The Phillips Collection: Influence of Color and Emotion
Commentary By Rolf Rykken
In the early 1940s, while stationed at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, neophyte painter Richard Diebenkorn often journeyed the 30 miles north to Washington, D.C., to prowl the galleries of The Phillips Collection. Here he saw the works of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Edward Hopper, Paul Klee, Georgia O’ Keeffe, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It was Matisse’s “Studio, Quai St. Michel,” that seemed to have the greatest effect on the Californian: the geometric lines, the glimpses of landscapes, the diffuse figures (some faceless, as in Matisse’s “The Painter and His Model”), the big bright colors—are all evident in the range of his own subsequent work, though the figures come and go and the color is more muted.
I thought of this when I was in art-grad school at the University of Maryland several years ago and was criticized by advisors (all abstract expressionists) during a critique for being too much under the influence of the Phillips as they viewed my narrative, domestic, figurative scenes of bright basic colors.
I began working at the Phillips in 1989, first as an information-desk volunteer, then as a museum assistant, often positioned near Diebenkorn’s “Interior with View of the Ocean” (1957) and “Girl with a Plant” (1960). When I began painting, hints of a Diebenkorn influence appeared (and continue, though German Expressionism, Edward Munch, Nicholas de Stael and Pierre Bonnard seem to hold a bigger sway). Is it possible to absorb paintings after being in their presence for so many years? Yes. They seep into you like a virus, and they don’t leave.
For me, Diebenkorn is about color and emotion — at least in the Berkeley paintings and the figurative works; the Ocean Park series is more controlled, colder. And while the color and passion certainly aren’t in the same room as Munch or early Kirchner, they do linger with Pierre Bonnard in sunniness and the pleasure of place but with an underlying tension in all the geometry of diagonal lines and contrasting colors.
Bonnard once said, “A painting is a series of spots [that] are joined together and ultimately form the object, the unit over which the eye wanders without obstruction.”
And in many of Bonnard’s works the figure (or character, as I call them in my narrative work) is often his wife and former model, Marthe’, entering a room, sitting at a table with a dog or fronting a magnificent outdoor scene with giant palms seeming to surround her.
Duncan Phillips, the first and earliest American to collect Bonnard, wrote that Japanese artwork taught Bonnard to subordinate “the figure to its setting [and display] the little joys of everyday in a way purely decorative.”
Bonnard painted with a loose group of individuals (Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, et al) who called themselves the Nabis, and who nodded to Paul Gauguin as their model. And while Gauguin referred to Bonnard and the others as “musicians” of color, Bonnard really adhered to his own path.
“I want only to do something on my own and I am at present unlearning what I took a lot of trouble to learn during four years at” art school, he is quoted in Andre´ Fermigier’s “Bonnard” (1984).
Bonnard was unlearning proper academic drawing (he once referred to his drawing as crude; Phillips wrote that to conventional viewers he seemed almost to “paint irresponsibly”), proper composition (here is where Japanese, Degas and Cezanne influences are seen, in the flat areas of color, in the odd cropping and peculiar perspectives). This unlearned approach is especially obvious in his 20th century work, of which Phillips described Bonnard as the “link between Impressionism and Expressionism.”
For the most part, Bonnard was a reporter, a reporter of his impressions of a scene he selected to depict in the manner and with the colors he chose to express with.
With Bonnard, as John Updike said in The New Yorker in 1990, one warm color melts into the next or one pattern rests upon another and in his domestic scenes such color patterning “is more than a metaphor for intimacy — it is intimacy incarnate and radiant.”
Bonnard, Phillips wrote in 1928, can be linked with Delacroix, Daumier, Corot, Courbet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Redon in exalting “the human spirit and its need for individual expression unfettered by academic precept. It matters little that Delacroix and Redon were inspired respectively by drama and mysticism whereas most of the others were moved by the aspects of the visible world out of their immediate experience. The kinship between them is based on the bond of all those who believe that art is, by its nature, emotional and proceeds from the emotion of the artist to the response of all who can feel as he felt….Romanticism is for the inspired, instinctive followers of the gleam.”
Emotion, emotional.
To some, dreaded words and condition.
What is suggested, Phillips says further of Delacroix, in Delacroix’s brooding portrait, “Paganini,” “is the suffering, yearning soul of the artist of all races, in all ages.”
Why are some viewers — as well as many artists — so afraid of emotion in painting, either through expressive style or narrative content? Why are so many people so blasted cool and technical? Are emotions so messy that they have to be avoided even in a two-dimensional form?
For me, the whole point of painting is human expression, passion — to show what is going on with the artist’s heart and head.
Which easily brings us to Chaim Soutine, another Phillips example of emotion.
If Soutine wanted to get across unease and foreboding about an approaching storm, as in “Windy Day, Auxerre,” you saw it.
If he wanted us to wrinkle our noses at the sight of putrid dead meat, as in “The Pheasant,” we did so.
If he wanted us to know that the woman he was painting (“Woman in Profile”) was a prissy pill, we saw it.
What we see is what Chaim Soutine felt during the creation of that work.
Soutine, Bonnard, Delacroix, Diebenkorn: artists communicating their feelings and emotions, all at The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW, Washington, D.C.
