Joseph W. Reed Review

PAINTERLY NARRATIVE

Joseph W. Reed

Americanists would rather quote Emerson than eat. But to quote Emerson in an essay on painting takes some fancy footwork: Emerson didn’t like any paintings much. He infrequently used them in the essays, usually as a metaphor. Perhaps if paintings had only represented sequence better than space – then Emerson might have warmed up to them, thought about them, made of them a philosophical metaphor. We might now have an Emerson essay about painting, space. None of this happened and it is unlikely that Emerson ever looked – really looked – at many paintings.

But there is space in Emerson. The essays follow a rhetoric somewhere between that of a preacher and a clever lecturer. Argument takes a sudden turn, finds a humorous sidetrack or a surprising hyperbole, takes on an altered tone. There are breaks in sequence, non sequiturs, angular transitions (what Richard Wilbur cites as Emerson’s “leaps and swerves and abrupt discoveries”). All these make the kind of verbal space that can take us aback as readers. In these essays process is an arrangement by which we will grant acceptance to Emerson’s proposals, so acceptance of the process becomes acceptance of the argument.

Emerson is very much at home with a strong eccentric strain in American art: Charles Ives writes in “Postscript” to 114 Songs, “To see the sunrise a man has but to get up early, and he can always have Bach in his pocket.” Emily Dickinson writes, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant –.” Emerson’s essays partake of this quirk. A slantwise eccentric progress is central to American art. We follow Emerson’s lead, or Dickinson’s, or Ives’s, and it takes us into the woods. We may get lost unless the narrative, the argument, the poem, the music, or the landscape leads us out.

Emerson’s spatial argument makes a process similar to landscape painting’s spatial journey, spatial narrative. As with Emerson, acceptance of the process of looking at a good landscape the way it makes us look at it is not far removed from what the greatest American eccentrics do. We follow a landscape or an odd argument or a rhetorical figure to the horizon and accept the journey. In an abstract landscape we find some place that infers a point of disappearance. We may find ourselves in a trackless wood but we are still farther along than if we had never started.

Such dashes into oblivion, courageous leaps of faith are characteristically American, like some of Mark Twain’s understated shortcuts, William Faulkner’s dramatically surprising closing lines: revelations that for a moment get behind the mask of the text so we suddenly see the wizard. Dickinson is proved right: we see the truth but see it slant. Or (as Faulkner’s Lena Grove says) we see a “fur piece.” Landscape painting, Emerson, Ives, Twain, Dickinson more than anything want us to see something we might without them never have seen at all.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of the summer.

Emerson believes Americans define themselves by their habitual surroundings. So his context acclimates us, guides us into acceptance of his swerving arguments. Any statement in the essays bears a kinship to what lies all around it, so Emerson’s essays demonstrate the attractive affinity: His prose attracts us, but more significant, it demands parallels. His arguments begin to look like something we have seen before. Seeing better because we know his contexts, we yearn to prove that whatever American thing we are examining is like Emerson. Whitman knew this: when Emerson sent him an admiring letter Whitman never asked permission but stamped a part of the admiring prose in gold on the binding of Leaves of Grass: like me, like my poems. And Emerson after initial bafflement seemed to understand: this made Whitman a difficult friend but a dyed-in-the-wool American.

So the process of acceptance in an Emerson essay and the process of navigating the space of a landscape painting value truth in the same way. More: both Emerson and landscape dig so deep in the American essence because each is trying in its own way to get a handle on all that wilderness America started out with.

Thomas Eakins preferred portraits to landscape and liked Whitman better than he did Emerson. Whitman liked sentimental painting better than he did Eakins’s. Winslow Homer painted landscape but seemed to want to make it look as if Americans had sprung full-blown from the clouds, without spiritual or philosophical underpinnings: Gulf Stream is an allegory, but not an allegory of origins.

American culture is almost as hung up on American painting as it is on Emerson. But simple acceptance (what Emerson seeks) is less frequent in painting, never as easy to get at as an Emerson essay: American painting boasts not just characteristic, but great painters: spiritualists like Ryder, color – and gesture – abstractionists like Arthur Dove and John Marin. Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth are each heavy with very different symbols and by them either one abstracts his personal privacy by his own symbols. It is hard to put an adjective to the sui generis Georgia O’Keefe: she re-defines natural regionalist objects and then casts them, one as a cloudy abstraction, another as a flower landscape. Jackson Pollock – most important – re-defines American landscape twice: first as a heavily symbolic psychoanalytic fable; then as a more mystifying and apparently mystic space made of dribbles and drips. We trace Pollock’s colliding lines and follow out his overlaps until finally his painting teases us out of thought. To look well  at a Pollock painting we must construct for ourselves a narrative of intense seeing. This is not without continuity: a narrative we construct  for one painting helps us with the next and the next, brings us back to the painting that formed it, then to another painting and another. All are engaging, all seem to be in medias res, all end in discovery. The passage to the horizon through individual mark, mode and symbol, is the common experience of looking at any landscape. Each individual’s life is but a voyage out and not a voyage complete; to complee the voyage is to eliminate landscape’s usefulness.

I have been looking at Ian Harvey’s work for more than twenty years and I find in recent work, not very hidden, relics of what I was looking at in paintings he was making in the eighties: a tree stump, a pool, a picket fence. But how in the nineties is each of these changed by developments in technique, aim, color, material, structure, and most noticeably  by a confidence that enables him to leave more and more things out. Now the painting itself contrives to lead us, make us look. And in this looking the paintings seem to assemble for us there is a great power – the power of a complex process, gradually (but never completely) understood.

We follow where they lead not to revel in concentrated meanings, or find something like what Henry James called “the figure in the carpet” but to get there. Getting there in the case of Harvey’s work is more than half the fun. The paintings have an echoing infinity of suggestion and search.

Landscape is a narrative and a quest. Paintings don’t suggest rhetoric, they enact a rhetoric different from that of discursive argument. The order visible in a painting is not sequential. It was certainly painted, revised, restored, but the sequence that interests us is apparent and synthetic, not generative. We may guess at a painting’s beginning, but a painter can fool us. Marks appear as non sequiturs without series: one detail does not grow out of what preceded it as it might in an argument. An argument supplies order and sequence freely and readily; in a painting we cannot know for sure.

A painting is not sequential or linear but collective and recapitulative. What we get is what we see. Marks, squiggles, smears that perhaps once stood in one relationship have become changed, neutralized or erased completely – or they are crowded toward the painting plane or off into the distance. A good painting bears traces of everywhere it has been but it doesn’t always tell the truth because it is not interested in sequence. It wants to spread it all before us at once so it can help us by showing us where it is going.

I think landscape is the most characteristic American painting because of subject: all that wilderness. Landscape is what the first Americans cherished and what arriving and encountering cultures found there that was so different from what they had known: it was a wild and stormy night filled with plenty, a pagan and wretched land haunted by presences never to be explained.

We try to enter portraits (the next most characteristic American painting) through a subject’s stance, the color, the eye. But a portrait can baffle us with the opaque. At the end of the day the persona behind the portrait is forbidding, unaccepting. We don’t really get very far beyond knowing what our attempt to understand the portrait has been like.

Landscapes coax us in, pretend to be like our own space in what we call the real world, they tease us with partial transparency, momentary clarity. They dare us to figure them out, to make of their smears and strokes and drips a narrative, an internal voyage. Maybe if any painting once got it perfectly right it could show us the voyage complete, but it never can. That would be too final. Portraits are insistently opaque, landscapes are perpetual travel.

Harvey’s work has this in common with Pollock’s. An American artist, it seems, can expect a viewer to undertake the voyage or the intense search his or her painting or poem or song suggests. All ask for more than a glance. Concentrated looking tries to find out where the painting comes from, where the artist has been, what he has left behind or obliterated or moved on to.

Emerson has the last word:

Until this higher agency [reason] intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression . . . If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen, causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are those delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its god.

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 1997

(from Ian Harvey, Recent Paintings, 99 Commercial Street, Brooklyn, New York. self-published catalog, 1997)