William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master
I recently visited an exhibition of a great artist entitled,
“William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master,” at the Phillips Collection, June 4, 2016--September 11, 2016. Some of the
paintings moved me deeply, very deeply.
Staring at a painting for quite some time, I was asked to reveal what I
found so intriguing. I was not at a loss
for words.
After I visited the exhibition for the second time, I felt I
could conduct a tour.
After reading the excellent exhibition
catalog, from which I learned a lot, it became clear to me that I saw Chase's paintings from a different angle. Since I am a poet and a writer, this is
perhaps not that surprising. An artist in a written medium, untrained in
the visual arts, is not intimidated, however, when words become brushstrokes; art, after
all, is art. In my case, I don’t think
what I have to say is particularly profound; the angle of sight, and,
especially, my angle of insight, is, however,
different. Who knows?, the resultant view might prove to be complementary
to the art historian’s way of looking at Chase’s work.
What is it, then, that I see, an aspect of Chase’s work that others seem to have missed? The virtuosity and dazzling technique are undeniable. What I see—feel free to deny it, but, please, only after reading this article—is a painter who was able to show and tell. Dazzling technique is Rossini; technique and profundity combine in Mozart. In my opinion, Chase is closer to Mozart than he is to Rossini.
In this essay, we shall emphasize the symbolism in Chase’s art, an important aspect that, to my knowledge, has received little attention. We will begin our discussion with an analysis of an 1875 painting, “Keying Up”—The Court Jester. We will continue with an analysis of two additional paintings that “say” what this painting "says", albeit with a different emphasis. Each of the two works will be preceded by two “interludes”.
First Main Painting: “Keying Up”—The Court Jester, 1875, oil on canvas, 39.5 x 35 in.
This painting dates from the middle of Chase’s six formative and successful years at the Royal Academy in Munich. The broad brushwork and dark tones of the Munich school were ideal for the internalization of subject matter, especially of portraits; in contrast to the fine brushwork of the Hudson River School, the result is much more subjective.
What is Chase trying to convey with the work? We see a man having to resort to alcohol to give him the courage to perform. His features indicate that he resorts to alcohol frequently; his nose displays the typical erythema of the alcoholic. Notice his right hand—the skin is thin and a vein is bulging. The slight swellings of both knees suggest cartilaginous degeneration and arthritis. This man is not young. He probably never enjoyed being a court jester; he gives the appearance of being dissatisfied not only with his “vocation,” but with life in general.
You have to be intelligent and witty to entertain a sophisticated audience. He must amuse the court, providing them with material that he thinks the royals would like to hear, but he can never be sure. There were no unions for court jesters; if he fails to be amusing, he is in danger of losing his livelihood, which could easily be a death sentence. His life is not easy--We can see in his features signs of chronic anxiety. Notice the upturned mustache, like a painted fake smile. He must “put on a happy face,” in marked contrast to the puffy features and downward gaze of an obviously unhappy man.
At this point, I will allow my imagination to run a little freer. What I say must be consistent with this painting; it need not be the only possible interpretation, however. Understatement and suggestibility, in any case, are two nouns that are not strangers to great art.
I imagine that this man came from a poor family, not an
unreasonable assumption. Either that, or
the fact that he is a dwarf—notice the length of his legs—restricted his
possibilities. Possibly both of these
factors apply. We mentioned that this
little man had to be intelligent and witty to succeed in his precarious line of
work. I imagine had been known for his
wit from an early age, an ability that brought him to the attention, probably by chance, of a
nobleman. The jester was clever enough
to make it all the way to the top—that is, to the presence of the king. He was young at the time; he became a great
success. How the lords and ladies
laughed! His success went to his head;
as a poor man he had hitherto never received such attention.
Now, many years later, the party’s over. He hates what he’s doing and must “key up”
with alcohol before he begins his shtick.
Perhaps a new, younger king, doesn’t find him all that clever. Things, to put it mildly, are not looking up
for him.
As an intelligent and quite possibly, an ambitious man, he
had hoped for something better. I
imagine him thinking of what might have been, had he not been born deformed and
poor. The fact that he has to dress in
ridiculous garb and prance about before people, some of them half his age, is
deeply humiliating. Only one escape is
left for him: numbing his despair with alcohol.
I referred to his routine with the Yiddish word, shtick. Suddenly the background becomes a back stage
of a theater. He is about to begin a
vaudeville routine. He hates himself for
having to earn his keep in this manner.
Chase brilliantly indicates his entrapment with his rendering of the Fool’s bauble, in this case a little dummy that is the spitting image of the jester. Usually the bauble, also known as the marotte, is a scepter with a small carving in the likeness of the performer. Chase takes this a step further: the dummy looks like the jester in his earlier days; the red nose of the alcoholic is, however, already apparent. Having to look at himself at the beginning of his decline and having to joke about it is another source of humiliation for him.
Chase always knew what he wanted to do in life and was extremely successful as an artist, teacher, friend and family man. When this work was completed, Chase, at 26, was well on his way to fulfilling his ambition. I can’t help but think that for Chase, perhaps unconsciously, this great painting conveyed a message dear to his heart: Do what you hate to do and you eventually wind up,--figuratively, that is--as an aging, miserable court jester. This painting is a warning for all those who have sacrificed their soul in order to get by. Like the jester in the painting, you might find out too late and be too stuck in habit to do anything about it. Joseph Campbell said it well: follow your bliss. If not, you will most likely become, if you survive, an old fool.
First Interlude: Tenth Street Studio, ca. 1980-81 and ca. 1910. Oil on canvas, 46.5 x 66 in.
This painting was begun two years after Chase’s sojourn in Munich. Chase has begun to show mastery in interiors as well. In this painting, his famous tenth street studio is depicted.
I am not aware if anyone has written on the symbolism of this piece. What I suspect Chase was trying to convey leaped out at me as soon as I saw the painting.
There are two levels in this painting, one on the “human” level, the upper border of which is formed by the straight lines at the top of the picture frames near the two central figures. These lines are broken as we gaze toward the left, but do continue on a somewhat lower level. The piece of furniture in the corner and the painting behind the seated figure delineate the upper border of this "human" area.
Above the line of vision of the figures is a huge stuffed swan, the neck of which is pointing to the lower realm.
I had the distinct impression that the swan is a memento mori; it looks like it is ready to dive-bomb into the realm below, like a bird of prey in free fall. (Does the angle of the swan’s wings indicate that death is modifying its flight in order to directly strike unawares the ‘victims,” two figures almost directly below, preoccupied with activities on the lower level?) All three figures could see the “death swan” if they looked up, but they are apparently content for the time being to keep to the lower realm.
The viewer, however, sees the whole picture. The swan is, in fact, the most prominent figure in the painting. The swan does not have any of the horrific features of medieval mementos mori; she is pure white, an inevitable blank. Chase, however, was an inveterate optimist. Death is not depicted here as something horrible; it is white, even beautiful, and necessary. The striking figure of the swan is evenly balanced by everything below it—that is, the realm of life below. The viewer sees the whole picture, life and death in harmonious balance.
In Chase’s time, with its improvements in public health, death was beginning to be put out of sight, even out of mind. The figures in the painting could go about their worldly activities for a prolonged period without death putting a premature ending to them. (The life span at the time was about fifty, largely due to the still very high infant mortality rate.) That “prolonged period” is, of course, even longer now.
Yet death will have its due, no matter how unaware we are of it, which seems to me to be the subtle message of this painting.
Second Main Painting: Sunlight and Shadow, 1884, Distemper on canvas, 65.5 x 77.25 in.
This painting affected me most of all.
We see here that Chase is not only a master of portraiture, as in “Keying Up”; not only a master of interiors, as in “Tenth Street Studio”, but has become a veritable master of the play of light and shade as well.
The symbolism here is quite subtle. It is that of a microcosm subsumed into the macrocosm. The artist gave the paining two titles, an indication of the work’s duality. The macrocosm title, the main title, is “Sunlight and Shadow”; the microcosm title is “The Tiff”. Let’s begin with a discussion of the microcosm, the relationship between the man and the woman, presumably husband and wife.
We infer, by the empty chair that has been pushed back, that
the scene had begun with a tête-à-tête breakfast scene. The wife, whose face is scarcely visible, is
lying on a hammock; she is looking at the observer, her angle of vision is 90
degrees apart from her husband’s. She
has her hand to her lower face; she is, or has been, crying. The husband, is looking down, lost in
(perhaps guilty?) thought. There is
trouble in paradise.
This aspect of the painting, however, is hardly noticeable
at first. What is important is the whole
picture, a delightful, well-balanced interplay of sunlight and shadow. If one divides the canvas vertically
through the middle, it splits into a yin side and yang side. The yang, masculine side, is dominated by the
male figure in white; a light-yellow painted wall of the house frames him. The white tablecloth is mostly on the side of
the male figure. On the yin, feminine
side, warmer reds dominate. The pink of
the lady’s dress is framed by the gentle red of the neighbor's house. The man has his left arm on the table
pointing (unbeknownst to its owner) to the pink flowing dress of his wife,
horizontally suspended, the upper edge of which forms a broken line from hand to
dress. It looks as if the husband it
pushing her away. In a way he is—they obviously have had an argument. No doubt about it, she left the breakfast table in tears.
The colossal figure of the male—perhaps a symbolization of
his ego—is balanced by the wife and the figure of the servant in the
background. The philosophy of yinyang,
however, indicates that what is apparently separated is really connected—behind
everything is oneness. That’s exactly the
idea that is conveyed here. Seen from
afar there is no tiff, just harmony and balance. The separation of reality into yin and yang
only occurs in thought; nature, as we see here, knows no duality.
Chase’s little touches amaze me. Notice the blush of red extending from the
man’s pocket, matching the red of the flower in the vase on the table just
below his wife’s head, from which it was probably taken. Chase is telling us what the painting as a
whole tells us: the couple is still very much connected, although at the moment
they don’t know it. There are patches of light, the result of sunlight passing
over and between leaves, on the ground.
Notice there are also a few little patches of light on the tablecloth,
close to the female figure. Light is
being served, as it were—the couple doesn’t notice; their pangs of separation
have temporarily put blinders over their eyes making them unaware of the feast of light before them. But not on ours. We see everything;
they are part of the cosmos like everything else; we see only harmony.
Perhaps the man is an upper-class version of the court jester; I like to think of him in that way. He is dressed to the nines; he is undoubtedly extremely successful. Is he, however, doing what he wants? Is the stress of his position wreaking havoc on the relationship between him and his wife? Is he in danger of becoming alienated like the court jester, in a very different but related way?
Perhaps not. Chase, the inveterate optimist, gave this painting the alternate title, “The Tiff,” not something like “Prelude to a Divorce.” In this idyllic world, an argument, not to mention a tiff, cannot last. The upbeat nature of this painting gives us the impression that the couple, especially the man, will soon see what we see, the whole picture. Once again they will be internally what they are externally, integral parts of a shimmering whole.
Second Interlude: The Lone Fisherman, c. 1892, oil on panel, 15 x 11.5 inches
Chase once told pupils to cut an oblong hole in a card, then look through it as through a camera lens until one finds something interesting,
something different. Move the view
finder to a corner, and there you might have found a worthy subject for a
painting. One then needed to add what he
considered to be essential: a subjective view.
Painting objective depictions of nature was not for him.
One can imagine that he followed his own advice with this painting. The scene is depicted from a very odd angle, more like the view as seen from a crab on one of the rocks in the foreground. Only a child or an artist would be likely to ever look at a scene in this way.
Was Chase merely trying to create an oddity here, something that provided one with an original, crab’s-eye view of the world? As is often the case with Chase, there is much more going on here.
In order to explain what I mean, we need to take a small philosophical diversion. Simone Weil once wrote, “The higher order exists in the lower order only as something very small.” This is true, but only from a human perspective. What she means is this: what we first notice in the night sky are the stars. This is the higher order, which fills a very small volume of space compared to the lower order, the vacuum of space, which is almost infinitely vaster. Next, the higher order, life; the matter which composes living beings is very small compared to the inorganic matter in the universe, the lower order. Similarly, human life is but a fraction of the entire biomass of earth.
We take notice of the higher orders first; they seem more significant to us. We tend to see life even when it's not present. Thus we see faces on Mars, or as some claimed to have seen, the Virgin Mary on a potato chip. Our brains are programmed to see what is human, people, faces.
This portrait almost turns this truth upside-down—The huge rocks in the foreground remind one of the size of celestial bodies, so much greater than the size of a human being. The whitish surface of the sea wall reminds me, in a way, of the path of a comet, shooting into the depths of space. We eventually discover that the path is broken by a member of what it to us the highest order of all.
We don’t notice the fisherman at first. This is precisely the point. At first, he looks like just another rock.
Then we see him--the title of the painting, after all, makes us look for the fisherman. Yet what would this
painting be without this human figure?
Although the volume of space that the fisherman fills is almost
nothing compared to the vastness of the rocks behind him, he is indeed what
gives the picture definition.
Chase goes even further: the man looks like an integral part of the rocky landscape. (Notice how his tawny hat blends in with the yellowish sand on the far shore. This, I think is deliberately symbolic. Perhaps Chase is telling us: we think we’re special, but we’re not. Perhaps he is also telling us: consciousness makes us special after all. Suddenly we realize that without consciousness we wouldn’t be able to see anything, rocks, stars, nor human beings.
Chase’s technique is so dazzlingly apparent, that many have missed the subtle symbolism behind many of his paintings. In 1919, for instance, the critic John Van Dyke wrote this about the artist’s work: “It is perhaps a shortcoming of Chase’s art that he insisted upon merely seeing his subject and not thinking about it.” Good God, Mr. Van Dyke, did you ever get that wrong!
Third Main Painting: Self-Portrait in 4th Avenue Studio, 1915-1916, Oil on Canvas, 52.5 in. x 63.5 in.
Chase said of this painting, completed shortly before his death in 1916 at the age of 66: “One always remains a student; and every new canvas I have had was the rarest opportunity to make that the best I have ever done. I have just made a portrait of myself standing with a blank canvas in front of me. This is to be my masterpiece. The ideal and the aim of it all I believe is that you can remain young all the time to the end, always be a fresh fighter, ambitious to the end.”
A blank canvas for painters corresponds to a blank page for poets. After one finishes a work, no matter how satisfying the result, one is back to square one, an empty surface. This can be terrifying or at least disheartening. Not to the man in this portrait. He is not afraid of anything.
And a masterpiece it is, a perfect reification of his words in a work which goes much further than those words, as we shall see.
Chase is looking directly at the observer, exuding self-confidence. This man is absolutely convinced that he has no reason to lower his gaze before anyone. His face reveals a man who has followed his passion his entire life—and has met with great success. The facial expression recalls Chase’s Munich days, when he mastered the art of portraiture, such as in the Frans Hals-inspired painting, Ready to Ride, which was also displayed in the Phillips Collection exhibition. In the eyes of this self-portrait you see not only self-confidence—a whiff of vanity, and more than a whiff of seriousness are present as well. The expression is, however, not severe—somehow one gets the impression—from the upturned mustache, perhaps—that Chase is smiling under all that facial hair. When I first saw this painting, Frank Sinatra began singing, “My Way”, inside my head.
As in the previous paintings, the symbolism in this final portrait is subtle, understated, but very
much present. From the right side of the painting, light streams through an open window. This is no normal
light. Everything in the vertical oblong
area into which the light is streaming is vaguely drawn, as opposed to the well-defined figures, including Chase himself, on the left side of the
painting. There is a brown strip, the
right-side border of the canvas, which separates the world of light—I would call it
the transcendent world—from the world of humanity. If you look carefully at the faint red lines
streaming in from the window, you will see a hand—the streaks, the fingers,
point directly at the canvas. (This is
no anthropomorphic hand, by the way, Chase painted a century after the
Enlightenment in which an anthropomorphic representation of transcendent
reality was no longer intellectually possible.)
The supra-human hand pointing toward the canvas is nothing short of a modern version of Michelangelo’s painting depicting God giving life to Adam in the Sistine Chapel. Adam’s inanimate hand has become a blank canvas. It is up to the artist to bring the world to life onto the canvas. The artist, unlike Adam, is, however, unaware of the hand behind the canvas. He is separated from the world of light by the blank canvas. Direct communication is no longer possible. God—spirit or whatever you like to call it—is, however, within him. The artist alone will be able to recreate creation, just what the hand is beckoning him to do, without his ever being aware of its presence.
Chase was an expert in harmonizing and balancing colors, so that the result is pleasing to the eye. But the use of colors here is very symbolic as well. The hand seems to be pointing directly at the red splotch of paint on the palette. Notice also that there is a thin reddish vertical line descending from the artist's right eye. The color of creation depicted in this painting is red. The red line below the artist’s eye tells us that the eye is the window to the soul. The red on the palette reveals what is inside the house, as it were. Inside will soon become outside, as the red is transferred to the canvas after they pass through the alembics of the artist's mind.
This painting is not only a subjective painting of an artist but an objective one as well—a very apt symbolization of the creative process.
Conclusion
I chose the paintings which I classified as “three main paintings”, not because I felt that they were the best in his oeuvre—although they certainly are great paintings. I chose them because they fit together like the panels of a medieval altar. The left panel consists of “Keying Up”—we see here a wretch who was never able to be true to himself. On the right we have a close-up of the male figure in “Sunlight and Shadow”—a man who will not experience poverty, but is in danger of wasting his unique opportunities due to poverty of soul, initial symptoms of which are revealed by his downcast gaze. In the center is this portrait of Chase informing everyone at the altar: “Do not waste your life. Be true to yourself!"
Few will see exactly what I see in these paintings, but the
ability to evoke various responses is one of the beauties of great art. In some of Chase's best work, five examples
of which have been presented here, we have emphasized the symbolism, the
messages Chase, whether consciously or unconsciously, conveys. In the final self-portrait, however, Chase himself
becomes the message: Do what you really want to do. Find pleasure in what you
do and work as hard as you can. Follow your
bliss. This is your only chance! Like me, develop a good eye for the world. Like me, also develop a good I for living in it. You might have less money. You might have less fame. You will face many challenges. But look at me. I succeeded.
Why can’t you?
Sounds like Chase is telling us to become poets, in the
broadest sense of that word. And, indeed, he is.
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