Vilko Gecan – The Cynic

“Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist.”

(George Carlin)

Vilko Gecan, The Cynic (Cinik), 1921

Painting “The Cynic” is a self-portrait with an interesting and thought-provoking title. Gecan was twenty-seven years old when he painted it and yet the title doesn’t match the ardour of youth, the optimism and a sense of endless possibilities that we might usually tie with that phase of life. The man in the painting looks tired, old and worn-out. His hair, little of what is left, is combed in a strange way, adding to his dishelved appearance. The look on his face is close to a grimace; we can read the turmoil on his face. His lips are sealed tight; he is not the type who would spill his heart out to a stranger in a bar, he is closed-off from the space around him and yet, despite the wall of silence and moodiness he had built, we can sense that this man with an elegant bow-tie is a fragile, sickly and deeply lonely individual. His twisted fingers bring to mind the way Viennese Expressionists such as Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl would paint the hand. The pose in which he is sitting at the table is contorted and strange as well, certainly looks uncomfortable and agitated. Carefully crafted sense of depth in the painting is reminiscent of many Expressionist paintings and films. You can see from the sketch bellow how Gecan built the sense of depth. The figure of the Cynic takes up most of the canvas and the space around him feels crammed and too small. A feeling of uncertainty and dread hang in the air.

The heavy and muted earthy tones are pulling us down into the abyss along with the Cynic who is cynically reading his newspapers and sitting in his armchair. The manner in which the space around him is painted certainly speaks of Gecan’s knowledge of Cezanne’s art and Cubism, but the overall mood and energy speaks of other, more disturbing currents in art at the time; expressionism, which sought to portray the inner world of the sitter. Gecan’s self-portrait and the space in which he is seated speak volumes about the state of his mind. Furthermore, the newspapers he is reading are called “Der Sturm” and were known for promoting Expressionist art. “The Cynic” is Gecan’s best work and one of the best examples of the Expressionism in Croatian art.

Gecan was, unfortunately, drafted in the First World War, captured in July 1915 and spent the rest of the war in captivity in Sicily. After the war, in 1919, he moved to Prague with his fellow-artist and life-long friend Milivoj Uzelac. Two other artists had been living and working there since the war had started; Vladimir Varlaj and Marijan Trepša. The four artists; Gecan, Uzelac, Varlaj and Trepša make the “Group of Four”; a group of artists who worked in Prague at the same time and returned to Croatia soon after the war. Each artist soaked in the artistic influences in his own way and upon returning home they were a wind of change for the Croatian art scene. In 1921 Gecan held his first solo art exhibition in Zagreb, and in 1922 he already, restless and eager for experiences, found himself in Berlin.

Gecan was described by people who knew him as a gentle, slightly aloof, tidy and elegant man so his perception and portrayal of himself as a cynic may imply less a personality trait and more an acquired realisation of the way the world and society is. This was the man who had experienced the horrors of war and the following disillusionment with everything he believed in, it brings to mind the well-known saying of George Carlin: “Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist.” And it also makes me think of Georg Grosz’s portrayal of the world and that of other Neue Sachlichkeit painters. Gecan’s slightly deformed figure and face are perhaps a mirror to the degeneracy of the society around him. Nothing is the same for him. Having once tastes the bitter taste of disappointment on his tongue he cannot go back to painting idyllic landscapes and classical beauty.

Vilko Gecan, The Cynic, sketch from the Zenit magazine

A sketch for this painting appeared in the avant-garde Dadaist magazine called “Zenit” which was published in Zagreb (1921-1924) and then in Belgrade (1924-1926). The magazine promoted the newest and most rebellious art from all over Europe as well as a concept of the Balkan’s barbaric-genius painter. They emphasised the power of dreams, spontaneity, and subconciousness, in contrast to the cold and rational academic art.

Art in John Fowles’s The Collector

“I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From what I want to be.”

(John Fowles, The Collector)

Berthe Morisot, Child With A Red Apron, 1886

John Fowles’ debut novel “The Collector” is one of the most fascinating novels I’ve read recently and it will probably become one of my all time favourites as well because the theme is so fascinating. It’s about a lonely, alienated individual called Frederick who collects butterflies and one day “collects” a girl called Miranda, a pretty twenty year old art student that he had spent weeks admiring from afar. I wrote a book review of it here, but today I would like to focus on the theme of art in the novel because it’s not so often that art gets mentioned in fiction. Art is bound to come up in the conversation with Frederick because Miranda is an art student in the dawn of the sixties so it’s specially interesting to hear her thoughts on the then contemporary art world. After Frederick kidnaps her, he keeps her in his basement and they spend time together and start to get to know each other. On one of such occasions, Miranda draws a portrait of him:

“One day about then she did a picture of me, like returned the compliment. I had to sit in a chair and look at the corner of the room. After half an hour she tore up the drawing before I could stop her. (She often tore up. Artistic temperament, I suppose.) I’d have liked it, I said. But she didn’t even reply to that, she just said, don’t move. From time to time she talked. Mostly personal remarks. “You’re very difficult to get. You’re so featureless. Everything’s nondescript. I’m thinking of you as an object, not as a person.” Later she said, “You’re not ugly, but your face has all sorts of ugly habits. Your underlip is worst. It betrays you.” I looked in the mirror upstairs, but I couldn’t see what she meant.”

Paul Cezanne, Four Apples, 1881

Another time, Miranda made still life studies of fruits in a bowl. I think this scene shows Miranda’s artistic temperament and how Frederick never has a clue about anything, he is so inferior to her in every sense that Miranda cannot help but laugh. For example, he thinks the best painting is the one that is most accurate, most realistic, he doesn’t understand why someone paints something in a free-spirited, colourful way:

“Another day she drew a bowl of fruit. She drew them about ten times, and then she pinned them all up on the screen and asked me to pick the best. I said they were all beautiful but she insisted so I plumped for one. “That’s the worst,” she said. “That’s a clever little art student’s picture.” She said, “One of them is good. I know it is good. It is worth all the rest a hundred times over. If you can pick it in three guesses you can have it for nothing when I go. If I go. If you don’t, you must give me ten guineas for it.” Well, ignoring her dig I had three guesses, they were all wrong. The one that was so good only looked half-finished to me, you could hardly tell what the fruit were and it was all lop-sided. “There I’m just on the threshold of saying something about the fruit. I don’t actually say it, but you get the idea that I might. Do you feel that?” I said I didn’t actually. She went and got a book of pictures by Cezanne. “There,” she said, pointing to a coloured one of a plate of apples. “He’s not only saying everything there is about the apples, but everything about all apples and all form and colour.” I take your word for it, I said. All your pictures are nice, I said. She just looked at me. “Ferdinand,” she said. “They should have called you Caliban.”

Syd Barrett with his painting, spring 1964

And I chose this last quote because it shows Miranda’s view on art at the time, her disdain for the avant-garde approach to art. This picture of Syd Barrett above may seem out of place because the post is not about him or the Pink Floyd, but the reason I decided to include it is because he was an art student in the early sixties. When I read The Collector and thought about Miranda, I also thought about the real people and the real art scene from that time. Miranda the book character was probably a few years older, but they could have crossed paths in London. Syd’s generation praise imagination and had a child-like vision of things and I love that approach to art; experimental and fun, not stuffy and rigid and full of rules. I also love how Miranda points out that the bottom line is that either you can paint or you can’t, and I agree:

“I felt our whole age was a hoax, a sham. The way people talk and talk about tachism and cubism and this ism and that ism and all the long words they use — great smeary clots of words and phrases. All to hide the fact that either you can paint or you can’t. I want to paint like Berthe Morisot, I don’t mean with her colours or forms or anything physical, but with her simplicity and light. I don’t want to be clever or great or “significant” or given all that clumsy masculine analysis. I want to paint sunlight on children’s faces, or flowers in a hedge or a street after April rain. The essences. Not the things themselves. Swimmings of light on the smallest things. Or am I being sentimental? Depressed. I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From what I want to be.“

Boris Grigoriev – The Model

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

(Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch)

Boris Grigoriev, The Model, 1926

I discovered this gem of a painting a few days ago and I knew it was something special that I needed to devote a post to. This painting by the Russian painter Boris Grigoriev is titled simply “The Model”, but if you really take a look at the girl who is posing for the artist, you can see how much uniqueness and character there is to her. In particular it is her face expression that I just cannot get out of my mind! Her round doll-like face is framed with a stylish black hat and thick, short yellow hair which looks like it was made of straw. Her blushing cheeks are like two bright, blooming red poppies, and that vibrant vivacious red colour matched that of her shirt. Grigoriev uses a limited colour palette, but the contrasts and shades make this artwork exquisite. The girl’s slightly pointed little nose, lips pressed together and that gaze of her blue eyes – oh that gaze! – speak so much of her character and feelings. Her gaze shows defiance and rebellion, but the blushing cheeks reveal a lot too. It seems that she is secretly embarrassed but decided to hide her gentler emotions under the coat of arrogance and toughness. Her blue eyes are large and doll-like, her gaze protruding and her pouting lips pressed together in silence. It certainly makes me wonder of what went on between the painter and the girl during the time she posed for him. Perhaps he joked about something and she didn’t find it funny, or perhaps he asked her to pose in a way she didn’t particularly wanted to. I just love the contrast of the girlish and womanly elements in her; her face is round and her cheeks red as if she were a doll, she is sulking and pouting like a little girl who didn’t get something she wanted, and yet her figure is feminine and not childlike.

Boris Grigoriev was born in Moscow in 1886. His father was a banker, and his mother had a fondness for literature, music and art, which may have influenced the young Grigoriev as well. A fellow Russian artist of the time, Alexandre Benois, said of Grigoriev “How can one not call his quick but perceptive manner wonderful? How can one fail to admire the courage of his colourful contrasts, which are always harmonious, and with all the beautiful and bold combinations?” Looking at this painting, we can see how true Benois’ words are. Grigoriev uses limited colours, earthy, coppery, sensuous shades, but the overall result is a harmony of colour contrasts that is at once vibrant and soothing to the eyes. Grigoriev traveled a lot, and from 1921 to 1926 he spent his summers in Brittany where he, like many before him, enjoyed in the treasures of archaic villages, fashion and customs of the locals, the world still untouched by the modernity.

Since “The Model” was painted in 1926, perhaps Grigoriev painted it whilst in Brittany. Though maybe she is too modern for Brittany, maybe she is the child of Parisian boulevards. Regardless of whether he painted poor peasants in Russian or hookers in Marseilles, Grigoriev never romanticised his models; his approach was sincere and unique, he preferred to capture their characters and realness of their faces. The poppy-cheeked girl here is pretty, but she doesn’t seem the least bit idolised. Even from an early age Grigoriev saw himself as a loner and an individual. He chose not to be strongly connected to a specific art movement, but walk his own path and explore. Still, he cited the works of Van Gogh, Cézanne and André Derain as his inspiration, and indeed, in “The Model” I can see how Cézanne might have been his inspiration. The girl’s limbs, her legs particularly, look somehow geometrical, as if she were a wooden doll. As much as the shapes here are reminiscent of Cézanne, the warm, rich colours and the mood are sensuous and lively.

To connect this post with the quote I cited in the beginning, I have to say that this painting is something that I will not forget soon, the girl’s lovely, sulking, rosy-cheeked face is something that will linger in my mind and stay there forever.

Paul Cézanne and Katherine Mansfield: I, myself, am changing into an apple, too

Paul Cézanne was one of those painters who are here to show us that sometimes what is painted is less important than how something is painted. Cézanne is our birthday boy today, he was born on this day in 1839.

Paul Cezanne, Four Apples, 1881

The simple, yet striking composition you see above with four apples, ripe and idle, gracing the table, is typical for Cézanne. Unlike some Dutch Baroque master who wanted to show his skill in painting with perfect accuracy or displaying wealth symbolised by flowers and fruit, Cézanne’s motifs were of an entirely different nature. He used every motif to explore colours and shapes. Here we see four apples in different sizes and colours, we see the brushstrokes that created them but we can also feel how real and touchable they are, their red and green colours oozing life. They are placed on a grey surface, the edges of which are left unfinished, exposing the canvas and the thick brushstrokes of grey paint, leaving visible this pulsating line which visually divides the painting or “the illusion” and the bare canvas or “the reality”.

And now a small digression, since the motif of apples is present here, I will use the opportunity to share with you a very interesting fragment from a letter by Katherine Mansfield to her painter-friend Dorothy Brett.

“What can one do, faced with this wonderful tumble of round bright fruits, but gather them and play with them—and become them, as it were. When I pass the apple stalls I cannot help stopping and staring until I feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple, too—and that at any moment I may produce an apple, miraculously, out of my own being like the conjurer produces the egg. When you paint apples do you feel that your breasts and your knees become apples, too? Or do you think this is the greatest nonsense. I don’t. I am sure it is not. When I write about ducks I swear that I am a white duck with a round eye, floating in a pond fringed with yellow blobs and taking an occasional dart at the other duck with the round eye, which floats upside down beneath me. (…) There follows the moment when you are more duck, more apple or more Natasha than any of these objects could ever possibly be, and so you create them anew.”

What a beautiful, delightful and psychedelic idea; to imagine yourself turning into an apple, becoming the apple that you see in front of you!? But let’s get back to Cézanne. What he wanted to achieve was the illusion of depth without sacrificing the luminosity of colours. In a way, his ambivalence towards the art of proper drawing opened a gateway for many artists who followed. His brushstrokes, palette of colours and relentless interest in portraying similar scenes make Cézanne’s paintings highly recognisable. He was often repetitive in the choice of subjects and he was mainly concentrated on still lives and numerous landscapes with Mount Sainte-Victorie, but he also painted many interesting portraits of his family and imaginary figures. Unlike his contemporaries, the young bohemian artists who arrived to Paris to struggle and thrive in creating their art, Cézanne was from a well-off family and later even inherited a little fortune which allowed him to entirely devote his life to art, without any sacrifices, and to really explore his artistic visions without worrying about pleasing the possible buyers or earning for bread.