I neglected to tell you last week that for a while, painter Bryce Martin was married to a sister of folk singer Joan Baez. Such a tidbit may not matter much in your assessment of Marden’s work, but it got me thinking of how different forms of art interact with each other.
I think it's interesting when one form of art works alongside another. I can't think of too many good examples of this off the top of my head but the. first one that springs to mind is the interaction between the novelist Emile Zola and the painter Edwouard Manet. Both were key players in the emergence of modernism in France in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In addition to novels Zola wrote art criticism and hotly defended Manet when the artist was raked over the coals by conservative critics for his controversial 1865 painting Olympia.
Manet, in turn, painted Zola's portrait in 1868, placing the writer in a setting crowded with references to the seriousness with which they both took art.
20 years later, Zola wrote a novel about the French art world, loosely based on his friendship with modernist Paul Cezanne and other painters.
More recently, in 1938, poet W.H Auden was Moved to creation when he encountered a painting at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels.
In the style of Dutch master Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the painting was ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ dating from around 1560.
Icarus, you'll remember, was the guy from Greek mythology who, using artificial wings, ignored advice from his father, flew too close to the sun and plunged to his death into the sea. In the painting all you see is Icarus’ legs disappearing below the waves as a ship sails serenely by.
Auden’s poem frames the death as an event who’s affects don’t extend further than the poor Icarus, he says, “about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters, how well they understood it’s human position. How it takes place whilst someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”
It’s a great and perceptive poem about a wonderful and intriguing painting. In 2022 Elisa Gabbert wrote about the poem for the New York Times and sharply phrased Auden’s message as “somethings only a disaster if we notice it.”
An idea that fits our distracted society, uncomfortably well.
