Stephen Burt

 

There is a line in Emerson that says that "perpetual modernness is the merit of any great work of art," and it would be hard to find a more suitable way either to introduce or sum up Stephen Burt's body of artistic work. For in this line we are given a clue to the paradoxical condition that Burt nourishes in his painting and, yes, in his spectators, as well: how tradition uncloaks the piercing presentness of the body; how the human figure is an occasion for sheer sensuality and pure intellectual activity, which Burt terms as the more base desires and the higher senses of beauty; and that in becoming fully conscious of the artful materialization of natural form we are suspended between being altogether present and completely self-abnegated. Stephen Burt is passionately aware of a crisis in our contemporary art, and its acute need of the dimension of contemplation. To those who wish to be dislodged from a sort of complacency about such things, Burt's work can rekindle the deepest ranges of beholding.
There is a courageous exposure in these works to techniques drawn from the Northern Renaissance masters and from a boldly self-conscious academic tradition. Burt is not hesitant about borrowing and transforming 'style,' nor does he conceal his reverence for meticulous anatomical detail. Viewers who identify the references to Schongauer and Rubens among others, will experience sheer intellectual delight in savoring Burt's pictorial erudition. Unmasking these allusions and engaging the virtuosity of the artistic labor, we neutralize Burt's explicitly painted nudity as a potential object of voyeurism, as a thing being seen when it shouldn't be. The paintings furnish, then, a genuinely satisfying intellectual activity.
Yet the work holds more, for it calls viewers to plumb a still deeper level of content. Close study, long looking, abandoning ourselves precisely to the craft, we see that tradition is but a language--the way English is for me--that opens Burt's eyes to the real meaning of the human body. It enables him to materialize--indeed to make visible--the most physical and immediate human form--our bones and sinews. To peer beneath the surface of human form to see its presentness, as Emerson would call it, this is what traditional drawing style and anatomy enable Burt to do. As spectators, then, we are obliged to do the same--to look with penetrating intensity at the powerful drama of human form that unfolds quite literally before us.
To really see these works of art is not a study or mere intellectual exercise. To engage the form, as Burt has done, is to experience true aesthetic solitude, where the contemplative dimension of beholding arises--the one that takes us to the deepest layers of meaning where, as C.S. Lewis put it, ". . .at once I become myself and a thousand others . . ."

Joanna E Ziegler
Professor of Art History
College of the Holy Cross
November 2002

 

 

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