Greetings, Pilgrims!
Thanksgiving in Tumultuous Times. Lots and lots happening, too much no doubt, but perhaps one can get a bit of clarity, take a moment to reflect on blessings or just the wondrous quality of this moment? Many of my friends and interlocutors seem rather hopeless, or see hopelessness all around them. The news is terrible. I drafted a snarky tour d’horizon of current horrors, but cut it. Too discordant. Besides, you can find horrors easily enough, elsewhere, probably cannot avoid them, if you are online enough to be getting this newsletter. Maybe it is time to talk about Wellness? Seriously, bathos is so boring, even my own discontents, I’m only listening to be polite. Ok, enough with the Nietzschean mockery. Down boy! It’s the holiday season!
Despite everything, I think we may be on the brink of widespread renewal. Surely certain cultural forms, liberal modernity broadly speaking, seem exhausted. Apparently I said, in college when asked what I wanted to do: “hasten the end of the Enlightenment.” No doubt as a result of my efforts, that end appears to have come, not just in the realm of ideas, but in social life more broadly. Now that it’s gone, I kind of miss all that light, all that superficial clarity. (Careful what you wish for is hardly a new idea.) Consider: we have already seen a worldwide resurgence in religious sentiment, whatever I might think of the nascent theologies. (Paul comes to Ephesus to give the Greeks the good news, and I’m that guy drinking wine in the back, marveling at the new enthusiasm.) The idea that our politics is founded on autonomous “reflection and choice,” to be so American, is sadly risible. Yes, politics has become tribal, but there is vitality to tribes — hence “social network.” In his Towards a New Romanticism project, the always interesting Ted Goia is tracing parallels between the US at present and Europe, especially Germany, in the first years of the 19th century. Maybe? And I do think that AI is forcing a serious examination of what it means to understand, to write, to play (computers don’t play chess), and perhaps what it means to do science, too. Sometimes I think of this as Existentialism 2.0. So we are asking, at a time of great doubt, what remains, and what emerges, and how do we live with our dispensation?
Thinking about such things with Picasso. Which brings me to Pablo Picasso: shortly after WWII, the painter repaired to Fontainebleau, outside Paris, with his new wife and infant son, also Paul (that makes 3). As Picasso in Fontainebleau (MoMA) tells us somewhat elliptically, it was a time of domestic tranquility, tendresse, but also of intense output, culminating in four major paintings, two versions of the neoclassical Three Women at the Spring and two versions of the cubist Three Musicians. The exhibit pays fruitful attention to what went into the paintings, the space of their composition, and Picasso’s life and friends at the time. I didn’t realize I would write about this, and so didn’t photograph. Sorry ‘bout that.
Of course most of Picasso’s personal life was anything but tranquil. We live in a time in which moral judgment seems broadly required, as if anybody cares what I think about a dead man’s sins. I suspect this reflects widespread insecurity: vis-a-vis the global digital, it is hard to be sure we exist, with whom. But I judge therefore I am (good). I’m not entirely above that sort of thing, but I won’t indulge the vanity here, beyond saying that with Picasso the gentle and the ferocious sides of eros are never very far away, hanging in the air as it were, tense. Both aspects of the erotic do not neatly map upon, but intersect in complex ways, other familiar oppositions, nature and culture, public and private, respectable and constrained (“bourgeois,” it was said) and transgressive and libertine (seminal?), and so forth. All of which is somewhat neutered by the context, the eminently respectable (no longer modern?) MoMA. After all, the institution of the museum was invented to tame the iconoclastic rages unleashed by the Revolution, to discipline aristocratic, and often sacred objects with republican propriety in public and ostensibly secularized spaces, where plutocrats now underwrite public access to “iconic” images. Officially, anyway, MoMA is a pretty safe space, as the saying goes.
At Fontainebleau, Picasso was working in two very different, yet imbricated (for him) styles: a series of “classical” women, at springs, with babies, with each other, monumental, almost sculpted. Many very large drawings. And the cubist paintings, bespeaking the “modern” idiom, the confidence, of the creative ferment of the first decade and a half of the 20th century. Harlequin and Pierrot and a strange monk, lest things get too out of hand? Evidently this combination of the cubist and the classical was frustrating for the commentariat: was Picasso looking forward or looking back? This schematism, of course, is too simple minded, as if history were a railroad. The question, if we are creatures of (past) history yet also subject to change beyond our control (history as it emerges), is what abides, what is swept away, and what emerges? Surely the Great War did much to end the European tradition, at least as reconfigured in the 19th century. But the modernism that Picasso himself had done so much to introduce had just as surely introduced horrors. Whither Europe after the Great War? Or, as I was saying, whither us, now?
One of the dangers of a literary imagination is ambush by circumstances that must mean something, maybe many things, but what? While I am staring at a large study of a half nude woman with a water jar, willfully knowingly post classical, and thinking my thoughts, a baby cries. Not mine, I think, and not in real distress, so I ignore it. The baby is very suddenly silent, which surprises me, and so I turn to look. A very large and strong Mediterranean-looking woman with a hard jaw and olive skin is sitting on one of those “contemplate the masterwork” benches, suckling an infant at her enormous left breast. Madonna at MoMA? She is looking past me, at Picasso’s early meditation on much the same thing. You may have seen the woman’s likeness: she seems to have stepped out of Les Damoiselles d'Avignon, which is upstairs. Do paintings have ghosts? Cubist Madonna confronts classical image of woman via enraptured misogynist? The child’s skull is the clear almost black of the water in the Okefenokee, stained by cypress trees. Close to Madonna, their hips touching, sits a much smaller woman with dark skin, maybe Black, in the American sense, maybe not.
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As a respectable bourgeois, hell a grandfather, I quickly turn back to staring at paintings. But thoughts come too thick and too fast, best to let them on through. Identities, not to say relationships? Maybe they are New Yorkers, but I think not — Spain? Brazil? Public, private? Modern? Classical? Natural, i.e, transhistorical? Female? Implicitly, male? Gentle, victim, ferocious, victimizer, all helpless and beyond judgment, maybe only sympathy? The baby cries and is switched to the right, the meal ends, they go, I go, to look at more paintings. I am suddenly very tired, too many paintings, too much thinking, and begin slowly walking along Central Park to a dinner meeting on the Upper East Side.
Another Picasso moment. When it was time, I took our son to visit Princeton. For my non-American readers, the “college visit” is a fraught rite of passage in the United States, as young men and women are shown colleges they might wish to attend, they might or might not be able to get into, and earnestly told that their lifelong happiness rests upon making the right choice, and of course being accepted. It is very, very competitive. For many of these bright young things, smartest kids they know, it is the first time they have faced numerous other students as smart as they are, and in the same ways. Children come to realize, maybe for the first time, that they have a real chance of significant failure. On visiting days at “elite” schools like Princeton, brightly polished, intensely coached children are marched around by their fretful parents, under the watchful eyes of the admissions staff. The tension is almost literally palpable; stomachs churn. You can see the ambition and anxiety in the kids’ and their parents’ eyes. It is cruel and hilarious. I laughed and murmured to our son, “the water is cold, isn’t it?”
When we visited, the Princeton art museum was showing Picasso’s Vollard Suite of engravings. In the Vollard Suite, from the darkening ‘30s, Picasso again confronted the Classical inheritance and Mediterranean tradition, and his own artistic gifts and demons, with not only a sense of balance, but especially lust and violence. The Suite was completed in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. The Germans would invade Poland in 1939. Surely this represents a failed modernity? Although my son wanted to get away from Princeton as fast as possible, I wanted to see the work, wander around, thinking about eros, writing, violence, fathers and so also mothers, succession . . . what do you think about that, Sigmund? (Some of you may be worried about long term psychological trauma. Rest assured, the boy acquitted himself well then and since, and we remain close.)
What do you see first? Did you see it at all?
In response to the images and discussion in Sorbet, Buffalo as Ireland, etc a fine interlocutor wrote:
Colors—where one sees color I noted texture, glow and shadow across vegetable, flower, herb, and bark. Color becomes colorful in or as something—an object that is of its essence a visual signification inviting a visceral interpenetration in the thing and by the viewer.
I responded:
Your point about texture is very good. I think it is pretty much impossible to isolate "color" or "light" or "form" or what have you . . . so you look for one thing and see something else.
But what do you see “first,” in the sense of what makes the most immediate, perhaps strongest, impression? I usually see shape, but in Sorbet I was studying color, specifically the colors at a farmer’s market. As my reader points out, however, we can identify a perception, an experience, “color,” or “texture,” but we cannot have that experience exclusively, without other experiences. We get close, looking at a cloudless blue sky, or diving in clear water. But that is light, not a thing, and even there, we perceive variations, not to say the feel on the skin. Late in life, doing his papercuts, Matisse spoke of cutting “into” color. And Yves Klein tried to paint pure color “monochromes.” He even claimed to “invent” a blue. I don’t think a color can be invented — the spectrum is what it is — though of course a pigment can. But you get the point: he wanted just pure blue, as blue as can be. He came close.
Close means not quite: we always perceive in addition to color.
Once upon a time there was an argument over whether a purely non-representational painting was even possible. Suppose we understand the fundamental challenge of painting to be the translation of three dimensional experience, in time, onto a static, two dimensional plane. This is, of course, impossible, which is a beautiful thing — painting cannot be solved, finished.
But now suppose we turn the enterprise around, and instead try to make a painting that is in no way representational of something else, not even three dimensional space, that just exists in and of itself? A painting that was not an illusion (this is not a pipe)? A painting that was, one might romantically say, completely honest? It turns out that any mark upon the plane, even the light falling across its surface, to say nothing of any glass covering the work (back to reflections!), or the frame, or even the edge — unless this is an infinite painting? — is perceived as, evokes, depth, the third dimension. And I’m not sure it was said back in the day, but the viewer sways, often with stereoscopic vision. A purely two dimensional and static work does not appear possible.
I think this discussion is much like our little colloquy on color/texture. As humans, we conceptualize, abstract from, experiences that we do not have as such. I will leave what this might mean for LLMs, constituted by data as it is, not for what it represents, for another day.
Happy Thanksgiving, and welcome to the holiday season, pilgrims.
— David A. Westbrook