Article on Art and the Brain in the New York Times, April 12

Gray Matter

What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art

By ERIC R. KANDEL

Published: April 12, 2013

THIS month, President Obama unveiled a breathtakingly ambitious initiative to map the human brain, the ultimate goal of which is to understand the workings of the human mind in biological terms.

Jonathon Rosen

Many of the insights that have brought us to this point arose from the merger over the past 50 years of cognitive psychology, the science of mind, and neuroscience, the science of the brain. The discipline that has emerged now seeks to understand the human mind as a set of functions carried out by the brain.

This new approach to the science of mind not only promises to offer a deeper understanding of what makes us who we are, but also opens dialogues with other areas of study — conversations that may help make science part of our common cultural experience.

Consider what we can learn about the mind by examining how we view figurative art. In a recently published book, I tried to explore this question by focusing on portraiture, because we are now beginning to understand how our brains respond to the facial expressions and bodily postures of others.

The portraiture that flourished in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century is a good place to start. Not only does this modernist school hold a prominent place in the history of art, it consists of just three major artists — Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele — which makes it easier to study in depth.

As a group, these artists sought to depict the unconscious, instinctual strivings of the people in their portraits, but each painter developed a distinctive way of using facial expressions and hand and body gestures to communicate those mental processes.

Their efforts to get at the truth beneath the appearance of an individual both paralleled and were influenced by similar efforts at the time in the fields of biology and psychoanalysis. Thus the portraits of the modernists in the period known as “Vienna 1900” offer a great example of how artistic, psychological and scientific insights can enrich one another.

The idea that truth lies beneath the surface derives from Carl von Rokitansky, a gifted pathologist who was dean of the Vienna School of Medicine in the middle of the 19th century. Baron von Rokitansky compared what his clinician colleague Josef Skoda heard and saw at the bedsides of his patients with autopsy findings after their deaths. This systematic correlation of clinical and pathological findings taught them that only by going deep below the skin could they understand the nature of illness.

This same notion — that truth is hidden below the surface — was soon steeped in the thinking of Sigmund Freud, who trained at the Vienna School of Medicine in the Rokitansky era and who used psychoanalysis to delve beneath the conscious minds of his patients and reveal their inner feelings. That, too, is what the Austrian modernist painters did in their portraits.

Klimt’s drawings display a nuanced intuition of female sexuality and convey his understanding of sexuality’s link with aggression, picking up on things that even Freud missed. Kokoschka and Schiele grasped the idea that insight into another begins with understanding of oneself. In honest self-portraits with his lover Alma Mahler, Kokoschka captured himself as hopelessly anxious, certain that he would be rejected — which he was. Schiele, the youngest of the group, revealed his vulnerability more deeply, rendering himself, often nude and exposed, as subject to the existential crises of modern life.

Such real-world collisions of artistic, medical and biological modes of thought raise the question: How can art and science be brought together?

Alois Riegl, of the Vienna School of Art History in 1900, was the first to truly address this question. He understood that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional likeness on a canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the world, the viewer interprets what he or she sees on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Riegl called this phenomenon the “beholder’s involvement” or the “beholder’s share.”

Art history was now aligned with psychology. Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, two of Riegl’s disciples, argued that a work of art is inherently ambiguous and therefore that each person who sees it has a different interpretation. In essence, the beholder recapitulates in his or her own brain the artist’s creative steps.

This insight implied that the brain is a creativity machine, which obtains incomplete information from the outside world and completes it. We can see this with illusions and ambiguous figures that trick our brain into thinking that we see things that are not there. In this sense, a task of figurative painting is to convince the beholder that an illusion is true.

Some of this creative process is determined by the way the structure of our brain develops, which is why we all see the world in pretty much the same way. However, our brains also have differences that are determined in part by our individual experiences.

In addition to our built-in visual processes, each of us brings to a work of art our acquired memories: we remember other works of art that we have seen. We remember scenes and people that have meaning to us and relate the work of art to those memories. In order to see what is painted on a canvas, we have to know beforehand what we might see in a painting. These insights into perception served as a bridge between the visual perception of art and the biology of the brain.

So how does our brain respond to portraiture? As we look at a portrait, our brain calls on several interacting systems to analyze contours, form a representation of the face and of the body, analyze the body’s motion, experience emotion, and perhaps, empathy. Along with these instantaneous responses, we form a theory of the subject’s state of mind.

The brain’s representation of faces is especially important to the beholder’s response to portraiture. Our brain devotes more space to reading the details of faces than to any other object. We react strongly to the expressionist works of these Viennese artists, in part, because our brain contains specialized cells that respond powerfully to the exaggerated facial features these painters portrayed.

Moreover, the sense of stimulation we often experience when we look at a portrait is thought to be due in part to the activity of “mirror neurons.” Signaling by these cells in the motor areas of the brain can make us perceive the actions of others as if they were our own.

All of which goes to show that the real “eye” of the beholder is the brain itself.

Eric R. Kandel, a professor of brain science at Columbia University, a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is the author of “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present.”

NYT Article on John Singer Sargent

An Article in the New York Times, Thursday, March 21:

Examining Sargent’s Shift From Oil to Watercolors

By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI

Published: March 20, 2013

BY the time John Singer Sargent reached his mid-40s at the beginning of the 20th century, he had long been saluted as the best society portrait painter of the Gilded Age. But he was having a midlife career crisis.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Carrara: Lizzatori I," a watercolor by John Singer Sargent in 1911.

Brooklyn Museum

"In a Medici Villa," by John Singer Sargent in 1906.

He was a darling of established critics, but to up-and-coming artists, he seemed old-fashioned. Around 1900, he put down his oils and turned to watercolors, capturing landscapes, gardens, exotic locales, and people at leisure, at work and at rest, often on his travels in Europe and the Middle East. Experimenting with unusual compositions and new techniques, he reinvented himself aesthetically.

Sargent never did convince modernist artists that he was one of them. But the curators at the two museums that bought many of those works a century ago are hoping for a different outcome when “John Singer Sargent Watercolors” goes on view, first at the Brooklyn Museum on April 5, then at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Oct. 13. The exhibition brings together 93 of Sargent’s best watercolors from 1902-12 for the first time.

“These were years when he was very experimental,” said Teresa A. Carbone, the curator of American art at the Brooklyn. Sargent was living in London, where watercolors were highly prized. His, though, were different from those of British watercolorists — more gestural, for one thing, and mystifying for their use of opaque watercolors at a time when they were typically translucent.

The lush results are not only “very beautiful,” Ms. Carbone said, but also innovative in ways that are just now being appreciated — even by her and Erica E. Hirshler, senior curator of American paintings at the Boston museum, who collaborated on the exhibition.

Ms. Carbone planted the seed for the show in 2008, with an e-mail to Ms. Hirshler. “We were besieged by requests for loans of the Sargent watercolors, and I thought we ought to think about what we wanted to do with them ourselves,” Ms. Carbone said. Her first thought was, why not unite the two collections? Ms. Hirshler agreed.

“Then it became more interesting,” Ms. Hirshler said, as the two curators began their research. Among the things they discovered was that these works represented Sargent’s own “vision of himself as a watercolorist at a very important moment.” As such, they were far from tangential to his career.

Sargent, “an obsessive traveler” in the words of Ms. Carbone, would sit with his brushes and watercolors on his journeys, capturing the scenes before him, often from odd angles — low in a Venetian gondola, for example. He made dozens and dozens of images, many in a series, intending to keep them himself. When he allowed some to be exhibited in London in 1903, 1905 and 1908, they elicited mostly good reviews. But they were never for sale.

Then, in 1908, his friend, the Boston artist Edward Darley Boit — whose family was the subject of Sargent’s renowned 1882 painting “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” — wrote to him. Boit proposed a joint exhibition at the Knoedler & Company gallery in New York. Sargent eventually agreed, probably to help his old friend’s career.

As Ms. Hirshler recounts in her essay for the exhibition catalog, he wrote to Boit that “sketches from nature give me pleasure to do + pleasure to keep + more than the small amount of money that one could ask for them.” He did not want to be bothered by repeated requests to see them.

Relenting slightly, Sargent raised a possibility: “... I really do not care to sell them — at any rate not piecemeal. If by any chance some Eastern Museum, or some Eastern collector wanted to buy the whole lot en bloc, I might consider it.” His watercolors, he declared, “only amount to anything when taken as a lot together.”

Sargent selected 86 watercolors and packed them off to New York, where they drew glowing reviews and crowds of viewers. Knoedler, aware of the artist’s wishes, contacted museums in hopes of making a sale.

The Brooklyn Museum quickly made an offer for 83 of the watercolors (three were truly not for sale). Sargent hesitated, wondering if Boston, where he had more patrons and closer ties, was interested. Boit and his brother called the Museum of Fine Arts there, but its bid came too late and was smaller. Brooklyn won the trove for $20,000 (about $500,000 in today’s dollars).

Soon Boit proposed another joint exhibition, and Sargent agreed. The date was set for 1912. This time, the Boston museum raised its hand early in the preparation for the exhibition, and before the opening it bought 45 watercolors for about $10,800.

As visitors to “John Singer Sargent Watercolors” will see, the two collections are very different.

Brooklyn’s works are mostly smaller, freer, more expressive. Almost none are signed. Knowing that his next works would land in Boston, Sargent made them larger and more finished, and signed them.

“They are all just a delight,” Ms. Carbone said. “We don’t tire of looking at them, and people will experience that when they come. Some of the subjects have pictorial depth, but not a lot. It’s all about Sargent’s immersion in the process.”

They are all spontaneous, she added, but it’s also clear that Sargent “worked the sheets very aggressively. There are nuances, shifts in technique.” Many, like “In a Medici Villa,” from 1906, show Sargent as a master of reflected light. Some, like a series portraying the marble quarries above Carrara, border on the abstract. What he didn’t paint is often as interesting as what he did.

One of Sargent’s favorites, “Bedouins,” from 1905-6, was shown and critically acclaimed twice in London before he sent it to New York. It shows two tribesmen, with faces sharply rendered; their garments are suggested as if the watercolors dissolved.

Some are reminiscent of his oils. “The Cashmere Shawl,” from about 1911, is one. It depicts a woman in a white dress and patterned shawl, an example of his use of the wax resist technique, which left some spaces perfectly white. “It’s a phenomenal work,” Ms. Carbone said. “It’s close to his regular portrait practice, but the whole sheet is executed all the way to the edges. It’s freer.”

In Brooklyn, the museum engaged a watercolorist to demonstrate six of Sargent’s watercolor techniques, including wax resist and scraping, in videos that will be shown on small monitors in the galleries.

As they view these works, visitors will see, as many contemporaries did, that far from stagnating, Sargent was innovating in his watercolors. Yet it’s easy to understand why appreciation of them faded. By 1910, abstract art was budding in Europe and America.

A year after Sargent’s second exhibition at Knoedler, the momentous 1913 Armory Show in New York took place, changing everything in the art world. “His modernism becomes old-fashioned very quickly,” said Ms. Hirshler. Sargent’s reputation declined, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that his oils came back into favor. Now, perhaps, is the time for his watercolors to regain their renown.

THE WORK OF JOSEPH ORFFEO

Thank you to Allison for brining Joseph Orffeo's (Jan. 5, 1926 – March 6, 2013) water colors to my attention. Joseph Orffeo was a New York painter and sculptor and studied at the Art Institute of Buffalo in the 1940’s and 50’s with influence of Robert Noel Blair (American, 1912-2003) and Charles Ephraim Burchfield (American, 1893-1967). Orffeo’s art developed in an atmosphere of experimentation, spanning several decades and through multiple mediums.  He does both landscape and abstract works in A watercolor style which allows the medium to have a strong voice.  Here are a few examples of his work below, and you can see more at http://www.meibohmfinearts.com/exhibition.aspx?ID=52 and http://www.angelfire.com/ny2/orffeoart/page17.html

from the Buffalo News:  March 8, 2013

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Jan. 5, 1926 – March 6, 2013
Joseph Orffeo of Colden, a local artist and sculptor whose work spanned six decades, died Wednesday in Mercy Hospital. He was 87.
During World War II, the Buffalo native served in the Navy Armed Guard and was stationed in the South Pacific. After his military service, he studied at the Art Institute of Buffalo, where he had his first solo show in 1951. Several other solo and juried group shows followed over the years.
In 1971, Mr. Orffeo served as an instructor and head of the Art Department for the Urban Art Project. He was a painting instructor at the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art in 1974.
In 1985, just prior to a full-scale exhibition of his acrylic paintings and drawings, then-Buffalo News Art Critic Richard Huntington described Mr. Orffeo as “one of those rare artists who paints for the pure pleasure of it.”
“He makes his living as a barber, rarely exhibits, and displays his work mainly for friends. An Orffeo exhibition, when it happens, is more likely than not to be at a little-known place,” Huntington added.
Mr. Orffeo is survived by his wife of 42 years, the former Linda Pilger, and three sons, Remy, Jerome and Andres.