an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, December 2006, ISSN 1552-5112
Anthony Caro’s DÉJEUNER
SUR L’HERBE II:
Inside and Outside the
Frame of Picturality
fig
1 fig
2
(fig 1) Anthony Caro, Déjeuner sur l'herbe II
(1989), Steel rusted and fixed, 82 x 280.5 x 185.5 cm
(fig 2) Edouard
Manet, Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863), Oil on canvas,
214 x 269 cm
Anthony
Caro’s sculptures do not fit into a linear art historical narrative. The artist
has constantly shifted his attention from modeling to casting, from expressive
figuration to pure abstraction, from the use of bronze and scrapyard materials
to that of clay, paper, wood and terracotta. Throughout his artistic career, he
has repeatedly invented new challenges for himself, refusing to be identified
with a single style or technique. Caro took sculpture off of its plinth, yet
subsequently framed it within the space of table structures of diverse shapes
and sizes. Likewise, he transferred the expressiveness of sculptural forms into
the realm of ingenious colors of abstract works, only to abandon its symbolism
altogether and focus on the highly suggestive syntax of his sculptures.
Acknowledging Caro’s movement away from radical abstraction in the 1980s and
towards the search for sources that lie beyond the strict boundaries of
medium-specificity, Peter Fuller rightly remarked that “formalist criticism
will have enormous difficulties in attempting to come to terms with Caro’s
recent achievement.”[1]
Due
to the limitations of art historical interpretations which demand the fixity of
original artistic intent and the identification of precise points of reference
in Caro’s sculptures, Table Piece Y-98 ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe II’ (1989)
has frequently been perceived as a sculptural illustration of Edouard Manet’s
famous painting. Its sphere of meaning has thus often been restricted to its
identification with a formalist translation from one artistic medium to
another. Nonetheless, Caro’s sculpture refuses to be confined to the canonical
coordinates it hints at; instead, it can be seen from within a framework of
analysis in which reality and picturality merge, thanks to its highly allusive
power and its direct or indirect link to a multiple series of artworks.
The present paper is an attempt at a post-structural
understanding of the relationship between Manet’s and Caro’s approach to the
déjeuner theme, one which proposes a more nuanced view of the correspondence
between signifiers and signifieds in the two artworks. A deconstruction of the
predominant critical interpretations can reveal the instability of meaning in
Caro’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe II. The play between the two déjeuners’
denotations and connotations is highly vivid in the context of their temporal
and spatial distance from one another.
Caro
chooses to engage in a dialogue with Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The
sculpture is focused on the portrayal of human bodies, while the landscape and
the still life are more fragmented, receding to the left corner of the
composition. The continuum between bodies and pictorial space moves towards a
continuum between the art object’s space and the viewer’s space as a tray-like
shape stretches out of the table, emphasizing the horizontality of the
composition while it substitutes for the perceptual relationship established
between the spectator and the intense female gaze seductively directed outside
Manet’s pictorial frame. At first sight, the nude woman and the two men in
Manet’s painting appear to be the only figures that correspond to the
“characters” in the sculptural composition. They appear to be enduring memory
traces of the artist’s viewings of the artwork. Their silhouettes are
abstracted and, although their sculpted contours are sharper than the lines of
the pictorial representation, a complete recognition of the three characters’
identity is denied because no cultural signage is provided.
Through
his incomplete references to the 19th century paragon of Modernism,
Caro emphasizes the painting’s lack of interpretative closure that has
originally aroused the hostility of critics. His sculpture has been marked by
its exploration of the pictorial canon. Both his drive for abstraction in the
1960s and his drive for abstracted figuration in the 1980s were prompted by a
careful consideration of pictorial compositions. Encouraged by Greenberg to
change his habits in order to bring a transformation to his sculpture, Caro
visited the
Supporting
the interconnections between art mediums and the idea of re-interpretations of
the canon, in 1975 Caro wrote a letter to John Hale, the chairman of the
National Gallery in London, proposing a series of lectures that would challenge
the ordinary analysis of Old Masters’ paintings. They would rescue them from a
canonical perspective and would present their works as if they had freshly
emerged from the artists’ studios in the 20th century. Probably as a
result of his interest in such a less conventional approach, the National
Gallery invited Caro to display one of his sculptures in the company of
paintings of his own choice. The exhibition took place in 1977 and was entitled
The Artist’s Eye. While commending Caro’s wish to show an abstract
sculpture in the context of Old Masters paintings, John Russell, the art critic
of New York Times, decried the sculptor’s selection of this particular artwork,
writing that its illusive morphology, resembling graceful traces of brush
strokes, and its positioning against the gallery wall emphasized its pictorial
condition rather than the specific characteristics of the sculptural medium.
Though
his works are embedded in the history of painting rather than in that of
sculpture, Caro does not seek engagement with the formal problematics of either
medium. Viewers are enticed to identify possible allusions to canonical works.
In The Artist’s Eye exhibition, Caro chose to surround Orangerie
with paintings of diverse styles and themes which shared similar compositional
syntax[3].
By exposing the numerous links that can be established between apparently
disjoined artistic periods and distinct figurative representations, he showed
that the origin of his sculpture does not rest within a unique artwork.
Instead, he is inspired by the correspondences that can be established between
abstract signifiers and landscapes, portraits, and still-lives that have become
pictorial landmarks within the art historical narrative. Explaining his
preference for the painting canon, Caro underlined the freedom he experienced
while improvising on a medium that required fewer formal constraints: “It was
better to go to painting than to old sculpture because painting gave one ideas
of what to do but no direct instructions on how to do it.”[4]
In the case of Orangerie, the allusions to other paintings were the
result of its juxtaposition with Old Master works in the National Gallery
exhibition. In the case of sculptures of the 80s and 90s, the references to
pictorial signifiers are either extremely subtle, since their sources are
tentatively identified by critics,[5]
or sharply overt, since their very title incorporates the precise name of the
painter and of the work that inspired the abstract configuration.[6]
Déjeuner sur l’herbe II
situates itself in the intermediary position, as Caro does not directly refer
to Manet, but incorporates in his title the name of the 19th century
painting. Caro considers the titles of his works as elements adjacent to the
sculptural composition, which needs to remain open to negotiations of meaning.
In his 1975 interview with Lisa Lyons, he observed that most of the titles of
his works are just a matter of identification and are not supposed to limit the
visitor’s perceptual relation to the piece[7].
Starting with the second half of the 80s, Caro’s references to the canon were
becoming less and less covert. In the exhibition Aspects of Anthony Caro.
Recent Sculpture 1981-1989, held jointly by Annely Juda and Knoedler
Gallery, his works that originated in the syntax or thematics of other art
objects were coined “source sculptures.” They were considered to indicate the
artist’s engagement in “a dialogue with other disciplines, such as
architecture, or the study of old master paintings”[8]
and his departure from a preoccupation with the inherent qualities of the
materials used. Déjeuner sur l’herbe II was included in the exhibition and
was designated by Tim Hilton “the most complex work of the late eighties.”[9]
Déjeuner sur l’herbe II is
far from being a sculpture that functions solely in conjunction with its
reflection of the source painting. Its meaning oscillates within the space between
the signifiers of the two artworks. It is the indefiniteness of formal
parallelisms combined with the field of open significations that render Caro’s
sculpture more than a translation of the 19th century representation
in an abstracted mode. In 2005, Manet’s and Caro’s Déjeuners were
juxtaposed within the same exhibition space at the Musée d’Orsay. Once the
material boundaries between the two works collapsed, their meaning tended to be
restricted to the range of formal similarities and differences between them.
The display attracted interpretations which underscored medium-specificity
characteristics and the metamorphosis of Manet’s painting into an abstract
composition. Thus, in the exhibition catalogue, Ann Hindry noted that “Caro’s
work drew its rich singularity, as he developed as an artist, from his ability
to assimilate and reinterpret – in three dimensions and for his own purposes –
formal conventions going back to Renaissance, the lessons of Manet, the
principles of Cubism.”[10]
But Caro’s approach to the Déjeuner sur l’herbe entails more than a
change of expressive means; it is simultaneously an elusive presence and an
elusive absence as it addresses the viewer’s imaginative and mnemonic
abilities. From a phenomenological perspective, Déjeuner sur l’herbe II is
placed within the scope of the “third distance,” perceptual mechanisms defined
by Ortega y Gasset as “acts of mentioning”[11]
in which the index of representation is only alluded to and cannot be visually
retrieved as entirely real. Caro’s sculpture might be viewed as a trace of
Manet’s work, other paintings dealing with the same theme, or a reproduction
furtively seen in an art album or calendar.
The
distance between creation and re-creation of a particular artistic theme is
like the distance between reality and its representation: the denotation and
the connotation of the “real” image or of the re-contextualized “framed image”
are the objects of subjective perceptions. No unique truth can be established,
as the image is neither entirely real, nor entirely virtual. Jacques Derrida
has uncovered four different processes through which truth is usually
reconstituted: truth as “unveiling” (unmediated reflection), truth as
“adequation” (subjectivized translation), truth as “picturality”/sculpturality
(characteristic of representation in a specific artistic medium) and truth as
“passe-partout” (accommodating differences in terms of both form and content).[12]
In connection with Caro’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe II, two of these methods
of truth-investigation seem to have been favored. Interpretations based on
truth as “unveiling,” “adequation,” and “picturality” have been privileged by
certain critics who have seen Déjeuner sur l’herbe II as an approximate
or accurate sculptural rendition of a pictorial model. Nonetheless, Ian Barker
rightly suggested in his critical biography of Anthony Caro that it is
necessary to debunk one-sided analyses of source sculptures as
three-dimensional illustrations of paintings and to transpose their
interpretation within the field of truth as passe-partout: “These works and
others inspired by the paintings of the Old Masters still remain largely
misinterpreted as transpositions, rather than being correctly seen as
sculptural analogies.”[13]
For
William Packer, Caro’s approach to Old Master paintings is an attempt at
unveiling the originals’ structure and meanings to contemporary viewers who may
no longer discover the innovative dimension and the subtle significations of
artworks that have already become canonical. According to him, Caro reflects
the reality of pictorial representation by finding abstract equivalents to
their signifiers and more accessible denotations for their signifieds, as he
aims “to reveal the bones and sinews of these great works from which they
derive their life and strength” by giving volume to flat surfaces and ensuring
that “each element takes its proper place, plays its proper role.”[14]
Packer assigns to the sculpture the function of parole, as a splintered
image of the original langue of the painting, exhibited by Manet in the Salon
des refusés in 1863. Thus, the meaning of Déjeuner sur l’herbe II is
conveyed solely by its reference to the painting, which is presumed to include
the code for its own understanding. Caro’s source sculptures are neither
parodical pastiches nor fully-fledged representations of pictorial forms that
undergo abstract and three-dimensional transformations. In Déjeuner sur
l’herbe II, what is elided from and what is added to Manet’s painting are
not only elements of style, form, or medium. Caro’s sculpture could be instead
described as an impression of the canonical work of modernism viewed from
within the contemporary context. In an interview with Ann Hindry who outlined
the formal correlations that exist between Manet’s modernist landmark and
Déjeuner sur l’herbe II, Caro concluded, “for me, it’s the basic general
feeling that the painting gives, nothing specific but that hint.”[15]
In the same context, Caro pointed out the fact that he did not want his
sculpture to be an “illustration” of the Old Master painting.
Some
critics have been intent on delineating source sculptures’ similarities with
the 19th century painting and their formal differences, being
reluctant to take note of the loose correlations that are at work in Caro’s
sculpture. Phyllis Tuchman saw his engagement with pictorial landmarks in the
80s mainly as a strategy aimed at securing a position for himself in the art
historical hierarchy. In “Sculpting Space,” she firmly stated that, “while no
one has ever called Caro an appropriationist that is exactly what he was being
when he based the formal language of several grand pieces on Old Master
paintings.”[16]On the other
hand, Tim Marlow argued that Caro has actually “never sought to paraphrase.”[17]
What he offers the viewer of his work as a sign of the pictorial source is an
incomplete series of parameters of Manet’s painting and a linguistic referent
in the title to which one inevitably clings in order to step beyond the
abstract configuration and discover links with a prior art historical
narrative.
Likewise,
interpretations of Déjeuner sur l’herbe II founded on truth as
adequation and truth as adaptation fail to take into account the free
correspondences between the pictorial source and the sculpture. In spite of the
fact that she concedes to the contemporary nature and concept of the sculpture,
Ann Hindry supports the idea that Caro “remains true to his source”[18]
as if it were a paragon whose formal characteristics are not to be questioned
or modified. By the same token, Kenneth
Baker highlights the perceptual game entailed by the viewer’s recognition of
references to Manet’s painting, but concludes that Caro’s merit resides above
all in the abstraction of forms and in the “power of tangible presence denied
to the ingredients of a picture, no matter what the conventions that support it
or that it overturns.”[19]
Both readings are grounded in the critics’ belief in a one-sided dialogue
between the two works. For those
relying on truth as adequation, it is the signification of the work that is the
focus of Caro’s re-framing; for those defending the idea of truth as
sculpturality or picturality, it is the form of the work re-modeled in a
different medium that is the main object of transformation.
In
an attempt at finding a common denominator for Caro’s sculptures, Peter Fuller
affirmed that “Caro’s sculptures tend to work from a single point perspective,”[20]
while David Cohen maintained that Caro expresses his allegiance to the
modernist canon by stressing “the physicality of sculpture, its working ‘in the
round’- abolishing any sense of single-point perspective.”[21]
The reading of Déjeuner sur l’herbe II from the perspective of truth as
sculpturality would necessarily entail a special emphasis on the vision offered
by the tactile quality of the three-dimensional
object, which supplements the flatness of the pictorial representation. This
may also be the result of the fact that Manet’s painting became notorious at
the time of its exhibition in 1863 not only on account of its morally
objectionable representation, but also on account of the artist’s manifest
disregard for single point perspective.[22]
Although he decided to replace the plinth with the table, which is usually
placed below eye level, Caro maintains that for him the optic is more important
than the haptic, and he strongly opposes the idea of direct contact between
viewer and artwork. Throughout his career, Caro has manifested no radical
attachment to three dimensional or to two dimensional forms in spite of
critics’ attempts at categorizing his works in this way. As he likes to
maintain, his sculptures are created on the edge between different mediums.[23]
In Déjeuner sur l’herbe II, Caro adroitly combines flat surfaces with concave
and convex forms. The slightly curved shape that corresponds to the contours of
the second woman bather is mirrored by the almost flat, circular shape that
extends within the viewer’s space; deflated surfaces are never completely
planar, just as the volumetric body of the foreground female figure is
partially devoid of its voluptuous presence as it is hollowed out to suggest a
state of utter bohemian detachment. The formalist reading of Caro’s sculpture
in terms of medium-specificity is partly engendered by his well-known
friendship and collaboration with Clement Greenberg, the most influential
American critic of abstract art, who strongly believed that each art medium
(beginning with modernism) sharpens the specificity of its formal
characteristics in order to retain its autonomous status. Caro shares
Greenberg’s views on the primarily optical dimension of sculpture, but
challenges his opinion that sculpture guards its own specificity by remaining
“tied inexorably to the third dimension” and by being “inherently less
illusionistic.”[24]
Déjeuner sur l’herbe II has a chimerical
effect through the bridges it builds across time and through the playful depth
it establishes as it reinterprets perspectival representation within the mode
of abstraction. Distant figures become increasingly abstract as they transform
into more clear-cut geometrically-shaped forms, although they maintain their
size and close interrelations with the rest of the composition. Seeking to elucidate such problematics
concerning the interpretation of Déjeuner sur l’herbe II starting from
characteristics inherent to the sculptural medium, Caro commented, “there was
never any question of trying to make three-dimensional painting. This might be
more what Clem [Greenberg] had in mind for the purity of means.”[25]
The sculptor’s lack of interest in the integrity of the sculptural qualities of
his art object is also denoted by the fact that he had no particular
requirements regarding the installation of Déjeuner sur l’herbe II inside
the gallery space. Its positioning in gallery corners was favored due to its
L-shaped table, ultimately emphasizing its picturality because visitors could
not observe it in the round.
Caro’s
Déjeuner sur l’herbe II is both a reading of Manet’s painting and a new
writing; it is a “remedy” as it is a quotation and it is a “poison” as it
imposes its own distinct representation. This latter may be a portrayal of the
image of Manet in the modernist gallery - as has been the case in its
juxtaposition to the source painting in the Orsay exhibition - a representation
of a painting without a frame, or even a mirroring of a real contemporary image
which is reminiscent of the representation proposed by the 19th
century painter. Déjeuner sur l’herbe II displaces the fixity of the
logos and re-tells its story while seeking its own validity, setting forth its
own subjectivized truth. Its connotation emerges from the operational realm of
the “pharmakon” conceptualized by Jacques Derrida as being “within the order of
the pure signifier, which no reality, no absolutely external reference, no
transcendental signified, can come to limit, bound or control.”[26]
The abstract sculpture could be regarded as a supplement, both a
substitution and an addition. Discussing his forays into the pictorial canon,
Caro claims that there are two ways in which he approaches the signifiers of
Old Master paintings: “far away from the subject, the way I did in Déjeuner
sur l’herbe II”[27]
or closer to the morphology of the original coordinates, as in his
re-contextualizations of Van Gogh’s Chair in late 1980s. If we try to match elements of source
sculptures that depart from formal relationships with paintings against the
corresponding pictorial forms that inspired them, the playful impact of the
loose connections established between the two is annihilated. For Tim Hilton,
who favors the interpretation of Caro’s Déjeuner in terms of the
indefinite links to the Impressionist source it indirectly quotes, the
sculptor’s most innovative relationship with pictorial tradition is “most
potent when it is least recognizable,”[28]
functioning on the verge between the momentary act of identification of the 19th
century artwork and the realization that the parallelism is only illusory.
Caro
neither looks down upon the canon, nor relies upon it blindly; his sculpture is
an adroit incursion within the series of Déjeuners to which it simultaneously
attaches and adds meaning. Déjeuner sur l’herbe II exists as both
parergon and ergon. It is impossible to completely separate it from the source
painting, yet it is also impossible to analyze it only in connection with its
allusion to it. Caro’s decentralization of meaning extends beyond the formal
characteristics of Manet’s painting. His sculpture is part of a series just as
much as the original canonical painting was part of one. Déjeuner sur
l’herbe I (1989) has been recognized by critics as a sculptural framing of
Monet’s composition (1865), which was at the time of its creation a challenge
to Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) due to its more conventional
approach to its thematics. In order to subvert the canon, Caro referred
initially to the lesser known paragon, only to then turn his attention to
Manet’s composition, which has become an auratic construct of 19th
century painting. Through this reversal of chronology, he actually hints at the
fact that Manet’s painting itself is not a primary model in the series of
“Déjeuners sur l’herbe.” In picking the déjeuner as a theme, Caro reiterates
the gesture of Manet who “had developed an interest in appropriating motifs
from his predecessors’ pictures for use in his own.”[29]
Caro’s sculpture is palimpsestic, but it is not parodic, as that of Manet who
rebels against formalist issues and moral conventions of the 19th
century.[30]
The
source for the theme of the 1863 painting was partially derived from Titian’s Fête
champêtre, while that composition was inspired by Marcantonio Raimondi’s
engraving The Judgment of Paris, after a drawing of Raphael, which drew
upon a Roman sarcophagus that is now found in the Villa Medici in
Through
his repeated reference to recurrent pictorial themes, Caro gets involved in art
historical discourse. While describing the context in which he created his
variations on The Descent from the Cross by identifying
correspondences between Rubens’ and Rembrandt’s pictorial representations of
it, Caro rhetorically exclaimed “Why leave it to the art historians to discover
these things? Let’s be frank about their ancestry.”[35]
Nonetheless, he immediately admitted that this idea might have been a mistake
on his part, probably because he had thus reduced the loose suggestiveness of
his sculptures’ syntax by indicating the precise pictorial sources at which he
was hinting.
Viewers
who come in contact with Caro’s sculpture in the absence of Manet’s painting
have to re-create subjective mental projections of the original, which are
never exact or complete representations of it, but whose subjectivized
significations are as important as those of the fixed “text” stored in the
archive. The trace of Manet’s painting virtually accompanies Caro’s work; it
“belongs without belonging,”[36]
being at the same time inside and outside the work. The real and the virtual
dimensions intersect and meaning is rendered unstable. While teaching at St.
Martin’s
From
the point of view of the passe-partout, or the ambivalent restitution of truth,
Caro’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe II is placed inbetween absences and
presences of form and content; it recalls the 1863 version of the theme, but it
does not quote it; simultaneously, it borrows and it lends as parergon, ergon
and potential future paragon. As Adrian Searle points out, “Caro at his best is
all about openness and closure”[38]
and Déjeuner sur l’herbe II is not an exception to the rule. The
“palimpsest” approach it exhibits fluctuates from the initial closure of
analysis -provided by the inevitable reference to Manet- to the openness of the
free play of signifiers. For Caro, just as for the viewer, there is no fixed
langue; perception and remembrance of an original signifier imply a creative
departure from it, accompanied by a process of resignification. Ellipsis stands
at the core of his approach to Great Masters’ paintings. The human figures are
associated with the characters in Manet’s painting only as a result of their
location in the composition. As they are all denuded of specific
personification, as far as gender and cultural specificity are concerned, they
are shadows of the signifiers and signifieds of the 1863 painting. Presumably,
the woman still maintains the focus of the image, as her body is less
fragmented than that of the other corporal silhouettes and she replicates (to a
certain extent) the posture of the female figure in Manet’s painting. Caro’s
female figure appears relaxed, just as a model that poses without mimicking the
stereotypical seductive gesture of holding her hand under her chin and without
faking a sudden turn of her head. The convoluted lines of the female body are
straightened and voluptuousness subsists merely at the level of viewers’
subjective projections. The basket filled with fruits, which could have been
interpreted as a symbol of fertility and abundance, stands void, like the
concave torso of the woman and the tray-like shape that offers itself bare to
the viewer, like a paradigm that needs to be filled with meaning. As
David Cohen suggests the identification of
abstract forms with elements in Manet’s painting can be only tentative,
“as the eye adjusts to Caro’s sculptural vision, some shapes begin to read as
touching, if not convincing, renderings of the voluptuous turn of a thigh or
prop of an elbow. But the reading remains highly selective and subjective. It
is an account of an energy in the original quite remote from that in the
particulars.”[39]
Truth
as passe-partout is located neither uniquely in the abstracted space of Caro’s Déjeuner
sur l’herbe II nor within Manet’s painting whose trace is perpetuated from
one representation to another, but in the temporal and spatial distance that
separates them. It has multiple facets and its traits subsist at the level of
the entire series of framings of “the déjeuner” beyond the borders of reality
and picturality. The re-contextualized perspective upon the bohemian theme
betrays changes in contemporary perceptions and dislocates the canonized
interpretation of the paragon. Caro does not cite Manet’s name, yet he manages
to evoke his presence in the absence of a precise quotation. He projects a
mental perception of the painting triggered by open-ended sculptural forms. In
the process, his work engages the viewer in an exercise of imagination and
interpretation that destabilizes and opens out singular interpretations, as it
transgresses frames, tables, museum walls, and canonical investigations for an
ultimate truth.
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and
image
Volume 3, December 2006,
ISSN 1552-5112
Notes