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
All abstract artists of any quality, from the very beginning, thought about what they were doing. They had to come up with reasons for making certain tropes[forms of symbolic thought] and neglecting others. They had to investigate whether their own understanding of the meaning of these could be shared by others, if their work was full, and rich enough. They often had to come up with processes for working which would naturally develop such tropes.
No one started with a given form sense, and than composed within it with no new searching.
People painting now who accept AE as a starting place are not serious artists.
People who paint now and accept forms out of the bauhaus are not serious artists.
People painting now who look to some earlier abstract artist as the model for their work are not serious artists.
Making it new means making it new.
But to make it good thought, feeling and work from a process, an idea, and some sort of motif are three ways of getting there. There are others. All are necessary. Searching and experiencing are necessary. Painting a one man show is the least necessary.
I have been looking at abstract paintings by successful contemporary artists. I have certainly not seen most of them[such artists], but none of them were doing any of these things.
Love,
Gabriel
There is a Seurat drawing show at the MOMA. He is far enough back and unquestionable enough so that there should be no trouble writing about him. Wrong!! Modern critics find it very difficult to go back before modernism in 1910, unless there is a body of related suppositional writing for them to use as a guide. Because Seurat was active before there was anything we could call abstract painting and therefore we cannot be helped in understanding him by pointing to abstract painting unless we point to him as its forerunner. In the fourth sentence of the review by Roberta Smith on the front page of Friday's art section (October 26, 2007] comes this phrase "...they instantly clarify the show's intent, which is to clarify the way the silent, classical remove of Seurat's impeccable, stylized paintings was distilled from an active socially aware engagement with the world that registered most fully in his drawings."
I will merely underline one usage. The word classical, short for Neoclassical means working towards fulfillment as an artist by filling in the model of a previous neoclassical master. For Seurat, say Ingres, or better David.
It is true that Seurat spent countless hours finding the models for his paintings. There usually was a single figure, occasionally two whom he noticed and sketched from life. When a drawing was complete, and sufficiently worked out to be used in a painting what we see is nothing classical, but a newly made metaphor taken from that scene.
In la Grande Jatte in the near middle distance, above and between the man with top hat and cane and a lady who may be knitting, is an image of a red object which starts out as a round open shape enclosing a white volumetric circle. It proceeds to the ground as a form with some apparent weight and strength. Behind it as a gray stone, something like the glacial boulders we find in the Northeast.
In the drawing for this object, there are enough pentimenti to tell us that he was working from an old lady sitting on the ground, wearing a hat with a streamer tied around it and then reaching the ground behind her. She has been changed into a strange combination, which takes it place in space, leaving the rock [her torso] in a different spatial location than the ex hat.
In the distance, underneath the rear of the tugboat, two soldiers walk arm in arm. One wears a white hat the other a black hat. Now, this is a figure composition, so we expect figures. The figures' actions are normative enough that we do not question some of the more remote groups. But this group had been first turned into toy soldiers cut out of wood rounded on the lathe before it was placed in its naturalistic atmosphere. So, we have a solution of another metaphoric type, developed in drawing. The two girls who sit at the far edge of the large shadow which controls the front and bottom edge of the painting have also been worked up in drawing with great persistence and intensity. To identify further, one of them has a parasol and the other is enjoying the sight and smell of some flowers she holds in her hands. Look at them very carefully. They are seated on a very gentle rise of ground, neither of them is sitting in a shallow well which can hold about half of their thighs and buttocks. There is also no marking, rendering or volumetric progression which gives us the idea that either of them could change their poses and suddenly feet would appear and they could run or walk away. Seurat's drawings for this pair have turned them into "nagas" or Indian snake goddesses, with the torsos, head and arms of a person but the lower parts of a snake. This is extremely radical metaphoric reconstruction through drawing. Throughout the painting, ladies with bustles have a new form which cannot be changed. We look in vain for the extra set of legs which should appear under their bustle, but the expectation is that it should be there. The man playing the trumpet has permanently fused in his back arched position. The little girl on one leg is permanently so.
I call Seurat's constant impetus in this work "local metaphor." Many different kinds of things occur such as the lady whose hat has engaged a sailing boat, and even has a round cloud as a part of her hat. In many cases the reaction I have when I realize one of Seurat's many visual puns is to laugh. I don't think I am laughing at Seurat but with him. He saw the jokes, and he put them there. Each of his major paintings is composed differently, using different elements. This is, of all of them the one the most about metaphoric construction and humor. I don't deny that he also has both a spatial arabesque and a linear one, but I think that those too are sufficiently antithetical to cause witty paradoxes which are a joy to behold.
I do believe that with his work he did contribute to the generations of artists who followed him. The influence is obvious on De Chirico, and on the first Balthus Street Painting. But another influence is on the work of Paul Klee. Klee never claimed that he sprang full grown from the head of Zeus. He was influenced by Seurat, Redon, and the Rape of the Lock" series of prints by Klinger[as was Di Chirico].
The painting by Seurat which is the closest to something one might call classical is at the National Gallery in London. It is called Bathers at Asnieres. Immediately, there are problems with this. It is not composed like a tradition classical, romantic or baroque figure painting. In fact, it is not like any earlier figure painting. It is composed like a Claude or Poussin landscape. The layers in the space established by large forms with their cast shadows, and with repoussoirs, usually the head or head and torso, keeping the rest of the space back and behind each such figure. There is a side to side rhythm which works use slowly into the space of the painting. We don't have any strong art nouveau linear movement to bother our traveling. The most developed figures are two boys. One is a redhead with his shirt, hat and other articles of clothing on the grass behind him. The other is a boy fully dressed, wearing his straw hat and sitting somewhat further into the space. The drawings which develop these two figures are the sort of which some critics could say they are extremely classical and build the form up in an unambiguous and vital way. I, too, believe that to be true. But they are both radical restatements of the figure. The figures have been newly reconstructed leaving out numerous insertions and other anatomical checkpoints into volumetric wholes which do not resemble any early artist's work. They do not much resemble the figure either. They are new figures created through the simplification of forms seen in light against a surrounding series of, first of all, values, which encroach on the figure, and later tones, including the hues and their intensities.
They can not be picked up and taken out of their world and understood, nor can the drawings be taken off the page and still understood. This is not true of some work of David, and of a good deal of work by renaissance masters. This is thoroughly late nineteenth and twentieth century drawing. Do remember that the new Goupil drawing course for which Van Gogh's brother with working had changed the emphasis in understanding figures into the simplest possible silhouttes made up of sharp edges, which would express the form. And was it Van Gogh[?] and some of the others who did the exercises and found them useful. Seurat comes out of that world. The forms of the figure are not built up little by little by anatomical shreds, but in a fell swoop from an understanding of the large silhouettes and their light and shade faces, seen in the context of their composition.
First of all, among the critics with an exception or two whom we must all know, none of them look for metaphor. They do not understand the metaphoric nature of formal struggle, but think of it as a struggle to make abstraction. This is of course nonsense when we start with a period where there has been no prior abstraction accomplished. The way to abstraction away from figuration must be through poetry, because only the metaphor gives us a different goal to appreciate and try to accomplish other than the look of the motif. Seurat is a metaphor driven artist. But unlike, Cezanne, for example, he presents his achievements as a series of discrete solutions different from one another.
So a Seurat drawing show is important and not to be missed because we are in at the beginning of modernism. Seurat invents a variety of compositions taking different sorts of advantage of his studies and his experiences. He was, of course, busy mentally with all sorts of other goals, including his neoimpressionist build up of form and coloristic understanding of forms in space and not. It is always important to return to him because he was one of the great forerunners of radical twentieth century abstract and metaphoric painting, and even of some of the better surrealists.
Love,
Gabriel
P.S. I have not been well enough to go and see the MOMA show. I was in the hospital all day today, and tomorrow go to clinic. I am very impressed by the importance of Seurat, and the misunderstanding of his work, and of the work of symbolists, generally. I think he is someone to study and learn from. Not learning how to draw(classically or not] but learning how to think. So very little any of us do nowadays can fairly be called "poetry". We need an exposure and to think about it on our own. We won't be getting help from any non-painters.
Dear Friends:
I am sorry I have not been able to deal with th blog for more than a month. As far as I my health was concerned, it was not a good month. I spemt most of it in the hospital with a few sickly days out at either end. This is one of them. The next few months will tell whether I am out of worries or not. The thing is very technical and uncommon and it relates to an illness I thought I had finished with ten years ago.
Meanwhile I have not gotten to any shows. The Ian Tornay show, though looks too good to miss. Besides his landscape paintings which are intense and intensely brushed, he is showing some low reliefs of the same subjects, in which he is working out the space using fairly hard edged lines, most of them horizontal and vertical.
He is a very interesting artist, and shows at the Bowery Gallery. I think he has never been looked at by any reviewers. More is the pity, his work deserves serious looking at, and serious support.
Of course I cannot claim to be unbiased. He was one of the last two serious artists to go through the Queens College MFA program before it became an establishment tool. He is a family man, and teaches to make part of his living.
It probably goes this way. Since I like him I am delighted that he is such a good and serious artist.
Anyhow, please don't expect too much of this blog until I am better.
Love,
Gabriel
I started this and then lost it. Tom is a very fine landscape and cityscape painter. He is terrific all around. But the new paintings up on his site are all landscapes and cityscapes and mixtures of the two. He doesn't really need a particular level of abstraction, nor does he use a specific kind of color. He follows the motif. He is really very good with early evening cars on a super highway. They and their lights blur wonderfully, while the nearby higher level plants on the edge of the cut into which the highway is going are quite naturalistic in color and detail. They aren't moving, and they have only natural light on them. This caring for specificities of light and degree of conventional figuration which he sees changing from place to place can make very mundane subjects overtly poetic, to their credit.
I didn't tell you that he studied with Stanley and that Jeremy Long first gave me his name, he and Jeremy were classmates.
It was a pleasure to discover him for myself, because he has already developed in oparticular and personal ways and he is another really good artist bucking the tide of the establioshment and its say so,
Here is the url: http://www.tom-tomc.com/
Eventually I am going to write about the MUMOA and the Serra show and the rest of it. Serra probably produces the most experiential art which I have problems with. A sculptor friend of mine called it "his Schtick", And in all fairness, it is at least that.
Love,
Gabriel
Peter Schjeldahl is a member of the art world establishment, whose criticism follows the current establishment's line. He may be good enough, from that
viewpoint, to forge ahead, now and then, and establish some art world dogma himself.
Schjeldahl accepts the corruption in the current scene as a valid
part of the scene, without specifying it. In a recent New Yorker,
reviews a book by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, whom he describes as a
"Dutch-born American scholar of nineteenth-century European art."
He says "She details the rise, the fall, and the tireless
machinations of art's first recognizably modern careerist.(The
title is Courbet's contented characterization of himself.)" This is
"The Most Arrogant Man in France." I do not doubt the truth of the
incidents which are described. But they have been subtly twisted
to produce a picture of Courbet as if he were a corrupt living
artist. As far as I can tell from the review, Mrs. Chu has no sense
that the artist she is dealing with was the great figure in
European painting for his generation, an amazing prodigy who
not only fulfilled a romantic and a radical artistic persona, but
was the most invested in traditional pictorial construction of any
of his generation. Studying art only at the schools he
attended before coming to Paris [he did not attend an important art
school, per se], he studied in Paris by copying in the Louvre. From his
studies he learned an enormous amount , especially from baroque
painters of all countries. Whatever manipulation he may have
engaged in, he was engaged in supporting the finest paintings made
by a member of his generation. The painting which Schjeldahl
reproduces, a self portrait as madman, is wonderful to see
again. It is not often reproduced, and it is, in itself, a
masterpiece.
Yes, it is true that Courbet manipulated to try to become a great
success, and that he did achieve such a success eventually. But
what is never said is that he deserved that success because of the
quality of the work. He may have been the most arrogant man in
France, but he also deserved to be. He is the only artist I
can think of who never had a really well informed teacher, and yet,
not only understood picture making but was a radical who pushed it
much farther through his innovative construction. The series of
four paintings called "Portrait of Jo," is the last necessary step
before Cezanne. In them (they are all versions of the same
painting) he moves over the surface of her head so that it becomes
nearly square. He is representing the result of several viewpoints
rather than one fixed view of his motif. The painting is gloriously
full, spatially, as it is also more flattened to the picture plane.
The picture plane acts almost as it does in a Cezanne. In New York,
we are lucky, because the version at the Met is the finest of
them all. This is not an isolated event. So many of his
paintings stretch pictorially like the Portrait of Jo. As a
landscape painter, his "sous bois" often have no ground plane to
which we can attach any perspectival readings. All of the space is
sensibility based and connected to the picture plane for the source
of spatial arabesque which makes the paintings three dimensional.
The Artist's Studio is best understood as a proto symbolist
painting in a naturalist mode. He presents his painting activities
of many years as a world of its own to be understood not through
realism, but through the many tropes he has achieved, all seen
together cheek by jowl in a form we have not seen before, but will
see again in Redon, Seurat and Gauguin.
It is Courbet's greatness which reduces his exhibitionism to a
minor portion of his effort. But for Schjeldahl and, as far as we
can tell from his review, for Mrs. Chu, it was the most important
thing about his life and art. And, moreover, it helps to justify the
current scene in all its squalor.
Courbet's
"manipulations" are used to support a current art world which is ssumed
to be full of such activities, taken
for granted and not evenmentioned by Schjeldahl. Thus the supposed corruption of
Courbet is used to help justify the assumed, but never stated corruption
in today's
art world.
Where in the current scene is there anyone with even a tenth of
Courbet's talent?
Brian sent me this card announcing his show in the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton. It arrived here about June 16th. It is his first show in a couple of years. He used to show at the Bowery Gallery. Now, he is living and teaching at UNH. Anyhow the painting shows a nude in sharp perspective on a couch. Although most of the forms are in shadow or in half light, there are some strong contrasting shapes, primarily on the nude, in full light. The girl is a redhead and she is resting on a couch with a redwood frame, and possibly, light blue cushions. She has reached the last page in the book and on one side we see the cover which is very dark, but still, with what appears to be some paper attached to it. I am used to Brian's touch. He was one of the very best students Rosemary Beck ever had, and she did him a lot of good and no harm. But it has been years since the influence of Bonnard was deductible quickly when one looked at his work. It is still there in his sensitivity to color. Every time he returns to a place the new look at it not only affects the drawing, but the color changes, too, at least in a small spot, although sometimes I think he makes larger changes. Looking at the image for about a month and a half, now, my impressions of the painting [which I have assumed is a modest size, say 36 inches in the long dimension] have changed radically. For one thing after a while I thought I noticed that he was making one of those shifts, best used by Cezanne, in which, because of the change in the speed of the movement of our eyes, or because of a tired hand, we come to the same place at a different point. This results in a discontinuity between the forms, and tends to reach out and punch the canvas flat for a moment, after which it rises and shines with much more spunk, into space. I thought that was interesting. I had never seen him do that before. But I kept looking at it, and eventually I realized that the book his model had in her lap was actually wider than I had realized [the lightest lights in it were not so very different from the colors of the lights on her knees]. But in fact there was no real shift. He had just faked one, so we got that bump in the space, and then when we looked again, it wasn't really there. I things like that are happening many times in this painting, and that really is something new in his work.
Despite the fact that he is dealing with a figure in perspective, he does not concentrate on the drawing. Some edges of the figure's forms are a bit irregular because he is wandering around over them, changing the color, rethinking the space. Things can actually look badly drawn until you catch on. The drawing he is getting is the drawing he needs for his space, for his model's mood, for how she feels and how he feels about her. He will have as much "good drawing" as he needs, and otherwise he is painting and the touch, the stroke, the color is all. I think it is the best painting of his I have ever seen. And it breaks the rule that every one always puts their worst painting on the announcement.
I think that in some ways Brian is more like Stanley's students than some of my other New York friends. He does use a modernist as a model to get into painting. His modernist is Bonnard. Since Bonnard's major progenitor [sorry that was the only word I could get for it] was Renoir, maybe Brian should look at Remoir, too. Renoir, after all was one of the greatest figure painters, and himself spent his last years looking at and learning from Roman painting-I mean ancient Roman painting.
There are other issues in Brian's work, too. Not so much in this painting as in some others he has had up at UNH. Brian was never trained in any Chinese painting tradition. He started out in art in the USA at Queens. His wife, though, was, and he has seen the flower and bird tradition [one of the major Chinese subject matter areas] a lot. In some of his other work he has been trying to deal with that as a western style oil painter. Since I come from an imageless tradition, except in words [Judaism], I can't fully understand what it is to need to come to grips with a group of familial images. But it seems a neccessity to me, especially when I see Brian doing it.
It do spend a lot of time looking at some related artists and their work. The Shijo, Nanga, Maruyama and other classical school painters of Japan from the 18th and 19th century. Quite a few of the greatest are particularly liked for their Kacho [flower and bird] paintings. Ans the finer Shijo school painters like Bumpo, for example, or Keisai, can make a flower or a rabbit a tense, marvelous, structured image, and structured with a free brush, too..
You know, it would be very nice if Brian would put a JPEG of that painting up at UNH so some of you could see it It really is a terrific, quiet painting with wonderful bumps which make a marvelous abstract shape in that painting which occurs because of the nude but has nothing really to do with a nude, and much more to do with this rectangle of paint based on those wonderful images that developed while he painted them. It really is a very geometric painting, too. Bravo, Brian, I wish you many more.
Love,
Gabriel
I recently looked at some new work of a very gifted artist who has been part of the Midwest Artists Group. It brought up new issues which have been around, and which need to be addressed. Some of them are, how does one learn to paint abstractly after a good cubist education, and the influence of AE? I understand that the letter is being circulated some, so I will wait to continue with the topic.
I am of the opinion, though, that it is not possible to paint abstractly without a new understanding of the character of subject matter, metaphoric implications of form and composition, and most important taking on new responsibilities as an artist. By definition, there is no continuation possible for AE. Each one of the original first generation patented not only an image but a pictorial process through which to obtain the image. Fitting in the spaces between patented images, and/ or continuing with the processes developed by the AE painters results in second or third rate "family" work, and cannot aspire to even a small percentage of the originality and seriousness present in the work of the best AE artists.
I don't think that most of the abstract work produced between the wars has any greater possibility of continuation, either. Burgoyne Diller, was a sort of miracle worker. He managed to infuse Mondrian's choices with a new intensity that makes his late work very much his own. I believe that no other neoplastic painter of Diller's generation or later has been able to do this. So, how does one proceed as an abstract painter, into the future, without AE, or between the wars abstraction [at least, most of it]? And where are our models ? And what are we trying to accomplish. Is there something abstraction can do better than figuration? What is it? Why do we need it?
Love,
Gabriel
While I have been very friendly with Leland Bell, and his wife, and their daughter, and his students and their students, it should be obvious that I did not follow a parallel path as an artist. Leland and his students and further students all believe that they have to tie on to a tradition in modernist painting which is figurative and express themselves by continuing it. Leland did open up, for his students, several figures who were not thought of as potential mentors and sources for continued work, such as Derain, the late Soutine, Balthus and Helion.
In my development something else happened. Bell and his friends in the Jane Street group were about ten to fourteen years older than I was. Al Kresch actually went to the same school I went to, Brooklyn College. But his Brooklyn College featured Amedee Ozenfant as it s best known artist, and he like most of the other Jane Street group then studied with Hans Hofmann who became their major influence as abstract painters before they changed direction and became figurative.
When I got to Brooklyn College, the painting department included Ad Reinhardt, Alfred Russell, Burgoyne Diller and the chairman, Robert J. Wolff. While I continued my studies there, Mark Rothko, Stanly William Hayter and Jimmy Ernst were added to the faculty. They did indeed reccommend the Hans Hofmann school to me and I went to it for a summer in Provincetown. But, after that summer [I had met deKooning there] I came back and studied with him, and studied printmaker with Hayter before he arrived at Brooklyn. Unlike Leland and his friends, abstract expressionism was not originally a dirty word for me. I found many of the artists, more than the ones who taught at school, exciting.
Note that none of my teachers were figurative. As a high school student I had a Saturday class with Isaac Soyer, thre youngest of the Soyer brothers. He was a very nice man, and he did try to help, but I learned very little about representation from him, beyond very basic concepts. So, when I began to paint after Brooklyn, and my work was related to the motif, I was starting from scratch.
One of the things which abstract expressionism gave to any of us who finally rejected its cult of personality and its overvaluation of the big brushstroke was a sense that we could start all over again. We could look for influences through out the history of art and not be content with occupying a seat in a coach driven by Picasso, Matisse or Bonnard. In between Brooklyn and my army days I went to an art history school, the Institute of Fine Arts. I had one teacher for two classes, Richard Offner. One was "Great Masters of Italian Art" which was supposed to get through the renaissance, but actually never got past the generation of Masaccio. The other was supposed to get up to the 14th century in Italy, and it did. But a great deal of time was spent on Italian painting of the previous two centuries as well. Now, aesthetically these periods were ones which modernist painters particularly loved. There was little that my elders among the artists would not have loved in the works of the Romansque painters through Giotto, Duccio, and the later Sienese and Florentines. But because of my exposure through a major devotee of these works, to them, I began to see them all as models for painting. Not through some cubist or fauve painter, but directly from them. That was very different from what the members of the Jane Street group thought or did.
It didn't mean that I stopped loving Marquet or Balthus, or Giacometti, or any other great modern master. It meant that I did not necessarily accept them as models.
Now, Derain's essay which he meant to publish as a kind of artist's manual, which was translated and publ;ished by Roseanna Warren in the Georgia Review in the 1970s explored a new idea. He felt that to manage a life in art without falling into the avant garde trap, one could look at a scene, think of it in terms of how it would be painted, say by a sign painter for a farmer's supply store in the 19th century in a provincial town, and paint like that. But using your distinctive brush as the major source of your painterly originality. I still think that is a viable idea, but it is nothing I ever wanted to do. There are many models from different centuries and different traditions whom we can emulate. In his recent book on Sienese painting, Timothy Hyman, who is a painter, argues for their work as a more useful starting point than the Florentines, because so many of their decisions are based on the needs of narrative painting. I never put that formulation together, in the abstract, but the more I was working in narrative compositions, the more they influenced me. This was all before I knew Timothy. Sienese painting had fascinated me since the early 1950s.
Now, what is my point in all of this? Well, I believe that most of the people who read this blog were students of someone from the Bell tradition. It is a short list, but a good one. It seems to me that you ought to know why I am different from you all, and that there is another tradition out there which has fundamental agreements with you, but is not completely congruent in its direction and thought.
The best New York painters, for example, whom I know about are people who had as their teachers, the people who later founded the Studio School, like Cajori, Mercedes Matter and Sidney Geist. Some of them also were my students. A number went on to the Studio School, which has produced very few figurative artists, despite the long apprenticeship to the model the students had.
During the period when Leland taught there, some of the students did become figurative, but when he left to teach at Parsons, his influence did not remain strong.
What does this mean? It means that not all the good painters whose work you will see, and the people whom you will find as potential comrades in arms out there, will have your exact training, and your exact favorite artists and prejudices. There is much more that unites you all than divides you. But expect to see work which is not familiar in all ways, and respond to it fairly.
There is another teacher who has had a broad and useful influence. Some of my students, Stanleys, and people from the Studio School studied with him productively, he is Lennart Anderson.
Now when he was a kid, he discovered a teacher who taught the method of Charles Hawthorne, which was essentially the method of Edwin Dickinson[a Hawthorne student]. That method was an American response to impressionism. It involves honing the eye to look at the motif in color in light and responding to these sensations as the way to build a painting. He represents a different path than the previous two but his students are part of your world, too like Christine Hartman, who found him useful after studying with Stanley. I know of others from different traditions who did so, productively, too, like Chris Sermergieff, or Sonia Fox. The last two came from Queens College, and the Studio school respectively.
Love,
Gabriel
A friend just asked me to look at the work of someone whose work I did not know, which was on the web, and also someone other friends of mine liked. In reproduction it was very hard for me to work out a clear response.
The use of a brushstroke which affects the character of the image we observed, rather than the look of some thing observed in nature, has been around since at least impressionism. Before that date there were occasional periods in the West, such as Venetian mannerism, and the Genoese baroque where that was true, but to a much smaller extent than in moder times. This artist used such a brushstroke.
One thing which has happened to our eyes and our hands, since impressionism and post impressionism, and the very active brushstrokes of expressionist and fauve painters, as well as the other descendants of Cezanne, is that we have become desensitized to the affect on the image which we present to brushstrokes which describe our abstract studies and discoveries while at work. Contemporary artists cannot have, as a general rule, the kind of sensitivity to distortions of the image which seem necessary to them to achieve a firmly held abstract logic, that artists working in the 1860s had. This is because, we have all seen and appreciated much such work, ourselves, in the hands by many great artists of the past hundred and 30 years, or so.
The eyes of an artist like Chardin, over his lifetime became capable of seeing both warm and cool colors at any point in a form which he was trying to realize spatially, in light, and with a great understanding of the needs of the picture plane. But, even at the very end of his life, he hid these color changes in plain view by masking them easily to refer to the forms which he was intent on realizing. It is well known that late in life his hand was too shaky to hold a brush productively, so he shifted all of his work over into pastel. So the late pastel portraits and self portraits represent his final thoughts on expressive and constructional color. None of his exaggerations come across as anything other than as wonderful means to describe his subjects. I can remember going into a room in a museum in the Loire valley which was filled with pastel portraits, largely by 18th century contemporaries of Chardin, and one self portrait of his. His pastel was down on the other end of the room from which I entered. The room was kept with the light off, until a visitor turned it on, so I did not notice his portrait at first. I looked at a whole series of portraits by others, all of which seemed lovely, until I got to his, after which the portraits in the remaining quarter of the room seemed to be lifeless. His deviations from his period's normal practice, to me, with my twentieth century eyes, seemed more modern and more fulfilled. Full of life and light.
Another artist, the Genoese Baroque painter, Alessandro Magnasco worked with a very big brush which he used to portray eccentric subjects. Gypsies, Monks carousing in a dining room, Jews praying in a synagogue, a bizarrely exaggerated painting of the inquisition torturing a heretic, a bizarre painting of skeltons rising out of their graves to attack living people. He also painted more conventional subjects. In those the brushstroke is not quite so large. But, so much of his work, which has a very large brush in it is also of bizarre subjects which could stand a bizarre pictorial hand.
It reminds me of something which happened in the 20th century in music. The members of the second Viennese school, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Von Webern, all began their lives as late romantic composers. All were profoundly influenced by Wagner and revered Gustav Mahler. Their early music, such as Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht, Berg's Piano Sonata Opus 1, and the early orchestral pieces of Webern fit into this mold. But, like the German expressionist painters, they all developed into artists whose work evoked the darkest part of the human psyche. Berg's two operas are about the development of insane rage by a low ranking soldier at his wife, the mother of his child, for her adultery, whom he finally murders, and in the other opera a woman who is evil incarnate who deals out sexual depravity to both women and men, with all of her male lovers ending up dead.
Now, as he developed, Schoenberg's music got more and more dissonant, his subjects were often bizarre , but his musical construction got more and more formally controlled and distant from traditional music. He finally invented the tone row as a new ordering of musical form. It made every moment, necessarily atonal and was also the perfect vehicle for violent emotion.
The tone row, based on any music which had preceded him, was intrinsically ugly to listen to. Berg's Lulu and Wozzeck were both written using tone rows, so were all of Webern's works [he was perhaps the most extreme of the group]. But they presented their new musical system as the solution for all the problems in late romantic musical organization, and many composers all over the world accepted this and wrote music in this form. However, as members of different generations elsewhere in the world than between the wars, and people not from Germany and Austria they did not have the emotional needs in their work which was found in Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. That made for music whose forms were fully contradicted by the emotional content which many of these later composers tried to impart. I can remember an American twelve tone composer of many years ago named Ben Weber, whose music was fully twelve tone and whose feeling was not particularly expressionist, and who therefore wrote music which was problematic, always. I have had this problem with the work of many later American composers whose understanding of the twelve tone system was much more profound, but whose emotions were not fulfilled by its dissonance and aural violence. This musical example can be called a flaw in the level of abstraction. When certain forms are understood emotionally as well as formally, and an artist chooses to use them because of their meaning, and deviations are also thought through, then we get metaphoric art. Art which purposefully aims through association, to produce specific emotional qualities the artist wishes to express. The new forms being examples of forms which express these emotions better than the existing ones.
When I was a kid, and all of my teachers were abstract artists , there was a general epithet which was applied primarily to conservative and academic painters who tried to stick their toe in the water of abstraction by painting works in which they applied some cubist devices to fundamentally conservative paintings. We called those artists "semi-abstract painters." There were some very good people who meant well for whom this was a problem.
Quite a few American artists were affected by the plight of the poor, the dispossessed and minority members, especially, African Americans. They became Social Realists, and often joined the Communist party. But, most of them were members of the intelligentsia to begin with, and so, like other members of the intelligentsia they had been exposed to modernist French painting. Often the exposure occurred during a stay of several years in Paris, then the acknowledged capital of the art world. One such artist was Robert Gwathmey. As a kid I knew about him because some of my friends went to Cooper Union, where they had him as a teacher. My friends [most of them] liked him as a teacher and learned things from him which were useful to them as artists, but his own work was another matter. He was apainter, primarily, of African Americans, going through their daily lives. They would be seen working in cotton fields, at home, in the street, in characteristic locales. The works I was most familiar with had exaggerations in the use of lines, shapes and pattern which broke up the forms of the people or most often trapped them in a net of lines, which functioned visually like a cage. One way of seeing the paintings was as a series of thoughtful, soulful images overlaid by a more abstract school of Paris painting. The painting had potential meaning as a comment on the subjects, but the meaning was out of control. Instead of concurring with Gwathmey's fellow feelings for his subjects, they subjected them to a kind of prison cell of lines which worked against his ostensible, and purposeful subjects. It would be useful to compare the paintings of Jacob Lawrence painted in those same years. Especially his Migrations Series. These are metaphoric paintings using modernist means to express metaphoric responses.
Now, Braque, Picasso and Leger, for example, all made paintings drawing on their cubist constructional principles which showed abstracted and reconstructed figures. But in each case, the artist understood the meaning of the distortion in the painting and the distortions supported the images presented. Leger, by the way, was a serious, life time Communist, of working class background, and as early as his first large painting, as a cubist, in the teens, painted a city in cubist style which stood, in that painting, for the oppressive economic system, which oppressed the people within it. Paul Klee, in a witty comment on cubism, which influenced him a great deal, made a print which he called "Death of an Ideal", which showed an entirely analytic cubist city, with an analytical cubist man, lying dead, just outside of its gates. Although he is far from serious, it is clear that he understands cubism and is using it for a metaphoric end.
After World War II, a number of surrealist artists who had gotten progressively more abstract over the previous ten years or so, began to paint works which were entirely abstract. This was not an abstraction like that of Mondrian, Van Doesbrug, Torres Garcia, Malevitch, El Lissitzky, or Helion, all of whom were, in part, at least, intensifying formal tensions and compositional construction as they became more and more abstract. It was an abstraction, at least in part of images of abstract shapes in an invented world. Some of the major figures in France were Vieira Da Silva, Wols, De Stael and Hartung. For them abstract constructions were the world of their paintings. These paintings might have specific formal events happening in them, but they had little to do with the kinds of forming found in earlier modernist painting. From 1950 through 1953, influenced by my teacher Alfred Russell, who tried to spend 8 months out of almost every year in Paris, and who was a part of this group, I also worked in this tradition. The tradition could not have existed if it hadn't been for the abstract paintings of artists whose forms were rich and full of tension and movement. But although they used these forms, which in general went back to cubism, they used them against cubism. Intense colors were forced to stay behind dull ones[De Stael], a large cubist looking structure, was more available as a huge open steel structure of a building before any facade has gone on it [Vieira da Silva], the painting is seen as an overlay of a multitude of arbitrary horizonals and verticals, which we look through [Wols], huge brushstrokes provide an image of intense movement which often does not re-engage the eye or move over the surface in more than one direction[Hartung]. In some ways, many of the American Abstract Expressionists, who had been abstract surrealists before their most successful work could also be discussed in these terms [Gottleib, Rothko, Still, Motherwell et al]. Some of the Americqn painters were, in fact abstract surrealists in much of their developed work, Baziotes is probably the best known.
The painters I have just been discussing used the forms found in some earlier works as images which had their own logic. There is nothing semi abstract about them, because the abstraction is being used because of the image it generates.
So, learning how to find forms in nature which express your formal response to the motif, as well as the full range of your sensibility to color, movement and space, in the hands of a talented artist should produce good work. But, when any part of such a painting, the product of fine observation and inspired description of the motif also has some large forms which are more available as those shapes in Vieira Da Silva's paintings of complex structures in her own world, than they are as forms which tensely activate pictorial drama, movement, tension, space, light and air, there is a problem with the level of abstraction in the work. This kind of problem is a new one. Only a post abstract painter of our several generations can have such a problem. Many years of looking at abstraction and of trying to work through abstraction to figuration, has to be behind any one with such a problem. It is a good problem, once it is recognized. There is enough work to look at which can help solve it, and it is all work with which we are familiar, the work of the great French masters, for example, who worked between 1870 and 1950. The Post impressionists, Fauves, Cubists and the related abstract painters in Europe through the same period. At the same time, having this problem means that one is sophisticated about some of the very best work produced in the 20th century.
There is of course another solution. Become aware of the breaks with constructional painting, and if they express some emotion or idea which you actually care about, try to make the painting, as are Paul Klee's paintings, metaphoric.
It is shameful when a young artist has been trained without any awareness of what happened in radical art in the first half of the 20th century, and is instead apprenticed to the last of the Pompier painters of the nineteenth century, by his/her teachers.
Love,
Gabriel
