149 Paintings You Really Need to See in North America. Julian Porter

      El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Feast in the House of Simon, 1608–14

      The Art Institute of Chicago

      People attributed his elongated figures to astigmatism. Not so. Born in Crete, he was a product of a Byzantine background using elongated proportions seen in Byzantine figures. He was constantly pre-occupied with ideas of mystical religion, the ecstatic union with the Divine Spirit. He was very successful in life, but treated with contempt after death, finally resurrected to his immense current stature after the First World War, when artists began to ignore establishment stuffiness and standards of correctness.

      El Greco left Crete with its ancient Byzantine rigidity and arrived in Venice to see Tintoretto’s unconventional symphonies of sweep, slash, long javelins of lines, and colour, colour, colour. He developed a bold disregard for natural forms and colours. He made mannerism more aggressive and made it meld with the religious fervour of Spain.

      He was overconfident. He proclaimed Michelangelo couldn’t paint. He worked under Titian in Venice for a time but was disturbed by the sensuous (hence anti-religious) nature of Venetian work. After a stint in Rome he settled in Toledo, Spain, with his wife and son. His success in Toledo was huge. His villa on the verge of a canyon had twenty-four rooms, many completely unfurnished. At night, he paid an orchestra to play while food was served.

      He was a well-read mystic of a sort. One of his friends called on him to take a walk. El Greco’s room had curtains drawn, so all was dark. He was in a chair, neither working nor sleeping, and refused the walk, as “the light of the day disturbed his inward light.”

      For a time critics viewed him as mad.

      Sir William Stirling Maxwell, in 1864, said:

      El Greco has been justly described as an artist who alternated between reason and delirium and displayed his great genius only at lucid intervals.

      Manet and Delacroix proclaimed El Greco a genius.

      Here, Feast in the House of Simon has a sparkle, electric shiver, colour so bright as if splashed on yesterday. And the electricity of the conversation! A sweep and curve of interaction. Look across at the Tintoretto, yes, yes, you can see Tintoretto’s influence!

      JP

      20. Nighthawks (1942)

      Edward Hopper (1882–1967)

      Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942

      The Art Institute of Chicago

      Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

      Life happens while you’re making plans, the saying goes. The folks in Nighthawks might heed this advice before it’s too late.

      Ruminative, brooding, probably no one captured the lack of spirit of his times better than Edward Hopper. If ever there was an existentiality to painting, Hopper exemplified it. Ivo Kranzfelder, in Hopper , put it this way: His paintings “reveal a world that is no longer in a state of innocence, but has not reached the point of self-destruction.”

      A life-long New Yorker, Hopper showcased what was pure and simple about America post–First World War. Gas stations, railways, forlorn houses, sun-shrouded but empty apartments, these were the constructs of everyday life. Using a more defined form of Impressionist palette, Hopper employed light and shadow strategically, emphasizing, indeed, heralding, emptiness as motif.

      Here, the fluorescent lighting draws us into the café in contrast to the desolate street, the slumbering neighbourhood. A calmness pervades, no hurry even though the country was engaged in a foreign war, far from its domestic shores. We don’t see any entrance to the café. Either we aren’t welcome or the characters themselves are trapped?

      With little emotion showing, there seems to be bare interaction. Each is lost in his or her thoughts, pensive, maybe worried. What are they thinking? The canvas affords us the chance to imagine their feelings. What a profound experience, almost like no other of its time and place. Like bees in amber. Caught. Forever. Anywhere, USA.

      SG

      Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers (1865)

      Édouard Manet (1832–83)

      Édouard Manet, Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, 1865

      Oil on canvas, 190.8 x 148.3 cm

      Gift of James Deering (1925.703)

      The Art Institute of Chicago

      Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

      The great Impressionist, with his “flat” canvases, almost oriental patterns, use of black and stage figures, and sense of theatre. Here so-o-ooo immediate, with a Goya ink background. Christ naked — the mockers indifferent.

      A palpable sense of taunting and indifferent scorn.

      The flat black deadens all. On the left the yellow ice cream jerkin runs against Christ’s spindly legs and big bunion on his right big toe, his scrawny, pale shoulders, weak arms all create defeat. The pupils of his eyes as black and empty as the background. The lance tentatively poking him is a slumbering animal.

      I have followed closely the art writings of Julian Barnes, an English novelist, and have come to trust his judgment about artists. He brings new insights that delight me. Imagine my horror when I read in his 2015 book, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, his contemptuous put-down of this painting in a chapter of praise for Manet. This painting was one of three religious paintings by Manet (1864–65). The catalogue description for a 2011 show in Paris said they “… revolted his enemies as much as they embarrassed his admirers.”

      Barnes says of this (and the other two paintings):

      … they are sort of derivative, academic monsters you nowadays find hung high up in provincial Musées des Beaux-Arts long exiled there by a relieved Paris art bureaucracy. (“Look we are sending you a Manet!”)1

      I still believe it is a picture of profound religious insight.

      JP

      21. Untitled #12 (1977)

      Agnes Martin (1912–2004)

      Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, 1977

      India ink, graphite, and gesso on canvas, 182.9 x 182.9 cm

      Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund (1979.356)

      The Art Institute of Chicago

      © Estate of Agnes Martin / SODRAC (2017)

      Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

      Do you see the flower? It’s there in the grid, luminous against the grainy background. You just need to look carefully!

      Canadian-born Agnes Martin moved to New York City in 1932 and began creating her iconic abstractions. When she arrived, she met a small, but ultimately influential, cadre of like-minded artists. Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Rauschenberg were among them, spending their time creating postwar American

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