Tal Sterngast. Twelve Paintings E-Book

Michael Eissenhauer

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Hatje Cantz Text
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 153

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Berlin's Gemäldegalerie is known for its outstanding collection of European paintings from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. Each chapter in this book is dedicated to one painting from the collection. In the breadth of this idiosyncratic selection, painting, as it discovers itself becomes a medium for the formulation of modern subjectivity. Each painting in focus unfolds its own making and its artistic concerns as they reflect contemporary issues, today. What are the paradoxes within which art is made by women? How does the primordial drive to destroy works of art affect today's art discourse? Where did the modern struggle of painting against the picture begin? Why does the Wild Man from early German Renaissance still haunt us? And why doesn't it matter whether Jan Vermeer used an optical device for his paintings? Twelve Paintings highlights the currentness of the Old Masters.

Leseprobe

Twelve Paintings

Tal Sterngast

Excursions in the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Colophon

Managing editor

Lena Kiessler

Project management

Richard Viktor Hagemann

Copyediting

Kimberly Bradley

Translation into German and Copyediting

Ulrich Gutmair

Graphic design

Neil Holt

Cover design

studio stg

Lithography and Production

Vinzenz Geppert

© 2020 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz

© 2020 Hatje Cantz, Berlin

and the author

www.smb.museum

Published by

Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH

Mommsenstraße 27

10629 Berlin

www.hatjecantz.de

A Ganske Publishing Group Company

isbn 978-3-7757-4767-7 (Print)

isbn 978-3-7757-4907-7 (eBook)

isbn 978-3-7757-4909-1 (PDF)

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To Amalia

Preface Michael Eissenhauer

Introduction:Tal Sterngast

The Museum as a Safe Space

Amor Vicint Omnia (1601–02) by Caravaggio

Body Painting

Susanna and the Elders (1647) by Rembrandt van Rijn

The Conspiracy of Painting

Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife (1655) by Rembrandt van Rijn

Through a Glass Wall

Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1663–65) by Jan Vermeer

The Creativity of Women

Prince Heinrich Lubomirski as the Genius of Fame (1787–88) by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun

The Vertigo of Time

The Melun Diptych (ca. 1455) by Jean Fouquet

The Architecture of Heaven

The Madonna in the Church (ca. 1440) by Jan van Eyck

Zooming In

The Presentation at the Temple (ca. 1454) by Andrea Mantegna

Shadow of Existence

Self-Portrait I and II (1649 and 1650) by Nicolas Poussin

Nature’s Plan

Landscape with St. Matthew and the Angel (1640) by Nicolas Poussin

In Search of the Wild Man

Landscape with Satyr Family (1507) by Albrecht Altdorfer

The True Image

The Holy Face of Christ–Vera Icon (ca. 1420) by an unknown Westphalian artist

Acknowledgements

Colophon

Preface

In her analyses of twelve outstanding works of European painting, Tal Sterngast unites the craft of art criticism with unsparing social inquiry. In her singular reading, the film scholar extends and sharpens our perspective of the works in question; for in these paintings, the products of bygone centuries, she perceives contemporary life’s gravitas and volatility. Sterngast stresses not so much the archaic quality of these museal objects, but instead their current relevance and significance to both art-historical and sociopolitical reflections and insights. These are perhaps more important today than ever before. With her book, the author offers us fresh views at old works.

A moment of doubt and unease led Sterngast to visit the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in 2016. The momentous political developments and upheavals of recent years had just begun, and their social and moral consequences—which continue to profoundly shake structures that until then had appeared stable—were no more than a shadowy foreboding. Sterngast came to the Gemäldegalerie hoping that these centuries-old works of art could provide the guidance to “return to the present, better equipped,” as she writes. I am happy to report that her quest was successful, as well as remarkable. Through encounters with what was familiar, the author discovered the exceptional.

Besides the author, who happily accommodated my request that she assemble her essays on works from the Gemäldegalerie into book form, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the production of this publication—my colleagues in the General Directorate and the Gemäldegalerie who worked on the content and editing of this book, as well as the staff at Hatje Cantz Verlag for their time and efforts.

Michael Eissenhauer

Director General of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Director of the Gemäldegalerie, Skulpturensammlung and the Museum für Byzantinische Kunst

Introduction

Tal Sterngast

The world as I thought to know it came to an end in late 2016. The result of the Brexit referendum in Great Britain in June activated my reality principle as a distortion. That year’s swelteringly hot summer in Berlin clarified, too, that irreversible changes on a global scale would dictate our lives from that point on. Finally, in November, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, complementing the sense of reality-as-nightmare. Realness lingered away from life, or rather, unrealness penetrated it so much, blurring the difference between all categories. Nevertheless, life seemed to go on.

All of this indicated a profound break in the paradigms of representation in this moment of time. A collapse informed by the dissolving of reality into “reality,” but also by the transgression of what we consider human: in the interfaces between organic and inorganic, in the invasive character of social media and in variations of the “return of the repressed” (which renders shame obsolete and breeds populism), either as a symptom of a major crisis or as the crisis itself. Not unconnected to that, the fostering and acknowledgment of the inner merits of artworks seem to make more and more space for external values—political, cultural, or sociological—that now dominate almost all areas of contemporary art making, writing, and exhibiting. Suspicion and mistrust in images coincide with suppression and a redefinition of what is allowed and what is forbidden, as new sensitivities inherit the old ones. The more uncertain facts in reality become, the more vague, unfamiliar, or terrifying they and their prospects are; and the more uncertain it becomes what images are and what purpose they serve. Why are artworks still being made and exhibited? Who needs them? Who are their viewers?

At the end of that year, a feeling of being repulsed by current affairs led me to the Gemäldegalerie, a place that was brand new when I moved to Berlin in late 2000 and that still preserved a specific sense of the city, hardly detectable now in other parts of Berlin. Almost a decade after the Berlin Wall had fallen, the building, housing the reunited Berlin state collection of European paintings from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries completed in 1998 (planned by the Munich architects Hilmer & Sattler und Albrecht) was placed at the top of the Kulturforum’s hill. This “piazzetta,” a Brutalist slope of cement and granite, leads to but also separates the former West Berlin culture conglomerate from the street and passersby.

Planning for the museum complex began around 1967 and was constantly interrupted by controversies, still noticeable in the fractured ensemble. Meant to serve as an ersatz for the cultural holdings left behind the Berlin Wall in the early postwar days of Berlin, the district’s architectural beacons were also meant to mark West Germany’s return to the family of free nations, and no less, a defiance of the German Democratic Republic. Most prominently, it first included the New National Gallery pavilion (1968) by Mies van der Rohe, a modernist icon of steel and glass meant to house twentieth-century art.

According to Hans Scharoun’s original vision of the district, the Philharmonic Hall (1963) and the State Library (1978)—both with golden metal mesh draping their facades with elaborated curved compositions—created a soft backdrop that meant to harmonize with the forested front of the adjacent Tiergarten park and to serve as a complex but pluralistic place for everyone. In contrast, Rolf Gutbrod’s Brutalist layout from 1967 suggested a built landscape that exposed its own construction, in the few buildings remaining of his initial plan. The new Gemäldegalerie rejected this historical urban planning context and rather sealed itself from its surroundings.

Intentionally reminiscent of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum (Old Museum), the building corresponds to an aristocratic palace, with an enfilade choreographing the viewers’ pace chronologically along the north-south axis in a two-kilometer sequence through seventy-two rooms, colored velvet coverings for the walls, and paintings arranged in a salon-like hang. A large empty hall bisects its center, representing the Alpine frontier in a spatial gesture, one of several that were perhaps meant to be generous or grand but ended up being simply slightly odd. To me, the Gemäldegalerie seemed as worldly as it was local, pretentious as it was humble. Its architectural denial of recent history (with its wounds and scars) and its very surroundings created an island that remains, in a way, like the collection itself, not organic in its environment, and preserving palpable artifice.

If the present seemed to move toward such an unprecedented brink of change, what did it still share with the older worlds that this collection represents? While the corpus of knowledge and discourse regarding contemporary art seemed to reference almost only the near past, Old Masters were mostly left to forensic scientists and art historians. Perhaps restricting myself to this specific, local collection for a while would offer some latitude. One by one, I chose twelve works hanging in the galleries, already carrying a certain patina, as objects of observation in order to return to the present, better equipped. The essays, each dedicated to one painting, were first published in the weekend supplement of the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, on a roughly monthly basis, starting in November 2017.

In the breadth of this selection, painting can be seen as it discovers itself along dichotomic coordinates—the optical and the tactile, the geometric and the organic, illusionistic and spiritual, religious and atheist—and becomes a medium through which modern subjectivity formulates itself. Each painting in focus unfolds its own emergence and concrete pursuits as they also reflect, presumably, something of today’s concerns. Two temporal and spatial (geopolitical) axes cross my selection: first the east-west axis, divided by the Mediterranean Sea, where routes lead from the ancient to the modern world and from Greco-Roman to Christian hegemonies, from Orient to Occident; and second, the art-historical north-south axis, with the southern Renaissance at its core radiating from Italy to beyond the Alps.

Every painter, Gilles Deleuze wrote in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), needs to recapitulate the history of painting, and thus each writer may recapitulate painters’ recapitulations. I approached the paintings like the contemporary art I have been writing about for the past fifteen years. I wanted to treat them as an art critic would. That is why the fields of ideas surrounding the artists and their work are considered, and the essays jump from high to low resolution, from bold generalizations to very specific details. The choice was guided by my current concerns and tastes. It does not necessarily reflect the emphases of the Berlin state collection.

When the general director of the State Museums of Berlin, Michael Eissenhauer, suggested that we collect these essays in a book, it was the most generous, appealing invitation and proposal for both me as a writer and for these texts, allowing them to become more than sporadic publications in a newspaper. A text is also a space, and writing is the process of creating this space and getting lost in it at the same time. The writing is only completed by the reader, who by observing it from outside ends the writing. So, last but not least, this compilation is also a journal of sorts—of my expeditions to the Berlin gallery, but also into writing itself; to what these twelve paintings taught me about the possibilities of writing and thinking about art.

It was an honor and great challenge to allow these essays to be turned into chapters within a broader story. This would not have been possible without Ulrich Gutmair, who carefully translated the texts from English to German and edited them first for the newspaper and then for this book. The transition from articles to essays in this publication was also skillfully mastered by the book’s English editor, Kimberly Bradley. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to both of them.

The Museum as a Safe Space

Amor Vincit Omnia (1601–02) by Caravaggio

Caravaggio’s painting Amor Vincit Omnia still has the power to halt viewers in their tracks. The boy’s hand behind his naked body directs the viewer into the painting to the figure’s other side. Although the painting addresses and is provocatively committed to confronting the viewer, it also orients them toward the back of the work. The painting evokes a space that opens to an illusionistic distance, an extension of the real space of the painter in the studio, and the viewer in the gallery.

In a radical search for the roots of abstract painting, the American painter Frank Stella asserted that Caravaggio invented a new kind of pictorial space that projects itself beyond the surface of the picture plane and into the space of the beholder, engulfing and subsuming it. We find ourselves caught up within this sphere, whose effect can be compared to a gyroscope, a spinning object capable of accommodating movement and tilt.1

The year 2017 may be remembered as a time when art was attacked from within. That summer, Open Casket (2016), a painting by the American artist Dana Schutz, was exhibited as part of the Whitney Biennial in New York and caused an art-world uproar. Schutz’s painting depicts an iconic image of the African American struggle for equality, namely the 1955 photograph of the lynched fourteen-year-old Mississippi boy Emmett Till, whose mutilated body was exposed in an open-casket funeral that his mother insisted upon. Critics and artists demanded that Schutz’s painting be not only removed, but also physically destroyed. In the heated discussion about “Black anguish, White guilt,” or who does or does not have the right to use certain images in works of art, there was little debate about what kind of painting Schutz had made.

Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Triumphant),1601-02 / Caravaggio (named), Michelangelo Merisi (1571–1610) / Canvas, 156.5 × 113.3 cm / Cat. Nr. 369 / Acquired in 1815 from the collection of the Italian noble family Giustiniani / photo: Jörg P. Anders

No one seemed to be reaching beyond the intention and the work’s being a cultural sign; something meant to be read and interpreted. Pictorial parameters and the ways the painting addresses its viewers seemed abolished from the general discussion. It is worth noticing that a peculiar feature of Open Casket that may have intentionally or unintentionally stimulated the furor was never addressed: there is a certain indifference to the subject matter, despite the artist’s statements to the contrary. The work seems to have been shaped the exact same way that all Schutz’s paintings were painted before or after it—as a jolly, Expressionist illustration. The painting circulated in the media, disconnected from its exhibition context—Twittered, Facebooked, and Instagrammed.

A few months later, two New York sisters in their mid-twenties launched an online petition asking the Metropolitan Museum of Art to remove or restrict the presentation of Thérèse Dreaming (1938) by Balthus. The subject of the painting, on view in the Metropolitan since the nineties, sits with her head turned, eyes closed, and a knee raised to expose her underwear. On the floor, a cat, a frequent motif in Balthus’s paintings, drinks milk from a dish. The picture is boldly painted in warm brown tones. The pubescent model Thérèse Blanchard, who was about twelve at the time she sat as a model for Balthus, was the artist’s neighbor in Paris. She appears alone, with her cat, or with her brother in a series of eleven paintings completed between 1936 and 1939. The painting is beautiful and prurient: the girl’s cheek, nose, and lips are flush in reds and her arms lifted, as is her knee, in a revealing position that seems absurdly relaxed. Glowing and haptic, tactile and smooth, the exposed flesh of her hands and legs is both still and alive. Even the cat seems carved, just like the Cezanne-esque still life arranged on the wooden table behind Thérèse: glass vases, a can, and a Cubistically-depicted cloth that refers to the loose white underwear toward which our view is elegantly led—the heart of the scandal.

More than 11,000 people signed the petition, aided by a tailwind of outrage following the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s misconducts in Hollywood and the #metoo campaign. One of the petition’s initiators, Mia Merill, who was an art history student at New York University, warned of the objectification and sexualization of children, which in her eyes the painting romanticizes.

Although admired by significant postwar artists (in Paris, Pablo Picasso acquired a painting from the Thérèse series while Balthus was still painting it), targeting Balthus was not an unexpected move. Throughout his career, the acclaimed and exceptional Polish-French painter, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908–2001) was surrounded by an aura of forbidden erotic sensuality fused with an unquestionable timelessness. Over six decades the subjects of his figurative paintings remained primarily young girls, which he depicted in domestic interiors, street scenes, or landscapes blending Renaissance frescoes (Piero della Francesca and Andrea Mantegna immediately come to mind) with nineteenth-century French Realism and early Modernist figurations toward abstraction.

The new sensitivities of identity politics, lately reloaded and bluntly articulated in the art realm, have reduced both Schutz’s and Balthus’s paintings, and maybe painting in general, into literal pictures in which one sees an image within the circulation of media images, equivalent to an advertisement in its impact. Such reductive evaluation is remarkably questionable, if not plainly cant. More sexualization, appearances of abuse, and objectivization can be found in a Calvin Klein ad than in any given painting. Moreover, images circulating through social media, pervading every bit of our awareness today, are created by internalizing these very parameters of “objectifying,” which are now utilized as both self-expression and a business strategy. This new wave is a zeitgeist powered by good grounds and reasoning that is nevertheless blind to ambivalence, thus abolishing a forceful source of interest, beauty, and gravity that has been fueling visual art for thousands of years. Thérèse Dreaming presents a duality within the complex relationship Balthus establishes with the painting’s beholder: one in which the artist’s own vulnerability is also involved, an evident identification with the seductive girl on the threshold of adulthood and clearly displayed in the painting.

In Jacques Lacan’s theory of psychological development, the mirror stage is described as the moment in which the child discovers its own subjectivity—its separateness not only from the surrounding world but also from its mother. Transposed into a historical framework, according to Michael Fried,2 Caravaggio’s mirror image is a “moment” in art history in which the primordial self-enchantment of art making is confronted with self-awareness, with the artist celebrating the discovery of his detached artistic self and simultaneously expressing the traumatism this entails.