Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806)Don Quixote Attacking the Biscayan, 1780s, Brush with brown and gray washes over charcoal on laid paper, 16 5/16 × 11 5/16 in (41.4 × 28.7 cm)
THE ARTWORK AS A JOURNEY
Successive approximation is a process whereby the artist makes statements that he or she then continually corrects, gradually arriving at the finished statement. The work alternates between creative generation and critical assessment. It proceeds as both a response to the subject matter and a response to what has already been achieved in the work.
This process can be glimpsed in many old master drawings where the artist has launched into the work but then adjusted his first statements in a continuous process. In a drawing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) illustrating a scene from Don Quixote, multiple marks and erasures are visible, recording the struggle of the artist to arrive at a successful composition. Similarly, in many paintings from the Romantic era, by artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner (1789–1862), John Constable (1776–1837), and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), it is possible to see that the artist has made numerous changes during the course of the work as he pushes both drawing and color into position.
Prior to the late nineteenth century, artists would conceal the process of successive approximation in their finished work. The idea that the work of art could incorporate the record of these changes in the final state gradually took hold during Impressionism, with its immediate and fresh technique. The Postimpressionists took things further. In the mature works of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), the artist stood in front of his subject matter, usually a landscape or still life, and made numerous attempts to record exactly where he perceived the locations of various elements in his composition to be. “Painting from nature is not copying the object,” he once observed, “it is realizing one’s sensations.” As he turned his head or moved slightly, his perception of location shifted. The painting becomes the sum of its attempted approximations.
Similarly, the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), working later in the twentieth century, made drawings, paintings, and sculpture that engaged in a long process of approximation and correction. For this artist, the process created a gloriously deep and unearthly sense of space in drawings and paintings and a strangely thin and attenuated set of forms in his sculpture. In both cases, the artist saw the works as unfinished. For him the process of successive approximation remained open ended. “That’s the terrible thing,” he said, “the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.”
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806)
Don Quixote Attacking the Biscayan, 1780s, Brush with brown and gray washes over charcoal on laid paper, 16 5/16 × 11 5/16 in (41.4 × 28.7 cm)
Alberto Giacometti (1901–66)
Portrait of Annette, 1961, Oil on canvas, 45 5/8 × 35 1/4 in (115.9 × 89.5 cm)
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
At the Water’s Edge, c. 1890, Oil on canvas, 28 3/4 × 36 7/16 in (73 × 92.5 cm)
