The Kunsthistorisches Museum

In yesterday’s blog I brought up the topic of ecphrastic poems, and today’s visit to the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum (Art History Museum) offered a chance to think about the topic again. Suppose I begin with the Brueghels. (That is, the paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. His father Jan was a good painter, on a smaller scale, and his son Pieter the Younger at least made decent copies of his father’s work.) One Brueghel not among the KM’s holdings is The Fall of Icarus, which led Auden to write “Musée des Beaux Arts,” about the work that is found in the Brussels museum whose name is Auden’s title. The poem begins, “About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters…” and goes on to explain why. Auden focuses on the “incidental” character of a painting’s central drama as portrayed in the context of onrushing, indifferent human activity. Auden observes that, while a martyrdom is underway, the torturer’s horse “scratches its innocent behind on a tree,” and, meanwhile, it’s business as usual for bystanders in the picture. When some pivotal event in sacred story occurs, there are always children around “who didn’t especially want it to happen.” Brueghel takes the same approach in some of the KM pictures, for example, The Conversion of St. Paul, where the viewer is hard put to locate the missionary saint in his tumble from the horse he was riding on the road to Damascus. Hundreds of people are trekking through a mountain pass (somewhere entirely un-Syrian, with figures dressed in 16th century, as opposed to biblical, fashion)—some are riding, some are soldiers in armor, but others are just trudging along. Near the center of the picture we eventually do find a small figure of a man who looks as though he has just had a sunstroke, next to his horse, which is lying down. A couple of fellow travelers pause to offer assistance, but most don’t. It’s not so much an instance of La Rochefoucauld’s “We all have strength enough to bear the sufferings of other people,” so much as a sort of cruel imperviousness: people just don’t notice.

No doubt it was the impact of Auden’s poem that led William Carlos Williams to write his sequence Pictures from Brueghel, a sequence based on those paintings where the artist depicted village life in northern Europe. Williams’s poems have a down-to-earth, galumphing charm but they are not in the same league with Brueghel’s portrayal of peasant life in the Low Countries. This fact should remind us of the risk involved when we choose artworks of great magnitude as the subject of our poems: the disparity between the original and our version can be crushing. In Brueghel’s picture of a peasant wedding feast, there are many good reasons to be overwhelmed. First, the exacting realism of the piece, where nearly every square inch of the picture attests to dedicated observation and precise rendering—the matte finish on a terracotta wine jug, a child sucking its finger, the bagpipe player’s cheeks belled out as he puffs at his instrument. Yet Brueghel’s draughtmanship is not photographic. Human characters are rendered in his own inimitable stylized manner, with a strong feeling for volumetric form, almost as though his people were clothed statues that he has painted. (You get the same feeling from Piero della Francesca’s figures, but Piero allows them to remain static and statuesque, while Brueghel humanizes his characters through bustling action and vocal interaction we can almost hear.) The faces sometimes have a caricatural aspect, to a degree tapping into Northern Renaissance painting’s tradition of the grotesque, as found in painters like Bosch, Altdorfer, Mabuse, and even sometimes in Dürer. But Brueghel is laughing with, not at his peasants. These are celebratory pictures, carnivalesque, down home, reassuring.

The next ecphrastic painting in the Brueghel series is Berryman’s “Hunters in the Snow,” after the painting of the same name (it hangs in the KM). This is one of the artist’s most powerful pieces, pushing toward the monochromatic as he works to give us the sense of a snowbound winter evening under verdigris skies. The silhouettes of the three hunters and their dozen hounds (some with with curled tails) are nearly black, sharply contrasting with the bone-white snow. And figures further in the background skating on a pond are simple silhouettes, with nearly all color and detail suppressed. Only one hunter has only one dead fox hooked to his pike; the day’s sortie hasn’t resulted in much, and who can eat fox anyway? You feel that it is cold, cold, a day “when icicles hang by the wall,” as the Shakespeare lyric puts it. Berryman’s poem comes closer to matching the power of the original. He is aware of the implied hardship and his spare language amounts to a verbal equivalent thereof. He enters the painting and senses what its figures feel.

No one yet (so far as I know) has written a poem about Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, and it is probably wiser not to. His rendering of the subject belongs to the tradition of imaginary and unbuildable architecture; though I suppose skeptics said the same about Cheops’s pyramid when ground was broken for it. An unforgettable image, this circular tower of brick and limestone, with the truncated high-rise shouldering aside a cloud or two. The destructive proliferation of languages is imminent, and humankind will never be the same again.

Let’s make a switch and go to Francesco Mazzola, better known as Il Parmigianino. I missed his works here when I visited forty years ago for the simple reason that the KM is so huge, with so many side galleries, it takes ingenious perseverance to see everything hanging there. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t know about Mazzola at that time. But I’ve come to admire him a lot, and recommend paintings in the Naples Museum and the National Gallery, London, for anyone who is curious. But the KM has a work I particularly wanted to see: that was his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the stimulus for one of John Ashbery’s most celebrated poems. And there it was, considerably smaller than I imagined. Which didn’t mean it didn’t have presence or wasn’t moving. Mazzola was so young. I think he died in his thirties, and in this portrait he seems little more than an adolescent, with tender features and a gentle expression. Not only the image, but the physical painting itself is convex, which separates it from flat representations of convexity, as in the background mirror found in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage. Looking at it, you have the eerie feeling that you are seeing your own reflection, only, it’s not your face. And in the foreground there are the much enlarged four fingers of his right hand, the thumb hidden; presumably he is at work drawing the portrait we are seeing.

To turn anecdotal, I recall when I first read the poem, I believe in the summer of 1974. John sent it to David Kalstone, an English professor and critic of poetry (see his Five Temperaments and Becoming a Poet), who had sort of volunteered to serve as a mentor for me in those years. David and John happened to live opposite each other on 22nd Street in New York and became friendly. Anyway, David was spending the summer in James Merrill’s house in Stonington, Connecticut that summer and invited Edmund White and myself up for a weekend. During the visit, we sat down together and David read out the poem. Our jaws dropped; we were stupefied. And when “Self-Portrait” came out a year later in the book with the same title, it sort of swept the board, raking in three major prizes for that year. John had been pretty thoroughly marginalized before then, but that book changed everything. Not that the work is typical, on the contrary. It’s the most discursive poem he ever wrote, and among the longest. It makes arguments, includes autobiographical details, and even quotes art history scholars. It also develops some of his lushest imagery—not without a certain disquieting undertow of implication, however. For example, in the passage about there being one bullet in the chamber, a trope that transforms the painter’s room into the magazine of a revolver. I don’t automatically assume he was aware of all that the poem contained back then. No more than I assume the poem is a product of “automatic writing.”

And, yes, of course I spent some time with the KM’s staggeringly beautiful Vermeer, The Artist in His Studio. Though I’ve seen it several times since 1968 and spent hours going over every detail, there is always more to notice. One sensation I experienced today was the feeling that the scene was actually filled with some indefinable, pellucid gel, as clear but not as liquid as water. And if it can contain a liquid, then the picture space must exist in three dimensions, not two. Its spatial terms are like ours—a brilliant acquarium, filled with hallucinatorily believable creatures, no matter that the painter’s back is rudely turned to us. What other painting shows the principal figure with its back turned? No actor ever allows that to happen onstage, but Vermeer took the discourteous risk, one that is supposed to alienate audience attention. Why? Because he and his avatar are absolutely wrapped up in the second world that painting is. He doesn’t care that we are there behind him watching. We don't exist for him. The model turns her head in our direction, granted, but looks down and can't see us. She is an allegorical representation of Clio, the Muse of History. But also a young woman, demure, pleased at being painted, and ineffably lovely.

Around five o'clock I stumbled out of the museum in bright sunlight. Football (soccer) fans thronging the streets, yelling and creating fan-type ruckus. With my genius for timing, I scheduled a trip to Vienna for the week when the city is hosting the Europe games for 2008. I realize I don't live in the same world as the one most people believe they are inhabiting. But Somebody loves us all," as Elizabeth Bishop said in "Filling Station."

Vienna

I was only once ever in Vienna before, just over forty years ago, when Ann and I made a trip from Paris to Greece and stopped in the old capital of the Austro-Hunagarian Empire on the way. Not a long visit, the main object to see the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which among many masterpieces has the best Brueghels to be found anywhere. Not to mention one of Vermeer’s greatest works, The Allegory of Painting. (That visit is mentioned in the poem “Seeing All the Vermeers,” in my most recent book Contradictions. The poem combines ecphrasis with autobiography, and works as a kind of résumé of my life from 1965 to the mid-1990s. Anyone interested in the topic of ecphrastic poems might check out some notes on the subject I wrote for the Academy of American Poets website: www.poets.org.)

I was out of the hotel this morning by 9:30 and took the U2 to the Karlsplatz stop. A short walk from there to the Staatsoper, but there doesn’t seem to be a ticket office open. I think Strauss's Capriccio is being done this week, a thoroughly Viennese work it would be a treat to see here. I’ll check at the hotel desk and see what they know. From there I walked to the Albertina Gallery, which I didn’t visit 40 years ago. No less than three large exhibitions were on offer. First, there was a collection of works by Oskar Kokoschka after 1934, when he exiled himself from Vienna (for the usual reason: first to Prague, then to London and Cornwall, and finally to Switzerland.) Only after the Second World War did the artist return for visits to Austria. I knew nothing about the late works, so different from the haunted dark brown, black and gray portraits of his early phase. These were generally highly colored, reminiscent of the Fauves, Bonnard, Nolde, Dufy. Kokoschka in exile doesn’t disdain from “postcards,” either; there were views of Florence from just above the Ponte Vecchio, of the Matterhorn, and of Salzburg—the sort of subjects modernists after Cubism abjured as banal or sentimental. We’re meant to read them as celebrations, clearly, and it seems cold-hearted to refuse to join in the artist’s pleasure in what he sees, especially when rendered with so much élan. Portraits were downplayed in this exhibition, but whenever one did appear, as the sole subject or else as part of a larger tableau, they never failed to leaven the picture. He had the ability to make the human face move and breathe, partly through carefully calibrated renderings of the eyes and other studied details. I never though of Kokoschka as a watercolorist, but numbers of the works were precisely that, engaging pictures of animals, landscapes, or flower pieces done with a wonderful lightness and economy, and lots of white space left around them to breathe in. The London oil paintings included a view (coincidence!) of the Tower Bridge, with the drawbridge aloft. After the Kokoschkas went to live in Cornwall, he produced some spirited pictures there. These are all sited in the coastal village of Pol Perro, which I remember with pleasure from a visit there in 1978. (Actually, after that visit I wrote a poem titled “Cornwall,” found in my selected poems, if you want to look it up. I've begun to feel a kind of kinship with Kokoschka.) His Cornish paintings are lovely evocations, sometimes including the fish, crab, and lobsters hauled in by the locals.

There are also many allegorical works, sometimes leaving the viewer with the mixed feelings stirred up in us when we look at Vermeer’s Allegory of Faith. So much skill, and so few precautions taken against laughter. Also, the artist was quite ready to produce artistic responses to political events like the bombing of Guernica, the Anschluss, the annexation of Czechoslovakia, or Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Kokoschka wasn’t as squeamish as his ars gratia artis colleagues; instead, was rather careless as to how his work would be received. There’s something great-hearted about that. I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way, but it always provoked a smile in me whenever I focused on his initialized signature “OK” down in the corner of a painting.

Next was a show of works by Paul Klee, recently donated to the Albertina by Carl Djerassi, who did the world the great service of discovering, in 1952, the birth control pill (a newspaper here designates it as the “Anti-Baby-Pille.”) I met Carl in the late 1980s when I was a resident at the Djerassi Foundation, an artists’ colony in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Palo Alto, California, where he lived with his wife the critic Diane Middlebrook, one of the most charming scholars I’ve ever been friends with. This past winter I got the sad news that Diane had died. I first met her in the early 1970s when she did a teaching stint at Rutgers and lived in New York; a former student of Harold Bloom at Yale, her specialty was poetry. I recall that her dissertation (later published) concerned Coleridge’s theory of the imagination and how it could be applied to Whitman’s poetry. Some of you may have read her critical biographies of Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath. During my stay at the colony Diane and Carl came over and had dinner with the residents, and I got to like him too. I was aware that Carl collected Klees, though I never saw them. I think I did hear a while back that he contributed some of the collection the San Francisco Museum of Moern Art. And now another part is gong to the Albertina, in the capital of Carl’s native land, with which he now seems to have made peace. (It begins to sound like a broken record, but of course he had to flee Vienna at a young age when the Nazis came to power.) What I must ask Carl the next time we meet is why he developed a special enthusiasm for Klee, I mean, as opposed to, say, Chagall, Soutine or Steinberg. Well, the work speaks for itself.

Finally, an exhibition of a group of paintings recently placed on permanent loan with the Albertina by the Batliners, a husband and wife who have been collecting modern painting for many years. About one hundred works, beginning with the Impressionists and moving forward, with stops for Monet, Vlaminck, “Der Blaue Reiter,” “Die Brücke,” Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard, Magritte, Mirò, Chagall, Picasso, Braque, and Rothko. One of the less known artists, placed in a room with other avant-garde Russian artists of the 1920s, was Natalia Goncharova, a Russian émigrée whose work I don’t ever recall seeing before. I mention her because, among other things, she was the teacher of Sara and Gerald Murphy when they came to live in Paris in the early Twenties. I won’t go into that story now, but interested parties should see an article I wrote about the Murphys for the 60th anniversary issue of The Hudson Review, published earlier this spring. Artistic themselves, the Murphys were also great patrons of the arts. And so long as we have societies where massive disparities in personal wealth exist, the rich can take steps to compensate for their larger share of economic power (sometimes acquired, after all, because of unusual talent and hard work) by philanthropy. A beneficiary of the Djerassi Foundation myself, I’m glad to see it make a generous contribution to the cultural life of Vienna and to the world at large.