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
