Joel Schwartz

4-21-2012

ENG 258

Armory Show of 1913



Oscar Bluemner’s landscape depicted in his 1911 painting Canal, Patterson, New Jersey parallels T.S. Eliot’s “Unreal City” and the modernist motifs of his poem The Wasteland.  Bluemner was an American and his painting’s setting a scene ten-years prior to Eliot’s description of post-World War One London, yet his bleak portrait and The Wasteland’s prose fit together like they were made for one another.  I see leafless and scrawny trees peeking out from behind simplistic structures and Eliot‘s words resound -“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”  The world these artists were born into had re-invented itself through industrial revolution and would not be coming back.  Cities grew in size, nature’s place within them shrank accordingly and a modern landscape emerged to replace a more classical one.
Long before these men’s documentation of their changed surroundings, the American poet Henry Wadsworth noted his in saying that if a material revolution should radically change the nature of the items we interact with “the poet will sleep no more than at present” and I believe this brings up an interesting notion.  Modern times are no less beautiful than classic ones and the respective artwork of each must be held in the light of the values of the period which the artist attempted to reassure or challenge.  The classic masters painted the divine - religious or natural - and the modernists chose to portray human beings in all their gritty commonness.  Enlightenment thinking would lead to the commission of paintings to glorify and honor subject material greater than man while Modernists were spending their time documenting everyday life.


In 1912 the American painter Guy Pen du Bois creates a scene of two women reading books in their living room, titles it Interior and calls it art.  The notion is so familiar, so acceptable in its normality that it exists within the thin line separating bland reality from respected critique of it.  Painted 100 years ago, the piece shows women in what would have been seen then as in their place inside the home - inside of society’s limits placed upon them.  The women are domesticated, heads buried in their books, reading for leisure in a period where their role outside the home was minimal at best.  Emily Dickinson’s words compliment du Bois’s piece perfectly when she writes “They shut me up in Prose, as when a little girl - They put me in the Closet, because they liked me ‘still.’”  The women in du Bois’ piece are no more marginalized by society than Dickinson was but the depiction of them had become acceptable subject material for the visual arts - they had become a social landscape to replace the natural ones of the past.  The divinity and breathtaking qualities which ethereal works were praised for at once seemed pretentious and as if they were lying to their audiences about what being alive is all about.  It’s understandable to strive for perfection in life, yet repeated and never-ending scenes of perfection leave the art viewer feeling as if they’ve living palely by comparison to the beauty they look upon.  Conversely, we see the simplicity of human existence - of two women reading much as we have on long nights - and are re-affirmed of the divinity of the little things in life.  It’s spiritualism in the commonplace.   It’s artists who wandered from portraying subjects with inherent godlike qualities and rather began bestowing these characteristics upon what was previously the common rabble.


We gaze upon the French painter Paul Cézanne’s self-portrait completed in 1894.  The piece echoes Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself where he says “I resist anything better than my own diversity and breathe the air and leave plenty after me, and am not stuck up, and am in my place.”  Whitman’s prose is very humbling, much as Cézanne’s portraiture would have you believe of him as well.  The separate works each portray their creators without exalting them in the process - each man modestly acknowledges himself as an individual without boasting.  One characteristic of Modernist thinking is that of self-consciousness and focusing ones eyes upon one’s immediate surroundings, not striving to create something perfect but rather to create something human.  Whitman summarizes this concept best in saying “What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you? All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,  Else it were time lost listening to me.”