Mathew Pokoik - news

This excellent and crowded exhibition is made up entirely of the MET’s impressive collection of Dutch School paintings (roughly 1600-1800). While the title might make one think the focus of the show falls on Rembrandt, its really a show about collecting and the impact of wealthy collectors on the art market and museum culture - and why not? Many reviews have responded negatively to this curatorial focus, yet in many ways this investigation of the root of the MET’s collection and early history shed light on todays environment of overheated art collection fueled by new global wealth. Overwhelmingly contemporary art work that enters museum collections and major exhibitions are being chosen by a new breed of collector rather than curators or other individuals in the not-profit sector. Is it then surprising that so much of the new art that is seen engages first in spectacle and only second in any type of visual/aesthetic investigation (Damian Hirst or Matthew Barney for example)? What this exhibition makes clear is that this is an old story in many ways. In fact, I’d say The Age of Rembrandt touches upon this point on three distinct meta-levels.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-portrait, 1660
The Met, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913

First - Rembrandt himself was a smart business man who new how to “work it”, like many contemporary artist he painted for a group of new money wealth in the trading mecca of 17th century Amsterdam. Himself a beneificary of this prosperity, he lived beyond his means, like many examples of new wealth - spending vast amounts of money on all sorts of luxury goods (he was also a prolific collector of exotica, some of which can be seen at his former house in Amsterdam). He eventually lost everything to his creditors as his work went out of fashion and he died poor and virtually alone.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Noble Slav, 1632
The Met, Bequest of William K. Vanderbilt, 1920

Second - This show is an exhibition about the wealthy American collectors of the 19th century. The paintings are arranged in the galleries in “the approximate order of their acquisition”. Thus documenting the inner workings of how a museum obtains a collection - shall we say the reality of collection acquisitions - In doing so, it documents the effort of the new American wealth to establish cultural legitimacy. The post-reformation Dutch painters seemed to have been of particular interest to these new collectors, possibly because within the Dutch Republic can be found the origins for early American values and religious practices.

Upon entering the first room of the exhibition we are presented with a stunning wall of Rembrandt portraits - all with the names of the collectors who donated it - in large grey / white letters floating above the ornate picture frames. From left to right in the room:

Altman - Friedsam - Vanderbilt - Neilson - Huntington - Marquand - Harkness

Considering that one can view these paintings at any other time at the MET, minus the thick crowds, how were the curators to arrange these painting? It would be inaccurate to use them to say this is a acurate representation of the Dutch School because the selection is really a reflection of these particular collectors interests rather than the actual historical age of Dutch painting.

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662
The Met, Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889

Third - What do these curatorial choices and investigation in 19th century American art collecting teach us about our own commodity based over-blown atmosphere in the Visual Arts, where we are saturated with New Wealth within a now Global Art Culture?

On a last note - This show also makes clear for me - it is not Rembrandt who holds the undisputed heavy weight championship of the Dutch School, but rather Vermeer. With his quite understated and relatively small canvases of interior private moments and spatial / light studies.

Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, Richard Prince

With the major Richard Prince show now open at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (which I have not yet had a chance to see). I’ve been reading a large collective of reviews and articles on the artist in a variety of publications. This week’s New Yorker has a short piece on Prince by the insightful Peter Schjeldahl that is hands-down the most …well the most intriguing of these articles. Schjeldahl is not afraid to be critical of this art world giant, yet always in ways that make me ponder Prince’s work and the current trends in art that Prince so well represents. Schjeldahl is everything a critic should be, it would seem from the article that he is not entirly enthusiastic with Prince’s work, yet he clearly recognizes the degree to which Prince is a summation of current trends and with his words does not simply approve or disapprove but questions.

Here’s the opening of Schjeldahl’s article on Prince:

The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture…Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. His bald rip-offs of painting styles from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and, lately, Willem de Kooning make him an artist as irreverent art critic, razzing exalted reputations. Prince can seem to cover, in an insouciantly corrosive way, the whole topography of the aesthetic in present high and low life; and he is acute enough that a refusal to play along, for the nuanced pleasures that he provides, would be bigoted.

So read the article and more important, go see the show of this seminal American artist, if you’re out of town the Guggenheim has an excellent on-line exhibit here.

My only complaint with Schjeldahl is that in a recent write up about the Rembrandt show at the MET, he said that the show “reconfirm’s Rembrandt’s towering supremacy”. How anyone could say this when Vermeer is hanging nearby on the wall is just beyond my comprehension?

Words and letters may also become a sub-album within The Global City. I’ve been pondering the word images of Shannon Ebner, Lee Friedlander, Edward Ruscha and others.

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

©Edward Ruscha

©Shannon Ebner

The deeper I immerse myself in the work of Bruegel and the historical context that he lived and worked in, the greater my amazement becomes of his creative and social vision. He expanded what the visual arts could look at in its illustrative capacity; he expanded the possibilities of what subject matter could be in the visual arts. Not to say that their are no precedents for the work he did, but I am convinced that he cracked open this nut far deeper and with greater commitment than anyone else before him. Consider if you will this small oil painting he made a year before his death.

Pieter Bruegel the elder, The Beggars, 1568, The Louvre, Paris

There is no precedent I know of in the European visual arts that takes in such a clear and straightforward view of an image directly dealing with suffering and poverty. Previous efforts dealt with these themes through the mythological, such as Christ’s suffering on the cross, Bruegel takes us to the real thing with his gaze that does not turn away. Of course there may be additional messages hidden in the symbols of this work whose meanings have been lost to time, such as why are there foxtails pinned to the beggars? And what of the begging monk in the far right background, who begs by choice, rather then as the result of war, plague, or nature?

Recently in Berlin I was able to see in the flesh this tiny and mysterious panel:

Pieter Bruegel the elder, Two Chained Monkeys, 1562, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Bruegel deals with suffering as an equal partner to the absurd, I’m suddenly curious if Cervantes had the chance to see any Bruegel’s? They seem to share an interest in the nature of suffering as something of an absurdist jobian parody. He is after all a most literate of painters, at a time when paintings function was to illustrate a known story - often for the church - Bruegel freed up what painting could look at while also being a master storyteller. He takes advantage of narrative visual suggestions, and cultural meaning -such as this well known parable of the blind leading the blind - to create a meaning that the viewer creates in active engagement and question making. Their are no easy interpretations when looking at these paintings, they encompass the dark as well as the light.

Pieter Bruegel, The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind, 1568, Galleria Nazionale, Naples

Albrecht Durer one day wrote in his journal that he visited the studio of Joachim Patinir, “a good landscape painter”, and with that simple statement, we find the first known written reference to the idea of landscape in art as its own distinct form.

Joachim Patinir, St. Jerome in the Desert, 1515. Louvre, Paris.

Would we today describe Patinir’s work in Durer’s footsteps and entitle him a landscape painter? Imagine this as if he were alive and working today, and I think the description would be more like “a painter of religious scenes that take place within a landscape”. He doesn’t quite make the cut in terms of this funny idea we’ve formed of landscape.

Yet if you study his work and the handful of facts known about him it becomes clear that he missed this mark by a hair’s breath. He was ready and willing, but first the very role and function of art in culture had to change, which the Reformation helped along.

Saint Jerome in the Desert creates a visual equality between man and nature, with nature standing in for the role God traditionally played in painting. Shifting away from the strict Aristotelian hierarchy that placed us in the center of the universe, Patinir places St. Jerome as a relatively small figure in the lower central foreground. 53 years latter Bruegel took this idea and pushed it the next step in his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where all we see of Icarus is a leg poking out of the water in the lower right foreground.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1558, Musees Royaux, Brussels.

Both painting are still holding on to the traditional role of using painting and the landscape as a backdrop for the illistration of a religious or mythological subject. Both painters consciously point the way towards a new functionality of art, the detailed study of the world - a discipline of seeing and the study of nature. As a photographer I’d say this is the very roots of my tradition.

A poem by W. H. Auden on Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow !n a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

As to this form of landscape and our cultural mental image, I’ve noticed that students, when asked to visualize and draw their ideal landscape will make creations that almost uniformly contain mountains, water, human occupants, and a horizon line in the upper third area of a horizontal composition. Amazing that an eleven year old child when asked to draw a landscape will make it in a manner much as Joachim Patinir did with his Saint Jerome in the Desert.

I just finished teaching an Aesthetic Education Lincoln Center Institute workshop on these two paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and felt that this could hardly be a better subject to start the blog off with. Additionally working on the planning of this workshop, raised some questions that led to curating the show The Interactive Landscape. Over the next few days I will be exploring the context of the origins of landscape in western art as seen in the work of these two terrific painters who worked in Antwerp in the early and mid 16th century, Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, triptych, ca. 1518, MET, NY.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565, MET, NY

A wonderful element of these two paintings is that the development of landscape as a visual language, its own genre, is so well illustrated. Bruegel in particular was a radical innovator, not just as the potentially first serious painter to make large scale dedicated landscape paintings in Europe, but as the first visual artist, in my knowledge, to look towards the poor and the peasant class. In doing, expanding the parameters of what an artist could look at, becoming a mirror of the world, the birth of a tradition.

The Peasant Dance, ca. 1568, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.