Jackson Pollock, a Zombie Michelangelo. This is not a believe in reincarnation, but more the notion that both can be seen to exemplify a Hegelian process of emergence; the ethereal Zeitgeist working itself out into the corporeal world through an unconscious interplay between the ‘genius’ artist and his social/political/historical context.

Pairing these artists might seem needlessly grandiose and obtuse, looking to establish links between the two grand traditions of Western art which are often positioned as antithetical. A search for continuous histories rather than specific differences, however, reveals that aspects of art, and therefore perhaps the human condition, remain constant.

The analysis of Pollock within this framework requires a consideration of Clement Greenberg Modernist doctrine. Greenberg’s position is navigated by a reading of classical art which seems to align itself with Vasari’s account of the Italian Renaissance.

Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’ provides a three stage account of the Italian Renaissance, culminating in 16th Century Central Italy, and in particular Michelangelo. Vasari labelled great art as having a focus on the intellectual properties of design, the use of draughtsmanship for purely mimetic, figurative ends. Multiple figures placed in a convincing box like space were arranged to relate to some grand biblical or historical subject. A painting was to be a window which denied its reality as a two dimensional support with paint spread across it.

Greenberg describes a historical journey which moves in the opposite direction, with painting returning to itself. He describes a move from Manet, through Cubism and to the Nadir of abstract expressionism.

Greenberg stated:

“The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence”

This Kantian methodology is the nub of Greenberg’s argument for a Modernist approach to painting. The argument is for a painting which celebrates its flatness and the spreading of paint across a two dimensional support. Subject matter is to be done away with in place of a singular focus on the formal properties of the discipline.

The work of Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock is thus held up as the ultimate example of each doctrines ideal. Seen through the eyes of Vasari and Greenberg, therefore, Michelangelo and Pollock are the total antithesis of each other.

Such a standpoint needs to be filtered through a realisation of the limitations of both writers. Both are bastadisations of history, myopic assessments made to justify their position. The work of the artists preceding Pollock and Michelangelo is manipulated to fit into a preconceived narrative. Both make the presumption that the ideals they espouse for their historical and geographic context can be accurately and liberally applied to past art from different locations. Cubism is reduced to a mere step towards abstraction, rather than an intense testing of the limits of realism. Piero Della Francesca’s spiritual stillness and geometric flatness is seen as an inability to create the depth and dynamism of a Michelangelo. An in depth analysis of the misreading of the art which precedes their respective demi god’s is not necessary here. The implications such mistakes have on their readings of Michelangelo and Pollock are what is at stake here.

Numerous other reassessments of Greenberg criticise his analysis and implementation of his findings, but not the findings themselves. David and Cecile Shapiro and Eva Cockcroft make detailed accounts of political implications of Greenberg’s doctrine and Pollock’s work. They highlight a paradox in the account, that the idea of the works as autonomous, solipsistic closed doors on association, is exactly what made them such potent political weapons; as symbols of American liberty and the freedom of the individuals expressionism. This is held in direct opposition to Soviet Socialist realism.

Fur gives an account of Greenberg’s amnesia over the importance of Surrealism both to Pollock and Modernism in general. She reassess his work, particularly the ‘cut out’ pieces’ within the context of his connection to surrealism. Her psychoanalytical approach, not of the biographical type but rather the pychology of the works and their impact on the viewer, reinvigorates Pollock’s practise.

New Art historical approaches, particular gender studies, provide an almost limitless critique of Greenberg and the whole process of production and consumption in which Pollocks work was produced. There is not enough room to even summarise those here, but Michael Leja and Anna C. Chave are of particular interest.

What these various revisionist accounts reveal, however, is a common condition. The Greenbergian doctrine ignores the clear importance of Pollocks imagery within fields of thought outside the frame. They are not closed doors but potent images which resonate through every level of the social and historical context in which they were produced. They emerge from and engage with the real tangible world in numerous and profound ways.

The mythologizing of Pollock and Michelangelo has been covered in much depth. Barbara Rose gives a good account of the role of Greenberg and Namuth in the sublimation of Pollock image. Krauss’ scathing account in the ‘Optical Unconscious’ demonstrates the exact mechanics of the creation of the Pollock myth.

The problem with much of the new literature on Pollock is that it takes Greenberg’s account as its basis rather than Pollocks work. The shift in this hierarchy moves the work from what should be a secure position at the centre of analysis, and instead focuses on the possibilities of errors in Greenberg’s application of his analysis. What is almost always taken for granted, therefore, is the visual analysis itself.

It is the presumption that Greenberg’s visual observations are correct that I wish to dispute, so reclaiming new ground for the possible understanding of Pollock’s work in a wider history of painting. The sheer flatness of the works, the visual power of the imagery and the balancing of formal content are all crucial to the dynamics of viewing a Pollock.

Harold Rosenberg’s account of Pollock and the other abstract expressionists is often dismissed, partly for its madcap notion that the objects themselves are subordinate to the process. Rosenberg’s dismissal of the finished product is clearly flawed, but his analysis of the importance of the process and the shift in the manner in which artists approached the canvas, is of deep importance.

Rosenberg famously stated:
“At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”

His claim that what was to go on was merely an event, and the picture lacked importance was incorrect. But it is true that Pollock’s works should be read in the terms in which they are created. They are recorded of an event, which is true of all paintings, but a Pollock expresses this truth at every stage of the viewing process.

We cannot escape the physicality of Pollock’s gesture. Our eyes trace the journey the paint made from the stick to the canvas. Each curved line talks of the movements of his arms across the surface and of his body around is perimeter.

The is a distinct musical quality to the way our eyes move up, across and through a Pollock. We engage in an optimality which has various rhythms, paces and melodies. Our eyes transverses a great swath of canvas, as one sweep grabs us, then we are held in a congested cluster before finding a way out and around the canvas again. The hypnotic quality of this journey sees us coming in tune with the pulse, beat and sensations of Pollock, like we might settle into the patterns of a signers voice or a drummers beat. We are not afforded a total detachment from the process of the images creation, instead we are actively involved in it, particularly as the image still seems alive, in the process of shifting and moving.

Biographic projector onto images is widely, and rightly, dismissed, but this engagement cannot fail but to open up some kind of reading and understanding with the mythological character of Pollock. There is something overtly masculine and sexual about the manner in which these images are made, and this something violently assaults our eyes on viewing the finished image. The great Amercian hero, all energetic, all action, athletically parading around the canvas, sticks held as if extensions of the penis, wildly ejaculating over the bare skin laid across the floor.

Rosenberg was wrong to dismiss the finished object as secondary to the process of the images making, but Greenberg and others are wrong to forget the importance of this process. The object and the process are always intrinsically linked, and in Pollock this link is central to any reading. The final object is, as much as anything else, a potent index of its own creation. Pollock’s paintings are monologues, providing autobiographies of their own making.

Perhaps the most common misconception of a Pollock is the notion that they speak entirely of flatness, a singular description of the spreading of the material across the surface. This is heralded as a modernist ideal. The reality of the images comes closer to a permanent ideal of painting.

View a Pollock in the flesh. Your eyes travels up and across the canvas, attaching itself to a single line, moving at pace across the surface. As the line moves over or below the webbed lattice our eyes moves with it, shifting across subtle illusionistic and physical depths. Our journey is often broken but arrival at points of coagulation. Our eyes shift from attention on a single line to awareness of a web area, this shift in registers creates the illusion of depth. Suddenly a space is opened up which our eye can fall into, dependant on the area and the painting, this depth various from very shallow to infinitely deep. It’s akin to the depths we find in a forest as our eyes search and move between layers of trees.

We are constantly oscillating between a reading across the surface to a reading through the surface. This two fold play between the reality of flatness and the illusion of depth if not new, but is a permanent truth of painting. The second we lay any mark on a canvas a sense of depth is created. The second we lay any mark on a canvas an awareness of flatness is created. The job of the painter is to harmonise these two registers.

This two fold play is something Pollock and Michelangelo both do. Look at Lavender Mist and Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’ (Sistine Chapel). Is the viewing process that different? In the Last Judgement our first reading is not to go through the wall, but instead for our eyes to travel up and across, running up, around and across the spiralling mass of forms in the sky. It is a secondary, although equally as strong, reading which takes us into the picture. Like with a Pollock, we are aware of the image as a window and a wall, no viewing is spatially singular.

Both achieve these through their use of line. Michelangelo’s line is obviously harnessed towards exquisite mimetic ends, a figurative master class. Pollock’s line is, clearly, liberated from any direct figurative concerns. Yet for both there is a grammar of vision, there is an importance in using line as a sign with a multiplicity of references. They are aware of the role of line in the mechanics of viewing a painting. They use it to navigate us across and through the canvas, always fluctuating between both spatial registers.

It is the shift between two points of opposition which underpins Pollock’s work. The basic construction of Pollock’s work resides in a careful balance between order and chaos. Krauss’ essay on Pollock in ‘The Optical Unconscious’ reveals a history of criticism on the work which looks to polarise our reading. The language seems to veer towards a focus on the intrinsic order within his work or its seeming chaos, each being used as a device with which to either denigrate or subliminate his work.

The aggressive accusations claim ‘A dog or cat could do better’, they are ‘painted with a broom’, Pollock has just pissed on the canvas. They are labelled as the daubings of a pissed spider excreting paint.

The apologists praise the works relation to natural ordering systems, to the tight patterning of classical compositions,

The reality is that both statements are true of the works, they seem to sit precariously between utter chaos and a beautifully composed order. Just as our eye settles into a rhythm, defined by the seeming consistent ordering of the lattice of lines, the whole image breaks down. The image then becomes a sheer mess of lines in front of our eyes, just as it seems to be incomprehensible, our eye takes on a new line, bringing the whole into a new focus. We rediscover potential orders and patterns within the work.

Krauss correctly relates the distinction between the two points in regards to the shift in the works from a horizontal mode of production and a vertical axis or consumption. She discusses the shift in terms of the sublimation of Pollock. Yet it seems to reach further than this. In shifting from the horizontal to the vertical Pollock shifts gravity. A line of paint which sits flat, without dripping, goes on a journey from a mere index of Pollock’s process and past presence to a floating phenomenon of liberated line. It is the shift from the framework of the works making to its viewing, which raises the makes Pollock makes beyond a mere record of his presence and into a world of otherness. There is a certain magic within this new gravity defining pattern, a kind of unconscious energy which seems to sit beneath the line. They seem alive, but they seem to speak of mystical internal forces rather than being mere autobiographical accounts of their making.

In laying his canvas across the floor Pollock was able to liberate line, to reinvigorate his range of marks, to find his signature expression. But it is in the shifting of the plane back to the vertical for the purposes of viewing which allows his webs of lines to transcend themselves and to find a moving power which is akin to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. The word ‘Terribalata’ was used to describe the sense of awe which the Last Judgement induced on viewers. Its closest translation is perhaps to the 19th Century ideal of the sublime. It seems that this is the best frame in which to read Pollocks work, as if it is a sublime landscape, and we become Friedrichs wanderer, looking across and into a force of nature.

Tintoretto’s use of space reminds me of Caravaggio’s use of light, its excessively theatrical. It is interesting that Tintoretto should chose an almost square format in which to create, through the use of architecture, an incredibley deep recessive hole. Rather than being a perverse challenge, its as if he wants the power of the depth, without provide total distraction from the central drama in the foreground. Logically we are aware of this deep impression of space, but the square squeezes the life from it, so pulling our eyes, or keeping them locked to, the foreground action.

On the left a quite brilliant figural arrangement takes place. One figure stands tall and flat to the picture plane. The other lies flat, horizontal, and pierces the picture plane with the kind of foreshortening of a man trying to out do Michelangelo at his own game.

In Caravaggio’s ‘David and Goliath’ (1610) the hero presents the viewer with the screaming head of Goliath; David remains stoically calm despite the obvious magnitude of his heroism. Viewed from today the image, whilst great, seems ludicrous in the depth of its theatricality.

I restaged the image, performing a series of dramatic poses and gestures which similarly looked hold out a hand as if presenting a victors trophy to the audience. These performances lead to a series of prints.

The emptiness of the hand exposes the figures dramatic self importance to ridicule. His heroic nudity if castrated by his wearing of socks and boxers. Is there anything more pathetic than socks and boxers? The regal crimson and red is merely meant to provide another clash between the figures ideal self image as a hero and the reality of his ineptitude.

An Absence of Noise

The absence of noise is different from silence.  It is something that is particular to visual material, it is present in painting and in the silent films of the early 20th century.  Perhaps the most suitable example in moving image is the Eisenstein film which famously influenced Francis Bacon, The Battleship Potemkin, in which occurred the scream, significant in many of Bacon’s images.  The absence of noise is a powerful apparatus for purely visual imagery because when skillfully managed, it creates an imbalance that adds to the impact of a work.  Harmony is a strange word to use in the description of a painting and it is often misrepresented.  The greatest of compositions find their harmony in a series of carefully manipulated inbalances, creating tension as the eye (or, significantly, the eyes mind) is unable to rest and an energy is realised.  This imbalance does not only have to be developed through the direction of shapes and lines and the positioning of colours, it can also be found in the understanding of how an image can manipulate the psychology of a viewer.

Bacon was always a painter of psychological states, the scream is one example of how he accessed the mind of the post-war nation.  Its power lies in the expectancy of a noise to follow, which never does.  We see the scream and we tense up in the wait of some horrible primal yelp, when this doesn’t arrive an imbalance is provoked that is never resolved and so the eye’s mind attempts  to fill the space by taking closer account of this particular muscle spasm, by scanning the flesh/paint, the horror of the paint matter and the morbid fascination with the materiality of the flesh are both revealed.  It is almost like the viewer is put in place of the surgeon-painter, objectively prodding and peeling the matter, but we are not surgeons and the process is not objective for us, we see the horror of the moment in the result of the reaction (the scream). 

Jan Vermeers ouevre is in stark contrast to the volume of Bacons, however, the absence of noise plays a similarly important role.  Before we even take into account the role sound plays in his work, it is clear Vermeer was a master of light and the art of considered composition.  However, it is the role of sound (or lack of) which is where we find he rises above his contemporaries.  If I use one of his greatest works, The Milkmaid, as an example to best illustrate my point.  It has great power within the silence of the act and revels in the considered observation of watching a woman concentrating intently on pouring milk into a bowl.  Its success comes from drawing the viewer into the act, by painting the milkmaid within the isolation of her surroundings, the viewer is made aware of how silent the room must be, and by becoming aware of the silence in the image we notice the absence of the only sound that should be present, which is the sound of the milk pouring into the bowl.  This is how the necessary inbalance is created.  The only word one can use to describe the painting is that it is a meditation on a single act and everything within the painters arsenal is used to describe the act, this, added to the fact that the highlights on the pouring liquid seem to dance with the musicality of the sound, make the abscence of noise all the more pertinent.

I have started to build up a sereis of character types. My painting’s are increasingly moving towards multi figured narratives. I still think the single male figure will continue to be the main focus on my work. The shift, theatrically speaking, will be from a monologue to a central character with a supporting cast.

I want to approach the build up of this cast with as an openness. The first batch of drawings have been from images borrowed and sources from newspapers. Often they are of a figure (or two0 looking outwards) It shifs back towards the notion of the returned gaze and the protagonist. Ideally I would like to catch something of Manet’s single figures, that reverie and detachment, that introspective melancholy. It is the denial of the communication offered that seems to be the striking feature of his figures.

These two lads above disturb ne slightly. Those plastic smiles, smug grins pulled across mask likfe faces. I like the thought that perhaps they are saying, ‘We know something you don’t know’.

Interview by Tom de Freston with Antonio Santin.Painter, born in Madrid, 1978, currently lives and works in Berlin. Exhibits broadly internationally.With many thanks to Antonio for the time and thought put into the following answers Read the rest of this entry »

I have recently been do a series of drawing of figures who seem to be holding there own head, which is detached from there body. They begun as the product of a monoprint mistake, where I forgot to insert a neck (very neckligent…could not help the pun).

 The mistake sparked an interest, the figure made me laugh, so I started consciously pursuing these figures who seem to have inacted some kind of self decapitation. I wanted them to be a bit comic and ridiculous and called them ‘the boy whose head fell off’.

Today I made an alteration on figure in a new work which is based on Michelangelo’s David. David now appears to be holding his own head, as if having pulled it out of its socket. I suddenly reminded me of other images of David, the victor holding Goliaths head in his hand. It seemed interesting that David could perhaps holdin, victoriously, his own head in his hand. As if he was both David and Goliath, hero and villian, victim and victor, beast and man. It seemed to both deconstruct the history of the heroic male figure and play on trgic, but more importnalty, witty and comic ideas.

I have attached a photoshop mock up of an altered version of Carravagio’s David and Goliath. 

 I am currently starting on a series of drawings which look to develop a cast of character types, almost figures from some particular, currenlty unknown, race. They all seem to have pig noses. I think i might start working on a sereis of illustrations of this David like figure holding his one head, as if victorious. i like the idea of him also pushing the sword between hislegs, as if the threat of castration is present.  

 This waffled blurb could actually become something far more coherent, I could like to spend some time later looking into this notion…

Throughout the History of painting light has played a central and crucial role. A painters ability to excavate light from the stuff of paint has been a continuous fascination. The nature of the search and the type of light found has shifted, as if in some dialectical discussion with the zeitgeist itself.

 It seems that before now the various incarnations of light have tended to be the product of a meaningful, often spiritual search.

 A discussion with a friend yesterday made me reconsider in more depth the changing role of light in paint. He commented how the invention of electriicty must have significantly changed our relationship with light. before this point its existence, from either than sun or flame (notably in the form of candlelight) seems to be rooted to various religious belief systems. The sun as a symbol of God’s creative power, the candle as a ritulisitc tool in a various guises.

 We need only look to the type of light seen in medieval manuscripts or renaissance nad post renaissanace paintings. The type shifts hugely from an illuminated manuscript to a late Titian alterpiece or late Rembrandt self protriat. In eahc case, however, the light seems to glow from an inner depth, it seems to be conujured the medium itself. It seems weighted with a deep and moving spirituality. The light itself seems to be a manifestation of a deep and profound set of beliefs, imbued with a spiritual energy.

The invention of the electrical light bulb is a facet of the enlightenments wider program. Technological and scientific developments led to the deconstruction of previous belief systems and the arrival of doubt. Man repositioned himself as the centre of his own universe.

 The late modernist program seems, to me anyway, to be an attempt to find a new set of absolute ideals by which to measure ourselves and lead our lives. If we look to the late painting’s of Rothko it seems that this is one of the purest examples of this search for a new spirituality, a humanisitc one in his case.  The result is a form of light no less powerful, no less imbued and rising from the paint itself, than that seen in any religious altarpiece. The transformation of paint into light runs parallel and the notion of light as a motif of a deep spirituality continues. The context and framework of such a belief system seems more fragile, having been searched for rather than being the proudct of a certainty.

The biggest shift, however, for me, seems to be in the light of paintings beyond this date. The attack on the ideals and monolithic structure of the modernist program, as a whole, has led to the fracture and doubting period of postmodernism.

Along with this more philosophical and wide ranging shift have been contiued developments in the existence of light itself. We now have light everywhere and in various false forms. Television screens, computer screens, cities which never sleep in dark, mobile phones flashing constantly. We are surroudnign by a constant hum and glow of artifiically created light. Running parallel to this is a seeming lack of any credible and singular belief system to hold onto. Everything has been attacked, deconstructed, doubted and exposed as bankrupt. It feels, to me at least, a fragile and fasle existence, empty of any sense of divine prescence.

It seems both false and impossible to have the kind of light in painting now which exists, with great power, in a Rmebrandt or Rothko. Rather our light is more superficial, more surface based, more artificial. it is the light in a Daniel Richter painting, figure glows as if radioactive, burning form inside but due to some nuclear disfigurment or x-ray malfunction rather than any divine prescence.

Or the figures of Neo Rausch, a sickly sweet green or yellow glow often emminates, as if form within. it seems powerful and moving, but consciously false and unreal.

I think it is this form of light, deep and movign, yet false and artificial, which i want to imbue my figures with.

 I have yet to see this work in any context other than a book. Even in that format it blows you away. Finding this image of it in situ it makes me realise how much I want to actually see it. I want the expereince of its scale, of its spiritual context, of its engagement with the architecture of the building.

It is a work of staggering power and inventiveness, often credited as being the paitner’s breakthrough, the synthesis of the two great geographic styles of High renaissance painting. The athletic power and dynamism of design associated with Central Italian combined with the absorbing sense of touch, emotive and narrative power of colour and spiritual evocation of paint as light more readily associated as having a Veneitan history.

The combination of these factors, regardless of geographic roots, is a synthesis of upwardly mobile dynamism. All os the formal attributes of a painting are harness to tell of and induce the experience of a rise from the profane lower realm to the spiritual higher realm.

Like listening to choral music, feeling the pulse and melody resonate through your entire frame, its enough to make you appreciate how the sensations can be read as the confirmation of a divine spirit. considering the nature of its subject this is the ultimate compliment of the power of Titian’s painting. If I was not already so cynical towards such beliefs i would be readily converted. As it is it is enoguh to except that it just moves me on a levle beyond mere intellectual deconstruction.

Jacques Louis David’s Brutus. 1789

Look at the still life at the centre of this piece; a proto photographic, almost Carravagesue, creation. It is a small but crucial detail. It speaks of the paintings true meaning. The blade pierces the fabrics, a reference to the piercing of the domestic space by the loss of the young men. The still life is a poetic metaphor for the whole painting. This is a picture about domestic grief.

History lies. The perpetual desire to find meaning in a picture through a socio-political recontextualisation is the legacy of T. J. Clarke’s brilliant writing. Such a methodology denies an analysis which places the works visual structure at its basis. David’s Brutus is a case in point, a closer analysis of the picture shows that we should not so readily accept this image as one overflowing with proto revolutionary sentiment.

The accepted analysis of this work is that it anticipates the revolution; a celebration of a republican state, with Brutus as its hero. There is no doubting Brutus is the key celebrity figure of republican ideals. Having swore an oath on the body of Lucretia (who had committed suicide after being raped by Tarquin, the monarch) he led the charge for the overthrow of the monarchy. As head of the republic he had to display myopic stoicism in following his ideals. He sentenced his own sons to death for their plot to restore the Monarchy.

The grounds for this image as a celebration of pro republican feeling are flawed on two levels. Firstly it depicts the domestic grief in response to the sons death. This is the tragic effect of Brutus’ actions, not the best moment to select to aggrandise republican ideals. The Oath of Brutus or the sentencing of the sons would have shed a warmer light on the ideology.

Secondly there is no historical evidence to suggest that in 1789 David, or indeed France, had vehemently Republican ideals. The French revolution, the collapse of the Monarchy and the rise of the republic seems to have happened in an incredibly short period of time. To suggest such ideals would be intrinsic to David’s morals is to ignore the fact that this was a man capable of adjusting his moral compass for personal and artistic gain at any moment. This painting may be a celebration of antiquity, but it is not a call to arms. The ‘Death of Marat’ 1795 is a far more incontestable example of pro republican propaganda.

If such an analysis is bankrupt, or at the least flawed, then we need to return to the image itself. When we do we find an image of surprising compassion and emotional complexity. This is not the cold purely intellectual construction that a label such as Neo-Classical so unhelpfully suggests.

Consciously or not it is the structure of David’s images which initially controls our segmented consumption of the whole. In previous works, such as ‘Oath of the Horatti’, the structure is more explicitly controlled by architecture. Whilst architecture is present, and important in this composition, it is a single object that pivots the image. The empty chair in the central of the painting is the pivot around which the drama unfolds. It is empty. The absence of the presumed figural presence attests to the void left by the death of Brutus’ sons. Its spatial centrality speaks of its narrative importance. The dead bodies are carried through in the background; by it is this foreground absence which strikes a chord. Thus the image becomes about the domestic grief and reaction to an absent other.

The chair echoes the division of the image into engendered realms. On the right we have the female half and on the left the male half. They are positioned as emotional binary oppositions. A dialogue between the halves is opened up, each feeding our reading of the other

The female half is about the presence of grief. The group of figures echo the Niobe group. The borrowing is not just about a knowing nod to antiquity but an awareness of the power of emotions contained in the particular figural mechanics. The mother reaches out in a hopeless grasp, trying to deny her sons passing. At the same time her other arm holds up her daughter who swoons from the gravity of emotion. The double action speaks of her role of a mother, caring for a daughter, which thus heightens the sense of lost contained in her outstretched arm. The other daughter holds her hands up to block the vision; her features contain a moving melancholy. To their right a figure is draped with a cloth. By hiding her features our imagination creates a reaction beyond the realm of vision.

Brutus displays no such outward emotion. His stoic presence recalls Michelangelo’s Issiah. The quotation is not just derivative or an elitist reference but an awareness of Michelangelo’s ability to display emotional feeling through the form of a figure. David creates an emotional contradiction between the top and bottom of Brutus, between the face and the body.

The face looks out blankly, stoically excepting the death. Its eyes look to us but the lack of communication speaks of an emotional blankness. The body, conversely, twists dynamically, the toes curl like those in Titian’s ‘Crowning of thorns.’ The tension in the figure speaks of a burning anguish which is being repressed rather than an emotional bankruptcy. He sits in shadow, his back to the empty chair and his family. Everything about his pose is fraught with unease.

We move between the two realms aware that the female grief attests to the torment which Brutus tries to hide. The cost of his personal loss for the greater good of the state is pictured not as heroic, but tragic.