> I must admit to reading and frequently enjoying pieces in the New
Love,
Gabriel
Well, as you all know I have been busy with my show which is finally in my home town. Seeing a lot of your work together helps you to realize what you are doing and have been doing. I was surprized that the earlier paintings, brushed on intently without the brush showing much, and with less pushed color did fit with the later ones. The color sense continued from the first to the others, in large measure. I was also surprized that I had done a figure painting that I still like in 1973, because I must not have been very secure about it, since I did not start painting narrative paintings until 1986.
I also learned something else. You can get to work with all the best intentions and even be inspired by some things that happen while you are working out the painting and you can still make major errors. Having good intentions and good skills does not armor you so that your work will be successful. Intense introspection and self criticism is always necessary.
I have had very good experiences with younger artists. Many years ago when I was working on my first serial subject matter painting, Barbara Goodstein came to my studio and gave me a crit on the first version of the first panel of "A Crime and Its Consequences." I thought that what she said was apt, and after continuing and completing that painting, which was a horizontal painting, I started over again with a vertical one, which did do much more of what was needed and I finished the series. I no longer remember her specific comments, but I know that they worked.
There is one finished painting in the show where the reactions of another younger artist have set off thoughts in my mind about my handling of the composition. There are things in that composition which do not function as I wanted them to function and I will go back and try that same subject again and hopefully improve on the result. Although I have not done this much, it was basic to Leland's process. He worked over and over on the same composition through a series of paintings. Ultimately solving it in different ways on several finished paintings. It is interesting to note that this process was not borrowed from any of his heroes like Derain, Helion, Renoir,or any other twentieth century figurative painter, but is more closely related to the way some twentieth century abstract painters worked. I think that it may be the reason that his late, large figure paintings seem to me better than any large figure paintings by either Derain or Helion, which I have seen. It was very successful for him over a number of years through to his last work. I should be heartened by his experience since I am going to follow it a bit, now.
There was one curious incident, too. At the symposium when a panel of artists discussed my work, near the end of the question period a young women asked the panel to comment on how and where the paintings showed anything Jewish. It happened that she is the older daughter of my cousin at whose house we spent the second Seder just a few days earlier. It was a curious question because she knows me, and, I think, was surprised to find nothing Jewish in the work. And, of course she was right, their is nothing overtly Jewish about the work. Unlike some of the better American Jewish writers, I do not have an autobiographical need in painting. And I have done no subject matter paintings about a specifically Jewish subject. The closest I get is Freud, in the subject "Family Romance". And that is surely not canonical, but rather the work of an acculturated Jewish scientist.
There is a connection though to Judaism in a family tradition. My father, who was was an inspiration to me, spent 18 years of his life as a believing Orthodox Jew and a Chassid, and had Smicha by the age of 18[smicha is ordination]. He then tried to work a great wonder for all, with no selfish thoughts, through what amounts to religious magic and failed. When he failed he had a break down, both physical and mental, and was hospitalized in the big town, Warsaw, and there read his first secular words in a Jewish newspaper. His mind now refused belief in Judaism, and he was no longer a believing, pious Jew. This radical change affected the lives of his brother and two sisters, especially when he broke off an engagement he had had since he was very young with an equally young girl, because he would not be the scholarly rabbi her parents expected but an unbeliever. Since arranged marriages for the sisters had now become impossible in the small town they lived in, his father ultimately took the four children of his first wife [who had been dead for some years], leaving his second wife at home with her children. When they all eventually reached New York City where the story was not known, his two daughters got married and my father and his younger brother found good jobs [he was in his early twenties by this time], and my grandfather went home. Now that he could not do any good works using religious magic, he became a socialist and rather quickly a union organizer rather than a craft worker in leather [yes, the name is a trade name]. The rest of his life was spent as an idealist working for worker's contracts, integrating by a clever trick, a segregated union in Virginia, and finally spending many years as the representative to the American labor movement of the Histadrut, the Israeli labor movement. He was a hard act to follow. But it was clearly his and my mother's standard that we should all do something useful, not only for ourselves but for other men and women. Originally they had hopes of my becoming a scientist, since as a child I was so interested in natural history[collecting bugs, snakes, salamanders and the like, breeding tropical fish, Etc]. But It was art that excited me and that became the thing I wanted to do. The thing is, that although I am neither very political nor someone who aspires to do Jewish art I do mean to do something useful with my work. I hope that the experience of the works will rub off on the observer and help with his/her psyche by giving it new paths to travel. That is supposed to be true of my landscapes and still lifes as well as my figure paintings. They are about people and their lives. I won't try to specify more, partly because my hopes are not necessarily in the work.Although I am neither a political nor a religious painter. I am soneone who believes that good art can do good.
And that is one of the reasons I am made happy by seeing so much good and striving art among the younger artists.
I will be writing about other things in my next post.
Love,
Gabriel
I wrote some of this in answer to a letter and left it there, but I think I want it to be here, too, because its says something about Bonnard which I had not said earlier.
There is much more to Bonnard's late style and all the rest. Bonnard never left symbolism behind him. As a Nabis he was pledged not to use known symbols including known subjects like a madonna and child. He was also pledged to try to find new sources of poetry in painting.His color is not meant only to report on what some things looked like on a particular day or even a selection from what something looke like, once. It was more important to deal within the sensations and feeling he got from those things, fruit, flowers, landscape, interiror in conjunction, often with a figure. The beginnings of one symbolist composition is the comparison between a woman and a bunch of flowers. That comparison was begun by Courbet where it usually turns up in small or middle sized paintings. Several of the wonders of this Bonnard show include women, flowers, and sometimes women with landscape, or all three. In one painting her reflection can be seen in the mirror behind her, where Bonnard's head may also be seen. The reflected figures, far away, do not have the light and color of the one in the foreground, which may almost be seen through and might be a wanderer arrived from faery. Now, don't get the idea that I have gone sentimental like a bowl of slush. We need some extraordinarily sharp metaphor to make sure that we see the strangenesses in his paintings. There is no such thing as a normative figure in any other painting-think of the one where there is a crouching female figure in the darks between two table tops, which fits completely into the space between and in tone almost disappears in the darks. Can we believe that was an accident? I don't. He is a child of both Gauguin and Redon, always at their best in poetry and construction. There is nothing like a pictorial method in his color, he adds and subtracts for specifically poetic reasons in that motif. And we have to learn to read and almost translate his poetry to know what he is doing and what he could mean to us. [I had a typing error and said -use-but that too is true].
It is also important to remember that he was the one major direct influence on Balthus, whom we all read both formally and in terms of the added meanings in his subjects, Symbolic ones [from a symbolist viewpoint.We need tofollow how it affects his painting practice, as in the several pictures which carry the meaning of the Dream-not the painting with the nude and the dwarf-but the one with the sleeping girl and another wafting by and the meaning of the detailed surrounding patterns and of the rose she is carrying to the sleeper-dreamer. That line of symbolism is not foreign to exactly one of the major artist of the school of Paris-Bonnard.
You know, it took me twenty or thirty years to look seriously at Redon as a model. But he and Gauguin and Seurat and Vuillard are better models for our futures than Matisse or Picasso. most especially not Matisse after 1930 and Picasso after Guernica. That is because his aim in painting was not to simplify and intensify as in Matisse or, at that point in his life, to use his life's discoveries in paintings to show new mastery, rather than new poetry, as in Picasso. Bonnard continues to look for new poetic statements. In his work, even radical reduction of diagonals to parallel vertical lines ends up being part of a poetic whole. There is no coloristic logic in relation to nature. Istead there is the many possible tropes which can be found in nature through intense observation rather than a few simple potentially caricatural color choices. Picasso was 100% wrong when he complained about Bonnard's many small color changes. They were part of the strength of his late work. His strining toward those nuances which enhance and can totally transform our experience. It is a great shame that Matisse decided to do with out them after 1930, and they never were a part of Picasso's attention. The greatness of Picasso's inventions were not available to others of his and the next generation, except as part of Picasso's well known bag of tricks.
What Bonnard did is a pictorial mnethod available to others which should in the hands of others, with different pictorial and life experiences, have different outcomes.
Love,.
Gabriel
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Here is a new story about Caravaggio and photography and my reply from a Librarians group.
At 07:05 PM 3/11/2009, you wrote:
Every few years another scholar comes out with a theory that some artist used photography or the close equivalent in his work. Some of the candidates to date, besides Caravaggio are Vermeer, Karel Fabritius [who is sometimes also Vermeer's teacher], and Leonardo. There always is some evidence. Both Karel Fabritius and Vermeer were affected by the contemporary Dutch craze for the perspective box, Fabritius even designed at least one. Leonardo certainly made drawings and diagrams which are suspicious. Caravaggio has no extant preparatory drawings, except those for a lost painting underneath one of his others. There are two major problems. If any of these men had such a secret, it died with him. How could Caravaggio have made such a major discovery, and none of his devoted following ever got a glimpse of it? For many years all over the European continent the Caravaggieschi either held sway, or competed for the prize. If there was some high road to it, would all of them have forfeited the chance and still worked it out by time honored, slow and thus conservative, pictorial techniques?
And, there is another problem. Miraculous as photography still looks to us, the generation of artists who had recourse to it in the 19th century, soon found that there were new problems using photography. The artist had to be very careful and wary of the perspectival distortions which could render the images incredible. For example in a series of paintings painted, not from life, but from photographs from life, Eakins produced a series of paintings full of these distortions. When drawing or painting from the model, though, he regularly eschewed them in favor of controlled spatial development.
A recent American painter, Leland Bell [he died in 1991] was very open to so much of the great tradition in art including the neoclassizing contemporaries of Caravaggio, Claude Lorrain and Poussin. He also adored the LeNain brothers who were influenced in some measure by Caravaggio. But for Caravaggio and his truest followers, Bell had the back of his hand. Even without photography, he felt that they gave too much of their concern to the appearance of light and shadow in perspective, and insufficient thought to those same shapes as forms in space. The attempt to imitate nature in all her details without also using the whole mind, refined taste, and connection of the artist through the art he had imbibed as well, doomed those artists to ignominious failure in his eyes.
No artistic technique by itself ever created greatness. Great apparent originality and the greatest apparent realism to date were not enough. Claude and Poussin were improbable masters. First of all they weren't Italian. There had never been a great French artist in terms which the Italians accepted. Both French artists studied with members of the school of Annibale Carracci, the Bolognese neo-classicists. Their way out of the ambiguities and extravagances of late mannerism was to go back to the more painterly and orderly forming of the Venetian high renaissance of Titian and Giorgone. Although Carracci was uneven, as were his brothers and their students, somehow their example settled into Claude and Poussin whose work was both consistently spatially logical and orderly, and who often aimed for the sense that these were arcadian groves, hills and lakes were where they spent their time, and wanted to be there even more. The sense of "et in Arcadia ego," was all over their work. Such work could not be corrupted by over realism, as among the Carravaggisti nor with spatial distortion and peculiarity, as in the mannerists.
They and other classicising French painters brought the Venetian renaissance to France, where it has stayed ever since. In the last century we called it "School of Paris."
My final point is that it really doesn't matter much whether Caravaggio used photos or not. It was the Bolognese, who had no tricks at all, who formed the future of European painting by reviving and continuing with the Venetians, who painted with wonderful passages which strayed through the forms, and fulfilled their space.
Best wishes,
Gabriel
Lennart, in his 80's and now being adjudged partially blind [he can only see with peripheral vision] has a show up of recent work, a block or so from the Met. The show is made up of paintings of the figure and of still life. The largest painting by far is an Arcadian scene with two nudes in it. The famale nude is in the foreground and there is a male nude in the near distance. He has been painting quite large Arcadian paintings for many years. This one is of modest size, it is probably about 5 feet by 6 feet. It is a misty day. There is more mist between us and the male figure, but we can feel it flowing over all the forms. Despite his visual limitations, this painting feels like he truly was in Arcadia himself. It is a wonderful part of an artist's late work. Old art books used to be much involved in the artist's late style, as in Titian, for example. The looseness, and uninhibited assurance, which we see in Titian, in his paintings which free the passages from being subordinate to the forms which they describe are legendary. Well, with all his visual problems, I think Lennart has a great late style.
The show was not huge and the Met stays open until 8 on Saturday, so we went to see the Bonnard show. I went back and saw it again roday. The show concentrated on interiors, often with a figure or two in them. Nothing was painted befure the 1930s and the works continue into the 1940s close up to the year of his death at 80.
At a panel discussion about the last NY Bonnard show, held at the MOMA, Jack Flam said that he taught 20th century art without mentioning or showing Bonnard's work. At that panel he did opine that he would rethink his options. He has an essay in this catalog. Actually, there were 2 rooms in the last Bonnard show which showed the same kind and quality of work as that in this show. There was a room full of the bathtub paintings, and a series of interiors with a figure up close overlapping a figure in the distance. Bonnard traveled a different path from both Matisse and PIcasso. His late work corresponds to late work of Dufy and Braque. All three artists painted large interiors during the last years. All of them spend a long time on some of those paintings, many years on each by Dufy, and solid months for Braque.The work is not exactly like much of each artist's other work. They each set themselves very serious and difficult problems. The work, in each case is their best.
Bonnard was neither a fauve nor a cubist. As one of the Nabis [prophets in Hebrew] he was a symbolist, self directed at finding newly poetic subjects and in painting them to achieve further metaphoric expression in color, composition and paint handling. Although his color can be very bright and his composition very much getting into full space from a taut picture plane, his form solving is never the reason for the work. Everything he does is meant to enrich our associations with the subject of the painting. This subject is often an interior with a still life in it and a figure or two. There is no doctrinaire espousal of any compositional or coloristic program. These both change as they can increase the tropes we experience in the painting. Women are contrasted and compared with flowers. The flowers glow, and sometimed the women trump the flowers, doing more than glow. A figure in the foreground may have no large contrasts, and may remain invisible until we see a much more normatively contrasting small figure behind it in the middle distance. Then its rich associative nature becomes clear, if only temporarily as anothe element of surprise and feeling becomes unveiled. Their is multiple association between the forms, landscape, sitll life, figure, table covered with food, in which each element is compared with, or complements another. The associations differ radically from one painting to another. Even apparently similar paintings in subject matter and size eventually show us that the connecting consequences of his pictorial process is to show us radically contrasting development and forming.
In his early work, as seen in the show at the Met some years ago, of large scale early work by the Nabis, he is perhaps the member of the group who shows the least talent. He was no wunderkind. As the years went by his work became more and more wonderfuland the work of his last twenty years was probably his best work.
There was a small room filled with his studies for paintings. Many small scale with pencil only, and others with added color and paint. These are usually wonderful despite their dimunitive size. They are true working drawings. There is no attempt to knock us dead. It is work for his own edification. He gets it together and then he paints the hell out of it.
While he is no obvious virtuoso he does do something which neither of the two most famous of the school of Paris painters, Matisse and Picasso were involved with in their late work. Besides coming to terms with large spaces and forms expressing the subject and its relation to the canvas, quite radical picture plane oriented work, at times, he also means to have a way of reading the paintings in small takes. These are arrived at through the develpment of passages within the large forms which would otherwise verge on abstraction. These passages are exactly what Picasso despised. He thought of them as the second and third and so on guesses of an artist unwilling to come to terms with the one right color which should be in that form-and only that color. In fact, Bonnard purposefully worked out those passages to produce a work which could last longer for the viewer and attract him to the poetry contained in the work. These symbolist druthers seemed not merely bad but useless to Picasso.
Given the hard headed modernist spatial construction of so many of his later works, his later work can also be seen as work which comes historically after both Picasso and Matisse, and upholds the flag for slow painting, as a reconstructed space, unlike their work in that it is filled with passages of pictorial incident which add to and fulfill the composition.
I think that we will need to be revisiting some of the other members of his generation in their late work, such as those already mentioned, Dufy and Braque, at leastVuillard, late Soutine, and another, and comprehensive look at Derain. There were, of course other Fauves and Cubists whom we have not seen recently, like Leger and Gris.
Love,
Gabriel
I think that Walter Strach is a very fine painter. I must have seen ten shows of his work by now. This is very much the best one. But they were all a pleasure and have been getting better in small increments every time. Among the teachers he had at Pratt and Queens College were Mercedes Matter, Charles Cajori and Louis Finkelstein, who worked with him at Queens. Although Cajori also taught at Queens, Walter knew him from Pratt where he taught figure drawing. With that background there is no way he could have missed understanding modernist painting and its abstract structure. In this show, for example one of the paintings is long and thin, measuring 24 x 66, it is titled, Red Barn in the Middle. If you are someone who understands piocture making, that might be a difficult shape, since you want your viewer's eye to travel over the surface many times in many ways exploring the space which results. For a modernist painter, such a shape is a little less daunting than for some one of an earlier generation. That is because of the conceptualization which grew out of cubism and Cezanne of the paintings pictorial axes and their use to develop and control the space of the work. In this painting and the others in this shape, Strach has worked with that modern understanding and has visually, in his painting mind, divided the paintings into three irregular parts with two vertical axes, in order to fulfill that need.
Most of his shows have been in water base painting media like Gouache and Tempera, as is this show. He has been, for many years a virtuoso exponent of these media. One of the things in this show that is different from his past exhibited work is that wherever it was possible, and it helped intensify the feeling of the motif, he has let his first brushstrokes stand, without modification. These moments are often breathtakingly clear, clean and beautiful.
I have, in front of me two color images of the paintings on post cards used to notify us about the show. I am sorry to say that they flatten out the color and generalize the paintings. One of them, which shows a "Sous Bois" composition from a little bit outside, does give a better idea of the original. The gray horizontal shadows in the snow at the bottom of the canvas are some of those first takes which he did not alter. Even in this poor card, they look electric.
The thing about Walter which does not fit into conventional modernism as it now is practiced, is that with all his sensitvity to modernisms pictorial issues, he has a desire for the big unfettered landscape of the great 19th century masters like Courbet and Corot. But he cannot imitate them. His form sense is different from theirs, although I do think he does things often in the spirit of Courbet. Some of his new work also reminds me of Derain's brushstroke Corot's of the 1920s, too. But if he had a path into landscape painting I could niot clearly characterize it as coming out of any specific Fauve or Cubist painters. I think that his eye was sophisticated by cubist and fauve work. Like all of us, he knows the quality of Nice Matisse, Marquet, Dufy, Roualt and Derain. But not one specific artist brought him to himself.
There is something very original about his slant on painting. In the past I can only think of still life painters who worked with a limited number of objects on a relatively consistent setting like Chardin, Zurbaran, and in the twentieth century, Braque, Morandi and Dufy[Dufy, rather for his late studio interiors, each of which took him years]. Strach paints only at one site. It is a house and barn on a property which hs wife bought many years ago, I think before they married. It is the only place he has painted for some years. This is treating a piece of the outdoors like a studio set up, in some ways, and it is another reminder that he is still with us as a modernist making up his own art as he goes along while honoring the masters of the past, including the twentieth century, but he still has to make it on his own, and make and break new rules which they never laid down.
Despite his quality and pertinacity, I believe that Walter has never been reviewed by any New York critic. If the Sun had not folded, he might have had a review this time, but it did fold. Many years ago, one of my formulations was that perhaps in the future instead of the avant garde paradigm in which we continually find the great art in the new, we might find it in something which seems unfashionable and not new, at first glance, which someone has pursued over time. I think many people, not necessarily those with bad eyes, walk into the galley and see what seem to them conventional and boring landscapes, and they walk right out. Over the years that must have happened with critics, too. Well, one of the things which Strach's show tells us, is that we deserve a better audience, and better critics, too.
From about nineteen fifty nine on, I returned to New York City where along with me Leland Bell had just been hired to teach in the foundation program at Pratt Institute. I had known other Jane Street members. Nell Blaine, slightly, since she was the Aunt of a childhood friend who had become a sculptor, Hyde Solomon because we met at Yaddo, and Ken Ervin who taught with me at SUNY New Paltz, and probably hired me, there. So, Leland and his general position was nothing startling for me. But he inhabited his position with much more articulate power and had a truly charismatic personality, something not true of the others I had met before him. I had discovered Balthus by myself. On the occasion of his first American museum show, I went to the MOMA show several times, and to his concurrent one man show at Pierre Matisse Gallery, which included the final version of "The Room", a very intense and strong work. I had already rediscovered Dufy, the Nice Matisse, Soutine and had become taken with the Japanese brush stroke painters of the 18th and 19th century including the Shijo school who worked from nature in color, with a big brush. I referred to them in the sixties in an article for Art Forum called "Expressionism, Eccentric and Concentric". At the end of the article I credited Leland and Al Kresch for the angle at which I discussed the issue. But I also included a photograph of an album opening showing a seated woman by Onishi Chinnen, one of the finer figures, from a book I had gotten. I found out many years later that Al never knew I had credited him.
I have neglected to discuss Helion, who was the whole Jane Street's guide into figuration from abstraction, and under whose aegis Leland and his friends worked. I will discuss that in the next piece.
A good part of Leland's beliefs were reflected, as I saw them in that piece. I realized that he felt that a quick, brush stroke approach could give a finer and more intense idea of a figure or other things in a painting which expressed its tension, gesture, and its forms, through the calligraphy of the artist. This is also true in the late Soutine, when he is no longer wildly distorting the space, but using his brush to make it intense and full. These certainly were behind the work in question, and by then Al's, Leland's, and Ulla's work. I recently heard that Leland saw some of Stanley's work, some years ago, and complained that he couldn't see Sranley's stroke! The former student of Stanley's, who told me the story said, further, "but now, Stanley has his own stroke, and it isall over the work." He had to get it his own way.
When I heard Leland talk about what the entry points were into our contemporary figuration, he was never exclusive. Many of his friends felt that it was impossible to get into modernist construction with out going through Cezanne, and/or Matisse. Leland seemed to want to open up the means up to include Seurat, Late Renoir and, of course, Derain. He also valued Dufy, Braque, Vlaminck, Marquet and Soutine. Occasionally he would push Kees Van Dongen He certainly was not immune to the work of Picasso and the cubists, especially Gris, who went through a late period in which he tried to accommodate figuration more directly with less cubist distortion. In his contemporary context, which included the cubism of the Studio School, at which he later taught, he came across as someone who wanted there to be a greater openness in the modenist figuration which a number of thoughtful artists then espoused.
He brought up other artists with enthusiasm: the pastels ond paintings of Redon, Courbet, Corot, Delacroix, and earlier Watteau and Chardin. He certainly espoused Poussin and Lorrain and enjoyed the work of many earlier artists including the 14th and 15th century Sienese, whom I adored.
Sometime after 1977, The Pierre Levy collection was given, upon Levy's death, to the nation. Until that time, the only person I knew who was allowed entree into it was Leland. Now it was placed in the museum at Troyes which was a few hours train ride from Paris. So, I and my wife went and saw it. We were pretty much true believers, expecting to be knocked out by what we were going to see. Levy had a huge number of Derains, but he also had Balthus and some of the other better painters of his period. Well, we were not happy. The collection consisted of about 25 large paintings and some 60 or so quite small ones. Among the large paintings we found only two which added up. They were a still life and a view sous bois of a village out in the light. I had seen a large study for it in a show in New York, and thought it was a great one. The big one was even better. And every single little painting was a knockcout, whatever the style. But the great quantity of the paintings, based on looking at painting the way I ended up loving all the others didn't hold up. They were not fulfilled. I started to look for reasons. The collection included a portrait of Levy's wife which was a hard fought failure. at the Orangerie, another collector of Derain's who had died earlier had another portrait of his wife. That one was the same sort of dismal failure.I decided that Derain had a problem of staying inside the painting. He most often tried to maintain conscious, vigilant control of what he was doing. He couldn't let go and stay limber while he painted something he felt needed to be wonderful. Since he never did this with still lifes-I have never seen a failed one-it is not a failure of talent, but an unconscious change in his mind set.
I have seen, though enough Derain's to know that his ideal of how an artist should work was something he could achieve, and did so many times. He felt that rather than making up a new, eccentric, or even bizarre style, an artist should cultivate his own stroke and execute each work with that personal calligraphy. He also believed that with each new motif it was possible to accept a new style, which was executed with the continuing personal calligraphy.
For example the style of a painting of a farmer harvesting grain [hops] could be that used by a provincial painter making a wooden sign for a bar. The choice of style should then be executed within that style with the artist's own stroke. Among Pierre Levy's smaller paintings, this idea was essayed successfully over and over again.
Derain had another idea which he did not write about [the fragments of his book on art were translated by Roseanne Warren and published in the Georgia review in the 1970s]. He would make an abstraction, not through a cubist reconstruction of the forms, but by a brush driven version of traditional painting as in the work from Watteau and Chardin through Corot and Courbet. In this version he would display fewer of the spatial cues which were required by those artists, thus, in a sense abstracting the work, and fulfill the painting and its space in part by the intensity of his brush and its movement over the picture. All of these ideas of Derain's are new ones. They imply a profoundly different view of how to relate to tradition than was practiced, not only by academic painters, but even by those who felt themsleved consecrated to the modern spirit of forming, in conjunction with the great art of the past.
Ultimately, Leland felt so embattled about these sources he espoused that he was uncomfortable with almost any one who was not one of his students, probably with the exceptions of Charlie Marx and Al Kresch. I think Nell Blaine, another one of the Jane Street Group, was OK. In those days, she was much more accepted as a painter than Leland, and she supported both him and Al.
What happened to his ideation about paths to get into good painting? Well, he was no longer open minded. You had to go through Renoir, Matisse and Derain and the others of his favorites, or you were not doing the right thing. Thus far I have neglected another one of his favorites, Modigliani. By the way don't get the idea I disagree with any of his picks. I value Derain differently, but he would be there, too, for me. His taste was absolutely impeccable, for example including the greatg Eilshemius'. The one artist he introduced me to, was Marquet, whom I had not found on my own. Modigliani, alive during the early cubist amnd fauve days managed to find his own way as a figure painter by discovering cycladic figures for himself and working as a sculptor while he injested there wonderful and original forming. Then when he painted his nudes and portraits, they were fully reconstructed in those terms as he painted from nature. Surely a genius, but also mad about the figure and unwilling to develop it by abstracting it. He reconstructed it in such a way that the nudes are among the most sexually provocative nudes, while at the same time fulfilling in spades their full formation as paintings.
Well, I finally got to see some art in a museum. We went to the Met and while there saw the loan show of drawings and works on paper owned by Swiss collector. There were some miraculaous things in it as well as some duds, and at least one fake. For some reason people out there think it is easy to fake a Degas.Not in this show, I have also seen fake Rodin drawings. The problem is that both of them were supremely gifted and it is nearly impossible for a faker to get on their level as artists. This show had a large scale figure which superficially looked like a real drawing hung near it of several. But the forming was atrocious. After 1884, Degas coukld almost do no wrong. Some drawings are better and few not so great, but they are all, at least, good. Most are miracles. So, a bad one is a fake. I can remember a fight which Leland picked with Lennart Anderson, apropos of nothing. To add the coup de grace, Leland said and he didn't think much iof Degas, either!! There is a lot of earlier Degas which shows great talent, academic skills and no real sense of putting it together. Somewhere around 1884, with Mary Cassatt in the hat shop it all comes together. It is easy to miss if you go through a Degas show from the beginning, feeling negative for a long period. Then, you may have your mind so decided that, great eyes or not, you can miss it. Actually it is easy to miss. Cezanne is impossible to miss. He is a dutiful hard working painter working alongside Pissarro. He never gets it. Then suddenly something happens and he is a different artist. Instead of messes he is producing one more wonderful work after the other. But Degas starts with academic mastery and has to unlearn bad ideas and become a different artist altogether.
The last big Degas show in New York, a group of my younger friends went through together commiserating about how lousy he was. I went on my own, and started at the last room which contained three of his late, great Russian Dancers. THen I went back, seeing success after success until we got to the unfinished paintings signed with the final auction sale stamp, which he never completed, some of which look very modern and very bad. But those omitted, the late work is great. We bring our own values and prejudices with us when we look at the art of great masters of the past. What we can see and love is what we should concentrate on. That is where we can get insights for ourselves. THere is no such thing as unprejudiced viewing. The prejudice marks our seeing as our own action as much as it is the work of other people. The sad thing is people who have no masters to speak to them, not people who look at work other than the work you look at yourself. We all learned so much from Leland. He was probably the first artist I ever hard rave about Watteau, and Lenain, but many of us were with him for Corot, Courbet, Millet, Delacroix, Gericault and Ingres. His taste was not about tightness being worse than the brush. Ingres was his great master as well as a great master for the rest of us.
Stanley Lewis has probably found out more from Constable than any one else I know. Constable could be a wonderful painter and there are loads of examples of his best work in the USA, but especially in London. He also studied hard at the school of Courbet. That Deux Damoiselles a la Bord de la Seine taught him a great deal. He knew it would. Different artists speak to different living painters, both while they are young and later on. There is so much great stuff out there that the accidents of time and place do not seem to deprive any of us of study sources from past masters. I think it is exhilerating to work through a great artist's work because we get closer to someone else's passion, but always in our own way. Natalie Charkow Hollander has certainly learned an enormous amount as an artist from working from Claude and Poussin. Of course, this does not mean she didn't get other wonderful things from the motif, she did. The two things can go hand in hand some more passionate at one time, some at another. And, of course, most of the time she was translating Poussin and Claude into relief sculpture, quite an extrapolation.
Although there have been a number of concerted efforts to over clean paintings all over the world, especially, it seems to me in England and in Italy, all the paintings damaged by this still do not lose their great quality,altogether. That thought came to me while I was looking at Titian's Venus with an organist. I think it must have been a miraculous painting. I think some day we will be able to get it back again. There was a great small Giorgione in the show I had neve seen before. It shows Laura, Petrarch's idealized love, in front of laurels. I just saw a plate of it on the net. It was much better before its recent cleaning. In the plate on the web it does the kinds of things which Giorgone was famous for doing. The painting I saw does them far less. We are lucky, though to have so many photographs taken in different time periods of all of this work. There still remain a group of famous and largely undestroyed Giorgiones, also Titians.
I may have mentioned that I owned for some time, a photographic catalog of the paintings in the museum at Dresden. The catalog was made in 1859. The photographs are all quite large. None of them look as though they needed any cleaning to remove old varnish, or anything else. The NY Public Library has the set. One of only two or three in the country.
I know that you like it best when I discuss something I care about with affection. That is, of course the best for me, too. I did not go to the museum wanting to find fault, but rather to enjoy great work. I did do some of that. Perhaps I will enthuse more the next time.
Love,
Gabriel
