I’ve been writing a novel on and off for the past eight years. This is often an insufferable way to start a conversation, but it’s an insufferable sort of novel—a book of endless beginnings and an unending collection of unnamed characters living unremarkable lives, narrated by a writer/narrator who wants nothing more than to have written a novel. It’s sophomoric, and not just because I started it right before my second year of college. It’s like the old saying goes: “If you have nothing good to say, turn it into a novel.”
Possibly unsalvageable, the novel represents to me a desire to create art for the sake of having created it. It started without a plan and it rarely continued with one. I wrangled plot concepts and half-ideas of characters into a semblance of a narrative, starting from nothing and ending not much further off. I know why I wrote it and why it still sits in my Google Docs, waiting for me to pick it up again, despite my best instincts—you can’t be a writer if you haven’t written anything. You can’t be an artist if you haven’t made art.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
—
I first learned about Karl Friedrich Schinkel reading the glossy art book What Great Paintings Say by Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, trying to learn what it says on the cover. My wife spent a dozen years formally studying art; I did not (cf. Broad Sound: Vol. 1 for my apologetic writing on not studying music, either). I flipped to a page and found a painting of a Gothic cathedral that felt like a dream. Turns out, that’s almost exactly what it is.
Schinkel was an early 19th-century Prussian architect and painter whose career rose with the fall of Napoleon. Though he designed sets for stage productions and had an eye for the fine arts, Schinkel’s vocation was architecture, a role distinctly tied to governmental bureaucracy. To trace his career is to follow a line of government contracts and civil servant promotions. At one point, the architect rose to head of the Oberbaudeputation, a position in which Schinkel “supervised all building work in Prussia, a task he took very seriously,” per art historian Peter Betthausen in “Karl Friedrich Schinkel: A Universal Man,” his piece for a 1991 exhibition of the same name. Getting to that point took some time.
The problem with most wars is that they cost governments a lot of money, especially if they’re against Napoleon. Schinkel took government service under the king in 1810, but Napoleon was finally defeated only five years later, and during his early career, the civil servant struggled to fulfill his visions of grand architecture. He sought to memorialize the wars that had led to the redrawing of lines for Germany—and, indeed, all of Europe—with a magnificent structure. Schinkel and Goethe and many others considered Gothic architecture to be of distinctly Germanic origins, and a testament of Gothic grandeur would be a source of national pride. “Schinkel would never build a national cathedral to commemorate the wars of liberation,” I read in What Great Paintings Say, “probably because the public purse was empty.” So, he did the only thing there is to do when there isn’t enough money: make art.
“Our mind is not free if it is not the master of its imagination; the freedom of the mind is manifest in every victory over self, every resistance to external enticements, every elimination of an obstacle to this goal. Every moment of freedom is blessed.” This was Schinkel’s personal motto, per Alfred Freiherr von Wolzogen, his son-in-law (as quoted by Betthausen). As an architect shackled by costs, Schinkel sought his freedom elsewhere. That’s what art is for.
In an 1810 exterior perspective design for a memorial chapel or mausoleum for Prussia’s Queen Louise, you can see Schinkel yearning to go beyond the material means permitted to such a project. The watercolor painting depicts a space that is grand, almost endless, and certainly Gothic. Pillars and arches upon pillars and arches form a triple entrance that extends deep inward below vaulted ceilings.
“The Gothic architectural style,” writes art historian Helmut Börsch-Supan in his essay “Schinkel the Artist,” “which was thought to be of German origin, was an affirmation of faith in the German Middle Ages, and, accordingly, of resistance to the hegemony of Napoleon, who took his cue from imperial Roman traditions.” The real mausoleum that Queen Louise lies in looks like any other Roman-style building, complete with pediment (that triangle thing on top of the columns) and Doric columns (those column things under the pediment).
In his 1810 pen lithograph of a Gothic church behind trees, we once again see Schinkel dreaming, hiding his great, imposing structure behind a great, imposing tree. By concealing it, he realizes the Romantics’ “search for the complete work of art uniting harmoniously all the manifestations of man and nature, architecture and religion, poetry and music,” if you’d ask art historian Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher. (Her answer can be found in the 1991 catalog Karl Friedrich Schinkel: A Universal Man.) If you’d ask me, I’d say he’s making a space that feels more real. Hiding behind something implies depth, implies a third dimension with its Z-axis and its vanishing point. Hiding implies a world within the art. That’s my perspective, anyway.
The most fascinating of Schinkel’s painted works, to my mind, are two that could be considered siblings: Cathedral Overlooking a City (1813) and A Medieval City on a River (1815). Gorgeously sunlit from the rear and front, respectively, the cathedrals in both paintings feel idealized to the point of exaltation. The river cathedral lays beneath a perfectly arched rainbow; the other looms over all, overtaking the focus of the painted image. These buildings are so big and so decidedly Gothic. See the pointed arches, the carved statues and ornaments, the peaks and spires, the rose window. You better believe those buttresses are flying.
Out of context, these paintings depict scenes that feel perfectly arranged; the artist, we think, must have found a really great day to stand before these cathedrals, or else fibbed a little, because the world is not so kind so often. Look at the way the light halos around the river cathedral, shafts illuminating the intricate features of this stunning construction. The world is not often so kind to art, we might think. And we would be wrongly right.
Neither cathedral exists—money and bureaucracy and Napoleon would see to that—and yet they have a realness to them that’s undeniable. Schinkel’s river cathedral is the best memorial he could create for Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III’s return from the field. Schinkel would sketch and propose enormous monuments that would never come to fruition. He was able to build, but modestly: “What Schinkel the artist imagines soaring into the heights, Schinkel the architect kept firmly on the ground,” write the Hagens.
You can’t be an artist if you don’t make art (at least, that’s what some say), but that’s not why Schinkel made these paintings. He had something inside him that he needed to express, a longing to connect with his national identity, and to demonstrate pride for a newborn people and a newly ended Holy Roman Empire. At this point in his career, Schinkel was uninterested in the classicism of Roman- and Greek-style architecture. He wanted instead that work of art uniting harmoniously with the world, a bridge between man and nature and all sorts of artforms. He had something to say with art—with architecture, whether real or imagined.
And Now: A Brief Interlude About Michelangelo
- “In its sheer bulk, the literature on Michelangelo is michelangelesque,” wrote Paul Barolsky in Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and Its Maker. I’m mostly sharing this because I think the quote is excellent, but I also am wary about wading into these heavily trafficked waters.
- Michelangelo believed, as SpongeBob would demonstrate after him, that there were hidden forms within the block of stone that would become a sculpture. It was his responsibility to remove the extraneous and bring out the figure within.
- Michelangelo’s work was often accompanied by a quality of non finito—there was still some rough-hewn element of stone left behind, or a hint to the larger block from which the work emerged. Two compelling reasons exist for this:
- Non finito as a means of depth: Michelangelo was “intentionally finding in unfinishedness a particular means of expression that is reliant upon the contemplative viewer to infer and complete the picture.” — Benedetta Ricci, Artland Magazine
- Non finito as a means of braggadocio: “By leaving a trace of what the statue once was, Michelangelo revealed the virtú of his hand in bringing mere marble into the likeness of a living, breathing being.” — Barolsky, The Faun in the Garden
- Michelangelo was an artist of Pygmalionesque quality. We’ll get back to this.
Richard Haas is another artist engaged in architecture, though unlike Schinkel, Haas’s work is mostly painted. “Richard Haas is an artist about architecture—he makes people stop and think about architecture and realize that buildings are not just a backdrop; they are also an active presence in our lives,” wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger in Vanity Fair, per Haas’s own website.
Haas told art historian Avis Berman in a 2009 Smithsonian oral history that he never liked the term, but his art engages with the concept of trompe l’œil, the artistic use of visual illusion to trick the eye into seeing painted things in three dimensions. Haas is a mural artist, creating works that turn the two-dimensional canvas of building façades into three-dimensional painted spaces.
One of the earliest expressions of this art concept can be found in a story about two painters, recorded in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (translated by John F. Healy):
In a contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Zeuxis produced so successful a representation of grapes that birds flew up to the stage-buildings where it was hung. Then Parrhasius produced such a successful trompe-l’œil of a curtain that Zeuxis, puffed up with pride at the judgment of the birds, asked that the curtain be drawn aside and the picture revealed. When he realized his mistake, with an unaffected modesty he conceded the prize, saying that whereas he had deceived birds, Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.
In a way, trompe-l’œil can be understood as a means of deception, as Zeuxis sees it. But to me, false depth in art creates a new reality.
Haas’s best works feel like magic tricks, expanding spaces and deepening architecture to continue outward and/or inward, allowing the eye to see more through paint, beyond the brick and steel that lie beneath. They create totally new spaces that feel real—and, I would argue, are. While never suffering due to war with Napoleon, Haas’s art comes up against the difficulties and bureaucracy of permission necessary to create at the scale he does; canceled and modified projects litter his records. In the oral history interview, Schinkel said, “politics is such a volatile and changing thing that it can have a terrifically bad effect in a matter of seconds when things don’t align correctly.”
Through the right connection, Haas was able to put up his first major mural in 1975, at 112 Prince Street in New York City. The front of the building featured cast-iron design along the façade, frames and edges jutting out beyond the windows. The east side to the left was a sheer wall with two windows. Under Haas’s design, the east side was painted to look like an extension of the building, adding windows and curtains and cast-iron design, as if the building was a whole object, not partially a placeholder for an adjacent building’s west wall.
Look into his portfolio and you see works of art further integrating into their environs, but often doing more than just fitting in. My wife and I visited a Haas mural in Yonkers, N.Y.: Gateway to the Waterfront. The piece isn’t fully intact and was partially covered by an urban-renewal project-in-progress, but even from across the street, it was something else. Larger than life, flanked on both sides by images of two stone statues above Ionic columns, the gateway led into a cave of stone and dripping water, sunlight streaming in through its roof. A work of flat painting, Gateway was anything but—its frame seemed to jut out, its figures shadowed just right, and the cave within seemed to extend ever inward.
I look at images of his artwork adorning flat sides of buildings or punching holes in reality, extending, expanding, and elevating, and I see the same urges of Schinkel—here is an artist intent on a world more grand, a world more possible. In the art showcase Richard Haas: An Architecture of Illusion, Haas testifies about his work on the Crossroads Building at Broadway and 42nd Street, turning plain edifice into a magnificent memorial: “I was attracted to the building because it is an enormous tower 130 feet tall and 28 feet square.
“small windows on the east side and was otherwise solid cinderblock. The building had apparently been thrown up in 1906 by the owners to retain air rights, since the laws were being changed at the time… This building was always a favorite of mine, but unfortunately it lost its skin in the early 1960s.
As Haas continues, he speaks of the project as restoration, and that’s really what it is. Lit up and glanced at from the street, the Crossroads building under Haas’s coating is as real as any other skyscraper in the city.
—
My unfinished novel has many unfinished characters, and there are two who appear more than any other. The first is the author/narrator, a figure who questions every decision he makes in telling the stories of nameless people who live in the same city and suffer from different forms of mediocrity: failures in direction, employment, emotional satisfaction, self-awareness, understanding how revolving doors work. The second most frequently appearing character is a young-ish man on the way to his first day of his first job, suffering from an overbearing mother and oversweating back and underexperienced engagement with the world. They’re both the same guy. Everyone’s the same guy.
The novel is written in such a way that it’s being written as it’s being read. You’re engaging with a text perpetually incomplete, almost but not quite stream-of-consciousness. And the thing that I can’t escape is how much it is a work about art for the sake of its having-been-created. God, it’s rough. Art should have a reason to be, shouldn’t be this work forever in progress. This thing that’s solipsistic, that’s masochistic. It’s a lot.
Here is the epigraph that opens the manuscript, a quote from Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm: “The scientific name for swordfish is Xiphias gladius; the first word means ‘sword’ in Greek and the second word means ‘sword’ in Latin. ‘The scientist who named it was evidently impressed by the fact that it had a sword,’ as one guidebook says.”
It felt apt.
—
I am not trying to be funny when I say that the artist whom Richard Haas most reminds me of is Wile E. Coyote. Created by artist Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese, Wile E. is on a perpetual mission to catch and eat the Road Runner, a blue-feathered bird that zips through Monument Valley like a veritable Speed Racer. In one of his most famous wily efforts, seen in the 1949 short “Fast and Furry-ous,” Wile E. paints a tunnel onto the side of a cliff face, hoping Road Runner will collide into it at full tilt. (A New Yorker cartoon by Will Santino depicting the familiar scene has the coyote smugly thinking, “An art degree will never come in handy, they said.”) Despite Wile E.’s best efforts, Road Runner runs right through the mural, entering this alternate art world by following the line of the road. Wile E. tries the same thing, colliding and collapsing into a heap.
As modern successor to both Parrhasius and Zeuxis, Wile E. fools himself as an artist, creating an expression of trompe l’œil as real to Road Runner as it is earth-shatteringly painful to its own creator. As a metaphor, it seems fair to recognize this image for its truth: art gets away from us all, and the artist may lose control of the very thing they tried to create, unable to enter the world that is so convincing and inviting to their audience. I think of the coyote when I think of Richard Haas because they were both able to create something so real with their respective arts.
The cinema of Looney Tunes extends the line of tradition dating back to early film. Its ability to create space within a smaller frame that feels real and tangible is familiar to anyone who knows a bit of background about the movies: “An oft-repeated anecdote of early film history,” writes film professor J.P. Telotte in Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E,
recounts how audience members at the Lumière brothers’ first screening of their Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) recoiled in fear as the train moved from deep background toward the foreground and eventually off the frame, as if expecting the mechanism to emerge from the screen and enter into their world. It is a story that, though perhaps spurious, has been so frequently recounted precisely because it suggests the sort of phenomenal power of those first projected images, while also hinting at the new cinematic mechanism’s ability to suture—somewhat disturbingly—two different sorts of space, the reproduced world of cinematic space and the real world of human experience.
While writing about Wile E. and Road Runner, Telotte describes the Road Runner’s actions as “constructing a new geography for the scene.” Though I prefer to think of the coyote as the creative force, it is true that without the Road Runner, the painting would be just a painting. Like Michelangelo’s refined stone peeking out of roughened edges, the tunnel welcomes its audience to finish the effect on its own behalf. The creative process can belong as much to its viewer as it can to its creator.
—
I said we would get back to Pygmalion, so let’s go back. There are two major Pygmalions in the history of Western literature (not counting Pretty Woman): the myth relayed by Ovid in his Metamorphoses and the play written by George Bernard Shaw. In the myth, Pygmalion is an artist who’s tired of women. He sculpts a statue that becomes his perfect woman, and is so perfect, in fact, that she seems to be real:
A miracle of ivory in a statue,
So charming that it made him fall in love.
Her face was life itself; she was a darling—
And yet too modest to permit advances
Which showed his art had artful touches in it,
The kind of art that swept him off his feet;
He stroked her arms, her face, her sides, her shoulder.
Was she alive or not? He could not tell.
(Translation: Horace Gregory)
Pygmalion is the paradigmatic artist of the real, the predecessor to Shaw’s Henry Higgins, who first talks about passing a flower girl from the slums off as a duchess before determining himself to “make a lady” of her. To transform—whether by sculpting out of marble, painting on a canvas (gallery- or building-sized), or chipping away at a girl’s elocution—is to create.
Michelangelo and his non finito works of art beg endless comparisons to Pygmalion. Historian Barolsky quotes Michelangelo’s contemporary Vasari, who quotes the poet Strozzi, referring to the figure of Christ in Michelangelo’s Pietà as “vivo in marmo morte,” or “alive in the dead stone.” Barolsky refers to Vasari’s invocation of the theology of the incarnation, as the figure is brought to life in “muscles, veins, and very pulses.” To Michelangelo, the figures were alive inside the stone, and he just needed to let them out. He leaves the rough edges of stone still visible so you can see the act of transformation and understand that art creates something real, which is not just to say tangible.
“Landscape views are particularly interesting when we detect signs of human existence within them,” said Schinkel, per his son-in-law Wolzogen. “An overall view of a land on which no human has ever set foot can have a quality of awesome beauty; but the viewer becomes uncertain, uneasy and unhappy because what a human being most wants to experience is the way fellow human beings tame nature, live within her and enjoy her beauty.” Even for Schinkel, who idealized nature and painted perfect trees, it can only be as beautiful as it is with the input of human effort and artistry.
Think of Haas, who made a series of proposals in the 1970s to paint the shadows of torn-down buildings on the façades of the blockier, featureless replacements covering the graves of the original Madison Square Garden, of St. John’s Chapel, of the Singer Building. Think of Mary Poppins jumping into the chalk painting, Zeuxis asking to pull back the curtain, Schinkel building in paint, Haas creating reflections and shadows and windows to the past and to imagined presents, and you’ll see people looking to engage with the reality of art, trying to reach beyond the borders of the frame. Haas insisted that he didn’t like the term trompe l’œil being used regarding his work, and while I don’t know his reasons, I have to agree. Your eyes aren’t being fooled if what they’re seeing is real.
—
“Logicians have no place near poetry,” wrote Mark Forsyth in his book of linguistic analysis, The Elements of Eloquence. It might not be true, or it might rely on its context, but there it is, between a set of curved lines that make it important. It’s in the back of my notebook with such lines as “One rule we do not deviate from: never be boring” (my copywriting teacher Rich Pels) or “I find myself incapable of being moved by vegetation” (poet Charles Baudelaire). That notebook collects all sorts of quotes and ideas and spitballs and lists, the kind of stuff that formed the novel that should probably never be. I worry. Am I a logician who misunderstood his place? You can’t be an artist if you haven’t made art. That’s what I tell myself. And when I make art for that reason, I just don’t know if it’s art at all.
One of my favorite quotes in the back of the notebook is a poem by Shel Silverstein:
A lizard in a blizzard
Got a snowflake in his gizzard
And nothing else much happened, I’m afraid,
But lizard rhymed with blizzard
And blizzard rhymed with gizzard
And that, my dear, is why most poems are made.
My novel doesn’t have any great lines that tell you about art, unless you count that thing about the swordfish, which, of course, I didn’t write. A scientist was impressed by the sword on the tip of a fish’s nose. Voila. Art makes things real, but it also highlights strange things that only you thought were interesting. It’s how Schinkel was able to build his cathedrals, how Haas was able to open worlds on the sides of buildings. It’s how I spent eight years on and off writing a novel (yes it’s insufferable, get over it)—not wasting time, but trying to create something and see if I made anything real. Maybe the next thing will be. Logic will tell us nothing helpful.
One of the most meaningful gifts that my wife, with her dozen years of art and art history study, ever gave me was a print of one of her paintings, a work inspired by Brazilian artist Romero Britto. Brightly colored, angular and Cubist, the print hung on my wall before we were married, and moved with me—and then us—through our different apartments over the years. She rarely (if ever) gave away her art
Some years ago, I asked my wife why she makes art. “I always liked art,” she answered, “but once I started actually studying and practicing, it became this kind of catharsis for me. Painting is where I can put my emotions without having to actually communicate with anyone.” That quote made it into my notebook, too. I’ve never forgotten what it felt like to be opened up to in that moment, to feel her art bringing us together, uniting us by something true but rarely spoken.
I picked up a book called What Great Paintings Say trying to learn what it said on the cover. I saw cathedrals and gateways and truth. Miracles of ivory and human transformations. The human project is non finito, however much we may fool ourselves. We keep writing, we hold onto our Google Doc drafts and spitballs and quotes. Bare bricks could make way for the Brooklyn Bridge, the sun could shine on the cathedrals in our hearts. I’m still looking for my cathedral. I don’t need to prove that I’m a writer, to write for the sake of having written. But when I find what I’m looking for, I won’t be able to help writing.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
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