The Ratjen Collection IV: Eisegesis

Let's finish up our tour of the National Gallery's exhibition of German drawings from the Ratjen Collection (begun here, here, and here). I only have one more drawing to discuss with you, but I have a fair amount to say about it.

Before we get to that, though, I need to set up the story. Lately, I've been working with Leah. Leah (or, more specifically, her belly), inspired my very third blog post, called On Bellies. Apart from having a snazzy belly, Leah is a wonderful model - dedicated, skilled, beautiful, and fascinating to talk with. If you paint from life, and you talk while you paint, you rapidly discover that "fascinating to talk with" is really, really important in a model. So anyway, I just finished a little portrait of Leah:

Leah, 2010, oil on canvas, 24"x20"

I'm planning a larger painting of Leah. One of the many cheerful things about her is that she is irrationally fond of snails (she might argue that this is not irrational). She is particularly fond of the Common Mystery Snail (yes, there is such a thing, although its exact taxonomy seems to violently divide the snail enthusiast community). Since I like to work the personal quirks of models into their paintings, I've been trying to figure out how to do a painting of Leah with a Common Mystery Snail of extraordinary size. I had just about come up with an idea, here:


This was the last of many sketches of composition ideas, and when I drew it, I thought I was satisfied with it. Then I went to see the Ratjen Collection, and I saw this drawing there:

Johann Evangelist Scheffer von Leonhardshoff, German, 1795 - 1822
Saint Cecilia, 1821
graphite on wove paper
Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, Patrons' Permanent Fund

Like the Ruth and Boas drawing from the previous post, this was a preparatory sketch for a painting that turned out to be much less interesting. Just so you know what's going on in this picture - Saint Cecilia seems to have gotten herself beheaded on account of her strident Christianity, but being a Saint, the beheading didn't take until she'd performed several miracles. Von Leonardshoff elides the icky problem of the botched beheading by placing some hair over the wounds on Cecilia's neck.

When I saw this drawing, I instantly thought, I oughta steal this composition for my Leah painting. The pose and placement are fairly similar; it's not like nobody has ever done a painting of this approximate placement of the human body before. I was planning it, Von Leonardshoff planned it - he just did it better than I did.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I was convinced, not only that Von Leonardshoff's version was better, but that my own version was contrived, even insipid. No doubt, if I'd painted my initial idea, I would have found some authentic emotion or meaning in it; I find that I do that, as I paint. But the idea itself, as it stands, is essentially "hot chick with big snail."

Von Leonardshoff, on the other hand, hints at something more distressing and more profound. His arc of the flesh seems to me to vibrate on the very edge of a dream. St. Cecilia sinks into a troubled dream. She is no longer her body, but on the verge of separating from it. As her corporeality dissolves, a greater and greater proportion of her subsists inside her dream. She is moving toward her dream, but her dream, in turn, speaks backward through the weakening bands of her physicality, to the material world she is leaving behind. The dream transforms her, makes her into a dream-object in the real world. Von Leonardshoff's St. Cecilia exists in two worlds, dream and waking, and Von Leonardshoff interprets the emotional texture of this dual state as being like one of sinking down drowsily into slumber, as if slumber were a thick porridge in which the body is bouyant, but still sinks.

There is another painting of a woman, famously suspended between the two worlds in a similar way:

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781

If you remember her facing the other way, that's because he painted it twice and noodled around with the composition a bit.

This is a powerful, frightening image. But it is different from the idea that appeals to me. In the St. Cecilia, I see a solidity, a presence, to the dreaminess which, just now, strikes me as more essential, as closer to what I am trying to get at. It is unadorned with props and imagery. It is, itself, woven from a material half-sunk in dreaming. It does not require the symbols of dream-language because it is itself a dream.

This points us toward the subtitle of this post - eisegesis. There's a pair of important words for Biblical interpretation, exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is a fair word: it means to use various responsible methods of reading to draw out a meaning that inheres in the text. Eisegesis, in contrast, strikes me as a bit of a sarcastic made-up word: it means to read into the text - essentially to impose whatever was going through your head anyway onto the text and claim that you see it there too.

We could open a whole can of literary-critical worms if we decided to try to establish the legitimacy of this distinction, but instead, I'm going to take it as a given that the distinction is real.

Now, I like to think that a lot of what I do when I look at art is exegetical. But if you've been hanging out at this blog for any length of time, you will no doubt have concluded that I am big on eisegesis as well. I understand and accept this; I find it rewarding, the same way that some people, who do not believe in tarot, find it rewarding to read their tarot cards. It helps them to structure and evaluate the topics they contend with - I too find it rewarding to allow an artwork to be more meaningful than, perhaps, it really is.

I strongly suspect I have done that with regard to Von Leonardshoff's poor St. Cecilia. I have not spent so much time looking at her. Rather, I have spent my time thinking about the relevation I had when I looked at her. The drawing itself is a substrate for the idea, and what I have derived by a small measure of exegesis, and a large measure of eisegesis - all of that is now available for me to pack into the Leah painting, so that the Leah painting can support a legitimate exegesis of a dreamish state.

Or to put it in a less fancy way, I let my mind wander.

That about wraps it up for the Ratjen Collection. I was tired by the time I fled the National Gallery - most of the stuff I've told you about in these last four posts, I thought of in the hour or so that I was there, which made it an idea-dense visit, relative to my ordinary rate of thinking at least. Let me once again express my gratitude to the National Gallery for making the materials from the show available for us to pore over in detail and at a distance. I hope this has been a worthwhile interlude for you.