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Het Steen

Fifteenth Approach to Het Steen: Part One

October 10, 2011
Art Seen, Het Steen, National Gallery
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Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Perhaps, because autumn is really starting to get going outside, the autumnal colours of the foreground seem particularly strong. The browns, in fact a translucent wash (looking a bit like a Sienna, though probably an umber with a touch of yellow) over thicker white underpaint with sludgier greens and umbers mixed on to the underpainting. This site, along with the National Gallery site itself, is helpful

Painting materials of Peter Paul Rubens: http://www.lalaragimov.com/research

Norman Bryson in ‘Vision and Painting’ (Macmillan, London 1983) talks at some length about the triangulation between the artist’s viewpoint, the viewers’ and the vanishing point. Stressing the importance of what happens, or is presumed to happen, this side of the picture plane. It is difficult to be both the artist and the artist as viewer but, we know that this painting was made for his own pleasure, possibly to display his own success to the powerful, but for Rubens’ pleasure nonetheless. I.e. an autumn scene for a man in his own September days, fact closer to November as he died four years later. Is it therefore too fanciful to make associations between the rumpled, creased, worn ground plane as it moves from the cart at bottom left to the rising sun top right and skin. Steen is after all, flanked in the National Gallery by two versions of the Judgement of Paris, young female skin by the yard.

Next to me on the bench in front of these three paintings a youngish art student in a flowery red summer dress is making a tonal study of the earlier Judgement (on the left from 1597-9)

Peter Paul Rubens: 'The Judgement of Paris', 1597-9. Oil on Panel. The National Gallery, London

The central nude (Athena) appears in the drawn copy to have clear bikini marks, whereas Rubens’ goddesses of course are immortal and have no marks of the sun at all. While for example, the clearly human Adam in the van Eyck brothers Ghent altarpiece has worked in the fields and his burnt head and arms are testament to his lowliness.

The van Eycks: 'The Ghent Altarpiece, detail'. 1432 tempera and oil on panel

Sun tan as a desirable attribute doesn’t start till the early Twentieth Century.

So, skin, the action on Steen takes place on a surface light by raking light, the more one looks at it, again perhaps the triangulation of viewer’s viewpoint, the more this looks the skin of an old man, no longer taut, odd risings of hair in the folds.

That grouping of oak and silver birch in the foreground, they really do look like the subsequent tree paintings of artists like Ruisdael, Hobbema and Constable, a line you can trace back to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and back further to woodcuts from Titian. The tops of the trees, billowing forms are tinged with pink as are the grey clouds in the top left and fronted with thick creamy white. A similar palette to that around Discord in the storm clouds in the other Judgement of Paris to our right, the later one: 1632-5.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'The Judgement of Paris', 1632-5. Oil on Panel. National Gallery, London

Huge billowing shapes, dramatic lighting, powerful form, this upper right section of Steen is slightly different to the climactic conditions and tree-scape across the autumnal, linear composition below. Rubens is gussying up the scene a bit, he can’t help it, all those years of grand istorias for the powerful; it has become a habit. The isolated intense focus on others areas, the abrupt changes in scale, show an artist working on bits that interest him, no need to harmonise the composition.

Today seems to be young and old day in the National Gallery, huge fleets of little children, all pigtails and holding hands are ushered through with much shushing and repeated directions. Amongst the excited little beings are the old, with sticks and grey jackets and  audio guides and armfuls of gallery pamphlets; fretful that they are in front of the wrong painting as they press buttons 9, 4 and 3. I am suddenly surrounded by an unnumbered horde of small, very small children all with their ‘Kerbcraft Walking Bus’ fluorescent tabards, their joy is overwhelming, their need to sit on the bench equally so; time to go. 

Fifteenth Approach to Het Steen, 1636: Part Two

October 10, 2011
Art Seen, Het Steen
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Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Thinking further about those clouds and the trees in the foreground, their derivation and their future effect (although this was less in the Netherlands, the major influence would be on artists like Constable,Het Steen was owned by Sir George Beaumont, Constable’s patron). I have been reading the catalogue for a National Gallery Exhibition on ‘Dutch Landscape, the Early Years, Haarlem and Amsterdam 1590-1650’ published in 1986, National Gallery Publications, London. A show which centred on the development of work directly from nature; a process that characterises Dutch landscape drawings, prints and paintings in the seventeenth century.

Rubens was though, a Flemish artist, Italianate, learned, and devoted to istoria. The growing 16th century Dutch landscape tradition, developing around Haarlem, based itself on nature/ observation, the ‘extensive landscape’ a correlation between marine and landscape painting particular to the newly reclaimed Dutch landscape. These artists, inspired by the marine painters like the splendidly named Vroom, closely observed wind, cloud types and the effects of light. Unlike the Flemish:

“These [Rubens’] clouds are an arbitrary backdrop and are scarcely recognisable in meteorological terms” J E Thomas, Geographical Magazine 51.7 April 1979, quoted in ‘Dutch Landscape’ page 79.

“the marine painters observations of the sky ensured that in Dutch Landscapes and marine paintings sunlight always falls from the same direction [as the wind], Rubens’ ‘artistic licence’ in showing shadows falling from opposite directions in the same landscape would have been unthinkable for a contemporary Dutch artist’

In fact the light and shadows fall in Steen is reasonably consistent from top right to bottom left. There is no strong wind but a gentle East to West breeze, following the line of the clouds would seem believable. The painting that Russell is referring to in this second reference is the ‘Return from the Harvest’ in the Galleria Pitti, in which the shadows cast the peasants in the foreground run at right angles to the source of light.

By the way, can I recommend the Hay in Art Website www.hayinart.com which does exactly what it says, in great detail; indispensable.

This double light is not down to incompetence, or lack of knowledge, it is the traditional role of the artist to transcend the natural.

“It is by this that Rubens proves himself great and shows to the world that he, with a free spirit stands above Nature and treats her to his higher purposes” Goethe, conversation with Eckermann, in discussion over Return from the Harvest where Goethe uses the double light as an illustration of Rubens’ greatness, rather than Russell’s approach which tries to indicate Rubens’ indifference at best.

To point out where Rubens/ Flemish landscape and the emerging Dutch tradition meet, it would be worth mentioning Carel van Mander. van Mander’s treatise on painting, (Het Schilderboeck) published in the Netherlands in 1606, and went into great detail about art, artists and translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Chapter 8 was exclusively on landscape, parts of it seem relevant to Het Steen, for example:

“4: note, first of all, how over there the bride of old Tithonus rises from her saffron bed to announce the approach of the torch of day, and see how the four piebald horses soaked with water, rise panting from the shallows of the Ocean. See how the little purple clouds become tinged with pinkish red and how beautifully Eurus’ bright home is adorned ready receive Phoebus…see there in front of us, hunters are walking with their dogs through the green dewy fields: see how that trodden dew turns a lighter tone of green, showing their footprints, and so giving their route home. (Let the landscape recede smoothly into the distance, or let it gradually merge into the sky)”

From ‘Dutch Landscape, the Early Years, Haarlem and Amsterdam 1590-1650’ published in 1986, National Gallery Publications, London page 36.

There is a distinct similarity between these stock figures from classical myth and the role of the genre figures that people Steen’s foreground, certainly the horse/ cart drawing of the sun across the sky motif. A coincidence? A wry reworking of classical themes? Probably, these references were, after all, part of the trade of any literate 17th century artist across Europe. Had Rubens read van Mander? What is more relevant perhaps, is that these references had nothing to do with the new Dutch landscape style that was appearing, on his doorstep as it where, some 100 miles away from Het Steen.

It would be tempting to say that old man was learning new radicalism, by working directly from nature for example. Certainly this is a recognisable landscape, but, all the marks of composition, of his higher purpose, of studio bound painting, are here. Het Steen is framed, by the group of trees that also frame the house. The hunter, fallen tree arrangement makes the traditional the diagonal, foreground repoussoir element, characteristic of Flemish landscape painting.

“First of all it is important to show clear contrast in the foreground, as it pushes the other planes into the background. Ensure something large is painted in the foreground as was done by Bruegel and other great artists who are acclaimed for their contribution to landscape painting. Since they often place enormous tree-trunks in the foreground let us enthusiastically strive to follow their example.”

van Mander quoted in From ‘Dutch Landscape, the Early Years, Haarlem and Amsterdam 1590-1650’ published in 1986, National Gallery Publications, London page 38.

The Steen pictorial space is divided up into the traditional brown foreground, green mid and blue background. Yes, there is evidence of farming, of quotidian purpose that you can see in drawings especially by artists like Coninxloo. Rubens’ painting contains the field boundaries, the milkmaid etc. But, the centrality of the hunter makes it clear; this is a landscape for recreation. And, lastly there is the high view, the recognizable method for constructing the Antwerp landscape style that you can trace back to Patinir and the early sixteenth century.

So, back to the trees.

Van Mander wrote that the changes in the representation of trees in art in the Netherlands, was down to Coninxloo, because of him Netherlandish trees in art became leafier. Coninxloo  was an artist who specialised in dense forest landscapes, a subject and style that according to Christopher Brown in the Dutch Landscape Introduction, (‘Dutch Landscape, the Early Years, Haarlem and Amsterdam 1590-1650’ published in 1986, National Gallery Publications, London page 17) you can trace back to Pieter Bruegel the elder, and his son Jan Brueghel the Elder. Pieter had in his turn taken his inspiration from woodcuts after Titian, Campagnola and Muziano, i.e. from art, from higher purpose, not from life. 

Rubens’ little group of tall foreground trees, growing at angles, overlapping one another, with recognisably different foliage, and the foreground tree stump; this compositional form is pure Flemish landscape tradition. A tradition that Rubens had already conquered on his return to Antwerp from Italy, in his groups of landscape painted 1614-25. Paintings that seem to celebrate lushness, fertility and his identification with his native country. A return to prosperity after war. In the horribly complex history of the Netherlands, this was a period of powerful Counter Reformation, lots of work for a Catholic history painter newly returned from Italy, e.g. the Raising of the Cross for Antwerp Cathedral, 1610-11.

The landscape painting that makes all this clear is ‘Milkmaids with Cattle in a Landscape: ‘The Farm at Lacken’, 1618, oil on Panel, The Royal Collection.

Rubens: 'Milkmaids with Cattle in a Landscape: 'The Farm at Laeken', 1618. Oil on Panel, The Royal Collection, London

 Notice that there is some formal similarity between the arrangement of the right hand branches on the birch in the clump above the figure with the cornucopia of fruit and veg on her head and the right hand birch in the Steen foreground. To further emphasise our theme about the derivation of, and intentions behind these compositions, Christopher Brown in ‘Making and Meaning: Rubens Landscapes’, points out that this composition loosely owes something to a Titian woodcut (Landscape with a Milkmaid 1525).

Boldrini (after Titian) Landscape with a Milkmaid 1525. woodcut, British Museum

And, he goes deeper to show that the church, just visible top right, was a key centre of Marian worship and nationalist associations. In other words there are strong connections between this painting of prosperity and peace, the power of the Catholic Church and the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, Rubens was their court artist. Do we find our trees in Het Steen pointing us in any of these directions? No, the context is different. There is of course the same brass jug, here for containing milk, in ‘the Watering Place’ of 1620 for, presumably, water and in ‘Landscape with a Rainbow’ (generally assumed to be the companion piece to Het Steen) where it is also on a head, either water or milk. A Rubensian shape for indicating plenty/ fecundity/ prosperity, i.e. peace?

Fourteenth Approach to Het Steen, 1636

August 25, 2011
Het Steen, National Gallery, Poussin: Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake
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Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-a-view-of-het-steen-in-the-early-morning
24th August, morning, not long after opening, summer holidays, no schoolchildren.

The proportions of Het Steen are interesting, much wider than tall, (131.2 x 229.2 cm, ie 1:1.75)  a proportion that developed, from the initial central three panels through to the seventeen that he finished with. It is noticeably wider than, for instance the smaller landscape works on the wall behind. A proportion that reinforces the notion that we are not looking through a window, it does not correspond to the windows shown in Het Steen. The painting is not quite two equal squares, they would have to overlap slightly. Certainly the proportions summons up the notion of stereoscopic vision, two eyes not quite combining and the mid point marked at the bottom of the picture plane by the upturned tree.

For someone who made such spectacular paintings of grand horses fighting, the two cart horses really are splendidly rural.

Are there two figures on the tower? Or is just the castellation? The blobs are in roughly the right place for architectural features, but then again they are slightly different colours. The left is bluish, the right is yellow; the blue figure could have an outstretched hand: “This is all mine”. Reading too much into vague sploshes of bravura paint?

If these are figures, than that could place Rubens, the narrator, within the pictorial space at a series of viewpoints. He is on the tower; by the gate; on the cart; as the hunter; as the artist/ creator and of course as the artist/ owner of the estate showing it off to the privileged viewer. And, each time I see this painting I am convinced that this is a view made to be shown rather than an artists’ ‘personal response’ in the late 19th Century manner. The way that our perceptual perambulation is arranged makes that very clear.

Clark talks about Poussin’s tiny figures in ‘The Sight of Death’,

“What are these miniature figures in Poussin about? Why do they come and go in perceptions? Why, once see, do they matter so much?….I think they are best understood as different proposals about recognition and interpretation, about “picking out” what is human in a human and non-human world, about the way humans belong to their surroundings…Let’s talk about stories. They are analogous to the small figures in Poussin: that is, there often turns out to be more and more of them, implied, embedded, the longer one looks.”

(T J Clark: The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 0300137583. Pages 45-50)

The figures then, give the painting agency, do they work the same way in Het Steen?

 A young Eastern European (Russian perhaps?) points out the two flying ducks to his girlfriend, then the hunter, then he makes the appropriate internationally recognised gestures for shooting something. She laughs appropriately, but looks slightly embarrassed.

I go to look carefully at the tower, I think that (probably) these are merely battlements/ castellation. Presumably such architectural features were for show. But, whether or not these figures are ‘real’, the point about their role remains.  The fisherman on the bridge, or the hint of figures to the left. I return to the bench to find a Japanese woman sitting on my notebook, she is not apologetic.

Thinking about Clark, I go to see Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’

Poussin: 'Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake', oil on canvas, 1648

 

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/nicolas-poussin-landscape-with-a-man-killed-by-a-snake

It has been in Room 19 for a while now, but the lighting is bland and dull. Gradually lamps turn on, the room gets brighter and slowly the painting comes to life. It clearly needs strong light, whereas the same lighting scheme kills the Rubens; Het Steen was made for dim candle light: the North. ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’ for the bright clear South. Returning to the original position a painting was designed for, can affect how we understand it. Such a search can become an ‘early music’ style fetish, nonetheless it is extraordinary how different art, for example the Poussin here, can look under sympathetic lighting. The lighting clicks off and Landscape’ returns to a dull, dark gloom.

‘Bunker PLC’, A Sensory Installation by ScreenDeep. Abbot Street, Dalston Hackney, East London

May 16, 2011
Dalston, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Poussin: Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, Time Based Art
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http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/10/bunker-plc
http://screendeep.wordpress.com/bunker-plc/
A fully immersive art experience in every sense. It starts with online booking, then a woman in wellies and clipboard ticking off names, in front of a large rusted metal door in a carpark at the back of a warehouses just of Kingsland High Road, East London. You have to walk past a McDonalds and all the excitement of Hackney street life to get there. ‘There’ is Edgelands, the car park is one of several hemmed in blank urban spaces, derelict and graffitied (including oddly a memorial to a Chechen freedom fighter). In the distance the sound of Ridley Road market (“come on love don’t be shy, everything for a paand”) around the wastes are stacks of cardboard for rough sleepers. But we must go; our group of slightly baffled art enthusiasts are being hurried through the door by a tall figure in black with a strange voice.
Down steep stairs into darkness, dampness and oddness. We are recruits for a job with Bunker PLC apparently. We fill out application forms in almost complete darkness, chivvied by strange figures with headtorches, who fit waterproof slippers over our shoes, later we will get into full waterproof ponchos. Scientific glass vessels full of beautiful, crystallised plant life provide light. We watch the company film, full of appropriate corporate cliché, in another room, hurried down many dark, wet mouldy corridors from low ceilinged space to space. We find out more about the company, set up after cataclysmic climatic events in 2012 (we are in the future now). Life evolves underground: human pollination; urban vertical farming; genetic modification by plunging the hands deep into bloody chest cavities; a hands on art work then.  The combination of film/ sci fi/ dystopia/ comic references echoes throughout the hour underground and in every one of the rooms; crystallised books by Ballard in one room, references to Tarkovsky on a white board in another. The conviction by the actor/ artists is total, as is the whole set up.
The usual fear of role play promotes the wish to see this art work on many levels. As a walk through film, a theatrical polemic about climate change, an artwork that derives from performance and installation traditions of the 1960’s. I suppose you could say that critique has been implicit within performance art since Oldenburg’s anti materialist Happenings and is certainly present here. You could also point out that a future in which nothing works is a common feature of much contemporary art work. Noticeably none of these futures involves digital technology, imagine Blade Runner without all the toys, or the replicants for that matter.
But you could also say that what links many of these works is a common understanding of the role of time within the artwork and in the way that the viewer encounters it. There is more to this than the simple process of setting the work in the future, as seen in both ‘Bunker PLC’ and ‘whiteonwhite’ (see previous post).  Could we say that, in using an overarching narrative: the role of this imaginary corporation in a future society that has undergone cataclysmic change; the search for meaning by a geophysicist in a post Soviet city, both works fluently create sequenced packages of time that are apparently linear, but are in fact circular? Time that appears ‘representational’, in that it is subject to the usual chronological rules that exist this side of the picture plane: diurnal (A diurnal cycle is any pattern that recurs every 24 hours as a result of one full rotation of the Earth).But time that is in fact subject to systems set up by the artist/s.
In the Bunker, although our narrative packages are physically divided by rooms in which the different activities occur, including the relaxation room/ bar at the end where loud music is played at us. Drinks, by the way, have been served throughout in different forms, there is a level of humour/ wit/ fun in this work that is admirable and adds to the sense of understanding this on many levels. Although the way we move through the scenarios appears linear, they could work in any direction. I did try to move away from one room, only to be approached by a very fierce actor/ artist squeaking “Task? Task? Have you completed your Task?” at me; impressively staying in character throughout. In ‘Bunker PLC’, in common with ‘whiteonwhite’, we make the overarching narrative complete in our reaction to the sequences of activity we participate in, and the connections we make between them and what we know of the outside world.
How does that fit into what I have been struggling with in my encounters with an earlier art work (Het Steen, see earlier posts)? We left the notion that art needs to be a physical object behind in the 1970’s. Nonetheless, the way we encounter, for example the glued together boards covered with green and brown paint that is called ‘A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning’, bears more similarities with these two recent works than you might think. Granted they are not art objects, In an art object, traditionally a flat piece of static painting, time can be encapsulated in the ways in which the artist has laid material on the surface: slowly drawn line; thick violent gestural paint; visibly layered surfaces etc. Time can also be manipulated conceptually ‘through the picture plane’ as it were, on the other side of the Albertian window. So, for example in Het Steen we see the horse pulling the cart with its two occupants to our left, the sun will rise, the hunter will shoot the ducks on the far side of the fallen tree. In other words the representations are presented for us to read as mental images that we can happily accept as a narrative sequence subject to the usual rules of diurnal time.
As I think I have established in earlier post, it is how you traverse the mental image of the landscape that tells the viewer about the qualities of that landscape. ‘Bunker Plc’ the artwork is both a physical landscape – a Second World War bunker- and a conceptual landscape- ‘Bunker Plc’. We traverse the conceptual landscape according to the rules we are given by the imagined protagonists. So what have we established? That these works (‘Bunker PLC’, ‘whiteonwhite’) are also ‘landscape’ in that they involve traversing a landscape (physically and conceptually). They involve presenting time, on the far side of the ‘picture plane’, as a diurnal chronological process sequenced through traditional narrative structures. But, beneath the immediately visible layers of pictorial space, in the formal features of the composition so to speak, are far more complex, contemporary, non linear time based processes. Playing with stories is as old as humankind, it’s fascinating to see how artists are now working with them in such a multilayered referential and, crucially, easily accessible manner.
It occurs to me as a postscript that: Het Steen, like most painting is the work of a single ego, and as many post Pollock (Griselda not Jackson) will point out, white and inevitably male. Whereas both Bunker Plc and whiteonwhite are collaborative works, film is inevitably so and such a substantial installation must have demanded continuous negotiation. Both contemporary works seem to be largely put together by women, Eve Sussman as well as the rufus corporation for ‘whiteonwhite’ and Jo Shaw & Olivia Bellas, as well as the other women artists and actors involved in Bunker Plc.

Eleventh Approach to Rubens ‘Het Steen’, 1636

April 29, 2011
Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, National Gallery
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Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-a-view-of-het-steen-in-the-early-morning
Het Steen

The behaviour of gallery goers is endlessly fascinating. Apart from the usual schoolchildren (poorly behaved and French today) others trudge through the galleries, is this a form of nomadism? A pilgrimage? Something dutiful, done with little interest, the journey is the penance, the reward comes at the end. Although some are clearly fascinated and will stand entranced. Is gallery going a useful space to think about life outside the gallery?
Woman on cart has red blouse/ shirt and blue dress; contrasting complementaries. Only just noticed that the man driving the cart is actually on top of his horse, not on the right of the woman as I had always assumed. He (looking vaguely like a younger Rubens, with the hat to hide his baldness) is sitting on some sort of saddle and the two horses have a heavy bridle between them to pull the two wheeled cart; a fairly agricultural affair. She sits on hay with the brass jug (by the way there is a very similar jug in an equivalent late landscape ‘Landscape with a Rainbow’ 1635,

Rubens: 'Landscape with a Rainbow', 1636. The Wallace Collection, London

a peasant balances it on her head). In front of her is the deer.