Month: December 2021

More on Diagrams and Paintings (P23)

On December 22, 2021

In the previous post, I raised the question what I have learned from submitting paintings with a strong diagrammatic element – applying concepts and ideas from MyManet – to the Annual Exhibition of my art society.
One conclusion was that I still have a lot to learn as an aspiring painter.

But I also learned from the experience more about Manet and how the diagrammatic element in his scheme results from the content, from the objects and relations depicted.
If diagrammatic structures are intimately related to the content of Manet’s painting, then “painting diagrams” is one way to understand his art.

Figure 1: Compairing two Group Portraits

How innovative Manet’s approach is can be understood better, perhaps, when we compare it with the tradition of group portraits in the Dutch painting tradition of Rembrandt and Frans Hals.
Two examples are shown in Figure 1.

Heike Baare (2009) has offered an inspiring analysis of Manet’s multi-figure paintings comparing them with those group portraits. (Actually, she refers especially to the art historian Alois Riegl who is cited also by other critics of Manet, e.g. Michael Lüthy and Richard Wollheim referred to in previous posts.)
Here, I will extract – irresponsibly simplifying her and Riegl’s arguments – only one interesting observation on the problem of group portraits:

Group portraits show a number of persons which are identifiable as particular individuals, for instance the participants of a lecture (Rembrandt) or of a board of an institution (Hals). The painter needs to arrange the portraits (or whole figures) in a composition and has two options,

either to arrange them in a formal composition distributing them somehow balanced in the picture space,
or to show the figures engaged in some activity which assigns each figure a meaningful position and provides a “story” about their relations.

Obviously, these are not alternatives but can be combined in varying degrees.

Rembrandt choses to provide an underlying “story” showing the participants of a lesson;
Hals arranges the portraits formally in the picture space just indicating a common physical space.

The more the painter refrains from offering an internal “story”, the more the viewer is put into the position to provide a unity to the group and will feel the need to invent an external story to make sense of the painting.
This is especially the case, because some of the figures – following the logic of portraits – may look at the viewer and engaging him or her.

In the case of Rembrandt, the figure in the upper centre is looking into the general direction of the viewer, but not engaging the viewer; in the case of Hals, two women appear to engage with the viewer, while the focus of the other three is unclear to the viewer just as in many portraits.

In as much as the viewer fails to detect some unifying relationships, the unity of the painting will rely solely on the formal composition.

Balancing the composition becomes a formidable issue, since all portrayed individuals want to be adequately represented. Nobody wants to play a side role – unless the role is grounded in the social position in the group, as in case of the lecturer in Rembrandt’s painting.

To solve the problem, Rembrandt finds a quite ingenious solution:
He shows all of the figures as being attentive to the lecture and five of them to the book in the foreground.
This way, everybody is sharing the same role, except for the lecturer who is obviously in a special position but not enhancing his role by engaging the viewer.

More radical is Rembrandt’s solution in The Syndics (Figure 2), where the figures are attentive to somebody next to the viewer outside the picture space and in front of the painting.

At the same time, Rembrandt is refraining from “telling a story” – like he did in The Anatomy Lesson. Instead, the gazes create a dynamic which, on the one hand, is much more compelling than the additive portraits by Hals, while, on the other hand, avoiding the impression of a genre painting telling a story about everyday life. And the viewer is assigned a very important role in the composition.
Rembrandt is quite daring in The Syndics, and the painting must have fascinated Manet on his visit to The Netherlands.

Figure 2: Rembrandt The Syndics of the Draper’s Guild (1662)

Rembrandt’s reaching out to the space of the viewer invites a comparison with Manet’s scheme:

The central figure might best be seen as thinking with a gaze beyond the painting – as a Third in Manet’s scheme.

The gazes of the three figures to the right and the figure on the edge to the left dominate the painting paying attention to an unrepresented “other” outside the painting. Their role in Manet’s scheme is comparable to the Second (Berthe Morisot) in The Balcony gazing outside of the picture space to the left (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Relating the gazes in Rembrandt’s The Syndics to the gazes in Manet’s The Balcony

Rembrandt shows three figures in this role accentuating this gaze. We can assume that this is partly due to the fact that he has to somehow accommodate six figures. Comparing it with Manet’s The Balcony (left side of Figure 3), we might, therefore, eliminate two of them as redundant.

Then, Rembrandt applies the strategy of The Anatomy Lesson of creating dynamic tension by a common focus of these gazes. But there, he captured their gazes by the book within the painting (see Figure 2), now their gazes reach out of the picture space. But the three gazes are crossing the picture space meeting the gaze of the fourth figure at the position of the unrepresented “other”. Thus, they are more contributing to the unity of composition than the disrupting gaze to the left in The Balcony. Re-arranging the gazes in Rembrandt following the composition of The Balcony (see the left side of Figure 3) demonstrates the disruptive effect. Manet is anchoring the composition with the gaze of the First (the lady to the right engaging the viewer).

This role of the First has no direct counterpart in Rembrandt’s composition. However, there is another interesting feature: The second figure in Rembrandt (from the left) might imply another unrepresented “other” to the right of the viewer. Thus, the viewer finds herself or himself between two other persons in front of the painting which has a similar engaging effect as Manet’s First.

In Manet’s scheme, this figure would occupy the role of the “other” completing the social space by a perspective on the group from the back (see left of Figure 3) rather than – like Rembrandt – populating the space in front of the painting with another viewer. With Michael Fried, we might say that Rembrandt produces a “facingness” of the whole painting without implying one viewer at a specific position in front of the painting. Still, the painting is showing a unity arising from the gazes within the painting, which is missing in the “additive” faces in Frans Hals’ composition.

Manet’s approach is even more disruptive by confronting the viewer with very diverging gazes which appear not to be harmonized by a unifying interaction with the space of the viewer. Worse still, the space of the viewer itself is ambiguously defined, since in front of the picture space the viewer seems to be hanging in mid-air (or standing at an opposite window?) and in the background the viewer is confronted with an almost totally black space which only indicates that someone is or could be looking out toward the group and the viewer.

In view of MyManet, comparing the paintings by Hals, Rembrandt and Manet, we see that

Hals presupposes that the viewer – guided by the formal composition – will be coordinating the group of portraits into the unity of a painting.
Rembrandt creates a dynamic of gazes within the painting producing a unity which engages the viewer in front of the painting.
Manet creates a complex social space through gazes relating the figures within the painting to unrepresented “others” – including the viewer – outside the painting and risking the unity of the painting in the process.

As pointed out in Post 20 discussing The Balcony, Manet supports the unity of the composition with a very strong frame in bright green colour. However, standing in front of the painting (as I had the opportunity a few months ago) one cannot help but realizing the tension created by the divergence of the social space of gazes that is only tamed by the physical space of a railed balcony.

The problem of the traditional Dutch group portrait, as sketched out above, was to decide (and to solve by composition) which role the viewer had to assume. The viewer could be enlisted to coordinate externally the portraits of the group by an interpretation, or the activities and relationships of the figures within the painting would internally provide a unity (“story”) which the viewer could readily engage with. The latter strategy ran the risk that the internal relations would assign roles to the portrayed persons which they would not readily accept.

This problem is, obviously, also important in Manet’s multi-figure paintings. Although his problem is not so much that the individuals want to have a fair place in the painting. Manet’s figures are identifiable, but not intended as a group portrait. They are typically family members, friends or professional models who will accept their assigned role (Fanny Claus, the second woman next to Berthe Morisot in The Balcony was apparently not so happy with her role.)

However, the basic problem applies also in Manet’s case. Since he aims to reduce the “story” regulating the relationships among the group and with the viewer, the issue of the “unity” within the painting shifts to the formal composition and/or to the unifying role of the viewer. The problem is enhanced by the fact that Manet deliberately violates the rules of perspective breaking up the physical space within the painting and, thus, not extending the picture space into the space of the viewer. The viewer finds herself or himself in a rather insecure position in front of the painting, or – as MyManet suggests – as viewing a scene “on stage”. Manet’s paintings show not the unified space of naturalism, his realism is a re-construction of “what is seen” and “what exists”.

The interpretation of Manet’s paintings is, therefore, often driven by an alternative between

focusing on the formal composition providing a unity with painterly means, and
focusing on the “story behind” the illegible gestures and activities of the figures.

Thus, the “modernity” of Manet’s painting is interpreted either as revealed in his first steps away from naturalism and toward abstraction in modern art (in the following generation of painters), or in Manet’s representation of the fragmented and socially alienated life of contemporary Paris with painterly means.

Regarding the first alternative,
with the loss or avoidance of a narrative, the “facingness” or expression of the painting becomes important, but the viewer is losing a “face” because he or she is addressed as an increasingly anonymous viewer (if not customer) who is as alienated as the portrayed figures.

Regarding the second alternative,
Baare refers especially to the sociologist Georg Simmel – cited often by other critics as mentioned in previous posts. Baare misses, however, an essential feature of Simmel’s sociology. A generation after Manet, Simmel is not only the analyst of modern urban life and culture, he is also the founder of a “formal sociology” and social network analysis. Today’s diagrams of social relations or “sociometry” is heavily indebted to Simmel. Just like Manet – in view of MyManet – tries to establish the internal and external unity of his group paintings not through a “story” but through an underlying model of social relations in social space within and around the picture space, Simmel is looking for the infrastructure of social relations which is carrying the diversity of cultural lifestyles. (Interestingly, Simmel sides with Rembrandt’s internal vitality in his view on art, while the focus on external form is characteristic of his sociology; see Georg Simmel, Rembrandt, 1917).

In the Post on Manet’s Realism, I have suggested that Manet’s realism is inspired by “reasoned images” – by drawings of scientific objects like the human body or animals and plants. In case of Manet’s scheme, the “scientific object” is the human group and the structure of basic human relations as constituted by the gazes within the picture space and to agents not represented in the painting.
Formal or compositional aspects are closely interrelated with aspects of content.

Unlike Rembrandt, however, Manet is not trying to engage the viewer by the imposing vitality and subjectivity of the figures. The content of social space – created by the gazes and gestures – retains in Manet an objective formal character. The role of the viewer is more complex, the viewer is asked to reconstruct the social space within and around the picture space, not just to “face” the painting.

In “Seeing Being Seen”, I tried to capture the role of the viewer in reconstructing a social space by “walking around” the group. The painting assumes the character of an “installation” as pointed out in the first post.
“Seeing Being Seen” addresses directly the content of Luncheon on the Grass – the way gazes structure the social scene depicted.

In the next post, I will take a closer look at the different meanings of “Seeing” and “Being Seen”.

See You in two weeks – in 2022!

On Paintings, Diagrams and Exhibitions (P22)

By Richard Pieper

On December 6, 2021

In Edouard Manet

Sometimes life interferes in significant ways with the plans of human beings – actually, it does that on a quite regular basis.

In my case, the plans for this post were intercepted by the Annual Exhibition of the Järvenpää Art Society of which I am a member.
Aspiring to full membership, I need contributions accepted by the jury.

So, I submitted these three paintings:

Figure 1: My contributions to the Annual Exhibition 2021

“After Matisse”

“A Bar near Folies-Bergère”

“Seeing Being Seen”

The event clashed with my plans into different ways:

The preparation of the three paintings submitted took much more time and effort than anticipated. That may be considered a rather usual miscalculation on part of a novice in the “art business”.
But it made it necessary to postpone the publication of my post.
Sorry about that!
The other interference occurred with the planned content of the post and was equally unexpected.
The jury accepted one of my three paintings and excluded two others.
This is also an event to be expected and accepted, but it got me thinking about the reasons why these two were excluded.
These reflections suggested a different theme for the post.

So, I would like to share my reflections on the jury’s decision, because the issue is directly related to MyManet – both paintings present themes on Manet!

The problem may be put in the following way:
Did the jury select a painting and reject two diagrams?

Let me state at the outset that I am not questioning the decision of the jury.
I would like to be – however modestly – proud of having a painting accepted for the Annual Exhibition.
So, to be proud I must assume that the jury was competent making that positive decision!
But then, it makes no sense to question their competence in the other two cases…
Besides and obviously, I have a lot to learn and to experiment on my way to expressing myself in artwork. The experience of preparing my submissions to the event demonstrated that again.
The task of the jury was to evaluate the quality of the paintings and I accept their verdict.
Thus, the quality of the three paintings is not my concern here (but in front of the easel).

My question is more self-critical and, in part, conceptual, and related to MyManet:

Looking at the three paintings, one difference between the selected “After Matisse” and the two “Manets” stands out:

“After Matisse” (original: Still Life with Oranges 1913) is a still life which does not try “to make a statement” beyond “pure painting”. It just offers an art experience – “art for art’s sake” – as is typical for Henri Matisse. This was also my goal for the free copy. “After Matisse” is not a strict copy, the dimensions are already different – the copy (40×40), the original (94×83). My version tried to catch my impression of the original (as if it would be a still life itself) – and learn something about painting in the process.
The two “Manets” are not copies, they are “about” Manet and cite elements of his paintings. “A Bar near Folies-Bergère” (acryl, 80×100), obviously, cites Manet’s famous “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882), but it includes also references to four other bar paintings of Manet (besides a citation of Velazquez).
I will return to my painterly interpretation of Manet in a later post when looking at the original Bar as his last application of – what I call – Manet’s scheme.“Seeing Being Seen. Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass” (digital drawing) presents a sketch inspired by the gazes of the four figures of Manet’s scheme in Luncheon (lower left)
– with the gaze of the First (the nude) looking back at the viewer,
– the gaze of the Second looking towards the other two persons,
– the gaze of the Third to the more distant “authority” beyond the picture space, and
– the view looking “over the shoulder” of the “Other”, the bather in the background.
Thus, the sketch combines the different views which the viewer would have walking around the group and meeting their eyes (or looking over the shoulder).
The participant viewer would experience “seeing being seen”.

Both “Manets” are “about Manet” in the sense that they are conceptually inspired by MyManet. They are not only paintings but illustrating arguments: They support the general thesis that Manet is applying – consciously, or not – a certain scheme.
In case of “Seeing Being Seen”, this is quite obvious; in case of “A Bar near Folies-Bergère”, it is more subtle, since the painting presents an own application of the scheme. However, the accentuation of the perspectives of the main actors by straight lines crossing the painting suggests quite strongly that there is some kind of model or scheme at work.

While the “Matisse” is straight forward a painting, the “Manets” can be seen (also) as diagrams.

The question arises whether or to what extent the jury preferred paintings over diagrams.

Or, since I do not want to discuss the criteria of the jury:
Did I make the mistake that I painted (too much) diagrams rather than paintings?

Clearly, in MyManet the aim is to interpret Manet’s paintings with the support of diagrams.
Did this aim influence my painting of the “Manets” too much?

Another question may be what I learned about MyManet when trying to paint with his scheme or diagram in mind.

This question, I will take up in the following post.

First, let us look at the differences between paintings and diagrams.

The question assumes that there is a substantial difference between paintings and diagrams and that their principles are, to some extent, in conflict with each other.

So, what is the difference between a painting and a diagram?
There is, of course, a wealth of literature on this issue.
And the question very quickly leads into a deep discussion about “what is art – and what not?”.

So, here I like to share only some personal reflections motivated by the three paintings.

We might expect a categorical difference between the two concepts based on semiotics.
Take, for example, the well-known distinction between icon, index, and symbol in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. This distinction is derived from his fundamental triadic system, here applied to the level of signs:
– an Icon presents certain qualities which it shares with the objects it presents;
– an index represents a certain relation between qualities or aspects,
often a causal law is depicted;
– a symbol is interpreting qualities and relations in some meaningful context.

Following a triadic scheme, we might distinguish between pictures, diagrams, and text. Then, diagrams and paintings appear, at first sight, as categorially different. However, Peirce saw diagrams foremost as visual schemes distinct from logical relations and symbolic language (another triad in Peirce’s system). Therefore, pictures and diagrams both belong to our visual ways of “world making”
which Peirce, by the way, believed to be quite fundamental to our understanding of the world.

On the level of painting, we would distinguish – following the triadic scheme – between the painterly means (like colour, line, shape, brushwork, etc.), the formal composition or design relating elements, and the narrative (“story”) contextualizing the elements. We would point out that Manet is clearly focusing on painterly means, that he follows in his multi-figure paintings a certain scheme, and that he is decidedly avoiding “telling stories”.

In this view, “After Matisse” is clearly focusing on painterly means, “Seeing Being Seen” is the most diagrammatic work, and “A Bar near the Folies-Bergére” attempts a more interpretative application of the scheme.

However, we would not expect that there is a categorial problem in combining painterly and compositional or formal aspects in a painting.

Let us agree that diagrams and paintings are both visual ways of “world making”, but have different aims:

Diagrams cast information and relations or patterns into a visual form.
The content of a diagram is usually described in a text, but typically the content displayed in the diagram cannot be adequately and practically formulated in a text. Some information and insights depend on the visual medium. “The Art of the Diagram” (Schmidt-Burkhardt 2019) consists in creating a representation which allows us to grasp essential insights visually, literally seeing the pattern in a flood of data. Modelling and experimenting on the computer has enhanced diagrammatic methods dramatically. We are understanding and “making worlds” with the aid of “beautiful evidence” (Tufte 2006) represented in diagrams.
The “truth” of the diagram resides in the adequate representation of the world including possible, past, or future worlds; it depends on knowledge about the world and adds to it.
Paintings do not necessarily represent anything in the world, although they often do or are perceived as representing something. “Seeing-in” a painting something represented or “seeing-something-as” a work of art is not an act of simply recognizing an object in the painting or a painting as art.
On the one hand, our ways of seeing are culturally developed. When we see faces or horses in the shapes of clouds of a painting (or in nature), this does not mean there are those objects independently of our ways of seeing. Our perception applies culturally learned distinctions and patterns, but we also apply these patterns in an act of creative imagination, it is a way of “world making” changing in history and with societal circumstances (Davies 2009).
On the other hand, in the creation of each painting the artist is not simply applying our culturally developed ways of seeing. Painting is also an act of creative imagination and of “world making” which, in turn, may suggest new ways of seeing. This creativity is limited only by the material restrictions of the production. In the virtual worlds of computers, these limits can be stretched to the limits of our innate visual capacities.
Boundaries for this creativity are not so much in the process of production expanded by ever new technologies and media, but in our culturally mediated ways of perception, our understanding of what is art, and to what extent we want to restrict our concept of painting (e.g. to the application of lines, shapes and colours to a 2-dimensional flat surface rather than including sculptures, installations, performances, holograms, film, photography, etc.).
The “truth” of painting resides in the way it enriches our aesthetic experience of the world and by (eventually) being perceived as belonging to the “world of art”. The cycle of production and reception of ways of seeing involves learning processes and takes time. In the case of Manet, his contemporary audience did not (yet) understand how to align his painterly innovations with established ways of seeing.

The aims of adding to our knowledge and the aim of enriching our aesthetic experience do not necessarily harmonize. Often, we find one aim pursued on the costs of the other. However, as the history of diagrams and paintings demonstrates, diagrams can be very artful without violating the requirements of knowledge, and paintings can incorporate new knowledge about the world without losing their aesthetic quality.

A good example working both ways is the well-known drawing of the proportions of the human body by Leonardo da Vinci (Figure 2) who was an artist and a scientist as well as an engineer.

Figure 2: Leonardo da Vinci (1490) The Vitruvian Man.
The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius

and four versions generated by the diagram

This diagram is over 500 years old, and it still inspires generating new ideas.

As shown in Figure 3, I have extracted four versions from the original scheme. We can easily imagine that these figures will motivate rather different paintings.
Moreover, the figures suggest quite different socio-psychological states of the person depicted.
We might even associate the four basic emotional and interactional states described in Post 16 with the figures:

Figure 1 conveys a rather elated and expansive mood reaching beyond the confines of the drawing
Figure 2 seems rather down to earth established in his own world
Figure 3 is reminding of the proud and victorious sportsman or warrior
Figure 4 appears to be rather insecure and vulnerable, perhaps even lying on the ground.

Certainly, these interpretations are not the only ones suggested by the figures, but they demonstrate that diagrams can give rise to a variation of forms and even content (not only) in painting – just like Manet’s scheme, where moving the basic roles of the scheme into different positions of the composition generates different challenges.

Thus, diagrams can be integral and productive structures of paintings, not only on the level of formal composition but also on the level of content.

I have to conclude that the question about the exclusion of my “Manets” has less to do with their diagrammatic content than with the quality of my painterly means. Actually, the decision to submit the “Matisse” was motivated by my anticipation that the focus on painting rather than supporting MyManet with paintings may prove to be the more successful strategy.

Which leaves us with the question, what I learned about Manet’s scheme trying to apply it in my own paintings.
This will be the topic of the following post.

See you in two weeks!