Christopher Allen’s art history series: understanding expressionism
Expression in painting has been used to convey not only emotions for their own sake but also to convey narrative meaning.
Last week we took an Australian colonial painting, Benjamin Duterrau’s The Conciliation (1840), as the starting point for reflections on the genre of history painting. The whole conception of his work, which otherwise can seem puzzling to a modern viewer, as well as the artist’s many studies of individual figures, can be understood more clearly when we reconstitute the painting’s original frame of reference.
This also helps to make sense of a set of related objects that are vital clues to appreciating the painting: a series of 12 reliefs, modelled in clay, cast in plaster and painted, of Aboriginal heads and one of George Augustus Robinson. The reliefs were produced around 1835-36 and were advertised for sale in 1836, but almost all can be matched with figures in The Conciliation, so clearly Duterrau had conceived this work within a few years of his arrival in Tasmania in 1832.
Some are primarily portraits of the most important individuals in the story. One is of an anthropological detail that somehow fascinated the artist and that he included in the painting: a man sitting on the ground and straightening a spear while clutching it in his teeth.
But the most notable of the reliefs, from an art-historical point of view, are those titled Credulity, Anger, Suspicion and Surprise. And as we can learn from the online version of the Dictionary of Australian Artists, the sale notice in 1836 draws our attention to “various expressions of some particular passions … which Mr Duterrau has carefully observed in those interesting people”.
The most obviously significant thing about these reliefs is that they recognise a common humanity in the Aboriginal people. But in an art-historical perspective, the words expression and passions are the keys to a whole world of ideas and theoretical reflection about the nature of art.
Readers may associate the term expression with the varieties of expressionist art produced about a century ago, but it has a much longer history than that. In modern art theory, from the Renaissance onwards, expression meant the representation of thought, feeling and emotion in the figures in a picture. Leonardo said the two most important things were the representation of figures and of the inner life of those figures.
Because the word moto in Italian means movement and is cognate with emotion, it was easy to see these things as parallel: the moti of the body and those of the soul.
As Lomazzo wrote in his Trattato (1585), the artist “not only expresses in his figures things as they are, but also shows certain interior movements as though painting … the affection of souls”.
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Dufresnoy, in his Latin poem on art theory published in 1668, spoke of the motus animorum, the movement of souls, and the “expression of feelings hidden in the heart”.
Emotions were not represented for their own sake, however, but to convey narrative meaning in a history painting. Already in 1435 Alberti had written: omnia ad agendam et docendam historiam congruant necesse est — “it is necessary for everything in the picture to come together in performing the story and making it clear”. More than three centuries later, Sir Joshua Reynolds was even more specific: “Those expressions alone should be given to the figures which their respective situations generally produce.”
Several famous anecdotes in art history emphasise the paramount importance of expression in conveying the meaning of a history painting. In one of these, Annibale Carracci watches a little old lady with her grandchild in the Oratory of S. Andrea at S. Gregorio Magno in Rome, frescoed by two of his pupils: on one side Guido Reni and on the other Domenichino. The old lady looks in silence at Guido’s painting, but when she looks at Domenichino’s she starts to point things out to the child. This was clearly the more successful of the two in expressing its subject.
By the middle of the 17th century Nicolas Poussin, French but resident in Rome, was the greatest master of expression in painting. His work epitomises the classical principle that expression always serves the subject, and he taught that it is not only found in the features of the face and the attitudes of bodies but also in the whole composition of the painting, including the choice of colour and light.
It is the economy of expression in all the parts of his paintings that makes a work such as Et in Arcadia Ego (1637-38) so effective and memorable. Three shepherds and a female figure who may represent the Stoic idea of reason or wisdom have come upon a tomb in the midst of the idyllic land of Arcadia. The tomb is inscribed with a Latin epitaph that could be translated as “I too once lived in Arcadia”, and thus interpreted as the voice of the dead man; or as “Even in Arcadia, I am”, in which case it is the voice of death reminding us that no one is beyond his reach. Everything in this picture, as is usual with Poussin, conspires to evoke the poetic idea of the story, and nothing is overstated: attitudes are animated but still, gestures are significant but not histrionic, and facial expressions are so subtle and specific to the situation that it would be hard to label them in the way that Duterrau did in his reliefs.
Duterrau’s source for his more pedestrian understanding of expression was Charles Le Brun, who became the first painter of King Louis XIV and in that role dominated the whole art world in France for decades. In his youth he was a great admirer of Poussin and travelled to Rome with him after Poussin’s stay in Paris in 1640-42.
Le Brun was a tremendously energetic, gifted and able young man, but he did not have Poussin’s depth or subtlety. In addition he was profoundly influenced by Rene Descartes’s late treatise, Les Passions de l’ame (1649), in which the philosopher outlined a strictly mechanical and virtually hydraulic interpretation of the passions.
One of the most important effects of Descartes’s theory was to break down the continuity of affective states, feelings and moods that we find in Poussin and in earlier practice and theory into a set of distinct “passions”, with a further reduction of psychological to physiological phenomena. Each passion comes to be understood as a collection of physical reactions manifested in certain distinctive grimaces in the facial features.
Le Brun was very attracted to this reductive understanding of expression, and he conceived his important early painting, The Tent of Darius (1661), not in Poussin’s manner as a group of people participating in a single action but rather as disparate individuals reacting in distinctly different ways to the same event, in this case one that followed Alexander’s final defeat of the Persian king, Darius III.
When Alexander visited the king’s mother, wives and concubines, they mistakenly prostrated themselves before his more opulently dressed friend, Hephaestion. Horrified by what they had done and terrified that Alexander might be enraged, they were astonished to find that he dismissed the misunderstanding with magnanimity. The scene was thus one that offered the possibility of a variety of quite distinct passions.
Years later, when Le Brun was effectively the head of the new Academy, he gave a series of lectures on expression, and many of the illustrations he used were taken from heads in this painting. The drawings were later engraved and published several times in the later 17th and early 18th centuries. And thus the distinct images of Wonder, Fear, Anxiety, and so on, became fixed in the subsequent academic tradition.
This is the tradition to which Duterrau was a late, minor and colonial heir. Following Le Brun, he thought of his composition as made up of a series of expressive heads, representing all the different reactions he imagined the Aboriginal people could have — among them Credulity, Anger, Suspicion and Surprise — to the proposal for peace and conciliation being offered to them by Robinson, the central figure in the picture.
And the fact he not only produced the expressive head reliefs but even offered them for sale before painting the picture itself leaves no doubt that he had planned the whole set of passions to be included from the very beginning of the project.
The finished work — or the reduced version of it that we still have — may be awkward and technically deficient in many ways, but it represents a very systematic attempt to follow academic practice.
Duterrau is not, as it happens, the only Australian painter whose work needs to be understood in this light. The same principles apply to the far more accomplished work of William Strutt.
If there is something slightly disconcerting about Strutt’s Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851 (1864), commemorating the terrible Victorian bushfires that occurred in the year the colony of Victoria was separated from NSW, it is that on close inspection not only the human features but even more conspicuously the animals have been forced into a mechanical and also anthropomorphic form of expression.
Even more obvious, however, are the exaggerated expressions in his Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia 1852 (1887), painted in England but commemorating an event that had taken place soon after his arrival in the colony. Strutt, who had been trained in the academic tradition in England and France, went to great lengths, like Le Brun, to represent a range of different characters and reactions to the holdup, culminating in the desperation in the eyes of the young man in the centre of the composition, who fears for the virtue of his new bride.
Less than 10 years later, Tom Roberts, although he too was among the few 19th-century Australian artists to have had an academic training and therefore to be capable of painting the figure competently, took an entirely different tack in his Bailed Up (1895, partly reworked 1927). This painting too was based on the mid-century bushranging that was largely in the past by Roberts’s time, and specifically on the figure of Captain Thunderbolt, who had been killed in 1870 (and who incidentally also inspired another painting by Roberts, In a Corner of the Macintyre, also 1895).
Thunderbolt was known as the “gentleman bushranger” and Roberts’s painting is surprisingly lacking in the drama and menace that Strutt had depicted, with some reason since his bushrangers have already killed a man. But apart from the enigmatic mood of this picture, it is also notable that Roberts deliberately avoids the caricatural expressive heads typical of the less gifted exponents of the academic tradition.
Instead, like Poussin, he subordinates all individual figures to the expression of the common subject and to the evocation of the feeling and mood shared by the participants in a collective action.
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