by
Robert Taylor Literary
and art critic of The Boston Globe Courtesy
of the St. Botolph Club, Boston
In
"The Painter of Modern Life" Baudelaire describes
the artist as a passionate spectator "amid the ebb
and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and
the infinite." A near-contemporary, the critic Edmond
Duranty speaking of Degas, concurred: "By means of
a back we want a temperament, an age, a social condition
to be revealed; through a pair of hands, we should be
able to express a magistrate or a tradesman; by a gesture,
a whole series of feelings . . ." Gardner Cox called
this preliminary act of sustained observation his "fly
on the wall" technique; his initial step in creating
a portrait was to study the subject interacting with the
environment. "Pay no attention to me—I don't
exist," he would say, making rapid sketches. As a
portraitist he regarded the mysteries of identity amid
the fugitive flux of time, but he would not have been
so distinctive an artist if he did not also have a visionary
sense of the fantastic and the infinite.
Unquestionably his best-known work was in portraiture.
He did more than 300 portraits, from General George C.
Marshall and Supreme Court justices to tender domestic
images. The genre established his reputation and in it
he gave his own answer to the question "Why paint
portraits during an age of photography?" The obvious
reason lies in the monocular vision of the camera; unless
the moment is propitious, it cannot see with the complexity
of the human eye. Behind the latter and interacting with
it looms the intelligence and sensibility of the painter.
The portraits of Gardner Cox are not validations of power,
they are too serious for flattery, they do not serve as
mere decor or as routine commissions from banks, universities
and wealthy individuals, and though he was a realist with
an obligation to likeness, the portraits allude and suggest
rather than submit to the exigencies of practical representation.
The tension between getting a good likeness and making
a good picture accounts for the haunting quality of many
of his pictures—the Felix Frankfurter at Harvard
Law School, where a few loosely-brushed strokes constitute
a background for the head like the visible emanation of
mental activity; the Dylan Thomas, painted in a burst
of enthusiasm after hearing the poet deliver the first
reading of "Under Milk Wood" at the Fogg Museum,
yet capturing his tragic vulnerability; the profile portrait
of Robert Kennedy which, like the Dylan Thomas, sounds
an eerily prophetic dark note (now in the National Portrait
Gallery, the picture antedated Kennedy's assassination
by a few weeks) where the subject is isolated, almost
engulfed by space.
Dean
Acheson, Statesman,
by Gardner Cox, 1974
Each
portrait by Gardner Cox constituted a complex skein of
relationships between painter, sitter and spectator. Growing
up in a world where John Singer Sargent dominated portraiture,
Cox had obviously looked long and hard at Sargent, but
the portraiture of the young New Englander was to have
nothing about it of Sargent's paste-jewel society panache,
with sitters inhabiting Reynolds arid Gainsborough settings;
it was more in accord with the introspective spirit of
art's mid-century. The subjects of Gardner Cox are usually
placed in abstract spaces and define themselves through
a gesture or a formal interplay of color relationships.
They express what they are rather than who they are; the
social accessories are kept minimal; the inner self is
reciprocal with the outer likeness.
The difference between a Gardner Cox portrait and one
that only documents is the difference between poetry and
prose. Not every artist, however fluent, can paint a portrait.
Patently the task requires empathy with people, a psychological
instinct and a compelling touch of curiosity But giving
visual life to someone else also requires an imagination
which affords the appropriate image. Gardner Cox's portraits
may seem remote from the forms and textures of his visionary
personal statements; one is objective realism, the other
an alternate universe of shadowy images, slight distortions
and near-surrealist juxtapositions. In fact, the inward
fantasy of this universe overlaps the other. The face
is a mystical landscape no lessthan the stellar panoramas
of the invented compositions.
From the start of his career achieving universality was
a major objective. That career commenced formally rather
late when, in 1936, the 30-year-old Gardner, who had been
designing houses, stores, even a nightclub, left his father's
architectural firm in order to devote himself to art full-time.
But painting had long been a passion; Gardner's mother
was a gifted artist who had studied in Paris, and even
in the Depression he found an audience. People liked his
work, he could make a living. "In those days I did
landscapes," Gardner remembered, "And after
World War II, I painted oils of cobwebs in the dewy morning
grass." On a painting trip with friends, an annual
Columbus Day event, he usually painted a single leaf,
the papery veinings meticulously rendered, just as every
spring it was a ritual for him to paint a single crocus.
The direct nature studies bear an oblique relationship
to the fantasies. He began the latter with elemental arrangements,
designs he called his "basics," because the
painting employed a vocabulary of basic contrasts, line
and cylinder, solid and void. The basics, however, evolved
into the visionary constructions with their shifts of
scale and images of eggs, crumpled paper and stone. They
were neither naturalistic or out of this world, and could
not be measured in man-made terms. "Eggs have a delicacy,
a smoothness, are monumental, and instinct with life,"
he said. They were moons, space vehicles, birds' nests,
seashells, planets. They were the pristine oval of the
face awaiting the magical detailing of the artist. They
were anticipations of voyages through the cosmos, but
the journey not the arrival mattered and transformation
gave the shapes infinite possibility. The landscapes often
extend to a far horizon above which great plants flower,
majestically floating. Sometimes the terrain features
vast rocks on a scale of unknown immensity A surrealist
painter contemporaneous with Gardner Cox would tend to
make the vision hallucinatory, dreamlike and feverish;
but, characteristically, Gardner open-endedly allows the
spectator to complete the meaning of these elusive sites,
carrying the picture only to the point where his viewer's
imagination is stirred.
Lessing
J. Rosenwald, Director
of Sears, Roebuck & Company and founding benefactor
of the National Gallery of Art, by Gardner Cox, 1955
And
here is another connection between the portraiture and
the fantasies. The range of Gardner's portraits, from
Robert Frost to Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, from the
granddaughter of Owen Wister to Dean Acheson and Gov.
Michael Dukakis, suggests the trust in which his sitters
placed him. The same concern for someone else's sensibility
apparent in the celestial fantasies translates into the
quiet conviction of the portraits. With his John L. Lewis
eyebrows, jaunty bowties, houndstooth sports jacket with
a crimson bandanna stuffed casually in the breast pocket,
Gardner himself was a character as vivid as anyone he
painted. He had the dash of Whistler without Whistler's
deplorable temperament. Gardner deserved the trust of
his sitters; he did not project his ego but his respect
for truth and the high estate of art. Although someone
dubbed him "the court painter of Harvard University,"
he was no more a court painter than Goya—as his sturdy
response to Henry Kissinger's rebuff indicates. Invited
to "improve" the image rejected by Kissinger,
Gardner declined because "I didn't see anything I
wanted to change." What could a Secretary of State
tell him about portraiture? In his Harvard Alumni report,
Gardner wrote, "Principal Works: Many portraits and
other paintings in collections of: the National Gallery
of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Boston Museum of Fine
Arts; government departments: State {three secretaries),
Labor, Defense, Air, Army, U.S. Supreme Court (seven justices);
universities and colleges: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago;
many in private collections. Occupation: Artist."
THE
ARTIST EXPLAINS HIS APPROACH
In
painting a portrait, my aim is to depict in one image
a convincing evocation of the appearance and character
of the subject—what he or she looks like and feels
like to me. Of the two aspects, the second is much the
more elusive and difficult, but it is the sine qua non,
and the work would be lifeless without it.
My first step is to familiarize myself with the subject,
and I propose the "fly on the wall" approach.
This consists of making notes and sketches of the subject
going about his or her normal business in familiar surroundings—chambers,
office, laboratory, lecture room, home—conferring,
telephoning, reading, thinking, moving about—under
pressure, in cheerful moments or irritating ones.
During this approach the subject must ignore the painter—no
polite conversation, no trivial courtesy. (Perhaps an
occasional request that the painter leave if a conversation
becomes confidential.) Sketching and investigative note-taking
go on for a series of sessions until the painter feels
he has enough data. It is painless for the subject, wastes
none of his time, for he had done virtually no posing
at all, and it has supplied a wealth of material to the
painter: informing, stimulating and involving him. By
this time the pose, the main characteristics of the sitter
he intends to suggest, along with the general color tones,
and the size of the picture have become settled in the
painter's mind, and it is time to proceed to the studio
to paint the actual portrait.
In the studio the subject becomes the "sitter"
and takes a previously selected pose. The importance of
the pose cannot be overemphasized. The body carries many
messages and its shape and bearing identify the person
even from the back a block away. It is an important factor,
along with expression on the face, in evoking appearance
and character: whether the sitter is aggressive or passive,
large and portentious, small and feisty, frail or robust,
etc. To quote Montaigne: "each particle of a man
reveals him" and the body is the largest particle
in the picture, it is the element that establishes the
portrait's character as seen even from a distance.
But it is, of course, through the face that the personality
can be both most emphatically and most subtly suggested.
Specifically, the expressions that animate the face, as
caught by the painter, make the portrait.
Here the painter has an advantage over the photographer,
who must accept what the camera sees—i.e., the sitter's
expression of that instant only, while the artist can
edit what he sees and express more penetratingly his feeling
about the sitter. He can indicate at least two expressions
and sometimes even more, selected as suggesting special
characteristics. For example, the right side of the face
may be depicted as serious and stern: an eye slightly
narrowed, the corner of the mouth drawn slightly down.
The left side, on the other hand, may suggest warmth and/or
humor: a slightly smile-crinkled. eye and a slightly upturned
corner of the mouth. This apparently contradictory sternness
versus warmth (a not unusual combination) is in no way
confusing to the viewer, whose gaze automatically shifts
back and forth very rapidly since it is not humanly possible
to focus on more than one small area of the face at a
time. Thus the viewer receives in rapid succession a number
of impressions which the painter has provided and this
variety animates the portrait.
When the painting is pictorially satisfying and looks
and feels to me like the subject, I have done.
Gardner Cox
October 1984
From
"Lawyers Painted by Gardner Cox," Harvard Law
Library, 1984.
Gardner Cox: Sketches from Life
by Phoebe Barnes Driver (Dublin, N.H.: W.L. Bauhan,
1995).
Unitarian
Note
Gardner
Cox was a member of the First Parish in Cambridge, The
First Church in Cambridge (Unitarian Universalist).
A
Gardner Cox Gallery
Sketch
of Phyllis an hour after Poppy's birth, July 1946
Poppy, 1950
Ben, 1946
James, 1953
Sketch
for portrait of Henry Kissinger
Sketch
for portrait of Felix Frankfurter.
General
George C. Marshall
Studies
for portrait of Robert Frost
Portrait
Painting
Based on the desire for perfection.
Recording existing but passing charm.
It will last with the race.
It will always be in—as long as
humans are human.
Portraits are challenging, force
you to work.
(Interesting people). Bring all aspects or factors
into play:
Line, Color, Value, Edge, Texture. (Rhythym)
Draw
Back. Temptatiopn to please (which is
almost always fatal. Hope to (can only please
yourself) & succeed. You do not know what
another thinks of himself—or what a wife
thinks of a husband and so on.
Make
it feel as they make you feel—that's
the best you will ever do!
