Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘On not finishing. … Like the person who does not say goodbye, but instead exits untainted by valediction. Of course they could finish but they choose simply to stop. And only afterward do you come to realize the transitory was in fact the terminus, the passage the limit, the process the finale. Little did you know it was the last time. But people’s last words tend to stick in the mind, and it is exactly the same with paintings’.[1] This blog is an attempt to show how art that is not understood as a component in a relationship of co-operative making of the experience, like that in a friendship or unequal but apparently enduring exchange of love, is not understood at all but merely consumed. And in consuming, one is consumed, like Milton’s Eve ‘ingorg’d without restraint, / And knew not eating Death’.[2] On the importance, again, of Christopher Neve’s writing, this blog concentrates on his book written during the COVID lockdowns: Christopher Neve (2023) Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague London, Thames & Hudson.

For my earlier blog on works by Neve, use this link.

This blog will, and is meant to, use up all my tears about an ending I mourn. It is not an ending of particular significance to anyone else. But in the midst of mourning an immediate loss – the words (in a text) began (there were only 2 following sentences no longer than this): ‘Tonight I am ending our friendship’ two days before a planned visit – I was nervously reading, in part to dull an undisciplined mind, the book I had taken with me on this trip – Christopher Neve’s new book. As I say in my first blog on Neve (there’s the link here again), I love this writer; not despite but because of its basis in a subjective interpretational response to artworks that is not strictly historical, objectively critical nor merely descriptive but uses advanced skills from each of these areas of praxis to achieve a synthesis that itself feels like discursive art that combines very selective forms of writing like that in a memoir, but a kind of memoir of the inner self more than the outer self.

Outer events are recounted of course but they amount in this book to little more than locating the writing of this book during the recent period of lockdown in response to the global crisis prompted by the emergence of SARS-COVID infection during 2020, Neve’s retreat to a country house and garden and the constant dribble of news from an outside world of alarming mass death statistics. Interspersed with the chapters are interludes that combine garden musing with bulletins from COVID’s frontline – news of the tragedy of deaths in mass and of failure of government, especially in the UK.

But death lives in the Arcadia of a spring garden too: ‘a sadder and lovelier spring’.[3] For Neve has now, as he feels his own mortality more evident and pressing has engaged in thinking about the death of great painters and the concept of ‘late style’ so associated with the latter end of painting careers which went on until the painters’ deaths:

Part death, part memory, part intuition. A way of working that transcends technique and sets no store by the ability to finish. A willingness to take risks, to chance the arm. The urgent need to leave behind terms of reference and sets no store by the ability to finish.[4]

This is in no way a definition of late style upon which art historians concur. Some very reductive accounts for instance tie the characteristics of Titian’s late style, by an extremely brain-dulled art history, mainly to his failing eye-sight, a fact Neve slyly acknowledges without giving it too much credence in saying: ‘From Titian’s palazzo, up near the Biri Grande, he can, even with old eyes, see the foothills of the Alps forty miles away’ (my emphasis). He gives more credence to Titian’s impatience with minutiae of everyday detail, his slowness and reluctance to begin a task and his ease in stopping when others find it still incomplete, his sense that truth lies not in plain statement but in ambiguity: ‘Titian knows very well that you can pile up facts but that they will not be entirely true until there is an ambiguity’.[5] Incompletion isa way of knowing the world as it is.

 I felt, reading this, that I was entirely comfortable with the notion of the non-finito in painting and its use throughout art history, but Neve is not just making a point about style, he is making a point about how art brings you in, engages with you in a complex interaction, and sometimes leaves you high and dry with only questions in your mind. He is talking as if art could relate to you in a much more than passive way, and that its operations, independent of you, could not only pleasure but pain you, comfort you or leave you bereft. Of course I was sensitised emotionally and cognitively to the notion of not entirely explicable endings in relationships and interactions on this visit, for reasons I have stated, but after my turn in driving on the way home, I was trying, as is my wont, to stifle the disturbing memories of my relationship with that friend (he never liked to call it a relationship) triggered by its streets and venues by reading, I came across a chapter called ‘Daumier on Not Finishing’. Expecting just more brilliance like that that which examined the non-finito trait found in all the other painters, even Gwen John, which surprised me and then felt completely right, I actually read this. And floodgates opened in my eyes, prompted though, I think, much deeper:

On not finishing. Some paintings break off as if they have said as much as they need to say but are averse to the idea of completion. Better just to end. Like the person who does not say goodbye, but instead exits untainted by valediction. Of course they could finish but they choose simply to stop. And only afterward do you come to realize the transitory was in fact the terminus, the passage the limit, the process the finale. Little did you know it was the last time. But people’s last words tend to stick in the mind, and it is exactly the same with paintings’.^[6]

The echo of ‘Tonight I am ending our friendship’ was too gross, the analysis of what was m missed, basically that endings are not offered complete but a stopping of the interaction that will in part never be fully explained, because its terms do not belong to a mere recipient of the interaction’s process, whose dynamics belong to someone else, even when you may have triggered the possibility of their process beginning and being, comfortably or otherwise, sustained. When the other stops, there can be no completion, no rounding off and closure. One is left by some paintings, that is, after an enforced break up of your ongoing relationship, in this explanation still lacking or wanting (in its double sense of absence and desire) something that is missing by virtue of the truths it speaks. How was I to understand this?

In Melanie Klein’s influential use of the word, the reparation which I am still seeking at this dreadful ending (though only to me) is an acceptance of loss and the independence of the other – a move into the ‘depressive position’ that accepts that it cannot and should not want to control the other, one of many damaging aspects of love. However, it is also one that has so feared being hurt and damaged by the other, that it may have itself sullied the basis of trust in the relationship. For all this I take responsibility when I feel a bit more mature about it. Klein calls all these negatives the paranoid-schizoid position. Even though that name feels excoriating, I sort of know what she means. And although psychodynamic reparation is not cure or even balm, it rests realises that the pain to be endured belongs only to the internal world of the self and is not helpfully projected into the world of the past relationship, even if it was sometimes in living through it. It accepts responsibility for the fact that being in love with someone can, and did in this case, make them feel constrained from independent life.

But therein lies the ambiguous truth of the pain, for in a relationship that has sustained you, you may still seek the soothing and containment of the other’s supporting explanations. What I needed I think to myself still was a sort of ritual goodbye and mutual recognition of completion of at least understanding would have been a better option. That is still an illusion for as Klein shows the residue of paranoid-schizoid forces that attempt to cling on to love that have in probability helped to end the feelings of one partner, might have made such a ritual an object attracting to it all the resistances to an ending of which that condition is capable. Writing these paragraphs has helped me in fact to already repair some of the worst damage of not knowing why the relationship ended. But there will still be room for tears for knowing is insufficient in itself without a reflection in traumatised feeling and habitual behaviour.

I hoped that blogging about what Neve says might help, for it is clear to me that the long passage I read in the car on the way home past Leeds, and which had so great an affect would at least establish the area of commonality between my emotionally-engaged intellect and my individual experience, which is otherwise non-communicable. Neve appears to address this – deliberately vaguely, incompletely and with ambiguity – in his chapter on ‘Rembrandt and Suffering’, starting with a vague enough suggestion that a task that might be imagined as possible might still never get completed: ‘It may just be possible to talk about painting in relation to suffering’. There follows a picture of the suffering involved in an economic depression; as with the of the bubonic plague in the Titian chapter, this is an entirely socio-politic al event, but it has human consequence including enforced endings, such as evictions and family or community breakup. And there is in this picture even ‘the long roof of the plague-house’. We can’t quite though in Rembrandt’s ‘landscape drawn with a reed pen’ quite get the details clear of what is going on. Nevertheless, Neve’s response seems more charged than the details account for – and its significance in terms of his overall project still not made clear – as if, and this is the case I think, its entire and whole meaning could never be made a clear and COMPLETE picture

… Does life have no meaning except what you bring to it?

Because this is not intended as straightforward art history but as something half understood< I am going to tell you a short story about three women. {and there follows a pen picture of the three love relationships of Rembrandt and the suffering, as well as the pleasure, they involved}.[7]

I have no doubt that the endings of all these relationships are crucial, even if offered as only ‘half understood’ (more than just incomplete understandings) but they emerge in another kind of process – the process of artistic mark-making that has not termination in simple meanings, only the insistence that process, incomplete as it is, is perhaps all there is. And the process involving aging, the accidents of time and change and illness and death and parting are not unlike the confidence that the process matters more than being fooled into a belief that there is completed meaning to our lives – and that suffering is one mode of that process (having lives and deaths – others and ourselves – absences and presences that remain out of our control) and we had better cope with that within or not live in any real sense. Here is Rembrandt’s mark-making process recreated in subjective vision of the viewer:

…: a face made up of broad statements rubbed, wiped and scratched by every kind of inspired revision in the way of drawing. An accumulation of impulses, very often set down quite fast and partly eliminated. It worked because of its apparent speed of execution and because the process itself remained visible, deliberately left in sight as if to excite the viewer’s imagination. Its crusts and glazes, dabs, wounds, twists and turns of the brush, accidents, corrections, thoughts and afterthoughts all looked as if they were still wet. A drawing and profound re-drawing in oil paint, left off, abandoned at a beautiful stage rather than completed.[8]

Here in-completion is a leaving that is sad and beautiful as if compounded the wisdom of the story of the three women Rembrandt loved and lost, for some of which losses Rembrandt must have felt completely responsible. Would Hendrickje Stoffel been so exposed to the return of the plague in Amsterdam in 1653 if she had not been exposed also to debt and poverty by Rembrandt’s desire to buy respectability and a large house rather than accept a mediocre living with his talent unseen in merely social terms in a bourgeois society often entirely given up to the appearances of wealth and status.[9]

The linking of learning through relationships – their pleasures and pains – can be illustrated throughout the examples but also in the framework narrative of loss in a time of a new plague – that of COVID. But it reaches a climax in the loneliest of the painters, Chaïm Soutine, who defies our relationship to him as a hindrance to his self-making. This is especially conveyed in the analysis of the painting Children Playing at Champigny (c. 1942-43, oil on canvas). It is the painting used on the book’s end-papers.

It is a painting of a children playing and relating, but perhaps Soutine has less interest in showing the completeness of his understanding of a relationship he has ‘drawn and redrawn quickly’. Looking at the white marks in a blue sky, he is more interested in the mark-making than the explanation of the relationship at its centre; ‘the excitement of the mark and what caused it’.

The process of painting at a particular moment. … Could the children be him and his friend Michel Kikoïne at Smilavičy? There must have been a moment when he was happy, excited, young, when the sky was blue, the air was clear and he felt no pain. There is yet time to accomplish something without explanations, just to fill the space with his own free will. And then to stop. Not to make some point, find an answer, solve a problem, come to a conclusion. Just to stop …

Having a relationship with Soutine’s painting is shut off by the necessity that it exercises its maker’s free will and independence of a viewer’s queries. Accept the freedom and independence of this man and let go of him to his freedom or choose a self-willed fate that surrenders the beauty of those last moments as well as their pain. At times Neve seems to suggest that late style is that moment when a painter has lost that which made their younger work complete – the control of time. It is something he notes In Pissarro and Constable and sees break down into disintegrated process in their late style.[10] It is best illustrated in Gwen John, whose last works ‘are small pencil marks on tiny pages, small experiments of great presence made of next to nothing’. It is just before she ‘dies anonymously’. ^[11]

We need I think more than ever in a time of forced parting and absence and the death of many to understand that some people so misunderstand time and their own part in it they will not leave but become despotic children holding onto power. Here is Trump, for instance:

Mexico, without testing, Brazil, Argentina and India had the highest death tolls apart from America, where the unhinged and despotic president discharged himself from hospital, lost an election but refused to leave office, obstructing quarantine arrangements. He went about shouting ‘I won! I won!’ while deaths increased exponentially, many people falling ill for a second time.

Now I do not think I can easily make my point that such persons fail to understand why sometimes others, and even themselves must stop and give up life, a task, a pursuit of something they can complete and explain, but I think they would do so more easily if they, like Trump, had less childish narcissism. And hence I suppose I need to learn that a stop in a relationship caused by someone else has deeper urgency for me, if not for the other involved, precisely because their existence for me has just been simply stopped in effect, and explanation is foregone. In a relationship an end is as much really as you get. To keep holding on is to invite the death of all free will around you, which in the end has to be respected in the loved one.

I don’t suppose it will get any easier having said this with regarded to the end of the thing I called a relationship, but he didn’t. But it shows that using time reading, however remote the project from life in appearance, is often more important in the process of its remarkably broad human statements, its apparently brilliantly random marks than in its reduction to simple explanation. Were this not the case I would never read another book nor love anyone new again.

Read the book. There is so much more richness in it. The test case is, of course, Poussin, for he was a completer.

Love

Steve

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[1] Christopher Neve (2023: 105) Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague London, Thames & Hudson.

[2] Milton’s 1674 version of Paradise Lost Book IX. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45745/paradise-lost-book-9-1674-version

[3] Christopher Neve (2023: 8) Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague London, Thames & Hudson.

[4] Ibid: 7

[5] Ibid: 24, 28

[6] Ibid: 105.

[7] Ibid: 40f.

[8] Ibid: 45

[9] Ibid: 42f.

[10] See ibid: 55ff., 98ff.

[11] ibid: 64