"Love never dies a
natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It
dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it
dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
Anais Nin
"Fantasy,
abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the
mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
Goya
Thankfully, before
going to Madrid, my mum gave me €500 spending money for my holiday which
greatly helped fund my holiday. On Wednesday 30th June 2004, Helen
and I got a flight to Madrid. Helen and I arrived in Madrid at 4:30pm. After
putting our things away in the hotel, we walked around the city centre. That
night I drew marker sketches in my sketchbook.
The following day we
went to see the Julian Schnabel exhibition in the Palacio de Velázquez. The American Neo-Expressionist’s
retrospective was main reason for our trip to Madrid. Like with Basquiat, I admired
the democratic lack of technical skill of Schnabel and grandeur of his ideas. However
when I finally saw so many Schnabel`s in the flesh, I found my high opinion of
the American's dented. Schnabel’s work promised more than it delivered, he was
like a flamboyant self-taught singer trying to ape an opera singer yet unable
to hit the high notes of pure ecstasy and profundity of a maestro. Compared to
Max Beckman, Jackson Pollock or Bacon he was just a theatrical, decorative,
showy Neo-Expressionist. That said - I still found great beauty in many of his
canvases.
Schnabel
compared himself to Picasso, Beckman and Pollock. Yet I wondered aloud in the
gallery, where was the deep angst and deathly seriousness about technique and
feeling that was present in their work? Schnabel's figurative drawing was
woefully inept. There was absolutely no sense of a real study from life.
Schnabel's drawing was lumpy, crude and awkward. He was unable to give his line
or contours spring and weight. Schnabel's drawings of faces were adolescent and
naïve - his eyes were too big, his lips too fat and his noses too long, flat
and poorly shaped. In the plate paintings, Schnabel's impasto was 'ready-made'
by the broken plates. The emotion of the impasto was thus conceptualized with a
modern twist. In fact, the paint brushed over the plates was often very thin
and sometimes transparent - it was a sculptural, gimmicky impasto - not a
tormented or intense impasto. Repeatedly, I wondered where was the deep
emotional impact that I had come to expect in Schnabel's work from
reproduction. Schnabel's paintings were highly mannered affairs. In comparison
to Schnabel - my paintings look compacted, explosive, thickly impastoed and
dense. Moreover, my work was even more adolescent and uncouth. Everything in
Schnabel's abstract paintings was staked on controlled chance and immediacy. My
work in comparison looked too contrived worked out and ordered. However, I saw
no torment in Schnabel's work.
Schnabel's abstract
paintings were simple designs on a large scale and he used size to intimidate
and overwhelm the public. Schnabel obviously ripped off Victor Hugo, Tàpies,
Twombly, and Polke in works like this but his paintings lacked the originality
and myth of their work - they were too modish and theatrical. His shapes were
evocative of the natural world, graffiti and abstract expressionism and sometimes
Schnabel came up with beautiful and elegant drips, swirls and blotches of
paint. However, I was left wondering if any of his biomorphic shapes had any
real meaning in the way a Klee, Kandinsky or Pollock did.
In the
abstract canvases of the 1990s, Schanbel’s brushwork was increasingly rough,
impetuous and ad-hoc and the canvases were covered in accidental drips, tears
and spots of paint. He painted all his abstract shapes in a semi-thick,
semi-opaque run of colour and at great speed - so the slathered paint on his
canvases often looked sloppy and disingenuous. Sometimes he was happy with a
few smears and shapes but other times he worked the image up densely. Most of
the time it looked like Schnabel started his abstract paintings with no
planning and finished them when he felt like it. They often looked unfinished,
and I was left wondering what if he had kept painting. I remembered that
painters like de Kooning, and Auerbach had painted, scraped down, painted and
scraped down repeatedly, until they came up with a truly convincing image.
His
large-scale Abstract Expressionist influenced work from 1994 onwards felt and looked
like theater backdrops. Twombly's shadow loomed large in these vast works whose
scale washed out any emotional involvement – so much so that I realized that no
painter no matter how passionate they were could load such vast canvases with real
emotion. I remembered that de Kooning rarely painted on canvases larger than
70" x 80" because that was the limit of his reach.
Remember I
was a fan of Schnabel's work. However, I had based my knowledge of his work on
reproductions. In photographs, his paintings looked more graphic, more incident
packed and more powerful all round. In the flesh, they looked more sparsely
painted and affected. For all their emotional out pouring - they remained
unconvincing. In photographs, I did not see the squandering of paint and reckless
use of canvas by a multi-millionaire. Moreover, in the flesh, Schnabel's
colours were not emotive like Beckman, de Kooning or Bacon's were. To make
matters worse Helen was utterly bored and unimpressed by Schnabel’s work. Her
dismissal of his work hit home. One of the first things we had ever done was
look at the catalogues on him I owned as we cuddled in bed. At the time, Helen
had loved his work and that was one reason I fell in love with her. Now her
disinterest in Schnabel seemed to echo her disinterest in me.
Then we went to the Prado for lunch and then strolled around
the museum. I was overwhelmed by the Titian’s, Tintoretto’s, Bosch’s, El
Greco’s, José Ribera’s, Velázquez’s and Goya’s in the Prado. These various Italian, Flemish and Spanish, artist struck me
as the very summit of western oil painting and western oil painting was to me
the very summit of human visual culture.
Titian was considered
by many to be the greatest painter in art history, I could not disagree, though
personally I preferred more emotive painters like Rembrandt. Titian's brushstrokes were silvery, shimmering and nuanced. His
brushstrokes caressed the flesh of his women. His flesh colours were creamy,
grey and blushed. The paint was measured and sat in the grain of his rough
canvases. Titian's art was both sensual and refined. He was a man very much in
love with people. In Ofrenda a Venus, 1518-19
He painted countless chubby cupids - that were full of life and had a superb
faithfulness to anatomy. Children are notoriously difficult to paint but Titian
made it look like child’s play – pardon the pun. In Ticio,
1548-49, Titian created an image of great energy, movement and drama. The
eagle was vicious looking and the tumbling and twisting of the body was
captured with dynamic but incredibly nuanced brushstrokes. The paint sat in the
grain of the rough canvas and seemed to be boldly caressed into the forms. I
drew a couple of drawings of Titian’s radiant nudes Danae, 1553 and Venus and an
Organ Player, 1545. However Titian’s grace, humanity and mastery - was
quite beyond my skills – and my drawings were embarrassingly crude and ugly.
Seeing
a handful of great Raphael paintings together for the first time I was
surprised by their power, grace and beauty. Raphael was the father of academic
painting and I (as you know) hated academic art. But unlike his followers Raphael had a
startling grasp of anatomy, colour and all his work glowed from within with a
warm humanist light. It was this warm light and humanism that Ingres for
example could not emulate. I realised that in rare cases like Raphael, great craftsmanship
and technical skill were the product of an almost divine blessing. I did not
believe in God but if there was one – I knew the gifts of artists like Raphael
were God given. Training and experience could enrich talent but the germ of it
was given before birth.
Velázquez’s Las Meniñas was a magical painting, flooded with a silvery light. The little Infanta held my rapt attention. She was
at once innocent and knowing. All my life when I looked at paintings,
I would look at the brushstrokes - imagining I was painting them myself and
wonder if I could do better. With Velázquez, I
knew that I could live a thousand life times and never reach this kind of
perfect touch, registry of tone, or feeling for people. Velázquez's
brushstrokes were so full of élan, variety, daring and consummate skill yet at
the same time were never showy or overtly emphatic. His colouring was
restricted yet full of resonance. His brushstrokes ranged from fluffy and soft
to darting and sharp. His mark making was infinite in its variety. Soft and
hard, angular and organic his mastery of tone created an extraordinary sense of
light and life. I was drawn also to the slightly blurred little dwarf boy Nicolás
who was captured in mid movement as he prodded with his foot the old, fat and tolerant
dog. Nicolás looked as though caught on camera. These people so different to us
never the less breathed the same air and were filled with similar worries. This
was Aristocratic Realism at its height! Looking at the work of Velázquez, I was
thrilled to the core by the sheer craft and skill of his painting technique
which he raised to a level of genius I doubt any other painter has ever
achieved. Velázquez gave dignity to everyone in his art, registering their
flaws, but never denigrating their character. It was I thought just how we
would wish God to look upon us - with compassion, wisdom and forgiveness.
However I was not impressed by everything in the Spanish school - I found
Murillo a sugary bore.
Later we went to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. I was
overwhelmed by the brilliance and lively colour of the German Expressionist
masters; Kirchner, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluf, and Beckman. I adored the
Impressionists paintings of; Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet and van Gogh on
display as well as the portraits of John Singer Sargent. That night Helen and I
had a KFC meal - then we had lovely
bottle of red wine in the Circulo de
Bellas Artes an artists’ drinking club, which the public for a €1fee could
drink in. On the walls hung wonderfully skilled life-drawings from the early 20th
century, which I loved. When we got back to the hotel, we smoked joints and I
looked through my art books.
On Friday we went to
the Museo Arqueologico, we saw great
Roman and Iberian artifacts, but the recreation of the Altamira Caves was closed due to the heat and lack of air-conditioning.
Then we went to Café Gijon a famous
literary haunt in Madrid were Hemingway was known to have been a drinker. The walls
of Café Gijon was lined with drawings
and poems by its famous regulars. We had a horrible traditional meal of
venison, which the waiter had recommended and ended up costing us €85. Later we
went to Centro de Arte Reina Sofia,
and saw retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein - which I thought was awful. I had no
time for the mechanical, impersonal looking Pop art images of Lichtenstein. Also
in the Reina Sofia we saw a large
retrospective of important paintings, drawings and collages of Dalí, which we
spent over an hour looking through. Seeing Dalí’s early work impressed us more
than the later crass work we had seen in Figueres in 1999.
In the permanent collection,
we saw Picasso's Guernica and his
studies for it, as well as many of his other paintings and sculptures. I
admired the political significance of Guernica, Picasso’s ability to turn a
specific event into a universal statement against war, and the visceral power
of his iconography. However, I thought it was little more than a blown up
drawing and as an oil painting I thought it had little to recommend it. Although,
Guernica as an icon of twentieth century art was unparalleled, as a painting I
felt it just did not work. I felt it was compositionally unbalanced.
While standing in front
of Picasso’s Woman in Blue from 1901,
an early Toulouse-Lautrec inspired oil of a Madrid lady seated in along dress;
I overheard two women discuss the work. “It’s a shame he stopped painting like
this!” The educated viewer of modern art in me felt shock at such a reactionary
and conservative view of Picasso’s career. Had Picasso spent the rest of his
life painting these kinds of society portraits he would have been a total
irrelevancy in twentieth century art. Yet, it was true that such work which
spoke of beauty and painterly virtuosity that had its own charms. The greatness
of Picasso though was his ability to straddle both the old world of classical
beauty and ancestral skill and the new world of modernist distortion, formal
invention and intellectual playfulness.
We also saw a great
deal more work by Dalí whose work was declining in my estimation due to his
old-fashioned technique and Miró whose paintings and sculptures were assuming
greater importance to me due to the more modern and democratic techniques. I
saw for the first time in the flesh a large number of paintings by Antoni
Tàpies - who was something of a revelation to me. I was very impressed by the
material sophistication and richness of Tàpies paintings that was impossible to
understand without seeing them. Another discovery for me was the paintings and
drawings of Antonio López Garcia whose work haunted my memories for years to
come. López was one of those rare realist painters who re-energized
observational art.
We stayed in the hotel
that night, smoked joints, and relaxed. On Saturday, we went to the Museo de Ciencias Naturales where we saw
a great exhibit of dinosaur bones. While Helen read her book outside in a café,
I went in and I made some drawings of the stuffed animals. Then we went to the Prado and had lunch outside.
Later I went in to the
galleries and drew graphite and coloured pencil drawings from the Titian`s, and
José Ribera's. José Ribera’s paintings were some of
the ugliest and yet compulsive images I had ever seen in Western art. Many
painters had painted scenes of religious martyrs being tortured – but in José
Ribera’s hands these scenes took on an almost hellish quality. José Ribera's treatment of skin was earthy, rippled emotional and
morbidly sensual. José Ribera painted skin in the shadow of ageing, decay and
death. José Ribera was at his best painting old weathered men. But his Mary Magdalene of 1641 was full of warm
sympathy, compassion and intelligent love of beauty. José Ribera's brushstrokes
were not as flashy a Velázquez or Titian but they were sure, succinct, earthy
and sombre. His colour scheme of brown, black, grey, crimson and light blue was
as sophisticated as a late George Braque. José Ribera's depiction of men was
full of sin and debauchery - you could sense their weight and gravitas.
That night we watched a
huge Gay Pride march from our hotel
window and then went out and joined the march.
On Sunday we went to the markets, Helen bought clothes, and I purchased an
animal hide for €30. Then we went to the Prado
and I did more drawings from Goya's Black
Paintings. My drawings from Goya's work in the
Prado were an attempt to give myself access to Goya's code of nightmares. However,
my versions were more Art Brut than Romantic.
Goya’s
Black Paintings were a demonic vision that had never the less emerged out of the
Rococo training of an enlightenment figure. They were a rebuke to all the
dreams of the enlightenment and the good life he had lost. Goya's work had
always had an element of caricature, but in the Black Paintings, it reached a fever pitch. Goya's black was applied
thick and thin, transparent and opaque and had numerous inflections of grey,
green, brown and blue running through it. Goya's brushstrokes in the Black Paintings were worried, brutal,
clotted, worked and reworked and yet his old genius and virtuosity underpinned
it all. They were like screams of measured and skilfully articulated complaint.
And for me they were one of the most powerful visual documents of the brutal,
superstitious, paranoid and animal like aspects of human nature.
Goya's
painting The Dog broke my heart with its
humanity. Critics rightly hate cat and dog paintings - they are usually
sentimental and kitsch. But Goya's dog was full of pathos and refined
understatement. Was the dog drowning, or looking for its master? There was more
pathos in this painting of a dog than I had seen in hundreds of crucifixions.
It was a heart-rending image - especially for a dog lover like me.
On our way back to the hotel,
we had a glass of wine in the Circulo de
Bellas Artes. At the hotel, we watched the Euro 2004 final and saw Greece beat Portugal. On Monday, we went
back to the Julian Schnabel exhibition, and I took notes on the paintings in my
sketchbook. Then we went to the Centro de
Arte Reina Sofia and while Helen sat outside, I looked around for an hour
and a half. On our way back to the hotel we dropped in again to the Circulo de Bellas Artes and had a glass
of wine.
That night Helen and I
had a huge fight, she said that she had been expecting me to propose to her in
Madrid. She told me she could not stick my selfishness any longer and she
thought we would have to break up. I was frankly stunned, since I had no idea
she had expected a proposal and my head was only full of the art in Madrid. Looking
back now, I can see how self-centered I was - but I also know I could not have
changed. Helen knew that too. We had grown apart as people. We wanted different
things from life. My rejection by NCAD had not broken me – but rather driven me
further to prove them all wrong. Helen wanted children, marriage and financial
security – and I cannot blame her for that. Even I knew it might be decades
before I could support a family. I still only lived to become a great artist.
We
went to sleep still mad with each other. The following day we made up – but it
was a truce not a real peace. We went to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza had another quick look around and then got
a taxi to the airport. Our flight was delayed and we had to hang around the
airport for four hours. We arrived back in Dublin at 1:30am on Tuesday 7th
July, and went straight to bed. The memories of this last happy holiday with
Helen would haunt me every night, before I fell asleep, for over a year.