What you learn from museums

The painting in the photograph above is John George Brown's Scraping a Deerskin (1904). Old Ken happened across this picture while strolling idly around the grounds of the Huntington Art Gallery not so long ago. Whatever you want to say about this painting (and no need to get that nasty!), it got Old Ken to thinking. While we have explored what you can learn in archives in several posts now, museum-learning - - asking questions and finding some provisional answers from art-objects - - has somehow lagged behind. Time to hop to it!



Where to start? The fiction of our picture is that we see a bearded, bespectacled man at full-length, leaning forward in what Tom Waits would call "pool-hall concentration" as he works on an unpleasant piece of drudge-work. His head appears in silhouette against the open barn window and that horizontal band of gauzy, rural landscape we can see through it. We might almost imagine that a luminous painting by George Inness has been embedded into this shady workshop-picture. Perhaps we could say that this is a picture pre-occupied by the past; we might catch an allusion to, say, Caravaggio's infamous St. Matthew in its posing of the concentrated bald pate at work on animal skins (if we allow that Caravaggio's evangelist is, in fact, writing on vellum). But, what is most striking to Old Ken is the powerful, multi-sensorial evocation of the task at hand - - the scraping of a skin whose fatty oils are pooling on the rough-hewn, barn-board planks below.



In composing his picture, Brown has used all kinds of clever graphic tricks to suggest the illusory presence of his scraper - - note especially the flickering white band of paint denoting back-lit highlights. But, he has also resorted to some techniques that put him in curious relation with his figural subject. What struck Old Ken up close (and as registers passably enough in this photographic detail) is how the canvas itself has been scraped. As along the figure's right buttock and midsection, the rough textile weave shows through where the washes of thinly-painted pigment have been abraded. Here, Brown seems to want us to compare between the mere feints of stress on fabric that he signals with the hole in the scraper's shirt at the left elbow - - a mark painted with thick, robust oily strokes - - and the actual wear and tear on cloth that he has performed in making this picture. So, is the painter making some kind of identification with the figure of the scraper? If so, what could it mean?



The oily pool of fat on the ground is also interesting. In the fiction of the picture, this oil has been scraped off the deerskin and is now sinking slowly into wood. But, it evokes the pools of oil-paint media that Brown himself would have created on his own studio floor by scraping down the picture on which we are looking. And, rather than being scraped from an animal skin and soaked into a wood support (both, of course, traditional supports for painting), oil media has been applied to canvas as a binding medium for pigment. If the painter is a scraper, the picture seems to suggest, he is also like a bather who salves or perhaps annoints damaged surfaces with oily films, healing the animal with the vegetal (and vice versa).



Now, this is where actual art historians would want to break off and test some of these wild hypotheses. But, the key for Old Ken is emphasize how a seemingly unpromising object like Brown's humble ditty can nonetheless generate and guide a sequence of observations and inferences in a most pleasant way. Similar kinds of fun can be found by looking at another unprepossessing object above: William Michael Hartnett's After the Hunt (1883). While the fiction of our scene is likely clear enough from our photograph ...



... look closely at the way in which the dented, gleaming hunting horn has been painted.



To create the illusion of brilliant light reflecting off the upper side of the horn's bell, Hartnett applied a thick, cakey smear of white paint softened with Naples Yellow at the margins. As under the raking light in the detail above, this crusty impasto actually juts out slightly from the surface of the canvas. So, the artist is using the "sculptural" properties of paint to render a purely optical effect - - while the thick, green cord next to it, which actually would project out toward the viewer were the objects depicted real, has been rendered in flat, matte paint. All of this causes a strangely doubled double-take. That is, we are looking at what seems to be a flat surface (the painted canvas) that is trying to pass itself off as horns, game, hats and other three-dimensional whatnot. But, in reality, the flatness is itself an illusion; what appears to be optically brightest is also (ever so slightly) physically closest to the viewer.

“Now ... possibly some may say," if Old Ken can quote one of America's leading seventeenth century philosophers, "To what purpose all this curiosity?” No purpose, really. Just that museums teach us things that we can't get elsewhere. While maybe Google Art Project or equivalents will eventually offer the requisite resolution, it's hard to beat the good old museum for making made-ness perceptible.