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Lädt ... What Heaven Looks Like: Comments on a Strange Wordless Bookvon James Elkins
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An unknown masterpiece of visionary art--as daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly different--reproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians Somewhere in Europe--we don't know where--around 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracks--nothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appear--shapes--even figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint. Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs. This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sources--Baroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incomplete--always she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment. What Heaven Looks Like is a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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The number fifty-two seems like it should be significant, as do plenty of the images in the book, the painter’s many references to Christian figures, Greek gods, and contemporaneous guides to alchemy. Elkins observes that no subject ever reaches a point of finality, where we might comfortably claim there is some sense to it. “Nothing is unwelcome, unless she recognizes it,” he writes. (He has decided, quite plausibly, that the artist is a woman.) “I would like to think she lost interest in her project when she began to feel at home in the contours of her imagination.” Elkins wants to avoid meaning and its inevitable outgrowth, narrative, in the work. He seems to struggle against the same impulse in his writing, a form where it is even more difficult to evade, and is aided by a self-imposed limit — a single page of commentary for each painting.
Through his commentary, I found myself led, but not strong-armed, into noticing the many features I had missed about the paintings. His brief explanations of historical context are also helpful. One place of disagreement comes in his thoughts on the title page; he is mildly skeptical of the idea that the inscription might be by the artist herself. In particular, though, the description in these few lines of the painter as an “Ape of Nature” appeals to me — it reminds me of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” in which an ape named Red Peter explains the method by which, after his capture and transportation to Europe, he fashioned himself into a human. In his novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee has the eponymous writer deliver a lecture in which she notes that “Red Peter took it upon himself to make the arduous descent from the silence of the beasts to the gabble of reason.” I sometimes think this painter must have tried to climb in the opposite direction, journeying into muteness and effecting, as Elkins notes, a certain forlorn distance from the rest of humanity.