In the last novel before his death, All That Is, James Salter is gravely misunderstanding how one should view certain works of art, as well as how to create the material conditions which may keep paintings more or less intact. He describes his visit to the Prado Museum in Marid: ‘The Prado was dark, as if it had been neglected or even abandoned, the masterpieces were hard to see’.
Wrong – on two counts.
First of all, someone who has visited the Goya’s in that magnificent museum will remember how, in many of its rooms, not so much ‘darkness’, as a delicate chiaroscuro is determining the lighting of paintings on the walls – a gentle clair-obscur, resulting from light coming in through half-, or merely quarter-opened shutters. If that piercing light would be allowed to immediately touch these canvasses, in only one year the fierce Madrilene heat and summer light would simply kill all their beauty.
What is more: Those, who manage the museum in Madrid, are wise men and women. They have understood that the ‘Modern’ way of museal exhibition, by way of artificial light, is the worst manner of presenting a canvas. You only have to use your imagination, and think of the conditions under which Goya, El Greco, Velasquez and those other masters have created their work – in the atelier, with only natural, northern light entering, and at most a candle to assist them. They were commissioned by people who owned large, shuttered houses, with candle-lit rooms, spaces more or less like the ones in the Prado, where the pictures would hang and be admired.
It reminds one of what the French ‘Orientalist’ painter Fromentin experienced on his 19th-century travels in the Sahara. He remarked that the cruelly sharp, almost perpendicular light of the desert sun was radically killing the bright colours of joyous Arabic reality – all fading into a muddle. I claim, that the same would happen to the colours of his own, and of all those other paintings, when they would be exposed to such fierce sunlight in a museum or, for that matter, in private rooms. Colour loves shaded light.
Salter did not understand, that in the chiaroscuro of Prado’s interiors – with a sun, obliquely reflected, peeping in between the lightly opened shutters – such half-light was in fact highlighting the brilliance of the Goya’s grand paintings.
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Renzo Piano, an architect-engineer who produced both horror buildings, as well as a few masterpieces, may have reached his zenith in the design of a museum in the desert of Texas. He understood all. To house her art collection, some rich widow of an oil baron commissioned a building from him. Piano was aware of both the material intricacies of art works, as well as their aesthetics. To properly use natural light on the paintings, as a true engineer he designed special roof lamellas, which would adapt automatically to the intensity of the sunlight outside.
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This, more or less, follows the same principle used by Jean Nouvel in his building for the Institut du Monde Arabe, in Paris. In this building, a set of over-sized diaphragms, copied from old-fashioned cameras, would open and close with the passing of clouds, also producing a synaesthetic of ear and eye, by making a whizzing sound during their often-continuous opening and closing.
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A painting’s colour is always in love with natural light – its changing intensity according to the time of day, with varying amounts of red and blue, where the earth’s atmosphere is functioning as a Newton-prism, filtering out certain bits of the light’s spectrum. One should not make the mistake of, on the one hand, confusing the painter’s need for invariable northern light in his atelier, while actually painting his picture, and on the other hand, the need of the observer for variation in light that allows him – as an amateur – to enjoy all the possibilities of that painting.
Salter in Madrid – obviously an American – had no idea what he was seeing and what he was talking about. Over there, in the USA, the museal adoration of artificial light began, especially versions of that awful neon which, though invented in France at the beginning of the 20th century, would conquer at high speed the USA and its neon-lighted advertisement industry. Like the fierce sun, so is soft museum-neon killing works of art – now of course, also here on our continent.
Perhaps, Salter’s misunderstanding the Prado and its lighting is all about being an American in Europe. In his memoirs – Burning the Days, a far better book than his novels are – there is the same type of mishit, this time not regarding art, but in missing the essence of the good tomato. ‘In Tangiers the market was teeming, mounds of tomatoes, many misshapen…’ In America – as by the way in the Netherlands – they are supposed to be baseball round in order to be good. However, anybody who is living in France Profonde, or who has traveled the Greek islands, knows that the best-tasting tomatoes are rather curiously formed.
Sierksma, Montmorillon, 14.2/2023
PS
A reader might object to the argument developed, claiming that I only talk about atelier painting – thus, hooked on my particular subject of the Goya’s in the Prado, a painter who worked som time before, in France at first, they started to paint in the open air. That, however, would be a misunderstanding. Let me once again quote Salter, in order to answer this objection. ‘In earlier years , the painters had all come because it was cheap and because of the light – clear, transcendent light that seemed to come for miles in the long afternoon’. Leaving aside the notion of ‘transcendent light’, which is obscure, it is as usual beautifully phrased – yet again, wrong painterwise. Anyone, having observed a outdoors painter at work, knows he’ll pack up after one and a half hour, at the most – the light has changed, so has the subject of his painting. To continue and not wait till the next day, at the same hour with the same light, would make the painting consist of parts that would not fit, would not coincide with one another – colourwise that is. And, by the way, these outdoor paintings also suffer from too much sunlight, after they have been finished and hung somewhere.
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