Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum

The sculpture overall is clearly banal, but then the title implies that the pig is a representation of banality, so that the piece becomes an allegory of itself, its superficial meanings and appearances feeding back and feeding back till any fixed perspective you might take on the thing becomes completely relativized and hollowed out. This hollowing is the artwork’s “content” — it manages not just to exhibit banality but to aesthetically objectify it, to deliver it up to experience. Koons achieves this effect with remarkable acuity and variety of means: there’s a deft Duchampianism at play, what with the hired craftsman’s signature preserved on the base of the carving; despite its stupidity, the sculpture cultivates some “formal” intrigue, namely in the pig’s ambivalently downcast head and its high-tone color scheme; it’s nimbly aware of — but not beholden to — its institutional context, inhabiting a space between non-art and hyper-art which the museum steps in blithely to mediate. Would it be better art if all this were done in better faith? Probably. But man, this is postmodernism on all cylinders.

Cady Noland. Oozewald. 1989. Aluminum, nylon, silver cloth (69%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA)

JFK iconography sees diminishing returns on its edginess and conceptual lucidity as we move further out of the 20th century. (Lutz Bacher’s work suffers from this, too.) And Noland’s art in general loses a lot through its “museumification” — this piece seems to have much less “form” as a standalone sculpture than it would have had as part of an installation or a series. (This is a problem with conceptualism in general which curators, as much as artists, should have to bear.) That said, there’s much more to this work than there appears to be at first. It strikes you as lightly aestheticized nostalgia, but then you notice that the narrow metallic border around Oswald’s silhouette is irregular, protruding a little at his shoulder and at the left side of his head. Why? The artwork seems conspiracist or thinly political, too, until you try to come up with an explanation for the precise size and placement of the circles all over the metal sheet, or for Noland’s decision to display that sheet like a folding “We’re Open” sign. The stupid title contributes to these ambiguating mechanics. It is equal parts direct (the folded flag oozes out of Oswald’s wound like political violence seeping from the nation’s unhealed traumas) and circuitous (like, what the fuck does that even mean?).

Bruce Nauman. Diamond Shaped Room with Yellow Light. 1986-90/2018. Concrete, LED bulbs (56%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Middelheim Museum

This piece is evidently a comment on the sterile feelingless environments of commercial buildings from the end of the 20th century (office complexes, department stores, etc.). It evokes very well their liminality and subtle disquieting spatial effects. (It comprises two triangular concrete “rooms” partitioned in the middle, lit by some yellow LEDs hung high up on the interior of the structure.) As with much art from the moment just after Minimalism and Conceptualism, Nauman’s piece suffers from its unrooted novelty and its misplacement of aesthetic intent. While the artwork is clearly derived from late-modernist architecture, it makes its claims upon experience via space at the expense of structure. That is, it is an atmospheric situation more than it is a configuration of forms. Great buildings, however, are spaces at the same time as they are structures. Now, of course, Nauman wasn’t making a building — he was making a postminimalist “site.” But the impossibility of bracketing the history of architecture when you consider this work as an aesthetic whole places unexpected limitations on its value, and this is precisely the problem with postmodern art. Convention — the circumscribing burden of past art — creeps in despite artists’ best efforts to shirk it. No matter how phenomenologically eerie this bare set of chambers might be, it could never make as magnificent a claim upon your senses as something by Kahn or Breuer, or alienate as authentically as an actual strip mall.

Bruce Nauman. Carousel. 1988. Steel, aluminum (81%)

The Hague, The Netherlands: Kunstmuseum Den Haag

This piece confronts the primary issue with postmodern visual art — its tendency to fall unwitting victim to convention by rejecting it outright and so allowing it to fester, sidelong and unconsidered, inside artworks’ weird formal recesses — by semantically acknowledging and then conceptually metabolizing the history of sculpture. Namely, the cast steel creatures with the stands still stuck in their feet look like they’ve been ripped out of bizarre equine monuments, just to be included in Nauman’s device. Their presence as, like, debased epitomes of the sculptural medium gives licence to the rest of the work — gridded floor; machine; kineticism — to function as something murkily other than sculpture. Having unyoked itself from the strictures of medium, the piece, with one of its hands, hits you with its straightforward brutality, and, with the other, does legerdemain with meaning. The work is palpably significant, in other words, but also unaccountably vague: of course something repellant has been done to these animals, but the whys and even the whats of it all are completely obscure. The beasts’ forms are slightly off-base (and why is one of them hugging another?); the circular movement and the dragging along the floor seem like (literal) overkill; the apparatus at center is way too stark, and yet it’s apparently deliberately shaped. And so a gulf opens up between the directness of the piece’s import — it is about violence, full stop — and the circuity of its means of meaning this.

Pedro Cabrita Reis. The Passage of the Hours. 2004. Glass, aluminum, brick, iron, cement, fluorescent lamps (64%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Middelheim Museum

The piece, which looks like a bombed-out apartment building, is a deceptively complex system of building’s-structural-components-as-empty-frames. It fosters a continuous confusion of insides and outsides. An I-beam, for instance, will appear to be delimiting the border of some negative space, but then you’ll realize that it itself is being delimited by a fluorescent bulb on its own outside, which then makes the erstwhile outside into an inside (and so on, and so on). This visual-semantic mechanism is traceable to Cubism and, before that, to Cézanne. It is stimulating, but without the aesthetic authority afforded by a grounding in the tradition of a medium (which Cézanne and the Cubists undoubtedly had) it runs the risk of becoming circular and inartistic. Reis’s patent disregard for architectural authority — this is literally an anti-building — gains him some shock-points, but it holds his undeniably “interesting” visual effects from legitimating themselves artistically.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rijksmuseum

Perhaps Rembrandt’s greatest painting. Its energy derives from the force-counterforce mechanism of its figures pushing down and out against the inward, upward thrust of their table. Simple, but Rembrandt has marshaled every element of the picture towards this end. First there’s the table itself, the butt end of which is massive and smushed against the front of the image, but also shaded and imprecisely rendered, such that despite its commanding presence it nearly vanishes alongside the six lit faces of the syndics. Then there’s those syndics, whose collective form is as unified as it is varied and rhythmic, locked together by the L-shape of the seated man at left and proceeding rightwards as a broken wave of head-tilts and shifting eyes. This wave crests and crashes not only on the y-axis but on the z-axis too, such that the painting seems to pulse all through its midriff, yet without threatening to rupture the sanctity of depicted space: the syndics, for all their motion, are wedged tightly between the wall behind them and the picture plane-affirming mass of the table before them. The painting manages to convey both a radical self-consciousness of its limitations and its conditions of possibility (a “modernism”) and a blithe commitment to real reality (it’s there in the way the figures stare out of the picture). And I haven’t even mentioned the delicacy of Rembrandt’s handling in, for instance, the gloves or the tassels of the tablecloth, let alone how improbable it is that this delicacy coexists with the firm rendering of the syndics shirts and the suppleness in their flesh.

Rembrandt. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. 1632. Oil on canvas (92%)

The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis

The paint handling here doesn’t have that controlled mania to it that characterizes Rembrandt’s best work. His much later Syndics group portrait is among the greatest paintings in Dutch art because, unlike this picture, its surface manages to convey this sort of detached, frenetic aliveness, but without at all undermining the fragile unity of its group of figures and their complex web of relations. What this painting does possess, however, is just such a complex web as the Syndics, maybe even a more dazzling one. It’s far from unique to observe that the space between Tulp’s gesturing hand and the heads of his students is a chasm whose dramatic potency is almost unrivaled in art, or that the array of glances that cluster in the left half of this painting is at once immediately grasped and impossible to describe. And apart from the internal energy and resolvedness of these dynamics, what makes these figures so beguiling and attractive is the apparent absence — or at least the extreme shallowness — of the space they’re crowded into. There’s a lot of volume in this painting, but it all emerges out of the relations between bodies, rather than from their placement in depth. It’s men making meaning (space is the meaning of paintings) through their free and rational activity: and the whole of this action unfurls, foreshortened, from that book at bottom right.

attributed to Rembrandt. Raising of the Cross. c1633-45. Oil on canvas (80%)

The Hague, The Netherlands: Museum Bredius

Smarter people than me have both claimed and disclaimed this as an actual Rembrandt, so I'll just go ahead believing that it could be one, and recognizing that, regardless of its attribution, it's great. It's a study, of course, so the miasmic quality of its rendering can't be read into too much, except insofar as such miasmas — more controlled, maybe, and more partial, but no less rawly emotive or disruptive of narrative clarity — are one significant aspect of Rembrandt's style. The painting's value derives from a system of diagonals that resist resolution into any coherent spatial order: the cross is the dominant line in this painting, but it's countered by the plane implied by the foreshortened horse at right, rhymed (somewhat awkwardly) by the spindle of a tree at back upper left, and undermined by the spade beneath it at center, which is just barely unparallel to it. The resulting sense of balanced chaos is like a volumetric expression of the strange effect of the paint handling: despite all the flux, that spade at center (for instance) possesses as much heft and linear definition and palpable surface as any chalice in any Dutch still life.

Rembrandt. Andromeda. c1630. Oil on canvas (85%)

The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis

Rembrandt has somehow managed to make Andromeda both a void at the center of this picture, and its only truly bodied form. This is an effect of the real material substance of the paint in the foreground rocks and in the foliage above the figure. It causes Andromeda’s flat pallid belly and flank to seem almost disappearingly convex, but also, the abstract physicality of these oranges and browns serves to emphasize how delicately, how almost infinitesimally drawn — just how lovely an image — she is. (The accordioned skin in her neck and pits, the shadows that walk down to her groin, the rusty shock of hair crying out to the same-colored stones at her ankles — this is unrepentant rendering.) In the 1630s, Rembrandt’s jewelled surfaces were sometimes the main point of his pictures (c.f. Bellona). Here, the lavishness is peripheral, aimed, at once, at relativizing and at concretizing the representation. And so, though somewhat slight, this picture points forwards to the philosophical blacks of the painter’s maturity, which serve the same purpose. (It also offers up a solution, if sidelong, to the indulgences of Rubens. Paint-pushing here is a means, not an end.)

Rembrandt. The Vision of Zacharias in the Temple. 1633. Oil on panel (88%)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rijksmuseum

These religious pictures of Rembrandt’s have an obscurity to them that’s rooted somewhere deeper than his tendency to depict marginal biblical scenes, or his paintings’ odd artificial appearance,* or even the literal darkness of their tones. At least in this painting of Zacharias, the obscurity is deep and structural, facilitated no doubt by the darkling, decorated field and its brash, rapid jumps in value, but not entirely reducible to these qualities. More completely it (the obscurity) pours out from impossible spaces like the dark nook in the chair behind that leaning staff, or the scar of blackness that’s been cut between the heavenly light at upper right and the red-brown background behind the priest. So lively and variegated and palpably immediate is the whole of this image that these moments of quietude — of near nothingness set against the erratic presences of Rembrandt’s patterned objects and planes — serve to anchor the formal relationships that surround them but also almost to ironize them, as if to point out that there’s an Absolute from which all this differentiation has emerged and to which it might be obliged to return. There’s a contingency to Rembrandt’s lovely surfaces, an anxious quality, to that makes them so much more than decorative.

*Rembrandt liked to costume his friends and apprentices elaborately, and then paint them from life in the studio.

New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)

The bottle rack suffers for not being the urinal. This isn’t Duchamp’s fault, except to the degree that it is implicit, in his attempt to transcend art’s restrictions by completely embodying the artness of art, that only a single eloquent gesture could ever take up the Readymade’s mantle, with all other similar “moves” being subject to a greater or lesser degree of conventionalism. (This is the case not just within Duchamp’s practice, but for the whole subsequent history of appropriation that flows from his work.) Whether because they’re so spiky and cool-looking, or because there are many different (potential) versions with slight variations of “form,” or simply because they don’t quite have the cache of Fountain, the bottle racks demand to be taken as sculpture. Not just as sculpture, to be sure: the non-art aspect seems almost literally to flow through their negative spaces and to hang on their metal hooks, distancing these objects from facile recognizability, despite the resolute presence they possess. But as sculpture none the less: there’s a prettiness the bottle racks can’t evade, which is the fault of their reception and a mark (however faint) of their failure.

Marcel Duchamp. Eternal Siesta (after a poem by Jules Laforgue). 1911. Pencil, watercolor, and crayon on light tan wove paper (90%)

New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)

Much as this may be a sketch, and much as it may be an early work, it still seems to lay out — and to do so as clearly as his contemporaneous paintings do, or more so — what Duchamp’s project really was, and how, almost in spite of itself, this project relates ineluctably back to histories of looking and of the pictorial arts. The cubism which Duchamp got up to is easy (if deceptively so) to see as, well, cubism; this drawing can’t be seen as much at all, except scribblings and maybe (maybe) a richly degenerate Symbolism. And yet, there’s a distinctness to this assortment of pictorial signs — not as a registration of thought or a trace of the artist’s hand or a representation of some worldly thing, but as itself alone, whatever it is. So what you see is a depicted object struggling to demonstrate, not its transcendent identity with the means through which it’s been brought into pictorial being, but instead its distinctness from anything but itself: its essence, I guess. This is obscure, but it’s there in the way the drawing hovers just above the abyssal empty space of the page; and in the openness of every form on its own, but the ultimate closure of their amalgamated whole; and in the refusal of any one portion of the arrangement to assert its position behind or before any other; and in the way the color seems neither to accent nor to indicate nor to model nor to mold. This is Duchamp demonstrating what pictures want to achieve but never possibly could; and so he moved on from pictures.

Marcel Duchamp. Box in a Valise (from or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy). 1935-66. Leather valises containing miniature replicas and reproductions in various mediums (80%)

New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)

The series of all these boxes taken together is our proper critical object, not any one box in particular. These are machines for fixing the unfixable essences of artworks, or rather, they’re jokes on the contingency that underlies our experience of all art. Their aesthetic substance is the gulf that exists between the total sum of their parts, and the actuality of any one of the individual “original” works they reproduce. Criticism of the boxes is therefore, by its nature and theirs, purely speculative, at least to a certain degree. At Duchamp’s retrospective, however, MoMA’s display of the series forced further speculation than was necessary: the display mystified and materialized the boxes, turning them into art-object fetishes rather than preserving their vastly interpenetrating conceptual mechanics. You can’t have visitors pawing at the art, of course, but to display the cases as cheeky design work is to sap them of their potency. (This isn’t to say that the way they assert themselves as sleekly made, slightly gauche keepsakes isn’t part of what they’re doing aesthetically. But what’s important is how their odd, evasive connectedness negates the significance of their design for our experience.) Were I able to range out all the components and take my time going through them, I imagine Box in Valise would strike me as a masterpiece.

Marcel Duchamp. Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?. 1921. Painted metal birdcage, wood, marble, two glass dishes, thermometer, cuttlebone (56%)

New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)

As Greenberg was wont to point out, an artwork that founds some new style (or genre or medium or format or whatever) is usually going to be lower in quality than the works that build off what it proposes. The former will be unwittingly beholden to past forms, while the latter can reflect with more distance and clarity on the relationship between novelty and convention. This famous artwork is as good a contender for the title of “first Surrealist object” as anything. It therefore demonstrates the problem. It’s caught between the conventions of sculpture and the frantic aesthetic possibilities of concepts. (The same could actually be said of much, if not most, later Surrealism.) The work’s main effect results from a sudden collision: you recognize in a flash the collective unfitness of these objects — you may even recognize a vague poetic relation cultivated between them — but soon the shock morphs into an easy understanding facilitated by the sculptural qualities which the work has failed either to skirt or to transcend. The marble is a joke on sculpture that, to its aesthetic detriment, forces you to gauge the work at least in part against the history of carvings in marble; the formal openness of the birdcage (which Robert Morris would take up to better effect in his own, more successful non-sculptures) does not sufficiently negate the (sculptural) solidity of the assemblage overall. The title of the piece does a lot of the experiential heavy-lifting, which would be fine except that the connection between sneezing and the stuff in the cage is too oblique to reward sustained attention.

Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. 1917-. Porcelain urinal (99%/1%)

New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)

If there is art it is somewhere inside this.

New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)

First off, the black bands at either side of the canvas are like anti-Seurat, negating and relativizing the image rather than affirming (as do Seurat’s painted frames) its self-sustaining liveliness and interiority. (It’s too easy to read negativity, even hostility towards art’s most basic methods into Duchamp’s early work, but it’s also probably foolish not to do so.) What’s most interesting about this painting, however, is the way it “reads as” or “performs” cubism, while also deftly shirking cubist formal demands. This isn’t the same thing as misunderstanding the style, à la someone like Severini. Instead, it’s a matter of using this new mode against itself to reveal its own limitations. (And we’re back again to Duchamp’s flippant negativity.) Only the figure herself is fragmented; all the unarticulated ground around her, plus the rather unabstracted staircase behind, situates her in a space unaffected by her presence within it, which is almost the opposite of cubism. (There’s a similar simplicity of the figure-ground relation in the more famous second version of this painting, though there it’s a bit less plainly evident than it is here.) Additionally, there are many just-visible pockmarks on the surface of this painting — mostly in the upper left — that ever so delicately foreground its object-qualities, though in a much more literal-minded and anti-imagistic (i.e. less “painterly) way than, say, Picasso‘s chair caning. The upshot of all of this is that the painting points in the direction of an affirmation not of itself as a painting, but of the nude descending as an actual reality. Despite the debasements to which it has been subjected by the techniques of an increasingly critical modern art, this figure has a presence apart from that of the picture. The source of Duchamp’s conservatism is here, but also the source of the promise he’ll continue to hold for modernism until the day it dies. It seems strange to call Duchamp a realist, which is what I’m doing. But what are the readymades other than things that, once they’ve submitted themselves to every conceivable critical operation, assert some sort of inexplicable Being?

Georges Braque. Pitcher and Three Bottles. 1908. Oil on canvas (73%)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum

This is the calm before cubism’s storm, and it’s a nice painting, if far from Braque’s best. You can see him working through Cézanne’s shards of figuration, working them up into so many discrete planes and beginning to recognize and deal with the untenability of this operation if plasticity is to be preserved. This is there most substantially in the way the shadowed space between the bases of the pitcher and the two bottles climbs up towards the back wall and dissipates there into patchy greens and grays, as well as in the top surface of that piece of fruit, the front face of the pitcher, and the tabletop’s sudden break with perspective at left. The surface of the painting overall is hereby left pretty well pulled apart, which Braque has tried to remedy by floating his greens all throughout the scene. It’s quaint compared with the full-on commitment to planarity that would come in the following years, but it works out in a small way. The grassy accent at the mouth of the pitcher, itself a response to the hue of the front bottle’s right side, is the best single instance of this.

Pablo Picasso. Woman with Mustard Pot. 1910. Oil on canvas (71%)

The Hague, The Netherlands: Kunstmuseum Den Haag

This is just prior to high cubism. The style is still working itself out, and so the painting lacks both the ease of earlier Picasso and the explosive novelty of what was soon to come. Of course, the fragmentation is here, and it’s doing interesting things to objects and their umwelt: look at the mustard pot at left, how its mouth tips forward but the base is depthlessly flat, teeing off a muddle of grays and browns behind it. (Are these colors describing the dimensions of the [implied] table, or is its fusion complete with the wall behind and above it?) But there are issues. Picasso’s facture is still beholden to modeling. That is, there’s no brushwork (except for what makes up the table I just mentioned) that isn’t subservient to one particular plane or another — and one of Cubism’s great innovations was its consummation of the liberation of handling which Cézanne had begun. This problem doesn’t remain local to particular depicted surfaces, but extends into the picture’s overall design: that flowing green repoussoir at right seems to indicate that Picasso couldn’t yet bear the prospect of opening up his painting to the fact of its own surface; it holds the painting awkwardly inside of itself, despite several indications that it’s ready to burst free.

Pablo Picasso. Violin. 1911-12. Oil on canvas (87%)

Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum

The brightness is almost repulsive, but it serves a handful of ends. First, and most simply, it forces you to see this painting not for any accidental niceties, but for its taut relations and the tightwire act of its spatial logic. Second, it allows the “image” (such as it is) to dissipate around the edges of the canvas, without losing any of its hard-won internal coherence (the oval shape of the frame facilitates this as well). Third, it allows for remarkably slight shifts in tone to produce enormous dimensional effects, as when the patch of deep brown just to the left of the painting’s true center sets off a spiral sequence of planes pulsing forwards and back, starting with the tall white trapezoid just to its (the brown patch’s) right and culminating near the base of the neck of the violin. While this painting lacks the inexplicable, undeniable fulcrum point that much of the best cubism possesses — it’s almost the black squiggle at the top, and it’s almost that bit of brown I mentioned, but not quite — it nevertheless never falters. A work of refinement despite its difficulty, if not quite an epitome of its style.

Marcel Duchamp. Apropos of Little Sister. 1911. Oil on canvas (85%)

New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)

Duchamp’s cubism-proper is so good as cubist painting that it can feel correct not to read it against this stylistic grain — but that would be a mistake. This painting, however, is not quite cubism-proper, and so it instructs us better than, say, Nude Descending in how best to consider Duchamp’s picture-making practice. Though it occurs as a sequence of planes, the abstracting of this girl’s body isn’t measured and objectivizing in the way of Picasso or Braque, but rather plaintive and uncontrolled — almost sentimental. Though one third of the canvas is left untouched, things don’t lead back inevitably to the picture plane and to “flatness,” and so things here aren’t ultimately about the painting or “painting” as such. Instead, it’s all about the girl. According to a hamfisted modernism, this would spell kitsch, as would the blues in the upper left and the almost illustrational quality of the cutely crossed legs. But to make such a judgement would be to take this painting as a painting, and maybe it asks that we take it otherwise. There’s a pervasive indistinction at play: in the colors lapsing into each other; in the broken fields of paint that hover somewhere between literal surface and illusionistic depth; in the bodyless body of the little sister. Rather than averring its picture-ness, this is a painting struggling to deny its status as a painting — a different (almost an opposite) sort of modernist negation. This impulse was better suited by non-mediums like the readymade than by the vaunted medium of painting. Still, Duchamp’s ability to use his format against itself is spectacular.

Bruges, Belgium: Museum St. John’s Hospital

The busyness that characterizes this triptych is an intensification of earlier Flemish tendencies, à la Christus or van der Weyden. There is still, inside each of Memling’s scattered figures, all of van Eyck‘s stillness and surety of comportment. But they also possess a newfound forcefulness — a heightened capacity for movement and interrelation — and it’s doing things to their world, things that Campin‘s exquisitely cramped interiors could never have accepted. This is most evident in the oneirism of the right panel, but it’s also there in the rückenfigur at left and the way his hip-thrust kicks off a zig-zag through the city street and past its walls and back into the far recesses of the image; or in the harsh distinction which the center panel’s columns impose between the front and the back of the scene. (There’s almost violence to the way the background’s been cut into six thin slivers.) As the 15th century progressed, Netherlandish painting’s tight tether to reality was transforming itself into something more like a shackle: Memling had to realize that his predecessors’ verism was not a sustainable achievement, but rather a pit of polar forces that would come to rend apart pictorial perfection. Bosch dealt with this problem by thematizing it; Memling, here, tried instead to metabolize the coming rupture, to make it into a new, even a realer form of realness. A failed pursuit, but its result was this masterpiece.

Hans Memling. Triptych with the Adoration of the Magi. 1479. Oil on three panels (88%)

Bruges, Belgium: Museum St. John’s Hospital

Each panel throws its figures into a different sort of architectural surround, and in answer the figure groups collect themselves differently, inhabit space in different ways: this responsiveness not simply of figures to their grounds, but of the precise comportment of each object to every other, across all strata of the illusion, is the root of Memling’s quality. At right the figures’ clustering in middle depth causes the system of apertures and enclosures in the cathedral walls behind them to bristle; at left the disjunct openness of the group contributes to the strange power and directness of the scene’s hierarchical proportioning, but it also makes the Holy Family seem almost coddled by their humble stall. (Vide, too, the slight repoussoir of a crop of stones at lower left.) And at center, it’s as if these two spatial programs from the wing panels are blended into one. Mary’s upright centrality puts the dozen-ish figures around her into lockstep with their setting — see how Joseph’s body doubles the angle of the wall at his back — but then their dispersion and individual liveliness seem to break apart the building almost as much as Mary (and the pyramid she forms with the magi) brings it together. The space of this picture engages in a push-pull between fragmentation and coalescence. This dynamic is the classic perfection of early Netherlandish illusion wrestling (this was decades after van Eyck) with its limits and its conditions of possibility.

Hans Memling. Christ with Singing and Music Making Angels. 1483-94. Oil on three panels (80%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts

These three enormous panels originally comprised just a portion of a lost larger altarpiece, which you have to imagine was once one of the jewels of the last great phase of primitive Netherlandish art. As it stands now, this triptych-by-default is exquisite but (with justification, of course) unresolved. The whole thing repeatedly gestures downwards, not just literally, as in the case of Christ’s downcast glance, but in general with every mote of its movement and weight: in each of the side panels the figures are positioned with a lateral rhythm that, by way of the inmost angels’ jutting woodwinds, presses off of each image through its bottom inner corner; and then there’s the gold space of heaven, which is open and airy at each pictures’ top while the bodied mass of seraphs pulls the composition somewhat awkwardly earthward against it. These elements, and others, would have found completion in the rest of the polyptych, but here they’re calls with no responses. Of course everything is still rendered with a supple stillness, and of course there’s a thickness to the formal relations between these figures that, somehow, manages not to interrupt each one’s enclosed and silent perfection. But these successes only make this artwork’s incompleteness all the more lamentable.

Hans Memling. Moreel Triptych. 1484. Oil on three panels (78%)

Bruges, Belgium: Groeningemuseum

The wing panels stake their claim to being European painting’s first group portraits, which is of art historical significance. They’re thick with detail (especially the right one) and they have the handsome appearance of polished stones. But as group portraits they don’t quite rival, say, Dirck Jacobsz’s famous Guardsmen from a few decades later, with its never-ending pinball game of pantomime. Elsewhere, Memling makes much out of his stiffness and his quietude. At his best, these qualities in his paintings can mount towards nearly unrivaled refinement; here, they’re repetitive and in ungainly contrast with the dazzlingly various features painted into the background. (Patinir was soon to invent landscape as a separate genre to solve the problems that caused Memling to stumble in this work.) Across its three panels this altarpiece lacks the deliberate sense of placement, and of forms’ responsiveness to each other across multiple layers of depth, that characterizes Memling’s best work: Christ and his bearer are too neatly framed by the cliffs and the clouds; the throngs of supplicants leave little room for formal relations to fester. Of course, the fabrics and foliage and many disparate surfaces are extremely well-painted, but it amounts to much less than what’s usual for Memling.

Hans Memling. Triptych with Lamentation of Christ. 1480. Oil on three panels (75%)

Bruges, Belgium: Museum St. John’s Hospital

Despite their intricate interrelations, each body in this painting has a strong self-enclosed, almost atomic quality. This gives the picture a slightly staccato effect (especially in the middle panel) and dramatically emphasizes the distinction between figures and their grounds: look at the impossible distance between that limned left arm of Christ and the Virgin’s cloak behind it. This hardness and linearity is common to early Netherlandish art, but in paintings from the end of the 15th century like this one, it begins to approach a degree of self-consciousness and high achievement that nearly amounts to a crisis. The figure group at center is almost exotically disunited, malformed by Christ’s rigor mortis cleaving John from Mary and Mary from the front of the image. The fracturing stems from the same realist impulse that led Campin and van Eyck to sculpt their perfect spaces behind the picture plane, but their equanimity has been displaced by a nervous energy — it’s utmost realism working its way past the point of tenability, almost like Italian Mannerism’s emergence out of Renaissance balance and measure. Memling tends to wield this mounting contradiction better when he leans into it, but here there’s a bid for balance that’s totally confused by (among other things) the gulf between foreground figures and the background expanse. Against his reputation, Memling is not actually the great painter of old Flemish poise and precision, but of their steady dissolution.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Van Gogh Museum

The colors and the slanted arrangement are pretty out-there and so bring this painting up to the brink of extremity for its own sake, but it’s all justified by the graphic intensity of the tree-and-sower system slammed up against the picture plane, and by the delicate integration into these two figures of certain elements of their ground. Namely, the breath of sunset greens inside the crook of the tree at top center, and the strokes of lime in the coat of the farmer, pull the background up to the very front of the image, but also temper it by subordinating its high tones to these backlit blacks and browns. Also, the graphic nature of this painting goes a long way towards resolving one of the big problems in Van Gogh’s style: his tendency towards mark-making at the expense of spatial order. Here, his famous daubs are there in the fields and, to a lesser extent, in the sun and the sky, but they’re corralled by the hard lines around them and suppressed by the two stamped figures up front. The marks therefore impart a wild surface energy, without disrupting or distracting from the more crucial build-up of depth and volume. (It’s telling, though, that it takes so extreme a figure-ground contrast as this for Vincent to bring his handling under control.)

Vincent van Gogh. Enclosed Wheat Field with Rising Sun. 1889. Oil on canvas (75%)

Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum

This painting prefigures Klimt‘s divine landscapes in an interesting way, but it is a smaller artistic achievement. Klimt manages to aesthetically justify his paintings’ pure decorative cores by destabilizing them with the barest, most vanishing hints of spatial hierarchy. (It reminds you of Altdorfer‘s great St. George.) But Van Gogh is forced, by his compulsion for tossing around paint, to close in the pretty part of this painting with a wall (literally!), so as to firm it up in space and legitimate its relation to the rest of the image. This is just an extreme version of the way he tends to bind his forms with thick black lines. It’s a solution, but an evasive one. Not that I’d deny the unique effect of that tilty enclosure barely containing a universe of sweeping greens; it’s just worth pointing out that Vincent causes more problems than he solves.

Vincent van Gogh. Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun. 1889. Oil on canvas (74%)

Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum

Van Gogh only ever moved partially and passively (at his best) towards the sort of orderliness and control of the painting’s worked-over surface that characterizes the art of, say, Cézanne, the consummate post-impressionist. Vincent’s mark-making is never not overbearing; it is the primary feature of his paintings that they are amalgams of daubs and strokes — errant, erratic — before they are figures, forms, even patterns. This primacy of the mark makes the space of Vincent’s paintings feel subordinate to their physical presence, which is a limitation. In this piece, however, there’s enough variability to the appearances and effects of all the different applications of paint, and enough build-out to the composition in the background, to make the maelstrom in the foreground seem contained and deliberate (if not quite necessary). The obvious achievement in this regard is the haystack near the front of the image, which defies the artist’s compulsive facture to body itself into plasticity. But the way the curves of the mountains find an echo in the windsweep of the hay is productive, as is the cordon sanitaire of dragged paint in the midground. The yellow sky and thick-rimmed sun is a travesty.

Vincent van Gogh. Shoes. 1887. Oil on canvas (72%)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Van Gogh Museum

Vincent’s manic brushwork is never as controlled as Cézanne‘s at even his sloppiest. But it’s usually pretty exciting, and at its best (as here) it achieves worthwhile effects. This painting’s moderate success lies in its bottom left corner, where space bends around the heel of the shoe before congealing in that darker patch of paint and then dissipating upwards into the breezy upper quarter of the canvas. But by the top right corner it’s all a bit too dissipated, energetic but open and unfocused. When Vincent manages to sustain the spatial results of his markmaking, he can be great. Otherwise he’s not much more than a masterful decorator, slinging experiments but failing to follow through on them. (The patches of brownish-pink on the shoes’ soles and tabs are cool, but they don’t go far enough towards commingling figure and ground.)

Vincent van Gogh. Garden with Courting Couples: Square Saint-Pierre. 1887. Oil on canvas (53%)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Van Gogh Museum

This painting epitomizes what’s wrong, aesthetically, with Van Gogh’s frenetic facture. The obvious comparison is to Seurat, and slightly less so to Cézanne: Vincent’s skein of fast marks is related to the all-over effects of both of these painters, more so to the atomically pulled-apart figures of the former. With Seurat, however, there is always a close (if somewhat inarticulable) relationship between the lovely surface patterns and, not only the objects these patterns give weight to, but moreover this weight itself and the dimensional space it’s set within. In contrast, Vincent here focuses on surface at the expense of plasticity and a coherent spatial order. It’s as if this scene takes place behind the array of brushstrokes, instead of being brought about by or in conjunction with it. Daubs of nonlocal color appear perfunctory and merely expressive, failing to bring disconnected zones of the canvas into any sort of unlikely concert (as do Seurat’s colors); the sky presses down too heavily on the canopy of trees, but this heaviness doesn’t disperse through the picture’s lower half.

Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts

It’s as close to self-evident as anything in art can be to say that Rubens is all about the way he paints his flesh: it’s supple, motile, topographical in its rhythms of shadowed pits and peaks; unimaginably differentiated in hue and texture, too, but also as real as the skin on your own arm, or somehow more real despite its mottlings of strange reds and blues. Problem is, Rubens has many pictures where, in addition to showing you that he can paint bodies with such controlled bravura, he also works to prove that he can get away with compositional murder — swinging masses and reaching forms in all sorts of states of collision, diagonals against diagonals against diagonals, tableaus nested in vignettes within pictures inside of pictures. It’s seldom not breathtaking but it’s usually too much, and it muddles his virtue as an essentially figural artist. So, in pictures like this Epitaph, where every inch of the arrangement seems calibrated to focusing attention on the perfect painted flesh of Christ, it’s possible to recognize Rubens’s genius acutely. It’s an almost craftsmanly genius, one born above all from attention to the task of rendering. But then, what makes this altarpiece exceptional isn’t the complex luminosity of the Lord’s torso alone, but, more generally, the way the whole of this ensemble prepares you to see the flesh of your savior. His body is opened out towards the picture plane. His head in profile is pressed against the indistinct ground behind it, flat and regular like the atmosphere of an icon. The patrons in the side panels occupy not only a different, but also a much more developed and particularized space than Christ and his figure group at center, underscoring the arbitrariness of and therefore the simple enframing function performed by the grey background. The apostles are rapt, staring at Jesus; their slightly convex arrangement cups the Lord and counters his left arm’s extension, concentrating the energy of the picture right at the point where his hip meets his shrouded elbow.

Peter Paul Rubens. Venus Frigida. 1614. Oil on canvas (76%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts

I’d be insane to say that the figures here are anything other than perfectly sculpted, or that the brood of the sky or the desolate sway of the hills are anything other than miracles of Rubens’s brush. Venus looks at once lissome and like she’s made out of stone; the left side of the canvas rivals anything ever done by El Greco. But there’s something fake and inexcusable about Rubens when he paints like this, so controlled in his recklessness, so choosy and witting. Is the stone/stump mass to the right of the goddess a stunning little passage? Is it an abstract cry across the canvas to the turbid background, unsettling even the most settled forms in the satyr’s belly and Venus’s back? Yes, of course it is. But is this “all-over” quality in the surface of this painting ultimately only in service of the flesh Rubens so relished painting? Is there a carelessness at work in three-fourths of this painting that makes you question the virtue of every delectating muscle and fold in the quarter of the canvas that really counts? Also yes.

Peter Paul Rubens. Raising of the Cross. 1609-10. Oil on three panels (88%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Cathedral of Our Lady

Despite how full-bodied his paintings always seem, Rubens actually deals in extremely shallow space, here as elsewhere. Volume is much more the attribute of objects and figures than of space itself. (This is why his backgrounds often seem so phoned-in, as do the sky and the stones in this painting.) There could be mere feet, even inches, of recession into depth between the tugging bearers at bottom right of the central panel and the upraised arms of the attendants at upper left: and however much distance there actually is between them, their extension backwards into the core of the painting is, at every crucial point, countered by an even bolder projection out towards the picture plane (this mostly comes in the form of Caravaggesque highlights on each muscle’s bulge). Through this dramatic push-and-pull between the inside and out of the image, which seems to take place not in any one location but fractally across the painting’s whole surface, there emerges a sense of connectedness between all of the figures, but also of violent dehiscence. The forms in the painting seem at once to be coagulating and rending themselves apart. While the same effect is more convincingly (because more quietly and economically) achieved in the best works of Caravaggio, this is among the artworks where Rubens’ busy braggadocio is most aesthetically legitimate.

Peter Paul Rubens. Descent from the Cross. 1611-14. Oil on three panels (78%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Cathedral of Our Lady

The discontinuity between the three scenes in this triptych is interesting, especially as a foil to the inter-panel unity of its companion, the Raising of the Cross altarpiece. But in the final estimation, things don’t quite come off: compared to the Rockox triptych — which uses a similar separation of its wing panels from the action in its central scene to control and concentrate the effects of Rubens’ extravagant facture — discontinuity in the Descent seems instead to detract from the monumental oneness of the figure group in its middle panel, and to draw away from the magnificent paint handling that makes up the body of Christ. (Look especially at the cocky horizontality of the stairway Mary’s standing on at left, at how it gets no response till the meek rungs of the ladder to the right of the Lord.) The Descent shares with the Raising an anxiously shallow depth of field, as well as a heavy implication that there exists in the space just behind its figures some massive, vacuous force that’s in the process of breaking apart but still somehow scaffolding everything around it. In the Descent, however, this force is cloistered in the heart of the central panel; in the Raising, it seeps through every relation.

Peter Paul Rubens. The Prodigal Son. c1618. Oil on canvas (81%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts

It actually suits Rubens to be working in this unusual (for him) low Netherlandish idiom, rather than to be aping grand Southern structures. Closer to Beuckelaer than to Titian in its arrangement, but still replete with extravagant handling, this picture contains more places than usual where Rubens’s handling can go safely wild, without getting lost in itself — the flank of a cow or the rump of a horse; the webs in the rafters; that brief lit segment of wall at left, before it gives way to bric-a-brac and darkness. Rubens was such an avid paint-pusher that, in his pictures, vastness often became a liability, and structure could come to seem like an afterthought or an apology for his indulgent working of the surface. This picture, instead, possesses the orderly disorder of early Flemish still life, but Rubens has suffused it — a necessary addition to that idiom’s somewhat picky visual language — with the vivacity of Venetian facture. It makes his bravura in this medium seem controlled and deliberate, almost completely necessary. This is probably because brushwork here is specifically keyed to, bounded by, discrete “things” in the painting: swine, legs, wooden wheels, sunrise. If nothing else, it’s interesting to see Rubens engaging in “inverted still life” (shoving the “prodigal son” action into the bottom right corner of the canvas) and the covered-candle trope (which the Utrecht painters were only just then perfecting).

London, England: The National Gallery

The magic of the best 15th-century painting — and it literally does feel like magic, looking at art this good — pours forth from the fact that this stuff is recognizably modern, and yet it’s not beset with any of the modern anxieties which artists would come to develop around depiction and its many impossibilities. There is no guile here, no winking — there is very little art. What there is is a shadowed floor and some stockinged legs, the folds of a gown and a chandelier. There is a pregnant woman and a man, as well as their dog. Light courses through the window and brightens the bricks. There is some fruit on the desk and the sill, and it’s all set in very shallow space. What I’m trying to comment on isn’t this painting’s verisimilitude, exactly, but rather the ease with which things exist amongst things inside it, their perfect positioning within a system that occasionally points outside itself (the tips of those shoes, the sliver of background through the window, and of course the mirror) but is never self-questioning, and has no need to be. And that’s not a shortcoming, but a virtue. Since every object delivers itself to you so fully, every surface gets to be a sensational delight: the weighty green folds, the adamant hardwood, every point in the chandelier. Nothing here is in contest with its own presentation as an illusion. Everything is.

Jan van Eyck. The Goldsmith Jan de Leeuw. 1436. Oil on wood (95%)

Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum

Of all the half-dozen or so early Netherlandish paintings in its small gallery at the Kunsthistorisches, this portrait by van Eyck is the only one whose subject looks straight out at the viewer. Its value as an artwork, though, isn't reducible to the way it addresses you: there's the vague glow of its background, which makes the sitter's black garb the blacker; there's the game of van Eyck's shading, which describes de Leeuw while also averring that all about him can't be known; there's the perfect limning of the goldsmith's neck and paws, played against the fur — soft, almost vanishing — that lines his collar and sleeves. These aspects of the way the image is built, which in a limiting parlance we could call the painting's "form," contribute to an impression it gives of severity and earthly thereness, but also of the opposite of that — a threatening abyss. But there's something about the overall effect this portrait has (perhaps it's something about what it is, as such, to experience any good portrait) that feels particularly irreducible to formal language. Whatever it is, it's in that stare, those eyes: there are glints of full humanity in them, among the first not just in the history of art, but in the history of man. And painting has promise (so seems to say van Eyck) insofar as that humanity is constituted by, constitutive of, look meeting look.

Jan van Eyck. Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?). 1433. Oil on wood (92%)

London, England: The National Gallery

Whether or not it’s empirically true that, as Gombrich wrote, van Eyck “invented oil painting,” it feels when you look at his portraits as though you’re witnessing the very advent of figures occupying the same pictorial space as, and thereby being forced to establish themselves consciously against, a ground. It’s in, I think, the vague glow that’s there around the bulk of his subjects, and in the knowing glances they cast off the front of their depicted worlds, that van Eyck establishes the promise and the power for experience of this new problematic in the history of representations. And yet, his characters don’t struggle: they’re not vexed — as they’d come to be in later European painting — by this new condition they’ve been flung into. Instead, here, the sitter (the artist?), his face a chart in richly varied hues of the mind that’s hiding behind it, purses his lips and directs his glance in full faith that his dark-cloaked shoulders will be distinguishable against the darker surface behind them. His turban is both a real thing and an astounding painterly invention.

Jan van Eyck. Saint Barbara. 1437. Oil on panel (81%)

Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts

It’s fabulous of course, and it proves just how perfect van Eyck’s draughtsmanship was — febrile and exact, always at the threshold of something — but it also shows just how insufficient was drawing alone for conveying the fullness of this master’s abilities. Van Eyck’s genius, that is, wasn’t only in his placement of things into breathing space, or in the touch he would give at the boundary of every object, but more generally in the way that the glimmer and the small weight of his oils could vivify what was already well-enough alive as drawing. This is all a little inexact, but van Eyck’s beauty is so plain and natural as almost to demand inexactness. His drawing is sinewy and sparse, both full in every form and somehow also not there at all. But this is only a portion of what makes his finished works among the greatest things in the history of art.

Jan van Eyck. The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos. c1441-43. Oil on masonite, transferred from panel (77%)

New York, NY: Frick Collection

This is not among van Eyck’s greatest works. It lacks the singularity of presence typical of his portraits, as well as the magical sense of depth and order — whereby space and the surfaces inside it always come to seem realer than reality — that characterizes his other Marian scenes. Comparison with the similarly arranged panel in Bruges will clarify the Frick painting’s shortcomings: the shallow depth and tighter crop of the Groeningemuseum’s piece forces each of its figures to assert themselves more powerfully within the volume of their room than do the characters at the Frick; the absence of much empty space has all the patterning and perfectly modeled robes vying for visual supremacy. In the Frick picture, however, the landscape that spans the whole back of the image sucks your eye away from the action and sort of disperses your vision. (Van Eyck’s Madonna at the Louvre also has a far-receding background, but it’s bracketed by columns and walls at left and right.) This leaves you to marvel at van Eyck’s facility in rendering robes and decorated surfaces, but it saps the picture as a whole of its strength.

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)

The title is overblown, of course, but the difference between Bird Sensing the Essential Insanities and some of Graves’s less-good philosophizing work is that this piece’s symbolism doesn’t ever exhaust itself, and is in fact complexified rather than explained away and liquidated by its title. Namely, it’s difficult by means of visual experience alone to put together how this pensive bird is supposed to be relating to the bands of red and the fields of gray that surround it; it takes the oddly specific, oddly ambivalent framing device of the title to suggest how the space in this image might be working, but then you’re left with questions like: Are the red bands the “insanities,” or are they expressions of the bird’s sensing activity? Is the titular bird actually the small one at bottom left, and the more mythical-looking avian at center is some vision it’s having? Is that jagged gray form a vessel or a stone or a pit or a pond? Does the wedge of black at upper left exist in the same world as the tableau in the foreground, or is there a medley of cosmic stuff at play here? In a word, there’s an exciting contradiction between the almost overdetermined signifying specificity of the sensing bird emblem and the ambiguous spatial order it’s set within. On an art historical note, it bears mentioning that the “mask” the bird is wearing is obviously an allusion to the “formline” technique, suggesting Graves’s interest in the Native arts of America’s Northwest Coast.

Morris Graves. Moor Swan. 1933. Oil on canvas (78%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)

Already at this early stage, Graves was toeing a few lines: those separating cosmic significance from a sentimentality for symbols; experimentation from petty daubing; well-wielded emptiness from a lack of finish; and a productively limited from a simply limiting narrowness of palette. This painting manages to stay on the artistically gainful side of these divides, but it only ever does so by a hair's-breadth. Its main dynamic is the coexistence within it of (and frequent interaction between) three separate pictorial layers: untreated canvas, thinly applied paint, and thickly applied paint. The distinctness of each of these layers gives the work an appearance of being rent apart, yet this disunified quality is sufficiently present across the whole of the painting's surface as to provide for it a paradoxical sense of pictorial unity. When tensions between the three layers come to a head — as they do on the swan's back, where raw ground, sparse blacks, and glistening thick impasto feathers are all crammed tightly together — the power of Graves's technique is apparent, but elsewhere, as in the planes of blending pigment above the bird, their relations are a bit too untroubled and therefore inartistic. The swan threatens at first glance to be too neatly a symbol of something, but then its ambivalent relationship with Grave's complicated handling of paint — look how its left flipper sticks out into that band of plain canvas — saves it.

Morris Graves. Still Life with Onions. c1937. Oil on canvas (78%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)

There’s a bit of Hartley in here, and a bit of Matisse, but this painting isn’t reducible to either one of their styles, and that’s very good for it. There’s a funny perspective thing going on (this is the Matisse) such that the tabletop which the produce is set upon seems to be parallel to the picture plane, while the close-by ground and the far-off landscape at each one of the four corners of the canvas both appear to be receding into depth. In a more classically modernist composition like this (as opposed to one of his more expressive, less taut, more symbolical pictures), Graves can seem at times to struggle to make his individual forms interact with the overall (Matissean) pictorial order. But then the handling is absolutely stunning, not just at the level of all the individual brushstrokes that make the tabletop seem turbid and alive, but also the marks that rim each form (and this is the Hartley). Too, the color is phenomenal: the peach in the main plane and the browns and grays around it are given life by these erratic strands of red and yellow and green at their edges. If this painting doesn’t suggest that Graves had developed a style, it does demonstrate that he had cultivated his talents.

Morris Graves. Spring with Machine Age Noise No. 3. 1957. Ink and transparent and opaque watercolor (52%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)

This strikes you at first as a bad painting — the sort of thing done by a dilettante in the afterglow of New York abstraction — and it never gets over that initial badness. But some patience and a willingness to take it on its own terms reveals it to be at least an interesting work of art, if not quite a good one. Its title tells you how to look at it: synesthetically, as a portrait of a natural soundscape corrupted by "machine age noise." If this doesn't exactly justify the lack of substance in the picture's pretty watercolored foreground, or the dissonant relationship between this and the overbearing abstraction in the sky above, it at least explains these faults and grounds them in something better than misapprehension or mannerism. Still, it's not enough that Graves had an interesting idea for why to paint this painting; what counts is that it failed to come through as an elaborated visual language.

Morris Graves. Each Time You Carry Me This Way. 1953. Ink and charcoal on green-toned paper, now faded to brown, mounted on heavyweight paper and fiberboard (40%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)

Sometimes Graves's symbols pull themselves apart from whatever it is it seems he wanted them to symbolize; other times they don't. When they do, the pictures can be good; when they don't; Graves's art struggles. This drawing is one of those where the image just screams armchair philosophy and half-baked metaphorizing, which is to say it's a bad Graves. In part this is because of its title, in part it's because the bird seems an "illustration" and the landscape elements surrounding it are too cleanly abstracted to serve as a countering force to its clarity, in part it's because there's nothing to challenge the slick facility with which Graves has handled his charcoal and ink. The problem isn't that Graves ought not to have striven towards meaning, but rather that meaning here goes on at the expense of pictorial integrity, which is a different sort of significance than the one Graves was consciously after. And so it's all too readily graspable.

St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts (Exhibition: In Caravaggio’s Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi)

First off, it’s pretty fucking crazy that Boulogne would have not only couched this Denial in a cardshaps image, but actually minimized the biblical portion of the scene and crammed it into just the upper left quadrant of the picture. I’m sure there’s iconographical significance to this that’s beyond my knowledge, but I’m also sure that the tension between these two modes, religious and secular, was at a very basic level intentional and intended to shock, aesthetically — it still manages to do so. Not only that, but the strange marginality of the picture’s ostensive focus (Peter) casts itself over the whole rest of the scene and animates the configuration of bodies and objects throughout it. Peter’s hand, hovering in space just inside of the picture’s left limit, is about the only thing here that isn’t implicated in some sort of grabbing, crossing, twisting, flipping, jostling, or pointing motion (even the relief figures on the sarcophagus are in a complex state of physical interaction): that hand is a node of stillness that sets off the barrage of chiasms leading to it from the opposite edge of the painting, through all those knotted limbs and glances. It might be said that Boulogne spells things out more than Caravaggio ever needed to — his forms actually collide instead of implying collision — but while this is a limitation on his art it’s also a highly developed visual language.

Caravaggio. Boy Bitten by a Lizard. c1597. Oil on canvas (82%)

St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts (Exhibition: In Caravaggio’s Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi)

Except for its value this is pretty much the same painting as the London Boy Bitten, which is slightly earlier. But something about the muddiness of this picture — compared to the high tone and sharper contrasts of the other version — makes it come off a bit worse (though it’s still great). It’s probably because the driving force behind both artworks is the way the boy’s shoulder looks like a projectile hurtling towards the front of the image, but then something about the gleam of his fingernails or the play of the light on his wrist holds it back in space. Tonally this picture is much more even than its twin, so the drama that goes on between its various illuminated forms is less intense.

Gerrit van Honthorst. Monk Reading. c1618. Oil on canvas (71%)

St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts (Exhibition: In Caravaggio’s Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi)

This painting is caught somewhere between the plastic intensity of Caravaggio and the philosophic clunkiness of his greatest and most singular follower, de La Tour. Here, miserly light doesn’t quite reduce structures to their basic components (as it does in de La Tour), nor are there many surfaces that wrench against each other and their darkness to signify vibrant movement (as there are in Caravaggio). Instead, there’s a primitivity to the forms and their relations with each other, and a lack of dynamism to the way illumination is at work. Light kind of clobbers the objects it falls upon, instead of lightly limning them. The monk’s hands and his forehead and the book he’s holding are all rather blockish, but not as a result of the application of some particular theory of lumen, but rather intrinsically so. There’s a staunchness, a sense of weight, that this picture gains, but it sacrifices too much in the way of subtlety and coherence of its spatial logic. There’s small wedge at the right edge of the picture that is confounding, but I wonder whether the canvas has been cropped.

Jusepe de Ribera. Saint Thomas. c1612. Oil on canvas (79%)

St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts (Exhibition: In Caravaggio’s Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi)

Obviously Ribera’s great, but on occasion you can see in him, almost more clearly than in any of the other tenebrists, what was lost in the transition from the breakthroughs of Caravaggio to the style of “Caravaggism.” Of course this painting is amazingly structured, with the rumpled cloak bodying itself out the front of the image and the hard vertical of the staff bisecting that angled ray of light and the Saint’s perfect laterality undercut just slightly by the twist towards the picture plane of his right hand and the faint grin on his face and the black beady eye beneath the lightness of his forehead and his ruddy cheeks. All great, but isn’t there a slight aspect of “designyness” to this? Doesn’t the light coming in from the left look more like Ellsworth Kelly‘s aestheticism than it does Caravaggio’s violent grappling with the conflicting realities of painting and what it represents? Isn’t Ribera taking things about this picture for granted?

Francisco de Zurbarán. The Flight into Egypt. c1638-40. Oil on canvas (83%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

Zurbarán is the great Spanish Caravaggist, but there’s another, perhaps a conflicting tendency at work in this painting, too: the tonality and even somewhat the spatial sense of El Greco‘s mannerism. El Greco’s influence is less prominent than Caravaggio’s, but it’s there, and the tension between the two is productive and strange. It’s all Caravaggio, of course, in the terse realness of Joseph’s feet and in the perfect shadow his fingers cast across his palm; nor is there any of the Greek in the spreading darkness that molds the donkey’s face and neck. But the pink of Mary’s robes (if not the shadows between each fold) is El Greco, as are the streaks of light that hit Mary’s lap and diffract across its surfaces. The composition, too, is less cinched than the Roman’s tend to be, and the figures inhabit its space more ambivalently — more akin to the way Magdalen, with her weight, yokes foreground to back- in the El Greco in Worcester. While the complete, refined style of either of the two earlier masters are better than Zurbarán’s hodge-podge here, it’s also true that there’s no mannered copying or unreflective mashing-together going on in this painting. Rather, it’s alive with all the frantic movement right that goes on right before a synthesis.

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

It would be a disservice to the graphic inventiveness of Uccello's art to say that its greatness is merely a matter of how well it figures a collision between the medieval mind and the modern. Yet this notion captures, however reductively, the essence of his art: there is an untroubled coexistence in his paintings of flatness and depth, of the bounded quietude of each figure in itself and the infinite motility of these figures altogether in their infinity of correlations. This painting, originally made for a cassone (fancy chest), is slightly weaker than, say, his famous San Romano three-piece, not only because of its smaller scale but also because it struggles somewhat to manage its busyness (which can feel somewhat dispersed) and because the ground on which its figures are set is comparatively unactivated (in the San Romano pieces there's a constant struggle between figures and grounds for organizational priority). It's worth noting that the profusion of rigging and vertical spears is a visual instantiation of Uccello's obsession with perspective: diegetic stand-ins for a painter's orthogonals.

Cosimo Rosselli. Adoration of the Christ Child. c1495. Oil and gold on wood panel (46%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

There are two tiny triplets of magi in the background which I sort of like. But there’s a lot of painting here besides them, and it’s not very good. Mary is somewhat oddly framed by the manger behind her. The landscape is disheveled and the building is too orderly. The way Mary and Joseph lean in towards each other is far too easy to grasp. And against this, the counter-movements of Christ and the toddler John serve not to complexify the overall figure group, but to sap it of its cogency. The four of them are neither disconnected enough to seem productively chaotic (Piero), nor cohered enough to feel like perfected geometry (Raphael). This structural ambivalence percolates from these four figures out through the whole of the picture, causing all sorts of unarticulated spaces and shapes to fester (see the band of tan ground between the grassy knoll and the base of the manger’s foundation).

Fra Bartolommeo. The Creation of Eve. c1510. Oil on wood (69%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

This painting is small and brushy, so I wonder if it was made as some sort of private devotional picture. (The handling, and the way the figures inhabit their surroundings, reminds me a bit of Raphael's predellae.) It's not a screaming success, but there's an undeniable quality to it that demonstrates the high degree of aptitude common to Florentine painters around 1500, even the minor ones. There's an odd variability to the postures — God's stiff lateral configuration; the complex curving and twisting of the Adam/Eve-system; the juxtaposition of this figure group with the weird open trapezoid of the first family to its right — that rhymes with the active forms of the landscape. The gradient in the sky is compelling, but its prettiness is somewhat out of tune with the rest of the picture.

Pietro Perugino. Dead Christ with Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus (Sepulchrum Christi). c1494-98. Oil possibly with tempera on panel, transferred to fabric on panel (85%)

New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Exhibition: Raphael: Sublime Poetry)

There’s less surety about forms, and more anxiety about what it means to paint a picture, in the work of Perugino compared to that of his student, Raphael. For this reason Perugino was probably the better (if less perfect) artist. The winningest feature of this painting is the way Christ pushes past the threshold established by that ledge in the foreground. This is a metaphorical transgression of the picture plane — an indication of the savior’s heightened reality compared to that of the two saints flanking him — but also an ironic intensification of the separateness of this scene in toto from the viewer’s own world: there’s no amount of movement forward that could counteract the way Nicodemus tugs Christ slightly backwards into depth, or the stillness of Joseph and his glare. Worth noting, too, is the rhythm of hand-shapes moving laterally across the panel just north of the sepulcher, plus the mottled complexity of the three figures’ skin (which points forward to the shading of del Sarto). This is a humble picture — no masterpiece — but precisely keyed.

Raphael. Portrait of a Woman in Three-Quarter Length (La Muta). c1503-05. Oil on limewood (93%)

New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Exhibition: Raphael: Sublime Poetry)

By and large, Raphael’s portraits are his best works of art. This is because they would force him to condense and concentrate his will to perfection, which in the more complex pictures could lead him towards theatrics or even acrobatics. Here, the mute’s pyramidal form is countered by that upturned triangle of necklace; the frontality of her face offsets the torque of her shoulders; the smoothness of her bust gives way to the rumples of her sleeves; her fingers are a world of movement which the rest of her body tries and fails to suppress. And all of this is set before that perfect pitch backdrop: a pure figure against a pure ground, this is the paragon of portraiture.

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

This painting is a domestication of Winslow Homer; it’s derivative of him not just because it’s a seascape with crags but because it balances intense handling with flat and calm, and because of the way its silhouettes manage not just the tones but the shape of the water. But with its dry surface and corpulent forms and selective indulgence in the weight of the paint and the shape of the brush, the painting points forwards to later American modernisms rather than backwards to the hard nose of 19th-century American art. In so doing it seems to have misrecognized, or willfully abandoned, the sense for things’ realness — and the hardheaded effort to register this reality in and as pictures — that underlay Homer’s project. I don’t like how Rockwell’s colors seems to sit just outside the objects they convey, or how he tosses around his brushstrokes without making it a principle of the painting, or how the cliffs are ever so slightly defined and ever so slightly obscure. There’s not a lot of conviction in this picture.

Blanche Lazzell. The White Petunia. 1932 (block cut)/1954 (printed). Color wood block print (80%)

Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist)

The point isn’t that figuration gave to Lazzell’s abstracting tendencies a rootedness which her pure plays of form never quite managed to provide: she has plenty of figurative canvases that miss the mark. Nor is the point that her woodcuts’ white line technique was capable of splitting up her surfaces without detracting from the deep connectivity of her forms: there are prints of hers where the lines interrupt rather than strengthen and accent the harmonies between shapes. The point of this print is less absolute than either of those observations. The work is depictive without seeming hinged on any one imagistic moment; it unfurls without losing its center of gravity; its dry tones and light registration hold it back from achieving the absolute superficiality — which is what many of Lazzell’s paintings suffer from — that all of its forms seem to be arguing for. There’s a cuteness to the way some of the representational structures are forced by the fractured design to break and bend, but then there are passages like that down-reaching rose at center stretching out over the two planes of green.

Blanche Lazzell. Painting No. 1 (Abstract Study). 1925. Oil on canvas (58%)

Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist)

There’s proto-Stella there in the way Blanche spangles some of her surfaces, such as that dotted ovoid in the top left corner. The reason, I think, she gets decorative like this is to try and solve the same problem for the paintings that her famous white lines solved for the prints: that of distinguishing planes as depth without actually setting them in depth, and thereby preferencing any one region of the design over any other. Problem is, while the prints often manage to appear both sufficiently differentiated and pleasingly nonhierarchical, paintings like this one just end up looking stacked but dimensionless, while the dots and lines that adorn certain planes end up becoming busy. But Lazzell is to be commended for her colors, which while clunkily selected are nevertheless varied and at least surprising, as well as for the liveliness of her lines, which like Mondrian‘s pretend to be clean and clinical but are actually prone to stop and start quite organically.

Georgia O’Keefe. Music — Pink and Blue No. 1. 1918. Oil on canvas (73%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

Among her earliest abstractions, this painting is a rare success of O’Keefe’s. Typically her organicism cloys and her colors are far, far too pretty. The colors here are pretty but also are complicated by all sorts of gradations and suppressed extra layers, and the forms, while soft, are self-sure enough in their movements and unspecific enough in their interrelations to justify how easy they are to take in. The painting’s main arch-form is certainly too regular, but the individual surfaces that comprise it make up for this by the infinite variability of their presentation: hues ebb and flow and never seem to settle into place. It’s problematic that this painting’s morphology is something that O’Keefe’s inspired colorism has to, like, apologize or account for.

Georgia O’Keefe. A Celebration. 1924. Oil on canvas (39%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

O’Keefe’s art loses out as soon as she gives up color for form-making. The only aesthetically productive thing she could ever really manage was a sort of pensive unfixity of hue; her curves and curls and folding bulbs seldom work together towards anything greater than themselves, and her paintings are always badly painted. There’s something equivocal about O’Keefe’s modeling, as though she couldn’t bear to commit to any one structure over another. Look at the grayer, more prickly cloud-form at the foreground; not only is its wily physique unfounded intrinsically, but what propositions made by the softer shapes behind it does it develop, repeat, negate, or transform? I think it’s just that they’re round and it’s less round. (Too, the zigzag of blue negative space at center tries to justify the vertical format of this picture, but it doesn’t get away with it.)

New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art

In Bingham’s best pictures there are these invisible forces — orb-like fields of power and influence — that manifest between his ever-interacting figures. This is a lesser work of his because, by and large, it lacks such dynamics (though they’re somewhat there in the arc of the oarsman’s back and the bend of both of his arms, and in the way he thereby seems prepped to catch and cradle the projectile energy of the boy leaning beside him). But Fur Traders is also among Bingham’s better-painted canvases, with its vitreous play of reflections on river and the delicacy of its sky. The clouds above, as well as the smoke the old man’s puffing, do that Frederick Kensett thing of stacking small amounts of very tangible paint atop a flat and perfectly illusionistic surface, such that the former is pulled backwards into the representation while the latter is made to seem more literal than it can really bear. This is by no means a slouchy Bingham, but nor is it his masterpiece.

Ralph Albert Blakelock. Moonlight. c1885-1893. Oil on canvas (83%)

Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery

This is a good Blakelock, mainly because of how completely the trees congest the sky. This gives to all of the buildups of heavy paint (Blakelock’s trademark) an aspect of focus and specificity which they often lack in his more open pictures. Whereas Blakelock sometimes treated the whole of his surfaces the same way — piling on the paint as much in the forests as in the swamps as in the expanses of distant clouds — here the sky, minimized by the foliage, is chromatically various but relatively flat; the trees, opposite this, are a singular brooding black, but they also possess an immense amount of literal dimension and weight. The effect is that all the corporeal energy of the painting (or, of the paint of the painting, as paint) is by the same stroke enlarged and restricted: it’s as if the light from the moon that dapples the heavens is forcing itself through the canopy to press up against the very front of the picture, but then something stops it there and throttles it (the light gaining weight as it moves from back to front of the image) towards the horizon again. That this picture heavily implies its own material realness, but then represses it and buries it in the midground, is distinctly American. Impressionism lives on the surface; Blakelock is obsessed with but ultimately recoils from it.

Thomas Eakins. Kathrin. 1872. Oil on canvas (86%)

New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery

What is it about Eakins that vaults him so far above any of the rest of the American genre painters and portraitists? For one, it’s in how he took his Caravaggism seriously, but also how he didn’t take it as a given. Look at Kathrin’s fingers and forearms, the way they’re bodied by a darkness that’s pierced by those long splinters of light; or at her foot, which looks set to kick through the picture plane till the corner of that stool holds it back. There’s a tenebrist’s sense of luminous volume in all of this, but also a jaggedness and a reservation that’s all Eakins’ own. (It’s like he’s using William Mount to fix Joseph Wright.) For two, Eakins’ paint engages in a struggle with the things it represents: it’s not exactly that his realism is undercut by the physical presence of his pictures, but rather that there’s a palpable quality to his paintings that at first emerges out of, but then eventually detaches itself from and comes to work against, what they depict. Here, the cabinets and the chairback and all of the folds in Kathrin’s clothing have more substance than the surface of this painting is able to manage; it’s all realer than real.

George Inness. Peace and Plenty. 1865. Oil on canvas (53%)

New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is a somewhat early painting by Inness, from before he’d fully calibrated his impressionistish technique. The painting’s large size doesn’t do it any favors; all the room things have to breathe takes away much of the urgency of the artist’s famous tonal mania. The tones are compelling, sure, especially in the way, for instance, the aureole around that tree at center spreads itself through the sky around it, dappling even the underbellies of the clouds in the far upper corners. But the shadows and hues in the foreground are a little ordinary, and the silhouetted figure cut by those trees is not as severe as it might have been. (Blakelock does darks and earthtones better than this, and his silhouettes always pack more of a punch.)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The Seashore. 1883-85. Oil on thin board (83%)

Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art

This painting is like Fitz Lane doing Monet — a special artwork, though one which can’t be liked without reservation. What ought to give one a small amount of pause is the streaky application of paint, which at its best can be equal parts abstract and evocative of real movement, but which Whistler has relied on too completely: this becomes a minor liability in the painting’s quieter passages, where it appears affected (for instance, the stretch of water between the lone woman at right and the boats above her). But what nevertheless enthralls one about this picture is the disconnect between its carapace of a surface — an impenetrable glossy threshold, echoed within the image by the adamant shoreline and horizon — and the ethereal rendering of its scene. All those streaks that make up the painting seem to rest on top of, rather than to compose, what’s being depicted. It’s as though there are two separate abstractions operating here at two different registers: that of the image and that of the object of the painting. (Typically, we think of modernism as being defined by the confluence, not the dissonance or parallelism, of these two registers.) When this artwork really shines is when these two aspects of the painting glance off of each other momentarily. It happens in the blur to the left of the pair of figures on the beach, in the streaks of paint that rhyme with the verticality of the ships’ masts, and in the zig-zagging that the paint in the sky does to signify “clouds.”

St. Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum (Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism)

This painting proves Dalí to have been a pornographer, not just because of that tush but because there's so little on offer besides it. The way the panel's been painted seems borrowed from the landscapes on metal by Brueghel or from Ernst's decalcomania, but it possesses none of the former's limpid movement or the latter's shocking configurations of forms. Instead, Dalí seems to have construed this painting’s gradients, and to have peppered them here and there with a building or a bush, to provide a setting without visual difficulty for his vulgar Venus to flaunt through. Nothing in the landscape responds to her and she responds to nothing in it: she just bares. Never mind that there’s a little bit of grotesquery to the way the girl’s body bends: this enhances her butt’s appeal rather than alienates you from it (as might happen in a more serious surrealism than Dalí’s). The true lack of this artist's psychic complexity is made plainer here than in perhaps any other of his paintings.

Salvador Dalí. Femme Couchée. 1926. Oil on panel (38%)

St. Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum (Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism)

The figure here is an obvious riff on pre-Cubist Picasso‘s Iberian nudes. Dalí was a bad-faith copyist. Rather than take Picasso’s pictorial ideas and attempt somehow to transform them (or else just record the other artist’s style in an effort to understand it), Dalí has instead smoothed out and simplified Picasso’s forms so as to subject his art to ridicule. The problem isn’t that Dalí ought not to have made jokes on his countryman, but rather that he sacrificed pictorial integrity to do so: all of the brushiness and contradicting planes of Picasso have given way to smooth shapes and regular shading and unsublimated desire and easy geometry. Sure, it’s possible that, had Dalí’s joke been sufficiently funny and open-ended, it could have aesthetically justified how middling this painting is, as a painting. But Picasso didn’t need Dalí to spread his style’s legs; Cubism ravishes itself.

Alberto Giacometti. Disagreeable Object. 1931. Bronze (67%)

St. Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum (Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism)

Most of this artwork’s aesthetic energy resides at the point where its title collides with its material component. That’s a fancy way of saying that as a sculpture, it’s just okay, but as a gross-looking pupal thing in bronze that’s outright called “disagreeable,” it’s funny, and in a way that’s pretty open-ended and therefore artistically substantial. There are all sorts of untoward sexual and organismic and violent resonances to the artwork’s physical appearance; it’s a Brancusi gone bad. The “disagreeable object” appellation serves to underscore these meanings but also sort of to neutralize them, as if this were some totemic device that’s been yanked from its own natural context and stultified. (That’s basically what it is, but self-consciously so.) It bears mentioning, however, that there are limitations to how good an artwork can be whose main engine of aesthetic significance is a conceptual flourish like this work’s object-title interaction. The well of possible experiences to be had with Disagreeable Object is somewhat shallow: you note its physiognomic weirdness, you note the way the title detaches that weirdness from the thing itself and turns it into a conceptual object for consideration, and then you move along. There’s little reward for sustained attention.

Alberto Giacometti. Disagreeable Object to Be Thrown Away. 1931. Painted plaster (58%)

St. Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum (Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism)

This is a weaker work than Giacometti’s Disagreeable Object, mostly because it’s just less disgusting. Since the joke here is that calling the thing “disagreeable” somehow minimizes and aestheticizes its disagreeableness, the ickier and more uncanny the object is, the better it ends up being as an artwork. The horn-forms are kind of disquieting, sure, but as a group the three of them actually convey a sense of balance altogether, and the slight curve to that plane they’re jutting out of is actually a little pretty. That this object is “to be thrown away” is pretty funny since it’s plaster painted to look like bronze, but that part of the joke doesn’t really go anywhere aesthetically. (Apparently Giacometti gave this object this particular title more than a decade after he made it; for awhile it was just known as an “object.” It doesn’t succeed much more on plain sculptural terms, however, than it does on these humoristic-conceptual ones.)

Paul Klee. Untitled (Last Still Life). 1940. Oil on canvas (84%)

New York, NY: Jewish Museum (Exhibition: Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds)

Klee is one of the few modernists for whom a playful sampling of other artists’ idioms (rather than a combative appropriation and transformation of their styles) was not a limitation on, but a source of his greatness. That’s because his symbolical mysticism was so wholly elaborated — so complete and so singular a way of seeing — as to have been capable of transforming even the barest and least developed quotation or allusion into an unequivocal expression of the artistic mind of Paul Klee, and Paul Klee alone. This painting is obviously a riff on the interiors of Matisse, but it’s remarkably un-Matissean in its substance. That black ground, for instance, isn’t vying for the picture plane: it’s a cosmic field entirely removed from the sculptures and vases set before it, teeming with little runes and squiggles. Likewise, all the flat circles and ovoids in this scene (teapot’s spout; sculpture’s arm; both ends of that worm-form; sun) refuse to jump towards the painting’s surface even though they’re all aiming right at it: instead they engage each other in a sort of floating tribal dance somewhere halfway between the background and the very front of the picture. Sure, there’s a degree of solipsism — or at least hermeticism — to the way Klee constructs his images, and arguably this painting is missing a fulcrum point. But there’s a logic here that’s undeniable, no matter how ineffable.

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

I’ll never not see Chase’s paintings as merely garlanded by, rather than imbued with or born from, Impressionist techniques. His paintings don’t indicate a way of seeing but a way of painting. Inevitably, this limits their quality, but on occasion it creates unique aesthetic possibilities. Namely, there can be something compelling that crawls out of the gap between Chase’s style and his substance. If Impressionism is this painting’s garland, then the painting itself is a thing that rebuffs garlanding, like a dirty iron pan or a barrel. The heft of the fish and that huge hulking cauldron and the suffocating closeness to each other of all of these stuffs and the bottomless black depths of Chase’s colors — even, it somehow seems, the lighter ones — are completely hostile to his vibrant application of paint. There’s an excrescence of pigment behind the gills of the big cod in the dish that almost looks like the paint being pushed off the surface of the canvas by the too-full image behind it.

William Merritt Chase. Over the Hills and Far Away. c1897. Oil on canvas (38%)

Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery

Chase displays some very minor facility with color in the bottom fifth of this painting: it’s attractive how those aquas slink through their purples and greens. But the effect of this is slight, and Chase fails to export it to any other region of the canvas, the totality of which is flatly flat and underexpressed in terms of line and hue. Despite the lightness and variability of their tones, the greens in the fields seem sort of heavy and hulking as they lie there in the midground, and the sky bears down upon it all with a discomfiting ambivalence. There’s nothing anywhere to punctuate Chase’s leaden brushwork, nothing to lighten the load of all this paint. The horizon is obsequious in its flatness; those two trees at right don’t do enough to challenge the state of things. This painting fails to deliver on the few meagre promises it makes.

Victor Dubreuil. Barrels of Money. c1898. Oil on canvas (68%)

St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts

The interest we take in a painting like this is certainly more “conceptual” than it is strictly visual, derived for the most part from the weirdness of Dubreuil’s decision to paint money and to paint it brimming from barrels — we like this painting to the extent that we see it as surrealism avant la lettre. But it would be a mistake to discount the artist completely as a colorist and an arranger of shapes. Proportion works wildly here, suggesting that either the vessels are tiny or the greenbacks are huge; the barrels have somehow more dimension than they ought to while the money has less, which makes for a strange and undefinable optical effect; space is by turns crammed and, at the picture’s top and bottom, eerily open, and for some reason Dubreuil has included a column in the background that just about vanishes into darkness, but also manages to mimic the barrels in front of it and to lock them into pictorial place. This all amounts to something less than a distinct painterly language, which is actually to Dubreuil’s artistic benefit. You get the sense that he was trying to convey how dollars for him were a specious non-thing, the social fact of which muddled physical reality while also somehow heightening it. There is confusion here because Dubreuil was confused. If what his picture offers up to experience is narrow and minimally complex, it’s also strange and not quite resolvable.

Childe Hassam. Old House and Garden, East Hampton, Long Island. c1898. Oil on canvas (66%)

Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery

Here Hassam has hardly bent his subject — this country house and gardens — to fit the form of his brushy, vibrant, somewhat abstracting picture. Rather, it's like the "impressionistic" style hovers atop the scene but seldom if ever seeps inside of it, as though this is a photograph that's been put through some Frenchifying filter: look at how little the streaky sky blends with the roof of the house, or at the way the floral whites and oranges sit heavy atop their shingled background. This is all to say, of course, that Hassam was a mannerist who aped the generation of Parisians that preceded him — but might there be something more than mere repetition in this picture? It's possible that Hassam's tendency to focus not on relations, but on things, paired with his boggling commitment to practicing a style of painting (Impressionism) that was categorically relational, is what led to pleasant little paradoxes like, for instance, the almost linear distinctness of his foliage despite how much it looks like it wants to blend into a single substance, or the inexplicable heft of that purple house. Hassam is bad as an Impressionist, but maybe he's good as something else.

George Inness. Goochland, West Virginia. 1884. Oil on wood panel (77%)

Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery

What can be (but isn't always) remarkable about Inness's mature style is how blended and in flux each discrete region of his paintings can be, but then how cordoned off from each other — how almost alienated, obscure — these regions are made to appear within the totalities of the pictures they belong to. This painting's mottled green lower half is a galaxy of variegation and indefinable hue, but it's also very definitively (though, it bears mentioning, not cleanly or crisply) separate from what's above it: the sky and the trees and the outcrop of buildings. That birch to one side of the center, listing left, does a lot of work towards dividing up the image, but its presence isn't wholly sufficient for explaining the geometry of Inness's picture: in fact, none of the surefire lines that you see are wholly to blame for the painting's somehow clinical overall effect. What this painting is doing seems mostly to take place somewhere behind its visible surface, and only to seep through covertly to appearance. That's a little obscure, but so is Inness at his best.

St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg

From many Dutch portraits you get the sense that all the networked gestures of limbs and crooked objects amounts to something. Not so here — and it’s fantastic. There’s a pure ambivalence of spatial relation between, say, the book on the cushion and the subject’s hand pointing vaguely off-frame away from it; the wicker bag hangs off the back of that chair the way a wicker bag would hang off the back of a chair. Everything’s floating here with all this empty space around it, and yet that space is somehow impossibly shallow, too — look at how perspectival the tiled floor is, till, with the immediacy of a car crash, it slams into the wall less than a quarter of the way up the panel. But then that wall itself is a dappled world of light coming in from the left, not a reality for the viewer to fall further into but an instance of pure painterly charm. In its simplicity this painting is more like a Vrel than a Vermeer, but it has the touch, too, of a handler of paint like Ruisdael.

Willem Claesz. Heda. Still Life with a Tankard, a Plate of Oysters, and Glasses on a Table. 1636. Oil on wood panel (80%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

Before getting into what makes this painting great, its bottom right corner has to at least be mentioned: there the front surface of the tablecloth is on a frolic of its own, sharing its palette with the creamy brown background behind it but teeming with all sorts of touches and blooming hues that make it seem like a moment of painterly extravagance all to itself. But that’s not the main course. What is is the network of pregnant spaces between Heda’s tabled objects: an arabesque between the prunted beaker and the ewer; the cradling of an oyster shell by the cruet’s spout; the sliver between the bronze saucer and the right edge of the cruet’s bulb. Relative to other Dutch still lifes (by Snyders, van der Ast), there’s an emptiness to this one that makes the placement of its objects seem that much more intended. Also, there are many little affinities between unlike objects: the squeezed lemon doubles the platter; the crumpled paper doubles an oyster; the snail shells double the beaker’s nodes; the front of the table doubles the wall. This implies a vague metaphorical dimension to the picture that enhances the impact of the placement of its objects without making it seem like a semantic puzzle.

Pieter de Hooch. Brothel Scene. c1675-80. Oil on canvas (74%)

St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg

There are paintings by de Hooch that are better than this one “as paintings,” but conceptually it gets the aesthetic job done fairly well. By this I mean to say that there’s something lacking in the colors (the overall orange tone is a like a film atop the image) and the massing (the painting’s top half is unjustifiably barren) and the two figure groups (they’re both a little centerless and overdefined), but then what’s missing is mostly made up for by the open-ended musing about the possibilities of picturing that the picture performs. The two windows at the back are like discrete pictures, as are both of the two parties of revelers, and there’s an actual painting hanging high up on the wall at right. Each of these different scenes-within-the-scene is equivocal about the claims it would make on the others as to significance and priority, but it’s also clear that they’re all somehow interacting with each other, and that this ambiguous interaction is the engine of the painting’s effects. Look at how the mistress is walking along that tiled orthogonal towards both the picture plane and the couple, or at how that prurient dog yokes the fore- and background scenes together.

Jacob Rootius. Flowers in a Vase. 1674. Oil on canvas (53%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

An unremarkable but, for the most part, unimpeachable floral still life. It gets (but then squanders) bonus points for its trompe l’oeil elements. The bouquet is set within a wall nook that’s identical with the picture plane, and in a few instances the flowers jut out beyond the nook’s threshold (past the picture plane, that is) and into the apparent space of the viewer. However, nothing about the rendering or the configuration of the bouquet itself — which is pretty but perhaps too precisely delineated, as are many Dutch florals from this period — interacts with the trompe l’oeil mechanism. The seeming indifference of the arrangement of flowers to the coy framing device that surrounds them gives it all the effect of a trick more than a deliberate artistic strategy.

Gerard ter Borch. A Guardroom Scene. c1652-53. Oil on panel (66%)

New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery

ter Borch was better suited to portraits of individuals than to genre paintings like this one. This group of figures required perhaps a bit more of an architectural environment than they received, and the geometry which the three men’s bodies form is not quite as complex or as precise as it might have been. (In his portraits, ter Borch’s underdeveloped setting and the stiff forms of his figures are a boon, not a liability.) Something in the colors is off, too; the orange hues in the characters’ skin aren’t sufficiently distinguished from the tones in the rest of the painting, leaving the whole surface feeling unpunctuated. But then, there are moments: the glint on the sleeping soldier’s armor; the prodding corner of the tabletop; that sinew of something working itself between feet on the floor.

Unknown Artists (Nabataean). Beit-El. 4th century BCE-1st century CE (86%)

Eilat, Israel: Eilat Mountains Reserve

Toward the center of a small hill that is more of a pile of boulders, called Yocheved Hill, at the periphery of the ancient copper mines of Timna, you can find an engraving chiseled into one of the stones. It is about 20 inches tall and 12 inches wide. You can be right next to it without knowing it is there — even when you know it is there and are looking for it, it is hard to notice. To the contemporary viewer, it looks like the geometric façade of a house. To its Nabatean makers, it was an eye-god idol: a schematic depiction of a face with two rectangular eyes. This kind of icon was prevalent throughout the Nabatean world, including in the city of Petra and across Wadi Rum. The story told in today’s touristic Petra is that these carved deities were given eyes so that they could enjoy the sight of the offerings which worshipers would lay before them. In the Hellenistic world, such sacred stones were called baetyls, a word derived from the Semitic compound Beit-El: Beit meaning “house” and El meaning “god.” In Genesis 28, which recounts Jacob’s dream, Jacob took the stone that had been under his head while he slept, poured oil on it, and called it Beit-El. In light of this semantic duality, this carving’s visual duality of a façade and a schematic visage becomes especially meaningful, implying an ontological complexity: there is a slippage at play here between being and representing. In the story of Genesis, the Jewish God creates the world through language — through naming. The image engraved on this boulder could be understood as a representation of a god. But in the practice of ancient stone worship, the baetyls were actual embodiments of the deity: they were gods themselves. This is not a house of god as a metaphor; it is the actual deity. Perhaps this was a very early theological predecessor of the much later Catholic idea of transubstantiation. Both Jewish and Catholic Christian traditions embed a magic of creation and transformation in language. Even today, magicians retain popular secret spells: hocus-pocus and abracadabra are derivatives of sacred language. Abracadabra comes from the Hebrew/Aramaic evra ke-divra — “I will create as I speak.” Hocus-pocus echoes the Latin sacramental phrase hoc est corpus — “this is my body.” The secularization of these transformative practices set the stage for the ready-made art object and conceptual art of the 20th century.

New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art

It's tough to say whether Johns deployed his complex conceptual systems in order to justify indulgence in the basic tactile and optical pleasures of painting, or whether, instead, he saw in this beleaguered medium (painting) a fertile ground for planting the convolutes and paradoxes about thought and vision which he tended to throughout his career. Arguably, it's the slippage between these two possibilities — or, it's the practical untenability of any distinction — that is the main engine of Johns's work. As an arrangement of shapes and colors this painting is spectacular, with its overdetermined halving at the center, and its cramming together of so many different possibilities of pattern, and its juxtaposition of signifying with nonsignifying elements, and its network of planes that by turns push each other towards and repel each other from the surface of the image. Out from all of this emerges (or is it layered on top of? I really can't tell) a set of propositions about what a picture is that fails to ever resolve itself, and that is edged towards continually stranger and more tenuous positions by the way the painting actually appears.

Jasper Johns. Untitled. 1975. Oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas, in 4 joined parts (83%)

New York, NY: Gagosian Gallery (Exhibition: Jasper Johns: Between the Clock and the Bed)

Johns's crosshatch artworks tend to be good to the extent that certain aspects of their visual presentation muddle or undermine their relationship to the crosshatch series as a whole, but without removing them completely from the series or making it seem like they're not in the final estimation answerable to its formal logic. To put this differently: these paintings make their claims on our attention at the point where their status as discrete works of art intersects with their status as nodes in a network of ideas and possibility. The breaking-up of this painting into four parts of unequal size, the clouding and the dripping of the paint at the top right, the occasional continuity but occasional discontinuity of lines and colors at the spots where the canvases meet, and especially the darkening of the pigments in the picture's bottom right rectangle — none of these creative decisions are prepared for or even entirely sensible within the methodical mark-making program that governs the crosshatch series as a whole. And yet they bear down on our experience of this one individual expression of the sum of the series, and thereby they implicate themselves in its meaning.

Jasper Johns. Corpse and Mirror II. 1974-1975. Oil and sand on canvas, in 4 parts (82%)

New York, NY: Gagosian Gallery (Exhibition: Jasper Johns: Between the Clock and the Bed)

Most of the aesthetic substance of any one of Johns's crosshatch artworks accrues from the specific way it situates itself (or fails to) within the system of his crosshatch series as a whole. By this, I mean to say something more than, "it's interesting how Johns kept returning to this one theme obsessively," but something less than, "the series in toto is the actual artwork, at the expense of the individual significance of its discrete print- or painting-components." This painting — a good, almost a great crosshatch entry — has a band of grey behind the colored lines at its right that replaces the white ground of the rest of the visual field. Additionally, the artwork's "image" (if you want to use that word to refer to the sum of all these red and blue and yellow lines) extends out past the boundary of the joined canvases onto the interior of the frame. Little flourishes like this are not exactly explicable; they provide visual spice — differentiation — to the manic regularity of the hatchmarks, but they also make it so that this particular work, due to the many particularities of its appearance, cannot be reduced to the logic of the series overall. This is a good Johns crosshatch piece because it contains much that resides outside of the series' program, and yet these elements don’t at all undermine the painting’s relationship with the conceptual scheme overall. The work shows you how art's autonomy and art's heteronomy are intertwined, and proceeds to make this intertwinement itself the object of your aesthetic consideration.

Jasper Johns. Flag. 1960. Bronze (60%)

New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery (Exhibition: Jasper Johns: Flags)

In critiquing Johns, you have to be careful to balance the "autonomous" aspect of his artworks against the role they play as nodes within the larger conceptual systems that constitute his "practice." The proposition that a work like this makes — that a single symbol like the American flag can take on an infinity of presentational guises and still cling to something of its original meaning, if perhaps by its fingernails — is merely interesting in a vacuum. But within the totality of Johns's oeuvre it becomes (at least potentially) aesthetically sophisticated. As a discrete work of art this thing is slightly more than a navel-gazing exercise: it's palpable, the tension between the symbolic clarity of the stars-and-bars and the obscurity of the object-image's actual surface; but there are few rewards for sustained contemplation.

Jasper Johns. Flag. 1955. Graphite and graphite wash on prepared paper (74%)

New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery (Exhibition: Jasper Johns: Flags)

Among the most remarkable things about Johns is the clarity and immediacy with which, in his first few years as an artist, he developed the iconography and posed the problems which he would carry with him throughout his entire career. This drawing of a flag (among his trademark visual phonemes) is just the second thing in his catalogue raisonné: from the get-go, he was already working out how to make symbols scream with meaning and signifying nothing, all at once. To the degree to which Johns’s whole project is embedded in this one very early piece, it’s an interesting artifact. To the degree to which that project is actually expressed by Flag, it’s a good work of art — and by and large, it is. That the banner is cropped at its right edge, turning it into something somewhat less or other than a real American flag, is compelling; that the hatchmarks sit so nervously atop their ground of graphite wash is compelling, too. The uneven shading of the flag, especially in its lower right, pulls it back from meaning, as does the eerie difference between the hard-line left and bottom edges and the unbound top and right. While Johns is certainly at his best when he incorporates his conceptualism into more elaborated, classically unified, “autonomous” works, there is nevertheless a lucidity of thought (despite their obscureness) that characterizes his simpler gestures like this drawing.

New York, NY: Pace Gallery (Exhibition: Sam Gilliam: Stitched)

Gilliam's work is only ever good to the extent that it convinces you that there's more to all his flowing fabrics and uncontrolled colors than the fact that, in the history of painting, he got there first. This is to say that sometimes Gilliam proves that there's deliberation behind the ways his canvases fall and their soaked colors clash, but other times he relies too heavily on the quasi-sculptural funkiness of his designs to make up for the fact that they're not very thoughtfully arranged. This piece is on the borderline: its tie-dye palette is inexcusable and because of that the many scraps of fabric fail to ever gel in painterly terms, but then the way it's stitched together is clearly intentioned, and the varied shapes of all the swatches by turns interact with and work against the physique of the object overall. (Look at the way, for instance, that interrupted band of diagonal red in the bottom portion sits on the crest of a crumple, or how that blue quadrilateral at upper right pokes towards the outermost corner of the piece.) There are many discrete pleasures here, but they fail to amount to a totality — this artwork is less than the sum of its parts.

Anselm Kiefer. Orithyia. 2024. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, and charcoal on canvas (40%)

St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum (Exhibition: Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea)

Kiefer’s late, gigantic paintings are smug. They take it as their task to resolve the tension, to suture the divide, between images and the material stuff through which images are conveyed for experience. They want, in a word, to be both and at once presences and illusions — literal and figurative — which is why they’re so full of gold leaf: medieval icons didn’t deal with any knowledge of themselves as pictures. This all is smug because it’s not just Kiefer, but all of modern painting that desires such oneness, and Kiefer’s late paintings comport themselves as if they’re in possession of some sort of mystical solution to the problem. In actuality, their excrescent surfaces are like complex apologies for the treacly figures they contain; their colors are those of any gift store gilder; their monumentality is an end, not a means.

Anselm Kiefer. Brennstäbe (Fuel Rods). 1984-87. Oil, acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas with ceramic, iron, copper wire, straw, and lead (51%)

St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum (Exhibition: Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea)

Kiefer is better the less his images try to be representational. His best works are the unabashed sculptural paintings, rather the hybrid picture-sculptures like this. Brennstäbe suffers quite a bit for being a landscape; this makes its assemblage elements (actual fuel rods affixed to the surface; a Schnabel-esque dish) seem pat. It’s better when it’s expressing anxiety over the literal/pictorial problem it sets up (upper right quadrant), worse when it’s behaving blithely (extreme peeling across the whole lower third). The main issue is that Kiefer seems to have set up a system where he can call on sculpture to explain away bad painting, and call on painting to apologize for bad sculpture. It’s a fundamentally squirrelly approach.

Gerhard Richter. Zwei Kerzen (Two Candles). 1982. Oil on canvas (50%)

New York, NY: Sotheby’s New York (Exhibition: Icons: Back to Madison)

It’s tough to admit that there are paintings — potentially good paintings, even — that can be victims of the popular success they’ve had as images. Would these Richter candle paintings be better if one of their ilk hadn’t been made into, like, the most famous album cover ever? Probably. But it’s impossible to see any of them as anything other than all the associations that attend on Sonic fucking Youth. Of course there are paintings like, I don’t know, the Mona Lisa, that manage, when you’re looking at the real thing, to slough off all their cultural sediment and become more than the sum of what our image economy has prepared you to think about them. I guess that’s because paintings like the Mona Lisa are actually really good. (Which is maybe to say that this painting is not that good.)

Martin Wong. Houston Street. 1986. Acrylic on canvas (84%)

New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art

What this painting does is trick you into treating it like an object — not quite a sculpture or a wall work but something more basic — so that it can bowl you over, in the final estimation, as a painting. Its flirtation with the history of trompe l'oeil, the way it pushes up with discomfiting realism against the edges of the canvas and the front of the picture plane, is the first thing that goads you into experiencing it more with your body than with your eyes. And then its size and its lowness to the ground and its overwhelming array of tactile effects all finish the job. But there are aspects to it that, once you fall into approaching it in the way you approach "things," just as soon disqualify it from occupying an uncomplicated place of immediacy in your physical world: its sides aren't painted, only its face; though big, it's too small to be a real gate; its far right edge isn't a deceptive surface but a tenuous sliver of pictorial depth; there's cramming and perspectival fuckery in the top left corner, but then the rest of the image ignores this and goes on being blithely illusionistic and flat. Not only do these sly visual effects come steadily to disrupt the phenomenological stuff that starts to happen as soon as you put yourself in front of this object — they actually manage to divert your bodily experience up towards your eyes. Vision is forced to make up for all the failures of physical presence to account for what it is that Wong's painting is doing.

Ottawa, Canada: National Gallery of Canada

Guercino painted this same scene a number of times; this one’s among his better goes at it. As always with this artist, you get the sense that there’s an easing up at play in this painting — that Guercino is coasting on the innovations of others rather than forging his own path. In a word, Guercino is mannered Baroque. But he’s also sometimes good: the foreshortened well pushes Christ back just barely into depth and, by terminating to open onto some empty space at right, dynamizes the woman’s pose and draws it towards the picture plane; the near antagonism of the two figures’ postures with respect to each other — the Samaritan twisting away from Christ, Christ pulling her back to the left edge of the canvas by flicking his fingers — makes the scene feel tense and teetering; elements extraneous to the action, like buildings and foliage, have been kept to a minimum, and are only included to the extent that they further animate the relationship between the figures (the tree at right, for instance, seems to nudge the woman toward Jesus). There’s little to remark on, however, in terms of color or modeling: the brooding contours are of their time and don’t seem integral to the arrangement.

Claude. The Sermon on the Mount. c1656. Oil on canvas (57%)

New York, NY: Frick Collection

If Bruegel‘s Tower of Babel were the Evil Twin, this painting by Claude would be the Good Twin. I think that saying that is to badmouth the Frenchman, who’s often worth liking but in spite of his rationalism and orderliness and mensuration (ditto Poussin). When Claude paints disorder, as he’s done here, he does so with the aim of overcoming it; the Northern artist, instead, always leans into chaos (and thereby actually tends to conquer it). This painting, like Bruegel’s, has in a bottom corner a repoussoir of land with busy people on it, and its main feature is, at center, a squat, hulking, ovoid hump of great Christian import. And like another Bruegel painting (The Conversion of Paul), this one by Claude minimizes the titular biblical action and stows it away in a little slot of the scene. But what allows Bruegel to get away his unfocus and all of his devices is a sense for the totality of his pictures, and a usual subordination to it of their many constituent parts. The way Claude, instead, has here worked over every rapt figure, every lamb, every leaf in every tree seems to be at the expense of the painting as a whole: you get the tonal richness and all the brooding of Baroque but none of its psychic stakes, only a dry perfection and a cascade of isolated and highly refined local effects.

attributed to Georges de La Tour and Studio. Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene. c1638-1639. Oil on canvas (67%)

Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum

Having little knowledge and zero authority, and on the basis of quality alone, I have to doubt this attribution. Or at least I have to doubt the fullness of Georges’s participation in this picture. The orange fleshtones, lithic outlines, and miserly dispersion of light are all, of course, echt La Tour, but what they amount to here is beneath the master’s ken. There’s too much crowding and displacement of forms at the painting’s core, such that the three-figure tableau seems almost to stutter; Sebastian’s limbs, though darkened, never lapse into complete obscurity, which keeps the picture’s mysterious emergent qualities at bay; the surfaces, especially of skin, are too brushy and indistinct. Just look at the helmet at the left of the painting: the light reflecting off it is so dull! With some tightened modeling and refined poses (which together would probably fix the imprecision of the movements of the light) this picture might be as good as any by La Tour. As it is, it has the effect of a very studious copy.

Nicolas Poussin. The Abduction of the Sabine Women. 1633-34. Oil on canvas (92%)

New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art

This painting is Poussin in a word: strict classical architecture hemming in a paroxysm of human activity that is, itself, composed of figures just as rigid, just as modeled, as the buildings bounding their movements. Poussin admits chaos into his work only as the remainder of absolute precision. It exists here as the unaccountable spaces between weapons and limbs; it’s present especially in that oblong patch of empty ground cutting diagonally across the image from baby up to horse. But even at its most violent, everything in this picture is so controlled. Look at the figure group closest to the picture plane at right, a scalene pyramid whose peak is the dagger held up by that gold-shirted buff guy. A mass of flesh and fabric, the group pushes left against the image’s opposite thrust, casting an invisible line up towards red-robed Romulus, who extends his arm out above the scene to set off the picture’s pulse rightwards. Often, I get the feeling that what’s good in Poussin is all the stuff he doesn’t have control over, namely, the odd blocks of space and tonal shifts that exist just outside of his perfectly sculptured forms — the bits of unreality that the painting of perfect reality has to admit. In this rare painting, however, he has brought those things under total governance.

Nicolas Poussin. The Death of Germanicus. 1627. Oil on canvas (74%)

Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art

Poussin’s busy figure groups are sometimes capable of establishing a sort of sly or even unconscious organization that works against the chaos they predominantly offer up to vision. Not so in this painting, which is a skein of immaculate poses. (It should be noted that the geometry in the architecture up above does seem to be trying to impose order onto the scene below). This painting is by no means bad, but its quality works against its intentions. Namely, the high achievement of Poussin’s modeling, and the precision with which he’s rendered space, result not in verisimilitude but in a bizarre cut-and-paste appearance to every figure (which is sort of this artist’s trademark). You could just about peel the woman at far right off of the canvas and place her somewhere else in the composition, and with little detriment to the picture overall. It’s a pretty amazing visual effect, almost like the limning of old American painting (Copley comes to mind). Poussin is certainly better whenever his pictures manage, against their own logic and his technique, to work themselves up into systems, but there’s something to be said for the too-perfect qualities of this painting, and for the weird unreality it produces.