Big yellow

Here's something to see. It's a giant public sculpture in Rochester, New York, known as Threshold. The color is what they call safety yellow. Whether it's actually the color most easily registered by the brain, which the article asserts, I don't know. But it is a color that comes up a lot in children's media of all kinds.

On the other hand there are the shadows it casts. Shadows and light, the brightness of the mellow setting up a contrast. A very neat use of negative space, as this was all left-over material.

Artist of the Second World

 

Aleksandr Gerasimov was not just a Russian artist, he was a Soviet artist. It's not a coincidental distinction. He was intimately tied to the regime during its most autocratic stage. Aside from some operatic depictions of Lenin, he also painted official portraits of Stalin, some of which could make one wonder whether Gerasimov had to paint them over to erase apparatchiks who had fallen out of favor.

But whatever his political role, he was still an artist. A very good one, too. "Boat Trip", seen above, has long been one of his most sought-after works. Several kinds of sensuality are at work here. The mist and spray that rise from the water feel real enough to make you think of the way flecks of cool water feel on the skin. There are also the Russian women relaxed in the sun, one extending her legs, the other leaning forward into the wind. They're mostly turned away from us, enrapt in a grand picture of their own. The man had a real feel for his subjects.

Formidable guardian

King Edmund, also considered a saint, remains an important figure in Bury St. Edmunds, which is named after him. It's a rather wild story. The Vikings killed Edmund for not renouncing his religion and threw his head into the briars. There, the head was guarded by a wolf, and became a relic.

Doris Zinkeisen does justice to it here. She was a theatrical costume designer in addition to being a painter. A sense of the theatrical is what it needs. You can hardly miss that the head is in a spotlight.

Louped

I don't know Victor Brauner's art that well, in general. From one telling of his life story, I know that he got in the middle of a fight between two other artists and lost an eye, which is an awful thing to happen to anyone, much less an artist. But depth perception or no, he kept painting throughout his life, which you have to respect.

The sculpture above, Wolf Table, is a well-known piece by him. It's also very good. It captures a twoness that can happen in dreams. Also, note that one of the table legs is bent and has a paw. What phase of the moon is it, anway?

Oh Aubrey

 

Aubrey Beardsley, avatar of Art Nouveau and the Decadent movement. He may be the best remembered of Oscar Wilde's collaborators. Certainly he's left his mark on the world of illustration in the years since he worked. 

One thing I didn't realize about him until very recently. Besides his getting a free bowl of soup with his haircut, I mean. With all the drawings he did, prints he made, all the indelible images, he was only 25 when he died. Who knows what he would have gone on to do.

In his death throes he begged his publisher and a friend to destroy all of his obscene drawings, which by some standards would be the majority of them. They didn't obey, of course. He could still tell St. Peter that he'd given it the old college try.

180

There's a lot of interesting stuff in Pop Art: A Critical History, edited by Steven Henry Madoff. It collects a lot of varied writings starting in the 1950s (when the original British edition of Pop started) and continuing through retrospective analyses in the 1990s. 

What really stands out is how quick and vast a change in the public perception of art and artists happened in a very short amount of time.

Abstract Expressionism was the dominant style for about the first fifteen years after World War II ended. Painting had, for decades, been moving away from objective representation of the real world. Abstract Expressionism brought the trend to its logical conclusion. Paintings became pure expressions of form, color, pattern. It was now considered gauche to ask "What's it supposed to be?" The layman's criticism of "My kid could paint that"  really took off here, but among the initiated, this was what art should be. 

Pop Art, especially in its American phase, changed all this overnight. Now you could very much tell what you were looking at. It tended to be very familiar things: comic strips, movie stars, advertising montages, products you trust. All delivered with the precision of a Madison Avenue print ad campaign. If you looked closely enough and asked the right questions you might see some continuity with the previous regime. But again, as far as public perception went, this was the biggest change since Impressionism had hit in the latter 19th century.

One good bit is a public symposium with Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. The moderator asks each of them when and why they started doing what they do. When he gets to Warhol, Andy says, "I'm too high right now. Ask somebody else something else." Probably got a laugh in the hall, but it's obvious that the real issue is that Warhol doesn't like being put on the spot. He's ready to join in the conversation when it's a conversation. I found this quite relatable.

Somewhere in there

 

Aside from Salvador Dali, the best known Surrealist artist is probably René Magritte. Magritte was born a few years before Dali, and he died much earlier, but his images―coolly off―have never been forgotten. The world has further changed since he last painted, but he still speaks to many.

In some ways, "The Reckless Sleeper" (above) is a pretty straightforward depiction of sleep and dreams. A man lies sleeping in some kind of bunk. Below him is the subconscious. The objects therein are randomly selected, but he will assemble them into the story of his dream tonight.

Well, sort of randomly selected. There's an apple and a bowler hat, both famous components of Magritte's other works. So there's an author's signature here.

Ready or not

 

From what I gather, based on the superficial amount I know about his life, art was an escape for Carl Larsson. A private escape from the hardships of his early life, and eventually a means to leave them behind. 

So it makes sense that a lot of his work projects a peaceful domesticity. This isn't the easiest subject to make compelling, but he finds a way. In this painting, "Hide and Seek", it's an unusual angle. The girl hasn't found a good hiding place in most senses. That table is wide open. But it's not the first place you'd look, so the game can go on for a few minutes. Of course the high vantage point also allows for the display of the round vase and its shadow.

From the other side

 

The mechanized future of early pop art had become the present, and the liberation from the old values it promised had come to be seen as what it was: an emptying-out process of jumped-up consumer stimulation that left you with very little in the way of tangible values. If pop started out as a way of "liking things," as Andy said, probably quite sincerely, its legacy in the '70s and '80s was more complicated: you can like things all you want, but they will not like you back. In fact, when you're not looking, they will rob you. It's now more or less agreed that the great liberation that was supposed to flow from the new industrial society never actually took place, and even if it did, it ushered in another set of problems. The great leveling of social codes that followed the breakdown of the 1950s order only led to more anxiety. By the '70s, pop art started to look like an embrace of this new consumer-driven social order; it felt a touch corrupt and compromised, and integrated a little too easily into the middle-high strata of public taste.

The above passage is from David Salle's How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art. Yes, bless him, Salle is a fellow adherent of the Oxford comma. Specifically, it's from Salle's overview on Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein became famous in the '60s for his update of the pointillist method. He would take comic book panels, subtly alter their imagery and layout, enlarge them in the form of paintings, which also included enlarging the Ben-Day dots.

Lichtenstein eventually moved onto other subjects, derived from high art rather than pop ephemera. It was a necessary change. His old style had been (re)appropriated by the makers of ironic t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. You could see it as the curse of the SubGenius. But while he changed subject matter, the dots stayed. One might look at them and wonder why he was doing it like that. Salle, a much sought-after painter in his own right, provides some explanation of why Lichtenstein was doing what he did the way he did it.

His insights extend a bit beyond the art world as well. The "emptying-out" he speaks of certainly reached a lot further, and has never ended. The past sixty years or so have seen a great deal of change on the social, economic, and political fronts. It's mostly been a discarding of the old where one waits in vain for the "in with the new" part. So how can you counteract that? It's an open question.

How it grows

 

Expressionist art has a reputation for being angsty. While this impression is helped along by the term's later association with cinema, certainly expressionism can go to some dark emotional places. Still, that's just one aspect of it.

August Macke's "Gartenbild" of "Garden Picture" shows a different side. On a sunny day, a mother works in the garden while her small daughter plays nearby. The town, represented by the houses in the background, is bright and colorful. Nature, represented by the green plants, is powerful, yes. But it's benign and cooperative as well. 

Macke's work often showed affection for his Westphalian home and excitement for the world at large. The outbreak of war darkened his mood noticeably. Sad to say, he was almost immediately killed in that war. One can only wonder what he might have painted otherwise.

Art at home

 

Marcel Rieder's career as an artist started in the late nineteenth century but extended well into the twentieth, as he died during World War II. He'd have been among the first generation of painters to see the lightbulb come into common use. His usage of electric lighting was canny, as in "Kitchen Interior" above. These are shaded lights, bringing out color, leaving a healthy amount of ambient shadow. Not overpowering. To that he adds a lyric sense of what the domestic world is like in the evening and at night.

Que Serra

Partly on someone's suggestion and partly out of my own instinct, I've been researching more on the late sculptor Richard Serra. He worked in metal for almost all his works, often at an overpowering scale. He claimed to be more influenced by architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe than other sculptors. As it happens I like Mies van der Rohe, although not his skyscrapers so much.

Unlike most of Serra's works, To Whom It May Concern was made to be shown indoors. The solid black walls make an interesting contrast with the scrubbed white walls and pearl colored carpet. I wonder what went through the heads of the patrons walking around those walls.

The lack of the shock of

 

One conclusion I took from reading Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New is that avant-garde envelope pushing is not a sustainable phenomenon. The period from the late nineteenth century to the middle twentieth saw a lot of bold art movements, starting with Impressionism and winding up with Abstract Expressionism, with Pop Art being a kind of denouement. This was something of a result of historical circumstances. You had a conservative art establishment at the beginning, sure to take scandalous notice of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist innovations. At the same time it was an artistically literate crowd. The fact that the Bourbons' collections had been made public after the French Revolution helped a lot here. 

The art world wasn't as innocent as all that for long, but there was still enough pent-up energy to sustain itself for 80-100 years. But that couldn't go on forever. Successive generations couldn't have the same impact, even if they had brilliant artists among them, because it was already understood that they were free to do anything.

The above picture is by a young painter (born 1993) named Louis Fratino. It made enough of an impression on me that I looked him up. His Wiki page says that he's part of something called "New Queer Intimism" which is "a contemporary art movement inspired by the immediacy and colorwork of Impressionism paired with the intimacy of everyday queer life." And I like some of what I've seen of his painting, but...Fernand Leger and Henri Matisse would have been about as shocked by his style as by his being gay, which is to say not at all.

Which is to say that this "New Queer Intimism" has some talented people associated with it, but the term is by definition tied to aspects of identity more than the process or intent of the work itself. With or without labels, the most rewarded artists of our time have gone all the way back to being Neoclassical. Not, as Jerry and George would say, that there's anything wrong with that.

Διαφορά

I was reading The Greek Conquerors by Lionel Casson today and was struck by something. Ancient Greek art has the reputation for a precise kind of beauty: the golden ratio and all that. Greece is where the "classical" in "neoclassical" comes from. 

It wasn't always like that, though. Mycenaean artifacts, whether painted, sculpted or carved, are quite different. In some cases they're gorgeous, but their perspective is quite naive. Case in point:

After a few centuries we see greater detail, more of an understanding of perspective.

What caused the change? Maybe it was a foreign influence. Maybe some people just had more leisure time. The only obvious conclusion is that things were in flux.

Warning: umlauts ahead

I know little enough about Conrad Felixmüller's life story. That he was born Conrad Felix Müller and chose to combine his middle name and surname into one, yes. And of course that he was German. He was German and lived at just the right time to live under Nazi rule. This was a miserable circumstance, as you might guess. The Party deemed him a degenerate artist, something that no one of any artistic discernment would agree with, but who needs taste when you have power?

"Children's Carnival Bustle"―given the mouthful title of "Kinderfastnachtstreiben" in its original language―is a sprightly bit of nighttime color. There's also a bit of doubleness to it. While we're looking at them, the children are also looking out at us, at the adult world. Perhaps this is why the small boy in the lead is decked out in oversize grownup clothes, accessorized with clown nose.

Way to go

Labyrinths are a very old theme, and there must be a reason for that. Educated guess? Our unconscious minds stylize the space we move through, emphasize things through repetition. The result is that we create mazes in our dreams, and respond to them when we find them elsewhere.

Meeting Slides looks to be a fun labyrinth. Swedish artist Carsten Holler codesigned it with American architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and it was built in Kemi, Finland. It's made of snow, and also outfitted with windowlike apertures. For cluing me into this one I have to thank Francesca Tatarella's book Labyrinths & Mazes: A Journey Through Art, Architecture, and Landscape.

Let's bring some color to '25!

 

Henri Matisse drew from eclectic sources. Old enough to remember the first wave of Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, he also knew Greek pottery and statuary, as well as Islamic decoration. And of course he and the Spaniard Pablo Picasso had an ongoing artistic conversation, in spite of their very different temperaments. But in the final effect he was an original. He looked like no one else and there was no one like him.

"The Daisies" is Matisse all over. It's a mature painting, from 1939, and in a few years he'd mostly switch to cut paper. You could break it down into four rough quarters. In the upper left is the nude, a painting within a painting. To contemporary eyes she looks like she's scrolling on her phone, which is both funny and sad. The classical pitcher is also mostly in the upper left. Upper right gives us the flowers of the title, flower that's never too much. The pensive model in the lower left has taken on an entirely red hue, blending in with her chair. And in the lower right is the table that holds up the pitcher and flowers, as well as half a dozen lemons. The table has a very substantive base.

All of them make up a harmonious and inviting whole.

Something else.

 

In his 1980 book Shock of the New, Australian art critic Robert Hughes writes:

By 1979 the idea of the avant-garde had gone. This sudden metamorphosis of the popular clichés of art criticism into an unword took a great number of people by surprise. For those who still believed that art had some practical revolutionary function, it was as baffling as the evaporation of the American left after 1970. But ideas exist for as long as people use them, and by 1976 "avant-garde" was a useless concept: social reality and actual behaviour had rendered it obsolete.

The artists of The Pictures Generation probably wouldn't object too strongly to Hughes's judgment and might well share it. Still, the loose-knit group did seem to suggest a post-avant-garde avant-garde. Their work was like Pop Art in that it borrowed imagery from mass culture, but tended to be drier, more analytical, in some cases less material. 

John Baldessari, a 6'8 bear of a man from the rural part of Southern California, was an unlikely mentor figure. But his hybrid visual art―straddling photography, printmaking, painting, and collage―made him apt. There's a playful alienation to a lot of it, intentional mislabeling, figures whose faces are covered with absurd shapes. And his reputation would continue to grow, Baldessari eventually attaining the immortality that comes with voicing yourself on The Simpsons. (After it had started to suck, but still.)

"The Table Lamp and Its Shadows", seen above, comes from a 1994 series of monotypes. It serves as a traditional kind of art: the still life. There's something a little off-kilter about it, though. Maybe it's the way the cord glows yellow and disappears into the blank white background. It captures the paranoid feeling of being out of place in a hotel room.

In the making

It was the desire to improve both aesthetic standards and working conditions that generated a further article of faith shared by many active within the Arts and Crafts movement: the belief that the material and moral fabric of society had been infinitely better sometime in the past, be it in the England of the Middle Ages or the America of the pioneer age. The ethos of industrial capitalism demanded production for profit rather than need and had generated shoddily designed goods in the process at the expense of both their aesthetic appeal to consumers and the well-being of the workforce. These miserable conditions were in stark contrast to those of a pre-industrialized past in which, it was generally believed, production took place under far more wholesome conditions. The crafts of medieval society had none of the "engine-turned precision" of modern industry, but they retained the sense of humanity that [John] Ruskin so admired. Writing on "The Nature of the Gothic" in the second volume of The Stones of Venice, published in 1853, Ruskin insisted that: "You must either make a tool of the creature or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them."

(from The Arts and Crafts Movement by Steven Adams, 1996)

The more things change, the more they stay the same? We might not face exactly the same conditions as in the mid nineteenth century. But the process that Ruskin decried, wherein the industrialist's technological measurement becomes the standard for all activity, hasn't left us. 

The Arts and Crafts Movement itself is intriguing. In a way it was backward looking. Of course. If you're looking for ideals and ideas, you have to examine the past at least a little. You can't look exclusively at the future, because the future isn't here yet and hasn't revealed its intentions. 

Awaiting

 

Demeter, in Greek mythology, is the goddess of the harvest and of plant life. The most prominent part of her legend is that her daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades and forced to marry him. While Zeus ordered the underworld god to return Persephone to her mother, by that time she had eaten of the underworld's food. Thus she could not stay with Demeter always, but rather had to divide the year between husband and mother. Demeter would not allow plants to grow while her daughter was imprisoned, giving rise to the seasons.

The gods of Olympus could be grand, cruel, childish. Demeter's plight shows them at their most, well, human.

"Demeter" is also the title of the above painting by Patrick Procktor. Procktor's biography is easily summarized. He was a polymath likely headed for great things even before he became an artist. In the 1960s he became involved with London's gay demimonde, befriending Joe Orton (whose portrait he drew) and David Hockney. Hockney's still with us, but Procktor passed on in 2003.

It's his hand, eye, and judgment for which he'll be remembered, of course. The "Demeter" painting creates a contrast between lush green plant life in the upper rough half and austere white marble in the lower. A symbol of the daughter's absence, it seems. It's allegorical and more than a little melancholy, but above all alive.