ARTWORK
Mushtaq Bhat
DRAWINGS
Greatness can at times appear almost mundane. When I scrutinize the drawings of Albrecht Dürer,1 rendered by the master with a firm and steady professional hand; the end and start of a line appearing as an absolutely unbroken continuum of a perfectly executed act, at times as elating in its emotive expressiveness as those evident in the drawings of da Vinci, I invariably feel myself confronted with a undeniable fact: the self evident perfect ease with which it has been executed. This is not to be confused with just some kind of self discipline at work, as that of an René Margit, who had his easel standing on the carpet in a furnished room and who as the legend has it, in response to an enquiry, concerning the possibility of the paint falling on his carpet, seems to have made that famous remark, "the paint belongs there on the canvas and not on the carpet." It is the same ease of execution, that Rembrandt exhibits in his etchings and more recently Picasso in his drawings. But then you realize, it is actually nothing very rare. And you can train people to accomplish these more artisan than artistic feats. Many contemporary designers, with increased know-how (acquired through increased advances in Mathematics, Physics and Technology) can often surpass, at first-glance these technicalities. Of course, you may think of something like the skeletal strokes of the Creature House Expression 3 software (that Microsoft purchased) and with which you can predetermine with full precision how a stroke should render itself graphically (vector based) and amend its path and create even interference patterns with considerable ease and not much training; that any body can learn, (a few of my Muses graphics were done with Expression 3) or you may think about all those great advances in 3D-renderings and robotics, and say, hey dude, that is all redundant and obsolete. I agree, although you will admit, that this fact alone won't make a da Vinci out of a graphic designer. However this is not the subject of my discussion here, I hope to talk about that elsewhere. To continue then, I have moreover seen school girls and boys showing a profound dexterity in rendering lines and forms and contours. There is an hardly much known German painter, Carl Graeb,* some of whose aquarelle works are master pieces that way! An exhibition of his works once in Potsdam, (East Germany at the time) hardly drew any crowds! And his catalogue showed horrible reproductions, not doing any justice to the brilliance of his color palette! Thousands of leaves of a tree, depicted in some of his, lesser known aquarelle drawings, have been executed with such a mind-boggling meticulous care and dexterity (unlike digital graphics, you are not allowed to make any single grave mistake when painting in aquarelle) so that each leaf in itself is a miniature artwork! An almost 100% perfection!
There is however a lot more to Dürer than that and who, by the way also has some great aquarelle works to his credit, which have not lost their brilliance after all these centuries. First of all, there is this great thirst for new dimensions. that characterizes an epochal mover. This is not somebody, who is using and repeating his once acquired technical skills to furnish the estate of some Duke or a King or (nowadays a Bank). Here we have, above all a seeker, discoverer and creator, rolled into one. In almost no time, he acquired almost all the Italian graphical know-how of the times and as a pioneer and leader in his domain, he set new standards, and gave, just like Johann Sebastian Bach, a particularly new north European flavor to the southern Italian culture, and attained new heights and created new standards. And like da Vinci, he remained equally a student of nature as he was a master of his domain till the end of his life. Van Eyck or Rembrandt were of similar nature, all looking for new medium or new ways for expressing their artistic aspirations.
Holbein,2 a great portraitist, who probably has had a great and lasting influence on portrait painting in general, although most of his subjects are predominantly the members of the noble classes of the time. But then ...
Enter Vermeer!3
Here you have a without doubt a modern painter. The sujets are you and me and the house and the family, the interior, the wonderful Dutch brick houses, reflecting a slow romantic and somewhat relaxed bürgerliches (which some misinformed people associate with bourgeoisie) pace of life, often decorated with flowers, lutes, virginals, and depicting neighbors, lovely milkmaids, scholars and students, cavaliers, mistresses and children and set amidst a naturally much more intact and noiseless landscape. As if a new middle class or even the lower classes were just discovering prosperity and education, so long the prerogative of the upper middle class and the still extant aristocracy. A middle class charmed life, one may say! Anyway a reprise from decibel- and cement- and stress-pollution of our more generous but no less demanding modern times. I presume the Dutch had then, as they have now, relatively less urban ghettoes and slums, compared to many other cities in the world despite the fact, that they have a very high population density. And these people do not appear to be terribly rich, just well living and I think might represent a significant percentage of the total population during the golden dutch age. Vermeer probably was quite familiar with his surroundings in Delft, as such I presume, he would not have shied away from depicting social misery if it did exist there. Furthermore, unlike some of contemporaries, like Van Goyen, he tended toward a realistic reproduction of his world. Not much is known about him and even his work might have suffered the same neglect, if not for the dedicated work of William Bürger (J. T. Thóre) in mid 19th Century. He seems to have incurred great debts at the end of his life. Nevertheless, his works do appear to represent an optimistic epoch in European history _ the beginnings of a period of great maritime discoveries and expansions and subsequently an increase in trade, that lead to a more widespread distribution of wealth in the population. In fact all of the so called genre Malerei seems to pay tribute to this fact, a noticeable increase in affluence. Well a life, that had apparently time for music lessons at home, wine and chat or I assume, a seaman's tale or two and when the kitchen still possessed a great social communal function and whose pleasant smells one can only imagine! If you are in the mood and receptive, you may automatically begin to relax, watching his artwork and submerse yourself in this epoch!
* Of course in his time (1816-1884), Carl Graeb was a well known artist and a professor at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, and amongst his customers he could count Queen Victoria and the Prussian Kaiser. But his small formatted aquarelle works are hardly ever mentioned anywhere and no body has thought them fit for a book or catalogue in a more professional manner. Some of them are masterpieces in aquarelle technique, achieving and even surpassing the brilliance of oil, in reproducing an atmosphere of a humid temperate foliage. You can almost feel, as if it had just rained an hour ago. On closer look, many of them will show you a detailed structure of even the smallest leaves of a shrub or tree and there are thousands of them! Each done with an extraordinary precision and although rendered with fastidious accuracy still emanate a specific kind of artistic flair and reflect the joy of working in a such sensitive medium. A joy that only this mistress, for me the most feminine of all the media associated with pigments can evoke! And yet they do not translate to mere photographic reproductions, they exhibit through out the brilliance of a great medium, and the queen of pigments. And I presume, that they are not products of the toil of many in the studio. They have a specific individual signature and are probably all from one hand. Doubtlessly he was great master of this medium, but the people of his time, appreciated predominantly his architectural works, of royal residences and interiors, which however do not necessarily differ drastically from the works of his contemporaries, like Caspar Scheuren. Something you could think of as professional studio work, where other folks mix the colors and sometimes finish off the whole goddamn thing and you just sign it and well everybody is happy, when the Duke pays the bill. You can see one of his aquarelle landscapes and zoom into the tree on the left and watch the leaves, although they seem to me to play here a merely decorative role in a panoramic architectural and cityscape theme and I presume, have not been executed with the same dedication (or joy) as the ones, where the theme is the nature in a cultural landscape itself. They are not even remotely like the small ones I saw, , during one of the rare exhibitions of his works in Potsdam in 1986. Unfortunately none of them were reproduced in the catalogue. At that time they were owned by Staatliche Schloesser und Gaerten Potsdam Sanssouci. I have no idea who owns them now, but hope that some day some one might consider these small byproducts of his worth a professional catalogue.
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