5. Beauty in Painting

David Sylvester: “Max Ernst tells how his father, an honest man, painted a picture of his garden from which he left out a tree for the sake of the composition, and was afterwards so troubled by this untruth to reality that he went and cut down the tree.”

6. On Knitting

There is this sentence from To the Lighthouse that I love: “Not liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she twitched the stocking out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.”

Virginia Woolf says in her diary that writing is about putting words on the backs of rhythms. The sentence above is that idea in action. The sentence has three dependent clauses before the subject shows up; after the subject clause, three subsequent clauses appear, further modifying the subject. The three dependent clauses point to mental activities: “Not liking,” “and wondering,” “wondering.” But the later three clauses are grounded in tangible sense: “the fine gravings came drawn… about her lips,” “she grew still,” “and now… settles.” The first three clauses are organized as participial clauses: “Not liking,” “and wondering,” “wondering.” And the last three clauses are organized by the stringing-along of that workhorse conjunction and: “and all,” “and she grew,” “and now.” On either side of the independent clause in the middle of the sentence, the clauses are as carefully organized as they are dramatic.

The core of the sentence is the clause “she twitched the stocking out.” Everything before and after that clause is elaboration. A different writer would have had just the plain core — but this is Woolf. And it needs saying that the sentence itself enacts what Mrs. Ramsay is doing in the sentence: she’s darning a sock. The sentence, then, is a piece of knitting. And more, “she twitched the stocking out” denotes the only concrete coordinate in a moment that is otherwise very fluid, that is happening in the mind. In the first three clauses, we are in thinking, in the final three clauses we’re in metaphor. Mrs. Ramsay begins in fretfulness and ends in unabashed poetry. And in the middle of all that, the plainness of what she’s actually doing: “she twitched the stocking out.”

7. Classicism

For years I admired Agnes Martin’s paintings without having known much about her. The simplicity of her abstract planes, the Shaker-like minimalism, the modulated soft colors — these spoke of a hard-working gaze and an even harder-working hand. Martin would have seemed an artist only of precious sensibility if, over the years, she hadn’t stuck so obsessively to her vision, which replicated itself in painting after painting.

Reading the volume of Martin’s writings only confirmed the drivenness that’s the soul beneath the paintings’ serenity. Martin was an unforgiving whip to herself. Her paintings are so modern that one expects her to speak from an avant-garde position. Instead, the theme one discovers in the writings is her repeatedly affiliating herself with a classical posture towards art: “I would like my work to be recognized,” she wrote, “as being in the classic tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art can not possibly be eclectic. One must see the Ideal in one’s own mind. It is like a memory of perfection.”

Jed Perl claims in an article on Cezanne that “The truest classicists offer transcendence without catharsis.” What Perl means by this transcendence is perhaps something like what Wordsworth meant, declaring in his “Intimations” ode that to him even the “meanest flower” brought thoughts “too deep for tears.” Wordsworth, schooled in his own mortality and the immortality of nature, arrives at a “faith that looks through death,” an equanimity beyond merely cathartic emotion, beyond tears. Given Perl’s formulation, in the work of these classicists what seems to be the achieved characteristic is an alertness that outdistances tragedy and all its busy feeling. The classicist, by this definition, has a Bartleby dutifulness that is also a kind of hauteur. Roger Fry, in his Cezanne study, has a description of the young artist that could stand as an image for that Bartleby figure: “So far indeed was he from possessing any sort of hide, that his fellow students nicknamed him ‘l’ecorche,’ the man without any skin to protect his sensitiveness from the strokes of fate and the malice of his fellows.” Agnes Martin is in this same line of being and ambition: the cool wisdom and the formal fanaticism, haunted by perfection.