18 pages • 36 minutes read
John AshberyThe Painter
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Artistic Representation
Ashbery’s “The Painter” is about representational painting as well as representationalism strategies in art in general, particularly (and expectedly) poetry. At the heart of the poem’s narrative is a conflict of two differing views of art that hinges on how representation is treated. The building dwellers believe in art “[a]s a means to an end” (Line 10), of “putting [themselves],” or anything else, “on canvas” (Line 29). The building dwellers believe that art should capture and recognizably represent something in the world. However, the painter hopes that “nature, not art, might usurp the canvas” (Line 14), seeking art that avoids the controlling and limiting practices of traditional representation.
The tradition of Western art is largely based on representation, where paintings (and poems) recognizably depict some scene or object or figure in the world or in nature. In this kind of representational art, the accuracy and skillfulness of a representation is largely what determines the value of a work of art. Paintings and poems that vividly or subtlety recreate lived experience are deemed effective insofar as they reproduce the world and its contents in careful detail. However, there are traditions of art that push against both these practices and these ways of evaluating art, producing paintings or literature that might not recognizably reproduce some concrete object in the world. This kind of art is often called abstract, but because its many different threads contain work that is not properly abstract (certain strains of Impressionism, Surrealism, or Cubism, for instance), it is better to simply consider it nonrepresentational.
In the poem, the painter’s desire to produce nonrepresentational art, paradoxically, stems from his refusal to misrepresent that which he hopes to paint. When he paints his wife as “vast, like ruined buildings” (Line 16), he does not do so to be contrarian but because this is truly how she is (or, at least, how she is to him). It is for this reason that her portrait seems to have “expressed itself without a brush” (Line 18)—that is, expressed itself without any artistic intermediary. Similarly, the painter “dip[s] his brush / In the sea” (Lines 19-20) to paint the sea because he hopes to not paint an inherently false image or symbol of the sea, but to literally portrait the sea in all its “angry and large” truth (Line 11). In this way, the representationalist desires of the building dwellers are revealed as expressions of fear and control. After all, if the painter follows their instructions, the building dwellers can have their own, neat views of nature and reality reinforced for them in digestible paintings that literally capture their subjects, pinning them like butterflies under glass.
Artistic Persecution
The poem’s thematic concern with artistic persecution works together with its examination of representationalism. The painter’s desire for a truer form of art is not intentionally revolutionary or confrontational. In fact, he is described as simply “enjoy[ing] painting the sea’s portrait” (Line 2) just like how “children imagine a prayer” (Line 3). The painter simply enjoys his own process and appreciates nature; he has no ambitions about destabilizing the world of the buildings. However, his private artistic practices and personal desires provoke “malicious” (Line 28) mockery from “artists leaning from the buildings” (Line 27). This detail is important because it shows that, for Ashbery, societal persecution of the artist is dependent on the contempt of other artists, specifically artists who fit easily into the social status quo. Even though the painter has no interest in the building dwellers, the fear-response his art provokes by means of its unbounding of reality and nature leads to physical violence. The poem concludes with an angry mob of building dwellers “toss[ing the artist and] the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings” (Line 37) to be devoured by the sea.
Prayer and Desire
As a sestina, “The Painter” is thematically dominated by the six repeated words that conclude each of the lines in each stanza. Most of these repeated words fit naturally into the thematic and narrative concerns of the poem: “buildings,” “portrait,” “subject,” “brush,” and “canvas” each concern art, society, and representation (Lines 1, 2, 4, 5, 6). The final repeated word, “prayer” (Line 3), is the only one that does not explicitly fit the narrative. This choice of repeated word, however, reveals an important element of Ashbery’s text: the centrality of prayer and desire to art. The painter initially approaches his art with the naïveté of a child who thinks “prayer / Is merely silence” (Lines 3-4). This comparison portrays the painter’s approach to art as both somewhat misguided and, crucially, a result of a prayerful desire. For the painter, the human act of desiring and praying is what is important—not the institutionalization of prayer to some defined God or in some preordained format.
When the building dwellers urge the painter to paint a subject more digestible, they suggest one that is “more subject / To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer” (Lines 11-12). For the building dwellers, prayer is a specific and graspable set of desires that can shape some un-shapable thing. This portrayal of prayer is one in which desire has been properly placed into the acceptable movements of society. Here, prayer and desire are almost opposite of the painter’s wordless prayer, not oriented as a “means to an end” (Line 10). Similarly, the collective anger and fear of the building dwellers at the painter’s return to his nonrepresentational practice is described as a “howl, that was also a prayer” (Line 35). This stanzaic repetition of prayer to describe personal and collective desire shows the personal and near-religious importance of conceptions of art in “The Painter.”
