In the 20th century, up to and including abstract expressionism no great artists were formalists. Formalism was a creation of critics, not artists. Many artists in the 20th century found the need to put together books which conveyed their view of the art world, or of how to teach art. Some of those authors were Amedee Ozenfant, John Graham, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Andre Derain. Klee’s longest book, which he may not have intended to publish, was published posthumously as The Thinking Eye, and Derain’s monograph was published incomplete, as he left it, in the Georgia Review, translated by the very young Roseanna Warren. Some important artists statements were published in “Possibilities 1,”. S. W. Hayters “New Ways of Gravure” has much invented material about the origins and practice of art mixed in with no-nonsense instruction in various media. All of these artists describe the practice of art as a metaphoric activity. With Derain, one of the as-ifs is to paint in a style which embodies the personality you have conceived of as immediately germane to the subject matter you have chosen. With Klee, a degree of animation is assigned to the forms which are themselves able to produce the work. Or, in other words, the artist identifies with a forming methodology as though it were in charge of making the work of art. Hayter believed that from within his process, which entailed automatic drawing, he could discover ways of proceeding beyond his current preoccupations. Remaining where he was would be the equivalent of sitting in a comfortable armchair as it grew older and finally applying doilies to all the spots which he had worn out. Although Rothko never clearly said this in words which have been preserved for us, he was aiming at a distillation of the grandest, heroic stance of the Greek epic. Mondrian, a utopian, wanted his paintings to serve as a calming union of life and death: intense but permanently at peace.
Art historians have willfully misinterpreted works which contained specific tropes, as masterworks of formalist constructions. One of these is Matisse’s “The Conversation.” Some twenty years or so ago, the three panels which made up that painting were first exhibited together again, as they had been hung in the Russian collector’s home, who originally bought them from Matisse. The central panel, showing Matisse and his wife at opposite ends of a large interior with a dark blue background and a window with a pleasant sunny landscape between them, had been painted as a central panel of the triptych. It had heretofore been shown by itself, only, as though it was the whole work. But, following the original installation photograph, it was shown at the Met as part of the triptych. This had been impossible in the USSR because the two side panels had been given to the Leningrad museum and the central panel to Moscow. The left panel shows a sculptor’s modeling stand with a female figure on it in front of Matisse’s large painting, now at the MOMA, “La Danse”. There is another version of this painting in the Met. The right hand painting as its major form has a series of clay flowerpots sitting on each other, which make up, roughly a female figure. Behind the pot which would be the head, the leaves of a plant in bloom, with red blossoms next to every green leaf cascade down and to our left. The message from Matisse is simple. His wife sees herself as the eternal feminine, fecund like a plant and inherently beautiful in her nature. Together with her represented figure, in the central panel, she means to draw Matisse to herself, and, he presents her as a natural force, more than as merely a person, in her desires. Matisse, on the contrary is the artist, sculptor and painter who needs to spend his time with the models from whom he works in sculpture and in painting in order to accomplish his work, which involves the experience of drawing, sculpting and painting from them. The argument was about the degree to which he was involved sexually with his models, from his wife’s viewpoint, to the detriment of their marriage, and herself. The tropes are very clear even if you didn’t know that he was involved with his models beyond their immediate use as source of the forms in his work. There is no attempt made to hide any of this material. But a formalist will willfully not find it when he looks. Not every work by a modernist artist will have this obvious clarity and directness on a symbolic level, but understanding a great deal of modernist art does need a mind looking out for that material. For one thing, Mondrian was not the only artist of his generation or a later one to come to the painting with an idea about it that derived from Burke'C, and later Kant’s, ideas of the symbolic significance of the composition of forms in a landscape painting. Burke’s Sublime was basic to an understanding of Barnett Newman’s work, and had an effect on Mark Rothko’s work as well. Newman, in his first lecture at the Artist’s Club made it clear that he wanted viewers of his paintings to achieve the experience to be found when seeing and walking around Great Snake Mound in Ohio. That mound is constructed so that the viewer gets a sense of its great length, because walking along side it one does not get a sense of an ending but of further continuation. One of Burke’s categories was the painting which goes on and on and is not ended by the ends of the canvas on the left and right. Courbet’s beach-scapes are painted with this experience in mind. Newman’s work can be thought of as diagrams of the Burkean Sublime. It is not merely my idea that his paintings are about that, it was his idea, and very well stated, too in both words and paint.
But is there not a time when specific tropes become stale? Beginning with Malevitch and Mondrian, haven’t modern abstract painters taken Burke and Kant about as far as they can go? Can more painters come by and make wonderful work with those same forms and similar compositions? That is the problem of contemporary abstract painting. This has been an exceptionally rich century for abstract art. From almost the beginning of the century until now, most of the best minds and the finest sensibilities were producing abstract art. Some of the imagery came from Burke’s sublime and in other instances, the beginning point was symbolism and the works of artists like Odilon Redon. Klee, for example who worked within complete abstraction and also with a variety of images and signs [like the arrow, the exclamation point], and also with generic accounts, both graphic and painterly of subject matter sources, like his late written landscapes [painted as though they were written in calligraphy].
How does a new abstract painter go about his work? Well, for one thing he must eschew all the old and now stale abstractions of his predecessors. Instead of the work, he should be influenced by the idea that he can go and invent his own images by finding his own sources for imagery and compositions which he has developed or intuited or dreamt himself. To be an abstract painter means not only taking a place in the ongoing tradition, it also means taking such a place that you can find your own forms and construct your own new takes on that tradition. For my eyes there has been no living abstract artist who has done this since the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Thinking of our tradition as one firmly rooted in the art of early centuries through the mid twentieth century, of course believing in the kind of forming and ideology to be found in the grand tradition of the twentieth century including Duchamp through the Glass but not his model later on, we come to a location which is stale and the artist needs to invent new forms. But they can no longer can be invented by tearing an abstraction to a passion and arriving at something which is ineluctably your own, as did the first AE generation. Each time they did that, all of them still in the shadow cast by Mondrian and Arp, they patented a compositional scheme, and a particular process to get to it. All the patents are still valid. There is no way for a young abstract painter to go into that world with so much already decided by artists who arrived at their prime decisions in the 1950s at the very latest. Those ideas and processes which were not patented, are of very limited strength and little freshness. They will be doomed, at best to be minor followers, and at worst to produce incoherent works of little value. What an abstract painter needs to do is find something in perception, history, biology, physics, poetry, mathematics, anthropology, or philosophy [and many other aspects of human thought and striving] which engages him in an activity which requires specific actions and choices, and keep on with it until he produces work of quality and independence.
It is harder now, to be an abstract painter, than it is to be a figurative painter. There are so many success images, and so many of those are spurious. The success in the world substitutes for success in the work. Even if the works have quality, are they freshly seen and can they hold future development? The problem is that a whole group of late modernists learned, in art school, not how to be artists in the first sense of the word- that is creators who will find wonderful forms for themselves and their viewers, but artists in the sense of people who know how to make those gestures in their work over a long period which simulate a fine modern artist’s development. They have learned, in fact, only how to be careerists. They can fool the critics, curators, dealers and the cognoscenti, without providing either enduring work, or work which is not trite.
On the other hand figurative painters have a problem, too.
Many, in fact, became figurative in recoil from the later stages of the
modernist movement or from post modernism. Despising what they see around them
as sham, their response was to work from the motif in some version of what
looked like premodernism. Some of these people can make wonderful simulations
of the style of Rembrandt, or of Bouguereau, or Carvaggio. They have emphasized
representation, and being of normal intelligence, and digital abilities, they
have found it easy, over several or many years to learn a great deal about how
to represent nature, the landscape, the figure, still life or all of these.
Unfortunately, these reactionaries have by no means also learned how to
manipulate the forms of painting which even a second rate academic like
Bouguereau could do. All of the French 19th century academics had a
much more modernist view of the act of painting and pictorial construction in
paint than do these modern old fogies. Any one who looks at the catalog of the
exhibition of the French Prix D’Rome paintings, their sketches and preparatory
work, is seeing better work than contemporaries who mean to be in that tradition
can produce. The year Bouguereau won his gold another artist also won it, and
later became famous and successful in Paris. The subject which was set for them
was “The finding of the dead body of Queen Zenobia.” Unlike Bouguereau’s
painting which has no clear metaphoric content, that other artist produced a
work in which the horizontality of the Queen, found dead on the banks of a
river is worked into the composition which means to commemorate her death
through its construction. It also does have a spatial arabesque, so in more
ways than one, it is the work of a
knowledgeable artist. It is no masterpiece because the style was already pretty
cut and dried and lacking in rich potential already. But we cannot assume that
academic 19th century artists as a group were know-nothings, just as
we can no longer assume that 20th century pseudo avant-gardistes are
knowledgeable, and not dealing in clichés in their work. It should be stressed that both Bouguereau and his colleague understood spatial arabesque and that their paintings were composed through using it. Spatial arabesque is what Hans Hofmann is famous for having taught in a modernist context. And it is something most of the new fogies never heard of. In fact it was so common in the late 19th century that the Nabis [a group which included both Bonnard and Vuillard] had in their credo the thought that they would forego that bourgeouis shibboleth and not use it unless or until it forced itself on them out of the composition and structure of the motif in the painting. Although, they both embraced it in the context of their later work.
So it is my contention that the character of painting and the sources of meaningful compositions both must change for artists to be contributing some thing worthwhile to our culture. For that matter, they have to change so that artists are doing something worthwhile for themselves, too. Every serious artist wants to do something worth his/her time and effort. And, since artists must work for quite a while developing something worth while, it would be a shame to work very hard and come up with very little. Among serious artists at a moment which should properly be one of confusion and regrouping, it is not a time for a boy or girl wonder to arrive with a new word at a young age. Despite the fact that the establishment thinks it has such people it has only people playing with trite images and ideas in establishment style. It is going to take anyone worth their salt a decade or two to have some thing worthwhile to offer. To be able to see around the problems facing us, it is merely sufficient to have worked for some decades in getting to a worthwhile location. This demands not only intelligence but stubbornness, a lack of willingness to follow the main chance, and even more, a lack of willingness to produce trite work, as so many of those around us are doing. No one formal constructional method is enough to produce for any artist the potential for good and personal work. We know that the Nabis rejected spatial arabesque as trite in the 1890s just as Leland Bell and his friends rejoiced in it as something real and necessary in good work in the period from 1950 through to 2000. But I have seen lots of work which I could read, as Leland did, which is not marvelous and not rich, and which is full of trite and tawdry gestures. So I no longer believe that spatial arabesque is enough. I certainly taught it to all of my students, and were I teaching again I would still teach it, but I think we need more than that.
I also believe Andre Derain’s unfinished theoretical manual is full of fine thoughts like the one in which he recommends that an artist decide what style a painting should be painted in. He thinks that seeing the motif and painting it well is not enough, so the artist who is painting a farm scene might decide to paint it as a village sign painter would have gone about it in the last century, for example. Then his brush, representing his artist’s personality would be the major connection between the painting and himself, and not the style. This was an attempt to get out of the avant garde trap. And it is an interesting one. The problem with it is that Derain was not good enough to break out of the trap himself. With all the good will in the world I am afraid that I have seen very few large works by Derain which make much sense. His best works, aside from his still lifes and a few landscapes, are all the very small sketches. The ones in the Pierre Levy collection seem to me marvelous no matter what style they are painted in. They are what we have, to fulfill his theoretical dicta. Most of the larger paintings [say at least 30 inches in one direction or larger] are failures in his own terms. This is only untrue for the still lifes which all seem to have been wonderful for him to paint and for us to see.
The way he analyzed the problem, Leland needed a great Derain as a forerunner. I don’t think we do. For one thing all of us have both Leland and Ulla, and also his friend Al Kresch. All of them represent a development out of the grand figurative tradition of modernist Paris, as well as a return to figuration by well trained and gifted abstract painters.
Actually, I don’t think they are the only avenues towards renewed and fine figurative painting. Between them, they represent one healthy direction. This is a moment when many painters have learned how to paint from nature with only designed surface principles to differentiate their work from book and magazine illustration. Most figurative work we see is not formed in any way. This is even true of people who mean to form, but do not fulfill their own forms often enough to produce successful work. Unlike Leland, I don’t think that everyone who does not form is necessarily a scoundrel. There are failures of imagination, art school educations, and misapplications of design as seen by Arthur Wesley Dow through the Bauhaus. Klee, whom I revere as one of the fullest, most original sensibilities of the century, never produced even one student who could be called his equal. I would not mind being thought of as less than some of my pupils, but then I am not in Klee’s league. Then, all that teaching of mine would have been worthwhile. The good thing about Klee is that he left his teaching notes behind, and he can still have pupils from their study. [The Thinking Eye] So he may yet get the pupils he deserves.
Have any of you stopped to figure out what di Chirico was doing in his early great work? He didn’t do it until after he saw analytic cubist paintings. And what he did was re-visualize as images the broken down forms of cubism. He did not throw away the pictorial movements and tensions in his best work. Although he has turned cubism back into things, the things still move in space and over the canvas as the cubist paintings did. He was inspired to do peculiar work by having a remarkable take on something wonderful and the most abstract we had yet become. For some reason he was not able to keep it up, but Morandi who had visited Cezanne and cubism before he made his metaphysical paintings was able to keep it up for several decades. I think, though, that in between Morandi and Hopper there no longer is any way that tense figure ground relationships in a sharp side light can have that same poetry again. Perhaps that is why in his late work Morandi forced the negative shapes to overpower his forms, none of which read as volumes any more.
So, without historical references, let me say again what kind of art we need, and where it might come from. From figurative artists we do not need repetitions of academic models; repetitions of Cezanne; repetitions of late Matisse; expressionism, not based on personal weird or cultural dissatisfaction, but based on prominent 20th century examples like Soutine. We need figurative painters to go to work, beginning with influences which leave room for development even if you start very close to the master or masters involved. I think Nice Matisse fulfills that, and also Marquet, after the height of the Fauve movement. Looking at the late Dufy interiors and also the late black Braque interiors has room for more development.[looking at both of them]. Many of Picasso’s synthetic cubist influenced still-lives done in the 1920s and 1930s have ideas which he did not entirely fulfill. The peculiarity of the best Courbets and some of the best Corots has never been full faced up to. The portrait of Jo at the Met, or of the Ingres, Comtesse d’Haussonville at the Frick are fully developed non academic paintings, although without a really sharp eye, they may be misunderstood as academic painting. I think that Seurat can still be a major model if one looks at all of his largest paintings and thinks about how much he changed from one to the other. Some of the middle sized landscape and city views are very worth learning fully, too. Now, what about works from other centuries? Can we be inspired by them, too? The most important thing is to make art history into a personal response rather than a dogmatic historical approach. The back of the Duccio Maesta, as it should be seen, with each painting cheek by jowl up against the other was very influential on the great 15th century Sienese retardataire artists like Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo. But since that time, as Timothy Hyman correctly intuits, it has been the Florentines all the way. So there they are, together with the Lorenzetti and Simone Martini, neglected masters with a radically different approach to subject matter, story telling, than the Florentines had. The Ambrogio Lorenzetti Results of Good and Bad Government has had little influence, despite its great celebrity. Ambrogio was , of all things, a metaphoric painter through his forming. That is really a very modern concern. I don’t mean to say that all of his forms had metaphoric content, in closely related fashion; they had it in very different ways, because their content required changes in forming. He sounds more like Paul Klee, or perhaps Andre Masson, than he does like a fourteenth century Sienese. But, that is what he was. So, one of the places we can look, as figurative painters, for a personal approach is at the works of past masters. And masters who were not in the highest odor might, if they speak to us, be full of startling potential for innovation. [The words, "The Highest Odor mean not of the highrest reputation".]This is especially true of those masters who became part of the scenery, as some other spot was self-elected for greatness.
Once we begin to believe in our own right to construct our own present, it is not necessarily to look only at historic art from our own culture, or only at art. There are other sources for pictorial construction which may become metaphoric. Alfred Russell has been working with more than three dimensional spaces and forms, and situating normative figures in them for about 30 or 40 years. His source was a book written by a mathematician written for Physicists.
While the figurative tradition was not broken completely by late modernism, because a number of the original group continued to use the forming of modernist painting, this forming was in a direct line with 19th century figurative work, and early representational painters. So one could use the pictorial analysis common to modernist work to get back into earlier work like the French and Venetian tradition, and much farther back. But, post modernism, which has over the past 60 years become more and more important in the teaching of studio artists and of art history, does completely break with the past, and affords any artist who has not known something else no springboard to intelligently get into issues involved in baroque or renaissance painting, for example. There is no pictorial connection. These young artists are as lacking in any approach that would lead them to profit by studying that art as most art historians. The art historians in the past century usually had no practical art experiences under their belts. They could not draw or paint, and this was responsible for loads of absurd writing about things which they did not understand. But now, it is not only art historians, but a whole generation or two of young artists who are in the dark.
So, what are the issues? The necessity in one’s own work to make a connection between our understanding and some part of the heritage of artistic concerns and capabilities which is all over our past, before 1950. We must also make connections with the processes of conscious metaphoric construction. Knowing it when we see it is not enough. We have to be able, ourselves to make up procedures for developing it in our work. Old metaphors that have been around for a hundred years or so, and can be found everywhere, are stale metaphors. If we realize that and either try to revivify them, or find some new ones, we will have a chance at really good work. If we stay within them, not aware that they are stale, we will whether we want to or not, produce stale work. Well, I think the compositions which Burke came up with in his sublime, are now quite stale. The sublime is not so sublime. We know the potential processes for identifying metaphor. We have had many examples of it. We should be able to find some others. It should be clear that L’Art informel in Europe and Abstract expressionism in the USA is also stale. But the way out is not to do something disgusting or frivolous which makes us seem the true avant gardistes of the next wave. All of the avant gardistes of any new wave will be clearly affected, insipid and lacking in anything worthwhile to offer. The Avant Garde, now, is a sham. It is work culled from the newest by the art eaters who need it to improve their social status, and validate their money. And it has been painless. The art has often gone up tremendously in value, and even made a profit for its buyers. That does not mean that any of it is any good, it just means our society has been fooled into validating it. The establishment critics are not people who love art, or who understand it on a deep level. The best of them just understand what is fulfilling to an aesthetic developed by looking at the establishment since AE. All of which is based on the disabling new historical scheme with Duchamp as the Poppa.
First of all, there is no reason why working either abstractly or figuratively is preferable. Second of all there is no reason why an artist should go at his work from the conventional constructional principles of painting seen as continuing the traditions of Bonnard, Cubism, Matisse, Marquet, or Mondrian.
The defining painting for Balthus, in his first show was his first "Street Scene" in his first show, dated 1935. It was odd, the major influences on the composition were Seurat's Grande Jatte, and the best Scuola Metafisica paintings of Di Chirico. For example, he intensifies the picture plane and at the same time uses it as a springboard for spatial development by inventing a double image. The black hat with red piping on the woman who is the closest figure to the picture plane, and a shop sign of the same colors behind it -- between them the two forms become a horse's head on about the same level of abstraction as the work of Duchamp Villon. Also the boy walking towards us, immediately behind her picks up the shop sign behind and above his head not only as she does, but following the imitative principle of the chef's hat to his left. There are many more spatial anomalies which help to construct the deep pictorial space, but all of them have arguments between apparent images and pictorial association. That same boy wearing a chef's had, had a hat which has picked up two signs, one nearly rectangular and one partially oval [it is cut off by the top edge of the painting]. This constructional device is reminiscent of the lady whose hat has picked up a variety of images including a distant, full size sail boat, in Seurat's Grande Jatte. So, what would be surrealist devices [or proto-surrealist to keep time straight] are being used to make pictorial space, and construct an abstract structure for the painting. There are many more examples in this painting, these are only a few. So there is no divide between well constructed cubist or Nabis painting and surreal or irrational work. Since this is in Balthus it cannot be outlawed from good art. One might come to worthwhile work through surreal image distortion as well as through "echt" cubist manipulation. We must keep the book of means and the exploration and adventuring of a new artist open to various worthwhile strands in artistic development of our time. Not any one tradition holds precedence over any other in the creation of new ideas, new means of forming and new means of poetic reference. Balthus first version of the Street Scene was painted in an unexceptionable Nabis manner, for example. http://www.artchive.com/artchive/b/balthus/balthus_street.jpg
Many of us know well the road to development of abstraction, for example of such an artist as Mondrian. Before he discovered Cubism, he was first an unexceptionable painter in the Dutch version of a symbolist inspired Art Nouveau. When he first discovered cubism and made sense of it he was happy to find half destroyed houses in a Paris bombarded by German guns. The subject had new, decreased objectivity. The subject did not add up into a house or several houses, but to ruins of houses. Individual planes and surfaces which could be dealt with less so as to reproduce an image of a house, and more as disjunctive parts of houses, parts of walls. ceilings and floors. So he had no imperative to render them. Instead he used these bits and pieces to organize a pictorial whole in his canvas. He could not repair the actual buildings, but he turned his canvases into actual wholes. Thus repairing the results of brutality and death. It is not surprising that eventually, he was able to paint completely abstract paintings which emphasized this unity and order with no objective reference. His paintings became, as he says he meant them to, balances between life and death, between the horizontal and the vertical, as an excerpt from his writings on "Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art", still shows. Along the way he learned how to develop the forms he used into complete and profound abstract pictorial wholes whose forming derived from Cubist construction. His was a development which actually led from symbolist imagination through figurative development towards cubism and then beyond cubism towards perfection in non-objective construction.
But the progress of Joan Miro from Fauvist and cubist influenced figure, still life and landscape painting which had many different irrational qualities to full fledged abstract surrealism, was a contradictory path. In his works before 1923 he might seem a more "orthodox" modern artist. The influence of the fauves was in his color and patterns, the departure from perspective or even perspectival and ground planes with no diagonals was there, but until 1923 the the irrational repetitionemphasis on the irrational in, say, rows of grain, tiles, awning stripes, had not become an element on their own. They have in Hemingway's the Farm smaller than the Hemingway painting painted in 1924, which is now in the Guggenheim, has many more abstractions, irrational in 1923. But a second farm, muchrepetitions and distortions out of plane for irrational intensification of some detail. It also had inventions or reinvented forms which stand for oxen, ducks and other farmyard creatures. The painting is a whole vocabulary of irrational, invented forms. And while Miro went through this period with rapidity and became an irrational abstract painter by 1924, Picasso looked back at this period for some twenty years mining its irrational forms. The Picasso series abstracting the forms of a bull would be unthinkable without those of Miro [a small detail in this painting] His shmoo shaped figures show up in many places, for example Picasso's crucifixion. His bone period figures find their source here. Miro does not get less abstractly formed by searching for irrational abstract invention, he constructs with a more intense constructional force than ever. He becomes an abstract artist by inventing breaks in logic -- in the logic of rational paintings, which are more rational in pictorial structure than his own less erratic, more normative forming. His work gets more poetic, more inventive, more original in associations than it was, and yet, is also more intense pictorially. Mondrian's better paintings, but rather better painting of a different kind than the embrace of irrationality. Let me make a fine distinction; while artists look at what Mondrian did as the work of a fine, intense craftsman who was not irrational, their is no rationality in pictorial decisions. They are made because of pictorial needs, not just the eye is involved but the whole mind and the body of the artist. Why a shape should go a 1/4 of an inch one way or another is based on an intense response to the forms which is wholly irrational and based on the sensibility. Mondrian is not a path is not the only one into abstraction. Rejection of the irrational does not createrationalist, but in the best possible way, a frozen expressionist. His ideas about the meaning of painting have an honorable source back through Fernand Hodler to Kant and Burke, but in the operation of them, he, as a truly sensitive and caring artist is not rational. To the contrary, he has honed his sensibility to the most extreme position so that he can produce blends of life and death and not disasters. So where is the difference between his process and Miro's. Miro also thought and constructed so that his paintings would be more intense and more effective as images. He also honed his sensibility. It is the subject matter and its source which marks his independent path. He is making up poetic statements, associating images in his paintings with other forms. The individual associations dislodge them from their neat and unproblematic place in a normative world. They allow him to make a new world in which his exaggerations, associations, and intimate reconstructions can order a different kind of space more intensely. Little by little, Miro reaches out for a new kind of abstraction in which the processes inevitably produce irrational forms with less and less recognizably, but their own new logic. Now, he reaches for a world of like minded objects whose connection with representation becomes more and more distant until the work is entirely abstract. A part of this process is a fuller more intense abstraction. Both artists become more abstract, one follows his earlier ideation into intensity and the other develops a new ideation which leads him into intensity.
So there is more than one way of arriving at abstraction. This was true in the past, why should it not be true, now? But this is not the issue, merely an explanation why the future does not necessarily belong in the hands of figurative artist. I will discuss the figurative artist next, and then finally
having got this out of the way, I will discuss the possible valid future for both figuration and abstraction. Of course, I think both are possible. It will depend on the artists to make the work fully alive and fully wonderful for our future viewers.
I have wanted to write about Al's work for some years. He has a modest traveling show, now. It is at Wright State University near Dayton Ohio, now. This essay is in the flier which accompanies the show.
Al Kresch has been dealing with the same motifs for at least 40 years. The earlier paintings that I have seen, not unlike the best work of Derain and Marquet, show him reacting not only to the largest forming and emotion issues in the landscape, but also to very small and intimate ones, without, nevertheless, losing a certain broad, grand sweep. Kresch has always seen that grand sweep, no matter the level of abstraction in his work.
Now, looking at the mastery in his recent work, it is clear that while he learned a great deal from his many years of close study, he is most taken with the broad sweep — the gesture of the landscape in its enormous space, out of scale to the ordinary person, with his viewpoint on the ground at a distance.
As the landscape century, the 19th century offers us many examples of artists who responded to Burke's notion of nature as sublime. The greatest of them, and the most consistently sublime in his landscapes, was Courbet. Al Kresch's new paintings reveal a very strong sense of Courbet's feeling for landscape. Courbet did not try to depict nature's minutia, but rather captured its broad sweep and grand rhythms, as does Kresch.
In the 20th century before him, the artist who reflected this the most was George Roualt. I think Kresch gets to Roualt as an influence because of how he sees the motif with Courbet. Roualt is not his master, but a comrade on the way to intensifying and purifying his view of that overwhelming landscape out there, the one that makes us feel our own size, and eventually reverses the size so that we can see ourselves as larger than, rather smaller than the motif.
As a result of his openness to models from earlier generations, he becomes a more radical and original artist himself. Originality,especially originality that has meaning for us, is not found in ignorance of past examples, or ignorance of the motif, but in using as much knowledge from many sources available to us to arrive at our notions of the motif. Too many times we say to ourselves, I am just a painter, I cannot use all of that knowledge in making the picture. Kresch does not do that. Whatever he knows and feels is an important part of what he has to say to us about the motif. This makes him an important landscape painter for our time, since what he feels during the experience of painting becomes a source of new knowledge for anyone experiencing his new painting.
It may seem harder now to see an artist shaping the thoughts and feelings of his contemporaries in their social and political stances, but insofar as any observer must feel the strength of Kresch's emotion and forming of the motif, he is changed. This change, which exhilarates and lifts up every viewer, also has a political dimension as well. We begin to believe in the goodness and fullness of man through experiencing the goodness and fullness of each painting, and in this way we become better citizens.
Actually, it is important to separate Richard from Cezanne, too. Recently I wrote an essay for a show of work by several Midwestern artists. I called the show "Post Abstract Figuration." The artists
Philip Hale, Bob Brock, Barbara Lea, Mike Neary, Timothy King and David Rich; had this in common, they were very well prepared to see and feel the abstract construction in nature as they painted. Their training was quite modernist, yet they used it to help realize the motif, and not depart from it. Richard has been doing this since at least 1963. He is thus a member of an older generation at work in the same way. The Midwestern painters all had some contact with people like Wilbur Neiwald, Stanley Lewis, Lester Goldman and Michael Wallin, all of whom themselves went through abstraction on the way to a figurative style. When I went to school in 1952 no self respecting young artist could work in other than an abstract style[and in Lester's case, back again]. After AE gave us carte blanche to go off on our own, as the artists of that generation had done, we found abstraction to limiting a field to remain in. Too many things had been cut off and patented by too many good artists. It seemed as though the greatest area for freedom and personal development would be in working from the motif and trying to realize it in painting. This is what Richard LaPresti tries to do. One more facet of his personality as exposed in his work needs stressing. He is a very passionate man. His paintings are, in fact meditative, but they also are full of passion. Passion for the floor, the walls, the people, their relationships, the air in the room - of course in his interiors. And similar passion for the sky and the clouds and the air between us and them, and the land, the trees and foliage coating and sprouting from it and all of the buildings. He expresses his passion with his brush and the paints he chooses. This is sometimes why the intensity of colors is more than merely normative. The colors are exaggerated because they make more pictorial sense that way and because the exaggeration feels more right than reportage would feel. He is not reserved about his forming but full of zest and verve and passion. So we cannot discuss his color dispassionately as a constructive element, only; although, of course it is that, too.
So, there are at least two generations of such artists. Come to think of it, there are three. Originally Leland Bell, Al Kresch, Nell Blaine and Louis Matthiasdottir were also abstract painters. When they returned to figuration they did so with all the intelligence which had informed their abstract paintings. Unlike Balthus or Derain all of them were abstract artists first, before they returned to the motif.
The LaPresti show opened yesterday. We went to the gallery a bit late because of other necessary appointments on Saturday. It is a large show. None of the paintings are much beyond 40 inches in the long dimension. Most are smaller. The subjects this time are still life, landscape, city scape, beach scene, seascape, a life class with posing models and many artists work. It is the broadest range of mastered motifs he has ever handled at one time. His brush is loose and used to develop the forming of each motif. Each painting was a pictorial challenge, I believe. One reason is that he did not know beforehand how he was going to realize the forms. There were lacks in the motif for compositional reasons, of which he was aware from the beginning. So he was quite ready when, after a while he saw a reflection across the water from in to out, leading straight down to the bottom edge of the canvas helped to realize the surface and the space at the same time. One of the paintings has two of them in perfect positions. They were, however improvised on the spot. The second time it happened, he was waiting for it and at the point in the day when it showed up he quickly got it down.
He has been painting beach scenes for decades. This time, for the first time, the plane of the beach was important to him. He tried to realize the sharp horizontally of that plane and not raise and lower it to rationalize the figures he worked into the composition which were always moving and agitating that plane in the past. The views of the insides of studios with a model or models posing for a group are a new motif. They do seem to have a related space and complex spatial movement which connects them to the beach scenes. They must be the equivalent of the beach scenes, only painted in the winter. In some respects they are easier for him to deal with than the beach scenes. Since everyone is painting or drawing the motif, there must be very little movement. Of course the same is true for the models. So he gets more time to think about relationships than at the beach. This does help him and the large paintings from this source are among the strongest in the show.
Now, I have not mentioned anything about his level of abstraction. He is not a realist. His work is on a level of abstraction between Cezanne and someone who has been an analytic cubist but uses naturalistic color usually somewhat heightened. The major joys in the work are joys of construction , although mixed with some whimsical, and slightly odd references to the motif. We get opinions about the character of posing for a group of artists. The models are somewhat different creatures than the busily working artists. The differences are a part of the meaning of the painting.
There are some cityscapes which in a most informal and enjoyable hand try to make sense of a town in terms not distant from Cezanne. Actually while we all know Cezanne, and there have been innumerable artists who have tried to paint like him, there is very little painting which actually brings it off. LaPresti is not trying to paint like him. He is using his developed sensibility which was guided in his early years by a number of teachers who had a cezannist connection, and the formal impulse, which comes from those years becomes a part of his armament and shows up in a motif closest to Cezannes. Those teachers included Mercedes Matter, Charles Cajori and me.
In his generation the work of someone who is immensely gifted in the kind of spatial read which in modern times found in Cezanne one of its first major figures can very well not seem an imitator, Because having gained his knowledge working from the motif with several different versions of the construction required, and from his own daily practice over the decades, as well as much more abstractly than Cezanne ever did, it could adhere to that sort of construction and not get so close to Cesanne that it is imitative. Besides, none of the cezannists ever got close to Cezanne's realization, and LaPresti does.
I will leave off talking about his color until another time.
The art world of the last 45 years has recast our modernist past. In the late 19th century the modern movement went through Redon, Rodin, Cezanne, Seurat, Gaugain, Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh. The next group to appear were the Fauves [Matisse, Derain, Marquet, Van Dongen, Dufy, Vlaminck and Braque] Braque, together with Picasso founded Cubism which included Leger, Gris, Lipschitz, Laurens, Duchamp-Villon, Archipenko and others. After Cubism Dada appeared, which included Arp, Picabia and Duchamp. Now, the high point of Duchamp's work was the large glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by her own Bachelors, Even. After that, without doubt the high point of his career, he spent a few years playing with readymades and then quit art completely. spending most of the rest of his life enjoying living, playing chess and having a fine circle of friends in New York, his adopted home. It was only after AE that first the Neo Dada and Pop artists began to reevaluate his contribution and make him the center of the 20th century artistic scheme. His readymades were quite suddenly raised to the level of major examples and major models for such artists as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein and others. The changed view of the early part of the century was that it was all about getting away from the traditional concept of art which held its place on the wall and in the space and produced new poetry and new logic of facture through poetic ideas. No, it was challenging all the possibilities of art and making something which was a joke simultaneously on the aspirations of the artist and the piety of the audience.
Johns' early paintings were painted with an AE hand, but rather than going through that sort of improvisation on the way to a self chosen image which would carry formal and philosophical weight, the work of the brush was to describe a previously chosen image which might have looked like something profound, but was in fact nonsense -- and that is not a criticism. Nonsense like an alphabet, a pattern of numbers taken from a math book, a map or a flag. None of these were images chosen because they revealed the heartfelt yearnings of the artist towards making a poetic statement, but images which made fun of that. These were, after all, the children of Duchamp.
Today the art world, from the major museums through the major art schools to the dealers and the artists inside this world all judge other work from this viewpoint. Only it has now gone on for 45 years, and the younger artists have to be aware of their precedents as well as being inside this ideation [I should rather call it propaganda]. Everyone is happy. The paintings within this golden land keep getting astronomically more expensive every year and the one standard by which to judge any art is its monetary value, and the standard to judge an artist is his[her] income.
It is too simpleminded to say that the art world, after the success of AE decided to have a permanent avant garde in place from then on, and to support it and carry it immediately into the establishment. That is one of the reasons for the blend of P. S. 1 and the MOMA. Yes, it is true that we now have a permanent avant garde, but more important it is an avant garde based on a modernist past which has been invented by the current crop of major artists [using their own standard of their wealth]. But the art which was supported was only new and avant garde by measuring how much ir carried out Duchamp's example. It must of course also carry this idea to newer and more questionable objects and images. Thus the avant garde is made to include only questionable images and peculiarities. There is no thread except that to tie it to the past. But now it is only the new past this art world has created with Duchamp as the central role model.
If you have read the book, first published in 1956, "Canvases and Careers" by Cynthia and Harrison White, you may have a good idea why the first Avant Garde came to be. The overproduction of too many extremely skilled and ambitious academic painters in France and in other European countries by the academies made it necessary to find new ways of making a living for qualified professionals. There were several possibilities. Some academicians gave up their painting and became producers of lithographed popular prints. And a few began to work further and further away from the accepted norms of pictorial behavior. Some brave entrepreneurs first essayed the role of the dealer, and supported several of these until it came time for their first group and one man shows[both of these institutions were invented then and there]. And their very peculiarity and difference from every thing everyone else was exhibiting, ultimately made them all successes. I was careful there, I said was showing, because Gustave Moreau -the teacher of many of the Fauves, was painting work in secret which could have been showed with their work, but he kept it hidden.
So an avant garde, and all the other 19th and 20th century avant gardes were formed of artists working in a style which was absolutely despised by the main figures buying art, curating art, and writing about art. They were not painting to requirements of the Haute Bourgeouisie, the major critics and the museums, and they attracted no early and easy enthusiastic responses. None of this is true of the pseudo avant gardes since AE. Contrary to the current opinion, I would mark AE and post war Art informel in France as the last of the avant gardes. And although they were real, perhaps even they had a little too much of a model for artistic behavior from early 20th century abstract painters like Mondrian,Van Doesburg, Vontongerloo, Gabo, Pevsner Arp, Brancusi, Malevich and El Lisitski, and therefore, did not have quite as much freedom as they thought they had. But I still think of several of those artists as true and full figures.
So, what is the situation now? If an artist works from the motif and looks for poetry in his intimate response to the motif, or, for that matter also his large forming responses to the motif, he is taking himself too seriously. He should not be looking for some way to express his response to a motif in formal terms with potential poetic meaning. He should be simultaneously responding to a motif and its inherent stupidity and the inherent worthlessness of traditional forming. Then he would be part of this brave new world. Not that I think that world is either brave or new. I think it is craven and trapped in a time warp.
With this new establishment in full fettle the time was ripe for academic critics to enter and justify it philosophically. At a time not too distant from that of the 30's Duchamp, Wittgenstein upended modern philosophy. From his viewpoint most of the crucial subjects of such as philosopher as Kant could not even be discussed philosophically. They were outside the potential subjects of discourse. Lated in his last published work,"Philosophical Investigations." and in the notebooks of his later lectures he reevaluated a good bit of territory in a highly non doctrinaire way. Using his new insights he opened up, all over again many of the issues which early on his work had closed down. Some of his best students went on to consider topics out of classical philosophy and subjects which that had a better fit outside of his philosophy, like concepts out of Freud, for example.
When any of the serious modernist figurative artists works from a motif there are an infinite range of possibilities involved in the forms observed their colors and the character of the edges of shapes. The level of abstraction ar every point is up for grabs. If a reference to the motif is required that reference has a wide range of degrees of detail and complexity to be decided, not only for every point in the canvas but also for every form represented. The two are different and affect each other. Thus the complexity in Wittgenstein is best seen in referential painting.
No philosopher nor even a serious philosophy student, when I read in Philosophical Investigations I found wonderful exhilarating support for modern metaphoric thought processes, pointedly for my own when I worked from a motif. On one page he discusses looking at a window which has two panes in the upper part and two in the lower part. He then discusses how to look at it. One way would be to see it as a cross, another way sees it as four equal planes, another would be two planes, each divided in half horizontally. Or we could see it as two planes divided in half vertically. He goes through all of the possibilities noting how we feel when we restrict the possibility to only one of those groups. He pointedly mentions the cross, of course he has made a point about the restrictive thinking made necessary by Christianity, but I can take it as an endorsement of the artist's open ended look at the motif with metaphoric possibilities as one of the things on his mind.
From the viewpoint of a professional philosopher this kind of discussion could seem to point towards Duchamp readymades as a wonderful artistic extension of Wittgenstein's philosophy, which, emphatically, it is not. Duchamp took things out of context and put only one new potential image onto them, destroying their original context. This opens up nothing, rather he closes down whole avenues of thought for the sake of a joke which should stall all future art. Which it did do, at least for Duchamp. There is no serious parallel between Duchamp and post Duchamp and modern philosophy. Philosophers are something like poets, people who work for the wonder in their work with little expectation of reward. While Duchamp was a joker, finished with his career as a producer of art, the current establishment is exactly the reverse everything it does is predicated on money and career. Not only for the artist but for the whole of the art world and its various denizens.
All over the country there are small pockets of serious people. They probably had contact with some of the better teachers at work from the 1950s until now in Boston, New York, Kansas City, Chicago, New Bedford, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Bay area, Bloomington, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. In all of those places and in many others unregenerate modernists were hard at work both teaching and painting over those years. Some of their students, despite the lack of acceptance in this art world have been working seriously ever since. They have been accomplishing works responsive to the issues and more than that. They have been exhibiting, primarily locally, since they are not very commercial in this context, but sometimes nationally, as well. So those are what I think are the issues. To build on the baby of modernism, and not throw it away [like the bath water] in a yearning for the easy negation of post Duchampian nonsense.
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..
Friday, I was on a bus back from my clinic and I must have thought of something vainglorious, because I immediately stopped myself and remembered something Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote many years ago and which I read in the 1950s. He started out this [nameless] book by making a comparison between the Indian philosopher Sankara, and the German mystic, Meister Eckhart. I think the quote was identical, or nearly so in both men's work: "An artist is not a special man, every man is a special kind of artist." Some artists, certainly those of my generation, both men and women, had some idea that we were special because we chose to be artists and because we worked at it whether we were supported by the art world or not. We then had, as a group, the sort of status cooks, computer millionaires, popular musicians among several categories, now have. Artists, that is "fine artists," no longer have that status outside of the reputation game, which nowadays depends on sales, almost only. Then too, the artists who fit into that camp, in reputation have, at the same time a questionable reputation with the general public. They do, as far as the general public is concerned, bizarre things, peculiar things and ugly ones. So, the reputation we garnered around the time of AE (Abstract Expressionism), as a group, is gone. One of my models, a few years ago, one of my favorites of all time as a model, a person and a straight talker, once told me why she didn't go into the "Fine Arts". She was an art school graduate, but she majored in clothing design. Once she was out she decided to make hand crafted shoes, only. because, they were very hard to make well. They had to fit and they had to last, and also they had to look good. This is, of course unlike most other clothes. As long as they cover those proscribed parts of the body, almost anything goes. There are very few craftsmanlike necessities. If some part doesn't fit, so what, it might be a new style. Anyhow she said that she couldn't see what was the use of all the fine art which people did. She felt it was something like the design of clothing which did not have to fit, and completely alien to what she did, making shoes. I think she was a very right thinking person. The first things which artists have to decide for themselves is, what is the purpose of what they are doing. We cannot merely enter the water of the art pond and swim around in it without knowing where we are and what we are doing. It is our own responsibility to decide just what we as artists are and what we are doing. We also ought to know why we are doing it. It is not enough that we make art because we love to do it and that joy at working in the studio overwhelms almost any negative thoughts we might have. For example I know that for most of my life, whenever I didn't paint, I was murder to get along with. Well, so on a personal level it was better for my family if I went into my studio regularly and painted almost every day. But, Let me leave you with this [in part I of this piece] if a shoemaker has a tough job making shoes, what is the tough job that an artist has and a clothing designer doesn't have? What apparently necessary qualities of especially women's clothing design are there which are not required in good art?
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
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
