ART & ARCHITECTURE INTERVIEWS for FIVE BOOKS, ESSAYS, FIELD NOTES

No. 7 - The Sleep of Reason

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Janis Tomlinson| 15.02.21

Goya

The art of Francisco de Goya reflects the social and political chaos of Spain in his day, leaving later generations to read into his prolific work many often contradictory interpretations. Art historian Janis Tomlinson recommends books that disentangle Goya from the retroactive projections of later admirers and situates him in his own time. In this conversation, we also discussed what it takes to write a compelling biography, taking our cue from two excellent examples on Catherine of Aragon and Willem de Kooning. Timed to coincide with the opening of a new show, Goya’s Graphic Imagination at the Met, this discussion was a true delight.

WHAT’S CAUGHT MY EYE & CROSSED MY SCREEN

Portraiture in a Time of Plague

The crown prince Philip Prospero was painted by Velazquez when he was two. It’s a portrait of great foreboding, with its dark background and the amulets draped around the sickly child to ward off the plague. Prince Philip died two years later.

In Goya’s day too, Spain was wracked with plague and misfortune. That Goya was an attentive student of Velazquez shows in his finest work. What’s less obvious in the paintings themselves but made very clear in Janis Tomlinson’s biography is the skill with which Goya negotiated shifting political allegiances in a time of extreme political turbulence. Portraiture was a symbolic means of consolidating power, and whose portraits you painted could determine not only whether you received patronage, but even whether you lived to tell the tale.

Watching the visually lush costume drama The Royal Exchange with our daughters recently reminded me of the central role that portraiture played in early modern diplomacy. In 1721, the Regent of France, wanting to seal the peace with Spain, offered to the Spanish King a marriage between their respective heirs: Louis XV, age 11, and Maria Anna Victoria, the 4-year-old Spanish infant. The Regent of France also offers to marry his daughter, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, 12, to the Prince of Asturias, the 14-year-old heir apparent to the Spanish throne. Their portraits were like promissory notes in the new alliance.

Diplomatic art operated within a ceremonial and symbolic system where even small distinctions were imbued with considerable significance and where reciprocity, honour, prestige, magnificence, friendship, and concepts of gift-giving were crucial components in constructing its diplomatic meaning.

Based on the eponymous novel by Chantal Thomas, the film presents these heirs to the crown, pawns in a game of early modern realpolitik, as the fragile children they were, haunted by adult dramas and the shadow of the plague. The film is no masterpiece, but it is sensitive and human in depicting stolen childhoods, and presents these remote historic figures with great sympathy, not so different from us after all.

Portraiture & Empathy

Time is distance. It can be hard to look past the costumes of historic portraits, so bizarre to the contemporary eye that the subjects wearing them can seem alien to us. Wandering Old Master galleries in any of the great museums of the West can be a through-the-looking-glass experience. So many unfamiliar poses and weird outfits - the wigs, the stockings, the Biblical or mythological references. These people are nothing like us. At heart, however, the finest portraiture – from the Fayum tomb portraits to the present day – is the deeply familiar human experience of connection. I myself have felt blinded myself to this fact until recently by the costume drama. The opulence of Velazquez’s court paintings, for example, or the finery of Van Dyck’s aristocrats and kings. These people are nothing like me.

And yet these people are very much like me. ‘Sargent is the Van Dyck of our day.’ So said Rodin, and who’s to argue? If you look past the costumes of the gilded age high society portraits that make so many of Sargent’s subjects look hopelessly distant to our twenty-first century eye, you find an artist who conveys a terrific amount of empathy for his sitters. “He lets each sitter create their own tragedy, their own farce. He lets them reveal the image they have of themselves, and then he lets that image waver and falter. The end result is not ridicule but compassion. Sargent’s genius was to reveal the fragility of these moments of person-being without completely dissolving the necessary illusions.” Courtesy of The Easel, which gathers some of the best art writing on the internet. Morgan Mies, contributing editor, seems always ready with a timely reconsideration of unfashionable art.

Robots, Rembrandt & Recognition

Chess grand masters, when playing the game, engage the same areas of the brain that are involved in facial recognition (the inferior temporal cortex and the fusiform gyrus, if you must know). That’s how a chess master is able to play dozens of opponents in simultaneous games at once. Each board reads like a face, and the recognition sets that particular game apart from every one of the others.

We are a planet of billions, but if you found yourself in a crowded market in a distant part of the world, you would still be able to pick out a familiar face from the crowd. A chess master sees a particular configuration of pieces on the board in the same way - it’s instantly recognisable. For all their similarities, no two faces are identical. So the question then arises, is depicting someone simply a case of reproducing the precise geometry of their features? Or is it possible to depict someone recognisably without being ‘literal’.

A recent project to create ‘The Next Rembrandt’ poses a similar question. Clever programmers defined algorithms to distill data representing a quintessential Rembrandt portrait, then had it 3D printed by robots (the topographical relief of a portrait is very much a part of its verisimilitude). Curators and scholars were confronted by a manufactured portrait that appears in almost every respect observable to be a missing Rembrandt. Even if it lacks an ‘aura’.

Had the creators read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? The video is mesmerising, although this pointless exercise calls to mind a magician spellbound by the skilfulness of their own sleight of hand. A more cynical viewer may wonder whether the point of this innovation, a collaboration between Microsoft and ING Bank, is little more than the legitimation of advancements in facial recognition surveillance technology with the imprimatur of fine art.

Perhaps the move to digital media and technologies in art is likely to make counterfeiting more prevalent? As a corollary, some big name artists and their factories—for that’s effectively what they are—have become like sites of mass production. In this way, artists have arguably become almost like forgers of themselves (think Hirst, Koons), an ersatz version of their own original ideas in order to supply a market for luxury commodities desperately hungry for the big ticket names that will burnish the credentials of this or that private collection.

As digital images and digitally produced artefacts become more commonplace, my wager is that the handmade becomes more prized, and not only for becoming more rare. Life imitates art. See Philip K. Dick for details, with his riffs on counterfeit artefacts in The Man in the High Castle (or indeed the replicant animals of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

To accept a reproduction in place of the original also signifies a break with the ritualistic aesthetics and politics of earlier times. Yet humans express joy or loss through music, we ornament our dwellings and ourselves, and mark momentous stages of life - birth, rites of passage, death – through art. Artists assume society’s aesthetic responsibilities - a sacred purpose, whatever the market may say.

When Reason Never Sleeps

The sleep of reason produces monsters. Equally, monsters result when reason never sleeps. We live in a wake-centric world that devalues dreaming, not to speak of sleep itself. In the perennial philosophical struggle between reason and the passions, reasoning by the cold light of day has won the upper hand in time. What is Killer AI if not the result of a technologically jacked-up culture of unbridled rational individualism?

We need the warm cloak of darkness to reset and restore, and to experience dreams in order to have an anchored sense of self. Sleep or die. Dreams are mind-expanding experiences, and central to art, play, imagination, intimacy, spiritual practices and the borders of sleep. In crisis times that call for ever more imaginative solutions, we would do well to put down the coffee cup and close our eyes.

Emotion is not opposed to reason. Contrary to the accepted wisdom of aeons of Western philosophical tradition, emotions help us with so-called ‘practical rationality’, acting as a gateway to our values. That’s why they matter in the ethical challenge of policymaking.

Reason? Let’s not give up on reason, but let’s give it a rest.

Paint It Black

In her biography of Goya, Janis Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death. She shows how Goya’s likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery—from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist’s personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya’s late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the “black” paintings, now in a dedicated gallery in the Prado Museum.

Following a renovation of Houston’s Rothko chapel, a re-evaluation. Rothko viewed the chapel as his final statement and these paintings too have an end-of-life character about them. They are nocturnes, their dark colours (some only dark plum and crimson) better appreciated under the new lighting. And they are big works, as if Rothko wanted to create a separate world (and in this too, they recall Goya’s black paintings). The paintings are totemic, reductive, and quiet. “It’s all intense, but whether it’s soothing or hypnotic or grim or traumatic depends on personality and mood. Let’s just say it’s an otherworldly place.” This review was a welcome ticket for armchair travel.

On a bright day in August last year I stepped into a darkened room in Zaragoza, Spain, and found myself surrounded by phantasmagorical visions. We had a stroke of luck last summer, in the year of the plague, to take advantage of a small window of opportunity to drive to France and Spain. Armchair travel gave way to the real thing.

The Museo Goya is one of the only places in the world you can see all of Goya’s etchings at once, in one place. It is a disconcerting experience. Goya painted radiant portraits of maidens and flower girls alongside official portraits of nobility. He also painted fantastical scenes of stupefying horror, both supernatural and man-made.

In Goya’s day, the Enlightenment project was still young. It represented a promising bulwark against superstition and, perhaps worse still, religious fanaticism. Two hundred years on, and the Enlightenment project may have led us into a social and environmental impasse. The promise of technological progress established conditions of possibility for expanding human life-spans, while making also making nuclear and climatic armageddon possible.

If the sleep of reason produced the monsters of Inquisition, the relentless wakefulness of reason has produced the monsters of surveillance capitalism in an era of mutually assured destruction. Imagination is called for, and that’s a faculty that benefits from stillness and a good night’s sleep.

Shot through Goya’s works is an eye for portraiture that has secured his place in the iconography of Spain. What does it mean to create a portrait? For all their similarities, no two faces are identical. So the question then arises, is depicting someone simply a case of reproducing the precise geometry of their features? Or is it possible to depict someone recognisably without being ‘literal’. When I paint, I feel I have a responsibility to capture someone’s likeness. It’s like paying one’s respects or paying them tribute. Otherwise I might as well be painting landscapes or still lifes. Equally however, it’s fair to ask – what’s the point of portraiture in the age of the selfie?

Thank you for taking the time to read this issue.

Romas Tauras