Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate
Reading Pictures looks at the work of great artists–from the intensely familiar to the undiscovered–and examines the stories behind them, tracing the passage of life into art. Pablo Picasso torments his mistress Dora Maar and then paints brilliant studies of her grief-crumpled face; these evolve into the weeping woman in his great indictment of fascism,Guernica. Manguel untangles what this story, and countless others, shows us of our twin impulses toward creation and destruction. A tour of the psyche more than of the museum, this book dares to ponder, with contagious wonder, why we create.
Not since John Berger’s influential Ways of Seeing has an essayist so eloquently examined what happens when we are moved by profound works of art and how we decode a wordless language that touches us so intimately. Richly illustrated, Reading Pictures shows us that there is no limit to the stories we may find if we look with care and delight.
Not since John Berger’s influential Ways of Seeing has an essayist so eloquently examined what happens when we are moved by profound works of art and how we decode a wordless language that touches us so intimately. Richly illustrated, Reading Pictures shows us that there is no limit to the stories we may find if we look with care and delight.
阿爾維托．曼古埃爾 (Alberto Manguel)/著《意象地圖---閱讀圖像中的愛與憎》 (Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate)，薛絢譯，台北：台灣商務，2002
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After an international success with his prize-winning A History of Reading, writer, novelist, translator and editor Manguel, a Buenos Aires ex-pat now living in Canada, returns with a series of meditations on why great art moves us. Twelve chapters focus individually on painters from Caravaggio to Picasso and Joan Mitchell, the photographer Tina Modotti and architect Peter Eisenman an intellectually ambitious range supported by an impressive section of notes at the back of the book suggesting familiarity with a vast array of scholarly books. Yet the book's subtitle and frequent use of the first person betray the fact that this is less a work of art history than a catalogue of reactions, many of which are triggered by excruciatingly banal questions: "But can every picture be read? Or at least, can we create a reading?" leads to the assertion that "[the] attempt not to communicate is at least as complex as the attempt to communicate, and undoubtedly as old." The chapter "Pablo Picasso: the Image as Violence" contains this observation: "most men in Western art suffer stoically." The wandering style that worked so well in History is less masterful here, and the lack of sustained thought throughout makes it hard to imagine most readers (of either gender) stoically getting to the end. (Sept.)Forecast: Many buyers of A History of Reading, which was translated into 22 languages, will pick up this book by association, as will readers looking for the next How Proust Will Change Your Life. The result will be better than average sales, but not a History-style breakout.
Blurred vision
Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel asks the question: can we ever articulate a painting? by Michael McNay
One forgets that Roger Fry, who more than anyone educated his countrymen into an appreciation of the "formal relations" in painting, wrote almost equally of their literary power. Of the Arena chapel, Padua, Fry wrote: "Giotto has touched a chord of feeling at least as profound as can be reached by the most consummate master of the art of words." So why not read pictures?
In the case of Alberto Manguel, the answer might be that he seems ill-equipped as a guide because of an incapacity to do the other part of the job. One example will serve: discussing Picasso's paintings around Guernica , he writes of the "haphazard canvases" portraying Dora Maar, Picasso's muse for the weeping woman with baby in Guernica ; but in all art history there are no portraits less random than these cubist-based paintings. At a guess, Manguel means to describe the way Picasso fractures and reformulates his sitter's features; but that's not what he says.
Haphazard might better describe his own loosely linked series of essays dressed up as chapters. But if this is a book with almost nothing useful to say about painting as such, it is full of suggestive ideas about social forces and their effect on art. Manguel's passage on the supreme difficulty of producing an art of the Holocaust is as good as anything on the subject; although it seems a shame that it is based on the memorial project for Berlin rather than the completed piece in Vienna by the sculptor Rachel Whiteread. I have seen only photographs of this, but they seem to bear out Adrian Searle's verdict in the Guardian : "The building's emphatic muteness and silence is the appropriate response to the enormity of its subject."
Manguel might not have been convinced, for he has his own experience of the immutability of evil, at school in an Argentina under the yoke of the military junta. "Each instance of evil exists in its own terms," he writes. "The Holocaust, for instance, is its own paradigm; each other instance of evil - the torture of Argentine children by the military or the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia - is only equivalent to itself. We don't need to assemble them to have a gestalt portrait of evil. Evil, like God, is in the details." But then he also writes, beautifully, "absence too can be a monument"; and maybe the silent voice of Whiteread's Judenplatz memorial meets his argument.
The two central chapters concern image-making and iconoclasm, ideas that, as the actions of the Taliban remind us, are always current. Manguel is fond of faintly opaque Biblical quotations, and on the difficulties of art turns to Ecclesiastes (1:8): "All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." But he does not quote the more transparent and utterly central justification of the iconoclasts: "Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the Lord" (Deuteronomy 27:15). Indeed, he is more interested in the multiple meanings of images than in the impulse to absolute prohibition.
His starting point is the sixth- century Pope Gregory's justification of pictures in churches: that for the illiterate they are the equivalent of reading. Manguel traces the development of imagery from the strictly controlled content of early Christian portrayals to modern figurative art, in which, "Since the artistic language of our time is not specific in its connotations, our interpretation remains private, one of many, a story added to the private story of the painting itself, a second or third or tenth layer of meaning that grows not from the original skin of the painting but from our own time and place."
Every portrait, Manguel argues, is a self-portrait because "we [the viewers] bring to a portrait our perceptions and our experience. In the alchemy of the creative act, every portrait is a mirror." But: "In order to know objectively who we are, we must see ourselves outside ourselves, in something that holds our image but is not part of us . . . as Narcissus did when he fell in love with his image in the pool." Perhaps; but perhaps, too, this analysis is over-subtle. Does it help us to understand Rembrandt by himself, or the self-image of the aged Titian peering yearningly into the face of the dead Christ? Only darkly. When it comes to words seeking to unravel the innermost content of painting, we are thrown back on the preacher: "vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes, 1:2).