Mind's Eye

This painting from 1947 by Jackson Pollock is titled Alchemy. Measuring over one meter high by over two meters wide, the painting is entirely composed of abstract forms. From afar, the work appears generally dark and is punctuated by dots or lines of brighter colors. Upon closer examination, it is entirely covered with a dense web of thin, looping drips, splatters, and streaks of paint in various colors, including black, yellow, gray, white, and red. The drips, each a few millimeters wide and often going the entire length or width of the painting, crisscross over each other, building up in layer upon layer across the entire surface.

The variety of paint types include oil, aluminum, and enamel. This gives some areas a glossy sheen while other colors are matte. The lines thicken and thin in places as if flung, and in other places the paint pools. Lines layer over each other again and again, building an overall impression of a dark textured surface like a wall upon which signs are inscribed in bold white pigment.

The enormous scale and thickly layered paint can make Alchemy resemble an environment or landscape. Dispersed across the surface are textured materials, including sand, pebbles, rope, and broken wood sticks. A finger running over the surface of this painting would feel a greatly varied topography. It is so extensively layered, in fact, that conservators found that the lightweight fabric could barely support the work’s heavy coats of paint and other materials on its surface. They also found that the fabric is commercially printed—perhaps a tablecloth or curtain hidden underneath the many layers of paint.

The visual experience of the work might feel chaotic because of the overlapping cacophony of drips and colors, yet it simultaneously seems ordered—carefully composed like a recipe or symphony. Spontaneous but controlled, the painting is intricately woven of lines distributed in every direction, with the density of the lines easing near the edges of the work. In the lower-right corner, text in black paint reads “47 Jackson Pollock.”

It was this year, 1947, that Pollock devised a way of working that forged a new path away from the conventions and tools of traditional easel painting. Laying canvas or fabric on the floor, he poured commercial paint from the can directly onto the painting surface, or used a stick or brush to drip or fling paint onto it. Alchemy is one of his earliest “drip” paintings.
The movement of his body became an essential part of making his paintings. Pollock wrote, “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” Alchemy might make us consider the energy put into the physical process of creating the work, and how its lines chart the movements of the artist’s body in doing so.

This sculpture by Martha Boto from 1963 is titled Structure optique, or Optical Structure. The work is made of transparent Plexiglas and measures 31 centimeters on each side and 53 centimeters tall. It is composed of 48 clear disks that appear suspended in midair like prisms hanging in a chandelier.

The sculpture is contained between two flat, black squares made of dark Plexiglas sheets, which sandwich 12 thin, perpendicular columns made of clear Plexiglas rods. Each of the 12 rods, or columns, has four clear disks stacked vertically along it. Each disk measures about five centimeters in diameter and resembles a lens taken from a magnifying glass or round eyeglasses. The way the larger circular forms are attached to the thin vertical rods is reminiscent of how objects are affixed to carousel poles.

The prismatic disks are oriented in various directions, but they are carefully aligned to be symmetrical, or placed in mirror image, if the sculpture were divided along its central vertical axis. You might imagine how light passes through and reflects from these 48 prisms, creating an optical play of luminosity and movement.

Martha Boto, who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1925, played a key role in the evolution of Optical and Kinetic art. She explored the possibilities of materials that could reflect and absorb light. The year after making this work, she would begin to use electric mechanisms to project light onto moving objects, making the first kinetic lightboxes.

Marino Marini’s L’angelo della città, or The Angel of the City, from 1948, is a bronze sculpture with a dark patina and matte finish that stands nearly two meters high, two meters long, and one meter wide. It depicts a stylized horse and rider and stands guard on the outdoor terrace of Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo, facing Venice’s Grand Canal.

The horse stands on four straight legs that rise from a solid rectangular bronze base below, which is the same width and length as the animal’s torso. It juts its head and long neck straight out from its body, making one extended straight line from nose to tail, parallel to the ground. The horse’s nostrils flare, its mouth is slightly open, its eyes are tiny dots, and its ears appear pinned back against its upper neck. Because of these features and its long neck stretching forward, it almost seems to be running at full speed, except that its legs are firmly planted and perpendicular to the ground. A very short mane lines the top of the horse’s neck and its tail is a small, round nub, both disproportionate to the overall size of the horse.

A man rides the horse bareback with his legs straddling its thick belly and both arms outstretched from his body in a wide T-shape. Both of his hands are closed in fists. He tilts his head to the sky in a strong, triumphant gesture. The man is naked, and his thick, squat body shows muscle definition around his chest and abdomen. The rider has an erect phallus that juts out from his body.

Marino Marini, who was born in Italy in 1901, drew on the tradition of Etruscan and Northern European sculpture in developing his equestrian figures. From the mid-1930s onward, his horse-and-rider works evolved from relatively slender and poised classical forms into a more simplified and archaic-feeling style featuring squatter proportions, like in The Angel of the City. What kind of assertion do you think Marino Marini might be making here with his horse and rider?

Leonora Carrington’s Oink (They Shall Behold Thine Eyes) is an oil-on-canvas painting from 1959. The work is horizontally oriented and measures 40 centimeters high by 90 centimeters wide. It is mostly painted in deep brown tones. In this dark, surreal, and mythical scene, a griffin-like creature on the left appears to cast a spell toward five people on the right, tightly tucked together on a single wide bed.

The hybrid creature has features of many different animals: the body of a large cat; the head of a jackal with long pointed ears; the thick wings of a bird; long talon-like claws; and a long, raised tail with a human face at its tip. It is covered in tawny fur with black stripes along its neck and black spots along its rear. Seen in profile, the creature has one visible wing that drapes downward with black-tipped feathers barely sweeping the floor. The creature raises its front leg toward the bed where the five people lay in a row. From its paw or talons, thin rays of light or a wispy cloud seem to pour onto the bed over their blanketed bodies, perhaps sending the figures healing power.

The laying figures share the simple-framed wide bed with a tall headboard. A single red blanket covers all their bodies up to their necks. Their skin is painted in shades of blue, gray, and white, which gives them a sickly pallor. They each have long auburn hair that appears to stick straight up electrically, which look like tall flames of fire. Behind them, standing along the headboard, are three seemingly religious figures dressed in dark robes and caps. The figure farthest in perspective releases a white dove into the air. The middle figure holds a cross and looks down at the people in bed. The nearest figure holds onto the headboard and looks at the creature. A hissing snake coils up the bedpost.

On the floor at the foot of the bed, is a clear vessel containing deep-red liquid. Rising from the red liquid is a tiny figure painted in all white with a lifted arm. The tiny white figure hovers above the substance pouring from the creature’s paws or talons. The dark setting of the painting might be a brick or stone hospital. Its arches and columns evoke medieval architecture. The room has no ceiling; instead, the dark night sky appears overhead with a light emanating from the horizon in the distance. On the far-left side of the painting, a ghostly white bull rears its head from a doorway.

Leonora Carrington, born in England in 1917, spent time among the Surrealist circles in Paris. During World War II, she fled from France to Spain and later recounted her experiences in a 1944 memoir titled Down Below, which was inspired by the hallucinatory themes and dreamlike visions of Surrealism. She later moved to Mexico, where she lived for more than 40 years and found artistic inspiration in the country’s cultural and religious traditions. What does the scene depicted in Oink (They Shall Behold Thine Eyes) bring up for you?

Arbres, or Trees, by Rosemarie Heber Koczÿ, is a sculpture from 1972 made of organic materials, including hemp, sisal, jute, raw silk, algae, and wool. The work oscillates between the form of a two-dimensional painting, a woven tapestry, and a soft sculpture. It is vertically oriented and measures about a meter high by just over a half meter wide.
The work resembles weaving ropes that snake from top to bottom, like tightly wound roots of trees or like long branching limbs reaching upward toward the sky. The ropes vary in thickness and size. Some are thin while others are thick and knotted, mimicking the knobs and branches of trees in a dense forest. The fibers of hemp, sisal, linen, jute, raw silk, and wool are colored in earth-tone shades of cream, off-white, beige, sand, caramel, and chocolate.

If you were to reach out and touch this work, it might feel incredibly soft in some areas and scratchy in others. Following the forms with a finger, one would feel these winding, thin lines growing thick and bulbous in some places. Some of the ropy forms are carefully wrapped or wound around other organic materials. In some places, the materials are knotted or intertwined so carefully that they almost look like finely knitted silk. Across this mixed-media sculpture, the winding and branching forms evoke the subtle vibrance of plant systems and their roots and shoots.

This painting by Pablo Picasso from 1937 is titled La baignade, or On the Beach. An oil, conte crayon, and chalk painting on canvas, it is horizontally oriented and measures approximately 1.3 meters high by 2 meters wide.

The painting features three large, stylized figures in a seascape. The two figures in the foreground are bathers playing with a toy sailboat on the shore. One stands with legs partially submerged in the water, leaning over the other figure, who is kneeling in the sand and holding the toy sailboat. The figures are painted in a geometric style made up of sculptural curves and sharp angles, almost as if they were carved from stone or cast in cement. They have anthropomorphic features: heads with exaggeratedly tiny eyes, noses, mouths, and ears; and bodies with exaggeratedly large, curving necks, torsos, breasts, limbs, and bottoms. A third figure looms in the distance: a voyeur watching the two figures in the foreground. It seems this figure is either submerged in the water up to their neck or peeking only their head up from behind the horizon line. The bodies of all three figures are painted in voluminous shades of light gray, furthering the sculptural feel.

The thin curved sliver of a shoreline is in the foreground at the bottom of the painting and is the same shade of light gray as the toy sailboat. The two figures in the foreground are set against the expansive cerulean-blue water behind them. A horizon line dividing the sea from the sky sits at the top third of the canvas; the sky above is painted light aqua blue. What mood or tone does this work evoke for you in color choice, subject matter, and style?

Kenzo Okada’s Above the White, from 1960, is a vertically oriented oil-on-canvas painting measuring about one-and-a-quarter meters tall by one meter wide. This abstract work features softly painted shapes against an off-white background.

A large brown geometric form dominates the composition. Starting from the center, it is a rectangular shape that pushes upward and turns diagonally toward the upper right of the canvas, going off the edge. A thin, white cigarette-like rectangle is placed horizontally within the left side of the brown shape, jutting off its edge into the off-white background. A small white rectangle resembling the shape of a matchbook rests inside the brown shape toward its bottom.

Across the center horizon line but behind the brown shape, a light-beige band divides the painting roughly in half. On the painting’s lower left, a bright yellow band meets a white semicircle outlined in black. Below sits another cigarette-like horizontal streak of paint in white and brown. To the right, a thin black line evoking a match rests on a softly rectangular brown shape. A small purple square is right below it. In the bottom-right corner, two wedge-shaped forms sit along the right edge of the canvas; the cyan wedge diagonally placed atop the red wedge. The artist’s signature, “Kenzo Okada,” is painted in small black letters along the lower-left edge of the canvas.

Overall, the painting reads like a still life of common objects—perhaps items lying around on the table in the artist’s studio. Although non-natural objects are evoked by the forms, the earth tones evoke the natural world, as does Okada’s method of painting; the application of diluted oil paint builds a flat, matte surface, making the subject matter feel somewhat misty, cloudy, or blurry.

Okada was born in Japan in 1902. He built an early successful career in Japan as a painter and a professor. After moving to New York in 1950, he quickly became part of the group of artists known as the Abstract Expressionists. Inspired by the radical shifts in the idea of what painting could be, Okada abandoned figurative painting and began to create abstractions. During this time of experimentation, he forged a unique identity by evoking Japanese aesthetic sensibilities and sources while working loosely within the Abstract Expressionist style.

Nu (esquisse), jeune homme triste dans un train, Nude (Sketch), Sad Young Man on a Train is a painting by Marcel Duchamp from 1911, dated 1912.

Measuring one meter tall by 73 centimeters wide, it is a vertically oriented oil-on-canvas panel mounted to pressboard. In this dark painting, a figure standing in the center of the composition appears to be in motion, as duplicate images of him radiate outward to either side like in a hall of mirrors. The figure is highly stylized with a helmet-like head, indistinguishable facial features, and planer suggestions of a block-like torso, arms, and legs. There is no clear definition of muscles or bone structure. Sharp black horizontal lines cut across his head and torso, furthering the suggestion of movement.

The figure is painted in skin-tone shades of dusky brown, caramel, burnt sienna, and raw umber, almost like the colors you might find in a sepia-toned photograph from the same era. The figure is depicted largest and lightest at the center—a clear focal point—with each subsequent depiction on both sides shrinking and darkening toward the painting’s edges, where the figure is entirely swallowed in black.

This painting displays Duchamp’s interest in various styles and artistic developments of the time, including Cubism, with its subdued palette, emphasis on flat surface planes, and abstracted representations. He also chose to portray two movements: those of the train and of the lurching figure. The Italian Futurists depicted movement similarly, representing the past, present, and future trajectory of a figure. This painting feels like a photograph with multiple exposures capturing an action or like something predating a stop-motion image.

We might wonder about this young man’s journey, proceeding from past to present, and into what future the train delivers him.

Paul Klee’s Zaubergarten, or Magic Garden, made in March of 1926, is an oil painting on a plaster-filled wire-mesh surface. It measures 53 centimeters high by 45 centimeters wide. It is a richly colorful and whimsical work depicting simplified forms of patterns, places, and objects. The painted plaster structure is mounted in a wooden frame that hugs the edges of the painting.

The surface of the painting undulates with concave divots due to how the sculptural plaster was applied when wet to its wire-mesh base. It appears that, while still wet, the plaster surface was scratched or etched with a sharp tool, creating detailed lines and marks that then hardened. Finally the white plaster’s surface was loosely painted with washes of color, which pooled in the deeply etched areas. Overall, the work appears to have patches of pastel tones that highlight the textures embedded in the plaster surface underneath.

From afar, the color effect is like that of a tie-dyed fabric. The background is painted in soft dabs and patches of colors in warm shades of orange, yellow, pink, mauve, brown, and brick red. Perhaps these patches of color are like the various flowers, grasses, and brushes that make up a garden.

At the center of the painting, a mint-green face stares at us with large almond-shaped eyes and long eyelashes. This head stands like a statue bust upon what appears to be a golden pedestal, or perhaps rises from within an enormous chalice. To the upper right, a vivid ultramarine-blue circle outlined in black evokes a pool of water, an opening onto the night sky, or a planet. To the left of the green head, a crescent moon in burgundy red cradles a smiling pink sun. Between the blue circle and the crescent moon floats a brown shape made of a round face and four tentacle-like arms that reach toward the upper edge of the painting.

At the upper center of the painting, a multistory pale-yellow tower extends beyond its etched outlines, as if emanating yellow light. And its edges are lavender tones. Along the center-left edge of the painting, a gray watchtower or belltower rises above a pale-orange facade of a multistory building. Above, in the upper-left corner, are ambiguous forms: perhaps a sky-blue bell and a tiny floating window in front of an enormous white full moon. The painting also has several areas of light-pink decorative forms, including a triangular section in the upper-right corner containing a decorative pattern of thin swirling lines and shapes.

Klee employs his signature calligraphic drawing style of thin lines to delineate the objects in this painting. Yet here his lines are physically marked into the plaster, which appear like a primordial surface worn and textured by history. Each object represented appears to float, perhaps fixed, or perhaps mobile like orbiting planets or cells. Magic Garden feels like a cosmic eruption of a symbolic and magical world composed of natural, man-made, and geometric forms—a world in which Klee is the maker and keeper of secrets.

This wall-based sculptural work by Marina Apollonio is titled Rilievo n. 505, or Relief no. 505, and was made around 1968. The work is 50 centimeters high by 50 centimeters wide. Initially the work gives the impression of a precise tapestry made of shiny strips of aluminum woven horizontally and vertically. They are mounted over Masonite pressboard, a type of hardboard surface, which is painted with a bright green fluorescent paint. The backing isn’t initially noticeable due to the aluminum strips woven over it.

Upon closer look, the strips of structured aluminum are all vertically oriented; the appearance of horizontal strips is an illusion created by the way the vertical strips are structured to curve toward and away from the Masonite. The curving concave and convex forms alternate between each vertical strip and its neighbor, giving the impression of a warp and weft.
Another way to describe this is to imagine weaving vertical aluminum strips with horizontal straws; after affixing the aluminum in place and removing the straws, gaps would remain where the strips formed a kind of hill shape over or a valley form under the straws.

If one moves to see the wall-based sculptural work from the side, then the bright green of the painted Masonite base peeks through the open space underneath the projecting “hills” of the aluminum strips. These convex forms loop out away from the hardboard surface, catching the light reflectively, and the “valleys” (or concave forms) sit darker in shadow. Adding to the optical illusion, the shiny aluminum strips bounce the bright green color of the hardboard, like multiple reflecting mirrors that change from various angles.

In total, there are 17 vertical aluminum strips in this symmetrical work. The widest strip is at center, with each subsequent strip narrowing on both sides—the thinnest strips sitting along the left and right edges. This adds to the optical sense of convex dimension and creates changing illusions of weaving while mirroring color and light.

Marina Apollonio was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1940 and attended the Accademia di Belle Arti of Venice. She first made metallic reliefs with color sequences in 1962, choosing to use industrial materials and sharing the depersonalized vision of other Optical artists. Throughout her career, she has played with illusionistic visual experiments to make works that seem to physically draw the viewer into the painting. How is our experience of this work affected as we move around it?