To Some Point True and Unproven

Meg Atkinson  |  Ben Pranger

MARCH 31 — MAY 19, 2019

I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh. As the walls clear themselves of everything but transparency, the scent of carnations leaves with them. I am out in the open and above the windows have hinged into butterflies, sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected. They are going to some point true and unproven.

 —Rita Dove, Geometry

Ben Pranger, Castle Keep, 2019, wood, 29 X 27 X 10 inches.

MATHEMATICIANS, SCIENTISTS, ARTISTS, all grapple with the question of space—its vastness, how to understand, measure, and depict it. Rita Dove’s poem suggests a theorem that blows apart the space where our ideas reside until any old notion we previously held explodes and flutters away. Artists have been addressing the question of space for ages. Traditional painting saw the canvas as a window into another place, giving the viewer glimpses of what life was like in the artists’ real or imagined world. Then Modernism like a nanny checking a rambunctious child, pulled back space to explore the surface itself. The Greeks freed the kouros figure from its stone block and sculpture took its first stiff step forward until thousands of years later we have the explosive wall sculpture of Frank Stella blowing out from the walls like Dove’s poetic house, all energy and color. The artists in “To Some Point True and Unproven,” Meg Atkinson and Ben Pranger, have taken up the challenge to tame space and make it a subject of their work. Meg Atkinson courses the tension between the two impulses of flatness and depth. Ben Pranger also excites tension in his work — between the structure that holds his work together, and the emergent “fluid forms” of his sculpture.

Meg Atkinson, Little Green, 2016-2017, oil on canvas, 20 X 16 inches.

Meg Atkinson’s active and colorful paintings call to mind the bulbous forms, juxtapositions and chance layering of 1970s and 80s New York City subway graffiti, or the vivid, controlled abstraction in the paintings of Stuart Davis. Both the graffiti artists and Davis layer forms upon each other, creating interacting imagery that enlivens the surface. Graffiti forms are not generally contained—graffiti artists didn’t consider the edges of the subway car or wall they were painting on, so the imagery floats and expands in an infinite space, but the shapes, often defined by contrasting outlines weave around each other in a Gordian knot, creating the sense of a writhing movement. Davis often defines the plane of his canvas with a bold color contrasting with the forms that seem to rise and fall above it. The active forms are sharply defined by their honed edges and weave their way amongst each other. They interact with the contrasting background plane, while enlivening the surface with their color tensions. Davis’ work is all color and shape interactions but in a contained and controlled area. It is with the color tensions and their implied visual movement where Atkinson intersects with both the graffiti artists and Davis.

An unapologetic tinkerer, Atkinson often revisits her canvases. A completed painting with a static grid becomes a base layer for another iteration. She may begin to add planes of color that create depth. Further visual interest comes from contrasting colored shapes, often in biomorphic counterpoint to the geometric objects that lay beneath. There is the visual magic, the interplay of shapes and colors creates a recognizable depth. The biomorphic shapes frolic around near the surface, while the geometry that lay beneath rises and recedes, pushing the shapes that lie on top of them around. The whole composition is a very carefully choreographed dance of rhythmic movement fed by color, shape, and value; a lava lamp of color globules pulsing and groping, amoeba-like, finding their own space and changing as you look. Each painting taken as a whole becomes its own self-contained universe, as fascinating as observing the private lives of microorganisms under a microscope.

Ben Pranger, The Ins and Out, 2018, wood.

Ben Pranger’s sculptures protrude from the wall like the organic growth of an insect hive or seem to grow from the base like a termite mound. The work gives the impression that it is still in the process of growth, like an expanding yeast, changing imperceptibly with each viewing. As with a hive or a hollow in a tree, the empty space is an integral part of Pranger’s sculptural language. Like Lee Bontecou, whose steel armatures and canvas skins defined and embraced negative space, Pranger controls the void, because what is surrounded and what surrounds are equally important. A hole in Pranger’s work is both a shape and a negative space pulling the viewer in. It is a compositional element that creates visual energy that pushes your eye around from one place to the other.

Pranger’s wall reliefs can also read like a drone view of ancient Mesoamerican ruins. They build out the void with stepped pyramidal shapes that advance and recede from their empty spaces very much like Bontecou’s lines that define specific shapes. For Bontecou the lines always lead you toward, then away from the all-important void. Pranger’s graduated steps lead you into and out of his wall pieces, all the while drawing your eye to and away from the blackness of the shapes. These are then surrounded by the textural landscape of a matrix of wood bits or paper pulp that provides the foundational matter and visual cohesion. It is a monumental gesture, both architectural and organic; both hard edged and soft, each informing the other. The busy galleys of animated bits of matter keep the whole from flying apart into nothingness, as the points of the stars are defined by the emptiness of the universe.

Atkinson and Pranger have constructed visual languages that communicate with each other. There is a call and response between Pranger’s three-dimensional sculptures and Atkinson’s two-dimensional paintings. Both play with positive and negative; with what moves forward and what falls back, with what remains empty and what is full. Both are designers of their spaces, building stages and platforms for their harmonic dances of color and shape. What is also evident is that space and the movement within it continues to be a problem worthy of infinite interest and investigation. Their ultimate destination may still be unproven, but Atkinson and Pranger bring us another step closer “to some point true.”

Arthur Bruso & Raymond E. Mingst, curators

Curious Matter © 2019 used with permission

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Colima Culture Mask

Colima Culture Mask, 24" w x 23" H x 6" D, 400 B.C. - 200 A.D., clay

An observer can appreciate an object for its beauty, but the most important aspect of an artifact for archeology is context. Without the knowledge of where something was found, its position in the site and what was found with it, much of the understanding of an object’s use and meaning is lost. Removing a historical or archeological object from its site through looting or ignorance always leaves the scientist with more questions than the object by itself can answer. Such is the case with the Colima Culture Clay Mask. I came across this mask while perusing the Central and South American collections of The American Museum of Natural History. The sparse label information simply identified it as a Colima Shaft Tomb Mask. Colima is a state in western Mexico. Along with the other western Mexican states of Jalisco and Nayarit, Colima was part of a loosely interlocked community of peoples, each with their own culture and visual art style, who used the shaft tomb tradition as their burying practice.

Recreation of a Colima shaft tomb.

The shaft tomb is a method of burying the dead in an excavated chamber connected to the surface by a vertical, or nearly vertical shaft that could descend 10 to 65 feet underground. The tombs were excavated from tuff – an easily worked stone comprised of volcanic ash. They were created between 300 BC to 400 AD, although the end dates are in dispute. The bodies would be placed in the tomb and surrounded with ceramic grave goods (usually figurative) that depicted activities of daily life, along with obsidian tools and weapons, jewelry and household pottery often containing food. The entrance to the burial chamber, at the bottom of the shaft, was usually guarded by a broken clay figure, a “shaman,” (a name given to the figure by the archeologists) designed for the purpose of warning and protection. During its creation, the “shaman” figure was charged with the depicted guardian spirit. It was broken when placed at the entrance to the tomb to release the spirit from the confines of the clay figure. The surface entrance to the tomb was then sealed with a stone slab, which may have been originally on the inside of a dwelling. There is evidence that the tombs were used for successive familial burials. The effort expended in excavating the stone chambers and the high quality of the funeral goods placed in them, indicates that they were exclusive to the elite of the culture.

Examples of Colima grave figures.

Before the discovery of an intact tomb in 1993, all of the western Mexican shaft tombs had been found looted of their ceramic goods. This made determining the purpose of the funeral object’s placement and meaning impossible. The artist Frida Kahlo and her husband, artist Diego Rivera, had a large collection of these shaft tomb figures which they began acquiring in the 1930s. It is possible from the public displays of their collection through photographs and paintings, that they started a greater interest in collecting the shaft tomb figures. By the 1950s, the vogue for the artifacts reached such a demand in Los Angeles that fakes began to enter the market. The fakes caused collectors to place a premium on the original figures and put a huge stress on dealers to find additional authentic objects, while encouraging treasure hunters to find new tombs and caches. The entire burgeoning market stream of collector, dealer and treasure hunter, caused a nearly wholesale desecration and spoiling of most of the western Mexican archeological sites.

Left: Photograph of Frida Kahlo holding a grave figure. Right: Frida Kahlo painting "Self Portrait with Monkey" depicting a grave figure.

It was the almost Cubist abstraction of the human face on this Colima mask that caught my attention. The almond shaped head, prominent brows, close set eyes, the incredibly long and prominent nose that slashes down the face to the frowning mouth, gives the impression that this is a disapproving expression from an entity that is in judgement of the soul. This is not a mask that would be worn by a person to take on a new character or to be used in a ritual. Instead, this is a mask for visualizing an otherwise invisible or imagined entity who is in some way connected with the afterlife, or a stylized impression of how the people saw their own faces. The eyes are not pierced for seeing. There is no accommodation for breathing. The smooth interior would not sit comfortably on the face. Since the mask corresponds with the visual style of other masks that were found within the state of Colima it was almost certainly part of the funerary tradition of the Colima culture.

There is a practice in many diverse cultures of placing a mask on the deceased to hold the spirit in the body and keep it from wandering on Earth. As the body is the vessel of the soul, the face is the connection between the vessel of the body and the world. To place a mask on the deceased face would place a barrier between the face and the world, thus preventing the spirit from wandering, while providing time for the spirit to complete the transformation from material reality to the afterlife.

Masks are also used in various funerary practices, as in ancient Egypt, to preserve the identity of the deceased. Those masks depict an idealization of the deceased face or a generalization of what the people visualized as their cultural ideal. This tradition was practiced where the people believed that the spirit leaves the body to travel to the afterlife but also needs to return to the tomb. The idealized mask helped the spirit to recognize its own body.

Many Mesoamerican cultures believed that the tomb was a transformative space akin to the womb. The tomb is a place where the spirit transitions to a new life. After a complicated afterlife journey, the transformed spirit is reborn to Earth through a woman’s womb. (Kings however were believed to transition into gods.) The belief was that life existed within death, and death existed within life. It was an endless cycle of being and nonbeing; of flesh and spirit. The funerary mask was a symbol of that duality and a conduit that allowed the fusion of life and death. The Colima mask may have been intended for that purpose. By obscuring the true face of the deceased with an idealized identity, along with the magic of the gods, the mask facilitates the re-creation of the old spirit joining the universal. The ideal spirit combines with it to form the creation of a third independent spirit that is reborn to the living plane.

Unfortunately, much of the information about this Colima mask is speculation, only understood through the uses of funerary masks from other cultures, or more specifically, from other Mesoamerican cultures from which we have a more complete understanding of their uses. Since what is known about this particular mask is only its affiliation with the Colima culture, and that has been determined through stylistic analysis of the visual trends of the Colima, we can only make assumptions on its purpose based on how similar cultures used their masks. For us the mask exists as an object that can be admired for its physical form. The acquisition of shiny or interesting objects seems to be a human trait. Great sums are often paid for objects that have a perceived value. Ownership of these items are equated with social prestige. This sets up a competition among people for acquisition of certain objects such as art or other scarce commodities creating an artificial monetary value. This is what happened to the western Mexican funerary objects. Desire for ownership drove a market to loot the ancient gravesites. But the removal of some pottery from an old tomb is more than filling a desire for the market, looting archeological sites results in the theft of cultural heritage. Without in situ study, the context of the object is lost, its deeper meaning can never be known. The richness and depth of its significance to history and the culture is lost. Artifacts can be a doorway to the past, but only if we curb our tendency to value the object over knowledge.

Arthur Bruso © 2019

Review of Bruegel or The Workshop of Dreams by Claude-Henri Rocquet

Most of Pieter Bruegel’s life remains a mystery. He left no record of his time on earth except his enigmatic work. There is not even a self-portrait from this artist who painted many faces, although there is a drawing of an artist at work with a patron looking on that is often considered a self-portrait. Even his birth date is guessed at as between 1525 – 1530. This range of dates is deduced by subtracting the date of his recorded entrance into the painter’s guild from the approximate age of when apprentices were expected to apply to the guild, as his birth date in Antwerp has not been recorded. There are two 16th century contemporary accounts of his life which break the silence of history. Lodovico Guiccardini wrote Description of the Low Countries in 1567, which gives an account of the history and arts, among other information on the 16th century Netherlands. Guiccardini was the nephew of a wealthy Florentine merchant, sent to Antwerp to supervise their trading interests in the Netherlands. His book gives a detailed biography of Bruegel. It was an influential book during the time of its publication and has become one of the major sources of the little information we have on Bruegel. Karel Van Mander, in his 1604 Schilder-boeck included an entry on Bruegel along with biographies of other artists of the time. His is the second account, although it appeared 35 years after Breugel’s death. Guiccardini and Mander do not agree on various events, such as Bruegel’s place of birth, or his station in society. Knowing whether Bruegel was born into a wealthy or poor family and his level of education, would help towards an understanding of how the painter came to his empathy of peasant life which became his main subject matter. These disparities in the main sources of information further obscure our knowledge of Bruegel and his times.

The Painter and the Buyer, 1565, pen and ink on brown paper, 10.0 in × 9.9, Albertina, Vienna in,

Bruegel lived in an era of change and conflict. The Italian Renaissance was at its wane, while the Northern countries were increasingly becoming involved in a struggle with their Hapsburg rulers for control of their country and freedom to worship as they pleased. The Hapsburg court was positioned in Spain. The Northern countries, such as Brabant, the home of Bruegel, and the rest of the Netherlands had embraced the new Protestant version of Christianity as set forth by Martin Luther. The Hapsburg monarchy was loyal to the Pope and committed to enforcing a unified Catholicism on all of its subjects. The Low Land subjects rioted, destroying Catholic churches and works of art. The unrest eventually escalated into the Eighty Years War. The Hapsburgs retaliated with the Inquisition. It was a tumultuous time to be born.

In his novel, Bruegel or the Workshop of Dreams, Claude-Henri Rocquet takes the spare and conflicting facts known about Bruegel: his marriage, children and his paintings, and fashions an imaginative narrative that dares to open us to the mind of the artist while trying to have us understand the origins and meaning behind his dense and symbol laden works. Rocquet first imagines a young Bruegel taking a trip by boat from Antwerp to Amsterdam, describing how the artist drew the reinforced towers that guarded the sea approach to the Dutch city. Rocquet takes pains to describe the license an artist would take with the architecture to create a more pleasing and readable composition of the scene than the jumble it actually would have been. The drawings that have come to us of Amsterdam by Bruegel have the buildings and towers arranged differently than other contemporary accounts. As Rocquet writes: “This view of Amsterdam is not a faithful rendition of what the contemporary traveler saw. Bruegel took pleasure in letting his pen follow the bend of the shore, the arches and porches, the curves and openings of the arcades. He took pleasure in the lip and the molding of each tower, in the prismed facades, in the delicacy of the distant balconies. The details are exact. But his imagination may have rearranged the buildings and, as an artist disposes on the table the bottles and pitcher he is about to paint, so may Bruegel have moved Sint-Anthoniespoort somewhat closer to the Svych Utrecht tower.” Besides the drawings, there is no other evidence that Bruegel ever visited Amsterdam. He may have used maps that often included scrupulous drawings of the cities they depicted. Rocquet allows himself to dream about what may have been from what Bruegel has left us.

Rocquet then has Bruegel travel on to Haarlem and describes a meeting between Bruegel and Dirck Coornhert. A meeting that like the trip to Amsterdam itself, most probably never did happen. Coornhert is considered the father of Dutch Renaissance scholarship, as well as an artist and theologian. It happens that Bruegel and Coornhert share many of the same rationalist religious ideas. To have them meet in person would explain their affinities, and it gives a context for the drawings of the Amsterdam gates as viewed from the sea. Rocquet spends many pages recounting their wonderful, but probably imaginary conversation – we have no way of actually knowing what was said since it comes from the head of the author and not Bruegel. Even so, it is a treat to read the two minds of the philosopher and artist making small talk about craftsmen and local gossip, interwoven with heavier discussions on theology, where Bruegel, as Rocquet would have it, gives Coornhert the idea to write the book of his religious ideas, while offering the reader a possible background to the humanistic ideas that appear throughout Bruegel’s oeuvre.

Towers and Gates of Amsterdam, 1562, chalk and ink, 7 in. x 12 in each

Rocquet has done his research. He has read the books by Guiccardini and Mander. Mander mentions a battle painting of Joachim Patinir, which is now lost. Patinir died around the time Bruegel was born. He had been an influential painter who contributed the world landscape to Western art. The world landscape is a type of panoramic composition where the viewer has an elevated position, and the figures are dwarfed by their surroundings. This high viewpoint dominated landscape painting for centuries and was an especially favorite compositional device of Bruegel’s. Rocquet muses whether Bruegel had seen Patinir’s panel, because Bruegel’s first painting, The Suicide of Saul, incorporates Patinir’s world landscape compositional idea, it is even a battle scene very much like the lost painting as described by Mander. “Were there a fir tree growing at the left edge of the picture, no one would see the dying king, for Saul ended his life alone.” So, says Rocquet in describing The Suicide of Saul. True to the manner Bruegel would follow throughout the remainder of his career, The Suicide of Saul depicts a deep vista, swarming with figures. On the left, isolated on an independent cliff, is the inconspicuous body of Saul, impaled on his sword by his own hand. His armorbearer is following his master to Death. As would become Bruegel’s formula, the main action of the painting is hidden in a detail, while the main focus of the painting is the swarming soldiers and the glinting pattern of their armor and lances. Again, we have no way of knowing if Bruegel saw Patinir’s work or not. The painting Mander describes was in a private collection and he was writing 35 years after Bruegel had died. The composition of the world landscape had become a staple of Netherlandish painting during Bruegel’s life time and had begun to spread throughout Europe. Italian painters of the 16th century were very much taken by the concept and even employed Northern European artists in their workshops to paint the effect. Titian used the technique in his own work. But, Rocquet ties us this posie of another imagined event as way of explaining how Bruegel’s signature compositional device came to be embraced by him.

The Suicide of Saul,1562, oil on panel, 13.2 in × 22 in., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

At the age of 10 or 13, Bruegel was apprenticed to Pieter Coceck van Aalst a successful designer, painter and engraver. Van Aalst had traveled to Turkey and according to Rocquet, regaled Bruegel with his tales of travel, so much so, that Bruegel vowed to travel beyond the Alps himself. At 25 or so, he became a free master of The Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp. This completed his apprenticeship with van Aalst, so he set off for Italy as he had dreamed. Rocquet writes a fantasy describing Bruegel’s first meeting with the wealthy van Aalst who stops at an inn owned by Bruegel’s family. Impressed with a painting the young Bruegel had painted on the outhouse door, offers the boy an apprenticeship. It is all a fabrication devised from the imagination of the author. These details of Bruegel’s family and the outhouse door with its painting have no recorded evidence in history.

Bruegel traveled in Italy for 5 years. On his return to Antwerp, he joined the Four Winds workshop of Matthias Cock. Rocquet writes, “It is unfortunate that one cannot visit the Four Winds salesroom and workshop…. One can only dream. The engravers in the back room, working by the windows, the daylight setting the copper ablaze; the presses with their star-shaped wheel, like the wheel on a poop deck; the black of the inks, the carefully coaxed proofs; the shop with the comings and going of clients and browsers, prints drying on lines, tapestries cartoons, packages to be carted away to a ship or down some road. The shop printed pictures – all kinds of pictures: Raphael and Hieronymus Bosch, Titian and Michelangelo, saints and patriarchs, the Virtues and Vices, gods and goddesses, all manner of animal, maps of earth and sky, city maps and birds-eye views, customs and costumes, the theater of proverbs, landscapes of America or Brabant, examples of architectural styles, street scenes, peasant scenes, crowds skating on the frozen Scheldt, seagoing men and their vessels, wartime disasters and sufferings, the splendor of the emperor, a monster fish beached at Gröningen. Imagery both scholarly and popular.” Bruegel worked as an engraver and designer at The Four Winds. He would keep a connection with the workshop for the remainder of his life. “It was not the need to earn his living that kept Bruegel at The Four Winds; it was happiness. He was happy to be a member of this crew, this family, happy in the midst of so many inventions and exchanges, happy to be able to say things the way simple folk like and understand.”

In 1553, Bruegel left Antwerp to live in Brussels. There he was married to the daughter of his former master Pieter Coceck van Aalst and opened his own workshop where he concentrated on the paintings that would bring him lasting recognition. Mander tells us that he was forced to move to Brussels by his mother-in-law. According to the Mander biography, he had promised to marry his servant girl while living in Antwerp, but she turned out to be too much in the habit of lying. He made an agreement with her that he would put a notch in a stick for every fib she told. If the stick was filled with notches, the engagement would be called off. Unfortunately, the stick quickly filled with notches and the engagement ended. To avoid any further involvement with the servant girl, the mother-in-law insisted that Bruegel move away and start his own shop. Of course, Rocquet elaborates on this, giving us the entire exchange as the mother of his betrothed pours forth her reasoning and encouragement to the silent Bruegel. The conversation is plausible but carries the details and emotions of a writer’s dialog, rather than an actual interaction. How could Rocquet, or any of us have been the fly witness to this private scene which would be the turning point of Bruegel’s life?

The book provides the known events of Bruegel’s life and then brings them to life through the imagined possibilities. Rocquet composes, outlines and finally sculpts a fully three-dimensional fabrication of the life of an artist in the 16th century. He hangs the name of Bruegel on this fabrication, because that is the sketch he started with. And why not? Rocquet understands the mind of an artist and is empathetic with the man who we call Bruegel. It is fascinating to read the inventive, fully fleshed out episodes behind the creation of Bruegel’s major works and how they coexist with the events in the artist’s life. Rocquet uses a poet’s insight and romantic touch with the words he chooses.

I do have one criticism; the man portrayed as Bruegel in these pages is not a 16th century consciousness, but a late 20th century (published 1991) consciousness. Each age and country have, along with its language and customs, a way of thinking that is inextricably woven into its expression and its use of idioms. Bruegel would have spoken Brabantian, a dialect of Middle Dutch which became the basis for Modern Dutch. Latin was the language of the learned and clergy throughout Europe. It was used as the language for the captions that accompanied the prints Bruegel designed, but it has been suggested that Bruegel did not know Latin and had to have his Latin captions written by others. But he was also living in a country where the majority of its citizens had embraced the ideas of Protestantism, which preaches a canon of pragmatism frugality and discipline. We do not know for certain what religious affiliation Bruegel followed. It is obvious from his work, that he had a thorough understanding of Christianity and the Bible. That he was being supervised by Spanish guards during the last years of his life may point to a Protestant leaning but could also indicated a subversive political ideology was detected in his work by the Hapsburg king.

The dreamy, romantic language Rocquet uses throughout his novel is in direct opposition with the pragmatic, frugality of the national Dutch personality and the Protestant ethic of hard work and discipline being embraced by the 16th century Netherlanders. Yet the author does create the perfect tone to assist his reader in envisioning the artist Bruegel, considered the heir to Hieronymus Bosch’s phantasmagorical visions, as working in a workshop of dreams as the alternate title suggests. Still, this is a modern fantasy imposed on an historical figure by the author. It is not a book to be read as fact despite the attention to detail and the obvious research on the subject. It is an excellent linguistic device with which to enchant our imaginations. If these are the words that activate the spell to lift the veil of time, then so it is.

Arthur Bruso

© 2019