Page 12 - Studio International - November 1974

MATURALISM/MODERNISM:

A FUTURE FOR FIGURATIVE PAINTING

JOHN CLARK

There is within the history of Western painting
a tradition of naturalism that can be defined as
an approach to painting in which depicting
directly from nature is of primary importance.
The business of transcribing through careful
observation can give both a meaning to
technique and be in itself the actual content of
a work. Vermeer and Chardin are perhaps the
best two early exponents of this attitude in
which empirical selection is the overriding
formative process. Naturalism, however, also
depends on a set of strict conventions, all of
which were systematically broken by the most
advanced artists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century: the impressionists and
Cezanne, and then Matisse and the cubists. It
may be useful to set down these conventions
and show how they were subverted, in order to
see more clearly the situation regarding
figurative painting now, after almost a hundred
years of modernist art; for not only did these
artists attack conventional figurative painting,
they of course developed a rich new set of
structures that lead inexorably to the planar
and surface painting of the 1960s and 70s.
Many of the conventions of naturalism are
of course the same as those used in almost all
painting up to the end of the nineteenth
century. The most obvious one being that the Chardin The House of Cards 1741. Oil on canvas, 233 / a x 28% in.
visualisation involved seems to happily coincide are stuff, but there is no dynamic interaction perspective in a Watteau, for instance, but the
with normal habits of looking as employed by with solid objects. Space surrounds but does space is still 'tactile'. It is this convention of
everyone when not looking at paintings. For not invade the figure. Because the space is space as a kind of unifying glue, that all Western
the viewer of a pre-modernist work it is as if he consistent and there is this separation of spaces painting had in common up to the end of the
were looking into another room or through a and volumes, the viewer feels that, in his nineteenth century, and it was this that artists
window; the incidents viewed are still and imagination, he can confidently reach into the set about questioning.
compressed but remain in a similar visual painting and be certain of where things are. So Paradoxically the challenge to naturalism
language to the room in which he stands. The this is a kind of 'tactile' space. came about through artists who believed
painting mirrors and affirms the viewer's own There are several other conventions within passionately in working directly from nature. In
intuitive knowledge of space and gravity. This naturalism: the observance of physical laws of Impressionism, volumes are dissolved and the
is an important reason for the layman feeling gravity and perspective, the use of observed differences between them and spaces minimized.
comfortable in front of a traditional painting: light and colour, a non-gestural painting This is achieved partly by the use of a colourful
it is not just that he can recognize the subject technique so that the specificness of objects is all-over brushiness within the painting which
matter, rather that he can empathize with the not destroyed, and the depiction of common then consists of modular surface marks resulting
apparent certainty with which objects and objects, events and places. The most important in a space that is atomized equally across the
spaces are depicted. A painting by de Hooch, rule however is that of tactile space. Chardin's surface. It also came about in the case of
for instance, can be seen as a box with the floor House of Cards in the National Gallery, London, Monet's Cathedrals and Water Lilies because he
as the bottom of the box and the ceiling as the is a perfect illustration of this idea. It is as if chose subjects in which object and surface are
top. Actual walls may be included to show the the boy in the painting is demonstrating that the same thing. Any separable space was
vertical sides or they may be hinted at by the objects depicted can be picked up and re- literally squeezed out. Having done this, Monet
verticals echoing the physical edge, as they often arranged and at the same time suggesting to the was freed from making space/mass
are by windows in Vermeer. Within the box viewer that he could do the same thing. differentiations and could then establish
meaningful volumes are arranged and a clear Dependence on a space that can be understood surfaceness as a unifying convention in its own
distinction between objects and spaces is physically not just optically is not confined to right. While developing radical new ways of
maintained. Volumes are discrete, and self- artists who use planar spatial constructions; it composing and structuring painting, Monet
contained. Spaces are materially different. also exists in paintings that are basically retained naturalistic colour: but colour as a
Vermeer paints atmosphere and light as if they atmospheric. There is not much linear weapon against conventional naturalism was
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