Formal Definitions and Myths in My Paintings

Leonardo

Formal Definitions and Myths in My PaintingsAuthor(s): Ethel SchwabacherSource: Leonardo, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1973), pp. 53-55Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1572427 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 6, pp. 53-55. Pergamon Press 1973. Printed in Great Britain

FORMAL DEFINITIONS AND MYTHS IN MY PAINTINGS

Ethel Schwabacher*

'It is repugnant to me to do as so often is done, namely, to speak inhumanly about a great deed, as though some thousands of years were an immense distance; I would rather speak humanly about it, as though it had occurred yesterday, letting only the greatness be the distance, which either exalts or condemns.'

KIERKEGAARD [1]

In the 'Divine Comedy' [2] Dante described him- self as walking down the dark descent into Purgatory with the great Latin poet, Virgil. Many years ago, when reading Dante, I was entranced by this method of juxtaposing the past and the present and felt that such a method could well be applied to painting. In the poem, Dante and Virgil are brought together, to coexistence, without regard to the difference in time and the fact that Virgil had been dead over a thousand years. Was it not 'wild' and 'unreal' to ignore or put aside the usual, stable, logical connec- tions-accepting and even wooing the poetic ones? And yet, as poetry it became real: Dante and Virgil belonged together in the poet's mind as a vision of relationship and perfect unity. And the mind had become its own subject matter.

My interest in the lyric/epic approach was further stimulated some years later by my reading Kierke- gaard's 'Fear and Trembling' [1]. His adaptation of the story of Isaac and Abraham contained a similar awareness of the presentness of the past. The painting resulting from my thoughts on this story is shown in Figure 1. And, indeed, a similar pattern seemed to emerge as I read Sophocles' 'Oedipus' [3]. I felt a clear continuity between Oedipus, the Greek king who lived in 500 B.C., and Freud's reincarnation of him as the Oedipus fantasy in all of us: he was still the same one who, submerged in his unfortunate fate, killed his father, married his mother, fathered his own brothers and sisters, brought disgrace on his homeland, was exiled to a distant land and there died a glorious death. The painting shown in Figure 2 (cf. color plate) was based on this story.

These perceptions led me to create a series of paintings based on Greek myths, 'rehumanized'-

* Artist living at 1192 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10028, U.S.A. (Received 20 December 1971.)

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Fig. 1. 'Of Abraham and Isaac', acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in, 1969. (Photo: 0. E. Nelson, New York.)

to return to Kierkegaard's remark. In giving thought to the application of the epic mode to painting, I realized, of course, that many painters in the past had attempted this. Giotto, for instance, provided a marvelous example of the bringing together of elements important to poetic thought in such a way that they seemed inevitable, though they were in fact incorrectly juxtaposed from a represen- tational point of view. What delight one felt to find all elements or images 'sink in' to the pool of expression, expanding it, causing it to overflow. As Blake put it, 'Exuberance is beauty. The cistern contains, the fountain overflows' [4]. The ladder structure of Giotto's painting of the "Madonna and Child" in the New York Metropolitan Museum was a way of building successive elements in the order of their poetic importance. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he found a way of giving all elements importance: the Infant and adoring shepherds, the Virgin, the Angels and hill and stars.

53

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Ethel Schwabacher

I was now committed to lyric/epic painting where the mode of expression was mythic and involved a historical continuity. The central statement was the deed and in my paintings the deed generally involved a separation which took place on the way. Yes, it had to do with 'visions on the way' condensed into visual images: of this one and that one on the way caught up in longing and in the opposite or conflicting emotions of the deed. Caught up, further, in time/space, psychological necessity, decrees of destiny.

But there was another element in these myths. The pain of separation from the beloved-whether wife or son-might be balanced by some major gain: Orpheus will return to the world after losing Eurydice and to the creation of poetry; Prometheus, though he has been exiled from his home amongst the gods, knows his own destiny, namely, the eventual overthrow of Zeus-and knows that this will bring him his freedom (Fig. 3). In Orpheus and Apollo, Orpheus has been killed by the Greek women in revenge for not returning their love-and is in danger of being defiled in his last resting place by a snake but Apollo protects him from this evil and he is assured of immortality for his work. The primary emphasis, it seemed, was on affirmation, though tragedy was presented, since it existed. This showed profound consideration for the spectator. The affirmation of life permeated the pain of life, the resurrection illumined the crucifixion. The affirmation consisted in perceiving a positive out- come beyond the tragedy: resurrection, freedom from bondage, immortality.

Now all this was very complex. The stream and the counterstream-and one questioned whether such complexity could be brought out and presented

Fig. 3. 'Prometheus Bound', acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in, 1970. (Photo: 0. E. Nelson, New York.)

through visual images, or did it require words ? The use of the myth helped in that the story was known -the story of the deed and its implications. And the particular modern version could be seen as a continuation or variation, updated, with a coloration of the present giving a sense of newness. We had already found in Kierkegaard [1] that this sense of newness could be brought about by the presentation of Abraham and Isaac as a screen story for Kierke- gaard's personal one. He becomes Isaac, and Regina also becomes Isaac. Kierkegaard adds the marvelous piece on the child at the mother's breast, which expands the story of the deed outward and inward. In fact, as poets often do, he anticipated modern psychological insight; in referring to Abraham's relation to God, he draws on the mystery of the child/mother relationship-the separation from the breast being the initial trauma-thus adding poignancy to the anguish Abraham felt at having to choose between his God and his son (Fig. 1). So in the capsule of art-a microcosm of the macrocosm -we find the range of possibility or shall I call it the range of the real ?

This takes us to the aesthetic side of my works. Here the images and the structure of space and color must carry the burden of penetration into the emotional strata and of suggestion, acceleration of suggestion, accumulation of impact-multiple evocations. They may reach toward the center of attention through a peripheral or a vertical/hori- zontal approach. A further wide range of response can be sought through memory traces or allusions to past stockpiles of aesthetic experience or through metaphors that draw on nature as well as art or, finally, via the great array of sensations experienced -experiences brought in as it were by magnets- the magnets of association, suggested or free. So, we see the individual is conditioned by the emotional.

Music asks that we follow it in the order in which it is presented. We follow from moment to moment consecutively; we cannot skip forward nor anticipate conclusions. In a traditional painting the situation is different. The picture is presented whole. It does not unroll in time. We are free to start at any point in the painting and to proceed to any other point as we will. But does not the artist try to in- fluence the succession? Does he not concentrate or focus the attention of the spectator, leading it to the most important point and on and on in specific directions? Today, since the rise of modern art beginning with Impressionism, there are those who do no such focusing, but rather they leave more to the imagination and will of the spectator. I reject this. It is, I believe, a fallacy, an abnegation of responsibility. The artist must have the courage to define (and in a way thus to limit the possibilities) whether it be of the story or of the structure.

Now, in order to bring the images within grasp of the mind as a totality and to increase the clarity, I decided to use a method similar in effect to an inverted opera glass. This was the method of Leonardo da Vinci, Petrus Christus etc. (even Dali). Emotional distance was introduced and unity of

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Formal Definitions and Myths in My Paintings

thought was focused to a sharper edge. In recent years, as we have seen, the illusory tendency was to lose distance, to become immersed, to immerse the spectator, to have him participate, not as a viewer, but as an actual creator. What confusion as to the nature of art! Art, it seems to me, must insist on sufficient distance from immediate emotion in order to bring about an easy assimilation of the image or event. In the end, art was to give the history of the event, not the event itself.

Talking with Barney Newman in 1953, I1 recounted my experience in the West of the U.S.A. that same summer while working on my book on Gorky. Looking at the mountains, I thought: 'We do not blindfold ourselves, go to a spot, remove the blindfold, put on blinkers and look through a square fixed in front of our eyes and say: "Now I am ex- periencing Nature-this is Nature!" Rather we experience it in movement. As we walk, it unrolls or curves beyond our sight and round down beyond our feet. Diagrammatically we could simplify it this way: imagine that nature is an inverted cup placed over us and the view that we used to think of as flat is now spread on the curved inner surface of the cup and indicates the space between us and the arbitrary limit. Somewhat less simply put: let us imagine that the cup is not solid or fixed in a station- ary position but that it is a conceptual or hypothetical cup that moves. Moreover, that it expands or contracts. And, finally, that it is flooded with an infinite variety of degrees of light and filled with endlessly varied, combined and related shapes or structures. If we are to represent on canvas the visual effects we have experienced within this hypothetical cup, how shall we proceed? The canvas is a flat, determined area limited by its edges. Shall we resort to illusionistic painting to suggest depth and movement? Shall we create an "as if" system? This is our task: to construct a new logic to meet the needs of a new vision. To this Barney Newman responded, "Why, Ethel, that is exactly the way I see the world -only I have expressed it that I stand at the North Pole and see 360 degrees around me!"'

This vision involved form circling around us, this being true of all forms of planes seen at some distance, as the sea or sky-the plane curved at the edge of vision (if we did not turn our head). The balance of form was weighted against the flatness of the canvas, a concept I sometimes expressed as keeping visual experience at some distance in order to make it more readily comprehensible (as in the opera glass technique). I allowed, then, only a slight bending our of the determined distance, possibly a slight endangering of complete compre- hension. This was the aspect of chaos, of mystery, that I did not want to remove entirely as it would be too delimiting, cutting down too far and sharply

on the full measure of our actual experience. On the other hand, one had to prevent the sometimes too wild, unformed and undetermined from drawing the work beyond the proper measure of art. Order had to balance chaos.

In my new paintings the balance between formal definition and mystery was also defined by the use of the diagonal (Fig. 2). The diagonals focussed attention on the division between mountain and sky, between the solid earth and the atmosphere. They suggested precipitous divisions between stability and instability, between life and death, between here and there, between the sense of danger and control-the snake about to bite and defile Orpheus, controlled by Apollo; the rock that might crush Sisyphus, held back by his strength and endurance; only Eurydice succumbs, because of Orpheus' disobedience or lack of control. The diagonals divided fear from belief, trust, hope, affirmation, joy, the exultant.

Poets take great interest in the position of words, the position frequently determining the full meaning. My way of putting this in regard to painting, my way of making an equivalent, was the positioning and quantity of a plane, usually in my work a color plane or area. I searched for 'the place where' it would say the most with the greatest economy and exactitude; it was to be concrete and abstract at the same time.

As an example I considered 'the place where' Prometheus put his feet down in his first step away from bondage-by its position as well as by its color, the spectator was to gather in its meaning. The place was a green plane between the red (pain), moving toward the yellow path (new life, 'La Vita Nuova')-all of this of course was an appeal to the preconscious. If the preconscious was aroused, this tapping of deep sources should happen simul- taneously with understanding of the story or, on the aesthetic side, of the larger architecture or space structure. The quality of response emerges from the peculiar sensitivity of the individual. He would, one hoped, respond to everything as one would wish but this, I knew, was rare and I could rejoice if it happened occasionally.

REFERENCES

1. S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Oxford University Press, 1939); by W. L. (A dupli- cation), Princeton 1941.

2. Dante, Divine Comedy, trans. L. Binyon, P. Milano, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1952).

3. Sophocles, 'Oedipus at Colonus' in The Complete Greek Drama, W. J. Oates and E. O'Neil, Jr., eds. (New York: Random House, 1938).

4. W. Blake, Poetry and Prose, D. V. Erdman, ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1970).

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*1 *1 *1

Top: Ethel Schwabacher, 'Oedipus', acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 in, 1971. (Photo: 0. E. Nelson, New York.) (Fig. 2, cf. page 53.)

Bottom left: Ernest Edmonds, 'Nineteen', mixed media, 170 x 135 x 15 cm, 1968/69. (Fig. 2, cf. page 14.)

Bottom right: Ludmila Kodratoff, 'Jungerer Klang', oil on canvas, 82 x 65 cm, 1971. (Fig. 5, cf. page 40.)







[facing p. 28] [facing p. 28] [facing p. 28]



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Formal Definitions and Myths in My Paintings