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Contemporary Art and the Tradition of Painting.
> I must admit to reading and frequently enjoying pieces in the New
> Yorker. Nothing about art, of course. Those major articles are
> usually about really dreadful artists whose work has begun to sell
> in quantity and at high prices. Several of them in recent months
> were figurative artists. Sad to say, always figurative artists who
> are completely unknowledgeable about the traditions of picture
> making which we all continue to develop.
>
> A recent issue had a piece on a fairly young Chinese movie director
> who came from provincial family so out of it that it was an
> adventure to ride his bicycle into the countryside where he
> could see a railroad train going by. Eventually through
> persistence, sheer cussedness and talent, he got into their big
> film school in Beijing.When he was ready he began to make films
> without any approval and won a prize in Hong Kong. Then he went
> through the program and made some docudramas mixing real and made
> up footage which featured problems in the lives of ordinary
> Chinese. Still winning prizes, the government finally cracked down
> and he was told he could make no more films. He was not allowed to
> buy film or use their equipment. With the help of friends he did it
> all. Then he sent the film out to Cannes where it won the
> festival's big prize, but was still unable to show it in China. He
> was already making compromise films and no longer corresponded to
> the ideal of the as yet unsuccessful younger film makers. But his
> films did continue to some degree dealing with issues in China. So
> he did it again and won the Venice biennale. Now he has made a lot
> of money from overseas showings, and he and the government are
> comporomising as to what he can film for showing in China, and then
> overseas. Sorry, the magazine is nowhere to be found, so I can give
> you no names. But, I think his story which is treated as a sort of
> miraculous fable, is nothing by comparison with what you, and
> people like you, face. I put myself in that same bag.
>
> I will explain. One of the things he had going for him was that he
> managed to see many foreign films while he was in Beijing. The work
> of people he felt especially drawn to, especially some French
> directors of decades ago, taught him a lot about film making. Also,
> outside of China, even in Hong Kong, European and American standards
> were fully engaged. He not only had examples, but ideologies. He
> certainly did not transgress on the ideologies of the world outside
> China. In sum, he had political problems with his government, but
> at this moment of Chinese desire to encroach on the world stage and
> challenge that world economically and in many other ways, he was
> good news.
>
> Well, what about us.?
>
> There is no ideology as constructed by a figure outside of our art
> world which justifies and ratifies our mutual work and its
> character. The reigning ideal is that of the Avant Garde. All of
> the recent headliners in the art world subscribe to it. First, work
> should contravene existing artistic truths and be objectionable to
> even, and especially, the last batch of artists who had made it.
> This portion of what true avant garde artists had done from the
> 1870s through 1950 has been held sacrosanct. However the other
> half of the equation has not remained operative. Each of these
> Avant Gardes questioned the existing order of the art world and
> proposed a quite different one. They were usually relatively young
> and worked in, until then, obscure styles. Their work was picked up
> by collectors and critics very slowly, while the official art world
> of academics, peintres pompiers like Bouguereau, Cabanel, and
> Gerome and their followers held the center of the three ring
> circus. Some years ago it would have been difficult to see the
> Pompier works anywhere. Now they are all on view in the Grande
> Gallerie of the Met, together with other equally bad somewhat later
> work of the same ilk. I approve of this as long as we know who and
> what they are. They represented the dying breed of conventional
> picture makers who painted bourgeouis subjects.However, today,
> success in the art world by pseudo avant gardistes means instant
> success in the big moneyed part of the art world. New museums of
> art which feature only post World War II artists have sprung up in
> places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.A new
> building has been added to the Tate housing also their modern
> collection as well as the rooms for contemporary art. Poets,
> novelists, Philosophers, Art Historians and Art Critics vie with
> each other in endorsing various stripes of the new pseudo avant
> garde. At leat, a newly successful artist must be sufficiently
> eccentric to rate their approval. Eccentricity as well, something
> horrifying to the ordinary citizen who is not a part of the art
> buying public, is a useful positive part of an artist's portfolio.
> Mayor Guiliani did well by the Saatchi artists at the Brooklyn
> Museum some years ago. The elephant dung is a laughable ploy which
> neither does any good or any harm, pictorially to the work in
> question, but scandalizes religious Catholics. Unlike the Muslims,
> no Fatwa directed at him, but the anger and outrage helped him
> make stardom with not particularly distinguished work. His case is
> the one, because of the histrionics, which I remember most
clearly.
>
> The post-Duchampian starting point for so much which is now en
> vogue has changed the way the art world establishment looks at
> everything. Duchamp spent most of his life in New York playing
> chess, talking and writing about art a little with his friends like
> Katherine Dreier. Essentially Duchamp was a retired artist. He had
> had a short career and a long life after it, which has now been
> reinterpeted as not a retirement at all,but the logical end to his
> years of questioning art with his readymades. The final act would
> be to stop producing work, and taught us a fitting end to his
> career.. When he found out that a new part of the art world was
> invoking his name he was thunderstruck. He returned to work, first
> with multiples and then with his last work, now housed behind a
> glass window at the Philadelphia museum. He was now held to be the
> ideological source of a series of avant garde movements. His
> attitude towards the art object, essentially against the production
> of art, but rather the naming of choices out of the ordinary world
> as art and giving them a new context on the wall, was now thought
> to be the substitute for all other artistic activities. His friend
> and co-founder of the Parisian Dada movemnt, Picabia, spent his
> last years doing painted sendups of academic Spanish brushstroke
> academic art. Very few knew that, certainly not Eilshemius who
> Duchamp called perhaps the best American artist on the strength of
> a very bad Eilshemius painting which he read as he did Picabia's
> work. That was doubly unfortunate, for, while Eilshemius did more
> than his share of clunkers, much of his work is fresh, full formed
> and full. His preference for that Eilshemius does not follow from
> what is taken to be his newly constructed idea of what art is all
> about. It flows from a hatred for traditional painting, even in a
> modernist guise. A real follower of Duchamp would have followed
> his last, possibly only, great work: "The Bird Stripped Bare By
> Her Own Batchelors, Even" sometimes called "the large glass". But
> none of his recent followers are interested in that. The late
> combines are all that matter.
>
> What would an ideology that supports us look like?
>
> First of all it would not be avant garde oriented. It is surely
> true that we are not trying to produce art which contravenes
> previously held views of what art is about except for that of the
> anti art Pseudo Avant Garde view.
>
> So what are alternatives to that view? In the period just before
> the success of the Avant Garde [Impressionists, the first true
> avant garde] the reigning style was that of the Academy and/or
> Pompier painting. Those artists controlled their art world. In
> Paris they gave out public mural commissions and public sculpture
> commissions from the government. and painting and sculpture prizes
> for work in the annual salon. Both of these could lead to more of
> the same and to private commissions. We are not in that position
> and we do not want to be seen as a conservative group, because we
> are not one. we do not believe that we present a new sensibility
> which supercedes all the avant gardes to become another one.
>
> Now, why do people like to look at landscape painting? Because the
> landscape represented carry emotional qualities which speak to
> them. This was the essence of Burke's original idea of the Sublime
> and the Beautiful. Compositions fulfilling his requirements are
> found in work by Courbet, Corot and Constable, and, in fact, in all
> the Barbizon School painters. With less quality pictorially, they
> can also be found in 19th century American painters, like the
> members of the Hudson River School, perhaps most clearly in Kensett
> and Innes. It is also true of some Ryders, but Ryder also deals
> with romantic notions such as overcoming hostile and dangerous
> nature. Are landscape painters still working out of Burke? Of
> course they are. There also have been attempts to identify and use
> other tropes and metaphors in landscape painting? A few as in some
> of Balthus' landscapes which direct our minds back to the neo
> classicism of Poussin and Claude Lorrain, but with something
> unusual and perhaps obsessional thrown in which is clearly a 20th
> century. An example would be the huge fruit in his painting of a
> harvest scene.
>
> We are living in a very strange period artistically, and now I mean
> it in positive terms.. We can look at more of what was produced as
> art than any people on earth before our time. And we have been
> taught by the anthropologists to look at art from another culture
> in space or in time or both in terms of the values of that culture
> itself, rather than to superimpose our art values onto them. We
> accept not only the tradition of high art as the 19th century
> artists thought and painted it, but also accept the tastes of
> those, back then reconstructing the art world of the past in
> Europe. So that, of course we look at the pre Raphaelites, meaning
> here the Italian artists who came before Raphael. Most of us love
> not only the early renaissance but both Florentine radicals of the
> Gothic period and the more conservative and story telling Sienese
> school, as well as their finest retardetaire Sienese continuation
> in Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo. But we go backward before the
> father and son Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, to enjoy the 11th and
> 12th century Italian religious sculpture and painting. We also
> enjoy the ancient work of the Romans in mural painting, and Greek
> painting wherever we can find it, as well as their sculpture. Bear
> with me I go over the catalog a bit more: That is where 19th
> century artists would stop. Sure the museums were robbing Egypt and
> the Near East blind. But nothing outside Ancient Greek art was
> considered great art. They were considered historical curiosities. But
> not any more. Ancient Greek, Persian, Assyrian, Etruscan and Indian
> sculpture are all considered masterpieces which artists
> particularly enjoy. But, of course we don't stop there. We are all
> wild about prehistoric cave painting. Now this list is mostly
> European. But do remember the influence of Japanese and Chinese art
> near the end of the nineteenth century. If anything many of us love
> that work more than its European copyists did in the late 19th
century.
>
> Now we have hit an interesting point. The one great art tradition
> which, except for some mural paintings in caves, had a completely
> different aesthetic than that of the West is the painting of China.
> Insofar they took part in that tradition, this is also true of both
> Korean and Japanese art. I am not going to try to define Chinese
> construction methodologies as they were in Sung since there is a
> great essay by a great practitioner which does it so much better
> than I could. It is in "the Essay on Landscape Painting" by the
> great Sung master Kuo Hsi, which was first translated some 90
> years ago for "The Wisdom of the East" series.
>
> Chinese landscape painting rather quickly became an abstract
> tradition which was judged by complex artistic standards. Artists
> learned how to paint by working from examples of master paintings.
> Their copies after a while were not only copies but also in their
> own hands. This was a guide line for younger artists to follow.
> After the Mongol conquest, the first generation of Yuan painters
> included a group who did something strange. They began to paint
> directly from nature and to make up new ways of dealing with space
> in a more naturalistic way. For the future of all these artists the
> most influential became Ni Tsan. While he did show much more clearly
> how the space developed, he did so with an idiosyncratic dotted
> brush mark and less emphasis on the differences between different
> kinds of foliage in earlier painting. Another one of those artists
> was Mi Fei, whose work is related to Ni Tsan's in several ways, but
> without the dotted stroke. The painter Huang Kung Wang had a lesser
> reputation, although a big one with landscape painters themselves.
> For that reason the large traveling show from the Taipei museum
> which was shown at the Met a few years ago, while it had relatively
> little of the other artists, had a larege and important scroll by
> Huang Kung Wang, the first I had ever seen in the flesh. He, it
> turns out, was looking at nature while he painted and there is
> something akin to the Cezannist method at work in his paintings,
> although I am still not so sure and cannot generalize from one view.
> At any rate the looked nothing much like great Sung painting.
>
> From the late Sung and perhaps even more in the Ming Restoration,
> artists whom the Chinese most prize often, after working through
> free copies of the best work of earlier masters available to them
> did something new. They looked around at whatever paintings they
> could find by other artists, not members of the reigning school,
> not major influences on them. They looked at not only Sung and Yuan
> artist but as far back as Tang and 6 dynasties art. Then their own
> style was a variation which included the influence of artists and
> ideas which heretofore had not been part of the living Chinese
> culture of art. History had become even more open and nurturing of
> new work by contemporary artists, some of whom have since been
> regarded as masters.
>
> This was not a very radical departure from past Chinese practice.
> But the historicism, and learning to paint by making copies had now
> been ideologically supplemented by looking for new artistic
> positions through this study. And the study of artists who were not
> an important part of the canon already was now crucial. The choices
> also told about the artist doing the choosing and his predilections
> as well as what was known or seen in the works of his new model.
>
> I believe that in many ways we have become as old a culture as the
> Chinese were in the thirteenth century when Mongol rule was
> established over all of China. I mean that we have an art history
> which goes back to the 4th century BC in Greece from the viewpoint
> of figures from the renaissance on, so at least 700 or 800 years.
> And we have also since at least the middle of the twentieth century
> loved the works of artists perhaps another thousand years back.
> And, of course we feel romantically connected with ancient
> cave painting, too. And then there is the 20th century.
>
> The artists of the 20th century as a group were the most radical of
> any time and place. They were the most diverse and artists as
> different as Balthus and Klee, who, for example, inspire me. Why
should
> we not build in historical inspiration into an alternate path for
> us all? We are not inspired by the works of the pseudo avant garde,
> which was the Avant Garde's role through say 1963. Leland Bell
> claimed to be a direct artistic descendant of Derain, Soutine, Roualt,
> Marquet, Helion and Giacometti and Balthus. His early, abstract
> work seems to me quite influenced by Hans Arp, too. As a figurative
> painter he looked for and found a line in twentieth century
> painting which he could climb on to. While he was not personally
> influenced by Derain's most radical theory of painting facteur, he
> knew about it, too, and spread the news. Derain said that an artist
> should cultivate his idiosyncratic stroke, or hand mark, but
> develop his works in this way. He should find a motif and then
> think of how it could be painted, for example a haying scene, and
> then paint it through the eyes of a local bar for use as a shop
> sign. As you know Balthus did try that once in his painting for a
> restaurant on the Cote D'Azur. Thinking of it with the crucial
> knowledge about Derain's idea changes it a lot in my mind. To the
> best of my recollection, though I cannot think of a painting of
> that sort by Leland. Leland did one thing I don't approve of,
> though. Having made his decisions and created a historical line
> for himself, he did not suggest that his students do likewise, but
> he told them to do as he did. If this is not true, it does seem to
> be true of most of his students from Parsons to whom I have
spoken.
>
> On the other hand Leland's personal historicism seems to have
> worked very well for him. He not only became a great teacher, but
> also a great painter. I found his show in Washington a revelation,
> especially the last several rooms of the most recent work. The same
> was true of the paintings he did after that show. I know I am not
> alone in thinking this.
>
> But my idea for a new kind of painting which could be worth
> developing over the centuries is that we should look for art that
> speaks to us which has not particularly influenced artists in the
> last hundred years or so, but not solely that art. We should
> already be practitioners of the best pictorial traditions in the
> last century. We should start out our personal journey with as
> strong a craft of picture making as we can get. Then, and only
> then, will we be ready to find inspiration in a different past
> which we will make out own.
>
> In my case an important part of my past is Sienese painting. I
> discovered it in an art history class of Richard Offner's at the
> Institute of Fine Arts in 1953. I have had Paul Klee as a model
> for thinking out a painting from early on and he probably helped me
> to get to Redon. Marquet and Dufy as models I probably owe to
> Leland. The late Braque to a retrospective I saw at MOMA when I was
> a kid. I couldn't understand where his color was coming from and it
> kept me thinking of him ever since. All of the light making
> Venetians got me. Not just Titian and Giorgione but also the
> Bellinis and Carpaccio. In Japan, the Shijo school primarily a late
> 18th and nineteenth century group who painted from nature in
> natural color with the big brush they got from the Chinese. Does
> all of this come together? I hope so, but I am stuck with it. It
> affects my touch, my compositions, and my color. I don't recommend
> it for anyone else. I do recommend in cultivating your own taste
> and seeing it in your work. There still is too much AE influenced
> work, too much out of the old Studio School stereotyped work with
> no personal taste taking part in the creation of the viewpoint, but
> merely a school style. Too many of the Ex Studio School artists
> show love for exactly the same works loved by the paradigmatic
> teachers there, and nothing else. One of the really good things
> which came out of the old Studio School was a strong sense of
> picture making which is essential for any artist's future growth.
> At the time, it was one of only a very few places where that could
> be gotten and I happily sent students there from Queens and
> elsewhere, and happily taught their students as well. But as long
> as the only path was towards the avant garde, those students have
> not done very well. It is necessary to provide yourself with the
> tools to get to a personal vision. Working without history is a
> kind of visual starvation. And even the most surreal artists like
> the paintings of Di Chirico from the Scuola Metafisica period
> -which I heard Leland call beautiful several times, at least
> sometimes in public, can be and often are both full of well
> understood picture painting as well as visual oddness making us
> experience a sense of loneliness and questioned space more
> powerful than Hopper's work at its best. This last century is full
> of great work which is capable of giving the artist a new
> direction. After all, most of it is now part of history and not
> part of our current art world. And then going back to the
> nineteenth century can be both a jump and an inspiration. Courbet
> was one of Balthus' heroes and models, together with Piero della
> Francesca and Poussin. In his hands it did not go to eccentricity
> but to more fully formed and poetic work.
>
> Let me hear how you feel about all of this. I am trying to chart
> the future, always dangerous to do from the past.
Love,
Gabriel
Love,
Gabriel
