Here are three oil paintings in the European representational tradition that have found their ways to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. They are not particularly good paintings and they are worth thinking about so as to help understand why oil painting in its representational mode is such a satisfying experience, ones that give pleasure not because the artist is clever or insightful or with superb technique, but because painting itself in these of its genres has a power of its own. These paintings can be best appreciated for what it is to be paintings.
“Fisher Folk'', by Phillip Sadee, a Nineteenth Century Dutch painter, shows a cluster of three people to the right of the painting, one of them a child, the two adults in conversation. An immediate pleasure comes from any viewer recognizing that they are capable of recognizing that a conversation is taking place even though we do not know what they are talking about and even if the viewers may not be self aware of the fact that it is pleasing to feel the power of recognizing the social fact, people unaware of all so many of the things that are understood without being also articulated or coming to their attention even if they are within attention. Farther away are some figures that are near a boat that has come on shore, and is probably to be inferred as the fishing boat indicated in the work of the title. There is here another pleasure, which is that of the aesthetic pleasure of seeing the balance between the near figures at the near right and the further figures and things at the remote upper left, people again not necessarily articulating aesthetic balance even if they appreciate balance as a matter of either convention or the inevitability of the ways spaces are related to one another in ways that are inevitably beautiful or somehow well balanced. So the recognition of social facts as well as aesthetic matters are part of what a painting does and not just what a particular painting does particularly well.
A third feature of “Fisher Folk” is the visual atmosphere, especially in its color. The sky is grayish and so overcast, as might overtake any fishing venture. Moreover, the flats on the shoreline are brownish with mud and interspersed with bits of the water on top of the mud, sufficiently so that a viewer will notice whether the three interlocutors are properly wearing shoes for the cold and muddy slush, and that does seem to be the case because they are warmly dressed and their shoes do not seem worn. There is pleasure in the fact of this expanse, something only likely to be seen at a seashore, and so the viewer is getting to see a different kind of place and it is entertaining to see something different without having to go there, which also happens in novels that describe places to which the reader has not been, whether Dublin or desert like New Mexico. It is both a fact and an imagination and also a mood in that an overcast day can set a mood, so people think, for a place or to a people.
Fourth, the painting is just for a moment, a snapshot of the three major people taken together, perhaps ever to be remembered by that little girl as something set in her memory, the placements of the people, the quiet of the distances, the harshness of the air, while that girl seems to be merely passing time, as do most times we do, while having had their experiences etched in their permanent memories. That is what all paintings do, not just in Kodak kodachrome or more advanced photos. They fix a moment in eternity, however it unfolds before and after if there is a story to be told or if the scene is only altered as a weather event. A painting therefore stills time by itself, which is a neat kind of metaphysical trick as old as happened when cavemen recalled a hunt and made it permanent on their walls, separate from the moment that had happened on the hunt and so pleasant to reobserve and review around a campfire. Those four things are what oil paintings do even if the people creating them do not add anything special or new in their presentations.
Gian Panini, an Eighteenth Century Roman who, among other things, did imaginative creations of the vistas of Roman ruins, is a more accomplished and better known painter than Sadee but the Panini painting at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, one called “Capriccio of Roman Ruins with Figures”, is not a particularly distinguished painting, certainly not as good as his “Views of the Colosseum”, which much improve the arrangements of those same elements, “Views” shows a nice, greened sloping path between the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, the parts composed together as if one could walk over it, while the one on display in Salt Lake City is jumbled together and even added with an ivy invested pyramid, which did not exist among the Roman ruins of the Eighteenth Century. Panini shows in his “Capriccio” visitors walk through the past surrounded by objects somehow eschewed and distorted in perspective, as if the objects were play models that had dropped onto the floor of a child’s room. So there is in “Capriccio” less of the art that makes some other Panini’s artistically successful, but presents itself only as something more basic, which is the idea and the experience of these shapes separately and overlapping and looking different from one another, as is the case with Trajan’s Column, which is a tall column rather than the circular Colosseum or the arched but squat Arch of Constantine,these shapes taken together as well as reminiscences of objects people will feel pleasure at having recognized as part of their cultural heritage.
The inferior painting works anyway despite its deficiencies of the arrangements of its parts. The column breaks the front of the Colosseum, and it is always a pleasure to see things before and behind, testaments to mental acuity as well as to pleasant contradictions. The images are given detail and even the shortened view of the spectators walking through Rome are Lilliputians and so awed by what they behold as overbearing them. These are people in another real life context, as was the case in the seashore in “Fisher Folk”, but the Roman scene is of human made artifacts rather than the geometry of a seashore, the Roman scene sort of like the jumble of styles that make up contemporary Las Vegas, so the tourist can get it all, to notice imitations of New York and Venice without ever having left their country, while those on the Grand Tour had to undertake considerable exertions so as to see what it was they would see. The shapes in Rome are familiar and yet each one of them catch its own particular object as an experience and these objects are magnified when they are seen close up, and also seen as real ruins rather than imitated ruins. I myself still feel thrilled to have wandered through the real ruin of the Colosseum so as to see it so different, myself placed in that time, as well as today, as a result of waiting on line so as to enter it, still intact enough to be there recognizably. That is what a ruin sees whether it is admirably or artistically presented to a viewer. Imagination trumps art or, rather, the reality lightly or distortedly presented is enough to fill the imagination of the viewer with the weight of experiencing a moment of the past just as “Fisher Folk” was a moment of the present or the nearly present when it was just painted.
There are standard topics and genres in painting. They are the subject matters that can be dealt with visually. There are seashores, as in “Fisher Folk”, because the curve of the shoreline, the arcs of sand and water, the gradual water moving to its horizon or the shore giving to its elevations, are intriguing to everyone, pleasant whether a viewer is aware of the effects or not. Similarly, there is the topic of monuments or ruins or, more generally, of buildings, of cityscapes, which give their straight lines overlooking or crossing over other lines, blocs of space competing and complementing one another and these have always been intriguing, and so have been with Panini, who was always monumental, sometimes his paintings being of crowds of people or showing an abundance of paintings at some fanciful art museums. There are also other kinds of standard genres. There are streetscapes and crowds and some of paintings that zoom down to cafes or dinner parties in interior rooms and then there are individual or group portraits where people are posed and where the viewer speculates or tries to penetrate what the person being portrayed is really like. Another visual staple is the portrait of flowers, which would seem to be trivial but commands a good deal to attention. One of these painters is Worthington Whittredge a Hudson River School artist who did a great many other and superior things but whose inclusion in Salt Lake City is of a portrait of flowers remarkable for not having the ample color that was present in the Impressionist painters with whom he overlapped, and which had so mightily revamped what people could see in color, shocked by its vividness, and instead is a rather mundane painting of his “The Garden”, which is notable only in that it makes a viewer try to understand what is so wonderful about flowers at all.
Whittredge presents mostly white and some few red flowers that rise up on separate trelesses, these parallel and perpendicular trelesses enclosed in a clay or wood perimeter outside of which can be seen with a watering can lying on a path of bare sand that encircles the wood perimeter, and beyond that can be seen a fence and some undeveloped grass that shows one more time that the flowers themselves have been carefully cultivated. The flowers would not last very long if the trelesses had not been tended, all of this work done so as to let some flowers sparkle, however dull they might be, even if the mundane flowers do seem to be fluffy and fully developed and full of their white or red colors. So that is what makes flowers what they are: a lot of work so as to show something biological in nature but severely altered by human creation or grafting or care? The flowers in Witteredge give off their fragility, and so are very different from the lushness and wildness Manet would see in his water lilies. The colors and the texture of the petals and the intricacies of the flowers themselves are what is important even if these are not stellar examples of flowers, but these are what they are and are “beautiful” as an intrinsic aesthetic matter and so apart from the convention of what is often ascribed to flowers, which is that we think flowers to be beautiful, though even though this intrinsic beauty of flowers seems a minor form of beauty, much less so than music or epic poetry, even if flowers are taken as the essentially beautiful, just a pastime that requires a lot of work. Beauty is overdone, or so would be my conclusion on the basis of the Whittredge painting.
Pleasurable still, whether natural or contrived, in that flowers are the standard objects of painting in that they are familiar and, perhaps, because flowers are intrinsically conjoined with the geometry and the experiences of painting in that flowers have colors and weird shapes. Some people, though, may not like painting as an experience, perhaps best to leave painting in general or perhaps only flowers as just merely being pretty, or else people can be unappreciative of just one of its periods or genres, but painting does seem to be one of the arts, characteristic of all arts, that a viewer can take it or leave it, his or her own on the critic’s judgment, of whether the object lives up to having become a deep or abiding aesthetic object rather than merely a decoration or, in another instance, as a story that rises to being aesthetic because it conveys resonances such as ironies or twists or deep felt feeling rather than a story just made up for the hell of it, as if story making were something of a quirk, like doing jigsaw puzzles, while real things don’t have to do with stories but with technology and other sciences. There is no need to “read” a painting any more than a story is read or perused, an activity that requires some attention, and the articulation of the read can always be treated as a “reading in” rather than as an appreciation of what is. Even less than wonderful paintings aren’t just natural as aesthetic pleasures if people refuse to notice what they experience even as they do experience them.