Death Excitement: Leonard Meiselman's Paintings

by Donald Kuspit

Restated in terms of instincts, ugliness—destruction— is the expression of the death instinct; beauty—the desire to unite into rhythms and wholes— is that of the life instinct. The achievement of the artist is in giving the fullest expression to the conflict and the union between these two.
Hanna Segal, A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics

Leonard Meiselman is an expressionist painter, and what he expresses, in the very surface of his paintings, is death, more particularly the all but overwhelming anxiety—the terrifying excitement—it arouses in us. Meiselman is obsessed with death, not just the everyday death of people who have lived their God-given three score and ten years, if not longer, but man-made death, the inhumanity that leads to premature death, that cuts people off in the prime of their life, and even murders innocent children. Why shouldn’t he be, for in the last century there was more mass murder than ever before, greater indifference to life on a greater scale than the world has ever known before? It began with the stalemate of trench warfare, in which opposing armies fought each other to a meaningless death, climaxed with the destruction of the Jews in the Holocaust—a vicious event that became symbolic of the suffering that has left its stain on every century—and gathered fresh momentum with the destruction of the World Trade Center at the beginning of this century. Meiselman’s paintings of Jewish prayer shawls and the tattered American flag are poignant reminders of these last events.

The paintings are as disturbing as the events themselves. They are existential memento mori that concentrate, in a single image, indeed, a single object, painted with agonizing emotional realism—a brilliant mix of gesturalism and realism, in which painterly gestures seem to dissolve the real object, which nonetheless survives in ghostly form—their destructiveness. Meiselman’s paint becomes the acid of death eating through life, leaving behind a mournful, horrific reminder of tragedy and loss. We usually repress our anxiety about death—annihilative anxiety, expressive of our own destructiveness as well as our fear of destruction—but Meiselman takes it out of its hiding place in the unconscious, exposing it through his forceful, and fearless, painterliness. It preserves what is left of life even as it announces its death. He looks death in the eye, and his eye never blinks, because it is full of instinctive life, ironically evident in the fatal gestures.

Against Forgetting and Kaddish, along with other prayer shawl paintings, and the two versions of Flag from Ground Zero, are not only powerfully painted, as their gestural turbulence indicates—it tersely conveys the emotional as well as physical disintegration the victims suffered—but iconographically original. Meiselman paints the Triumph of Death, but where Death is traditionally conceived as the anonymous remains of a human figure, Meiselman’s prayer shawl and American flag symbolize Death, becoming in effect figures—symbols that convey all too human emotion, indeed, that seem more poignantly human and expressive than any human being. Meiselman’s prayer shawls and flags thus become uncannily intimate and personal. His signature painting certainly personalizes them, but so does the fact that they are culturally specific, each evoking a particular people and their ideals. The Jewish prayer shawl and the American flag are sacred emblems—God has blessed America as well as the Jews, which is why both represent a higher truth and the possibility of a better life than are ordinarily available on earth—and continue to be so in Meiselman’s paintings, however profaned by death. Meiselman’s Triumphs of Death take us a step beyond those of Hans Baldung-Grien and Hans Holbein. In Meiselman, Death—morbid decay, conveying inevitable misery—is not only pictured but ingrained in the image’s texture, which gets under one’s skin—one is infected by it, as it were—while retaining its collective significance. Meiselman’s irksome gesturalism—the tortured painterly skin of his images—gives his paintings an air of explosive panic beyond anything imagined by the German masters.

In fact, Meiselman’s prayer shawls and flags are spiritual skins that have been stripped from living bodies. They are frayed but still intact—recognizable if ruined. Meiselman’s handling seems to shred them in rage—they in fact look like they have been through a shredder, as their striated appearance suggests—even as it conveys their abandoned condition. They are like the imprints of Christ on the Turin shroud and Veronica’s napkin—mysterious stains marking the surface of the canvas with the victim’s appearance, as barely decipherable as the mystery of his sacred being and painful death, of which they are the aborted memories. Indeed, Meiselman’s paintings are about being and nothingness—how nothingness dwells within being, and is released by suffering, but also how nothingness gives being more presence. Meiselman’s prayer shawls and flags have a startling presence, by reason of the insistence and intensity with which Meiselman paints them, and because of their isolation in the darkness, which puts them beyond consolation. Meiselman is painting the two sides of his identity: he is Jewish and American. They converge in his self-portraits, which show the same acute consciousness of suffering and death—the same agony—as his symbolic portraits of the Holocaust and America. (Both his prayer shawls and American flags are survivors, or rather artifacts that symbolize the victims, more particularly, the cremation by fire that links them. The former are based on a photograph of a pile of prayer shawls confiscated by the Nazis at Auschwitz and the latter on a photograph of an American flag found at Ground Zero.) In the September 11, 2001 collage he screams—in a self-portrait (Myself), repeated as though amplifying the scream and destroyed, as though Meiselman was a victim of the eventÑwith even greater agony than the figure in Munch’s The Scream. For Meiselman has witnessed two Holocausts, and his scream is their witness, while Munch has only witnessed his own mental derangement, that is, testifies to his own insanity, rather than the insanity of the world. In another self-portrait he stares out at us from behind a painterly veil or shroud, haunting us like the ghost of one of the victims. He clearly identifies with them, which is why he is no silent witness—he must scream as they could not , scream for them, express their suffering in public as they could not, express the agony of their death throes stifled by the indifference and contempt of the Nazis.

Ironically, the unrelenting black and blood red that Meiselman uses in many of his portraits—perhaps most noteworthily in Self-Portrait with Father—and in several of the prayer shawl pictures are the colors of the Nazi flag, where they symbolize power rather than pain. This suggests that Meiselman, while identifying with the dead victims of the September 11th and Jewish Holocausts, also suffers from survivor’s guilt. Meiselman has studied many faces, and he always finds the “inner face” behind them, to use the psychoanalyst Michael Eigen’s phrase. It is invariably melancholy, as his portraits of Martin Buber—his humanistic father figure—but also grim, as his abstract portraits—marvellous studies in psychological realism, for all their abstractness—indicate. All of Meiselman’s portraits are introspective—acutely aware of inner life, psychodynamic as well as sociodynamic, like the best expressionism—but none more deeply than the abstract portraits.

They dramatize the psyche, conveying the dialectic of annihilative anxiety and cosmic ecstasy at its core, indicating that Meiselman, however engrossed in death and destruction, also yearns for integration, for the heads are self-contained wholes however grotesquely distorted. Split, even fragmented—all but shattered—they nonetheless hold together (as the frame around the head in Witness emphasizes). They are portraits of a troubled, tortured integrity, but integrity it is nonetheless. If, as Hanna Segal writes, beauty involves “the desire to unite into rhythms and wholes,” then Meiselman’s abstract portraits— lined up in a row, they seem to trace the stages of the self’s disintegration, what looks like a passionate whirlpool slowly but surely becoming a desperate abyss—are oddly beautiful rhythmic wholes. The philosopher Francis Bacon said that all beauty has something strange in it—something ugly and destructive, referring again to the Segal epigraph—and Meiselman has brought out the destructive ugliness in beauty (and the self) with no loss of wholeness, however shaken it may be. The abstract heads show the conflict be between the death and life instincts that rages within Meiselman. (His art is clearly a projection of his inner life.) They seamlessly unite, indeed, seem, paradoxically, one and the same, in his marvelous drawings, where each rhythmic line is full of instinctive life, and as such death-defying and whole in itself, while at the same readable as a cutting edge—a fatal incision in organic form that at the same time defines it. The same perplexing union of death and life instincts—of painful anguish and ecstatic exuberance (antithetical emotions seem the same at their most intense)—is evident in Meiselman’s paintings of whales and trees, although in them the balance is tilted to life rather than death.

Theodor Adorno has famously argued that it is barbaric to make art after Auschwitz, which is pure negativity become socially actual. But Meiselman shows that it is still necessary, however barbaric the intense expressivity of the art that results may look, that is, however much it reflects, and thus seems to temper, the barbarism of the events it acknowledges. Especially when it acknowledges the disaster of Auschwitz—brings to artistic life the death that it is—and similar Holocausts. Adorno’s idea is intellectually interesting, but beside the human point, as Meiselman indicates. He shows that one must try to paint—articulate, art, at the least, being a mode of intense, commemorative articulation—the impossible but real, especially because its impossibility makes it real, and the most interesting and engaging art is ultimately about the mystery of the impossible become real, the strangeness of the incomprehensible actually occurring, that is, “realized” in both the inner and outer worlds. As Meiselman’s scream suggests the time for silent, passive witnessing of man’s inhumanity to man is over. Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are on the rise yet again—they will probably always be with us—and it is high time to give voice to our horror and anger at them, which is what Meiselman’s profound paintings do. It is a sign of life to do so. The death instinct may be alive and well in Leonard Meiselman’s paintings, but so, with an aggressive power more than equal to it, is the life instinct. All his works are an effort to find meaning in death—especially in mass death, which makes it seem all the more meaningless—and the meaning he has found is that it contains life, unexpectedly.

Donald Kuspit is an art critic and professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the editor of Art Criticism and contributing editor at Art Forum, Sculpture and New Art Examiner magazines. Kuspit's books include Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Essay Death Excitment: Leonard Meiselman's Paintings, Copyright © Donald Kuspit, 2002.