TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112690/1126400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 163 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 85

America's Saintly Sage


A look at Albert Pinkham Ryder's myth -- and its limits

By ROBERT HUGHES


    In the end, it is artists who make other artists famous. A
striking case in point, in America, was Albert Pinkham Ryder.
This somewhat reclusive visionary was born in 1847; grew up in
the whaling town of New Bedford, Mass.; studied in New York
City; spent most of his working life there and died in 1917.
As far as is known, he painted fewer than 200 works. Yet a
succession of American artists has looked up to him as a sage,
a holy man: the native prophet who linked tradition to
modernism.

    The young independents who organized the epochal Armory Show
in 1913 -- Arthur B. Davies, George Bellows, Walt Kuhn and
others -- made sure that Ryder was the only American to share
its central galleries with the new European masters: Matisse,
Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh. "There's only Ryder in American
painting," remarked Kuhn. "No artist ever used more of the
vital energies of the imagination than Ryder," wrote Marsden
Hartley in 1936, "and no one was ever truer to his experience
. . . One finds his elements so perfectly true that even the
moon herself must recognize them if she had time to look." For
Jackson Pollock, in 1944, "the only American master who
interests me is Ryder." From Andrew Wyeth and Morris Graves in
the 1940s to Bill Jensen today, Ryder influenced or at least
had some talismanic value for a striking number of Americans
who had nothing else in common.

    The difference between fiction and myth is that people do
not feel impelled to act on fictions, whereas myths are a guide
to life. In this sense, one could say that Ryder, in the
process of becoming the very prototype of the saintly
visionary, patron of outsiders, pure of spirit and attuned to
the great rhythms of nature, became America's first mythic
artists' artist.

    Yet to visit the Ryder retrospective, the first in a
generation, which has been assembled with meticulous
scholarship by Elizabeth Broun at the Brooklyn Museum (through
Jan. 8), is to become sharply aware of the limits of the Ryder
myth. He is like Poe -- so overwrought, yet so influential. One
sees, not for the first or only time, the paradox of American
art in its larval days: how its course could be deeply
affected, and the enthusiasm of its artists unstintingly
engaged, by works whose actual aesthetic merits often seem
slight.

    The show contains perhaps a dozen paintings before which one
can feel the enthusiasm Ryder's name has always generated. Most
of these are his famous "marines" -- dark, concentrated images
of boats, the fishing smacks of his New England youth, pitted
against wind and wave under the centered, tide-dragging eye of
the moon. But then there is the rest of his work, and
especially the earlier religious and allegorical material, much
of which is bathetic and some quite ludicrous in its earnest
gropings toward elevated pictorial speech.

    In part, these limits were due to the poverty of Ryder's
training as a draftsman of the human figure. Ryder could make
dramatic, even magical conjunctions of shape. His color,
judging from what is left of it, was rich. But he drew feebly.
New York in the early 1870s could not give an art student much
more than a remote echo of beaux arts disciplines in that
department. The convention is to treat this as Ryder's good
luck: it enabled his native, visionary qualities to prosper,
unsullied by academic convention.

    But the truth is that his figures and animals never
benefited from their awkwardness. His horses are spindly,
half-seen nags, and the dryads, babies and damsels in his
decorative paintings are boneless stereotypes. Ryder's attempts
at decoration -- mirror frames, screens and so forth -- look
naive and gaumless compared with the more polished work of
Tiffany or John La Farge. Ryder was not sophisticated enough to
rival them, while as a Realist he was stumped by a lack of
curiosity about the actual, resistant world. You know at once
that Ryder spent no time looking at a body and analyzing its
structure. Instead he generalized, in conformity to what the
sentiments of the day called "poesy." Therefore he was at the
furthest possible remove from those great American empiricists
of his time, Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer.

    Does his inadequacy with the figure matter? Yes, but not
fatally. Turner himself -- whose Slave Ship, often seen in New
York in the 1870s, is probably the main source for Ryder's
perennially astonishing vision of Jonah in the churning waters,
about to be swallowed by the whale -- also drew figures like
slugs. Still, when you look at the figures in Ryder's The Story
of the Cross, whose "awkward posture and flattened quality" the
catalog rather optimistically likens to Duccio and Cimabue, you
know that any such comparison is impertinent. The Ryder is
pious kitsch.

    Landscape Ryder could handle -- though not for reasons
Turner would have approved. It made fewer demands on
particularity. "There was no detail to vex the eye," Ryder
wrote of one view of a lone tree in a field near Yarmouth,
Mass. And so "I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color
and taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white and
brown in great sweeping strokes . . . I saw that it was good
and clean and strong. I saw nature springing into life upon my
dead canvas. It was better than nature . . . I raced around the
fields like a colt let loose, and literally bellowed for joy."


    Thus Ryder the proto-Expressionist was born. He sounds like
De Kooning, but actually he looked more like his idol, Corot,
only denser and more fixed: tiny imploded scenes, whose glow
and atmospheric subtlety were much admired in their time but
can hardly even be assessed now. For in pursuit of jewel-like
effects and deep layering of color, Ryder painted "lean over
fat," so that slower-drying strata of paint underneath pulled
the quicker-drying surface apart. He would slosh abominable
messes of varnish on the surface, and pile up the pigment by
incessant retouching until the images became quaking pitch
lakes.

    And then there was the dirt. In the late 19th century, when
curators were presumably less anal than they are today, dirt
was considered a positive adjunct of museum art; it lent
mellowness and venerability. Ryder's studio was filthy, a pack
rat's cave. "It is appalling, this craze for clean-looking
pictures," he once complained. "Nature isn't clean." To
distinguish between the dirt, the dust, the brown varnish, the
pigmented glazes and the goo underneath and then to stabilize
the surface to preserve some notion of Ryder's intentions have
always been a conservator's nightmare -- and a losing battle
as well. One may be quite sure that whenever it takes place,
the next Ryder retrospective will be even less visible than
this one.

    Only the paintings with the strongest tonal structure have
remained altogether legible, and most of these are the marines.
Images like Moonlight (which he actually painted on board ship,
returning from a trip to Europe) go far beyond the
self-conscious poeticism that infests so much of Ryder's work.
They are diminutive in size but large in scale. Thick darkness
and eerie light turn in the sky; the sea heaves, scattered with
moon flakes and endowed with a Courbet-like solidity. "My soul,
like to a ship in a black storm,/ Is driven, I know not
whither" -- Vittoria's dying words in John Webster's Jacobean
tragedy The White Devil seem to fit this recurrent dream of
Ryder's coastal childhood, the boat scudding in the maw of the
waves or becalmed, like a floating coffin, on the expectant
water.