Archive for the 'John’s Bailiwick' Category

Paris was first called the “City of Light” in the 18th century; it was home to many of the great scientific, philosophical and literary minds of the 18th century “Age of Enlightenment.” A later and more literal appellation came as a result of its early deployment of large-scale urban street lighting at a time when many other European capitals were still swathed in nighttime gloom.

There is a certain irony, then, that this radiant city should become the capital of early 20th century Surrealism, a literary and artistic movement that positively wallows in literal and metaphorical darkness and crepuscular ambiguity. And while we most easily associate its tenets with the dream-like twilight of semi-consciousness, automatic writing, and improbable conjunctions of images and objects in painting and sculpture, it is photography that is the subject of a traveling exhibition that closed recently at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. It is now at the International Center for Photography in New York City, from January 29-May 9, 2010, then at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia.

Amazon.com Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris link

The New York venue is certain to create much interest, as this is the first major exploration of surrealist photography I can think of since the landmark L’Amour Fou show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in autumn of 1985. This exhibition’s catalog by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, with an essay on surrealist texts by Dawn Ades, has been the go-to book for the last twenty-five years:

Amazon.com L’Amour fou : Photography and Surrealism link

Its Corpus Delecti chapter by Ms. Krauss vividly demonstrates that explicit sexual imagery of the female body in the work of controversial figures like Hugnet, Bellmer, Ubac, and Boiffard, were matched by more mainstream artists such as Kertész, Man Ray, Bing, Breitenbach and Brassaï. In a time long before gender and political correctness issues began to contextualize public art, explicit images of the female nude presented one portal into an exploration of the unconscious state that was the male Surrealists’ main pre-occupation. Women photographers like Lee Miller, Nusch Eluard, Dora Maar, and Claude Cahun created self-portraits that at first doubled those of the men but they soon found their personal iconography.

The unique perspective of Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris, curated by Therese Lichtenstein, with catalog essays by her, Julia Kelly, Colin Jones, and Whitney Chadwick, is stated in a forward by Susan H. Edwards, Executive Director of the Frist Center:

[The exhibition] offers a fresh perspective, drawing new connections by examining the role of the city as muse and the burgeoning popularity of photography as a democratizing factor in the dissemination of culture.

Getting beyond standard history and museum-speak is exactly what this exhibition does. As soon as you enter the darkened grey/blue quasi-twilight lit galleries you enter a world of unsettled, unstable mood, of images that seem to almost float out of the near darkness, freeing themselves from the walls as they engage your mind. Even the most literal, the most familiarly representational of them, the ones we think we know, the Kertész of Bauhaus-like odd perspective views of daytime Paris, or Brassaï’s foreboding, nighttime, foggy streets with its inviting dens of alcohol and flesh, create a beckoning yet unsettling presence. The photos do not exist here as mere documents to examine, but as entry points into an unpredictable psychic world, mysterious, dangerous, yet irresistible.

Amazon.com The Secret Paris of the ’30s link

Though it provides only a pale approximation of the haunting atmosphere of this exhibition, here is a video that gives some orientation. The intimate, dim lighting in the galleries is overpowered by the recording video camera, losing much of  the mystery of the installation:

In the video you relevant books and magazines displayed in vitrines. Exhibitions about Surrealism generally feature the major literary texts of the movement: its several manifestoes, editions of poetry, and the two major novels of André Breton, Nadja and L’Amour Fou. But several of these cases also display open copies of VU magazine along with the artists’ photos on the walls nearby. VU was a French weekly news magazine, a predecessor of LIFE and LOOK; it was published from March 1928 until May 1940 and covered much the same range of news, sports, social and cultural events as its American counterparts; however, its commitment to photography and photomontage was singular. This went well beyond the American styled photo-essay as we know it, as it covered new and imaginative aspects of layout and design. VU’s pages are chock-a-block with photography, much of it in an overtly experimental style that incorporates elements of Russian Constructivism and of the German Bauhaus, but with a distinctive Gallic tilt toward the surreal and poetically non-literal. VU, and its arts and literary companion, Minotaure, were in every sense avant-garde even when documenting quotidian events.

Amazon.com VU: The Story of a Magazine link

In addition to providing a wider audience for the artists’ works than any gallery, especially at a time when photography was still considered by many to be only a craft, not an art form, VU assignments were a source of stable income for the photographers. Vu provided a security blanket for the many artist/ flaneur/ foreigners such as Brassaï, Kertész, Bing, and Breitenbach to indulge their passion to capture the ever-changing and unpredictable life on the streets of a still to them “foreign” city, while working under the cover of being accredited photojournalists. Here is Andre Kertész’s VU press card:

The prime position of the American artist Man Ray in this milieu is evident in the exhibition. Not only did he reflect many of the stylistic concerns of the other photographers of the Parisian scene, but he was singular among them on many fronts: his fashion work graced the pages of tony magazines for the idle rich; his portraits using surrealist metaphors were highly sought by celebrities who wanted câchet in the art world; his darkroom experiments in solarization, montage, and camera-less images which he called Rayographs, broadened the parameters of pictorial language; his sexual affairs and his many mistresses like Kiki of Montparnasse and Lee Miller, made him the envy of fellow artists; his paintings, sculptures and composited ready-mades allowed him entry into the inner sanctum of the Surrealists and acceptance as an equal among the prestige painters of the movement; his photo-documentation of Surrealism’s poets, novelists, painters and sculptors rendered him the movement’s visual diarist:

Man Ray Wikipedia entry link

A 1934 publication of Man Ray’s photographs from 1920 to 1934 illustrates the wide range of his subject matter.

Man Ray’s introduction to the book reads like a lot of “Surrealist” gibberish extolling some of leader André Breton’s arcane pronouncements, but he does refer to the photographs as “autobiographical.” Perhaps in a certain sense all artistic work is. But here is a sample of his writing:

Seized in moments of visual detachment during periods of emotional contact, these images are oxidized residues, fixed by light and chemical elements, of living organisms. No plastic expression can ever be more than a residue of an experience. The recognition of an image that has tragically an experience, recalling the event more or less clearly, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames, the recognition of this object so little representative and so fragile… .

It does go on and on. Maybe it sounds better in French. Or maybe Man Ray had been in France a few years too long. He reads as precursor to the semioticians. In any case, I wonder what Garry Winogrand would have said about his pronouncements on photography.

As much of a revolution that the Surrealists insisted they represented, the truth is that they had numerous antecedents, the most direct of which was the movement’s emergence out of the deaths and ashes of WWI, the Swiss-born, “anti-art,” Dada. The dream-reality qualities of Surrealism harkened back in literature to Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lautréamont, and in photography to that most unlikely of men, Eugène Atget, whose photos of an ancient and disappearing Paris, evoked the Surrealists’ fundamental ambivalence toward modernism. Atget’s clochards and street vendors, as well as his studies of shop windows and empty streets, documented a disturbing and uncanny space that seemed ripe for surrealist ir-reality. Here is an Atget daytime shop window and a Brassaï nighttime one:

Among the galleries in “Twilight Visions” LCD TV monitors also hang, flat to the wall like a paintings or photographs. They show films imbued with the Surrealist spirit, such as Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Man Ray’s L Étoile de Mer, Emak Bakia and Renoir’s Little Match Girl. These films reinforce the intersection between film and photography so vital to Surrealists and that was to increase in the coming decades. This exhibition of film, visually oriented magazines, and photography all together, argues compellingly that there was a cultural shift occurring at this moment that will resonate through the rest of the century: that the visual media will become primary vehicles of cultural expression, usurping the centuries long dominance of the printed word, relegating even painting to the purview of a marginalized elite.

Man Ray’s L Étoile de Mer (part 1) YouTube link

A truly marvelous aspect of the “Twilight Visions” exhibition is the pre-eminent role it gives to photography and to VU Magazine in the realization of these same Surrealist ideas. While much of the literature and manifestos of the movement are today mostly historical referents and footnotes to the ennui and psychic crises of the period between two horrible World Wars, the visual arts gain support here as the key expressions of the epoch. The photographers of Paris in the 20s and 30s are not a stand-alone, navel gazing claque unto themselves, but great artists who are in touch with a larger audience. Their work is not only a window into the entire society, and an engagement with the socio-political reality of an emerging faschism, but haunting testaments of an alternative psychic reality that nibbles at our waking consciousness even today.

ONE

He gives the reason for undertaking the journey in the diary’s brief foreword: “At the end of November, 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die.” Eisner was 78 at the time.

Born in Berlin in 1896, she had fled Germany in 1933 and like many Jewish intellectuals had tried to regroup in Paris. During WWII she was interned in a concentration camp at Gurs in Aquitaine. After the war she worked closely with Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinemateque Française as a chief archivist while continuing to write for Cahiers du Cinema during the crucial early years of the Nouvelle Vague.

La Cinémathèque Française link

Werner Herzog continues, “This must not be, not at this time; German cinema could not do without her now.” So, in a gesture of iron-willed control over seeming dark inevitability, Herzog decides to walk from his home in Munich to Paris to visit Eisner, convinced that if he does, she will recover. The thought behind this decision has a certain historical kinship to that of the medieval pilgrims to Santiago Campostella in Northwest Spain, who also believed that a hundreds of miles walk would save their souls.  Herzog sets off on what will be a more than three week odyssey equipped with little more than a small rucksack, a compass, some survival money and, improbably, a new pair of boots. Convinced of the necessity of his trek, mere material preparations must have seemed an irrelevance. Moreover, he says, “I want to be alone with myself.”

His daily record of this walk was published in German in 1978 as Vom Gehen in Eis and in English in 2008 as Of Walking in Ice:

Amazon.com Werner Herzog – Of Walking in Ice: Munich – Paris 23 November – 14 December 1974 link

If the sheer physical discomfort he endured—from rain, ice, snow, chilling wind, suspicious peasants and farmers, were a measure of grace gained, then Lotte Eisner, who died in 1983 at 87, would still be alive. This journal is not one of an adventure in nature but of unrelenting discomfort. Herzog’s confrontation with the raw elements of an early winter and its assault on his body reads as an analogue for that of many of his fictional characters, who also face down and are battered by implacable if not outright hostile Nature. Neither Aguirre, Fitzcaraldo, nor Dieter Dengler lives in a time/space continuum much different from that which Herzog faced on this journey.

To understand the passion that drove Herzog to begin this walk to save his mentor you need to understand the role of Eisner in postwar German film. Though she lived in Paris, her soul resided in German cinema. Her books on Murnau and on Expressionist Cinema, The Haunted Screen, provided a link back in time for the New German Cinema filmmakers of the 70s to the golden era of the 20s, to Murnau, Pabst, Lang; that primacy was cut off first by the introduction of sound and then by the hegemony of National Socialism. Eisner abandoned Germany even earlier than Fritz Lang.

In the book Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin, the director recalls encountering Eisner:

I first met Lotte because of her voice. At the Berlin Film Festival in maybe 1965 she gave a lecture, the first time she had returned to Germany since 1933. I walked past the open door of the lecture hall and heard her voice. It was so stunning and so special I just walked in and listened….  (he met her only several years later). I vividly remember sitting with Lotte in her Paris apartment drinking tea and almost casually [said] to her, “I just can’t go on.” And in between a sip of tea whilst munching a cookie, without even looking at me, she very calmly just said, “You are not going to quit. Film history will not allow you.” Then she went on about her noisy neighbors or something like that. It was one of the key moments of my life.

Amazon.com Herzog on Herzog link

Besides being alone for three weeks, besides the pilgrimage to save a friend, besides coming to terms with his growing international success after the release of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Herzog had an almost philosophical reason for undertaking this journey. Since his teenage years, walking (not hiking) had occupied a singular place in his spirit. Later in the Cronin book he says:

Traveling on foot has nothing to do with exercise. I spoke earlier about daydreaming and that I do not dream at nights. Yet when I am walking I fall deep into dreams. I float through fantasies and find myself inside unbelievable stories. I literally walk through whole novels and films, and football matches. I do not even look at where I am stepping, but I never lose my direction.

Of Walking in Ice is not an ordinary account of a journey. It does not even resemble the poetic journey of Bruce Chatwin, another great walker, in Songlines. Herzog’s walk happens on a seemingly real physical level: the details of terrain, temperature, wind, ice, all appear to be factual. But in the midst of what seems to be a literal description, something untoward happens. Something strange, unexpected. But then it gets even stranger, so strange that you realize you have crossed over into a near metaphysical realm. The walking itself becomes the story, an ambulatory Bildungsroman, a kind of virtual prolegomena to an entire universe of stories and characters, mad, fugitive and evanescent, that one day will escape his fertile, febrile mind and into the images of his films: the characters of Aguirre, Fitzcaraldo, Dieter, trapped in a hostile, not benign, Nature.

Certain critics have spoken of what they see as Herzog’s link to the great 19th century tradition of German Romanticism as captured in the paintings of Casper David Friedrich. But nothing is farther from Herzog’s truth, it seems to me. Nature in his universe is aggressive, if not outright homicidal, toward man. This becomes increasingly clear in his documentary films of the past decade, even if it is still, for some, ambivalent in his earlier feature films.

Throughout, the writing is of closely observed and recorded detail, as if the words were film images. On day three he reports:

Hail and storm, almost knocking me off my feet with the first gust. Blackness crept forth from the forest and at once I thought, this won’t end well. Now the stuff’s turning into snow. On the wet road I can see my reflection below me. For the past hour continual vomiting, only little mouthfuls, from drinking the milk too fast. The cows here break into a gallop unexpectedly. Refuge in a bus stop of rough, stained wood. Open to the west so that the snow blows into the most distant corner, where I am. Along with the storm and snow and rain, leaves are falling as well, sticking to me and covering me completely. Away from here, onward.

Setting out the next day, Tuesday 26 November, he thinks of Eisner, ill in Paris:

How is she? Is she alive? Am I moving fast enough? I don’t think so. The countryside’s so empty, and has the same forsaken sense for me as during that time in Egypt. If I actually make it, no one will know what this journey means.

Two days later his description of the weather begins to feel more existential:

A black morning, gloomy and cold, a morning that spreads itself over the fields like a pestilence, as only after a Great Calamity…. There was a grey speckled swan, fighting against the current, but he remained in one spot, unable to swim more swiftly than the current. Behind him the grating of a mill, before him water rushing abruptly down, leaving him just a small sphere of activity. After a period of turbulent tumbling and churning there, he is forced to return to the shore.

Is this a literal description or is there an anthropomorphizing element? Does anyone feel the spirit of Aguirre on the slowly sinking raft, chasing the monkeys as he slides downriver at the end of the film? Are his own reflections a Herzog “story” that he creates while walking? Or is it simply reality reported?

It is two days later. Herzog continues on in foul weather, his introspection and solitude becoming stronger. Coming upon a bus stop shelter he tries to find refuge only to be met with stares by passing children. He moves on:

Then snow, snow, rainy snow, snowy rain; I curse Creation. What for? I’m so utterly soaked that I avoid people by crossing sodden meadows, in order to save myself from facing them. Confronting the villages I stand ashamed. Confronting the children I change my face to look like one of the community.

Another two days on, Monday December 2, Herzog happens on a red rock quarry where he sees a rusting truck and a petrol fire nearby. In the sheets of rain he can feel “the annunciation of the end of the world.” A train races through the landscape, “its wheels glowing and a car erupts into flames.” He now moves clearly into that über-physical realm from which stories and heroes are created:

Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity.

What is the Absurdity? The very next line after the above is: “This is the situation. A dense cloud of flies and a plague of horseflies swirls around my head.”

Is this some form of inversion of Herzog’s vaunted “ecstatic truth?” Is Jean-Paul Sartre lurking somewhere in the wings? One of the many things I find so riveting about Herzog and his films is this conflation of fact and imagination, how the mind mulls over the quotidian fact and exalts it almost into the realm of the meta-physical. It is a bridge to the doorway of madness, and there is no filmmaker alive who can cross this threshold the way Herzog does. Instead of seeing the Blakean divine in a blade of grass, Herzog sees the maniacal. To enter into the world of his anti-heroes in nature is to enter the obverse of Wordsworth and the whole tradition of bucolic poetry.

TWO

Where many dystopian, visionary filmmakers find their metaphor in urban decay, Herzog finds his in what many of them seek as refuge and solace, an unspoiled nature, but for him it is often a malevolent one. As I read this diary of his journey from 1974, I feel it is a key to understanding his work.  To be as reductive as possible: “Nature is not our friend.”

One of the very few detours Herzog takes on this journey is to Domrémy to see the birthplace of Joan of Arc. As he gets close he tries to find shelter by breaking into several abandoned or vacant houses, a routine he has exercised when there were no dry barns or shelters along the way. After all the discomfort to get there, his comment on the site of Joan’s birth is quiet and simple:

At Domrémy I went inside Joan’s house; so this is where she comes from. It lies right by the bridge. There is her signature, before which I stand for a long time. She signed it “Jehanne,” but most likely her hand was guided.

“Her hand was guided.” This is such a “Herzogian” phrase. Was it guided by God, by a roughly clad village scribe or a soft-handed priest? Such ambiguity is crucial.

Again he continues to walk. He sees the passing landscape in fragmented moments, like jump cuts in a film, until his attention is frozen by the sight of a single apple tree, still bearing fruit:

Apples hang in mysterious clusters, close to one another…. I picked one, it tasted pretty sour, but the juice in it quenched my thirst. I threw the apple core against the tree, and the apples fell like rain. When the apples had grown still again, resting on the ground, I thought to myself that no one could know such human loneliness…. So I went and shook the tree until it was utterly bare. In the midst of the stillness the apples pummeled to the ground. When it was over, a haunting stillness grabbed me and I glanced around but no one was there. I was alone. At an abandoned laundry I drank some water, but that was later.

We are deep into the world of the fictive Herzog hero, raging against the world of nature, and no matter the passion unleashed, one that is indifferent to him. The deliberate disjunction in time and space embodied in the last line speaks of reality run amok. In a certain sense it is irrelevant to us, and I suspect also to Herzog, just how “real” all this is. He has often been accused by critics that his documentary films are not truthful; but that is an irrelevant position to argue. So, what exactly, is truth? Herzog says that “facts” are not truth. And why should his non-fiction films (or even this narrative of a journey) be limited to the “accountant’s” facts?

On Thursday, 12 December, Herzog is about 50 miles from Paris and decides to push ahead without stopping. Outside the town of Provins a bus overtakes him. Out of this a “story” emerges:

… While passing, the driver opened the pneumatic doors to throw away his burning cigarette butt. Both doors opened when he did it, in the front and in the back. The driver does this from habit, he almost never has any passengers to drive, the bus is almost always empty. One day a school kid, leaning against the door with his satchel, falls out. They only find him hours later because the only two passengers on the bus are seated farther up front and didn’t notice a thing. But it’s too late and the child dies that night. In court the bus driver has nothing to say in his defense. How could it be, he asks day after day, again and again? The sentence, incidentally, hasn’t been passed yet. The cold has made my hands as red as a lobster.

This story begins as a simple “fact” maybe gleaned from a local newspaper. But the tone quickly becomes clearly speculative and ends again with that odd disjunctive comment—this time about his cold hands. How are we supposed to “read” this? Like his films I think. Reality and personal mood are inseparable. Herzog is creating “ecstatic truth” to match his own drained physical state.

The next day he reaches Paris and the hectic parade of passing people fragments his impressions even more. The day’s last entry is positively Beckett-like:

Several waiters took up the pursuit of a dog that had run out of a café. A slight incline had been too much for an old man, and he pushed his bicycle, walking heavily, limping and panting. Finally, he stands still, coughing, unable to go on. On the rack behind him he has fastened a frozen chicken from the supermarket.

Must hunt Peruvian harp music with female singer. Exhaulted hen, greasy soul.

Someone had told Eisner that Herzog had come to see her, and he had walked over 500 miles. She is clearly very weak but Herzog is not in such great condition himself. He recalls the meeting:

We shall boil fire and stop [sic]  fish [he tells her]. Then she looked at me and smiled very delicately…. For one splendid, fleeting moment something mellow flowed through my deadly, tired body. I said to her, “Open the window. From these last days onward I can fly.”

So could Eisner. She recovered and lived almost nine years longer.

THREE

Herzog is an amazingly physical as well as thoughtful filmmaker. I experienced his high energy when we were making Zak Penn’s film, Incident at Loch Ness.

We spent long hours for several weeks on Loch Ness in a cramped boat. The crew had a daily respite for lunch, however brief, when we could pull up to a dock, disembark and eat a sandwich at a picnic table. Often Herzog remained on board, pacing, itching to continue work. Here is a short clip from Incident at Loch Ness, Werner on Werner:

And on playing a character named Werner Herzog:

There is a brief scene early in Incident at Loch Ness where I am talking to and filming Herzog as he pages through a journal he kept during the making of Fitzcaraldo. The font is tiny. At the time I shot the scene he was using a magnifying glass to aid in the transcription. The journal has recently been published under the title, Conquest of the Useless. He told me the script in his journals is always this small:

Amazon.com Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo link

FOUR

It is no surprise that when he was once questioned about the efficacy of film schools his reply was less than enthusiastic. What should matter to an aspiring filmmaker, he believes, is something like the experience he had while walking to Paris to visit Eisner:

Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let’s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometers. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.

At a time when so many of our film schools have become recruiting depots for the mainstream motion picture and video industry and when some don’t even refer to themselves any longer as “film” schools (a much too parochial term given their multivalent curriculum) Herzog’s dictum has added meaning. Without true life experience to draw on and with the confining walls of academia growing ever higher as “critical studies” usurp what once was a maverick field of study, I can’t help wonder if there is any co-dependency between aspects of this insularity and the seeming poverty of real human stories in “Hollywood.”  I’ll let Herzog have the final word on this impoverishment. He speaks of images—but in film, images can also bear the weight of ideas. Herzog’s films are the proof.

I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. We need images in harmony with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. One must go to war, if need be, to find these unprocessed and fresh images.

A lone stack of hay sitting in a mown field does not seem at first look to be a likely subject for great art.

I took the photo above at the side of a country road just outside the town of Fairland, a once prosperous farm community in northeastern Oklahoma. It’s as mundane an image as you can imagine in this once Native American land. Equally ordinary for the Norman farmers who were Claude Monet’s neighbors were the stacks of hay they raked into conical piles each autumn.

The fifteen paintings of “stacks of wheat” that Claude Monet exhibited at the Paris gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel on May 4, 1891, though, were immediately hailed as a significant breakthrough for the artist, one of the founders of the “Impressionism” art movement. This series, somber sentinels of grass in newly mown fields, were painted from stacks located almost outside the door of his two-acre farmhouse in Giverny. This work became the first in an ongoing series of paintings Monet was to execute during the next decade. The subjects included poplar trees located in a marsh just up the Epte River from his farmhouse; the west façade of Rouen Cathedral; the Houses of Parliament and Charing Cross Bridge in London; and late in life, large canvases of the water lilies in the pond on his own property.

Monet painted about thirty scenes of haystacks in all, but this group of fifteen (painted between the fall harvest of 1890 and March of 1891) was the first time he exhibited a number of them together. He had painted an earlier study from 1865 titled “Hayricks” but it is a more generalized landscape, not yet subject to the close examination of changing color, light and decay that became the focus of the 1890-91 series.

The haystack paintings are scattered in museums and collections all over the world. Even the Louvre in Paris has only one. But if you enter the Art Institute of Chicago, ascend the sky-lit main staircase, pass through the glass doors to the right and walk to the Post-Impressionist and Impressionist Galleries, you at last come to a south wall in Gallery 206. Six of the haystack paintings line this wall, five of them from the original group exhibited by Durand-Ruel. This is the largest concentration of this seminal series to be found anywhere; this is always the first stop I make when in Chicago and am able to rush over to the Art Institute. I will illustrate them in this essay, one at a time, in the order that I recall seeing them hanging, left to right.

These are not haystacks as we think of them today. The bales of hay that we all know are bound from grasses or from the remains of grain or wheat stalks, after threshing. The modern “combine” machine changed the whole concept of how wheat is harvested. Today, the wheat kernels are separated from stalks at the cutting stage. In Monet’s time in France, the wheat field was cut by hand, and then piled into conical stacks to dry until the wheat kernels could be threshed later in the year. Machines that did this rendering were not owned by individual farmers; threshers would make a circuit through the farm fields during autumn and winter, some places not being harvested until March. The dimensions of the stacks are deceptive; their height often exceeds fifteen feet. Since Monet never included animal or human figures in these paintings, the scale is difficult to judge.

Before the exhibition of the fifteen stacks even opened, ten of them had been sold. And it should be no surprise, given the richness of the Art Institute’s holdings, that nine of them were bought by Chicago collector Bertha Honoré Palmer. American collectors were intoxicated even then with French Impressionism and bought everything in sight, then sent the hoard back home. It is why American museums are so rich in paintings from this period. Monet’s fellow artist and friend, Camille Pissarro, initially demurred at the excess of enthusiasm voiced by critics and public alike. He felt that Monet had sold out to jejune American parvenus. But once he actually saw the work he said:

That the effect is both luminous and masterly is uncontestable. The colors are at once attractive and strong, the drawing beautiful… it is the work of a very great artist.

For this series and for many of the following ones, Monet developed a strict painting regimen. Earlier in his career he would go out into nature (plein air) and paint rapidly in the open light. It was the quick and evanescent “impression” that he was intent on capturing. Beginning with the haystacks series his vision turned more introspective.

It’s not that he worked any slower than earlier. But he would move from one canvas to another, as up to seven of them were lined up in the field; he was trying to capture the shifting nuances in color and texture of the morning or late afternoon light. He wrote:

I first of all believed that two canvasses would do, one for grey weather, one for the sun. One day I saw that the light had changed. I asked my step daughter [Blanche Hoschedé] to fetch another canvas, then another, still another. I worked on each one only when I had my effect.

Monet worked often from dawn’s first light until the last light of dusk, seeking the essence of how light transformed the humble forms of the stacks. He would then continue to refine the work in his home studio where he felt he could burrow into the essence of each canvas in unhurried contemplation. His friend the critic Gustave Geffroy wrote of this work:

The stacks… are a fulcrum for light and shadow; sun and shade circle about them in a steady pace; they reflect the final warmth, the last rays; they become enveloped in mist, sprinkled with rain, frozen in snow; they are in harmony with the distance, the earth and the sun.

Monet spoke about the “envelope of air” that surrounded the stacks, a kind of aura. There is a sense of anthropomorphism here as if the paintings were human portraits. In fact, it is not just color and light that fascinated Monet but also the changing character of the stacks in time. When you look at reproductions of the entire series this becomes evident. Shortly after harvesting, the conical stacks display a thrusting top, rising almost to a point. Over the weeks and months, with exposure to the elements, the tops become more rounded, settled; the cones droop, almost like a heavy human body hunkering down with age. Monet wrote about the near symbiosis he felt with individual stacks. In fact, he paid certain farmers not to harvest them at their appointed time so bonded he felt with individual “models.” Of course, he needed them to continue their “sitting.” But they must have seemed to be his daily companions as well. Isn’t it a bit axiomatic that the artist falls in love with his model?

I understand this sense of vigil Monet spoke of regarding the shifting shapes of nature. Early in my own career I spent four months hundreds of miles inside the Arctic Circle, north even of the village of Barrow, Alaska, on a children’s film for Disney Studios. In my spare time and when the weather co-operated I enjoyed walking north to the very tip of the peninsula to observe and photograph drift ice and small icebergs. Their morphing shapes from day to day, yet always recognizable, made me feel a sense of kinship in time that you can derive only when photographing something that “ages”.

Much critical study of Monet’s various series, especially of the haystacks and of the Rouen cathedral façade, focuses on the nature of the light, along with how colors and that light—incident, reflected, and refracted, contribute to the overall “character” of the painting. But the element of time is also present in the work and Monet spoke directly to it. As his study of the stacks became more intent, as the stacks themselves became more familiar as unique objects, he said that he felt:

more and more driven with the need to render ‘ce que je èpreuve’ [what I experience]. For me the landscape hardly exists at all as landscape, because its appearance is constantly changing… but it lives by virtue of its surroundings—the air and light.

Monet was forty-three when he first rented, then bought, the two-acre farm and house at Giverny, halfway between Paris and Rouen. His wife and sometimes model, Camille, had died on September 5, 1879, leaving him with two sons. Although Monet continued occasional travel to paint new series, his focus shifted later in life to the home, gardens and lily pond of the farm. The impermanence and shortness of life weighed on him as he struggled to maintain a household. The cycle of seasons and the dominion of the land became very real for him. The Haut-Normandie region of France was called the “breadbasket of Europe”; the fertility of the soil and its ability to rebound from sterile winter into the fecundity of spring and the harvest of autumn was a very human cycle. As he aged, Monet saw himself as part of this circle of life. The spirit of these humble stacks of wheat, seeming to wait patiently for their gift of food to be harvested, inheres in Monet’s paintings as well. The grand ranks of the stone blocks of Rouen Cathedral and of the Houses of Parliament, while seeming febrile in the changing light and air, remain stubbornly non-organic and lifeless, no matter how long the viewer studies them. But the soft muffins of the stacks of wheat have an aura that is part of the “envelope” of which Monet speaks. What can be more of a contrast as a subject for art than these stacks of hewn grass when compared to the soaring, indifferent totems of a congested city?

In a soaring flow of purple prose, a Dutch critic wrote of the effect these paintings had on him. At first he says he sought to escape their intense colors and textures that assault his sensibilities with:

Gaudy colors, these zigging lines, blues, yellows, greens, reds, browns, dancing a crazy sarabande on the canvas [but finally] irresistibly compelled by this medley of colors to recreate the artist’s vision.

The litany of erstwhile urban artists abandoning cities to rediscover themselves in the country is a lengthy one. Just recently, I wrote about that quintessential urban photographer of New York and Los Angeles streets, Garry Winogrand, who shortly before his death bought a large format view camera and talked about buying land overlooking the Hudson upriver from New York City. There is also Donald Judd, the hard-edged minimalist sculptor, who bought a tract of land near remote and arid Marfa, Texas, to house his own work. There is the example of David Smith, who learned his trade as a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, then became a defining artist in steel just as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem DeKooning did on canvas. Smith moved his studio to upstate New York, and like Monet, lived and worked in near isolation, at Lake George. He “farmed” his land into a crop of transcendent sculptures.

Even more dramatic than Monet’s patient record of the change in organic matter (the stacks of wheat) is an intense record of decay that was made by Smith. He had long made photographs of his own work in the fields outside his studio near the village of Bolton Landing; the abstract steel sculptures nestled among the grasses of summer and they rose in stark silhouette against the snows of winter. But of all the photographs he made of his own work, it is the study of a decaying steer head on a steel tabletop that is the most anomalous and disturbing. I came across these pieces some years ago in a show of Smith’s photographs at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea. Graphic as they are, they are well within the painterly tradition of nature morte.

Though Monet does not seem to have painted dead animals, the momento mori this genre represents must have been very present in his mind as he trekked daily into the fields to paint the haystack series. Here is a short video clip from the Art Institute website that shows the slow decay of similarly shaped stacks when exposed to weather:

Art Institute of Chicago video link

Monet lived to age 86; he is buried near his beloved farm and gardens in the Giverny churchyard. These last years were spent close to home. Cataracts and infirmity limited his outings to find new subjects, but late in life he did find an entire new universe in the light, color, and reflections of his ever-expanding gardens and lily pond. The Museum of Modern Art in New York currently hosts a small but beautiful show of several of these triumphant paintings, the apogee of an artist’s life spent in close examination of nature in all its myriad manifestations.