Why is Caravaggio so popular now?

Contemporary artists from Frank Stella, Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola, Julian Schnabel, Robert Longo, and Martin Scorsese to Louise Smith, the young short-list winner of 2011’s National Portrait Gallery’s Portrait Award, appropriate, quote (Jones 2011, 30) and/or are informed by techniques, images, ideas, and even “projected spherically informed space” (Weschler 1987, 98) from Caravaggio. Indeed, Caravaggio, the Baroque genius Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who died in 1610, has grown increasingly familiar to many contemporary artists. Although first resurfacing after centuries of being ignored with a comprehensive show of his work in Milan in 1951 followed by one in Paris in 1965, and a more limited one in Cleveland in 1971, the period of increasing “Caravaggiomania” (Spear 2010) most notably spans from the 35 piece showcase (there are only 60 authenticated pieces in all) of his works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1985 through last year when two dozen of his paintings were exhibited in Rome to estimates of five thousand visitors a day in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of his death.

According to University of Toronto art historian Philip Sohm, “Caravaggio’s popularity—if measured by the number of books, catalogues, and scholarly papers devoted to him—has overtaken that of the other Michelangelo Buonarroti in the last 50 years” (Kimmelman 2010). His popularity spans to the interests of all living generations of contemporary artists and the artistic styles and/or movements represented by his work have expanded from the Baroque of his day to many of the contemporary categories we use today—from Julian Schnabel’s neo-expressionist Exile painting completed in 1980 to Frank Stella’s current move towards “radical abstraction” (Ottmann 2011, 25), Cindy Sherman’s Post-Modern Masters Series, and what scholar Mieke Bal refers to as the “Contemporary Baroque” used by artists as diverse as Andres Serrano, David Reed, Jeannette Christenson, and Carrie Mae Weems as outlined in her book Quoting Caravaggio Contemporary Art, Preposterous History published in 1999. According to David Ekserdjian in an article written for The Art Newspaper last July (2010), “Caravaggio has become the ultimate old master superstar,” subject of his own biobpic, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, from 1986.
But, why? Why do contemporary artists take such interest in Caravaggio?

Cindy Sherman emerged from the 1980’s as one of America’s preeminent artists, having had her own show (a retrospective) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1987. A photographer and performance artist, Sherman does not consider herself an art historian or intellectual: “I’m not remotely intellectual I’ve never been a reader of books and my sensibility has been completely shaped by mass media” she told author Kristine McKenna in a 1989 Los Angeles Times interview. In 1990 Sherman released a series of untitled photographs drawn from historic paintings of the masters—Sherman purposefully doesn’t title her work in order to leave their meanings somewhat ambiguous (Cloutier-Blazzard, 2007). Her interest in the subject matter “casts doubt on her supposed lack of art historical knowledge,” according to writer Kimberlee Cloutier-Blazzard. The series makes the past relevant to the present by using past imagery as “a critique of contemporary events in the art world” and pays homage to the past—instead of acting as “Feminist manifestos” or “wry, cynical copies” (Cloutier-Blazzard 2007).

One of the “History Portrait” series of thirty-five photographs, Untitled 224, is a 48” X 38” photograph of Sherman appropriating Caravaggio’s Self-Portrait as Bacchus—better known as the Sick Bacchus (images attached). The work was made when the artist and her husband were living in Rome. It was based upon photographic reproductions of the masterwork because she “never went to the churches and museums there” (Woods-Marsden 2009, 29). The image is Caravaggio’s self-image of the youthful, androgynous Bacchus, the classical god who gifted wine, the means by which poetry was created and philosophies were exchanged, to humanity, and who stands as a metaphor for artistic inspiration and, via his laurel leaf, immortal fame (Woods-Marsden 2009, 34).

The work is unusual for Sherman. It is one of the few images that she has taken of herself representing a man (“it’s harder to do men because you find yourself doing only that boring, tough, macho pose. There’s nothing interesting about that” (Collins 1990)). And of all the History Portraits, it is the closest, most literal imitation (Woods-Marsden 2009, 36). But, why Caravaggio? And why a Caravaggio painting that depicts a self-portrait of the artist portraying himself as a sick Bacchus? Especially since most art historians like to discuss Cindy Sherman’s photos in terms of a Feminist critique of the “male gaze” (Cloutier-Blazzard 2007).

In an effort to find out for myself, I emailed Sherman via her agency in New York, Metro Pictures Gallery. I asked why Sherman chose Caravaggio (email and response attached). The agency was kind enough to forward me three articles that they had on file, which I would assume might closely represent the potential opinion of Sherman herself. Two of the articles were from The Los Angeles Times and another was from Art Issues. All were written in 1990, around the time of her exhibition of the collection at the Linda Cathart Gallery in Santa Monica. Los Angeles Times writer, Kristine McKenna’s, interview of Sherman revealed that Sherman took her work as humorous and poignant, which “tempered any underlying cynicism” although she confided that Sherman admitted to being “always wrong in my interpretations of my work” (McKenna 1989, 90-93). Art Issues author Susan Kandel, specifically addressing the Caravaggio appropriation, which she felt was the strongest work of the series, surmised that “the photograph, with its implicit claims to authenticity, forces the viewer into an acute awareness of the in authenticity of the painting, while presenting itself as an ersatz version of it” (Kandel 1990, 16). She goes on to compare it with Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio, where the filmmaker stages the counter-Reformation’s “most powerful paintings as tableaux vivants, foregrounding not the flawless finished products but the untidy processes of production” (Kandel 1990, 16).

In an article written for Source Notes on Art History in 2009, Dr. Joanna Woods-Marsden, surmises that Sherman appropriates Caravaggio’s “self-image” (Woods-Marsden 2009, 36). Even if Sherman failed to see the Caravaggio show held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art held five years before her series (1985 and 1990, respectively), Dr. Woods-Marsden hypothesizes, the “buzz on TV and in the print media” about Caravaggio’s “violations of decorum and his inability to conform to early modern societal standards” might have made him “an appropriate role model for an American artist in the 1990s.” If she was merely satirizing the concept of allegory “so foreign to the modern mind” her satire could not in any way diminish the old masters work (Woods-Marsden 2009, 36-37).

The most compelling rationale for Sherman’s appropriation of Caravaggio, I believe, was developed by writer Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard for Bread and Circus in 2007 and indirectly supported by Sherman herself in an interview she held with Therese Lichtenstein for the Journal of Contemporary Art in 1992. Cloutier-Blazzard suggests that Caravaggio inclusion of a “protruding bare shoulder in concert with a sensual look, luscious curls, and all those tactile, juicy fruits” in a painting that “used an antique sculptural prototype similar to the Villa Albani Antinous” (the famous young same-sex partner of the ancient Roman Emperor Hadrian), “begs for interpretation” that the artist was gay. In 1989 and 1990 when Sherman created her work, Jesse Helms “waved around images” of Robert Mapplethorpe (who had died of complications arising from AIDS in March of 1989) in his war against the National Endowment for the Arts. Mapplethorpe, like Sherman and Serrano (who I also quotes Caravaggio) were all part of the New York scene of that time. Tellingly Sherman chose Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus (1593) instead of his later Florentine version of Bacchus (c. 1597) as her prototype. Cloutier-Blazzard is the only writer to point out that the peaches in the Caravaggio are missing in Sherman’s piece. Peaches are traditionally the iconographic symbol of veracity or truth—a telling omission.

In Sherman’s interview with Therese Lichtenstein 15 years before the Cloutier-Blazzard article and two years after Untitled 224 was produced, Sherman responded to questions about her 1992/1993 Sex Series stating: “I definitely acknowledged the fact that I was influenced … by the whole NEA censorship problem.” She later states: “AIDS was also an issue I wanted to address… the fear of aids and the terror that it engenders in the sexuality of our culture” (Lichtenstein 1992, 78-88). Although these replies were directed at her more recent series, I see no reason why, in concurrence with Ms. Cloutier-Blazzard, the concepts might not apply to the appropriation of the Caravaggio Sick Bacchus in 1989/90. The Lichtenstein interview also revealed that Sherman “felt that (her) previous show (before the Sex Series) was “so commercially successful that it made sense to go out on a limb in these difficult times.” “Since I really don’t expect people to buy my art anyway, and because I don’t have to worry about funding or being censored at this point, I thought I might as well really try to pull out all the stops and just make something that directly deals with sexuality and censorship without compromising my values” Sherman stated. Perhaps, Caravaggio, the “most successful” piece from the History Portraits series was the beginning of something new for Sherman. And perhaps Sherman, who also underemphasizes her role in feminism, is more of a gay rights activist than she lets on.

Whereas some contemporary artists like Cindy Sherman (Untitled 224, 1990), Julian Schnabel (Exile, 1980), and Robert Longo (Untitled After Caravaggio, Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1601, 2008) directly appropriated images from Caravaggio, others such as Bill Viola (Quintet of Remembrance), David LaChapelle (photographer and film director), Vittorio Storaro (the celebrated cinematographer who shot Angelo Longoni’s Caravaggio) and filmmaker Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ) have found inspiration in the hugely influential uses of light and dark and Caravaggio’s choice in composing images like contemporary photography that capture a moment that is not necessarily the beginning or end or a narrative action (images attached). Filmmaker Martin Scorsese indicates that his paintings were “like modern staging in film…powerful and direct” and that he admired Caravaggio’s use of street people enough to “do Jesus like Caravaggio” (Landi 2011, 103). Bill Viola, whose Quintet of Remembrance “recalls Caravaggio…in the visual quality of the images—their color, light, and chiaroscuro, and also their realism” (Frankel 2000, 145)—says; “the thing I really love is his darkness…it’s a kind of organic and ontological force, and that’s really strong for me because video is all about light and dark” (Landi 2011, 105). David LaChapelle is quoted as saying “Caravaggio used light like a photographer and his pictures are cropped like photographs…it’s a photograph before photography” (Carter, 2010). Vitorrio Storaro declared in a lecture that ‘Caravaggio was…a great filmmaker…he was searching for composition, exactly the way we do when we look through a finder or a monitor or viewing the subject on a screen” (Spear 2010).

Art writers support these notions. According to critic David Ekserdjian “it is the collision of unfiltered naturalism with an operatic sense of drama that makes Caravaggio so overwhelming, and it may not be by chance that his public breakthrough came in the age of film noir, when highly wrought chiaroscuro was the dominant cinematic—and therefore visual—mode.” He continues; “the immediacy and directness of Caravaggio, allied to the death-fixated violence of so many of his creations, seem ideally suited to the present (impatient) age” (Ekserdjian 2010, 28). Ann Landi agrees when she writes “the theatrical quality of the artist’s compositions and his extreme use of chiaroscuro, modeling from velvety darks to brilliant lights, also appeal to eyes conditioned by movies and photography” (Landi 2010, 107). Art in America writer, Richard Spear, goes farther by stating; “it is a profoundly visual art with distilled messages that are not reliant on familiarity with conventions…it is significantly in step with contemporary culture and fast-paced media” (Spear 2010).

No contemporary artist has made it more of a life mission to understand and utilize Caravaggio’s transformative techniques in the field of abstract painting and sculpture than Frank Stella, who had been credited in Robert Storrs 1985 New York Times article as the “great academic painter of his generation.” Stella also had his own retrospective in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987, two years after the very important reintroduction of Caravaggio at the Metropolitan Museum, which Stella wrote an extensive review of (for the New York Times). During this time Stella also published a book, Working Space, which was based upon a series of lectures he gave at Harvard (the Norton Lecture Series). The book, the lecture, and his review of the Caravaggio retrospective all went to great detail to illuminate Stella’s views on the contemporary importance of Caravaggio’s work. In 1987, just before his retrospective, Stella told scholar Laurence Weschler that he came across Caravaggio’s St. John the Baptist in Rome where he had agreed to spend a season at the American Academy in an effort to prepare the lecture for the Harvard Series. “And that painting just suddenly seemed like the only painting there—as though it were not just better than everything else there but more real. I’d never felt before such a physical thing about a painting as I did with that one” (Weschler 1987, 96).
According to Stella, “Caravaggio’s explosiveness, his dramatic pictorial impact, seeks out the problems facing painting today.” He goes on to write that “the more we see of Caravaggio the more we see a complete artist” and that he admires Caravaggio’s “gift for creating a contained, posed, spherically shaped space, sculptural tangibility and spatial depth exceeded by none.” He credits Caravaggio for giving his successors the “pictorial roundness and completeness that we call great and which we instinctively use as a standard to judge painting today, whether we realize it or not.” Stella’s Harvard lecture series defined the “malaise” and “impasse” that he feels abstract painting has fallen into and resolved, as he did in his review, that the solution to the “entrapment in flatness” and “barren imagery of abstraction and the limp caricature of our new realism” lay in understanding Caravaggio whose’ “projective, physical, real pictorial space,” “projective gesture, psychological presence and pictorial import” can “speak to the present-day plight.” That painting needed to be more “lively and real—a sense of vitality that moves and catches the light” like Caravaggio’s work (Stella 1985, 39, 57-58, 71).

Stella acknowledged these qualities in rare early and some mid 20th century artists such as Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Newman, and de Kooning, but felt that the combination of these qualities went missing in today’s work. Critics actually assailed Stella for using the great Master to point to his own work, and because they overlooked the “psychological and spiritual implications” of Caravaggio’s art (Storr 1985, 13). That he “seemed utterly uninterested in the religious, literary, psychological, or spiritual wellsprings of an artist’s work”—only space, composition, form and perspective seemed to matter (Weschler 1987, 95). Despite his earlier criticisms, Stella has spent the last quarter century applying what he felt Caravaggio knew to contemporary painting. In an interview for the International Sculpture Center’s 2011 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture (Stella as 1987 joked about how his “paintings” could also make good “sculptures” Weschler 1987, 98)), Stella continued to quote Caravaggio, ending the interview with his belief that “we still haven’t found any new modes of expression that build on 20th century abstraction” (Ottmann 2011, 25-29). (Images of Stella’s work attached.)

The potential reasons for the use of Caravaggio by contemporary artists are as long as the proposed reasons for Caravaggio to have made the art in the first place. John Varriano does the best job of any in categorizing Caravaggio’s strengths and passions in his book Caravaggio: The Art of Realism. Ranging from erotic appetites to wit, violence to a love of gesture and expression, the book concludes with what I believe are two of the most compelling reasons of all for contemporary artists to emulate: “his realism was part of his self-presentation as an outsider and a rebel, a persona doubtlessly as satisfying to himself as it was calculated to impress or unsettle others”; “in the end, Caravaggio seems to have painted as much for himself as for anyone else” (Varriano 2006, 135).

The “bad-boy,” James Dean-type artist persona is a relevant argument for Caravaggio’s exceptional work to be emulated particularly by young artists. Art in America writer, Richard Spear, concurs writing that “other artists who have attained celebrity status—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, van Gogh, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollack, Andy Warhol—typically have an absorbing life story on which the public can fasten” and Caravaggio’s was full of “the stuff of romantic legend and a perfect fit for the image of the archetypal anguished bohemian artist” (Spear 2010). Andres Serrano, whose Piss Christ drew controversy two years after the New York Caravaggio show in 1987, is quoted as being “drawn to Caravaggio’s use of marginal characters in his art” and his “outlaw character.” “He’s a perfect example of a person who in another life might have been a madman.” (Landi, 2011, 105).

Canadian contemporary visual arts critic takes the rebel persona argument further: “it was this hard-drinking, tough-living painter, who cared, as few artists have ever cared, about the kind of ordinary working folk who just come to church out of hope for heaven or fear of hell, then die and are forgotten” (Mays 1992). We live in a day when many artists find inspiration in speaking of and too the common people. By using common folk, and even male and female prostitutes in his religious iconography, he speaks, I believe, of the highest level of Spirituality—that we are all equal. How can this not be interesting to many contemporary artists today that are seeking deeper meaning in their art and in this world and who, along with an increasing public awareness, have difficulty accepting the wide gap between rich and poor?

Who could speak better of the common people than Caravaggio, who despite occasionally living in palaces, closely identified with the outcast, poor, or dejected? In this regard, John Varriano is also correct, for Caravaggio did paint about himself. Other scholars concur. Catherine Puglisi who wrote a book entitled Caravaggio in 2000 believes that “Caravaggio’s life and work speak to the literary enthusiasms of our day, a time when memoirs are particularly popular” (Landi 2011, 106). John Spike, a Florence-based art historian and the author of the “catalogue raisonne of Caravaggio’s works also entitled Caravaggio (published in 2007) agrees, writing “this is the first painter in the Western tradition who convinces us that every picture he does is about himself” (Landi 2011, 106). Ann Landi concludes her contemporary article with the statement that Caravaggio took Leonardo’s idea that “painters tend to paint faces resembling their own” to “its logical extreme by making paintings that seem directly concerned with his own life.” This is the reason, she says, that he is often described as the first modern artist (Landi 2011, 107). Michael Brenson concurs, writing that Caravaggio may be one of the first artists who seem wholly modern, and who therefore provide a perspective on a particular kind of modern sensibility” (Brenson 1985).

Contemporary artists can interpret Caravaggio’s works in contemporary ways—in theme and technique. Yet the artist left behind no written documents to illuminate either his methods (did he use a Camera Obscura, artist David Hockney questions in his 2001 book, Secret Knowledge) or his intent (was he gay? Derek Jarman, the director of the film Caravaggio, says yes). He leaves the door open for interpretation just like Cindy Sherman does now. But why do an ever-expanding number of emerging contemporary artists—young artists from every major in the undergraduate program at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland in 2011, for example—flock to Caravaggio? Certainly, like Leonardo and the other “celebrity artists” he has entered the common artistic lexicon. His images are found the world over in products and gadgets (from pasta sauce to Etch-a-Sketches), multimedia formats (an iPhone App allows tourists to walk his steps in Rome), exhibitions, literature (in thousands of citations), and even on stamps (from Ireland to Russia to Umm al-Qiwain) and former currency (the 1983 100,000 Lira note). But beyond this distraction is more.

Unique to Caravaggio is painting who he did—the “Other”—how he did—in a spiritual light—when he did—at a time like our own when society ruled by popes and princes is crumbling—touches our contemporary sensibilities and tugs at our soul. With all due respect to Frank Stella’s fascination with Caravaggio’s technique, I find it impossible to separate our current fascination with the artist with his spirituality, which I feel is the main crux of his work. Art writer Brenson agrees when he writes: “No matter how direct and immediate Caravaggio’s work may be, it is still controlled by a penetrating awareness of the unknown” (Brenson 1985). Serrano was only partially correct: Caravaggio was a spiritual madman—a Shaman, if you will. What illuminates a secularly and religiously polarized world more than the extreme contrast of light and dark that Caravaggio so boldly employed—metaphysically exposing the lesson in our spiritual journey? We’ve crossed an impasse where are old traditions, institutions, governments and structures are no longer working. We seek answers. And what speaks more of solution than the unifying principle of raising the images of commoners onto a place at the spiritual table that Caravaggio, through the ages, speaks so loudly of?

What Caravaggio was able to accomplish was genius—a term with “no scientifically precise definition” that is “associated with unprecedented insight” according to Wikipedia (May 7, 2011). Caravaggio may not have known the full extent of the spiritual significance of his work, nor might we be fully aware of the spiritual reasons why his work is compelling to us. Many artists are drawn into tapping into a visual language that is universally appealing yet their own unique discovery, thereby giving them what Caravaggio touched upon. Some like Cindy Sherman reference Caravaggio’s ability to tap into sociopolitical concerns. Others, like Frank Stella, want to reproduce his genius by technical means. Some, like Martin Scorsese, deconstruct his images and compositions and reinvent his otherworldly use of light and dark in contemporary film. Whatever our motivation, we rebirth, redefine, and recreate Caravaggio in our collective consciousness by quoting him. David Ekserdjian writes “it may have taken an astonishingly long time for his hour to come, but from today’s perspective it is now virtually impossible to imagine that his sun will ever set” (Ekserdjian 2011, 28). John Bentley Mays writes, “it is Caravaggio, however, who sill be cherished until there are no more people left on earth to cherish art at all.” Most profound, is the following epitaph written by Caravaggio’s friend, poet Marina Giambattista:

Death and Nature
Made a cruel plot against you,
Michele;
Nature was afraid
Your hand would surpass it in every image
You created, not painted.
Death burned with indignation,
Because however many more
His scythe would cut down in life,
Your brush recreated even more.

Bibliography

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Langdon, Helen. Caravaggio: A Life. London: Pimlico, 1999. Very comprehensive yet insightful biography of Caravaggio’s life complete with excellently reproduced images of his work.

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Mays, John Bentley. 1992. Ask not how contemporary art has failed us, but how we have failed art. Rich, energetic patrons are the engine behind any successful art scene. Unfortunately, Canada’s art world is being driven by poor artists, penny-pinching curators and academics with an axe to grind. Is it any wonder the scene has become stuffy? (The Arts: Art). Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada), September 26, 1992: C16.

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Woods-Marsden. 2009. Cindy Sherman’s Reworking of Raphael’s Fornarina and Caravaggio’s Bacchus. Source Notes in the History of Art Vol. XXVIII No. 3 Spring 2009: 29-39.