Willem de Kooning 'Untitled VI' (1983) Meyerhoff Collection

The only thing dull about The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection at the National Gallery of Art: Selected Works (NGA) through May 2, 2010 is the exhibition title.  I’d rather call it, with apologies to Wallace Stevens, Ten Ways of Looking at a Painting, with further apologies for the handful of drawings, prints and 3-dimensional works;  it is overwhelmingly a paintings exhibition.  The works, some already donated, the remainder promised to the NGA, are superb and the curatorial decisions intelligent, provocative and subtle.  Harry Cooper, curator of modern and contemporary art, arranged ten sections, each labeled with a subject to ponder while looking at the art.  Then he modestly withdrew, allowing the works to speak directly to viewers and to each other.

Frank Stella 'Gray Scramble' (1969) Meyerhoff Collection

The artists, of various post WWII approaches, are mostly very well known: de Kooning, Kline, Rothko, Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Stella, Kelly and Marden among them.  What Cooper’s exhibition did was shake up my usual and customary thoughts about these long-familiar artists and asked me to look anew.  I left with understandings that were less neat and contained but a lot more interesting.

The first gallery, labeled Scrape, is an essay in the brushless application of paint.  On entering I saw the splendid de Kooning Untitled VI (1983,  above), made when the artist’s painting was all gesture and no mind  – but what gestures!  I peered closely at an untitled painting by Julian Lethbridge of 1989 whose surface resembled alligator skin but couldn’t fathom the paint application from mere looking, despite clear indications of the use of a broad palette knife.  Beside it was one of Albers’ homages to the square which reminded me of his description of his practice: no skylight, no studio, no palette, no easel, no brushes, no medium, no canvas.  I was caught off guard when Brice Marden’s Picasso’s Skull (1989-90) employed scraping not for the figural lines, but for the background.

Roy Lichtenstein 'White Brushstroke II' (1965) Meyerhoff Collection, NGA

Concentricity was the theme of the second gallery and the surprise here was that it applied to shapes beyond circles.  After a moment the themes began to echo, as they would more and more throughout the exhibition. I remembered Johns’ concentric circles in two lithographs in Scrape then saw indications here in Johns’ encaustic, Mirror’s Edge 2 (1993), that he scraped paint through a screen, using it as a stencil.  Another Albers in Concentricity was isomorphic to the one in Scrape, with equally scraped paint .

Robert Rauschenberg 'Frigate (Jammer)' (1975) Meyerhoff Collection

I laughed when I saw the Bochner drawing First Fulcrum (1975) in Line, as the only lines were the negative spaces between the two geometric figures. The lines in Agnes Martin’s Field #21 (1963) contributed to a regular grid wherein each individual line became lost.  In Rauschenberg’s Frigate (Jammer) (1975,  above) the irregular line was a piece of wire which impaled a cardboard tube at the top, projecting through it and supporting a plastic water glass, while its tail end was draped with a ragged red flag of the sort used by trucks carrying oversized loads.

Ellsworth Kelly Blue 'Violet Curve I' (1982) Meyerhoff Collection

Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Violet Curve I (1982, above) was the first work visible in Gesture, its gesture created by the curved meeting the straight side of the shaped canvas, turning it into a directional arrow.  A more conventional example of gesture was Franz Kline’s Turbin (1959) where the gestural brushwork was as much a masculine display as a peacock’s tail. Another Johns encaustic appeared in Drip, creating further echos; it bore another sign of a screen, this time used to transfer paint, as a stamp.  Grace Hartigan is not usually associated with fluid paint, but in Josephine (1983, below), the empress, her contours seeping away, walks through an atmosphere of drips.

Grace Hartigan 'Josephine' (1983) Meyerhoff Collection

And so on, through Stripe to Zip, Figure or Ground, Monochrome and Picture the Frame, with surprises throughout.  Exhibitions drawn from the permanent collections are appropriate to the current financial climate, but more than that, when a museum has such great collections they integrate the museum’s collecting function with its public and educational ones, leveraging the returns.

The Darker Side of Light; Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900

Edgar Degas 'Woman by a Fireplace' (1880-90) monotype, NGA

The NGA currently has several other exhibitions drawn largely from its own collections.  The print department is showing The Darker Side of Light; Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900 through January 18, 2010 then traveling to Chicago, curated by Peter Parshall.  I love prints and would heartily recommend this to anyone similarly inclined.  It gathers 120 works made in France, Belgium and Germany in the later 19th century, largely etchings and other prints but including a  number of small sculptures, reliefs and medals.  The premise is that this was the period when the modern notion of privacy developed and with it came a range of art intended to be viewed within that personal space.  It was also the period of the etching revival, when artists rediscovered Rembrandt’s printmaking and turned out masses of prints for collectors obsessive enough to be interested in multiple states (as many as ten, all duly indicated on the prints and in catalogs).

Felix Bracquemonde 'The Moles' (1854) etching, NGA

The exhibition is arranged around themes (The City, Nature, Obsession, Violence and so forth), and reveals some of the odder interests of the period that were too marginal to feature in paintings: the dead rodents of Felix Bracquemond’s ‘The Moles’ (1854, above, PETA wouldn’t like it), the plague of Cholera in Paris (1865) by François Nicolas Chifflart, depicted as a swarm of nude figures floating above the city, or the hallucination of fish floating through the sky in Charles Meryon’s otherwise topographic Ministry of the Marine, Paris (1865). Anyone who doesn’t know Max Klinger’s series, A Glove (1880-81, below),  has missed one of the late 19th century’s great expressions of fetishism, made at the time the term was adopted in psychology.

Max Klinger 'Abduction' from 'A Glove' (1880/81) etching proof (I/II), NGA

One problem with the exhibition is that in a gallery with prints by Degas and Munch it’s impossible to concentrate on the Besnards and Zorns.  The exhibition includes a handful of really first-rate artists who overwhelm the larger group who were splendid technicians, but artists of limited, if interesting, scope.  It also strikes me as unlikely that anyone who collected most of the etchings in the exhibition would be interested in the one lithograph by Munch, which would bear display at more than hand-held distance.

Klinger’s eroticism was displaced or expressed relatively chastely and while the subject runs through several of the exhibition’s themes, its most overt expression is Franz von Stuck’s Sensuality (c. 1891), depicting a nude woman with a huge snake writhing between her legs and around her shoulders.  This brings up a significant omission in the exhibition, which is the frankly erotic (Felicien Rops’ genre better-known than those in the exhibition); they were clearly an art of privacy, referred to in the catalog but not on view.  This is an occasion when they might reach the museum walls; I assume some linger in closely guarded museum Solander cases.

The Drawings department also has an exhibition drawn from the collections: Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500 – 1800. I can’t do it justice here.

Michael Jackson, group dance in Beat It, very reminiscent of the Jets and Sharks in West Side Story

Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History by historian William H. McNeill talks about the physical and emotional underpinnings of dance and drill and other human synchronous movement. We all love to dance and we fall easily into step with each other when walking; even aerobics classes are satisfying whereas doing aerobics by yourself is odious.  Why is that? McNeill says there’s something in the human bones and psyche that compels us to move together — and then rewards us for doing so. We feel good when moving together with others. There’s a spirit of group cohesion and shared emotion that happens, some pack animal body-and-mind-happiness that occurs.

Marching band stepping together.

Our ancestors learned this, and dancing allowed them to bond. Dancing may even have helped foster language development (chanting being a natural partner with dance). Moving together rhythmically helped Homo Sapiens evolve and dominate the landscape over non-dancing and non-marching species. Governments have corraled group movement for use in the army — Hitler of course abused this human love of mass physical movement with his goose-stepping soldiers and Heil Hitlering citizens.

University of Michigan graduation. Football crowds often do the human wave, another way to move together in time.

In very early times, organized religions allowed group dancing as a way to commune with god. (One of the byproducts of the rhythmic dancing for some people is the onset of a trance state, seen as a direct communication with god.) The Quakers and the Shakers got their names from the group movements associated with their religions according to McNeil.

Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street New Orleans, crowd in unison hoping to get some beads. Far from a mystical religious experience...or who knows, maybe for some it is.

Visual representations of dance, drill and other synchronous movement

Image of a battle in the War of 1812. By Oleg Parhaiev, Russia

McNeill’s book got me thinking about visual representations of dance and drill and about visual repetition motifs in general. And here’s what I think: That even if you’re not physically moving but are observing dance or drill — or are looking at a visual representation in 2-D of dance or drill — the visual image triggers a similar pack-response as your eyes move around the image and pick up the the rhythmic movements  and register them on you.

Fra Angelico. Early religious paintings often repeated motifs like halos and body stances to achieve visual harmony

And while there’s less of a physical response when looking at a 2-D image than there is to looking at a video (after all, there’s no music to enhance the effects), there is still something immediately satisfying when you look at a work with a repeat motif of bodies moving together.

Busby Berkeley movies in the 1930s specialized in images of group motion. This is a still from Footlight Parade.

Popular culture and art both love these movement spectacles. Think of Busby Berkeley (watch video) and the Rockettes; the human wave at college football games; and the standing and singing of national anthems everywhere. Think the Olympic parade and church rituals (Catholic ritual when I grew up was all about standing sitting and kneeling en masse triggered by some unseen signal–all while chanting unknowable Latin words in haunting melodies). In choreographed dance for the stage, especially in musical theatre, often it’s the group numbers that bring the house down.

Breughel's Wedding Dance in a Barn shows a whole town dancing it up.

Certainly artists have always loved making images of synchronous bodies in motion. McNeill’s book has pictures of a Minoan Crete harvester vase from 1500 BC that shows people dancing and singing in time: Medievalists painted legions of angels (and legions of praying sinners) in synchronous harmony; Breughel painted peasants dancing at a wedding; and many artists working for governments have drawn, painted and photographed army battalions in formation.

Sandra Scolnik, painting from the New York art fairs in 2007.

In our day Matthew Barney, one of our age’s great visual image-makers, has a scene of a chorus of dancing girls ala Busby Berkeley in one of his Cremaster films.

Matthew Barney, from the Cremaster series.

Visual representations of repeat patterns

Bruce Pollock, a Philadelphia artist, makes mandala-like paintings.

Mandalas and other abstract art designs with intricate repeat patterns have a similar bodily appeal. Mandalas are used for meditation and can produce calm or trance; Op Art is about provoking a bodily/retinal response of a different kind.  Standing in front of a Bridget Riley painting triggers my flight response.  (For more about Op Art check out this website.)

Edna Andrade was a Philadelphia practitioner of op art.

Jackson Pollock’s works are like melted mandalas.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

One reason that works of abstract repeat patterns like those of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden are popular and have helped spawn an entire universe of artists working in similar fashion is that the works are satisfying to look at and make.

Brice Marden, Marden, Brice, Chinese Dancing, Oil on canvas, 60 x 108 inches, from the UBS collection

I’m not sure why all this fascinates but it seems that there’s a human need for perfection expressed in the desire to move together and make images of repetitive movements.  We know we’re not perfect and maybe this is all a way of saying even though perfection is not possible we can get pretty close with these bodily and emotionally satisfying movements and representations.