::: :::My Fathe r’ s hous eon w ill barnet ’s pai nt ings

Thomas Dumm

© 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾Designed by Heather Hensley

Typeset in Arno by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication DataDumm, Thomas L.

My father’s house : on Will Barnet’s paintings / Thomas Dumm.pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.isBn 978-0-8223-5546-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Barnet, Will, 1911–2012—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I.Title.

nD237.B264D86 2014759.13—dc232014005690

COver art: Will Barnet, My Father’s House. Oil on canvas, 1992. 35 1/8″ × 38 1/8″. Gift of Will and Elena Barnet. Yale University Art

Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. 2009.6.1. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of AmherstCollege, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

CONTENTS

aCknOWleDgments vii PrefaCe ix

:::intrODuCtiOn The Living and the Dead 1

One My Father’s House 35

tWO The Dream 45

three The Family (The Kitchen) 55

fOur The Mantle 65

five The Vase 73

six Three Windows 83

seven The Mother 91

eight The Father 99

nine The Golden Frame 107

COnClusiOn Becoming Human 115

:::nOtes 121 inDex 123

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For sustained support and critical comments regarding the essays in this book I wish to thank Julian Olfs, Judith Piotrkowski, and the collective wisdom of the advisory board of Theory & Event.

This project would never have been possible without the support of Randall Griffey, who was curator of American art at the Mead Museum of Amherst College when I received his invitation to meet Will Barnet in the autumn of 2008. The director of the Mead, Elizabeth Barker, was generous with her time and advice as well. They both have my gratitude. More globally speaking, Amherst College sustains and supports the re-search and scholarship of its faculty as always. I have been happy to take advantage of its generosity once again.

For her continued friendship and advice and insight into the world of

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art and artists in Manhattan in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, I am most grateful to Elena Barnet.

Most important, my deepest gratitude, as I hope the essays herein at-test, is for the generosity and friendship extended to me by Will Barnet. Since our first exchange of letters in the autumn of 2008, he shared with me not only his biography but also his wisdom, with characteristic hu-mor, charm, and kindness. He is missed.

An early and abbreviated version of the introduction to this book ap-peared in the Massachusetts Review 50, 4 (December 2009): 577–85.

PREFACE

Sometime in the summer of 2008 I received a call from Randall Griffey, the curator of American art at the Mead Museum of Amherst College. I had not met Randall before and had not really had any connection to the Mead, even though I had been on the faculty of Amherst College for decades. Randy (as I came to know him) was calling me because he had read a book I had recently written on loneliness, and thought that I might be interested in participating in an event at the Mead during the 2008–9 academic year. A New York artist named Will Barnet was donating a painting to the Mead Museum. Given the subject matter of the painting, he and Elizabeth Barker, the director of the Mead, thought I might be a good interlocutor with this artist when he came to present the painting in February of 2009.

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I had never heard of Will Barnet. My ignorance is not surprising, to me anyway, as I had not really followed the world of high art very closely. But I thought it might be interesting to look into the matter, and so I tentatively agreed to have a public “conversation” with the artist. Randy said he would send information about Barnet, especially about the paint-ing Amherst College was being given and its place in the series of paint-ings, collectively named My Father’s House, that Barnet was donating to a group of New England colleges and university museums.

When I finally saw representations of these paintings, I was aston-ished. The painting being donated to the Mead, The Dream, was as power-ful an image as I had seen in a very long time, but each of the nine paint-ings in the series had a similar impact on me, and the cumulative effect was stunning. I felt a strong need to understand why they so affected me. In the weeks that followed, I found myself becoming more and more nervous, worried, fretful, deeply concerned that I wasn’t up to the task of discussing this work in public, let alone in the presence of the artist who had created these paintings. I tried to come to some understanding, dig-ging through my limited education of art to try to verify my naive belief that what I was seeing was not only my impression but perhaps that of others as well.

A promise is a promise, and so not only for my own edification but be-cause of my commitment to the public event, I did what I could to try to understand what Barnet was attempting in this series of paintings. Sev-eral weeks before he was scheduled to come to Amherst for the public celebration surrounding the bestowing of this gift, I wrote him a fairly lengthy letter trying to explain to him what I thought I was seeing in these paintings. He wrote back to me immediately, assured me that I had understood his intent better than most people who had written about this series. While I did not really believe him—I had by then heard about his kindness and generosity—I thought that even if I made a fool of myself

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in public, it was for a good cause, and besides, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time (that I had made a fool of myself, that is).

So early in 2009 Barnet came to Amherst to give a lecture on the paint-ings. Following his talk, I was invited to join him on stage for a public con-versation. Questions were posed and answers given, and I escaped from the stage relatively unscathed. Later, at dinner, Will and I talked for real, not for a public audience, and I discovered that he was not only an art-ist but a highly articulate artist who explicitly understood himself to be a New Englander, albeit a New Englander who had been living in New York since 1929. He understood himself, in other words, as an intellectual in the tradition of New England transcendentalism. Those whom he read in-cluded some of my favorite American and European thinkers—Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Nietzsche, Spinoza—and much of what he painted, especially his figurative work, was deeply influenced by their works. It turned out that what he liked about what I had to say stemmed from my having noticed those influences in these paintings.

By the end of that evening he had invited me to travel down to New York to visit. Among other things, during the course of the dinner Eliza-beth Barker and Randy had come up with the idea of conducting inter-views with him about his long history in the world of New York art. While that project was eventually abandoned, it nonetheless was a spur for me to continue to travel to Manhattan from Amherst periodically, digital re-corder in hand, to listen to what he had to tell me.

At the time of his visit to Amherst, Will was ninety-eight years old. He still painted constantly and did so up to the day of his death at the age of 101. One way of comprehending the scope of his career is to realize that he had remained a continuously visible presence in the world of art since he first exhibited in New York City in 1934. But as impressive as his endur-ance was, his reputation isn’t a result of it. Instead, his reputation is built upon an extraordinary range and depth of talents: as a painter who has

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mastered both abstract and representational genres, as a master print-maker, and as a teacher of other great artists. He always went his own way, and yet it always seemed as though everyone else would, if not follow, eventually come to understand and appreciate his singular vision. Indeed, in recognition of Will’s extraordinary accomplishments as an artist, he was awarded a 2012 National Arts Medal, the highest honor an American artist can be given, by President Obama.

So I visited him. And then I visited him again. By the time of the third visit, I needed no excuse to come see him. We realized we had be-come friends across the gap of several generations. I mourned his loss in November of 2012. I remain in contact with Elena, his wife of over sixty years.

In December of 2009, the Massachusetts Review published a short essay of mine on My Father’s House. The essay, which had grown out of our ini-tial engagement, included a color inset of the nine paintings that com-pose the series. Though I really needed no excuse to keep coming to New York, we nonetheless struck upon the idea that I would help Will write a book about his philosophy of art. Over the course of 2010 I traveled down to New York periodically to ask him questions about his ideas concerning art. I took notes, trying to keep up. I even was invited to come to Maine to visit him while he and Elena vacationed at his daughter Ona’s artist colony / summer resort.

I came to realize that I could not write a book on his philosophy of art. I was simply too ignorant and my education too belated to do justice to his thoughts and words. Toward the end of 2010, I came down to New York City on yet another visit; over dinner I explained to Will and Elena how I couldn’t continue the project. He was very gracious, as always. I felt terrible. Thinking again, I realized that I had barely scratched the sur-face of this series of paintings, that as I had come to know Will better, as

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I came to learn more about his life as a child in Beverly, Massachusetts, I understood the paintings better and had more to say about them.

There are some lessons in life that are hard earned, but there are others that come as gifts. With these the happy obligation is to give back, even as one knows one need not. Discharging such a happy debt is impossible anyway. Emerson once put it this way, “The gift was overflowing from the start.” So it seems here.

This little book is the result of the gift Will Barnet gave, not only to me, but to any and all who want to look and see. What follows is not a work in art criticism or art history. If I had to declare what it is, I would have to say it is a written narrative accompanying a visual biography of a family, a work of critical appreciation—if such is still allowed—and perhaps an amateur docent’s exercise in imagining what he would say to a group of people with questions about this series.

It is also an effort to describe and decompose. De- scribe, in the sense of bringing to the paintings a sort of script or scripture concerning their appearance in the world. De- compose, in the sense of provoking in those who see the paintings some of the feelings of ghostly uncanniness that informs their composition. I want to dwell in the possibilities of thought and feeling that are enabled by this series, possibilities that Will Barnet has illuminated with such care.

Montaigne is commonly said to have invented the essay form in the West. One of his most brilliant successors, Emerson, liked to invoke Montaigne by noting that an essay is an attempt, an effort to articulate something that is not so easy to otherwise articulate. Essay by essay—one attempt after another—a series comes together, as in Emerson’s famous collections Essays, First Series and Second Series. The hoped- for effect in any such series is that eventually each member of the series touches all others, that through tacking this way and that an uncertain path forward

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and through an experience, we are provided—again to think of Emer-son—with that which has been dis- membered in the form of a conscious re- membering. In other words, I want to share with interested readers my experience of thinking about and through this series of paintings, realiz-ing that each painting is anticipating the next while building on all others that have been finished before, not in the desire of representing any par-ticular order of progress but in re- creating a moment when there was a world that still has something to tell us.

In short, I want to show how this series of paintings ought to matter to us. I want to try to explain how in Barnet’s recreation of a world past we can see reflected, in what we now think and do, the tragedy the past world has handed down to us and its continued and unresolved presence in our lives. Perhaps this is too much of a demand to be made of any series of paintings or, for that matter, any single work of art. But it so happens that even in the absence of such a demand, art continues to be made, great art still happens. Surprisingly but not so surprisingly, too often when it does occur, it still is not always noticed for what it is and might become. I do not know whether to be concerned or comforted by that fact.

amherst, massaChusetts January 2014

intrODuCtiOn

THE L IV ING AND THE DEAD

:::I grieve that grief can teach me nothing . . .

—Emerson, “Experience”

this is a BOOk aBOut the Barnet family of Beverly, Massachusetts. To be more precise, it is a book containing reproductions of a series of paint-ings collectively named My Father’s House and a series of essays reflecting on those paintings.

The paintings illustrate the members of the family in the way that por-traiture has classically attempted. Yet we need to remember that portrai-ture itself is a struggle to copy more than the features of a face or a body. Portraits are copies, models, of the body, of the face. But they are models that in some ways are designed to tell us more about their subjects than the subjects themselves might be able to tell otherwise.

These paintings are dramatic; some might even say tragic. In a strange way the series is a family album. A hope underlying the essays accom-

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panying these paintings is that they may help us understand how the images our artist produced of his family are about much more than just that one family, even as it is a powerful and strange testament to their lives together and apart from each other. My sense is that in exploring both the family and how it has been figured and configured by the artist, we may learn more about our own condition now, something of the state of our relationships to each other and ourselves and the predicaments we find ourselves facing in a time of turbulence and trouble. Perhaps this is the larger sense of portraiture, after all: that in modeling this family, the artist helps us learn more than we otherwise would have learned, only in this case not only about the family but about us.

The essays hew closely to the paintings, but they also try to reach slightly beyond or behind them. That is, because I, the author of these essays, am given to thinking and writing about the pull of the private, the depredations of loneliness, and the stubborn will of human beings as they try both to inhabit and to overcome the limitations of mortal life, I see in these paintings themes that sometimes reach beyond or away from or outside their frames. Beginning from a perspective informed by the writ-ings of philosophers and absent a serious education in art or the history of art, my hopeful pretense, or perhaps arrogant wish, is that something can be said to and about these paintings that otherwise would be missed by those with a more disciplined understanding of the art of painting.

PeOPle are very Often sentimental about their families. But we know that these sentiments can include a broad range of feelings, not all of them warm and loving, some even deadly in their force. Family members too often are the authors of their own tragedies, family homes too often places where violence is done, cruelty imposed, life lost, trauma inflicted. Oedipus. Ophelia. Jesus. Juliet. Lear. Abraham. Isaac. Ahab. Antigone.

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Hamlet. But also Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, the salesman crushed by his own careless life. But also Sethe, the heroine of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, killer of her own child. But also the Gilmore family of Utah, portrayed famously by Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song, less famously but perhaps more tellingly in Mikal Gilmore’s searing family history Shot in the Heart. These latter references are important to bear in mind because these American works reflect a variety of flavors of tragedy that our artist clearly understands, himself the only American- born mem-ber of an immigrant family.

The tensions of family life, even in families whose members love each other profoundly (perhaps especially in such families), are multiple, in-tense, and often connected by the despair that can accompany trying to live, to get by in life. Havens in a heartless world, our houses reflect the desire of families to turn inward, to make of home more than it can bear, to succumb to the temptation to become citadels of protection. Such a demand for protection creates the preconditions for tragedy, for like all citadels, families can come to be prisons as well, dark and gloomy con-tainers of loss and fear.

Do we live like that now? Contemporary American families seem to be scattered to the winds. Most of our families partake in no com-mon meals, have no common schedules, and when together have little in common except for parallel activities or parallel passivities. We don’t even watch television together anymore. The screens that we eyeball are customized to our common yet separate eccentricities. We are always searching for something new to desire, not even desiring that for which we search, going down a common road to nowhere. We are in danger of being crushed by the weight of nothing at all. In many ways, we are homeless people seeking a home.

The Barnet family, being of an earlier generation, would seem to have little to tell us about our more deeply commodified existence. Except

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they do. If anything, with our lives dissolving into the sea of waste we have created for ourselves—what has been called at least since after World War II our consumer culture—Americans have been in an ever more desperate search for something that we might imagine to be a space of quiet and succor. Traditionalists become more shrill in their dismal asser-tions about the shape- shifting form of the family the more its shape has shifted, but their bellicosity, whatever their underlying beliefs may be, is also a sign of their deepening despair for the future. Nontraditionalists are increasingly turning to living alone rather than face the challenges that come with being with others, hoping to achieve some measure of peace but finding that they do not even know how to be home alone. All of us still want to be at home, however we imagine it, but we do not know that when we come home we may want to run away again, for the very same reasons we have been attracted to home’s possibilities. The terrors that accompany home life are multiple. And yet we cannot turn away from the idea and institution of it. The Barnet home is not an exception to this problem. It is a distillation of its contradictions.

The gothic understanding of home and family has been a common-place in American arts and letters, certainly since Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” and probably before. But there are some iterations of the gothic that resonate beyond the genre, that exist to carry us into other places, other ways of seeing, even other ways of being. How-ever, the gothic sensibility does not allow us to escape easily from its powers. The gothic reminds us that our homes are haunts, filled with ghosts. These ghosts are to be revealed to us, and we can become recon-ciled to them but only if we have the courage to look carefully and see them in their fullness, in their late humanity.

The Barnets are only one family, but by the grace of the artist in the family who portrayed them, they have come to represent multitudes. Their home is a haunted place. These paintings encourage us to ask, how

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do houses become haunted? The usual ghost story tells us about a mur-der, a suicide, a fatal illness, all of them preventable, all of them associated with broken hearts. Family ghosts come back to our houses, together and alone, to remind us of their absent presence. If we ignore them, a deep and massive spiritual unrest awaits us. Time comes out of joint, a turbu-lence of souls overwhelms us, an unnamable something so pervasive as to become inseparable from our very existence, even as we would never want to be a part of it. It is when we comprehend just how little we know of those who haunt us that we recoil in horror. Yet we must be brave. We must have courage to live, to confront our ghosts. There is no escaping the memory of our past relations, even though, paradoxically, we are con-stantly forgetting.

if ghOsts haunt Our hOuses, lost and forgotten, then angels—those emissaries of God, who, as Tony Kushner has suggested in Angels in America, have been abandoned along with the rest of us as that entity has taken what seems to be a permanent vacation—watch over us, only help-less to do more than witness the catastrophe that is unfolding before us.

Walter Benjamin famously tried to describe something akin to this. He presents us with an angel of history, the reluctant caretaker of what Benjamin imagined to be a part of history’s unthought heritage. For Benjamin’s angel—inspired by a remarkably strange painting by Paul Klee, a painting he cherished as a prized possession—the past is con-stantly receding as the angel is blown into the future, helpless to do any-thing but look back at the ruins. Of this angel Benjamin writes,

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like

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to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This is what we call progress.1

Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus (1920), is an unusual image for an angel. It is a copperplate engraving painted over in spots with some watercolor. The image we see is formed from a line drawing, the hair like thick rib-bons curling into a halo. The shapes that compose the angel’s body and limbs are predominantly rough triangular forms. The body has the ap-pearance of being transparent or at least translucent. And it indeed does seem to be being blown backward into the future.

Benjamin sees wings. So too, it seems, does his friend Gershom Scho-lem, who wrote a poem, Gruß vom Angelus (Greetings from Angelus) especially for Benjamin, containing the following lines:

My wing is ready to beatI am all for turning back.For, even staying in timeless timeWould not grant me much fortune.2

For Scholem the angel is interested in going back, but how does that compare to being in “Timeless time?” Presumably it would mean turn-ing back to the Paradise that lies before history, away from which he is being blown—but why is such a return to Paradise not the same as time-less time? The only difference might be this: a return to Paradise would suggest the erasure of history. In timeless time, the angel of history is re-signed, Scholem might say, because simply being “all for turning back” is not the same as struggling to go back. For Benjamin the angel con-

Paul Klee (1879, Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland–1940, Muralto, Switzerland), Angelus Novus. Oil transfer and watercolor on paper. 31.8 × 24.2 cm. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem; John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, New York. B87.0994. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner.

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tinues to struggle, struggles to go back to Paradise, and is relentlessly being blown into the future. The angel is not resigned, never resigned, always struggling. We might say that for Benjamin the angel is never de-feated yet always losing.

I want to understand why Benjamin and Scholem see wings on this angel but fail to note that this angel lacks arms or that its arms have be-come wings. Why might it matter that the angel’s wings are arms that end in hands? If we were to speculate, could we imagine these hands as being useful—that is, useful as hands? The fingers appear blunt, almost vesti-gial, as if the angel does not need them. Indeed, as wings they appear to be held away from the angel’s body, the fingers unable to allow the hands to do the things hands usually do, like grasp or open or applaud. Not being human, perhaps the angel has no use for hands.

But a characteristic of the human is handiness.This question concerning hands matters if we are to understand at all

the paintings we are to see. We will be observing hands doing things in this series of paintings, things that are very human; extraordinary things, though not in grasping ways. Hands will be telling us about things. Hands will be moving across faces, across pads of paper. Hands will be petting cats. Hands will be conjuring. And hands will be invisible, out of frame, doing their work, thinking.

But let us set hands aside for the moment. Instead, let us return to the angel of history. Let us imagine that the ruin piling upon ruin that Benjamin’s angel witnesses, born of the violent collisions of so many events and things, not only piles upward but in its pressure produces heat and, combusting, sometimes light, light out the darkness of all that we have done to this world. Let us imagine that the history we write is only a series of descriptions of those ruins, written over and over on a single page, ruin after ruin, akin to the Freudian archeology of the unconscious. If held up to the palimpsest of our spectral markings, the memories we

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have scrawled on lines, would we be able to decipher what has been left behind, through the terrible clutter we have created? I doubt it. Perhaps the debris has piled too high or not yet high enough. Perhaps we could never dig deep enough, fast enough, to clear the site of progress. Per-haps Benjamin’s catastrophe is piling up behind us, and that overwritten page—call it history—is going up in flames.

What if there were no angel looking back, no angel weeping for us, struggling with the terrible wind, beating its wings, furiously trying to re-sist what is called progress? What might we see for ourselves in the ruins? Anything at all? Could we hope for a light that would enable us to locate the horizon of night and the end of day? Or would we be finally blinded, condemned to live in a dark that has become so total as to eliminate the very idea of seeing? Would we still try to fight our way back, to resist progress, or would we resign ourselves to the woe of loss? If that were to be so, how would we ever be able to see our ghosts? How would they ever communicate with us? Do our ghosts need angels to light an uncer-tain path to the future?

If we are left to remember the past, we must also remember that the past exists for us in the form of thought images. Benjamin writes, “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”3 Articulating history for him means seizing “hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”4 And the danger is not only to the living, who will be defeated if they fail to remember the past, but to the dead themselves, who will be forgotten, who will disappear into something that isn’t even the past, but is instead oblivion.

Our ghOsts are Our anCestOrs, our formers, those who through the hydraulic forces of Dna sucked in and out have made us who we are,

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if not who we will become. We know most of our ghosts because they have died before us, sometimes at our hands. We may have thought we knew them when they lived. But we also know that they died with many of their secrets intact, even as they have transferred to us some of their vital matter. In return, what do we do for them? We revere them. But we also forget them in the very act of revering them, bury them by remem-bering them in a way that will allow us to forgive ourselves for forgetting them. They suffer from being forgotten, they suffer their abandonment as a second death. They are restless because we forget them. They haunt us more deeply than any of us can properly fathom. They remind us that we too will die, that we too will be revered, forgotten, and restless.

We could say to our predecessors as well, what did you do to remem-ber those who came before you? Perhaps some endless chain of bad faith in and of humanity is at work. More forgivingly, this reverence and for-getting may be part and parcel of the fear we have always had of and for those who have died before us. If the equation we produce tilts the bal-ance from that of being more afraid than forgetful or more deflected than acting in bad faith, can there be something more forgiving in the way we approach this sorrowful past? Can we remember our ancestors in such a way as to allow them the peace of memory? Can we suspend the time of their time without killing time? Can we unbury the dead, so that they may be properly buried at last? Can we wave good- bye to the new angel, our angel of despair? And what would that mean? Will we ever be able to live?

I ask too many questions, I know. But these are not only my questions. They belong to all of us, just as we belong to them. They are questions that are unanswerable, but they still must be asked. Our artist asks these questions. He captures the flash of memory in those dangerous moments.

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he is a native Citizen of the United States, the only one of his family born within its borders as, after a complicated and obscure family migra-tion from Europe, the Barnets settled into American life in Beverly, Mas-sachusetts, on the North Shore across the bay from Salem.

He is a denizen of an overfull century of turmoil and transformation. (Has there been a century upon which we have left our traces that has not been full of turmoil and transformation? We are always at the end of the world, it seems. We struggle, like the angel, against a speed that gathers, pulling us toward the future, as sure a force as the wind. Still, the twenti-eth century certainly seems to us who have lived through it to be one of great turmoil, if only because it has been our turmoil.) The litany of disas-ter and wonder is a familiar one to all sojourners of the twentieth century: two world wars, a world depression, the great and terrible flu epidemic, split atoms, space travel, the hiv epidemic, technological advances un-paralleled in human history, crucial advances in human rights, vaccines that eradicated entire diseases, and still, greater levels of destruction of humans by humans than ever before recorded. The word “holocaust,” which once meant a burnt offering, became with the capitalization of one letter the name of what was foolishly hoped to be a unique political catastrophe. But it wasn’t, excepting in the true but largely inconsequen-tial sense that every snowflake is unique.

The person who I am referring to as “our artist” or “the artist” (and to whom I will refer throughout the rest of this book) saw a particular form of art in this country and throughout the world become a dominant aes-thetic of the twentieth century. This art troubled the waters of represen-tation, called into question almost all of the received ideas as to how art might bear a relationship to truth, and so reconfigured that relationship as to present art, and us, with a philosophical crisis.

Shortly after our artist met Arshile Gorky in 1934, the two of them went for a walk through Manhattan. Gorky pointed to a commercial sign

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in a shop window and suggested that that would be the future of art. Gorky was prophetic, but only to a point. The staging of pop art was but one of many futures of art during that century. Cognizant of this future development in art, our artist did not go into the future with pop but ex-plored so many other futures as to become a master of arts—in a sense the wise man of the New York art scene but with his own aesthetic sense intact.

Our artist has his own thoughts. He has long known how to bide his time, quiet, informed, knowing what he was doing, knowing the limits of that knowledge, Socratic in style, aware of his own ignorance and the truth of the limits it has imposed on him but, perhaps even more inter-estingly, on the rest of us as well. He has had the patience to show us who we are to be, who we have been, and—I believe most difficult of all—who we are. He does not provide us with a simple mirror in which we can see ourselves but much more: a vision of possibility and impossibility repre-sented in every trace of every shape.

Little Duluth, Big Duluth, Spokane, to name just a few of his own abstrac-tions, major paintings resisting other abstractions, browns and whites, arrowhead forms, shapes from who knows where (he does), colors of such subtlety that they don’t exist anywhere else but on his canvases and in the night sky, ever- seeing cats, yarn, wise children assured of their sup-per, Madonna not grieving yet solemn, Central Park, desire displayed in the hitch of a hip, despair on the streets, blue Maine light, memories of widow walks, walking widows, ocean horizons akin to the infinitely blank expanse Ishmael is urged to contemplate before signing onto the Pequod, weight in the forms of the rich men and women, lightness of step and grace in despair, occasional dogs, sweet and dumb—not nearly as atten-tive to the subtleties as those shrewd cats, the dogs fountains of want and laughter, tails wagging.5 In other paintings, like Enclosure, a deceptively simple flatness only emphasizes the infinite labyrinth of the mind.6

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Lithographs, prints—our artist, ubiquitously present throughout this land and world, yet strangely underknown to all but himself and those close to him, a personage internationally famous among a small group of aesthetes (though that is changing even as I write these words). Though it may be too obvious to say so, he is very self- expressive. Yet even as he explains his art a deep mystery adheres to it. His admirers cannot always express why, cannot reach the point of saying what it is that renders him different, despite the many spilt words, as here. But it also is true that any-one who sees even one of his prints from the 1970s is likely to exclaim in recognition, “Oh, that’s Will Barnet!”

He has been a teacher of other artists during most of his years in New York at the Art Students League, including some of the most heralded artists of the twentieth century. He has been sought after as a teacher throughout the United States and over the decades has painted where he has taught as well. In all of his years he has resisted the anxiety of the influence of those he taught and his own peers, preferring instead to be perturbed (which is to say inspired) by Vermeer, Rembrandt, El Greco, and other classical European and American painters, as well as the indige-nous artists of North America. These artists, it seems, have been his famil-iars even more than his contemporaries have been. He was encouraged since a child by the librarians at the Beverly Library to look all he wanted at the art books they had in the collection, and he took full advantage of the privilege. This early exposure created his yearning to become an art-ist, and he started in earnest by the time he was twelve. (Michelangelo, whom he admired as a child though he was not to influence Barnet’s work, was a figure he discussed with his baseball teammates with such familiarity that they mistakenly thought that the painter of the Sistine Chapel was just another kid from a nearby Italian neighborhood.) His longevity has allowed him to share his memory of seeing, as a young stu-dent, the great John Singer Sargent at work in Boston. Of course, as he at-

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tended to the work of these past masters, he also listened carefully to his peers, his students, the other New Yorkers who worked the same streets.

Having been both alone but not lonely and lonely but not alone, he has learned enough through experience to have been able to give renewed expression to this most fundamental of American archetypes, the lonely ones. Herman Melville once called them the “isolatoes.” As loneliness has become ubiquitous in modern times, as the world itself seems to have succumbed to that larger pathology, absorbing but also transforming the cultural meaning of this existential angst, he has drawn upon the memory of and arc of the life of a family that only he can depict. He has painted the family he grew up in, his birth family, and the family he made with a first wife who left, and then the family he made with his beautiful and care-ful second wife. Always he has worked to connect the specificity of each family’s life to whatever larger meaning it may have for anyone who can appreciate the beauty of despair and the blunt endings of all moral jour-neys. A prodigal son of sorts, he left his birth home early, but unlike his older brother, who left in anger, he returned, and remained attached to his mother and father and his sisters. That attachment deepens the sense of sadness and beauty informing his work.

His heartbreak and joy have both been bountifully measured through his adult life. Heartbreak: a first marriage ended badly. Joy: the fact of sons and the fact of another marriage, to his wife since 1954, Elena, who bore a daughter, Ona, and who sustained him and loved him through his long second life.

He experienced what only a few of us have experienced, having lived so long as to cross over the one hundred year anniversary of life. The sadness that comes with the loss of one’s own generation, one by one, is a wilderness only the very aged experience, and he is older than most. He knows from close observation how hard death is, but even here he learned early. When he was six years old his father took him to say good-

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bye to his aged grandfather, after his grandfather was hit by a car and mortally injured. Looking up from his deathbed his grandfather asked this little boy, “Do you think it is easy to die at ninety- six?” (Probably no easier at 101.)

He is a deep diver (as Melville once observed of Ralph Waldo Emer-son), someone willing to risk his lungs bursting if he is able to bring back to the surface the treasures he has found far below, in the dark, unknown as yet to anyone but fathomed by his intuition. (He is extraordinarily sensitive to the dark and seems easily able to paint it in all of its hues.) And he is a reader, which is to say a writer, someone in conversation with the thought of other American thinkers, especially Emerson and Emily Dickinson, as much as he is of any other writers of the unconscious.

His youthful reading of Nietzsche (who himself named Emerson as one of his most admired and influential predecessors) was not that of a young man leaning on the strength of another heroic thinker but of an old soul in conversation with another old soul, an artist ready to absorb the tragedy Nietzsche offered to explain. Nietzsche furnished him with ideas of solitude and its power, of plasticity and the control of chaos, and of chaos’s blessings. Apollo and Dionysius but not in equal measures. Nietz-sche paradoxically showed him ways to be a better democrat as an artist. He responded to this philosopher not by repairing to the insularity of the mountaintop but by finding his own way through the conundrum- filled valleys of the ordinary of modernity. It would be too much to say that he has always known what he is doing, but it would be a tragic underestima-tion of the power of this artist to imagine that he has not known better than most.

As a denizen of Manhattan through most of the twentieth century and beyond, our artist, like so many other New York intellectuals of that period, absorbed the thought of Freud as though it were in the water. He learned enough to take his own dreams seriously. Like the philosopher

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Stanley Cavell, he would be puzzled if anyone were to suggest that he not take himself seriously, knowing that if he didn’t take himself seriously, no one else would need to.7 (Of course, Freudian seriousness is the most serious seriousness of all forms of seriousness. Even its jokes are serious.) The artist is smart enough to know that it is only when one takes oneself seriously that one can learn to laugh, and he is indeed a man of great and good humor.

There is yet another thinker with whom our artist converses, the anti- Descartes, Spinoza. Spinoza of Amsterdam, who thought of the univer-sal as a material principle in our lives, Spinoza, the excommunicated Jew, Spinoza, the atheistic lover of god, the lens grinder, the ethicist, another companionable thinker, another fellow traveler for this compassionate democrat. Spinoza, a man of substance, that is, a person who saw the substantial body of our souls, the connections, the rhizome under our feet, who recovered horizontal links in the subterrain, sub- stance being his way of understanding.

Our artist is not a philosopher, at least no more a philosopher than any of the rest of us. But he is informed. More than that, it is not information he has but the practical wisdom of someone who for so long lived on his wits, lived the life of the New York artist, knowing that art, philosophy, science, are enjoined by care, love, anger, and a desire so painfully blissful that it is too often denied, that must not be denied not only if he were to succeed as an artist but if he were to succeed as a democratic artist.

in sO many of this artist’s paintings we struggle to see with him what has not yet been shown, what lurks inside the dismembered remains of our private and separate pasts. We are drawn to the flat surfaces of his paint-ings, a flatness that defies and yet gains depth not by perspective but by light and shadow, parallax, framing, atmosphere, balance, strange shape-

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liness, odd geometries, so that a new clarity emerges for the viewer, as though we ourselves have been flattened and reconfigured, an enactment of the dismembering that precedes all remembering. If his representa-tions of figures did not appear to be so real, we might call them surreal. (Isn’t that what surrealism is, in the end—an intensification of the real?) He holds a metaphorical mirror up to us, and we see things about our-selves and about our others that we never have seen before. Whether we are disturbed or relieved by what we see depends on who we have been. And yet there is objectivity to his work, as though the plurality of human being is both reduced and expanded in his representations.

Our artist once summarized his approach to painting and, more gen-erally, to the plastic qualities of his art with this single, potent sentence. “My interest has been in developing further the plastic convictions that have been evolving in my abstract paintings; so that a portrait, while re-maining a portrait, becomes in this sense an abstraction: the idea of a person in its most intense and essential aspect.”8 The notion that he is en-gaged in painting the idea of a person is yet another sign of the intensity with which he approaches the relationship of reality to art. This intense focus on the conceptual is what we might call a metanarrative, a self- consciously reflexive effort to be sure to maximize the meaning of every stroke, every juxtaposition, every blending of color and line. To apply the abstract to the form of the person—he of course has no monopoly on that count, but he is so successful at it that at times it is as though he has painted what Emerson, when speaking of the human person, once re-ferred to as “a golden impossibility.”

What is a person? We know that a person, when imagined in juxtaposi-tion to a human being, is an artifice, a being less of the earth and more of the plastic arts, of the power of life and experience, and of politics as well. To be a person is to be in the field of life, moving across vectors of touch and interaction, the play of life marking the shape of who we are and who

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we will be. In this sense, remembrance is always an act in the ongoing re-construction of the person. Who am I? I am more than this human that I am; I am a person, as difficult as being a person may be. And to know this person it is necessary to know who this person once was. Who are these persons, these Barnets portrayed in this series of paintings?

Our artist’s work on the theme of memory and its repression reaches a climax of sorts in this series. But memory is ubiquitous. The project of memory finds expression in almost every phase of his artistic life, from the sketches he produced in 1932 wandering in the dark heat at night in Central Park, a heat that drove everyone from their apartments and tene-ments to seek relief in the cool quiet of the park, to his period of abstrac-tion, one rooted in his persistent attempt to paint reality, to the paintings under consideration here (to which we will be able to devote this book), and then to his recent return to abstraction. But in this series it is as though everything else he had studied, every work he had painted, every sketch he had made, and the innumerable products of his extraordinary skills as a lithographer had somehow prepared him for this intense ex-ploration of his own birth family, a family lost and recovered and, as will happen in the end for all of us, lost again.

Did I say he is a man of great and good humor? He is. But there is almost no comedy in this series of paintings (perhaps in the parrot, per-haps in the cat, but not in the persons). In these paintings he traces the tragic line. This is a series of paintings about absence, loss, a family bereft of itself, melancholic in the most ordinary, which is to say, most extraor-dinary, way. He finds the extraordinary in the ordinary; if he is a philoso-pher, his is not only a philosophy of art, it is a philosophy of existence in all of its complexity.

In speaking about this series, he once suggested that the capture of memory itself was his quest. He asked, “How do you paint something that

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is no longer there?” What a question! It is our question, a question of our time, for this is a time that could be characterized as suffering from an aphasia that prevents us from being present with each other or ourselves or even realizing how absent we may be from the experience of our own lives and of the lives of each other.

A key question this series poses concerns the idea of presence. For us who are living now, the question of being present is a complicated one. So many of us have learned how to be absent while present and how to be absent in the present that actually being present in the present has become the most difficult thing for us to experience. Why is that so im-portant? Because this fracturing of time is an exemplary feature of the modern world, and its power consists of denying our persons the possi-bility of acknowledging each other as we are. Being absent while present means that while we may physically be somewhere, we are nonetheless unable to think or feel our place there. In such circumstances we find our-selves lonely while in the midst of a crowd. Being absent in the present means that we find ourselves to be the only ones who are where we are, all others not being there. It is as though we enter an empty room and have the thought of being in the wrong room, thinking that no one is here or, worse, that I am not here and all the others are. In this circumstance we are unhappily suspended between the past and future, with no way of imagining ourselves in our own time.

In developing his philosophy of moral perfectionism, Stanley Cavell has identified the problem of being present in the present as the very quest of moral philosophy.9 We are imperfect beings who seek to be better, realizing that we will never achieve our end but can measure our-selves against the terms by which we depart from being here. For Cavell, this is the essence of what he calls moral perfectionism. The difficulty is that of distraction, which is itself as much an ethical problem as it is a

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psychological one. When we are distracted is when we are unable or un-willing to see what is in front of us or in seeing what we see, fail to see what is not there.

Both of these conditions of distraction are kinds of loneliness. When we experience either of these conditions the space of presence and the time of the present are both lost to us. Our others are lost to us. To strive to be present in the present, to try to make oneself intelligible to others but also to one’s own self, is a major element in thinking about the loneli-ness of our age, addressing it as an ongoing experience, not overcoming it but dwelling within it, reaching for a better solitude in hope that we might reach a better understanding of our circumstances. This series of paint-ings brings to light the terrible problem of not being able to be present. And yet these paintings also reconcile us to that sad fact of absence. In that sense, the artist demonstrates a way in which we might better live together, even as we come to realize that we are destined to be apart.

tO ask the questiOn “How do you paint something that is no longer there?” leads to further questions and answers about how we remem-ber the houses of our past. Our artist was inspired to compose this series of paintings by his older sister Eva, who in 1990 was living alone in his father’s house. Eva, his last surviving sibling, was eleven years his senior and in failing health. When he visited her, he saw her wandering through the rooms of the house. He soon understood that, suffering from illness, she was hallucinating the presence of departed family members. Notic-ing when and how her hands would touch her face, he was able to infer when she was seeing images of the past. This is the past that is no longer there, still present in a ghostly form. This is the past she was seeing, the ghosts of the family gone.

Immediately after he returned to his studio, our artist began work on

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a painting of Eva, a portrait of her staring out of a window. He was to en-title it The Dream. That painting turned out to be only the first one, as that painting led to another and another, and the series emerged. Composed over the course of the next four years, each painting is directly and indi-rectly related to each and every other one.

Unlike Benjamin’s angel of history, whose hand- wings are blown back by the wind of progress, Eva is able to touch her face, and in touching she is able to conjure the past, to remember what has been buried and for-gotten. But remembrance is never complete and not always even begun before finished. Suspending the moment, that is, representing the mo-ment suspended, is a quest, never an end.

A comparison may enable us to see the enormity of the task our artist took upon himself. Ralph Waldo Emerson begins his famous essay “Ex-perience” with a frightening description of the sense of disorientation we feel when we are lost. For Emerson, in its depiction of a kind of disorien-tation, the sense of loss feels like a loss of feeling itself.

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir- tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike, we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.10

Cavell has noted that “Experience” appears as the second essay in what Emerson explicitly calls Essays, Second Series. He suggests that Emerson is

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telling us in his punning way—“in a series of which we do not know the extremes”—that he does not know where or when this series of essays begins or ends, that it is indefinitely open, that it will continue at least as long as he does, and now we know, even longer (since we still are think-ing through the meaning of his words, sentences, and paragraphs almost two centuries after they were written).11

Within each essay in his series, Emerson famously juxtaposes sen-tences and paragraphs that, at first glance, do not seem directly con-nected to each other. Only through reflection and repeated readings do the multiple perspectives and meanings that he seeks to convey come through to his students and readers. Any single essay in Emerson’s series is to be defined not only as a descriptive piece of writing but as an at-tempt to accomplish something—in his case, to show the uselessness and perhaps, paradoxically, the usefulness of experience itself. And yet even more, this particular essay is an attempt to show how we attempt to essay, assess, how we attempt to measure the distance between where we are and where we have been—that is, how we may go about writing an essay, moving from an indefinite beginning to some sort of end. Cavell has said that it is an essay on the possibility of writing an essay. It is an essay that Emerson is writing, an essay that demonstrates by its existence that an essay can be written. So in a very particular sense, Emerson’s essay on ex-perience is devoted to the effort to describe what is no longer there—in his case, the reality of his grief for his dead son. He conjures his son’s ghost out of the uselessness of his grief.

Emerson’s description of grief eerily parallels what the artist has painted. “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature,” he writes. The indolence, the lethargy, the sleepi-ness—he writes, “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illu-sion”12—becomes an important element, but not the only one, in what

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the artist paints. The shadows that threaten our perception, the night clinging to the noon of our day in the groves of trees, the shadows of the interiors of our houses, and the glimmer of light just beyond our sight that might somehow lead us back to the life we have forgotten become, in the images the artist created with his hands, something more, a conjuring of family ghosts and a recovery of memory, two handles on everything, never a settled meaning because of being composed of time within time.

So it is for Emerson. His sentences almost always have at least two meanings, and when he says that he grieves that grief can teach him noth-ing, he is grieving the lesson that grief is teaching him, the lesson of noth-ing, that we come from nothing and return to nothing. “It is very un-happy, but too late to be helped,” he writes, “the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.”13 In the face of this unhappy discovery we nonetheless attempt to be present while we are alive on earth. We attempt to think, even if we fail, as we will. And if we fail, we try again.

Thinking is something that we do with our hands as well as our heads. (Benjamin’s angel may be considered a thinking angel to the extent that we can say that it has hands.) Emerson refers to hands in “Experience” in a way that reflects our artist’s painterly use of them. He writes, “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition . . . Direct blows [Nature] never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.”14 The clutching hand will not attain to the knowl-edge of objects. We will be frustrated in our desire to capture reality, be-cause reality cannot be captured. But we might engage in another relation to reality if we are ready to receive what thoughts come to us. Emerson once said that all he knows is receptivity. Thinking as receptivity is the

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opposite of thinking as asserting, as knowing with certainty. The former shows an open hand, the latter a clutching one. One is handsome, the other unhandsome.

“Our oblique and casual relations . . .” We do not directly see each other or even look at each other directly. Is this how the artist sees things? It is like telling the truth on a slant, as Emily Dickinson once wrote. But how is this obliquity connected to casual relations? Later in “Experience,” Emerson says, “We thrive by casualties.”15 There is something fatal about the casual character of our relations, something determined by tempera-ment, by fate. We want to resist that fatality even as we appreciate its power. Freedom itself largely consists of such acts of resistance. Emer-son says, “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.” What else are the paintings in this series but surfaces? The flatness, the surface of the canvas that allows us to look into a house as though it is still there, sharpens our insight and allows us to see the mistakes that were made by those who lived within its walls.

Indirection, glancing blows. What might we find in a glance? In his essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin suggests that people view film in a state of distraction and that the distraction itself enables them to see what they otherwise would not be able to see.16 Is this the indirect glance of which he speaks? If so, does such a seeing not disable our ability to slow down, to pause, to walk in the manner of his nineteenth- century flaneur? Quick and slow, slow and quick—is the path of our vision determined by the politics of speed itself? When I ask you to slow down, am I saying that you do not see certain elements of our artist’s work? And what would those elements be?

Perhaps it is incumbent upon us to look both ways, both distractedly and attentively. Perhaps it is the object itself that might tell us how to look or at least send us a signal as to how it wants to be seen. Perhaps there is a struggle, involving seeing, between the viewer and the viewed—and the

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artist as well. In any case, our attention to how we are seeing, the moods we are in, our vacillation between sleepiness and alertness, only deter-mines so much, and even then the object itself remains—shimmering, various, yet there nonetheless.

We may try to separate our thinking world from what Emerson called “our great talking America.” But it was also Emerson’s hope that our true romance would be found in realizing—that is, making real—the world we think. Up again, old heart, he urged. Emerson’s way of giving us heart was through his essays. For our artist it is through his paintings.

Our artist’s hanDs are handsome. Exceptionally large, powerful, with long, tapering fingers, hands remaining strong enough to be incredibly delicate as well. Operating on the flatness of these canvases he rearranges and re- members the limbs of his family tree. He juxtaposes shapes that compose themselves into representations of bodies in space. They adhere to the surface of the canvas, enacting their own rigorous casualness. We glance at those who are appearing to us on those surfaces; we try to take in the entire image of the being and, of course, do not quite ever absorb it all at once. But we are equipped to receive if we forgo our clutching, if we give up our desire to hold. This is how our artist prepares to paint some-thing that is no longer there, the nighttime that is always present in the shadows of noon. He comes to us with figures that are reassembled body parts, ready as ever to become who they are.

It is not only a process of making real that is involved in the represen-tation of things in the world. It is also writing, painting, and acting so as to discover what it is that we think and feel. This is the artist’s way. Our artist is a genius in the sense that Emerson gives the term: a person who, having access to his truest self, is able to show it to the rest of us as a part of our experience as well. (Such a form of genius is equally available to

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us all. This is a fact of democracy.) He is able to give testimony to the truth of the present, in a constant struggle to realize himself as a person, relying on whatever tools are at his disposal, the hands of thought and craft, the head, the heart, the receptive eyes, and whatever is strewn on the ground—struggling through the sleepiness of midday, the shadows in the woods, in the house, in the clouds above the endless plain of the Midwest, in the infinite ocean of the Maine coast, in the widow walkers’ eyes seeking an end to the endless horizon. Glancing casually, that is to say obliquely, at his paintings we learn how tragically casual our casualties are. Emerson said that he thrived on casualties. That is a bloody thought, but it is also sanguine in the other sense as well—a vital element in the self- confidence of one who can take on the surfaces of life and give them depth.

The shadows, the shades, the presence of ghosts just out of the frame or in the frame and out of the line of sight, the haunted faces, the solid walls, the blocky furniture, are all there. Looking past each other, afraid to look directly in the face of the losses of lifetime but also afraid not to look, how is this dreadful sadness to be conveyed? Perhaps it is only someone who has a lasting love of the humanity of those he has lost would ever be able to paint such a scene. And yet he has, not just one portrait of a sister in a hurting place but nine paintings, an indefinitely open series where he hopes we will find ourselves, a series that will be completed only when those who look upon it cease to be moved by it.

But there is more here than love, there is the bitterness of loss, the starkness of a past that can never be recovered. We can smell death in the colors on the canvas. While there is love, love is never enough. With-out the terrible pain of loss the tragic line he wants to draw cannot be expressed, the representation of the representation, the staging of the tragedy, the echo in the hallways, the palpable sense of the presence of

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those who have long been gone. He would be left with something less, perhaps in its own way every bit as worthy of exploration, the melodrama and even the comedy of the comings and goings of an American family. But the truth of his family, the bedrock reality of its idea and history, is founded on this loss, found in loss, lost and found. (Tragic beauty, the product of pain, does it tempt us to seek the pain to find the beautiful?)

We are always ready to become human. Our artist realizes that his open hand, ready to close upon his brush, but not to clutch, never to clutch, not to capture, but to draw us forward, inward, leaning forward, ever closer to the infantine joy that is intertwined with and underlies every tragic moment of our lives, is all that he has to offer. And so he leans forward, as we shall see.

Emerson says, “Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.”17 Our artist responds, wholeheartedly: Let us paint the men and women as if they are real, because even with our great uncertainties, we can make them so. We have our tools to make them so. If we do it well, we will have given them a gift of the reality that they might have otherwise denied themselves. This is the gift he offers us, as an artist of the ordinary. He gives, he does not take. In this series, his whole heart is thrown into this act of giving, of rediscovery. What he is recovering is a melancholic house, another dimension of the gothic ex-perience, New England in the clear light of a dusk that will soon to turn into darkness. The ghosts come out after dark, not because they are afraid of the light but because the light is afraid of them. We conjure our men and women into reality, and then night falls, and they reappear as their ghostly selves.

So another gift of our artist is the boldness of his mistakes, which he turns into misgivings. His misgivings are almost never mistakes. The hesi-tation, the frozen moment, the stillness in these paintings at times makes

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them seem as though they are, paradoxically, still life paintings, not a series of portraits of the members of a melancholic family. How does one express such stillness in a medium that is already composed of fixed images? I do not know. But our artist does. This is the task this artist has charged himself with: to present his family not as a mistaking but as a misgiving.

PriOr tO the DisCOvery of the optics of the unconscious, the real-ization that we see more than we can consciously absorb—introduced to us with the invention of photography—we relied on our painters to represent the unconscious, giving us no more correspondence to who we are than photography can do but in their own way being discriminately observant of the posture, the gesture, the thought behind the bodily still-ness that manifests itself in the smallest of movements. An exposed ner-vous system through which the wind can blow and animate these paint-ings allows us to listen to them as well as see them, observe them well, as we might observe our sleeping infants, checking their breath by listening, and noting the rise and fall of their breasts. With the rise of photography, many of our painters abandoned this task. It seemed over for them, it seemed they needed to move past the claims of the bodies that walked before them, to plunge into the abstractions that were to constitute our new way of seeing after the photograph claimed that earlier turf of rep-resentation.

Our artist knows that it is a foolish wisdom that imagines that we will ever be able to move beyond the body to something that is outside it or to pose the idea of freedom as being somehow beyond our bodies. The gestures in these paintings are nothing less than signs of how our bodies think and feel. This is what our artist knows.

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i have referreD tO our artist as a wise man. It is such an uncom-mon label to use these days, because we are lacking exemplars of wisdom in our culture. But he is wise, and his wisdom is not common, however democratic he is and however democratic the consequences of what he has to show us might be. We ought to pay attention to a person who has been as wise as he has been for as long as he has been. We ought to look at those bodies he has painted for us, for they continue to whisper to us, truth on a slant, which is the only way we will come to know it.

It may help us to recognize that for our artist biography can be under-stood in its most specific and primordial sense: as a kind of writing of the body, an essaying of the terrible weight of the reflexivity of all of our efforts to think about ourselves, the walls so often closing around each of us as a protection against the light of words. The bio- graph, understood here as a body marked, tattooed, re- presented to itself as itself, written on itself, is an ongoing theme of this series. These bodies represent them-selves as bodies, over and over again, in an infinite regress, in two dimen-sions.

The painting of this series has been the creation of one of those im-proper histories, a strange biography of a family, a very specific family that once lived in Beverly, Massachusetts. The members of this family—mother, father, sisters, brothers—are his subjects, his collective subject. He includes himself, especially himself, for there is no looking at these paintings without our being aware of the presence of the person who has painted them. He is in our place throughout, even as he sometimes is looking at himself.

It is a strange kind of biography in another sense as well. There is no narrative, only images, and the images reflect not only the artist’s per-spective, his interior exteriorized, his pain, his guilt, his love, and his fear, but the perspectives of the others as well. And yet the very titles of

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the paintings in this series, with the exception of the painting that they are collectively named under, achieve their strange objectivity through the simple use of the nonpossessive, definite article the. The father, the mother, the family, the mantle, the vase, the three windows, the dream, the golden frame. Objects are linked with specific family members as totems and symbols, each family member has a separate existence, and yet they are as joined as the limbs of a single body. What has been dismembered is re- membered here.

As a way to see these bodies, the artist presents us with the most rigor-ous formality. The formal characteristics of the paintings allow us to see these bodies as abstract representations—no humans look like them, and yet all humans do. He captures them, as might a camera. Abandoning the nonpossessive and labeling the series and the signature painting of the exterior of the house they lived in with the possessive my confirms our artist’s own presence in his past, his endlessly unfolding story, told frame by frame, with no necessary order needed, a nonnarrative past recovered.

This is his account, his essay, his attempt, no one else’s, and yet we know that he realizes a larger truth than merely his own, merely the image of his family (as if we can dismiss them with a “mere”). We are to learn something, something perhaps not expressible in words, about the shape of love, abandonment, and ghostly existence. And even though words may not express it, they may be used to at least acknowledge what he has done.

rOBert POgue harrisOn has suggested that Martin Heidegger got it exactly wrong in his essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” when he argued that we will come to know what a house is only when we successfully think through what the essence of being is. Harrison writes, objecting to Heidegger’s argument, that “[I]f anything, it is by thinking the essence of

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a house that we will come to know what being is.”18 He goes on to note that it is well known that the first houses were houses for the dead, our forebears, designed to preserve them through our long period of awaiting our reunion with them. We might think of the artist’s series of paintings as an act of preservation and transference as well as his narrative of loss. We might imagine it as a form of ancestor worship in the form of the re- creation of a house, a graveyard for grave men, to follow on Mercutio’s deathly pun.

As early in Western thought as the pre- Socratic Greeks, a surprising number of thinkers who would be considered serious have been deeply concerned with the question of metempsychosis—what we more com-monly call the transmigration of souls. But their attraction to this ques-tion is not superstitious. Our ordinary lives are extraordinary in part be-cause we achieve this intimate interaction with the dead through the plain and simple inheritance of parent to child, older sibling to younger, a communication as deep and mysterious as any available to us mortals. The memetic faculty is a barely discovered continent of human being, even a century after Freud. But it is by taking on the characteristics of our forebears, by imitating them and modifying them, and then by pass-ing them over to our children that we achieve this feat of transmigration in the most prosaic and ordinary of ways. This ordinary experience is ex-traordinary, it presents us with the plain fact of human being. That we so often fail to recognize its extraordinariness is part of its power over us. And, as Cavell would hasten to remind us, perhaps the most extraordi-nary thing about it is that it is ordinary.

For all of the pain that our lives entail, we have had this gift, we humans, to invent all sorts of ways to transfer a part of ourselves to those who are to come. We do this in the face of, and because of, our knowledge of the fact of our mortality. The representation of mortality rarely achieves such levels of perfection as it does in this series, these essays on a family of

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ghosts. To enter My Father’s House is to enter into the possibility of some-thing rare, the possibility of a change of mind, of a transfiguration of our own selves through the experience of seeing something that is no longer there. Why should we be surprised by this possibility? Like true philoso-phy, that is exactly what great art does. It changes everything, even as everything remains somehow the same.

We could follow Thoreau’s similar suggestion about writing and read-ing and try to see these paintings as deliberately as they were painted. For our artist, deliberation is everything. He will not spill his paint, as Jackson Pollock did, counting on the random gravity of the drip to show him the way, expressing his genius in a single gesture multiplied. We might say that Pollock is an extravagant painter, pouring out excess in every splash, letting the paint think for him, transferring his handiness with elaborate abandon. Our artist is extravagant as well, but his extravagance is of a dif-ferent kind.

He realized early on that to probe deeply by staying on the surface, respecting the power of the paint by thinking with it, required that he embrace the luxury of the lifelong student who has become the master, always observing as directly as he can, making study after study, carefully waiting for his paintings to tell him when they are done. He understands the power of revision, the power of waiting, the power of repetition. Patience, patience, he might say to us; the true romance will be realized in the practical power of the paint. Because the quest for the sort of per-fection he seeks is a lifelong one, his longevity is a special gift. Or perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps he has lived so long precisely because he has lived in such close proximity to the perfection he will never reach. In either case, the way he works, producing as many as a hundred studies before committing paint to canvas, not realizing a completed canvas until he is certain, even if it takes years or even decades for certainty to arrive, his time is never wasted. That is, just as for Emerson books are for the

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scholar’s idle times, so too for our artist painting is for his idle times. The trick to this sentence and this advice is that for the scholar all times are idle times, all times enable us to read and write. And so it is for our artist. Time is never wasted. He sees and paints as Emerson thinks and writes, always ready.

Imagine. Were we able to devote one tiny fraction of the time our art-ist has devoted to painting this series of paintings to looking at them for ourselves, we could spend fruitful days with each one of them. We would have the opportunity to go close to the canvas, to see what we can detect in each brushstroke, or given the smoothness, the seamless quality of the line and the paint, to reimagine the place of each form, the careful juxta-position of images, so that we would come to know how impossible his paintings are. We should only spend our time so well. How much time do we have?

the questiOn Of time is a pressing one for us denizens of the mod-ern world. The difficulty is that we always seem to be running out of it, and hence we fail to slow down. One of the first things that we need to do when looking at these paintings is to slow down. Slowing down sug-gests that there is something that can be revealed to us only through long looking, through detailed description, so that the painting before us in a sense falls apart and comes back together again but not as it was before. Oh, to take apart these paintings as though they were made of building blocks and then to put them together again. Would we have a better sense of what it means to remember?

Our time is to be one of re- membering and recovery, for we have been dis- membered and our cover has been stripped away. Those who thought they were at home are now homeless, just as we all will be, even-tually. Ghosts we will become. But there is no need for this life to end

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as tragedy, though it surely will end. As another of the artist’s favorites, Emily Dickinson, once observed: “’Tis Life’s reward—to die.”

But to die is not the only reward of life. There are other pleasures along the way, and the pleasure we may experience with this series of paintings is that rare realization that someone we may have never met is able to tell us something profound about ourselves without ever saying a word.

Emerson began his most famous essay, “Self- Reliance,” by telling us that he had recently read some verses written by an eminent painter. I wonder if he could have had someone like our artist in mind. Emerson noted how one is somehow admonished when one confronts such origi-nality. If well taken, that admonishment will only be a spur encouraging us to further self- trust. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost . . .”19 My Father’s House, it seems to me, speaks our artist’s latent conviction as a universal sense. We are admonished by this series, in the best possible sense—spurred on to think our own thoughts, convicted by the truth, and thus, perhaps, made free, if only fleetingly, in that brief period that lies between two eternities.

n O t e s

INTRODUCTION

1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Thesis IX), in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 258.

2. See The Correspondence of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, edited by Gershom Scholem, translated by Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1992), 79–80. The poem is incorporated into this thesis.

3. Benjamin, “Theses,” 255 (Thesis V). 4. Benjamin, “Theses,” 255 (Thesis VI). 5. For a comprehensive catalog of Barnet’s work up to the mid- 1980s, see Robert Doty, Will

Barnet (New York: Harry Abrams), 1984. 6. See Patrick J. McGrady, Will Barnet: Painting without Illusion: The Genesis of Four Works

from the 1960s (Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; distributed by Penn State Press).

7. See Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2010).

8. McGrady, Painting without Illusion, 25, quoting Barnet in 1962. 9. See, e.g., Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays, Second Series, in Emerson: Essays and Lec-

tures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 471. 11. See Stanley Cavell, “Taking Steps in Emerson’s Experience,” in “This New Yet Unapproach-

able America” (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1984). 12. Cavell, “Taking Steps,” 473. 13. Cavell, “Taking Steps,” 487. 14. Cavell, “Taking Steps,” 473. 15. Cavell, “Taking Steps,” 483.

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16. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

17. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 479. 18. William Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2003), 37–38. 19. Emerson, “Self- Reliance,” in Essays: First Series, in Essays and Lectures, 259.

CHAPTER 1 : MY FATHER’S HOUSE

1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10 (emphasis in the original).

CHAPTER 2: THE DREAM

1. This point is famously made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations II, xi. “But we can also see the illustration now as one thing, now as another.—So we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it.” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., translated by G. E. M. Ascombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 193.

2. “Experience,” 473. 3. This painting was completed in 1991. Given the pose of the woman in the painting, two

remarkable images come to mind. First, we might think of the famous American film com-edy Home Alone, which premiered in 1990 (written by John Hughes, directed by Christo-pher Columbus). The poster for the film advertised it as “a family comedy without the family,” and the child actor in the film, Macaulay Culkin, is pictured in the poster with his hands pressed against his cheeks. His mouth is wide open, whereas in the painting the woman’s mouth is shut. Of course, the other famous reference that could be made, per-haps the more obvious one, is to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the famous series of paint-ings and prints he completed between 1893 and 1910. Interestingly, Munch’s series is titled in full The Scream of Nature. This painting presents nature in the form of trees, sky, and crows. It contrasts strongly with the austere interiors we will be seeing in later chapters.

CHAPTER 3 : THE FAMILY (THE KITCHEN)

1. Frederick Seidel, “Easthampton Airport,” Poems, 1959–2009 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009).

CONCLUSION: BECOMING HUMAN

1. This is a central claim that Cavell advances in his magnum opus, The Claim of Reason: Witt-genstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). See especially part 4, “Skepticism and the Problem of Others.”

2. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, with an introduction by Edward Hoagland (New York: Library of America, 1991; paperback, 2010), 74.