Brother's Keeper: Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures

The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth.

Genesis 4:10

Figure 1.

Pietro Lorenzetti, (Italian, active Siena 1320–44), The Crucifixion, 1340s, tempera and gold leaf on wood, overall 16 1/2 x 12 1/2 in. (41.9 x 31.8 cm); painted surface 14 1/8 x 10 1/8 in. (35.9 x 25.7 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift and Gwynne Andrews Fund. New York City, NY, 2002.

Visual representations of death rarely show corporeal agonies. Even in its most plentiful rendering in Western art history, those of Jesus' crucifixion, as seen in the small devotional picture by the fourteenth-century Sienese Pietro Lorenzetti, His unblemished torso spews a single stream of blood. Depiction of the sight of Jesus' corpse is common, of the strife of ceasing to live, not so. In the modern period, viewing photographs of bloated torsos splayed on the Gettysburg battleground or of an emaciated body early in the AIDS epidemic offers perverse scrutiny of cadaverous degradation. But formal postmortem portraits customarily idealize inert mortality as "resting in peace." Or, as in John Sloan's early-twentieth-century portrait of Isaac L. Rice commissioned by his bereaved widow, death is denied by its title: Silence. That is, "Shush! He's sleeping."

Figure 2.

John Sloan, Silence, 1915, etching, 9 7/8 × 11 15/16 in. (25.1 × 30.4 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, 1926, Courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Soothing bereft mourners, the mood is honorific, the intention elegiac, a genre that literary critic Tammy Clewell aptly encapsulated as offering "consoling substitutes to heal the wounds of loss" (2004, p. 48).

Figure 3.

Robert Smithson, Christ Series: Christ Carrying the Cross, 1960, ink and gouache on paper, 18 × 18 1/8 in. (45.7 × 46 cm), photographer: Paul Hester, Courtesy Menil Collection, Houston © Holt/Smithson Foundation / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Robert Smithson's brash paintings of the Christian Savior in his death throes upturn all that.² Expressionistically depicting a bloody process of dying, the imagery on canvas or paper is horrific, the mood vitriolic. Made in the early 1960s, Smithson declared of his work, "These paintings are not for arty chatter but for the lacerated soul" (1961b, p. 4). In spirit, they illustrate Melanie Klein's and John Bowlby's insights that mourning can include regressive feelings of anger and aggression, a process of ambivalent grieving. Applying and extending these, literary scholar Jahan Ramazani found "a resonant yet credible vocabulary for grief in our time—elegies that erupt with all the violence and irresolution, all the guilt and ambivalence of modern mourning" (1994, p. ix).

Figure 4.

Robert Smithson, Jesus Mocked, 1961, oil/paper, 37-1/2 x 35 in. (95.3 x 88.9 cm.) © Holt/Smithson Foundation / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Smithson's renderings of Christ's death exemplify what Ramazani terms the "anti-elegiac" (p. xi). The designation particularly applies to Smithson's evident ambivalences in his representation of the pictorial surrogate for the sibling whose death prompted his own birth—the predecessor whose sacrifice gave him his life but who in family lore becomes an obtrusive prototype.

Smithson (1938-1973) is renowned as a distinctive American artist especially lauded for:

• • An innovative art form, "earthworks," consisting of huge mounds, trenches and marks carved in raw earth in remote expanses in the western United States. These were spatially environmental, but not politically environmentalist.³

Figure 5.

Alice Neel, Robert Smithson, 1962, o/canvas, 40 x 24 1/4 in (101.6 x 61.6 cm). The Locks Foundation, Philadelphia, © The Estate of Alice Neel, Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner.

• • Mordant and fantastical essays on the art of...