What are the major issues in art today?

What are the issues in painting, now? One of the peculiarities is that after a century of exploring metaphor through the structures and forms presented by the artist, most of the establishment won't know what you mean when you put it like that.  All of the finest abstract painters of the century had ideas in their heads when they painted, and it was their intention to get to your head with those ideas. I have already mention Mondrian's overwhelming concern. The balance between life and death, when seen in his paintings was supposed to affect the audience and make their lives better. He was a genuine Utopian. 

I can see Paul Klee as a more complicated metaphoric painter. He did not stay with any one idea very long. Each of his pictorial ideas has a metaphoric meaning. He tended to work within one of those structures until he hit the top and then do something else. The Thinking Eye lays it out plainly. Now that the book is out of print and very expensive, you don't need to buy a copy. Go to a good art library and read in it. It is not a book to go through fast. Just concentrate on a few pages that intrigue you. He had so many wonderful ideas. Often in the book they show one of the works coming out of the logic he has set up in words and pedagogical drawings. One of his great summing up paintings is called "Picture Album,"  it was painted in 1937. It is up on the net. Unfortunately it is one of his larger paintings and is seen too small. The closest thing to it is found not in the work of an artist but in a book. It is in Grandville's "Un Autre Monde." The basic shape is a theatrical stage with a proscenium [in Grandville].

Not only are very few living artists thinking metaphorically, a great quantity of the accepted masters don't even realize that as artists  we are expected to not only produce striking images, but the images have to have some sort of pictorial action. All of the AE first generation knew this. Look for pictorial action in Reinhardt, Rothko, Tomlin, Newman, Kline, deKooning and even in Pollock, it is there. It is also true of the first postwar European generation. Look at the abstract work of De Stael, Vieira Da Silva, Hartung, Wols. If you study the earlier work of Wols, it may help you to understand the better known work.

Now, as far as figurative painters are concerned, to be the true heirs of this last century, you also need to understand metaphor, and how it can be used in figuration. It should be easier to see in Giacometti, Morandi, Soutine, Modigliani, Bonnard and also, perhaps easier in Marquet, and Nice [the place] Matisse. There are problems. None of these artists get into our eyes without ideas of art historians whom we have all heard.  Giacometti is presented [as far as his later work from the motif is concerned] as a sort of successor to Cezanne. There is nothing dreadfully wrong with this as far as Giacometti's motives are concerned, except that it leaves out other crucial intentions of his.

Giacometti before the 1930s was one of the most radical and original abstract sculptors of the century. Among  his other works, there are a number of sculptures of the figure, like the spoon woman. In these he is making up an anatomy which is not based on perception and abstraction from perception, but invention with an as if in it [metaphor]. When he returned to the figure in the 1930s, he did not give up any of his  invented, metaphoric ideas, rather he found them all over again while working from the motif. He was his own true follower. What he had learned once, appeared again in new guises, and often in greater complexity. Even among artists who teach art, that whole phase of his work has too often been disregarded in order to make him a new sculptural Cezanne.

One of the more unusual 20th century developments could be called [using the analogy of color] "Local Metaphor". In his later work in color, Redon was a master at this. A branch could be by turns, as though burning, fluorescent and opalescent. This, within the same pastel or painting. Metaphor could also be taken away from something in a painting and placed somewhere else. So, instead of a shell having the shiny, opal-like quality, part of the background, or the air, would have it.

I have been raving about Seurat's Grande Jatte for decades, now. It is not about finding the volumes of nature all over again, it is about making a poetic statement. If you look closely at the two soldiers in the background, they are obviously made out of wood turned on a lathe. Several of the figures are permanently stuck in their poses and could never move[a little girl skipping, and a man sitting at the edge of the large shadow down front who cannot move his arms away from his legs, ever. There is at least one lady whose hat has gathered up a lot of things into itself, including a sailboat. There is an old lady in the middle distance, sitting on the ground who is actually a lighted street lamp [Balthus cribbed this idea for the first Street Scene]. To the front, what makes you think that lady with the bustle could ever get it off? The entire painting is filled with these things. At the same time, he is building up volumes, and he also had an Art Nouveau linear arabesque which ties everything up into movements of the observer's eyes.

It seems to me that this Seurat is an important predecessor for Paul Klee, and more obviously, Balthus.

Love,

Gabriel