Gabriel Laderman on Art

What are the major issues in art today?

What are the issues in painting, now? One of the peculiarities is that after a century of exploring metaphor through the structures and forms presented by the artist, most of the establishment won't know what you mean when you put it like that.  All of the finest abstract painters of the century had ideas in their heads when they painted, and it was their intention to get to your head with those ideas. I have already mention Mondrian's overwhelming concern. The balance between life and death, when seen in his paintings was supposed to affect the audience and make their lives better. He was a genuine Utopian. 

I can see Paul Klee as a more complicated metaphoric painter. He did not stay with any one idea very long. Each of his pictorial ideas has a metaphoric meaning. He tended to work within one of those structures until he hit the top and then do something else. The Thinking Eye lays it out plainly. Now that the book is out of print and very expensive, you don't need to buy a copy. Go to a good art library and read in it. It is not a book to go through fast. Just concentrate on a few pages that intrigue you. He had so many wonderful ideas. Often in the book they show one of the works coming out of the logic he has set up in words and pedagogical drawings. One of his great summing up paintings is called "Picture Album,"  it was painted in 1937. It is up on the net. Unfortunately it is one of his larger paintings and is seen too small. The closest thing to it is found not in the work of an artist but in a book. It is in Grandville's "Un Autre Monde." The basic shape is a theatrical stage with a proscenium [in Grandville].

Not only are very few living artists thinking metaphorically, a great quantity of the accepted masters don't even realize that as artists  we are expected to not only produce striking images, but the images have to have some sort of pictorial action. All of the AE first generation knew this. Look for pictorial action in Reinhardt, Rothko, Tomlin, Newman, Kline, deKooning and even in Pollock, it is there. It is also true of the first postwar European generation. Look at the abstract work of De Stael, Vieira Da Silva, Hartung, Wols. If you study the earlier work of Wols, it may help you to understand the better known work.

Now, as far as figurative painters are concerned, to be the true heirs of this last century, you also need to understand metaphor, and how it can be used in figuration. It should be easier to see in Giacometti, Morandi, Soutine, Modigliani, Bonnard and also, perhaps easier in Marquet, and Nice [the place] Matisse. There are problems. None of these artists get into our eyes without ideas of art historians whom we have all heard.  Giacometti is presented [as far as his later work from the motif is concerned] as a sort of successor to Cezanne. There is nothing dreadfully wrong with this as far as Giacometti's motives are concerned, except that it leaves out other crucial intentions of his.

Giacometti before the 1930s was one of the most radical and original abstract sculptors of the century. Among  his other works, there are a number of sculptures of the figure, like the spoon woman. In these he is making up an anatomy which is not based on perception and abstraction from perception, but invention with an as if in it [metaphor]. When he returned to the figure in the 1930s, he did not give up any of his  invented, metaphoric ideas, rather he found them all over again while working from the motif. He was his own true follower. What he had learned once, appeared again in new guises, and often in greater complexity. Even among artists who teach art, that whole phase of his work has too often been disregarded in order to make him a new sculptural Cezanne.

One of the more unusual 20th century developments could be called [using the analogy of color] "Local Metaphor". In his later work in color, Redon was a master at this. A branch could be by turns, as though burning, fluorescent and opalescent. This, within the same pastel or painting. Metaphor could also be taken away from something in a painting and placed somewhere else. So, instead of a shell having the shiny, opal-like quality, part of the background, or the air, would have it.

I have been raving about Seurat's Grande Jatte for decades, now. It is not about finding the volumes of nature all over again, it is about making a poetic statement. If you look closely at the two soldiers in the background, they are obviously made out of wood turned on a lathe. Several of the figures are permanently stuck in their poses and could never move[a little girl skipping, and a man sitting at the edge of the large shadow down front who cannot move his arms away from his legs, ever. There is at least one lady whose hat has gathered up a lot of things into itself, including a sailboat. There is an old lady in the middle distance, sitting on the ground who is actually a lighted street lamp [Balthus cribbed this idea for the first Street Scene]. To the front, what makes you think that lady with the bustle could ever get it off? The entire painting is filled with these things. At the same time, he is building up volumes, and he also had an Art Nouveau linear arabesque which ties everything up into movements of the observer's eyes.

It seems to me that this Seurat is an important predecessor for Paul Klee, and more obviously, Balthus.

Love,

Gabriel

Gabriel Laderman - Monday, August 28, 2006 12:34:47 AM

I am not sure why I don't like the idea of myself as a theorist. The theories of one wet behind the ears young Englishman, just returned from his grand tour of the continent [after he graduated] have been in charge of the art world at least since 1780. Edmund Burke thought he was going to do something like Longinus on the sublime, but, for art. Instead he did something wholly original and unprecedented. He associated different kinds of composition-landscape, no less- with emotional states which were desirable to achieve in painting and he called them "The Sublime." If you keep his ideas in mind and look at landscapes by Courbet and Corot, or the other Barbizon painters, or Constable, you may get a very different idea of what they accomplished and why. Despite all the other subject matters, the 19th century was the century of landscape painting. Claude was considered a great artist before this, but that would often go with "but isn't it a shame he can't do figures any better than that." Landscape was second best. Figure painting was the land of magic and meaning. While there is no need to throw away our landscapes or stop doing them, the figure as a major subject has been inhabited by so few artists since the end of the 19th century, that it is the subject matter the most open for reinterpretation. There is an awful lot of room for talented figure painters. If you begin and also try to rethink your premises along the way, you will almost necessarily come up with some gold while digging. Some of the twentieth century artists who have done figure paintings which move me the most are Roualt, Modigliani, Dufy, Matisse, Balthus, Picasso and Braque. I have left out Giacometti, because as a sculptor he is outside very direct influence. His paintings are both beautiful and haunting, but I don't feel close to them.   In my own language and generation I am far enough away from most of them not to find their hand cramping mine if I get too close. It is easy to go elsewhere and difficult to stay inside some modernist. So they are all very safe as influences.

One of the difficult things is to understand what even someone who lived only 60 years ago meant in his work. Many of us feel connected strongly to work of that time, but there is a schematic reesponse which all of the members of our generation can make, which does not take into account the particular background which the artists were escaping from, and the direction they meant to go in. We don't understand Picasso, Braque or Modigliani because we live later and cam see a lot of their work in museums. We have to immerse ourselves not only in their ideas, but also in the work they were looking at. We have to understand what they thought they were seeing, and how it changed their heads and hands. Modigliani looks deceptively easy to figure out. But first of all you have toknow that he studied in the Academia in Firenze where the Machiaioli and Post Machiaioili were teaching. It really is essential to understand what he came out of. His color sense was permanently fused at that time. What were the reasons the Machiaioli used those colors and none other? Would you have the same reasons for doing it? It certainly was something Italian. It was an Italian response to impressionism. But why that response. Look at some Fattori, or the others and figure it out.

Roualt was a very radical painter, who, nonetheless kept a connection with the grand figure tradition of the past. No one had used black outlines like his in painting for hundreds of years. Also not long ago while Leland Bell was alive, I heard so many people saying they didn't understand his lines. Ask the question why did he use those black lines? Well, Roualt was dead and well accepted, so they didn't say it about him, but they could have. Roualt, unlike Picasso never lost his connection with the figure observed. A good deal of Picasso's work, especially from the 1930s on is not about perception, but about ideas about the figure [some taken from 1923 and 1924 Miro], some taken from surrealistic processes. This is not a put down, just a statement of fact. All art is not alike, and in any one artist's life, not all of his work can be judged by the same principles. It is worth knowing those two things independent of this use I made of them.Picasso was one of the few important painters who made figure paintings which did not reflect his observation of the figure. There have been othres since him. Their work does not speak to me.

Isn't it strange to realize that almost all of Redon's work in color came after the black and whites? He was much more of an obvious progenitor of surrealism in the black and white work. But he seems to me much more fun and more useful in his pastels and paintings.

Love,

Gabriel

Some Artists' Theories [not mine].

I just noticed that someone on the web calls me an art theorist. That is something I neither am nor want to be. I think about art because I have to. I am making it, and I believe that any artist who doesn't understand where he is in his work, and what the options are, is left without a road map in the fog. It isn't always done in words, but every artist has to do this.

Many years ago Bill Hayter wrote a credo for Possibilities One in which he likened a person making automatic paintings and drawings without thinking about his process to someone sitting in a comfortable arm chair. After a few years there are bare spots which he/she will have to cover with doilies. But it will still be the same old armchair. Do remember he is talking about automatic drawing, not academic painting. But the implications for everyone are whatever you do you have to think about what you are doing or you will be in that old armchair. Now, if this is art theory, it is Hayter's art theory. I am just reporting on it.   His New ways of Gravure is full of art stories which are presented as inevitable truths. What they are is Hayter's wonderful imagination, spouting "truths" because they help him understand. He has a nice story about the beginning of art-how, who and when, which is fun to read.

When Rothko was first exhibiting his abstract paintings, the ones just after those with linear images and apparent movement -the first one with shapes all roughly rectangular but many of them, and progressing towards more and more simplified shapes, no one knew that there was a lot of his own literature in what he was doing. It was not public knowledge that he was aiming for intense, full, powerful painting which involved, in his mind a bold tragic stance, not totally unlike Greek tragedy. Now that we know something about this from saved writings, it makes sense. He was working out of a need to communicate an original metaphor through his work. It was self chosen and he did have some writing about it. Although, the later writings if they did not get down on paper are there in the paintings. Newman discussed the great snake mound as the source of his compositions. That was pretty clear - It fulfills one of the categories of Burke's sublime. He was a conscious metaphoric painter, too. I don't believe this is true for every member of the AE first generation. Motherwell, for example, wrote an article which I believe appeared in VVV, called Mondrian and Di Chirico [or vice versa]. He associated Mondrian with rationalism and Di Chirico with the irrational. It is very clear that this is what he was thinking off when he painted all of his Spanish elegies. The article had a repro of a Di Chirico with a looming oval of the head of a man with a title something like "the child's father." Abstracted it could become a large slightly irregular oval. So I believe Motherwell to have been an art theorist who was trying to take a metaphoric stance in his work. The problem is that his theory was not so good as Rothko and Newman's. Mondrian was not, at least in my book, a rationalist. I believe not only what I see on the wall but what Mondrian wrote down. An excerpt would go something like this. I paint to find the balance between life [the vertical] and death[the horizontal]. They have to be perfectly in balance or else the world in the painting spells disaster. Somehow Motherwell never believed in what Mondrian wrote down so clearly in Plastic Art and Pure Plastic art. If you can get at it read not only Mondrian's words in Robert Goldwater, Artist's on Art, but also Max Hodler's page called an Essay on Parallelism. That proto-expressionist was very close to Mondrian, at least in word.

Love,

Gabriel

Gabriel Laderman - Friday, August 25, 2006 9:05: 41 PM. Credo as a writer.

I have not published anything in a magazine [or anywhere else] since 1972 or so. A friend suggested I review a Morandi show at the Guggenheim and I did. The last six things before that, ending in 1970 were published in Art Forum and Art News. My longer writings in the past few years have been in emails to friends, or people whose work I liked. One of my friends, now dead for some years, Larry Campbell, had it as his principle as a critic only to review shows of people whose work he liked. He upheld this principle about group shows, too. He did not review one of those unless he liked the character of the show as well as at least most of the work in it. He reviewed for Art News primarily in the period before and during the tenure of Thomas B. Hess.

I have never written a negative review, myself. But I plussed and minused a friend who is now a former friend, and that should have taught me something. The art world that I knew best was full of jostling ideas and jostling people. Motivation was always hard to understand. Things haven't changed much, because people haven't changed much . But the work looked, at shown, and reviewed in the magazines - the offical art world's work - has no interest for me. The distinctions between ideation and image making in that world seems more and more like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, from where I look at it. Meanwhile some very important issues are not addressed ever. I should qualify that a little. There are very rare artists in the official establishment who do understand many of the issues, but they feel no responsibility for solving them. The issues become a joking point for them. I will wait and see whether anything like that shows up which I like more than dislike. If the right criteria prevail, I might write about it, too.

So when I get going you will get no negative reviews here. I will only discuss people whose work I get something from and work of the past in the same category.  That gives me limitations only in terms of recent times. There is so much from many other periods which is worthwhile, it will depend more on what I get to see.

Love,
Gabriel