H IS FOR ART
I have the Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History here - excellent nighttime reading. A postmodern masterpiece in several ways. First, it contains no art whatsoever. Second, every artist, regardless of their talent, significance, or achievements, gets between 1/4 and 1/2 page of coverage. And third, it has a cute little Penguin on the side, which must refer to Linux and the emerging postcommercial ethos.
The weirdest part, though, is that most of my favorite artists begin with "H":
Hogarth
Hiroshige
Hokusai
Winslow Homer
Edward Hopper
David Hockney (I know, it's trite, but I like it)
Throw in the Hudson River School. That doesn't leave out too much, from my perspective. Brueghel, I suppose, Joseph Cornell (who is robbed, by the way, getting half as much space as Hockney) and Velasquez. And Goya and Ingres are just one letter away.
And that's my posse.
posted by Anonymous at 11:01 PM
4 Comments:
I am sure I speak for all of us when I say "My favorite artist begins with a 'B'" :). After all, who doesn't just rave over the unsurpassed work of Carlo Bragaglia or his bronther Anton.
A minor omission: everyone. (And if you're going to bait for bear, don't be surprised when you get a bear.)
There is an aesthetic thread to most of the H, and only the H, artists you mention - a pervasive sense of coolness and isolation, which is why Bill Gates just coughed up $30 mil for a fairly minor Homer. (The Hudson river school is excepted, as are the Bs and Cs. Homer was the first artist I really loved. But then I was eight. ) This concerns me, although these are some fine artists, except for the overrated Hockney, and the overrated Hopper, and oh hell....
This comes from reading too much art history and looking at too many book prints, where these artists reproduce well, as does traditional Chinese and Japanese painting. The smoothing and flattening of printing favors work like this, as television makes uniform our eyes, and photography busily clicks away our souls.
Van Gogh, for example, just reproduces shittily. The great spiritual love of life woven into the surface and the tremendous courage in color disappears in the small, brutal flatness of the page. If you haven't seen Van Gogh's better work in person as an adult, an all too common problem, correct this asap. And spend time.
Go see Roger Shimomura (who does reproduce well). Bay Area sculptor DeStaebler. And the wonderful Brueghel has living roots in northern renaissance painting.
Get off you readin' rear and into a room full of real art.
Spend at least 20 minutes in front of the nearest Rothko, slightly drunk. And the Bay Area is filthy with Parks and Diebenkorns. Amble through the SF Art Institute for the Rivera mural - one of the most approachable anywhere - and the atmosphere of life unhobbled, and hopefully uncompromised, that breathes through a real art-making space.
Picasso, who invented Cornell, was the most knowlegeable modern about Goya and Velasquez. Take your girl for a good long leer at his nude line drawings. There's more sex in those lines, and in Matisse's, than a decade of furtive internet porn surfs.
(This won't work in S.F. outside of a show though, the collection isn't very good.)
Here's my rule of thumb: One book, ten galleries.
I will leave the comment on Hockney to Zhi Lin: "He can't draw, so he doesn't want to think anyone else can."
"I love art.
I love history.
Yet I hate art history."
-Phil Govedare
And when did you last see a massive, fleshy Reubens?
And this is what concerns me, if only as a strong cautionary. Art rarely, if ever, really lives in tidiness, or its haughty relation, purity (a problem I have with a lot of contemporary artists, and a notion, I am increasingly convinced, that is at the drive of the very worst of human actions), because what is true, even to appearance, and what is true of the mind, is never perfectly known. If it ceases to grow, to penetrate, or if it merely assumes, it withers.
Graphics of all kinds tend to share a mechanical and now digital sheen. This sheen obscures rather than reveals, the opposite purpose of art.
This is not to day that apparant perfection of a Botticelli as glorious pagan eye candy is to be spurned; far from it. But that was pleasure so deep it was radical politics, a defense against war, bureaucratic religion and asceticism, whose effects were so powerful Botticelli himself was sucked up for a while in the violent reaction, burning his own paintings. Thank god he recovered his senses, probably thinking of that wavy blond renaissance cookie who has stolen the minds of all who gazed on her for over half a millenia now.
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