In 1964, Swiss-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919–1988) exposed the anatomy of a painting by stripping canvas from a stretcher. For Untitled, which she created that year while living in São Paulo, Schendel left only a few traces of canvas, which can still be found tangled in the tacks that originally fastened it to the wooden support.1Untitled will be on display in Gallery 413 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, until the fall of 2023. By separating the fabric from the skeletal structure behind it, the artist revealed the bare bones upon which paintings are mounted and hung. The work permits a penetrating view—not dissimilar to that provided by an X-ray—that traverses soft tissues to apprehend a solid, underlying frame. To be sure, Untitled seems to replace the canvas with a transparent plane, echoing the metaphor of painting as a window through which the world becomes visible and knowable—a metaphor that can be traced back to the Italian Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 treatise On Painting.2For an English translation of the original text, see Rocco Sinisgalli, ed. and trans., Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Schendel hijacked this comparison to make it literal; however, rather than upholding the illusion of an unmediated glimpse of reality, Untitled directly opens onto the realm of material things, unveiling the wall on which it hangs.
Ironically, this aperture also corresponds to a closure, as the empty frame gives way to the solidity and impenetrability of the wall. The cardboard panel that Schendel loosely brushed with white pigment and nailed to cover the top-right corner of the stretcher provides a similar obstruction. Partially substituting for the discarded canvas, the panel is sheathed in paint and conceals the wall behind it. At the same time, by virtue of its monochromatic surface, it mimics the plastered blankness typical of white cube exhibition spaces. Yet, Schendel’s loose application of paint and layered brushstrokes give the panel a translucent quality, as if it were a veil through which the cardboard base partially seeps. This effect characterizes most of Schendel’s artistic production from 1964 onward, especially the works that she created using thin sheets of Japanese paper, the bulk of which was given to her that same year.3In a 1977 statement to the Department of Research and Documentation at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation, Schendel claimed: “I was once given a large amount of delicate Japanese paper. I stored it, not knowing what to do with it. I had no plans. ‘Do you want it?’ ‘Yes.’ Some time later, about a year, I started to work with that paper.” Reproduced and translated in Rodrigo Naves, “Mira Schendel: The World as Generosity,” in Léon Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, ed. Luis Peréz-Oramas, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 62. Schendel exploited the diaphanous texture of this material in works such as those in the 1967 series Graphic Objects, which she fixed between sheer acrylic panels and suspended from the ceiling.4For compelling discussions of works in the Graphic Objects series, see Sonia Salzstein, “In the Void of the World,” in No Vazio do Mundo: Mira Schendel, ed. Sonia Salzstein, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Galeria de Arte do SESI, 1996), 15–48; and Sarah Suzuki, “Mira Schendel’s Graphic Object,” post (blog), The Museum of Modern Art, January 20, 2017, https://post.moma.org/mira-schendels-graphic-object/. Foreshadowing these later works, the artist invited the viewer to look through Untitled while also partially obfuscating their gaze, thus establishing the work as both a visual channel and a blockage.
Schendel emphasized this tension between transparency and opacity through her manipulation of solid materials. Although the stretcher appears to be a naked structure, the artist presented it as a crafted and manipulated object by highlighting her own manual interventions. For instance, she modified the horizontal bar bisecting the frame by applying black oil paint onto the unprimed wood, allowing it to organically absorb the pigment; she added the cardboard panel, the edges of which do not perfectly align with the scaffolding’s regular symmetry; and she painted the panel so forcefully that a hair from her brush still remains embedded in the white pigment. The numerous white specks that constellate the stretcher could derive from this gestural application of paint; however, they may have also have occurred when the artist hammered the panel into the bars.5Senior Painting Conservator Anny Aviram in conversation with the author, March 30, 2021. Schendel dramatized this action by leaving the nails with which she fixed the panel to the wooden frame deliberately visible. The nails pierce the painted cardboard surface as if painfully breaking through skin, partially tearing it as they entered the stretcher’s cross-like scaffolding. This aggressive process invokes the Christian trope of the Crucifixion, which would have resonated with Schendel’s Catholic upbringing in Switzerland and Italy.6Although Schendel was born to Jewish parents, her mother had her baptized in Zurich’s St. Peter und Paul Kirche in 1920. In 1936, Schendel started studying philosophy at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, an institution that combined academic and religious education. See Geaninne Guitiérrez–Guimarães, “Chronology,” in Léon Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, 269. Thus, the penetration that Untitled elicits is not merely visual, but also physical.7On the corporeal connotations of Schendel’s work, see Denise Birkhofer, “Eva Hesse and Mira Schendel: Voiding the Body—Embodying the Void,” Woman’s Art Journal 31, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 3–11; and Geraldo de Souza Dias, Mira Schendel: Do espiritual à corporeidade (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009).
Schendel’s corporeal engagement with the canvas and stretcher calls to mind the discipline of anatomy, which reveals otherwise invisible bodily structures through dissection. Like Alberti’s window, anatomical images bring transparency to opaque bodies, making them knowable to the viewer.8Mechthild Fend explores such epistemological connections between pictorial and bodily surfaces in Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). In many ways, Untitled achieves just this. Yet, despite its anatomical echoes, this work’s transparency does not offer clarity; for all its geometric rigor and simple construction, it is haunted by ambiguity and tension. Untitled challenges the viewer’s gaze by eliciting conflicting impressions of surface and depth, matter and void, presence and absence. Highlighting and isolating the process of viewing per se, it calls attention to the mechanics of vision, to paintings’ potential to engage perception. The work propels the viewer to map the visible and invisible surfaces that it comprises, fostering a complex relation with the object. This relation manifests through the wall that Untitled frames, which serves as a connective tissue that extends to the broader gallery and reminds the viewer that they and the work inhabit a shared space. As Schendel unveiled the bare bones of painting, she exposed artworks’ inextricability from the bodies looking at them.
- 1Untitled will be on display in Gallery 413 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, until the fall of 2023.
- 2For an English translation of the original text, see Rocco Sinisgalli, ed. and trans., Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 3In a 1977 statement to the Department of Research and Documentation at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation, Schendel claimed: “I was once given a large amount of delicate Japanese paper. I stored it, not knowing what to do with it. I had no plans. ‘Do you want it?’ ‘Yes.’ Some time later, about a year, I started to work with that paper.” Reproduced and translated in Rodrigo Naves, “Mira Schendel: The World as Generosity,” in Léon Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, ed. Luis Peréz-Oramas, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 62.
- 4For compelling discussions of works in the Graphic Objects series, see Sonia Salzstein, “In the Void of the World,” in No Vazio do Mundo: Mira Schendel, ed. Sonia Salzstein, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Galeria de Arte do SESI, 1996), 15–48; and Sarah Suzuki, “Mira Schendel’s Graphic Object,” post (blog), The Museum of Modern Art, January 20, 2017, https://post.moma.org/mira-schendels-graphic-object/.
- 5Senior Painting Conservator Anny Aviram in conversation with the author, March 30, 2021.
- 6Although Schendel was born to Jewish parents, her mother had her baptized in Zurich’s St. Peter und Paul Kirche in 1920. In 1936, Schendel started studying philosophy at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, an institution that combined academic and religious education. See Geaninne Guitiérrez–Guimarães, “Chronology,” in Léon Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, 269.
- 7On the corporeal connotations of Schendel’s work, see Denise Birkhofer, “Eva Hesse and Mira Schendel: Voiding the Body—Embodying the Void,” Woman’s Art Journal 31, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 3–11; and Geraldo de Souza Dias, Mira Schendel: Do espiritual à corporeidade (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009).
- 8Mechthild Fend explores such epistemological connections between pictorial and bodily surfaces in Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
