My Father's House: On Will Barnet's Painting 9780822377283

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M Y FAT H E R’ S H O U S E

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M Y FAT H E R’ S H O U S E  :::

 

On Will Barnet ’ s Paintings

THOMAS DUMM

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014

© 2014 Duke University Press All 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 Data Dumm, 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 2014 759.13—dc23 2014005690 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 Amherst College, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Preface  ix

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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

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

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 research 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

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 attest, 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 humor, charm, and kindness. He is missed. An early and abbreviated version of the introduction to this book appeared in the Massachusetts Review 50, 4 (December 2009): 577–85.

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P R E FAC E

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.

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 painting Amherst College was being given and its place in the series of paintings, 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 astonished. The painting being donated to the Mead, The Dream, was as powerful an image as I had seen in a very long time, but each of the nine paintings 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, digging 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 because 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. Several 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 :x:

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 paintings. Following his talk, I was invited to join him on stage for a public conversation. 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 artist 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 included 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 Elizabeth Barker and Randy had come up with the idea of conducting interviews 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 recorder 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 endurance 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 : xi :

mastered both abstract and representational genres, as a master printmaker, 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 become 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 initial engagement, included a color inset of the nine paintings that compose 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 surface of this series of paintings, that as I had come to know Will better, as : xii :

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 : xiii :

and through an experience, we are provided—again to think of Emerson—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, realizing that each painting is anticipating the next while building on all others that have been finished before, not in the desire of representing any particular 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

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Introduction

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

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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 paintings 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 portraiture has classically attempted. Yet we need to remember that portraiture 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-

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 writings 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. :2:

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 member 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, intense, 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 containers 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 common 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 :3:

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 assertions 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 commonplace 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. However, 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 reconciled 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 :4:

do houses become haunted? The usual ghost story tells us about a murder, 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 turbulence 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 constantly 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 helpless 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 constantly receding as the angel is blown into the future, helpless to do anything 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 :5:

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 ribbons curling into a halo. The shapes that compose the angel’s body and limbs are predominantly rough triangular forms. The body has the appearance 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 Scholem, who wrote a poem, Gruß vom Angelus (Greetings from Angelus) especially for Benjamin, containing the following lines: My wing is ready to beat I am all for turning back. For, even staying in timeless time Would 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 turning 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 timeless 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 resigned, Scholem might say, because simply being “all for turning back” is not the same as struggling to go back. For Benjamin the angel con:6:

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.

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 defeated 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 become 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 vestigial, 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 :8:

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. Perhaps 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 resist 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 uncertain 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, :9:

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 remembering 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 remember those who came before you? Perhaps some endless chain of bad faith in and of humanity is at work. More forgivingly, this reverence and forgetting 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 balance 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 migration from Europe, the Barnets settled into American life in Beverly, Massachusetts, 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 twentieth 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 disaster 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 unparalleled 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 inconsequential 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 aesthetic of the twentieth century. This art troubled the waters of representation, 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 : 11 :

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 explored 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 interestingly, 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 represented in every trace of every shape. Little Duluth, Big Duluth, Spokane, to name just a few of his own abstractions, 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 supper, 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 attentive 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 : 12 :

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 anyone 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 indigenous artists of North America. These artists, it seems, have been his familiars 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 artist, 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 student, the great John Singer Sargent at work in Boston. Of course, as he at: 13 :

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 careful 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 journeys. 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-­ : 14 :

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 Emerson), 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. Nietzsche 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 underestimation 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 : 15 :

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 universal 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 paintings, a flatness that defies and yet gains depth not by perspective but by light and shadow, parallax, framing, atmosphere, balance, strange shape: 16 :

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 representations 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 ourselves 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 generally, 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 remaining 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 engaged 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 referred to as “a golden impossibility.” What is a person? We know that a person, when imagined in juxtaposition 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 : 17 :

we will be. In this sense, remembrance is always an act in the ongoing reconstruction 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 tenements to seek relief in the cool quiet of the park, to his period of abstraction, 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 exploration 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, perhaps 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 extraordinary, way. He finds the extraordinary in the ordinary; if he is a philosopher, 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 : 18 :

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 important? Because this fracturing of time is an exemplary feature of the modern world, and its power consists of denying our persons the possibility 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 ourselves 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 ourselves 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 : 19 :

psychological one. When we are distracted is when we are unable or unwilling 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 loneliness 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 paintings 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 remember 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. Noticing 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 : 20 :

a painting of Eva, a portrait of her staring out of a window. He was to entitle 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 indirectly 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 forgotten. But remembrance is never complete and not always even begun before finished. Suspending the moment, that is, representing the moment 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 “Experience” with a frightening description of the sense of disorientation we feel when we are lost. For Emerson, in its depiction of a kind of disorientation, 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 : 21 :

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 thinking 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 sentences and paragraphs that, at first glance, do not seem directly connected 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 attempt 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 experience 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 sleepiness—he writes, “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion”12—becomes an important element, but not the only one, in what : 22 :

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 nothing, he is grieving the lesson that grief is teaching him, the lesson of nothing, that we come from nothing and return to nothing. “It is very unhappy, 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 knowledge of objects. We will be frustrated in our desire to capture reality, because 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 : 23 :

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 temperament, by fate. We want to resist that fatality even as we appreciate its power. Freedom itself largely consists of such acts of resistance. Emerson 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 : 24 :

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 determines 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 something 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 representation 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 : 25 :

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. Without 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 : 26 :

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 experience, 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 hesitation, the frozen moment, the stillness in these paintings at times makes : 27 :

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 realization 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 stillness that manifests itself in the smallest of movements. An exposed nervous system through which the wind can blow and animate these paintings 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 representation. 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. : 28 :

I have referred to our artist as a wise man. It is such an uncommon 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 understood 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 themselves as bodies, over and over again, in an infinite regress, in two dimensions. The painting of this series has been the creation of one of those improper 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 perspective, 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 : 29 :

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 rigorous 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 : 30 :

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 commonly call the transmigration of souls. But their attraction to this question is not superstitious. Our ordinary lives are extraordinary in part because 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 passing them over to our children that we achieve this feat of transmigration in the most prosaic and ordinary of ways. This ordinary experience is extraordinary, 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 extraordinary 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 : 31 :

ghosts. To enter My Father’s House is to enter into the possibility of something 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 philosophy, 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 reading 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 different 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 perfection 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 : 32 :

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 artist 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 juxtaposition 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 modern 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 suggests 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, eventually. Ghosts we will become. But there is no need for this life to end : 33 :

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 originality. 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.

: 34 :

One

M Y FAT H E R’ S H O U S E

:::

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.

In the first chapter of Walden, entitled “Economy,” Henry David Thoreau discussed the possibility of living in a simple wooden box, with holes drilled in different strategic spots to allow air circulation while still affording protection from the weather and to prevent too much closeness while still keeping the body’s vital heat from escaping. In short, he wanted to prevent the box from becoming a coffin. Perhaps he was taking things a little too far in the name of economy, but his point was still well made. In his desire to live deliberately, he did not want his house to be a mausoleum, at least not while he lived. But even a minimal and utilitarian space like a box, because it is a container, may serve as an apartment and has within it some obscurity overhead, as he suggested at another point in Walden, spaces where there are shadows—in the corners, in the nooks and crannies—that may be the hidden resting places for those who wish not to be seen, the flickering places where the ghosts of a house will usually reside. The house we are looking at is hardly so austere as Thoreau’s box. It has its own simplicity deriving from its builder’s sense of form and utility. And in conformity with another dictum to which Thoreau adhered, this house was not designed by one person and then moved into by others. It was built by the person who lived in it and who owned it. This is our artist’s father’s house. He helped his father build it when he was a boy. It was built without blueprint or design, but it is straight and true, with a foundation of stone providing the superstructure with a solid base that cannot be seen but can be inferred.

Beverly was a small industrial city on the North Shore when our artist was a young man and is now a prosperous North Shore destination town. This is where his father built his house. During our artist’s upbringing Beverly also was a minor port of call, as well as a base for fishermen. Across the narrow inlet from Beverly can be seen the more famous and, for most of its history, more prosperous town of Salem. During our artist’s boyhood, Beverly was still pretty much a working-­class town, though like all small cities of the time, there was, up the hill, affording better views, a substantial neighborhood composed of the veritable leaders of the community. This was not the Barnet family’s neighborhood, nor was it their circumstance. In this painting the house is represented as dense and blocky, three stories tall, the substantial weight of it reflecting the aesthetic from the last era when mass and sheer size were what mattered most in a house. The banks of windows facing the street are double sashed, three on each side of the front door, the middle windows of each slightly larger than the two on each side. A porch the width of the house frames the first floor, with the large front door placed precisely in the middle, between the banks of windows. The second floor repeats this pattern of windows and seems to have a floor plan similar to the first. But there is also a center room, a hallway at the top of the stairs. The second floor is divided into two apartments. One apartment has its own door that opens to a small sleeping porch. On the third floor there is yet another door opening out to a porch, but this porch has no roof above it and emerges from what appears to be a cupola. The family lived on the first floor and rented the upper floors. The facade of the house is strong and straight. The viewer’s eye is drawn upward to try to take it all in at once, but the mass of the building presents the appearance of being larger than the eye can readily absorb. : 38 :

The lights are on upstairs and in the third floor as well. From the darkness of the light in the sky it seems to be evening, perhaps the edge of night. Or perhaps it is the light of predawn. Having grown up along the shore of Beverly, it is likely that the artist is well aware of the difference in the light of a late evening and an early morning. That he is able to paint that light is another matter altogether. When we look to the front door of the house we see the silhouette of a person. It seems to be the figure of a woman, but the shape of the shadow is slightly fuzzy, ambiguous, and the legs could simply be obscured by the lower third of the door. The fuzziness of the silhouette suggests that the door is a screen door. Perhaps the front door is ajar to let in a cool evening breeze from the street. Is this person looking outside through the screen? It seems so. We cannot see this person’s face. The door is placed dead center, between two long and narrow windows. These windows may be contributing to obscuring this image, because they seem to be emitting light onto the porch, though they are also under the shadow cast by the porch roof. We are looking in, but we cannot see the person’s face, so we cannot know for certain. The lower third of the door is divided into four equal sections, the division reminds one of a cross. This block cross-­hatching is repeated up the center of the building, in the second-­floor door, and in the banister of the third-­floor balcony, further creating a sense of height. Is she waiting for someone? Who would that be? Has she just entered the house? Is her back to us? Is she preceding us? Is she looking inward? Toward what or whom is she looking? Should we follow her up the stairs and into the house? Who would be giving us permission to do so? Aren’t we looking into a private space? Is this woman really here at all? Or is she a ghost herself, adrift in an otherwise empty house? How could we come to know this person? What could we want from her? What may she be trying to show us? : 39 :

The questions come. But we must recall that we are not looking into a house but at a reproduction of a painting of a house. This painting is a two-­dimensional representation, a flat canvas with geometric forms. It is the painting in this series that most completely satisfies the simplest rules of drawing. There is a powerful symmetry at play in this painting. One could draw a line down the center of it, and it would be as though the two sides mirror each other, except for one thing. The straight lines, the cut shadows, only remind us more fully of the curved lines shaping the outline of the silhouetted figure. She leans slightly to one side of the door. The human presence is highlighted by the symmetry of the house. The symmetry of the house is highlighted by the presence of the human. What is the artist trying to paint here? Is the figure in the doorway the representation of a ghost? In the sense in which we have been using the term, it surely is a specter of some sort. Is he trying to frighten us? Perhaps we are to be frightened for reasons that are beyond his ken. Perhaps he is simply painting the truth of this house as he has perceived it, and perhaps this is all he saw, a human somatograph acutely tuned to the abstract thought that measures our emotions, measuring the presence of the ectoplasm of this ghostly figure. Perhaps this is what he is painting. How long did the artist stand outside this house, how many nights did he paint in the dark, painting the dark light of evening turning into night? Perhaps. Everything seems. But what is? This representation does not seem to permit us to gaze as we are so used to doing, to gaze in such a way as supposedly to allows us to dominate the subject of a painting. The figure in this painting may not even be turned toward us but turned away, evading our gaze. We can see this figure, and yet we can’t. If this were a real house we might climb the four steps to the front porch, cross the porch, and try to follow this person inside the house. Could we do so without violating : 40 :

the privacy of this person? To follow this person inside, in this context, what could that possibly mean, other than to pursue the meaning of this painting as far as it will take us, to place it at the beginning of a series that has no end and perhaps no beginning. I have been throwing the word ghost around. What does it mean to use this profoundly disturbing word, ghost? The philosopher Jacques Derrida once noted that most ghosts seem to refer to the past, a matter he found ironical when he examined that famous opening line of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. “A specter is haunting Europe,” they proclaimed. This was a specter that seemed exceptional, a ghost that was oriented toward the future, not toward trying to resolve a past so much as escape it, a ghost groaning to be born, its future interrupted by a pressing present, trying to become untethered from the past that had made it what it so far was. In a sense Derrida’s science of the haunt, his hauntology, is a testament to the veracity of this series of paintings, even though it is not known whether he ever had the chance to see them. For Derrida, hauntology “. . . would harbor within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves. It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly.”1 These paintings, as deeply concerned with the past as they are, nonetheless speak of the disaster of the present and future. Our artist is guiding us into this past: he is undoubtedly haunted by it. And yet the paradox of this focus on the past is that it is also a reflection on the present this person is living and that the artist is representing in this painting. Is the artist anticipating the death of the figure, in this painting, in this life? Is he, like Derrida, inventing a new form of hauntology, comprehending the end incomprehensibly? Or is he trying to be our angel, illuminating the disaster that has piled up before us? : 41 :

Eventually we will come to realize that the person in the doorway is in likelihood the artist’s sister, Eva. But if we are attentive to the frame we are looking through—that is, if we follow whatever rules we may invent to view this series—we will not yet assume that it is she, for we don’t know yet who it is. We have not yet entered the house of the father. Presumably, we are not to assume what we cannot know. But how could we do otherwise than conjecture some larger meaning from what we are shown? What would it mean for us to invent a family that lives within the walls of this house? On the basis of the evidence the artist presents to us in the form of paint on canvas, we need not invent the truth of this family but only abide by what the artist has shown. We may think of houses as conjurors of shadows. It is in the shadows that our ghosts reside. What shades are present in this house? There are so many shadows here. It is almost as though darkness rises up the facade of the house, as our eyes are drawn upward past the lighted windows on the second floor toward the dusky sky. The house is surrounded by this approaching darkness. The darkness deepens the longer we look at it. Twilight turns into night, and night becomes deeper with every glimpse. We hesitate at the threshold. This is a big house, eighteen windows, large and small, three doors, imposing, and that is only counting the facade. But we are not on the threshold of a door to a house, we are looking at a painting. What does it mean to hesitate at the threshold of a painting? Where are we to go from here? The paintings may themselves be but visible objects that hide their truths from us. But the truth of this series of paintings is not deliberately hidden. Our artist’s secrets are not willingly kept. His hope is that the flatness of the painting, its geometry of balance and austere firmness, its single curving body, will give way to or, at least, prepare us to explore the complex depths of the sympathetic imagination that informs the quest for the truth of this past. It is a romantic quest, one that could imperil our : 42 :

perception, if not the prospects for our lives. Many of us seek to fight our way out of our past. Our artist is asking us to fight our way in, to look for the signs of existence that might be found in the walls and doorways, the windows, the furniture, the very soul of this house where once the Barnet family lived, until that family was shaken apart. All quests for truth, all inquiries concerning our pasts, are dangerous, potentially deceptive. But there is no antidote for our desire to know. Despite this terrible quandary, we find ourselves seeking protection within spaces that somehow have turned into the very opposite of safe. We run blindly into charnel houses of our own making. What we learn will inevitably hurt, even when what we learn validates the love we had for the thing we hoped to destroy, perhaps especially then. Even as we know we are looking at the representations of an idea of a family, if we are to come to terms with these paintings we must do more than look at them, we must adhere to the pretense of imagining the reality of those family members whose images are before us. If we are to do that, then in that spirit we must be respectful, as strangers entering the artist’s home, because he is a stranger to us, albeit one who is welcoming. By painting this series he has invited any and all to look. This is the risk he has taken. We may come to know the members of his family better than we do now, but we cannot yet claim any real knowledge. Nor should we presume that we could know better by the end of this tour. The artist himself is uncertain as to what he knows of them. Indeed, he painted these scenes from the past in order to share the mystery, to seek confirmation of what he believes to be the case: that his family, while unhappy in its own way, is also much like all families, contrary to Tolstoy’s famous observation. This uncertainty haunts him, as it does us, as it does anyone who has lived in a home and left . . . or stayed. Mother, father, sisters, brothers, whispers of the infinite, the stillness of the paintings compels us to listen as well as to see. The rush of love, : 43 :

the beating heart, the sudden intake of breath, the tense echo of conversations that never occurred, even as they surely should have, the squawking parrot, the muffled thump of the cat as it leaps from the arms of the woman who loves it, the quiet of a room where someone is napping, a light being turned on, turned off, a whistling teakettle, the scratching of a pencil on an artist’s pad, doors opening and closing, the sound of tears shed too late, regrets and apologies unspoken, a spontaneous encounter in the hallway, footsteps on the porch. What do we hear? What do we see?

: 44 :

Two

THE DREAM

:::

Will Barnet, The Dream. Oil on canvas, 1990. 48" × 32". Gift of Will and Elena Barnet. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts. ac 2008.25. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

An old woman looks out a window. What does she see? What do we see? We see what she can see but indirectly, as the reflection of the sky and what is in the sky on the glass of the window. Birds, crows, appear in semi-­silhouette. They are flying in an almost random way outside, but if you ever watch a murder of crows, you can see that they like to fly at each other, toward and away from each other, as if they are children at play, their caws loud and harsh, as if they were mimicking the screams and shouts of kids on the playground. (Our artist loves crows—they appear in many of his paintings.) There are four of them here. The sky behind them is vivid blue but darkening. Are those reflections of trees or clouds that we see? It is not clear. Are the birds shown in the light of late afternoon, or has darkness already fallen? Is the woman actually seeing the birds, or is she looking beyond them? Does that window exist somewhere? That is, is it a window in the house we have just been thinking about, the house we have just been looking at? If it is, then where is this old woman standing in that house? Is it the father’s house she is inhabiting? If it is her father’s house, on what floor is she standing, from where is she looking? What is she looking at? If it is her father’s house, what is in the house that is represented? Is there a kitchen that is or is not to be seen in this picture of the window? Is there a steam kettle somewhere inside this house? Is there water in the steam kettle? Is the water boiling? Is tea being prepared? Is it cold in the house? We cannot know the life that is occurring behind the glass,

let alone whether something as simple as a teakettle is on the stove, boiling, whistling. It seems important to remind us that this is a representation of a woman standing in a room of a house, standing in the window. So we could be asking, instead, is there a representation of a kitchen in this representation of a house, and in that representation is there a stove, and on that stove is there a teakettle, and in that teakettle is there water, and is the water in the teakettle being heated by a flame, and is the water boiling? The paradox of representation is always this: no representation can ever be complete, because there is no view from which any single thing can ever be completely viewed. This is a problem of perspective, certainly. But it is not merely that. It is not that something unseen can always be imagined but that the possibility that is already there, hidden from our sight, cannot ever be absolutely excluded. We may understand this problem of what is seen and what is not seen to be at the center of a major philosophical problem of our time. It seems as though one of the struggles of art consists in how to express the unrepresentable elements of representation, in part by filling in the invisible elements, in part by gesturing toward that very unrepresentable representation in the work of art. What our artist is able to represent and how he comes to be able to do so emerges from the realm of what is impossible to represent. In that sense he is not the only one who is trying to paint what is no longer there. The artwork is always to be interpreted as we see it. It follows the rule of the illustration, only without the accompanying explanation.1 But we know that the painting is more than an illustration. It is a work that invites us to imagine with it, imagine rooms in a house, lives being lived. When I first began to think about this painting I conjectured that this window was in a second-­floor bedroom, that the woman in the window is looking out onto a street, specifically, a street in Beverly, Massachusetts. : 48 :

But our artist has explained to me that the family who lived in this house only occupied the first floor and rented out the other floors as apartments. The woman is looking out a window that must be from a side of the house or the back of the house, not from the front, because her view of the sky is unimpeded by the porch roof. It may well be that she is looking out a window that is in the kitchen of her father’s house. If this problem of representation presents one side of the difficult task our artist has grappled with, the attempt to understand the pain of others and express those pains is the other side of that problem. How is our artist to try to understand? In part, by creating a world that will enable us to begin to acknowledge the pain of others. Painting by painting, he is in the process of creating that world and placing persons in it. And in creating that world he is taking on the pain of remembering it, of putting the past into the present. While it is famously true that none of us can literally feel the pain of others, we learn, expression by expression, to acknowledge it, to sympathize with those who are bearing the pain. So far we have largely pretended that we haven’t a clue as to who the people in this house might be. Continuing that pretense, while it may have helped us begin, could be outliving its usefulness now. Who are the people we are talking about? So far, we have seen only this old woman and the reflection of the crows, four of them, in the window. We will need to place some faith here, beyond the faith we may hold in our own sanity and intelligence (no little faith that), a faith in the veracity of our artist. We need to trust in him, to have the faith that he is showing us something that he honestly believes connects us to his father’s house. This is not a small thing, given that artists are in the habit of using illusion in order not only to reveal the truth but to deceive as well. And even if he is trying to represent the truth as he sees it, he may still be mistaken. We must acknowledge that as well. This is the first painting that our artist completed in his series. He : 49 :

named it The Dream. We might ask, what is this person dreaming about, assuming that she is the dreamer and not the dream? Or who is the person being dreamed, if it is the case that she is the dream and not the dreamer? Emerson still lurks. “Dream delivers us to dream,” he cautions, “and there is no end to illusion. Life is a strain of moods like a string of beads . . .”2 Our artist will have us inhabit this ambiguous territory of the dreamscape, not necessarily knowing, one way or another, who is dreaming whom, what mood follows, one from another. What if the dreamer is our artist? What if he is dreaming of Eva and dreaming throughout this series, dreaming even as he is painting? What if his dreaming is his way of mourning, his way of preparing his way back to his birth family, returning to that space of infantine joy and sorrow? We may be better able to think about our artist as a dreamer once we understand better the dream itself. For now let us stay with the idea that the dream is being had by the woman represented in this painting. Even if she is within the frame of this picture, dreaming, we still may ask, what is the mood of this woman? Who is she to us? Who is she to the artist? Why is she the one we need to understand first? This woman is home alone, very alone, looking out of the window, standing between the open curtains. No other member of the family appears in this painting. We might say that this is a family story in the absence of the family.3 She is wearing a cardigan sweater or perhaps a robe of some sort or perhaps a housecoat. Maybe the house is cold. She touches her cheeks lightly, tentatively, not quite covering her closed mouth. The window sash crosses her forehead, separating the top of her head from the rest of her face, almost like a tourniquet, as if it is holding her skull in place, preventing her brains from spilling out, as if aiding the hands, holding her together. Or could it be that it is pressing upon her, causing her pain? Her eyes are visible but almost obscured by the sash. The upper half of the window is divided, six panes through which the images of the : 50 :

crows appear. Each crow is slightly obscured by the reflection, three by the frames holding the panes of glass, one by the curtain to the woman’s right. The window frame, just like the rest of the facade of the house, is as straight as a plumb line can make it. The clapboard siding of the house fights the powerful verticality of the window frame with its own insistent horizontal lines and the curtains that hang straight down, their lightness contrasting with the darkness of the room behind her. She is strongly framed, as though a prisoner behind bars, though not actually. Her body is not quite centered in the window. She is leaning very slightly to her right, barely disturbing the symmetry, much as her silhouette, turning away from the doorway, disturbed the symmetry while standing in the doorway of My Father’s House. Let us stop pretending that we do not know this woman. Of course we know who she is. We have discussed her in the introduction to this book. We mentioned her in the first chapter as the woman standing in the doorway. She is Eva, our artist’s older sister, and she appears in most of the paintings in this series. To understand this painting, it helps to be aware even now of at least some elements of how she appears in the other paintings in the series. In them, as in this one, Eva’s face seems to be that of someone whose thinking is hallucinated, dreamy, shadowy, perhaps slightly frightened, her state of mind shifting from one spot to another, back and forth, from the mother’s room to the kitchen, to the dining room and the bedroom, constantly in a state of distraction. She seems to be drawn forward by an unspecific light, pushed forward in her reverie. But while she is looking out the window and her eyes are focused, it is not clear that she is looking at the crows. She sees something. They may be the crows, but there may be something there beyond our range of vision. What is she looking at? Why does it matter? There are clues that our artist has given us. In most of the paintings : 51 :

in which she appears, when Eva has two hands to her face, she is seeing something that we cannot see. But this painting is, perhaps, an exception. Here we are allowed to see at least the reflection of what she seems to be seeing. We can see the crows. But these birds are not what she sees (and does not see) in the other paintings in this series. In those paintings, other members of the family appear (or do not appear). And in those paintings, she is touching her face with only one hand. So when we see the birds and see that she is seeing the birds, what are we seeing? The complications of seeing are a theme throughout these paintings, because, as we have noted already, the artist was trying to paint something that is no longer there. Could the birds be incarnations of her mother, father, sister, and brother, those who have already departed? Could this painting be a representation of Eva’s first glance at these ghosts, making their first appearance to her, becoming present for her as she prepares for her own departure? Perhaps the birds are only birds. And perhaps Eva is only staring out the window, not looking at anything in particular at all. But this painting of her at the window provides one of the very few glimpses from the outside to the inside of the father’s house. The glass is between Eva and the outside. We are looking into the window, we are separated from her by the glass’s invisible presence. Glass is a miraculous substance. It is a surface we can look through. To represent glass can be a way to represent invisibility, something we can see through, something that is both invisible and visible at the same time. Eva is behind the glass. The window is also a mirror of sorts, because we can see in its reflection. (We will see one more painting that represents a mirroring as well, leading us to wonder if all paintings are not mirrors, more or less.) While we are looking at Eva, The Dream complicates our gaze, because in this painting Eva is facing forward, straight toward us. But here the title of the painting helps us see the strange absence behind her eyes. She is : 52 :

elsewhere, and the link between the words of the title and the painting itself shows her unconscious being made plain to us, her absent presence. Looking into the house from outside, in both The Dream and My Father’s House, we see only Eva, alone. She is our interlocutor. But what is Eva telling us? Because glass is a surface that we can look into, as we look at this painting we are constantly reminded of the question of what a surface is. But it is not only in this painting that we are enabled to think about surfaces. In every painting in this series there is a formal quality—the framing, the parallax, the color palette—that reminds us of the surfaces of the paintings themselves. The reality of the flatness, the two-­dimensionality revealed for what it is, the constant reminders that a series of paintings is what we are looking at, intensifies the experience of loss we feel even as we make discovery after discovery. This is a world that is lost to us; we cannot know these people. In a sense they are not people. And yet they are more than people. Their very humanness is here, on display, resurrected from death by the hand of the artist. The intensity of their presence cannot be denied. Somehow we do know them. Or we at least know things about them. For instance, we know that Eva was a reclusive person. She and her sister Jeannette, like Emily Dickinson before them, led their lives in a solitude that became deeper and more profound as they grew older. We see Eva looking out the window, behind the screened door. With one exception, in every painting she appears in she is profoundly alone, even as she is surrounded by the her family members, even as they appear in ghostly form. Those ghosts are allowed to mingle with each other, whether they are the ghosts of the dead or the ghosts of the past. Why is there no younger Eva? Why can she conjure the past of her family but not the past of her own life? As the guardian of her father’s house, she, every bit as much : 53 :

as her brother Will, holds the keys to the family’s secrets. We can evoke those secrets, but we cannot, we need not, and we should not know them. Eva’s gift, instead, is to give us her dream, uninterpreted and uninterpretable. There are always secrets, but when revealed they never tell us what we most need to know. We never will fulfill that need. Our artist does not try to tell us or even show us what he thinks we need to know. He doesn’t know himself. But he is also there, the invisible presence in every one of these paintings. It is no accident that The Dream is the first painting in this series to have been completed. It contains all of the elements of the artist’s vision for this series: the unknowable but acknowledgeable mystery of the lost family. It is all there, right behind Eva’s eyes, in her posture, in her resignation, in her stillness. And what of our artist? Who is he in these paintings? He is present as both an older and younger version of himself in two of these paintings. How do we account for his continuous presence, less obvious than Eva, but every bit as pervasive? Whose dream is this, anyway? It is the dream. Our artist could have entitled it Eva’s Dream or Will’s Dream, but he called it The Dream. I earlier noted the use of the impersonal article in this series. In this instance, it would seem to indicate that our artist is trying to allow us to dream as well as himself. How do we separate the dreamer from the dream? Is it even possible?

: 54 :

Three

T H E FA M I LY ( T H E K I TC H E N )

:::

Will Barnet, The Family (The Kitchen). Oil on canvas, 1992. 29 1/8" × 42 1/2". Private Collection. © Will Barnet, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

Four people, three women and a man, are represented within the frame. The man and two of the women are in the kitchen. One of the women is standing in the light in mid-­distance, across the threshold of the kitchen in what seems to be a passageway between rooms. The doorway immediately behind her opens to another room, which opens to yet another room, a receding series of frames, enhanced by the blockiness of the pale yellow, off-­white door that swings open in the direction the woman is looking. This woman is Eva. There are rooms we can see over her shoulder, looking through at least two other doorways. She is wrapped in a shawl. Her one visible hand is touching her cheek. We see her in profile, looking toward a source of light. Perhaps she is looking toward the front door, perhaps toward another room. (We will soon be able to conjecture, from another painting in the series, that she is looking toward the dining room, but we don’t know that yet.) In the foreground, in shadow, the man is sitting at the kitchen table. At the same table a woman sits as well. Both the man and woman have one hand visible on the tabletop. Further to the right is another woman, standing near the stove with her arms crossed. She too shows a single hand. All three of these figures are looking toward the woman in the light. They are all in the foreground of the painting, equally spaced across the room. None of the faces of those in the kitchen bear discernible features. None of them are looking out of the frame toward the viewer. We can see their backs. They are dressed in dark colors. We can see what the people in the kitchen may be seeing, but we can-

not see what Eva is looking at. These people in the shadows of the kitchen are Eva’s father, her mother, and her sister Jeannette. The mother and father are sitting at the table, Jeannette is the one who is standing to the side. This is the family of the title of the painting. The corner of the kitchen near the stove seems unreal in its angle, not ninety degrees, but some unknown degree. The wainscoting is not quite straight; it is as though there is a slight bulge in the wall behind the stove, as though the house has settled a little bit since it was built, as though perhaps the foundation was not as solid as we thought it was. The shadow on the wall behind the stove contrasts not only with the bright light through the doorway but with the lighter wall that frames the doorway. In this painting, it is as if Eva has brought these people into existence by touching her hand to her face. This is the act of conjuring that we will see again and again. In other paintings in which the artist himself appears, we will see another magic at work. His way of conjuring the ghosts of his family is not by touching his hand to his face but by touching his sketchpad with a pencil. And we will see that he conjures not only other family members but his own earlier self, a self that does not yet realize the emptiness of the house his sister is inhabiting by herself. The father is wearing a hat, and a parrot is perched on his shoulder, looking toward Eva like the others, from over the top of the father’s hat. The hat and the parrot are simple totems of his life. His hat on, the father is always ready to go to work. The parrot, a pet, came from one of the many ships from foreign lands that put in to port at Beverly in the early twentieth century. Beverly is a New England town with a just claim to be a birthplace of the American industrial revolution—there is more than one such town in New England—but it also has a special claim to be the birthplace of the American navy as well. Supposedly the first ship of the Revolutionary fleet was built there in 1776, before a navy even existed. (Some historians contest this claim.) The artist’s father was not a sailor : 58 :

or a fisherman. He worked in a shoe factory—and worked and worked. In building his own house, he took that ethic of work home with him. As a young man the artist helped his father build this house. We might imagine, recalling again the facade of this building, the effort that was involved. We know what prodigious habits of work the artist took with him into adulthood, an inheritance from his father if ever there was one. From the kitchen we can see into several rooms. We can look through the door frame of the kitchen to the interior room where Eva stands. The open door discloses a third room, and looking through that room we can see into yet another room, one that seems to have a window, a window that is darkened. The framing of each doorway emphasizes the distances between the kitchen, hallway, the next room, and then the last room. A painting, so it seems, hangs on the wall near Eva. The lightness of the first room is repeated in the light blue of the two succeeding rooms. The kitchen is barely furnished. The colors are drab, almost monochromatic, with areas of darkness almost as severe as the darkness of the distant window. We see no refrigerator or icebox, just a simple table covered with a cloth, a few chairs, an old stove with an old-­fashioned kettle on the burner, and a second table beside the stove. The father and the mother almost link hands, and in the dim light they semiframe the doorway to the hall where Eva stands. We will see the images of Eva’s family again and again in this series, represented in their ghostly presence through these colors, shades of gray and brown, even the lighter colors subdued somehow. These are the shades of memory. The parents sit; her sister stands. Where are the brothers? Not in this domestic space but away from their father’s house, one in the business of business—estranged as we come to know, angry at his father in a permanent way—the other painting paintings, printing prints, sketching the denizens of the great city, working, the travails of life bearing on him but : 59 :

also bearing him up. They have left home, even though they once were there. The artist does not claim for himself and his older brother the status of being fully present in the father’s house, because they left. Their maturity meant departure. For the older brother, apparently there was a prodigal son scene of conflict, a fraught relationship that in time meant that he would not return home again at all, the differences between father and son having become too great. For the artist, something softer but also sad marks his departure. The mother is not well, is depressed actually. His father is undoubtedly overworked, perhaps overcome by the responsibilities of his job, at least by his need to be the provider for all of them. In this sense the family is composed of only the father, the mother, and the sisters, those who have lived their lives in full within the father’s house. The brothers are not included. Their homes are elsewhere. The artist is in New York for the sake of his art, his brother is in Canada for the sake of his business. The artist, the youngest member of this family, will return to visit from time to time, but his relationship to this interior space is made complicated by the fact of his separate life. We may be able to see in other paintings in the series some of the reasons for this separation. But we can also already see that Eva is essentially alone in this house, that the people in the shadows are former selves, either dead or, in the case of the artist when we eventually see him, long gone from Beverly, living the life of the artist, scrambling for many years to make ends meet, teaching, traveling, experiencing the world as he needed to experience it, eventually rising to world fame. Eva never left, and Jeannette never left. As the years turned into decades, they turned inward, and the house in Beverly became more and more the home of recluses. Their privacy became over time a privation, a loss. One after the other they disappeared into their thoughts, alone together. We do not see the eldest son, who left, never to return. We will see him : 60 :

in one painting, however, a painting that is exceptional in many ways. But we will also see images of Will Barnet as a younger man and a middle-­ aged man. These drops of time will be suffused with ambiguity. Let us look closer. The father is represented as looking directly to his left, as if he is close to catching a glimpse of Eva’s face. His head is perfectly, if strangely, formed, very rounded, though the top of his head is flattened by the porkpie hat. His back is strongly curved, almost hunched, and the parrot perches comfortably on his shoulder, its tail draped down the father’s back, almost touching the back of the chair. There is mass and solidity to the father’s body, yet the flow of his arms, the curve of his back, forward angle of his torso, the grace of the bird nestled against his shoulder, all lend his posture a certain beauty. This is the body of a man who built a house, the man who built this house. The mother’s back is turned away from us, at a slight angle, so that she too is looking toward Eva. Her head is turned as well, slightly toward the left. We are able to see very little detail of her head, just a hint of what may be the shape of her hair, perhaps pulled up in a bun. There is no way we can see her face at all. She is presented almost as a silhouette. (She will appear facing us in The Mother, but there she will be a silhouette in almost total darkness.) Jeannette, standing in the far right of the frame of the painting, is also closest to presenting a face to us. We can see the shape of her nose, the cut of her hair in a bob. Her arms seem to be close to her side, as though she is trying to shrink away from the frame. Indeed, part of her body is out of frame altogether. The father, the mother, and the sister are an audience to Eva. They are watching from the shadows, as though in a theater looking toward the stage. But what is being staged here? This is the story of the family, of life as lived in the father’s house. Eva is our guide, but our artist is directing : 61 :

her through the rooms of the house. He allows for so much light to be shed on these spaces, these surfaces that are straight and clear planes. But there never will be enough light to reveal everything. More of the truth will be in the shadows. We will never hear their voices, even though we might imagine, if we were to speak with our artist, what that soft New England brogue would sound like if they had something to say. What is this stillness? It is a stillness of thought that we can almost see depicted here and in all the other paintings in this series as well. The artist wants us to see this stillness as something living. His shadow work is unstable, not consistent with the sources of light; as he is someone who knows well how to paint these shadows, we can be sure that it is not a matter of error. He wants us to feel the shadows waver. The artist knows, better than most, that to see is to think by being present. Absolute stillness requires a shimmer in the shadows, otherwise we will not be able to distinguish stillness from death, and if we are unable to make that distinction we will be unable to endure our encounter with these paintings. We will be forced not to see what we otherwise would see. But how are we to be present? How are we to endure in this encounter, moving from room to room, how are we to be there with Eva in her father’s house? How are we to think with her, even as she is no longer there? “Speechless—ecstatically still” is how the poet Frederick Seidel has described the experience of being caught in an airplane in a headwind, speed reduced to zero, suspended, levitated.1 As a metaphor for being present in presence, this image captures something of the way we might experience the stillness of presence. It is a moment of suspension. Speechless, outside self, the stillness of being outside time while inside its movement: this is the moment of the still point of desire, our inclination moving us forward but not—just—yet. It is an active silence, as active as : 62 :

the movement against the headwind. To perdure in the presence of presence, this is a work of thinking, an encounter we seek to understand by slowing down. We will proceed slowly, suspended within these rooms, in this haunted house. It will require that we make a great effort, even if only to stay in place, for if we do not we will be knocked down, blown helplessly into the future, as if we were the angel of history, had folded our wings, shut our eyes, and surrendered to the wind.

: 63 :

Four

THE MANTLE

:::

Will Barnet, The Mantle. Oil on canvas, 1992. 37 1/2" × 41". Gift of Elena and Will Barnet. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. 2008.25.1. © Will Barnet, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

In this painting we see Eva standing in front of a fireplace. There appear to be greeting cards on the mantle and bric-­a-­brac, all vaguely represented, the geometry of rectangles repeating in various sizes and shapes. A large painting of a chicken, a hen, hangs on the wall above. This painting within the painting appears partly in darkness, and it is unclear whether the entire canvas is represented within the larger painting. To our left of the mantle we can see empty shelves. In the fireplace below the mantle there is nothing to see: no fire, no andirons, not even a stick of wood. The fireplace is as empty as the shelves. The emptiness, combined with the darkness, contributes to the suggestion that this must be a cold room, maybe in a cold house. Eva has moved from the hallway, or vestibule, that now appears to have been between the kitchen and the dining room—the spot where she stands in her portrait in The Family (The Kitchen)—and into the dining room itself. When in the hallway she was looking toward the front of the hallway into this room with its fireplace. Now she is looking somewhere else. Something or someone seems to have caught her attention; her hands are rising to cup her cheeks, her eyes are slightly hooded, and her posture conveys a sense of guarded alertness. Her arms are pulled in to the front of her torso. Her body is erect, and her head is turned hard to the right, at what seems to be an impossible angle. Her hair is drawn back in a bun. Her face is shaded, and the rest of her body appears to be half in the light cast from the hallway behind her and the window in the back

of the house, beyond where the kitchen doorway would be—­perhaps a pantry?—and half in the shade of the dining room. The window is very much like the other windows we have seen, its bottom half composed of one pane and the top divided into six, though we cannot see the window as a whole. What are we seeing when we look toward that distant window? The clock is on top of some sort of container, it seems, that is placed in front of the window, but the window and the clock are in a room that seems farther away from the dining room than the hallway Eva has moved through. The kitchen entrance must be before the room where the container and clock are to be found. That room is on the other side of the wall from the stove in the kitchen. Perhaps the container is a refrigerator and the room is a pantry, a place where the food is kept. That room is bright enough to dispel the notion that it is not daytime (though there is reason enough to doubt). Room within room, each one seems smaller than the one before. Were we to trace the path from the dining room to the hallway to the pantry, we would be going from darkness to light, from larger space to smaller. Eva stands, not in the center of the painting, but slightly to the right of center, not squarely under the center of the painting of the chicken nor the fireplace. This slightly off center placement creates a sense that the room is large, in that there is an emphasis on the larger space Eva is looking toward. The curved shape of Eva and, in this painting, of the chicken strongly contrasts with the vertical and horizontal lines of the doorways, the fireplace, the blocky shapes of cards and refrigerator, and the shelves. Even the vertical line of the sweater Eva wears contributes to this visual tension between body and building. The time is four o’clock. We know this because we can see the small clock that rests on top of the refrigerator in the room that appears on the other side of the hallway, just around the corner of the kitchen proper. : 68 :

The light coming in from the window in the back of that hallway suggests that it is afternoon, and judging from the shadows in the dining room it is possibly a winter day. Again, there is shadow above, some obscurity in the rafters that goes back to Thoreau, but Eva’s attention is drawn, not toward the ceiling, but to something or someone out of the frame of the painting, on the shaded side of the room. The dining room is strangely desolate. The slightly reddish tone of the wall suggests that night is soon to fall. The painting of the chicken, the painting within the painting, has this bird facing the darkness, the same direction as Eva’s gaze. The bird of morning is facing the darkness. This is no Chanticleer crowing to greet the sun, as Thoreau would have it. It is instead a hen of mourning, anticipating the night. Why is there no rooster? Is it that there is nothing to crow about? But do not hens have lives to live as well? The final sentence of Thoreau’s Walden is “The sun is but a morning star.” This implicit pun of “morning” and “mourning” lengthens the distance between noon and midnight, between sun and moon. The diurnal and nocturnal are ever separate but always paired. We should hope that it isn’t four o’clock in the morning—that would be very sad, to think of Eva wandering through the house so late at night, so early in the morning. But then again, perhaps she is anticipating morning in her mourning. What would it matter were it four in the afternoon? The dusk is what connects and separates the day and night. Does it matter whether she is awaiting the dark or awaiting the light? The bird is there as a shape, almost as an abstraction. We can barely see its legs, which blend into the ground at its feet. The feet are rudimentary at best. Of course, the feet of chickens are themselves but rudimentary. But on second glance they are propulsive. This hen is walking forward, into the darkness. It is a still accompaniment to Eva, who, we sense, will walk toward what she seems to be seeing. Perhaps the bird is also a sign of the human presence—Socrates’s definition of the human as “a feath: 69 :

erless biped” and Diogenes’s response, plucking a chicken and showing it to Socrates, saying, “Behold, I have brought you a man,” come to mind. The hen does have a human aspect. Eva enters this room as she enters her days and nights, alone but looking. We presume she is alone in her father’s house. But is she really alone here? Her hands are raised, close to her head, her thinking hands almost cupping her face. But they are not touching her face, even though her right hand seems as though it may be covering her mouth, perhaps suppressing a scream or at least a gasp or exclamation. Perhaps she has just expressed her surprise at the presence of . . . what? From yet another perspective we might even imagine that she is clapping, perhaps trying to clap away something she has seen. (In the ancient Roman theater clapping became a way of expressing appreciation for the performance of a particularly powerful actor. By clapping, striking their hands in front of their face, the members of the audience, mesmerized by the performance, broke their contact with the supposed spell the actor had cast upon them.) The thought that Eva’s clapping begins in her fear of being fascinated by the mesmerizing image of another being suggests that she is seeing someone who both attracts and frightens her. Is this an experience of the uncanny? Is Eva applauding in order to break a spell? Who has cast a spell upon her that she wants to break? Who is haunting her? We already know those she is envisioning. We probably will not learn why, though we will continue to ask. In this house there are always more questions than answers. But here there is time. In fact, there is a play on the time of this hour, the four o’clock hands on the clock, a hen looking toward the dark, signifying the strange ambiguity of the time of day. It could be four o’clock in the morning, even though the window is lighting the room, perhaps despite that light. Just as Eva is suspended in time between day and night, : 70 :

she is suspended as well in the face of her lonely fear, expressing the terror of not knowing how to go forward but also unable to go back. She is in a series of which she does not know the extremes. It bears repeating, and it will be repeated again and again, in more words and sentences about the other paintings in this series, that Eva’s hands are thinking hands. When both hands come up to her face she is seeing something we cannot see. When one hand is up to her face we can see what she does not. There is only one painting where her hands are at her sides, not near her face, and in that painting we cannot really see her. In My Father’s House there is no way to tell whether she sees anything at all or whether there is anything for us to see. Perhaps there is no one behind the screen door, not even Eva. Even if she is there, perhaps before we enter the house there is no one to witness what she sees. It is only the presence of the artist that allows or even compels her to conjure up these images of her past, the ghosts who haunt the house. What she sees cannot be seen without his painting. Is she really there, or is the artist conjuring her? Is the teakettle in the picture filled with water or not? Is it hot? The artist conjures what is and isn’t seen. But the question of the image still haunts us. What is it that Eva cannot see? Does it matter? The cumulative power of these images is beginning to bear fruit in the form of reflections on the very question of what it means to reflect. Every image we see takes us farther into the immanent infinitude of the artist’s internal world: a house, not of mirrors, but of one mirror, a mirror that impossibly encompasses every surface. This mirror is akin to Borges’s map, the map so detailed that it covered every surface of the emperor’s domain and hence induced a giddy uselessness in those who tried to use it. How can we get out of this house? Where is the tain of the mirror, the blank back of the canvas, the place where we may retreat so as to contemplate what we have seen? There is no such place, we are : 71 :

caught in this series. We are going nowhere. There is no other place to go than where we are, and so we will press on. Eva is moving on to another room. We will follow her, because for now, it seems, we have no choice. Our artist has truly trapped us. If we are ever to leave this house, it will only happen once we have visited all of the rooms he has deigned to show us.

: 72 :

Five

T H E VA S E

:::

Will Barnet, The Vase. Oil on canvas, 1991. 30 1/2" × 30 1/8". Gift of Elena and Will Barnet. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. M.2008.7.1. © Will Barnet, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

In this painting, we see Eva standing in left profile, her hand to her left cheek, her upper body wrapped in her shawl. She is in the dining room. She is looking forward but seems to be looking absently. Her posture is very similar to that she held in the kitchen. As she holds her left hand up to her face, she appears to be deep in thought, perhaps worried. Somehow, tentativeness on her part is conveyed. A picture hangs near her head. We are unable to see what the picture represents. In the foreground there is a single chair pulled in close to the dining table. On the table, at the far right side of the painting, is a vase of flowers. On the other side of the table there is a second chair. Further in the background—is it the living room?—a dark blue sofa with a couple of throw pillows on it is placed against the wall under a set of three large windows. The sheer curtains are drawn shut. Behind the curtains the shades are pulled down. Because she has one hand to her face we know without needing to look that Eva is not alone in this painting. In the shadows, in the middle ground of the painting, framed by the doorway between dining room and living room, stands Jeannette, Eva’s older sister. She is holding her cat in her arms. The cat looks over Jeannette’s shoulder, its posture suggesting that it may be about to spring away from her, its tail straight, not curled, as though it might be squirming as Jeannette tries to calm it. Jeannette looks to her left, looking away from Eva. Her face is blank, containing no visible features, the barest hint of her eyes but no nose and no ears. It is not easy to discern what room Jeannette is standing in, whether she is standing in the frame of the large doorway connecting the dining room

to the living room or is in the living room itself, though the difference in the size of Eva and Jeannette suggests that Jeannette is in the living room. Maybe she is occupying the threshold, both in and out of the frame provided by the wooden framed doorway, occupying this liminal space. Both Jeannette and Eva stand within the bounds set by the doorway. Yet there is a great and empty space between them; the center of the room is a void of sorts. This expanse of space is emphasized by the strange flatness of the table, which seems to lack depth, and the subtle difference in size of the two chairs, the one on the farther side of the table slightly smaller than one imagines it being and hence farther away. How broad is that table? The arch of Eva’s eyebrow, her wide eye, and the shawl, which seems tightly drawn around her, contribute to a sense of vulnerability on her part. Her turned back may represent the fact that she is turning away from us. Her turned back seems also to be a sign of her loneliness. She is standing alone. In The Mantle, also a painting of the dining room, Eva was looking directly toward the spot that Jeannette is occupying in this painting. It is possible that she was then seeing her sister and that her raised hands was a sign of her second sight, the signal we have suspected. When Eva sees her family members, we do not. When we see them, she does not. If it was Jeannette that Eva saw in that other painting, she does not see her now. We see her, but Eva does not. The rooms here are lighter than the others we have entered so far. The colors are more vivid—blues, browns, greens. And while the wall of the dining room seems to be of the same material as that depicted in The Mantle, helping us to understand that this may be the same room, in The Mantle the room is much darker. But there is also a balance in this painting, a sort of off-­center symmetry played out between the windows, the large doorway between the rooms, and Eva and Jeannette. The two sisters seem to float above the strong horizontal plane created by the din: 76 :

ing room table and the blue sofa. Eva stands, Jeannette stands, the chairs stand, erect, all of them with New England backbone. The vase stands, two bands of blue wrapped across its lower and upper waists, something indiscernible painted on its fat middle, bright flowers splashing out of its mouth, slightly overfull. The bands of blue parallel the lines made by the sofa cushions, not quite as clean, somehow closer to human than artifact. Why is this painting entitled The Vase? The object itself is tucked away in a corner of the painting. In fact, the flowers in the vase are partly out of frame. Despite its position at the edge of the frame, the vase is essential to the painting, not because it provides the painting its name, but because the vase is somehow the most important element of the painting. It is up to us to determine why that is so. In Wallace Stevens’s poem “Ode to a Jar,” he writes about placing a jar on a hill in Tennessee and how in doing so he transformed what had been a wilderness into a place. That is, the jar, a human artifact, simply by being placed where there had never before been any thing made by humans, turned an unmarked space into a marked place. Something akin to that is happening in this painting. If we reflect upon the positioning of the objects in the painting, the two sisters balance each other, but that balance is upset when the vase is included as a counterweight to them. Then the relative weight of the sisters versus the vase becomes a point to reflect upon. The Stevens poem implicitly gestures toward “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” the famous romantic poem by John Keats. Keats’s poem itself was a reflection on the dead Greeks depicted on the urn. Urns are designed to hold the ashes of the dead. Stevens’s jar is on a hill—on the earth but not of it. The vase on the table is not an urn, not a jar, but a vase with cut flowers. The kinship of these objects, though, is not to be underestimated. Cut flowers will eventually die. A jar on a hill will eventually break. An urn survives only as a memorial to the dead. When our artist includes this : 77 :

ordinary vase in the painting and then names the painting after it, he is asking us to reflect on the relationship those sisters enjoyed with the objects they cherished and on how the continued existence of those objects after their deaths remains as an element for our understanding of how their lives are to be remembered by those of us who remain. Vases are feminine in shape. They are receptacles. This vase is rounded, swelling in the middle, pregnant with the meaning of the love these old, never-­married sisters had for each other, holding flowers that might or might not be roses, symbols of love. Neither of the sisters is in a position to look at the vase. In fact, both of them are able to look away from it. But the vase, seemingly ignored by both sisters, has an existence independent of them. They may not look at it, but in a strange way it looks upon them. It is in a position of light, on the same plane as Eva. But like Jeannette, it is also on a threshold, both in and out of the frame of the painting, as she is in and out of the dining and living rooms. In this sense the vase connects the two sisters, visually links them by reflecting aspects of both of them. What lights up this room, a room with the shades drawn tight behind those sheer curtains? The windows are heavy. The weight of the walls bears down on the frame of the doorway. The picture hanging on the wall, another object half out of the frame of the painting, is yet another element of its verticality, a vertically oriented rectangle among a series of elongated rectangles: the windows, the curtains, the door frame, and even the backs of the chairs. Jeannette is Eva’s older sister. Our artist has explained elsewhere that Eva and Jeannette were very close and that both were increasingly reluctant to leave their father’s house as the years and then the decades passed. They became reclusive. Our modern term for them would be “agoraphobic,” from the Greek agon, “contest,” the agora being a public space of contestation and exchange, and phobia, “fear.” Like Emily Dickinson they : 78 :

addressed the world on their own terms but thought of that outside world as a secondary matter, the primary world being the eternity they were always on the threshold of entering. Could we call this position a fearful one? Were they afraid, or was their refusal to leave their father’s house about something else, something deeper, something of a protest against the way things were, not in the house, but outside it? We cannot know the secret of their hearts, but we are able to acknowledge the depth of their connection to each other. Living in a port town, perhaps Eva and Jeannette had reasons to fear travel, to feel the danger of the world outside. The world beyond Beverly was there right there outside the sisters’ window, to be found by looking into the horizon from the North Shore. They may or may not have known about the comedic but cautionary scene in Moby-­Dick. This is the episode when Captain Peleg, one of the owners of the whaler Pequod, asks Ishmael why he wants to sign on to that whaler. Ishmael responds that he wants to see the world. Peleg suggests that Ishmael look over the bow of the ship, and when he does Peleg asks him what he sees there. “Not much,” [Ishmael] replies—“Nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there’s a squall coming up, I think.” Peleg responds, “Well, what doest thou think then of seeing the world? Do you wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t you see the world where you stand?” Eva and Jeannette saw the world from where they stood, and that was enough for them. They shared the same bed for many years. They undoubtedly had much to say to each other, even or perhaps especially in their silences with each other. To refuse to contest the world outside their windows may have been a mutual act of courage, their joint endeavor to overcome the danger in their lives by paying the price of fear, reinforcing each other in their common wish to be left alone—but alone with each other. : 79 :

Their love for each other may have been so deeply assumed that it needed no words. Can we imagine how terribly Eva would miss her sister? How terrible it would have been for Jeannette to know that she was leaving her sister behind, alone? Even here, though, even in Eva’s imagining as depicted in this painting, they are not together. Instead, they clearly cannot see each other, because they are not looking at each other, more precisely because they are both looking away from each other. What is Eva missing in not seeing Jeannette? Look again at how Jeannette holds the cat in her arms. This is a tender gesture, one of affection, of care. That cat could be a child, and Jeannette seems to be mothering it. These little gestures tell so much. Eva misses her sister’s motherly love, her wisdom, her carefulness, her solidity and certainty in a world otherwise hostile or at least increasingly strange. When the mother is gone, Jeannette is there. When the father is gone, Jeannette is there. When the brothers flee, Jeannette is there. What happens when Jeannette is gone? Our artist paints them as missing each other in so many ways. The vase is the sign and seal of their love for each other, a love that is intense enough that they are fulfilled by it, even as they are separated by death. And yet they do not look upon it. They seem to assume its presence. This intense relationship, the sisterhood of Eva and Jeannette, winds out like a red thread woven through the nine paintings in this series: both sisters appear in paintings four times, in The Golden Frame, The Family, The Vase, and The Three Windows. Only Will appears as often as Jeannette, and only once in a painting with Eva, in The Golden Frame. If presence is to be felt as a kind of repetition, there is no one closer to Eva then her sister Jeannette. How does the artist feel as he paints his sisters, their mutual enclosure of each other perhaps tighter than any mirror or frame could possibly signal? Is he painting his exclusion from this relationship? Is he painting his sorrow for their lonely lives together? : 80 :

Eva is in the light, Jeannette in the dark. We can begin to fathom the depth of the isolation Eva suffers by her posture, her turned head, her hands pressed to her face. How deep does this loneliness go? We all know that we all are lonely, that this life offers us only intervals of closeness to others, whether those times include friends, lovers, or family members. We are all alone. Yet it is those moments that shape who we are, those contacts that matter to us are what matters as much as the essential separation. It is not a matter of overcoming our loneliness. It is a matter of incorporating it into our lives.

: 81 :

Six

T H R E E W I N D OW S

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Will Barnet, Three Windows. Oil on canvas, 1992. 30 1/8" × 34 1/2". Gift of Elena and Will Barnet. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. sc 2008:53–2. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

In this painting we can see Eva standing in the bedroom she shared with Jeannette for so many years. She is looking toward a source of light, perhaps streaming in from a side window. We can see that in the right corner of this room there is a table with dried flowers on it. There is the suggestion of yet another window in the far right corner of the painting, but if it is a window, it is not of the same length as the others. Perhaps it is a doorway to another room, the unseen source of light. Her right hand is touching her face. Her left hand is gripping the bedstead. Of the three occasions her one hand touches her face, this is the only depiction of her when she is conjuring up an image and we are able to see both of her hands. The features of her face are sharply in focus: her nose, her eyebrow and eye, her ear, the bun of her gathered hair. She is draped in her clothing, the shawl (or is it a sweater?) around her upper body, the dense and thick ankle-­length skirt continuing the line to the floor. Her body is half in light and half in shadow. The bed stretches across the middle ground of the painting. The head of the bed is hidden by what appears to be a dresser that is closer to the foreground. Three large windows appear in the middle of the painting, taking up much of the canvas. They are all darkened, the middle window darkest of all. The shades are fully drawn shut. The shadows are irregular, faintly indicating the presence of curtains. These windows assume a power in this painting as the objects of focus. They assert themselves, looming over the bed, almost willing the light away from the room, guarding the deep privacy of the room. The drapes in the center window are

slightly pulled back, almost as though a wind is blowing. Not for nothing does this painting have its title. We have noticed that when Eva touches one hand to her face, it has been a sign that she has conjured the image of someone. If we follow the other paintings, we should be looking for that someone not where Eva is looking but exactly in the direction opposite her gaze. But upon first look, there is nothing to see. However, if we look carefully and closely, we can see a faint shadow in the far left of the room, in the foreground, in front of the bed, framed by the left window. The shadow is in a shape similar to that of Eva; there is the hint of a shawl, a dress, and rounded shoulders. The head seems turned in the opposite direction, away from Eva and toward the opposite wall. The shadow is so slight that we can see through it to the bed, to the window behind the bed. It is what we think of when we think of ghosts, transparent, a shade. Because we have seen Jeannette before, we may want to work with the presumption that this is her ghostly image. But before we do so, we may want to follow another path. It is not clear that this is Jeannette. The faintest outline of arms down, hands holding each other, suggests that there may be no cat in this shadow’s arms. Does she need the cat in her arms in order to be Jeannette? Jeannette appears with the cat in her arms in one other painting, The Golden Frame, but not in another, The Family (The Kitchen). Could it be that this figure is that of Eva herself? Eva with her hands down, Eva as we have seen her before we entered her father’s house, as we saw her in that signature painting, seen in silhouette behind the screen door. What might it mean if it were to be the case that Eva has conjured a ghost of herself? Here she is, thinking, thinking perhaps of herself, of her earlier self, a self who lived in these rooms for many years. Perhaps she is reflecting on the terrible loneliness she bears, the powerful emptiness of her father’s house. Perhaps she is imagining herself after : 86 :

death, haunting these rooms, rejoined with her already parted siblings. The painting itself seems vast and empty and dark. The windows loom in the background almost ominously. Look again at the shadow of the figure on the left. It seems to float. The shadow does not go the whole way to the floor. And its shape is not the same as the shape of Eva, so it is not an image of her earlier self, after all. Who else would it be if not Jeannette? It can only be Jeannette. Here in the quiet of the bedroom that they shared for so very long, Eva would be most likely to remember her sister, remember their intimacy, and re-­ member what has been dis-­membered over time, reimagining the time they were together. Her remembering could be thought of as a sort of incorporation of her dead sister into herself, a process that undoubtedly began when they were young and was largely completed by the time of her sister’s death. This absorption of her sister into herself might be imagined as an end of the time of her mourning or its continuation by means of this strange form of séance, this conjuring of the shadow of Jeannette. Except that we do not know the when and the where, even the how, of Jeannette’s demise. It is not for us to know. But here is a more discouraging thought. It may be that this painting represents Eva at the beginning of the process of the loss of her power to conjure, that the fading of the image near her bed is a consequence of her weakening abilities. That she is gripping the edge of the bedstead, that she seems animated with concern, could be an expression of a deeper worry, the worry of the very old, that there is a continued diminishment of ability, that there is an end coming, a fading away. Is Eva looking to the future? Doubtful. Is she thinking about the past? More likely, but what if she is unable to remember as she once did? Perhaps she is caught, captured, suspended here in an impossible place, unable to carry on, unable to go back, thinking through nothing other than her continued presence in the house her father built, maybe remember: 87 :

ing him, maybe not. This inability to move forward to the future, to be unable to reenact the past, is a sign of her loneliness. Would that be something that our artist could possibly represent, something that is no longer there? What have we forgotten? This is a series of paintings, and there is nothing more (or less) than conjecture that follows us as we struggle to understand what may never be available for us to understand. Our bewilderment in front of this painting, the shadow reminding us of what is missing in the painting, threatens to overwhelm us. How long must we gaze upon these ghosts? If it has been through the will of Eva’s self-­imagining, a will reimagined by the artist, that we have been seeing her, and seeing what she has seen, we then will need to imagine further the relationship of Eva to her brother Will. The power of the artist who has commended her to our sight must be separated from the love of the brother who knew her so well. We need to emphasize, while gazing on these ghosts, that there is another presence in these paintings, every one of them: the artist himself. We see through his eyes. We who are looking may come to notice that our seeing of these multiple visions is enabled by the common fact that we are none of us one, we are always at least two, perhaps more, and hence we see in ways that may be unfathomable to us. The fading of the other image, then, suggests that Eva herself is fading, that she is becoming a ghost of herself, that she is being absorbed more and more deeply into her father’s house. The light that falls on Eva is already casting her into shadow. She is becoming a shadow of herself. There is no visual logic to these shadows, no clear relationship to the light. They appear as if to take the members of the family away, one by one, farther into the shadows. The house is haunted. She has been the caretaker of ghosts. What else was she to do? What else is our artist to do? What else is Will to do? : 88 :

And what of the three windows that give this painting its title? Three windows appear as well in several other of our artist’s paintings, The Father and The Vase. But those are not the same three windows. These are windows in the bedroom that the sisters shared. They are closed. We cannot see out of them. Why three? Is it only because that was the structure of the house? Three windows, two sisters, one bed. The background becomes the most forceful element of this painting, the strong lines, and the space between them showing a solid wall. The importance of windows in this series of paintings cannot be denied, but what is the substance of their importance? They are not the trite windows into the souls of these people. They are almost the opposite; that is, they seem to prevent the members of this household from being able to look out of the house. The three windows seem to hold the house up, they are almost walls—the drawn curtains, the lack of light, an absorbing darkness that does not so much cast shadows as it exists as a shadow. The one exception to this rule is The Dream, and in the case of that painting, it may only be a dream that Eva is having, a dream about being able to look outside, to see the crows, to know what the world beyond the interior of this house is like. And yet The Dream, the first painting in this series, is the last and only painting to present us with a sense of what it means to look upon the world. These windows are closed, and they enclose a family turned in upon itself. Each succeeding painting will further enclose the members of this family, until they are, in the end, suitably framed, fixed, frozen in time.

: 89 :

Seven

T H E M OT H E R

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Will Barnet (American, 1911–2012), The Mother. Oil on canvas, 1992. 29 1/8" × 42 1/2". Gift of Will and Elena Barnet. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Petegorsky / Gipe Photo. 2008.14.1. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

Eva is not represented in this painting. Instead, her younger brother, Will, is. He stands looking toward his right into the light. He is wearing a sweater, overcoat, cap, and scarf. His hands are in his pockets. His mouth is slightly turned down, as though he is thinking a sad thought. Like Eva, Will is conjuring images, imagining members of the family, but hiding his hands in his pockets signals something other than Eva’s hands on her face. His tools are not in use, other than the force of his thought. He is preparing to leave this house. He looks as though he is cold. A line in the far left corner of the painting suggests a window, perhaps the source of the light in the room. In the middle of the painting appears the silhouette of a woman sitting in an armchair, her hands folded together in her lap. She is wearing what appears to be a dress with a high collar, and we can see enough of its detail in dark outline to notice that it has long sleeves and formal-­looking cuffs. But it is also possible that this woman is wearing a housecoat. It is possible that she has retired to the bedroom to rest. But she is not at rest. Her hair is tied up in a bun, and her posture is completely erect, not relaxed at all. Her silhouette could be that of a New England matriarch from any one of several centuries past. But we know she lived in the twentieth century, and we know that she was not of New England stock. Her pose seems to suggest that she is waiting for something or someone, that she is ready to respond to a knock on the door, so to speak. We see her face in profile. She has a sharply pointed nose, a strong though propor-

tional chin, a broad forehead. One might imagine that she is a beautiful woman. Her face in profile is very similar to the profile of the face of Will. She is looking toward her left, toward a chest of drawers that has a mirror attached to it. The mirror reflects nothing specific, a flash of blue light that reminds us of the color of the sky reflected in the window in The Dream. Perhaps it is the light from the same blue sky, light pouring into the window that we have imagined exists in the corner of the painting. The chest is as darkly painted as she is, in deep shadow. There are no paintings on the wall. Standing in the foreground, leaning forward into the very middle of the painting is the figure of Will as a younger man. He has his tablet out, braced against what appears to be the arm of another chair. He is sketching the scene of this woman who is his mother and of his older self. This is in part a self-­portrait of the artist as an older man being drawn by himself as a younger man, a self-­portrait painted by an even older version of this man than either of two versions in the painting. The time bends that are entailed in this series of representations is fabulous, in an original meaning of fabulous—that is, being both in and out of time. The younger version of Will, depicted partly out of frame on the right side of the painting, much farther in the foreground than the other figures, in the darkest part of the room, and the older version of Will, standing on the left side of the painting in the lightest part of the room, serve to balance the silhouette of the mother in the painting’s center. It is as though they have drawn their energies from her eclipse. It is also as though they have surrounded her, the young Will, the older Will, and our artist. She has become, in this painting, the dark star of her son, the focal point around which he has lived his life as an artist. The mother sits in the darkest of darkness. While we can sometimes see the faces of other members of the family or their faces are turned away from us, her face is not even traced. At first glance, in the painting it : 94 :

seems as though Will is trying to sketch her and the older version of himself. His head is at an angle, slightly tilted, as though he is uncertain as to the line he wants to take. But the young Will, like the older Will, looks in the same direction, away from the woman in the dark, out of the frame, toward the light that shines from an unknown source. Is our artist imagining himself at that other age, without his mother, without his earlier self before him, an orphan in his old age but an orphan nonetheless? Will’s mother bore him at the age of forty-­five, twelve years after Eva was born. The youngest child by that many years, how was he to know the struggles of the family in the years prior to his birth? For younger children, what has happened in the family before they arrive on the scene is not history so much as myth. Our artist’s mother bore her other children in Europe and in Canada. He was the only child born in the United States, the only native-­born American in an immigrant family. He was already different from all of the rest of his family upon his birth. They had survived pogroms in Europe, fled to the West, and migrated to Canada before moving to New England. This house is their final settlement, their final destination, the place where they will die someday. Careworn, one imagines the mother, but also house-­proud, no doubt. Our artist’s mother was melancholic to a great degree. She rarely left her room after he was born. A deep sadness took her over. We would recognize this sadness as a form of postpartum depression. She was very old for that era to even be bearing a son, and Will’s birth surely was not planned. She may even have blamed her baby son for the misery she suffered, a feeling not uncommon among those who suffer such depression. Perhaps she even wished, in her saddest moments, that he never had been born. How would that have hurt her son had he ever heard such words or even if he only felt the shunning? Did her sadness suffuse the house with her darkness? Are the shadows throughout the house signs of the pain that she could not contain in her room, a pain that needed to be shared : 95 :

with or could not avoid being shared with her children? What we are to know of this mother will come from her son, and he paints her black, hands folded on her lap, looking away from the light. She died before he left home. It is as though she retreated from light, preferring the quiet of the shadows. She is the first ghost in the family, this family of ghosts. Perhaps without even knowing so, the artist’s mother was the one who allowed her youngest child to dream, to be able to say to himself, even as a child, “I am an artist.” If he actually had been the child she didn’t want, he whose existence had made her ill and depressed, he surely would have sensed it. But neglect is also in its way, a form of permission. The mother may have helped her son, perhaps even goaded him, into a different kind of existence than an ordinary working-­class kid from Beverly would have ever otherwise imagined. Our artist may have wanted to leave home, he may have dreamed of leaving home. She was a mother who would let him go, who may not only have given him the permission but may have encouraged him in his art, giving him the confidence he would need, confidence that would culminate in his youthful departure from Beverly to follow his dream to Boston and then to New York. The mother is hidden from us. She is a specter. Could we imagine her in the world outside this house? I doubt it. She had endured so much even before our artist was born, how was she to bear bearing him? How was she to know what he would become? She was the mother to our artist, who did leave, who entered the world. Our artist is willing himself to leave his father’s house, to imagine himself, as Emerson has suggested, as someone who would shun his father and mother, sister and brother, even in the name of whim but hoping that it be something better or at least more substantial than whim that he is pursuing. If so, he would not be troubled by the need to shun, he would be possessed of a self-­reliance that might allow him to go into that world. : 96 :

Those who have been shunned first, however, have a double struggle facing them. They must will themselves to overcome as well as to become. Our artist needed to be able to summon the strength to shun, to take leave of his family and find his way. But shunning for him does not have to be an abandonment of home, especially if the son returns to look, to paint, and to share in the pain of the family. What more can any artist do than share his pain, to use the alchemy of his skill and imagination to transform that experience into something worth sharing with others? Out of pain comes art. But we also know that out of art can come great pain as well, perhaps the worst pain of all. To represent his family as he does is a painful thing for him. Do the ghosts cry out to him, do they worry that their secrets will be exposed, that whatever dignity they had in life will be denied them in death? Or do they understand that his attempts to essay the truth is the artist’s way of honoring them? Our artist’s way of taking his leave of home is a lifetime of preparation so that eventually he will be able to paint this series, to embrace the tragic elements of his family’s life in Beverly. Not all of that life, not all of any life, is composed only of tragedy, but these paintings represent that part, the part of the mother withdrawn into a sorrow so deep that she cannot overcome it, the part of the sisters who turn inside the house to find the love that otherwise would be denied them. These paintings are his steps in a series of which he does not know the end. How could he know better than anyone else where he will end? Of course, he can’t. But he can prepare. And his preparation allows us to see just how indefinite our world is, how closed it is, how open to change, how terrifying in its beauty. Dare we think it? How beautiful. How terribly beautiful, this tragedy of life.

: 97 :

Eight

T H E FAT H E R

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Will Barnet, The Father. Oil on canvas, 1992. 33 1/8" × 43". Private Collection. © Will Barnet, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

We are looking at a painting that depicts people in two rooms, rooms that we have seen before in The Vase and The Mantle. These are the dining and living rooms. Will again appears in both his guises. Older Will is wearing a tie and jacket. He is sitting at the table, in the light, looking toward its source, his face turned at a ninety-­degree angle from his body. It is an almost impossible position to sustain. He is holding a sketchbook in one hand and a pencil in another, but he is not drawing. Through the doorway from the dining room we can see into the living room. Under the window, we see the figure of a man reclining on the blue sofa. He is wearing a cap, and his arms are wrapped around each other as though he is trying to keep warm, his legs pulled up. He is lying on his side. He is likely asleep, but we cannot know for certain because we cannot make out any details of his face. This is the father. The shades of the windows are partly open to the outside. There is a bright light shining there, outside the house, though it does not seem to be shining into the living room, perhaps because of the protection of the porch roof. The living room is in shadow, as is most of the dining room. To the right of the painting we see younger Will, standing erect, holding a sketchpad and pencil, looking in exactly the same direction as his older self. He is very tall, standing so straight. If we look back on a painting we have already visited, The Vase, we see that the contrast between Will’s height and that of his sisters is extremely pronounced. While our artist is a very tall man, Will’s height in this painting is such that he would almost need to duck his head were he to walk between the dining room and the

living room. Indeed, the top of his head extends beyond the frame of the painting. He is also very thin, especially but predictably in comparison to his older self. The fingers of his hand are long, and his hands are large. The arms themselves are exaggerated, elongated, disproportioned when compared to the rest of body. The left quarter of the painting is bathed in a strong light. In contrast, the painting that hangs on the wall, the image of which we are unable to discern clearly, is presented within a severe black frame. This darkness is repeated in the door frame and the wall between the windows of the living room. The dark of the dining table cloth is deep and extends into the lighted side of the dining room. The strong vertical line presented by the figure of younger Will—in contrast to the horizontal emphasis of the painting, the sofa, the table, and the light coming in from the windows— is reinforced by the door frame and the wall between the windows. It is almost as though young Will is himself helping to hold up the ceiling. The picture on the wall, while still cut off, a longish rectangle, the bars of light under the shades, the long view of the table, older Will sitting, his father’s prone figure—all contrast with this young man in his vigor and energy. There is a balance in the painting similar to that found in The Mother. The young Will and the older Will are placed on either side of the father. But there are significant differences in the placement and postures of these figures as well. The mother sat in the bedroom, and both Wills were in that room. In The Father, the father and the Wills are lying down in different rooms. Older Will is holding his pad and pencil and sitting at the table, while in The Mother he is standing, hands in pockets. Young Will is not using the sketchpad in this painting, but he holds the pad in front of him with one hand, his pencil in the other at his side. This painting emphasizes these generational differences. Young Will is standing, older Will is sitting, and the father is lying down. But the focus of younger and older Will is drawn to the light, while the father is resting : 102 :

in darkness, facing in the opposite direction, toward what appears to be a deeper darkness. With whom does older Will have more in common, his younger self or his father? Obviously the older Will is a continuation of young Will, but the older Will may now know better what his father’s experience has been, what tolls the raising of a family, the pain of aging, and the weight of responsibility for so many years have placed on his father. For carrying these weights for so long are now a part of Will’s experience as well. Why is Will’s father sleeping? Of course, he is tired, he is always working, and when not working he rests. It may be that simple. But if he is sleeping, then he is not to be disturbed. He is to be left alone. Young Will does not disturb him, but that also means that he is alone as well. They are alone together, young Will and his father, in his father’s house. Older Will seems slightly perturbed by what he is seeing. We are unable to see what he sees. His mouth is turned down, his eyes narrowed, almost as though he is glaring. The face of younger Will is less sharply drawn. He does not appear to have the same expression, the same downturned mouth as his older self. He instead seems to be gazing neutrally, perhaps curiously, into the distance. If the artist here is conjuring the image of his father and his younger selves, paralleling what he does in The Mother, he is in this case imagining them not together but apart. His younger Will is not sketching his father, as he may be sketching his mother in The Mother. He is not even looking at his father, nor could he be looking at his older self. In this painting, younger Will is dressed in a long-­sleeved pullover sweater, and he appears even younger than in The Mother. His face is less filled out, his body longer, thinner. What if it is the case that it is older Will who is conjuring his father and younger Will, in a manner that parallels Eva’s conjuring of family members? What would it mean that he is not using his pad and pencil? Is it : 103 :

more simply his presence that brings them to the surface? And what are they telling us? The father is asleep, the young Will is alert, attentive, as older Will sits, meditating, perturbed, something not quite right with the scene. What is not quite right, of course, is that there is a linear trajectory to this life, and older Will may not be happy with what he is imagining. His father is asleep in this painting, but older Will knows he is dead, as younger Will does not. Younger Will has more energy, and yet he does not yet know where that energy will lead him. He faces the prospect of being painted by our artist, though he cannot yet imagine that this will be his fate—to paint his younger self when old. This folding of time is not to be confused with Eva’s remembrances. In representing himself in these various guises, our artist is opening up to the past more fully than he has before. Love and sorrow are both present in this house, in this painting of the father, but so is a sense of transit, of departure into a future that will end in the death of all. Older Will and younger Will both are leaving and very soon. If in The Mother it was older Will who was taking his leave, in this painting it is younger Will who appears to be the one who will be the first to depart. Even so, as we might imagine he would, young Will appears to be more at home in this painting than does his older self. It is to be his initial departure, a sixteen-­year-­old headed off to art school in Boston. He will have much to report, much to learn, much to share with his family upon his visits home. While the older Will knows that this is his last visit, that the life of his past will not continue into the future, the younger Will is not yet aware of how difficult this is, of the challenges facing him as he moves through the terrain of the world of art and artists. The older Will, wearing a tie and jacket, is settled in life, has returned to his father’s house to see his sister. He is thinking of his father, the tired old man who fathered Will late in his life, raised him with an ill wife in the house, the man who let him go away to Boston. Older Will is thinking : 104 :

of his younger self, so ready to leave, so anxious to begin. He is assessing the past, and he is not happy. But that is also of the nature of assessing, of reflecting, of essaying the facts of one’s life. How could he imagine himself as satisfied when making such an assessment? To be satisfied would mean to be done. And he isn’t done, not even now. To ask yet again, why is the father depicted as sleeping? Is it simply because our artist remembers him as tired, as exhausted by his work? In an earlier painting, The Family (The Kitchen), the father is sitting up, his parrot on his shoulder, as present as any of the others. Here the sleeping father is not to be disturbed. One wonders what has been left unresolved between father and son, why this peaceful scene should appear as a picture of irresolution, as though the son is creating the father, secretly, in an attempt to reconcile a past that is irreconcilable at least in part. This irreconcilable past is a part of the never-­ending struggle between almost all fathers and sons. None of us know when reconciliation can occur. Not usually upon the death of the father, for then it is too late, too belated. If the effort is made sooner, perhaps a better death awaits. But so much of life is composed of belated realizations of all that we have lost, all the paths not taken, and all the words not said. It is true that sometimes there is enough love and laughter during life to make our partings easier. For all our love for each other, we know that no one is immune to the harms that life distributes through our families. The harms are often distributed unevenly and hence tend to set family members apart. Love is not enough to prevent these heartbreaks of life, even for the most lucky of us. Once the damage begins, it admits of no end. There is no closure to the pain of life, even as there are now entire industries—drugs, therapies, entertainments—designed to provide such closure. As if there can be such a thing as closure. In the time of My Father’s House such distractions were not available. Hence another lesson to be learned from this lack: we may learn to leave quietly, to be: 105 :

come our own ancestors, belatedly transferring our troubles on to the next generation. A large part of the wisdom of the artist is that he allows that pain to appear in his work. The exposure of such intimate matters is something that draws us to his work. But this is no exhibitionism. It is a public claim about our lives in common, as expressed in the innermost life of the artist, vibrating outward so that eventually the world will hear its truth. What his father must have meant to him! There is no ease in love, though surely there is strange comfort to be found, even in its loss. As we have been examining the geometry of these works, the symmetries and asymmetries that have drawn our eyes this way and that, the shapes that have arrested our attention, the colors, in balance and out, that have dazzled us, we have not noticed so much the veiled expressions of love that have underscored each and every one of these paintings. They are there, woven into the warp and woof of each and every one of them. Framing these paintings are expressions of love: a cradling, a holding, and a claim of belonging. The subjects of these paintings belong where they are. They are at home, but they are also leaving. They are both at home and away. There is no solution to such puzzles. All we know is what has been imparted to us by those who have gone before. And to represent that is to show us how we may attempt to reclaim what is irrevocably lost to us. Fathers and sons are often less than certain about how they are to love each other than are mothers and sons. This is trivial Freudianism but, nonetheless, true. If our artist’s mother turned away from him as a result of her depression, his father would try to be there to pick up the pieces, to attend to that loss. That he is sleeping might then appear to be the result of his constant care, his constant worry. And the posture of younger Will, standing, looking toward the future, and older Will, sitting, contemplating the past, could represent something more than this loss: a depiction of the tenderness that enveloped this house, even in darkness. : 106 :

Nine

THE GOLDEN FRAME

:::

Will Barnet, The Golden Frame. Oil on canvas, 1990–1995. Gift of Will and Elena Barnet. 58 3/4" × 33". Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. sc 2008:53–1. Art © Estate of Will Barnet / Licensed by vaga, New York, NY. Alexandre Gallery, New York, NY.

We see four people in this painting. They are looking out from within a golden frame hanging on a wall. These are the Barnet siblings: the artist’s sisters Eva and Jeannette, Will, and Will’s older brother. The siblings are grouped together, each one looking directly out of the frame. Except for Jeannette. Jeannette’s eyes are downcast. What are they looking at? The frame seems to be the frame of a mirror; the wallpaper within the frame is the same as that outside it, suggesting that this mirror may have hung in the Barnet hallway, and that the opposite wall was bare. As verification of this suggestion of a mirror, in the background we can see through a doorway into the dining room, with the chandelier hanging down behind the heads of the two men. The four siblings, then, are looking at themselves, assessing their own selves through the image of them in the mirror. They are crowded in on each other, a mutual haunting of each by the others, each one connected to the others, a single gaze that is multiplied by a power of four, unified yet individualized. The effect of the representation of the mirror is powerful, even as we all know the trickiness of how mirrors create all sorts of effects, illusions of presence and absence, reflections that can seem infinite in depth. Such an intensity is how we might imagine the power of thinking hands, the delicate force of our artist, the hallucinatory power of his memory, and the still point of desire that inflects all of our histories, personal and public. Yet there seems no place for us here. The mirror, the painting of the mirror, the golden frame—these elements have worked

together to bring these people tantalizingly close to us but always beyond our reach, a golden impossibility in a golden frame. The Barnet siblings are shown in their characteristic postures, each one with the appropriate totem of his or her existence on display. Eva has her hands to her face, Jeannette is holding her cat, the older brother is wearing a suit and heavily framed glasses, and the artist is holding his sketchpad and pencil. These totems signify the primary ways in which each responds to the world. Eva’s eyes are wide open. We are able to see her entire face for the first time. She appears not frightened but instead slightly curious. She is wearing the same sweater she was wearing in The Dream. She is pressing her hands against her head, pushing upward, concentrating her memory. In the painting we see her seeing her siblings in the mirror’s reflection. They do not appear as ghostly images but as solid and real bodies. Does this mean that her conjuring hands have succeeded or failed? The vertical stripes of the wallpaper are in strong contrast to the horizontal siding that appears in The Dream, making her appear taller in this painting. The act of posing side by side with her siblings gives her a denser reality than in any other painting in which she appears. Jeannette’s cat is in her arms; she is stroking it, and looking downward, perhaps resistant to the idea of being included in the portrait, unable to refuse but sustaining her privacy as much as she can. Is the cat a symbol of her shyness, her introversion? She is dressed in a robe, another sign, perhaps, of her reclusiveness, her unwillingness to leave the house. In contrast to Eva, whose hair is gray bordering on white, Jeannette’s remains untouched by gray. Has retreating into her father’s house somehow retarded the aging process for her? Will’s sketchpad is his way of thinking, his gaze is direct and forward, he is openly observing himself observing. This is the older Will, the mature artist. He is in the center of this mirror and in the center of this : 110 :

painting, standing tall. Notice how his head extends above the doorway, a neutral and observant look upon his face. His broad and deep forehead connotes his intelligence. He is the sibling who is most fully reflected within the mirror. The other three all have at least one shoulder slightly outside the frame. His pencil is at a precise slant, held firmly between his thumb and first two fingers. One imagines that this is how he holds it while engaged in sketching. Will’s older brother looks directly forward, rigidly erect, arms tightly at his side, both his head and shoulder edging toward the outside of the frame of the mirror. It is as though he has already left the house. He is wearing a blue suit and a firmly knotted tie. His eyes look narrowly out from behind horn-­rimmed glasses. This is the only painting in which the older brother appears. We know less of the older brother than we do of the other members of the family. We know that he left the house in anger as a young man, that there was a conflict with the father, and that he did not return to Beverly upon leaving. He became a business man in Canada apparently, but his estrangement from his father was permanent. Such a bitter ending between father and son is sad, even tragic in a way. How would it feel to lose one’s child to anger, what must the siblings feel upon that departure? Were they forced to choose themselves between father and son? And what of the nameless older brother? How deep was his hurt? How bitter? To be rendered nameless is a way of losing one’s identity. It is yet another way of falling into shadow. The older brother is, perhaps, the first ghost in this family, a ghost before his death, an absence not filled. This is a group portrait. The mother and the father are not in the picture; these children are all adults. Perhaps the parents have already passed away. The children do not seem happy to be here. No one is smiling. Their sadness saturates this painting, the frame concentrates it, and the mirror focuses it to so sharp a point as to make us want to avert our gaze. : 111 :

The family portrait is an attempt to represent a family’s life together. This is why we gather together to be photographed. Our historical importance depends upon the temporal fidelity each one of us holds to our self when we are portrayed by another. We strike a pose. We hope it is the right one. But portrayal is always betrayal as well. Our postures reveal more about us than we realize. Out of portraits we learn about the small acts of violence that make up so much of the everyday life of the family. They are our histories, picture by picture. Family albums trace the beginning, middle, and end of a generation’s existence, and sometimes the entire family line can be documented, completed. What we see in these paintings that compose My Father’s House is a family suspended, unresolved, haunting itself. Is the entire series of paintings an attempt at a family album? How can our artist himself be positioned in front of the mirror? His image is looking out at himself, but how could that be? He is painting what he sees in the mirror, he is painting a strange doubling of himself and his siblings. Perhaps we should say that it is Will Barnet whose image is captured in the mirror and that our artist is painting the mirror image of himself, an indirect form of self-­portrait, a self-­conscious reflection on the very idea of reflection, reflection to infinity. This infinitude is of the deepest concern for our artist. But the mirror of The Golden Frame tightens the focus of this gesture, seals off this family in the interior of the house. It demonstrates a particular terminus in the very tightness of the vision it presents. What that termination point is remains to be explored. Where it is will be infinitely deferred. Representation at the limits of itself has led so many others to work in what they consider to be pure abstraction. But the artist has pushed farther than that. These figures are abstract representations of the real. These people are framed. We have seen frame after frame, frame within frame, frame lapping over frame, as we have proceeded through : 112 :

these paintings of the artist’s father’s house. The direct, absolute correspondence of the mirror to the image of the mirror, this perfect parallax view that establishes the only depth that our eyes can hold, forces us into the frame, but there is no place for us here. There is only the image of these siblings, eternally looking at themselves. To show the drama of his family’s life when no one is there any more, realizing that time is present all the time, as he once put it, the artist attempted a series of paintings of time itself, of the shadows that allow glimpses of familial ghosts, of the haunting of his father’s house. The Golden Frame suggests a golden ring, a circle, a marriage of sorts—the marriage of siblings? Is what happens among brothers and sisters not akin to marriage, perhaps even outlasting any marriage, if the mother and father have the great good luck to die before their children do? These children are orphans in their adulthood. Orphans, as are we all, should we be so fortunate as to outlive our parents.

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Conclusion

BECOMING HUMAN

:::

There is a crack in everything God has made. —Emerson, “Compensation”

Our artist seems to believe in humanity. Had I begun this book with such a blunt assertion, the reader would have been forgiven for thinking that I or our artist or both are naive at best, perhaps even unserious. After all, what in the world could it possibly mean to say that one believes in humanity in this day and age? Indeed, how is it possible for anyone to believe in anything anymore? Perhaps, then, it is not belief but something else, what Stanley Cavell would call not knowledge of others but acknowledgment of each other, of the pain we suffer, of the existence of other minds, knowing that we cannot know what is in others’ minds but that we can acknowledge the fact that they do have minds, mutually acknowledging that we cannot know what other

persons are feeling or thinking. We might call this, as Cavell has done, “living our skepticism.”1 Reflecting on this series of paintings, I cannot but be inclined toward our artist’s deep sympathy for his fellow human beings. After a century and more on this earth, hardly living a sheltered life, he would know of the goodness and the meanness of life and still and always take its measure in full. Like the best of American transcendentalists—I think here especially of Thoreau—he has provided us with images of the human as a quest and as a question. How we are becoming human is an endless puzzle, something we must do on the fly while living our every-­bit-­as-­vital animal lives. Indeed, how we become human is how we become human animals, recognizing the facticity of biology, appreciating our mortal limits, trying so hard to use our tools to move beyond those limits, yet realizing as we go along how we will fail in the end. “Becoming”—such an interesting word. Let us think about its varied meanings by placing it in a couple of sentences. “I am becoming angry.” Here “becoming” is a process word, qualifying “am.” If one were to say “I am angry,” then one would be in that state of emotion. To become something is to achieve something and implies being finished with such a process. The definition itself tells us that becoming is “that which is coming into existence.” It is the gerund that does the work here, suggesting something in movement, emergence, something out of nothing. Let us try another sentence. “That dress is quite becoming.” Something that is “becoming” in this sense is something befitting, suitable, having a graceful existence. I like that this is the other primary definition of the word. (In fact, the oed suggests that this definition is the original meaning of the term.) Could we ever say that someone’s becoming human is either becoming or unbecoming? Do we put on a human suit : 116 :

when we attempt to become human? Not exactly, but we do work on our manners and mannerisms, our simple courtesies becoming part of our selves. We are creatures of artifice, and if we fail to embrace that element of ourselves we fail to become human in yet another way. To believe in humanity, to go back to my claim about our artist, is not to believe in some innate goodness of human being. It is instead to admit that there are degrees of being human to which we aspire and to admit as well that what we call good and evil are registers of our halting journey forward to whatever our next step might be. This is another way of describing what Cavell, in many of his writings, calls “moral perfectionism.” That phrase could be misleading, especially if one thinks that the term “perfectionism” refers to something or someone actually achieving the state of perfection. This is not what he means. Nobody’s perfect. Nobody ever will be. I think this is what Thoreau is going for when, in Walden, he writes, “To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”2 Such a state of perfection, full awakeness, is not available to mere men but is something that would make one into something akin to a god. What we are about when we are becoming human is striving to improve upon who we are by thinking, reading, writing, and in the case of our artist, painting all of that with which we are presented. Cavell suggests somewhere that Thoreau meant every word of Walden, that he was deliberate in his writing, in as full control of his meaning as he could consciously be. Let us imagine that such deliberation is found in every brushstroke our artist commits to his canvas, brushstroke after brushstroke, erased, amended, reshaped, reformed, until he is satisfied that he can do no more with the painting he is painting. Has he achieved perfection? No. There is no such thing as perfection. But how close to perfection our artist has come. : 117 :

And there are no such things as angels and ghosts, either, are there? No, that is not right. Our angels and ghosts are representative beings; that is, like our gods they are imaginary entities of our own creation, doing everything they can to instruct us on the forms that the uncanny, that exhilarating and frightening sense of being human, can take. The uncanniness of these paintings is precise, in a Freudian sense. For Freud, the uncanny is something that is concealed, buried, a strange subterranean desire that springs again and again to the surface despite our wishes. The dread we feel, though, is not from the very real presence of that which has been buried but from our not knowing, but feeling, its buried presence. In this sense, it may be that the English rendering, un-­canny, a nonknowledge or nonunderstanding of that which is before us, may be as appropriate a term for the experience of seeing that which is no longer there as un-­homely, unheimlich. This is the form of the uncanny that we can associate with the ghostly, and the haunting of this house should be palpable to us by now. The uncanny is where our ghosts reside. There is another form of the uncanny, one associated with what Immanuel Kant once called “the sublime.” This is where the angel of history resides. The angel is terrified, but in being terrified it is also terrifying. It covers the territory of terror as much as it encompasses the chronology of the human. What are we to do with this angel and all other angels who would try to carry such responsibilities for the human? I realize that I have burdened this angel with an enormous weight, but truth be told, it has been no more than the angel could bear. While there is no denying the sadness, the dread, the hauntedness of this house we have explored in Beverly, Massachusetts, there is also enough thought, enough canniness, to allow us some sense of comfort, even as we are faced with the thought of our own departures, from our home and from our life. There is a commonality to the spaces that the artist has painted, a familiar that shines through the unfamiliar. The tables, : 118 :

the chairs, the windows, the bric-­a-­brac, even the door frames are shapes we recognize. It is in this sense that the uncanny and the canny reside together. Perhaps only the wisest among us are able to recognize this coexistence—or the most naive. We are living through a crisis period in the human habitation of the world. But we are always living through crisis. Everyday the world is ending, and it has been ending for the longest time. Nonetheless it is a simple truth that the world has become a far more complex place than it once was, and we cannot ignore the fact that our complex being is placing us and the earth we inhabit in greater danger than we ever have been in before. The catastrophe of mass extinction lurks. The fading of human beings into nothingness is no metaphor for our existence; it is part and parcel of what we intuit, what our science suggests, what has so many of us fearful and crazed. In the face of such complexity, perhaps the very simplicity of this series of paintings, the minimal surfaces that evoke such complicated responses, the lines, the colors, the quiet they provoke within us, may encourage the coming of a new simplicity in our own lives, an austerity we might cultivate within ourselves in response to our diminished circumstances, as we walk our yellow brick road to nowhere. We will dread such a haunting if we are not prepared for it. To prepare ourselves surely will mean that we must learn to face our past, to try to be present with our memories, to realize the drama of our families going and gone, their presence in their absence in our days and nights, their calm waiting in the shadows that bring these dreams to us.

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No t e s

INTRO DU C TIO N

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

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. C HAP TE R 1 : MY FATHE R’ 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). C HAP TE R 2: THE DRE AM

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 comedy Home Alone, which premiered in 1990 (written by John Hughes, directed by Christopher 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, perhaps the more obvious one, is to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the famous series of paintings 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. C HAP TE R 3 : THE FAMILY ( THE KITCHEN)

1. Frederick Seidel, “Easthampton Airport,” Poems, 1959–2009 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009). C O NC LU S IO N: B E C O MING HUMAN

1. This is a central claim that Cavell advances in his magnum opus, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, 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.

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Index

agoraphobia, 78 angels, of history, 5–10, 63, 118; and ghosts, 9; wings of, 6–8 Angels in America, by Tony Kushner, 5 Angelus Novus, by Paul Kee, 5–7; Gerschom Scholem on, 5–7 Art Students League, 13 Barnet, the brother, 60–61, 109–111 Barnet, Elena, 14 Barnet, Eva, 20–21, 42, 50–54, 57–62, 67–72, 75–81, 93, 85–88, 109–110 Barnet, the father, 58–59, 61, 101–106 Barnet, Jeannette, 53, 58–59, 61, 75–76, 78– 81, 85–87, 109–110 Barnet, the mother, 58, 60–61, 94–96 Barnet, Will, as subject in paintings, 54, 61, 93–95, 101–106, 109–111 Beloved, by Toni Morrison, 3 Benjamin, Walter, 5–9, 23; and the angel of history, 5–9, 21 Beverley, Massachusetts, 11, 29, 38–39, 48, 58–59 Big Duluth, by Will Barnet, 12 biography, 29 Borges, Jorge, 71

Cavell, Stanley, 16, 19, 21–22, 31, 115–117 Central Park, New York, 18 crows, 47, 52 Culkin, Macaulay, 112n.3 Derrida, Jacques, on ghosts, 41 Dickinson, Emily, 15, 24, 34, 53, 78–79 Diogenes, and Socrates, 69–70 Dream, The, by Will Barnet, 21, 45–54, 89, 94 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 15, 17, 21–25, 27, 32–34, 50, 96, 115; on grief, 22–24; on hands, 25 Enclosure, by Will Barnet, 12 Executioner’s Song, The, by Norman Mailer, 3 family, Barnet, 1–5; Gilmore, 3 Family, The (The Kitchen), by Will Barnet, 55–63, 67, 80, 86, 105 Father, The, by Will Barnet, 89, 99–106 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 31 ghosts, 5–6, 26, 33, 40–41, 53–54, 118; as ancestors, 9–10; and angels, 9 Gilmore, Mikal, Shot in the Heart, 3 glass, 52–53

Golden Frame, The, by Will Barnet, 80, 86, 107–113 Gorky, Arshile, 11–12 Gothic, American, 4

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15 optics, of unconscious, 28 personhood, 17–18 photography, 28 Poe, Edgar Allen, 4 Pollock, Jackson, 32 portraits, Will Barnet on, 17

Harrison, Robert Pogue, on houses, 30–31 hauntology, 41 Heidegger, Martin, on houses, 30–31 Home Alone, 112n.3 Kant, Emmanuel, 118 Keats, John, 77 Klee, Paul, Angelus Novus, 5–7 Kushner, Tony, Angels in America, 5 Little Duluth, by Will Barnet, 12 loneliness, 20 Mailer, Norman, The Executioner’s Song, 3 Mantle, The, by Will Barnet, 65–72, 76 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 41 Melville, Herman, 14, 15 Miller, Arthur, 3 Moby-­Dick, 79 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 3 Mother, The, by Will Barnet, 61, 91–97, 102–104 Munch, Edvard, The Scream of Nature, 112n.3 My Father’s House, by Will Barnet, 35–44, 51, 53, 71

Sargent, John Singer, 13 Scholem, Gershom, on Angelus Novus, 5–7 Scream of Nature, The, by Edvard Munch, 112n.3 Seidel, Frederick, 62 Shot in the Heart, by Mikal Gilmore, 3 Socrates, and Diogenes, 69–70 souls, transmigration of, 31 Spinoza, Baruch, 16 Spokane, by Will Barnet, 12 Steven, Wallace, 77 Thoreau, Henry David, 32, 37, 69, 116–117 Three Windows, The, by Will Barnet, 80, 83–89 Tolstoy, Leo, 43 uncanny, 118 Vase, The, by Will Barnet, 73–81, 89

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