Gabriel Laderman - Monday, August 28, 2006 12:34:47 AM

I am not sure why I don't like the idea of myself as a theorist. The theories of one wet behind the ears young Englishman, just returned from his grand tour of the continent [after he graduated] have been in charge of the art world at least since 1780. Edmund Burke thought he was going to do something like Longinus on the sublime, but, for art. Instead he did something wholly original and unprecedented. He associated different kinds of composition-landscape, no less- with emotional states which were desirable to achieve in painting and he called them "The Sublime." If you keep his ideas in mind and look at landscapes by Courbet and Corot, or the other Barbizon painters, or Constable, you may get a very different idea of what they accomplished and why. Despite all the other subject matters, the 19th century was the century of landscape painting. Claude was considered a great artist before this, but that would often go with "but isn't it a shame he can't do figures any better than that." Landscape was second best. Figure painting was the land of magic and meaning. While there is no need to throw away our landscapes or stop doing them, the figure as a major subject has been inhabited by so few artists since the end of the 19th century, that it is the subject matter the most open for reinterpretation. There is an awful lot of room for talented figure painters. If you begin and also try to rethink your premises along the way, you will almost necessarily come up with some gold while digging. Some of the twentieth century artists who have done figure paintings which move me the most are Roualt, Modigliani, Dufy, Matisse, Balthus, Picasso and Braque. I have left out Giacometti, because as a sculptor he is outside very direct influence. His paintings are both beautiful and haunting, but I don't feel close to them.   In my own language and generation I am far enough away from most of them not to find their hand cramping mine if I get too close. It is easy to go elsewhere and difficult to stay inside some modernist. So they are all very safe as influences.

One of the difficult things is to understand what even someone who lived only 60 years ago meant in his work. Many of us feel connected strongly to work of that time, but there is a schematic reesponse which all of the members of our generation can make, which does not take into account the particular background which the artists were escaping from, and the direction they meant to go in. We don't understand Picasso, Braque or Modigliani because we live later and cam see a lot of their work in museums. We have to immerse ourselves not only in their ideas, but also in the work they were looking at. We have to understand what they thought they were seeing, and how it changed their heads and hands. Modigliani looks deceptively easy to figure out. But first of all you have toknow that he studied in the Academia in Firenze where the Machiaioli and Post Machiaioili were teaching. It really is essential to understand what he came out of. His color sense was permanently fused at that time. What were the reasons the Machiaioli used those colors and none other? Would you have the same reasons for doing it? It certainly was something Italian. It was an Italian response to impressionism. But why that response. Look at some Fattori, or the others and figure it out.

Roualt was a very radical painter, who, nonetheless kept a connection with the grand figure tradition of the past. No one had used black outlines like his in painting for hundreds of years. Also not long ago while Leland Bell was alive, I heard so many people saying they didn't understand his lines. Ask the question why did he use those black lines? Well, Roualt was dead and well accepted, so they didn't say it about him, but they could have. Roualt, unlike Picasso never lost his connection with the figure observed. A good deal of Picasso's work, especially from the 1930s on is not about perception, but about ideas about the figure [some taken from 1923 and 1924 Miro], some taken from surrealistic processes. This is not a put down, just a statement of fact. All art is not alike, and in any one artist's life, not all of his work can be judged by the same principles. It is worth knowing those two things independent of this use I made of them.Picasso was one of the few important painters who made figure paintings which did not reflect his observation of the figure. There have been othres since him. Their work does not speak to me.

Isn't it strange to realize that almost all of Redon's work in color came after the black and whites? He was much more of an obvious progenitor of surrealism in the black and white work. But he seems to me much more fun and more useful in his pastels and paintings.

Love,

Gabriel