Richard Hennessy
Carter Ratcliff |
A CONVERSATION |
Carter Ratcliff: Let’s start where you do, in
the studio, at the moment when
you make the first mark on a blank canvas.
Richard Hennessy: Well, that’s
a moment fraught with a sense of the
momentous. A plunge into the unknown. Because, no matter how long you
have painted, no matter how much experience you have accumulated, you
can never completely predict what the mark you make with your brush will
look like. You make the mark and then you have to react to it. And your
reaction may not be immediate. It may take a while—for me, at any
rate,
because I never start with a plan for how to proceed. Plans make it all
too
easy. They relieve you of the need to pay attention to what you’re
doing.
Just following the plan through to the end isn’t challenging. A
painting
acquires interest by becoming a record of the interaction of mind, matter,
and physical activity. Choosing. Preferring. Judging. Making.
CR: And,
eventually, the painting is done. But what about preparatory
sketches? Notes toward an overall composition? I’m reminded of
how-topaint
books, with their advice on blocking out the main elements of the
composition and so on.
RH: Well, the ‘main elements’ emerge
from the process, as does the subject—
the poetic content. They can’t be rushed into existence before
you’ve picked
up your tools and mixed your colors. I compose as I paint, from within
color.
From within stroke. The oil medium makes this possible, though there
is, of
course, an enormous prejudice in favor of drawing coming first and painting
later. That’s about fresco. Because of the nature of that medium,
a fresco
painter had to work everything out in advance. But not all great painters
did
that. That is why there are so few Titian drawings, and almost none whose
attribution isn’t controversial. There are, perhaps, two drawings
by
Velazquez. That may be merely an accident of survival. But both these
painters worked directly on the canvas. In the wet. Monet, whom I rank
with
Titian as one of the greatest technicians of all time, is very much to
the
point. People have recently tried to make a case for the unknown Monet—
Monet the draftsman. Yet his drawings are not artistically interesting.
His
compositions were not planned in advance, on paper. They emerged from
the
process of painting. The color-space which resulted is one of the most
august
and original achievements in all of painting.
CR: What about Michelangelo’s
drawings, and the Florentine idea of art
those drawings do so much to sustain—disegno and all that? Surely
those
drawings are great in their way, even though Michelangelo may not have
prized them as much as we do. He thought of himself as a sculptor, and
I
think it’s arguable that his drawings are not all that pictorial.
Or if that is
a silly thing to say, isn’t it nonetheless true that his drawings
are not about
pictorial space? They look to me like notations of form, and often the
forms
just float on the page. They’re the drawings of a sculptor who
painted
under protest. Maybe he would have liked to refuse the Sistine Chapel
commission,
but how could he? Ultimately, though, he was right about himself.
He was a sculptor. And an architect.
RH: A very great architect. As for
the drawings, they’re about
mass and
compressed energy. They’re the greatest drawings about mass that
have
ever been done. You really believe in the solidity of those figures—and
every grain of notation counts toward that effect. I recently gave a
talk at
the New York Studio School, which led me, at one point, to put a Mondrian
and Rothko up on the screen. Then I followed up with Michelangelo’s
God,
creating the sun and the moon. Both arms are extended, the fingers pointing
intensely. And his gaze is intense. With his left hand, he is creating
the
moon. With his right, he is creating the sun and pointing right at it.
Talk
about eye-hand coordination—a completely unified body-mind. One
substance,
with the power to create a universe. For centuries, Christian Europe
had been oppressed by the image of a man with both his hands nailed
down. Fortunately, determined efforts to nail down the mind as well proved
unavailing. With the advent of the Renaissance, the body returns in all
its
glory. With Michelangelo, we get the world’s most famous image
of touching—
the creation of Adam on the Sistine ceiling.
CR: I wonder about Michelangelo’s
religiosity. Of course, he was religious—
a Catholic in the manner of his time and place. But his idea of art
was Neoplatonic. Pagan. His David is Hercules. So I suppose there is
no way
of knowing just how much piety we should see in his images of the
Scriptural god.
RH: Michelangelo’s God is the same as humanity’s—an
imagined ideal
agent, an ideal doer. No doubt an idealized self-image. Or so it seems
to me,
as a painter. But I am getting into risky territory here. It has to do
with
pride and what we all love about painting—the spectacle of a world
emerging
from the painter’s hand and mind, from one’s body and one’s
mind
simultaneously. To paint is to unify one’s being. So there may
be an element
of self-portraiture in Michelangelo’s images of a god that is all
of a piece.
Of course, the ancient Greeks talked of a sound mind in a sound body,
and
yet there is also the Christian view that man is created in god’s
image. And
the body was never thrown away. It was going to be resurrected. That’s
the
thrill of painting, to assert this exalted idea of the body, though there
are
moralizers who would think that’s over reaching. Isn’t that
the perfect
word: overreaching? Because reaching is what you do with your arms. That
acceptance of—or insistence on—the earthly body is owed to
humanism,
which gives us a set of very exalted ideas about what we are.
CR: Ideas
that are of no use whatsoever unless you’re concerned
with who
we are. Many of today’s art-lovers turn to art as if it were a
hot-air balloon,
a way of lofting oneself far above oneself. Far above life as everyone
else
knows it. The other day you were talking about a show of early Cubist
work
you saw in a gallery on 57th Street—paintings and collages, with
their bits
and pieces of readymade imagery. No doubt these were shocking when
they first appeared: scraps of ordinary life in the exalted realm of
art. I
suppose the idea, in part, was to flaunt the ordinary at the expense
of the
exalted. Which is all well and good, and yet one of the effects of collage
was to suggest a new and improved way of putting a painting together.
RH: Juxtaposition versus composition.
CR: Exactly, and it looks to me
as if this turned into one of the 20th century’s
standard routines. How to make a picture. But not in ten easy lessons,
because no lessons are required.
RH: True. It’s easy just to make
arrangements, to place one image next to
another until you’ve filled up the surface. Collage can be an evasion
of composition,
which is the core issue. And, as familiar as collage has become, for
some it still has the look of a challenge to tradition. A faded look,
to put it mildly. Nonetheless, I don’t want to deny the greatness
of the very first
collages or of Analytic Cubism in general, its dematerialization of mass;
separating the contour, the edge, from the mass, then atomizing it. Mass
becomes this glowing, spectral, atomic vision of itself. Extraordinary.
Then Mondrian came along and tidied it up.
CR: And once he had done that—once
he had shown the way beyond the
clutter of Cubism, all the messy ambiguities—he launched the grand
project
of repeating himself for the next two decades. Not quite fair, of course,
but there does seem to be something fanatic about carrying on as if one’s
style were the style. The only one that humanity would ever need.
RH:
What we have to remember is that not so very long after he and Braque
invented collage, Picasso was painting neoclassical works, those ponderous
figures that look as if they’re made of stone. Having dematerialized
mass,
he now proceeds to paint bodies as heavy as anything that has appeared
in
the history of art. For Picasso, there are no permanent resting spots.
You
arrive at a certain place and then you go on. I believe that all things
human are provisional. Nothing is permanent. But the people who saw in
Cubism
the key to pictorial structure had a conversion experience. Flat, squaredaway
form became the be-all and end-all, and I think that began the
process of the emptying out of painting, with wilder and wilder claims
of
moral righteousness. I admire Mondrian enormously, up to a certain point,
but I think his painting shows us the prettiest face that fanaticism
managed
to put on in the 20th century. With his mature style, he equates rectitude
with rectangularity. The less going on, the greater the claims. But when
does rigor become rigor mortis? When does MoMA become an acronym for
Mummies of Modern Art?
CR: Are you thinking of the utopian schemes that
were funded, so to speak,
by the metaphysical certainties of Mondrian and other painters of de
Stijl?
Not to mention the artists of the Bauhaus and Constructivism?
RH: Yes.
These were artists who had all the answers. They were going to
teach everyone how to live. Answers have only a temporary usefulness.
The
search is the interesting thing. Whenever an artist pursues an ultimate
solution, I become suspicious. The origins of Mondrian’s fanaticism
can be
seen in a painting from 1912, called Evolution. It’s figurative,
thus an
embarrassment for people who promote Mondrian’s later work. There
are
three panels, with a nude woman in each. The one on the right bears a
Star
of David on each of her shoulders. The one on the left, while not allegorized,
I assume to represent Christianity. The one in the center seems to
stand for the new religion Mondrian was always looking for, and only
her
eyes are open—staring bug-eyed. All three of them hold their arms
pressed
to their sides. But it’s more than that, almost as if their arms
were growing
into their bodies. Exactly the opposite of evolution. What does this
tell you?
After all, arms are what we need to paint. The denial of the body built
into
this kind of abstraction.
CR: Paintings have to be painted, as a practical
matter, but you’re
arguing
that painting of this kind implies a bodily image. The flesh devolving
to
some early stage of embryonic development, while the spirit—or
the
mind—leaps to a higher level. A higher level and a very narrow
one, where
the mind can conceive of painting only as a blueprint for utopia.
RH:
But this denial of the body can be seen in the work of abstract
painters who were anything but utopian. There is an early Rothko, from
1941 or ’42, called Crucifix, that shows arms and legs in piled-up
boxes,
looking like a Louise Nevelson. On top is a head. Or three heads: profiles,
left and right, and in the center full-face. One thinks of Christ and
the
two thieves, crucified. I was stunned the first time I saw that painting,
like a body blow. I suddenly realized that the boxes we see stacked in
the
abstract Rothkos are like those limb-packed boxes. His later paintings
are headless, armless, legless trunks. So that appears to be the price
of admission to this kind of abstraction. Your arms. Your legs. Your
head.
CR: What’s left of the body is a ruin, like an antique statue with its extremities
missing. Of course, there is a romance of the ruin—think of Northern
Europeans wandering around the Mediterranean in the 18th century. The
Grand Tour, upon which one did not set out without a supply of stock
responses to things that had fallen into disrepair. Or been subjected to vandalism.
The Acropolis owes much of its decrepitude to the explosion of a
17th-century ammunition dump. That’s how the Turks were using it in
those days. No one blames them, really. It’s almost as if they are to be credited
with aesthetic refinement, as unconscious as it may have been. With so
much of the past in ruins and the modern spirit so given to doubts about
itself, ruins become a sign of integrity. Of authenticity, to use a modern
word that goes some way toward justifying the modern spirit’s self-doubts.
Think of those sculptures of Rodin’s that present just a fragment of the
body. The irony of the part with the presence of the whole. But not all
ironies work. Maybe those fragmented bodies of Rodin’s ought to be seen
not as grandly monumental but as sadly mutilated. What’s left of the body is a ruin, like an antique statue
with its extremities
missing. Of course, there is a romance of the ruin—think of Northern
Europeans wandering around the Mediterranean in the 18th century. The
Grand Tour, upon which one did not set out without a supply of stock
responses to things that had fallen into disrepair. Or been subjected
to vandalism.
The Acropolis owes much of its decrepitude to the explosion of a
17th-century ammunition dump. That’s how the Turks were using it
in
those days. No one blames them, really. It’s almost as if they
are to be credited
with aesthetic refinement, as unconscious as it may have been. With so
much of the past in ruins and the modern spirit so given to doubts about
itself, ruins become a sign of integrity. Of authenticity, to use a modern
word that goes some way toward justifying the modern spirit’s self-doubts.
Think of those sculptures of Rodin’s that present just a fragment
of the
body. The irony of the part with the presence of the whole. But not all
ironies work. Maybe those fragmented bodies of Rodin’s ought to
be seen
not as grandly monumental but as sadly mutilated.
—
RICHARD HENNESSEY has sailed the high seas of painting––widely
and freely
––for more than forty years. Always aiming at a comprehensive
style, with composition
as his overall concern, he has steered well clear of the extravagant
asceticism
of the anhedoniacs and the stolid klunkiness of pile-it-on bricoleurs.
When
he felt obligated to speak out, he wrote essays, five in all.
CARTER RATCLIFF’s books of poetry include Fever
Coast and Give
Me Tomorrow. Arrivederci, Modernismo will be published
by Libellum Press later this year.
A contributing editor of Art in America, he writes frequently
about American and
European art.
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