End of Year Hiatus

Posting will resume again in January, 2011.

Norman Rockwell, "Telling Stories" Exhibition

Recently I had a chance to visit the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. to see the Norman Rockwell exhibition “Telling Stories, Works from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.”   Over 50 works were on display from each decade of Rockwell's professional career and it was very kind of Lucas and Spielberg to let their collections travel.

The focus of the exhibit was how Rockwell told stories, specifically through the characters depicted in the paintings.  Both Lucas and Spielberg acknowledge Rockwell’s gifts in this arena and as filmmakers he constantly inspires them. The curators let the work stand on its own and as a viewer I was invited to take a look and enjoy Rockwell’s stories.  Here are some thoughts on what made Rockwell a successful storyteller.

1. Careful Planning: Rockwell was devoted to his craft and solved all the pictorial problems before making the painting.  Many times he made fully developed charcoal drawings completed at actual size (approx. 40"x50”) for the Post cover paintings.  Rockwell resolved all the drawing issues in the charcoal study.

2. Composition: He was great at composing pictures.  There is always a center of interest and several ancillary areas that assist in developing the theme as well as lead the eye around the painting.

3. Character: What drove Rockwell was his desire to let the characters tell the story.  Rockwell got out of the way and let the characters take over.  Additionally, he imbued all the shapes and forms of his figures with personality.  As a result, the people feel unique and lifelike.

4. Conditions: Rockwell was adept at selecting and depicting the needed objects, locale and circumstances (the proper conditions) to effectively tell the story.  He was sensitive to the fact that the simple items and small experiences make up each day and then eventually, once strung together, make up a life.

5. Clarity: The people in his paintings always display clearly what is on their minds.  Additionally, their clothing always registers the effects of the body’s action upon it.

Through Careful Planning, Composition, Character, Conditions and Clarity Rockwell painted people, places and things with purpose.  It’s clear that he was telling a story in paint and he was a success at it.

Replacing Post-Modernism

In the previous post I noted the end of Post-Modernism was due to its preference for critique and ironic commentary over offering a replacement worldview to Modernism, (one concerned with solutions to the fundamental topics of inquiry). In the wake of the collapse of Post-Modernism, there are several possible movements that could replace it.  These different approaches may be categorized as such:  a return to tradition, a return to nature, a return to the past, a return to sentiment and a return to narrative.

A return to tradition concerns the propagation of a set of beliefs and habits that have existed for several generations for the most part unchanged.

A return to nature is typified by a direct personal interaction with nature, a discernment of nature’s principles and an awareness of psycho-physiological responses.

A return to the past is characterized by a tendency to openly explore historical models and solutions.

A return to sentiment is marked by a change in attitude from ironic critique to sincere belief.

A return to narrative is epitomized by the telling of stories and myths.

In future posts I will investigate how each tendency is being manifested in contemporary representational art.

End of Post-Modernism

Modernism was a critique of the Enlightenment that tried to replace Enlightenment projects with new beliefs. Post-Modernism, however, doesn't offer a replacement. It is just critique. As a result a void is left after Modernism has been stripped away by Post-Modern critical theory. To fill this void people have built new critical theories that replace Post-Modernism.

One such critical theory is called  Post-Colonialism.  It holds that the world is divided between victors and victims, particularly in the form of subjugation by racist colonial powers. Post-Colonialists use tools of deconstruction to reveal hidden meanings as well as the hidden vertical power bias inherent in cultural structures.

Post-Colonialism offers a narrative and it is one of exploitation.  This gives people something to do, namely fight against exploitation and not just be ironic.  Post-Colonial action trumps passive Post-Modern ironic critique.  Large narrative trumps interest in minutae & nothingness (an example in the visual arts is Kara Walker). Post-Colonialism for good or ill fills the void left by Post-Modernism. This is the end of Post-Modernism.

Interestingly Post-Colonialism is a return to the past. In future posts, we will see how others have returned to the past in an attempt to get beyond Post-Modernism.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of the Past

Classically the purpose of history was to evaluate facts and to asses causes and effects in order to describe and possibly understand events and the intentions of significant actors.  Each historian had their own procedures and opinions about what constituted facts, causes, effects and so on.  Some believed in  a linear time scale and others insisted that time was cyclical.  Regardless of the differences they proceeded by looking at the past in order to understand past events and their connections to the present (the time in which the historian lived).  Post-Modernism breaks with this belief in a significant way.

Some Post-Modernist thinkers (i.e. Baudrillard) assert that the field of events is flattened so that countless events exist simultaneously.  The idea is that there are innumerable amounts of information and data, so much that one cannot evaluate it or comprehend it. Competing and contradictory ideas exist simultaneously. A person exists with this information or data events but has no proper relationship to them. A person as a subject becomes lost to these events.

This Post-Modern attitude is expressed differently within each artistic discipline but some general characteristics are: a mixing of previous styles, use of irony or ambiguity and a preference for the artificial or synthetic over the organic or natural.

If the past is considered it is only as a reference wherein some superficial aspect is picked up and used by the artist.   The beliefs, traditions and sustaining ideas of the past are unattached from their proper context.    All is simultaneous synthetic data events and meaning is impossible.   A result of this attitude is that the present is cut off from the past. This is the loss of the past.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of High Art

 

In previous posts I have been tracing the loss of the real, of narrative and of beauty as outcomes of Post-Modernism. In this post I wanted to continue this idea and look at the loss of high art.

As is often the case with Post-Modernism we need to briefly turn our attention to Modernism and review Modernism’s relationship to beauty.

With Modernism there was a tendency to critique beauty by looking at its opposite, namely the ugly or the grotesque. In conjunction with this, there was a critique of artistic control through randomness and a critique of reason through practicing automatic art, championing art born from dreams or from the insane.

With Post-Modernism these art practices mentioned above become authenticated as independent activities, free from a critique of beauty. Instead of existing in a vertical structure beneath beauty, they exist as equals in a horizontal relationship to beauty.  No longer is beauty held up as the pinnacle by which artwork is judged.

Pop art began the great winding down of the project of Modernism and helped to usher in Post-Modernism. With Pop art there was widespread embrace of the objects of commercial activity as well as the introduction of irony.  The everyday objects available from the market were introduced in an ironic fashion, in many cases just to test the openness of Modern Art theory, the buying public and supporting institutions.

One project of Post-Modernism was to dismantle the authority of institutions such as academia and museums.   Once this final arbiter of taste was removed, there was no vertical relationship by which all art could be judged.  By accepting and promoting every day objects as art (such as comic strips, previously called low art) there was no high art from which to judge all art objects.

Some Post-Modern art activities include conceptual art, performance art and lowbrow art.  Conceptual art often uses deconstructive techniques to attack the institutions of art and make explicit power relationships in cultures.  Conceptual art also works with abstract relations that many times challenge any working definition of art.  Performance art highlights the significance of every human endeavor or act.  Many times performance artists work in a scatological way with the body and its material products (Mike Kelly).  Lowbrow art most clearly foregrounds the loss of high art by putting forth objects that were consistently deemed low art, such as underground comics (R. Crumb) or punk aesthetics (Raymond Pettibon). 

None of these movements are interested in beauty nor appealing to previous generation’s views of taste with its resulting evaluations of what is high art. With Post-Modernism comes the flattening of the field of art and an expanding of the definition of art to include most activities. This is the loss of high art.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of Beauty

Much of the project of Modernism was an attempt to critically evaluate (and possibly replace) fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment.  Post-Modernism was a re-evaluation of Modernism (with a critical review of Modernism’s project and solutions) and the Enlightenment. By challenging what is real, Post-Modernism confronted claims of objectivity as put forth by science.  By challenging grand-narratives, Post-Modernism denied a shared unifying cultural language and mythos.  What I want to look at now is the challenge to beauty.

The Modern artists inherited from the Enlightenment 200 years of evolving aesthetic theory that placed beauty as the prime concern and pinnacle achievement in the arts.  Some thinkers (notably Kant and Hegel) claimed beauty as either a universal truth or an  objective truth, while others (Hogarth) believed it to be a subjective state that was reducible to a set of attributes that could be used to judge a work of art as beautiful.

In the 20^th century the central concern for artists shifted from creating beautiful works to expression.  Recording the objective look of the outer world was replaced with giving expression to the subjective inner states. Some artists challenged beauty by looking at its opposite the grotesque, while others argued for judging work based on formalist criteria. Though there was not a single direction the critique of beauty took, it was not an all out abandoning of the idea of beauty.  Modernism didn’t have a problem with beauty as an idea but, rather, it argued about what was beautiful and proposed new alternatives.

Post-Modernism challenged the notion of beauty head-on. Some thinkers (Adorno) took a political approach and linked aesthetics to larger cultural concerns regarding authority and power.  Others looked at psychology and reinvestigated the nature of the sensation that was, at an earlier time, called a response to beauty.   Lyotard used the term the sublime (a state of pleasurable anxiety), Freud called it the uncanny (a state of feeling uncomfortable at experiencing something familiar and foreign at the same time).  Either way each identified the initial reaction as something terrible or frightening not exalted or pacifying.  Post-Modern artists (such as Chris Burden) exploit this through performance pieces that put the artist in danger and cause unease in the viewer.   This is a true loss of beauty.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of Narrative

 
In my last post I investigated Post-Modernism and the loss of the real. Here I wanted to examine the loss of narrative.

What advertising and media are to the loss of the real, technology is to the loss of narrative. There are two points to consider: the creation of private experiences and the loss of shared narratives. We’ll take a look at each in turn.

As technology increases, the theory was that people turn inward and surround themselves with what they want to experience.  Each person tailor makes his environment and has increasingly less to do with a shared experience with another.   In Post-Modern parlance we do not inhabit a public space and we are locked into private language.

Objects and events in the 1980s and 1990s seem to fit in with this theory.  Here are some examples: Sony Walkman (which allow a single person to listen to the music of his choice and to tune out the public), arcade or computer games (the player gets lost in an artificial world without other real people), subcultures each with their own language, fashion and music (new wave, punk, heavy metal, etc.) and virtual reality. Virtual reality was a very interesting creation as it embodied everything the theorists (Baudrillard and Jameson) claimed was occurring in our culture: people through technology would fall into their own private synthetic experiences.

These experiences may be new and thrilling but they were insubstantial and fleeting. People would be stuck living in a fractured personal space.  This is a symptom of a larger issue addressed in Post-Modernism (mainly by Lyotard); people no longer live with the shared narratives of the past.  These so-called grand narratives are the beliefs that drive cultures.  Some examples are: belief in reason as put forth by the Enlightenment, belief in God, belief in progress and belief in nationalism.

These critical ideas concerning narrative played themselves out in the visual arts through artwork that was fractured or disjointed (Bruce Nauman) and through the expression of private narratives (Matthew Barney). Video art and collage became common.  The video art when being literal sometimes took the form of a documentary or a diary.  It expressed a private narrative with its focus on the microcosmic details of a single life.  The collage art (such as R.B. Kitaj or Jeff Koons) was always open-ended and not given to a single interpretation.  The very form of the collage denies a single narrative.

Many times these grand narratives are present in a culture but go unrecognized.  People believe them and accept them but aren’t necessarily consciously aware of them. To the Post-Modernists, by the time a grand narrative becomes recognized it is beginning to lose its hold over a culture. 

This Post-Modernist proposal is quite a blow to representational painting as this was throughout history the art form that gave visual shape to the grand narratives of a culture. Later, we will look at how some artists have attempted to re-introduce grand narratives in their work.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of the Real

 

What I have been tracing so far in previous posts are two things: the various critical issues confronting art during the 20^th century and the emergence of Post-Modernism. What I want to look at here is the broad landscape of Post-Modernism.

There are many diverse thinkers in Post-Modernism, three in particular (Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard) steadily influenced artists from the 1970s to today.  Derrida analyzed language and turned it back on itself to reveal hidden assumptions and motivations (deconstruction), Lyotard focused on the loss of authority brought on by vast amounts of information available in the marketplace, and Baudrillard asserted what we experience is a simulation brought on by the real undercut by the interchangeability of signs. What each thinker shares is that they all challenged pre-Modern notions of what is real (an objective state of things knowable through investigatory acts such as science). These abstruse ideas filtered into the artworld as investigations of media, advertising, words and images. 

Post-Modern art tends to move away from painting and sculpture and towards photography, video art, text-based art and performance art.  Photography has taken up where Realism left off; namely, by doing social documentation. Video art explores the arena of image and simulation. Text-based art emphasizes words and ideas separated from actions and images. Performance art tries to reclaim the value of human action with antics that often are undermined by their own confusing and meaningless gestures. When painting is practiced narrative with a fixed meaning is often set aside for open-ended collage.

These thinkers and artists see the seemingly constant bombardment of disembodied voices and panoply of images cause us to live a life among manufactured and mediated experiences.  When all we experience are phony pre-made superficial images then what is real?

Photorealism and the Aesthetic of the Lens

Photorealism evolved out of Pop artists’ reliance on photographs but took photo-based painting to a new level.  The Photorealists abandoned irony and overt social commentary preferring a meticulous rendition faithful to the photographic reference.  Complicated street scenes of Manhattan with numerous storefront reflections of skyscrapers, pedestrians and city buses were a common theme.  Also, they reintroduced the figure and portrait as a serious subject matter though they preferred the quotidian character over the mythic or ideal. 

By taking fleeting, complicated or incidental subjects they by necessity became wedded to the photograph.  In doing so, they followed in the footsteps of any artist in the past that used an optical aid or device (such as a mirror, black glass, camera lucida or camera obscura). More specifically, there were artists of the past who used photographs as an aid in making paintings: Gerome and the Orientalists of the late 19^th century France, Modernists from Picasso to Max Ernst to Dali and commercial illustrators of the 20^th century.  Though there was artistic precedence, Photorealists did something new. 

By staying faithful to the photograph, they painted not what the eye saw but rather what the camera saw.  Previous artists used the photograph as a tool to assist with the details of a pose or an aspect of architecture.  It was a way to lend specificity to an artwork that was otherwise based on painting from observation (or at least painting from principles of observation). The Photorealist took the photograph as that which should be painted. In doing so they replaced the search for the truths of Nature with something else, a mechanically produced flat copy of reality.

The Photorealists preferred the aesthetics of the lens to that of sight. What one sees is a complicated coalescing of electromagnetic signals as visual input which has been transferred as chemical information to a brain where it is recognized in consciousness. The camera is dead, fixed and inert where as sight is alive, changing and active.

By preferring the lens over the eye, the Photorealists separated themselves from the unfolding history of representational art.  They removed themselves from the empirical concerns and discussions of previous artists.  No longer did they ask “what are the principles of Nature, what does the eye see and how does one depict it?”.  By choosing an image as the final arbiter over any visual conundrums, they, in a manner unimaginable to previous Realists, successfully excised Nature from painting.

John Currin

In John Currin's latest show at Gagosian Gallery, he has all but abandoned the exploration of the grotesque and the lascivious.  It is a small show with large paintings that look more like Norman Rockwell and feel less like Otto Dix.  With the exception of two large paintings, the work could be done by a contemporary realist painter enthralled with the art of the past.  Indeed Currin has stated his affection for Northern European painting and it is clear, once again,  in the forms of the female figures.

Some of the forms tend towards decorative arcs that are less natural than they are mannerist but it is easy to overlook this as, in this exhibit,  he has shown himself to be a superb painter.  A good example of his talents is in the way he paints drapery;  he works with varying degrees of thickness to allow the paint to advance or recede.   Up close one can make out the warm red ground (imprimatura) and the similarly toned outline that in some cases peeks through the tiny space where one object stops and another starts.  With the figure he tends towards elegant understatement allowing the forms to disappear into lush silvery and creamy tones of paint.  I think he paints legs very well, striking a nice balance between action and rest.

But there is more to a painting than how the paint is applied and in those areas Currin excels, too. The spaces are clearly defined, the illusion is strong.  If the light is inconsistent it is not glaringly so.  The forms tend towards the unnatural but it is only in the most awkward caricature that it is bothersome (fortunately not much on display in this show).

The work holds together as group but unlike other years, most paintings contain a single isolated figure. Currin's strong sense of social commentary or ironic narrative is missing in most and is only clearly seen in three paintings (albeit large with two or three figures).  Currin is a deft postmodernist who sometimes must defend his desire to paint well.  But looking at his work throughout his career, it is clear that Currin is able to pick and choose the best pieces of paintings or periods to from which to borrow.

There are several things from which a traditionally minded painter can learn.   For example, what's nice is that Currin uses these selected elements to construct a world.  Everything exists in a believable setting unlike many Post-Modernists that, say, work with collage.  The collage highlights the artist's selection but by retaining the look of the selected element the work lacks cohesion.  This tendency to construct a world is actually an optimistic endeavor. It shows a way out of Post-Modernism (with its collapse of narrative and refusal of a harmonious whole ) and it is called mythopoesis.

Claudio Bravo

Claudio Bravo's recent exhibition at Marlborough Chelsea shows this masterful painter in top form. The exhibition includes over 50 paintings half of which are large trompe l'oeil paintings of wrapped or wrinkled paper. The remaining are beautifully modeled still lifes of an assortment of objects and three small landscapes.  Unfortunately, his figurative work is missing in this show.

Bravo's career as a gallery painter coincides with the rise of Pop art.   Bravo paints beautifully with a strong emphasis on optical fidelity.  Sometimes the work tends towards a slickness that is hard for me to discern where it originates. The majority of his work avoids difficult themes and tends towards the pleasingly decorative. 

To be fair he has created very large religious or humanist themed paintings in the past that rival those by the best western artist.  Add to this that Bravo is prolific and he strikes me as the type of artist that must always be painting.  It is understandable why he doesn't paint such demanding works daily.  In either case, with his reliance on what his eyes see and his desire to make beautiful paintings, Bravo confronts Post-Modernism head on and denies its hold over him.

The objects in the paintings tend to look expensive and often Bravo places them besides disposable objects such as styro-foam packing blocks.  This lends a touch of whimsy to his work but more than that he has captured, in one particular way, what it looks and feels like to be alive now.  His vision is sharp and clear eyed, there is no irony or ambiguity. He traffics in the beautiful and what is lacking is a sense that he must apologize for it.  With his paintings Bravo participates in the unfolding tradition of western painting and clearly shows that it is a worthwhile endeavor.

Post-Modernism: Crisis Confronting Empiricism

A fundamental tenet of postmodernist theory is that reality is unknowable or, rather, what one experiences is a series of words or ideas (often referred to as signs) that make reference to things in the world. What we know is the sign but not what it points to (i.e. the thing in the world).

This is an old problem in philosophy concerning the limits of knowledge: if what one knows is knowable only through one’s senses then how does one have knowledge of the thing itself (not just a set of properties one perceives)? In fact some philosophers deny that there is a thing itself as we never have any direct experience of it.

 For instance, if I look at my desk I see certain attributes regarding its color and its proportion. If I change position, the color and proportion of the desk change as well due to perspective shifts. The dilemma is what does the desk look like. How can I know what the real desk looks like if all I experience is thousands upon thousands of different views?

This issue was brought to the forefront just as Empiricism was gaining a foothold. Indeed one can see a visual depiction in Cubist painting. Post-modernism, however, took the dilemma to heart and used it as a basis for generating art.

Post-Modernist Painting

Post-Modernism is the term used to describe the dominant trends in visual art today. As a term it is somewhat of a catchall but most critics agree that in the 1970s there was a fundamental shift in art away from the concerns of Modernism. Simply, Modernist artists were interested in creating new forms and, in their embrace of the new, each movement was in a creative dialogue with the past. Not so for Post-Modernists. After Modernism came to an end, there was no tradition to look to for guidance or to push against.

Each dominant movement of Modernism set out to get beyond some aspect of traditional painting: the Fauvist wanted to get beyond the actual color of things; the Cubist wanted to get rid of a stable perspective, the Futurist wanted to get beyond static painting and introduce time into their work, the Dadaist got rid of artistic control and opted for randomness and chance, the Surrealist dismissed rational ordering of our waking life and asserted the primacy of dream images, the Expressionist wanted to be done with subject matter trumping an artist’s response to the subject, the Pop artist got rid of the whole foundation of representational art and the Minimalist wanted to strip away everything but materials and surfaces.

Each Modernist movement chipped away at shared ideas of objectivity as expressed in traditional painting. They did so by exploring the subjective state of the artist. Suddenly there was a shift from accurate depiction of the external world to representing the internal states of the artist. With Modernism how the artist thought, felt, and desired became part of the subject. The notion of a shared perception became suspect and as a result no movement lasted very long.

Post-Modernist art has two main influences: Pop art and Minimalism. From Pop art, Post-Modernist artists inherited the notion of working by means of constructing a narrative by selecting from a pre-designed set of images. From Minimalism, Post-Modernist artists learned that each item is taken at face value and that there is nothing beneath the surface. In short, the Post-Modernist artist is free to trade in superficial images, to construct and combine them in any order and to arrive at any meaning.

Post-Modernism does not look to an objective nature for the source of information (as representational painters in the past may have) nor does it actively rebel against this outlook (as Modern artists did). Post-Modernism has no interest in doing either for to do so would make it part of a tradition. How contemporary representational artists handle the problems of Post-Modernism is the subject for another time.

Minimalism and the End of Modernism

Minimalism was an art movement that was contemporaneous with Pop art and was one of two (the other being Pop art) major influences on Post-Modern visual art.  Through its consistent stripping away of subject, pictorial illusion and artistic expression, Minimalism signaled the end of Modernism.

Coming after Abstract Expressionism, what the Minimalists inherited from the Abstract Expressionists was the idea of the reduction of subject and pictorial space to events on a surface.  But this is all they took away. Instead of expression, the Minimalist practiced an art of no-expression.  Instead of gestural marks, the Minimalist went for hard edge surfaces.  Instead of the symbolic, the Minimalist favored the literal.  In short, to the Minimalist a black square of paint on a canvas was simply that a black square of paint on a canvas.

If anything the Minimalists thought that the AbEx painters weren’t consistent in their approach. To them the AbEx artists were caught up in expression, injecting the subject of self-expression where there ought to be none. Jackson Pollock famously remarked, “that I am nature” when he was criticized for no longer painting nature.   Ad Reinhardt, an Abstract Expressionist that led the way to Minimalism, said, “The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."

What we have with Minimalism is the logical conclusion of what was started by the Abstract Expressionism, a complete break from the past.  Minimalism with its desire for reduction turned away from both illusionistic and expressive painting with nature as its source and guide.  All that was left was the physical presence of the artist’s material. 

The main problem with Minimalism was to determine what shape would the work take.  This would be answered literally.  Artistic freedom was in the selection of the shape of the work and many artists played with geometry.  Some painted only regular geometric shapes on canvases where as others worked on non-traditional shaped canvases (both regular and irregular geometric shapes) and while others began to paint three dimensionally by extending their shapes into space. This last tendency blurred the line between categorical distinctions of drawing, painting and sculpture favored by Modern artist.

If I imagine a home decorating store with all of its cans of paint, I can see the problem of Minimalism.  If all one has are materials then what is to guide one in the creative act?  Without a plan, how does one know what can of paint to purchase and for what purpose?  If the Minimalist were interested in stripping away aspects of art than why is it that they left artistic selection?  Several musical composers followed this train of thought and composed mathematically.  This way there was a plan, the music was determined without the influence of the composer. Just as Minimalism concluded Modern art, it gave rise to Post-Modernism.  It seems that Post-Modernism was a fait accompli as Minimalism simply left too much unresolved.  We shall see how one of the foundational problems of Post Modernism, (namely, out of many equally valued choices, how does an artist select what to work with and what to do) plays itself out.

Warhol and French Realism

Andy Warhol, "Last Supper", 1986

 

Andy Warhol more than any artist helped shape the visual culture of post-World War II America. Often considered a Pop artist, I wanted to look at Warhol as a representational artist and to see how he changed American art.  I believe Warhol completely changed the ideological foundation of representational art from operating under the influence of French agrarianism (hand and land) to that of American capitalism (machine and money).

Pop art as a movement came along after Abstract Expressionism.  The Abstract Expressionists broke with artists of the past by working with both a personal symbolism and by dismissing the notion of looking at nature.  Pop art contained objects, subject matter, figures and portraits.  It was a representational art that had all of the aspects of art that the Abstract Expressionist painters wanted to leave behind. 

Warhol was trained as a traditional illustrator and his work in the 1950s resembles the shaky pen and ink linear style of Ben Shahn, a leading artist of the previous generation of Social Realists. This linear style has many artistic precedences and can be seen in the work of the French Neo-Classicist Ingres or the British Classical draftsman John Flaxman.  Warhol from his earliest days as an illustration student was an heir to a tradition of representational art and, unlike Abstract Expressionism,  was one that remained fascinated by image making and representation.


Before we continue, it’s important to consider the foundational ideas of representational art for a moment.

In the late nineteenth century most professional American artist were trained in France.  The French artists and teachers at that time taught a Romantic Realism (Gerome), Classical Realism (Bougereau), Naturalism (Breton) or, to a lesser extent, Impressionism.  Each movement had its origins in the French Realist movement of the 1850s (notable examples are Courbet and Millet).  Arguably mid-century French Realism was the strongest influence on early twentieth century representational American art.

There were three main principles of French Realism:

1.)   indebted to the philosophical movement of empiricism, these artists were keen to depict what could be seen by one’s eyes;

2.)   they were influenced by Socialism and were concerned for the poor over that of a growing wealthy class; and

3.)   they romanticized an agrarian lifestyle that stood in strong contrast to the newly developing industrialized world. 

Warhol broke with each of these and replaced it with a new form of representational art that was ahistorical and non-traditional.  We’ll take a look at each in turn.

Warhol used silk screening as a method of image production and though his work was hand made, it wasn’t made from scratch. Rather, Warhol made aesthetic selections from a set of pre-designed objects; he selected photos of items or products, already in the market place.  His personal style and resulting individualism were due to recombining existing elements in a unique way.  By contrast, the French Realists had a firm belief in objective observation and full faith in their ability to accurately depict what they saw.  They were not concerned with aesthetic choices as an end in itself.  They lived at a time when they believed that reality was knowable and it probably never crossed their minds to be interested in a system of objects and signs from which reality is selected and constructed.

Warhol depicted everyday objects that were newly available to the consumer.  Their mass produced uniformity ensured that they were the same regardless of the income level of the purchaser.  Additionally, Warhol worked with popular imagery of glamorous stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Elvis Presley.  These images represented a type of symbolic American royalty. Their glamour is what inspired awe from others and set theses stars apart from everyone else.  The French Realists wanted to paint what they saw and what they saw was a disparity between the wealthy class and the peasant class. They were concerned with depicting a social condition of poverty not consumerism. They chose to show the struggles of the peasant class depicting them as individuals, not symbols, whose lives were shaped by long hours of work. Their paintings were made as a criticism against the encroaching ideas of the new enterprising industrialists.

Warhol desired to remove the evidence of the handmade from his work and to emulate the machine. Warhol’s machine minded outlook was in direct opposition to the rustic aesthetic of the French Realist. The French Realist depicted laborers working with their hands and felt there was dignity to manual labor.  Warhol often worked with serialization and repetition to foreground the mass produced aspect of products.  Mass production allowed large profits to be accrued through fast and efficient productivity. Mass production of such a large scale was only possible due to the use of machines in industry.  The French Realists depicted a more deeply textured and less uniform lifestyle dependent on manual, not machine, labor. 

Though in some ways I have sympathy with the French Realists I cannot deny that their worldview doesn’t quite fit in with America as it is now.  Part of the issue is that Americans in the late 20th Century moved away from a country lifestyle to that of a city lifestyle.  Family farms were sold off to developers of shopping malls or suburban homes and people worked for companies. As the nation became a service economy, shifting away from a manufacturing based economy, people stopped working with their hands.  With more leisure time, people sought out new forms of entertainment.  The country became enamored with ever changing popular ephemera and was less interested in the solemnity of paintings of peasant farmers.

In summation, by breaking with art derived from a French Realist tradition, Warhol filled the void with: subjective selection (not objectivity and empiricism), consumerism and awe for the symbolically glamorous (not socialism and sympathy with individual peasants) and a machine-made aesthetic (not hand-made).  This was a shift from what an individual’s eye could see about the natural world to what the advertiser’s camera caught about the merchandizing world. It was a triumph of a new American capitalism over the old world French agrarianism. 

As we continue to live in a Warholian world it is not easy to see how the old world sentiments could reappear in painting without looking like kitsch art, sentimental romanticism or insubstantial decoration.  This is the difficult problem that traditionally minded representational artists of today must confront.

It is interesting to note that Warhol was a lifelong Catholic, attending Mass several times a week.  However, religious subjects and themes rarely made it into his art because he felt that his religious life should remain private.  Given Warhol’s influence it is fun to speculate on how the art world would be different (and what representational artists would have inherited) if he created and publicly released religious art throughout his career.

An interesting exhibition of his more than 60 Last Supper images was on display from 1999-2001 at the Guggenheim Museum Soho. You may read more about it here: http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/warhol/

Larry Rivers and Return of the Figure

Larry Rivers Detail of "O'hara with Boots on", 1954, NY Times photos

Larry Rivers (1923-2002) was an artist whose work falls between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Coming of age among jazz musicians and beat poets, Rivers is characterized as having a bold and frenetic personality.  Perhaps due to his energy, it is difficult to easily summarize Rivers' body of work as it fits into many categories or sometimes none at all.  He worked on large historical paintings that were in some ways a pastiche of the past, filmed television documentaries, painted groundbreaking still lifes of everyday objects, and completed a series of lithographs which included text by poet Frank O’hara.  Additionally, Rivers painted nudes and portraits, made sculptures, acted in films and designed sets and costumes for opera.  While his late paintings appear to me garish, flat and impersonal, his work from the 1950s is interesting and it is what I want to consider in this post.  

    

In the 1950s, He had been a student of Hans Hoffman but abandoned a completely abstract style.  Rivers being ahead of fashion, began to include figures and narrative into his paintings. A large painting entitled “George Washington crossing the Delaware” from 1953 is indicative of his work at this time. It is at once semi-abstract and semi-representational and thus difficult to describe. A comparison to DeKooning’s series of Women paintings completed at the same time is helpful. 

DeKooning’s work is full of furious paint marks that seem to try to eradicate the figurative elements that keep popping up on the canvas. In this way, DeKooning was moving towards abstraction, trying to exorcise the figurative artistic training of his youth. However, Rivers’ work looks as if a fog that having not yet lifted obscures the visual tableau.  It seems that at any moment the forms will become more clear and precise and certainly less abstract. It is interesting to note that the painting  "George Washington Crossing the Delaware" was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York very soon after it was completed.       

Rivers’ paintings of the 1950s often depicted his friend the poet Frank O’hara or his mother-in-law in the nude. These works are at the same time scrutinizing and intimate and harken back to an old tradition.  In some he paints with only black and white while in others he paints with a limited palette reminiscent of past masters.  He has a somewhat flattened style but through numerous brushstrokes he achieves volume.  Perhaps it was a result of lack of training but his volumes are never exactingly specific.  His work appears more sincere than accurate.     

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the paintings become looser and he develops a simpler style. In the past, this type of work would have been considered a sketch or an etude.  However, it is one of the aspects of 20th century painting to take something not fully formed and consider it a finished work. They are not without charm but in many cases he uses the image as a foil for larger ideas about painting.  He adds text alongside the image both as a playful descriptor as well as flattening decorative element.  Later, perhaps out of an impulse for the simple, he moved into collage and then silk-screening.  These works are no longer paintings but Rivers uses historical figures and narrative elements more freely.  Away from the nude, Rivers was able to explore more theatrical scenarios. In some he uses everyday objects (such as flags or Camel cigarette packs) that resonated with Pop artists.

There are two fundamental problems of post-World War II American painting: how to show that painting figures is worthwhile and how to create a narrative work that resonates with viewers.  This apparently is difficult to resolve, as there is always the issue of time intensive training.  Moreover the problem is exacerbated by the lack of a fundamental uniting mythos.       

Larry Rivers seems to have gotten at the problems outlined above in his own way by using a divide and conquer method.  First he worked with the figure, painting from observation and then he worked with complicated narrative subjects by any means available.  Unfortunately, it was a highly idiosyncratic method, too personal and difficult for younger artist to build upon.  His contribution, however, was to Pop art and the symbols the artists used.  In many ways, the ideas expressed in Pop art are the closest we, as a culture, come to having a shared set of beliefs.

 

In 2008, a major exhibition of works from Rivers’ early years, 1952-66, was held at Guild Hall in East Hampton.  Follow the link to a good article about it:

http://www.hamptons.com/detail.php?articleID=455

1950s and American Neo-dadaism

In recent posts I have been interested in looking at the development of American painting immediately before and after World War II.  Although there were numerous artists working in a variety of styles, Abstract Expressionism has come to dominate the history of this period. What I would like to look at briefly in this post is a style called Neo-Dada.

Neo-Dadaism is often looked at as a transition style between the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and the Pop artists of the 1960s.  Neo-Dadaism takes its name from the Dada art movement which came about in Europe around the time of World War I. Like its namesake, Neo-Dadaism was characterized by playfully extreme insouciance. Taking Modern art as its target for folly and criticism, Neo-Dadaist quickly set about to undo what the Abstract Expressionists had created.  Abstract Expressionist artists were very interested in putting to rest the need for a subject matter in art.  However, the neo-dadaist such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns slyly introduced it back.

Rauschenberg was wildly creative in comparison to the more cerebral Johns and he set about dismantling the venerated categories of distinction held by Modern art; namely, drawing, painting and sculpture.  By making three-dimensional artworks of found objects that were assembled and subsequently painted by him, Rauschenberg dispensed with two long held beliefs of Modernism; namely that painting occurs on canvas and that the painted image is flat.

Heading off in a different direction, Johns began working with familiar symbols such as maps, targets and flags.  In doing so he re-introduced subject matter but also played with notions of representation and objecthood.  Simply put his painting of a flag is simultaneously a painting (a representation of a flag) and a flag (an actual object).  Moreover, Johns chose mundane objects that were often overlooked and elevated them to high art.  In so doing he attacked the notion of high art as established by Modernism.  By placing these innocuous objects next to Abstract Expressionist paintings, the grand gestures of the latter began to look silly.

I find it ironic that a painting of an American flag could take the steam out of Abstract Expressionism (an art form that was strongly influenced by European art). The Neo-Dadaist were not interested in tradition but rather in doing something new. They didn’t look back to pre-Modern European art at all.  Their work was a critique of modernism and in dismantling modern art they had nothing to offer to replace it.  Thus Neo-Dadaism was unsustainable as a cohesive movement.  Perhaps this is why many of the artists went their separate ways pursuing disparate and highly individual albeit ahistorical styles.

By the end of the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop art, which relied heavily on representing objects of all kinds. By exploring the many layers of subject matter that occurred when diverse objects were suddenly juxtaposed, Pop art signaled the end of Abstract Expressionism and more than any other movement continues to shape American painting today.

Fairfield Porter and American Painting

Fairfield Porter, "Velazquez Study", 1974

 

Fairfield Porter is a singularly unique American artist whose work connects the art of 19^th century painters known as the Nabis with post-World War II figurative American painting. Born into a wealthy Midwestern family and educated at Harvard, Porter was at times a host to many younger American painters, an art critic, a poet and a troubled artist-hermit. He struggled through the 1930s to find his way with paint but came into his own in the 1950s.  His figurative work was ascending just as the critical attention was quickly turning away from it.  Inspired to take up figurative work by comments made by the Abstract Expressionists proponent and critic Clement Greenberg, Porter placed himself squarely within the New York School of art.

Porter came about when the figure and representational painting were being directly challenged as a viable artistic activity. His subjects were thought of as having the look and feel of a comfortable New England bourgeois lifestyle.  But Porter didn’t see it that way.  Rather, he chose the subjects because they were easy, that is, the views of Maine he painted were those that he saw just out his door.   In this way he was a pragmatist not an old guard reactionary.

Porter suggested that he was interested in the process of painting and not the subject.  Process is a broad term that encompasses the manner an artist paints as well as his interest in his own activity. For Porter, painting was "the connection between yourself and everything ... you connect yourself to everything which includes yourself”. I have sympathy with this sentiment and I would refer to this as a painting practice whose goal is the further realization of one’s subjective state in paint.

Looking at Porter’s work, I can see the delight in abstract patterning that he must have picked up on in the paintings of the Nabis as well as the abstract painters in his social circle. His painting seems simple and easy but I am doubtful that this was the case. Often graphic clarity and well-positioned tones do not easily come into existence and Porter’s years of struggle bear this out.

Currently, what is of interest to me about Porter is that he highlights a particular type of artist cut off from a European artistic tradition of observation. That is, I believe, many artists of the 20^th Century were culturally cut off from investigating the visual field as a subject.  After Cezanne and the School of Paris, artists began to see painting as a series of artistic choices. One no longer practiced painting with an open receptive attitude asking questions like “is this brush mark on the canvas the exact shape that I see?”.  Rather the artist began to impose his own views about the world on the canvas stating “this is the shape I want it to be”. Unfortunately, this modern belief establishes a fundamental separation between the artist and the principles of the natural world leaving one to push paint around guided by artistic principles alone.

I have come to see Porter as endeavoring to understand the abstract underpinnings that belie a very specific and detailed painting practice that has the honest  observation of nature at its core.  Interestingly, Porter long believed that Velazquez was the greatest of all painters of the past.  He said, "[Velázquez] leaves things alone . . . . It isn't that he copies nature, but he doesn't impose himself upon it. He is open to it rather than wanting to twist it . . . and he also knows when it's unimportant to pay attention."    In terms of openness to the visual field and sensitivity to human form I would agree.

Quotes in this post come from a wonderful article by Klaus Ottman called "An Unfinished Quality": Fairfield Porter's Creative Process”.  The essay was authored to coincide with an exhibition of Fairfield Porter at the Parrish Art Museum April 11- June 13, 2010.

 You may view Klauss Ottman’s article here: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/9aa/9aa336.htm

You may view an archive of Porter’s work at the Parrish Museum here: http://www.parrishart.org/parrish.asp?id=130

Painting Demo: Green Heirloom Tomato

Dennis Cheaney "Green Heirloom Tomato" , 2010, 4"x4"

There are numerous ways to paint.  For my 4 inch x 4 inch paintings I like to work alla prima on a white support (oil-primed linen adhered to board).  Here is a seven step procedural outline on the creation of my painting.

Step 1:  Make a quick drawing with burnt umber and mineral spirits.

As I was composing on the canvas, I had to discover what size and placement of the tomato I liked. Notice that the tomato was drawn in twice.  The larger outline filled the panel quite nicely but didn't leave room for the folds of the drapery.  Later, however,  the folds were removed.

Step 2:  Put in the darks and cover up the white of the canvas.

It is difficult to see all the values and colors against a white canvas.  It is helpful to get rid of the problem  by quickly filling in the background and foreground.

Notice that the paint sometimes overlaps the contours of the tomato.  With alla prima painting, I like to rediscover the contours by shaping the wet paint.

Step 3:  Mass in the forms of the tomato.

Start with the darks and progressively add lighter mixtures. The tomato in nature is rounded and the painting should clearly show the general gradation on a rounded form.

The paint is opaque.   I like to have enough paint on the canvas to cover an area as well as a little extra.  This extra quantity of paint allows itself to be pushed around on the canvas and reshaped as needed.

Step 4:  Complete the mass-in and reshape the contour.

The tomato has been completely massed-in and the paint reshaped in order to better express the  tomato's surface.  The contour has been more clearly defined.

The end result is that the paint layer of the tomato is a little rounder and smoother than it was in the previous step. 

Step 5: Reshape the background and foreground.

The paint of the background drapery has been reshaped and in the process the paint ridges have become less prominent.

The smaller forms of the foreground, which appear as little bits of light and color, are put into the wet paint.

Step 6: Place in the smaller forms of the tomato.

The small forms of the tomato are light and give extra specificity to the tomato's form.  The highlights are placed in.  They appear sharper and lighter than the other parts of the tomato.

I felt that the background drapery distracted from the tomato.   I readjusted the still life arrangement and brushed out the background paint to match up with the light effect on the new still life.

Step 7:  Place in the smaller forms and specific details.

This is the final stage. I placed in the remaining highlights around the tomato.  I added the smaller forms and details of the stem and its leaves.

Once the whole thing was painted, I was able to adjust the wet paint to appear as sharp or as subtle as what I was looking at.

This is my standard process and it took about four hours.

Socialist Realism: The Style of Soviet Art

Vera Mukhina "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman", 1937

I am interested in looking at the origins of American art and tracing the varieties of realism and its critical reception through the 20th Century.  In previous posts I looked at three dominant art movements in the United States during the 1930s:  Regionalism, Social Realism and Abstract Expressionism.   In this post, I wanted to briefly explore the government approved style of art in the Soviet Union that existed alongside these three art movements in America.

From the early 1930s-1950s, Socialist Realism was the form of art that flourished under the approval of the Soviet Government. It was a state sponsored artform in which the art was used as a tool to educate the people about the benefits of Communism. Socialist Realism took as its themes the worker, the government bureaucrat or the military man, commemorating each as a hero. A specific genre of celebrating the cult of personality of Stalin was particularly favored.

Coinciding with the rule of Stalin, Socialist Realism was fashioned to be a deliberate turning away from the excesses of Modern art.  Interestingly, during the Russian Revolution of 1917 some party officials saw the then new Modern art as sympathetic to their goals.  The Bolshevik and the Constructivist artists were together breaking with the old bourgeois culture. By 1918, the old style academies were shut down by the new government's educational and cultural minister.  However, after a debate during the 1920s among the party officials about the purpose of art, it was decided that the complexities of modernism were to be replaced with a simpler, more proletariat-friendly art.  This ended the period of post-revolution art (also called Heroic art) and ushered in the new Soviet art, Socialist Realism

For its clear and easily understood manner, a representational style was favored. In painting, realism was narrowly proscribed to be the sympathetic depiction of the daily reality of the worker and anything that showed the unpleasantness of Communism was to be avoided. Often landscape paintings depicted abundant fields or industrial subjects that showed the efficiency of the Soviet economy.  In sculpture, Socialist Realism looked back to the severe style of Republican Rome and depicted young and strong figures fresh from work, tools held high above their heads.  

The forms of Socialist Realism were inorganic, rigid and inflexible. As a style, what it lacked in human warmth, it more than made up for in powerful presentation, especially the public sculpture. As with all totalitarian art, one could tell that people were to be sacrificed on the altar of government plans.

Realism as an art movement has always had socialist leanings.  From its inception in mid-nineteenth century France, there was a tendency of realist artists (such as Courbet and Millet) to avoid subjects that appealed to the ease and comfort of an aristocratic culture.  Foregoing depictions of sitters in well-appointed apartments, the Realists artist showed people at work. Often the artists celebrated a return to nature and deliberately choose subjects that showed evidence of a dignified albeit hard life born out through manual labor.

An interesting and beautifully illustrated book published in 1998 called Socialist Realist Painting shows Socialist Realism in its full and proper context.  The author Matthew Brown traces the origins of Socialist Realism prior to the Russian Revolution and well beyond the death of Stalin when Modern art was allowed into the nation. Mr. Brown does a wonderful task in revealing the paintings that were produced that didn’t fit into the approved style.  Many of them are great works filled with empathy and humanity that somehow survived destruction by government censors.
  
One of the strawman arguments that  Modern art and Post Modern art aficionados have put forth is that figurative work (especially that inspired by Classicism) is fascist.  It seems to me just as people may go about doing many things (such as joining any political party and choosing to do good or bad), that figurative art may do many different things.  It may commemorate great military battles,  depict important religious events, celebrate the human in action or capture the fey expression of  a society debutante.  What was interesting to me as each art movement vied for cultural dominance in the United States was that the artist was always free to do and depict what he desired.  This was true then as it is  now.  Sadly, it wasn't the case for the artist in the Soviet Union.