Poetry, Imagery and the future of painting.

You know that I believe that there is nothing out there which is a real avant garde. I believe that there hasn't been any since Abstract Expressionism. Although that was the tail of the dog, wagging, it was stilll real. Since then there have been a whole lot of pseudo avant gardes which elicit the support of the art buying class, which after about a hundred years, learned the lesson that they should follow the avant garde, support it and buy its paintings. But they are not aware of how this fundamentally alters the whole structure.  The pseudo avant gardes are mimicking the real thing in order to get success, fame, fortune and more important the ability to live a bohemian life in the shadow of the upper class, which their biggest successes, perforce must join.  The whole circular business is a shoddy and poor joke.

But, in that case what do artists have to strive for, and how do they do it?

I think that art has finally reached a point where it fits into the mood of ecclesiastes:  "...there is nothing new under the sun."

But I don't believe that is a terrible place to be. Among the artists who worked in the shadow of impressionism, the post impressionists were each looking for ways to reconstruct painting, reduced to a quasiscientific look at the light at a given moment in time, in divisionist color. Cezanne invented a new and radical way of constructing a space and building form in his paintings. The impressionists dispensed with such issues, and in trying to reinvent spatial construction, Cezanne invented a new way of doing it. In some ways, among other things, so did Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Following generations kept up the inventions. Matisse looked at a motif and thought, 'traditionally I would organize it this way, what can I do to organize it which is not traditional'? Sometimes one can almost hear him thinking in those terms, especially in Nice. His whole generation from the cubists through the fauves to the somewhat  later  expressionists like Soutine
thought in ways like that. They eschewed the traditional methods they had grown up with and invented new ones. In some circles, today, these new methods have  become cliche's. They are now cliche's because the artists who use them do not use them as alternatives to the old traditional methods, which they do not know, at all, but because they are the "right way" to do things.

In my opinion there is no longer any imperative to use one specific way of doing things rather than another. Clearly, and by definition, modernists tried not to use traditional means of construction. The last people to actually make paintings which looked traditional to some eyes would be Ingres  and Corot in their figure paintings and portraits. Although many important painters in the 20th century looked back to both of them, they looked back at models which they had to radically alter before they used them successfully. Braque, Picasso, Derain, Balthus Matisse and the late Soutine come to mind as artists who were looking back at more traditional work, for inspiration.

But the assumptions which they made were in every case quite clear. "We cannot continue this tradition without altering it radically."  These assumptions were typical of some of the more conservative, but wonderful modernists. People like Gabo, Pevsner, Brancusi, Arp, Mondrian, Malevich and El Lissitzky were almost entirely uninterested in these issues, and mined new veins of pictorial language to arrive at poetry.

But what does one do once the Avant Garde imperative is gone? It becomes clearer than ever that the true search of an artist is for poetry.  All the various constructional methods of the past and the recent past are open for association. If we want to make poetic statements, now, even the detailed study of anatomy is open to us as a poetic source. When Anatomy was studied in the 19th century it was studied as the inevitable underpinning of all figure painting, with invariable proportions and volumetric constructions. It was taught well, primarily in the academies.  But now it is taught almost no where. And where it is taught it is taught again, as the inevitable, necessary underpinning of all good figure paintings.  That is not the way I see it functioning to Ingres. Why should our understanding of anatomy, especially if it is detailed and comprehensive, not be a source of poetic invention? The European world spent centuries accumulating such knowledge, why should we look only at mathematics and physics and the other sciences for sources of metaphor, and ignore the human body?

Another potential source is perspective. In the 15th century, with artists like Piero della Francesca working diligently at perspective, the artists were for a few years ahead of the mathematicians.  Aren't there poetic implications available in the varied uses of perspective today? The mathematicians do now have things to show us, especially in Non-Euclidean geometry.  These things were  not foreign to Paul Klee, who used a great deal from math and science as imagery in his work.  That means that they are already within the artist's tradition, and not materially foreign thought.

I have noticed that once serious artists begin to study spatial construction in their work they can rely on perspective projection, or Cezanne or Cubism or early easel painting devices like the system used by both Poussin and Claude in which a series of layers of light and dark, with repoussoirs help them to control the space. But all of these methods are very much inside the tradition of Western art, and have been there for centuries[even in somewhat different form, Cezanne's innovations].

One of Balthus' great innovations was to use the spatial construction, together with the color and taste in pattern taken from Japanese painting in the two paintings of his Japanese wife. Chinese and Japanese painting have even more radical spatial systems, none of which are used in the West [with the possible exception of the Good government fresco of Amborgio Lorenzetti]. In  some of these, the vanishing point is in the front, not to the rear of the painting. In others the vanishing point moves along the surface as the scroll is unrolled and as our eyes travel from right to left. In still others, the eye level of the viewer is very far above the scene. All of these have their value, depending on the subject matter .   Most of them are no longer in use in East Asian painting, nor in use elsewhere.  They are now a part of our shared visual culture, and available to all.

Since, in this new moment, I believe that what artists should try to do is make poetic statements about their subjects, I believe that all the riches of invention and pictorial production which have been developed all over the world should be available to us for our poetic needs.But what do I mean by poetic painting? I mean paintings in which the images and structures imply or associate with ideas, structures and images beyond what is described.  These associations make the painting a strating point for a long artistic journey, like that found in a fine poem. We, unlike the East Asians do not have styles of painting which are meant to accompany verse.  We also do not write our own verse on our paintings. It is the rare artist, like Michelangelo, who is a fine poet.

 In China and Japan the artist as poet is common. Buson, a great Nanga painter of the late 18th century is also considered Japan's second finest Haiku poet after Basho. But, Picasso called Klee "our poet." So, at least one 20th century painter was considered a poet in his paintings by a contemporary.  Has it not often been the case that earlier painters inspired poets? And Is not the Titian painting "Musica" or "Concert Champetre" in the Louvre, a painting about a poet reciting his poem to lute accompaniment in the countryside, surrounded not only by nature, but also by its deities, the nymphs?

We must start with what is near at hand, because we know it best.  But I have been moved recently by seeing a number of Leonardo figure drawings in a traveling show, etchings of a geometrical world with a classical figure in it, by Alfred Russell, Bilderbogen by Paul Klee[a disquisition on the relationship between image and symbol], Amazon by S. W. Hayter [a Figure made up largely, of topological lines], Joaquin Torres Garcia, "Constructif en rouge et ocre",  1931.

Please don't get the idea that the things which usually move me don't any more. I am just as high on Courbet and Corot as ever, and on Leland, Ulla and Al Kresch as ever. Stanley Lewis' new show is as much a bag of miraculous tricks as ever[and this time. full of perspective, used freely as always.] But I think my joy at a lot of the other stuff needs to be shared, because I think that many serious figurative artists ration where their eyes fall, too much.

Oneo fthe the things I am slipping into more and more, lately, is that figuration as a reaction against excess in our establishment, is not enough. There is no requirement that good art must now be figurative. What it must be is evocative. Rather than taking a position as an artist supporting one series of procedures, working from the motif, I think I and we should support the work of anyone who is trying to arrive at a truly poetic painting. Such a painting does not need to be conventionally figurative. It needs to be referential to images outside itself, but not necessarily normatively perceived ones. The level of abstraction may change, the rleation to perception may be odd, what counts is the presence of rich associative material in a pictorially pointed context.

As some of you may know American folk art and the American popular art of the cartoon and caricature are important to me, especially the work done in the 19th century before Nast, and alongside him. Most popular artists are not as inventive as someone like Klee, but even that is not absolute. Look at Grandville's book Une Autre Monde, for example. I think one of the plates prefigures Klee's "Bilderbogen."  This is the positive side of how I feel about anybody claiming that some figurative style is old hat and not worth doing. I think we could all be a lot more inclusive rather than exclusive.  Who knows where the next great, poetic visual image will come from?  I certainly don't, but I am hoping to see it soon.

Love,
Gabriel

Comments

[Dmitry Samarov]

An interesting read as always, Mr.Laderman...While I agree that new painting doesn't necessarily need to be figurative to be evocative, it seems to me that the noose is tightening for non-objective art...Whereas someone like De Kooning was responding to his world in an indirect way, many of his followers these generations later tend to adopt his visual language as a starting point...While this sometimes results in accomplished mark-making from time to time, it seems further and further away from any engagement or reaction to one's world...Similarly, those that take pop-culture as a starting point rarely seem to bring any insight aside from either cynicism or vapidity i.e. John Currin or Jeff Koons perhaps...I wonder whether you might devote a future essay to dead ends and wrong tracks, as you see them...In any case I thank you for devoting your attention to painting, which is still quite important to a few of us....

[Matthew Lopas]

[this is good] An excellent article. In a world of vast technical knowledge, multiple cultures that communicate and mingle with each other, large organizations that dehumanise, it is the effort, no matter the means,

[Gabriel Laderman]

Matthew I get a short sentence and a long incomplete sentence. I am sure there is more, but I cannot see it here.Love,Gabriel