On Ingres. An Ingress?

For me, painting becomes a modern act through the works of Cezanne and Duchamp. Duchamp seems to lift some of his thoughts on art directly from Cezanne, but the two - for me - go hand-in-hand in shaping the way art is thought about now. We are still digesting Duchamp's ideas of what constitutes art - is art an idea or is art an object? Is an object presented as art, Art? Duchamp very much took art from a strictly ocular activity into an intellectual one - from strictly 'seeing' the work of art to thinking about the work of art. His work was all about the joke, the pun - the idea. While the history of art is all about presentation and allegory and story - Duchamp's work is all about the why of it. About how much idea can be packed into a piece - and how those ideas are unpacked. His work becomes referential. His work becomes not about the object, but about what the object points to. It is detached, it is the birth of semiotics.

While the language surrounding art surrounding Duchamp was all very high-minded - Vasari, Ruskin, etc, - Duchamp sought to reduce the debate on art to its lowest and dirtiest, at the same time elevating the idea of art to an entirely new and relevant conversation. When he drew the mustache on the Mona Lisa, he was not merely defacing a masterpiece in effigy, he was making a statement about the history of Western Art. By adding the initials LHOOQ to the postcard, he was not only saying 'Look' - look at this painting. Really look at it. Not your memory or your idea of it. The Mona Lisa got lost a long time ago in the very portent of what it is and what it represents. It is the one painting on which the history of western art hangs. When we see it in the gallery we do not look at it. He is not only exhorting us to actually look at the painting - not as Leonardo, not to accompany all the stories which surround, but to judge it for what it is - a painting. Further, there is that pun L-H-O-O-Q - Elle est chauld au coul. She has a hot ass. A vulgar joke that still points to the truth of the painting. For all of our staring - we do not know what this model looks like from behind. It is, after all, only a painting.

So why Ingres? Why after all those words spilt on Duchamp did I mention Ingres in the title?

Because I believe that, through a strange combination of instinct and aesthetic decision the seeds of modern art begin with Ingres.

Ingres, an artist laden down with the history of painting. Every major painting a portent calling back into the history of painting. Critics called his work too Gothic, for the strange length of torsoes, for his colors. I would call his choices more Mannerist than Gothic, but then, Mannerism had not been identified as a school until much later.

A student of Jacques Louis David, Ingres work was beholden to his teachers ideal of 'historic' painting. All of those leaden and posed and staged canvases depicting some important event in history. I have never been a fan of David's. His work to my eyes, while always technically accomplished, just bores the crap out of me. There is no tension. There is no real drama. They are staged plays. The faces show nothing more than the boredom of the models standing still, wearing a tunic or a piece of armor.

Make no mistake, many of Ingres major works contain the same lack of drama. Stiff exercises in formalism. But there is something Ingres had that his teacher never did; an aesthetic sense that drove him slightly mad. That, for all of his strict adherence to the history of painting and to history itself, he made some strikingly modern choices in composition - and I believe that those choices were based solely on the fact that Ingres could not leave certain things well enough alone. He had to make his compositions work. And we see that most in the work he cared about the least - the work that he did to keep bread on the table - hos portraits.

I think, simply because he did not care so much about these works, he allowed himself a little more freedom - he was not beholden to his teachers and to all of that heavy heavy history - instead he was an incredibly talented painter, painting. And - what we see in all of that luminescent paint - in all of that richly rendered cloth and skin, are bodies that could not walk - bodies that could not move for lack of symmetry.

We are always taught in Art History 101 this lesson about Ingres. With no explanation as to why he did it. I believe he did it solely to resolve the composition - to bring everything together visually. To allow the eye to wander relaxedly around the canvas. His portraits offer a resolution his historical canvases do not. And it is this personal choice - this abstraction that plants the seeds. This most academic of painters was a revolutionary only because of aesthetic itch.

Following artists fought different battles. As the Academy changed, and as art became more secular - became modern - a line can be traced from the way Ingres broke the figure to the way Cezanne tried to paint what he saw - not through the camera lens - not through the creation of the diorama - but what his eyes actually told him - the permission for Cezanne to do this is granted in the strange shoulders and long necks of Ingres subjects.

Thoughts on the Diorama

Okay - before discussing any artist in detail or any artistic statement specifically, I want to dispense with some ideas about pictoral space.

Without diving into any cultural/historical/psychological overview of the subject, I just want to acknowledge that the pictorial frame pre-Cezanne is essentially a diorama.

In other words, at its zenith - when the image is done as we see as faithful - 'stuff looks like stuff' - the image itself is a box containing everything it needs to tell a story. Everything is in superb focus and the eye can find many attractive things between the main subject and the simplest element. The way a painting works - and this is still a pre-Cezanne-ish idea - is that it is a self-contained unit - it is a collection of things. In essence all painting is still life.

There are a lot of profound ideas contained within the frame - line, shape and form. Energy, rhythm and order. Multi-point perspective. The use of color, hot or cool, to push and pull the eye, to create a certain drama. There is a craft - a language in this kind of painting that in itself tells a story - a story I don't really want to tell here, right now. I just want to say that pre-Cezanne, all painting is a diorama - which is to say - it is a collection of things.

It does not work the way the eye works. It works the way memory works. It is about creating a narrative - a point a to point z scenario. Something self contained, containing its own life.

The way the eye works, and I want to get into this a lot more - is that seeing is not just a sensory act, it is also a cognitive act. When we 'see' we not only apprehend the object, but that object must fit into a context, both personal and situational.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a bit of pot-smokerish gibberish - one atom in one fingernail could be the center of a whole other universe - yeah yeah yeah. But. There is no escaping that fact that sight as much as any other sense, if not maybe more so, because we are such a sight intensive culture at the moment, is ALL about context. But I don't want to get too deep into this - I just want to say that all painting, pre-Cezanne, is about creating a diorama.

See: At its best, it might look pretty, but in the end, it has little to do with anything actual. It is simply craft of surface and illusion.

This is, I guess, a scattershot way of getting to a simple timeline - one that I am obsessed with, and one that, frankly? Bothers me.

Pre-Cezanne painting is about constructing the pictoral space along architectural lines - everything you need to know is contained within the boundaries of the frame. Masacchio, and De Vinci pretty much defined the space, and a whole bunch of other amazing people refined that space. They were all excellent and painting and drawing things that we could recognize as things.

Post-Cezanne (and why is it that the water is so damned murky around Cezanne? I can tie Courbet and Ingres to Cezanne, dammit) Painting is a much more modern psychological game - it is not only about the way the eye sees, but about questioning what the eye sees.

Painting goes from surface to interior. It goes from solely an ocular activity to a more philosophical activity.

This is all jibber-jabber, but this is my jibber-jabber. I just want a space to write down all the crap I think about while I paint and draw and look.