Primitivism and Cigars

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker. Karl Schmidt was born in Rottluff, today a district of Chemnitz, (Saxony), and in 1905 began to call himself Schmidt-Rottluff, in honor of his birthplace. He was a member of Die Brücke (the "Bridge"), a group of expressionist painters formed by four Judgendstil architecture students Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl and Erich Heckel. The name was a reference to a quote from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end..." ( Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, daß er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist), Later members included Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. The group had an interest in primitivist art, and had its first exhibition in 1905. In the Fall of 1911, Die Brücke moved to Berlin. The group eventually dissolved in 1913.

Die Brücke Group Members by Kirchner

(Schmidt-Rottluff is on right with glasses and goatee)

In 1937, the Nazis seized 608 of his paintings from museums and were classified as "degenerate art" ("Entartete Kunst"). After the war, in 1947, Schmidt-Rottluff was appointed a professor at the University of Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

Schmidt-Rottluffwas a prolific printmaker. His oeuvre is graced with 300 woodcuts, 105 lithographs, 70 etchings, and 78 commercial prints described in the Rosa Schapire Catalogue raisonné.

He died in Berlin in 1976.

In this particular posting, we focus on a self-portrait, where Schmidt-Rottluff paints himself with a cigar.

Cigars Help in The Difficult Crossing

We have had a couple of postings on the Belgian artist René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) who was famous for his surrealist paintings. One should refer to the prior postings Ceci n'est pas un cigare and The Cigar in a State of Grace for background. In this posting, we look at another of Magritte's works that incorporates a cigar. It is one of a series of paintings that attempt to depict the "difficult crossing," la traversée difficile. These paints all seem to have several fixtures. First, there is something akin to to a column or a baluster-like object, a bilboquet. In some of these paintings, it looks like a white pole similar to a pawn or a bishop's piece in a chess set.

In this particular painting dated 1946, the bilboquet shows itself in the form of a lamp. It may be called the "hero" or protagonist of the painting, and seems to be the center or stability in the piece. An additional common feature of all these paintings is the presence of a table. Most of the time, the legs of the table are depicted. In this particular version, only the tabletop remains. When there is a table, there is always an object on the table. In one of his paintings, for example, it is a wooden hand holding a bird. In this instance, the object on the table is a cigar box holding a lit cigar. Though the other paintings of this kind all have steps, in this instance the steps are only implied in the balustrade in the background. The curtain and the ambiguity between the outer and inner space are also frequent objects, in this case the presence of a window is extremely disguised. Always, the outside is stormy weather tied to the energetic and frothy sea.

The Smoker a la Affiches Arrachées

The French modernist artist Jean-Charles Blais was born in Nantes (Loire-Atlantique) on October 22, 1956. At eighteen he was enrolled at the "École des Beaux-Arts" in Rennes, where he studied art for five years between 1974 to 1979. Beginning in the early 1980s Jean-Charles Blais focused on the art of the Nouveaux Réalistes, Pop-Art and Arte Povera of Mario Merz, especially the works of the so-called "affiches arrachées", i.e, "torn posters," which had a fundamental influence on Blais' work.

Jean-Charles Blais began to paint on recycled materials, including posters, cans, cardboard boxes and sheets of newspaper. In 1982, he painted only on torn off posters, using the irregular surface to guide him in the painting of his characters, The surface defects, which removed an element of freedom, determined his compositions. His first characters are generally large men who occupy a large part of the pictorial space. The faces are always hidden, a characteristic which transforms the figures into heavy silhouettes. Later works of this genre subsequently refined the appearance, but the identity of the subject is still missing. In the art of Jean-Charles Blais of this period, his figures are no longer characters but objects, their bodies are pieces of painting.

The 1984 painting Le Fumeur, or "The Smoker," is of this latter category. We do not have a silhouette, but a large figure, with a small head, any personality hidden by a large hand holding a cigar and a great puff of smoke billowing forth from the hidden mouth of the anonymous smoker.

The piece is a pastel on paper, 32 cm x 26 cm.

That SEEGAR sure is a big'un!

What do you get if you have a lot of wood, paint, paper, and tobacco on hand, love cigars, and think big? Well, if you are the artist Roger Gober, you come up with a huge (alas, unsmokable!) cigar.

Gober was born in 1954 in the town of Wallingford, Connecticut. He studied at Middlebury College in Vermont and then at the Tyler School of Art in Rome. Currently, he lives and works in New York City and is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.

"Cigar" by Robert Gober

Gober is probably best known for his sculptures, particularly sinks and human legs, but he has also ventured into other areas, including photography, print-making, drawing, and other media. He has had exhibitions of his work in Europe, North America, and Japan. As Wikipedia puts it:

His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs, and has themes of nature, sexuality, religion, and politics. The sculptures are meticulously handcrafted, even when they appear to just be a re-creation of a common sink.

In his 1991 work entitled simply, "Cigar," Gober crafted a human-sized cigar. It is approximately 15 3/4 inches in diameter and 70 7/8 inches in length. "Cigar" may be found in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.

"Cigar" by Robert Gober

M & M and Cigars

The title to this posting is deceiving, as it has nothing to do with candy. Rather it has to do with an artist and a poet, with Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) and the painting of Mallarmé by impressionist painter Édouard Manet (1832-83). Mallarmé is a famous fin de siècle French poet whose poetic works were frequently put to music. For example, Mallarmé's poem, L'après-midi d'un faune (or The Afternoon of a Faun) was wonderfully put to music by the impressionist Claude Deubssy in the orchestral work Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. This would be a wonderful piece to listen to while smoking a cigar by oneself.

Mallarmé had a great affinity for cigars, and it shows up not only in one of his poems, but it shows up in Manet's portrait of Mallarmé painted in 1876. I have thus conveniently combined Mallarmé's poem and Manet's portrait of Mallarmé in one posting which yields the clever title M & M and cigars, for which I pat myself on the back.

First the picture:

Edouard Manet's portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé
1876. Oil on canvas, H. 27.5; W. 36 cm © RMN (Musée d'Orsay)

Now, the poem:

Toute l’âme résumée

by the cigar-smoking Stéphane Mallarmé

(in original French)

Toute l’âme résumée
Quand lente nous l’expirons
Dans plusieurs ronds de fumée
Abolis en autres ronds

Atteste quelque cigare
Brûlant savamment pour peu
Que la cendre se sépare
De son clair baiser de feu

Ainsi le chœur des romances
A la lèvre vole-t-il
Exclus-en si tu commences
Le réel parce que vil

Le sens trop précis rature
Ta vague littérature.

(in English translation)


The whole soul encircled
In our slow exhalings
Plural rings of smoke
Vanishing in other rings

They attest to some cigar
Burning wisely while
The cinders keep apart
From the clear kiss of fire

As the choir of romance
Flies up to your smile
Keep out if you come to
The real for it's vile

To clear a sense erases
Your vague literature.

(detail)

The poem seems typically impressionistic, concerned more with feelings and less with reality, calling reality vile, and something from which one ought to separate oneself, just like one ought to separate one's impressionistic lips and smoke, from the reality of the cigar's fire. When reality gets too close to the emotion it impresses, the impressionist runs scared, for the impression is more important that the reality, which, based upon Kantian philosophy, cannot be known. Only impressions can be known, the ding an sich, the reality in itself, is unknowable. Better vague musings and impressions than hard reality.

The Cigar in a State of Grace

René François Magritte painted his infamous painting of a pipe, of which we wrote in a prior posting. We ragged the Belgian artist around a bit on his choice of a pipe, rather than cigar, in his La trahison des images, the Treachery of Images. Ceci n'est pas une pipe would have been better rendered Ceci n'est pas un cigare for the reasons given in that posting.

But Magritte was not entirely pro-pipe. In fact, the cigar was featured in another of his famous paintings, one called L'état de grâce, The State of Grace. It is composed of a simple gray bicycle atop a lit cigar (or is it a lit cigar below a bicycle?). (Does it make a difference whether the bicycle is atop the cigar or the cigar below the bicycle?) In doing a little research I found a letter from Magritte that helps answer this specific question. According to a letter to Andre Bosmans dated October 23, 1959, Magritte was not inspired by the bicycle, and it is unclear whether or not the cigar inspired him; what he said is that he was inspired, and from that inspiration he derived the "subject to be painted: a bicycle on a cigar." It is therefore--from the artist's own hand--a bicycle on a cigar, and not a cigar below a bicycle, but it's still unclear whether he was inspired before any cigar, or was inspired by the cigar, and if not the cigar, then what inspired him. Personally, I thought the painting was a marvelous depiction of a cigar below a bicycle, but it is a horrible depiction of a bike above a cigar. But I do not know much about art.

There is, of course, another issue which does not yield a ready answer: there is an obvious disproportion between the bicycle and the cigar, and the question then is: which figure is disproportionate? Is the bike painted small, and the cigar normal size? Or are we to regard the bike as normal, and the cigar overly-inflated? Or--banish the thought--is the bike smaller and the cigar larger simultaneously so that there is nothing here to scale? We only know that they are relatively presented in different scales. Either way the bike and cigar appear to suspend, as if we were looking at a bike on a smoking blimp.

Magritte observed in another letter, this one to Suzi Gablik, that he was contemplating painting a bicycle, and then as if obiter dicta, he mentioned that "a bike sometimes runs over a cigar down in the street." This is an odd thing by which to get inspired. But I will admit it is probably more likely to get inspired by a bike riding over a cigar, then a cigar riding over a bicycle, just because the probabilities of seeing the latter are so low.

Magritte's L'état de grâce

It is hard to tell, but the cigar band has a picture of an owl on it, at least that's what I read somewhere. I don't see the owl. It did do some quick-and-dirty research on cigars with owls in their brand names. There are such things as "White Owl Cigars," but they are very cheap, and not something a Belgian would deign to paint. There area also Buho brand cigars (Buho is "owl" in Spanish), but this brand is not old enough to have been around during Magritte's time. We probably will never know what brand cigar Magritte had in mind.

But there is something a little more ominous about the painting: Why would Magritte have called the painting "The State of Grace"? The state of grace is a theological term, and it seems that whatever "inspiration" Magritte had it was not anything that pertained to the theological concept of "state of grace." Methinks Magritte may have been naturalizing or emotivizing, and certainly deprecating, the notion of sanctifying grace.

Now I can see how a cigar may be a vehicle of actual grace, but that is an entirely different thing that sanctifying grace.

Ceci n'est pas un cigare

The Belgian artist René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was famous for his surrealist paintings, in particular those that seemed to challenge or at least ask questions about reality. One of his frequent techniques was to place familiar objects in unusual contexts. Contrary to another surrealist, Salvadore Dali, Magritte's purpose was not to shock or disgust, but rather to evoke the sense of mystery, of mystère. But Magritte's brain was a little muddled in that he spent much time mulling over the likes of Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Saussure, and Foucault. He might have been better served by reading Aristotle and St. Thomas and learned about the sanity of a philosophy of moderate realism.


Perhaps one of his best-known works is The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images). It shows a realistic depiction of a standard pipe, but below it, in writing which looks like that of a schoolboy's hand, he put, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," which means (in French) "This is not a pipe." (In French, by the way, "pipe" is pronounced something like "peep," which makes it fun to say. A sentence like "I've got a pipe in my pants," becomes quite humorous if the word pipe is pronounced like the French would pronounce it. But I'm straying. Muhammad once condemned a man to hell because he had peep in his pants. But now I'm really straying.)

The painting is obviously meant to get us to think about the relationship between reality and concept and the representation of that concept, either in painting or in language. To get to the point, of course, there is truth and there is untruth in the statement "This is not a pipe" because it is ambiguous. Magritte insisted that had he written, "Ceci une pipe," "This is a pipe," below his depiction of the pipe, he would have been lying. But would he? If, before this discussion, I held out a picture of a pipe before you and asked you, "What is this?" You might have answered, "Why, it is a pipe," and you would not really be lying. You would of course would not be lying because you would be referring to the concept that is behind the painting. You would know that it is only a painting of a pipe, but you would know that it was communicating the concept of "pipe." Some things, however, are unexpressed: hence the ambiguity.

The problem, as I said, is one of ambiguity. It is unambiguously a problem of ambiguity. For one, what does the work "This" refer to? The painting? The painting of the pipe? The concept behind the painting? The sentence? The pipe that was the model for Magritte? What does "a pipe" refer to? A particular pipe, the "universal" or abstracted concept of a "pipe" or "pipeness," or the representation of a pipe? (We have been enlightened since Magritte's time, by that great mind and philosopher from Hope, Arkansas. We now know the copula "is" can mean some many things. To the ambiguity of "this" and "pipe" we can also ask, "It depends what you mean by 'is'?")

What, by the way, ties the sentence to the painting? If the sentence below the pipe had read, "Ceci n'est pas une piment," this is not a pepper, we would not even be able to have this discussion, because it would be true on all grounds: all the ambiguity is gone. But if the painting had read "Ceci n'est pas un piment" and had a painting of a pepper, the ambiguity is all in again.


Literally speaking, the painting of a pipe in Magritte's painting is not an actual pipe, a pipe in the concrete. This, of course, everyone knows. It is a representation of a pipe, and bears within it the ability to communicate the concept of a pipe, and perhaps even an individual pipe that lay before Magritte as he painted it. Thus the painting may encapsulate in representational form, both a concrete pipe and the concept, the abstracted idea of what a pipe is, of "pipeness." Conceptually speaking, however, the representation of a pipe does grasp in some way the concept of a pipe, even perhaps the individual characteristics of a particular pipe, and so it is false to say that the painting does not express, in some way, the concept of a pipe, the idea of what "pipeness" is, or even the whatness of a particular, concrete pipe. There is something of "pipeness" in the painting, maybe even the "pipeness" as expressed in one particular pipe that Magritte had before him that is communicated from the pipe, to Magritte's brain, back onto the canvas, even into the words "pipe," and from the canvas into our own brains, where we recognize the abstract concept "pipe" based upon our own experiences with pipes.

If we did not know what a concept of a pipe was, if we had no idea of what "pipeness" was, and if we did not have the ability to separate concepts or ideal objects from concrete objects or representation of concrete objects, then it would be impossible to know that a painted pipe is not a pipe. But obviously we see that a painting of a pipe has "pipeness" in it, just like an actual concrete pipe does, or just like the idea of a pipe in our own minds, or the the idea of a pipe in Magritte's own mind. Otherwise, we would not be able to be speaking of concrete, individualized pipes, paintings of pipes, and concepts of pipes or "pipeness." Indeed, we would not be able to even understand what the word "pipe" (whether pronounced "peep" or "pype") means.

It's all rather interesting, and it drove that erratic but brilliant Michel Foucault to write a monograph on it in 1968 (expanded in 1973) which (predictably) is entitled Ceci n'est pas un pipe. The work has been translated into English as This is Not a Pipe. It is almost ninety or so pages of ramblings, some of which makes sense, some of which does not. None of which is very important, and it is difficult to believe that the world is a better place for Foucault having written it. Did one person become better for reading it? Did one person come closer to truth for reading it? That is doubtful. I have looked at Foucault's work on Google books, and it is full of all sorts of interesting thoughts, including the concept of "calligram," which seem to dissipate as if they were so much smoke coming from a pipe. I wonder if it is my weak mind, but then I remember, that this is Foucault I'm reading. I'm not a better human for having glanced at it, but perhaps I need to mediate upon that.

Magritte got so much mileage off of his first painting that he painted a second which adds even more complexities, including perhaps a critique of Platonic or Hegelian notions of Idealism. I will not address those, as I already have said too much.


Anyway, what does Magritte's painting have to do with cigars? We are a cigar club, not a pipe club. Well, Magritte's selection of a pipe ("peep") betrays a hidden ambiguity which even the brilliant Foucault missed. The ambiguity is not one of painting or of the written language, but is one relating to the homphonic identity of "pipe" (pronounced "peep") and peep (pronounced "peep").


For that matter, there is a further ambiguity arising from the homophonic quality of the French "pipes" (peeps) and the famous if scurrilous diarist Samuel Pepys (pronounced, "peeps"). There are many pipes, but only one Pepys. But that aside, we can still have fun with the not ver savory Mr. Pepys. Others have observed this and have made a joke about it:


This homophonic ambiguity is disastrous, sloppy, problematic. It is a philosophical and artist faux pas. Had Magritte been thinking, he would not have painted a pipe, and he would avoided the homophonic ambiguity with "peep" and "Pepys." A clear thinker would have chosen a cigar, as a cigar suffers from no such pipe/peep/Pepys homophonic problem. A cigar is a cigar: there is no homophonic problem.*

It was very short-sighted of this artist. Even Homer nods. Magritte stumbled. I have therefore scoured the internet and found some folks who realized Magritte's lapse, and so I offer the club a modified version of Magritte's visual conundrum: Ceci n'est pas un cigare and (for the Spanish speakers) a version in Spanish, Esto no es un cigarro. These paintings are philosophically superior to Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Moreover, it makes me want to smoke a cigar.

One last thing. Magritte stumbled. But he did not do so because of a bias against cigars. Indeed, he painted a painting of a cigar below a bike in a painting entitled L'état de grâce, "The State of Grace." We'll get to that in our next posting.

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*There is a charter boat called "Sea-Gar" which might present a problem. But it did not exist in Magritte's time.

Botero's Los Cigarros

Fernando Botero (born 1932) is a Columbian artist. Starting as a set designer, he eventually focused on art. He is perhaps best known for his paintings and sculptures of subjects that are proportionally exaggerated or, to put it bluntly, fat and often grossly obese. The paintings puzzle: they have the ebullience of baroque, but the two-dimensionality of the Gothic. One of Botero's paintings is entitled "Los Cigarros," and it predictably features a fat cigar smoker. This person is postured in an alley ready to smoke his cigar which he holds, unlit, in his right hand. It appears that it may have been smoked partially before, but there is no wisp or other evidence of smoke that would suggest it is lit. The subject's left hand is in his pocket, perhaps searching for his lighter.

The colors of the "Los Cigarros" are very warm, with an emphasis on orange and browns. The man must be of some importance. He is dressed in a brown suit, wears a matching fedora, and has a pencil-thing tie which is--oddly--blue. His hands are well-manicured. There are three women peering out of their windows, perhaps wondering what this well-dressed man is doing in their alley. They appear to have their hair split down the middle and pulled back, in the manner of peasants. Oddly, there appear to be four oranges at his feet.

Los Cigarros by Botero (detail)

Los Cigarros by Botero