this coterie for the dedication his studio requires and become a great and successful artist. Not everyone will understand what he has done.

“It seems that Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he doesn’t care for Elstir’s painting. Not that that’s anything against him,” said the Duchesse, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the least like me, but it’s an intriguing piece of work.... He has made me like a little old woman. It’s modeled on ‘The Women’s Regents of the Hospice,’ by Hals. I expect you know those sublimities, to borrow one of my nephew’s favorite expressions,” the Duchesse turned to me, gently flapping her black feather fan.

No matter. Elstir by then knows that his work is good and knows to paint what he must paint, not necessarily what is expected of him. The portrait is not a commission piece, but rather a portrait he chose to do. She was his model, her face merely a loose hold on this world as he produced work that was out of this world.

Tricks trick us into believing in ourselves.

But, the painting...the painter

"Now he was once again at work upon his essay on Vermeer, he needed to return for a few days at least, to The Hague, to Dresden, to Brunswick. He was convinced that a picture of Diana and her Companions which had been acquired by the Mauristhius at the Goldschmidt sale as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer. And he would have liked to be able to examine the picture on the spot, in order to buttress his conviction."
This painting by Vermeer was in fact attributed to Rembrandt's student Nicolaes Maes at an auction in 1876. Not until 1901 was it properly attributed and that through similarities to Mary and Martha and a re-examination of a revealed signature J v Meer, which had been supposed to refer to Johannes van der Meet. Proust, in this passage, is looking back at a time before his character Marcel's life has begun, when Swann still hoped to produce a study of Vermeer. He has Swann considering the possibility of that the painting has been mis-attributed, which had he pursued would have, in fact, made him a great scholar.

Swann though does not pursue his work. The passage goes on, "But to leave Paris while Odette was there, and even when she was not there–for in strange places where our sensations have not been numbed by habit, we revive, we resharpen an old pain–was for him so cruel a project that he felt capable of entertaining it incessantly in his mind only because he knew he was determined never to put it into effect." Swann allows an obsession to intervene, and how easy when he can call it love!

Little is known about Vermeer because what is there to know about him? We have his work. Is that not enough? Here we have Diana, a peculiar rendition where she is fully clothed only the moon in her hair symbolizing her stature. She is not yet undressed to bathe. Acteon has not yet appeared to spy. This is Diana and her companions. Innocent because there is no reason for the goddess to be angry yet. Vermeer chose to portray this early moment in the story, not included in the narrative telling because there is nothing to tell and it would only be 'plot development'. But in a painting it can stand alone.

Swann appreciated this painting but not enough to pursue his own interest. When there is work to be done, life does fall to the side, even love. Any artist, writer, film-maker, musician can be called fixated, monomaniacal, egotistical if they are dedicated to the work they do. That is because they have chosen to do something that is not of this every day experience, but comes from a willingness to work despite what life may have to offer. Many sacrifice friendships, love affairs, social engagements to produce what they have to produce. Swann does not and it is the tragedy of his character. Vermeer was modestly successful in his lifetime then forgotten after his death, but no matter. His art, his work was being produced by the standards, slow, painstaking and long to be recognized perhaps, that were from the concentration of his own effort.

Changes in The Scandal of Susan Sontag

The conference on "The Scandal of Susan Sontag" offered an impressive array of feminist scholars. I hesitated for a moment before attributing that socio-political label, but I do not think any of them would be offended. The speakers had been Sontag's peers and significant advocates of a free path for women, even if they might have occasionally disagreed with her particular point of view. The first panel discussed her recently published, and seriously edited, journals from the years leading up to 1963 when she was thirty, had completed her education, and was just beginning to experience the success and fame she would embrace in the years to come.

One of the last questions posed by a member of the audience asked if there were any concerns that the journals revealed a side of Sontag far more uncertain than the fierce and imperious image she had presented in life. That absolute certainty had been a part of her success; she never worried about angering people with her opinions, even sometimes seemed to revel in the discomfort she caused. Were they not worried that we would begin to think of Susan Sontag differently with this new information? I was surprised by the question.

Why would we think of her now as any had thought of her then? Why should that be important?

I don't look at Manet's Olympia with the horror it caused the French when displayed in the 1865 Salon.

A quote from the Picturesque Lottery for the Salon of 1783, is quite clear in fact that we change the way we look at things: "Up to now we only expected amusement and neatness from their brushes; [women artists] show today vigor and nobility. They are finally the worthy rivals of our sex; and men, who had previously assumed their own talents to be superior in all respects, can from now on worry about real competition."

In fact, Susan Sontag was an advocate of change, which she discusses in some detail in her 1964 essay "One culture and the new sensibility". She recognized that art was "becoming increasingly the terrain of the specialist" and saw that as a part of the transformation of the function of art. Art's reference to the production of art, as well as its conscious use of other materials, produced an inter-textuality that was often only meaningful to students of art. She grants the discomfort caused by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Albers. Their collaborations, improvisations were "changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art". For her, "art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility". This new sensibility was of great importance to her, and a topic to which she returned in her continuing considerations of what would eventually be termed cultural studies. She participated in the new sensibility with her own works, but largely for her support of the new works being produced, glorying that the "seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense". A new sense was encouraged because that is what great art has always done.

The culture changes and works of art change too. Those who have come before become a part of the canon, or not. Some get forgotten for a while, relegated to obscurity until there is a reconsideration, for example Vermeer. Others' riotousness is incorporated into the education system so that Whistler, and Susan Sontag, can be found on most college programs, in one department or another, despite their once shocking life choices. Nothing remains scandalous if kept in the spotlight long enough.

I do not consider Susan Sontag particularly shocking, though I disagree with some of her views. I don't like Dali (with the exception of Hallucinogenic Toreador) but am not disturbed by him as the conservative communists were with his The Great Masturbator. I can't stand Jeff Koons' work enough that I don't even try to understand his 'art'. Yes, I did just put that word in quotes in reference to what he does. In time, the culture views the life and work of the artist in a new light.

The next generation comes along. The world finds new wars. People change. Art changes.

Picturing Proust

Proust uses so many artists in his grand work that there was recently published a book, Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, providing the images Proust directly mentions, or offering possibilities for the ones to which Proust only alludes. Swann loves Odette through Botticelli. The pregnant kitchen maid is Giotto's Charity. Bloch is seen as Mahummet II. Charlus likens his young friend Morel as a Bronzino. The list continues so that all characters are eventually attributed a pictorial relation. Even his perfect mother.

There are even wonderful academic articles on Proust's mention of art...and that is astounding and a joy because scholarly journals are not known for their prose style.

Proust translated Ruskin into French (with the help of his mother) and wrote articles in the Gazette des Beaux Arts on artists and shows, in Paris or abroad. He wrote poems as a young man based on paintings. He was always passionate about art, going to see his favorite Vermeer when it was being shown in Paris despite his current illness. He transformed his museum visit into the scene in In Search of Lost Time where Bergotte (the novel's author character) must see Vermeer’s View of Delft because of a critic’s having written about a little patch of yellow. The color is indeed perfect and Bergotte dies in the gallery, wishing he had written with a few more layers of color, like this little patch of yellow. Proust would die shortly thereafter, having already been ill and having gotten worse from the trip to see the painting.

Proust is largely depicted as a homosexual with an Oedipal complex, compulsively writing alone at night, after years of being a social climber. But there is a Proust who can not appear in any photographs because he is only visible in his writing on the arts. There he is glorious, strong and secure in his own passion. For this reason, among others, I prefer to avoid psychological readings of his work, dismayed at how easy it is to debase the heights he climbs with language.