Words, Facts, and Art

I am in London for eighteen days, soaking up the atmosphere, observing the architecture, and planning new paintings. While here, I finally read “The Castle” by Kafka, which I had been putting off, and saw three plays: “The Real Thing” by Tom Stoppard, “Slave Play” by Jeremy O. Harris, and “The Comedy of Errors” by Shakespeare. I also saw “Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers” at the National Gallery, an excellent exhibition of the paintings and drawings Van Gogh created between 1888 and 1890.

There were too many people at the exhibition. Because so many people were there to photograph the artwork rather than look at it, I was able, through patience, to get a good look at all the paintings and drawings. If everybody had wanted to look, it would have been impossible to see anything, since photographing something takes much less time than looking at it. If museums want to serve those who want to look at art rather than those who want to post photos on social media, they need to reduce the number of tickets they sell. Or they could simply ban photography, which would automatically keep out social-media addicts. But we all know that they will not do that. They like the free advertising they get with all those social-media posts. No matter that such advertising brings in social-media addicts rather than art lovers. In this world, no one, not even the art museums, believes that there is any need for anyone to actually look at art.

The National Gallery provided a small booklet listing the works in the exhibition, along with a short blurb about each work. I noticed that nearly all the visitors to the exhibition had the booklet in their hand the entire time and carefully read the corresponding blurb before looking at each work.

Lest it appear that I am criticizing the Gallery for providing the blurbs, let me mention that I, too, made a booklet for the art show I held last year at my New Jersey studio before moving to Ottawa. For each of the eighty paintings in the show, in addition to the title, medium, and size, I wrote a brief note explaining whether it was from life or from imagination, where I painted it, what motivated it, and so on. People loved the blurbs. Like the people at the National Gallery, they read the booklet as they looked at the paintings.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. The fact that the people viewing each show diligently read the booklet that was provided reveals an earnestness, conscientiousness, and respect for the art. But I have decided that I will no longer provide blurbs. Indeed, I have made a point of labeling the paintings in my new studio with just their identifier (e.g., “P158”). I don’t want the viewer to even know the title of a work before they look at it.

The reason for this is that I have recently become increasingly aware that visual art is a visual medium. Most people are much more comfortable with words than they are with visual art, which is why they like written and audio explanations. But when words are used to describe or explain a work of visual art, they introduce logic and reasoning, which is almost never what the artist intended.

I don’t mean that words necessarily produce reason and logic. Kafka, for example, used words to create a world devoid of reason. (More precisely, he used words to reproduce the lack of logic in the bureaucratic systems that human societies love to create.) But while words do not necessarily result in logic, logic requires words. When we attempt to reason logically, we use language or symbols. Since the blurb written about a work of art is not literature and does not aim to defy logic, it tends to make the viewer think rather than feel.

Here is an example. One of the paintings on view at the National Gallery is “The Toilet of Venus” by Diego Velázquez. In the painting, a nude woman is lying with her back to us. Facing her is Cupid, holding a mirror up to her. In the mirror, we can see the woman’s face, though it is rather blurry. Next to the painting, on the wall, a blurb explains that since we see Venus’s face in the mirror, she is looking at us rather than at herself. I am sorry, but this is nonsense. It is a faulty application of logic to a work of visual art. It would make no sense artistically for the mirror to show anything but Venus’s blurred face. I’m sure the member of the art establishment who wrote the blurb was very pleased with themselves and felt awfully smart, but the way they think is not the way an artist thinks. The reason we see Venus’s face in the mirror is that Velázquez knows we want to see Venus’s face; humans are extremely interested in faces, and the painting would not be nearly as effective if the mirror reflected anything else. He therefore gives us Venus’s face, but he makes it blurry because it is too beautiful for us to see clearly. (I imagine that Velázquez may not have made the face blurry initially. He may have painted in the face but felt unsatisfied with it, ultimately deciding that Venus’s face could not be represented by the face of a mere human.)

Blurbs written about art by members of the art establishment (who are not themselves artists, since our society does not respect artists and does not consider them worth listening to) are almost always irrelevant facts, unnecessary descriptions of the work, or speculations about the artist’s intentions, which are sometimes downright offensive. Here is an excerpt from the blurb about “View of Arles” (1889): “Van Gogh must have hoped his inventive combination of daring geometry and rich surface texture would impress other artists.” Members of the art establishment love to write and speak, always with a tone of mild contempt, about how some great artist or other of the past wanted to impress people. What they don’t seem to understand is that a great artist does not aim to impress. Great art comes from an earnest desire to capture something: a vague memory, a beautiful or striking view, a mysterious atmosphere, a sad feeling, a blinding light, or whatever happened to move the artist to go to the not-insignificant trouble of painting. A great artist may hope to enchant or mesmerize but understands that aiming to impress is a dead end. Claiming that Van Gogh was trying to impress other artists is incredibly disrespectful. Not only does the writer of the blurb claim to know what Van Gogh was thinking, but they reduce Van Gogh from a great artist to a pretender who cared more about what other artists thought of him than about realizing his vision.

Even when Van Gogh’s own words were included in the exhibition, they were misleading. About “The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles”, Van Gogh wrote to his sister, “So it’s a painting chock-full of flowers and springtime greenery. However, three black, sad tree-trunks cross it like snakes, and in the foreground four large sad, dark box bushes.” While waiting for my turn to look at the painting, I overheard two young men expressing bemusement about the ability of box bushes to be sad. When my turn came to look at the painting, I was surprised by how obviously sad the box bushes were. In drawing, there is something called “gesture”. A person can have a gesture, but so can an inanimate object. The box bushes had the gestures of sad, helpless, desperate people. The only way the young men could have missed this is that they were too focused on Van Gogh’s words. If there had been no words, and if they had simply looked at the painting, they could not have missed the desperation of the box bushes.

Knowing facts about a work of art does not add anything to one’s experience of the work. When I work on a painting, I want the viewer to look at the painting, enter it, and get lost in it. I want the viewer to create the scene in their own imagination; I want them to be reminded of things and places they have seen. I don’t want them to think; I want them to feel.

It is nearly impossible these days to go to an exhibition and view a painting in this way. If you stand in front of a painting for even five minutes, someone will come up right next to you and hold their phone in front of your face to take a photograph of the work you are trying to focus on. And if you say something to the person, you will only upset yourself and ruin your enjoyment of the rest of the exhibition. But if you go to a smaller, local art museum, or to the less popular rooms of museums like the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can still stand in front of a great painting for twenty minutes and get lost in it.

Walking around central London, I see tourists displaying the same focus on facts as the people at the Van Gogh exhibition. Groups of tourists from all over the world surround or follow tour guides who give them facts about the various buildings or monuments around them. But facts are not as interesting as they are cracked up to be. What is really valuable, in my opinion, about being in a place like London is the ability to look at one’s surroundings and drink in the atmosphere. Central London is absolutely gorgeous, especially when the sun is shining. The cream-coloured buildings, with their shiny black doors and black wrought iron accents; the black cabs; the red buses; and the green leaves and mottled barks of plane trees: that is what I love about London, and that is what brings me back.