The Painter’s Shadow World

Morgan Meis will say anything. He jump-starts complex philosophical ideas with slangy turns of phrase, referring to a “shitshow from start to finish,” a “fuckfest,” and “a real Fuck You painting.” He can also be perfectly sober, inviting discussions of “the operation of fate” and “the fear of God.” All this comes from Meis’s Three Paintings Trilogy, three books about three artists from three times and places: The Drunken Silenus (on Peter Paul Rubens), The Fate of the Animals (on Franz Marc), and The Grand Valley (on Joan Mitchell). Meis’s intellectual juggling act includes digressions on the work of Virgil, Jung, Hofmannsthal, Degas, Monet, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and others. It all adds up, but just barely, in a funky kind of way. This is the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.

For certain great artists, Meis believes, the creative act is a safe harbor where life’s pressures, exigencies, and calamities aren’t so much denied or resolved as reimagined as pictorial dramas. A painting, he argues, is “a second world, a shadow world.” It “isn’t a world of life and it isn’t a world of death.” For the artist “it is a second existence and you, the painter, go into that existence and then come out of it.” Meis moves from the Baroque virtuosity of Rubens’s study of a drunken mythological figure, through the jagged modernist puzzle of Marc’s allegorical animals, to Mitchell’s painterly abstractions and their flickering landscape allusions. There’s something miraculous in the way he convinces us—at least he convinces me—that a seventeenth-century Flemish painter celebrated throughout the courts of Europe has something to do with a German artist who was a significant figure in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and with an American artist who emerged in the 1950s as a leader of what came to be regarded as second-generation Abstract Expressionism and chose to live most of her life not in New York but in France.

The painter, Meis believes, is “constantly shifting…in and out of different forms of existence. A painting is the result of that shifting.” What he wants to explain is how and why these shifts occur and how the painting, although shaped by the artist’s experience in the world, achieves an order and a logic all its own. Writing about Mitchell, Meis proposes that the artist “had to kill off a few other versions of herself” in order to prepare to paint. He speaks of “the not-you-ness of you” as “something that can be constantly discovered” in the act of painting, and of “scritching and scratching at the feeling of a memory or even the creation of a memory that becomes a memory by painting it.” At the risk of oversimplifying his multilayered argument, I think it’s fair to say that he believes that life’s vagaries, the good as well as the bad, push the artist into that “second world, a shadow world.” That’s where painters do their real work. But without the push from one world to the other, the work could never begin, much less get done.

Meis, who’s in his early fifties, has spent a lifetime preparing for what he’s doing in the Three Paintings Trilogy. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, that unfinished and probably unfinishable juggernaut of cultural speculation; I see echoes of Benjamin’s theoretical daring in Meis’s work. He’s published some articles in The New Yorker and been involved with the online magazines 3 Quarks Daily and The Easel. In 2012 he produced an essay collection, Ruins, showcasing the range of his interests, with explorations of Moby-Dick, David Foster Wallace, Frans Hals, the allure of old-fashioned train travel, and the romantic beauty of the Hudson River. He writes well about photographs of urban decay, a subject of particular interest since he’s lived for years in Detroit. I’m glad to read him on the still lifes of Morandi, which for all their modesty he daringly and quite astutely regards as the products of a “great egotist.” In Meis’s earlier work I find some of the voracious curiosity and intellectual ingenuity that animate the Three Paintings Trilogy. But for his ideas to really take off he needs the two hundred or so pages that he uses so brilliantly in each of these three books.

Meis doesn’t confront works of art directly; at least that isn’t his forte. He regards particular paintings as catalysts for a more general inquiry into the knotty question of how artists work and how their work relates to the world they live in. His aesthetic speculations in the trilogy bring to mind books as extraordinary as Walter Pater’s The Renaissance and André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence and The Metamorphosis of the Gods. After reading Pater and Malraux—and it’s true with Meis, too—what you tend to retain isn’t the analysis of this or that painting or sculpture (Pater rarely deals in specifics) but some more general sense of the creative temperament and how it’s shaped by and in turn shapes the artist’s world. Meis is more interested in boldly interwoven speculations than in hard-and-fast conclusions. There’s nothing mechanistic or formulaic about the connections he makes.

The Drunken Silenus, the centerpiece of Meis’s first volume, is an improbable starting point for a wide-ranging experiment in aesthetics. I don’t think anybody would argue that this is an especially significant work in Rubens’s career, and Meis emphasizes the idiosyncrasy of his choice by declaring that when he initially found himself living for a time in Antwerp, where the artist spent part of his youth and his final decade, he had “absolutely no interest in Rubens.” Meis can’t resist a roundabout approach. He backs his way into big ideas. Instead of embracing one of Rubens’s more widely admired achievements—an ecclesiastical project, a salute to royal power, a meditation on female beauty, or one of the artist’s innovative landscapes—he zeroes in on The Drunken Silenus, likely painted between 1615 and 1620. He believes that in this dramatically compressed composition Rubens “wrangled with the hardest things both in terms of his craft, the medium, and in terms of what you can do, what you can show through that medium.”

This disquieting painting is dominated by the stumbling, overweight, stark-naked figure of Silenus, a superannuated participant in the drunken revels led by Bacchus, the name the Romans gave the hedonistic god the Greeks called Dionysus. Surrounding Silenus in this crowded, nearly square canvas is an allegorical mash-up of men, women, children, a nymph, and a satyr. Silenus is not a happy drunk. It’s a chaotic, unruly picture in which Rubens, by all accounts a sensualist, seems to be confronting and maybe even embracing the darker side of the Dionysian world. It was Dionysus who gave King Midas the gift of turning anything into gold. And it was Silenus, Meis reminds us, who warned King Midas that the only thing to really hope for was death, that “it would have been better not to have been born at all” and the next best thing “would be to die quickly.” Meis obviously enjoys the wildly ambiguous nature of classical stories and texts, which tap into so many passionate, contradictory, and irrational aspects of human nature. There’s a likable ease in the way he draws on the classics in all three books, discussing Dionysian excess in The Drunken Silenus, the Delphic oracle in The Fate of the Animals, and Dido and Aeneas (in both Virgil’s poem and Purcell’s opera) in The Grand Valley.

Meis suggests that a darkness, a melancholy, may have shadowed and maybe even fueled the pleasure principle that Rubens celebrated in so many paintings, perhaps most of all in The Garden of Love in the Prado. Rubens, who spent years in Italy and admired the luxuriant exuberance of Titian’s mythological compositions, eventually returned to Antwerp, which Meis sees as already in the seventeenth century a backwater, its harbor silted up, “a dead city,” as he puts it, “for ghosts.” He spends many pages on the tangled story of Rubens’s father, who died when the artist was still a boy, and who had been imprisoned and nearly executed after the discovery of his affair with the wife of William the Silent, the leader of the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. “You don’t fuck with William the Silent,” Meis concludes. He believes that the father’s catastrophic erotic adventures are somewhere in the background of the scandalous sensualism of The Drunken Silenus. He wants to leave readers feeling that Rubens’s gift for painterly seduction somehow “goes back to the father and raises him up and redeems him.” Of course none of this can be proved. But it feels right.

I’m making Meis’s arguments sound cut-and-dried in ways he clearly doesn’t intend. His writing is all hints, speculations, hypotheses. Writing about a painting by Rubens of two satyrs, he focuses on the unabashed gaze of a satyr who’s looking straight out at us. He imagines the satyr speaking: “‘Holy shit,’ he says, ‘you’re out there and I’m in here and we both know it. This whole thing is a joke.’” Meis pushes further, arguing that the joke “reveals the shadowy nature of reality itself.” There can be a swagger to Meis’s writing; it’s part of his method. Those figures who look out at us in Rubens’s work—like the nymph in The Drunken Silenus—suggest the extent to which, for Rubens and perhaps for any artist, Meis believes, “the false reality of the painting shows us something about the true nature of the presumptive real reality.” But what is that something? That’s one of the central questions in the Three Paintings Trilogy.

These books are almost impossible to summarize, because each of Meis’s asides opens up fresh avenues for thought and investigation. The Fate of the Animals (see illustration on page 8), the painting by Marc that is the focus of the second book in the trilogy, is a ferocious vision, with animals, among them a blue deer and two red cows, almost overwhelmed by a maelstrom of jagged, crisscrossing colored lines and shapes—a visual tornado. It was painted in 1913, near the end of Marc’s brief career, three years before his death at the Battle of Verdun. But for Meis this violent painting doesn’t prefigure the violence of the war so much as represent the violence that’s integral to human experience. In the letters that Marc wrote to his wife, Maria, in the months leading up to his death, he refuses to blame the war on politicians or generals. For Marc, Meis writes, war “is not something that came into the life of Europeans from outside. It is no strange mistake, no bumbling of generals and politicians. The war, Marc tells his fellow Europeans, is our own.” Meis presses the point, arguing that

the very fact that the war was a horrible tragedy is the exact reason that Marc loved it so much…. The war, the deep causes of the war, reached downward, ever downward into the soul of the world, you might say.

While Meis refuses to oversimplify the relationship between Marc’s reflections on the violence of the human spirit and the violent imagery in some of his paintings of animals, he’s intent on figuring out how feelings become forms. He focuses on color, especially the primary colors with which Marc paints and then partly annihilates his animals. Meis says that the strong primary colors transform something “we might glance out of a window” into what Marc and Kandinsky, to whom Marc was close, called a “spiritual experience.” Meis is certainly not the first writer to argue for the transformational power of color in modern painting. What’s new is how much he’s able to clarify about the relationship between strong color and strong emotions. “Somehow,” he writes, “color kicked [Marc] in the head, knocked him around a bit. He emerged like a new man, the stupidity dropped from his being, and he was suddenly an artist in love with color.” For Meis, painting a horse or a deer blue isn’t only a formal act, although it’s surely that; it’s also a way of accessing or acknowledging a psychological or even a metaphysical pressure. Armed with the force of color, Marc began to see painting “as a tool for thrusting aside what is inessential and penetrating to the root of what is most essential.”

Meis wants to make concepts concrete. One of his ways of doing this is by juxtaposing the work of artists—and artists and writers—who are related, but only up to a point. He brings D.H. Lawrence into his discussion of Marc because they’re both fascinated by the unruly, elemental forces that modern societies so often seek to suppress. Meis feels that Lawrence is more visceral, Marc more metaphysical. Lawrence “had the desire to reveal what is animal and what is instinctual—and therefore vital and powerfully living—in man.” As for Marc, he wanted to understand what is

spiritual under the surface of the animal and to show that this spiritual, this geistig essence is at the root of what makes the animal and the human more precisely and more deeply what-it-is.

Equally telling is a comparison between Marc and Paul Klee, a good friend of Marc’s who after his death restored a significant portion of The Fate of the Animals, which had been damaged in a fire. Meis writes that Klee, with his fascination with nature and natural forms, proved, “over and over again, that nature is inexhaustible and that this fact is a constant source of delight and wonder.” Marc, recognizing how endangered nature was by “the fate, the destiny, of Europe’s destroying of itself,” couldn’t help but regard even the joyousness of animals as “closely allied with suffering. The joy is a form, also, of pain.” As Meis sees it, both Lawrence and Klee were reaching for a romantic and in many respects untroubled relationship with nature, something that Marc might consider but could never embrace.

In The Grand Valley, Meis’s study of Mitchell, the shadows that darken the artist’s life aren’t primarily world events, although he does see in her decision to spend much of her life in post–World War II France a desire to be “close to things that have already passed away.” Here he may sense some distant parallel with Rubens’s choice to spend his later life in Antwerp, a city that Meis believes was already then past its prime.

For Meis the interest in what is lost or hidden—older civilizations, emotional conflicts, deep spiritual needs—fuels the act of creation. The artistic imagination, he seems to be suggesting, involves reenactment and restoration, a ceaseless renewal of essences and archetypes. This helps to explain why, when writing about Mitchell’s tormented and ultimately disastrous love affair with the French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, Meis discusses not only Dido and Aeneas but also Heloise, who “could not stop fucking Abelard no matter what.” After Riopelle left her, Mitchell, an opera aficionado, repeatedly listened to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Meis, who doesn’t necessarily worry about giving his speculative fireworks an evidentiary foundation, sees affinities between the overshadowing of Dido’s Carthage by Aeneas’s Rome and the overshadowing of the Parisian art world by New York. This suggests—at least to Meis—that Mitchell, who turned back from New York to Paris, is a tragic heroine on the order of Dido, who “pines away [in Carthage] as Aeneas sails off to make Rome possible.”

In the Three Paintings Trilogy, artists are always looking for something to paint that’s outside themselves, “a place that exists partly as the possibility of another existence.” For Rubens that something was a myth; for Marc it was the lives of animals. Mitchell’s immense series of abstractions, La Grande Vallée, was precipitated not by her troubles with Riopelle or by her own ultimately fatal cancer—at least not directly. The kernel, so Meis tells us, was a story related to her by a close friend, Gisèle Barreau, about a “magical childhood place frequented by Gisèle Barreau and her later-to-die-before-his-time cousin.” The paintings, with overlapping brushstrokes that Meis sees as playing hide-and-seek, are “about something that children know when they go off to places like the big valley.” The fact that Mitchell heard the story second- or maybe even thirdhand underscores, he believes, the doubleness or even duplicity that’s an aspect of the creative act. Once we’ve accepted the ambiguities of Mitchell’s process, it makes sense that Gertrude Stein, an American expatriate of an earlier generation, has a part in the final volume of Meis’s trilogy. Stein, who packed her work with puzzles and enigmas, was fascinated by the relationship between the reality of a work of art and the realities of the artist’s life.

Nietzsche’s ideas, especially his celebration of life’s powerful contradictory forces, are threaded through the trilogy. He’s discussed at some length in The Drunken Silenus, in which Meis, who enjoys incorporating biographical bits and pieces in his books, imagines Nietzsche during the Franco-Prussian War, “sitting under the gates of Metz and reveling in the defeat of the whimpering French.” In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche argued that the visual arts, Meis’s central focus, reflect an essentially Apollonian rationality and objectivity, a “pure contemplation of images.” But it’s the Dionysian spirit, which Nietzsche associated with the musical and theatrical arts, that unleashes the subjectivity that Meis explores in Rubens, Marc, and Mitchell. What’s most interesting about Meis’s response to Nietzsche is how the operatic grandeur and sweep of The Birth of Tragedy give way to a more ambivalent Dionysian drama. Nietzsche believed that the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides offered an entire community some form of catharsis, while for Meis’s painters catharsis turns out to be partial, particular—a glimpse of something.

Meis writes with such muscular urgency that his talk of gods, myths, prophets, and spirits never feels old-fashioned. Everything this writer touches becomes contemporary. My sense is that his astonishingly original work is nourished by a new bohemian spirit that’s emerged in recent years all over this country, in cities large and small, including no doubt Meis’s Detroit. These new bohemians are responding to the failures of our technological society by embracing everything that has for too long been dismissed as antiquated and esoteric. They reach for whatever is artisanal, bespoke, recycled, vintage. Meis brings a related energy and curiosity to much of European civilization. He has an easy, knockabout way of approaching Socrates or Virgil. He brings out the quirky charm of Rubens’s daunting virtuosity. There’s an omnium-gatherum aspect to the Three Paintings Trilogy that channels premodern scholarship, including the works of the seventeenth-century humanist and antiquarian Athanasius Kircher and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Meis is being self-consciously archaic when he gives each of his chapters a long, meandering title, often forty or more words, full of throat-clearing phrases such as “In which we explore…” and “On the nature of the self…” Some readers will find this roundabout phraseology quaint, even twee. He makes it work.

In the preface to The Drunken Silenus Meis confesses that he was aiming for a style that “would be direct, sometimes even downright agitated in nature. I wanted it to be funny and strange. I wanted it to be shamelessly intellectual at times and shamelessly crude at others.” He’s succeeded. This collagist’s style makes perfect sense when you’re determined to recover the authentic bits and pieces in a cultural landscape that’s failed you and your friends. I suppose there’s something of Pound’s Cantos in this approach, and maybe of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. If Meis packs in more than his Three Paintings Trilogy can easily hold, it’s because he’s so painfully aware of how much has already been lost or is in danger of being lost. Who can blame him?