For vincent van gogh the figure of the sower represents

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Chapter 3

Line

Learning Objectives

3.1 Distinguish among outline, contour, and implied line.

3.2 Describe the different qualities that lines might possess.

One of the most fundamental elements of nature is line. Indeed, lines permeate the universe, a fact that informs almost all the work of London-born painter Matthew Ritchie. Describing his painting No Sign of the World (Fig. 3-1), he explains: “I use the symbol of the straight line a lot in my drawings and paintings. It usually rep- resents a kind of wound, or a direction. The curved line is like a linking gesture that joins things. But the straight line is usually more like an arrow, or rein, or a kind of rupture.” From the bottom of No Sign of the World, vi- olet straight lines shoot up into a field of what appear to be broken sticks and branches. Above the horizon line, across the sky, looping lines of this same violet color appear to gather these fragments into circular fields of energy. His work begins with drawings that he then scans into a computer. In that environment, he can resize and reshape them, make them three- dimensional, take them apart, combine them with other drawings, and otherwise transform them. “From the very start, I’ve been working with digital tech- nology,” Ritchie says. “When you make something digital you make it out of little dots. And you can make lines out of particles, but they’re really just bits. . . . These are the classic forms of dimensionality—the point, the line, the solid—and then you add time and you’ve got the universe.” Ritchie’s project is just that ambitious and vast. He seeks to represent the entire universe and

the structures of knowledge and belief through which we seek to understand it. In No Sign of the World, it is as if we are at the dawn of creation, at the scene of some original “Big Bang”—as if the world is about to be born but there is no sign of it yet.

Varieties of Line What are the differences between outline, contour, and implied line?

To draw a line, you move the point of your pencil across paper. To follow a line, your eye moves as well. Lines seem to possess direction—they can rise or fall, head off to the left or to the right, disappear in the distance. Lines can divide one thing from an- other, or they can connect things. They can be thick or thin, long or short, smooth or agitated. Lines also re- flect movement in nature. The patterns of animal and human movement across the landscape are traced in paths and roadways. The flow of water from moun- taintop to sea follows the lines etched in the land- scape by streams and rivers. Lines, in fact, sometimes play a major role in human history, delineating city limits, county lines, and state and national borders— sometimes contested.

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Outline and Contour Line An important feature of line is that it indicates the edge of a two-dimensional (flat) shape or a three-dimensional form. A shape can be indicated by means of an outline, as in Yoshitomo Nara’s Dead Flower (Fig. 3-2). In Nara’s painting, heavy black outlines delineate both the little girl and the light bulb. This outline style is purpose- fully juvenile, evoking the Japanese love for kawaii, or “cuteness.” But, of course, Nara lends his “cute” little girl a kind of menacing punk-rock persona, even if the extent of her violent behavior is limited to cutting off a flower at its stem. The Japanese artist and art histo- rian Takashi Murakami has labeled the style of work reflected in Nara’s demonic little girls as “Superflat,” an insistence on two-dimensional forms that he sees as a defining characteristic of Japanese culture from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese prints to present-day animation (anime) and comic books (manga).

Where outlines tend to emphasize the flatness of a shape, contour lines form the outer edge of a three- dimensional shape and suggest its volume, its

Fig. 3-1 Matthew Ritchie, No Sign of the World, 2004. Oil and marker on canvas, 8 ft. 3 in. × 12 ft. 10 in. © Matthew Ritchie, Image Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Fig. 3-2 Yoshitomo Nara, Dead Flower, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 391⁄4 × 391⁄4 in. © Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

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50 Part 2 The Formal Elements and Their Design

recession or projection in space. The contour lines in Ellsworth Kelly’s Brier (Fig. 3-3) create the illusion of leaves occupying real space. Lines around the outside of the leaves define the limits of our vision—what we can see of the form from our point of view. As these lines cross each other, or seem to fold and turn, it is as if each line surrounds and establishes each leaf’s posi- tion in space.

Implied Line If we point our finger at something, we visually “follow” the line between our fingertip and the object in question. This is an implied line, a line where no continuous mark connects one point to another, but where the connec- tion is nonetheless visually suggested. One of the most important kinds of implied line is a function of line of sight, the direction the figures in a given composition are looking. In his Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin (Fig. 3-4), Titian ties together the three separate horizon- tal areas of the piece—God the Father above, the Virgin

Mary in the middle, and the Apostles below—by implied lines that create simple, interlocking, symmetrical trian- gles (Fig. 3-5) that serve to unify the worlds of the divine and the mortal.

Implied line can also serve to create a sense of di- rectional movement and force, as in Calvary, a painting by African artist Chéri Samba (Fig. 3-6). Samba began his career before he was 20, working as a signboard painter and newspaper cartoonist in Kinshasa, the cap- ital of Zaire. With their bold shapes and captions (in French and Langala, Zaire’s official language), they are, in essence, large-scale political cartoons. Calvary places the artist in the position of Christ, not on the cross but splayed out on the ground, a martyr. He is identified as “le peintre,” the painter, on the back of his shirt. He lies prostrate before “the house of painting,” so identified over the doorway. He is being beaten by three soldiers, identified on the back of one as agents of the Popular Church of Zaire. The caption at the top left reads: “The Calvary of a painter in a country where the rights of man are practically nonexistent.” Here, implied lines arc

Fig. 3-3 Ellsworth Kelly, Brier, 1961. Black ink on wove paper, 221⁄2 × 281⁄2 in. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, CT. Gift of Mr. Samuel Wagstaff in memory of Elva McCormick, 1980.7. © Ellsworth Kelly, all rights reserved.

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Fig. 3-4 Titian, Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin, ca. 1516–18. Oil on wood, 22 ft. 6 in. × 11 ft. 10 in. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. © 2015. Photo Scala, Florence.

Fig. 3-5 Line analysis of Titian, Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin, ca. 1516–18. © 2015. Photo Scala, Florence.

Fig. 3-6 Chéri Samba, Calvary, 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 35 × 455⁄8 in. Photo courtesy of Annina Nosei Gallery, New York. © Chéri Samba.

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52 Part 2 The Formal Elements and Their Design

over the artist—the imminence of the downward thrust of the soldiers’ whips—and the political power of the image rests in the visual anticipation of terror that these implied lines convey.

Qualities of Line What are the different qualities that lines might possess?

Line delineates shape and form by means of outline and contour line. Implied lines create a sense of enclosure and connection as well as movement and direction. But line also possesses certain intellectual, emotional, and expressive qualities.

No one has ever employed line with more con- sistent expressive force than the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn. Consider, for instance,

the kinds of effects he achieved in The Three Crosses (Fig. 3-7). As one’s eye moves from the center ground beneath Christ on the cross, his line becomes denser and denser, except directly above the cross where line almost disappears altogether, the source, one can only presume, of divine light. Otherwise, Rembrandt’s lines seem to envelop the scene, shrouding it in a darkness that moves in upon the crucified Christ like a curtain closing upon a play or a storm descending upon a land- scape, and his line becomes more charged emotionally as it becomes denser and darker.

Expressive Qualities of Line Line, in other words, can express emotion, the feelings of the artist. Such lines are said to be expressive. Of the swirling turmoil of line that makes up The Starry Night (Fig. 3-8), the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh would

Fig. 3-7 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Crosses, 1653. Etching, 151⁄4 × 173⁄4 in. 1842,0806.139. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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write to his brother, Theo, “Is it not emotion, the sincerity of one’s feeling for nature, that draws us?” Van Gogh’s paintings are, for many, some of the most personally ex- pressive in the history of art. His use of line is loose and free, so much so that it seems almost out of control. He builds his paint up in thick, bold strokes, so that they come to possess a certain “body” of their own—an al- most sculptural materiality known as impasto. So con- sistent is he in his application of paint that his style has become essentially autographic: Like a signature, it iden- tifies the artist himself, his deeply anguished and cre- ative genius (see The Creative Process, pp. 54–55).

During the 15 months just before The Starry Night was painted, while he was living in the southern French town of Arles, van Gogh produced a truly amazing quantity of work: 200 paintings, more than 100 drawings and watercolors, and roughly 200 letters, mostly writ- ten to his brother, Theo. Many of these letters help us understand the expressive energies released in this cre- ative outburst. In December 1888, van Gogh’s personal

turmoil reached a fever pitch when he sliced off a section of his earlobe and presented it to an Arlesian prostitute as a present. After a brief stay at an Arles hospital, he was released, but by the end of January, the city received a petition signed by 30 townspeople demanding his committal. In early May, he entered a mental hospital in Saint-Rémy, and there he painted The Starry Night. In this work, life and death—the town and the heavens— swirl as if in a fury of emotion, and they are connected by both the church spire and the swaying cypress, a tree traditionally used to mark graves in southern France and Italy. “My paintings are almost a cry of anguish,” van Gogh wrote. On July 27, 1890, a little over a year after The Starry Night was painted, the artist shot himself in the chest. He died two days later, at the age of 37.

Sol LeWitt employs a line that is equally auto- graphic, recognizably his own, but one that reveals to us a personality very different from van Gogh’s. LeWitt’s line is precise, controlled, mathematically rigorous, log- ical, and rationally organized, where van Gogh’s line is

Fig. 3-8 Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 × 361⁄4 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 472.1941. © 2015 Digital image, Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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54 Part 2 The Formal Elements and Their Design

The Creative Process

From Painting to Drawing: Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower

We know more about the genesis and development of The

Sower than of almost all of Vincent van Gogh’s other paint-

ings, and we can follow the work’s progress in some detail.

There are four different descriptions of it in his letters, the first on

June 17, 1888, in a letter to the Australian painter John Russell

(Fig. 3-9) that includes a preliminary sketch of his idea. “Am

working at a Sower,” van Gogh writes in the letter, “the great

field all violet the sky & sun very yellow. It is a hard subject

to treat.”

The diff iculties he was facing in the painting were

numerous, having particularly to do with a color prob-

lem. As he wrote in a letter to the French painter Émile

Bernard on the very next day, June 18,

at sunset van Gogh was faced with a

moment when the “excessive” contrast

between the yel low sun and the v io let

shadows on the f ie ld would necessar-

i ly “ irr i tate” the beholder ’s eye. He had

to be true to that contrast and yet find a

way to soften it. For approximately eight

days he worked on the painting. First, he

tried making the sower’s trousers white

in an effort to create a place in the paint-

ing that would “allow the eye to rest and

distract it.” That strategy apparently fail-

ing, he tried modifying the yellow and vi-

olet areas of the painting. On June 26,

he wrote to his brother, Theo: “Yesterday

and today I worked on the sower, which is

completely recast. The sky is yellow and

green, the ground violet and orange.” This

plan succeeded (Fig. 3-10). Each area of

the painting now contained color that con-

nected it to the opposite area, green to vi-

olet and orange to yellow.

The figure of the sower was, for van

Gogh, the symbol of his own “longing for

the infinite,” as he wrote to Bernard, and

having finished the painting, he remained,

in August, still obsessed with the image.

“The idea of the Sower continues to haunt

me all the time,” he wrote to Theo. In fact,

he had begun to think of the finished paint-

ing as a study that was itself a prelimi-

nary work leading to a drawing (Fig. 3-11).

“Now the harvest, the Garden, the Sower . . .

are sketches after painted studies. I think all

these ideas are good,” he wrote to Theo on

August 8, “but the painted studies lack clear-

ness of touch. That is [the] reason why I felt it

necessary to draw them.”

Fig. 3-9 Vincent van Gogh, Letter to John Peter Russell, June 17, 1888. Ink on laid paper, 8 × 101⁄4 in. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978.2514.18. © Solomon R. Guggen- heim Foundation, New York. Photo by Robert E. Mates.

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In the drawing, sun, wheat, and the sower

himself are enlarged, made more monumen-

tal. The house and tree on the left have been

eliminated, causing us to focus more on the

sower himself, whose stride is now wider and

who seems more intent on his task. But it is the

clarity of van Gogh’s line that is especially aston-

ishing. Here we have a sort of anthology of line

types: short and long, curved and straight, wide

and narrow. Lines of each type seem to group

themselves into bundles of five or ten, and each

bundle seems to possess its own direction and

flow, creating a sense of the tilled field’s uneven

but regular furrows. It is as if, wanting to repre-

sent his longing for the infinite as it is contained

in the moment of the genesis of life, sowing the

field, van Gogh himself returns to the most fun-

damental element in art—line itself.

Fig. 3-10 Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888. Oil on canvas, 251⁄4 × 313⁄4 in. Signed, lower left: Vincent.

Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.

Fig. 3-11 Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888. Drawing. Pencil, reed pen, and brown and black ink on wove paper, 95⁄8 × 121⁄2 in. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Courtesy of Vincent van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam.

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56 Part 2 The Formal Elements and Their Design

imprecise, emotionally charged, and almost chaotic. One seems a product of the mind, the other of the heart. And while van Gogh’s line is produced by his own hand, LeWitt’s often is not.

LeWitt’s works are often generated by museum staff according to LeWitt’s instructions. Illustrated here is Wall Drawing No. 681 C (Fig. 3-12), along with two photo- graphs of the work’s installation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1993, in this instance by his own studio assistants (Fig. 3-13). If a museum “owns” a LeWitt, it does not own the actual wall drawing but only the instructions on how to make it. Since LeWitt often writes his instructions so that the staff executing the drawing must make their own decisions about the placement and arrangement of the lines, the work has a unique appearance each time that a museum or gallery produces it.

LeWitt’s drawings usually echo the geometry of the room’s architecture, lending the work a sense of math- ematical precision and regularity. But it is probably the grid, the pattern of vertical and horizontal lines crossing one another to make squares, that most characteristically dominates compositions of this variety. The grid’s geo- metric regularity lends a sense of order and unity to any composition. Pat Steir’s The Brueghel Series: A Vanitas of Style (Fig. 3-14) is a case in point. The painting is based on a seventeenth-century still-life painting by Jan Brueghel

Fig. 3-12 Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 681 C, A wall divided vertically into four equal squares separated and bordered by black bands. Within each square, bands in one of four directions, each with color ink washes superimposed, 1993. Colored ink washes, image: 10 × 37 ft. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, Gift of Dorothy Vogel and Herbert Vogel, Trustees, 1993.41.1. Photo © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © 2015 LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. 3-13 Installation of Wall Drawing No. 681 C, August 25, 1993. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Fig. 3-14 Pat Steir, The Brueghel Series: A Vanitas of Style, 1983–84. Oil on canvas, 64 panels, each 261⁄2 × 21 in. Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read.

Fig. 3-15 Jan Brueghel the Elder, Flowers in a Blue Vase, 1599. Oil on oakwood, 26 × 197⁄8 in. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. akg-image/Erich Lessing.

the Elder called Flowers in a Blue Vase (Fig. 3-15). Brueghel’s is an example of a vanitas painting—that is, a reminder that the pleasurable things in life inevitably fade, that the material world is not as long-lived as the spiritual, and, therefore, that the spiritual should com- mand our attention. But the material world is represented in Steir’s painting not so much by the standard elements of vanitas painting—the fading flowers, for instance—but by painting itself. Steir’s Brueghel Series is a history of the styles of art. The artist worked for two years to orga- nize her study of style into a series of 64 separate panels, each 26½ × 21 inches. The final composition is approxi- mately 20 feet high. At the top center, one finds an almost perfect reproduction of the original painting by Brueghel. Two panels to the right is a painting in the style of American Abstract Expressionist painter Franz

Kline. Jackson Pollock’s famous “drip” style is rep- resented in the first panel on the left of the third row. What holds together this variety of styles is the grid, which seems to contain and control them all, as if ex- ercising some sort of rational authority over them. The grid organizes random elements into a coherent system, imposing a sense of logic where none necessarily exists. Steir’s history lesson demonstrates that styles come and go, soon fading away only to be replaced by the next. Her painting thus suggests that the pleasures of style are short-lived, even if the pleasures of art might continue on, even without us.

In Steir ’s Brueghel Series some styles are carefully rendered and controlled, others are more loose and free-form—what we call gestural. Often artists use both gestural and controlled lines in the same work.