What Painting Is, James Elkins

In James Elkins book What Painting Is I found a description that goes so well with Courbet's Violoncellist, Elkins writes:
Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts. The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries. Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.
Now compare the Violincellist with all its muddy moods and unexpected brilliance to this other Courbet in the European gallery, Autumn.

Autumn depicts two people on a bluff above a river under the changing leaves of a deciduous tree in fall. It has nothing of the memory of the tired body that made it, something according to Elkins you can see in great work of great artists. The painting should show the careful and nourishing gestures, the exhausted truces. Painters can sense those motions in the paint even before they notice what the painting is about, says Elkins. It reminds me very much of something Eudora Welty said about writers, that they can hear the rhythm of the next sentence coming before they know what it will be.

Gustave Courbet ~ The Violoncellist and The Cellist

Yesterday Amy mentioned that the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm owns a Violoncellist similar to the one here at the Portland Art Museum. Although remarkably alike, the one in Stockholm (shown above) does have a number of differences. First off, the title is just The Cellist. Next, you'll notice that there is no sheet music. And the overall painting is much brighter. The Cellist was painted in 1848, a year after The Violoncellist. Perhaps 1848, was a happier time for Gustave Courbet. Both are considered self-portraits and both do show Courbet holding a violoncello. Since Courbet couldn't play the instrument, we can all wonder why he chose to portray himself as a musician.

The hands in both of these portraits are expressive, almost portraits in themselves. Professor Steven Zucker from the Smarthistory project talked with Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator of the Portland Art Museum about The Violoncellist on a short video shot linked here. To the left is a close-up from Professor Zucker's photostream on Flickr. You can truly appreciate how Courbet crafted the nails, the knuckles, the fingers of that right hand.

An interesting side note about The Cellist and The Violoncellist – in 1919, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted an exhibition in honor of Gustave Courbet 100th birthday. The Violoncellist was loaned by C. E. S. Wood, one of the founders of the Portland Art Museum, for that exhibit. In 2008, The Cellist was loaned by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm for a major retrospective at the Metropolitan of Gustave Courbet's work. The Violoncellist stayed here in Portland. Perhaps in 2019, they'll both be hung in the same retrospective honoring Courbet's 200th birthday.

The Violincellist by Courbet

Courbet, the French painter of the mid 19th century painted this self portrait in 1847. Courbet liked to paint himself, in this case as a musician, in other cases as a poet, a peasant, a troubadour. X-rays of this painting show that the figures position and gesture changed over the course of the painting. He didn't paint from a model, but from his mind. The musical score in the middle right of the canvas is on a different canvas altogether. There is a second Violincellist in the National Museum of Art in Stockholm, without the music and a bit smaller. The painting is above all else, dark. Looking at it in the gallery I crane my neck here and there to see more deeply into it, but the deepest place is the expression on this man's face. His hands are knotted like twigs. His eyes look right through me, what is that song he plays?

Judy Cooke ~ More Zen and Robert Hanson

Finding that Judy Cooke had done the lithographs (see image above) and Robert Hanson had written stories for Zen Painters (see yesterday's post), I needed to know what Robert Hanson's work is like. The actual stories are not on the internet, but a Google search will net you the information that he has written a number of stories, that he is an accomplished artist, that he is a Professor Emeritus from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

In 2009 Robert Hanson exhibited a series of drawings entitled

Beauty

at PNCA's Feldman Gallery here in Portland. Acorn (shown to the left) was one of those drawings. He seems as transfixed with human heads as I am. Take a look at the individual lines, his marks and the unique coloration. His creations capture the essence of the individual.











In 2002 the Elizabeth Leach Gallery also here in Portland had a showing of Hanson's drawings, stories and photographs in an exhibition entitled Wicked Beings and Other Creatures. Here is an image from that show. From the Gallery's website you'll find this description:

Three short stories by Hanson will each feature one of his favorite early Northern European artists as its central character: Pieter Bruegel and the Giant Rabbit, Albrecht Durer and the Chiseled Christus, and Hieronymus Bosch and the Talking Picture. Accompanying the stories will be a series of portraits of fictional characters which Hanson created through the process of direct observational drawing, and photographs which suggest the imagery of forests and bring to mind stories by the Brothers Grimm.

And then in 2007, Hanson's "Three Graces", was at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery. The elegance of his pencil strokes whether they are his controlled gestures or exact colors create portraits that will stay in your memory for long periods. Here is Blossom looking over at us.

His portraits are so expressive. It's as if each of these people has joined me for coffee as they have done for the last twenty years. They're that familiar.

Judy Cooke ~ Egypt and Zen

Judy Cooke created Egypt / Stack #5 during a special project put on by Bullseye Connection Gallery. The gallery's Research and Education department facilitated Northwest painters and printmakers transition to the medium of glass. In addition to Cooke, Martha Pfanschmidt, Eric Stotik, and Mark Zirpe participated. The results of their work was subsequently shown in the Found in Translation exhibition at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Cooke used kiln formed glass to create Egypt / Stack #5. Glass joins the list of materials both conventional and unconventional Cooke has employed to create her art.

In addition to all of this Judy Cooke has also collaborated on at least one book. In Zen Painters, Cooke created lithographs to accompany short stories written by Robert Hanson. The text pages were designed and printed by Textura, a local Portland letterpress printing studio. Like all of Cooke's art, these lithographs are exceedingly elegant.

Wall O Pipe

The shapes in Corridor look more like plumbing pipe to me. If they relate to human bodies it's intestines, that's what I see.

Yesterday's link to Arcy Douglas, where he begins his post by talking about rubber and it's many uses, includes a connection to pipes- where it is used to keep things from leaking. Cooke used this pliable material, as LaValle pointed out yesterday, in her latest pieces. I think her earlier work, including Corridors, could have been influenced by this amazing doorway.

Judy Cooke ~ Another Tarp and more, including Rauschenberg

Judy Cooke created a series of work in the mid-seventies and entitled it Tarps. Corridors, shown above, is from that series. Following the theme of Celbration After the Fact, our piece of the week here at Fifty Two Pieces, Cooke took weathered canvas sections which had been pieced together and then outlined rich, black shapes using charcoal. Like the shapes from "Celebration", the shapes are both geometric and organic leading to a sensual feel. That sensuality was expressed by one viewer of "Celebration" with this statement: "I see the shapes of bodies; it's as if the canvas was used as a cover over two people." These were powerful abstractions for the seventies.

Oil (shown here on the left) is one of Judy Cooke's most recent works. In Oil, she has used a panel of aluminum plates painted over with black and with a panel of rubber on the right. Much like in Celebration After the Fact, Cooke has used staples to attach the aluminum to the frame. In his article on the website PORT, Arcy Douglass speaks to how Judy Cooke used these industrial materials in a very deliberate manner even though they may seem spontaneous on first viewing. His comparison of Cooke's work with Robert Rauschenberg's combines is well worth reading. In addition Jeff Jahn commented on Douglass' post with this statement:

Probably Cooke's best outing since the fantastic tarp series of the mid 70's (but presented recently). I hope she expands these combination pieces to a similar range. Also using materials that reference the automobile and healthcare gives them a topical quality that might really take off if used in larger projects.

As a side note, Judy Cooke's Celebration After the Fact was hung next to Robert Rauschenberg's Cardbird VI for nearly two years. Much like Douglass who compared works like Cooke's Oil with Rauschenberg's Factum I and II, the curatorial staff at the Portland Art Museum had connected Cooke with Rauschenberg. Shown below are the two pieces, side-by-side once again.