My First Artwork |

When I was a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University, I wrote my doctoral thesis in part about Ernst Gombrich. He very generously commented at some length on my description of his claims. Then, near the end of his life, I did for Artforum the last full interview of him. And so I now regret that I never asked him what always puzzled me, the significance of his astonishing early essay “Meditations on a Hobby Horse.” In that account, he describes in some detail the way that a child may treat a simple stick figure as if it were a hobby horse. No doubt, what interested Gombrich was the psycho-analytic roots of such symbolic play acting. After all, several of his early essays were written in collaboration with the analyst Ernst Kris. But he doesn’t in his later writings explain why this particular example so enchanted him. Or why he described it in a surprising way. “Picasso would turn from pottery to hobby horses,” he concludes, “one thing would be denied even to the greatest of contemporary artists: he could not make the hobby horse mean to us what it meant to its first creator. That way is barred by the angel with a flaming sword.” Why does he speak of an angel?

When starting in 1979 I began coming to Venice to look at artworks, the painting that first most interested me was Titian’s The Assumption (1516), which is in the Frari. Not a surprising choice, perhaps, because this large, prominent picture is very famous. It’s Titian’s breakthrough, the painting made his reputation early on. And so I read the literature on this work, taking particular note of its site-specific aspects, and learning that for a long time in the nineteenth-century it was removed from its original site. I was concerned with that history because at that time I was passionately interested in Leo Steinberg’s account of site-specific old master works, an analysis which applies very obviously to this Titian; Steinberg doesn’t so far as I know discuss it. Then, a couple of years ago, when— returned to Venice— I read the newest Titian literature, I asked myself what there was original to say about this now much-discussed painting. And, also, I wondered why I took an especially interest in it. Since I was not the sort of person who grew up visiting Venice, or reading about Titian, what in my background prepared me to admire this work? Of course, the Assumption (and the Ascension) are commonplace Catholic sacred themes. And it’s possible to have the perhaps unruly, irreverent thought that Titian’s Holy Virgin is a surprisingly hefty female, and so not someone who could easily rise up to the heavens. But I didn’t yet see what this observation had to do with my fascination with the picture.

At this point, my mind came to a halt. I was frustrated that my account was all too academic, with an accumulation of notes to the vast literature. And then I cast my mind back to my childhood. (Perhaps it helped that I have been rereading the last volume of the new translation of Marcel Proust.) I found myself distracted, thinking about the first artwork that made an impression on me when I was growing up in Santa Barbara, California. One of the marginal attractions of Proust-reading, as has often been said, is that it inspires readers to treat their own distinctive experiences as Marcel does his. (Alain de Bottom’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1998) effectively makes this point.) You don’t need to go to Combray to understand Proust’s madeleine. And so, I found myself involuntarily recalling the first artwork that I can remember, seen on the TV in 1954 presenting Mary Martin in Peter Pan. I couldn’t recall the entire story, which now on reading J. M. Barrie’s book, I realize is complicated. All that I remembered was one important scene. Peter, meeting the children, tells them that they, too, can fly if they will just think lovely thoughts. And, so they soon discover, after a little experimentation, she is right. Up they go, out of the window into the sky! You can view this scene on YouTube. Like the child who knows that his hobby horse is really just a stick figure, I knew that Mary Martin couldn’t really fly. No one needs grownups to tell him that burly stagehands who were backstage made possible her flying. But the whole, oddly complicated story of the play, the context for this scene, is not relevant here. I do love, however, learning that Barrie gave his complete royalties to Great Ormond Street Hospital, a London children’s hospital.

I don’t have any interest in critically analyzing this story, which is all too easy in our psycho-analytic culture. I am more interested in trying, no doubt futilely, to recall the moment when I first experienced this magical scene on our black-and-white television. As a child I soon graduated to another fantasy about flying, Superman . No wonder that when I grew up I published The Aesthetics of Comics. I have a childhood picture of myself wearing a Superman cloak. For me, analysis is unnecessary here. for the power of this fantasy is self-evident. Why wouldn’t a child love imagining flying, not in the banal practical setting of a commercial airplane, but under his free will when thinking lovely thoughts? It may seem a long distance from my childhood in Southern California and the Frari in Venice. But I owe to Barrie’s story the origin of my present appreciation of the flying-up-to-heaven figures in Venetian old master paintings. Does this present account show that I am secularizing Titian’s Assumption? I think not, for however it is explained, the rising up towards heaven of a figure is very worth seeing. You don’t have to be a believer to understand why Titian’s painting is so famous. And one of the distinctive pleasures of old age art writing are the opportunities it provides to return, as I am doing here, to childhood.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Carrier.

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