An animal and a green faced man gaze lovingly into each others eyes as the man offers the animal a glowing branch that scatters light. Above them the green, yellow, blue and red houses of a Russian village turn onto their roofs while a man and woman move up the main street, the man upright, the woman upside down.
The painting is called
I and the Village and can be viewed as laying out the key parameter's for what I call the art of reconciliation. Things and people are turned upside down, everything is in the foreground, and is alive, dramatic, moving. The artist,
Marc Chagall, is linking up different, unusual and unlikely images in a way that makes visual and emotional sense; in a way that communicates his love of his home, his world, his people, its sights, sounds and smells. He has succeeded, as Walther and Metzger write in
Marc Chagall, in "achieving a pictorial unity through the yoking of motifs taken from different realms of given reality". He has reconciled emotions, thoughts, reminiscences with lines, colours and shapes to create a harmonious, meaningful painting.
Walther and Metzger have suggested that "no other twentieth century artist had Chagall's gift for harmonising what were thought to be irreconcilable opposites". That is not so.
Cecil Collins, in
Images in Praise of Love, produces a work that brings together the life forms of the universe - astrological, biological, cellular, human and angelic - in a rhythmic, harmonious whole. His key character, the Fool, sums up the reconciling artist:
"The Saint, the Artist, the Poet, and the Fool are one. They are the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light."
David Jones drew and painted through a tangle of words and images all laden, for him, with other associations that he aimed to draw into his picture so that the work and the scene became layered with meaning. For him, everything was upfront, part of the foreground. He was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. His struggle was, as
Nicolette Gray has written, "to put down without loss of meaning or loss of art-form all that he needed to adjust into a unity."
In artists such as these we find an alternative and unremarked strain of modern art. A style of painting that we could term the art of reconciliation. It is a form of painting that begins with Chagall and which reveals the lie that he was just a follower rather than an originator among the principal artists of the 1920's. The art of Chagall is one which seeks reconciliation in all aspects of his painting.
In 'I and the Village' this can be seen firstly, as
Werner Haftmann has written, in the pictures' geometrical construction:
"Along the central perpendicular ... a large circle can be seen which seems to hang in the crosslines of the diagonals. ... In contrast to the concentrical calm of the circle, in which the diagonals are refracted as in a glass ball, the leaping, playful, diagonal offshoots bring in many richly contrasted movements. This geometrical net binds the whole construction firmly inside the picture rectangle so that, although in many places the edges of the picture cut through objective details, these do not point outside the picture margins but remain structural elements of the internal design. Nothing projects outside of the self-contained unity of the ornamental surface."
The construction of the painting clearly has no representational function instead its use is to harmonise or reconcile the various elements that Chagall wishes to introduce.
Reconciliation is, then, also seen in Chagall's choice of colour. Haftmann comments that "since the colours are in tone groupings ... colour loses its material quality and becomes the bearer of an independent, immaterial colour-light. ... it is a pure inner picture light, created out of the light values of the individual colours and their interaction. It is split into facets in the spatial and ornamental network of the picture surface, and shines unorientated out of the entire surface of the painting. The colour alone is the source of all light." Chagall's use of colour then also binds together, unifies, the whole composition.
What Chagall is doing corresponds to standard guidance which saw unity as one of the four qualities that should co-exist in a good painting. Unity could then be discussed in terms of unity of colour, unity of pattern and so on. However, in his use of construction and colour Chagall is also uniting some of the great artistic movements of his day. In his composition he makes use of the discoveries of cubism, in his colours the freedoms of fauvism and expressionism and, in his imagery he anticipates aspects of surrealism. His originality and innovations lie in the fact that, when all around him artists were dismantling the jigsaw of art in order to explore to their limits single aspects such as perspective, structure and colour, he was intent on fitting the pieces of the puzzle back together in new and imaginative configurations.
However, his urge to reconcile does not stop here. He takes us further by his unity of content. Throughout his work he brought together disparate images to reconcile them within the frame of his painting. In this picture the images are ones which spring from his childhood memories. This gives them a loose but wholly personal unity. However, the more important unities are in the way that they fit within the geometrical and colour harmonies of the painting and, in the symbolic and emotional links that he establishes between his otherwise disconnected memories.
Colour and pattern emphasise the link between the large human face and the animal face. The eyes are linked by a line that cuts across the other diagonals. The tender green filling the human face highlights the loving gaze directed at the animal. Together they emphasise the emotional unity underlying the picture, that all these objects and images are loved by the painter.
The images can be seen as bringing together four sections of creation; the human, the animal, plant life (the twig, bottom centre) and civilisation (the village). They bring together the strange (topsy turvey houses and people) with the ordinary (a man walking the village street, a woman milking a cow). They connect a person with a community, the 'I' of the title with the people and animals who populate the village.
These, together, may also hint at other unities; those of family where the animal may be symbolic of a mother figure, and the village, and all within it, caught up in a parent-child relationship. Or where the tender love expressed towards all these disparate objects is speaking of a spiritual unity with God expressed in every aspect of His creation and all linked and made worthy of love as a result. Whatever, Chagall has created a unity at every level within his painting so that both the medium and the content proclaim the possibility of reconciliation not solely within the confines of a frame but out there in the real world. If a human can reconcile within art, the painting seems to suggest, then reconciliation is possible within life as well.
This, then, is Chagall's art of reconciliation. His origination, the development of which has produced much that is valuable, although under recognised, in modern art. However, because Chagall has never been recognised as an initiator he has never been viewed as having followers. Despite this for a number of practising artists he is viewed as a key figure.
John Lane has written in
The Living Tree of how Chagall "set out to give embodiment to a unitive vision as comprehensive, though more personal, as that of the Middle Ages."
Ken Kiff said in 1991 that the great paintings which had been on show in London in the recent past - and he included Chagall's
Time is a River Without Banks as one of two examples - may be "more forward looking than perhaps any of this recent work." He felt that the new century may value and see the revolutionary aspect of things that some attitudes in the present century tend to suppress. Chagall, himself, expressed similar sentiments when he said in 1943:
"Mankind is looking for something new. It is looking for its own original power of expression, like that of the primitives, of the people who opened their mouths for the first time to utter their unique truths. Will the former vision be replaced by a new vision, by an entirely new way of looking at the world?"
Chagall's unitive vision finds echoes in the work of some of his peers and has been taken up, responded to and developed by other later artists.
Stanley Spencer, by locating biblical stories within his home village linked the divine and the earthly. In doing so he was aiming at a transfiguration of the ordinary, including himself. He spoke of having "noted in all my various desires that they have a relationship to each other and that they or many of them, come together to suggest some clue as to what their final form will be. This final something, the thing that ecstasy is about, God alone can give the order and reveal the design." By this he was suggesting that if, he linked a present emotion to a place that recalled a similar past emotion (this provided the setting for his painting) and to a similar biblical event (this provided the content of his painting), then the final work of art created would be both a release of that emotion in himself and a transfiguration of the emotion. Both would bring a sense of peace and ecstasy through an at-oneness with God and His world.
Cecil Collins, in painting fools and angels found another means of depicting divine and human action and response. Collins viewed art as "an interpenetration between worlds, as a marriage of the known with the unknown". In art, he said, the "imagination searches out and prefigures the mysterious unity of all life." As a result of this metaphysical purpose and exploration "a picture lives on many different levels at once, it is an interpenetration of planes of reality, it cannot be analyzed or anatomised into single levels because one level can only be understood in the light of others. The reality or interior life of the picture can only be realised as a total experience."
That total experience in Collins' work is unitive experience. Whether this is the attempt at reconstituting the world that is
Images in Praise of Love or the complex combination of symbol and structure that hymns the marriage union and reconciles masculine and feminine qualities in
The Artist and His Wife.
Collins was also preoccupied by our expulsion from the garden of Eden and our longing to return, in itself a reconciliation. This is a theme that was also taken up by
Norman Adams. Adams' produced a questioning, probing work, inspired by Gauguin's
Where do we come from, Who are we, Where are we going and based on the expulsion. An everyman figure is on a sloping pathway which he could be ascending or descending. Above him is a mass of blooming flowers, below a confused, muddy zone of swirls and scraping. His predicament poses the question to us as viewer, are we returning to Eden reconciled to God or descending into confused self interest.
Margaret Walters has noted how the religious subject matter of Norman Adams' paintings provide him with "a geometry, a structure of lines and circles that allows his complex colours, his masterly and distinctive use of watercolour, to work their magic." For
Sister Wendy Beckett this ability of Adams' suggests that a mystical sense of oneness is making itself visible in his work. In
The Way of the Cross and the Paradise Garden it is the radiance of joy conveyed by "angels somersaulting through a dazzle of colour bars, crosses of light, that proclaims the marvellous oneness of the Death of Christ and His Rising", the revelation that the two are different sides of the same love.
Adams indicates, in his notes on
A New Heaven and Earth the way in which the structure and the disparate content of his work are combined to form a unified work:
"The lower panel depicts The Slough of Despond in which human beings and beasts struggle through the bog. The central panel depicts the great mass of people, displaced like refugees, some of them sheltering in improvised tent-like structures: and in one a nativity is taking place. This painting was partially inspired by recent political happenings, beginning with the plight of the Iraqui Kurds. At the top of this panel, the heavens are seen to be opening, with a glimpse of better things to come. The great display of colourful Angels leads into the upper panel, which is all Angels (rather insect-like and developing from butterflies). The 'open-envelope' shape of the work provides an upward thrust to heaven: the two side panels (depicting the Birth of Adam and Eve, and the Angel of the Resurrection), hold the painting together like two embracing arms."
John Reilly is a contemporary artist who has been as strong and explicit as Collins in setting out his intentions:
"My paintings are not concerned with the surface appearance of people or things but try to express something of the fundamental spiritual reality behind this surface appearance. I try to express in visible form the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole."
Using lessons learnt from Orphism and Rayonism he constructs a pattern of rippling rays emanating from a central source of light. Within this structure he sets objects and figures composed of abstract shapes and colours that are indicative of their spiritual qualities. A painting like
No Parting includes natural formations, animals, human figures and plants held together, underpinned, in eternal circulation by the central point, which some may see as a pictorial device structuring a work of beauty and others as symbolic of God. In
Universal Power - The Fourth Day of Creation we are shown a snapshot of creation, of the first reconciliation of shape and form. As Reilly's abstract shapes spiral out from the central point they coalesce into those same fundamental, elemental shapes of bird, plant and human life.
For David Jones reconciliation comes through the tangle of associations and allusions triggered by words and images.
Caroline Collier, in
Under the form of paint, has noted his "fondness for entwinings, for complications, interrelationships, layers and correspondences." We see this most clearly in his use of line but, as Nicolette Gray notes in her comments on
Curtained Outlook, the level of unity achieved throughout his work is much greater than simply this alone:
"The artist has woven a complex of components into a new unity. The verticals of the window-frame, the windows and balustrade of the house outside, and of the jug on the table, are counterbalanced by the horizontal of the sill and the balcony, and by the outward-moving diagonals of the table, the toothbrush and box lid, and the downward-moving lines of the house. Movement runs throughout the composition - there is not a single straight line, not a flat wash of colour. The sudden accents of colour/tone/drawing pick up the movement of the composition. The drawing itself is part soft pencil, part brush drawing in colour, here sketchy, there emphatic. All the elements are worked together: form and content have been reconciled, unity combined with movement."
Finally,
Albert Herbert was another artist driven by a number of (artistically) unfashionable desires. He had a drive to make images and tell stories, to make accessible art, "paintings that are more public and easier to understand." Coupled with these drives was a concern with revealing the inner world, the 'marvellous', feelings, and through these, the collective mind.
His reconciliation of these disparate drives involved learning to see and paint as children do. "I learned to draw again as if from the beginning, drawing what I felt and knew rather than what it looked like." He also restricted himself to depictions of Biblical events and stories. These he treated as "symbols, metaphors, revealing the 'marvellous'". Religion he saw as revealing not just the inner world but also the collective mind.
His method of creating added a further level of reconciliation to his work. He explained that a painting usually started with some idea that could be put into words but that when he began to paint he became fully involved in "the struggle to harmonise shapes, colours and textures". This could go on for several months with the original idea becoming lost in the paint only to re-emerge as something quite different. In this way he both drew his images from his subconscious and integrated them into the wholeness of the painting.
His approach tallied with that of another of his peers, Ken Kiff. Kiff, too, argued that his subconscious images only achieved meaning through the process of shaping and forming the painting. The painting, as a whole, had to be discovered, by the artist, bit by bit. This had to happen in order "for the thing to really grow together and be significantly all part of the same growing thing". In this growth there could be a sense of peace, completeness and wholeness despite the presence, at times, of disturbing imagery.
Cecil Collins, too, came to use a similar approach to a united development of image and form. He called this process the Matrix. Collins' use of the Matrix involved the following; he would choose two complementary colours, then, with his eyes shut he would paint a number of brush strokes. He would then open his eyes and consider the marks on the paper or canvas. As he looked images would suggest themselves and he would select and paint the one that he wished to impose as the predominate image. The point of the Matrix was to "penetrate deeper into the creative imagination so that it is that which speaks to the artist and not the shallower levels of the mind ... The Matrix ... stands for all the hidden desires of the soul".
As a result of this approach the work of these artists can be understood at a variety of different levels. Herbert has explained this by saying that "when people ask what my paintings mean I find I reply according to who they are. If a christian asks about them I reply using christian words. If I sense they won't understand that, I can speak about the story in psychological terms, Jungian. Or I can speak as if it is an abstract painting."
There is an immediacy about his work that accords with the desire to be accessible and is the result of the combination of recognisable, childlike imagery with a vibrancy and thrusting to the use of colour and construction. Initial reactions draw the viewer into a more complex and creative relationship with the painting where we may read in meanings that make sense to us. Herbert felt that paintings are like mirrors, "they reflect something of what is already in the viewers' mind". In this way we return to the collective mind, universal experiences of the divine to which all people can relate.
These universal experiences, Herbert believed, cannot be better expressed than through Biblical imagery:
"The painting of Moses climbing the mountain and speaking to God in a cloud, is about the incomprehensible; God is beyond understanding, it is the revelation coming from outside the tangible world of the senses. It cannot be put better than in this Biblical image of something hidden from you by a cloud; and you going upwards with great difficulty, away from the ordinary world, and looking for something hidden from you."
His last exhibitions introduced a new motif for this experience, that of going through a curtain or veil towards something unseen. Herbert saw human beings as being outside of the temple, outside of the presence of God, but able to perceive and move toward this presence. He increased his depictions of the intersections between ourselves and God. These came through our common origins (
Eve gives birth to us all), and the person of Jesus (
Baptism) together with his regular imagery of the burning bush, Jonah and the Whale, Elijah and the Raven, and the Nativity. This increase in connections was accompanied by a lightening and brightening of his colour which culminated in the somersault of joy that forms
Happiness.
For Herbert, to arrive at this fusion of ideas and form took over thirty years, including years when he resisted his impulses and took his painting in other directions altogether. His fascination with Jonah may have been because he felt he too resisted his calling. If his earlier exhibitions centred on the struggles of obedience then the latter exhibitions celebrated the fruits.
Giles Auty, in writing of Norman Adams, noted that he belongs "to a relatively small tradition of painters whose outlook is positive. An affirmative vision such as his is especially rare in the modern art of the West, artists preferring to shelter more frequently behind masks of disillusionment and cynicism. Indeed, such negative views of life have the additional bonus of being perennially in fashion, the large black-humoured painting sharing something of the timeless chic of the little black dress." The tradition may be small yet it remains significant, if undervalued.
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Pierce Pettis -
That Kind Of Love.
