ART: A Master Draughtsman
eye WEEKLY
eye WEEKLY June 1 1995
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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STYLE STYLE
CONSTABLE, A MASTER DRAUGHTSMAN
To July 9.
Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St. W. 977-0414.
THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS
by
OLIVER GIRLING
This town is drowning in a wash of art-critical essentialism, courtesy
of the daily press -- let me try to grind out some grains of
materialist antidote.
For essentialists, an artwork's medium is the transparent carrier of
its content, read not as a function of other contemporary art, but as a
response to a literal "subject," or in abstract art, to Nature's
eternal verities: Sex and Death, the Wounded Inner Child, the perennial
return of spring flowers, etc. This gives work a kind of saccharin
autonomy, makes it a deus ex machina with the artist serving as the
inspired, bemused medium of a sweetheart god.
The same approach is sometimes invoked by students during critique.
Teacher: What's that fat purple stripe doing in the middle of your
painting?
Student: I was wondering that myself. It sort of appeared while I was
working.
Or the realist version:
Teacher: Ken, why does the woman in your painting Triple Nipple Ethel
have three vertically stacked breasts?
Student: Because our life-painting model has breasts just like that, I
swear ...
The fallacy in these explanations is that they fly in the face of 500
years of art history, which, as much as in those other artificial forms
-- opera and the novel -- is the history of carefully calculated
effects. (Imagine the irritation of the teacher Cimabue in 1490, when
his student Giotto fooled him by painting a realistic fly on his
Byzantine Madonna.)
A preamble to discussion of John Constable, whose drawings and
paintings from the David Thomson collection are currently on view at
the AGO. Constable, as much as any artist in history, needs rescuing
from his essentialist fans.
The exhibition's catalogue sets out to do just that. It not only
contextualizes the artist among his contemporaries whose principal
subject was light falling on the landscape -- Turner, John Linnel,
Cornelius Varley (inventor of the patent graphic telescope, an early
version of the opaque projector) -- but assesses his importance to
artists within the modern canon -- Courbet, Manet, Matisse, etc. -- and
the effect that particular materials commercially available to artists
at the time had on the direction of his work.
It's clear that the work couldn't be further from the taxidermic
naturalism of Robert Bateman, the killer-kitsch landscapes of Andrew
Wyeth or any of the current, anemic, landscape photo-realists who might
wish to claim him as a mentor.
It never stands as a witness to nature, but rather reconfigures it in
slow, symphonic passages, with an accretion of marks painstakingly
developed by endless apprenticeship to observation and graphic
rendering of the countryside, its vegetation, its weathers, its human
activities and constructions, to be montaged and edited later in the
studio, according to compositional need.
Constable lectured that the "art of seeing nature is a thing almost as
much to be acquired as the art of reading the Egyptian hieroglyphs."
These are drawings that lend themselves to being read, in a way that
the viewer doesn't try to "read" Gainsborough or Fragonard, whose
systems of mark-making, especially in the depiction of vegetation, they
strongly resemble.
This is the paradox: the two earlier artists, whose subjects are so
mannered, conjure a seamless illusion; Constable, whose theme is the
unadorned pastoral, uses shorthand, broken surfaces, tracing, obvious
Cartesian grids, color and distance notation to give the drawings the
fracture of modernity a contemporary audience can understand.
Yet Constable is not modern, though the English painter Patrick Heron
makes an energetic argument in the catalogue for considering him so
(Constable's rival, Turner, self-conscious and obviously picturesque,
has much more of a claim).
At a time when the modern is under siege, when historians in every
cultural form are combing through the past to decipher conventionalized
craft practices, this may be to Constable's advantage. His painting is
the height of English romanticism, not a dreamy or bleary-eyed art, but
a brilliant, improvisatory form based on disciplined looking.
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