Wrestling with Nature

The Obscuring Mirror & the Dream of True Perception

Page III

To see, to perceive, to experience is wrought with difficultly and such terms as ‘Expressionist’ essentially only obfuscate, they do not clarify; employing them to articulate what one has seen is like wearing glasses when one’s sight is perfect. In the end, such terms do not illuminate but impede one’s vision and the articulation and communication of what one has seen. When the degree to which we can see is already limited, such obfuscations further diminish abilities that we cannot permit to ebb. If we are to encounter things directly, if we are to see and experience them so that our encounter with things is manifold and original, it is vital to trust our responses and to move beyond our reliance on concepts and move into the dark of not knowing, into the possibility of inexpressivity, into silence. In that is our originality and in that is our passageway to sight. Originality as Emerson said is “being, being one’s self, and reporting accurately what we see and are. Genius is the first instance, sensibility, the capacity of receiving just impressions from the external world, and the power of co-coordinating these after the laws of thought. It implies Will, or original force, for their right distribution and expression.” The status of seeing aside, accuracy aside, in being completely himself, van Gogh organized, that is, shaped into a style, and presented his vision of the world, making his originality evident in a forceful and dramatic manner. When encountering his paintings for the first time, the painters here being examined were confronted with a mask more powerful than any mask they had ever seen. It was not the mask of one who was a dwarf of himself, it was not the mask of a god in ruins, but it was one who insisted on the absolute validity of his selves and let them flourish incandescently. It was van Gogh with the mask of the future.

In that radiant mask the future of painting truly did reside, at least one of its futures, and to each painter now considered ‘Expressionist’ different pathways were visible, pathways which encouraged them to manifest their originality and shape masks of their own. While initially some of them may have imitated van Gogh, ultimately, they incorporated and transformed him, finding in him a base metal out of which to forge new materials. For Kandinsky, aside from his vibrant combinations of color, van Gogh’s paintings contained the seeds of abstraction, germs which he would extend to extremes far from the orbit of van Gogh’s earth. Instigated by such force, Kandinsky would be able to affirm in 1911 in the Blaue Reiter manifesto that “the signs of the new inner renaissance,” the very renaissance which van Gogh thought possible and effectively proclaimed, were evident. At one point van Gogh even experimented with abstractions but said in the end that though it was “enchanted ground,” with it, “one soon finds oneself up against a stone wall. I won’t,” he continued explaining to his brother Theo, say “that one might not venture on it after a virile lifetime of research, of a hand-to-hand struggle with nature, but I personally don’t want to bother my head with such things.” He veered toward the abyss, but retreated from it, probably as we can infer because of his ultimate fidelity to nature, to his inability or refusal to consider more unsettling perspectives. Later, the ‘Abstract Expressionists’ would shatter form in an even more pronounced if not violent manner and extend painting into domains van Gogh foresaw but did not venture into and probably would have detested more than Francis Bacon. To Kokoschka, it was van Gogh’s link with the figurative tradition and his fervent humanism which aided later artists in avoiding what he saw as the ‘dangers’ of abstract art. For Heckel, the dramatic intensity of van Gogh’s visuality was completely unique, encouraging the artist’s own vivid and striking depictions of reality. Schiele’s inclusion in the exhibition is perhaps more intriguing than that of any other painter—perhaps even more than Klimt’s—for, at least visually, in terms of the application of paint, van Gogh’s influence on the Austrian painter is not as discernible. There may actually not be one, but without the excoriating clarity of the wandering Dutchman’s self-portraits, the impetus for Schiele’s extreme, hyper-conscious and histrionic self-portraits may not have come so freely. It was the energy, the galvanic force, and van Gogh’s self-reflexivity, his knowledge that what he was creating was a vision as well as his life which affected a diverse array of painters, each with distinct and powerful visions of their own, attesting to the richness of van Gogh’s work and what it was, and still is capable of provoking.

In general, most of these artists directed their attention not toward nature but toward their own inner worlds, making van Gogh’s extensive influence ridden with tension. However, while they did pivot away from nature, in another sense, it remained their sole concern. True, the natural world that van Gogh immersed himself in was not of abiding interest to most of the painters here, yet they focused on ‘nature’ just as intensely; that is, not on the natural world but on themselves as representatives of nature. As noted by Klee in the epigraph to this section, the artist is “himself nature, and a piece of nature within the area of nature.” “It is not form,” he said, “but a kind of inner truthfulness that determines whether or not a painting will have achieved something of significance.” Franz Marc declared that the painter “has only to listen to [his] own conscience—he who honestly asks will be told when the feelings that he expressed in his paintings were genuine and when he contented himself, frivolously, with empty formalistic shapes.” What marks the highest if not sole level of achievement here is not adherence to natural form or one’s ability to adequately or strikingly depict such forms. The painter is now free from all the previous constraints or demands of painting but given, and all gifts are comprised of dangers as the German sense of the word connotes, perhaps the most strenuous constraint or demand of all—that of striving for inner truthfulness, of listening, and listening is a difficult art, to the music of one’s own inner depths. In this is a decisive shift. Van Gogh focused on the natural world and attempted to discover its secrets, though cognizant that what he saw was affected by his temperament. It was not some truth, but a perspective of the world. However, while he did lead the way out of the rigid ‘optical’ naturalism and ‘scientific’ coloring of the ‘Impressionists,’ his paintings remain almost logical in comparison to those of the ‘Expressionists.’ In his work there is a structure and order that overrides any distortion. In van Gogh’s paintings, a tree is always a tree. A table is a table. A field is a field. The colors of such things may lack verity, but the forms remain realistic whereas the ‘Expressionists’ shatter natural structure almost altogether. In fact, one of the stated goals of the Blaue Reiter manifesto was the very “displacement of the center of gravity in art, literature, music.” If the center of gravity is displaced, then perspective is displaced and the whole world becomes a topsy-turvy abyss. Where perspective in van Gogh is disrupted or flattened out, in most ‘Expressionist’ work it is completely obliterated. In many ‘Expressionist’ paintings, it often isn’t clear what one is seeing and in that is a deliberate practice. A tree may be an amorphous blur; a table a block of color; a field of grass a sea of fire or a tumultuous ocean. There is no ground; there is no above or below; there is no sustaining law but only the eternal flux, the chaos that is chance, the dance of fire flickering like frames of a Stan Brakhage film. The focus is entirely on the self, which is examined as nature, and an expression of that self’s experience of the world. It is not a truth claim wherein some transparency has been achieved. It is an intensification and complete internalization of a focus that was formerly directed, at least predominantly, outward. The nether regions the ‘Expressionists’ explored as psychologists were the nether regions of their psyches. The poetry they painted was not that which was concealed within the natural world, but what they brought forth from within themselves. It is not that van Gogh was the apotheosis of the subject-self, for while imbuing all of his work with what he felt, in the end he always deferred to nature, but that all of the painters considered ‘Expressionist’ apotheosized the self as hitherto it never had been in the history of painting. In an epoch when the status of the subject could not have been more tenuous, as if it might slip away forever like an eel gliding through our hands, it became a major point of orientation. That fragile stability of the self remained; it is apparent in even the most aggrandized self-portraits, revealing that the very selves that created them could dissipate and vanish, if they ever existed at all.

In Alexej von Jawlensky’s eerie Self-Portrait in Top Hat, 1904, the distinction between the natural world and the painter is nearly erased. In fact, it doesn’t exist. He is blended into nature, or nature is fused into him as he is fused into it, a swirl of forces ready to consume one another. His left eye is visible, but is on the verge of vanishing as is his body, which is being consumed by the greenery about him. His top hat is the sole vestige of civilization—his clothes are already in the midst of transmogrification—and the firmest object in the painting; otherwise, the painter could be a flower within the larger field of nature, or something that nature will eventually consume entirely. And the top hat is beginning to dissipate, its edges dissolving in the storm of green about him. The instability of materiality is hauntingly palpable.

Herbert Boeckl’s Portrait of Kurt Plahna, 1917, is similar in its near obliteration of the subject, whose intensity remains but which is also blended into its surroundings, a whorl of violent, contrasting colors reflecting an emotional intensity and inner turmoil in which van Gogh’s influence is obvious. Conversely, the macabre darkness of the painting, its real ferocity if not terror, is lost in the exhibition catalogue and looks like a wholly other, much lighter, less apocalyptic work—Plahna died at sixteen in the defense of Carinthia weeks after the portrait was made. The reproduction of the painting is not even remotely accurate. This is a serious flaw with all of the reproductions, which distort the colors of the paintings and make them bright when they aren’t, while many lack the luminosity they have in life, such as van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, 1889, which is as radiant as few paintings in the world. Its glow is mesmerizing, like the light of the moon piercing an emerald in the blackest night.

Schmidt-Rottluff’s Self-Portrait, 1906, is another instance of an ironic emblazoning but near erasure of the subject, which is threatened by and fractions from amalgamation by its surroundings. The defining features of the painter’s visage are clear enough—Schmidt-Rottluff accentuates himself through an intensification of color and thick, short dabs of paint—but he is amorphous, more a fiery mixture of shape-shifting colors that merge into the background of the painting than in any of van Gogh’s self-portraits.

In Emil Nolde’s Portrait of Schmidt-Rottluff, 1906, the distinction between the subject and the background is in part nebulous, too. His gaze, which is directed towards the left field of the painting as if something is approaching to obliterate him, is full of apprehension. Many of his features are clearly defined—he is as much a part of the background of the painting as it is of him. Where the self, or selves inhere and the natural world ends or begins is strictly not clear.

This aspect of the above paintings could be seen as a figuration of the self as nature, of a depiction of the tenuous membrane separating man from the world which, in van Gogh, is always on the verge of exploding. In his reality, the world is aflame, like glass in a crucible, the whorl and torrent of becoming pushed to an extremity but not yet breaking open. In the world of the ‘Expressionists,’ the glass never makes it to the annealer. It explodes from the thermal stress. It is broken open. Chaos is presented in its unabashed formlessness and the world as appearance flourishes in all of its terror, flickering violently before us, an apocalypse ready to consume not merely every individual, but the world itself. Here we are, exploding together, in Meidner’s Apocalyptic Landscape, 1913.

This is not the dream of true perception, nor the obscuring mirror which does not know that it obscures. This is world as appearance in its fullest, most scintillating sense. This is world as appearance in its horrific truth.

In refusing to try to depict the world in a realistic manner, which they knew wasn’t possible, the ‘Expressionist’ painters overcame the threat of the camera obscura. The world as glittering illusion was given its full glory. They did not see things as they thought they were but created a vision of the world; they interpreted it and pushed what was impulse in van Gogh to its absolute extremity. In their phantasmagoric use of color, the ‘Expressionists’ became the arbitrary colorists of the future that van Gogh called forth. For him, the painter had to depict what he directly experienced from reality; what the ‘Expressionists’ depicted was the direct experience of their own inner selves. That was something van Gogh may have found ponderous and meaningless as, clearly, these painters had less contact with ‘reality’ than did Hoffmann and Poe, but then, perhaps their contact with reality was even sharper, perhaps they approached reality as van Gogh never had, perhaps they moved into the dark abyss of becoming, in which terror often threatens obliteration. “Art,” as Oscar Wilde said, “finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.” In knowing that the mirror is but an obscuring device, in knowing that the veils of the saving sorceress could not be removed, the ‘Expressionist’ painters confronted the tragic reality of the world. As they dreamt, they were inventive without return; in that plenitude, out of such abundance, through such sacrificial expenditure, they were nature in action, giving birth to joy and to terror, knowing full well that their encounter with the world was but one encounter, one film strip flickering through a projector, as reliant upon light as upon darkness, not a revelation, but yet another appearance flickering forth. The recreation of new values was for them not possible without the simultaneous destruction of the ossified values at rule in their time, not only in painting, but in life itself. In their confrontation with the world as tragic, they refused the myopic lie of Socratic optimism and they refused the belief in a stable and comforting truth, rushing instead like bulls into the terrifying ambiguity of the abyss. It is the world that laughs as we perish; it is the world that dances as we evaporate. It is the world as will to power and nothing besides. . .

© Rainer J. Hanshe—Nietzsche Circle, 2007

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007)

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