Seek My Face by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

this is an incomplete expression of the artist’s experience. Thus it is inadequate. The layman has difficulty in comprehending that plastic creation on a flat surface must not destroy this flat surface. Depth is created by a recession of apparent objects toward a vanishing point, as in Renaissance perspective, but in absolute denial of this doctrine by the creation of surface forces in the sense of
push and pull
. Nor should one try to create depth by the use of tonal gradation, any more than one should create depth by carving a hole in the picture. To create the phenomenon of
push and pull
on a flat surface, one has to understand that by nature the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received, as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. The function of
push and pull
in respect to form contains the secret of Michelangelo’s monumentality. Cézanne understood color as a force of
push and pull
, and in his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of color. Color is a plastic means of creating, ah,
Abstände
. Intervals. Intervals are color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. The whole world comes to us, as we experience it, through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. The mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art. The life-giving zeal in a work of art is deeply embedded in its qualitative substance. The
Geist
, the spirit, in a work is synonymous with its quality. The Real in art never dies, because its nature is predominantly
geistig
, spiritual.” On and on he would preach, pausing where a German word, aKantian concept, occurred to him first and had to be painfully, inaccurately translated.
    “Still,” Hope tells Kathryn, “he had us believing that to make art was the highest and purest of human activities, the closest approach to God, the God who creates Himself in this push and pull of colors.”
    Yet his lecturing, his handsome, fervent, weighty presence, had a hollow side. He did not let students see his own work. He was shy, the enterprise was so great, the Ideal was so stern a taskmaster. As he aged, and others reaped the glory he had foretold, his own work went oddly dead in its cradle of theory: squares and rectangles of raw color looking like manufacturers’ samples, without push or pull. At the time of his teaching her, his forms were still organic, bulbous and swooping like early Kandinsky but without that Russian wandering, those wandering drifts of brush-work, all the colors at once, like peasant decoration. “Flat, flat,” Hochmann would say over her shoulder. “Keep the picture plane
flat
. You’re losing the plane. You’re growing
holes
. Make the colors,” he would say, “sing.” Sing like Beethoven, those shimmering doom-laden chords impossible to do in paint, in palette-knifed rectangles. In the late ’sixties, after his death, Hope went to a giant Hochmann retrospective, a whole floor of the Whitney, and the paintings around her didn’t exist. They had evaporated, they had become walls of dust-catchers. Zack had not evaporated like that, though Hochmann had looked down on him, as an American ruffian, an out-of-control ignoramus. As Ruk would have said, a bandit.
    “Push and pull,” Kathryn repeats in polite bemusement. “Did you feel, ah, close to him as a man?”
    “Did we sleep together, do you mean? Please. He was over sixty, I was—what, twenty-two? Yet you’re right, Iwould have if he had asked; I loved him. He made us see what a noble calling painting was. Someone of your generation probably can’t believe how crucial, how important, how
huge
painting seemed then. It was like sex, yes, you’re right to suggest that. It hadn’t been domesticated yet. It hadn’t been put in its place, its page of the Living section, with a pat on its little fuzzy head.”
    Her companion