The Goldfinch: Truth in Art and Life

The Goldfinch: Truth in Art and Life

Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, 1654

 

 

“We have art in order to not die for the truth.”  Donna Tartt quotes Nietzche in the opening of one of her chapters in The Goldfinch, an epic journey of life novel.  It’s taken me all year, but finally, I’ve finished reading The Goldfinch (need a long plane trip to do that).  The entire drama is centered around a missing painting, or, shall we say, a stolen painting in the hands of the narrator.

 

It’s interesting that Donna Tartt chose a painting to be the symbol of her protagonist.  Carel Fabritius’ The Goldfinch — the painting — is a bird chained on a pedestal. He’s stationary–as if saying “I am.”   At one point, the author gives a hint of original purpose for the painting, that it was a signpost for a tavern.  (That’s the type of things art historians write about, but Tartt writes about the painting in a much more interesting way.)

 

Because I’m not a literary scholar, I can’t comment on Tartt’s writing. But as an art critic, she understands why we need art in our lives.  The quotes in the book are full of wisdom about the intersection of art and humankind, art and life, truth and life.  She understands art as well as any art historian.  Here are some quotes from the book:

 

“If our secrets define us as opposed to the face we show the world: then painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am.”

 

The voice in the book, Theo Decker, starts when he’s a 13-year old.  His life is a traumatic one, and he soon becomes an orphan.

 

“If every great painting is really a self-portrait what if anything is Fabritius saying about himself?”  (Here’s the other blog I wrote about birds by multiple artists.)

 

She describes qualities the goldfinch has that are like human qualities: “It’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another.” Later on Tartt writes: “… even a child can see its dignity: thimble of bravery, all fluff and brittle bone.  Not timid, not even hopeless, but steady and holding it’s place. Refusing to pull back from the world.” 

Before coming to this conclusion, the protagonist makes these smart observations about life: 

“Can’t good sometimes come from strange back doors?” 

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” 

As Theo goes through so many trials and tribulations, we think that it’ll end in tragedy and that he’ll be doomed.  Of Theo’s relationship to Pippa, the narrator says: “Since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other one down way too quick.”  It seems this truth is often the case in many relationships. Kitsey, to whom Theo is engaged, seems quite the opposite of Theo in so many ways, shallow and disengaged.  Do such opposites anchor each other and keep them from going to deeply in the wrong direction?   (The answer, well, is that his transformation comes without her in the picture) 

Tartt also makes us think about beauty and truth. 

“Beauty alters the grain of reality.” 

“It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance.”  The narrator explains at the end that the “only truths that matter are the ones I don’t, and I can’t, understand.” So what does the painting mean for him?  “Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separate every living creature from every other living creature,”  This description can be applied to the goldfinch, and how Theo sees his life.

 

 

“There’s no truth beyond illusion.  Because between reality on the one hand, the where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not; and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.” 

On p. 569, Horst describes the Fabritius painting: “It’s a joke….and that’s what all the very greatest masters do. Rembrandt, Velazquez. Late Titian…..They build up the illusion, the trick–but step closer? it falls apart into brushstrokes. Abstract, unearthly.  A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether.  The thing and yet not the thing.”  “There’s a doubleness.  You see the mark, you see the paint for the paint, and also the living bird.”  “He takes the image apart very deliberately to show us how he painted it. Daubs and patches, very shaped and handworked, the neckline especially, a solid piece of paint, very abstract.”   What lovely descriptions of the intersection of realism and abstraction. 

Why is The Goldfinch so touching to so many people, both the book and the painting?  Theo and Tartt express deep appreciation for the restoration specialists, like Hobie, Theo’s caretaker and business partner.  Hobie lovingly bring works back to their original state. In the book, there’s an intersection between truth and illusion, but there’s also the understanding that great art is at once realistic and abstract. 

The Goldfinch is a trompe l’oiel painting, but it is so much more. 

“Its the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone.  It’s the place where reality becomes serious and anything serious is a joke.  The magic point where every idea and it’s opposite are equally true.”   As I often say, art is about the reconciliation of opposites, and Theo and Tartt achieve this in The Goldfinch

In Dutch art history, Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt stands in between his teacher and the master of Delft, Vermeer.    Vermeer’s simplicity could not be imagined without The Goldfinch, and one wonders if he was in fact Vermeer’s teacher.  Fabritius lived in Delft at the time of his death in in 1654.  He died in a gunpowder explosion when he was only 32. Gerry, a blogger  in Great Britain, did a tremendous job of explaining Fabritius and his painting.  

I always enjoy reading books that center around a painting.  But this novel is not about how or why the painting was made.  It is about the journey of the painting and it’s presumed caretaker, what it does for him through his growing years and into several years of adulthood.  It is a symbol of his life, his hopes and the man he became.

 

Copyright Julie Schauer 2010-2021

 

In the Silence and Minutia of the Birds

Fred Tomaselli, Woodpecker, 2009, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
gouache, acrylic, photo collage and epoxy resin on wood, 72″ x 72″ 

I love talking about birds in my Art Appreciation classes, though with a focus very different from from the current SAAM (Smithsonian American Art Museum) exhibition, “The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art.”  The exhibition’s message is about man’s relationship to birds, with the accent on environmental issues.  My class talks about birds in flight, to symbolize our human aspirations.  Flying birds remind us that humans can soar even if we don’t literally know how to fly.

Chris Allen, A Grand View,  2010, Stone, beads, fetish
Photo from Pinterest, Bonin Smith

This exhibition and another excellent exhibition called “Bead,” at GRACE (Greater Reston Arts Center), honor the minutia of creation in thousands or millions of the small details that make up the birds.  Both exhibitions are breathtakingly beautiful, must-see experiences, though their purposes are not at all similar.  There’s only one week left to see the SAAM show, and almost two left weeks until “Bead” ends on February 28.  Two of the 15 artists in “Bead” included birds, but the show also features well-known national artists such as David Chatt and Joyce J. Scott. There are many other masterful and surprising interpretations of beads.  A pair of birds sitting on top of Chris Allen’s beaded stones is called A Grand View.  Beads are skin for the timeless stones of the earth and Allen’s construction is a metaphor for relationship of body and soul. (Chris Allen reminds me of both a blog I wrote before and the great sculptor I admire, Brancusi.)

Back at SAAM, Fred Tomaselli’s Woodpecker, is a large painting, but its smallest details are mesmerizing.  Three of his other large paintings are also in the exhibition, all densely patterned.  Tomaselli, originally from Santa Monica, California, recalls growing up with bright colors of Disneyland, but also is quite a naturalist, a bird watcher and a lover of fly fishing.  Today an exhibition of his work opens at the Orange County Museum of Art. 

Ingrid Bernhardt, Chic Chick, 2014, 5″ x 6″ 4″ papier-mâché, beads and feathers

As in Woodpecker with its beautiful details, there’s a dedication to perfection in Ingrid Bernhardt’s Chic Chick at GRACE. It’s a papier-mâché bird with added beads and feathers.  Tons and tons of the tiniest beads make it very intricate.  From the fallen feathers, the artist has made some beautiful earrings which lie beside the bird.  It’s quite a novelty and something special to behold.  Bernhardt compares her beading technique to the pointillism of Seurat and all the dots of color he used.

Laurel Roth Hope, Regalia 63 x 40 x 22 in.

Private Collection
© Laurel Roth Hope. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris
Chic Chick’s sheer beauty and attention to detail has lots of competition in the peacocks of California artist, Laurel Roth Hope, currently on view at SAAM.  She makes peacocks out of hair clips, fake fingernails, fake eyelashes, jewelry, Swarovski crystal and other beauty symbols.  One named Regalia, has all the pride associated with its species, and another sculpture named Beauty, is a composition of two peacocks who play the mating game.  This bird traditionally is a symbol of Resurrection and eternal life in Christian art, and the artist evokes a power worthy of that traditional role. Her peacocks are amazingly realistic, but the technique and innovative use of material is an example of how an artist can show us how to see the world in a new way. 
Laurel Roth Hope, Carolina Parokeet, crocheted yarn on
hand-carved wood pigeon mannequin,  Smithsonian
American Art Museum

Laurel Roth Hope is also concerned about the environment and biodiversity  To celebrate certain species that are now extinct, she crocheted sweaters that mimic the coats and plumage of these lost birds.  One, Carolina Parokeet, is in the SAAM’s permanent collection. Others in this group include the Passenger Pigeon, The Paradise Parrot and the Dodo. She used her hands to crochet sweaters in beautiful, tiny variegated colors and pattern. Much love goes into her creations. At the same time, we think of so many cultural concepts: beauty, pride, artifice (fake nails and fake eyelashes, loss, death.  We ask ourselves: What does the outer coat (outer beauty)mean? What does pride mean if it bites the dust in the end?  At the same time, the artist is giving tribute and memory to something that is lost.

Laurel Hope Roth, Beauty, detail from the Peacock series photo from the website

John James Audubon was America’s master artist of birds. Walton Ford is similarly a naturalist who works with combination techniques–watercolor, gouache, etching, drypoint, etc.  He breaks with Audubon with his complex allegorical messages, however. environmental messages, however. Also among the 12 artists in the Smithsonian show, several are bird photographers.

Walton Ford, Eothen, 2001
watercolor, gouache, and pencil and ink on paper
40 x 60 in.
The Cartin Collection
Image courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery
Only one of the artists, Tom Uttech, painted his birds in the way I usually imagine them — in flight.   Uttech lives in Wisconsin, and his landscapes come from the North Woods, as well as a provincial park in Ontario. Some of his titles are impossible. Enassamishhinijweian is my favorite.  A bear’s back faces us, as he sits still and calmly observes the world of nature passing by.  Multitudes of birds fly. An owl turns to look at us, and even a squirrel flies in the sky.  The museum label mentions Uttech’s immersion in nature and his belief in its transformative power, much like Emerson and Thoreau.  I’d guess that Uttech is also an admirer of Heironymous Bosch, a 15th-16th century Dutch painter.  He also loved panoramas. A bear hidden in each of Uttech’s three large panoramic landscapes.  These bears are probably the artist himself, or the individual who observes nature.

Tom Uttech, Enassamishhinjijweian, 2009, oil on linen, 103″ x112″  Collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas

© Tom Uttech. Image courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York. Photo by Steven Watson

Traditionally in art, birds in flight show contact between man and divinity.  A bird symbolizes the Holy Spirit.  In African and Oceanic cultures, the birds tie a living person to his ancestors.  Only one of the artists I noticed at SAAM, Petah Coyne, sees her birds as the travel guides, the conduit between heaven and earth.  Her elaborate black and purple sculpture is called Beatrice, after Dante’s beautiful guide through Purgatory, in The Divine Comedy.  It’s about 12 feet high, and is dripping with birds and falling flowers.  The beautiful work must be seen in person to be appreciated.

The many manifestations of birds reminds us of all the roles they fulfill: the silent and the singing and the flying.   We end up with a new, profound appreciation for nature, and the hope to protect its beauty, birds included.  These exhibitions helped me to see the vastness of this world, as well as the minutia of its details.

Copyright Julie Schauer 2010-2016