The BAC gets decadent with new 'Visions'

It was somewhat unnerving for me to be assigned to review the BAC's new exhibit, John Martin: Visions of the Biblical Flood, as it marked the eerie coincidence of my mother's existence as a senior at college with my own. My mother wrote her senior essay on the little-known Martin. As I write this, I picture her as she must have looked in 1964, with partial beehive and pale lipstick, mulling over reproductions of "Belshazzar's Feast," and wishing she had picked a more reliable artist.

When I called my mother with the news of Martin's appearance in New Haven and prodded her for facts about his work, she revealed that she remembered absolutely nothing about him. Rather than discourage me from seeing the show, however, my mother's strange amnesia made me curious. What sort of artist could be so unremarkable, and why would the BAC have a whole exhibition on the man?

The meeting of the three paintings that constitute Visions (and yes, there are only three) is an unprecedented event: these paintings have never been shown together outside of the painter's own studio. I think the BAC--with their traditional frump-chic decor--does manage to pull off this small show as "a whole exhibition." Walking into the exhibition room is like walking into a seraglio. Betassled, crimson curtains hang not only over the mouth of the entrance but in every corner of the room. How to explain the BAC's sudden decadence? The curtains are there to heighten our awareness of the exhibition's significance: it is a first, and an intimate first at that. They make the experience a cohesive (if somewhat hokey) experience--which is really what the effect of seeing Martin's art ought to be.

John Martin (1789-1854) has never been so well-appreciated as when he was young. His early paintings of chaotic biblical landscapes led one of his contemporaries to state, "That which chiefly distinguished Mr. Martin from other artists is his power of depicting the Vast,--the Magnificent,--the Terrible,--the Brilliant,--the Obscure,--the Supernatural,--and sometimes, the Beautiful." But by the time of his death, Martin had approached bankruptcy, had turned from oils to engravings in order to gain an income from cheap reproductions of his work, and had generally gone out of vogue. Even his obituary was reserved in its praise: "Possibly it was scene painting--sleight of hand; but it was also new. If easy the style was his own. Nobody else had caught the trick by which he ravished the senses of the multitude and sometimes dazzled the imaginations of calmer men."

The flood paintings compress the story of the flood into the span of evening, night and dawn. The first painting, "The Eve of the Deluge" (1840) depicts the conjunction of sun, moon and comet in the sky and the rising of the waters. Although the human figures in the work are rendered like two-by-fours and the pastel-colored heavens and waters look not unlike the sort of painting one might see on the side of a Chevy van, there is an ineffable, mesmerizing quality about the juxtaposition of earthy browns with crystalline blues.

Martin's painting of "The Deluge" (1834) is the BAC's own acquisition and is the most technically and compositionally adept of the three paintings. Through composition and color, it pulls the viewer between the extremes of despair and hope. The waves appear a sanguine brown and the only visible element of sky is the place where the red-tinted moon shines through a rising wave. Human bodies are minuscule on this canvas, overwhelmed as they are by the water's dark force. Light comes from two sources: a bolt of lightning shoots out in a spatter of white paint and sears one man at the painting's dead center; to counteract this flash of destructive light, however, the ark itself, pale and distant, rides a far wave. Although the backgrounding of the salient narrative image of the ark is a trick that Martin seems to have borrowed from Turner and Gericault, it's a trick that works well for Martin, creating a dynamic relationship between painting and viewer.

Although Martin's paintings owe much to the innovations of his contemporaries, he does have moments of painterly ingenuity. Take the third painting, "The Assuaging of the Waters" (1840), for example. Although the standard rainbow-sherbet sky has reemerged with the sun, and the waves are embossed with white in the manner of a sympathy card, the painting is redeemed from such saccharine effects of sunlight by the activity in its lower half. As the land recovers from the flood, so the relics of the antediluvian world reemerge. The acrid reds and greens of algae and the patterns of the Bosch-like crustacean shells create a jarring color field that, in being jarring, is intensely satisfying to regard.

Recently, my taste in art has become complicated by an increasing reliance upon irony. I find I often like less-than-beautiful paintings that try so hard to be beautiful and fail so grandly. I know I have inherited this penchant for the tragically showy from my mother: due to nature and nurture, both my aesthetic sensibility and my sense of humor are hers. I can imagine, therefore, why she might choose to write a lengthy, if forgettable, tract on John Martin. Martin's paintings are large and unapologetic, characteristics which she and I both see as a basic foundation for artistic greatness. Martin's brave attempts at greatness deserve to be admired, if the paintings that such efforts have produced do not.

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