Van Rensselaer

Van Rensselaer in 1889 wrote a little book on six artists she admired. She reviewed their work in a spirit of admiration and kindness. Among them was Winslow Homer whose work is now on display in a show at the Musuem of Fine Arts in Boston. I refer to her two page introduction in which she speaks of the role of the artist. "He neither copies nor falsifies the facts of nature. He transmutes them, giving them new beauties and a new meaning drawn from the essence of his own soul." Her admiration for the lone artist is boundless. Her feeling is the artist "insists on himself." Against all the odds the artist stands lone and tall and proud, after doing his or her work. Knowing all too well the magnitude of the accomplishment.

The woman at the Regis library in Weston who asked I look at the book she was reading, gave me a few words of her interpretation to go with the book she handed me to look at for a few moments. She said the artist is special," a mouthpiece" for the rest of us. I think that is good to say. That the artist speaks for the rest of us who go about our daily lives and just exist. To satisfy, perhaps, some eternal scheme laid out somewhere off this earth. The artist does a thing we should admire and respect, but when we overanalyze a thing we end up distorting its meanings. My friend in the library suggested that Mrs. Schuyler Van Renssaelaer did not tamper with the six artists she wrote about, but handled her interpretation with care and admiration and let it go at that.

What I get from the few words of Mrs. Van Rensselaer that I quote above is that the artists add a bit of something to their works that carry their offering to a somewhat higher plane. So a painting is more than a tree or a person. It gives the viewer a kick that goes beyond the surface of the work. Same with a photo. My concern here in with the work of the turn-of-the-century, painter-in-light, the photographer, Eugene Atget.

Good work or great work lasts a long time. It exists as itself and gives pleasure and meaning to generations unborn at the time the work was contemplated and completed. Seferi, the Greek poet, has a way to put it. He looks at the statues of his ancestors, lying about in disarray and claims they have avoided the cycle of life and death all people and things have to contend with. He says, "that while we, still upright on our feet are dying, become brothers in stone, united in hardness and weakness, the ancient dead have escaped the circle and risen again to smile in a strange silence."

It may take a thousand years but there you have it. A deliverance from decay and death. In the work itself. That may be the ultimate miracle of art. That it never dies, if it is good enough. Seferi clearly believes the old sculpture is good enough, having been purified in the earth for some years, before, some earnest archaeologist uncovered it for us to enjoy. It lives, plainly lives, and George Seferi goes up to it and strokes the piece with his tender hand and it responds to him. It breathes for him, shines from the inside and George is very happy, indeed. He tells us such things, as when he goes to Delphi and communes with the dear Charioteer, a statue, he stands beside, talks to and gets a reply.

Such is art. It jumps decades and centuries even, to join us, to regale us, to teach us. And then, it just goes back to being a statue, or a painting by Winslow Homer. It goes back into itself until another human penitent goes up to it and says, "hello, and what can I take from you today to brighten up my being?"

The work of art is not at any loss of energy for the encounter with the human. It just goes on its way, like the Everready bunny, banging its drum down the road.

If you have a limited belief in mysticism as I do, you have to get your kicks somewhere. I get them from art and literature. Poetry, too. These human forms of expression and meaning enrapture me, as some god might another person. Human emanations from the American culture, the French, the whatever. It all comes down to the same thing. We are privileged to be among greatness. Van Rensselaer has the right read on it, as she sits in her 1889 New England. Her two pages on the role of the artist are quietly apt. It is all it takes her to get the record straight, while I take vid after vid trying to say the same thing.

That we can't live without art, if we are smitten with the need to concentrate on the things of this earth, and are willing to let the supernatural world of saints, gods, and deities go their own way. Not to say there is no faith. There is lots; in what we can feel and touch. The rest? Well, I let it lie. If god is there at the end, so be it. I shall greet her or him. If not, I have covered myself by saying, I believe. I do, however, know that the photographer, Atget, bore his tired body through the streets of Paris, to take a few pictures.

I can say he is remarkable in his documentation of what he saw there. There is no attempt at art. It just comes out that way. His conception of the world was direct, pedestrian, common. That there was a structure or a crowd, and here he was to take a picture, so he took a picture. End of story. The pictures were pretty good. Atget stands beside us today and he explains this is this and that is that. He is a guide, what the librarian person at Regis called a mouthpiece for the human experience. As Aeschylus does, according to Seferi, he is a man "feeling and expressing himself close beside us."

The rules of expression are the ones that govern the use of his instrument, the camera and the film that goes with it. He has no theory of art, of photographic composition one can deduce from the pictures. The views are sensible and direct, not art-like, artsy. He says so, in Molly Nesbit's book, Seven Albums."

"These are simply documents I make."

His pictures become in his day models for interior decorators to use on clients contemplating additions to their homes. They would buy a bunch of pictures to get ideas from. Pictures Atget had shot to show this or that detail of a Parisian house interior or a section of grille work outside. The interior decorator would buy in bulk. The photos were cheap.

Painters who paint cozy street scenes or the realistic ones who would render a whore outside her doorway would purchase copies of his photos to copy and embelish. So Atget will film prostitutes, and street scenes and carriages with horses that some artist will buy and then render into a painting that will fetch a pretty price. His photos are raw presentations of everyday life someone will embellish to make a real product that is going to sell. He sells his stuff in bulk. If a painter, a "true artist," is , say , going to do a bridge in the city, he may buy a bunch of pictures of bridges Atget shot and choose one he can sketch into a work of painterly art.

Atget is content with his role and stays in the background. Only he is extremely passionate that his pictures be right. This he insists on. He is doctrinaire, closed minded, obstinate and very sure that what he produces must be right for what he is getting at. Whatever that happens to be. He really does not say, only his friends say he is of an inflexible nature on anything, and especially about his work. He follows a method, a schedule, and for him that is the one right way to do a thing.

He is characterized as "the old neighborhood photographer." Like the butcher or the fruit-monger. A common being, just plying a common trade. Yet the special comes through. Desnot, an interpreter of the time, says he looks at the world "with the marveling lens of dream and surprise." A few people in his day knew his greatness. Only a few.

He says, too, "These are the visions of a poet handed down to poets." How nice! He clearly recognizes the beauty in the pictures as many who have followed, poet and not-poet, have.

And Atget does it all. He is catholic in taste. Going about in search of light in this moody city, Paris, photographing "starched lace curtains, a basket of cauliflowers, a prostitute with yellow hair."

I cannot resist to praise him early in this work I am doing. His biographer, MacOrlan, knew him. "That old man of the theatre was inpenetrable." In his youth , into middle age, he had been a thespian in a traveling theatre, taking culture to the provinces, to the poor. A character actor who packed it in, to spend the rest of his days taking pictures others could make art of. He was impenetrable because he had learned how. To play a part of a play and then go home to eat and sleep. It was enough to satisfy him apparently.

MacOrlan goes on to say," no-one sought to understand either him or the profound value of his work." Indeed, we are still trying to get his point.

I guess you might say he is an artist of the people. I like that. Like Grandma Moses or the lithe illustrator, N.C. Wyeth. Or the socalled primitive, Earl Cunningham. And what an artist! Atget's got hats in a shop. He has corsets in a line. He knows to do shop windows. And he has street sellers as well. Vendors. I know I like vendors. I like shop windows and fronts an awful lot. The pictures of shoes in a shop. I go ballistic when I see shop fronts from any period. In a photo or a painting. I wonder about the life behind the thing. What it must look like inside. Who is there to wait on my needs? What will they say as they speak to me?

I have been working on the moving pictures of Stanley G. Chilson, of the area of Massachusetts I live in. He worked over a few decades himself. Like Atget did in his venue. His work mesmerizes, transfixes me in the way Atget's does. This Chilson is why I turn to Atget for relief and perhaps some added understanding. My training as a sociologist kicks in here. I am adept at questions regarding the everyday lives of common folk and Atget and Chilson pair up on this matter, although a continent separate, and some years to boot. The 1930's pictures of Franklin, the home-place of Chilson, are fixed in my deepest mind, as I write. I look at the masterpieces of Atget and my mind is on a nearby village-mate, Stanley Chilson.

My question is how? It is a generalized how. How could artists take something so common and mold something so beautiful? I just can never fathom it and spend hours trying to figure it out. The mind of the artist at its best, is closed to outer perusal. Even when the artist keeps notebooks. The creative genius is tricky and never really gives the thing away, what he or she is really up to. Atget comes off humble. I am just a picture taker, a documentarian. And what of Chilson? He just records the daily life of Wrentham, or Franklin or Norfolk. Not anything more.

Sure! In the latter's case, Chilson's, the public seems to believe him. I am the only one I know, who goes around saying he is a great, creative artist, like some wonderful painter or illustrator I happen to adore. Chilson never makes a claim, I am able to find. That his work is important as art. Like Atget he lives and then dies, thinking his work will never be seen as very important in the world of art and poetry. For me, Chilson's work is a merry song, a wonderful trill. I find in it great jumps of joy and fancy. Lots of classic and powerful stills if you take his motion pictures and stop them in the studio or on the home tv. Which I can do on the little tv I use to that end. A great artist indeed! Though no-one seems to notice. And from what I can gather from his nephew, Buck Buchanan, Chilson doesn't seem to mind. Buck knew uncle well and confirms his essential humility.

But this essay is to remember and note Mr. Atget, not Chilson. He will immortalize a race, a separate race he will characterize as embodying labor, as a social class, in his time. The ragpicker. He uses as bookends for talking about labor, the shopkeep at the one end. Respectable and somewhat prosperous, and the ragpicker at the other end. Atget is plenty sly. He says through his photographs, here we have the shops and the genteel working class and there on Main Street, view the new phenomenon that is going to wipe them all out and they don't even know it. The department store, a recent creation, will sound the knell of the small shop, so these photos are really memorials for what will soon go out of existence. He knows stuff and it is in his choice of photos. He is an extraordinary documentarian. What we would expect, no? Of course.

He will avoid the poor souls who work in sweatshops, factories, and dim ateliers. They're in the middle between the shopkeeper and the ragpicker. Very sly, he will concentrate on the ragpicker and develop the firm case that they, like the cockroach, will be with us forever, even when the mom and pop store goes the way of the dodo bird and the highbutton shoe. He is right. What he does is rub the fact of poverty, independent and proud poverty, in the face of anyone who may bother to see his work.

He is obviously political in his work. His message is clear. That the ragpicker exists to clean up what the bourgeois see as refuse. They are refuse too, the ones called chiffonnier. To be ignored and snubbed. So Atget photographs them and makes a strong political statement, that they, and he as well, as their chronicler, won't go away so the upstanding can continue their sanitized way of life. Scum are that way . They seem to breed more of same. Scum relent and persist. They are that way.

Atget's politics are extreme. He makes a claim that the poor should be allowed to exist. In this vein he idealizes them in their condition. He does it by just taking their pictures. He says the may look sad, but they are free, independent, satisfied, having some fun. He knows this as fact as he is among them a lot, taking pictures, patronizing their shady establishments. They are there and he will photograph them because they exist, are there and have something to add to the human equation that is Paris of his day.

A separate race. On the margins. "Content with their way of life....as enemies."

There it is, pretty plain according to Nesbit, the author of the book I am looking at on Atget, "Seven Albums." The ragpicker, male and female, child or elder, "is above all an independent. His life is poor, but his is free, and he wants to remain so." And, "The ragpickers live completely outside the rest of the world."

He uses, to represent labor at its most noble, the people who will handle the castoffs of the middle class; it is a caste of scavengers.

But first he will portray the shopkeeper, a set of people in the working class who are more elevated than the ragpickers. Atget photographs the tradesman and his and her place of work; calls it "Metier," trade. He shows us the one who will make and fix shoes, or hats or corsets. Or sell fruit or fix things or sell meat. His pictures of these more upscale folks are as beautiful as the ones of the ragpickers, the chiffonnier. But there is something ominous and precious in these shots. One wonders if the people and the establishments are too fragile and weak to remain in place, as the department store comes to control the block. The new big kid. The odd and old shops "looked over at the fairyland with a jaundiced eye." The small, mom and pop stores will not survive as well as the hovels and shacks and dumps the ragpickers call stores.

The authorities of the day tried hard to shut down the small shops of the poor merchants, the ones Atget called "metier." Kill them, with regulations. Limit display of items for sale. Rules. Laws. Requirements of state. No stuff on the street. Discrete window display or none at all. While all the time, the department store wowed the shopper with increasingly seductive and beautiful window and store displays. All approved by the officials who ran the town, Paris.

More attacks on the poor. Of course, it makes sense to stamp out vermin, even the human variety. These small shopkeepers tried desperately to rouse themselves out of the lower reaches of society and make it to respectability, but the state seemed bent on their demise.

In the meanwhile the ragpickers went on their rounds like country doctors going here and there to do their appointed work. Undeterred by weather or social conditions.

They do their work, gathering garbage, string, rope, metal parts, rags, rags and more. The author assures us "rags were rather like nature itself, something to be followed and harvested." The gatherers of the refuse the other classes left around to throw out.... the dark crows picking at the carrion at the road's edge.... they would patter over the earth after all other forms had burnt themselves out. With self-indulgence and pity. With too much wine and rich food. With homes overwarm in winter and too cool in summer. The lowest class has a fascination to Atget. This class is a bit like he is. Independent and aloof. Asking for nothing and taking everything. Right under the nose of the authorities.

Atget is a radical, a very dangerous one. Because he looks innocuous and doesn't bother anyone. He takes nothing anyone of importance wants. He looks like a shadow in his photographs. He is an inconsequential individual. He does not matter. The ragpickers don't matter. Only money and property do. And Atget and the chiffonier haven't much of this sort of thing.

Atget and his charges are invisible. That is the proper condition for the former to do his work. He does not disturb the environment around him and thus can take accurate pictures of what he sees. A master artist, indeed!

The petty shopkeeper tries hard. He will fail. It is inevitable. Some greater economic force will wither him. A depression, a localized run to banks over a rumor the dollar is inflating fast, a shiny department store, the illness of Monsieur or Madame who run the joint. Something and Atget and the ragpickers will tuck up their trousers, stick a piece of bread in their dirty pocket and go off to sneak a shot of a streetcorner at dusk or to stop and pick up a box with a varied number of discarded objects in it. The job of sorting this treasure will occupy the chiffonier and his or her family for hours. Such fun.

The picker of rags and detritus, we are told by Nesbit, the biographer of Atget, lives in a "perpetual present," which has in it a "doubtful future." Life is dangerous and problematic. No safety net. Blue Cross, or money in the bank. Just the towering now.

The towering now.

Where everything counts toward surviving once more, until the sun goes down and you have to rest to figure out how to survive tomorrow again. Atget's deep political radicalism comes in with his decisions to revere this class of brigands. It is a harmless thing in that it does not threaten the politics of Paris in any way. It is a kind of private joke he plays as he knows well he is impotent politically. He is a man of enormous and deep feeling, who goes about whistling, taking bland photographs, is all. Nesbit tells us how he has opinions and feelings about many issues, but states them only to his closest associates. All this repressed anger at the society plays out in his photographs and he barely acknowledges it except to closest associates.

Art always seems to seep out of the unconscious. We don't really know where it comes from or where it is going. The thing just sits there. Atget is a case in point. He hides and his work gives him away. He does this for no good reason I can figure out.

Why is it I can't understand why Stanley Chilson does his photography as he seems to do it? All those people coming down stairs? One scene of a great picnic, followed by a funeral of the police chief and then a set of scenes of Main Street. One looks at a welter of his work and swims in the period with no real understanding of what Chilson is doing to you.

And with Atget, too, one swims in a Paris, photographed randomly, a park here, a ragpicker there, a shopkeeper's window here. Just stuff and it has no rhymn, but it does and it has an ideology behind it too. In Atget's case it is clear. He identifies with the lowest of the low. He and they pick up stuff no-one else wants and throws away. And ironically we are left with some of the greatest photographic treasures of modern times. I am sure the same is true of Chilson, only I still can't figure him out and it bothers me.

I think what he is doing is saying life was sure good and full before the second World war and here is how it looked. I can't find a grand political reason behind his work, other than to idealize the thing he loves so. The self-contained, small town that would transform into a suburb under his eyes. He couldn't have liked it but here I have not evidence to support my case.

Atget's whole oevre, his work, is an exercise in independence, freedom. He cries out in so much of his work. I may be poor but I am free. Even though I sell my pictures by the pound to fools who will use them foolishly and even though no-one sees the beauty in them I do....I am free and that is worth everything to me. No boss, no person telling me to take this or that photo. The artist must be free to make the art. To get up every day and make the donuts as the guy in the Dunkin Donut ad says. With no freedom there is not an enduring art. The unconscious must make hay, be free. The hand must trace the outlines of the dreams of the previous night. This is the torment of the artist. His or her dilemma.

N.C. Wyeth did tremendous illustrations for magazines. Work for pay. Charles Burchfield designed wallpaper. Hated it. Hopper, magazine illustrations. Hated it. For money. So why is the money work of the three above so terrific in my view? 'Cause the spirit came through to dominate the paid labor. Same with Atget. He shot pounds of scenery some watercolorist hack would buy to make pictures he too would sell by the pound to the tourists, interiour decorators, postcard manufacturers. You can't kill the essence ever. Even when the artist needs to work to make money.

You can't kill society's ragpickers, the human cockroaches. You see, their motive is pure. They are free, even when sorting through the trash. So the artist. Chilson's source of subject matter comes of his unconscious, as does that of Atget. It doesn't look like much but there is a certain something. The magazines Hopper graced with his work are absolutely stunning even though he hated the work. Funny.

It comes down to what Seferi tells us of Aeschylus. That the artist is standing beside us like a statue that talks to you. Which is expressing itself as it stands close beside us.

The artist is foremost a trickster. Nesbit tells us right out that Atget's compositions are profound and meant to mislead. The middle class, the critic, the afficionado of photographs who will write an article in the local high-brow version of the New York Times. She says of Atget's photographs that they "pushed both rag and ragpicker off into the deep of space." She analyzes the composition of his photos and concludes he transports us to a new level, an hallucinogenic level. I think she is the first to note this in such great detail in her book on Atget. She gets it. That the art to be high art has to have the ability to move you physically, so to speak. And Atget does.

1-16 Use these notes to do a piece I am a camera on chilson subtitle The idea of mystery be my camera Use as inspiration the idea of Theophilos. So and tell......

So and tell. That is the title.

18-1-97 The last five or so pages go from intro to the issue of the ragpicker and that should be a separate thing or I should run it here and do another picture piece on Atget and mystery that Nesbit says he is doing to us. I am less interested in his politics than in what makes him great as a picture teller. So what means to me the most is his claim to greatness as a cryptic storyteller. His general stance toward the world . Anonymous and then the business of the politics and the ragpickers. So eventually I have to sort this out. Not hard. Read the bystander chapter on Atget. As well, try to figure out a bit more of what Nesbit is saying through my notes.

In some notes I say the title is "unto itself." Chilson and Atget show reality as something that is unto itself.and not unto the artist. The great artist like them is a sententious being. He is sibylline. Two new words I learned yesterday.

1-26 The picture of Atget is quite good. So it is almost a piece.

The artistic act almost always follows on another. To understand the mall you have to understand Chilson's main street. To follow what he is doing you have to know he is in a time of Evans, Lange and Shahn. That they are kin to Atget and the turn of the century.

Likewise Seferi comes of Theofilos, and Makryanni. Of Kavafi. And then it goes on back to Aeschylus and Sappho and the others. The artistic act often, most often, borrows and that is part of its strength.

The great artist like Atget blends what we call reality with metareality or superreality. When you look at a photo you take your sanity in your own hands.

I think, 2-1, that this is almost a finished piece on Atget. Just needs an ending and some stuff on the ragpickers taken out. This is not really something to count as a Chilson.. Where is the next Chilson? Have to get another non-Greek thing going. Maybe this is it. I am not quite sure.