Medieval/Modern Gothic Impulses in American Modernism

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Medieval/ModernGothic Impulses in American Modernism

RobertCozzolino

Opposite:detailofFig.11

When Van Wyck Brooks challenged American

writers in 1918 to transform their vital interests and

inspirations into a “usable past” from which they

could craft a living present, visual artists responded

with great enthusiasm. Brooks declared, “The past

is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and

adaptable ideals; it opens of itself at the touch of

desire; it yields up, now this treasure . . . to anyone

who comes to it armed with a capacity for per-

sonal choices.” Stressing the role of discovery and

invention in this process, he continued, “If . . . we

cannot use the past our professors offer us, is there

any reason why we should not create others of our

own?”1 While many American modernists dug

into the brief American past, others delved deeper

into history to find source material that supported

their aspirations in the present.

Some unusual hybrids of this search resulted

from modernists who drew on medieval art

and then-popular conceptions of the “Gothic.”

Manifestations of the Medieval integrated with

the Modern are plentiful and surprising, can be

alternately superficial and intellectually astute, and

resulted in a wide range of challenging imagery

that demands to be reexamined. Several modern

and contemporary artists in the James and Barbara

Palmer collection found inspiration in this period,

although their adaptations varied as widely as the

source material. What use did American artists

have for eleventh- to sixteenth-century Flemish,

French, German, and Italian art and architecture?

As that range of centuries suggests, the “Gothic”

was interpreted broadly among critics, historians,

and the artists themselves, depending on where a

given artwork originated. For much of the twen-

tieth century (at least through the 1960s), artistic

production that was made before or that emerged

in areas perceived to have missed, delayed, or

ignored the effects of the Italian Renaissance was

linked to the Gothic. For instance, in his influen-

tial book Form Problems of the Gothic, originally

published in 1911,Wilhelm Worringer wrote

that artists working as late as Albrecht Dürer

(1471–1528), Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–c. 1530),

and Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543),

despite being associated with German Humanism,

were “still adhering closely to the Gothic.”2 Such

an assertion makes it clear that critical uses of the

“Gothic” and medieval art encouraged the subjec-

tive appropriation of period material.

The degree to which these issues became

relevant to a modernist agenda by 1960 is empha-

sized by an essay Clement Greenberg wrote that

year in response to the exhibition Masterpieces of Flemish Art: Van Eyck to Bosch, held at the Detroit

Institute of Arts. “As far as I know,” he asserted

72 a gift from the heart

three sentences in, “not a single important painter

since the end of the sixteenth century has, in either

works or words, betrayed any significant interest

in anything in Flemish painting before Bosch.”3

Admitting that he had been a slow convert to

Flemish art, Greenberg conveyed how it had

recently forced him to “expand and revise old

habits of vision.” After recounting Michelangelo’s

and Roger Fry’s famous complaints against Flem-

ish painters—their emphasis on linear rhythms

over solid volume and clear space, specificity

and minutiae at the expense of universal form or

symmetry—Greenberg countered that the sup-

posed antisculptural tendencies of the Flemish

artists were unique and even radical. In his view,

the optical integrity of their flat, linear surface

minutia contributed to firm interlocking designs,

particularly in the large-scale figure compositions

of Hieronymus Bosch, making them antecedents

to the most progressive contemporary painting.

Greenberg reserved his highest praise for

Netherlandish painters Gerard David and Hans

Memling, whose “‘detached’ . . . disembodied,

floating kind of color” he found analogous to the

perceptual experience of light-bathed stained

glass. This epiphany led Greenberg to rediscover

the importance of Flemish painters, who had

transformed the Western tradition through their

use of “translucent, vitreous color . . . [capable of

pictorial power] even when it doesn’t ‘hold the

plane.’” Color that did not “hold the plane” was

Greenberg’s shorthand for color used illusionisti-

cally in a painting to describe objects and surfaces

as they should look in the real world. Making it

clear what he meant by this lineage, Greenberg

emphasized that these formal elements of fifteenth-

century Flemish painting presaged “the best and

most advanced of very recent easel painting in

America.”4 In Greenberg’s contemporary criti-

cism, this meant Color Field painters and their

direct predecessors, such as Hans Hofmann and

Barnett Newman.

Why did Greenberg feel it necessary to read

such visually incongruent paintings with his

theory of opticality, especially after beginning his

review by denigrating the role of early Flemish art

before Bosch? Coming on the heels of his seminal

essay “Modernist Painting,” at a time in which

his aggressive support for Helen Frankenthaler,

Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland was at its peak,

Greenberg was on the lookout for antecedents that

would help legitimate his hand-selected successors

to Abstract Expressionism.5 “Gothic,” which had

previously been a put-down in Greenberg’s criti-

cism, revealing among other things his extreme

discomfort with German art, here was harnessed

to aestheticism.6

Medieval art had been an important source

for a wide range of European modernists. John

Ruskin and William Morris, for instance, sought

to mend the separation between art and craft that

had persisted since the Renaissance, and their suc-

cessors sought to integrate spirituality with their

practice.7 In Germany, the founders of the Bau-

haus—Walter Gropius with Lyonel Feininger, Jo-

hannes Itten, and Gerhard Marcks—made explicit

comparisons between their enterprise and that

of a medieval guild or artisan’s lodge. The 1919

pamphlet “Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses

in Weimar” (Program of the State Bauhaus in Wei-

mar) resembled an avant-garde journal crowned

with Feininger’s bold woodcut depicting a Gothic

cathedral (fig. 1). Feininger had made several stud-

ies of a cathedral in the Baltic village of Zirchow in

Medieval/Modern 73

1918, using Cubism to analyze Gothic form, reveal-

ing their natural affinities and the Bauhaus found-

ers’ intentions to unify the arts under a new spirit

exalting craftsmanship. Exercises that Itten made

at the Bauhaus and published in 1921 showed an

analysis of Meister Francke’s Adoration of the Magi (c. 1424, Hamburger Kunsthalle). Grünewald was

another source for formal exercises; Itten’s courses

included such material as starting points for his

students.8

Greenberg made the leap to establish a link

between art of the past and the contemporary

Color Field painting he championed, but he chose

not to describe the long history modernists had

with medieval art. Most egregiously, he chose to

look the other way when confronted with ample

evidence that American artists had turned to

Northern European art for inspiration. John Sing-

er Sargent, for instance, had been entranced by

Hans Memling’s depiction of the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria from an altarpiece

made for the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges (1479).9

And by then, beloved artists such as Grant Wood

were routinely connected with art of the period.10

A focus on collecting and exhibiting medieval

art in America between the world wars also had

popularized interest in and framed the idea of the

Gothic and its legacy for American audiences.11

And art schools such as Yale, the University of

Wisconsin–Madison, and the Art Students League

were teaching to a revival of historical tech-

niques.12 Greenberg asserted, however, that “over

the last hundred years artists have not been heard

talking about Van Eyck or Van der Goes as they

have talked about Giotto and Masaccio and Piero.

This is true even of the painters who revived a

sharp-focused realism.”13

It is precisely the “painters who revived a

sharp-focused realism,” as Greenberg character-

ized them, who figure prominently in adapting the

Gothic to American art. One of the first exhibi-

tions in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Americans”

series, American Realists and Magic Realists, made

deliberate connections between contemporary

artists of “sharp-focused” realism and early Flem-

ish, Italian, and German artists. In an introduction

to the catalogue, Lincoln Kirstein compared Ivan

Albright’s “deliberate mortification of the flesh”

to “the negative phosphorescence of Grünewald’s

Christ” and claimed of Paul Cadmus that he

Fig.1LyonelFeininger,Cathedral for Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar,1919,woodcut,12x7½inches(image);161/8x123/16inches(sheet).Pub-lisher:StaatlichesBauhaus,Weimar.TheMuseumofModernArt,NewYork,GiftofAbbyAldrichRockefeller,156.1945


bore “a conscious debt to the truculent hatred

expressed in [Hieronymus] Bosch’s paintings of

Christ Mocked.”14

In Albright’s shockingly visceral And Man Created God in His Own Image (Room 203) (1930–

31, fig. 2), his unusual depiction of flesh is a visual

manifestation of his complex, hybrid spiritualism

that drew from philosophy and religion, includ-

ing Catholicism, Theosophy, and Buddhism. His

notebooks of the 1920s include sketches of and

references to works by Cimabue, Van Eyck, Dürer,

and Holbein, as well as the Triumph of Death

fresco at the Camposanto in Pisa. Always search-

ing for a way to make art a manifestation of his

spiritual ideas, Albright was drawn to the spiritual-

ity of medieval art and its focus on the body as the

bearer of cultural and religious meaning.

In this and other figure paintings, Albright

also adopted the format and meditative purpose

of devotional panels showing Christ as the Man

of Sorrows enduring earthly suffering. Albright’s

keen awareness of this iconography is articulated

in a statement he often repeated: “There is no sor-

row like existence.” This statement refocuses suf-

fering and redemption on humanity, also evident

in the ordinary people he chose as models. An-dachtsbild, or devotional images, such as Meister

Francke’s Man of Sorrows (c. 1430, fig. 3), present

images of Christ in his earthly suffering as a means

to encourage empathy and compassion. Contem-

plation of Christ’s bloody, wounded body was

thought to bring viewers closer to understanding

the physical depth of sacrifice and the potential for

spiritual triumph over flesh.

Albright frequently described art as a spiritual

covenant between artist, God, and audience. He

maintained this viewpoint through his last years,

Medieval/Modern 75

asserting in a 1980 notebook entry that, “every

picture should be a prayer.”15 Albright believed

that his subjects could embody spirituality and

provoke an emotional reaction in his audience that

would affect their own spiritual awareness. He

spoke of his vocation as one of teaching through

images that would provide meditation on mortality

and the power of God.16 Albright chose to investi-

gate matter and spirit by scrutinizing the bodies of

his Warrenville, Illinois, neighbors as the physical

manifestation of God’s power. In these works, the

focus is not on a named spiritual calling but on

the body’s emphatic presence. Albright shows the

weight, texture, and density of flesh while striving

to depict extrapictorial content through startling

formal transformations that imply an intangible

body—the soul—beneath the skin. He wrote in

1932, “The physical and objective looked into

deeply enough become spiritual and subjective

and abstract. . . . All that we perceive is a world of

surfaces. The real center is never seen. But it is

just that which the artist should strive to find and

body forth. I try to reach the essential and to give

it form—to express it.”17 By presenting individu-

als to our close scrutiny, Albright implores us to

meditate on mortality, the power of the life force,

and the relationship between our own body and

spirit.

This aim pervaded Albright’s meditation on

other matter as well, including still-life objects

or the landscape devastated by nature. Show Case Doll (1954, fig. 4) is a lithograph based on a

composition that Albright developed in 1931–32,

when he was exploring ways to portray mortal-

ity without representing the human body. In this

instance, he collected and arranged a group of

Fig.2(opposite)IvanLeLorraineAlbright,And Man Created God in His Own Image (Room 203),1930–31,oiloncanvas,48x26inches.TheArtInstituteofChicago,GiftofIvanAlbright,1977.36

Fig.3MeisterFrancke,The Man of Sorrows,c.1430,temperaonoakpanelwithdesignedframe,16¾x121/8inches.MuseumderBildendenKünst,Leipzig

Fig.4IvanLeLorraineAlbright,Show Case Doll,1954,litho-graph,17½x25½inches.PalmerMuseumofArt,GiftofJamesandBarbaraPalmer,2002.148


objects, including an elaborately dressed doll,

and placed them in a glass case. Contemporary

viewers found funereal and mourning analogies in

the inanimate object, which Albright later empha-

sized by titling several of the impressions of the

lithograph “Dead Doll.”18 Albright’s use of a doll

made overt the predicament of the physical body

as a shell or container for the spirit. After the Storm (Coastal Rocks, Corea, Maine) (fig. 5) was painted

in 1947 after the Albright family resumed their

regular trips to Maine. These trips had been inter-

rupted during World War II because of concern

about the vulnerability of the East Coast to bomb-

ing raids. Although After the Storm is ostensibly

the depiction of the aftermath of a violent seasonal

storm, its peculiar intensity carries the impact of

the war. The rocks refuse to lie still in the churn-

ing composition, rising upward and knocking into

one another. Their pink and orange tones call to

mind flesh rather than coastal boulders, and the

jumbled, interwoven innards of the fishing shack

mingle with them to suggest devastation beyond

the surface. Albright was known to use bodily

analogies in other small-scale landscapes of the

period.

Paul Cadmus’s Hinky Dinky Parley Voo (1939,

fig. 6) was exactly the sharply observed image of

humanity that Kirstein admired and to which he

Fig.5IvanLeLorraineAlbright,After the Storm (Coastal Rocks, Corea, Maine),1947,gouacheonpaper,213/8x29½inches

Medieval/Modern 77

compared Bosch’s work. When the work was

debuted, critics frequently assumed that Cad-

mus was moralizing through the exploitation of

horror and disgust. Henry McBride wrote in the

New York Post, “He must paint these dreadful

scenes in order to do us good.”19 Cadmus was

an astute and sensitive student of art history and

had the opportunity to observe a wide range of

late medieval and Renaissance paintings first-

hand. He maintained memories of this work as a

qualitative model for close examinations of social

and intimate experience. “I believe that art is not

only more true but also more living and vital if it

derives its immediate inspiration and its outward

form from contemporary life,” he wrote in 1937.

Emphasizing the role that immersion played in

his most biting satirical paintings, he continued,

“The actual contact with human beings who are

living and dying, working and playing, exercising

all their functions and passions, demonstrating

the heights and depths of man’s nature, gives re-

sults of far greater significance than those gained

Fig.6PaulCadmus,Hinky Dinky Parley Voo,1939,oilandtemperaonlinenonpanel,36x36inches.CollectionofLindaLichtenbergKaplan


by isolation, introspection or subjective contem-

plation of inanimate objects.”20

Kirstein was central to these issues as a col-

lector, critic, curator, writer, and intellectual force

in the art world at midcentury. Unlike Green-

berg, who implicitly discredited a heterogeneous

modernism, Kirstein recognized that there was a

lineage of modern artists who gravitated toward

the symbolic, conceptual realism of late medieval

painting and its use of the body as a vessel of pro-

found meaning. A small, exquisitely crafted Cad-

mus painting Kirstein once owned called Inventor (1946, fig. 7) instantly reveals his taste. Ostensibly

an icon devoted to the power of the imagination

(made manifest by dexterous hands), the paint-

ing depicts a man (modeled, not incidentally, on

his friend George Tooker) holding a mobile, also

owned by Kirstein, that Tooker had made from

Medieval/Modern 79

beach debris.21 Cadmus described how the paint-

ing came about in a letter to the Palmers:

In 1946 my friends Margaret and

Jared French rented a summer place in

S’conset, Nantucket and also rented a

small cottage nearby for me and George

Tooker. When we were not all four of

us painting (after work usually) we took

long, long walks on the beach taking

photographs and George collected beach

objects to construct mobiles in the eve-

ning. This inspired the picture. Although

it is not a “portrait” of him he did indeed

pose for it. I seem to remember that I

posed myself in a mirror for the hands

making many studies for them. Our cot-

tage was about a block from the cliffs over

the ocean with no such view of it as in

the work; within earshot of the breakers

but out of sight. I don’t think this was the

actual mobile he made. My version would

probably not balance. Artistic liberties.22

Medieval/Modern parallels were clear to

Kirstein; he frequently wrote to the artists about

these issues and recommended new talent to col-

leagues based on qualities they shared with art of

the period.23 It was Kirstein who recommended

the young Honoré Sharrer and George Tooker

to Dorothy C. Miller for inclusion in MoMA’s

Fourteen Americans exhibition in 1946, where

they were seen alongside artists such as Arshile

Gorky, Loren MacIver, Robert Motherwell, Isamu

Noguchi, and Mark Tobey. In witty, sometimes bit-

ing, narrative paintings, Sharrer explored politics,

sexuality, and the art world. Her major early work,

which Kirstein considered exemplary, is Tribute to the American Working People (1946–51, fig. 8),

which combines the technique, narrative style, and

format of late medieval painting with the artist’s

use of photography as source material.24 Designed

Fig.7(opposite)PaulCadmus,Inventor,1946,eggtemperaonpanel,715/16x91/4inches

Fig.8HonoréSharrer,Tribute to the American Working People, 1946–51,oiloncomposi-tionboard(polyptych),overall:38¾x77¼inches.SmithsonianAmericanArtMuseum,Washington,D.C.,GiftoftheSaraRobyFoundation,1986.6.97


as a secular altarpiece to the working class, Tribute was still in progress when Sharrer stated her aims

in the Fourteen Americans exhibition catalogue:

“I want to praise and caress the great majority, the

American working people. Every curve of their

lives I want to render with fanatical sensitivity and

creative realism. Their lives motivate my work as

Christ did the artist of the Middle Ages and as the

essence of mandolins and fruit does the Cubists.”25

Tooker was added to Fourteen Americans after the catalogue went to press—at Kirstein’s

strenuous urging—and was represented by two

paintings in the exhibition.26 Children and Spastics (1946, fig. 9) was singled out frequently by critics

reviewing the exhibition and was often compared

to Bosch’s cruelest images of torment. Jon Stroup

wrote that the painting “depicts a group of leering,

black-clothed boys, hooded with brown paper

bags and black pots, and brandishing broomsticks.

They resemble simultaneously little boys you have

seen in the streets and demons transplanted from

‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’ by Hierony-

mus Bosch. But the object of their tormenting is

not a saint. It is three miserable spastics backed

into a corner. This theme has been translated

with exquisite taste and precision into a picture of

delicate architectonic grandeur that somehow con-

geals the moral ugliness of the subject.”27 Emily

Genauer wrote that Tooker painted “sordid sub-

jects with a macabre, almost Gothic relish. [His]

technique is extraordinary . . . but [his] subjects I

find singularly and pointlessly ugly.”28

Like his friend Paul Cadmus, Tooker looked

closely at a wide range of thirteenth- to sixteenth-

century art and found that the technique and

narrative language suited his temperament. “Uc-

cello and the early Sienese masters were doing

what I’m trying to do,” he told an interviewer in

1957. But emphasizing the modern condition of

his unusual scenes, he added, “I am after paint-

ing reality impressed on the mind so hard that

it recurs as a dream.”29 Later, as if to repudiate

the criticism that works such as Children and Spastics regularly received, Tooker explained that

he painted “unpleasant” subjects deliberately to

show urban alienation and cruelty among human-

ity in order to protest it and provoke viewers to

“do something about making things better.”30 “In

some of my paintings,” he said, “I am saying that

‘this is what we are forced to suffer in life,’ while in

other paintings I say ‘this is what we should be.’ I

oscillate between the earthly state and a concept of

paradise.”31

A quiet, sensual work such as Window II (1956, fig. 10) makes it clear how Tooker continu-

ally depicted more than one aspect of humanity

throughout his career. The contemplative and

loving relationships suggested in his decades-long

Window series epitomize this dimension of his

work. He explained that like the nightmarish works

of urban spaces, these also grew from actual obser-

Fig.9GeorgeTooker,Children and Spastics,1946,eggtemperaongessopanel,24½x18½inches.MuseumofContemporaryArtChicago,GiftofMaryandEarleLudginCollection,1981.38

Fig.10(opposite)GeorgeTooker,Window II,1956,eggtemperaongessopanel,241/8x18inches


vation and his feelings about what he witnessed.

His house in Brooklyn was “a very good place

for paintings because there was a Puerto Rican

rooming house opposite us, and I could just look

out the window for subject matter. . . . [N]early all

of the window paintings are based on what I saw

through the windows.”32 The device of framing a

portrait within a window was a popular conceit in

fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art, which

Tooker greatly admired. He also intended the

series to be a celebration and deliberate challenge

in favor of interracial relationships and marriage.33

Tooker and his partner, William Christopher, were

active in the civil rights movement and their beliefs

frequently reinforced the subject matter of their

work.

Man in a Tree (1998, fig. 11) was inspired

by the story of Cuban novelist and poet Rein-

aldo Arenas (1943–1990), who was attacked for

his political views and for being a homosexual.

In 1979, he eluded police by hiding in a tree for

several days. Tooker’s painting suggests this event,

but it also alludes to a passage about freedom from

Arenas’s memoir, Before Night Falls: “I used to

Fig.11GeorgeTooker,Man in a Tree, 1998,eggtemperaongessopanel,15x181/8inches

Medieval/Modern 83

climb trees, and everything seemed much more

beautiful from up there. I could embrace the world

in its completeness and feel a harmony that I

could not experience down below. . . . Trees have

a secret life that is only revealed to those willing to

climb them. To climb a tree is to slowly discover

a unique world, rhythmic, magical, and harmoni-

ous, with its worms, insects, birds, and other living

things, all apparently insignificant creatures, telling

us their secrets.”34

Tooker’s painting also contains allusions

from art history. The iconography of a man in a

tree relates to the figure of Zacchaeus, a rich tax

collector from Jericho who climbed into a tree to

get a better look at Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem

on a donkey. A prominent depiction of this scene

appears in Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua,

which Tooker knew well, and had inspired other

works, such as Men and Women Fighting (1958,

private collection). Zacchaeus is traditionally seen

as a model figure of repentance, who defies his

public critics by giving Jesus lodging and offering

up his wealth to the poor. Is it possible that Tooker

conflated the two stories? His inclination was to

leave his work open-ended, but many of his paint-

ings function in this dual manner.

The reception that such artists received

showed that many American critics associated

excessive detail, surface animation, and expres-

sive distortion with a Gothic tradition. Such

connections were likely inspired by the writings

of Wilhelm Worringer, who emphasized a connec-

tion between Gothic form and spiritual meaning

in which ornament becomes the expression of

pathos, a “convulsion of feeling . . . [and] sub-

lime hysteria.”35 Worringer’s “Gothic” was less a

style or a period than an inherent psychological

and even ethnic sensibility. He traced its effects

to the sixteenth century, citing pictorial pathos,

the intense concentration of line and detail, and a

sense of tragedy brooding beneath all conceptions

of harmony or beauty.36 This concept appealed to

some modern figurative artists who were striving

to incorporate issues of life and death in single

images. John Wilde, for instance, drew on the ter-

rifying death and the maiden imagery of Hans Bal-

dung Grien (1484/85–1545) in The Mirror (1958,

fig. 12), which updates Grien’s painting to the

dressing room of a middle-class Wisconsin home.

A curvaceous woman stands in a contrapposto

pose before a long oval dressing mirror. As she

raises her arms to arrange the locks of her red hair,

an emaciated figure covered in green, rotting skin

joins her reflection. As the creature stands behind

the woman, its bony arms cross over her soft lower

belly to rest its skeletal hands on her thighs.

Fig.12JohnWilde,The Mirror,1958,oilonpanel,12x10inches.Privatecollection


Worringer’s Gothic artist was above all

mystical, concerned with how materiality and the

corporeal could convey the spiritual. He charac-

terized the Gothic sensibility as “irrational, super-

rational, transcendental,” its formal language being

analogous to the soul.37 This partly explained the

intensity of emotion and gesture in the figures of

saints and other bodies as well as a tendency for

depicted narratives to reveal the supernatural.

Worringer wrote, “There is at work here a passion

for creating fantastic shapes . . . a play of wild, con-

fused spirits who here and there assume a shape

only to evaporate again into shapelessness when

more closely examined. A certain wavering, a

restless agitation is common to this whole world of

specters and ghosts. The northerner knows noth-

ing calm, his whole creative power is concentrated

upon the idea of unrestrained, immeasurable activ-

ity. The storm spirits are his closest kin.”38

Worringer’s writing had a strong impact on

how early modernist critics and artists, including

the founders of Die Brücke and the Blue Rider

Group, as well as artists later associated with Neue

Sachlichkeit, interpreted and used late medieval

art and especially German art of the period.39 It

is clear, however, that Americans drew liberally

from numerous sources and found these qualities

in certain Italian painters, such as Carlo Crivelli

(active by 1457–93), whose extraordinary interpre-

tations of the Pietà (fig. 13) were widely admired

by modernists for their cathartic outpouring of

emotion and depiction of passionate expressions

and gestures by mourning figures.

In retrospect, it seems natural for American

artists working with the body to gravitate to this

period in European art history as they tried to re-

define its use in modern art. Cadmus and Tooker

and many of their peers daringly explored sexual-

ity and mortality in work that resisted any spe-

cific identification with religious iconography or

doctrine. Yet in doing so, they shifted the focus of

the body in American art toward challenging and

revealing issues of identity that in some respects

were only picked up by a generation of artists

working much later in the twentieth century, ready

to take on sexuality, spirituality, mortality, and their

public convergence in the 1980s. Cadmus is often

cited as a forerunner for a generation that included

artists such as David Wojnarowicz, who combined

religious imagery with political content in works

that drew attention to suffering. The links are

likely stronger than we suspect, and the range of

artists that a current generation looks back to for

inspiration includes many of the artists mentioned

here.

Vince Desiderio has a complex relationship

to art of the past, and has described his process

as an “allegorization of method” by which the

technological apparatus that enabled and drove in-

novation in illusionism (such as linear perspective)

becomes a theoretical component of his contem-

porary figure paintings by making the means by

which we perceive “realism” laid bare. His Expul-sion (1992, fig. 14) is a haunting and enigmatic

Fig.13CarloCrivelli, Pietà,1476,temperaonwood,goldground,overall:28¼x253/8inches.TheMetropolitanMuseumofArt,JohnStewartKennedyFund,1913(13.178)

Medieval/Modern 85

triptych portraying two figures who flank a room

in which light and shadow are the most tangible

presence. The title calls to mind the Genesis story

in which Adam and Eve are banished from Eden

for eating from the tree of knowledge of good and

evil. Desiderio’s allegory is, according to him,

about a fall from grace in this history of art. He

reflects on the circumstances surrounding this

triptych:

I painted this triptych as a memento mori in mourning for the death of modernism

and the depleted condition its passing left

in its wake. The woman in the right panel

is suffering from anorexia while the man

displays the medically identifiable char-

acteristics of a hermaphrodite. As such

the figures, expelled from the Eden of a

modernism, are also deprived of their ca-

pacity to procreate. They are the victims

of a merciless master (as De Kooning de-

scribed Mondrian). The center, of course,

representing Picasso’s last studio, now

empty, symbolized the paradise many of

us hoped to be part of—the exhilarating

promise of modernism.40

Desiderio’s work self-consciously embodies

historical modes only to push them to reflect on

the meaning they can bring to thinking about what

it means to paint in the late twentieth and early

twenty-first centuries. His method uses histori-

cal knowledge (including technical mastery) to

critique the role of history as a weight on artists.

The Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum has

also been an influential figure among contempo-

rary figure painters who draw on earlier periods.

In the 1960s, he studied classical academic paint-

ing while also working briefly with Joseph Beuys.

Since the 1980s, Nerdrum has developed a body

of work that reveals an obsessive relationship to

seventeenth-century Italian and Dutch art and a

penchant for apocalyptic visions of a world com-

munity reforming in the wake of a decimated and

depleted earth. Volunteer (2003, fig. 15) envisions

a strong female warrior figure bearing an infant,

her half-closed eyes suggesting a trancelike state

and paranormal abilities. These traits characterize

Nerdrum’s depiction of his figures, as the thickly

encrusted, viscous paint seems at one with the

Fig.14VincentDesiderio,Expulsion, 1992,oilonwood,oilonpapermountedonwood(triptych);centerpanel:107/8x153/16inches;sidepanels:10¾x63/16incheseach

Fig.15OddNerdrum,Volunteer,2003,oiloncanvas,301/8x31½inches


rough and barren earth that forms the backdrop

for his characters. Nerdrum’s narratives suggest an

esoteric, futuristic tribal culture and a human so-

ciety reinventing itself from a mix of remembered

traditions and new hybrids. Nerdrum’s devotees

(there is little doubt that this is the right word)

consider him the living embodiment of an “Old

Master”; his detractors consider him a purveyor

of kitsch. Nerdrum’s viewpoint seems to project

both poles simultaneously. He is nothing if not a

master of managing his public image and persona,

something he likely learned from Beuys, Warhol,

and Rembrandt.

It is clear that Paul Cadmus, for his part, paid

attention to the work of younger artists. Com-

menting on Michael Bergt, for instance, he drew

comparisons between the past and present, quick

to point out the relevance that traditional subjects

had for a new contemporary moment. He wrote

that Bergt’s “subject matter is varied, influenced

by what is happening in the world around us daily.

Therefore, some are frightening, grim, sad, as in

Fig.16MichaelBergt, Paradise Lost,1995,eggtemperaonpanel,17½x20½inches

Medieval/Modern 87

much Renaissance tempera painting where we are

given martyrdoms, crucifixions, hellfire. These

representations of horror and violence can delight

in spite of the themes because of the impeccable

technique and delicacy (How unlike the bloodi-

ness of films and television). The craftsmanship of

Bergt’s works is so assured that viewed alongside,

say, a Crivelli, or a Cossa, it need feel no shame.”41

Bergt has indeed made paintings appropriating

Crivelli’s celebrated Pietà discussed earlier, as

in Support (2009), as well as Masaccio’s famous

fresco of the expulsion of Adam and Eve in the

Brancacci Chapel in Florence (fig. 16). That shame

Cadmus deflected was that of post-Greenbergian

modernism and its uneasiness in the face of art

that built on such traditions. He knew all along

that it had simply ignored a powerful thread in

American modernism that persists to this day.

notes

This essay developed from a lecture I presented at the Palmer Museum of Art in November 2009. I am grateful to Leo Mazow and Joyce Robinson for the opportunity, encouragement, and faith that led to its present form.

1. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial 64 (April 11, 1918): 337–41.

2. Wilhelm Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic, Au-thorized American Edition (New York: G. E. Stechert and Co., 1918, 93–94.

3. Clement Greenberg, “The Early Flemish Masters,” in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 101–2, originally published in Arts Magazine (De-cember 1960). Accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, this large exhibition (213 works) included a wide range of objects, from painting to decorative arts. Flanders in the Fifteenth Century: Art and Civilization. Catalogue of the Exhibition Masterpieces of Flemish Art: Van Eyck to Bosch (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts and Centre

National de Recherches Primitifs Flamands, 1960).4. Greenberg, “The Early Flemish Masters,” 103. 5. For a discussion of this issue, see Bradford R. Collins,

“Clement Greenberg and the Search for Abstract Ex-pressionism’s Successor: A Study in the Manipulation of Avant-Garde Consciousness,” Arts Magazine 61 (May 1987): 36–43.

6. Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 217, 282.

7. Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar Eng-land: Medieval Modernism and the London Under-ground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also J. B. Bullen, “Byzantinism and Modernism, 1900–14,” The Burlington Magazine 141 (November 1999): 665–75.

8. Charles W. Haxthausen, “Walter Gropius and Lyonel Feininger Bauhaus Manifesto. 1919,” in Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman et al., Bauhaus 1919–1933: Work-shops for Modernity, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 64–67; see also 82–83.

9. A drawing Sargent made after the central panel of the altarpiece is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Francis Ormond, 1950 (50.130.143s recto).

10. See, for instance, Lincoln Kirstein, “An Iowa Memling,” Art Front (July 1935): 6, 8.

11. See Elizabeth Bradford Smith et al., Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940, exh. cat. (University Park: Palmer Museum of Art, 1996); and also Virginia Brilliant, Paul F. Miller, and Françoise Barbe, Gothic Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection, exh. cat. (Sarasota: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2009). The level of activity at this time is noteworthy, including the opening of the Kate S. Buckingham Gothic Period Room at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1924; The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1925 and 1938); and the Romanesque and Gothic rooms of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, opened in 1931. The second floor of the PMA’s then-new building was planned around the Gothic and Renaissance holdings of the Edmond Foulc collection, purchased in 1929 and at the time the largest purchase undertaken by an art museum. The John G. Johnson Collection was acquired in 1917.


12. Richard J. Boyle, Hilton Brown, and Richard New-man, Milk and Eggs: The American Revival of Tempera Painting, 1930–1950, exh. cat. (Chadds Ford, Pa.: Brandywine River Museum, 2002); James S. Watrous, “Technique Courses as Art History,” College Art Jour-nal 2 (November 1942): 7–11. For a specialized article on a recipe that Watrous had his students use in the laboratory, see James S. Watrous, “Observations on a Late Mediaeval Painting Medium,” Speculum 22 (July 1947): 430–34.

13. Greenberg, “The Early Flemish Masters,” 102. 14. Lincoln Kirstein, “Introduction,” in Dorothy C.

Miller and Alfred H. Barr Jr., eds., American Realists and Magic Realists, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 8. Grünewald became an exemplar of suffering and existential humanism in the twentieth century. Ann Stieglitz, “The Reproduction of Agony: Toward a Reception-History of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar after the First World War,” Oxford Art Journal 12, no. 2 (1989): 87–103.

15. Notebook 1984.6.39: 44, August 14, 1980. Ivan Albright Collection.

16. Notebook 1984.6.3: 43, 1929. Ivan Albright Collection.17. Artist statement in J. Z. Jacobson, ed., Art of Today:

Chicago 1933 (Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1932), 35.18. See, for instance, Daniel Catton Rich, “Ivan Le Lorraine

Albright: Our Own Jeremiah,” Magazine of Art 36 (Feb-ruary 1943): 50; and Harriet and Sidney Janis, “The Painting of Ivan Albright,” Art in America 34 (January 1946): 48.

19. This and other contemporary comments on the paint-ing are reprinted in Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus (New York: Chameleon Books, 1996), 46.

20. Paul Cadmus, “Credo” (1937, Midtown Galleries broad-side), reprinted in Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, 142.

21. Justin Spring, “An Interview with George Tooker,” American Art 16 (Spring 2002): 69. Tooker recalled, “I was making mobiles at the time and I posed for it. That would have been when we were on Nantucket. Incidentally I gave the mobile I had made to Lincoln and Fidelma. It was made of driftwood and seashells. It was over their dining table until the silk fell apart.”

22. Paul Cadmus, letter to Barbara and James Palmer dated June 21, 1995.

23. See, for instance, a letter in which Kirstein enthuses about fourteenth- to sixteenth-century German art and

calls Cadmus’s painting “essentially religious.” Kirstein to Paul Cadmus, June 23, 1945, Lincoln Kirstein Papers, Dance Division, New York Public Library.

24. For Tribute, see Erika Doss, “Sharrer’s Tribute to the American Working People: Issues of Labor and Leisure in Post–World War II American Art,” American Art 16 (Fall 2002): 54–81.

25. Sharrer, statement in Dorothy C. Miller, ed., Fourteen Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 62.

26. Lincoln Kirstein to Dorothy C. Miller, “Fourteen Americans” exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

27. Jon Stroup, “Time Out . . . 14 Americans,” Town & Country, November 1946, 108.

28. Emily Genauer, “[Review of Fourteen Americans],” New York World-Telegram, September 14, 1946.

29. Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 210.

30. Grace George Alexander, interview for “Artists in New York—George Tooker,” WNYC FM radio program, 1967, George Tooker Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 3.

31. Tooker in conversation with Thomas H. Garver, 1983, courtesy of Garver.

32. Spring, “An Interview with George Tooker,” 73.33. M. Melissa Wolfe, “George Tooker: A Biography,” in

Robert Cozzolino et al., George Tooker, exh. cat. (Lon-don and New York: Merrell, 2008), 33.

34. Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, trans. Dolores M. Koch (New York: Penguin, 1994), 5–6.

35. Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic, 66.36. Ibid., 93–94.37. Ibid., 93. 38. Ibid., 70–71. 39. The literature on these issues in German Expressionism

is extensive. Useful entry points are Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Ha-ven: Yale University Press, 1991), 50– 66; Sherwin Sim-mons, “Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalkers: Art, Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin, 1913 –16,” Art Bulletin 82 (March 2000): 117–48; Simmons, “‘To Stand and See Within’: Expressionist Space in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Rhine Bridge at Cologne,” Art History 27 (April 2004): 250–81; and Christian Weikop, “Brücke and Canonical As-sociation,” in Reinhold Heller, ed., Brücke: The Birth of

Medieval/Modern 89

Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913, exh. cat. (New York: Neue Galerie, 2009), 103–27. For Wor-ringer, see Neil H. Donahue, ed., Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995).

40. Vincent Desiderio, e-mail correspondence with the author, June 18, 2012.

41. Paul Cadmus, introduction, Michael Bergt: A Delicate Balance (New York: Midtown Payson Galleries, 1993).

Medieval/Modern Gothic Impulses in American Modernism

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