Francis V. O'Connor

Index
(Find by Searching Key Word. Most recent at top)

27. Will Barnet at 100. Review of his Retrospective at the National Academy Museum, through December 31, 2011.
(November 20, 2011)

26. Willem De Kooning, Abstract Expressionism, and the Grip of the Cubist Grid. Review of his Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, through January 9, 2012.
(November 20, 2011)

25. Birds of Fire - September 11, 2001 - A Prophetic Elegy
Introduction - GO TO “Writing Projects” in Menu for full text of the poem
(September 1, 2011)

24. The Exceptional: A Vocabulary
(September 1, 2011)

23. Lucretius and the Introverted Life
(September 1, 2011

22. Nature and Unnatural Space
(September 1, 2011)

21. An introduction to a Series of Lectures on the Connoisseurship of Abstract Painting and Sculpture
(May 20, 2011)

20. Kazimir Malevich and his Putative Spawn
(May 20, 2011)

19. Urban Explosions — Here and Abroad
(May 20, 2011)

18. Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) and the Redefinition of Aesthetics
(February 22, 2011)

17. Doubts About The National Debt
(February 1, 2011)

16. The Tucson Atrocity
(January 15, 2011)

15. Carl Gustav Jung as an Artist in the Red Book
(December 8, 2010)

14. High and Low Culture and Tea Party Politics
(December 8, 2010)

13. John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 22, 2010 to January 9, 2011) (December 8, 2010)

12. Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at the Museum of Modern Art (October 3, 2010 to April 26, 2011) + Abstract Expressionist New York: Ideas Not Theories: Artists and The Club, 1942- 1962 (October 3, 2010 to February 28, 2011) + Abstract Expressionist New York: Rock Paper Scissors (October 3, 2010 to February 28, 2011)
(December 8, 2010)

11. Why I Do Not Like Matisse (At MoMA through October 2110)
(August 15, 2010)

10. Charles Burchfield's Watercolors and Drawings at the Whitney Museum (June through October 17, 2010)
(July 1, 2010)

9. The Publication of The Mural in America
(March 17, 2010)

8. Charles Seliger (1926-2009): An Appreciation
(October 3, 2009)

7. New Archetypes
(September 15, 2009)

6. Dreamwork: An Exhibition
(May 12, 2009)

5. The Emancipation of Abraham Lincoln
(May 1, 2009)

4. A New-Found Portrait of Shakespeare
(March 15, 2009)

3. The Pantheism of Gerard Manley Hopkins
(March 6, 2009)

2. Our Poet-In-Chief
(January 20, 2009)

1. What Happened to O’Connor’s Page?
(November 2008)

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(November 20, 2011)
27. Will Barnet at 100. Review of his Retrospective at the National Academy Museum, through December 31, 2011.

When you are one hundred years old, and have been creating works of art since the age of twelve, doing the first retrospective survey of your life’s output is a formidable task. Organized by National Academy Museum’s Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Bruce Weber, let me say unequivocally, that it is one of the best retrospectives of an artist I have ever seen. Granting that so ancient and artist deserves a big show, this exhibited his life’s work from strength to strength — nothing in any way offended the eye — and you came away from a painter who never swerved from his own direction for the current fashion, impressed with the aesthetic and expressive power of his achievement.

His earliest creations were in the paneled gallery overlooking 5th Avenue. Here The Wheelbarrow (1935), with an ax in it and a shovel leaning against it, displayed literally everything you would want to know about labor — and the worker at rest. It is one of the most expressive “social realist” paintings I have ever seen. Nearby were a series of early figurative works strongly influenced by Cubism that were all colorful and meticulously composed.

Down from there was a procession of works from the late 1940s to today hung along the hall passing the elevator, and around into the second floor’s large gallery. Barnet had no “signature” style --- except that his early work as a printmaker impressed on him that primacy of the “plane,” and he has kept to that ideal of flatness as the basis for an abstract art that handily includes figurative elements — as in Three Chairs (1991-92).

The show was one masterpiece after another — most with figures; many pure geometric abstractions most of which escaped the cubist grid of some of his very early work— such as Enclosure (1962-2003), to demonstrate for once and all that the right angle is a cliché. Here is an artist that understands the old academic idea of “design,” and practices it with a modern flair that puts his many contemporaries, struggling to get the surface to “work,” to shame. The old National Academy of Design’s present museum has, with this splendid exhibition of Will Barnet’s century of achievement, redeemed any residual disdain for the tradition that founded it.

(November 20, 2011)
26. Willem De Kooning, Abstract Expressionism, and the Grip of the Cubist Grid. Review of his Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, through January 9, 2012.

There has been a great deal of interest recently in Abstract Expressionism, probably the most important movement in American visual art in the second half of the last century. [See below at Blog 12 for review of MoMA’s three-part exhibition of Abstract Expressionism in 2010-11.] Among the top-tier of its members was Willem De Kooning (1905-1997), although in respect to critical acclaim he tended to attract the eye of Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess more than Clement Greenberg. Thereafter, he has been ignored except for press reviews of his shows, some superb scholarship about his early life and artistic training in the Netherlands by Dr. Judith Wolfe, and Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s biography, De Kooning: An American Master (Knoph 2004.)

MoMA’s current retrospective was greeted by a review by Peter Schjeldahl in the The New Yorker, that declared De Kooning was “the greatest of American painters, and lesser only to Picasso and Matisse among all artists of the twentieth century.” [September 26, 2011, p. 122.] The spectacle of this exhibition proves this rash assessment errant hyperbole.

There are two ways of looking at an exhibition. The first presents the art to the eye as it is, and you react to it as it is — as I shall here. The second is to come to the art with a head full of ideas about the history of painting going back to the Renaissance, and describe it accordingly as it ought to be. The problem here is compounded by De Kooning having been by far the best trained artist to come to New York during the era of Abstract Expressionism. But that he is as outstanding as Schjeldahl claims, or can even be ranked first among the artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement however generously extended, is untenable. Faced with the achievements of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, Arshile Gorky and Philip Guston, De Kooning is utterly eclipsed.

Walking through the current retrospective at MoMA, organized by John Elderfield, MoMA’s Chief Curator Emeritus, one is impressed by five things.

The first is the utter mediocrity of the early works, which seem somehow washed out — especially the figurative items, and oddly groping in respect to the abstractions. One thinks of the awkwardness of Arshile Gorky’s early work. But here there is not a dependency on the School of Paris, but an inability to place a figure in a plausible space. Deliberately left out of the show are a group of standing men from the about 1938 that express the isolation and desperation of the individual caught up in the Depression. These works could well be called “social realist,” but one must make do with a bored Woman Sitting (1943-44) whose psychological isolation and bleak surroundings are typical of all these earlier works. As for the abstractions, Pink Landscape (c.1938) is typical arrangement of unfocused forms

Second, works such as Attic (1949) and Excavation (1950), catch the eye, while the smaller works that lead up to them do not. By the late 1940s there are a number of black and white abstractions with figurative elements that begin to coalesce into something new. Here, Black Untitled (1948) stands out. But they are few and seem to be, as Thomas Hess calls them, “negative"-like renderings of earlier formal relocations of motifs already integrated into the two large paintings already mentioned, like Excavation.

Third, with the Woman Series, (c. 1949-1953). we find ourselves in terra incognita. These are probably De Kooning’s most famous paintings — and his ugliest They are ugly as paintings in respect to their facture; they are ugly as figurative images. One, of course, is supposed to stop there, and say along with the artist and others, something bland about “joking” or “satire.” But when faced with psychopathology, it ought to be named as such — especially if joking suggests a defense, and satire implies a moral judgment.. De Kooning was well known as a ladies man. But the paintings in which he is depicting the object of his affection, are just ugly cartoons. You can free-associate with old girlfriends, if you like. Or think of that harridan splayed out in that early Pollock painting of his family romance [JPCR, 1978, Vol. I, No. 10, c. 1930-33; O’Connor, MoMA exh. cat. 1967, p. 19] — which De Kooning probably never saw. But whatever the sources in life and art, or in artists’ similar reactions to female agression, these works are an ugly anomaly, both revealing and revolting.

Here, it may be useful to quote a psychiatrist, writing about de Kooning, on the many faces of women:

One has simply to enumerate the various roles of women in order to arrive at an aggregate of contradictions, yearnings, and fears. Woman has, for example, been depicted as pneumatic, warm, soft, all-nurturing receptacle; a bewitching, beguiling, treacherous, fickle, seductress; a fearsome, demonic, omnivorous harridan; and an atavistic, primordial incubator of life. De Kooning’s figures are generally considered as demonic, erotic, mythical; in short an imago. The ladies, or rather the female idols, express the artist’s, and man’s, unconscious fantasy which of course contains the ambivalent aspects of wish and fear. . . .In the fifties, De Kooning portrayed a demonic, primordial female. In the sixties he seems to think that he has humiliated and subjugated her. Unknowingly he reveals this is not at all the case. Undoubtedly De Kooning thinks he has won; predictably De Kooning reveals that unconsciously he suspects that the lady has won.
[Dr. Eric A Baum, “De Kooning’s Woman, I through IV, and Others,” Department of Psychiatry, Harvard University, private communication to author, Summer 1967.]

I think Dr. Baum makes a number of important points here that explain the extreme tensions and ambivalences these paintings express. In his well-researched essay on their creation, he makes no attempt to diagnose a living person, but he reveals the matrix of pressures on any psyche confronting the female as Do Kooning openly does in his works. They also support my view that these works are, in retrospective, pathological.

Indeed, four eighty inch tall works of c. 1964-65, reiterate the Woman series in their way, and while not ugly, their looming, dominating presence and nervous facture only underscore what Dr. Baum has to say about the sixties.

Thereafter, and fourth, a number of large abstractions that follow from the late 1950s to the 1970s and beyond more or less work, and a few are quite striking. Among these would be Gotham News (1955), Bolton Landing (1957), Door to the River (1960), Untitled (1977 with strong blues), Untitled VIII (1977) and Merritt Parkway (1979), stand out. Alas, they are surrounded by any number of large works that do not — that display haphazard slashing and framing of colors that call to question the standards of selection prevailing in this exhibition.

There is also a display of De Kooning’s sculptures from the early 1970s — both standing figures and small works spread out in a vitrine. They are cast in bronze and patined black. They look like what would happen to a Knight in Shining Armor defeated and melted by a fire-belching dragon. The Woman paintings were just ugly, these sculptures are horrifying. De Kooning liked to be photographed with the Clamdigger (1972). Perhaps this is another aspect of his conflict with himself over the female — or another joke turned against himself. But these charred, writhing figures, and the sprawl of the smaller, experimental ones (some of which look like body parts), are disturbing, and in many ways sadder than the distress of paint lining the galleries around them.

Fifth, in the final decades of his life, his work is a fine illustration of Kenneth Clark’s famous essay “The Artist Grows Old” [in Moments of Vision, Harper & Row, 1981, in which De Kooning’s work grows simpler and more transparent. Here that is manifest — indeed, some of the works seem incomplete. The last group of these, with which the show concludes, seems randomly selected; a stronger visual case for them was made in MoMA’s show of the late paintings of the 1980s in 1997. Here they just resemble the depletion of energy and ability all around the viewer, and constitute a sad ending for a long and not unsuccessful — if problematic — career.

Finally, there is something to be said about De Kooning’s influence as an artist. His big abstractions after the Woman interlude, which contained a number of strong paintings, provided permission to paint abstractly for a wide range of artists who could not deal with the self-portraying aesthetic of the true Abstract Expressionists,.

Let me here quote what I said in my review of MoMA’s Abstract Expressionist exhibit that closed early this year [See Blog 12]:

What the Abstract Expressionists offered was a new expressionism, different from the coruscating imagery and blunt color of German Expressionism. This was because it evoked its vision through facture rather than using facture to heighten the illustration of realistic details of social, political, and moral dictates. Its aesthetic power was its capacity to set up an inner dialogue with the viewer’s reactions to the artist’s medium and manner, and how it affected the eye and mind. It is the ultimate development of the “painterly” tradition that goes back to Rubens and Hals, and something utterly unique in the history of American art. Put another way, Abstract Expressionism is about paint, and all the ways it can reveal what cannot otherwise be seen.

You many wonder if this does not contradict my reaction to so much in the retrospective here being reviewed. From the Woman paintings on, there is an overflowing abundance of vigorously-applied paint — BUT — it does not reveal anything but its own gesture. The overall impression here in De Kooning is not of the facture being the subject of the work — but of the facture hunting for artistic coherence and stopping when it was problematically achieved. This does not extend, as Schjeldah would have it, the art of painting from the Renaissance, it simply impedes it, homogenizes it, sort of socializes it, by offering up the struggle to make the painting “work” the ideal of painting.

There were many takers for this out — this escape from a seemingly impossible standard. These were (and alas still are in succeeding generations of artists), those who selected out from De Kooning’s facture and designs what I shall call the “cubist grid.” That is, they cannot avoid accommodating the edge of their rectangles with references to more or less stabilizing geometric filler. Indeed, walking through the current retrospective, I was constantly aware of the many incursions of right angles and rectangles, either set out with a ruler, or approximated by brush strokes, or filled in with colors, that inhabit De Kooning’s works. One of his famous paintings, Pink Angels (c. 1945), has a perfect little square at bottom right, and a lot of right angles inscribed throughout. Beyond that, many of the Woman paintings themselves have right angles around them, as do almost all big abstractions in later decades. whatever their quality.

In this respect, De Kooning, along with Hans Hofmann, inspired a number of his contemporaries — and later the second generation of his movement — in a dependence on the grip of the grid. One thinks of James Brooks, Georgio Cavalon, Herman Cherry, John Ferren, Perl Fine, Gertrude Greene, Grace Hartigan, John Little, Conrad Marca-Relli, John Opper, Melville Price, Stephen Pace, Jack Roth, Theodore Stamos. These are all estimable, honorable painters, who have very little to “say” artistically that is new, exceptional, or numinous. They simply could not shake off the allure of a rectangle’s edge, and the compulsive need to echo seductively stabilizing right angles in their works. But they all bury themselves in their New York Times obits as “Abstract Expressionists,” by virtue of De Kooning struggles — not of his betters’ confident celebrations of self.


(September 1, 2011)
25. Birds Of Fire: September 11, 2001 – A Prophetic Elegy

Introduction
This long elegy was prompted by the calamity at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It was written over the six months following, and published by Albert Dépas, in his magazine, Creative Insight (Summer 2002). Now that we are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the event, I thought it apt to republish it here — since it still makes its points, especially those about the tragic conflicts we face between religions zealots, terrorists and those in quest of democracy.

Indeed, these last years have seen a relentless struggle between religious fanaticism and secular rebellions against tyrants. People need meaning in their lives, and there are many who are unwilling to give up a certainty they deeply believe in. They are threatened — and they act to defend themselves, innocent within their beliefs, criminals to their victims.

The “great chain of being” that the distinguished humanist, Professor Arthur O. Lovejoy of the Johns Hopkins University, saw originating in Platonism and continuing up through the early 20th century, is now broken. Its central theory of a Western civilization based on ideals of the good, their continuity in history, and their institutional realizations, administered on a presumption of absolute rationality, is now shattered — as he came to realize they would be.

Indeed, his own elegy on that idea took this form:
The minds...of the great religious teachers have...been engaged in weaning man’s thought or his affections, or both, from his mother Nature–many of them in seeking to persuade him [to abandon] Nature’s goods and whose realities he cannot know through those processes of the mind by which he became acquainted with his natural environment and with the laws to which its ever-changing states conform. [The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1936 /​ 1960, p. 26.]

The tragedy of 9/​11 introduced us to another culture, where the old European rational humanism, and its armature in Nature, is rejected for religious forms of domination over it. These radical theological tendencies are clearly now part of our own political discourse — as they are in the Middle East.. This is the message of the poem’s last section, that may be seen as inadequate to the task — but offers a way to begin.

Since the poem is too long for this section of the website,
GO TO the Writing Projects link in the Menu
and click on “Birds of Fire - 9/​11 Elegy.”

Send Comments to FVOC@​aol.com

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(September 1, 2011)
24. The Exceptional: A Vocabulary
Recently, the music critic, Zachary Woolfe, published an essay on the idea of “charisma” in the Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section of The New York Times [August 21, 2011]. In it, he developed an elaborate definition of the term, and starting with Maria Callas, offered a number of examples in the world of music, of exceptional individuals who deserved being described as “charismatic.”

Woolfe traces the word back to its Greek origin in the name of Aphrodite’s handmaiden, Charis, which meant beauty and kindness. Christianity came to call gifts from God, “charismata” especially those meant for the good of others — “the gift that keeps on giving,” as Woolfe puts it. He also points out that in our time, the sociologist, Max Weber, used it to define a key quality of leadership, that inspires others to follow those who display it. I would suggest that Pope John Paul II and Barack Obama were such charismatic leaders — however you view their beliefs or ideas.

In the world of music, Woolfe offered a number of examples, such as Evgeny Kissin (piano), Joshua Bell and Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin), Marina Poplavskaya and Renata Scotto — to which I would add Reneé Fleming and the musical theater star, Audra MacDonald (sopranos) — and the tenor Juan Diego Flores.

These individuals stand out because they bring to their technical abilities a certain sense of personal presence and commitment that stands out in performance, and allow an audience to feel that they had exceeded mere talent for a form of genius — a sense the integrity of interpretation they brought to their renderings of a role or score.

Woolfe came to his subject to define and defend the use of the word “charismatic” in music criticism. He touches, however, on a key idea for judging not only the public presence of a performer — and within a wider frame of reference the characteristics of greatness in any art form. Indeed, in other fields where ability is conveyed with a certain infallibility and inborn grace, the public senses and awards such demonstrations with its enthusiastic approbation.

For instance, there are thirty teams in Major League Baseball, each of which are manned by many fine players. Yet it is the New York Yankees that stand out, and tend to sellout every stadium they appear in when traveling. The reason is simple, they are a great team because they have the greatest players, whose personalities tend to eclipse those of other teams. Here in New York, few can name any player on the other ocal team, The Mets, who stands out in the manner that Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera — and now Robinson Cano and Curtis Grandeson — are recognized. Their expressions of charisma are different: Jeter is cool but productive, with an occasional burst of perfection: as at the game he achieved his 3,000th by hitting a home run, and then went on in the game 5-5. Rivera radiates adament determination and closes out 98% of his appearances, often with three pitches. Grandeson, the newest and youngest, fields and runs the bases to perfection, and stands in, his fingers drumming the stem of his bat, grinning at the pitcher as if he can taste his next home run about to approach — which he more than often does. Cano, at second base, can field a ball with a coolness that contrasts with Jeter’s more energetic cool. They is matched on the team in age, experience and excellence by Brett Gardner, who does everything Grandeson does well, but projects a blank for charisma — as do the great majority of his teammates — as do A-Rod in respect to Jeter, or Sabathia next to Rivera. Other teams seem vacant of charismatic players, and come across as made up mostly of either boys in trade school, or honest-enough bozarks going through the motions. Watching the Yankees play such teams is like watching a vaguely sanctioned form of class warfare — with which the Boston Red Sox would probably agree.

Woolfe ends his excellent piece on charisma with a definition offered by the charismatic soprano, Aprile Millo. She quotes Ernest Hemingway’s description of how crowds at a Spanish bullfight could distinguish, in the entrance procession of the toreadors, those “who had the old spirit [of] nobility, bravery, heart, ‘duende’.... The crowd can sense the one with the authentic message, the connection with the truth.”

Her quote suggests that there are other ways to describe the exceptional in the arts, and it would be of interest to sort them out — our vocabulary for discussing the “aesthetic experience” being underused, perhaps because so little recognizably charismatic art is found in areas other than the performing arts. It might also be of use to add here that there is a difference between the interpretive arts, where the charisma resides in the performer, and the creative arts, where it may reside in the object created. Hemmingway’s novels, for instance, even The Old Man and the Sea, are not charismatic; Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, are..

Millo mentioned the Soanish term, “duendo.” I first came across this concept in a book by John Berger about Picasso [1965, pp. 38-39; 98.]. Quoting Federico Garcia Lorca [1933], he made a comparison between the “duende” of s singer, who gives her performance her all , and the directness, personal commitment and risk-taking Picasso displayed in the creation of a painting. Garcia Lorca, in his essay, makes a clear distinction between the Muse and the Angel, that are external agents, and the Duende, which he asserts is a discrete entity that indicated a person’s internal integrity of personality and expression. Here, of course, the duality implied by making the duende outside the performer raises a question about Muses and Angels. On the other hand, Garcia Lorca identifies the central quality of the duenda’s presence when he says:

For every man, every. . . step that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of the struggle that he undergoes with his duende, not with an angel, as is often said, nor with his Muse. This is a precise and fundamental distinction at the root of their work. . . .The angel guides and grants. . . .the Muse dictates, and occasionally prompts. . . . Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form. . . . while the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood.

Garcia Lorca goes on to point out that:

All the arts are capable of duende, but where it naturally creates most space, as in music, dance and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpret them, since they have forms that are born and die, perpetually, and raise their contours above the precise present.

Finally, he emphasizes the dark nature of the Duende:

In every other country death is an ending. It appears and they close the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them. . . . The duende, by contrast, won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death, if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house. . . . With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work. . . . The magic power of a poem consists in it always being filled with duende, in its baptising all who gaze at it with dark water, since with duende it is easier to love, to understand, and be certain of being loved, and being understood, and this struggle for expression and the communication of that expression in poetry sometimes acquires a fatal character.

Here, I would add hat the traditional distinction made between a talented person and one with genius — that the former does what he /​she can, while the latter does what he /​she must — pertains here, the genius, deriving from a resident daemon. is similar in its import and origins as the innate duende.

While hispanic-oriented, Garcia Lorca’s definition of the Duende touches on many aspects of aesthetic theory — such as the distinction most often utilized to distinguish between the ordinary and the exceptional — the Elegant and the Sublime. These concepts, like Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian — can still be found in academic discourse where value judgments are to be made. But of interest here is that the idea of the Sublime, while a discerned quality not an innate experience, is similar to the Duende in its capacity to conjure the dark side of experience.

Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime [1756] distinguishes the sublime from the beautiful — and was later promoted by Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses. We are moved by that which is dark and terrible and may induce horror — as with the eruption of a volcano or, these days, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear detonation. But, in art there is a certain pleasure in the awareness that the phenomenon is a fiction — or at a safe distance. The resemblance of Burke’s Sublime and Garcia Lorca’s Duende suggests that the dark side of life is indeed a subject for the arts and a definite part of the aesthetic experience.

Those who write about spiritual matters, often employ the word “numinous” to refer to texts or rituals, or even individuals, as partaking of a certain innate gift from God to do good. The word derives from the Latin “numen,” and defines as characterized by a sense of spiritual presence — as a numinous place or thing that seems spiritually elevated or even sublime. It might be added that the numinous is something recognized as perennial, that is always beyond the betrayal of time or linkage to a superficial goal. Something numinous radiates a subtle urgency. It reflects our wholeness, initiating a portrayal of something both here and now and yet immemorial. It is of interest that the psychoanalyst, Erik H. Erikson suggests that the first experience of the numinous derives from the first encounter of the neonate and its parents. A commentator on this idea of a “greeting ritual,” states that “Erikson laid stress on basic trust. . . . [and] accompanying attitudes and feelings that are not primarily in the service of defense [as classical psychoanalytic tradition would have it], but arise from free energy. . . or spontaneity—in a word, which occur in a psychic economy of abundance rather than scarcity" [Erikson 1966, p. 576ff; Pruyser,1985, pp. 260-61].

Today, as we shall see, the word “iconic” sometimes replaces “numinous” in popular — often youthful — parlance concerning fashions or celebrities. The word derives from the Greek, where it meant a likeness or image (as it does literally on our computer screens). Today it can mean either something of religious or spiritual import, such as an icon of a saint, or an object of attention or devotion, such as an esteemed public figure, or popular entertainer. While overused, the word still holds its numinous dimension, especially in serious secular discourse.

But a numinous archetype is in sharp contrast to anything that is just archetypal, or iconic, or symbolic, or a something typical, or least of all, stereotypical. The numinous overwhelms awareness with its spiritual imprint. The psychologist, C. G. Jung, used the word “archetypal” to refer to those states and images drawn from global human experience, such as male /​ female — mother and child — the animal or tree — that recur in all human expression, and around which works of art can be constellated. Indeed, it is the universal dramatized in the particular that is the foundation of all the narrative arts — whether as portrayals or inventions.

Finally, there is the idea of Authenticity raised by Millo’s quote. The truth of the Duende is a form of authenticity — which Woolfe initially aduces from Maria Callas’ performance in the opera Tosca. The photograph of Callas he reproduces shows her at that moment in the second act when she takes a knife from Scarpia’s dinner table. She caresses it in her hand with an expression of vulnerability gradually finding its spine — the better to avoid and avenge the price asked for her lover’s freedom. It proves Woolfe’s point about how a charismatic performer can sum up an entire scene with a single gesture.

The literary critic, Lionel Trilling has written in a book titled Sincerity and Authenticity, that:

The word “authenticity” comes so readily to the tongue these days and in so many connections it may very well resist. . . definition. . . , but I think that for the present I can rely on its suggesting a more exigent conception of the self and what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it, and a less acceptant and general view of the social circumstances of life. . . . Yet at the same time authenticity figures as the dark course of art. (1972, p. 11.)

We expect the arts and their creators and interpreters to be authentic — because, as we have already seen in other contexts here, art that avoids the dark side of things, can easily be found wanting trivial — unserious. The Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, reinforces this in a book titled The Ethics of Authenticity:

If authenticity is being true to ourselves,. . . then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole. It was perhaps not an accident that in the Romantic period, the self-feeling and the feeling of belonging to nature were linked. Perhaps the loss of a sense of belonging through a publicly defined order needs to be compensated by a stronger, more inner sense of linkage. [1991, p. 91.]

The art lover faced with Charisma, Duende, the Genius, the Numinous, the Iconic, the Sublime, the Archetypal and the Authentic, will notice a thread of similarity between all these concepts: That for art to find its power it cannot avoid evil, whether that darkness resides in the contemplation of murder, the inevitability of death defied, the purpose of spirituality, the often tawdriness of fame, the horrors of Nature can inflict, the full spectrum of human sameness, or the struggle to be oneself.

In the arts, the expectation is that the exceptional shall not hide the negative. Yet in our American culture there is a strong pressure toward the happy ending — the salvation promised by faith. We are not used to accepting fate. We want the beautiful, not the sublime. We want the reassuring, not the problematic. We want our definition of sincerity -- not the problematic of someone else’s authenticity. Which is why Americans have always been suspicious of the arts, which is why they cannot support them except at the minimum, which is why they drop the arts first when downsizing the schools. The arts, if honest, show things as they are, not as they ought to be — and the true artist will not let us forget that reality.

References
Berger, John (1965). The Success and Failure of Picasso. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 38-39.
Burke, Edmund (1756) A Philosophical Enquiry in the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.
Erikson, Erik H, (1966), “The Ontogeny of Ritualization in Man,” in Erik H. Erikson, A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980, edited by S. Schlein. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.
García Lorca, Federico (1933). “Theory and Play of the Duende.” Translated by A. S. Kline, 2007. Free download available at << www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/.../LorcaDuende.htm >>
Pruyser, Paul W. (1985), “Psychoanalysis and the Sacred,” in Hammond, Phillip, editor. The Sacred in a Secular Age. Berkeley, University of California Press, pp. 257-267.
Taylor, Charles (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
Trilling, Lionel (1972). Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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(September 1, 2011)
23. Lucretius and the Introverted Life
The question of how to be a happy, efficient, successful and socially useful introvert raises a number of questions that need answers. In common parlance, no male wants to be called introverted or “passive” in contrast to the extrovert’s activism, since such a denomination would have sexual as well as practical implications. Nor is it possible to live a normal, modern life, without taking actions within or without marriage and family, and within friendships, employment, and communal and political participation. Further, introversion is relative — an inbred temperament’s ongoing adaptation to circumstances — as indeed is extroversion.

One of the reasons I have always liked the Roman poet, Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 94- c. 50 AD.), is that he comes across self-evidently as an introvert — along with being, in his great didactic poem, De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things] — a brilliant logician when it came to the gods and Nature, as well as a follower of Epicurus (341-371 BC).

When I was a student, I read all the major classical authors as part of an excellent liberal arts program. But it was a Catholic college, and no one ever told us about Lucretius — because he was an atheist and had been condemned by the Church Father, St. Jerome, as a voluptuary who committed suicide. The way of thinking back then was that the good pagans could be polytheists and it was permissible to cherry-pick their stories (Homer and Virgil) and ideas (Plato and Aristotle). But the bad pagans did not believe in deity at all and were best avoided, lest Faith be threatened.

While I didn’t need Lucretius to lose my Faith, I did find him back in the 1970s, and came to know him as quite compatible with my own personality. Later, my Jungian analysis, in respect to Jung’s “psychological types,” revealed that I was an introvert given to thinking and sensation. The latter referred to my visual attraction to art and the aesthetic; the former to my relentless ratiocination, theorizing and writing. This is why, earlier, after twelve years of teaching in a decidedly extroverted environment, I left that fraught profession for opportunities to do pure research and writing. I also chose to make my living as a “consultant.” — advising the extroverts of the world how to avoid the pitfalls of their relentless enthusiasms, often uninformed actions, and not always well-founded self-confidence.

As a professional art historian I was also gifted with a good “eye,” that
could see works of art intuitively in much the same way I could discern other human events. My tendency to apply psychological principles from both Freud and Jung was at first viewed with suspicion, but eventually came to be respected when it was found I could explain the look or import of a work of art in ways that “could not be refuted” (as one of the skeptics in my profession once put it in his extroverted — but chastened — animosity).

Introverts, after a while, look out from their “isolation” with a certain acuity that the extroverts cannot — unless armed with facts and documentation. “Speculation,” was not scholarly; yet the very structure of the scholarly method (as with the scientific) is the hypothesis that generated insights which, fully explored, were often easily documented.

Lucretius, in his great Epicurean poem about natural phenomena, notes (at the start of Book Two), that looking out at a ship foundering at sea, or down on an army in battle, leaves you at peace because you yourself are not at risk. This introverted sense of things has been mine since birth — and perhaps a function of my proclivity toward sensation. I observe, and leave it to the extroverts to man the lifeboats and care for the wounded — which they can do with more effectiveness than I — while I can more usefully speculate about our fate in Nature or an unlikely salvation after here.

One might ask if Lucretius is living and promoting an ethical life. Epicureanism has long has a bad reputation — thanks mostly to the St. Jeromes of the world, who promote a culture of pain the better to prepare us for a blissful hereafter. Both Epicurus and the poet are, instead, promoting a life, not of wanton leisure or cynical indifference, but private simplicity and usefulness. The epicurean introvert would be seriously remiss if he or she neglected to call the Coast Guard or the medics when action beyond competence was required. It all boils down to the old distinction between the active and contemplative life. The former is certainly far more populated than the latter, and each proclivity is required to perform its public obligations.

Lucretius, true to his introverted temperament, was not an original theorist of the human condition. Rather, he depended for his ideas upon the earlier Greek philosophers, Epicurus and Democritus (c.470-c.370 BC) — and his own acute observations.

From the Epicureans he derived a brilliant de-bunking of the gods of his day — whom he felt caused much misery by inducing guilt and fear of retribution after death. Given what we see around the planet these days, with religionists causing almost all of the trouble in the modern world — vide 9/​11 — or the recent debt-ceiling extortions of economic true-believers in thrift at the expense of the poor, things haven’t changed. Lucretius makes logical short shrift of the gods of his day — especially in respect to their creation of matter, prescience and immortality. He says:

This is the first of Nature’s basic principles:
no thing can ever be produced by the gods from nothing. . . .
For if things came from nothing, any kind of creature
could then be born from anything, with no need of seeds [i.e. atoms].
[Book One, lines 149-50;159-60.]

Seemingly in contradiction of his atheism, he begins Book One with an eloquent invocation of Venus:

Since you alone, O goddess, are the Queen of Nature,
and since without you. nothing comes into the daylight,
nothing happy, nothing beautiful is created,
I crave your help in writing these verses, which I am trying
to fashion on the [things of Nature]. . . .
Therefore, goddess, grant a lasting grace to my words,
and meanwhile cause the brutal works of war to cease.
[Book One, lines 21-25; 28-29.]

Here it is plausible to think that Lucretius is not contradicting himself so much as allegorizing what all artists worship: their eros-bestowing Muse. St. Jerome, of course, would identify all matter of sexual wantonness and pagan dissipation, with Venus. Whereas our poet needs the life energy of Nature — its eros, as distinct from erotics — to grace his words. In short, Venus here is what chaste Beatrice was to Dante — a motivating force. In this respect, it is intriguing to find later in the poem, Lucretius twice praising the virtue of a homely woman who does not snare, but deserves, love. [See Book Four, lines 1146-1287.]

Having deleted the gods, Lucretius also leaves us without an afterlife, promoting the idea that a well-lived course here and now was sufficient. He is not about to adumbrate a material (neurological) basis for the spiritual, or speculate on what we would call the “paranormal” and psychological projection. But he leaves us with a bleaker nothingness than we might need to project today — given what we know of “after-death-experiences,” and genetic continuity. The former seem to suggest that death is a peaceful, painless experience tinged with our worldly expectations, and the latter can leave us with a comforting sense that our continuing beyond our demise with a legacy of what the fitness of our genes has allowed us to create for the future..

From Democritus, Lucretius took the idea of “atoms” constituting matter. While never using the word “atom” himself (but his English translators often do), he speculates on the structures of nature as assembled from an infinity of invisible particles of various sizes and textures that permeate all material things. From the perspective of today, no one would say he was not correct in general — but would adduce pertinent distinctions and discoveries that would support and individuate his inevitably uninformed intuitions. For instance, watching his wash dry, he adduced water as made up of particles that could also erode stone. Or in describing human procreation, his “seeds” would today be more germane understood as genes. So his genius was to see Nature as it was without the information to name what he was seeing — except in more logical and plausible ways than say the Pre-Socratic philosophers had managed with their unhelpful theories (such as Heraclitus’ notion of fire as the motivating element in the universe).
[But see Book Four, lines 1209-1232, for his recognition of what we would recognize as genetic devolvement in offspring.]

Finally, Lucretius was a didactic poet — which charms the cockles of my introverted heart!. His great poem was meant to inform and instruct — unlike Homer and Virgil who narrated stories, or Euripides and Ennius, who wrote verse plays, or Sappho and Catullus, lyric poetry. Didactic poetry is rare — and I have often experimented with it myself. Indeed, I have just compiled a book of poems on growing old that utilize many variations on the sonnet form to share what it is like to age in ways that prose would smother with deadening detail. Only poetry can sharpen into focus this last stage of the life course -- just as it helped Lucretius to explain everything.

And so we find Lucretius revealed in his great poem as a gentle observer of the world, living in a villa in the countryside away from the political and military upheavals of his day, a traditionalist living the good life prescribed by Epicurus and explained by Democritus three hundred or so years earlier — intuiting the microscopic extension of the teeming life in Nature from his backyard clothesline, writing his insights down in splendid Latin hexameters that influenced his contemporary, Virgil, while energized by his hope that his words would be granted a “lasting grace.”

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(September 2011)
22. Nature and Unnatural Space
(September 1, 2011)
The recent launchings of the last two space shuttles, and the revelation that each of these launchings costs over a billion dollars, makes one wonder if they are worth such an expenditure. There seems to be an obsession among astronomers, astrophysicists and space explorers, to find “life” somewhere else in our solar system — and beyond it in our galaxy. There is such interest in finding water and chemicals on Mars, that there are now plans to send a manned spacecraft to that planet to learn more than our robots did about it. There is also a growing inventory of planets around stars in our Milky Way that are so similar to Earth in location as to possibly permit the development of “life.” While a few admit that such life may not be exactly like Earth’s life, they are determined to find out.

Frankly, all this seems a great waste of intellectual and monetary resources. We have allowed curiosity to become a necessity — without knowing exactly what we are looking for — and more importantly, why we are looking in the first place. NASA has several unmanned spacecraft with high-resolution cameras like those on Hubble, scanning the outer planets and their moons for evidence of “life.” While this is revealing many fascinating and often inexplicable things, it is unclear as to just what these discoveries contribute to anything. Indeed, would we know “life” if we found it in such alien environments? One gets the sense that our egoism is such, that “life” has to be like our life here in Nature. The point here is that we have yet to exhaust our understanding of life on Earth — and it seems that is a project we could more plausibly pursue.

For instance — do we know all we might about those tube-like, prehistoric life forms at the bottom of Earth’s oceans that flourish in the dark on a diet of volcanic sulfur? What about the microbial world upon and within our planet (not to mention our bodies), that permeates the surface of Earth and penetrates deep into its lithosphere? Further, what do we know about the genetic structures of these ubiquitous creatures, and how they relate to the vast “uncounted” areas of our genomes? Finally, why is it that only a fraction of the life forms on Earth have even been identified — all the infinitely various insects, birds, small animals, and the vast variety of sea creatures. Is there not around our teeming planet enough life to keep our over-funded scientists busy — without trying to find “life” like ours elsewhere in the universe?

Or, to put this another way, Nature as we know it is limited to life on this planet that stops at the edge of the atmosphere. Beyond that — out there in space — is an inconceivably vast cosmos we can never really know. We ought to stay home and think more deeply about the Nature of which we are an intrinsic (and dangerous) part.
We can do that by taking a number of important steps:

1. Getting out of our heads the phony views of science-fiction’s alien civilizations — and intrusions from, and our excursions to, these fictions.
2 Accepting the fact that as genetic participants in Earth’s Nature, we have nothing to gain from knowing other life forms, even if they exist (and they probably do), out there amid the billions of galaxies and their trillions of stars.
3. Taking draconian measures to preserve the integrity of Earth’s environment — especially in respect to its climate, which is changing radically because of our blind refusals to accept responsibility for polluting it.
4. Pondering the difference between the creation myths humankind has projected to explain its local fate in Nature — and the fact that genetic evolution back to our origins, and beyond our life into the future, can provide a more provident basis for our spiritual awareness that a myth of other-worldly salvation — that is most likely the primary (and unconscious) impetus for our fascination with the an alien space.

Nature is life on Earth. It also has a secondary manifestation in the geologic and oceanic phenomena with which we must live. The universe beyond Earth is therefore unnatural and alien — literally beyond our ken. That it is seemingly made of the same elements and ruled by the same laws of physics, may be a presumption only partially true — depending on the partiality of our instruments, and those who manipulate them, to measure such things.

But what is out there in space is all too easily employed to serve as a vast Rorschach pattern upon which the best of our scientific minds cannot help free-associating with what they know. Vide the “Big Bang” theory. Indeed, one might go as far as stating that they have projected upon the cosmos a humanistic construct that is, like most projections, pure wishful thinking. Our best and brightest minds ought to turn their attention away from fantasies to the facts of Nature here on Earth — in which even they genetically participate and share a fate.

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(May 20, 2011)
21. An introduction to a Series of Lectures on the Connoisseurship of Abstract Painting and Sculpture

1. What is Connoisseurship?
The connoisseur, in the past, was often seen as an “aesthete” concerned with the precious or esoteric, or else as a purveyor of standards for aesthetic appreciation within a coterie taste for art — or other commodities such as clothes or wines. Here, connoisseurship, in respect to the visual arts in general, and abstract art in particular, is understood as a practical skill — expertise about the art object in itself as a made thing. This is separate from demonstrating art’s origins and cultural impact, that is the subject of the Art Historian, or articulating its place in popular taste, which is the job of the Art Critic. The Connoisseur’s expertise is not always as available or decisive as one would wish. The connoisseurship of abstract art is indigenous to 20th century art and its individualistic origins — and such similar works as may extend its era into our own new century. Having an experienced eye for abstract art is a rare skill unevenly distributed about the art world. The point of this series of lectures is to define the parameters and requirements of such visual acuity and to promote its understanding and practice by younger scholars for the future.

2. Geometric, Organic and Semi-Figurative Abstraction
The avant garde promotion of “modern” art began before World War I and persisted through the 1980s. In that period modern art was, very simply, abstract art, whether that produced by artists such as Arthur Dove, or the group that became the American Abstract Artists in the 1930s, or those now called Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s, or individualists, like the semi-figurative Stuart Davis, who spanned almost the entire era. Paying attention to how individual objects were made was minimal — unless the method, like Pollock’s pouring, or Warhol’s urinating, on prone canvases, made headlines. On the other hand, abstraction seemed very easy to do — especially from reproductions — and that led to an increase in false attributions — that ultimately threatens the integrity of an artists’ oeuvre and the transactions of the art market.

3. Looking, Seeing, Perceiving, and Recognizing
The general understanding of modern art as abstract art more or less put aside any interest in the connoisseurship of the art object in itself. How a work was made physically was replaced by an interest in formal values of “pure” composition — first adumbrated by Clive Bell’s vague idea of “significant form,” and later seen in moral terms in Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, for instance), as somehow redressing or “remunerating” (as Clement Greenberg put it), through the order and perfection of abstraction the poverty of modern existence. Indeed, the complexities of earlier forms of abstraction were smoothed out into “color field” abstraction that fit the critical theory of the moment. One was told to see the overall elegance of a work as an ameliorative subject matter, and matters of craft were put aside. In the course of all this, the perception of art was re-directed from the artist’s personal form and facture, to generalized ideas about it (Barnett Newman and the “picture plane,” for instance). So there is need to redirect looking at, and seeing into, an art object to more sophisticated levels of perceiving how it was crafted — and recognizing and articulating the distinction between form and facture.

4. The Recognition of Form
Form has to be distinguished from style, since the latter is a cultural phenomenon (like Cubism or Expressionism), and the former an aspect of the artist’s temperament. How Cubism is employed in, say, geometric abstraction and Expressionism in organic abstraction is one thing. But form, understood as expressed temperament — is quite another — and demands a psychological approach. The connoisseur must be returned to the role of the empathetic articulator of form — and that in respect to the art object’s facture

5. The Recognition of Facture
Intimately connected to the recognition of form is the discernment of an artist’s personal facture — or how the object as been manuFACTUREd. While form is the artist’s self-portrait, facture is the artist’s handwriting — and it is the latter that guides the eye toward a definitive recognition of authenticity. Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891), for instance, called the connoisseur’s role an understanding of “the physiology of art." Indeed, the forensic inspection of the art object has to be raised, on both the practical and legal level, to that of forensic graphology, psychology and medicine. These are the experienced application of objective knowledge of handwriting, behavior and pathology — to the level of the art object itself and how it was crafted by its artist. This is crucial to the connoisseur’s general understanding of abstract art, and also specific to the recognition of fakes (that display the manner of an artist) and forgeries (that are falsely signed).

6. Forensic Connoisseurship and Authenticity
Given that there are at present about 150 questionable Jackson Pollocks circulating about the planet, and probably thousands of other dubious works attributed to other major figures of 20th century art, the need for an applied, Forensic Connoisseurship is self-evident. Just how is this is to be achieved? What special skills are needed? How can connoisseurs be brought to work together? How can they avoid litigation? And what can the art world do to encourage and protect their efforts — are the subjects to be discussed

Here, reading Ronald D. Spencer. Editor, The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts. New York & London, Oxford University Press, 2004 — and downloading from the College Art Association’s website << www.collegeart.org >> its Authentication Guidelines for art historians, are good ways to start developing answers to these important and difficult questions.

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(May 20, 2011)
20. Kazimir Malevich and his Putative Spawn
The Madison Avenue outpost of the Gagosian Gallery empire has mounted an exhibition titled Malevich and the American Legacy. Ift is handsomely mounted on three floors of the gallery, contains six examples of the work of Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935), and a much larger number of works by contemporary American artists supposedly working within the aura of his influence.

Since I am planning a series of lectures (that may develope into a short book -- see Blog 21), on the connoisseurship of abstract art, I though it an opportunity to see how Malevich painted. Connoisseurship has long been relegated to “taste making” and it is time to get it back to an awareness of the craft or “facture” of how art, and especially abstract art, is “manuFACTUREd.”

This ambition was partly thwarted by sheets of non-reflecting glass, that prevented any total sense of the surface facture of his works. The most visible work in respect to surface facture was an early attempt at Cubisn, Desk and Room (1913), that tried to create facets with brushstrokes at different angles — which patchwork muddle failed to achieve it its goal. All to be seen of the white backgrounds in the later abstractions suggested that the whites were sort of patted smooth, that the blacks were, in places, heavily brushed, and that all of the colors were brushed thin about the edges and thicker toward the center of their rectangles. (which made a cautious, kinesthetic sense). There was also a certain visual tension about the edges of the colors on the white backgrounds.

On the formal level, as opposed to that of facture, they were all quite energetic — being designed on the bias. These angular compositions — such as Suprematism, 18th Construction (1917) and Mystic Suprematism (1920-27), produced a sense of vitality — almost a sense of “dancing” forms. (You can find the same thing in the later, more complex works of Kandinsky.

Compared to Piet Mondrian, whose rigid, a-symmetric grids manage, through a-symmetry, to achieve a vague sense of vigor, Malevich is an expressionist. But Mondrian’s facture is quite different. His painted background surfaces show meticulously brushed striations, and his blacks (as opposed to his colors), are varnished so they do not sink into the surface. He works hard at not being too self-revealing. Or to put that another way, Malevich allows you to sense his creative process; you can see his hand dealing with his edges; Mondrian is not so personally forthcoming.

Both of these geometric abstractionists are often faked, and knowing what their surfaces look like, it is relatively easy to see what happens when the faker’s assumptions of facture and form are dictated by color reproductions in an art book.

As for the American artists in the Gagosian show — who included Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre, Ed Ruscha, et al. — my first thought was why just these works and not others? Where, for instance, were the artists of the American Abstract Artist group of the 1930’’s, that display the same energetic forms as Malevich does, if not always the same compositional ploys? [Some of them are at D. Wigmore Fine Art, in a fine show titled Pioneers of American Abstraction: 1930-1940s.] But they were absent, apparently on the theory that Malevich’s famous Black Square (1915) was the dominant influence. This resulted in all too many more or less blank black squares and other blank objects — recalling the bleak offerings of Richard Serra’s drawing show a few blocks away at the Metropolitan — that seemed utterly meretricious when compared to Malevitch’s jaunty offerings. And on the level of the connoisseur getting to the “physiology” of the Americans’ works, as Giovanni Morelli once said was the purpose of the connoisseur’s task, lets just say flat, expressionless acrylics are no help.

The fundamental question here, however, is why the absence of expressiveness is a virtue in art and why these particular American artists find the 1915 Black Square so inspirational. Malevitch perhaps provides the answer — quoted in the Gagosian press release: “I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.” And one of the Americans present, Donald Judd, states that “It’s obvious that the forms and colors in the paintings that Malevich began painting in 1915 are the first instances of form and color.”

While I shall leave to the catalogue of this show, which I have not read, to provide an explication of this seeming nonsense, I shall confine my response to one big point: That to rely on the unnatural as the subject of art, needing the reductionism implied here to obliterate nature, and to reject abstraction, that emphasizes values over design, is not the best road to great art.

Here among these Americans, the Black Square is an experimental breakthrough — like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avigon — which was original and compelling in its day, but became a crutch for those who have nothing more to say except to preen at imitating a misunderstood, dated, and now an essentially meaningless precedent — and its honorable creator.

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(May 20, 2011)
19. Urban Explosions — Here and Abroad
It has been my fate to have spent two periods of my life working above the blasting of holes in the ground for subways. The first occurred in the fall of 1970, when I was appointed the first Senior Visiting Research Associate in the Research Program of the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts (NCFA — now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), in Washington DC. The local Transit Authority (TA) was digging a tunnel and station directly under the NCFA, which was housed in the old 19th century Patent Office Building. This was a magnificent neoclassical structure that was built in solid “post and lintel” style (i.e. stone on stone), with its interior walls veneered with thick coats of plaster.

I was given a fine big office on the third floor, with the museum’s library and the Archives of American Art, just down the hall. My two collections of essays on the cultural programs of the 1930’s — Art for the Millions and The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, were nearing completion, and the latter was being published by the Smithsonian Press.

I cannot recall exactly when the blasting started under the museum, but one of its first manifestations was the fall of a large chunk of the entablature in the museum’s great hall on top of two Albert Pinkham Ryders. These were only lightly damaged. The then director, Joshua Taylor, complained to the TA about this, and before there was time for a response, another blast opened a large crack in the plaster wall of his office, which was followed by similar fissures in other offices — including mine. Taylor was furious, and went straight to the top at the TA with his evidence of the danger to his museum’s collection and staff. He was coolly informed that the TA would cover any damages, but it would be best to wait until the subway’s completion, to see what else needed fixing. Taylor was livid, but powerless against the forces of public domain burrowing beneath his museum.

One result, however, was that the TA’s assigned an engineer to check on the cracks. I recall one famous day when he arrived at my door wearing a hard hat and bearing a pair of calipers. He explained that he was there to measure the width of my crack, and that he would return each week to make sure it had not seriously widened. I asked if I was going to be given a hard ha

11. Why I Do Not like Matisse (At MoMA through October 2010 )

As a card-carrying historian of modern art, I am expected to like Henri Matisse because everyone else has ordained him a founding master of modern art. The same goes for Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp. This does not mean I disliked the current pedagogic Matisse exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913 to 1917. It presented the artist’s earliest major works, and took pains to demonstrate with physical evidence how Matisse got his paintings to look as the do. All that was very informative. It would be facile if not facetious to say that he did not know when to stop — but I fear that is pretty much what usually happened, with, to this eye, problematic results.

The fundamental problem here is reduction, not abstraction. The difference is important. To abstract is to “take away” inessentials in order to emphasize what is important in the work. To reduce is to delete essentials until what is left is a mere ghost of the original image. Thus Mondrian and his Neoplasticism takes everything seen — including portraits — down to a carefully crafted grid of black lines and primary colors. Similarly, Duchamp demands that the artist “reduce, reduce, reduce,” until nothing much is left but the feeling — a notion foreign to his personality. His descending nude of c. 1913, which made his reputation by being insulted by the president of the United States, was not typical of his later works, which, like the notorious Urinal, are so ephemeral and inexplicable, that they are mere curiosities — especially as reproductions peddled from a suitcase. Granted the many permutations of modernism reflecting cultural fads, not all of this works any better than Gertrude Stein’s — and to an extent, James Joyce’s — muddling of the English language while trying to be verbal Cubists. The bottom line here is that modernism gave us abstraction to get at the heart of matters in all fields of the arts and sciences; those who took that gift to the extremes of reductionism in art, simply got nowhere — and leave us with often meaningless scraps of blatant egoism. And that explains the blatant egoism of contemporary art to this day. Lest this statement seem extreme, note that through August, MoMA is presenting an exhibition of noise titled Bruce Nauman: Days. It consists of square white speakers hung from the ceiling emitting inchoate noise — and was first heard at the last Venice Biennial.

If you are annoyed by now, read on.

The first Matisse I ever saw was his Backs (c. 1908ff), in MoMA’s Garden. I was just a kid, and it made me wonder why the fourth relief was supposed to be better than the first. Later, I began to wonder if this guy really liked women — despite their ubiquity in his work and biography. As for a model that visually explained abstraction, I later discovered Picasso’s variations on a bull — that were happily on view in MoMA’s Picasso: Themes and Variations exhibition. Here was a fine comparison of what happens when Matisse reduces a woman to a figment, and Picasso emphasizes a bull’s essentials in a series of lithographic states [1945-46].

This notion of emphasis vs. deletion was certainly in play when viewing his (c. 1909-1917). Thanks to modern imaging technology we can now, with the help of an early color sketch, and separations out of the various palimpsests of its creation, see how the early sketch got to be reduced to the final surface we now see. This reveals the same thing as the Backs
Indeed, the five women depicted bathing in a river have been reduced to four. The river has vanished and been replaced with a vertical slab of black — with a gratuitously curious snake at the bottom. The woman at the left is standing in jungle-like vegetation. The composite woman “standing” in the river looks like a quadruple amputee. And the two bathers to the left are faceless and possess a zombie-like calmness. These are connected with arbitrary curved lines that may be interpreted as a displaced river of sorts. In short, what was first a joyous escapade at a river is now a odd composition reduced to an eerie absence of giggles.

On a nearby wall is another large painting of similar stylistic aspect, The Piano Lesson (1916). Since I have always hated the sight of this work for personal reasons having to do with my own fraught piano lessons as a boy, I shall leave it to Peter Schjeldahl, who claims it his favorite Matisse, to articulate its artistic virtues. [“The Road to Nice, The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, pp. 70-72.]

The vertical erosion of quality in Matisse could also be discerned in its horizontal erosion on the walls of this exhibition. For instance, his splendid Bowl of Oranges (1916) showed up the aesthetic futility of three other similar compositions to its left. Similarly, his elegant Portrait Of Sarah Stein (1916) put to shame most of his other portraits in this show, that seem mere caricatures. On the other hand, his Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg (1914), with its curious loops around the central figure offered a visual interpretation of the sitter’s vitality that transcended her demure pose. If these works worked as art, then I must declare Composition (1915) worst in show. It had no redeeming characteristics and has the misfortune today to look like a rough map of Somalia.

But to get back to Matisse’s Bathers by a River, this work stands with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Back in 2002, when my old O’Connor’s Page was flourishing [see Blog No. 1 below], I published Commentary No. 14 “Reframing The Musterpiece: Concerning the Archival Fate of Works of Art.” Here are its major points:

<< Looking back over the 20th Century’s painting, and what takes pride of place in the various collections of “modern” art by which we know and come to define what happened, it seems time to start making a few serious revisions. Among the many masterpieces of modern painting, it is time to muster out of the received canon those works which are more documentary than artistic — those works which stood as experimental breakthroughs into new ways of seeing and doing art, but which, truth to tell, are artistic disaster areas (aka: bad paintings) when viewed objectively from beyond their century . . . In order to demonstrate what I mean— permit me to offer up, in a focused spirit of prophylactic provocation, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Matisse’s Dance, and Duchamp’s The Large Glass /​ The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. . . . As we start a new century, it is necessary to look back and to begin discriminating between the good and bad “icons” of modern art and to separate out the Musterpieces from the Masterpieces. Implicit in this task is the presumption that a work of art ought to display a certain achieved unity of vision and craft, and works that do not ought not to be presented as such achievements to a public that has enough trouble understanding the real masterpieces. >> [Full Commentary 14 available on request.]

So: From this point of view, Matisse’s Bathers by a River is a Musterpiece — a document of the artist’s oeuvre that ought to be mustered off to the stacks for those interested in such meticulous chronicling of his career and methods. It has little to offer the viewer, much to offer the student, and no aesthetic legacy to inspire the future.

Curiously, the splendid exhibition at the Whitney of Charles Burchfield’s work [see below at No. 10], had a slight similarity to this one at MoMA, in that it offers a deep insight into the artist’s working methods. And as he proceeds to enlarge his early paintings, they become better and better. So pedagogic exhibitions are to be welcomed — as MoMA’s Matisse show is to be welcomed. But in its case what is offered is often best put out of sight; what the Whitney reveals forever deserves public walls.