Gabriel Laderman on Art

Caravaggio and Photography.

Here is a new story about Caravaggio and photography and my reply from a Librarians group.

At 07:05 PM 3/11/2009, you wrote:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/4968509/Caravaggio-used-photography-to-create-dramatic-masterpieces.html

Every few years another scholar comes out with a theory that some artist used photography or the close equivalent in his work. Some of the candidates to date, besides Caravaggio are Vermeer,  Karel Fabritius [who is sometimes also Vermeer's teacher], and Leonardo. There always is some evidence. Both Karel Fabritius and Vermeer were affected by the contemporary Dutch craze for the perspective box, Fabritius even designed at least one. Leonardo certainly made drawings and diagrams which are suspicious. Caravaggio has no extant preparatory drawings, except those for a lost painting underneath one of his others. There are two major problems. If any of these men had such a secret, it died with him.  How could Caravaggio have made such a major discovery, and none of his devoted following ever got a glimpse of it? For many years all over the European continent the Caravaggieschi either held sway, or competed for the prize. If there was some high road to it, would all of them have forfeited the chance and still worked it out by time honored, slow and thus conservative, pictorial techniques?

And, there is another problem. Miraculous as photography still looks to us, the generation of artists who had recourse to it in the 19th century, soon found that there were new problems using photography. The artist had to be very careful and wary of the perspectival distortions which could render the images incredible. For example in a series of paintings painted, not from life, but from photographs from life, Eakins produced a series of paintings full of these distortions. When drawing or painting from the model, though, he regularly eschewed them in favor of controlled spatial development.

A recent American painter, Leland Bell [he died in 1991] was very open to so much of the great tradition in art including the neoclassizing contemporaries of Caravaggio, Claude Lorrain and Poussin. He also adored the LeNain brothers who were influenced in some measure by Caravaggio. But for Caravaggio and his truest followers, Bell had the back of his hand. Even without photography, he felt that they gave too much of their concern to the appearance of light and shadow in perspective, and insufficient thought to those same shapes as forms in space. The attempt to imitate nature in all her details without also using the whole mind, refined taste, and connection of the artist through the art he had imbibed as well, doomed those artists to ignominious failure in his eyes.

No artistic technique by itself ever created greatness. Great apparent originality and the greatest apparent realism to date were not enough. Claude and Poussin were improbable masters. First of all they weren't Italian. There had never been a great French artist in terms which the Italians accepted. Both French artists studied with members of the school of Annibale Carracci, the Bolognese neo-classicists. Their way out of the ambiguities and extravagances of late mannerism was to go back to the more painterly and orderly forming of the Venetian high renaissance of Titian and Giorgone. Although Carracci was uneven, as were his brothers and their students, somehow their example settled into Claude and Poussin whose work was both consistently spatially logical and orderly, and who often aimed for the sense that these were arcadian groves, hills and lakes were where they spent their time, and wanted to be there even more. The sense of  "et in Arcadia  ego," was all over their work. Such work could not be corrupted by over realism, as among the Carravaggisti nor with spatial distortion and peculiarity, as in the mannerists.

They and other classicising French painters brought the Venetian renaissance to France, where it has stayed ever since. In the last century we called it "School of Paris."

My final point is that it really doesn't matter much whether Caravaggio used photos or not. It was the Bolognese, who had no tricks at all, who formed the future of European painting by reviving and continuing with the Venetians, who painted with wonderful passages which strayed through the forms, and fulfilled their space.

Best wishes,
Gabriel

Lennart Anderson's show and then to the Met for Bonnard.

Lennart, in his 80's and now being adjudged partially blind [he can only see with peripheral vision] has a show up of recent work, a block or so from the Met. The show is made up of paintings of the figure and of still life. The largest painting by far is an Arcadian scene with two nudes in it. The famale nude is in the foreground and there is a male nude in the near distance. He has been painting quite large Arcadian paintings for many years. This one is of modest size, it is probably about 5 feet by 6 feet. It is a misty day. There is more mist between us and the male figure, but we can feel it flowing over all the forms. Despite his visual limitations, this painting feels like he truly was in Arcadia himself. It is a wonderful part of an artist's late work.  Old art books used to be much involved in the artist's late style, as in Titian, for example. The looseness, and uninhibited assurance, which we see in Titian, in his paintings which free the passages from being subordinate to the forms which they describe are legendary. Well, with all his visual problems, I think Lennart has a great late style.

The show was not huge and the Met stays open until 8 on Saturday, so we went to see the Bonnard show.  I went back and saw it again roday. The show concentrated on interiors, often with a figure or two in them. Nothing was painted befure the 1930s and the works continue into the 1940s close up to the year of his death at 80.

At a panel discussion about the last NY Bonnard show, held at the MOMA, Jack Flam said that he taught 20th century art without mentioning or showing Bonnard's work. At that panel he did opine that he would rethink his options. He has an essay in this catalog. Actually, there were 2 rooms in the last Bonnard show which showed the same kind and quality of work as that in this show. There was a room full of the bathtub paintings, and a series of interiors with a figure up close overlapping a figure in the distance. Bonnard traveled a different path from both Matisse and PIcasso. His late work corresponds to late work of Dufy and Braque. All three artists painted large interiors during the last years. All of them spend a long time on some of those paintings, many years on each by Dufy, and solid months for Braque.The work is not exactly like much of each artist's other work. They each set themselves very serious and difficult problems. The work, in each case is their best.

Bonnard was neither a fauve nor a cubist. As one of the Nabis [prophets in Hebrew] he was a symbolist, self directed at finding newly poetic subjects and in painting them to achieve further metaphoric expression in color, composition and paint handling. Although his color can be very bright and his composition very much getting into full space from a taut picture plane, his form solving is never the reason for the work. Everything he does is meant to enrich our associations with the subject of the painting. This subject is often an interior with a still life in it and a figure or two.  There is no doctrinaire espousal of any compositional or coloristic program. These both change as they can increase the tropes we experience in the painting. Women are contrasted and compared with flowers. The flowers glow, and sometimed the women trump the flowers, doing more than glow. A figure in the foreground may have no large contrasts, and may remain invisible until we see a much more normatively contrasting small figure behind it in the middle distance. Then its rich associative nature becomes clear, if only temporarily as anothe element of surprise and feeling becomes unveiled. Their is multiple association between the forms, landscape, sitll life, figure, table covered with food, in which each element is compared with, or complements another.  The associations differ radically from one painting to another. Even apparently similar paintings in subject matter and size eventually show us that the connecting consequences of his pictorial process is to show us radically contrasting development and forming.

In his early work, as seen in the show at the Met some years ago, of large scale early work by the Nabis, he is perhaps the member of the group who shows the least talent. He was no wunderkind. As the years went by his work became more and more wonderfuland the work of his last twenty years was probably his best work. 

There was a small room filled with his studies for paintings. Many small scale with pencil only, and others with added color and paint. These are usually wonderful despite their dimunitive size. They are true working drawings. There is no attempt to knock us dead. It is work for his own edification. He gets it together and then he paints the hell out of it.

While he is no obvious virtuoso he does do something which neither of the two most famous of the school of Paris painters, Matisse and Picasso were involved with in their late work. Besides coming to terms with large spaces and forms expressing the subject and its relation to the canvas, quite radical picture plane oriented work, at times, he also means to have a way of reading the paintings in small takes. These are arrived at through the develpment of passages within the large forms which would otherwise verge on abstraction. These passages are exactly what Picasso despised. He thought of them as the second and third and so on guesses of an artist unwilling to come to terms with the one right color which should be in that form-and only that color.  In fact, Bonnard  purposefully worked out those passages to produce a work which could last longer for the viewer and attract him to the poetry contained in the work. These symbolist druthers seemed not merely bad but useless to Picasso.

Given the hard headed modernist spatial construction of so many of his later works, his later work can also be seen as work which comes historically after both Picasso and Matisse, and upholds the flag for slow painting,  as  a reconstructed space, unlike their work in that it is filled with passages of pictorial incident which add to and fulfill the composition.

I think that we will need to be revisiting some of the other members of his generation in their late work, such as those already mentioned, Dufy and Braque, at leastVuillard, late Soutine, and another, and comprehensive look at Derain. There were, of course other Fauves and Cubists whom we have not seen recently, like Leger and Gris.

Love,
Gabriel

Walter Strach Recent Paintings A Landscape Vernacular, -at the Bowery Gallery

I think that Walter Strach is a very fine painter. I must have seen ten shows of his work by now. This is very much the best one. But they were all a pleasure and have been getting better in small increments every time. Among the teachers he had at Pratt and Queens College were Mercedes Matter, Charles Cajori and Louis Finkelstein, who worked with him at Queens. Although Cajori also taught at Queens, Walter knew him from Pratt where he taught figure drawing. With that background there is no way he could have missed understanding modernist painting and its abstract structure. In this show, for example one of the paintings is long and thin, measuring 24 x 66, it is titled, Red Barn in the Middle. If you are someone who understands piocture making, that might be a difficult shape, since you want your viewer's eye to travel over the surface many times in many ways exploring the space which results. For a modernist painter, such a shape is a little less daunting than for some one of an earlier generation. That is because of the conceptualization which grew out of cubism and Cezanne of the paintings pictorial axes and their use to develop and control the space of the work. In this painting and the others in this shape, Strach has worked with that modern understanding and has visually, in his painting mind, divided the paintings into three irregular parts with two vertical axes, in order to fulfill that need.

Most of his shows have been in water base painting media like Gouache and Tempera, as is this show. He has been, for many years a virtuoso exponent of these media. One of the things in this show that is different from his past exhibited work is that wherever it was possible, and it helped intensify the feeling of the motif, he has let his first brushstrokes stand, without modification. These moments are often breathtakingly clear, clean and beautiful.

I have, in front of me two color images of the paintings on post cards used to notify us about the show. I am sorry to say  that they flatten out the color and generalize the paintings. One of them, which shows a "Sous Bois" composition from a little bit outside, does give a better idea of the original. The gray horizontal shadows in the snow at the bottom of the canvas are some of those first takes which he did not alter. Even in this poor card, they look electric.

The thing about Walter which does not fit into conventional modernism as it now is practiced, is that with all his sensitvity to modernisms pictorial issues, he has a desire for the big unfettered landscape of the great 19th century masters like Courbet and Corot. But he cannot imitate them. His form sense is different from theirs, although I do think he does things often in the spirit of Courbet. Some of his new work also reminds me of Derain's brushstroke Corot's of the 1920s, too. But if he had a path into landscape painting I could niot clearly characterize it as coming out of any specific Fauve or Cubist painters. I think that his eye was sophisticated by cubist and fauve work. Like all of us, he knows the quality of Nice Matisse, Marquet, Dufy, Roualt and Derain. But not one specific artist brought him to himself.

There is something very original about his slant on painting. In the past I can only think of still life painters who worked with a limited number of objects on a relatively consistent setting like Chardin, Zurbaran, and in the twentieth century, Braque, Morandi and Dufy[Dufy, rather for his late studio interiors, each of which took him years]. Strach paints only at one site. It is a house and barn on a property which hs wife bought many years ago, I think before they married. It is the only place he has painted for some years. This is treating a piece of the outdoors like a studio set up, in some ways, and it is another reminder that he is still with us as a modernist making up his own art as he goes along while honoring the masters of the past, including the twentieth century, but he still has to make it on his own, and make and break new rules which they never laid down.

Despite his quality and pertinacity, I believe that Walter has never been reviewed by any New York critic. If the Sun had not folded, he might have had a review this time, but it did fold. Many years ago, one of my formulations was that perhaps in the future instead of the avant garde paradigm in which we continually find the great art in the new, we might find it in something which seems unfashionable and not new, at first glance, which someone has pursued over time. I think many people, not necessarily those with bad eyes, walk into the galley and see what seem to them conventional and boring landscapes, and they walk right out. Over the years that must have happened with critics, too. Well, one of the things which Strach's show tells us, is that we deserve a better audience, and better critics, too.