Every so often, a gallery owner or collector will ask me if I do narrative paintings. I really don’t if you go by the usual definition of the genre, and having to explain what I do paint has prompted me to really examine why I make the art I make.
This then, is a very personal reflection on that, and also the even larger issues of what art is about, what it does, and how I perceive the world I live in. Some of the ideas I’m going to talk about have come from collectors I’ve known, who have a deep understanding of art, born of their love of it. A lot of what I’m going to say here are ideas that I use to remind myself of where my focus needs to be in developing work. I’ll be speaking of painting because I am a painter, but I think what I’m going to say applies to almost all visual art. Each artist needs to apply it as their nature is so inclined.What this is all about is content in art.
The narrative genre is widely understood to be the artist basically painting a story. A story that has a setting and characters and action that happens in time and leads to some result. In the case of a painting, if the narrative is culturally familiar, like a myth or an historic event, the artist chooses the scene that is most representative of the story or the most significant to recall the action. If the narrative is invented or involving concepts like surrealism, the artist provides clues that the viewer interprets. The big conceptual challenge is overcoming the fact that painting lacks the element of time.
Narrative Painting
Before going further, let me talk about a couple of narrative paintings using the elements of narrative (time, place, characters, action, and meaning) in order to provide a backdrop for talking about content. Both were painted between 1935 and 1945 in America.
The first painting is Norman Rockwell’s, “Freedom of Speech”. As with almost all of Rockwell’s work, it was painted to be an illustration, a cover for the Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943, at the height of World War II. I chose an illustration to start, because illustrators tend to become illustrators because they are essentially story tellers by nature and paint to speak to the widest possible audience. They also paint for strong impact and are skilled at holding the attention of the viewer.
In the painting, the main figure, a “working man” is standing to speak at some kind of important, formal meeting, and because everyone is holding booklets, the subject is something complicated that’s going to effect the whole community. The intended message, which can be gotten even without the title is that every man (in America) can speak his mind and be heard.
In many ways, this is an incredibly well constructed painting and also, a very manipulative work, carrying a powerful message at the time, and beautifully designed to support the magazine’s brand image by playing to their readership. It is wonderfully painted, and during his life, Rockwell was admired by the public for his facility as much as for the vision he presented of an idealized America.
Time
The biggest challenge any narrative painter has is creating time. It is the biggest difference between art and music. Music exists in time. I frequently think of music and art as sisters who are jealous of each other. Music is jealous of art because she has a physical form, and art is jealous of music because she has time.
An artist creates time, by finding ways of keeping the viewer engaged with the work. Composition is important for a narrative painter. The composition has to lead the viewer around, keeping them curious and wanting to see and find more. Faces are the thing that people are drawn to look at the most and the faces here are designed to take you from one to the other. They are all looking at the speaker. You can’t help but wonder what the woman’s thinking, and even causing me to stop and wonder is a clever way of adding time.
The Cast
The speaker is given a hero’s treatment. He stands tall, his head framed by the dark background, maybe a school blackboard. (The magazine’s name would surround it in print). He is dressed in work clothes and seems to have come from work. He’s read the document and has it rolled up in his pocket, giving the feeling he doesn’t need to refer to it. He’s got it all figured out.
He’s handsome and the typical movie star version of an ideal man. His eyes are a light, bright blue, giving them a visionary quality. He’s young and his hands are large, worn from work, and strong. They are the hands of a doer. They are placed firmly on the back of the bench, a stand-in for his feet, firmly planted on the ground. People are listening intently and respectfully, reinforced by the ear of the partially visible man in the lower left corner. In every way, he is purposely designed to be an iconic picture of the everyman subscriber to The Post and a symbol for the dignity of the common man.
Most narrative art is made for a distinct purpose, as an entertainment, as a call to action, to inspire, and inform. One down side to arrative paintings, and especially illustrations, is that they can become dated, the more likely to do so when the purpose is relating to a social cause. In the Rockwell painting, for instance, notice that there is only one woman in the painting and she’s crammed behind the men. In 1940s America, the men made decisions about important matters. Also notice the lack of any racial or ethnic diversity. Both of these, in addition to the dress of the crowd, date the painting and place it in a specific time. There’s nothing wrong with this, and a great many narrative painters’ main interest is to give a picture of life in their own or different times and eras. Think of the work of Renoir, Goya, Hopper, Peale, Ingres, Vermeer, and Van Eyck. In fact there are certain things about life in past times that we only know from the art. Most musical instruments before the 1600s are only known by being pictured in art, including the instrument with the unfortunate name, Sackbut.
Next let’s look at a painting by the self-taught, black artist, Horace Pippin—“John Brown on the Way to His Hanging”
John Brown was an antislavery crusader in the 1850s. He was a charismatic man, mercurial in temperament, and a man with a powerful moral resentment to the enslavement of black people. He was capable of inspiring followers and also of brutal violence when it suited his aims. He attempted a raid on an ammunition facility at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), which failed. He was wounded and captured by troops led by Robert E. Lee, tried and hanged as a traitor on December 2, 1859. His insurrection and death contributed to dividing the nation and in part contributed to the beginning of the American Civil War.
Odd coincidences surround his death and fame. John Wilkes Booth, the future assassin of Abraham Lincoln was in attendance at Brown’s execution, as was Horace Pippin’s grandmother, herself a former slave. Union troops adopted a song, “John Brown’s Body” which they sang marching into battle, and which eventually morphed into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Artists were fascinated with him and he appeared in artwork throughout the early 20th Century. Including these pieces.
John Steuart Curry: John Brown
