Basking in Art

Why art needs history

gfkitty — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:04:05 +0000

Art becomes meaningful because it has the power to express important things that would in all likelihood remain unstated, or stated in less coherent or moving ways, in any other language. And this power is borne out by the fact that so much of the greatest in modern art…paintings, sculptures, and buildings that have come to seem the supreme monuments of our time..survive to triumph over the critical and popular hostility that greeted their first appearance. At no time has this been more evident than now, when a century-old modernist aesthetic is being contested by a healthy appetite for antiformalist experiment, bringing to art a new vibrancy comparable to the energy that charged the pioneer modernist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Clearly, great art can stand alone and speak directly to the perceptive viewer, regardless of how we or other writers may explicate it. Yet, like so many of the finest things in life, art for those who have been enriched by it constitutes an acquired taste, as worth cultivating, through an exchange of ideas, as fluency and freshness in verbal discourse. As the painter Wilem de Kooning said some forty years ago: “There’s no way of looking at a work of art by itself; it’s not self-evident…it needs a history, it needs a lot of talking about; it’s part of a whole man’s life.” And so we have written about the modernist experience..not only its forms, sources, and influences but also its cultural context and expressive content…fully confident that we cannot exhaust an inexhaustible subject, but nonetheless hopeful that we may bring alert readers together with some remarkable manifestations of recent civilization and thus expand their capacity to confront their own world with heightned awareness and pleasure.

gfkitty — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 03:12:16 +0000

Picasso and Braque had not set out with any specific program in mind, and Picasso in 1923 rejected the idea of research in art with words which soon became famous: “To search is meaningless in painting. To Find…that is the thing.” It will be clear from later Volumes that a very large proportion of what is best in this century’s art has been predicated in one way or another on what Picasso and Braque “found” between 1907 and 1914. They had liquidated, one by one, the problems which had been left unsolved at the time of the death of Cezanne in 1906; they had given altogether new answers to the question, “What can a picture be?” ; they kept alive the idea of the masterpiece and on many occasions lived up to it. In one sense, in 1914 their careers had hardly begun…certainly they were still giving new resonance to the idea of Cubism in the late 1940s and 50s…but it could equally be said that by the end of that fateful year they had completed what the art historian Edward Fry has rightly called the “greatest single aesthetic achievement of the twentieth century.”

Form in poems

gfkitty — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:45:08 +0000

One often views form in poems as giving a cohesive body to the mind, order to what might otherwise be incloate. Sometimes the formal choices so clearly give a complementary shape to the ideas of the poem (Ammons’s “Corson’s Inlet,” an obvious model with its fractal lines mirroring the natural line of the shore: Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” the fourteen lines of which emulate the rhetorical turns of a traditional sonnet) that the harmony of mind and body are patent.

But formal choices can just as easily create structural ironies (Housman’s use of iambic tetrameter…a mostly comic-sounding measure…for “To An Athlete Dying Young,” or, in a melding of the sacred and profane, the Blind boys of Alabama’s singing “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun”) that exploit the tensions they create. In these examples, elements of the structure actually complicate and shift meanings.

Modernism has lately been discussed in term of its reliance upon collage, fragment, disjunctive syntax, and other formal elements that reflect the anxieties and difficulties of the post-industrial age. But looking at poems of the era as “a heap of broken images” is an incomplete appreciation of their ruptures and estrangements. We are also being invited to see how “it coheres all right.” The blessed rage for order underpins even the most formidable compositions. Just to think of them as composed is to understand the intrinsic organization of all poems, including those whose patterns we might not readily assimilate.

Contemporary poets borrow freely from the challenging, sometimes frustrating practices of the moderns as well as incorporating what many modernists might have found suspect: received, or even imposed, forms. The results can be richy complicated. And why not? We live in a world where people die every day from complications…art should not simply explain the world; sometimes, it most show us how inexplainable it is.

The noticings of details

gfkitty — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:31:47 +0000

While painters labored at their easels, writers also wrestled with details. If the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style, it can no less be told as the rise of detail. It is hard to recall for how long fictional narrative favored the formulaic and the imitative rather than the individual and the original. Of course, original and individual detail can never be suppressed. Pope and Defoe and even Fielding are full of what Blake called the “minute particulars.” But it is impossible to imagine a novelist in 1770 saying what flaubert said to Maupassant in 1870: “There is part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.” J. M. Coetzee, in his novel Elizabeth Costello, has this to say about Defoe:

“The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details , signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves, a procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast up upon the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none . “I never saw them afterward, or any sign of them,” says he, “except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.” Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no depair, just hats and caps and shoes.”

Coetzee’s phrase “moderate realism” describes a way of writing in which the kind of detail we are directed to does not yet have the kind of extravagant commitment to noticing and renoticing, to novelty and strangeness, characteristic of modern novelists…an eighteenth-century regime, in which the cult of “detail” has not yet really been established.

the cubists

gfkitty — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:07:28 +0000

Juan Gris had made a very close study of Cubist painting as it was practised by Picasso and Braque, and he certainly knew the painting of 1909-1910 in which Braque had introduced a trompe-l’oeil nail in what was otherwise a purely Analytical Cubist pictue. In Violin and Engraving Gris not only painted in a nail of this sort but he pasted part of a real engraving into the frame in the upper right half of the picture. He also introduced Braque’s favorite subject matter, the violin, while keeping to his own compositional device of building up the picture in terms of tall, vertical strips offset by sharply pointed triangular forms. By 1913 Gris was dividing his canvas into vertical strips, within which the fragmented subject matter was allowed not only to slide up and down, as suited the composition best, but to be shown alternately in a naturalistic way and in notional form, as an outline drawn on a ground of flat color. Gris had also developed a voluptuous textural sense which delighted in the juxtaposition of many different kinds of surface, from simulated marble to the smoothness of a real playing card, and from patterned wallpaper to the rich, painterly substance of the foaming beer.

PICTURE BUILDERS

gfkitty — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:34:12 +0000

At the dawn of the twentieth century the builders of pictures were experiencing a quite extraordinary freedom and elan. Relishing moments of total liberty they were bringing this into painting by using whatever materials took their fancy. They began sticking real materials onto their canvases in an experimental manner. Braque said “If we want to show a man reading a newspaper, why do we have to fake it up with brushes and oil paint when we could just as well get the newspaper itself and stick a bit of it on the canvas?” This somehow flouted the Puritan ethic of hard work and the trade-unionism of the trained artiste-peintre; but it made good sense. Picasso tried something of this sort in 1912. Braque went into a shop in Avignon, bought a length of artificially wood-grained wallpaper, and used it with perfect congruity to indicate the drawer and top of a wooden table on which were assembled the classic elements of Cubist still life: a glass, a fruit dish, a bunch of grapes, and the words BAR and ALE. Picasso’s first steps in collage were direct and overtly subversive, as he thickly over-painted part of the oilcloth in order to lock it down into the substance of the painting. Braque by contrast introduced his strips of wood-grained paper in an exploratory way. Picasso’s textures were so dense as to force the observer almost to rub his nose in the picture to find out what was going on; Braque’s had plenty of air blowing through them. They were free to change the identity of those materials, and to use them literally as themselves, or metaphorically, or in a purely formal compositional way and with no reference to their identity in the world from which they had been lifted.These were storehouses of allusions, not all of them easily deciphered. Picasso has alwawys been a master of the verbal joke that may or may not pass unnoticed, and those who can read the small print in “Guitar” will find once again a wealth of sly insinuation. All of this brought into painting a new kind of physicality: one that was clear, open and lean. Not only the painting itself but the act of looking at it was restructured; and there was as much an increase in the pleasure given, and in the kinds of pleasure involved, as there was in the material possibilities which were henceforward at the painer’s disposal. Picasso was not only exploring but also amusing himself as he parodied his own labors. These experiences were not only complete but also enriching.

Basking in Art

gfkitty — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 01:09:35 +0000

We can begin by pouncing on the essentials of form. A form can be given a specific vibration, a throb all its own. Retain your own curiosity in a conciliatory universe. A form can have fullness and a tender simplicity or tension , a network of intersecting planes, or simple contours. There can be open, blade-like planes intersected with one another forming an autonomous structure. It is not necessarily decipherable. Bear in mind that it is not necessary to produce cult objects. You can develop your own system of visual cues using fragments of reality. Develop, retain and enrich your own new formal language. Let it evolve. You can develop and introduce an internal consistency that exits in and for itself. In the spring of 1912 Picasso said “everyone talked about how much reality there was in Cubism. But they didn’t really understand. It’s not a reality you can take in your hand. It’s more like a perfume….in front of you, to the sides. The scent is everywhere, but you don’t quite know where it comes from.”

gfkitty — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:35:13 +0000

Art is essential. If there were no culture, what would be the point of survival? How might we greet the day without a song? In any enclosed society we take intense pleasure in the masquerades which distract us from the routines of everyday life. The artist addresses the task of taking the future by the throat. Many artists keep diaries of lively drawings, pleasures in calligraphic terms. These may be easygoing drafts for future reference, perhaps to be developed into enlargements on epic scales. They can become majestic, even sculptural. An advanced artist may even suggest the depths of human frailaty or its reverse. The artist understands the overall play of ight that caresses the human and other forms. Darks and lights are among the artist’s gifts. He can add or subtract it at will. A picture carries the future with it, and it also carries the past. It has echoes and adaptations of early, primitive art. A work of art can stand squarely on the hinge of time. An artist can make the future visible. There are new ranges of developmental possibilities ahead that will astonish us. There is unquestioned freedom to reorder the evidence of sight. (Physicists are revising our concepts of physical space.) There is a constant transformation beneath the appearance of things. There is a delicate equipoise of internal contradictions. We must make human statements unique for their rich, slow beat and the steadfastness of warm, underlying beliefs. There is a quite unscientific pressure of the brush as it touches the canvas. These works are sanctuaries of openheartedness in which the artist holds nothing back from the viewer; imgination, deep feeling, and truth to self. There is an absolute dignity that can characterize the basic furniture of life. Artists, let us now begin with spare, bleached landscapes. First, let us devour the light.

Christmas Day 2009

gfkitty — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:15:25 +0000

Oh, Happy Day! When loved ones gather under one roof and celebrate the wonders of Love!

Christmas in Atlanta

gfkitty — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:05:40 +0000

Today I am in Atlanta with my family. I love cookies!