Posts (page 2)

Hi! I really can't spend much time here. I lose more than hgalf of 5 days a week to doctors, clinics and hospital procedures. I am not getting better, overall, but I am not getting worse, either. Thereare various chances in the future. All of them are risky, and some of them will have to be taken one after the other.

I have finally figures out how to show any comment anyone sends here. I think I didn't get there in time and some disappeared.  I will try not to let that happen.

Nothing has happened with me in gallery going, because I haven't gone.

I did get a privately printed book of Louis Finkelstein's writings which I intend to read. I also get cards with images of artist's work on them. One from a gallery in New Jersey had a landscape by Harold Bruder on it. I think it is the best thing of his I have ever seen.

Otherwise I have been getting art world crap in all the mailings. It is important not to mention names negatively, if possible because it all becomes useful for sales.

Now and then I think about past conversations. I can remember Sidney Tillim's idea of what I called Little men's marching and chinese chowder group, after an organization Barnaby's flying godfather belonged to.[Barnaby was a strip in PM and the Compass I believe when I was much younger].

The group included both Lennart and Leland. One day, Leland made it clear that he despised both Lennart and Degas. I don't know why it was important to him, but it does show that serious people cutting against the art world tide could disagree violently.  Actually I didn't much like it, but I liked them both and I also like Degas. The big Degas show at the Met was a great show if you started at the end and worked backward until you no longer like the work.  He actually became a great artist, but he started off as a very talented academically trained one, influenced by Manet. Look at the work starting with Cassatt in the hat shop. Except for unfinished paintings, signed with the auction stamp, the paintings and pastels from that point forward are all wonderful. But I do think that much of the earlier work is problematic.
Love,
Gabriel

Dear Kurt,

You do sound very changed, and very serious. I was thinking of the Reinhardt under glass at MOMA and the others. The Klee book I have been mentioning is by him and called the Thinking Eye. There are 2 volumes of it. I think the first volume is enough for a few years.  It is now out of print and expensive.  I am sure that any art library in a place like Uppsale, for example, would have it. So would any library connected with a museum which collects 20th century painting.

You know, all of those letters are there. I didn't know how to validate them, or even read them. I think the letter I am answering should now appear, but I am not sure of that.  Even if it doesn't, I am closer to getting it

It is true that abstraction has had only a short life, thus far, so it is hard to say, avoid the influence. I do believe that if you spread it around there is a lot to be learned. But I think of most of the people on that list of yours as people who are spending the interest on someone else's principle rather than investing their own minds hearts and souls in their work. I tend to believe that AE was not the dog, but only the tail of the dog, waving. That gallery which handles the Reinhardt estate had a show of Reinhardt/Mondrian a year or two ago.  And it was no show of equals. Mondrian's very best follower was, in my eyes, Burgoyne Diller.  And that is because, while keeping all of Mondrian's pictorial laws [no secondary colors, no diagonals, no brush strokes] in his late work, Diller was able to arrive a wholly different concept of power and a sensibility not so much foreign to Mondrian as very, very different. I had studied with Diller in 1950 or so when that was not yet true, but his work then, was very much like the best Mondrian, just before his last 3 or 4 paintings.

I certainly do not believe that any one like you has to know and go through all the work which has made it to the top of the hit parade and is abstract! In fact, that strikes me as the best way to douse your own feelings in ice water. Not all of the biggest reputations represent wonderful artists. Sometimes it is the ideas of an artist which are most exciting, not even the work. You should read Hodler. He was a big enough deal back then so that there may even be writings of his translated into Swedish, if your German is not too hot.  The one essay in English, his essay on parallelism of 1888 is a gem. He was such a big deal back in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century that I can remember a book whose title was "Cezanne und Hodler." 

Actually, how abstraction came out of figuration and a variety of other sources is really very mysteriou s. Rather than worrying about Ryman, I would worry about Malevitch or Boccioni, or Wyndham Lewis, or Sophie Tauber[Arp]. There is nothing happening in the 19th century which reliably can predict that there will be such a thing.  Learning about how and why and looking at those works seems to me a more productive way of getting there than following all the followers who followed the followers who....Etc.

I don;t know whether I told this story here.  My younger son is a flutist. Albert Roussel wrote a work before WWI called Jouers des Flutes.  It is a suite for flute and piano in which each movement gets a double name. One name for a living flutist, and the other for a character in a book of fiction, poetry, or in one case a great religious epic, who played the flute.  Michael had been playing movements out of the suite, and in fact the whole suite for some 15 years before he realized that he hadn't been going about it the right way. He need ed not only to look up all the flutists and find out  what they were like, as well as learning as much how they played as possible, he needed to read all of the stories, poetry and the religious epic to find out what was in Roussel's mind. So, he did. One of the references was a French novel of the period,not very common today, but he found it and read it. Krishna, of course was easy to find, but a long read.  Well when he was all done reading and had worked out the personalities of all of the flutists and fictional flutists, he worked it up for performance again. Nothing was the same.  He played everything differentl;y, not because he was an eccentric, but because he had done his homework and understood it all differently.  One day he found a recording of a performance he had given some 15teen years earlier, and it sounded like all the other performances flutists had been giving. He had realized that living in the 1990's he was in a different wor ld from Roussel and he had to treat him historically in order to give a really definitive performance.

Well we are living that far away in time and space [it was all in Europe]  so that we don't really understand what abstract art was about for those radicals who were living and producing it from the 19teens through 20s when it all began.  So studying them and their ideas would seem to make real sense for anyone really interested in abstract art.  None of the people around now who didn't  do that really understand what they are up to.  They are on the tail end of the bandwagon. If you start over again trying to understand, you won't be.  And,by the way, there were some mystics involved with some of it. People like Madame Blavatsky, and an American architect from Buffalo who wrote about four dimensional space being described in three dimensions. He made drawings of such things as tessaracts, for example. I will try to remem ber his name. It would also be interesting to read what Wyndham Lewis wrote, or what the futurists wrote. If you know Russian, maybe they wrote, too.  

A little bit of scholarship, and study as to what these people thought they were doing and why might open something  good for you.

When Ad [Reinhardt] was rich enough, he made a trip around the world in the summer time.  When he got back, he showed us at Brooklyn his slides. He repeated it at the Club as well.  There were two kinds of slides: 1. slides of details of Islamic mosque construction showing the shapes of the architecture and chunks of the words of the Koran cut into the stone and shown as part of the forms of the building. 2. The interiors of very dark Buddhist and Hindu temples full of marvelous figures of which we could only get a trace as we looked.  I don't know that he had painted the black paintings yet, but they were all there.

Love,
G abriel

This is the last of three answers to Kurt's letters. I am not sure the other ones will show up. GL

Dear Kurt:

I started this one already but it suddenly threw me out and I cannot find it again.  The problem with painting something "Mystical" is that , ideally you should be at least student of mysticism.
Mysticism has a hard and precise definition [with an exception]. It is the belief that individuality [individual personality and individual souls] are an illusion and one inclusive soul is the reality.

So, in so far as most 20th century artists were striving to express themselves in all their particularity, most of them cannot be called mystics.  In so far as he was able to hold that position Thomas Merton could be called a mystic.  I knew Ad Reinhardt too well to call him a mystic. But I would agree that he believed that there was something distinct from human life and different from other forms of thought, and that was art.  In his paintings over a period of some 20 years, he tried to separate the connectedness from the differences more and more, and finally in the black paintings achieved his greatest success in making paintings in which the flutter of connection ambushed you after you had been looking at the painting for some 20 to 60 seconds. His paintings [with out glass on them] will produce a wonderful movement up and out the top at that time.  That, though, did not make him a mystic, it did make him an illustrator of mysticism. And I think he would have been satisfied with that.

A mystic is someone who believes that the many individual egos [to a religious, souls] are illusions, and we are all u ited in one soul.  Usually mystics are to be found in a known religion. All of them, except Judaism will allow that definition. Judaism believes in the imviolibility of the sould so greatly that in it, mysticism is the desire to be as close as possible to the presence of G-d for all time, but not to be lost in him.  There is mystical Christian, Buddhist, Hindu,  and even Muslim art[although without any images].  And it is possible to think about several early 20th century abstract artists as people who were concerned with these ideas.

If these is what you were talking about, it is possible, although I dopubt that anyone much out in the art world today, thinks that way.

Love,
Gabriel

I had a friend, he died some years ago, who wrote reviews for New York art magazines all his life. When I first met him, in 1958, he was writing for Art News. His name was Lawrence Campbell[but always Larry]. One of his absolutes was that he would never write a negative review. His taste changed some over many years, and he did write raves of the work of friends, but the majority of his reviews were of artists, not necessarily people he knew, whose work he admired.  There is more of a tradition for that among American literary critics. If I am not getting the name wrong Robert Gorham Davis who was active till about 20 years ago was another such.
But he generally reviewed prose fiction.

Decorum is a word not found much in the art world. Although some of Larry's principles do get carried out out there in the establishment. The art magazines are full, only, with the kind of work which the editors and critics have a feeling for. As someone who has been seeing the Art mags for some 55 years I do have some general comments to make.  The New York Times used to have very exciting weekday and Sunday art pages. This is not so true any more, because somewhere a critical pen has been wielded and the number of reproductions of work which the paper reviews has gone down precipitately.  We all saw Giuliani go foaming at the mouth with the show of some recent Saatchi people in the Brooklyn Museum during his tenure as mayor. Most of the material raved about in the Times might very well get a very strong negative reaction if reproduced, so that the general Times reading public could actually see what the critic was raving about.  So, no one gets to see the stuff. The Sunday page tends to be filler, or, plants for friends of some one on the newspaper[not necessarily among the art critics] and is rarely written by one of their major critics.

Decorum is encouraged by these devices, and ignorance is kept, happily, blissful.

The other week, Kimmelman [who is actually a wonderful writer about pianists and the piano literature] was given the task of reviewing the great Tintoretto show in Vienna. In order to get into the mood, he had to get to a Viennese restaurant[and wine bar] which put him into the mood for looking at those old, and old fashioned paintings.  To see a really great show, he had to get into the mood and the period somehow!! Most of his reviews have had that sort of problem.  He is the Times' number 1 because he is thought to be a good newspaper man, and the times has the idea that all those critical jobs can be handed around to people with that sort of credentials.

I am used to the idea the the old Paul Georges crowd, who were hungry, dressed and acted broke [although they weren't] and used Paul as their critic and psychotherapist, would use any public event to attack other artists violently in speech and loudly in manner. I find it mildly perplexing that someone who supported a wing of the establishment should find it necessary to act like that, too.  It makes me sure that we are all doing right.  Of course the supporters of various parts of the establishment must feel very insecure about the true value of the artists whom they prefer.  The names which have come up most, thus far are Rackstraw Downes, Lucien Freud, Neil Welliver and quite a few others.

Actually I think that it should have been expected in our context, that some artists would take a rethinking of realism as a starting point for a neo-Avant Garde position. There must not be any kind of art which is being made which does not fit into the historical idea of the avant garde.  So some of the people I have already mentioned as well as a number of others fit that bill. 

Unfortunately, I don't think so. There is something about working from the motif which can produce good art, even new good art. The point is that no one can stop learning, adjusting and readjusting to the motif and the canvas and new insights, so that they can produce a nice new and easily graspable neo-avantgarde realism. Skill and intelligence, talent and sensibility are not enough. The artist has to keep being aware of him/herself and recognize when something has happened which requires new developments.  I am talking about constant non-vanguard development and change in the work

I think that it is clear that Stanley's path follows the changing understandings which develop in his paintings and drawings. And all of us know that there is still his sculpture, and figure painting to see, some day. He is a much messier artist than any of the establishment. It is not possible to cut off one idea and say, that's it!! Because each new idea is also in the middle of a step to somewhere else.  This is what new art which is good and new and not avant garde looks like.

Love,
Gabriel

I will get back to the topic of my unfinished essay later. I did manage to get to an opening, Stanley's new show.  He is always surprising. This time, for the first time he has gotten his gnarled and curious detail, which has been so great in the big drawings, into the paintings!!!  They now have a whole series of changes in color within any plane which help both to organize the larger shapes and to produce a counter melody [as it were]. I think that at least in some ways these are his finest paintings yet. Starting on your right as you enter, and around the corner, those three paintings are the ones which can be seen to do it best. One problem is that the light on the short end wall, opposite, does not do its best for the two very fine paintings hanging on it  and the light in the opening corner is just fine. There also are wonderful drawings of all sizes, some of which seem to have new ideas which are wonderful to see. 

He is a completely independent artist with his own pictorial needs, which are different from every one else's and he keeps on making giant moves towards ideas he has about what he wants to get. It becomes clearer and clearer that there is no artist out there who can be his model. He has learned from great 19th century masters and from 20th  century ones, but he looks like something new.  Now, is this something avant garde, new? No it is not. It is not hard to understand where he is coming from and what new portions of his sensibility he is adding into the work.  It is hard to understand why he wants to do it, until you see it done.  I would say that he is not so much an innovator as another voice to add to past masters, who enriches our understanding of them and of the world outside by seeing it in a another way. It does not require the kind of great jump that fauve or cubist art required of their audiences, but it presents new ways of getting at those same truths which so many 19th century pleine aire painters had, as also reconstructions from nature as in Soutine, Matisse, Marquet or Modigliani.

Don't Miss The Show!!!  There is nothing else like it, and there won't be until he shows again.

Love,
Gabriel

That same hypothetical painter who wants something powerful for herself wants to go to graduate school in painting. I have taught at several of these with soe regularity and at others now and then. One of the things theylike most to see is someone who has skills and sensitivities which show through the current work, and wants to change and do something radically different. Back in the days when I taught in such schools, I found it hard to believe that there wer e such people, but there were and there are, and faculties just loved the idea.

A young artist who has been exposed to several fruitful approaches, seems to have accepted one and done good work within it, and now wanted something else, was the ideal of a strong faculty member.  The character and quality of work done in graduate school it seems to me should reflect the student more than what was done before. Noone really matures in two years, and it is my belief that it would be better for someone working for an MFA to end up in the middle of a step. I agree with Douglas Florian that the process produces more than a series of products would offer.  It is good for the soul to be attracted to qualities not quickly arrived at. Also, which, when arrived at allow for a new procedural trip. There is a painting in the MOMA by Klee which is either called around the square, or the square.  It is a fully enjoyable painting, and seems like the end rather than the middle of such a quest. The last time there was a museum Klee show in New York, I think it was at the Modern, it seemed to turn out that way. There were about a dozen paintings assembled, and because of Klee's habit of dating everything it turned out that the one they have was the last. They were all about tat square in a grid. They are all wonderful, but that one seemed like the most wonderful after which it seemed to me Klee would have to go to some other idea.   Klee was a serial painter, much of the time. He tested out a new logic which would produce paintings unlike any he had done before, and work on it until he had realized that idea. I am not sure that I understand his sources of inspiration, but for anything to get to have pictorial, sensual meaning it must get to a place near the heart.  Even with " the Thinking Eye" to guide us, we can't get inside his head to make sense of what moved him and why. It is hard enough to do for yourself, impossible to do for someone else. Now and then  I think I can work it out with Nice Matisse, Klee, Odilon Redon, Marquet or Masson. So, the desire to make some kind of painting very far from what we do now is much less sensible than thinking of a procedure which might produce some results which would be, perforce, different from our current work, and then within the new procedure trying to work it out.

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