I'm going to go back 100 years or so to an artist I passed over: Goya. In the spectrum of artists from those of structure to those of feeling, Goya is definitely the latter. But what is remarkable is the way he anticipated the romantics and 20th century expressionists, working at the height of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightment thinkers of the 18th century believed in the ultimate and inevitable perfectability of man through reason. They largely ignored the existence and power of the bestial side of man, a fatal mistake. The Greeks were wiser: thouogh they elevated reason as man's great gift, they never forgat the other side of his nature. Their image was of the horse and rider - today the Id and Ego - and understood the need to respect and control the bestial side.

Goya saw the cracks in the Enlightenment facade, and saw the bestiality hidden beneath. He has two works which address the issue directly. The "Sleep of Reason produces Monsters", the frontispiece to his etching series on the Disasters of War, shows an awareness of the irrational which is unique at that time. The later painting "Saturn Devouring his Children" (above) is much more visceral but equally farreaching in its philosophical message. Saturn, who rules Olympus before he was slain by his son Zeus, represents everything that is bestial and always ready to overwhelm the forces of reason.

Goya began his career very much in the great tradition of Velazquez, as official painter to the Court of Spain. I show you his portrait of the Royal Family which demonstrates his mastery of the ideom, while showing a marked unwillingness to flatter the subjects in any way. In Goya's prtraits, men always seem to be weak and ineffectual, while women are strong; we see this again in a portrait of Dona Isabella de Porcel.

But early on Goya turned his attention to the irrational, partucularly in his etchings, but also in a work like "Majas on the Balcony". This seemingly innocent scene is fraught with menace, as the figures of the "secorts" loom out of a sinister darkness. This has been interpretated psychologically as the menace of the irrational, and also politically, as innocent Spain menaced by the Napoleonic armies. For me the two interpretations have become inseparable in Goya's thinking.

Reality for Goya Became Spain under the heel of Napoleon, and the bestiality which is the inevitable result of war. Where his earlier etching series were aimed at uncovering the irrational suspertitions of the people and the venality of their masters, the "Disasters of War" are like the work of a photojournalist, a witness to horror. Throughout he uses black and white as a vehicle for terror and panic with a power matched at that time only by the prison fantasies of Piranesi, and not seen again until Munch at the end of the next century.

My most recent post in this series was on Claude Monet, who so completely redefined the artistic enterprise that he set a new benchmark against which future artists had to define themselves. By limiting his focus to the facts of perception he created an unusually direct interaction between the artist and the visual world, but in doing so he effectively excluded the interests of most artists preceeding him, whether "classical" or "romantic".

There was, predictably, an almost immediate attempt to blend his new vision with the traditional concerns of artists. I have already discussed Cezanne, who in this context must be seen as a "classicist": concerned with the structure and order behind our perceptual world, what we KNOW as opposed to what we SEE. The second great "objection" comes from Van Gogh, representing , broadly speaking, the romantic thread in art: the projection of the artists feelings about what he sees onto the canvas.

I can't help but compare self-portraits by these two great post-impressionists. Both are dealing with the new palette set by the impressionists, and reinterpreting the impressionist technique of dabs of color that mimic the dicrete impulses of light and color on the eye. Cezanne has turned them into directional strokes which sculpt the surface and heighten our sense of the solid reality of the subject; Van Gogh has transformed them into restless acts of brush meeting canvas, transfering to the painting the intensity of the artist's feelings. With cezanne, we end up knowing almost nothing about the man; with Van Gogh, we know more than we can be comfortable with..

Van Gogh's intensity and passion go beyond volition to compulsion. In many of his works, it is clear that his intended message of peace and health is overwhelmed by the strength and hopelessness of his longing for it. "Starry Night" is a wonderful example of this: a scene which in its intentions is utterly peaceful - "Oh little town of Bethlehem..." - but in its ultimate effect, is the epitome of turmoil. So violent is the application of the paint that we can barely recognize that it is NOT a storm in the scene, but a storm in the artist's breast. This is matched by everything we know about his relationship with the world: he sought for friendship and love with an intensity which drove almost everyone away.

His many works of sunflowers are another example. Sunflowers for Van Gogh were a symbol of health and hope, an expression of his desperate belief that he had conquered his demons and emerged whole. But when we look at many of these works, we are able to see what he is trying to deny: the lurking presence of decay beneath the outward appearance of health.

One of my favorite works by Van Gogh is his "Bedroom at Arles". The journey to Arles was intended to free him from the poisonous influence of Paris; joined by Gauguin, he would at last be able to enjoy painting, friendship and lasting health. The "Bedroom" is again remarkable for the disjunction between what is represented, and what he projects through the work. It is a simple room with a few commonplace objects, ordinary to the point of boredom...until he filters it through his feelings. The room becomes incredibly claustrophobic, unable to contain the intensity of feeling with which he invests each object, so that one has the irresistible impulse to flee into open space. We have to imagine that some part of him was also prey to that impulse.

Lastly, a late work (ten years after his "early" work!), the olive grove. In the end he knew that he would never be well, and here the agony is more direct. Olive trees are tortured forms in themselves, and are made moreso by the violence and agony of his treatment, as pure an expression as we will ever see of a man's inner turmoil.

I turn now from Degas and Manet to Claude Monet - THE Impressionist. This is another of those artists, like Leonardo, whom I would not really call a "favorite", but whom I recognize as a towering figure in the development of artistic vision in his time. I respond more to the works of Degas and Manet. But as with Leonardo, no artist in the period following Monet could work without coming to terms with his redefinition of painting. You could follow him or reject him, but you had to deal with the terms which he had established.

Monet redefined painting on several levels: the enterprise, artistic vision, palette and technique. First, he finally stated that the work done directly on the scene was an end in itself. This had been coming, no doubt, but Monet and his fellow impressionists at last turned decisively away from the studio piece, developed form preparatory sketches. The "Bathing at Grenouillere" above is a good early example.

It is also an excellent example of Monet's new vision, as is the "Beach at Trouville". For me this is by far his most important contribution. Monet defined his enterprise as recording the play of light and color on the eye, perception as opposed to conception, what we see before we interpret it through experience. Darks are darks, lights are lights, and these can as easily destroy form as describe form. He has totally undermined the assumption that we are painting a known world, and using light and color to reveal it.

In the 1870's, Monet took another giant step, introducing the rainbow palette, and effectively banning blacks and browns from his work. The "Regatta at Argenteuil" is generally thought of as the work which first states this new palette clearly. It is certainly true that just at this time a whole new set of colors were becoming available to artists, without which the rainbow palette would not have been possible. But Monet's real discovery was that all the browns of the world were really made up of pure colors working together. His great gift was not the USE color, but to SEE color.

His final great invention was to translate the notion of perceived reality as a field of fragments of light and color, into the logically appropriate technique: broken flecks of color. If art is perception, then there are no forms or edges yet, since these are the result of interpretation in the mind. The "pointillist" technique is probably the most obvious trademark of the impressionist style in its maturity.

Monet went on to break new ground in another way: the series done of the same theme at different times. The haystacks series is archetypal, showing a subject with little inherent meaning as an object, but endless fascination as a foil for light. As Monet studies them at different times of day and of year, it is almost as if the reality of the haystack can only be the sum of all the discrete moments of its existence in light.

Two of his other series deserve special mention: Rouen Cathedral and the Waterlilies. In the series done at Rouen, most from the vantage point of a single window overlooking the facade, we see substance totally dissolved by light. He had begun this is his series on "Rocks at Etretat", but it is carried much further at Rouen. It is as if he wishes to take on the most difficult opponent: the solidity of stone.

The "Waterlilies" go even farther, but with a subject which is much more naturally susceptible to his vision. Water is less a reality than a reflector of reality, by nature. In these works Monet deals marvellously with the inteplay of lilypads an the surface with reflected trees and clouds, intermingling with an equal claim to "truth". In the later examples in this series, it is only with the greatest difficulty that we separate what is "real" from what is reflected.

I am turning from Degas to Manet, the other "older" Impressionist, though - unlike Degas - he never accepted the term as applied to his work. Like Degas, he had a strong traditional background in form and composition which he used to great advantage. Paradoxically, Manet is in many ways the most radical of the group, certainly the most confrontational.

It is fascinating to compare Manet to Courbet, the great revolutionary of the previous generation. It was Courbet who broke with the Academie, setting up his own competing exhibition, thus blazing the trail which the Impressionists then followed. But while Courbet's revolution was all about class warfare and social justice, Manet's is all about art itself. Manet uses confrontation to force the viewer to look at art in a new way.

One neon sign to his intentions is his obvious reference to earlier works of art; in a very direct way, his paintings are about art. The "Olympia" which we see at the top of the page is a prime example: it is a clear reworking of Titian's famous "Venus of Urbino" which would have been known to all his viewers. The Titian itself is radical in making eye contact with the viewer, breaking the long tradition of "voyeuristic" nudes where the subject is unaware of the viewer. Titian softens the pill by adding a dog (faithfulness) and the marriage chest.

Manet strips away those softening touches, and makes the viewer more than a voyeur: he is a visitor to a Parisian courtesan. The dog has been replaced by a black cat hissing directly at you, the intruder, while the maid delivers your bouquet of flowers. All of which tells you to stop looking for titillation and look instead at the paint. The buttery richness of the paint in the nude is only matched by the marvellous paintwork in the bouquet - fantastic! In other words, don't get mad, enjoy the painting.

A very instructive comparison is Manet's "Fifer" to the figure of "Gilles" by Watteau. Again Manet has found a significant predecessor in earlier art. The way the Watteau figure presents himself to the viewer, unleavened by story or action, is unheard of, and must have fascinated Manet. This unvarnished presentation is at the core of most of his works. Both figures seem to say "I'm just here; deal with it".

I'll include one further artistic reference, to Goya's impassioned "Executions of the Third of May". It is one of many Manet salutes to Spanish art, which he admired greatly. Manet uses the Goya as the basis for his "Execution of Maximillian" a similarly emotional and controversial moment...until Manet defuses it. He replaces Goya's menacing firing squad with a line of "toy soldiers", eliminates Maximilian as a hero by erasing his face in smoke...leaving only the play of lights and darks and the paint.

I turn now to what I see as the most interesting aspect of manet's later work: the psychological isolation of his figures. I see him as the first "urban" artist; that is, the first artist to notice how the city brings us into accidental conjunction with strangers in meaningless patterns. The "Barmaid", a subject which Manet did several times, brings two heads into "cosmic alignment", one directly above the other, neither aware of each other, in a conjunction which is meaningless and will disappear in a flash.

But it isn't just strangers. One of my favorite Manets is "The Train Station" showing a mother and daughter bound together not only by blood ties but also by color harmonies. The symphony of blues and whites is delightful! But when we look again we see that neither is aware of the other, both lost in their own thoughts; they could be miles apart. You think at first that the mother is looking at you, the viewer, but a closer look shows that she is looking into space. And knowing Manet, you must see this in the long tradition of mother and child paintings, and be struck by the lack of a psychological bond.

I'm coming back around to where I started, which was with Cezanne...and more generally with late 19th century European painting. I find more to excite me in that period than in any other.

As I think about the Impressionists, and the generations that followed, I definitely learn something about myself and what satisfies my artistic soul. I like structure. I am more excited by Degas and Manet, the two artists who had an "academic" training, than I am by most of Monet, and I like Monet better than Renoir. I can feel the lightness and joy of Renoir's work, its wonderful softness, but ultimately it leaves me wanting more.

In Degas' work, the feeling of carelessness in framing belies the artfulness behind it. Degas great genius was to develop an entirely new kind of framing (new at least in European art of the period) built on asymetry and arbitrary cutting off of the scene at its edges. The effect is of candid photography as opposed to composed photography, with its incompleteness and strange intrudion of neighboring elements. The "Absinthe Drinker" is an excellent example: the woman is in fact centered within the uprights of the frame, but this results in her companion being shoved rudely against the side, while on her right is emptiness, with tables running aggressively into the foreground. It seems dramatically imbalanced, yet holds the frame beautifully.

We can see the same thing in two earlier works, not yet affected by the color of his younger impressionist contemporaries. The "Cotton Exchange" begins the radical compositional experimentation of the "Absinthe Drinker"; it is remarkably informal in its organization. There seems to be no real subject, just the collage of life and movement in a space where everyone is doing their own thing. This was unheard of in painting before Degas. In "Carriage at the Races" the experimentation is definitely being carried further. At the exact center is a woman displaying her baby, clearly the "subject", while everything around her seems to fall accidentally in place. The horse and carriage on the right is "balanced" by near emptiness on the left, yet all held in place by the psychological focus on the center.

Degas is perhaps best know for his ballet dancers, explored in a hundred moments, from rest to rehearsal to performance. In these work he develops his compositional innovation in dozens of variations. In these works he seems to combine his strong semse of structure and framing with the insubstantiality and color of his impressionist comrades.

I'm gong to end with a work which is similarly experimental, but in which another element seems to emerge: a "psychological negation" created when the compositional elements seem to negate the human meaning of the figures. In "The Milliners" we see what is presumably two women arranging hats in the display window of a Milliner's shop. The hats - which are after all the intended center of interest for the shop - compete with the human figures to the point where they become "also rans", devoid of any psychological focus. This is probably an influence from Manet...my next subject!

I seem to be moving from artist to artist in a natural progression, and I will continue that with this post. I looked last at Dutch 17th century work, including still life, with its strong sense of organization and selection, and most recently at Vermeer, where every element in the frame is meaningful and carefully chosen. That leads me naturally to the 18th century Still Life master, Chardin.

Chardin seems to me to have the same sense of careful selection and organization, with another element which makes him special: being "of the earth". His still lives seem to grow out of the earth and to be made of the same substance. The compositions are always rock solid and immovable, seemingly built on a slab of living rock. The colors a earthen and close-toned, creating not only an internal harmony, but a harmony with the basic stuff of life. The works are like natural formations.

They are, of course, also evocative of a peasant life, with its simplicity and solid values. In this way, they seem to have brought together the dutch genre painters like de Hooch, with the Dutch still life artists, who seem to aim at a more elegant and well-to-do life, the life of their patrons. Chardin's stiff lives are reflective not of the buying class, but of the peasant class which was being increasingly romanticized in his time.

And Chardin did interiors as well, with very much the same feeling. What seems to separate him from his contemporary genre painters is the sense of monumentality and lack of anecdote; his subjects are timeless rather than momentary. In this he is the clear precursor to Millet and Daumier in the next century. Like them, his figures have a solid immutability than gives them stature, and puts tham in the context of traditional renderings of kings and heroes. Even a figure as unassuming as the "Girl with a Shuttlecock" is somehow monumental.

Having written about the "Little Dutch Masters", it is a natural step to move on to Vermeer. He was certainly one of their number - in fact, if you were to judge by the dimensions of his works he could be the littlest of them all - but he is also too great to be lumped among them. He also had a primary specialty - light filled interiors with figures - but also produced exquisite works in other genres, like the "Street in Delft" above. All with a sensitivity to ambient light never equalled before or since.

He is, of course, the center of a huge controversy, because of the strong evidence that he used a camera obscura to view his subjects and perhaps to project them on the surface. I think this is fascinating, and probably true, but not really relevant to the judgement of his greatness. Others were experimenting with this device, without comparable results.

Much of Vermeer's genius is in selecting and composing his subjects; they have that sense of serene perfection which Mondriaan sought after centuries later. It reminds me of the best still life masters, like Heda and Chardin, and in fact Vermeer's works are essentially still lives, even with the inclusion of figures. The figures add an emotive and narrative element certainly, but are completely integrated into the composition as fixed elements.

The other element of genius in his work is the describing of space through the fall of light on the objects and backdrop. His light is fantastic! It is so convincing that it describes the character and location of the window which is its source, even when that window is not shown.

Lastly, among my favorite vermeer works are the small heads, not so much portraits as studies, yet as carefully realized and resolved as the interiors. They are tiny, well under a foot in the longest dimension, and can only be fully appreciated in the flesh. Marvellous!

Hey, I've got a new computer and I'm back in business.

I'm going to continue the theme of my last post: artists who may not be great, but who are wonderful in their more modest endeavors. This time I am going to consider a group: the Dutch 17th century painters who have come to be known as "the little Dutch Masters".

The environment for painters in Holland in the 17th century was unique, and it led to a new and "modern" way of conducting business. For the first time in European art, the creation of paintings was not dominated by the church and the nobility. Instead, art was purchased in quantity by the rising mercantile class, and they were looking for art that expressed their wealth to be sure, but also reflected underlying Calvinist values. They wanted paintings that depicted their familiar surroundings, their possessions and themselves.

For portraitists this led to commissions; for artists in other genres, it led to a new kind of marketing: painting what you did best, creating an inventory, and selling already completed work to art buyers. Sound familiar? It also led to a new kind of specialization: artists not only had a style, they had a subject niche. By and large, painters of interiors did not do landscapes, landscapists did not do still lives, and it did not stop there. The artist Terborch was known for elegant interiors with young women in satin; he was known as the bets painter of satin in Holland. Jan Steen, on the other hand, concentrated on lowlife interiors, showing the unmannered but exuberant lower class.

We see the same phenomenon in landscape painting. Van de Velde was known for seascapes. Hobbema was known for rustic landscapes with peasant hovels and everyday activities. Aelbert Cuyp made a name as a painter of cattle, doing the finest cows to be found! By concentrating in this way, many artists of relatively modest talent were able to produce work of an extraordinary high quality.

Still Life was a rich tradition in the netherlands, and it continued in the 17th century. Artists like Heda were masters at allowing the rich burghers to show their wealth and station without the extravagance of work done for the nobility in Flanders and elsewhere in Europe. I find the still lives to be very much like the portraits: men in conservative black...but with a fine lace collar.

I will end with a landscape by Jan van Goyen, who has always been a particular favorite of mine. His work is always loosely painted in a palette of browns and greys, very evocative of the mist-laden air of the Netherlands. This near-watercolor technique in muted tones is very close to my own beginnings as a landscape painter. What always amazes me is how much richess, and yes color, there is in his very restricted palette. Wonderful!

On to Constable, my kindred spirit. Perhaps not as great in the fullest sense as Cezanne or Rembrandt, but wonderful in his sensitivity to the familiar in nature. He never left England, and did not travel very widely there, going only to Brighton, Weymoutn or Salisbury, within easy reach. How different his subjects are from those of his contemporary Turner, who always sought out the magical transforming moments in nature: sunrise, sunset, monumental storms. Constable made his art from that which was most familiar in his surroundings, seeing it with a sensitivity which was unmatched until the next generation.

Yes, he did break new ground, despite his unambitious enterprise. He understood the role of the sky in setting the mood in landscape better than any other artist before or after. He called the sky "the chief organ of sentiment in nature", and you can see it in all his works. He obviously owes something to Dutch 17th century landscape (which I will get back to another time!) but in addition to making the clouds a major player in his work, he sees for the first time that sky light is reflected in EVERYTHING, not just in the water. I doubt if you can see it in the reproduction provided, but in his Dedham Vale, the blue of the sky is reflected from the grass and the trees. Artists had never noticed this effect before, but would soon be seeing it with him.

Constable is still in the tradition of grand studio works to be presented at the Royal Academy. Today, with the Impressionist to break us free, we probably admire his direct sketches from nature, such as the view of Weymouth Bay, more than his larger works, and I like to think that he did too. These sketches are clearly complete in themselves in our eyes, fully realized but more vibrant and truer to the moment than the presentation pieces. Even the sketches of clouds are fully satisfying to our modern eye.

But I also love his presentation works for their deep grounding in the familiar world. When we look at a work like "The Cornfield", we can pick out the traditional devices that landscapes "should have"; the side screens, the view into distance, the path into the work, carefully salted with events to pique your interest. But none of that gets in the way of feeling the hot summer day, smelling the heavy musk of summer scents, feeling at home.

Since it is Constable, I am going to stick a couple more works at the end here, just to enjoy!

I have been picking out artists who are my favorites, and who also deserve to be called great because of the nature of their enterprise. Many of my favorite artists are not "great" in this sense; they are modest and unassuming in their scope and intentions. A good example is the artist with whom I feel the greatest natural affinity: John Constable. But before turning to Constable, I thought I should give homage to his truly great English contemporary, William Turner.

It is hard to like Turner as a human being; he was rather a nasty man, secretive, suspicious, paranoid. He is famed for going into the Royal Academy exhibition during "drying days" (when the show had beeen hung, the public were not yet admitted, and presumably artists were applying a final coat of varnish) and retouching his work with color deliberately calculated to "kill" the color in the neighboring works. He also would not give the time of day to young aspiring artists who sought his help or advice; how unlike his French contemporary Corot! If a young artist was destitute and starving, he would paint a fake "Corot" and take it to the master, who would sign it so that the youngster could sell it to hold off the wolf at the door.

But what Turner accomplished as an artist was truly remarkable. He went much further and faster in dissolving form in light than did the impressionists, and as a result looks remarkably modern even today. He took an Italianate tradition of landscape suffused in light, and took it quickly to its logical conclusion. It is facinating to compare the early "Dido Building Carthage", very much an homage to the 17th century artist Claude Lorraine, with any of his later landscapes, in which everything is freed from the constraints of solid form.

However, I think it is wrong to see Turner just as "almost abstract". However much his work seems to anticipate the "Compositions" of Kandinsky, the underlying impulse is different: Turner is at heart a naturalist. Far from trying to break from associations with the natural world, he is asking you to reach for them! A look at "Sunrise, Norham Castle" shows what I mean: The first impression is a swirl of meaningless color and light, but the figure of the deer drinking at the water's edge starts us on our way to interpretation. From the deer we get the water, which gradually distinguishes itself from the land, and ultimately the form of the castle itself becomes perceptible. If you are looking at it as Turner intended, you will end up with the entire scene.

Turner was legendary for his incredible visual memory. He could experience a sunset, or a storm at sea, and without sketches, return to the studio days later to recreate it. This is for me the core of his genius.

The decision to include Leonardo is not based on the impact of the work on me viscerally and emotionally; in fact, on one level you could say he is not a "favorite" artist at all. It is more that I stand in awe of what he accomplished as an artist, while so much of his energies and imagination were focussed on other things. And of course, after a piece on Michelangelo, it is only proper to give Leonardo equal time.

Michelangelo and Leonardo were the towering figures of the Renaissance until the younger Raphael rose to join them, great rivals, driving each other to greater heights. While Michelangelo yielded to no one in the ambitiousness of his schemes, he was always most comfortable with his chisel and stone; Leonardo, on the other hand, mocked his rival for getting covered with marble dust. For him, art was in the invention; the rest was "just craft", an idea which has had enormous influence in western art since Leonardo first posited it.

Leonardo's genius was to really invent something new, each time he put his mind to a problem, whether in art or technology. We are amazed to find that he seems to have thought of most of the great mechanical inventions of the next 500 years, such as the airplane and helicopter, but his invention was as remarkalbe in the field of art. In the "Madonna and Child with Ste. Anne" we see the invention of the pyramidal composition of figures which Raphael was later to elaborate and perfect in the High Renaissance. It is fascinating to see him work it out between the sketch and the final version, essentially completing the "invention". After this he would turn to something else; once the idea was fully realized, why repeat it?

The "Mona Lisa" shows a very different invention, in atmosphere rather than composition. The "Sfumato" (smokiness) which envelops the figure is something totally new, radically unlike the clarity of Renaissance painting in general. In subordinating color and form to light and atmosphere, Leonardo is anticipating Rembrandt. An artist who had just one of these inventions to his credit would be considered great.

It is remarkable that Leonardo could have achieved so much as an artist when so much of his energy was devoted to the wider exploration of the world and its possibilities. Even his art itself often seems to be in service of his voracious curiosity, as in his muscular study. I don't think we have seen his equal in intellect until Einstein.

In each of the previous posts I have asked the question "What challenge did this artist set himself that sets his work beyond good to great?". Not all my favorite artists have such an ambitious enterprise, but I will show one more; Michelangelo. For me, the remarkable thing about his work is how often he rose above crippling external limitations and turned them into glorious oportunities.

The "David" is an excellent example, especially if we accept the story about its creation. According to contemporary sources, a truley magnificent block of Carrara marble, intended for another sculptor, was tragically damaged in transit, with a chunk broken off in the middle almost to the center of the block. The sculptor for whom it was intended said nothing could be done short of cutting it into two pieces, so the city of Florence turned to Michelangelo and asked him if he could salvage something from the whole block. The result was the "David" and it is magnificent not only in spite of, but also because of the impossible restrictions placed on him by the block. The result is that Michelangelo has produced a classical torso too small for the size of the figure, which is dominated by the head, hands and feet...and the whole is totally convincing.

We can see the same in his works of architecture, in two striking examples. One is the Laurentian Library in Florence, which was built on top of an existing monastery building, and could only be approached through a tall and narrow space which should have defeated any attempt to create a succesful entrance. Michelangelo chose to make a statement of its awkwardness, creating a magnificnet stairway which runs down into the space like a flow of lava, heightening the visitor's sense of the constriction of the space.

At St. Peters basilica in Rome, he had a similar restriction: He was told to salvage what he could of the unfinished structure of his predecessor Bramante, including the four massive piers to support the dome. Bramante, a very good architect, was totally out of his depth with the St. Peters project: surviving designs show a scheme without any strong unifying element, a jangle of too many disparate parts. Michelangelo again turned the limitation into a totally unified and successful design.

It is appropriate that Michelangelo's greatest work in Fresco, the Sistine Ceiling, should offer the same difficulties. Instead of a clear unbroken field for his design, he had a ceiling that was awkwardly long, and broken up along the sides by groin vaults which imposed and arbitrary matrix. I'm not sure that even he has completely overcome the burden of the ceiling's architecture, but certainly he has made many generations of viewers forget about it.

I'm going to end by returning to sculpture, and turning to another mark of greatness. Scupture was always Michelangelo's first and greatest love, and he chafed under the need to work on other projects at the command of his patron, Julius II. Michelangelo believed that each block of stone contained a figure imprisoned in it, which the sculptor needed to bring to light and freedom. The amazing thing is that he did this literally!

Every other sculptor working in stone carves away the most obvious excess, gradually working toward the final surface of the figure. Each successive approximation makes it easier to go further without error. It is clear from the "Unfinished Slave" that MIchelangelo dived right in to the block, stopping within an inch or two of the final surface, without carving away other areas. This is not even possible; how did he DO it? There could be no greater evidence of genius than this remarkable ability to visualize the figure in the stone. Amazing!

This will be the third in my series of favorite artists, and I am still following the theme of the major challenge in an artist's enterprise which raises the work from good to great. In this case, however, it is a quiet artist working on a modest scale without earthshaking impact.

Klee's work is nothing if not unpretentious and personal. There is no sense that he was speaking to a wider audience than the one which would seek him out in his artistc seclusion. So why do I put him in a category with someone like Rembrandt?

For me, Klee's work is a marvellous marriage of the analytical and the intuitive. Every drawing seems to be exploring the essential nature of the fundamental elements of line, tone and color in their simplest forms, and yet each at the same time grows spontaneously out of the whimsical demands of the last stroke or color applied. I think I would love the work for the whimsy alone, but I can come back to it repeatedly for its deconstruction of the artist's process and the nature of line, form and color on a surface.

At times he is almost totally abstract, seeming to fit comfortably in the analytic tradition of Mondrian. But even then he is not seeking to remove all indication of in ideosynchratic maker, as mondrian is; I can feel him there, his mind and his intuition.

In his later years, his mood turned dark, and the character of his work changes from a whimsical delight to a menacing and forboding threat. Certainly events in Germany in those years would be enough to account for the change. But it strikes me that even then what serves him in conveying his new message is his old stalwarts: Line, form and color, still isolated into essential building blocks.

If you want to retire into quiet conversation with a work of art, go and look at a Klee. It's greatness is not advertised on the marquee outside, so you will need to go looking.

This is the second in my new series of my favorite artists, and what it is in their artistic enterprise that sets them above the merely very good. After having started with a self-portrait by Cezanne in my last post, I can't resist starting this post off with another self-portrait, one of many by Rembrandt.

How different they are! The Cezanne self-portrait, though it can captivate you as a work of art for hours, in the end shows you almost nothing about the man beyond his physical exterior. Cezanne clearly was not trying to explore his inner self at all. The Rembrandt, on the other hand, shows you infintely more than a thousand words could tell you about his soul, his humanity, and most importantly our humanity. Just look into his eyes, and get lost in them.

The eyes are certainly one of the keys. They are cast in a shadow which dissolves the barrier of the surface of things and opens the door to the soul.

The challenge of Rembrandt is to paint the substance of things, their texture, their reality, and yet somehow take you far beyond that surface into the depths of the essential human struggle. Aging. Dealing with our impermanance and our imperfection. How can he show us so much about ourselves? Because he is us, and we are all mankind.

Rembrandt's portrait of Hendijke bathing is one of my favorite examples. Hendrijke was Rembrandt's housekeeper and common-law wife. and we see her here as simultaneously totally ordinary and infinitely precious. Hendrijke's shift is one of the most astounding passages of pure paint in the Baroque, which features such absolute masters and Velasquez. But as much as I enjoy that paint, what always stays with me is the perfect childlike pleasure of the girl, unaware of being observed.

The same combination of physical matter and spiritual pnentration is there in the well-known "Jewish Bride". The two faces are individual but somehow let us substitute our own, or those ofany couple we love. These two are in love, but not lost in the immediacy of it: they are contemplating at future with both pleasure and suffering.

Rembrandt's religious work is likewise about humanity, not about awe. The "Descent from the Cross" Is a group held powerfully together by the use of light, and by the common bond of the moment...and yet they suffering and the meaning are totally personal for each of the participants! To go from one to another, to identify who they are and known what they personally must be feeling; this is the genius of the work.

I'll finish with Rembrandt's famous "100 guilder print" ("Christ among the Children"), his most ambitious etching. It is again totally unified by light and by feeling, yet filled with the individual responses of each child and bystander to the presence of Christ. Marvellous!

The other day I was in for treatment at my chiropractor, and he asked me if I had seen "that guy who paints on TV" and what I thought of him. I said I had, that he had mastered the skills of his craft, and had developed visual ideoms for natural elements which were now second nature to him. Then, in an effort to explain why that did not make him a great artist, I told him about Cezanne. Later, I decided that might make a good series of posts to do: artists whose chosen enterprise was such that the challenge of it elevated them way above the norm.

I told my chiropractor that Cezanne, far from whipping off images that he could do in his sleep, set himself a goal that is arguably the most challenging ever set by an artist. His goal was to fully describe the solidity of objects in space, while at the same time never allowing the viewer to forget the substance of the paint on the canvas.

Obviously, it can't really be done: the two are in direct conflict. Cezanne, predictably, was never satisfied with anything he did, and destroyed a great deal of his output. But what a marvellous result he achieved in the trying!

The self-portraits are a good place to see his struggle. Taking advantage of his magnificent bald cranium, he is determined to show you a solid spherical mass, built with sculptural strokes like chizel marks, a mass you are immediately convinced you could run your hand around and behind...except you can't! When you reach the edge of the skull, you strike a mass of paint surrounding it which is as dense and as demanding as the head itself. You are brought up short at the surface of the canvas.

The landscapes show you the same struggle at work. The early "House of the Hanged Man" (not yet influenced by the color of the impressionists) is a great example. The house is a massive block, impressive in its substance and solidity, but the view into distance which is at the center does not really let you past the house into space. Already in this early work the "space" has become dense and solid, adhering to the surface. Furthermore, the deliberate distortions of the lines describing the foreground change what should have been a road rushing into space into a flat slab on the surface. The later work of "Bibemus Quarry" shows him working out similar contradictions in the brighter colors of impressionism.

Still lives, which he returned to again and again, may be the best arena to see his enterprise, since everything is controlled by the artist to create the challenge he wants. His objects are always those which shout their solidity: round fruit, vases and dishes, almost never anything "wishy-washy" like flowers. Typically there is the corner of a table turning back into the space, or it would if he let it. The onions or oranges are marvelous in their roundness, while never escaping the grip of the paint around them.

At least one measure of a great artist is this: an enterprise that never allows him to succeed easily, which grapples with the fundamental questions of life, or, as in Cezanne's case, of the nature of art.