Subject and Background in Paintings and Poems

At the Courtauld Institute in class I was fascinated by two paintings in particular: Degas's Two Dancers on a Stage and Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.  I've been thinking about what about them interests me, and the biggest thing, I think, is their dissonance between subject and background.

Degas - Courtauld

In the Degas, the subjects are two ballerinas clad in white, shimmery dresses--you can see visual echoes of their movement--and colorful shoes and flowers adorning their hair.

The background is necessary to the painting not only for its utilitarian use simply as a placement for these subjects but for the dialogue it opens up with the subjects.  The background is filled with muted browns and greens.  It is not only a bit blurry, like the subjects, but smoggy.  A brown cloud even seems to be coming out to engulf the foreground in the upper-center part of the painting.  Furthermore, the space on the stage floor is very strange.  It seems to tilt in to the line that crosses the painting (going behind the legs of the dancers)--not at all expected from a stage floor.

Now--imagine the painting without that background, just with the subjects...  It's completely different!  That's what's amazing to me about it.  The question is, what does the background really mean in relation to the subjects?  Does it represent their inner states?  Someone else's inner state while viewing them?  Some sinister backstory or something horrible that has yet to happen?  General disillusionment? There are so many possibilities!  Nothing can be nailed down.  It is beautiful.

Manet - Courtauld

Similar things can be said about the Manet.  The main subject is the woman tending the bar, facing us.  There is so much interesting simply about her, perhaps more than the subjects in the Degas, because we see her face and it is a very interesting face, one that suggests great depth of emotion.  Even more interesting is the choice to pair her with a reflection in the mirror behind her.  How does she feel about all those people sitting there?  The placard says they are watching a performance, but why do they seem to be facing her--is this reflective of her inner state, feeling as if they are watching her?  And perhaps the biggest question of all--what is she doing in the reflection, leaning forward, when in the foreground she is totally upright?  The mirror can't possibly be a true reflection.  Other possibilities: is it reflecting her memory of some interaction with the man?  Or simply her thoughts and wonders--maybe that interaction hasn't actually happened?

Again, the painting imagined as just the subject without the background is entirely different.

Cezanne - National Gallery

(from http://www.zucapaca.com/wp-content/uploads/Paul-Cezanne-1900-1904-the-old-woman-with-rosary.jpg)

Perhaps the same can't be said of this painting by Cezanne, An Old Woman with a Rosary.  I need to go back to the National Gallery and spend more time looking at this one in person, but as far as I can tell so far, the background seems to merely reflect the deep melancholy of the woman.  It doesn't open up any additional questions like the first two did.  Does that make it a lesser painting?  I'm not ready to make that kind of judgment yet--perhaps the dissonance in the painting is just less apparent than in the first two.  The one thing that is clearly dissonant is her white hat, the only light color in the painting.  I know from a little bit of research that she was a nun.  So I am looking forward to delving more into her as a subject.

The idea of subject and background will be interesting in comparing paintings to poetry.  One poem that comes to mind is Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," in which one might designate the statue as the subject, the background two-fold: the empty desert around the statue as well as the frame of the whole poem being a story told by a traveler.  I've been thinking more about that frame, and I didn't even notice until I listened to that strange dramatic reading of the poem over music how weirdly the poem begins.  I had always somehow thought the first two lines go: "I met a traveler from an antique land. / He said, ...etc."  rather than "I met a traveler from an antique land / Who said, ... etc.  The first (my imagined reading) seems to make much more sense--that pause there before going right into what the traveler says.  It almost seems as if the narrator, the one who met the traveler, has an agenda in retelling this story of the traveler's.

Just as an aside, Diebenkorn's painting Woman by a Large Window also has a fascinating relationship between subject and background--the background being multi-faceted in that there is seemingly a room that the woman sits in as well as a view through a window and a mirror reflecting the room and the view--and there are lots of dissonances among the parts.

Diebenkorn - AMAM

"Ode to West Wind" and Greek Sculptures of the Nereids

The Three Nereids from the Nereid Monument are an interesting pair with Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”  Both are about life and death.  “West Wind” is about the wind which comes and goes as the seasons pass and symbolize the cycle of life and death.  Life and death are more overt subject matter in the sculpture, which shows the Nereids escorting the souls of the deceased to the afterlife.

Wind, too, links both works of art concretely in that it is both the subject of the poem and a feature of the sculpture in the figures’ clothes being blown as they journey over the sea.  And while wind is a more overt metaphor for the cycle of life and death in the poem, it is also symbolic in the sculpture, where it could be seen as an embodiment of the deceased souls rushing along over the sea.

Both works are very tactile.  The poem goes to great lengths to make the reader feel the main subject—the wind—and the metaphors used throughout, like the grand storm in the second section.  Looking at the sculpture, one can also very much feel the wind blowing and the spray of the sea very dramatically against the figures in all the dynamic wrinkles and wet transparence of the clothes as well as the sea bird and the partially visible dolphins.

Rather than totally reflect, the works also complement each other.  While the speaker of the poem calls the West Wind “Destroyer and Preserver,” the sculpture represents neither destruction nor preservation but a process that lies in some kind of space in between those two but is likewise a never-ending process.

Nature and Human Experience in Keats and Arnold

There's something powerful about nature and human experience in Keats's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."  In Keats it has more to do with experiencing nature via language, while in Arnold it's simply experiencing nature.  I'll begin with Keats.


"On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer"

The poem is in a single stanza, but many things point to it being two sections, lines 1-6 and lines 7-14.  One obvious one is the use of the conjunction "yet" to begin line 7, creating a distinction between what follows that word and what preceded it.

More interesting to note is a change in diction that separates the poem into these sections.  There are a few interesting words in the first section:

• realms
• gold
• kingdoms
• deep-brow'd
• demesne

But the section is played down by plain adjectives and verbs, such as:

• goodly
• seen
• been
• hold
• wide
• told
• ruled

(The image is the first that comes up from a Google image search of the word "goodly".  The image doesn't evoke any feeling, and in fact almost all of the images that came up were just the word printed out on various things--books and t-shirts.)

The remainder of the poem is a stark contrast.  Take in these powerful words and phrases:

• breathe
• pure
• serene
• speak
• loud
• bold
• watcher of the skies
• planet
• swims
• stout
• eagle eyes
• wild
• surmise
• silent
• peak

(This image is the first that comes from a Google image search of the word "breathe".  It is an action word, a human word, a feeling word, quite different from "goodly," a distinction which I think is shown strongly by the difference in pictures.)

http://lilavinyasa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/breathe_by_sibayak.jpg

What turns the poem from the first section to the second is the speaker's experience with Chapman's Homer.  I think experience is a key word.  I'm not familiar with Chapman's Homer, but it must be that the speaker really experienced these lands based on that text, whereas before he(/she?  probably he) had merely taken in the greatness of the world superficially somehow, simply traveling it, seeing it, being told of it rather than breathing it.  Furthermore, the speaker doesn't just experience the world as himself but is even able to step into the shoes of others—Cortez and his men—by the end of the poem and feel (presumably) what they felt.  It seems that language is key to experiencing—really feeling—nature, which then seems to open up to feeling the world as a whole, including experiencing empathy for others.

"Dover Beach"

I'm not quite as strong on my understanding of this poem yet--especially its third stanza--but something really stood out to me in the second stanza that bears a strong relation to the Keats poem.  Sophocles, as the speaker of the poem says, heard the sounds of the tide and the pebbles long ago on the Aegean, and the sounds "brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery..."  Here, rather than experiencing nature through language as in Keats, Sophocles has simply experienced nature first-hand. But it has still taken him to another level of human experience--it is a transformative experience that grants him greater empathy--just like in Keats.

Continued Desire for Legacies in the Romantics

Throughout history people have put lots of energy into their staying power after death, through religion.  One of the big ways they did this was through art.

A few examples:

Below is a tribute to the god Amun, represented as a ram, protecting King Taharqa.

The Parthenon's main sculptures are Greek Gods:

This Annunciation scene by Italian artist Paolo de Matteis from 1712 is one of so so many examples of Christian art's very intentional use of the colors gold and blue to best pay tribute to God.

Similarly in Westminster Abbey, King Henry III wanted to be buried as close to the center of the church as possible (I think close to the architect?), wanting the fasttrack to heaven.

Romantics like Percy Shelley continue the tradition of thinking about legacy.  I'll use his poems "Ozymandias" and "Ode to the West Wind" as examples.

Ozymandias - power’s ephemerality

"And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Shelley is clearly preoccupied by thoughts of legacy and power--both of which long ago vanished for Ramses II.  But unlike earlier thoughts on legacy, Shelley is pessimistic, suggesting that attempts to make one's self "symbolically immortal" (see link--might give a little trouble because it's through OhioLink) are in vain.

Ode to the West Wind - seeds of his writing spreading

The poem is very much about the cycle of life and death, paralleled by the west wind that comes and goes in its own cycle, the word 'wind' having the double meaning of breath or spirit.

In some parts of the poem, the speaker is accepting of death.  "Hectic red" in section 1, describing colored leaves of fall, also refers to "the kind of fever that occurs in tuberculosis" (thank you Norton footnote!).  Section 2 describes a fierce approaching storm, which could be seen as death.

However, as the poem goes on, the speaker definitely shows hints of thinking and wishing for a 'beyond' past death.  In section 4, "I fall upon the thorns of life!  I bleed!" seems a clear allusion to Christ's crown of thorns--suggesting his eventual resurrection.

Even more clearly, in section 5, the speaker begs the wind to "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! / And, by the incantation of this verse / Scatter...my words among mankind!"

So while section 4 shows a religious sense of self-legacy, section 5 shows the speaker's desire for legacy through the words of the poem, through creativity, and through the influence words can have on other people--a very different sense of symbolic immortality than that of earlier thinkers.