DIEBENKORN DOES THE WHITE HOUSE

The Obama Effect has thus far been mostly symbolic; he seems to balance every positive move (Israeli settlements) with a negative one (Guantanamo and torture), has approached the economic crisis much more like Bill Clinton than FDR, and been very cautious with his first pick to join the Supremes. But symbolic does has impact, and I'm all in favour of his latest move, which was to borrow a new set of paintings from the Hirschorn, including Richard Diebenkorn's 'Berkeley No. 52' (pictured right).

Diebenkorn's a fascinating painter, one of my absolute favourites. He's from the generation of the Abstract Expressionists and in one sense produced a West Coast version of AE which took a long time to get recognised. That may be because his Berkeley work, from the 50s and 60s, is more representational than one expects from Abstract Expressionism. Even his Ocean Park series, from the 60s and 70s, still features recognisable parts of landscape, more than a hint of Post-Impressionism in them. They have a relaxed, west coast feel to them; not the intensity of, say, Rothko (who did grow up in Portland, Oregon, where Diebenkorn was born, after all), whom they sometimes recall. There's also a touch of Franz Kline about some of them, in their structural, almost architectural, power; and it's interesting that the Obama's have apparently requested a Kline from Chicago, on approval, as it were. Apparently, Barack took Michelle to the Art Institute on one of their first dates.

The Obamas have also borrowed sculptures by Jasper Johns and Degas, and works by Josef Albers, Louise Nevelson, Rauschenberg and, oddly, a red painting by Edward Ruscha with words like 'I think' 'maybe' and 'yes' on it. This is Obama's Bob the Builder approach to art. Can we fix it? Maybe we can! They've also selected a couple of works by a little-known black American artist, Alma Thomas Sky Light (left) and the Chubby Checker-inspired 'Watusi Hard Edge'. There was an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal which, while noting the pressure to make political gestures when presidents pick art, was more concerned with the potential increase in market value for the artists. This, I suppose, would be more of a help to those who are still alive, though the works themselves need to be at least 25 years old before they can be added to the White House's permanent collection, lest presidents be seen to be playing the art market like British MPs play the property market with taxpayer funding.

Call me predictable, but I find it interesting that I immediately make connections between Diebenkorn, Rohko, and Kline--my favourites of the painters of my lifetime. There's also a nice parallel to be made with Cy Twombly (about whom I wrote last August; you can find that here), another AE artist working at a remove from the mainstream, outlasting them, and in an environment of relaxed bright light. You can see a bit of Twombly, and even more of Charles Demuth, in many of the Ocean Park paintings (right).

That Diebenkorn's work should appeal to Obama, raised in Hawaii and colleged, at first, in California, doesn't come as a great surprise. I remember in the early 90s spending a weekend in Healdsburg, mainly because Diebenkorn lived there. The Clos du Bois winery was there too, and between them and the nice little Inn I stayed in, I decided Healdsburg would be a fine place to live. I wonder if it's still the same, with a Disney 1950s feel to it. Oddly, that's the kind of feeling Diebenkorn draws from me; I find his work both contemplative and soothing, both of which I assume would be a boon to someone with Obama's job description. But the idea of having the great galleries of America as a shopping gallery makes me think the job might almost be worth it.

RE-VISITING VERMEER'S LADY WRITING A LETTER

I finally made it back to Dublin this week, and paid a visit to Vermeer's 'Lady Writing A Letter with her Maid', about which I wrote in my essay, which you can find here, on Matthew Hart's The Irish Game . The occasion was a special exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland, 'Vermeer, Fabritius, and De Hooch: Three Masterpieces From Delft', whose title is pretty much self-explanatory. In a small, nicely-proportioned room, Vermeer's 'Woman Writing' (Hart, and I, prefer the title 'Lady Writing A Letter', which I think helps set out the relationship between the two women in the painting better, but the gallery calls it 'Woman') is placed facing the doorway, flanked by, on the left, Fabritius' 'The Goldfinch' (1654) and, on the right, De Hooch's 'The Courtyard of a House in Delft' (1658). It's interesting, as the Vermeer is dated circa 1670, and there is a strong sense that by that time he had taken a step forward, in terms of both dramatic depth and use of light, and felt the influence of his two predecessors.

Having never seen 'Lady Writing' before, I was first surprised that it's somewhat larger than I had imagined, and then realised that it is exactly that sense of drama, of tension contained within his scene, that had left me with the impression of a more compact piece. The other big surprise was just how powerful that curtain on the left of the painting actually is: it's weight and texture hover in the corner, as if waiting to be drawn, close off the light, shut out whatever it is the maid is looking at, and stop the woman from writing the letter which she obviously must get finished right away. The heavy drapery itself casts an ominous shadow over the lighter curtain and the room's corner, on whose edge stands the maid, as if reluctant to move fully into the light. On the floor, the seal, which restoration revealed, and the hastily discarded paper—a crumpled draft? the original note she is answering?-- add drama, but it is the light through the window, which catches her and the task of her writing in the spotlight, which is so impressive.

It's easy to see the influence Pieter De Hooch must have had on the young Vermeer. 'The Courtyard', from the National Gallery in London, is marked by the contrast of open and closed spaces, emphasized by the three doors or shutters seen hanging open, and by the multiple framings of arches, doorways and support poles. Only the adult figure in the foreground lets the composition down. The exhibition brochure makes an interesting comparison with works like Gerard Houckgeest's renderings of Delft's Nieuwe Kerk; it's possible to see De Hooch as celebrating the same play of architectural grandeur and natural light on a much more human scale. It's also fascinating, familiar as we are with the tiles on the floors of Dutch paintings of the period, to look at the brickwork in the foreground and learn De Hooch's father was a master bricklayer.

Carel Fabritius' 'Goldfinch', usually seen at Mauritshuis in den Haag, is one of the more famous images of Dutch art, and it is a working of stunning simple perfection. It was painted in the last year of his life; he was killed in the explosion of the city's gunpowder arsenal, in 1654, when he was only 32. Because it's painted on a very thick panel, it's speculated that it was meant to serve as a door for an encased painting; thus it would have an almost trompe l'oil function hanging on a way, and the delicate chain that holds the bird to his perch takes on a double meaning about the capture of art.

Delft was known at the time for its experiments with perspective; Fabritius had been a student of Rembrandt's, and again, the exhibition brochure contains the only one of his paintings making such experiments, a view of Delft meant to be viewed through a peephole in a perspective box. It puts 'The Goldfinch' into, shall we say, perspective, because the balance between the bird, the two rails, and the feeding box, set against a wall whose warmth and texture is echoed by Morandi or O'Keeffe, is perfect. The coldness of the shadow cast on the wall contrasts with the warmth of the bird itself; viewed up close the feathers soften and it's possible to imagine the small chest heaving. Take a step back, and the head takes on an almost abstract quality, mirroring the pattern of the exposed wing.

In effect, the Vermeer catches the twin appeals of these works, the sense of light creating drama within the framework of both the painting and its architecture, that he learned from De Hooch, but also the small perfect stillness, the drama of the frozen scene. Fabritius does it more with close-up, Vermeer with spot-light, but these are cinematic effects. It's wonderful to see 'Lady Writing' hung in safety in the National Gallery, it was inspirational to see it displayed in such a revealing and inspirational triptych.

PRECISIONISM: THERE IS NOTHING SENTIMENTAL ABOUT A MACHINE

"The art of Europe is finished -dead- and America is the country of the art of the future. Look at the skyscrapers! Has Europe anything to show more beautiful than these?"

Marcel Duchamp wrote that in 1915. Faced with the alternative of a continent indulging itself in a ritual of mass suicide, one can understand Duchamp's enthusiasm for the new world he encountered.It was a world whose possibilities must have seemed endless to those prepared to look beyond the aesthetics of the passing age, influenced by the new perspectives the new century had already offered. As its subtitle, 'Reordering Reality', implies, the 1994 book PRECISONISM IN AMERICA reflects some of those possibilities, but also reveals the limitations of those aesthetics in coping with the changes in modern America.

Growing out of Cubism and Le Corbusier's Purism, Precisionism saw hope in the purity of things mechanical, which insinuated themselves directly into daily life. This was above all a way of imposing form on an increasingly chaotic universe. The seemingly formless romanticism of the 19th century, which reached its zenith with the Impressionists, offered no way to cope with the destructive pace of change in the 20th century. Disorder seemed to multiply geometrically, turning the world upside down, and revealing its dark side most clearly in the technological madness of the World War.

PRECISIONISM IN AMERICA spotlights the best known painters of this very loosely structured movement: Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe and Joseph Stella, along with photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston.It also provides revealing looks at Preston Dickinson, Elsie Driggs (that's her 'Queensborough Bridge, 1927' left), and the photographer Imogen Cunningham, which help us round out the picture of the art. The work of Driggs, O'Keeffe, and Cunningham also signaled another of the major reorderings of the century, the growing importance of women in modern art. The "cool, intellectual nature" of work by women often baffled contemporary critics, who expected more emotional,if not more 'twee', art, but in the new century, design would be based on cool intellectualism. Dorothy Grafly was perceptive in comparing Precisionist women's painting to "photographic purity"; purity, in the face of modern chaos, was the precisionists' ideal.

As a synthesis of American realism with European abstract design Precisionism harkens back both to classical architecture and to Cubism. William Carlos Williams had close connections with the Precisionists; Demuth's painting based on his poem 'I Saw The Figure 5' is one of the early works marking the move from synchronicity to precision. Williams might well have been writing about the Precisionists when he wrote "There is nothing sentimental about a machine. A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem I mean there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant."

You can see what Williams meant in Preston Dickinson's "Grain Elevators" (1923) or Ralston Crawford's "Buffalo Grain Elevators" (1937). Or the Sheeler photo, "Criss Cross Conveyors" (left), or Paul Strand's remarkable "Motion Picture Camera." Detail, simplicity and, yes, precision: materials converted to power with nothing redundant.

Yet for all the seeking to escape 19th century romanticism, Demuth could use an Impressionist palette in a painting of a water tower and a smokestack he titled "Aucassin and Nicolette" (1921, right) and incline the two structures toward each other, like those Medieval lovers. This may reflect innate American sentimentality more than Romanticism, but it begs the question of modernism. In the face of twentieth century America, as Duchamp realised instinctively, realism WAS modernism. Realism seems the dominant force at work here, reflecting, more than seeking out, a Cubist language. Paintings like O'Keefe's "New York Night" seek to imitate the patterns of nature in those of man: the lights of traffic reflected in patterns on hotel windows.

These artists were attempting to simplify the aesthetic formula of Cezanne and others, which had been done previously in America by the Synchronists, who used abstract forms; the precisionists' forms were real. They wanted art to reflect the perfection in straight highways, and gleaming skyscrapers. Demuth's early echoes of synchronism soon give way to still lives of eggplants, then the larger scale of factories and cities, like 'My Egypt' (right) justifiably famous both for its beauty and its message, that the works of modernity were every bit as classic as those of antiquity.

As with Sheeler's fascination with the simple lines of Shaker furniture, the Precisionists sought in both the past and in nature justifications for the precepts of modernism. The exterior fabric of American society never came to reflect those human fundamentals; the immediate shock of the Depression is reflected better in, for example, Edward Hopper, and another World War rendered the inventions of modernity much less appealling--it wasn't a coincidence abstraction flourished after that war. But that was something they could not have predicted. The pace of change increased faster, but much less precisely, than they ever dreamed.

PRECISIONISM IN AMERICA 1915-1941: Reordering Reality
Gail Stavitsky, Lisa Steinman, Rony Golan
New York: Harry N. Abrams/Montclair Art Museum

AN AMERICAN ARGENTEUIL: JOHN TWATCHMAN & THE COS COB ART COLONY

“The Cos Cob Art Colony: Impressionists On The Connecticut Shore”
National Academy of Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts,Houston; Denver Art Museum, 2001-2002
Catalogue by Susan Larkin, Yale University Press/National Academy of Design 2001, ISBN 0300088523, $35

NOTE: This article originally appeared, in only slightly different form, in The Spectator, during what happened to be the centenary of Twatchman's death.

Today, the village of Cos Cob is one of four commuter rail stops within Greenwich, the first and arguably toniest of the New York suburbs across the Connecticut state line. A century ago Greenwich was a farming town, the railroads just starting to encourage commuting,and Cos Cob was a sleepy fishing port, with its own packet boat still sailing daily to Manhattan.

In 1889, the painter John Twatchman settled in Greenwich and his New York colleagues soon began travelling by train from the city to visit and paint. The likes of Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson, and J. Alden Weir gathered at the Holley family’s boarding house (now a museum) overlooking Cos Cob’s tiny harbour, joining Twatchman’s students to create an artist’s colony where the interplay of ideas helped them develop a new version of Impressionism, much as Monet, Renoir and Manet had influenced each other twenty years before. This eye-opening exhibition, organised by the National Academy of Design in New York, not only casts light on some under-valued artists, but reveals much about a very genteel sort of American bohemianism. The locals were occasionally shocked: the local paper reported one Halloween party at Holley House, shaking its figurative head in disbelief at the artists carving pumpkins into likenesses of each other.

A contemporary New York columnist described Connecticut as “the land of steady habits”. One senses these artists taking inordinate pleasure in their relative freedom, not just within the small town but also from the New York art world’s more rarefied subject matter,just as the railway liberated Parisian artists a generation before. Cos Cob became, in effect, an American Argenteuil.

The influence of the French Impressionists was particularly direct. Robinson, who died in 1896, aged 44, spent half of each year between 1888 and 1892 as Monet’s next-door neighbour in Giverny. Greenwich’s harbour provided him with an American equivalent for subject matter. His “Low Tide” (1894) is the most striking of a sequence portraying yachts at anchor with the tides at varying stages,with hazy sunshine illuminating the richness of the exposed Mianus River bottom.

Weir had first visited Cos Cob, where his father, a painting instructor to Army cadets at West Point, vacationed. His “Ice Cutters” reminds one of a wintry Caillebotte. But where Weir’s approach to colour and light seems restrained, Hassam’s is audacious. Hassam remains the best-known American Impressionist, and this exhibition reflects why, showing a talent which absorbs myriad influences and bends them to a personal technique that seems almost uncontrolled in its sheer exuberance. As John Updike wrote, “one of the secrets of Hassam’s continued vitality is his willingness to throw himself and his paints at nearly anything.”

One sees this in his “Bowl of Goldfish” (1912), which places a Whistler figure in front of a lush post-Impressionist background seen through an open door. Within the bowl, the fish provide a swirl of gold that beggars the distinctions between foreground and background. It’s hard for Hassam to be understated, but the exhibition includes both etchings and watercolours, which help us understand the way he works. His painting of “The Brush House” (1916), done in watercolour over charcoal is a marvel of building spectacular effects from a minimum of brush work.

For all Hassam’s vivacity it is Twatchman who is the centre of the show, as he was the central figure of the colony. Reflecting his personality, Cos Cob remained more informal than more prominent art colonies, for example, William Merrit Chase’s at Shinnecock, Long Island. Twatchman’s Cos Cob also attracted writers like the crusading journalist Lincoln Steffens and novelist Willa Cather, and,in its second generation of artists, Genjiro Yeto, a student of Twatchman’s at the Art Students League in New York who spent five summers in Connecticut. Yeto’s illustrations reflect the Impressionist inspiration from Japan, and made a huge impact on the work of his fellow students, particularly Ernest Lawson.

Lawson’s “River In Scene In Winter” also reflects Twatchman’s delight in reworking the effects of sunlight on snow. And it is Twatchman who here is revealed as American Impressionism’s major talent. He may be seen best as an American Pissaro, an artist’s artist whose work manifests considerable growth and integrity, and plumbs subtle depths of emotion which escape some of his more exuberant colleagues, but which sometimes lacks immediate appeal. Twatchman can look like Hassam, particularly in “Little Bridge”, a painting of a bridge he built himself. But compare his view of Brush House “Coming Home In Winter” with Hassam’s, Twatchman view works in shadings of just one colour, provided an effect of amazing depth. 'Hemlock Pool' (1900) was vibrant enough to be shown in 1913 at the Armory Show.

After Twatchman’s death in 1902,Hassam continued to summer in Cos Cob and keep the colony active until almost 1920. Hassam’s later etchings show a talent which continued to grow. But the abiding impression of the exhibtition was Twatchman’s “Sailing In The Mist”,where a lone sail, and its reflection, blend into the sea, cloud, and mist, isolating the boat, and its pilot. It was the picture the Spectator chose to illustrate the article, and it's an effect worthy of any in the Impressionist pantheon.