Armstrong’s Choice
by R. Jay Gangewere
Richard Armstrong, The Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of
Art, picks some personal favorites in a stroll through the galleries.
Richard Armstrong obliged with characteristic wit
and intensity when asked to comment on a handful of his favorite works
in the museum’s permanent collection. He started with a list of seven,
drawn from thousands of paintings, prints, sculptures, photographs, films
and objects in the collection. We started with Bonnard’s Nude in a Bathtub,
a popular choice of nearly everyone. Soon we were talking about bathing,
art as a cleansing experience, Calvinism, and the location of viewers in
the great food chain of art. Here are his thoughts as he confronted some
of his favorites.
Pierre Bonnard, Nude in a Bathtub
To me Nude in a Bathtub symbolizes such a hopeful contradiction. It’s very
late in the artist’s life, and the person Bonnard pictures in the tubhis
wife and lifelong companion Marthedeteriorated, both physically and mentally
over a long period; by its completion, she had died. It is not a heroic
subject. And yet it makes a permanent impressionbecause it is so humane,
and so ambitious in what it synthesizes: color, memory, ineffable sensation.
Marthe was an older woman when Bonnard started painting this, but he
made her look young. She was obsessively cleanperhaps a hypochondriacand
spent a lot of time in the tub. She died before this painting was completed,
and Bonnard himself died a year after finishing it. Because Bonnard was
old here and very near the end of his career, one might expect some sort
of faltering of touch. But the subject is so important to him that, instead,
one sees an infusion of his own longing, and thus a sureness of effect.
It’s a Proustian painting, of course. She was dead: it’s a “remembrance
of things past.”
Edgar Degas, The Bath
There is a sense of freedom and mystery in The Bath. You can look at Degas’
pools of light and try to understand how fragments of color join to make
upor not make upreality.
Because of the way it’s rendered, The Bath is a very dry picture, with
a superimposition of linear order on top of the colors. An evocative painting,
it is darkly monumental as well. Degas has an incomparable ability to compose.
I like the way he disperses the subject, either by placing it to the edge
of the canvas, or by otherwise obscuring it. In this case, he uses a curtain.
Not seeing her face, I think, makes it more intriguing.
Joan Mitchell, Wet Orange
After Joan Mitchell moved to a place near Paris with an inspiring view
of the Seine, her work gained strength. Just as Monet had done in his paintings
at Giverney, Mitchell was able to recreate the landscape she had seen outside
by working inside the studio. She would look in the daytime, make drawings,
and then paint at night. So she is recreating the landscape, hours and
days later, under artificial illumination.
In Wet Orange there is organization of planes. Farmers like rectangular
or square fields because that’s the way surveyors depict fieldsrather
than conforming to topography. Mitchell has recreated that sense of organization
in paint, with lots of colors representing different shapes on top of the
landscape. And her willingness to show us process is very interesting.
There are places where she paints “wet-on-wet,” and where her instinct
is to paint in a grand, gestural manner.
This is a great work, in part because of its size. Like the Monet Waterlilies,
it is a panorama. You’re enveloped by it, and you feel you are experiencing
landscape. It’s optically quite rich, and demands attention. It needn’t
be thought of as having any particular meaning, but the title “Wet Orange”
undoubtedly refers to the condition of paint, and you can imagine it as
a reference to the water-soaked fields, or to the natural light on the
land after a rainstorm. In this painting Mitchell demonstrates kinship
with Monet.
Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Afternoon
Hopper always seems a colonial artist, and I’d say his kind of work is
most likely in an English-speaking colony. It embodies some not particularly
attractive Anglo-Saxon traitssuch as a modern fascination with the desolate.
Here, wooden architecture accelerates our sense of decay in the buildings,
for instance, and the picture is depopulated.
One of Hopper’s great strengths, it could be argued, is that his subject
is light. This celebratory picture seems to me to be either daybreak or
late in the day at his hallowed Cape Cod.
Willem de Kooning, Woman VI
This work represents a critical moment inside American art history, circa
1953. The freedom of abstract expressionism is already five years old,
and there aren’t many artistic ideas that still have momentum after six
or seven years. Usually by then they are getting codified and imitated.
Another reason this is such an important painting in the series is that
it’s a full treatment of the body. We see the body almost fully, and de
Kooning gives you a big range of colorationwith slashing brush strokes
on both sides. The Woman series was motivated by an advertisement for a
cigarette that was cut out of a popular magazine of the era, showing a
woman with a full-lipped mouth. I don’t know which cigarette ad this was,
but it mentioned the “T-zone” around the mouth.
The other great value Woman VI has here is that at that moment the museum
was not pre-disposed to abstraction. The museum didn’t buy this picture;
it was a gift of the great local collector G. David Thompson. This painting
bolstered the collection at a crucial moment, and it’s truly one of the
museum’s icons. We show it in a corridor axis, which allows you to compare
the realism of female representation from the late 18th-century [George
Romney’s The Honorable Mrs. Trevor, 177980] with this abstraction of the
late 20th-century.
Mel Bochner, Measurement: Plant
In conceptual art the concept doesn’t age, but the material does. This
tree has not been here since 1969. This is a lend-lease palm from Phipps
Conservatory. We went with Bochner (who went to art school at Carnegie
Tech) over to Phipps and he found the specimen that he liked, which corresponded
to his initial 1969 collage for the piece. Mel Bochner shows you reality,
and he shows you hyper-realitywhich is the measure on the wall behind.
In Measurement: Plant we’ve got black vinyl tape, a little architecture
for support, and the living specimen, and the artist’s intention to incorporate
thought into the act of viewing.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Yellow Bath)
Here’s an artist who has helped reinvigorate contemporary sculpture. She’s
best known for having cast the interior of a rowhouse in East London. In
the 1995 Carnegie International, Whiteread used the negative space of nine
different chairs to make resin molds for her Hundred Spaces, a field of
translucent abstractions. Yellow Bath is monumental and comparable to the
larger work, and so seemed suitable for the collection.
Yellow Bath is made out of rubber and polystyrene. Here we are looking
at the impression of a very ordinary, everyday object with a functiona
cast-iron bathtub. Whiteread configures sculpture through negative spaces,
and we’re encouraged to see this impression of a tub as an abstraction.
I see now that by picking Bonnard’s Nude in a Bathtub and also Degas’
The Bath, and Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture Untitled (Yellow Bath), I’ve
created a recurring motif of bathing.
I might be showing my evangelical Protestant roots, accidentally. There
is baptism and washing away of sins in some of these pictures. I always
think of art as a kind of salvation, even if there’s no afterlife. I think
a lot of artists, and people who like to look at pictures, see art, and
making art, as a way of surviving. As viewers we’re lower on the artistic
food chainwe think looking at pictures is in itself a kind of momentary
salvation.
Contents
Highlights
Calendar
Back Issues
Museums
Copyright 1998 Carnegie Magazine
All rights reserved.
Email: carnegiemag@carnegiemuseums.org
