pensive image

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hanoerThe Pensive Image: On Thought in Jan

van Huysums Still Life Paintings

Hanneke Grootenboer


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The Pensive Image: On Thought in Jan van HuysumStill Life Paintings1

Hanneke Grootenboer

But painting interposes a problem: there is the thought that sees and can be visibly

described.

Rene Magritte, 196

Flower still lifes such as Jan Van Huysums abundant bouquet of 1724 confronus with a methodological quandary: how might we make sense of the sheesplendour of the blossoming flowers, the almost blinding freshness of thcolours, or the breathtaking transparency of the canvas effected by thartists technique of fine-painting, the secrets of which he jealousy guarded(Fig. 1). How do we look at this quite overwhelming tableau, whichapparently, despite its abundance of species, richness of colour, anmeticulously rendered details, does not immediately answer to the conditionof pictorial legibility demanded by figurative painting. Any concrete startinpoint for a reading of this painting is denied, yet our gaze is allowed to creepin, welcomed by the dwarf morning-glory in the lower left corner thais suspended from the marble stone ledge holding up the terracottpot containing the bouquet. Climbing over the peony leaves and thwhite-and-red anemone, our eye is suddenly arrested by the peculiar positionof the tulip, which has taken a nosedive. The tulips inverted direction ifurther emphasised by the slight diagonal starting in the stem and continued

in the red streak on its petals, the sprig, and the delicate twig of the honestyFollowing the tulips stem, we arrive at the centre of the arrangement thatremarkably, shows a cut: the tulip has snapped and the bare ends of its stemare exposed.

The displacement of the tulip has left an indentation in the floraarrangement, which opens up in the upper left corner to the woodebackground. If the tulip had not been snapped, it would have completed thsymmetry of the floral arrangement as a counterpart to the fritillary on thright. However, as it is now, the tulip is pendent, revealing a lack that thotherwise full and lively arrangement has only partly managed to cover upWe might say, in fact, that lack is the general condition of this image. Oureading may have been arrested by the tulips upside-down position, but ou

wanderings have not quite come to a full stop. For something is pending inthis image. It is as if something has been set in motion, an ultimate meaningthat the painting keeps in reserve. What exactly does this still life wish tshow by means of the snapped tulip at its compositions heart? Not only thegap in the bouquet, but also the painting as a whole reveals a kind oopenness that does not necessarily call to be filled with meaning. Ratherthe indeterminacy of the pictures lack invites an understanding of thipainting as governed by a more abstract or theoretical paradigm that offers uroom for contemplation, or we may even say, for a thought.

1. This article grew out of discussions held in myresearch seminar entitled The Pensive Image at the

Jan van Eyck Academys Theory Department inMaastricht, The Netherlands, from January 2006

to July 2008. I am grateful to all participants for

sharing their thoughts with me on this subject, as

well as audiences at the Convention of the CAA in

February 2007, the annual Eikons conference in

Basel in November 2007 and the London Seminar

for Early Modern Visual Culture for responses on

a shorter version of this text. I thank Craig

Clunas, Geraldine Johnson, Maria Loh, Robert

Maniura, Gervase Rosser, and Alastair Wright for

their stimulating feedback on this essays final

state.

# The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press; all r ights reserved. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 34.1 2011 133doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcr011


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Fig. 1. Jan van Huysum, Flower Still Life, 1724, oil on panel, 80 69.6 cm. Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, Los Angeles. (Photo:#SCALA, Florence.)

16 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 34.1 2011

Hanneke Grootenboer


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In The Origin of Perspective (1987), his exhaustive treatment of thphilosophical question of perspectives multiple origins, Hubert Damiscconcludes that painting not only shows but thinks.2 He explains thaperspectives provided the painter with a formal apparatus equivalent to thaof a sentence. In assigning the subject a position within its paradigm, perspective opens up the possibility of something like a statement in paintingWhat is thinking in painting? Damisch asks. What are the implications o

such thinking for the history of thought in general? (446). Although I dnot wish to speculate here on the implications of such a notion for thhistory of thought, I would like to take a few steps towards sketchinthe consequences as well as the potential of Damischs conclusiofor art-historical modes of approaching painting. If there is such a thing aa thought in painting, how can it be detected or articulated? In this essayI propose that there is a corpus of pictures offering us something thalies beyond narrative or meaning, a place kept free of signification, fromwhich a thought arises.

Pensiveness denotes a state that is neither active nor passive, but remains inbetween the activity of thinking and the passivity of being lost in thought. InS/Z(1970), a painstakingly close reading of Honore de Balzacs short storSarrasine, Barthes ponders at length over the narratives concludinsentence: And the marquise remained pensive. Intrigued by this closinline, Barthes explains that there is an infinite openness in Balzacs use of thnotion of pensiveness, an illusion of polysemy, of multiple meanings unsaiand unexplored that we may call a thought-effect.3 This sentence, especiallbecause it is a closing line of a story, functions for Barthes as the degree zeroof meaning, escaping any closure, any code, or any classification. Balzacs lassentence is a theatrical sign of the implicit, indicating that the preceding texdoes not give all meaning away. Part of the texts signification has thus beenheld back by a line suggesting where the plenitude of meaning or a depth osense may be found. The term pensive denotes a semi-passive state that ifilled with unease. A pensive Marquise entails a thread, or a continuouinquiry: what could she possibly be thinking about? Indeed, within th

context of the sentence, we find no denouement here, resulting in Balzacstory as such taking on a state of indetermination, which is to say that iitself becomes pensive. The question arises as to whether we can find thesame unsaid expression and unexplored openness as Barthes finds in texts aa state of pensiveness in images as well. Partly departing from Damischassertions that painting actively thinks, I follow Barthes in stating that VanHuysums still life is a pensive image.4

This essay proposes an approach to images which goes beyond semiotiinterpretation by recognising in our close analysis of such pictures a kind oprofundity an interiority different from their meaning or narrative throughwhich these images become thoughtful. My investigation into this grouof pensive images is a response to the recent reconsideration of th

philosophical foundations of art history. Within the larger scope of thproject, the pensive image may be the vehicle through which we examine thways in which thinking is conflated with critique, theory, and philosophy, basking what role painting as a form of thinking may play in disentanglingthese overlapping undertakings.5

I am particularly interested in exploring the notion of the pensive image as imay be differentiated from similar terms accrediting painting with profundityAs we will see in Van Huysums painting, such profundity or philosophicadepth ultimately results from a virtual take off of tiny blobs of paint from

2. Hubert Damisch,The Origin of Perspective(MIT

Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), p. 446. Yve-Alain

Bois, Painting as Model, review of Hubert

Damisch,Fenetre jaune cadmium, ou, les dessous de la

peinture(Editions du Seuil: Paris, 1984) in October,

vol. 37, Summer 1986, pp. 12537, reprinted in

Bois,Painting as Model(MIT Press: Cambridge,MA, 1990), pp. 24558. See also Tough Love,

Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, pp.

24555.

3. The term thought effect was coined by

Naomi Schor in her article on Pensive Texts andThinking Statues: Balzac with Rodin, Critical

Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 2, Winter 2001, pp. 23965.

4. In The Emancipated Spectator(Verso: London,

2009), Jacques Ranciere has used Barthes

expression of the pensive image to describe

the role of the political image in contemporary

democracy. Evidently, my use and understanding

of the pensive image significantly differs from

Rancieres use of the term.

5. The distinction between theory, philosophy,

and criticism recently has been very well

articulated by Rodolphe Gasche in hisThe Honor

of=Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy(Stanford

University Press: Stanford, 2007).

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 34.1 2011 1

On Thought in Jan van Huysums Still Life Painting


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their support. This departure of spots of paint creates a minimal, shallowspace between the paint and its support, where meaning, or rather, athought, has become suspended. A close examination of Van Huysumsdewdrops and highlights will show how in his still lifes in general, and inparticular in the flower piece with which we began, in certain parts of thecomposition paint seems to lift itself from its support, creating a thicknessthat allows for a meditation on surface and ground, as well as on

transparency and the status of the pictorial sign, yet in paint. Pensive imagesthus show us thought in painting, not expressed in it (as with narrative), orbehind it (as with iconographic meaning), but visual thought as it is fullyembodied in form and materiality; they are able, as I will show, tophilosophise about their status as images, as such performing a kind ofthinking through their material form.6 The analysis of Van Huysums paintingwill be framed by a discussion ofWhat Is Philosophy (1991), in which GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari offer a theory on thought in painting largelybased upon Damischs essay on Paul Klees painting Equals Infinity (1932,Fig. 2). I will argue on the basis of a juxtaposition of Klees Equals Infinitywith Van Huysums flower still lifes that the work of both artists ultimatelytouch on similar issues, or to put this more precisely, that their work, in acomparable operation, attempts to think though issues of finitude and infinitythrough the application of dots of paint on a surface, however different theresults.

Let us return to the arrest of our reading by the bare stems of the snappedtulip in Van Huysums painting. The artist used a similar device in a series offlower still lifes, for instance, in a piece created in 1723 (Fig. 3). But theresult is rather different. In the 1723 image, the twig of a grapevine appearsto have been deliberately placed in a fixed, almost organic composition. Incontrast, in the still life of 1724, the tulip position seems accidental,subjected to an unforeseen change, as if the flower had been snappedunintentionally while the bouquet was in the process of being arranged, oreven during the process of its being painted.

The tulip may seem as if it has been displaced by sheer chance, but it

has triggered a series of effects. For instance, its upside down positionhas caused a dewdrop on one of its petals slowly to slide off (Fig. 4).Gravitys effect is well depicted by Van Huysum: the dewdrop is aboutto roll off the petal, apparently straight into the scallop that the femaleputto, on the relief adorning the terracotta pot, offers her malecompanion. The presumed accident of the snapped flower has beencarefully planned. By letting the drop roll off its petal into the scallop,Van Huysum is playfully shifting mimetic registers, creating a realm offanciful fiction within his hyper-realistic mastery of pictorial resemblance,delving deeply into the notion of a faithful image as such by means of avirtually moving dewdrop.

The sudden micro-focus on a dewdrop is no accident. Dewdrops have

been considered the hallmark of Van Huysums technique. In an odewritten at the time of the artists death in February 1749, theartist-biographer Johan van Gool celebrates Van Huysums enchantingimages, claiming that they would surprise even nature that had inspiredthem. Van Gool describes how in Van Huysums paintings fruit plantswere richly laden with silver dew, which were night drops sweated byblond Apollo during the summer.7 Such praise had venerable roots. Forthe second-century Greek sophist Philostratus (c. 170 245), the dewdropis the sign, par excellence, of the realism of flower painting.8 In his

6. Mieke Bal has described visual thought most

clearly inQuoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art,

Preposterous History (University of Chicago Press:

Chicago, 2001), p. 117.

7. O bloosend Fruitgewas, met zilvren daeu

beladen! Nachtdruppen die de blonde Apollozomers zweet! Johan van Goolen, De Nieuwe

Schouburg der Nederlandsche Kunstschilders en

Schilderessenvol. 2 (The Hague, privately

published, 1751), p. 26.

8. Philostrates,Eikones, vol. I, p. 23; see also De

Verleiding van Flora: Jan van Huysum 16821749,

ed. Sam Segal, Mariel Ellens and Joris Dik

(Waanders Uitgevers: Zwolle, 2006), p. 95.


Hanneke Grootenboer


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Imagines, Philostratus instructs that should one wishes the image to aim aabsolute verisimilitude, dewdrops should be found on flowers. However, inVan Huysums image, this particular drop appears to be sliding off thmimetic level and onto the fictional level of the relief; or rather, it itending towards such a shift of registers.9 In suggesting that the dropintentional fall outside the system of truth (or outside the system odeceit, for that matter) arrests the paintings mimetic function as aimage to be interpreted, we see here how some of its elements mafigure as a proposition, or statement, where the painting starts tbecoming pensive. Does it, then, offer us a thought?

The idea that painting can have a thought has a long history. Nicolas Poussi(1594 1665) frequently used the phrasele pensementorla penseewhen referrin

to a thought of the image. For this genuine painter-philosopher, the thought othe painting appears at the very beginning of the artistic process as that whichinitiates its design, all the while forming the pictures armature. In hcorrespondence with Chantelou of the 1640s and 1650s, Poussin mentionregularly that he is working on the thought of a particular painting, or thahe is sending a thought to his friend.10 A letter of 22 December 1647 iparticularly revealing in this regard, where the artist remarks that he hafound a thought for a painting he was commissioned to do for Monsieur dLisle:

Fig. 2. Paul Klee, Equals Infinity, 1932, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 51.4 68.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Photo: #SCALA, Florence.)

9. This shift may be typed in literary terms as an

anacoluthon, which designates any grammatical

or syntactical discontinuity in which a

construction interrupts another before it is

completed. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading:

Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and

Proust(Yale University Press: New Haven and

London, 1979), p. 289.

10. On 26 December 1655, Poussin wrote, Je

travaille autour de la pensee et distribution de la

Vierge en Egypte de madame de Montmort and

on 30 May 1641, he wrote . . .

je vous enverrai lepensement du frontispice de la grande bible.

Lettres de Poussin, 295 and 30, respectively.




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I have found [. . . Monsieur de Lisle] the thought, that is to say the conception of the

idea, and the work of the mind has been completed. The subject is the Passage

through the Red Sea by the escaping Israelits. Principally, it is composed of 27

figures.11

As this fragment demonstrates, Poussin obviously distinguishes la pensee,consisting of the conception of its idea which is the work of the mind, fromthe paintings subject matter, in this case a story from the old Testament, aswell as from its composition.12 Though linked, Poussins pensee differs as wellfrom the Italian term pensiero, by which is meant a sketch revealing thethoughts of the studious artist in trying out various compositions.13 It isreminiscent of a rather unpoetic version of Berninis concetto, yet it precedesinvention. What is more, it anticipates disposition, the first of nine parts thatmake up painting that Poussin recommends as an artists starting point.14

Fig. 3. Jan van Huysum, Flower Still Life, 1723, oil on panel, 80 60.5 cm. The State Hermitage

Museum, St Petersburg. (Photo: # The State Hermitage Museum, Photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard

Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.)

11. Je vous ai ecrit que, pour votre respect, je

servirais Monsieur de Lisle. Je lui ai trouvela

pensee, je vieux dire la conception de lidee, et

louvrage de lesprit est conclu. Ce subject est un

Passage de la Mer Rouge par les Israelites

fugitives. Le composeest de 27 figures

principalement.Lettres du Poussin, p. 244.

12. See Hubert Damisch, The Underneath of

Painting, trans. Francette Pacteau and Stephen

Bann,Word and Image, vol. 1, no. 2, AprilJune

1985, p. 204.

13. According to Francis Junius who wrote

Many who have a deeper insight in to these Arts,

delight themselves as much in the contemplationof the first, second, and third draughts which


Hanneke Grootenboer


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Preceding any manual action on the artists part, le penseeis a forethought rathethan a thought which can be visualised in a sketch, but can never coincide with ias if it were a blueprint of the work as a whole. 15 For Poussin, therefore, lpensee comes before the painting, as well as before the disposition of which iis constituent. Standing at the pre-history of a work, Poussins pensee doeremain visible in the distributions of the figures and in the disposition fowhich it provides a foundation. Apparently, Poussins thought emerges as thvery element that binds the various parts of paintings process together.

Following Louis Marins influential reading of Poussins dictum to read thtableau and the story about his work The Gathering of the Manna (163739Paris, Louvre), Thomas Puttfarken has argued that it is indicative of thartists conviction that his pieces should not be watched from a distance bustudied with great attention in order for his pensees (Puttfarken uses thplural) to be discovered in them.16 For Poussin, le pensee refers in fact to particular mode of seeing. Inspired by a perspective treatise by DanielBarbaro and the work on optics of Alhazen, the artist may have distinguishe

Fig. 4. Jan van Huysum, Flower Still Life, 1724, oil on panel, 80 69.6 cm. Los Angeles Count

Museum of Art, Los Angeles. (Photo:#SCALA, Florence (detail).)

great Masters made of their workes, as in the

workes themselves. . .seeing. . .the very thoughts

of the studious Artificier. Francis Junius, The

Painting of the Ancients, 1638. Claire Pace, Nicolas

Poussin: Peintre-Poete?, in Katie Scott andGenevieve Warwick (eds),Commemorating Poussin:

Reception and Interpretation of the Artist (Cambridge

University Press: Cambridge, 1999), pp. 76113.

14. Oskar Batschmann,Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics

of Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), p.

12. Another instance in which this difference is

made is in a letter on 15 November 1655

regarding a painting for Madame de Montmort of

the Virgin in Egypt.

15. Damisch, The Underneath of Painting

(1985), p. 204.




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Guattari in their attempt to define thought in painting. For the authors, apainting is a bloc of sensations, a mode in which sensations can beperceived as cut off or independent from humans who experience them.A spark of joy as captured in the eyes of a seventeenth-century portraitcontinues to shine today, outside of and independent from its sitter.Perceptions people may have had end up in a work of art as percepts, whileaffectations derived from feelings are preserved in art as affects. Sensations

consisting of percepts and affects can either be realised in the material, in thecase of a figurative works such as a portrait or Van Huysums still lifes,making up one pole in the scale of sensations, or the material passes intosensation as Deleuze and Guattari see happening in non-figurative art ofMondrian or Klee, where the underneath comes through.23 Contesting theidea that abstract art is pure flatness, they assert, following Damisch, that itmaintains a thickness, which as an imaginary space between foreground andbackground, ground and surface, or point and support, is evidently a trace oflinear perspective, or rather, of its removal. The artist no longer covers upthe ground of the picture to render the picture plane invisible, but ratherforegrounds its material by piling it up, folding it, or going through it. Inmodern painting, one no longer paints on but under, Deleuze and Guattariwrite.24

At the other end of the scale, Van Huysums exquisitely rendered flowerpainting is clearly an instance of painting on rather than under, in Deleuzeand Guattaris terms. Called the phoenix of flower painting, Van Huysumwas the master of what has been called fini or finish, the extremelypolished surface on which brush strokes have become truly invisible. Theartist was reputedly secretive about his working methods, always painting intotal isolation, refusing even to accept pupils. Van Huysums breathtakingfini technique culminates in his rendering of dewdrops that are generously

we may say a little too generously applied to the leaves in virtuallyevery flower piece he ever made. It is very likely that Van Huysum iswittingly quoting Philostratus by scattering numerous dewdrops over asingle piece as if he is obsessed with his own virtuosity in applying his prized

technique. One tulip petal in a flower piece of c. 1730 (Fig. 6) is a particularstriking reference to Philostratus famed description of a painting ofNarcissus bending over a pool which painted his face. Immersed in thereflection of his face in the water as if waiting for his mirror image to start aconversation, Narcissus does not hear what we, as viewers, say, Philostrateswrites. We must interpret the painting for ourselves, he concludes.Apparently, this work about reflection, image making and meaningproduction, had such a regard for realism that it even shows drops of dewdripping from the flowers, and a bee settling on the flowers.25 ForPhilostratus, the illusionistically painted bee holds a genuine sense of play:whether the viewer is supposed to perceive the trompe loeil insect as a realbee deceived by the painted flowers, or will be fooled into thinking that a

painted bee is real is ultimately of no importance. After all, he writes, aviewer may or may not be fooled, but Narcissus himself has never beendeceived by painting, but only by the pools reflection. For Van Huysum,however, a tricky bee may be a nice and playful detail, but it is the deceptionof the reflection of his dewdrops that really matters.

By putting the bee right next to his dewdrops, Van Huysum calls attentionto the difference between trompe loeil effects and the reflection of puretransparency.26 There is no confusion as to whether the drop is on the petalor the pictures actual surface, and so there is no corresponding impulse

23. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy

(1996), p. 193.

24. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy

(1996), p. 194.

25. Philostratus,Descriptions, trans. Arthur

Fairbanks (Heinemann: London, 1931), p. 89.On Philostrates Narcissus, see also Stephen

Bann, Philostratus and the Narcissus of

Caravaggio, in Ewen Bowie and Jas Elsner

(eds) Philostatus (Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 2009).

26. SeeDe Verleiding van Flora, cat. no. 27 and 28.

The bee mentioned in Philostrates Imaginessprawled the motif of the trompe loeil fly in early

modern painting, mentioned by Vasari in the Life

of Giotto, among other places. Interestingly, Van

Huysum seem to rely on the original written

source rather than the pictorial motif it has grown

into by placing a bee rather than a fly on the tulips

petal.


Hanneke Grootenboer


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to wipe it off.Trompe loeilsillusionism can be defined as a extreme consequencof (or departure from) realism, as a heightened truth in painting, one tharadically goes beyond verisimilitude by ultimately fooling the eye intbelieving that something is what it is not.27 Obviously, Van Huysumdewdrops are not trompe loeil features, though the line demarcating realism

and illusionism runs extremely thin here. The translucent drops appear as ithey are somehow located at the interval of realism and illusionism. To get clear sense of how Van Huysums treatment of these details differs fromthose of other still-life painters, let us compare his water drops with those othe seventeenth-century Dutch still-life artist Abraham Mignon (164079)As we see in Mignons elaborate Still Life with Fruit and Oysters oapproximately 1670 (Fig. 7), water drops falling from a plate of oysters arplaced within the pictorial realm as being suspended from the marble rim othe table. However, we observe, just below, that others have been caught in

Fig. 6. Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Vase Against a Landscape, c. 1730, oil on panel, 80 61 cm

Noortman Master Paintings, Maastricht. (#Noortman Master Paintings.)

27. I have extensively commented on this

distinction in The Rhetoric of Perspective.




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their descent. Remarkably, this state of suspension leads not to the effect ofmovement, but to the illusion that there are actual water drops spilled onthe paints surface.28

In contrast, Van Huysums dewdrops never acquire the status oftrompe loeil.His rendering of water drops searches for realisms limits in his attempt, Isuggest, to find its superlative expression. He seems to be seekinghyper-realism, a kind of extreme realism that becomes visible especially inthe dewdrops painted on light backgrounds, as we see on the pale pink petalof a rose in the 1730 still life (Fig. 8). This is Van Huysums genuine tour de

force: he creates translucence by applying highlights that barely contrast with

their underlying colour. His breathtaking technique is even more apparent inmoments like this when the rim of white paint indicating reflecting lightcasts an actual shadow that makes a painted shadow redundant, as is clearlyvisible on the rose petal.29 Can we formulate this tour de force as anattempt to visually think what remains unthought in the visual? Have hisshadow-casting dewdrops become expressive not in that they tell theunexpressed in painting, but rather the inexpressible?

In rendering these tiny blobs of translucent liquid, Van Huysum could nothave left a more superficial trace. We could not be much farther fromDeleuze and Guattaris exemplary abstract painting, yet paradoxically, underthe highlight indicating the drops reflection, the thin layers of superimposedpaint, often applied wet on a wet surface, seem to thicken, summarising the

idea of mimesis as transparency that is pure saturation. How many invisiblelayers of paint shine through its reflection? In spite of their small size, thesedewdrops blow up the notion of transparency to gigantic dimensions, raisingthe issue of the readability of pictorial transparency as such.30 Neither purelyrealistic nor illusionistic, the dewdrop articulates some kind of a split on thelevel of the surface; it is at once visible primarily by means of itshighlight, which indicates the presence of reflecting light, a dot on a dot and invisible in its double transparency. This split, I believe, prevents asimple visual perception of this painting as image. For where does the

Fig. 7. Abraham Mignon, Still Life with Fruit and Oysters, 1670, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

(#Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (detail).)

28. Another remarkable example is Diego

Velazquezs famousWaterseller of Seville of c. 1620

(Apsley House: London), where the drops on the

surface of the large jug realises a sensation of

dampness, whereby the surface of the drops

simultaneously seem to lie on the picture plane.

This is not a conscious trompe loeil effect, but

rather an example of hyper-realism on the level of

transparency as a surface quality (rather than

pictorial depth).

29. Elmer Kolfin,Voor koningen en prinsen: Destilllevens en landschappen van Jan van Huysum

(16821749) (Museum Het Prinsenhof: Delft,

2006), pp. 745. See also Van Huysums,A Basket

with Flowers, c. 173233, Museum Boijmans Van

Beuningen, Rotterdam.De Verleiding van Flora,

cat. no. F26.

30. In John Raphael Smiths mezzotints after Jan

van Huysums still lifes (which were well-known

in eighteenth-century Britain), it is even more

apparent how Van Huysums dewdrops do not

seem to have any outlines and are genuinely

translucent. Smith engraves Van Huysums flowerpieces to the letter and has an eye for every

small detail. He faithfully copies each of the far

too numerous dewdrops, yet cannot possiblycapture the level of their transparency. New

Haven, Yale Center of British Art, B1977.14.14217-8.


Hanneke Grootenboer


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transparency of the painting under the highlight stop, and where does the panebegin? What is painted on as seen through and what is painted under itimmediate image, shining through? Though not representing trompe loeeffects, the dewdrops, through their transparent quality, differentiatthemselves from the other signs on the panel by designating a limit, frontier for various pictorial units that may open new developments of theicapacities. The question arises of what exactly is the status of dewdrop a

sign, as the mark it leaves is a mere reflection of the transparent drop weimagine. The drop itself cannot be wholly a sign to the extent that it is purtransparency, acquiring the dubious status of a virtually invisible sign, onlvisible in so far it appears as a consequence of the mark, a mere dot opoint, of another sign, the highlight. The dewdrop seems to be vanishinbefore our eyes and yet it is there as we see through it.

Another well-known sign that has an even more ambiguous reputation as sigis the vanishing point. A comparison between the two points may shed light onwhat exactly Van Huysums drop expresses. For Deleuze and Guattari, thnotion of thought in art is heavily tied up with the extent to which thvanishing point can be a sign. Philosophy, science and crucially, for us art are three different modes that define thought in their respective dealingwith the infinite. Art, they propose, defines thought as passing through thefinite to rediscover or restore the infinite, or indeed to equal i t aargument apparently exclusively inspired by Klees 1932 painting EqualInfinity (Fig.2).31

On Klees painting a title, gleich Unendlich, and a date have been inscribed athe margin of the canvas. It belongs to a group of the artists so-called divisionisworks which grew out of his investigation of whether it was possible to rendespace in painting with colour alone. Characteristic for the works of this period ithe series of rows consisting of colour dots which cover the entire picture planeUnlike Seurat and the divisionist painters, Klee does not split his colours buoften uses the same colour for all dots in one row. In Equals Infinity, the dotare laid out on a plane that is attached to an ochre support that seems toframe it. The general problem he struggled with in this period is whethe

colour could be the proper tool for the conquest of finding infinity withinthe finite.32 This problem is tackled head on in Equals Infinity.

Deleuze and Guattaris great strength lies in their genuine reliance on (rather narrowly defined corpus of) paintings for developing their theory othought in painting. Klees painting, as much as Damischs reading of it, itaken seriously, and serves as a foundation for the two writers, or rather map that assist them in orienting their complicated ideas on the restorationof infinity. Thus following closely Damischs detailed discussion of this pieceDeleuze and Guattari see the blobs on the surface as the infinite passage owhat they call chaos in which the mathematical signs equals-infinity (1indicate the restoration of infinity (197). Thus, Klees picture is modern(ist) attempt to metaphorically inscribe the infinite in the finite

Evidently, grasping the infinity in the finite is nothing new to painting, alinear perspective has been utilised as a system of representation which doeprecisely that. As a finite mode of representation, linear perspectivembraces infinity in its configuration laid out by the point of view on the onside of the picture plane, and the vanishing point within in. In this systeminfinity is inscribed under the guise of a point, a trace in paint on thpictures surface that marks the limit of representation within its systemDespite the fact that it is called the vanishing point, this mark is not proper point at all, if we follow Albertis theory on perspective. Damisc

31. Hubert Damisch, Egale infini,Critique315 16 (aout-septembre 1973): numero special

Histoire/theorie de lart, pp. 691723.

Translated in English by R.H. Olorenshaw as

Equals Infinity, XXth Century Studies, vol. 15

16, 1973, 5681, special issue on Visual

Poetics.

32. Will Grohmann,Paul Klee(Lund Humphries:

London, 1954), pp. 283309.




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observes an inconsistency in the text when Alberti writes at the very beginningof his treatise that: I here call sign anything that belongs to the surface such thatthe eye can see it, a definition that clearly contradicts the indivisibility ofinfinity (which had been argued by Aristotle and Roger Bacon, amongothers).33 In the same breath, Alberti insists that a point is a figure whichcannot be divided into parts.34 Damisch has examined at length theconsequences of the paradoxical status of the vanishing point in Albertis

treatise. Is the vanishing point in painting a sign, a point, or a mere symbol?And can it be made visible? If we understand the vanishing point as a sign orsymbol of infinity, it should be visible in painting at least as a tiny dot whichdifferentiates itself from the surface to which it adheres, as well as from thesupport that it now marks and grooves, as Damisch writes (65). Tobecome visible in painting, the infinity-point should therefore depart fromits support, so to speak, and it is this differentiation that gives infinity itsmetaphorical character. However, the departure from its support makes itdivisible rather than indivisible and as such it will not qualify as pointaccording to Albertis definition. Damisch argues that, simultaneouslyindivisible, as Alberti claims a sign to be, and divided from its allotted spot,the vanishing point is thus theoretically split. However, as Damischdemonstrates exhaustively in The Origin of Perspective, in the practice ofpainting, the construction of perspective precisely conceals this split. Intheory, the convergence of the orthogonals we see only in painting, however,the point of convergence cannot possibly be visible as point to the extent thatit is vanishing. We may imagine this split between the vanishing point and itssupport as a division continuously levelled by the pictures ground, as if thepaintings support, in the process of depths recession, is constantly moving atiny bit away from us so as to not coincide with the dot of paint that signals it.35

Contrary to Deleuze and Guattari, who decided to read Klees image quiteliterally according to what it says in terms of the mathematical signs that havebeen written on its surface, Damisch is less interested in the equal sign and thes-shaped curve that bluntly state Klees title, and more concerned with theinterpretive status of the dots on the surface as points. The picture is an

example of concrete research in art (the phrase is Klees) in which Klee, inhis own words, analyses paintings anatomy, its skin and bone-structure.What we thus see here, Damisch asserts, is a study on the collection ofpoints, among other things raising the issue of the limit of semiotics fornon-figurative images. Though abstract, Klees painting operates within thefigurative realm, much as perspective operates, where the signifiers seem towork on infinity, tending towards it rather than signifying or rendering it.Referring to Seurats divisionism, the division here prevents the viewer fromconsidering the painting as a finished whole. Klees dots are colour-pointsthat function not as an image or symbol of the infinity-point but as itsequivalent. The colour dots stick to their surface so that they can be seenwhile remaining within the bounds of the sign in Albertis sense of the

word (76) and so that they are visible as well as indivisible from theirground. Klees dots thus have acquired qualities that they thus share with aperspectival vanishing point. However, the theoretical split has becomeconcrete. The split between vanishing point and ground that produces thethickness of depth is no longer a division between figure and ground as infigurative painting, but in Klees painting reveals itself as between figure andcolour. Whereas for thought, figure is divisible to infinity, Damisch writes,color [sic], from which painting starts, can be brought to a point, that isindivisible to the senses. It is within this thickness of the colour as

Fig. 8. Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Vase

Against a Landscape, c. 1730, Noortman

Master Paintings, Maastricht. (#Noortman

Master Paintings (detail of the rose).)

33. Grohmann, Paul Klee (1954), p. 285.

34. Leone Battista Alberti,On Painting, trans.John R. Spencer (Yale University Press: NewHaven and London), p. 43. Quoted in Damisch,

p. 65. See also on this issue Hubert Damisch andStephen Bann: A Conversation,Oxford Art

Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, p. 177.

35. Damisch, Equals Infinity (1973), p. 67.


Hanneke Grootenboer


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substance that a weaving or plaiting of thought and painting takes place, whenthought gets inscribedin paint.

If we look again at Van Huysums painting, I suggest that in the dew drops wesee a working on infinity that may be similar to what we see in Klees paintingVan Huysum is less interested in the dewdrop as realistically rendered figureand more in what he can do with it in pushing the limit of representation toits extremes. If we look again at a bead of moisture on a green leaf in Baske

of Flowers of around 173233 (Fig. 9), we see that the highlight showinreflected light is paired with a weaker patch of white within the dropmarking its refraction. As a point, this tiny point of refraction is aambiguous as a vanishing point, and as ambitious as Klees colour dotsInitially appearing as the ultimate pictorial touch of Van Huysums brush, thwater drop, in its invisible materiality, opens further outward, not so muchmarking the limit of transparency as, by widening its boundaries, tendintoward it. I suggest that Van Huysums dewdrops as the hallmarks of hivirtuosity offer an attempt at thinking through the opposition of opacity ttransparency, and the importance of the collapse of the latter in favour of thformer, observed by Deleuze and Guattari. The translucent water drocollides with the opaque white dot of a highlight, forming a new spatiaentity that would permit a thought to fit in it, or perhaps provide a slighmovement or vibe around which the entire composition appears trevolve, just as it does around a vanishing point.

If there is indeed a thought rather than a narrative or a meaning in thipainting, it should be found neither on nor under the pictures groundRather, it should be grasped as somehow departing from it in the shape of dot, as a patch of colour that seems to be raised from its support as if iwere acquiring a dimensionality, however minimal. This is an instance opaint taking off, marking a translucence that cannot even be properlindicated. This thought may lead us to rethink the notion of truth ipainting, especially as, in the particular case of Van Huysums flower piecesthis reflection does not stand alone but is supported (one may even safurther argued) by another moment of contemplation in paint, one agai

typical of Van Huysum.36

Several of Van Huysums paintings includexceptional passages rendering petals of tulips or other flowers, in which thextreme smoothness of the paintings surface is interrupted. If we looclosely at a detail of the flower piece with the trompe loeil bee of 173(Fig. 7), we see that the tulip petals fine veins have been marked by tinyincisions, as if an actual petal has left an imprint on the wet paint. Thincisions, barely visible in reproduction, have been slit by Van Huysum witha single brush-hair, which pierced the wet paint so that the layers underneathwould come to the surface through its grooves.37 Here, in the treatment othe petal considered in the light of the ultimate moment of transparencin the dewdrop that tends towards the mimetic limit Van Huysum seemto have found another variation in such a limit, having pushed it away from

transparency and towards the actual layer of paint as such. The purely opticainvisibility of the dewdrop becoming visible only in its reflection has beencomplemented, to a certain extent, by the illusion of a petals imprint inpaint, which introduces a sense of touch in this otherwise diaphanoutableau. If there is a truth in painting, we may propose, on the basis of VanHuysums flower still life, that if it cannot be told (as Cezanne famouslsuggested), it may be thought. Van Huysum lets the underside of paintincome through, and does so without losing any of the extreme realism that heachieved.

Fig. 9. Jan van Huysum, Basket of Flowers,

c. 1732, oil on panel, 24 16.5 cm. Museum

Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (detail of

a leaf).

Fig. 10. Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Vase

Against a Landscape, c. 1730, Noortman

Master Paintings, Maastricht. (#Noortman

Master Paintings (detail of the tulip).)

36. I follow here Damischs idea of truth inpainting, as he most clearly formulated in Eight

Theses For (or Against?) A Semiology ofPainting,The Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 2,

2005, pp. 25767. This idea has been explored ina different way by Jacques Derrida in The Truth in

Painting (University of Chicago Press: Chicago,

1987).

37. De Verleiding van Flora, chapter 6. Kolfin,

Voor koningen en prinsen (2006), pp. 745.




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Damisch has argued that the problem of what is underneath painting has onlybeen displaced or transformed by modernity in painting, which has retainedsomething of paintings thickness even though it claims to strive for surfaceeffects.38 Whereas in figurative painting the split between the vanishing pointand its mark remains purely theoretical because it cannot be shown, inmodern art it becomes visible, or rather figured as paint. Though adoptingradically different modes of applying colour dots to a flat picture plane, Van

Huysum and Klee are in agreement in that their works attempt to thinkthrough issues of infinity, colour, and transparency or opaqueness. VanHuysums still life with its undercoatings, glazes, and varnishes aims atsurface effects, just as Klees flat painting does. Indeed, Van Huysums dotdeparts neither from the translucent ground of the water drops surface norfrom the background of the green leaf, but from the entire painting as such.In turn, Equals Infinity, although it has given up depth, has lost nothingof paintings thickness. The profundity of Klees and Van Huysumspaintings is marked on as well as under, as a kind of ploughing of thesurface.39 This is what we may call these images pensiveness, whichencompasses inconclusiveness not as something that remains unexpressed, butas that remains inexpressible, even though it has been ploughed into thesurface of the painting. The notion of ploughing the pictures surfaceoriginally derives from Seurat, yet, already in the sixteenth-century Dutchart theorist Karel van Mander used the term to describe the way in whichthe viewers eye would penetrate a landscape painting, a process he calledinsien (looking in) or doorsien (looking through).40 Perhaps, Klees seed-bed(his own term), and Van Huysums water drops thrown together under ourploughing eyes will provide fertile ground for thought as well as for itsprovocation. If the eye thinks, even more than it listens, as Deleuze andGuattari write, paraphrasing Paul Claudel and Klee in one breath, we maywish to contemplate the possibility of painting as mute philosophy ratherthan mute poetry to become aware that, according to Van Huysumsflower still life, there are plenty of issues still waiting to be visually thoughtor philosophically seen.

38. Damisch, The Underneath of Painting

(1985), p. 205.

39. This is a remark originally made by Seurat,

and quoted by Deleuze and Guattari, What Is

Philosophy, p. 194.

40. See Martha Hollander,An Entrance for theEyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century

Dutch Art(University of California Press: Berkeley

and London, 2002), pp. 8 and 46.

Hanneke Grootenboer

pensive image

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