Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings

by James Elkins

One experience is unpleasantly overfull, the other painfully vacant.

The beauty of beauty is it simply exists. It calms our drive to understand what we’re feeling, damping our desire to write or research or theorize: and for that very reason, beauty is a word that many contemporary artists, and most people in my profession, would rather do without.

I’d say the people who wrote me saying they’d cried because paintings were beautiful were soothing themselves, without really saying anything.

I disagree with this - the beauty that evokes this response is closer to the "spiritual" feeling he describes for the Rothko. There is a quality in beauty that is overwhelming because in contrast to the world it has a perfect grace. It can come from perfection of form, elegance of craftsmanship and ease of evoking emotion. When Roxanna cried in front of the McQueen it was because it was so beautiful, and I suspect because it was something so light and perfect and whole (no element unnecessary), created by a dark mind that understood how rare those qualities are. In a way, it is the opposite of the void of the Rothko. It is a momentary completeness of meaning, linked to sorrow because it is fleeting, but held up in the face of the ugliness of the world, it's message being "Cling to This"

When I looked, I thought I could somehow see beyond the painting, that there was something behind it.

they are part of the risk of really looking.

The viewers I have been quoting tend to spend time alone in their thoughts, in the equivalent of the barren places where lightning may strike. They are open to the elements, exposed to whatever storms may come by. Most of us prefer shelter.

They have one foot in our world, and the other in the illogical, irrational domain of the artwork.

but I have almost forgotten that they mean anything.

Before, the leaves were magic: almost too beautiful to be seen without flinching, and colored an impossibly smooth and chilling blue.

It’s the complacency that worries me. If you don’t feel strongly, how can you know what’s out there, beyond the pale of thought?

I have truly gasped (jaw dropped, breath caught, etc.) from the sensation of what I guess we might still call Beauty, or some other kind of magic in art.”

“If you listen to the words people say when they look at paintings, it’s mostly things like… ‘Oh, how wonderful!’…or else they are just discussing the details of the picture, ozr trying to find out what the symbols mean, or other technical stuff. But if you can see the picture just for what it is, without restraining yourself, you might be overwhelmed by its beauty, which breaks all the resistance, and tears down all the walls between the object and the observer—even ‘inner walls.’ In that case…the painter and the observer grow into one another. They are united, like Siamese twins.”

I've been reading "Pictures and Tears" which explores the emotional response some viewers can have when interacting with art (and how the 20th Century dialogue about art has become quite clinical and anti-deeply emotive experiences.) This has been one of my favorite passages so far...

tears mingled and mixed, were given away and shared, elicited, paid, and bought: there were “tributes of tears,” “debts of tears,” and a whole liquid economy of love and friendship.

Maybe it’s to do with the stillness, the “depthlessness” of pictures, their uncanny ability to show us everything in a glance, and then keep it there in front of us forever. Maybe. At least it’s clear that paintings’ disjointed sense of time produces wonderfully intricate symptoms in viewers.

“people cry not during arousal, but during release.”

…a kind of craving for the company of beauty.

It is the recognition of something similar, the experience of being part of it, and maybe even a feeling of grace, a moment of unforgettable happiness.”

It as if everything in the painting is slowly sinking down into the hollow center, like flour settling in a sieve.

all have empty centers, voids where something should be.

Friedrich’s paintings are hungry paintings. They pull their viewers in, enticing them with loneliness. But you can’t find your footing in the empty spaces, and you start to lose yourself. This is the opposite of what happened to the people I described in the last two chapters. St. Catherine, St. Francis, and the others all suffered from pictures that had too much in them, that were too dense, too aggressive, too full. Friedrich’s paintings are too empty, the things in them too far away. The paintings in the last two chapters pushed on people, hurling them away. These pull on their viewers, drawing them forward and in. These paintings, in short, are about absence: just as the others are about presence.

The darkness is cold because the stars do not believe in one another

An abyss is literally a cleft in the world, and figuratively a fissure in meaning.

Rothko’s idea is that this uncertain grasping for visual markers is equal to RELIGION: that is, searching for some proof of God in the face of a dark and powerful, uncontrollable world—where the final end is Death—the black void that the paintings seem at first to represent. And yet, just as there are glimmerings of hope in the world, so Rothko gives us small, controlled inklings of hope in the ever-so-slight variations of color, blotches, lighter zones—hope that we are never (can never be) sure of.”

last thing a student needs is to become truly entangled in a picture, to the point where it begins to insinuate itself into her thinking, prodding and teasing her expectations, changing her mind, undermining her certainties, and even affecting the way she thinks. If they are given the chance, pictures can ruin our stable sense of ourselves, cutting under the complacent surface of what we know and starting to chafe against what we feel.

it’s comforting to think that paintings require only domesticated, predictable emotions. Everyone knows more intimate encounters might be possible. That’s why some paintings are masterpieces. But we also like them safely locked away in museums.

There’s a strange state of mind involved, in which you forget yourself just enough to lose track of the boundary between the picture’s world and your own world.

a painter named Frenhofer works on a single canvas for ten years without showing it to anyone. To Frenhofer’s “ecstatic” eyes, his picture is the most perfect image of a woman ever put on canvas: it is more his lover than his picture, more a living companion than an object. Yet when he finally unveils it, his friends see nothing but “a shapeless fog” with one “delicious foot” off in a corner. Frenhofer looks again, and realizes his masterpiece is nothing but “a chaos of color, tones, and vague hues.” He sees that he has wasted ten years of his life, and he staggers back, weeping.

“The Unknown Masterpiece” was written more than a hundred years ago, but it continues to exert a fascination for tortured painters and perfectionists of all kinds. It haunted Cézanne, who identified with Balzac’s tragic hero, and it was illustrated, somewhat carelessly, by Picasso. It is still assigned by teachers and read by painters, as an emblem of the madness of the search for absolute perfection. It’s a little hard to believe Frenhofer (how could he fail to see his beloved figure was invisible?), but he is a wonderful epitome of hopeless obsession.

Frenhofer is the tragic hero of the story, and all the danger and glamour are on his side. He literally loves his painting, and he goes insane when he realizes he has lost her. “Gillette, Or the Unknown Masterpiece” is a subversive story, because at first it seems Frenhofer’s passion is enviable, even if he took it too far. But Didi-Huberman is right: most of us, painters and spectators, have ended up siding with Poussin. Professionalism is safe, because its passions can be calculated.

To be in love with a painting—to cry—you need to risk being as crazy as Frenhofer. You need to be able to believe a painting can be alive: not literally, but moment by moment in your imagination. The experience can be disarming, as it was for me long ago looking at Bellini’s picture. It should be disarming. Everything else is just business.

When I cried in front of those paintings, I also did so in response to the painter’s courage, because I felt the painter…had been out on the edge, held it all together and made it work— and that may be the best explanation of what made me cry.

what moved me was simply being in the presence of a creative act so close to pure perfection as to seem an impossible achievement—and yet there it is: someone has actually done it: a human being can do that!