PART TWO: What we bring with us and what we should bring with us.
Well there has been a fairly long break. Three Mondays ago, including tomorrow, I was a step or two from the dialysis center when I suddenly lost consciousness, fell, getting my face all bruised and bloody and getting a concussion. The real problem was not the injury, but the reason why it happened. It took a week [5 days] to figure it out. So, now I am recuperating and I think they have it licked.
The real question is what is art for? let me give a series of noes.
It is not for financial speculation.
It is not primarily for private use, with availability to anyone else impeded.
It is not and should not be fashionable.
It is not an investment.
It is not interior decor.
It cannot be an ecological statement.
It does not serve any psychological discipline.
It is not primarily to keep the artist sane.
It does not have to be pretty and decorative.
It does not have to be ugly and indecorous.
It should have a serious level but can also be funny.
It is not primarily meant to fulfill an intellectual discipline.
We have had a requirement that artists produce something new and unusual only since the beginning of the Romantic period. It is most clear in the preface to the second edition of Wordsworth and his friend's Lyrical Ballads.
I think the requirement of originality has been taught along with everything else by almost all the art teachers in the world. Artists, reading and seeing the history of art since 1800 have imbibed it there as well. We all believe that we have to do something original to be authentic. But there is originality and originality. The nympheas of Monet were not a willed event. Little by little he found himself backed into doing them. It was the pictorial conclusion to his one man show ideal. It was almost ordained, and when it was reached, the viewing public was no longer interested in his work. It took at least half a century for the art world to realize the work was great and conclusive. In that same century, the art world has little by little removed quality from the late figure paintings of Renoir. They were also not like his earlier work, but in the image of the nympheas and the work by more recent artists, the decision made was that the Renoirs were not original enough, but rather bathetic and overblown conservative work. It was also conceived of, that all his nudes must be sexist. After all, he did say I don't paint with my brush but with my prick.[in French of course].
Of course I don't agree with the majority. A lot of the late Renoir, despite his arthritis which made it necessary to tie his brushes to his hands, is his finest work. In his old age he restudied ancient Roman painting and the new source, neither academic nor abstract pushed him towards newer and higher goals in figure painting, which were not retrograde, but something new and unseen before. One certainty is that the art world including artists, art lovers and art historians will not get it right every time. In the nineteenth century they did not even know who the important painters were until they were all dead and after the deaths of Courbet, Delacroix, and Ingres [whom they thought they got right] all of the pompier French academics were still considered to have been great. That questionable standard is still around us among artists, critics and historians who reject the current swim without understanding what the real alternative is.
Despite the fact that over two hundred years in the Romantic movement [seen from the viewpoint of the artist] have already passed, we are still hung up with the Romantic artist's personality. We are groaners and complainers and hard workers looking for inspiration. We get into the studio or out with our paints and box and look for great motifs to paint greatly. But didn't something change in the whole of the twentieth century? Should we all be looking only at Balthus, Derain, Soutine, Marquet, Modigliani, Soutine, the Nice Matisse, Bonnard and the great Vuillards? Should we look only at them together with Leger, Braque, Gris the good Picassos of analytic and synthetic cubism and the expressionist one of the thirties and forties? Can we learn something From Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Malevitch, the abstract Helion and such AE painters as deKooning, Rothko, Tomlin, Reinhardt, Kline and Newman?
I have purposefully skipped over a few names, they are Redon, Klee, Sironi and Torres Garcia. These artists were all metaphoric abstract artists, for at least part of their careers. Metaphor, as a conscious activity of artists did not arrive in full before symbolism. But it arrived intellectually in the middle of the 18th century with Burke's "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful".
One thing which we may not return to the dust bin is Burke's treatise. It is deeply embedded in the paintings of Constable and Courbet, and Corot. The strip painting which all of them used is pure sublime. But unlike Caspar David Friedrich, their sublime was filled with pictorial life and the artist had the means to invest the sublime with normative life in the face of its peculiarity compositionally. Now,do we have any requirements regarding the sublime? For one thing we must not act as though it is either nonexistent or that we have invented it. There is no new poetry in any of that. We have to investigate it with our mind and emotions in the motif, and find out where we sit, and then go through it to our own solutions.
And that is all for Part II..
