Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 34
Doctors need to mind their business.
by
Joan Altabe
A critic isn't an artist's favorite person. I get that. But this one isn't their enemy, either. Today, I defend them against doctors.
Case in pointlessness: Writing in this year's Archives of Ophthalmology, Dr. Michael Marmor explains Impressionism this way: "It's no secret that both Degas and Monet had failing eyesight."
Hear that? Impressionism, long considered a deliberate revolt against academic painting, is now deemed involuntary. Claude Monet's fuzzy water lilies, applauded as the essence of Impressionism, are the result of cataracts.
The pronouncement makes fools of art critics, like Paul Duranty, who wrote in 1877, "The Impressionists have made a discovery in color that strong light takes away the color tones... The most knowledgeable physicist would be unable to criticize their analysis of light."
Clearly, Duranty didn't count on criticism from eye doctors.
True, Monet had cataracts. Degas’s eye health wasn’t so hot, either, apparently. They say he had macular degeneration. But Monet had the cataracts surgically removed and Degas drew wondrously fine lines – hardly possible if he had trouble seeing. Anyway, it's hard to believe that bad eyes made Impressionism look the way it did. After all, the very name Impressionism suggests intention.
When Ohio ophthalmologist James G. Ravin attributed the indistinctness and yellow-brown cast in Monet's Impression: Sunrise' to cataracts, I pooh-poohed him. But I developed new respect for Ravin when he contested a medical supposition of 1913 that El Greco elongated his figures as a result of astigmatism. He said that without corrective lenses, astigmatics see the world as a blur, and there were no such lenses in the 16th-century when El Greco lived.
(BTW, X-Rays of El Greco's paintings show that under his painted figures were more realistic drawings, indicating that the artist distorted on purpose.)
If only medicos would read up on art history, they'd know that El Greco's elongations came from something other than an eye disorder. Cretan art in the 16th-century did not follow realistic Renaissance art principles. Imagery represented religious feelings, not real forms. Elongations were El Greco's way of conveying a striving to heaven. Neither did Van Gogh’s heavy use of yellow make him a glaucoma sufferer, as some members of the medical community have said. Van Gogh's palette, once dark, brightened after he saw Rubens' work. In fact, seeing Van Gogh' work is like seeing Rubens' exuberant brushwork, bright palette and curving lines in fast forward. To say that Van Gogh's use of wavy lines and large amounts of yellow was because of glaucoma would be like saying that Rubens' feverish brushwork was due to the gout that he suffered in his painting hand.
More nonsense: In 1995, Dr. Carlos H. Espinel, director of the Blood Pressure Center at Metropolitan Washington in Washington, D.C., penned a diagnoses in the British medical journal The Lancet. His "patient" was a figure in a painting by 17th-century painter Caravaggio. The doctor determined that the artist's model for The Sleeping Cupid had rheumatoid arthritis. He made his evaluation by observing a swollen left wrist, jaundiced skin, flushed cheeks, bluish lips and ears, emaciated chest and swollen belly.
Dr. Espinel's diagnosis has me wondering why we all don't just send photos of ourselves to our doctors and save office visits. Here's why. His theory about why Caravaggio portrayed an angel with arthritis is off the charts: "I think Caravaggio meant what we who care for the sick experience every day. That love transcends beautiful bodies, glowing colors, pleasure, health. Love is there, if we awaken it, in deformation, in darkness, in suffering, in death."
Sounds good, but it doesn’t sound like Caravaggio. Apparently the doctor doesn't know that the painter was one least given to noble thoughts. He had a quarrelsome nature and a violent temper. He stabbed a man to death and wounded several others. He was forced to flee Milan, Rome and Malta, go into hiding in Sicily, and live under threat in Naples. Altruism was definitely not his thing.
The reason Caravaggio painted a lump on the left wrist of the angel in The Sleeping Cupid is the same reason he exhumed a corpse to paint Raising of Lazarus. He was intent on realism, undiscriminating realism.
How intent? To convey a realistic air to Lazarus, Caravaggio asked his assistants to dig up a corpse that was in a state of decomposition and pose with it in their arms. When they asked to be excused because they couldn't stand the odor, Caravaggio raised his dagger to them and forced them to continue.
Saying that Caravaggio painted an afflicted angel out of sympathy is like saying that Rubens painted heavy women because he liked them that way. Rubens' correspondence shows that the opposite is true. "The chief cause of the difference between the ancients and people of our age," he said, "is our laziness and life without exercise: always eating, drinking, and no care to exercise our bodies. Therefore our lower bellies, overfilled by a ceaseless voracity, bulge out overloaded."
So, listen up docs. With all that free time you have to examine paintings, how about looking into some diseases that need curing.
— by Joan Altabe
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August 1, 2007
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