J.Paul Getty Museum, Giacomo Ceruti, A compassionate Eye, summer 2023

by ROSANNA ALBERTINI, Los Angeles

Giacomo Ceruti, Basket Porter with Dog, ca. 1720-25 oil on canvas 124 x 154 cm

Giacomo Ceruti, School for Girls ca. 1720-25 Oil on canvas 194 x 170.5 cm

Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 1942

What the eye beholds may be the text of life. It is, nevertheless, a text that we do not write. The eye doesn’t beget in resemblance. It sees.

But the mind begets in resemblance as the painter begets in representation; that is to say, as the painter makes his world within a world.  

A few words as a premise: the following post is a four hand performance —my daughter Barbara Calabi and myself playing together with words and thoughts: A Pisa-Los Angeles conversation. Barbara is a paintings restorer. She reads the brushstrokes better than me, through her hands’ experience.   

We are the future of Giacomo Ceruti’s pictured past. Three hundred years of transformations in the art of painting after him unfold in my mind. Shadows from the future slip back comparing themselves to some figures: Degas’ groups of dancers getting ready to practice, several femmes en bleu by Picasso. I leave to my daughter, a restorer of old paintings, the task of thinking about the surface skin of these canvases, their place in history. 

For the eighteenth century it was certainly a kind of painting  too rough to be considered excellent. The brush stroke imposed by the old school was smooth, flat, hard to distinguish, shading off the colors with continuity in such a way that pigments could blend into one another imperceptibly.

Today we are able to appreciate enormously these paintings because they seem to us modern and progressive, but a few centuries ago, when technique and good execution were a fundamental quality of the arts, painters like Ceruti were considered minor, not good enough. His work missing the roundness, I would say the depth created by a smooth execution in which forms don’t even look as if made by a brush.  Here, instead, the brush stroke is one of the characteristic traits of the artist, clearly present in every artwork. 

If his brush strokes are always rough, this is a modern and nonconformist manner of painting, and the final result is an excellent representation of the eyes’ expression.  His search for expression, along with the intention to render a state of mind, is this painter’s goal, so evident that he looks for it even in the dog’s eyes. 

The eyes and their expression are the center of his paintings. What the viewers are asked for is, what can they read by themselves in the eyes of the painting they are looking at. BARBARA CALABI

Giacomo Ceruti, Seated Beggar, ca.1720-25 130 x 144 cm

We are real now as the past was. The past is not a figure of speech. It is not only a tower of time. It is people, hands made stiff by age and work, curved backs and swollen feet. It is clouds and seasonal colors. We swear today is different. True for skyscrapers, computers and freeways but, did human nature change?  What’s reality for each of us, when we can’t pull the imaginary vision, feelings and remembrances, away from a painting in front of us, as if reality and imagination were inseparable, taped together. What do we really see? Things that stick on an inner mirror sending back a whole emotional picture?  Other images, other faces and places extending the canvas into an instant film? Pictures and mental impressions of living moments have an equal presence.

Hard as it is to unravel, I am sure Giacomo Ceruti mumbled all of that while he was painting. His eyes working like a strange camera turning around his portraits. Are you following me? One of them asks him. Stopping on unusual angles, almost wanting to introduce a twisted movement in his damned still images.  Or capturing a quiet resilience in a woman’s eyes. She looks like a young woman who forgot her age, she sits on her duty, spinning wool is work, isolating her from the world. If she ever stepped into the world. 

Giacomo Ceruti, Little Beggar Girl and Woman Spinning, ca. 1730-33 Oil on canvas 134 x 159 cm

It is tempting to compare Ceruti to Seurat, for the different scale of the images sharing the same space in the front and the background, extremely small and very big. A flash in my mind.  The two women take over the front of the canvas, the spinner fills the entire hight of the painting, they seem to be keeping themselves on a ridge: on the other side there is emptiness, separation. Maybe the city or village life is not where they belong. Ceruti paints building and streets indistinctly, grayish, almost ghostly–a place of others, una lontananza. The face to face comes first along with the tactile quality of the clothes, the cracks in the apron. 

The same pattern of humans on the edge of a void -my husband Peter noticed it before me, instantly- appears more than once among these 17 paintings. Yet their figures emerge and fill their own space with a dignity that reveals the beginning of a new time: our modernity. From the medieval serfdom to the protagonists of the social contract: one by one, each person becomes an island, a space whose edges cannot be altered, it doesn’t matter how hard their life conditions.

“Humans have been considered as essentially reasonable beings” which is wrong, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the same arc of time Ceruti made his paintings, “humans are nothing other than sensitive beings only following their passions;  reason is the only tool they have to compensate for all the stupidities that were caused by passions.” 

In the heart of the eighteenth century the crowd of nameless humans ignored by history raise their heads. Their eyes are sad, or intent, interrogative, withdrawing, provocative. All together, self awareness is appearing. Better, the artist gives it to them. Looking at us from his self-portrait, the painter is almost threatening: don’t foul me! Don’t dare to pity them because they are poor. These are my people, simple and proud. Even today Lombard people (from Lombardia, in Northern Italy) are like that, I can add. They are my people too, I recognize them. I grew up among them. Ceruti was from Milan. I am as well, and a village person. The beggars were integrated in our days, pretty often an old man, zio (uncle) Pedrin we called him,  was coming under our kitchen’s window calling for my mother: “pansa schissa Marietta!”  “Flat belly Marietta!” There was always something to give him. Others were drunk and curious, violent at times, normally gentle with us children. Lack of fortune was a common condition after the war. “You grew so much -I was twelve- Is it raining already?” An allusion to the beginning of my periods. He was one of the old men who used to chop our wood for the stove. I never forgot his words, the metaphor was cryptic but I grasped it. Besides, metaphors weren’t part of my language. That one is the first I remember.   A few days later grandmother came home in tears. Barbisun died, she announced. He was the man of the rain. Shot himself in the woods, hunting. Maybe there is an international popular language unifying all the poor. Giving birth, in Maori culture, is called “rain of the children.”

Giacomo Ceruti, Whine Tapping, ca. 1725-30, Oil on canvas 117 x 151 cm

Giacomo Ceruti, Self-Portrait as a Pilgrim, 1737 Oil on canvas 64.7 x 46.8 cm

It is surprising for me to find such a familiar human and natural landscape in these paintings immersed in a hazy* mood, and recognize my people’s expressions in Ceruti’s art. Of course identities are different, yet something in their eyes brings me back to a diffused state of mind of women and men hiding hope deep in their guts, well hidden, maybe forgotten, showing normally a cautious gaze, steady and pensive but far from optimistic, sometimes withdrawn and mixed with a smile, almost imperceptible. The present moment is all there is: let’s bend the head down, and work.

hazy: the online dictionary says it is an eighteenth century word, of unknown origin, (in nautical use for ‘foggy’)

The day’s first twilight.
Morning that once was dawn.
Day that once was morning.
The crowded day that will become the weary evening.
……………………………………………………………………………………………..
I was made of a brittle substance, of mysterious time.
Maybe the source is in me.
Maybe out of my shadow
the days arise, inevitable and unreal.

Jorge Luis Borges, In Praise of Darkness, 1969

IRENE

by Rosanna Albertini

I woke up at four. Dawn was barely starting. Not sure where the day was springing from, if it was me, or the house called Irene —the artist who had lived there— or produced by the desert. As the light became bright, the heat in the air gave me a state of oblivion, far from the big world and the small daily habits, only able to see and feel the long table with metal chairs, the small window with bars keeping at bay the land’s dryness, a ceramic Medusa head, and the climbing Jasmin half-alive for years, never dead. Sometimes I touch my head, it has that same kind of endurance. Waiting to wake up in a better time? Not really clear, yet the promise is there. 
Early in that morning, there was no promise. I was aware the clock’s tic toc had disappeared. Time was mine and it was light. Life’s insanity could stop. A small black hawk landed between the mesquite’s spines screeching from the bottom of his throat: “time has vanished and everything is good.”  Not bad to stand up between infinity and the feet on a dry portion of ground. A wall surrounds the garden. 

Back home in LA, still vacuumed by the un-indulgent breath of the desert, I open a book without knowing why. A poem jumps into my eyes, pitiless: don’t sleep, don’t bury yourself in the daily routine.

These are all Irene’s watercolors (no title, no year)

And for the time, just one exists:

I.

Just one exists and I am time,

I am the whole of light.  

the whole of time. 

    Wallace Stevens, Moment of light.

OK Wallace,  I understand the intensity of your moment, mine is similar but perhaps less hinged on the I. I felt  past, present and future as real and vivid as only one flower with different petals. Yes, in a flash of light. And light replaced time with my “I” submerged by a wave. All the moments I had spent in Irene over the last thirty years -one season after the other leaving intangible roots-  came to me at once. Not really memories: scattered moments were all around me in the same place, out of my brain. I thought for an instant this is my real house but no, it’s Irene’s: the place of an artist who painted and taught watercolor. Perched on my shoulder, she stared at her pictures along with me. 

To me Irene, I mean the house, was a lake when the heavy sweet water is so flat that stepping inside seems a sacrilege, almost breaking glass. A lake in which a goddess used to make cookies for neighbor children … I know nothing about her, does it count? Her stove, the old locks of the kitchen cabins, they still contain the touch of her fingers. The house made me prisoner like a lake in Maine, very hard to get out, the fairies keeping me there, what does it mean to go home? Enchantment is an addiction for me, woods and grass of my childhood hold my soul. My garden sucks me in. The desert light in the afternoon melts the image of my body as it does with trees and clouds, almost unreal clusters of particles. The day keeps going inevitably, without concessions: whether one likes it or not. 

Instead of painting, Irene the artist writes to her students how to put down the strokes of color, and to observe what produces distance by modulating colors, almost as if playing a clarinet. Her instructions, quite precise, are good for any painting. Drawing, drawing is the first thing —she wrote. I noticed dryness in her words. The watercolor art I know was a mess of wet paper. Irine’s watercolors are so well done the struggle disappears. The fall turned into winter stripping all the leaves from the nut tree. School had started for my small person already old at eight years. The elementary school in my Italian village had two big rooms. Two classes per room with the same maestra. A woman always wearing a black dress, feminine version of the black tunic on the priest’s body, used to enter every morning with a fiasco in her hands, containing the ink she poured very carefully into a hole in each small table. I leave to your imagination what we used to do with that ink, beyond writing, of course. That’s why we also had a black over-dress on the regular clothes. The back of the old building near the church included one more big room -I saw it that way- for the art school in the evening, from 8 to 10 pm. Nobody had TV in the nineteen fifties. Kids and adults learned the basic techniques for visual arts. Not more than five or six people. Ercole the wall painter was our teacher, my grandfather’s student in the same room. After grandfather moved to the clouds it seemed normal to send me to the evening school that was ten, fifteen minutes walking from home. I was initiated to water coloring. So difficult under the vibrant, loud voice of the teacher terrifying me. My reward was the walk home by myself, when the night had already spilled her own ink. I was friend with every inch of my space. The first snowflakes in the dark under a gray, low sky seemed to me a dance of frozen fireflies keeping me company, melting on my hands. Irene looks perplexed. 

Too young for watercolors —she mumbles shaking her dark hair, those I saw in her portrait on the wall over the fireplace. Never had I the sense of the right time for learning in my early ears, nor later. Hunger for making my own task, in my own way, was somewhere hidden in me. With impatience. No surprise I started to write, design, bind by hand, and publish my own American books to avoid the ordeal of begging for money to reach good publishers. I like publishing as an adventure. The first time was at Irene’s. In the heat of the summer, dropping sweat from my thick hair and pinching my fingers with a long needle. From her portrait, Irene smiled. Obeying my teacher I made two or three blank books every day. My fingers had to be trained to manage the tension between paper and the thin linen thread that required to be waxed and cut according to the number of pages. In my craziness I didn’t pay attention to Irene’s presence. She knew it, anyway pleased because I was learning an art, and was aware of the silent power of her adobe embracing my days, protecting my instinct.  

When my friend Jane crossed the Acheron to reach the time of the dead, I was at Irene once more, as I am now. Nothing disappears. Irene passes a weary hand across her forehead half sad, half surprised. Her living room, the  porch in the garden are a factory of flowers preparation for the memorial. I sit on the couch in front of the large and low round table. I practice making paper flowers with a Japanese technique and use crumpled pieces of paper —remains from an art school nearby. I don’t really know where I am, follow my hands. Where are the ashes? I ask. Somebody answers: just here, behind you on the black furniture. Jane is having the last tour of her Inn, moves from a cabin to another, also to Irene’s adobe, of course. Near me on the couch appears a skinny five year old girl impatient to move her hands on the pieces of paper. What’s your name? I ask. Gwynnett, she replies. Smiling, lively, curious, fearless Gwinnett. She picks the petals’ colors. Jane’s granddaughter, one of the many. Can we add a butterfly on each flower? She asks. We will certainly do it —I reply. Nostalgia doesn’t make sense. Through dirt and bodies, the frenzy of life doesn’t stop. Small and new, with black long hair and bright dark pupils, there is a Jane sitting next to me. Irene assents, understanding.

Photos: Rosanna Albertini & Peter Kirby for the watercolors.

NOTES

Irene’s adobe has become part of the Twentynine Palms Inn, in Twentynine Palms, CA, after Irine passed away in 1997, at the age of 95.  Irene Zimmers had married  in 1967 Gerald Charlton, the architect who had built the adobe in 1933-34, “banished to the desert” from British Columbia to cure his tubercolosis. 
Irene Zimmer was a water colorist. She was also an art teacher and became the President of the 29 Palms Artist Guild. The “High desert water color society” dedicated a commemorative tablet in bronze to her, which is now in the house.