howardpark/art history

Goya made this picture in the last years of his life and painted it directly onto a wall of his own house (his dining room, in fact). Part of a series called the Black Paintings, it is based on a scene from Greek mythology. The titan Saturn (Greek: Kronos), upon hearing a prophecy that he will be overthrown by one of his children, determines to eat them all. Jupiter (Greek: Zeus) escapes and later returns to take revenge for his cannibalized siblings; thus the attempt to circumvent fate provides the impetus for its fulfillment. Why would Goya put something so horrific (not to mention unappetizing) in his dining room?

One explanation lies in the other deity with which Saturn was traditionally conflated--Chronos, the god of time. Perhaps Goya, then in his seventies, wanted to reflect on the cruelty of time, which destroys life so relentlessly and indiscriminately. Another explanation is that the painting is an allegory of the civil wars which raged across Spain in the early 1800's and which became an obsession for Goya. This interpretation has particular relevance today. Napoleon, in command of the most powerful military machine the world had ever seen, invaded Spain on the pretext of "liberating" it. He had expected to be greeted with flowers after a quick victory on the field of battle. Instead he faced an unending stream of insurgents and "terrorists," against which his mighty army was powerless. In the end, he succeeded only in splitting the country into factions that spent four decades slaughtering each other.

To me, the picture has a more basic meaning. It represents the damage that current generations are doing to future ones without even thinking. The vacant stare in Saturn's eyes reminds me of the heedlessness with which we gorge ourselves on the luxuries of modern life, regardless of the cost to our children. Whether it means racking up huge debts that they will have to pay, or bankrupting the government that they will need to protect them, or destroying the planet that they will have to live on, we seem to be concerned only with satisfying our own monstrous appetites.

(The painting is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.)

This type of painting has fascinated me ever since I first started thinking about art. It's not one of those pictures of "nothing," inasmuch as we can discern the earth and the sky, but it's not really a picture of "something" either, unless pure, inscrutable form counts as something. The conflict between something and nothing, between representation and abstraction, is what makes it so fun to look at. It's also an elegant way to resolve two competing insights: the knowledge that a painting is ultimately nothing more than meaningless daubs of pigment on a surface, and the recognition that the human mind will nevertheless attempt to find meaning in any image.

(The painting is Yves Tanguy's Multiplication of the Arcs.)

Compare the realism of the sculpture above with that of the painting below. Notice how palpably Laocoön seems to be straining and struggling, whereas the best thing you can say about baby Jesus is that he looks a bit like Jackie Gleason. Now consider that the sculpture was made 14 centuries before the painting (and don't go thinking that I picked some no-name amateur for this comparison--Giotto is regarded by many as the greatest painter of his generation). That, in a nutshell, is why classical culture has long been revered as the unsurpassable peak of human achievement. It took Europe over a millennium to get back to where the Greeks and Romans had been, and much of what they accomplished has never been excelled by anyone, anywhere. Even we, who take so much pride in our modern Western civilization and feel it our right--our duty, even--to impose it on the rest of the world, have done scarcely anything to distinguish ourselves. In art, in religion, in ethics, in beauty, in decency, in love, in human happiness--in everything except science and technology, we have yet to outdo our forebears of 2,000 years ago.


(The sculpture is Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus's Laocoön and His Sons. The painting is Giotto di Bondone's Madonna in Glory.)

"Though they go mad they shall be sane / Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again" (Dylan Thomas, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion")


Although H.M.S. Temeraire was instrumental in the British victory at Trafalgar, she did not enjoy a glorious retirement. Instead she was towed upriver to a breaker's yard and torn up for scrap. The age of sail was coming to an end, and the age of steam was beginning to allow industrialized peoples to go anywhere, anytime, regardless of wind or current. Looking at this scene, with the sun fading in the background and the ugly, efficient steamer belching poison in the foreground, I can't help reflecting on the price we have paid for "progress."

(The painting is J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire.)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted two versions of the Tower of Babel: it was a subject he found particularly meaningful. Like the Bible story, the paintings are about hubris. Unlike the Bible story, his towers are not fundamentally sound structures destroyed by the decree of a jealous god. Instead, they are depicted as ill-planned and crumbling under their own weight. They have also been transposed to the Netherlands, which at that time was occupied by the Habsburg army of Philip II. Based on this fact, and the resemblance of the towers to the Roman Colosseum, they have often been interpreted as a parable about the precariousness of an oppressive military empire.

Whenever I see this painting, I think of the struggle that all Modern painters tried to resolve between representation and abstraction. Some attempted to find a happy medium, but Miró went for a clash of extremes. Parts of this picture, for instance the animals, are as simple an act of representation as a child's drawing, while others are purely graphic abstraction. It doesn't seem that they could both fit into one painting, but Miró makes it look perfectly natural.

(The painting is Joan Miró's The Table.)