art ongoing: Stieglitz,Steichen, Strand At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Stieglitz,Steichen, Strand At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

An exhibition of the work of these three photographers who were contemporaries and colleagues affords a wonderful opportunity to study that era of photography when the approach shifted from pictorialism to pure photography. When I entered the galleries however I noticed that the visitors were slowly drifting about the room and not stopping to look at any one photograph. Most of them, in fact, wandered in, drifted about, and left the area. Initially I assumed it was because the visitors were senior citizens and reasoned that they had probably seen all these works many times before. However, when I began to look I realized that the exhibition was so badly lit no one could see the photographs, only the glare on the glass from the over head lights. A year ago when I saw the exhibition of Picasso prints in this same museum, there was not one light source reflected in any of those over two hundred works. I assumed then that that was an example of the Met’s high standards. I see now that I was wrong. Apparently the photography department has a different set of standards and the parent body is blind to the results of their efforts. On another level it indicates indifference: the museum will hang the art but you have to do the work and adjust yourself in order to see it. If the photography department truly doesn’t know what good lighting is I would recommend that they speak to the folks who did the Picasso show last year. Another example is even close at hand: if the staff would stroll down Fifth Avenue to 71st Street they would see in the Frick Collection that not one light is reflected in the glass over the sixty-six examples from the Ludt Collection of Rembrandt drawings and prints. (See below.) Good lighting is possible; it simply requires that one have the standards and the will to demand it. Without perfect lighting exhibitions like this are a complete waste of time for all concerned. http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7bEC47F3BF-9FEB-444B-BBF6-E81E4748C49F%7d

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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

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Stieglitz,Steichen, Strand At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

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