I’d like to say a bit more about Frances McCormack’s remarkable ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ painting (discussed in my previous post) than I was able to think and articulate at the opening. As I noted, a part of the unfocused and unanchored impressions I had at the opening was that there was some kind of resonance with earlier art, in particular later works by Georges Braque, Arshile Gorky, and perhaps ultimately by Giovanni Bellini and followed by what Walter Pater called ‘The School of Giorgione’, the early Seicento Venetian painters. Having had the chance to reflect on this for a few days, I’ll present here a slightly more articulate version of that thinking, with a few words and some images, both of which I hope will stimulate the reader (if there indeed is any) to revisit these immensely appealing works. The brevity of the remarks next to the richness of the images will make this post seem perhaps more like the transcript of slideshow than a sustained piece of writing, but that does not strike me as a vice in this context.
I preface these remarks with three more points directly relating to McCormack’s painting. First, in her essay in the catalog characterizes her process of painting as feeling “similar to the experience of listening to a raga”, in that there is an inherited sense of strict form combined with a maximal feel of improvisation with its openness and warding off the sense of anything seems like a final accomplishment. Something decisive must emerge, but not something that forecloses the sense of adventure. (MCormack, p. 28) Second, ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ is part of a series of closely related paintings from 2019, four of which are reproduced in the catalog. First is ‘Underground Stream’, which is closely related in structure to many of McCormack’s paintings of the two decades, such as the painting ‘Plunge’ that I reproduced in the previous post.
Like its predecessors, ‘Underground Stream’ presents a dense clustering of elements in a large ‘center’, occupying perhaps three-quarters of the canvas. This kind of formal structuring seems to me a vehicle for McCormack’s interest in maintaining a heightened sense of the paintings’ processual character, as if the form evokes the human heart simultaneously in both its phases, diastole and systole. The stylistic difference between the earlier ‘Plunge’ and the later ‘Underground Stream’ is evident in the shifts from mature to late style (again, described in my previous post) with the latter’s simplifications, use of solid planes of color, and juxtapositions instead of transitions. ‘Underground Stream’, like a number of McCormack’s works after the year 2000, also contains part of a column from the Classical orders, here a diagrammatic depiction of a Corinthian capital.
The other two works of this group from 2019, ‘Sprites Near a Creek’:
And ‘The Conversation’:
finally dispense with the central clustering in favor of more even emphasis across the full canvas through bare juxtaposition of the thin vertical rectangles of the trees, with solid planes of background interspersed in the service of suggesting varying spatial depths. ‘The Conversation’, like ‘Underground Stream’ (an unlike the other two) explicitly depicts part of a Corinthian column in a white-line rendering upon a rectangle that is part black artifact, part gray-blue tree. The horizontal branch connecting the columnar tree with its fully natural neighbor to the left must be, so it seems to me, seen as a direct reminiscence of Bernini’s statue of Daphne turning into a tree to avoid rape by Apollo:
The third preliminary point has already been foreshadowed, which is ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ comes at the end of nearly two decades of use of column and tree as metaphors of each other, or perhaps as two renderings, by nature and by artifice, of primal elements of color, plane, gravity, and space. It’s noteworthy then that ‘Sprites in a Thicket’ does not contain the explicit columnar representation, and so one can ask the question (which admits of no definite answer but, as Kant said about artistic ideas, gives rise to much thought) why such explicit representation is omitted (or suppressed?). I only suggest here that it is a feature of late phases of a genre, as it is of late style, that elements that are typical and central are eliminated in the service of a greater immediacy, though they cannot really be eliminated as specters surrounding a work.
Now let’s recall two episodes from the poetic prehistory of McCormack’s painting. By what must be sheer chance, two of the greatest painters of the first half of the twentieth-century, Georges Braque and Arshile Gorky, each began almost simultaneously with the other a series of paintings of major ambition: Braque began his ‘Atelier’ series in 1939 that in the mid-1950s ultimately contained nine works, and from 1940 to 1942 Gorky painted perhaps eight works in his ‘Garden in Sochi’ series. Braques’s series has long been recognized as the masterpiece of his later period, and Gorky’s series has come to be seen as the crucial body of work marking the abandonment of his discipleship, especially to Picasso, and, although marked by the new orienting figure of Joan Miró, the series within which his mature style seemed to emerge, though not culminate. In the first painting of Braques’s series, ‘Studio (The Vase Before a Window)’ of 1939, Braques’s life-long concern with exploration of the space between objects and his post-1914 concern to develop the implications of the Synthetic Cubist spatial effects of juxtaposing colored planes takes the form of a new grid-like planarity:
Objects—a table, a chair, a palette, etc.—are outlined in white, and their placement across vertical planes of alternately wallpaper, wood grain, and monochrome renders both their situatedness within the space and their mutual relations irresolvably ambiguous. The two window grilles divide the sky itself into planes consubstantial with the other planes, and the relation between interior and exterior inherits the ambiguities of the interior elements.
With the ‘Garden in Sochi’ series Gorky, under the guidance of Miró, has left behind Picasso’s cubist space in favor of biomorphic forms situated uncertainly—in, on, or next to?—a solid olive green expanse.
Space vanishes in favor of metamorphosis, as the markers of delimitation and outline of the shapes are deprived of the consistency that would allow the viewer to acquire a feel for the identities of the forms. (For a penetrating discussion, see Golding, pp. 316-19) Mostly the forms simply touch or run up to the olive green, but there are also uses of both white and black lines to mark edges and internal differentiations.
Braques’s exploration of space, and Gorky’s highlighting of the metaphoric processuality of the figures are both taken up into McCormack’s painting, and both fuse with the large-scale structure of a series. For the series—Braques’ Ateliers, Gorky’s Gardens in Sochi, Mccormack’s Sprites of 2019—suggests another way in which McCormack’s concern with holding off definition gains artistic expression. One senses that no work is definitive; nothing can count as an exhaustion of the possibilities of the reservoir of motifs, styles of rendering, and artistic concerns that give the series its open-ended unity.
A second episode from the prehistory of McCormack’s painting, and one of the greatest in the world’s artistic painting, is the discovery and development of a landscape poetics of memory and imagination in the late work of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. For Bellini I’ll only cite the ‘Sacred Allegory’ of c. 1500-04 that was on loan to the Getty Center in Los Angeles about seven years ago:
In the magnificent study of the poetics of Venetian artistic painting of this period, Johannes Wilde notes that in this late work Bellini has abandoned the kind of patchwork depiction of space and recession that he had introduced around 1470. Consider the detail of the contemplative figure in a cave in the far middle ground/near background
in light of Wilde’s stylistic description: “Very little remains of the stage-set, alternating in a zig-zag of forms which built up Bellini’s earlier landscapes; nevertheless, though the parallel zone, distinguished one from another by slight modifications of tone, a slow recession is achieved, offering us homely sights that make this religious allegory a panorama of our world” (Wilde, p. 40) With the use of parallel elements Bellini undoes something of the coldness so typical of late Quattrocento perspective, where figures seem puppets set into a pre-existing and indifferent spatial grid. Instead, in Bellini and then fully in Giorgione, the figure is a thing of its immediate environment, or conversely something that exudes its own surroundings as a projection and concretization of its own mental state. Imagination and memory are as real in this poetics as the material thing. In the canonical statement of this poetics, Walter Pater noted that in the Alpine landscapes of the Venetian school of Giorgione, the painters only retain “cool colour and tranquilising line”. Music and the whole auditory sensorium is never far from this depicted “country of the pure reason or half-imaginative memory”. In the school of Giorgione “life itself is conceived as a sort of listening”, and “when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be far off”. (Pater (1873)) Not for the last time, McCormack has re-invented and re-invigorated Giorgionesque poetry for the contemporary world.
I break off here, in hopes that I’ve said enough to open the reader to some of the deeper and subtler resonances of McCormack’s painting. Nothing in my experience of the painting suggests that the resonances are exhaustible.
References and Works Consulted:
Matthew Gale, Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia (2010)
John Golding, Visions of the Modern (1994)
Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose 1945-49
Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art (1958)
Signe S. Mayfield and Frances McCormack, Frances McCormack: Rooted in Wonder: Paintings, 1984-2024 (2025)
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)
Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols (1980)
William Seitz, Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies (1962)
Kim S. Theriault, Rethinking Arshile Gorky (2009)
Johannes Wilde, Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian (1974)
Karen Wilkin, Braque (1991)