Lawrence Weschler - Through the Looking-Glass

He paused, gazing over at the L.A. vistas on his easels, and from them, apparently, free-associated back over to his upcoming BBC documentary project. "It will have the same title as the book," he said, "Secret Knowledge, but I’m thinking of giving it its own subtitle: ‘Four Picture-Making Cities: Bruges, Ghent, Florence, and Hollywood.’" He laughed and then grew more serious. "Because, actually, the history of picture making is continuous. Today’s Hollywood epics grow directly out of the tradition of prior history-painting: Abel Gance comes right out of David, DeMille directly out of Alma-Tedema, and David and Alma-Tadema, of course, directly out of what had come before: Poussin, Caravaggio, Van Eyck…. Think of the very shapes and dimensions of the screens upon which movies were projected from the very start, and then, conversely, of the lenses and other optical devices with which we’ve been showing that those earlier paintings were themselves created." I recalled how once, a few months previously, pointing to the deep shadows in a night scene of Velasquez’s, Hockney had quipped, "Day for Night." Back in the Bradford of his youth, Hockney was now recalling, "my dad used to take us to ‘the pictures,’ that’s what they were called, and they were playing at The Picture Palace. And in fact, looking at things again from the other way around, I think one of the most common misperceptions about the Old Masters is to imagine them as solitary freelancers, on the order of Van Gogh, for example–the great Romantic myth of the artist as anguished and questing loner. Whereas, of course, it’s not for nothing that Van Eyck and Van Dyck and Rubens and Velasquez were all said to have studios. Their studios were like nothing so much as the Hollywood studios of the Golden Age. They had lighting people and lens assistants, costume people and make-up artists, accountants and apprentices, and I’m sure Rubens had two flaming queens in the back in charge of all the hats." (Of course, one of the ironies here is that both the Old Masters and Hollywood were among the leading promulgators of that myth of the solitary questing knight.) "Caravaggio, in his cellar studio, arranging his models in their poses, draping the costumes over their shoulders, gauging the light, ducking behind the lens to study the image projected onto his wet blackened canvas, coming back out to rearrange the poses once again–his referent nowadays wouldn’t so much be some other painter as, say, Zeffirelli."

Caravaggio had probably been the principal focus of Hockney’s interest, certainly after Ingres, in the earliest phases of his historical investigations, and now, during the latter part of 2000 and into the winter of 2001, the Lombard master seemed to wheel back into the center of Hockney’s purview once again. This was in part owing to the sejourn of the dazzling "Genius of Rome" show at the Royal Academy in London; Hockney visited the exhibition repeatedly, often in the company of a new colleague-in-inquiry, John Spike, the seasoned Florence-based historian and author of a forthcoming Caravaggio catalogue raisonne. Spike subsequently recalled for me how he’d telephoned Hockney shortly after arriving in town for a few days’ visit and Hockney had insisted that they meet at the exhibit right then, immediately–alright, fine, in twenty minutes. "He is definitely a man on a mission," Spike commented, "and he is definitely noticing things." He went on to describe, for example, how the two of them had stood for some time before Caravaggio’s so-called Kansas City "John the Baptist"...

...and how Hockney had pointed out the absurd, anatomically impossible appearance of the youth’s rippling abdomen. "The reason is simple," he told Spike. "It’s another depth of field distortion. He was focussing his lens on the elbow in the foreground, such that the boy’s torso went out of focus. An effect you couldn’t possibly eyeball, but which you couldn’t avoid using a lens projection." Spike was convinced, but now he returned once again to Hockney’s passionate absorption. "At one point," he recalled, "a few moments later, I noticed how a stooped old man had stationed himself behind us and was likewise gazing intently. Actually, he didn’t seem to like this particular painting and was muttering under his breath. And you’ll never guess who this was: Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great photographer! Hockney was too absorbed even to notice. Needless to say, it was an uncanny moment for me."

Back in L.A., later in the winter and into the spring, as Hockney and Graves completed work on their book version of the theory (due out from Thames & Hudson and Viking this October), they remained focussed on Caravaggio, as I came to realize on another trip out, a few months ago, when Falco happened to be visiting as well. We converged on Hockney’s hangerlike auxiliary studio space down on Santa Monica Boulevard, which had been converted into a vast optical lab.

"Look here," Hockney veritably crowed, as he drew us over to a black tent-like structure, with thick drapes hanging over a tall metal-pipe modular armature, an easel on the inside of the tent, a sliding lens-bearing contrap-tion at its edge (where the drapes were pulled to the side) and a table on the outside, with a bank of bright daylight-simulating floodlights bearing down upon it. "Now, watch this." He placed a highly reflective armor breast-plate on the table (remember, we were in Hollywood, after all), so blindingly reflective, in fact, that it was virtually impossible to make out any of its details. "Now, come in here," he said, pulling aside the drapes. Inside, an image of the armor was indeed being cast, upside down, onto the blank canvas, but with the blinding brilliance subdued, the colors and the compo-sition subtly modulated into an enchanting compositional whole–one that looked, if you’ll pardon the expression, exactly like a painting. Falco had whipped out his calculator and was pointing out that both the luminosity and the spectroscopy of the armor still life were being compressed by the lens– he tossed off a series of numbers. But the most important thing, as Hockney now explained, was that the highlights had become palpably visible, they stayed steadily in place–it was possible to mark them with complete ease, in a way that would not have been nearly as manageable looking at the armor head-on, or rather with the eyes in one’s inevitably bobbing head. "Or try this," he continued, scooting outside and replacing the armor with a tumbling swath of satin. Again, out in the bright glare of the floodlights, it was almost impossible to make out the glaring fabric–but inside (the cast image was lovely and deeply affecting) you could easily make out where each of the highlights belonged. "Same thing with wall maps," Hockney went on. "We were noticing the wall maps in the Vermeers at the recent New York show, for example the one behind the girl in ‘The Allegory of Painting’...

...and we did the experiment. With the naked eye, there’d be such an overload of information–the coastline, the marshes, the borders, and so forth–that it would be difficult to make out the creases and folds in the hanging map itself. But when you cast such a scene through a lens, creases and folds are just about the first thing you notice….

"Now, come here," he drew us back out of the tent and over to a side wall onto which had been pinned a Hockneyesque pastiche of Caravaggio’s "Supper at Emmaus" of 1599. "We figured out precisely how he did it. It’s a bit more complicated than we thought before. Remember how before I thought he set up the whole ensemble, all four of the sitters, and then he had them pose while, retreating behind his curtain, he sketched out the whole thing on his glistening wet and reflective canvas, incising the contours with the blunt end of his brush so that his models could take occasional breaks and then return to their positions. But we don’t think it was quite like that anymore. Rather, here, look." He reached for a superb reproduction of the heartrending painting.

"Look at Peter’s extended left hand, here on the side, the one closest to us. It’s roughly level with the fruit basket, in terms of depth, yet just about the same size as the fruit basket: those must be mighty tiny apples and positively miniscule grapes. Now, look at Peter’s other hand, flung deep into the backdrop of the painting: it’s the same size as the one closest to us–in fact if anything even bigger, and bigger certainly than Jesus’s hand which in turn is thrust way forward. Before, we used to think he must have been using some kind of telephoto lens. But no, this is what he did, we did the experiment." Hockney nodded over at his pastiche.

The lens stayed in place, but he posed the figures separately, one at a time. First, let’s say, Peter. He moved his easel over so that the cast projection was falling on the canvas’s right side. He had his model pose with his hands outthrust, and first he sketched in the hand closest to us, but the rest of the guy’s body went out of focus. So when he’d finished with those notations, he had the sitter move forward, so that his head and torso fell into the sweet spot of the focus, adjusting the easel accordingly; and finally he had him move forward one more time, so that he could get the back hand which, being in the same sweet spot was the same size as the front one. Note how Peter’s gaze actually seems to fall on nothing–he’s not making eye contact with a Jesus who literally wasn’t there at the time he was painted. Okay, so now Caravaggio moved the easel again, so that the sweet spot fell on the center of the canvas, and he had the Jesus model sit in pretty much the same place and now he did him. After which, moving the easel again, he did the two other figures, one by one. Notice, by the way, the white table cloth over the Persian rug. That solved the Lotto problem–and you’ll notice by the way the same strategy being used by all sorts of artists around that time. You’ll also notice," Hockney was now regarding his own pastiche, "this way you could even use the same models over and over again."

It occurred to me that in a sense Hockney had refined his Zeffirelli analogy yet further. Caravaggio had effectively built up his story through a series of close-ups and reaction shots. "Exactly," Hockney agreed. "For the people of those times, such paintings were motion pictures–their eyes were invited to move through the unfolding story."

It also struck me that this more supple version of the theory bore to the original version something of the relationship that Hockney’s gridlike Polaroid collages bore to their more fluid and dynamic Pentax successors. For that matter, the entire theory had the feel of a lens being dragged across a vast swath of history as one detail after another fell into its sweet spot.

"This is what we now think happened," Hockney was holding forth, summing up. "It begins with the concave mirrors, most likely in Bruges around 1425 and spreading outward, but curved mirrors have got this problem: they can only project a zone of focus of about thirty centimeters diameter. Presently artists begin to notice that you can get the same and an even better effect with a lens, and that lenses are much more versatile. Della Porta is describing lenses projecting images through a hole into a darkened chamber being as early as in 1558. From 1570 or so till about 1660, we enter the era of the left-handed sitters–suddenly you see them everywhere, everybody’s drinking or signaling or grabbing their swords with their left hands, which is because the lens, unlike the mirror, not only turns the image upside down but reverses right and left. And the artists aren’t able to compensate for that until flat mirrors become affordable, toward the last half of the seventeenth century. After that, artists become more and more adept, the lenses more and more sophisticated–Vermeer, Velazquez, and so on–new variations arise (Reynolds’s secret camera obscura that could collapse into the shape of a book and, thus disguised, be slotted onto a shelf; Ingres’s camera lucida) up through the invention of chemical photography itself in 1839.

Brunelleschi: Florentine contemporary of Van Eyck’s, and widely regarded as the progenitor, actually about a decade prior to Van Eyck’s breakthroughs, of classic Italian mathematical abstract perspective. The story of that astonish-ing innovation is one of the chestnuts of art history: how Brunelleschi--who would go on, as his greatest achievement, to mastermind the dome over the Florence cathedral--had earlier in his career contrived a spectacularly realistic pair of paintings, one of the octagonal Baptistry as seen across the square from the Cathedral’s deep portal, the other of the view across another nearby square. Both of these panels have since been lost, but their reputa-tion lives on. So precise were they said to have been that Brunelleschi was able to bore a hole through the center of each of the panels and then have viewers stand precisely where he had stood in making them, bring the back side of the panel up to their faces, peer through the hole at the actual scene, and then extend a flat mirror at arm’s length so they could gaze on the reflection of the painted panel itself–and there was no difference!

Hockney and Graves had long been wondering about those panels and that epiphanous moment. How would anyone who had never seen photos or optical projections of any sort ever have come up with the idea for one- or two-point perspective or any other system of mathematical abstraction? There are no medieval antecdents, and understandably so: We don’t ordinarily suddenly find ourselves standing stock-still, storchlike, closing one eye and freezing the other in its gaze, in order to gauge a scene. Rather (as cognitive psychologists have recently been showing ever more emphatically) vision as it is lived involves a stereoscopic vantage in continual motion, with the perceiving mind actively engaged in retrieving memory, projecting expectation, computing relative scales, compensating for seeming discrepancies, and so forth. How would the idea of doing it any other way ever have arisen?

The standard account (for example in Martin Kemp’s Science and Art) has Brunelleschi extrapolating from the surveying skills and arts he had been perfecting in his ongoing study of antique ruins. But Hockney and Graves began to suspect that Brunelleschi may himself have been using an optical device, perhaps even a concave mirror--which, if so, might admittedly require a rethinking of the putative Bruges-to-Florence trajectory. At one point in his research, Graves dug up a remarkably suggestive description of a curved mirror being used to cast an image onto a wall "of things outside not in sight" in a 1275 (!) text by the Polish monk Witelo, who in turn seems to have based his hermetic suggestions on the writings of Roger Bacon and, before him, that eleventh century Arab scholar Alhazan. Graves was also able to build up a fairly strong case for the simultaneous presence of Witelo manuscripts at the turn of the century in libraries in both Florence and Ghent. Might not Brunelleschi and Van Eyck, omnivorously curious as both of them obviously were, have separately come upon the same reference? In the case of Brunelleschi, thanks to contemporary accounts, we know that he staged his demonstration, particularly of the Baptistry panel, early in the morning; that he stood five or six feet inside the darkened Cathedral portal, facing out into the bright morning light, and that the panel he created was approximately thirty centimeters in length (precisely the dimension of a mirror projection’s sweet spot). Mightn’t he have used a mirror to make the image in the first place and then, instead of moving the lens around as the Flemish took to doing, mightn’t he or his successors have noticed the way the three-dimensional world’s parallel lines seemed, on the two-dimensional panel, to recede to specific vanishing points, and then gone ahead and extended those imaginary lines to create a mathematical perspective (as an alternative to the multiple-vantage method with all its attendant splicing problems)?

Hockney became more and more convinced that this was indeed the case, and in late May, on the occasion of a gathering in Florence of scientists and historians exploring scientific issues in Italian Renaissance art, with both Spike and Kemp in attendance, Hockney arranged to have the Cathedral’s portals swung open at seven in the morning ( a highly unorthodox procedure for which he’d had to secure special ecclesiastical dispensation) so he could demonstrate his version of what he thought Brunelleschi did. And it worked.

What its "working" meant was open to debate. This time he even left the normally enthusiastic Kemp somewhat cold (Kemp had devoted an entire appendix in his Science and Art to his more orthodox surveying-based account): This was all just too speculative. "David sees the optical evidence everywhere," Spike, for his part, subsequently commented to me, "and that may be a problem. He attempts to explain too much. Carravagio’s Baachus being left-handed, for example: that could have had an optical genesis, but it also might just be an iconographic decision, the left hand being thought of as notoriously lascivious. David leaves too many threads for the naysayers. And yet the overall thrust of his argument is quite powerful."

Spike’s critique reminded me of an account I’d once heard of the nature of heresy in the Early Christian church–how a heresy in those days wasn’t so much false in itself as an excavation of a long-suppressed aspect of the Truth which was then raised to the level of the Whole Truth and idolatrized as such. The trouble with such heresies (and one could easily substitute all manner of subsequent ones–the feminist heresy, the afrocentric heresy, the Serbocentric heresy, and so forth, and maybe Hockney’s as well) wasn’t so much one of verity as one of proportion and right relation. (Another art historian once commented to me how she’d have thought that an artist of all people would have been the most suspicious of a Theory of Everything.)

But Hockney’s a real shape-shifter in this regard. Suddenly he’ll seem to double back: "It’s not that everybody was necessarily using optical devices all the time," he commented to me that day beside his optical tent. "Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, they often seem to be eyeballing things, whereas even those who clearly are using such devices may not be relying on them at every moment. But the devices established a standard, they dictated a look. In fact," he gestured back into the tent where the tumble of satin was still glowing on the blank canvas, "to see it was to use it. You see how overwhelmed everybody is by the sheer beauty of such projections even today--and we live in a world surrounded by movies and magazines and television. Imagine the impression that sort of projection must have made on them! And these were visually intelligent people, looking was what they did for a living. Surely they would have seen the implications. How convincingly a three-dimensional space could be laid across a two-dimensional plane. You think they would have thought twice about using it? And even if they did, with everybody else using it, the optical look would have spread everywhere because they’d all have been studying each other’s efforts."

In the meantime, I’ve been beginning to notice a subtle shift in the sorts of objections to Hockney’s theory that I’ve been hearing. In the earliest days, when I’d broach the theory with an art historian or a curator, I’d encounter the old bird-talking-back-to-the-ornithologist problem: what standing did a mere artist have even to be entering such charged and protected terrain? (All professions, as someone once said, are to a certain extent a conspiracy against the laity.) Hockney’s speculations would be dismissed out of hand–not true, impossible, where’s the documentary evidence, where are the written accounts or instruction manuals or references in ledgers and so forth? More recently, skeptical response has segued into variations on, "Well, we knew that all along." Or somewhat more subtly, "But who cares how they made the paintings–that’s not what matters. What matters is iconography, social context, market relations, the metahistory of representation"–whatever.

Hockney of course has been countering that the story of how artists saw and extended the possibilities of seeing is inherently fascinating, in and of itself. But in the end, that’s not been his principal concern. In the same way that during the early eighties, when he as taking literally hundreds of thousands of snaps across his photocollage passion, the celebration of photography itself had never been Hockney’s principal intention (in fact the whole passion was being conducted as a massive critique of the claims of photography) –so, more recently, for all his immersion into the techniques and triumphs of the Old Masters, celebrating their optical achievement has never been his principal focus. How they made their paintings–the 400-year optical hegemony over painting–matters primarily to Hockney because of what came after: his true passion has been the post-1839 assault on the optical waged by his real heroes–Manet, van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso, artists who through great struggle threw off the cyclops embrace of the optical way of seeing and instead began looking at the world with two eyes, from a more realistically moving and lively vantage.

"Look," he said to me one day a few months ago as we gazed across the length of his studio at the 1750-1900 expanse of his Wall. "Look at that fruit by Chardin over there on the left...

Chardin’s version, for all its indisputable mastery and beauty, feels far away, it’s a picture of fruit at the far end of an optical remove, they recede into the picture; whereas Cezanne’s even from this far away, feels right up close, those apples feel close at hand, they feel present to hand, they come out to us. That’s what you can achieve when you break from the tyranny of the optical.

"And yet," he now pulled me back across the room toward that section of the Wall, "for all the Modernist achievement in that regard, it was the monocular optical vision that appears nevertheless to have triumphed. Compare those Cezanne bathers there...

...an academic work which in effect continued the optical tradition in painting long after the invention of chemical photography. You can just see how Bouguereau was using projected photographs: the breaking wave is an entirely artificial backdrop, ludicrously unintegrated with the figure in the foreground, a flat; you can even make out the table the model must have been sitting on in the indentations of the sand. But this is the view that won and continues to hold sway to this day, in photojournalism, in advertising, on television (which is one great receding perceptual tunnel), in movies. David Graves came upon a great line in one of those 13th century precursor texts he’s been digging up, Arnold of Villanova’s advocacy of the need for secrecy regarding much of this emerging esoterica: ‘Some of this knowledge should not fall into the hands of showman and fools.’ Quite something to come upon," he laughed, "here in Hollywood on the far side of the millennium."

One morning I rose to find another of Hockney’s occasional faxes dangling out from my machine. He’d photocopied two printed texts onto a page. The first, in bold face, read:

Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be offered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment.

Beneath these unsettling edicts, Hockney had hand-scrawled:

I will try to send some better news later.

For all the humor of his dispatch, there’s no question that Hockney feels he is playing for big stakes–that more, at any rate, is up for grabs than a mere reinterpretation of the history of painting. Falco, for his part, has been pushing his researches into literally almost revolutionary territory. He is convinced that his collaboration with Hockney has been leading him toward an entirely new way of conceiving of the problem of computerized visual analysis, one of the holy grails of artificial intelligence research. So now he has yet something else to do on those mornings when he’s not monkeying around with his bikes out in the garage.

Another morning, Hockney faxed me a favorite passage from a book of astronomer Carl Sagan’s:

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said--grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

It wasn’t difficult to gauge Hockney’s subtext in faxing me the quotation: or rather to realize the way that for him these explorations of his were hardly trifling divertisements.

The other day, reviewing my files as I prepared to write this piece, I happened upon a handwritten note Hockney had faxed me roughly midway through the adventure, when the stakes were beginning to come clear to him:

Dear Ren:

We move on, we have begun to understand the construction of the Van Eyck altar pieces–Dirk Boutes, Rogier van de Weyden, etc. It’s not one window–like Alberti’s perspective, but many windows–more like the Polaroids.

Nevertheless, this is not just about Art History–nor about artists "cheating," although we had in the process of all this to understand the use of optics.

The real problem, as I’ve said before, is when the lens joins with chemicals–photography. The hand has gone and we are then reduced to a mathematical point. "The pencil of nature" [as the new medium was being referred to in the 1840s] is a mad idea: you need a hand with the pencil. It won’t do anything on its own.

I’ve thought this for a long time, as you know–but all this had to be done before others could begin to see what human vision means.

Images, Images, Images, they have taken over, and they are not human enough. Cezanne and cubism were right, but what has happened: Post-Modernism is Pre-Modernism, it accepts the chemical picture. Our job here is to make others see this, and the big pictures to come of the big beautiful world.

--No edges.

We are not mathematical points.

We are a dimension.

the 5^th (?)

I don’t know, but this is why all this was done.

Artists "cheating" is about the lowest level of all this–trivial and unimportant.

More later

Love life

David

Love life: this has been the way Hockney has been signing his dispatches of late–in fact for several years now. And it’s not mere verbiage. In fact the defiant love of life–in the face of his encroaching deafness, of the way AIDS and cancer have been laying the community of his closest friends waste, of the death of his 98-year-old mother at the outset of this particular passion, and of his beloved dog Stanley, at age fourteen, and now, of course, the horrors of the past several months–that unshakable treasuring of life itself has been the leitmotif of Hockney’s late career, and in many ways one of the most remarkable and heartening things about it.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz, has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since the early eighties, where his work has shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was recently granted a Lannan Literary Award. His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998) and the forthcoming Vermeer in Bosnia. His "Passions and Wonders" series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney's Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998) and Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999). Mr. Wilson was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, and Sarah Lawrence. He is currently director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU (where he has been a fellow since 1991). He is also a contributing editor to Mc Sweeney's and the Threepeeny Review, and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar emigre composer.