NEW FIGURATIVE PAINTING WHAT MAKES IT GOOD???
There are usually a half dozen successes in the art world every few years who can be called figurative artists. When I use that word I mean artists who both work from the motif, and whose work looks like the motif.
We now have at least three generations of English figurative artists whose success has depended on their figures being ugly, loathsome, and still looking to the layman as though these artists were skillful. I usually don't bother with them. When I have finally seen a show and realize what and where their limitations are, I forget about them. But, today, I looked at the art world for a few minutes through the eyes of a young, well trained, and thus far conventional artist. She is most excited by this sort of work, most especially when it is done by a woman. If women's bodies are invaded, their femininity or sexuality degraded, then she finds the work particularly good[cool]. I don't think this is because she is a silent masochist, but because she sees power in a woman doing this and she wants that power for herself.
I have nearly three strikes against me. I am a man, I paint nudes [although also an occasional male nude], and I am definitely over 30.. But I see power in the nude person, woman or man. While I do not believe that all nudes should be sexually impressive as their major function, it is one of the functions which interest me. The tension between the model and artist during the duration of the pose and its reflection in the canvas is an important part of most of my nudes. I am also interested in the tropes available to an artist in the painting of a nude. These do not include, for me, any tropes which care for the degradation of the model, or for the uglification of the posing figure. In the case of a specific narrative need, I could see the value of one or the other of those, but I have never chosen such a theme, and I doubt that anyone is likely to offer me such a commission[nor would I accept one].
One of the peculiarities of the situation is that each one of these artists, as they painting their paintings manages to make pictures which make no pictorial sense. There is no way of negotiating the spaces and figures in their work. One would think that someone who wished to show life as raw, and even rawer than natural, would care about the space in which their blocks of meat could exude confidence into their large, contaminated spaces. But none of these people seem to be able to do that, especially, when they are mature and should be working at their very best.
Surely Goya did it for most of his life, and the atrocities of Callot are full of vivacity, life, light and air. The prisons scenes of Piranesi are usually admired as his very finest work, Judith with the Head of Holofernes is usually thought of as Artemisia Gentileschi's finest work. The various rape scenes by renaissance and baroque masters usually leave us saddened by the fate of a classically pure and volumetric protagonist or at least a naturalistic, larger than life sized one..
I think that the current desire to make uglification the norm has a 20th century history. All of the artists who, as card carrying Communists felt that they should show their models [none of them in Russia, of course] look uglier and uglier as denizens of this wildly entrepreneurial place, where socialism is not practiced. So we got the work of Jacob Landau, Lonard Baskin, Renato Guttuso, Robert Gwathmey [with his black people in cubist cages], Bruno Caruso, Ben Shahn. These are the true formal and philosophical ancestors of out current monster makers.
So, if I were Saatchi, I would be worried about the potential for all of these artists he has supported to show up with bomb in hand, one of these days to carry out the implied terrorism in their work.
Love,
Gabriel
Comments
Does Lucien Freud fall into the ugly English catagory? It seems he easily could although I wanted to be sure that you would place him there and so I ask the question.
We all want and need an audience, Even an audience of one will suffice. In fact, the Greeks insisted that without an audience there was no art. (They also demanded as much from inspiration and technique). It seems Freud has an audience consisting of those who find viseral description (consider his late selfportrait in the nude, but for the high top shoes) to be a success in revealing an existential truth in seeing. Perhaps a cadavoral photo would offer the same satisfaction minus the paint handling (which, in Freud's case, holds additional interest for his established audience). Beautiful they're not. What they are, I'd love to have you answer although I don't know your personal policy about offering critiques of other artists in a public forum.
Very best wishes.
We are not members of the first generation in which there were artists who looked for the strange, peculiar, bizarre, and unusual for subjects, and were influenced by their subjects to produce queerer paintings. Alessandro Magnasco, the baroque Genoese painter was exactly like that.
Gabriel,
I was completely unaware of Saatchi.
Gabriel,
I was completely unaware of Saatchi. After looking up the people in their stable, I was a little overwhelmed by their confident production of grotesque images. Of course, I knew Alessandro Magnasco but I think he's less masochistic than some of the people at Saatchi. If you recall the name of that good painter (over there) who died recently, I would like to know who that is. At the same time I don't know if you have the time to respond to those who reply to your essays but in any case, I appreciate them and will respond from time to tiome. I also don't know why my reply (above) was abbreviated but I've written it again. Best wishes
I have not remembered his name today. He was one of the English measurers, probably studied with Coldstream or with Andrew Forge. There was a nice article in Modern Painters back when... His subjects were either still life or nude. The nudes [all female] are always posed so that you worried for their aches and pains holding the pose day in and day out. The negative shapes, it seemed to me, were a little stronger than the volumes. The color was completely naturalistic with some raise in the intensities in the still lifes. I just cannot remember his name Oh, I did prefer the still lifes.
Best,
Gabriel
I believe that the name of the measurer you're talking about is Euan Uglow.
My comment was truncated also. I'll try again to write the second, longer part. I am seeking clarification on one point: can you expand upon the charge that the pictures of these British painters unnamed 'make no pictorial' sense? Especially in relation to the paragraph above that separates your work and intentions. I am a real fan of your paintings, but have always found them difficult, especially in terms of the pictorial sensibility. Your work of the 90s, seems to share a kind of distortion with Freud, and even moreso, Paula Rego. The shadow-play is unconventional and agitated. Also, the yellow, all that yellow. I see how Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Fra Angelico use yellow for pictorial effect--I even seen Hugh Yorty doing it today--but, it seems like yellow has always been used in a reserved way for greatest pictorial effect. In your work, it does, I think, along with the shadows, negate the space for the figures to negotiate. I do apologize if this seems argumentative. I hope you and your readers will see it as a simple attempt to clarify my understanding of what I've read here. The article as a whole is thought-provoking. Thanks.
You are right. The painter whose name I could not come up with is Euan Uglow. The first of my two uglophiles are now on your list.
In some of his earlier and less detailed and closely observed work, it is sometimes possible to tell what the space is. In everything else I havce no idea what the space is he wants us to read except in some of his relatively recent landscapes made from inside the forest. In that experience it really difficult to work out the space and it can seem as though everything is coming at us in a completely disorganized way. So painting them that way is not wholely wrongheaded.
I met Augustus John's daughter in Malaysia in 1975. She was married to a civil servant and he had just retired and they were going home. She had been painting exactly that subject inside the Malaysian rain forest. She, by te way went to art school, but her father had given them instructions not to teach her anything. He felt that one should make it through ones own genius or not.
There is , as you know, a whole tradition which extends through the 20th century of how to deal with space making. There are a whole series of 20th century models as well as earlier ones. In learning how to be a detailed realist, Freud forgot about that tradition and based his art on the small relations which he learned to do with ease. This means that the large relationships are nowhere well expressed and that the space is always a disaster.
I think that there is an iobvious similarity between Paula Rego's distortions and some of min. I don't think the reasoning is related, nor do I see any connection withthe space making tradition in her work, either.
It certainly is true that in some of my paintings the space is more ambiguous than it would be, say, in the work of an artist like Braque.
For one thing, I donot contend to be as good as or as consistent as Braque. For another I have some other desires in painting. A painting of mine, Family Romance I is in part an homage to Braque. That already marks me as different. The whole painting is not an homage, only the right hand side as we face it is. In the left hand side I use different pictorial means than he used and I mean the two sides to contrast and carry a part of my thought.
I assume that your problem with yellow comes from The Dance of Death. It has a series of ambiguities of several sorts. The nude in the window is part of an ambiguity inside the house, to begin with. The same person turns up several times in the picture, and another turns up twice. The yellow is partly glare and difficulty. I wanted the space to be difficult to negotiate. The subject is in part about just that.
There is one other reason I am not like Paula Rego or Lucian Freud. The level of abstraction in my work, and the use of color in my work, to take two examples, is inconsistant from painting to painting. You may find a few paintings that remind you of Rego, but no more. I don;t see any resemblance to Freud, but I am sure what youj are seeing is rare.
Also all of this work comes out of a daily practice from the model without and ideational or conceptual reasons for distortion. There are hundreds of pastels which are only about getting that form right in its light on that page. Sometimes a specific gesture is observed and included. These are relatively simple paintings without a great deal of detail. The light and the form is all. Some of my larger paintings are like that. A few portraits and nudes, for example.
I also am and have been a still life painter. Something neithre of the artists you mention are.
Love,
Gabriel
There is one other reason I am not like Paula Rego or Lucian Freud. The level of abstraction in my work, and the use of color in my work, to take two examples, is inconsistant from painting to painting. You may find a few paintings that remind you of Rego, but no more. I don;t see any resemblance to Freud, but I am sure what youj are seeing is rare.
Also all of this work comes out of a daily practice from the model without any ideational or conceptual reasons for distortion. There are hundreds of pastels which are only about getting that form right in its light on that page. Sometimes a specific gesture is observed and included. These are relatively simple paintings without a great deal of detail. The light and the form is all. Some of my larger paintings are like that. A few portraits and nudes, for example.
I also am and have been a still life painter. Something neither of the artists you mention are, or could be, since it requires close study of the motif in its formal development.
By the way I know Hugh Yorty and his work. Are you in Springfield?
Love,
Gabriel
Gabriel Laderman like other guys of his generation were overly bullied by the progressive course of modern art history represented by artists a generation or so older than them,who jettisened every quality and value that existed for the previous 500 years of European painting.Laderman and his generation valiantly tried to rescue painting , but were crushed by pitiful lack of visual education ,as well as by their, on the whole, average skill levels, This was greatly exacerbated by the impossible desire to not only rescue the time honored values, but to also ally them with the developements of the 20th century,which were entirely incapatable with everything that preceded it.As a result, the works produced were inept.There were artists who tried to go right to the sources, so to speak, who tried making work without a 20th century influence, but they failed also for other reasons, I shall go into this more deeply in future comments.
This is complicated, as anyone who has closely examined it will find.
Coming put with authoritative, negative, ex cathedra statements is one way to end a conversation, not to begin one. Also, no one including me has any idea. If you are an artist [which is what you do sound like] what your work looks like. You would have to be some kind of master to live up to your opinions. Not that it doesn't happen, but in your case no one knows who you are and where you are coming from.
You did say something which I accept as true. That all of the artiosts who were brought up as abstract painters took some years to get beyond pretty bad work. This is not only where I started, but where Al Kresch, Leland Bell, Stanley Lewis and many more active today began.
But , no ones logically can be thought to stay at the same l;evel of incompetence for a long life of painting, especially if they are not trying to make it by invcenting bad paintings which look good to the uninitiated, but actually gripping with the issues at hand.
You do seem to be believe that from AE on the true traditions of pictorial thought and practice were all lacking in the work of contemporary figurative painters. On the contrary, the constructional understanding found in the work of Courbet, Corot, Gericauklt, Ingres and Delacroix are all out there in their work, and we can, in fact learn from them as easily as learning from Marquet, the Nice Matisse, Soutine and Modigliani. If you see those 19th century masters [and earlier ones] as distinctly different from the 20th century masters I just named , than you are the one having the problem of competence, understanding and producing works which reasonably improve our connections to the past.So, show us your work or consider your remarks unsaid.
Do realize that I was expecting soneone like you to step ojt of the woodwork. Avter all, the Forum Gallery is also a part of the scene, and there are a number of neo-academic paionters out there.
Here is a question. Is it possible to paint right now as though the 20th century never existed? How does that change the work produced?
Love,
Gabriel
I read your background data. Those were tumultuous times when you were young and studied. Many things were jettisoned and turned on their head by brilliant men with progressive ideas who had no idea where things would lead. As it turned out there is hardly anything left of the Grand Tradition of European painting. We are left holding an empty sack.
You write that because you and these other artists started out as abstract painters you had to get through some pretty bad work before you achieved anything worthwhile. It might be that because you started out as abstract painters there is something fundamental missing. In the work of the people you mention there is an inability to believe in the power of the infinite pictorial space that is possible when there is a profound relationship between the 2 nd and 3rd dimension.
Let us examine the work of these painters:
Al Kresch makes small intense landscapes. His color is bright, his paint is dense, and his form is fairly non-specific. He uses relatively large brushes for the size of his works, which have a kind of generalizing affect on the forms depicted. His color is so bright, it seems forced, and he has trouble reconciling said color with tone. The intense color for the most part either sits on the surface or advances. The surface activity of his brushwork and his color contradict the very depth that he depicts. This is a problem, not a solution. The result is an object rather than a landscape painting. There is virtually no air. The Modern tradition and the great tradition of landscape painting collide in his work and the work is disturbing rather than satisfying. In addition he avoids line, he does not draw, and this not only removes a tool for recession, but makes his work feel crude but crude in a no – nothing way and not in the sincere way that Van Gogh is ‘crude.’
Stanley Lewis seems to believe that if he plants his feet before a motif he will be able to over come all aesthetic problems and produce a work of art. He seems to have faith in what he sees and believes in an honest American way that if he can just depict what he sees it will be a successful work of art. Perception, itself is not a new idea for the basis of art but it was always used with discretion. It was an important tool in Flemish painting and was the basis for the Impressionist movement. Monet used it in a highly codified way. Pissarro and Renoir while working from perception were informed by Gothic art and Italian painting and it morphed into other forms in the hands of Degas, Cezanne and Gauguin. The New York Studio School trains students to improvise and paint and draw from observation. The overwhelming majority of them wind up painting abstractly, as the limitations of this approach become apparent. It would have been impossible to produce the work of Poussin, Titian Veronese, Rembrandt, and even Vermeer, if limited to thus approach. Mr. Lewis makes a gallant attempt but the only drama in these works is the struggle of the painter, which takes place almost entirely on the surface. Mr. Lewis can’t construct a painting any other way than in a perceptual
photographic space. which has almost no pictorial dynamics. Rackstraw Downs is in the same boat but his work is better.
Leland Bell is a more complex problem, as he never found a voice of his own as a painter. He wound up imitating Balthus and misunderstanding him by flattening him out in a series of nudes. He tried like mad to make representational paintings but put heavy lines around his forms so they would make more effective surface patterns, the poor man spent most of his painting life trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. You can’t throw away the 3rd dimension and expect it to come begging at your door. In his early work there are some passable imitations of Giocometti that are interesting because of the weird eyes Bell had because of some disease. Mostly he jumps from one style to another without finding anything. It never occurs to him to examine the tradition of western art and see what could be made from it. He can’t bring himself to look earlier than the 20th century. He tips his hat but doesn’t touch it. He acted like a high priest of painting but one who jumped from one idol to another. He was always preaching about quality without an understanding of how to achieve it. He is another casualty.
The false idiotic idea that Marquet, Soutine and Modigliani carry the knowledge within their respective works of the great French tradition personified by Ingres, Courbet Gericault and Corot and Delaqoix is a joke only to be believed by idiots who don’t see anything. To foster this on students is more than a crime, it is a sin.
To have to explain is painful but I will proceed. Ingres is a major interpreter of Western form. He is a profound portraitist and a draftsman equal to Holbein. His color is magnificent and his only shortcoming is an inability to compose large historical narrative compositions caused by his propensity for close detail and specific form.Delaqoix can certainly compose large complex narrative works almost equal in power to Rubens. He developed a system of form and space while entirely personal that added something profound and new to Western civilization. His color is integral to his form and unseparable from his line. Courbet and Gericault are giants of form and composition. Gericault being more Italianate.Corot is the father of a whole new school of landscape painting that is a balance between the naturalistic and the classical. To compare these three interesting but minor painters to these giants is misleading and dishonest.
Further, to state that a lack of recognizing the tradition that is apparent in their work and not realizing that these three are the true and full inheritors of the previous giants just listed disqualifies one from being taken seriously is merely silly.
Lets take them one by one.
Marquet is an interesting minor painter whose work is not without charm. He produced a kind of academic replica of Monet’s middle period, a fresh, direct depiction of the French landscape. He was certainly not capable nor ambitious enough to stretch his rather modest talent to attempting anything even nearly on the scale of any of the previous masters mentioned. His work is positive, bright and even good, but to compare him with even a giant like Corot is unfair to him. Corot could, at his finest levels almost approach Poussin or Claude, while Marquet might approach Corot at his most modest level. The kind of technique he used, a fresh alaprima, opaque, and direct handling precluded anything more complex.
Soutine , a Russian Jew, wanted more than anything to be Rembrandt. He lacked the intellect and the temperament for any other than the personal kind of twisted expressionism that he developed. He was basically a traditional colorist dependent on value. His difficulty in keeping his darks light in’ weight’ because of his opaque handling is an object lesson. Oil paint was not invented to be used opaquely. He produced a highly personal body of work that has a fierce beauty but no way is he in the same league as any of the previous masters mentioned. What is missing is the enormous body of knowledge of 3 dimensional construction t inherent in their works. A tendency to stay on the surface avoids all of that. Is what is gained worth it? I for one do not think so.
Modigliani, a stylist who could honestly in his elegance of line be compared to Ingres. It is interesting to compare them. As much as both of them stayed close to the surface the opacity and flatness of Modigliani is very different from the nuances of tone and form that are apparent in the work of Ingres. The great 3 dimensional weight of his forms are as sensual as what exists in Venetian painting and make the younger painter feel almost like an illustrator. Ingres of course was trying to follow Raphael but achieved something much different. To place Modigliani in the same category shows not only a misunderstanding of his minor contribution but does him a disservice.
The paintings that Mattisse made in Nice are lovely brief essays that demonstrate his understanding of the aspects of the French Tradition that he valued and wanted in his own expression. To place this group of works against the major works of the previous masters is also misleading. It reminds me of the idiotic recent judgement that Rubens sketches are superior to his major works. These kind of judgements are a kind of hyperbole invented to sell whatever is fgashionable at the time and at that time it was the New York School because of its propensity for improvisation. They are false and while seeming to be insightful for a while they do not last.
And finally yes, Forum Gallery is on the scene and there are a number of nonacademic painters out there.
Forum did have as its saint when Bella Fishko was alive Gregory Gillespie, a disturbed man who finally took his own life. Brilliantly talented but completely dependent on photographs, he, like many other Americans, never found his own form. He was actually a collagist with mystical bent. The photograph dominates most of the work of the Forum Gallery artists with a few exceptions. Nerdrum is interesting, but his paintings are exercises in value and he really cannot use hue effectively, which might be why they are so monotonous and repetitious. Most of the neo academic painters come from the New York Academy. They also are heavily crippled by the photograph and an inability to construct with color. This can be discussed further.
I do believe it is possible to make contemporary representational paintings but there are many pitfalls.
The first part of my rejoinder to you has not been answered, except accidentally. I will not accept that as sufficient. I will comment on a bit of what you have to say but in the future none of your rejoinders will be allowed to stay on my blog since you are unwilling to identify directly who you are and what you are, But, unfortunately it is easy to figure out.
You are almost totally ignorant of the issues involved in picture making. Picture making skills are very important in the work of every master I have mentioned here, and I mean conventional picture making skills and not esoteric ones known to only a small band of initiates. This is as true of Marquet and the Nice Matisse as it is for Corot and Courbet. There is no rigid line separating them from each other.
I assume that unlike Rackstraw Downs who has stated many times that he believes these skills to be old fashioned and part of the past which he means to give up, you don't even know what they are.
Rejecting picture making skills is not even original with him. His teacher Neil Welliver also explicitly rejected them before doing his large, brushy, detailed landscapes, and so did Janet Fish. There is a whole school of New York representational painting to be found in the galleries today which I would call the flat painting school. It often includes clear or precise perspective space [as Downs does] without any of the other necessary sensitivities which would make the work three dimensional. There is no doubt but that he rejects my work, but for different reasons than you do. There is a connection though, but it isn't my story. You will have to find it out yourself.
Gregory Gillespie is certainly someone I knew well at one point. We spent our Fulbright years together in Florence. He had only recently begun to paint over collages of half tone photographs, and he did paint from time to time directly from nature, landscapes, only. In these very small paintings he tried to get the light he found in the work of Maso di Banco, sometimes called Giottino, a Giotto student who has the first chapel on the left in Santa Croce. I was also very taken by those paintings. But there are other things going on in them, which seem to have interested me more than they did him.
The chapel was particularly narrow, and in order to make sense of the 14th century space, Maso felt he had to change the horizontal lines in each panel, as well as in relation to each other in all of the three panels. What these diagonals show is that Maso is aware of the changing horizontality and verticality of every location on the picture plane. He, and Giotto before him compromise with 14th century perspective and also paint with this awareness. This is, of course the same sensitivity which Cezanne develops, but with much less willingness to keep whole forms in an even compromised perspective space.
Gregory did have a teacher who emphasized this kind of construction, and I have seen an early print or two of his which show it. He studied with Diebenkorn in California. But as he worked more and more from photographs with less and less interest in the kind of spatial development and flow which he had already learned, his work became more and more artless and lacking in picture making skills.
So you have identified yourself. You are a neo-academic artist [if an artist at all] and have been taught only the surface of painting as though it was all that is there. Although there are many opportunities to study the whole of painting in this country, you have not taken the opportunity, so your criticism of me and my older and younger colleagues comes from abysmal and bigoted ignorance.
I hope that you are not so rigid that you will now fail to see what this stuff is all about. The only analysis of a painting I have ever published was in an Art News Annual called "Light in Painting," edited by Thomas B. Hess. It also came out as a paper back. You could see more of this in Meyer Schapiro's Cezanne. Not my kind of analysis, but his. I can remember drawing next to him in sketch class and being impressed with his work.
Stanley still teaches every summer at Chautauqua. He is a very inspiring teacher and you might find him worthwhile. I have no idea where you live but there are possibilities for East to West and from North to South.
Since I was myself a rebel, I am not angry with you. I feel for you and hope that you can find better targets. More than that I hope you find more useful sources. It would seem impossible to me , for example for someone to study Chardin-merely with the eye, even, and come away without belief in his use of the picture planes, its divisions and the placement of forms within it -and thus without belief in some of the picture making skills.
I can think of three more places to look for this in books. There was a professor named Allan Leepa who taught at Michigan State and who was a Hofmann student. He wrote a book: Leepa, Allen.
The challenge of modern art; with a foreword by Herbert Read.
This is the only fairly clear exposition of Hans Hofmann's pictorial doctrine in words, except for a list of comments during studio criticism assembled as "The Search for the Real and other Essays".
Hunt, William Morris: Talks on art, First Series and Second Series. These come out of studio critiques. He was a student of Couture and painted together with Millet. It is sometimes quite similar to what Hofmann has to say.
Hawthorne, Charles Hawthorne on painting; from students' notes collected by Mrs. Charles W. Hawthorne; with an appreciation by Royal W. Cortissoz.Webster,Hawthorne was an American who was influenced by and reacted against impressionism.
Love,
Gabriel Ladermaqn
Mr. Fink,
Would you not agree that it takes years of development as a painter to really know much about it? And just as you have formed your opinions concerning the painters you've mentioned both positively and negatively by looking at their work. don't you think it would be appropriate to direct people who may have read what you've written to a source to view your paintings? Just a few of your recent paintings? I'd like the chance to see what you've developed due to these judgements.
Ron Weaver
If you say I am ignorant of the issues involved in picture making please say, “what issues”. As I think I have quite an informed knowledge of said issues, I sincerely would like to know what issues you refer to.
The previous masters( Courbet Ingres etc) all made studio manufactured large complex works. This is one line that does separate the 4 later painters that you mention. The skills and knowledge that is required to make that kind of work is very different from the kind of direct painting that the later artists that you mention.
Mr. Downes and Mr. Wellover and Ms Fish might say what they will about what they give up or don’t give up but the fact is they are all conventional representational painters and are subject to higher values that have long been established and are beyond their control. Space is space, air is air, drawing is drawing etc etc. Your self important statement about the connection that might exists between Mr. Downes work and yourself and me having to find out for myself about it as if you are on some lofty level is childish. I would, as I stated, prefer to stick to the issues please.
I am familiar with Gillespie’s work and his earlier efforts. It is not necessary for you to try to impress with so much specific information about his development and it is sufficient for you to agree with me about the deadening effect of photography on his work.
As you see I am replying to you paragraph by paragraph so I can stay with your line of thought. I consider the statement that I have anything more than the most serious and urgent desire to get at the truth to be beneath responding to. I wish these artists well and am only interested in understanding why they fail to make better paintings.
I’m impressed that you wrote a book and knew Meyer Shapiro, Mr. Shapiro was an apologist for many reprehensible aesthetic ideas, no doubt because he had an affection for many of the painters responsible for the dreck that he hawked. I have read his work on Romanesque art.
Thank you for recommending a class with Mr. Lewis. I prefer to think about art rather than studying it. If I wanted to study it I would try to study it with someone who knows how to draw the human figure and I don’t think Mr. Lewis can do that.
Please don’t waste time “feeling for me”. If you want to discuss issues please inform me of what you disagree with in what I say.
I think you tried to tell me about what you consider are picture making skills in your sentence on Chardin. I am completely familiar with Earl Loran as well as the body of knowledge that looks at painting in the way you allude to. Please take my word for it. I do think there are large groups of skills that because they deal with illusionism are left out of the study of art and considered irrelevant. These particular skills however are there in large measure in the work of the greatest European masters. To not acknowledge this loss is something I do not comprehend.
I also am thoroughly familiar with Hoffman’s work and ideas as I also am completely familiar with Hawthorne work and writings.
Believe it or not, I might be able to teach you something.
Read your letter over. I will not accept your ground rules and your position as one which no one should question. Your original letters were attacks on me, my colleagues and my artistic ideas on this art world.
You are doing it even more in your latest missive, starting by intuiting my rage. That is your rage and therefore your idea of my rage in return. Kid, I am not mad at you. I don't respect ignorant criticism from the right and am more likely, as I did, to give a reading list in hopes that an unknowledgeable beginning right winger will learn better.
Of course, that is what I did do.
I began in the early 1960s, reading outside of the box. Thomas Couture', Hodler, Redon, the Delacroix diaries, Cennino Cennini, through Leonardo and his contemporaries. I read what artists had written as found in anthologies and monographs. If you are interested you can see some of my own writings in response to this. Most of them were in Art Forum in the late sixties, I think one was in the 70s.
I also spent a lot of time looking at the work of artists whom I found interesting. My major concerns were to understand things which had not been dealt with in my reading and my courses as an undergraduate.
In fall 1952 I began working for an MA in art history at the NYU institute. One of the courses I took was given by Walter Friedlander. His book David to Delacroix had just been translated into English. I took it, partly because I had read it. During the course, One moment I can remember is Freidlander saying he had, in fact like Ingres when he wrote the book but now he was convinced of his major flaws, and preferred the German neoclassic artist, Asmus Carstens.
I got this in response to a question: "In your book you are very high on Ingres... his response-" I have changed my mind"
What this means to any artist is that he had no functional idea of the formal values in Ingres, and their lack in Carstens.
So, based on this encounter with an art historian and many others I tend to be more impressed by the opinions, especially over a little time, held by artists.
So, now that we know you are not an artist-what gives you the right to stand on a podium and preach? Your gospel cannot be in your eyes, it must be somewhere else. But I don't feel as though I need to deal with it. I write nowadays mostly for my younger colleagues. The issues which you raise are interesting, because they are the issues which most serious figurative artists have to face out there in the art world on one side, while needing to face the establishment on the other side.
But I cannot see more than that in what you write. I would advise getting out there and reading artist's writings from before say 1935, going all the way back, with a little humility. Those artists did not have our eyes or our hands. Words similar to the onces we use as value and construction words had different meanings and fitted into concepts of art and the world which are different from our own. Learning a little about them opens the eyes and aids wisdom and understanding.
I wish you well.
P.S. I forgot about your remarks about Erle Loran. If you noticed it, I never mentioned his name. That is because neither I nor any of my friends or acquaintances believe that he knew what the hell he was doing when he wrote his Cezanne. His understanding of Cezanne begins and ends with the fact that there is a movement of the eye in his paintings. What that movement is, why it is, what is different in it from, say the work of Pissarro when they were working together is nowhere in his understanding or his diagrams. If that is what you think Cezanne is doing, you should read some of the book by Meyer Schapiro again. You devalued his worth too quickly. It is clearer there than in Loran.
Love,
Gabriel