I once saw a film in which Henri Matisse was shown in his garden, drawing some large, deeply lobed leaves. The drawings were made swiftly and simply, and the effect was that of watching someone with the command over his hand that a great skater has over her body, executing some intricate figure in a single graceful sweep. The film then repeated the episode in slow-motion photography, and what at normal speed looked unhesitating and confident was revealed as a sequence of separate hesitations and decisions, too rapid to be registered by either consciousness or perception. The drawings themselves showed nothing of this history of trials and probings—they looked as graceful and certain as the gesture of making them when normally perceived. Were it not for the slowed camera, we would have no knowledge of how many tiny decisions—how many tiny actions—were performed in what outwardly appeared to be a single flowing act of drawing. And the latter, like consciousness itself, which does not, as William James famously declared, “appear to itself chopped into bits,” in fact has the discontinuity of a bird’s existence: “an alternation of flights and perches.”
The stunning scrolling curves that Robert Mangold designates “curled figures” exist on a heroic scale by comparison with Matisse’s leaves, which were drawn on a pad of paper he could easily hold with one hand while he drew with the other. Mangold’s curled figures, by contrast, span large, multipaneled canvases and seem to imply the coordination of the artist’s whole body in a feat of strength and virtuosity, executing what appears at a normal distance from the canvas to be a perfect arabesque in a single draftsmanly act. The curled figures are compound spirals, which we read as unwinding from left to right, and we naturally infer that they must have been drawn from left to right as well, since we write in the same direction that we read. I want to describe the spirals somewhat closely, and in relationship to the space in which they are sited, since the points through which they unfurl have been plotted with the precision of a master shot in billiards. That alone should make us suspect of our first impression that they were drawn with a single flourish.
In Curled Figure XXII, the figure occupies four square panels. There are (so far) two versions of this work, which vary only in background color, orange in one version and a warm gray green in the other. I am mainly concerned with the figure itself and its relationship to the edges of the space it so gracefully fills. The figure resembles what is known as an Euler spiral, named after the Swiss mathematician who first studied it in 1744. It is an involuted curve—a curve traced as if by a point at the end of thread kept taut as it is unwound. It is important to realize that Mangold drew these figures without mechanical aids, in a procedure that depends entirely upon the coordination of hand and eye. But the relationship of the curve to the space, and especially to the edges, is so carefully thought out that it would be something of a miracle if the figure were drawn, say, with Matisse’s élan. The spiral begins at a point midway across the left panel and about a third of the way up from the bottom edge. As it unwinds, it touches the edges of that panel at three points—bottom edge, left edge, and top edge—before describing a serpentine path across the two middle panels, finally curling to a point midway across the right-hand panel and about a third of the way down from the top edge, after touching the edges of that panel at three corresponding points—top edge, right edge, bottom edge. The six points at which the curve touches—or nearly touches—the edges of the panels define the relationship between curve and its containing space, and the exactitude of its unwinding from point to point is integral to our experience of the work.
When we move closer to the canvas, however, we realize that, far from having been drawn with a single winding and rewinding gesture, the drawing of the spiral shows the same history of “flights and perches” that Matisse’s drawing does when it is viewed in slow motion. What at normal viewing distance is a perfect spiral is at close distance a path marked by little decisions and revisions, changes in direction and velocity, almost as if it were a drawing by Rembrandt where the search for the edge were as important as the edge itself, or where it is impossible to identify what belongs to the boundary from the search for where it is located. The comparison is overstated. To study a drawing by Rembrandt is always to be conscious of the way a figure emerges through the search for it. In Mangold’s drawing, we become conscious of the search at a near distance, but it vanishes from consciousness as we stand far enough away from the canvas to see the whole curve evenly unwinding from left to right, filling the entire expanse of the canvas, touching the edges at precisely the six points. Far and near are, as it were, like the two speeds at which we see the act of drawing in the film of Matisse. From a far distance, the whole figure has the inevitability of something made flawless and predictable by practice and disciplined reflexes. From a near distance, we see the “flights and perches” the trained hand makes as it feels its way from point to point. The concept of a spiral has no room, so to speak, for the imprecision and hesitation of the human hand. But it belongs to these works that the figures be understood as having been
drawn by hand.
It is Mangold’s
intention that these works exist on the boundary between drawing and painting, which means that the curled figure somehow retains its identity as something hand drawn. This, I think, is the function of those signs of seeking—the intermittencies of searching—as the pencil feels its way toward the exact gradients of the curve. Only when the form has been found—when the drawing is done and the figure has been executed to the eye’s satisfaction—does the painting begin. The color is laid down in a thin coat by means of a small roller and carried to the edges of the figure. It is crucial that it be a thin coat, in order not to obliterate the history of the drawing. One can see the marks of the search through the paint, as in a palimpsest. Or one can if one stands close to the surface. From a distance one sees just the handsome curve in a field of color, much in the way, when one sees Matisse drawing at normal speed, one sees the crayon execute an outline without any sign of hesitation. It is as if each of the curled figures is seen as a drawing at close range but a painting at normal viewing distance. The use of the roller enables the artist to deposit the color without calling attention to the act of painting. The entire achievement is an exercise in veiled bravura.
Euler could not have studied the spiral that bears his name without the previous invention of analytical geometry, which means that the curve is the graph of an algebraic equation. It is a fair conjecture, I think, that Mangold did not compute the loci of the points that define his curve, any more than spiders do in the webs that display curves very like Euler’s spiral or, for the matter, than the chambered nautilus, the coils of whose shell exemplify it perfectly. The spiral is found in certain flowers, but it is probably because of its presence in spiderwebs that it came to be called a clothoidal curve, after Clotho, one of the three Fates of ancient mythology. It is Clotho who spins the thread of our life to a certain length, determined by her sister Lachesis, at which point it is cut by the third Fate, Atropos. A spiral is thought of as a curve that unwinds around a point while moving farther and farther away until, as in Euler’s spiral, it winds back around a second point. And to make a final reference, the curled figures are scrolls—written texts that are wound and rewound about spindles, with only part of the text exposed at any given time. The curled figures, for me, are visual metaphors for narratives—the left-hand spiral the beginning, the right-hand spiral the ending. Once one starts looking for them, clothoidal spirals are everywhere. They are optimal for constructing curves in highways. They reappear as S curves in Rococo ornamentation, along with the C curves of Curled Figure XIV. What I always admire in Mangold’s paintings is the way one starts with trying to get the geometry right but then finds oneself thinking about the relationship of the hand to the forms, and then goes on to pick up human associations the more we think about them. Drawing, spinning, winding, rolling, and reading are cognate activities that imply beginnings and endings and actual durations. The “curled figures” thus are not simply forms that we take in all at once. We read them like texts.
The contrast between the essentially horizontal
Curled Figure and the narrow and starkly vertical
Column Paintings could not be more vivid. The use of the word “column” has an art-historical reference, primarily through their images, to the
Endless Column of Brancusi, which has, as form, no internally determined terminus. That is what endlessness means, after all—the figures, made up of regularly repeated pulses, can be indefinitely protracted in either direction. It is an endless
column, however, through its vertical orientation: The pulses ascend skyward. Freestanding columns—Trajan’s Column, for example, the Vendôme Column, or the Wellington Monument—carry the eye irresistibly upward.
Endlessness evokes infinity, and by a natural association the first of the Column Paintings has two of the familiar double-looped infinity symbols atop one another as in a mathematical totem pole. The curves touch or nearly touch the edges of the space at ten contact points. Notwithstanding the imperatives of composition, however, endlessness is not something that can be contained in a finite space, so however well the doubled infinite symbol is suited to its space, the image is cut off at the upper and lower edges, since it could go on and on in both vertical directions. It does not belong to the nature of an endlessly repeated image to relate internally to the edges of a space at all. The linear representation of heartbeat in an electrocardiogram has no internal relationship to the edges of the monitor, which merely shows a segment of the heart’s pulsations. Brancusi’s endless columns do in fact terminate, but their ending where they do is a matter of external and arbitrary decision.
The point is made visible in the other two
Column Paintings here on view.
Column Painting #2 has two sine waves, one the trigonometric mirror image of the other, which intersect along a vertical axis (one is solid and the other hollow). They execute a kind of dance, and though Mangold had characteristically fitted them to the edges of the space, they could go on crossing one another’s path to any distance. And similarly with
Column Painting #3, in which the waves have different amplitudes. One of them owns the lateral edges, the other owns the center, and they relate like male and female dancers, the latter whirling around the former. But the dance can continue indefinitely. Mangold has made the
Column Paintings about twice the height of a normal human, so eye level falls about midway between top and bottom. This gives them a certain human scale as objects, but the images imply an eternal ascent.
The only painting culture I can think of that uses the vertical format is the Chinese, with its wall scrolls of landscapes and clouds, cascades and abysses, confined within narrow spaces. I am suddenly interested in discovering where in that space the Chinese master of the tall landscape begins what I imagine as the downward journey of his brush. Chinese writing goes from top to bottom, and one imagines that Chinese painting must go that way as well. In the Column Paintings, the curves seem to rise rather than descend—their direction is up, implying, for what it is worth, something about the differences between spirit and matter.
A while ago, I asked Mangold whether 9/11 had had any impact on his art. I had been collecting examples of artists whose work showed the effect of that experience. Mangold felt that while he of course had been affected, he doubted whether his work had, or even whether his work could be. Yet I cannot help but wonder if these are less column paintings than tower paintings—whether they are not really New York paintings, slim, elegant, and vertical, and animated by imagery that implies no limit, even if it can be cut off by the Fates.
December 2003