The Discrete Charm of Duccio
Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art - October 13, 2024 - January 26, 2025
Janiva Ellis - StackedPlot - 47 Canal - September 19 - October 26, 2024
David Salle - New Pastorals - Gladstone - September 26 - November 2, 2024
Thomas Schütte - MoMA - September 29, 2024 - January 18, 2025
Giorgio Morandi - Time Suspended Part II - Mattia De Luca - September 26 - November 26, 2024
Denzil Forrester - Two Islands, One World - Andrew Kreps & Stephen Friedman - October 25 - December 18, 2024
Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 - Metropolitan Museum of Art
The direct correspondence between art and religion is that they both deal in the indescribable qualities of inner experience, which generates their own resistance to semantic description. Mallarmé's rejection of the juridical necropolis of French society points towards a hypothetical religious future that would affirm our heavenly instincts, as art aspires to do, and Danto's passage suggests the idea of a relationship between image and religion that attempts to excise the mediation of the artistic. These phases of early modernity and early Christianity are almost mirror opposites: Art as an affirmation of experience that becomes a utopian ur-religion on the one hand, divinity made so tangible that art becomes unnecessary on the other. Art today has precious little to do with our experience of life (hence its floundering) and religion, of course, no longer has a seat at the table; in Duccio's time, religion, art, and experience were indissolubly mixed. This is already too historically complicated for me or anyone else to address definitively, but I'm not trying to unravel the mysteries of temporality here. I don't even really want to complain about contemporary art. I'm only trying to think through why the Siena show at the Met is great, which is already hard enough.
Although I was enjoying it, when I first went to the Siena exhibition I kept thinking about the strangeness of all these people gathered in a museum looking at these very old pictures of Jesus. To the extent that that's an existential thought it's also a stupid one, but since I don't usually think that about art in this way it made me interested in thinking through what this work is doing. As research I read the articles on the exhibition by Jackson Arn, Ben Davis, and Holland Cotter, as well as this excerpt from Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Vasari's life of Duccio, and some chapters of a very poorly assembled public domain reprint of Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle's book on early Italian painting that I had lying around. The last of these is a straightforwardly useful factual account of some artists from the era, Vasari's passage on Duccio is three pages long and wrong about almost everything, and the Belting suggests a prehistory for Sienese painting that's useful at a remove, but we'll come to that later. None of the articles on the show offered me much help. They all lean on the preciousness of the work as self-evident, which is fine, but without making a particularly convincing argument for it. Davis says little more than the work is "tactile" and "present" in his reverent overview, Arn mostly gushes about technical details in a reverent overview, and Cotter leads with an interesting acknowledgment that Western religious painting can be especially awkward and demanding for its audience in a secular museum setting before going into a reverent overview. Each supplies a requisite amount of background information and makes some worthwhile observations, so they've done their job, but the work itself is addressed elliptically. The problem, I suspect, is that these "primitive" painters resist, or fundamentally oppose, the vocabulary of art connoisseurship that we associate with Western painting since the Renaissance. Arn in particular reads the paintings through a lens that feels anachronistic, acting as though details and qualities like the sense of a body's weight, a smile contorted to a scream, or the "irony" of a miniaturized city are all intentional choices by the artists and not the byproduct of convention or accident. These artists have clear sensibilities that distinguish themselves from one another, but treating them as individuals with knowable psychologies is to underestimate the remoteness of a 14th century devotional panel to the eye of a critic in 2024. Giotto, Duccio's Florentine contemporary, can be read more convincingly in this sense because his innovations set the stage for the the Renaissance, but the conundrum of Siena is that it did not anticipate the Renaissance. It certainly represented a development beyond the Byzantine, but since the change was much milder than what occurred in Florence it stands closer to a culmination of an old tradition than the emergence of a new one. The show's title, "The Rise of Painting" therefore feels misleading, doubly so because the school was essentially wiped out by the Black Death by 1350. It's impossible to know how Sienese painting would have proceeded without the plague, but, if I had to guess, my bet would be that it would have continued to resist the influence of Florence instead of succumbing to it by the end of the next century, like another Cretan school. Thus it's almost a misreading when Cotter notes his appreciation of Simone Martini's relatively dramatic, expressive figures, like Arn's search for perfect little moments of painterly detail, as if the two of them can't avoid looking for post-Renaissance qualities that are either amateurish in comparison to later painting or simply absent. Seeing the work in these terms isn't objectively incorrect, per se, but the emphasis feels off-balance. It's akin to speaking of Fra Angelico as an important pioneer of Renaissance painting; although his work demonstrates a thorough understanding of linear perspective, he's stylistically conservative in comparison to a Masaccio or a Uccello. That's no insult to Angelico or the Sienese, it's just looking for the heart of these paintings in the wrong quarter. To present this work in terms of what came later is slightly trivializing, as Davis rightly points out in his review, and historically questionable. But if this painting shouldn't be approached as a precursor to Renaissance art, how should we approach it?
As I said, the exhibition initially made me feel a little confused, and I mostly still am, thankfully. Certitude is the death of interest, in art as in religion, and engagement comes more from incomprehension and dedication than understanding. To make things more manageable, we can focus on Duccio's Stoclet Madonna and Child, a small devotional panel at the beginning of the exhibition and the most expensive artwork ever acquired by the Met. On first impression it's rather modest, a cracked little piece of wood with burn marks on the bottom of the frame from the candles that used to be lit beneath it. Christ looks like a chubby little man, Mary's facial expression is caught somewhere between boredom and depression, and her thumbs are far too long. The illusionary parapet may be an impressive detail for a painting circa 1300, but that's not quite enough to justify Philippe de Montebello allocating $45 million for what he hoped would become the American Mona Lisa. There may not be much to see when judged against, say, Velázquez, but realism is not the goal here. Devotional icons operate on a more intangible level than painterly illusionism because their image has been honed by the insistent repetition of an invariant image meant to evoke a religious permanence. Since the first image of the Virgin Mary was held to have been created miraculously, the pre-Renaissance convention of the Madonna and Child doesn't adhere to our contemporary notions of art and form. As Belting explains (the Danto quote above follows his thesis), early Christian relics and icons were considered to objectively represent the divine. Duccio may have been more interested in aesthetics than artists of the 6th century, but the basic concept was still that the image was holy in itself and artists only needed to repeat the composition to convey that holiness. This framework rejects almost every standard we have of artistic creativity; the artwork aims for a spirituality that the artist is subsumed by, operating like a laborer on a predetermined image towards a predetermined end. The end results still vary widely, of course, so a proper appreciation of Duccio's Madonna starts to emerge most easily when compared against others, like an earlier Madonna and Child by Berlinghiero or a slightly later Simone Martini. His figures are less stiffly statuesque than the former but more lofty and devout than the latter, landing on a harmonious balance between the earthly and the sublime, neither cold and impassive nor mundane and knowable. With that the details start to fall into place: the gathered fabric where Christ holds the hem of Mary's hood; the luminous blue-green of her robe and its golden hem; the grace of the tooled halos; the flowing ease of the panel as a whole. In other words it has an air of beatitude, a tangibly "auratic" quality unrelated to one's feelings towards Christianity. As an irreligious person I find it a convincing piece of real religious feeling, even if it took me a while to grasp its distinction in comparison to the rest of the show. The Duccio is ineffable and the whole show pursues that same ineffability, which is obvious. What's less obvious is the nature of that phenomenon, which seems to come from a synthesis of experience, religion, and art.
I'd argue that the paradigm of contemporary art still adheres to what Baudelaire sets up in "The Painter of Modern Life," in spite of the 20th century's many insistences to the contrary, if one considers the quality of successful art's relevance or "coolness" to be its ability to meet the present moment and avoid clichés, i.e. contrived imitations of the past. That may be an unpopular sentiment, but I'd also say that unpopularity has a lot to do with the sorry state of the arts. Briefly, because I don't want to dwell on it, my theory is that the rupture of modernity created a novel, phenomenologically rich experience of the secular world, whereas for the previous millennium-and-a-half European experience had been tied to, if not always dictated by, religious tradition. The modern break with the past gives Mallarmé his dream of a new religion founded on "the heavenly instinct in each of us," and that instinctual pursuit of phenomena in art worked for a time. What we've lost since then is that heavenly instinct, which is not to imply we need a return to religious traditionalism. Rather, we lack engagement with tradition in general, or more specifically an understanding of the means by which humans have navigated the ineffability of lived experience throughout history. That intellectual inheritance was still reliably received in the earlier phases of modernity because the culture industry hadn't yet swallowed up everyone's attention in its maw, but in the last 50-odd years, and particularly the last 20, media has gradually replaced society, the humanities, any need to think about the past whatsoever, whatever you want to call it. It's impossible to go back in time, like the "trads" want to do, but humans have until recently always appreciated and drawn from the past to inform their understanding of life. Taking no interest in the work and ideas of people from hundreds of years ago is an unspeakably narrow deadening way to live, just as it's deadening to only consume new music, movies, books, art, etc. Similarly, to have no interest in the history of religion because it's foreign to you is to throw out a particularly large baby with the bathwater. Religious thought has simply taken up too much space in the scope of human experience to be summarily ignored. Even the most rational-minded enemy of the opium of the masses stands to learn about religious history, if only to better reject it. I can't remember where she said it, but to paraphrase Danièle Huillet, any revolution must take religion seriously to have any chance of succeeding. This is all a can of worms, but I'm not interested in dealing with it further here.
I only brought up modernity as a contrast, because Duccio is most definitely not a painter of modern life. The life of Christ was more remote to him than he is to us, and he inherited a style of art that had been active for about eight centuries. This creates a strange temporal dynamic of an archaic image of a subject that was already archaic in its own time, which therefore doesn't follow the rules of illusionistic painting that we're used to. Where a Veronese or a Delacroix seeks to draw the viewer in to the world of their image by various means, i.e. Fried's absorption and theatricality, Sienese painting is pre-illusionistic and unconcerned with making Jesus and Mary appear to be real. The reality of these works is in what Ben Davis calls their presence, which is a bit too neat and simple a term, but a valid one. Rather than simply being present, I find these paintings draw you in to the time of their making, a transportation to the minds of the people who used them for prayer in their original context. Thus I was surprised to be captivated by the area of contemporary rugs and fabric samples because they succeed in filling in a large gap in the experience, suggesting the texture of the world of 1300 where the paintings evoke their own reality without representing it. This might be the source of their self-evident but still elusive appeal; that religious imagery and the icon tradition in particular is ultimately not representational or realistic in any sense that we're used to. It eschews its present in favor of an eternal atemporality of the spirit. There's still something of this quality in Renaissance painting, but the monolithic dominance of religious art slackens as technical developments in perspective, oils, and canvas emphasize more subjective and virtuosic artistic expression and subject matter broadens to include straight portraiture and classical subjects. What's so remarkable about the art of Siena is that it becomes almost a negation of painting by its own means, an art concerned only with effects beyond the visual. Even though hundreds of years of Christian imagery repeated with only minor variations leaves little space for the artist to explore, those strictures nevertheless can lead artists to produce art that far outstrips anything artists are capable of today. This unveils a difficult fact about the nature of art that's extremely foreign to us, unused as we are to the idea of a relatively static, shared visual culture: if art can achieve the transcendent, it does so by the means of the artist's idea of transcendence that they have received from a tradition or a culture, and only a great artist can realize a quality of sublimity within that continuity. For contemporary artists driven only by their desire for self-expression or career advancement, the gates of heaven are locked before they even begin.
Well, those are some of my thoughts on the Siena show. It feels abortive and poorly expressed when I read it over, but it's taken too long to write as it is. Aside from the works by Duccio (note the scratch marks on Satan in the Temptation on the Temple, the first panel of the Maestà predella), I'd also single out Simone Martini's Orsini Polyptych (As I lightly implied, I'm not a fan of his expressive faces but the colors and detailing are particularly sumptuous) and Barna da Siena's Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine. Other than that I'll say "just go," like all the other reviewers. The following reviews aren't much more than an addendum of stuff I've seen in the past month that deserved comment. Since TMAR is in a transition phase my habitual reviewing system is all fucked up, so I don't have my usual notes and these are mostly undeservedly curt. I had some vague idea of contrasting them with the Siena show, but the thoughts never really came together so I'm not going to pursue that.
Janiva Ellis - StackedPlot - 47 Canal
I saw this over a month ago and all I wrote down in my notes was "the tripped-out wreckage of the west, but affirmative by its technique and force," but it's one of the weirdest, most successfully shows of contemporary painting that I've seen in a long time. The paintings are suffused with a hallucinatory potency, everything is shadowy, crumbling, and strange with a vivid specificity that's engaged with the imagery of a idealized historical/timeless Noir Gotham while also feeling entirely engaged in the present moment. Unlike almost all paintings made today, these really feel like paintings that couldn't be made before 2024, and not for any banal reasons of technology or timely reference, which is what I mean when I say art still follows the paradigm of "The Painter of Modern Life." My painter friend was impressed by Ellis's confidence in including outwardly kitschy details that my friend would be embarrassed to paint, which is a good point. Like the ghoulish bald woman in a pantsuit dancing on top of a globe or the shockingly straightforward portrait of a woman dressed up for the club and smoking a cigarette, any of the choices she made could be entirely corny in a different context, but she has the vision and control to synthesize it all together into a seamless and evocative whole. I'm embarrassed that I'm failing to give this its fair dues, but I'd rather say this is a great show ineptly than say nothing.
David Salle - New Pastorals - Gladstone
Salle, as a seasoned appropriator, is well-poised to be the first painter to use AI successfully. Some of his chopped-up figures work as little glimpses of bodies and some don't, but what's most compelling is the sense of an attempted synthesis between the artist and AI, where he's aspiring to make the artificial sensibility of the program influence his choices as much as he's training the AI to generate imagery he wants to work with. I don't think it actually approaches an equal exchange, but the attempt in the first place feels like a step towards AI actually being generative instead of derivative. The best moments for me were where you notice that he's amended or extended AI-generated motifs in paint, as is particularly obvious in New Pastoral 11, and there are other good moments like the leotards in New Pastoral, Ballerinas. I don't really think they're great painting, but I'm not sure they're supposed to be. I found it extremely hard to make sense of these, which is already interesting in itself, and the works primarily document his own attempts to grapple with the implications of this new tool he's using even if as a viewer you consider them to be "failures," which doesn't feel like an appropriate term. It's an inquiry into technical means, not necessarily to a neglect of the ends, but as a shift of focus to something that becomes other than the usual aim of artmaking as an act and a phenomenon. It's an experiment, an actually exploratory experiment that tests a hypothesis on the substantive content of AI. It may not be a resounding success in the form of a midcentury artistic breakthrough but it at least manages to actually prod the limits of the nature of painting, which is no small feat in this day and age.
Thomas Schütte - MoMA
I didn't like this, but I suspect that's personal. Schütte might be a case of too much too late in the sense that I've seen too many "woe is me" cynical meta-art practices to appreciate the originator. Like his peers from Cologne, I missed the boat on getting obsessed with that whole era in my twenties and now I'm too old to care about this kind of gleeful dissipation because I'm too well-acquainted with its limitations and logical endpoints. His brand of alienation feels particularly influential to Australians, maybe, but I'm speculating. It would make sense that they'd go for the deep-cut guy, or maybe I just feel like they're more into sculpture than Americans. I think the root of my exasperation is that this type of willful failure-as-methodology is no longer productive when there's no more pretensions to deflate or sacred cows to kill; it's a fucking waste of time to sneer at a shitheap, I'd rather be doing something else. I liked the Frauen series and the shelter models in the last couple of rooms.
Giorgio Morandi - Time Suspended Part II - Mattia De Luca
This is another show I didn't make any notes for, but it's a townhouse filled with a ton of Morandis so I don't think I need to make much of an argument for it. Or rather, I was very involved in the work while I was there and had thoughts that were worth writing down, but I didn't so I can't remember them. His painting really works well in its own company, seeing the slow development of quietude in his vases until they become wide, flat, and immense, like Cezanné's apples squared. His landscapes have a rare verdant radiance that I associate with Albert York and some da Vincis and not much else. Don't miss the unfinished portrait of his sister on the back side of the painting of the clock on a pedestal in the room with the early works.
Denzil Forrester - Two Islands, One World - Andrew Kreps & Stephen Friedman
I didn't know about Forrester until I went to the Doig show at Gagosian so it's kind of a surprise to immediately get hit with a two-gallery show. I'm often confused by the artists that galleries chose to collaborate over, but Forrester's painting thrives under the deluxe treatment. He's a unique case because his subject matter is so simple that it seems like it shouldn't work; dub nightclubs, his mother at the sewing machine, a friend who was killed by the police, that's about it. I don't even really like his habitual purple/orange/blue color palette very much on top of that, but they're great. He's consistent to the point that it's difficult to even guess the decade of a given painting, but there's also a surprisingly fine-tuned development to his style from the '70s to now. As time has passed his paintings have stopped being documents of his social world and turned into reminiscences of concerts from the beach in Cornwall, but he remains able to capture something of the living quality of an event either way. He almost feels like an inverse to Janiva Ellis's extremely sophisticated, extremely contemporary approach to painting; instead of a complex, reflexive deconstruction of the baggage of painting and society, he just thinks of stuff he has feelings about and paints it. They do actually make me think of Siena inasmuch that his incessant scenes of dancers and sound systems aren't actually as concerned with the composition of the image itself as they are in capturing the atmosphere, the excitement of a crowd, or music as communion. He works backwards from an impulse to an image, to the point that the realization of the image is almost incidental, which isn't to trivialize the particularity of his methods. It's just such a straightforward, commonsensical approach to painting that what becomes emphasized isn't any formal or rhetorical content in his work, it's that the art world is so oversophsticated that we don't have more painting like this.