BY LEON WIESELTIER
It is still startling to behold the non-allegorical figuration of a hill or a field. Such a picture has the grandeur of all human creations for which the human is small, and not the most pressing problem. If we may call ourselves large, it is because we may make ourselves little, and expunge our face from the face of the world. We are nagged by the beautiful suspicion that we stand in the way of our own clarity. But when we remove ourselves, we fulfill ourselves. When we contract, we expand. In this sense, the correction of subjectivity is not only possible for us, it is ordained of us. We are here to see what there is, to see what there is for what it is. We will never see it perfectly, of course. The division between the subject and the object is a primal rupture, and we will fail to heal it, or to surpass it completely, as surely as we will fail to heal, and to surpass completely, our own individuation. But still we may move nearer and nearer to a view that is truer and truer. The partial failure of objectivity is a noble failure, and the partial success of objectivity is an affirmation of a calling. In painting, this calling is most completely honored in the landscape that is “about nothing”. This genre represents nothing less than the renunciation of the fantasy of union with the universe. Instead of a blissful integration, there is an effortful confrontation. Instead of a collapse of distance, there is an exploitation of distance for the ends of understanding. Such images of nature evacuate what we have found inside ourselves in favor of what we have found outside ourselves. The non-humanity of such pure pictures of place is a high expression of humanity: a stringency of civilization. Such painting is evidence that we have finally gotten out of our own way, that cognition has become a spiritual activity.
In the history of art, the “independent landscape” was a genuinely revolutionary achievement. The tradition was that human purposes were visited upon natural facts. The forests and the mountains and the rivers were interpreted as the instruments of myth, of religion, of morality, of emotion, of history, and lately of memory; they were nature’s seats of culture; they showed us mainly us. They were anything but themselves. They were symbolized out of reality. Even the conventions of the independent landscape eventually became impediments to the observation of landscape. Thus the emergence of the independent landscape—in which, according to Christopher S. Wood, “the beholding subject submits to the confusion, the mixed pleasure and fear, of non-purposive wandering_--was really an epic of secularization, in which painting learned to argue the side of the earth and to teach the lesson of nature’s otherness, its indifference to meaning. The emancipation of the landscape was accomplished very late in the history of painting, and it became one of modernity’s most significant proofs of the autonomy of aesthetic experience. But this optical and intellectual discipline is regularly imperiled by philosophic and political fervors, as in the contemporary “re-invention” of landscape in the interest of environmental homiletics. “Must we read that we may paint?” an influential eighteenth-century writer on landscape asked, and then mocked his own question. Trees are not texts. So the cleansing of vision is an endless labor. A way must be cleared through the mind for forms to make themselves known to the eye. The only way to advance is to begin again. Great preparations are required for fugitive moments of veracity.
Anne Peretz has a talent for such primary undoings. I meanit as praise when I say that she keeps beginning. Her growing strength as a painter is owed not least to her refusal to leave the rudiments behind. For this reason, there is no sophistry in Peretz’s brush. There is instead a classical and unglamorous determination to find painterly solutions for the problems to which perception gives rise. She does the work that is enjoined by a glance. She accepts the responsibilities of a point of regard. Peretz’s landscapes gladly exchange the myth of a place for its materiality, which amounts almost to a variety of asceticism if it is the hills around Jerusalem that one is beholding. For these are truly charged prospects. This topography is smothered in human notions, ancient and modern. Here vision is hounded by visions. Here the appearances need to be protected from the commentaries. (On a torrid afternoon many years ago, I stood with Yehuda Amichai on a road near the outskirts of Jerusalem and tried to hail a taxi. The poet stood there with his arm raised, but he was not heeded. Suddenly he turned to me and exclaimed: “This is the problem with Jerusalem: when you raise your arm to summon a taxi, you feel like a prophet!”) But Peretz sat in Lifta last year in the same spirit as her predecessors two centuries ago sat in the Campagna: secularly, patiently, reportorially, for the study of terrestrial truth. She found a way to wander non-purposively along a pilgrim’s trail. Peretz’s pictures provoke feelings, but they are not pictures of feelings. In her landscapes, the earth is not an emblem. Its beauty is a corollary of its integrity. Her canvasses are not designed to enchant, unless integrity is enchanting.
Not since Anne Ticho has an artist seized upon these slopes for aesthetic investigation, or lingered so profitably over the arduous pleasures of their ascensions. But Ticho mainly drew, and Peretz does not gather her information about the natural world by means of drawing. She proceeds from observation directly to oil, returning tones of paint for tones of perception, so as to master not only the look of a scene but also its solidity. In this way Peretz gives the feeling of a foundation—the geology beneath the impression, the rock that does not pass. The dust is in her palette. Her hills rise with an inexorability that is not merely sensual, the miscellany of patterns and details is unified by a king of physical conviction—by the earth’s conviction, which is the object of the painter’s conviction. Peretz’s extraordinary alertness shows in the ruggedness of her renderings, especially in their intelligent surrenders to impression. She never pretends to know more than she knows. (Her experiments with scale are also a consequence of her probity: in the larger canvasses there is nowhere to hide.) The absence of somany colors from these pictures—from On the Road to Jerusalem (cat. No. 8), from Ayalon Park (cat. Nos. 1,2,3)—is itself gorgeous. Peretz’s pictures around Jerusalem capture the collision of and aridities and fertilities that confers upon these surroundings their physical and metaphysical force. And her landscapes always honor the air, which strictly speaking is the landscape painter’s real subject. (This is finely accomplished in the euphonious pallor of Beach at Truro (cat. No 11), which is essentially an inquiry into atmosphere.) These pictures have no illusion about the world’s transparency, even in the radiance of the Levantine light.
Indeed, they leave the viewer gratefully disabused of the eschatology of radiance. For if ever we find ourselves, in a perfect light, we will gain only an experience of a perfect light. It, too, will be only an experience of seeing. This is the philosophical advantage of the painter, who expects nothing else. (On the subject of light, painters are greater authorities than mystics.) Peretz’s most intense explorations of radiance and form take place not in the mountains but by the sea. The success in Jerusalem is matched by the success in Jaffa. Her stark, modest, unpeopled roofscapes—these curves and corners in the pitiless sun—are admirable in their austerity. Their eloquence is the unrhetorical eloquence of geometry. In Peretz’s hands, the architectural improvisations of the city’s old quarter come to enjoy an almost mathematical necessity, a sharpness of definition that defies the port town’s historical and cultural blurrings. But these pictures are in no way idealizations. Quite the contrary. Peretz is exercised as much by the surfaces as by the shapes, and the facades that she paints are quiet narratives of visual incident, as the light falls and washes and stumbles and clings to the walls and the roofs. Where there is stucco, there is a story. The simplicity of these compositions is answered by their tactility. They are not tempted by abstraction; they prefer to remain loyal to the progress of light across matter, to the adventure of luminosity. It is only in darkness, Peretz seems to be saying, that reality is undifferentiated. When things are revealed, they are never all the same.
“A building in one of these pictures is a representative of the still and self-sufficient way that what is painted and pictures themselves both have their existence.” This remark nicely describes the attainment of Peretz’s roof pictures. It wasmade by Lawrence Gowing in hismagnificent essay about Thomas Jones, the Welsh painter of the eighteenth century whose small Italian roofscapes are one of large miracles of European painting. And more: “The Naples sketches achieved an enveloping unity by means quite opposite to dramatic illustration. They are gentle and precise and they illustrate nothing. They simply are.” In 1780, Jones leased an apartment in Naples on the top floor of a building opposite a salt warehouse, and busied himself in the customary way, by painting the bay and the distant, menacing majesty of Vesuvius. Then, in April 1782, he climbed up to the lastica, the terrace on the roof of his building, and started sketching the walls and the windows, around him in oil on paper, and discovered his genius for a gem-like rigor of representation. These precious sketches make empiricism seem like a reason for happiness. For the description of the world is one of the ways in which we defeat the disorder of the world verisimilitude in art is a stoic virtue. If Peretz is looking for ancestors, she can claim one in Jones. From her old Arab lastica on the Mediterranean, she strove for a similar feat of fidelity.
The development of a painter is a general encouragement, because it vouches for the ascendancy of consciousness over the dumb sublimity into which we have been cast. This is particularly the case when a painter of landscape comes into her powers. The earth may be the original cause of wonder, but it is good that wonder should give way to work, as ithas in Anne Peretz’s rich, diligent, unsentimental paintings. Her touch is now (in Gowing’s words, again) “the touch that not only describes but associates the material of paint with the liveliness of the world.”
Leon Wieseltier was literary editor of the New Republic from 1983–2014. He is currently the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution.