The False Mirror
On the Functional Intent of Art
Most elements surrounding art today are seen to be as rather highbrow: created by dreamy-eyed hipsters who wear white linen and braid their hair into dreadlocks, studied by scholars who talk through abstract adjectives about various isms, and viewed by the bourgeoisie over sparkling wine and olives sourced from the Mediterranean. But, although art certainly is an academic exercise for many, one need not be a physicist to experience the force of gravity.
This hyperbole is particularly befitting for art, because it is a very tangible force to be experienced. The mystery of a lopsided smile. The serenity of a blue-hued winter landscape. The charm of floating Japanese lilies. The pomposity of a neon-striped canvas. How does a painting affect you? There are many mediums of art’s production and consumption, but I feel particularly compelled to talk a bit more about the canvas.
Viewing a painting is, for me, quite unlike other forms of art. Literature is very high-volume, in that it can use the power of language, and the capacity of an entire book spanning six hours of your life, to put its message across. Film and theater can command even more power by capturing your visual attention, telling a story over two hours by making you vicariously live through their characters. Photography and painting, on the other hand, occupy a highly limited slice of your life. Spanning barely a few seconds of your precious attention, they’re a bit like the speed-dating versions of art. Especially if you’re going through an entire gallery of them, that contains thousands of specimen competing for your focus. This limited attention span, and the lack of specificity which semantics in language enjoys, can be very constraining. But it can also be very powerful, because the sense of ambiguity allows room for the viewer to participate more closely in the artistic process. By assessing their emotional response to the painting, and by forming an interpreted rationale behind the story being told. That is when a painting stands out. However, this room for interpretation can expand by very much, very fast. Which begs us to ask a deeper question, what functional role then does such art have in our lives, if any at all?
Historically speaking, painting has had an ever evolving role in the life of humans. Since time immemorial, it was a way to record important events and activities. Scribbling shapes on cave walls formed the foundational method of passing knowledge down to future generations, indeed the first records of human history. Analogous to how genes carry forward biological information to the next generation, art relays our collective cultural information to the next generation. Unarguably, it was a very important role to occupy. But with the invention of language, that role got occupied by stone tablets and manuscripts. If that were the only role for art to play, it should have died away in our cultural evolutionary histories. But, it did not. Because although words could capture a lot, they couldn’t capture highly detailed and intricately complete snapshots of scenes, personalities and activities. Art had a new role to occupy, to provide a realistic rendering of the observable universe. This was the era of romanticism and realism, of accurately sketching out the form, color and texture of human bodies. Artists were commissioned to paint mythological figures, kings, warriors and the common folk permanently onto canvases. However, with the invention of film and camera, that role too got occupied, this time by photography. While the canvas was an indirect imprint of the world, photographs were the literal imprints of light of all that could be seen with the eye. They were the ultimate records of the observable universe. Did we need painting then, anymore?
Yes. Because in the modern twentieth century, it took over a new role which was previously unfilled, in fact almost unrealized. The advent of surrealist painters and abstract expressionists opened up new ways to use colors and shapes, irrespective of how truly they reflected the real word, as a medium of communication for the human subconscious. A display not of the world, but of the mind’s response to the world. Not by explicit imagery, but by indirect invocation. It is in that spirit that painting could be called the longest surviving human technology, which created a new role for itself each time a more modern human invention took over its “designated” function.
We can observe this evolving trajectory of art’s functional role in something as “simple” as the changing depiction of still life, from the realist French artist Latour to the more recent French cubist Ozenfant or Spanish expressionist Picasso. However, can we view all kinds of art and artists under this trajectory? Enumerating and evaluating each of them would be a rather tedious exercise. But, we can narrow down our search onto a sliver of painting genres that is the intersection of both the artist and their art: a self-portrait.
Self-portraits, the original selfies of the art world, are perhaps the best place for us to judge the relationship of an artist with their artform. They elucidate the technique used by an artist in portrayal of their own selves, which can help us recognize their intention better.
The painters of the European Golden Age sought to achieve realistic impressions of themselves, stylised with their characteristic techniques. Leyster, a Dutch artist, uses bright and casual brushwork to portray herself in a jovial mood, looking straight at the viewer with a confident smile, wearing a proper dress complete with a stiff lace collar. (Of course, she didn’t actually paint while wearing that.) She’s elegantly holding a paintbrush in one hand and firmly gripping a bunch in the other, apparently painting an even more jovial painting within this self-portrait, that of a frolicking musician. (There’s evidence suggesting that she initially intended to draw a woman as the musician, supposedly herself, which would have made for an exciting self-portrait within a self-portrait: joviality ad infinitum.) The prolific Dutch artist Rembrandt’s self-portrait, on the other hand, is rather pensive. He had painted many self-portraits, each one at different points of his life, depicting a wide range of moods and feelings. This was one of the last self-portraits he drew, after suffering a deep financial crisis which led to most of his art being auctioned away to repay his debts. His fiscal misery is evident in his deep-set eyes and scrunched-up mouth, with a dark focus on his face and a soft smudging of the rest of the painting. The Spanish painter Velázquez too did many self-portraits, but Las Meninas (which has been arguably called the most complex and analyzed painting in Western art) is a rather interesting one, since it portrays Velázquez himself as a secondary subject. The painting isn’t even a self-portrait, strictly speaking, but it shows the artist at work, presumably painting the viewer while looking at them. Incidentally, the mirror on the back wall within the painting seems to reflect the king and the queen on the canvas that the painted-Velázquez is painting, which could intend to show the viewer as said royalty. Its complex characterization aside, much like Leyster’s self-portrait, this rich piece of self-portraiture serves as almost an advertisement for the artist. (Which is something easy to forget about artists, that art for them is a means of livelihood, after all.) A display of their technique, their ability to paint complex interactions showcasing an excellent sense of self-referentiality, to use their brushwork and pigments to depict the intended emotional joviality or somberness.
Moving onto artists of the nineteenth century, fewer people come to mind when talking about self-portraits than the famous Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, who like his predecessor Rembrandt did more than thirty of those. Van Gogh had a particularly unfortunate life, marked by bouts of depression, mental illness, and long periods of solitude. He was an extremely gifted artist who churned out hundreds of paintings, but never received recognition until his suicide, understood today as an emblem of the misunderstood artist. This particular self-portrait was one of the last ones he drew, after recovering from a severe breakdown at the sanatorium. In one of his letters to brother and friend Theo, he writes:
They say — and I am very willing to believe it — that it is difficult to know yourself — but it isn’t easy to paint yourself either. So I am working on two portraits of myself at this moment […] One I began the day I got up; I was thin and pale as a ghost. It is dark violet–blue and the head whitish with yellow hair, so it has a color effect.
He supposedly finished this painting in one two-hour sitting. His brushstrokes are characteristically Van Goghish, his eyes in a piercing gaze, his skin ghoulish, his thumb oddly poking through his blotchy pallette. Although this portrait was made after the episode of him mutilating his ear, he painted himself on his “good” side, as he might have looked at in the mirror, or perhaps this is how he wanted to imagine himself now: a sign of a recovery indeed. A close friend of Van Gogh, the French post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin painted his self-portrait around the time he met with the Dutch artist in Paris. Titled “self-portrait with halo and snake”, the painting has obvious references to showing Gauguin, the artist, as a biblical figure simultaneously both angelic (the halo) and satanic (the snake) with a background of Eden’s apples. The ambiguous use of the colours and an almost cartoonish look on Gauguin’s face further deepen the dual divide and portrayal of the artist in a balancing act, between renaissance-era mythological symbolism and his own. Incidentally, Gauguin and Van Gogh lived and painted together for a few weeks, but their friendship gradually deteriorated leading up to a tragic sequence of events where Van Gogh tried to confront Gauguin with a razor, and eventually mutilated his own ear with it. Gauguin’s self-portrait in his sculpture titled “jug in the form of a head”, with the red glaze of congealed blood along the face and absence of Gauguin’s ear, appears to be a reference to the complex friendship he had with Van Gogh. Evidently, these self-portraits were a mode of self-expression and catharsis for these artists first, a form of communication to one another next, and a public conveyance to the world thereafter.
The needs of expression seem to have evolved further when we take a look at more contemporary artists of the twentieth century, in close alignment with the changing functional role of painting as art. The cryptic works of Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher and Belgian surrealist René Magritte, for instance, are far from realistic portrayals of the world or people that surround us. The former explicitly dealt with rendering impossible objects, concerning ideas of geometry, recursion, and infinity. He conjured images from his mind, realizing them in nature through paper, rather than the other way around. The latter rerendered our outlook on reality, by divorcing commonplace objects from their context and putting them in odd locations. He took inspiration from nature, but gave new meaning to the familiar through a process of poetic reimagination. We see these styles reflected in their respective self-portraits. Escher shows his literal reflection warped onto a spherical surface, a rather strained portrayal of himself. Importantly, the sphere is held by his own hand, the hand of the artist that has etched this scene into existence. He is both the artist, and the viewer. This meta referencing goes beyond the self-referentiality of Golden Age painters, perhaps a reminder to the loop of artistic production and consumption: how we imagine an image of ourselves, sketch it out by ourselves, and also view it by ourselves, with accumulating gaps that seem to cycle through into a void. Magritte goes a step further from Escher by explicating the difference in what we perceive and what we want to create. His self-portrait, aptly titled also as “clairvoyance”, shows Magritte drawing a bird by observing an unhatched egg. His vision goes beyond Van Gogh’s wishful thinking, loud and clear: the canvas is an output of what the artist imagines the future of his subject to be. Maybe this vision is itself prophetic, and in that this painting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Stepping beyond the study of self-portraits, this analysis can be extended to other artworks of these two modern artists. Escher’s “drawing hands” are a beautiful representation of the paradox of rendering seemingly 3-dimensional objects onto a 2-dimensional plane, such as a canvas, by creatures that span 3 dimensions, namely the artist’s hands and his creative mind. Both the hands appear to draw each other like an ouroboros, both seemingly 2D and 3D at the same time, while in reality they are both most certainly constrained to the two dimensions of paper (or, more accurately here, of your screen). This intricate birth and death of the appearance of space from itself was of immense fascination to Escher, which populated most of his other artworks. Magritte, as before, takes Escher’s illusionary perspective to an explicit realization in his aptly titled painting, “the treachery of images”. He draws out a pipe, and writes in French below it: “ceci n’est pas une pipe”, or “this is not a pipe”. By using actual words, he demonstrates how pictures are mere representations of objects, and can never be the objects themself. A fact which appears obvious when stated, yet remains forgotten when not. (A mere glance at his portrayal of raining men in Golconda makes us flail at the impossibility of men falling down as rain, forgetting that these are just representations of men which need not follow the rules of actual men.) One of his more cryptic paintings is the minimalist “the false mirror”, wherein the subject’s iris reflects a cloudy sky. Amongst various other interpretations that can be made of this, when coupled with the title it extends the treachery of images to its extreme: our eyes too just capture representations of objects that we see, the treachery of perception, if we may say so. (Of course, this can be stretched further by supposing that the viewer of the painting is himself the subject of this painting, in which case we set up an interesting paradox that Escher would certainly have appreciated.) This subtle point might be unsettling to those who hold dear a universal reality which we can touch, feel, hear, and see, exposing a mere fragile “idea” of reality.
René Magritte had done in painting what René Descartes had done in philosophy, distilled the world into the cogito:
“I think, therefore I am”.
Therefore more importantly, and perhaps more optimistically, this point opens the door to the existence of multiple realities with respect to this cogito, in concert. A point which Escher was perhaps trying to make with the birth and death of layers of realities itself, in each cycle of the hands creating one another. This way of thinking in art came at a point in time when painting was freeing itself from portraying one objective reality, and onto depicting something else. Or significantly something more.
A painted canvas, at its most fundamental level, is a complex composition of simple brushstrokes dipped in multiple colored pigments. This reductionist principle may not help us appreciate the holistic beauty of a picture, but it sure is a helpful tool in seeing how a painting depicts something.
Post the age of realism, impressionist and post-impressionist painters experimented with the use of the paintbrush to depict the real world, such as natural landscapes. But more than the actual object, they appreciated the phenomenology of human perception. When you look zoomed in at Van Gogh’s “field with green wheat”, you perceive greens, blues, yellows and whites combed onto the canvas. Standing away, you begin to feel awe at seeing how those combs seem to convey the image of a green field. Similarly, Monet’s “the Seine at Giverny” at a close inspection appears as dabs of hues of green on a pale gray background. But at a distance, the “impressions” seem to have formed big bushy trees. The direction of the dabs seems to distinguish the “smudge” of trees from their even “smudgier” reflections in the water, etching out one layer of reality over the other, while everything still remains within the restricted plane of the canvas. Seurat’s pointillist technique of using coloured dots to tease out emergent patterns explicates the existence of a representative reality over an objective one. He paints the dots, but it is our mind that connects them.
Such paintings invite the viewer into a dialogue with them, which goes beyond just admiration for the beauty of a scene. It is an evolving communication, where the real-world object is impressed upon the viewer, subject to their response of what they make of it.
But why stop at describing the “real” world? When the technique of painting can depart from observed reality, so can its central objective. The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch used his paintings to convey something much less tangible. His “anxiety” series of paintings brilliantly and astutely capture a deeply unsettled state of mind. Using roughly the same palette of deep red & purple colours and hilly backdrop, Munch rotates the primary subject of the three paintings: a sombre man overlooking a bridge in “despair”, a ghoulish figure letting out a seemingly visceral existential “scream”, and a timid woman lost in her “anxiety” while swarmed by tall brooding men. This collection was, in a sense, a reflection of Munch’s own neuroses. A self-portrait series without him being an actual figure on the canvas. And these emotions, which might have been very hard to convey using concrete language as in literature or real imagery as in photography, were put across via the ambiguous enough and hence powerful enough medium of paint.
“I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.”
But photography too, if done with care and precision, can follow a departure from capturing the reality and denoting something more primordial.
A key difference between painting and photography is that in the former, every single brushstroke is committed with the thoughtful intent of the painter.
And in that sense, every square inch has an economical value of conveyance. Whereas in photography, it’s harder to control every small object that might be captured, particularly in natural environments. In that sense, while painting is about highlighting the subtle, photography is about hiding the unnecessary. But both media can overcome their respective challenges to reach a comparable exposure of intent. This commonality becomes more forthright if one were to compare the work of Munch with a photographer who lived close to a century after him.
Robert Mapplethorpe, arguably one of the most controversial American artists of the twentieth century, became famous for his minimalist black-and-white photography. His work featured celebrities and models, portraits and nudes, but most importantly an array of self-portraits, often explicit and evocative of feelings of mild disgust. A master of establishing intended focus in his photographs, it is difficult to not feel a response to his work. This becomes clear in the last self-portrait he took, before succumbing to HIV/AIDS. His straight confident gaze and strong grip on the skull-headed cane seem to show a spirit of respectfully facing his mortality, while the slightly unfocused disembodied face appears to foreshadow and embrace his imminent death. This depiction is starkly similar to Munch’s self-portrait of his stern and disembodied face, with a skeleton arm hanging below. Incidentally, Munch was always critical of photography, claiming that it “will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell!” Clearly, Mapplethorpe was one of the very few who were able to bring photography to heaven and hell.
And while for photography the challenge still remains much harder to overcome, the palette seems to have fast adapted itself as an “emotion capture machine”. The new wave of abstract expressionists and colour field theorists believe that application of colour by itself, detached from any realistic context, can be enough of an invocation to the viewer’s response. The Cuban-American artist Mark Rothko’s paintings, for instance, are simple combinations of mostly primary colors applied as rectangular swatches on the canvas. Can something as simple as choosing a different color combination depict a deeply encoded message, like an underlying current of emotion, as well as in Munch’s more “complex” “the scream”?
Some artists take the idea a step further, into the realm of interactive art such as that by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, where the communication of a subliminal thought is left halfway between the artist and the viewer. Some might argue that this question is rather pertinent to minimalist art. But in the most indirect way, this brings us back to the question this essay began with. How does a painting affect you? And we need not throw away the art of the renaissance or the Golden Age when asking ourselves this question. If anything, perhaps we need to review and revisit some of those artists armed with this question of emotional affection.
I found myself asking this question in retrospect of a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. I spent an entire weekend at the gallery, lost in its expansive and diverse collection of paintings. To my surprise, I was visiting on the opening day of a massive temporary exhibit on the great Dutch master of genre painting, Johannes Vermeer. Although his most famous painting “girl with a pearl earring” was not on display, there were some seventy other paintings from the artist and some of his contemporaries, who frequently got inspired from one another. Genre painting is as close to realistic painting as it can get, with the style depicting scenes from ordinary life, especially domestic situations, from seventeenth century Holland. They are richly imbued with symbolism, dogs standing in for loyalty, dropped letters depicting heartbreak, and paintings-within-paintings foreshadowing hidden layers of meaning.
Gerard ter Borch was one of the earliest influencers of Dutch genre painting, who mastered the depiction of implicit feelings of individuals through their explicit portrayals in everyday actions. His “paired” portraits of an “officer writing a letter”, and a “woman sealing a letter”, are an excellent example of this depiction, with the two paintings being almost duals of one another: in structure, in colour and in function. While it is not entirely clear what the two characters are communicating to one another, the imagery of a standing dog on the left, a sitting one on the right, a fallen ace of hearts on the left (perhaps the officer is writing a love letter?), and the muted colours on the right are sure to generate an atmosphere of chatter and gossip amongst the audience.
Gabriël Metsu, in an obvious inspiration from Ter Borch, created another set of paired paintings of a “man writing a letter” and a “woman reading a letter”. This set appears to be less mirror-symmetric, and with seemingly more overt symbolism, namely the painting of a mellow autumn on the left versus the peeking stormy seas on the right, and the well-supported hat on the left compared to the slipped out slippers on the right. Nevertheless, leaving us free to contemplate the state of affairs (perhaps, a break-up letter?).
Ter Borch explicates the mystery of these characters furthermore, in his famous painting called “the gallant conversation”, wherein the central subject appears with her back towards the viewer, occluding her face and hence her emotions and state of mind. What is the conversation about? Is this man a suitor for the girl? What does she feel about him? As we get a very private view of this intimate scene of three characters, questions invade our mind.
Samuel van Hoogstraten’s “view of the interior” puts the viewer further into a mode of action, by painting the perspective of a person intruding the privacy of a character’s living room. It is a very domestic, homely and welcoming view, of the broom and slippers, urging the viewer to come in through the threshold of the just-opened door whose keys are still dangling in the lock. The ultimate temptation lies in the reappearance of our “mystery girl” from Ter Borch’s “the gallant conversation”, which “hangs” in the back of this portrait by Hoogstraten. Of course, this all seems like a bit of a mocking on part of the artist. And the inter-referentiality of these paintings gives the impression that all of these seventeenth century Dutch masters are in on this mockery of the twenty-first century viewer.
Because the viewer cannot *really* cross this threshold: there exists a physical threshold of the painting.
Or can he?
Surrounded by all of these paintings, and being invaded by such questions one after the other, overwhelms the audience with one monumental feeling. It feels as if these paintings, and those paintings-within-paintings, have etched out multiple layers of reality. An interlaced pigment-underworld where these characters live, and cross-talk with one another. Wherein perhaps they travel into each other’s worlds, like the mystery girl hopping from Ter Borch’s “conversation” to Hoogstraten’s “view”. They are all limited to the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, but like Escher’s “drawing hands”, they pop in and out of material existence. Like the self-portraits of Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Munch, they invoke a sense of mystery, channel a flux of emotions, and weave a story around themselves. The physical thresholds of space or time might stop us from entering this pigment-underworld, but they cannot deter the subliminal message that art carries with it, across eras, isms and concepts. And it is precisely within that “false mirror” where the true functional intent of art lies. Somewhere beyond realism, surrealism, and abstractionism.
Because every mirror is false, after all.
But what matters, is that we refer to something. Refer to and communicate, about an observable object in everybody’s shared landscapes, or to an undercurrent of mysterious emotions in our private boudoirs. It matters not how real this communication is, or whether we fail or succeed at it. What matters is that we tried to create, to seek refuge, and to shelter relief in humanity’s existence, at all.
So next time you look at that Latour still life, that Monet landscape, the Kahlo self-portrait, or even that forsaken selfie, ask yourself:
How does it make you feel?
All images taken from common public sources on the internet.
The following paintings mentioned in this essay are currently on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC:
- Amédée Ozenfant, 1919: Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Guitar
- Pablo Picasso, 1918: Still Life
- Judith Leyster, 1630: Self-portrait
- Rembrandt, 1659: Self-portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar
- Vincent van Gogh, 1889: Self-portrait
- Paul Gauguin, 1889: Self-portrait with Halo and Snake
- Vincent van Gogh, 1890: Field with Green Wheat
- Claude Monet, 1897: The Seine at Giverny
- George Seurat, 1888: Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy
- Mark Rothko, 1954: Orange and Tan
- Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1991: “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.)
- Gerard ter Borch, 1659: Officer Writing a Letter
- Gerard ter Borch, 1659: Woman Sealing a Letter
- Gabriël Metsu, 1666: Man Writing a Letter
- Gabriël Metsu, 1666: Woman Reading a Letter
- Gerard ter Borch, 1654: The Gallant Conversation
- Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1662: View of an Interior, or The Slippers
- Johannes Vermeer, 1663: Woman Holding a Balance
- René Magritte, 1933: The Human Condition
