art ongoing: Man Ray,African Art and the Modernist Lens, at The Phillips Collection, Washington D. C.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Man Ray,African Art and the Modernist Lens, at The Phillips Collection, Washington D. C.

I’m not sure that I understood this exhibition. The museum literature states that it explores the role of photography in shaping an understanding of African Art in the early 20th Century and documents its influence on modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, surrealism, high fashion and popular culture. It suggests that photography played a role equal to that of modern painting. It is a very substantial exhibition taking up four or five galleries and for the most part shows us photographs made of African objects as well as some twenty of the objects that were photographed.

I think it goes without saying that if there is a new cultural influence in Paris, the fashion capital of the world, it will make its way to the general public through newspapers and magazines from that city as well as through other popular cultural outlets. I agree that photography plays a large part in the transmission of that impulse.But, contrary to the claim made here, that influence has no where near the same impact as African Art had on painting wherein Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avingon lead to cubism and the reconceptualization of picture space and the subsequent explosion of modern art. Even photo collage, of which there are no examples here, could have been shown as an indicator of influence, but of course photo collage comes directly from cubism, painting.

I am confused as well because the name Man Ray appears above the title. In the exhibition only 50 of the 100 photographs are his. Other photographers represented are Alfred Stieglitz, Cecil Beaton, Raoul Ubac, Walker Evans, et al. The Evans photographs were made for the 1935 exhibition catalogue of African Art at MOMA, the Stieglitz photographs were made, I would think as a record, of the exhibition at his Gallery 291 in 1918, Beaton’s work of course had to do with fashion, and so on. Many of Man Ray’s photographs were made for a book written by an anthropologist but because they were artistic interpretation rather than documentary or illustration, they were not used. How unused photographs can be said to be influential is beyond my comprehension, nor did the museum explain that they had been exhibited elsewhere.

Walker Evans photographs are straight forward documentary and they are excellent prints with good composition and a full range of tonal values that illustrate the objects very nicely. They look to have been made with a medium format camera, likely a four by five that he had just begun to use at that time. One question these raised that was not answered was how these prints made for MOMA came to be the property now of The Smithsonian. I was curious if extra prints had been made for sale in addition to the MOMA prints, and if they were widely circulated, which would attest to their cultural influence, or, if they had not, if MOMA had passed them on to someone else before they made their way to Washington. Evans archives are at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I am also curious if the Met has these negatives or a set of their own prints. But all that is beyond the scope of the exhibition. Sorry to have digressed.

What is immediately evident in this exhibition is that the objects themselves are far more interesting than the photographs regardless of who took them. Each one of them is an object exuding expressive form and with wonderful color and texture and bursting with symbolic experience expressing profound feelings. The implied comparison here could almost convince you that photography is not a fine art form after all.

As with every situation there is one exception to this observation and that is a photograph made by Walker Evans of an eight inch oval mask. This is so primarily, I think, because in the photograph the mask is tipped to one side and the eyes seems to be looking down with a sense of deep longing, whereas the mask on the pedestal is upright and stares straight ahead with a blank mindlessness: Evans’ photograph has imbued it with spirit,.

The outstanding Man Ray photo is his well known Noir et Blanche in which the black mask stands upright on the right and a woman with a made up white face rests her head on the table top. The oval of her head is a direct copy of the well known Brancusi work. Two different prints of this work are shown as well as a sketch he made before the picture was taken, two others with different cropping, and, finally, a copy of the magazine in which it appeared in yet a different cropping.

Included among the Ray works was one of his Rayograms, a photogram which made use of one of the items. I thought it a not very interesting work. It was of interest to me only because I have just read Moholy Nagy’ book, the New Vision, and he writes at length about photograms. I suspect that I won’t be trying to make any.

I was pleased to see here an early Lois Mailou Jones painting, from the Phillips Collection, which shows her working in a style that is African cum Picasso. I saw a career retrospective of her work in Philadelphia last year and it is always nice to see more of her work in other venues. (I have a hunch I saw this same painting in that exhibition.) Like Picasso Ms Jones was influenced by and worked in a number of styles. Unfortunately, unlike Picasso, she never made any of those styles her own; without exception they are all derivative. That’s too bad because her drawing was excellent and she had mastered the craft of painting. At one time she did fabric design for a firm in Boston, those florid forties floral prints used for draperies and upholstery. Apparently she was very successful at that but gave it up to be a fine artist. I’m sorry she didn’t achieve a voice of her own …her work is always well executed, just not interesting.

Again my comments are beside the point here …my mind wanders …but it was that kind of exhibition. It was interesting but not much beyond that. I can add that the lighting on the photographs was good …there were few reflections in the glass.

http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/current/index.aspx

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The Aesthetic

The Aesthetic.
I was trained as a set designer and I have studied life drawing at The Art Student’s League and NYU. I lived and worked in New York City for nearly thirty years. Recently I have felt that I needed to develop a better working criterion for looking at art works. Over the years three books have been very important to me and so I have used them to hone my understanding: The Art in Painting, by Alfred Barnes, of the Barnes Foundation; Problems in Art, by Susanne Langer, the American philosopher; and the essay, Kitsch and Modern Art, by Clement Greenberg, the American art critic.

Alfred Barnes promotes his belief that the appreciation of art can be taught just as science can be taught…through methodology. In the introduction to his book there is a long paragraph that sets forth his premise. But I think that a shorter version in the Barnes Foundation literature is sufficient here: “One cannot understand art by walking through a museum anymore than he can master surgery by walking though a hospital.” Barnes insists that the observer has to work as hard to understand an artwork as the artist did to create it. He begins the educational approach by naming the three plastic elements of painting: color, line, and form. Each of these is visible on the surface and each has as well a sub textural presence: color is the actual color seen but a painting has as well a tenor, a color overall. Line is a visible line but within a painting a line carries the eye. The painting has a vertical, a horizontal, or a diagonal line. Form is the visible evidence of geometric forms but it is also the summation of the totality of the work. He suggests that the person who wants to understand an artwork must begin with an understanding of the way color has been used because color is the first thing we see in a painting.

In her work Susanne Langer states that every culture has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that that need has been manifest in magic and ritual, religion and art. It is her view that the artist produces an artwork in order to express his feelings about something. When his mastery of craft allows him to have insights during the creation of the work at hand, that gives that particular work significant meaning. Those two elements, if brought together, result in the creation of an artwork. My disagreement with her concerns her preference for the use of the word “feeling”. There seems to be too much misunderstanding of “feeling” in looking at artwork. Too many persons are of the conviction now that the artist is expressing his emotions…I felt like such and such and so I painted this in this way to express myself, my emotions. I prefer to use the word “sentiments” in the same sense that Flaubert used it in his novel, A Sentimental Education. His novel was not about the developing melancholy (the emotional state) of a particular person but about that person’s forming a sensate understanding of the world in which he lives and as an aid for his adult life.

Where Langer uses the word feeling, Barnes states that an artist creates art because he has an added “interest”. He describes this as a compelling interest. I prefer to define it as a profound interest. Certainly an interest in any subject or effort is unlikely to produce major artworks unless it is more than an interest and more than compelling. I think profound is the right word. Very likely we refer to an artist or craftsman as a dilettante when we examine the complete works and find little that has sustained him other than his cursory interests or appeals to our own. And it is in the merely casual interest that we discover the distinction made by Clement Greenberg between kitsch and modern art. He defines kitsch as that which is pre digested for us, that which is easily digested, and he defines art as that which we may not always grasp at first sight but which creates a lingering iconic memory that we find resonating in our mind. It is that which resonates that causes us to go back, to return to the source and to look with greater attention at particular works. Eventually, through study and through opening ourselves to the experience, we may come to recognize these as the artworks.

This, then, became my criterion for viewing art works; that which we study is the artist’s mastery of craft, his expression of a profound interest, his insights which have come to him during the creation of the particular work that resonates with us, and in his decisive expression of “something”. In each artwork there is that which is “expressed”. In looking at every art work the observer “experiences” something. Thus there are two questions raised by every artwork: What is expressed? What is experienced? When the observer resolves this question with an understanding of the artist’s work and his intention, a communication between artist and observer has been effected. From this perspective it can be understood that an artwork is not merely an object placed on a wall before the observer but an experience to be shared.
By stating that I have devised a system for looking at artworks I should add that I do not use this system to the exclusion of opening myself up to another experience. Early in my adult life I was made aware that Aristotle’s Poetics was written long after the Greek tragedies it describes were written. The Poetics is the record of his response and efforts toward understanding of those deeply moving works. I firmly believe that first and foremost an observer of art should allow the work to communicate with him. It is when the work is presented with museum credentials or appears authentic and one does not hear what it says that one could fall back on a system for analyzing it and achieving understanding.

art ongoing

Monday, December 21, 2009

Man Ray,African Art and the Modernist Lens, at The Phillips Collection, Washington D. C.

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