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What Heaven Looks Like: Comments on a Strange Wordless Book
An unknown masterpiece of visionary art--as daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly different--reproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians
Somewhere in Europe--we don't know where--around 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracks--nothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appear--shapes--even figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint.
Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs.
This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sources--Baroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incomplete--always she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment.
What Heaven Looks Like is a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them.
Somewhere in Europe--we don't know where--around 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracks--nothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appear--shapes--even figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint.
Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs.
This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sources--Baroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incomplete--always she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment.
What Heaven Looks Like is a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them.
- GenresArtNonfictionHistory
128 pages, Hardcover
Published September 19, 2017
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261 people want to read
About the author
James Elkins
101 books222 followersJames Elkins (1955 – present) is an art historian and art critic. He is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also coordinates the Stone Summer Theory Institute, a short term school on contemporary art history based at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 26, 2022
A fascinating journey through one of the more elusive, inexplicable pieces of art to come down from the late 17th/early 18th century. The images themselves are baffling, powerful, and surreal, long before that last adjective was a word anyone used in art. I could wish that the book was larger, so that it was easier to make out details in the reproductions, but the images are reasonably crisp and well-photographed.
Elkins' commentary is essentially a description of his own wrestlings with the text. Sometimes, they're fascinating, other times I think they're misguided, but they're always an honest depiction of where his head is at, and I appreciate that. I would have liked some more historical background about the provenance and conservation of the original document, but I'd still recommend this to anyone with an interest in outsider/visionary art, or in the more oddly hermetic art of the timeframe that produced this artist.
Elkins' commentary is essentially a description of his own wrestlings with the text. Sometimes, they're fascinating, other times I think they're misguided, but they're always an honest depiction of where his head is at, and I appreciate that. I would have liked some more historical background about the provenance and conservation of the original document, but I'd still recommend this to anyone with an interest in outsider/visionary art, or in the more oddly hermetic art of the timeframe that produced this artist.
September 15, 2022
Three stars for Elkins's comments, five for the art itself.
August 6, 2022
Like the author, I sense the practice that led to this series of pictures makes for something like a diary. The paintings make me think of Leonardo's drawing instruction to find images in the stains on a wall, but this artist's practice is as much a meditative inner seeing as it is outwardly focused on the cut ends of wood logs. The result is a series of paintings with a very strange magnetism.
January 21, 2021
I'm a big fan of visionary art--from Blake to Philip K. Dick to Paul Laffoley. My favorite museum is the visionary art museum, so it's always a treat to find a new idiosyncratic world to explore.
This book is kind of an odd experience however, since the art was found without much context--and James Elkins is trying to create meaning. It's an odd experiment and commentary. I don't believe he's entirely correct, but I guess that's also kind of the point.
This book is kind of an odd experience however, since the art was found without much context--and James Elkins is trying to create meaning. It's an odd experiment and commentary. I don't believe he's entirely correct, but I guess that's also kind of the point.
April 13, 2018
Really beautiful images, but context is lacking and interpretations seem fanciful and unfounded.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews