Often, just when it seems an artist is comfortably rooted in one school he sneaks off and we find him in another- greatly confusing those following him. Great artists have always managed to be very slippery creatures and the truly visionary ones tend to transcend anything so limiting as a label. However, when successful, the understanding of an artistic movement can be a set of skeleton keys to the widely varying intents of the artists themselves, so that the unique trajectories of their individual imaginations are revealed to us more clearly. However, "Styles" and "Movements" as labels are only helpful insofar as they illuminate highly subjective truths from the current gale of relativism and do not degenerate into a bubbling theory pit, belching pedagogical ooze.
So with the desire to reveal rather than obscure, I think a look into artistic genealogies, to find shared sympathies between creators, can be a way of viewing a particular artist's work as belonging to a larger context than his own brief lifetime. Indeed, it can reveal the tremendous debt all artists owe to one another, as they help one another, albeit indirectly, navigate across the centuries.
Most discoveries in the arts are not the sole invention of one genius, but the work of many brilliant men and women, who carry a baton of artistic integrity across their own cultures, and respectfully wait for the prophets of the next generation to begin where they leave off. In this way "an idea" can be traced through two hundred years and many cultures before it finds its definitive, concrete expression.
The French Revolution and Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro could be thought of as the genesis of modern drama, with the birth of Realism in its egalitarian representation of character. Now as a form, Realism has become and remains the standard of twenty-first century entertainment.
Therefore in a discussion of the contemporary work of Manfred Heinrich Kuhnert (b.1931), to achieve any contextual insight and perspective whatsoever, it is necessary to penetrate an early twentieth century movement known as Symbolism (occupying a place betwixt and between Impressionism and the various off-shoots of Expressionism). By searching for various commonalities in artists separated by time and race, it is possible to understand more precisely where Kuhnert falls within the trajectory of the Western Tradition.
From the Florentine Renaissance, with its discovery of linear perspective, the dream of academic painting had been to restore an object to its identical form, like an exact copy of nature. As Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres lamented, "Art is never at such a high degree of perfection as when it so strongly resembles nature that we can take it for nature itself."
However, at the end of the nineteenth century it was discovered that this task is philosophically and practically impossible (as is now commonly understood) because any projection of a three-dimensional object onto a panel that has only two dimensions, postulates the existence of a code. In other words, you can't transpose the properties of something in the "real" world into a completely new creation without sacrificing major distinguishing qualities and choosing "signs" for the few things you can capture. When we photograph a loved one, the picture only captures the outer image (a "sign" or "representation") of his or her physical being, not the person's spirit, not the feel of his touch. In transcription, there is always a loss. As Claude Levi-Strauss said, "The graphic or plastic transposition, always implies the renuncification of certain dimensions of the object: in painting- the volume, the true colors, the odors, the tactile impressions…the temporal dimension.
Therefore one must choose which aspects of the three-dimensional form one wants to represent in only two: either a correspondence to the outer world, or as was the aim of much late-nineteenth and early, twentieth century painting, a correspondence to the inner world- a world so ephemeral in nature, with so many different facets to be expressed that systems of representation needed to be invented to precisely communicate its content. In painting, "It is not a question of deciphering, but of codifying the outer world," as Felix Feneon said at the beginning of the last century. According to Jean Clay, "Schematization became the law of painting."
It is a way of looking at the world that the Symbolist artists shared, not necessarily seeing things in a new way, but in a way that had never before been fully articulated. Of Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Symbolist poet, the American architect Claude Bragdon wrote in 1904: "Actualities only have value to him as they image… that spiritual world in which souls meet and dwell, and he communicates to our inner consciousness his interest in this immanent, but invisible universe… much as a mathematician is able to make plain the nature of fourth dimensional space, intangible to the senses." "If Maeterlinck's essays seem "strange and ineffable" it is only because the infinite refuses to be expressed in terms of the finite." These artists weren't interested in the banalities of daily life, but what lay directly behind them.
The Fourth Dimension (or at least as idealistic philosophical interpretation of it), was a higher reality beyond three-dimensional visual perception, including conceptions of the Infinite, the Evolution of Consciousness, and Philosophical Monism. This is the reality Symbolism sought to represent.
A mystical interpretation of the Fourth Dimension is a theme reaching back to before Romanticism and forward underlying styles ranging from the Symbolist and Cubist evocations of higher space, which utilized some degree of recognizable form, to the total abstractions of Malevich's geometric Suprematism.
The mystic philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, stated in his Tertium Organum, (1911, St. Petersburg) that "Art (including music and poetry) is a path to cosmic consciousness" and a "sensation of infinity" characterizes the first moments of the transition to the new consciousness of four-dimensionality: "The sense of the infinite is the first and most terrible trail before initiation. Nothing exists. A little miserable soul feels itself suspended in a infinite void. Then even the void disappears. There is only infinity, a constant and continuous division and dissolution of everything."
It is precisely upon this "division and dissolution of everything" which we will focus, following it as a desire in painting, even when the Tromp 'loil convention was enjoying its place as a visual maxim. In the work of great artists, especially toward the end of their careers, there seems to have always been a desire to get beyond the material world, to transcend the surface representation of things and, in doing so, reveal what energies are hidden beneath the forms.
Beginning with Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), one can see the forms of his late paintings melting away. As if desiring to get beyond his consummate technique, passion for life overruled restraint in his work. Rembrandt's earliest paintings were influenced by Caravaggio, and as he grew older he became less interested with grandiose and theatrical pageantry, and the historicity of his scenes, and more concerned with the fundamental human relationships.
In The Slaughtered Ox, (1655) "The sturdy and heroic character to which we have become accustomed drops away from the style of Rembrandt's old age. His paintings open up and gain transparency. Large, thick clots of pigment, imperfectly integrated into the whole picture, occasionally glisten from his canvases. Yet we do not sense any slackening of creative power in this great structural looseness. In this late painting, the matiere of the flesh colors takes on a life of its own, enhancing the sense of the precious and the marvelous, far above any facile conformity with the everyday world," states the Rembrandt critic Horst Gerson. Rembrandt had no intention of exploring a new "style" in these late paintings. He was not that gratuitous. No, it is the desire to paint more fully, more truthfully, that led this master to abandon the precision of his brush and give over to a stroke that would allow the vitality of his subjects to bleed through. The fact, that in Rembrandt, as best we know, this desire was unconscious and in the Symbolists, it was explicit and made conscious is of little consequence. The effects are the same.
Referring to how this development was received by the public, ironically Gerson says, "In certain respects, his situation was quite typical of that of the aging artist whose personal style reaches its climax, only after the period style has moved away from him."
Although John Ruskin, the great English theorist continued to champion him, Turner's late works, like Rembrandt's, were often ridiculed. Born one hundred years after rembrandt's death, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), reached his mature aesthetic vision in the 1830s and 1840s. The master of the turbulent sunset, Turner embodied the climax of the romantic vision, a vision which specialized in the revelation of the sublime, and he carried that embryo of what would eventually be called the Symbolist movement through the nineteenth century. John Constable once said of Turner's painting, "Airy visions, painted with tinted steam".
Charles Baudelaire, recognized as the first Symbolist poet, characterized Romanticism in 1846 as "intimacy, spiritually, color, and aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts." This remark could be an epigram of Turner, as the great art critic Robert Hughes says, he "infused the landscape with passion, energy and power, interpreting his subject in the most epic and elemental level, filled with strident emotionalism."
Looking at the work, the Slave Ship, (1840) "The image coalesces almost magically out of dabs of paint, alternately so thin as to be a mere wash and so thick that it forms crusts on the canvas. His handling of paint by 1840 had become personal and intuitive. Scraped, brushed, and smeared, its purpose was to create sweeping movements and general atmospheres; to imply rather than describe, both setting and details. Specific forms occasionally loom out of the organic, pulsing stretches of paint, giving context and reference points to the overall blotches of color," continues Hughes.
But this "strident emotionalism" too, would shortly be seen as a stepping stone rather than a Rosetta stone. Born ten years before Turner's death, "Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was the hinge on which nineteenth century Romanticism finally swung into twentieth century Expressionism," Hughes so astutely notes. "van Gogh's tumultuous and transcendent vision of nature dramatically opened the path for a new emotionalism and subjective temper in art. He opened the modernist syntax of color wider, to admit pity and terror as well as formal research and pleasure." Vincent himself stated, "By intensifying all colors one arrives once again at quietude and harmony. There occurs in nature something similar to what happens in Wagner's music, which, though played by a big orchestra, is nonetheless intimate.
In van Gogh's rich colors, the Symbolists would find their alphabet and a new syntax with which to embody the spiritual. His theory of saturating the canvas in color to achieve delicacy is a liberating concept of bliss. Bliss is no longer tied to restraint, with its embodiment relegated to a lone sunset, and a dab of yellow; instead van Gogh conceived of the infinite in an ebullient celebration of excess- a heaven of infinite potential.
Looking at his masterpiece, Starry Night (1889), Hughes stresses that "The moon comes out of eclipse, the stars blaze and heave, and the cypresses move with them, translating the rhymes of the sky into the black writhings of their flame-like silhouette. They commit the turbulence of heaven to the earth, completing a circuit of energy throughout all nature." And in The Garden of Dr. Gathet (1890) "Sight is translated into a thick plasma of paint, eddying along linear paths defined by the jabbing motion of his brushstrokes as though nature were opening its veins."
Vincent van Gogh was not a mad heretic, but a visionary possessed with absolute clarity, the vision of a world no one else could see. Nevertheless, he gave us the symbols of this inner landscape in his paintings, those of a great formal artist with a mandatory mission to express in concrete form what lies beyond and within.
According to Jean Clay, "Though he claimed to dislike van gogh's paintings, Chiam Soutine's (1894-1943) most radical work was a sustained effort to outdo the Dutchman's animation of language; namely, the series of paintings Soutine made in the town of Ceret, in the French Pyrenees, between 1919-1922. In their violence of expression, with their allegro furioso of paint and their peculiar airlessness, some Soutines might almost seem to be caricatures of his chosen masters: Rembrandt, El Greco, Courbet.
In The Old Mill (1922-23) "The house lean as if in a gale, hills rear up, the horizon is dragged on a furious slant, and the whole scene becomes a mass of tumbling paint," observes Robert Hughes. We have arrived in full Symbolist swing. The earth is reconstituting itself, no longer will it be seen as a physical manifestation of matter, but as a shattering mold releasing cosmic force and transcendent beauty.
This beauty becomes resplendent in the work of Odilon Redon (1840-1916). In his purposeful vagaries, sensuous folds of color undulate as if they were transparent veils caught in the wind. In Roger and Angelica (1910), the sea and sky envelop each other in an imploding whirlpool. Color has passed all liminal boundaries, the last remnants of which we still saw in the outline of van Gogh, and flows as if through nations with no borders. This corresponds visually to the philosophical monism the Symbolists sought to achieve.
The symbolist poet, Mallarme, designated the path that recommends "not painting the thing but rather the effect it produces. To name an object is to get rid of three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poetry that is made of guessing at it little by little. Suggesting it, is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol."
Redon, himself proclaimed, "For myself, I believe that I have produced an expressive, suggestive and indeterminate art. Suggestive art is the irradiation of sublime plastic elements, drawn together and combined with the purpose of evoking visions which it illuminates and exhalts, meanwhile inciting thought."
And Jean Clay goes on to say, "That the suggestion in painting results in privileging what is un-named in the system, its ground, its fabric; that by dematerializing the represented object we better reveal the substantial evidence of the representing material- that is what Odilon Redon's work proves. When he speaks of "putting back the light of spirituality in hte humblest means, even in blacks,", when he wants to "show everything that transcends or illuminates or amplifies the object and raises the spirit in the region of mystery, in the discord of the irresolute and its delicious anxiety" it is clear that the intends above all to be certain that his works have a "supplement of soul'.
Redon elaborates, "I speak to those who surrender themselves gently to the secret and mysterious laws of the emotions of the heart, without assistance from sterile explanations. All my originality consists, therefore, in endowing completely improbable beings with human life, according to the laws of the probable and in placing, as much as possible, the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible. This method proceeds naturally and easily from the vision of the mysterious world of shadows for which Rembrandt, in revealing it to us, supplied the key."
"The physical world was loosing its importance; it should be seen as a stumbling block, since it occluded the realities of the spirit from men's eyes. The millennium was coming in the form of what Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) called "The Epoch of Great Spirituality." Art was to prepare people to think and see in terms of immaterial form, rather than perceived objects like apples or nudes", says Hughes.
In 1912 Kandinsky wrote in the Blue Rider Almanac: "The veiling of the spirit in the material is often so dense that there are generally few people who can see through to the spirit. Thus especially today many do not see the spirit in religion and art. There are whole epochs which disavow the spirit, since the eyes of people, generally at such times, cannot see the spirit. It was so in the nineteenth century and is, on the whole, still so today. People are blinded.
In both Picture with an Archer (1909) and Painting No. 199 (1914), subject is the barest excuse for the dynamism of pure color; finally freed from the need to represent external realities, they both dance off the canvas in a jubilant celebration of the coming epoch. Kandinsky stated "To a more sensitive soul the effect of colors is deeper and intensely moving. [And so we come to the second result of looking at colors]: their psychological effect. They produce a correspondent spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the physical impression is important. Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposefully, to cause vibrations in the soul."
"In 1895 Wassily Kandinsky," states jean Clay, "upon seeing one of Claude Monet's Haystacks painted four years earlier at Giverny, marveled at the "incredible power, unknown to me, of a palette that exceeded all my dreams. The painting appeared to me with a fabulous power."" In Kandinsky's work, "Color escapes from form, in diluting itself it overflows the represented object's frontiers and spreads like an inundation over the surface beyond the boarders. Wassily Kandinsky revised his pictorial conceptions so thoroughly that subject matter now appears in his paintings only as lines, small fibers, or debris, all drowned in the expansion of lively tones."
Charles Beaudelaire's cry, "I want meadows red in tone and trees painted in blue," is taken up in the work of Manfred Heinrich Kuhnert (b.1931) and carried to climactic extremes in his juxtapositions of complimentary colors. It is a natural world given over to an iridescent glow before the apocalypse; a beauty so severe in its completeness, that one feels the painting is dissolving into Plato's world of Ideal forms and only our act of viewing it, is detaining it from its final synthesis. It is the embodiment of Nolde's maxim, "The more we move away from the Nature while remaining neutral, the greater the art."
In the Contemporary work, House in Wood's Cove, (1993) the gyrating shapes and patterns take on an effervescence inspired by the blazing southern light of the California coast. Cobalt blue is less the color of water, than a radiating energy within it. The cascading white void running down the center of the painting echoes the spiritual chasm so prevalent in Symbolist work: the place where the Divine opens to the Material, where the forth dimension becomes pregnable. There is a white heat emanating from within the center of the canvas that seems to be engulfing the rest of the pictorial world. As the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler once said, "Everything happens as through the mental image, the fruit of emotion becomes precise for the painter only in accordance with its materialization, as though the painter discovered this image gradually."
The course of the Symbolist trajectory can be traced through many artist in the Western Tradition. It is not a movement randomly appearing over a few years through external circumstances; but instead, is a deep-seeded desire in painting to communicate more personally, more truthfully from within, what is within. In its correspondence to the aesthetic concerns of the twentieth century, it discovered a name, and an explicit agenda. However, merely a formalist look at the movement will reveal only a clever spreading of paint and pretty colors. It is the content of the movement, a longing to express the poesis of the universe, a transfiguration of our ordinary world into a place of spiritual bliss, that sets the movement apart, and at least for intent, ranks its members as some of the most human and noble visionaries in art.
Manfred Flynn Kuhnert
Visiting Professor, Duke University, 1993