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.