Wallace Stevens

“The colour blue offers a multiplicity of remarkable characteristics to the observing eye and to the reflective mind alike. It is the only colour which can be seen as a close neighbor to and essentially akin to both dark and light, almost black in the night and almost white at the horizon by day; and it is also the colour of shadows on snow. It can darken, it can obscure, it may float to and fro like a mist, dimming reality with sadness and concealing truth…. By contrast light blue is the colour of loyalty and ecstasy—‘true blue’ for example….”¹

This description is from a remarkable study on Paul Cézanne by the German art historian Kurt Badt. Cézanne of course pushed the use of color and structure to new limits in all of his work and so many of the younger artists migrating to Paris at the beginning of the 20th Century soon became aware of this, including Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso
“Self Portrait”
1901
Oil on canvas
81 cm x 60 cm
Picasso Museum, Paris

For Picasso, this became one of the most important attributes to his early paintings. Alone and isolated as many artists found themselves in Paris at that time, it was inevitable that a certain melancholy would set in. This was intensified by the sudden death of one of his dear friends, Casagemas. The psychological range of the color blue became an important element in his search for a way out of his situation. Using local residents, not traditional artist’s models, he began to paint this series from 1901 through 1904. His portrait of Casagemas was painted as a tribute in 1901, and was included again as the male figure in “La Vie” from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1903.

Along with his description of the color blue, Kurt Badt also has mentioned the psychology of this color, even referring to it emotionally as ‘the blues’ as we might assume. For Picasso, this was a turning point.

Pablo Picasso
“La Celestina”
1904
Oil on canvas
70 cm x 56 cm
Musee Picasso, Paris

Whether it was a half blind woman in the street, a procuress named Celestina from a Spanish tragicomedy of 1499, or a totally blind man having his evening dinner, the people, their poses, and their color are simultaneously expressing a set of emotions and questions for the viewer. Add to these images, the portrait of “The Old Guitarist” from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, and we have more questions regarding life during this time period.

Pablo Picasso
“The Blind Man’s Meal”
1903
Oil on canvas
37 1/2” x 37 1/2”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The musician, with his head bent over his instrument, with the weight of blue pressing down on his shoulder, we follow the line of his arm downward to the elbow and across to his hand strumming the guitar. And then up the neck of this guitar, to his fingers holding steady on the chords, and then across to his other shoulder, through his own neck and back to his dazed expression: a full compositional circle. This resulted of course, in one of the most important modern examples of the ekphrastic tradition, Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar.”

“The man bent over his guitar, 
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. 
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,  You do not play things as they are.’ 
The man replied, ‘Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’ 
And they said to him, ‘But play, you must, 
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, 
A tune upon the blue guitar, 
Of things exactly as they are.’”²

“I cannot bring a world quite round, 
Although I patch it as I can.
 I sing a hero’s head, large eye 
And bearded bronze, but not a man, 
Although I patch him as I can 
And reach through him almost to man. 
If a serenade almost to man 
Is to miss, by that, things as they are, 
Say that it is the serenade
 Of a man that plays a blue guitar.” 

Pablo Picasso
“The Old Guitarist”
1903–1904
Oil on panel 48 3/8” x 32 1/2”
The Art Institute of Chicago

So, we have a set up between the artist and the audience: the artist saying that things are changed upon the blue guitar, while the audience insists upon a tune of things exactly as they are!

Stevens starts with this guitarist from the Blue Period but soon goes on to other thoughts, not descriptive but reflective: “A tune beyond us as we are….”³ and ventures into the modern world of painting and poetry. He has to touch upon descriptions of general life and the accompanying dilemmas of 20th century artists. This then continues through several of the later sections of this poem. As Glen MacLeod mentioned in Wallace Stevens and Modern Art, he fuses references to Picasso with more general observations to modern life and a sense of contemporary surrealism, a kind of “…permissible imagination.”⁴

 “A tune beyond us as we are,  
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar; 
Ourselves in tune as if in space, 
Yet nothing changed, except the place 
Of things as they are and only the place 
As you play them on the blue guitar,
 Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,  
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
 For a moment final, in the way 
The thinking of art seems final when 
The thinking of god is smoky dew. 
The tune is space. The blue guitar 
Becomes the place of things as they are, 
A composing of senses of the guitar.”⁵

Pablo Picasso
“La Vie”
1903
Oil on canvas
197 cm x 129 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art,
Cleveland, Ohio

 “The world washed in his imagination,
The world was a shore, whether sound or form

Or light, the relic of farewells,
Rock, of valedictory echoing,

To which his imagination returned,
From which it sped, a bar in space,

Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought
Against the murderous alphabet:

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.

A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.”⁶

“Is this picture of Picasso’s, this ‘hoard
Of destructions’, a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society?”⁷

1 Badt, Kurt; The Art of Cezanne; University of California Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles; 1965; pp. 58-59.

2 Stevens, Wallace; “The Man With The Blue Guitar” Collected Poetry and Prose; The Library of America; New York, New York; 1997; Section I, p. 135.

3 Stevens, Wallace; “The Man With The Blue Guitar” Collected Poetry and Prose; The Library of America; New York, New York; 1997; Section VI, p. 137.

4 MacLeod, Glen; Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory show to Abstract Expressionism; Yale University Press; New Haven and London; 1993; p. 197.

5 Stevens, Wallace; “The Man With The Blue Guitar” Collected Poetry and Prose; The Library of America; New York, New York; 1997; Section VI, p. 137.

6 Stevens, Wallace; “The Man With The Blue Guitar” Collected Poetry and Prose; The Library of America; New York, New York; 1997; Section XXVI, pp. 146-147.

7 Stevens, Wallace; “The Man With The Blue Guitar” Collected Poetry and Prose; The Library of America; New York, New York; 1997; Section XV, p. 141.

There is a Joan Mitchell painting in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art titled “Niege et fleurs” (“Snow and Flowers” in French) that was part of a special docent tour for the Contemporary Art Society a few years ago. This particular docent started out by insisting that the tourists pay no attention to the title of this painting. I thought that this was a shame, as this painting was exactly that: Snow and Flowers. Recently at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I walked into one of the galleries in the middle of the recent Joan Mitchell Retrospective and spied a large painting of a flower, an amaryllis, and that was exactly what it was: “La Grande Vallée II (Amaryllis).”¹

Joan Mitchell
“La Grande Vallée II (Amaryllis)”
Oil on canvas
86 1/2” x 78 5/8”
© Estate of Joan Mitchell
Courtesy, Guggenheim, Asher Associates, New York.

Furthermore, the Baltimore exhibition used many examples of how the gardens and landscapes of France influenced Joan Mitchell’s paintings. It also referred to the many writers, poets who were Mitchell’s contemporaries and predecessors, and how they were so important to her work.

The post-war aesthetic community in New York City consisted of so many painters and poets. They all lived in a certain few neighborhoods and gathered at many of the same local galleries and bars. For Joan Mitchell, who was always interested in literature, especially poetry, this was a fertile environment. Amongst her life long friends and literary colleagues were: James Schyler, Eileen Myles, Pierre Schneider, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery.

Beginning in 1955, Mitchell split much of her time living and working in both New York and France. After moving permanently to France in 1959, she continued her friendships with the poets of the New York School and become new friends with poets in France, including Jacques Dupin and J. J. Mitchell.

All the while, Joan Mitchell was both imagining and seeing this new landscape surrounding her. Flowers in her garden. The linden tree that was right outside her front door in France.

Joan Mitchell
“Tilleul”
1978
Oil on canvas
94 1/2” x 70 3/4”
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

These bits and pieces of nature, whether seen directly or out of the corner of one’s eye, always have the feel of movement and form. Haptic sensations of seeing and walking through the landscape, with a tacit understanding of the space immediately in front us.

And finally, there is this painting of a nearby hemlock. Mitchell was attracted to this form as it had been written about by Wallace Stevens. In 1916 Stevens had written of a peacock perching in a hemlock tree. Later taking off in flight. In this poem Stevens describes the movement of birds’ wings, the wind through the leaves of the trees, sensations of color and movement. The writing becomes physical, imagistic. The words becoming solid, like objects.

In the paintings of Joan Mitchell, there are certain guiding elements: the gestural brushstrokes, analogous and/or complementary color contrasts, and a space that is primarily felt as opposed to an illusion. There is no need for illustrating a thing, as the paint is that thing. The image is so strong and physical. And Mitchell’s painting “Hemlock” was inspired by this Wallace Stevens poem, “Domination of Black.”

“At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.”

“I heard them cry—the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?”

Joan Mitchell
“Hemlock”
1956
Oil on canvas
91” x 80”
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York

“Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks….”²

1 Roberts, Sarah, and Katy Siegel, eds.; Joan Mitchell; Baltimore Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yale University Press; New Haven and London; 2020; Plate 111.

2 Stevens, Wallace; “Domination of Black” Collected Poetry and Prose; The Library of America; New York, New York; 1997; p. 7.

BRIDGING THE GAP

Reflections on the plastic and ekphrastic traditions

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR

JOAN MITCHELL, WALLACE STEVENS AND THE AMARYLLIS, THE HEMLOCK AND THE LINDEN TREE