Andy Warhol wasn’t the only artist of the mid Twentieth Century who broke out of the era of Abstract Expressionism, which had lasted, after all, for only about twenty years, by painting objects that were found all around us in the consumerist culture recognized by the thinkers of the time and in ways that led to ready duplication by all the technology of the mechanical revolution. It was just that Warhol was expert at merchandising himself, which was perfectly appropriate a way to unify production with the meaning of his product, though one can claim that all artists, back to those recorded in Vasari, were up to the same task of projecting their names and reputations and in competition with one another for fame and money. Here are three other pop artists worth notice and from whose works we can assess the purely artistic strengths and shortcomings of their movement.
Read MoreRegional Museums
Cultures reside in formal institutions designed for their preservation. Whether those are newspapers or universities or secondary schools or church congregations or seminaries or legal systems, they are all self conscious about the need to protect the past by finding ways in which it relates to the present. The United States Supreme Court defends and protects the Constitution of the United States by giving it often quite controversial interpretations, just as English professors defend and protect the canon of great literature by finding new interpretations for old texts, by understanding how the texts fit into their own time and place, and by making room for new texts, so that American literature anthologies now include a number of African American writers.
Read MoreThe Age of Illustration
An illustrator is someone who provides pictures or graphics to help break up the text of a book or article and also provides a visual representation of something going on in a text. Illustration can therefore be thought of as a derivative form of art because the art does not rely on itself alone to convey its experience and message and that designation as derivative is also earned because illustrative art will have to be relatively simple and of conventional taste so that it will satisfy its magazine and best seller audiences. “Illustrator” can be thought of as a term of condescension by someone concerned with “high art”. Yet there was a great age of illustration that accompanied the popularity of wide circulation magazines, the technology available, from the 1880’s on, to give good quality reproductions of the artwork, and there was also a mass market for illustrated best selling novels, such as “Treasure Island”. Moreover, the age of illustration is not totally past. Consult the front page of the New York Times and congratulate the paper’s photo editor for having picked out what is usually a very artistically composed illustration for some top story. So let us consider the accomplishments and the point of view of some master illustrators from its Golden Age.
Read MorePostmodern Portraitists
There was a new flowering of portraiture after the end of Abstract Expressionism. The painters involved were representational, and so not like De Kooning at all, in that they did not want their figures to disappear into the swaths or streaks of color. But neither were they realists, in that their object was not to accurately portray those they represented but to develop new ways of representing people so that each painter had his own signature style, that not just what happens because a painter paints in the way he knows how to paint, but because the creation of a distinctive style was the basis of his accomplishment: his models served his style rather than the other way round. The inspiration for this movement was Andy Warhol who did not enhance our understanding of the figures he portrayed, like Mao and Marilyn Monroe. It was, rather, that the figures were already popular icons and what he did was to industrially produce a large number of copies through a silkscreen process that allowed each of the standard images to be produced in different colors. Warhol’s imagination rested on standing aside from his images to note that they were images rather than on enhancing the images, and so what he produced seems to me very cold and devoid of the life of the people who lend him their images, but that may be what he was, after all, out to do, postmodern art, now included in what is called contemporary art, prizing coldness and irony rather than depth of feeling or character analysis as its primary virtue. Now those who entered this common project of making the art more important than its subject did not see Warhol as their inspiration and one, Alex Katz, thought that Warhol had stolen from him, but artists throughout the centuries view with their competitors for stature and are most upset with those who would claim to be their betters. Consult Vasari to see professional competition at play, or consult any biography of Picasso. Let us consider the different ways some contemporary artists did their number on the artistic presumption they shared that the model served the artist rather than the other way around.
Read MoreArt Moderne Architecture
Rockefeller Center is a remarkable and lasting achievement. It is monumental without the coldness of the International Style that would in the Sixties come to dominate architecture, much less the Brutalist Style that dominated the Eighties and Nineties, much less the grandiloquent style of the decades after that, or the present Postmodern style which has bits of buildings glued onto one another as if we were living in a humongous Dickens neighborhood. What is it that made Rockefeller Center such a wonderful thing? It was, I suggest, its formal features rather than its relation to the public, which was ballyhooed at the time by the claim that the Radio City Music Hall was a “palace for the people”.
Read MoreThe Nature of American Painting
National traditions of art in the West have the same subject matters. There are landscapes and seascapes, portraits, battle scenes, disasters. apocalyptic and utopian imaginings. This differs from Chinese art, for example, which emphasizes landscapes and seascapes, and also from Arab art, which neglects the human figure. The Western national traditions are distinct, however, in that each has its own themes and its own artistic resources, and so a Dutch Golden Age portrait looks different from, let us say, a Nineteenth Century American portrait. A Vermeer would not be confused with an Eakins, and not just because of the way people are dressed or the settings in which they are placed. Vermeer gives his models a quiet grace that is emphasized by his subtle colors while Eakins makes his people impressive because of their carriage and the solemn colors in which they are painted.
Read MoreDrawing
Drawing, as an art form, is somewhat like silent movies or black and white movies in that they call attention to their artiface until they have established themselves well enough in your mind so that a drawing can be appreciated in its own terms, as a full blown kind of art. In the case of silent and black and white movies, these limitations are imposed by the limitations of the technology of that time, it taking a while for sound and then color, a mere ten or fifteen years later than color, to come to the movies. But even during the silent era, where films were interrupted by dialogue cards that had to keep talk clear and crisp, film had already developed most of its techniques: close, medium and long shots; novelistic story lines that combined public events with private life; deep investigation of character; angle shots so that railroad trains moved from upper right to disappear lower left; and so on. The audience adjusting its expectations of verisimilitude so that it could engage with very delightful stories, just as happened when audiences accepted the richly textured black and white of film noir so as to enhance its eerie and emotionally dark qualities, forgetting that it needed to be black and white after all, regardless of the mood conveyed, even though black and white musicals had been aglow with the lights and elaborate costumes designed for how they would look in black and white. The limitations of the technology did not seem so harmful that some directors, including Woody Allen, preferred to make their early films in black and white, to work under its limitations, rather than risk getting color wrong before they were ready to do it that way.
Read MoreCanadian Art
All nations are artificial constructions in that it was a series of deliberate events that went into each of their creations. Great Britain was created after many a battle, including those to unify Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, these battles not ceasing until the Battle of Culloden, in 1745, and the question of Scottish independence still looms for a post-Brexit Great Britain. The United States assumed its now “natural” shape after a period of self declared Manifest Destiny which enabled it to create a continental sized nation, its parts, whether the dividing line is drawn between North and South or coastal and interior, still not having found ways to overcome their differences. Nations may claim to be united by a language or an ethnicity or a point of view, but their nationhood never ceases to be a hard sell. Ask the Yugoslavians.
So it is no surprise to think that Canada is an artificial nation, pieced together from French and British colonies, ninety percent of its population living within a hundred miles of the American border, very culturally and economically dependant on the United States, and bound to have become part of the American Union if Benedict Arnold had had some better luck. There are many explanations for why Canada was able to forge a distinctive identity for itself, one that was not a part of the American identity. Some say it was because of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which tied the country together east to west and so avoided the pull across the border, though that is hard to say because Alberta cowboys have more in common with the Wild West than with their Toronto co-citizens. Some would say it is because of the distinctive institutions Canadians set up, such as a cabinet system responsible to Parliament, or a national health insurance plan, even though these institutions are shared by all or most Western societies. It is also difficult to explain a Canadian identity because the settlement pattern of immigrant ethnic groups from Western and then Eastern Europe (Scots and Irish and Brits and then Italians and Slavs and Jews) was the same in Canada and in the United States; it was just that more Europeans went to the United States, and Canadians still just can’t believe that they did so because the weather was better further south.
Read MoreStorytelling at Oscar Time
Hollywood has always been the preserve of middle brow sensitivities. Charlie Chaplin was sentimental; the very talky dramas of the Thirties and Forties testified to the sanctity of middle class life (think of “The Best Years of Our Lives”); the Seventies, given their taste for epics, translated the gangster film into a family tragedy (think of “The Godfather” trio of movies). And so it goes on, people without much education treating Hollywood as their canon of great literature, quoting “Casablanca” or”The Wizard of Oz” as part of the collective wisdom they have absorbed into their own heads, using those stories and phrases to capture events in their own fantasy and actual lives, just as Shakespeare or Dickens serve that function for a more educated audience. And so it is fair to ask a deep aesthetic question after this year’s Oscars, which made Koreans the latest group to move into the spotlight, just as in the past Hollywood acceptance marked the passage of Jews, Italians and African Americans into the assimilated parts of the nation, even if women, one such group vieing for inclusion, still consider themselves as having a way to go, however much the women’s point of view has driven story lines from at least the Thirties Warner Brothers’ musicals to the Nora Ephron romantic comedies of the Nineties.
Read MoreThe National Gallery of Ireland
The National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin, has holdings from many places, some of them quite good, like the collection of paintings from the Lowlands, and also the very good “The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4th November 1779” wherein Francis Wheatley, a recently arrived Britisher, painted a public and historic scene. The painting flatteringly captures Irish sunshine bathing a busy urban square, people gawking out of Georgian windows at the moment that an honorary gun salute has sent clouds of smoke into the air around a statue of King William III, the smoke billowing like Rubens’ clouds. So the picture may be taken as signifying the connection of Ireland to Britain as a long time thing. Wheatley’s painting also has the slightly higher than eye-level, straight on point of view that since Poussin has given seriousness to paintings by portraying the mythic as historical. The painting was not well appreciated at the time because of what I will consider an Irish aversion to overt political paintings.
All museums answer queries that are asked and some that go unasked. The question I have is this: what is the relationship of the Irish as a people to Ireland as a nation? Ireland is a geographical entity that became an ethnic group long before that term became fashionable as well as long before Ireland struggled for national independence, which was 300 years, or more, depending on when you start the count, before it succeeded in wrestling itself from Great Britain. Ireland had been the off-shore thinking house for all of Christendom when Christendom was relatively young. The struggles with the British conquest that make up what is known as Modern Irish history created that other struggle about whether to be Irish is to be a resident of Ireland or a resident of Catholic Ireland or just connected to Irish nationalism. It is to be remembered that De Valera was an American citizen. Or else Irish ethnicity can be defined as a comic garrulousness founded in a deep sorrow which an anthropologist might trace the distinctiveness of the Irish to the lack of primogeniture or to infant swaddling practices or child rearing practices which tend towards tough love, all of these post hoc explanations in that any difference in an antecedent can be treated as the cause of a cultural difference. Whatever the explanation, the fact of the matter is that the Irish, as Kennelly has said, have moved around the world and not only made an impact on it but retained their identity, whatever became of their nation, which is now independent but had its rebellion too late to save its language or, later, its family structure and distinctive class and family structure, from Westernization.
Read MoreSargent's Experiments
Every once in awhile Sargent did something different than paint portraits of women fully adorned and expressed in their clothing and of men who look rather craggy and whose clothes cover them rather than individuate them, a distinction that still holds, at least when women dress up for gala events like the Oscars. Sargent always went back to his true calling of realistic portraiture even when it had become a burden, his portrait of Woodrow Wilson capturing at least as much of the man as the photographs made of him at the time. It was a last gasp of the realistic eye in portraiture. Sargent’s experiments are interesting because they point out the roads not taken and because they show Sargent’s profound understanding of the art movements that were swirling around him in the course of his career, and so give reason to think that his art was chosen rather than the only thing he could have done,
Read MoreWar Photography
War photographers like to say that they do their dangerous work so that the people back home can be kept informed about what is going on in one war zone or another. That means they see themselves as reporters, providing information more than interpretation. I think, rather that they are more like artists who convey aesthetic experiences as well as, occasionally, information about what is going on. They take lightly their aesthetic role for the same reason that people who explore the aboriginal forests or track the path of sharks or manatees prefer to cast themselves as scientists, because they have titles associated with their names, rather than as outdoors people who love the wild and the sea. Academic publications are just an excuse for doing what they love. I guess war photographers just don’t want to admit that they are artists, even if the photography editors at major newspapers have an eye for whether their photographers are imitating the shadings and compositional styles of the Old Masters.
Read More"Luminism"
“Luminism” is a term first used by the art historian John Baur in the 1950’s to describe some of the second generation of Hudson River School landscape painters, such as John Frederick Kensett and Fitz Hugh Lane, who had a distinctive style which created, so art critics say, a serene view of nautical and seashore life by emphasizing distinctive colors, hiding their brush strokes, and highlighting the light-- “the illumination”-- of their paintings. They are supposedly influenced by Transcendentalist thought about the immanence of religion. I want to provide another category for the description of their paintings that I think better captures their essence and explains the other facets of their work and better places this modest sub species of landscape painting in the context of overall art history. That is the fact that they were dedicated to sweeping geometrical shapes and used hard edges on both human and natural objects. That made the Luminists quite different from the artists that preceded them where the power of the painting came from the richness of its darker hues and the thickness of paint that assumed an almost velvet like sheen, and where colors blended or even seemed to leech over to one another so as to create shadows and thickness and perspective. To the contrary, Luminism created a painting very much in focus and so seems remarkably realistic, almost photographic, even if its colors were fanciful or, what is the same thing, more true to life in a funny kind of way.
Read MoreNon-Modernist American Artists
American art in the Twenties and Thirties was not largely influenced by the Modernist artists who worked in Europe. There are no hints of Picasso or Matisse or Chagall or Mondrian or Braque, no departures in the meaning or purposes of representation, whether that means Picasso’s distortions of what is visible and invisible about a figure, superimposing parts of bodies so that a number of moments can be appreciated as simultaneous, nor of Chagall’s fanciful use of legend with no great respect for what would have been considered what is appropriate to a single composition, nor Matisse’s use of color and alteration of perspective so as to create very psychologically intense pictures of spaces and viewpoints, nor the geometry of Mondrian and Braque replacing subject matter entirely. Rather, what the American artists of the Twenties and Thirties try to do, I think, is to counter or adapt to the other visual art that had intruded into the cultural spotlight, and that was photography. This thesis is an application of what I call “The Laocoon Principle”, in honor of Gottfried Lessing, the eighteenth century aesthetician who focussed on the way the nature of a medium impacts on what an artist presents. The American artists did not face up to Modernism because of their preoccupation with distinguishing themselves from or imitating or adapting to photography, an art form taking up ever more room, especially ever since photographs rather than engravings had become a main feature of Twenties newspapers, what with their visual coverage of the slum poor, perp walks and urban construction.
Read MoreRothko, Pollock and Elsworth Kelly
Abstract Expressionism is an art movement that prided itself on its lack of meaning, that its large canvases were displayed for themselves, for their own sake, for what they were. A canvas need have no meaning, representational or otherwise, which is what Jackson Pollock said when he gave one of his many interviews about his art. He parried the question about the meaning of his art with the question: you don’t ask a field of flowers what they mean, do you? Actually, it is possible to give an even more radical characterization of what came to be called Abstract Expressionism, the movement first called “action painting”, in that it was a set of actions perpetrated by the painters and also because the paintings were so kinetic, which is not really true either, because that is only true of Pollock, because Rothkos, for their part, just sit there, taking you inside them as you contemplate them some more.
Read MoreAsher Durand's Nature
Asher Brown Durant was a leader in the Hudson River School that dominated pre-Civil War American nineteenth century painting. He is perhaps best known for “Kindred Spirits”, where he depicts Thomas Cole and William Culling Bryant, both important in the intellectual life of their times as well as influences on Durant, the two of them standing on a crag in the Adirondacks, their perch seeming to this viewer quite precarious and they too dressed up for going on a hike. I keep waiting for them to trip and fall off into space. So a picture meant as a tribute to his friends becomes both dramatic and comic because of the way in which it is composed and so has resonated as a great work of American art ever since.
Durant is less well known for what are his real contributions to the American landscape, which are a set of paintings in which humans either figure very little or not at all. What they depict, instead, are the visual qualities of nature that make of it a different experience than when people are a central focus, as happens in Bierstadt and any number of other landscape painters. This is nature as it is experienced rather than in the grand terms which are advocated by Ruskin to show nature as different from cultivated land, Durand, instead, is looking at nature as if were not a contrast to human life but something on its own.
Read MoreSargent Drawings
The exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s late charcoal portraits of fabulously beautiful women, at the Morgan Library and Museum, is quite profound. These pictures were drawn when Sargent was sick of doing the elaborately colored portraits of society women, those dressed up in fancy gowns, the costumes distracting from the fact that Sargent is primarily interested in faces and that he has the ability to render each face as distinctive and deep. Sargent’s facility as a portraitist, whether in color or charcoal, prompts a viewer to ask the most difficult questions about the nature of portraiture, and that fact alone casts considerable credit on Sargent for having raised them, even if neither he nor anyone else is able to fully answer them.
Read MoreForeground and Background
One aspect of our existential situation is that people are sometimes involved in their own histories and sometimes they are not. Sometimes we are actors in our lives and our circumstances as when we take on a new job or act as a Good Samaritan and sometimes we are bystanders, as when we experience technological unemployment or notice what is happening in a Presidential race. Sometimes we shift our focus, and so we are drafted into the Army because of Pearl Harbor and yet the story of ourselves as soldiers is so profound that the war is a story of all those G. I.’s. who make up the Greatest Generation, each one of them to be immortalized as the doers who brought World War II to its righteous conclusion. This alternative between being at the heart of a story or on the periphery of a story is such a fundamental feature of human existence that we are not aware of the importance and pervasiveness of the distinction even as It is a distinction that we cannot do without if we want to grasp what happens in life and what life itself consists of, just as we can not easily grasp what it would be to be a creature in heaven that had no physical being, just a spiritual being, and so not subject to respiration or the feel of the breeze on our cheeks. A good way to get some sense of this distinct characterization of every human being as caught up, somehow, in his or her history, is to treat it as a version of what can be more readily understood in art as the distinction between foreground and background, which is not just a convention of art but a characteristic of life recognized by art with perhaps greater accuracy than is true in literature or philosophy.
Read MoreArt Theory
Art theory refers to the development of concepts that are applicable to a number of art works so as to explain them rather than to the examination of a particular artwork, even though the concept may be drawn from a particular work of art and then becomes generally applicable, as is the case with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, which is drawn from “Oedipus Rex”, but has become applied ubiquitously. Art theory is therefore different from the trivial arguments about whether a Duchamp's toilet is or is not truly an art work or whether art is a matter of line and color or subject matter. These are fruitless philosophical arguments while the real work of art theory is to increase the body of concepts that can be used to analyze art.
Read MoreThomas Cole's "The Voyage of Life"
Thomas Cole’s “The Voyage of Life” is a series of four paintings he did in the 1840’s that showed the stages of human development, the first about childhood, the second about youth, the third about maturity, and the fourth about old age. These paintings set out a theory of human development when no theories of that sort would be rendered until the turn into the Twentieth Century and so the four paintings are like Cole’s four paintings on “The Course of Empire” in that they are breaking new intellectual ground and trying to find images to do justice to the insights that Cole offers up even if, I am afraid, he does not in this case do very well at illustrating his conceptions. The paintings in the series are worth consulting because they show us what a muscular intellect can do at starting out an entire field of human inquiry.
Read More