Lie Down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
— W.B. Yeats
This is from Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist by Caroline A. Jones (1996):
… Through the 1950s and 1960s, the genre of artist-photographer furthered in American by Edward Steichen swelled to massive proportions. Like Steichen, many of the participating photographers were direct heirs to a Northern European Romantic tradition: photographers Hans Namuth, Rudolph Burckhardt, Alexander Liberman, and filmmaker Michael Blackwood had all emigrated to America from various war-torn sectors of Germany (via Russia in Liberman’s case): with younger Americans such as Fred McDarrah and Marvin Lazarus they established careers as filmers and photographers of the emerging American avant-garde. Liberman, again like Steichen, had begun in the spirit of a pilgrim, returning to Europe over and over again after the war to photograph aging masters in their studios, pursuing the trope and seeking his own artistic identity at the same time. He began in 1947 the project that would take him thirteen years to complete and publish as The Artist in His Studio, described as: “so much like a religious pilgrimage that the photographs of the artists’ studios appear as shrines documenting sacred arts.” Many of Liberman’s photographs, before being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and published in book form in 1960, were published in Vogue in the late ’40s and ’50s together with accompanying essays on the artist and their work. The life of these texts and images has been rich, spread over many sectors of American society and enduring over decades; we can locate here a primary source for the postwar Americanization of the isolated Romantic artist. In Liberman’s 1960 book, we read:
Paul Cézanne is the spiritual father of modern art. … He is the painters’ painter, an archetype for painters. … This studio, stark and sad, a room of anguish and torment, was also the shell of a hardened egoist. Cézanne sacrificed all personal human contacts to achieve his vision. … Like Picasso, … Cézanne lived in ascetic, mystical surroundings, with painting as his sole luxury.
… Liberman deeply believed that the artists he documented “are the priests of a new religion — Art. … Their dedication to art, like that of men to religious orders, is a self-imposed vow.” Liberman (and many others) helped transfer this religion to America through tireless efforts to publish these photographs, seen in many incarnations and still in print … . Fascinated by every detail in these sacred sites, Liberman lovingly recorded their chipped cups, stacked paintbrushes, and dusty corners, as well as the artists who inhabited them — if they still did. By the time he visited them, many of these studios had passed from the realm of active production sites to shrines for the dead.
Death is perhaps the most convenient state of affairs for the fetishizing gaze. As Liberman describes the circumstances of his pilgrimage to Cézanne’s studio, we recognize the power of a fetish. To be fair to Liberman, it is a fetish that all art historians seek to know, the touch of the master:
The house he built himself … is a somber shell that still stands today. … The house is still intact more than fifty years after Cézanne’s death. By an accident of fate it was bought by a Provençal poet who lived in the lower rooms and did not touch the studio itself. Today Cézanne’s beret, his cape, his paint boxes, his rosary, his palettes and bottles of turpentine, all the objects that surrounded him during his work are there as he left them, untouched, unmoved throughout the years. [Emphasis added (by Jones).]
Because others have not touched these objects, they remain touched only by the artist. We want to touch them too, but ritual proscribes such sacrilege. The photograph is the fetish we can touch, and touch again, without havoc. Its connection with the sacred subject is also in the nature of an imperceptible touch, a trace, an imprint from the objects via light … .
… Michael Leja has argued, much of what each of these photographs has to say is framed in terms of the subjectivities of contemporaneous film noir. In these frames, the photographer (and viewer of the photograph) is constructed as voyeur, as spying penetrant of a private and hidden world. These precincts are both sacred and somehow sexual, conflating the two terms of solitude as the state of holiness and the site of “solitary vice.”
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Lie Down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
— W.B. Yeats“The sublime” was a category of experience by its very essence difficult to define, but always located in the individual. It entered art discourse through the work of Longinus (Peri Hypsous), but it was given its greatest impetus through the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century publications of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which was in turn carried forward in Immanuel Kant’s magisterial The Critique of Judgment (1790) and his lesser known Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). In Burke’s influential formulation, feelings of pleasure devolve from society, while the sublime belongs wholly to the individual, tied to basic and primitive drives of self-preservation and survival.
… Burke contrasted the idea of the sublime to beauty — the one great, the other small; the one rough, the other smooth; the one solid and massive, the other light and delicate.
… Instead of the topographic sublime that some critics would later locate in Abstract Expressionism, these artists’ experience seems logically described as an individual, subjective sublime (the “egotistical” sublime, as some term it) — echoed or induced by topography but personified in the artist himself. The sense of terror in the Burkean model was wedded, in these postwar artists’ terms, to the isolation of existential struggle, figured by the solitary individual under an empty American sky or the towering caverns of Manhattan, struggling like Yeats to climb out of the “rag and bone shop of the heart” (or, like Guston, to get the “rocks” out of their stomachs). The enforced solitude of the depoliticization that occurred in postwar American art was married to the darkness of a personal psychological search to create what Klaus Poenicke has termed America’s “Dark Sublime” …
My most recent previous post from Jones’s book is here.
-Julie



