John Golding. Paths to the Absolute. The 1997 Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

Like many I am an inveterate reader of obituaries and what I find most fascinating and enlightening about them is that there are so many persons who have made really important contributions to our knowledge and well being yet who have somehow managed to remain unknown to the general public. Often, I suspect, we tend to think that all the really important people are well covered by the press and the various media.  Actually, this is hardly so. In fact, in a world of six billion, with 300 million in this country, it is hardly to be expected. As an example, I recently read of the death of John Golding, writer, painter, and critic and thought it was odd that I had never heard of him, or remembered him if I had. Despite the present number of writers on the subject of modern art, I would have thought that my recent focus on the work of Picasso would have made his name known to me.

John Golding’s first published work was the study, Cubism, a History and Analysis 1907-1914, which was written in the late 1950’s as his doctoral thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art; Anthony Blunt and Douglas Cooper were his professorial supervisors.  It is considered the standard work on the subject. (Elsewhere Golding says that he does not understand cubism. Neither do I.) Over the years he has written on modern art for a number of publications, most notably for The New York Review of Books, which I have read from time to time, and those writings have been collected in the volume Visions of the Modern. In 1997 he presented a series of six evenings in the Mellon Lectures series at The National Gallery of Art and as it was on the subject of abstraction, an area that I am studying at the present, I decided to read his work.

As the Italians would say: Madonna! What a wonderful discovery! (Que bella cosa!) For a deep understanding of twentieth century art, one can discover few writers on the subject who have a greater scholarship, insight, and understanding. Mr. Golding has an easy and engaging writing style. His explanations are without art world intellectual pretense; he is eloquent and comprehensible and completely without obfuscation; he uses language to inform, not to impress.

When I compare what Mr. Golding has to say to what Kirk Varnedoe announced that he was going to say (speak for abstraction) and didn’t, scroll down to that entry, I was even perplexed as to why Kirk Varnedoe thought he had to speak for abstraction in the first place. Certainly he would have been aware of Golding’s work …Mr. Golding contributed an essay to Varnedoe’s 2002 exhibition Picasso/Matisse, and, as the Director of MOMA, he could have been expected to know any of the Mellon lectures which addressed modern art. Checking the index of the Varnedoe lectures I found no entry for John Golding.

In comparing the two series of lectures I believe the difference lies in their identification of the underpinnings of modern art. For Golding there is an intellectual, literary, tradition which has had an impact on society and culture. For Varnedoe, if I read him correctly, there is an impact of the society on the cultural life but there are more importantly various procedures from a set of formal values. In that regard I believe that Varnedoe continues in the line, the tradition if you will, of Alfred Barr, and I suppose by inference, William Rudin, his predecessors at MOMA. This philosophy is in accord with that of Nelson Rockefeller, art collector and an early Director and benefactor of MOMA, who did not like intellectual art or art that spoke of existential angst.

If these are indeed two distinctly different understandings of modern art I believe each has validity although I respond in a more positive way to Mr. Golding’s. But likely that has to do with my own education, background, and life experience. From my earlier interests in poetry and theatre I have a positive interest to art that has an affinity to the vegetation rituals although I am aware that such art often runs the risk of becoming merely illustration. Pollack’s Guardians of the Secret, a wonderful painting, is an excellent example. And while I can appreciate art that has as its concern the interplay and balance of the plastic elements, I am aware that it hovers above the canyon of intellectual nothingness, it runs the risk of quickly becoming a bore. The former evokes at the least the response: how interesting, while the latter too often engenders a …so what.

Paths to the Absolute is divided into six chapters, six monographs, one each for Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Pollack, and two chapters which elucidate the life and work of Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, and Clifford Still.  Thus another difference with the Varnedoe lectures is that Golding keeps his focus on painting while Pictures of Nothing has an overview of painting, sculpture and environmental constructions.

The first three of these painters were Europeans who came to their maturity prior to World War II; the latter four are Americans who hit their stride after that global event. With the exception of Kandinsky all of these men were sent toward their final destination by the development of cubism. Hence knowledge of cubism, even if only a knowledge of its history, is a necessary step toward the understanding of modern art.

But a knowledge of cubism alone is insufficient for the greatest understanding. It is Mr. Golding’s premise that born into a world that had lost the certainty of a spiritual path, each of these artists devoted their careers to finding the right path. There are many Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century works which contributed to the strongly held perception that the social order as it had been known had ceased to be operative. Among those works were The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Karl Marx’ Capital, and, among others, Golding also names Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Henri Bergson.

The work that is generally cited as having had the most profound influence on society and the arts was Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra which contains the well quoted line: “…the people do not know that God is dead” meaning, as I understand it, that the Church no longer stands as the moral authority for western civilization. The dilemma this posed was played out in turn of the century French literature in the works of Paul Claudel, Andre Gide and Roger Martin du Gard. Claudel converted to Catholicism while Gide remained a steadfast atheist. In his journals Gide tells us that he trembled with fear each time he was visited by Claudel, terrified that his old friend might try for his conversion.

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is often cited, as it is here, as having had the most profound influence specifically on writers and artists …Shaw, Eliot, O’Neill, et al. Also inspired by Nietzsche’s works there followed in 1920 Spengler’s The Decline of the West.

Early in the twentieth century Freud’s works acknowledged the impasse, Civilization and its Discontents, a truly great title, but sought to provide a way forward. He identified the ego and the id, the conscious, the unconscious, and the super ego, He also identified the libido, the sexual energy that is the basis of all our energy, and with it the concept of the polymorphous perverse, which states that we are all bisexual and that we are sexually attracted to everyone and that conflict arises when we use our social skills to sublimate those impulses. (You can see how Freudian Picasso’s works can be understood to be.) Equally important to surrealism was Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.

In addition there was Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, which brought to the table Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, the basis of Eliot’s Waste Land, Mircea Eliade’s work, and later Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. All of these works engendered in the art community a new appreciation of the world’s ethnic arts.

World War I was also an important cultural moment: cubism precedes it and the modern art referenced here followed. As an additional influence we might also insert the work of Kurt Schwitters who took from the detritus of the old, dead, civilization the materials for making a new art.

Theosophy was a strong influence in the life and work of Mondrian and Kandinsky is designated here as the most religious of these painters. In reading these pages I was sorry that Golding appears not to have been familiar with the work of Suzanne Langer because I think her statement best describes his intent: Every culture has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that need has been manifest in magic and ritual, religion and art.

The two painters of this group who provoke in me the most positive response are Mondrian and Pollack. While I can admire what Golding here considers their spiritual purity, I am much more taken with their life long transition from a mastery of academic art toward a very personal idiom that has always the character of fine art. And I especially like it that having achieved a signature image that could not be borrowed by others without obvious plagiarism, they moved on to further explorations. It is for this same reason that I am so taken with Picasso…that always moving on …finding, exploring, exhausting, and moving on …that and perhaps the intellectual realization that we cannot know: every day our telescopes in earth orbit tell us that our suppositions about the universe are wrong. I am certain that our spiritual certainties are equally wrong and for that reason I always prefer Langer’s “symbolic experience”.

The chapter on Mondrian achieves the remarkable feat of humanizing the man. Even though I suspect that he was very much a difficult person…more intelligent than everyone else and impatient because further along in his quest for his goal, he seems here to have been a likeable person. I also appreciate that the whole of his career is taken into consideration not just the grids and minimal colors for which he is so well known. Over the years in one museum after the other I have seen a full range of his life’s work and I find all of it extremely satisfying.

The chapter on Pollack, always the tragic figure due to his compulsive self destruction, tragic because his talent and achievement were so great, is one of the great pieces of writing on the arts. Mr. Golding knows his subject thoroughly and he has the most profound admiration and respect for his achievement. While he recognizes the drip paintings as a great moment in western art he is also aware that those paintings were made in a rather brief period and that Pollack went on to make other paintings that came out of that moment. It is those last paintings of Pollack’s that I find so intriguing.

I am less impressed by the work of Malevich and Kandinsky. In my earliest days in New York I saw the exhibition of Kandinsky’s work at the newly opened Guggenheim Museum and I was very excited to discover that if I wanted to be a modern artist all I had to do was to learn the language he had created …red means this and blue means that …or to add to it the language of Malevich …triangles mean thus and such and many little squares mean something quite other. Seeing the Kandinsky exhibition a second time, fifty years later, 2009, I realized that during the interim I had come to think of this as merely a technique, a contrivance, and I had by then learned that contrivance is the antithesis of art.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy seeing an occasional Kandinsky now and then …but certainly not in groups of two hundred…every fifty years is enough of that. And while I admire the writings of Moholy Nagy, Kepes, and Rudolph Arnheim, none of whom are mentioned at length by either Varnedoe or Golding, perhaps there is a third theory of modern art, I consider their ideas as suggestions for the use of the plastic elements in the construction of a painting not, as in Malevich, an end in itself.

Had I written these essays …or delivered them as lectures, I would have referenced the work of Schwitters rather than Malevich. Schwitters created a body of work almost every example of which has tremendous presence, a sense of rightness to it, and of such rich complexity as to demand the most intense scrutiny. He achieves excellence in works that are often only 8 by 10 inches. His works create a sense of symbolic experience the equal of Mondrian’s. But most specifically I would have chosen Schwitters because his work has been so influential: it is almost impossible to go into any gallery or museum in town or in the country and not see collage that references his example. Certainly his work represents a human something that wants to be acknowledged.

Because this survey stops in the mid 1950’s there is no mention of the revival of interest in Buddhism that entered into American intellectual life at that time. Seen from that perspective, modern American art has a completely different aspect.

After years of contemplation Buddha revealed his insights. All human life is suffering. All suffering comes from our attachments. If we can give up all of our attachments including our desire to experience sartori we will discover that we have always had it within ourselves.

When we explore the nature of our attachments we discover that life is Maya, illusion. This Philadelphia Chippendale chair that I prize so highly is a family heirloom given to me by my grandmother and given to her by her grandmother on her wedding day. While I cherish the object and its history Buddha would tell me that it is just a piece of wood in a specific configuration. Prior to this it was timber in a mill and prior to that it was a tree in a forest and prior of that it was light and air and nutrients in the soil. It is what it is and whatever color I give to it that is only the color that I give to it. That color is Maya.

Mr. Golding is a master of modern art scholarship and I certainly bow to his great knowledge. But I am sorry that he omits reference to the Buddhist tradition. I think it is wonderful that he sees in Barnet Newman’s zips the echo of the primeval artistic gesture. Not knowing about the primeval gesture I have only ever seen them as large monochromatic surfaces with a contrasting line. Knowing now about the primeval gesture, I see them as large monochromatic surfaces with a contrasting line.

I have sat in Rothko’s chapel at the Phillips Collection in Washington and I have seen, in a dimly lit room, three (four?) large paintings …pigments applied in a specific way on a sized and primed ground. I have stood before the enormous No. 14, 1960, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and despite the sense that it had been made as a visual experience designed to make me experience awe, it remained for me paint and ground …it has as its purpose manipulation, a benign and well meaning manipulation, but manipulation all the same. But, I admit, it can be Maya to those willing to allow themselves to become lost in wonder.

As each of these three painters, I am including Still, came closer to the symbolic experience he wished to share with others the works themselves grew larger and larger until in the end they sometimes became room sized. It is that aspect of modern art …that Larger is More Important… that The Big Theme Needs a Big Canvas …that often turns me away from it. (Mondrian could say as much with 24 by 24 inches.) Most of us look at the majority of the art works we see in reproductions in books or prints, just as artists from the classical eras saw most art works in reproduction. Few of the great artists throughout history had the ability the average American housewife has to see so many thousands of world class art works face to face. Reduced to eight by ten or even three by five inches a work should give us a strong indication of its vital import through its visual presentation alone: conversely, imagining a huge art work in a museum as a postcard reproduction helps to balance its ambition against its performance. I have a small post card collection of Rembrandt self portraits on my bookshelf and every one of them has tremendous presence and impact. In his comments on Barnet Newman Mr. Golding cites his work, Uriel, 1955, as one he finds extremely successful. In fact it is used as the dust jacket of the book and, frankly, as an example of fine art, I find that it is perfectly successful as a dust jacket. When I see these enormous works dominating the walls of museums I am often reminded of my visit to the Louvre where I stood before David’s Coronation of Napoleon. I consider these modern works equally overwrought and equally silly.

In my comments on Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures I suggested that with the rise to dominance of the Chinese nation the cultural capital was likely to move there as well. In these Golding lectures I am compelled to mention China in another context.

The present socio/political reality in modern China is, according to many, merely a new manifestation of its dynastic tradition that extends in a somewhat unbroken line back six thousand years. What is most remarkable, to a Westerner, about this long history is that China has never had an official religion. There has never been any authority other than respect …if the emperor does not respect the peasant who grows the rice, everyone, including the emperor will starve. In the arts as in life there has never been in China a quest for or even a desire to experience the Absolute. Those magnificent Tang Dynasty tomb figures are as close as they want to get; they celebrate life and express the wish that it might last forever. Compare that to civilizations that have had a religious basis …I say have had because those civilizations are extinct. So much for the absolutes.

Perhaps, here in the west, there is something we have yet to understand.

Maya. Hmmm.

Mr. Golding’s excellent book is available through internet book sellers. Strangely it is not available through the National Gallery Online Bookstore. Neither is there a list on the NGA web site listing all of the Mellon Lectures. This is a wonderful series of lectures that should have more public exposure. In the future I hope the deficiencies of the museum web site will be corrected.

John Golding’s writing in The New York Review of Books:

http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/john-golding/

Articles marked with a lock symbol are for subscribers only.

The Steins Collect. Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde

.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

When studying modern American literature Gertrude Stein, the experimental writer, comes onto the stage as the doyenne of a literary atelier in 1920’s Paris, mother superior to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Pasos, et al. In those literary years her salon was physically dominated by her portrait by Picasso, which gave her the imprimatur of modernity, and while they had been friends for many years, he was only now and then to be met there. It was also known that she was friendly with Matisse and that she had two brothers, Leo and Michael, who shared her interests in modern art.

When seen from the perspective of Paris, 1905, and the explosive appearance of modernism in the arts, Gertrude Stein is a beginning art collector and a very important one among the first supporters of Picasso and Matisse. In almost every telling Gertrude was the instigator of the collection put together by Claribelle and Etta Cone, her friends from Baltimore. (The famous Cone Collection.) It was also known that Gertrude, and her brother Leo, a would be artist, had an older brother, Michael, who shared their interest in art.

From whichever perspective the story has been told, it has been a constant that the Gertrude Stein residence at 27 Rue de Fleurus was a place where wonderful examples of modern art could be seen. Always as the background to the story of writers or painters that collection has attained legendary status. It would seem evident that eventually someone would have the idea of locating all of those art works and of recreating those historically important moments.

The Steins Collect is the result of that obvious thought, but strangely almost 70 years after the last of the Steins has died. In the catalogue overview, when seen from the perspective of the Stein family, Gertrude is now but one of three each of whom has equal importance. At last we get to know what Leo and Michael were up to!

In sum there were seven Stein siblings. Two died in infancy. Michael was the eldest and Gertrude, ten years later, the youngest. A sister, Bertha, accompanied Gertrude to Radcliffe and another brother, Simon, died in his early thirties. In this telling once Michael, Leo, and Gertrude are ensconced in Paris, Bertha and Simon disappear from the historical record. (Perhaps there is yet more to this Stein family saga.)

During the years when the Stein parents were alive the family had defined the word peripatetic. There was much relocating from city to city in the United States and at one time they spent four years in Europe, (the father was German born), most of them in Paris. Upon the parents’ death, when the children were all young adults, Michael took over the family business in San Francisco and very soon thereafter had established it so well that all of the siblings had a comfortable income for the rest of their lives.

The education of these peripatetic siblings could be described as equally peripatetic …the three of them studied, among other things, law, medicine, psychology, and philosophy, at a number of universities in the United States…Harvard, Radcliffe, USC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins …these were brilliant children. But with an educational emphasis on science and medicine, one might well ask, why did they buy art works? And how did they know with such certainty which art works by what unknown artists to buy?

This exhibition makes it clear that Leo is the key to that understanding. He was the first to leave the United States as a young adult and to travel widely …he made an around the world trip with a friend in 1895. As an urbane, educated, and cultivated person with independent financial means, certainly he had entre to those social environments that appreciated the arts. Early on, through his summers resident in Italy, he became friends with Bernard Berenson and through him, Roger Fry, one of the leading exponents of the work of Cezanne.

By 1902 Leo had decided to become an artist …hence the apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus which had a studio for his painting. Gertrude, after much educational shifting about, came to live with him in 1904 dedicated to trying her hand at writing. And in 1904 Michael and his wife Sarah moved permanently to Paris as well.

Three important events at that time should be kept in mind. Since 1880 it was more and more accepted that the academic style of painting had fallen into decadence …the Ecole de Beaux Arts was no longer held in high esteem. Secondly, the recent work coming out of Munich was creating a high level of excitement: Picasso’s first choice for the move out of Spain had been Munich but because of his limited funds he had to settle for Paris. And, third, in 1905 a career retrospective of Cezanne’s work convinced many, many people that the French route to modernism had been found ...Matisse, Braque, and Picasso among them.

In his book, The Nude, the 1952 Mellon Lectures, Kenneth Clark, at the very end of the study, introduces Matisse and Picasso and tells us that both were extremely ambitious for fame and success as painters. Both of them understood that this was a transitional period and both of them, academically trained, understood that a new tradition had to be created. We know their names because they were successful, and, being successful, they reinvigorated the art of painting. Their revolutionary works Clark names were Matisse’s Blue Nude, included in this exhibition, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, at MOMA, but the studies for that painting are here as well. Both works reference art which the two artists had seen in Parisian ethnographic museums and in both works the human figure has been reconfigured as the motif for creating expressive form.

Shortly after her arrival Gertrude and Leo decided to pool their resources and to collect as they were able …none of these drawings and paintings was very expensive. The burgeoning collection served two purposes: one; it identified them as not philistines, and two; as these artists gained fame the value of those works would increase, they could be traded up or sold as funds were needed. It was Leo’s understanding of the art world transitional moment that gave him the certainty that these were the right works to buy that made the collecting a sensible enterprise and explains why certain painters were their focus.

As the collections grew and as more and more people called wanting to see the works, it was decided that a regular At Home would be held on Saturdays at 27 Rue de Fleurus as Gertrude and Leo had known the Cone sisters to do back in Baltimore. At these times Leo would guide the guests through the collections and expound on art and modern art and the new tradition as it was being defined. Despite encouragements to write his comments down and publish them Leo was not a writer, neither it turned out was he a painter, and it was not until many years later that he was able to publish his ideas. I have never read his book, I have never known anyone to quote him, and there is but little mention here of any specific insights he might have had about the new art…so I am doubtful that his book has been very widely appreciated over the years. He comes off as a rather tragic figure and I couldn’t help wondering if he might not have been the inspiration for his sister’s well known remark: You are all a lost generation. And his dual lack of development might account for the fact that Gertrude is generally the star of the biographies and histories of the period, that and the self serving Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

With the arrival of Alice B. Toklas in 1910, Leo left to go on his own and he and Gertrude divided their collection. When Picasso entered his cubist period, Leo lost interest in his work and eventually focused on Renoir. That left Gertrude as the Picasso collector but as his fame indeed increased and as his prices soared, she was no longer able to buy his work. (She continued to support the work of other young artists, however.) She bought her last Picasso in 1924 but had to sell several earlier works in order to finance the purchase. It’s an odd Picasso; a Still Life with a guitar and many off putting black lines, as if to say “The way is barred.” Except that it suggests Picasso was suffering “painters” block, a rare condition for him, I can’t think that she made the right decision.

From their beginnings as collectors, Michael and Sarah focused on the work of Matisse and ultimately became his closest Stein friends. After seeing it in the Salon of the Independents in 1905, Michael and Sarah, who had studied the arts in college, bought Matisse’s Lady with a Fan, one of the greatest paintings in the Stein holdings, a Cezanne remade in the fauve palette. (Gertrude and Leo owned Cezanne’s Lady with a Fan.) Later Sarah assisted with the establishment of the Matisse school and studied with him.

Unlike the Cone Collection there is no extant Stein Collection: it was an accumulation over the years of many paintings that came and went. One very important piece of information about the Steins we learn here is that they were great proselytizers of modern art, not only inviting perfect strangers into their homes but encouraging exhibitions and loaning works to exhibitions and especially exhibitions in the United States. At the outbreak of World War I Michael and Sarah lost 16 of their Matisse paintings when they were confiscated while on exhibition in Germany. Thus not only was their pictures important but the Steins are important for having done so much to promote the new tradition.

In the catalogue photographs of 27 Rue de Fleurus are shown giving us an impression of the number of works owned by the Steins and of their placement within the small apartment. In a large empty gallery within the exhibition those photographs are projected onto the bare walls giving us a better sense of the physical size of the collection. This gallery can be seen in the web page video.

In walking into the exhibition I suppose one should try to imagine what it must have been like all those many years ago to enter a space where such unimaginable art works were hanging as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Unfortunately so many of them are now so well known that to imagine that one has never seen such things is impossible The closest I can get is to remember how, back 50 years ago, I first walked into the Museum of Modern Art and saw many of these and similar paintings there for the first time. Despite my having at that time a very rudimentary education in art appreciation 101, I was shocked, amused …by my shock and by the works both …and humbled by a display of authority for I did not know what. But certainly I felt like an outsider, a feeling, having lived with these works for 50 years now, I can no longer muster.

What is so immediately astonishing here is that so many of these works were very small. Several of the Cezanne bathers are only about 12 by 16 or 8 by 13 inches. Accustomed as I am to the Philadelphia room-sized Large Bathers it was pure delight to discover that Cezanne could work on such a small scale and create a work that in reproduction had all of the information of the larger, indeed grander work. Even smaller is his painting of five apples, 4 by 10 inches.

And the same goes for Matisse whose work here in the Collioure series are all oil sketches for later well known works. Several of the Picassos are miniscule …the self portrait from the same period as the Gertrude portrait is only 10 by 7 inches. A beautiful cubist still life, Guitar, is 6 by 7. His painting of one Cezannesque apple is only 5 by 6 inches! However, Boy Leading a Horse, a mainstay at MOMA, is very large and the nude portrait of Fernande from the summer in Gosol, which I have only ever seen in reproduction and which I assumed to be half life size, is in reality nearly full life size. And while in reproduction it is one of the interesting works referencing prehistoric Spanish art, when seen face to face it glows with luminosity. Picasso often achieves this effect although it is never suspected when seeing reproductions. Perhaps it should be emphasized from this that when one collects art works it is not the reproducible image that he buys, the composition, but the first hand experience and response to the actual object.

Over the years my enthusiasm for Matisse has waned considerably …I generally find him too slap dash and slap dash on purpose as if he had set out to create an anti-art. Kenneth Clark’s comments about creating a new tradition are probably relevant here. In some of the paintings on view we are made very aware of his process, that process being as it were a part of his technique. In particular we see in the portrait of the young Boy with a Butterfly Net, Allan Stein, the son of Michael and Sarah, that the pose has been changed and that the changes were made by painting out the original and over painting the revisions. It reminded me somewhat of the ethics of restoring a painting in which passages that have been repainted are of a purpose not quite the same color. As a conceit I suppose this is permissible but as a painting it seems to me to suggest a rather eccentric arrogance…which is pretty much what I have come to think of this person.

There are many other artists in the exhibition both masters and wannabes and it’s interesting that while the younger artists made wonderful paintings, when seen in situ with the innovators and the masters, they lack the masters’ passions; they take on the aura of the also-rans. Perhaps if they had lived longer and had made more paintings we might think differently: very few artists can achieve greatness on a handful of works …one thinks first of Vermeer and then…

In the first gallery there are some paintings that the Steins did not own and I believe they are only shown to remind us of the world in which the family moved. Among them are two Renoirs which represent what it is about the man’s work that I dislike …boneless over-stuffed sausage casings slathered with orange and blue polka dots to suggest …The Female! When Leo Stein began to focus on Renoir’s work Roger Fry commented that it indicated he had lost his interest in art. If he meant by that what I think he meant, I completely agree.

Despite the fact that this is an exhibition of the artworks collected by the Stein family, the highlight is the section devoted to the house Michael and Sarah commissioned from Le Corbusier. This was built in 1928 outside of Paris when they had ended their collecting days. They had seen his work at the 1925 International Exposition and decided to offer him the commission.

Here we see his drawings, his plans, photographs of the work in progress and photographs of the finished structure. Seeing this made me aware that for an architect who is considered one of the three great architectural geniuses of the first half of the century, and considering my love of architecture and my travelling to see examples and gallery exhibitions, this is the first time that I have seen one of his drawings face to face. (I have seen his one building in the United States, the building on the campus of Harvard University next door to the Fogg Art Museum.) In contrast to his staid classical modernism these evident hand made drawings spring to life. It was a delightful discovery and I can recommend this section of the exhibition as being worth the price of the ticket …which at the Met is no longer cheap. I suppose we should all be complimented that the new management considers all of us as comfortably within the 1%. But it is only a suggested contribution, even though there are no longer posted signs to that effect, which I suspect is in violation of New York State law, and one may still offer what he wishes to offer.

To end on a personal note: when I took my first art class in the eighth grade the teacher explained to us that most artists learned to paint by going to museums and copying the masters. As we had no museums in Kansas, at our immediate disposal, he suggested that we could use reproductions in books and magazines. For a reason now lost to me I decided to copy Picasso’s portrait of Leo Stein. The project was very successful and I was certain that it bore a striking resemblance to the original. I carried it around with me for many years and I suspect that I still do have it buried somewhere in the flat files. It was a great thrill for me to step to the wall here at the Met, to live for a moment in both the present and the past, and to study the original gouache, sixty years later, for the first time face to face. I continue to believe that my work, which I executed in poster paints, is an excellent copy. And of course it puts me in company with so many twentieth century artists…all of us guilty of having made careers copying Picasso. Alas, that genius is so rare!

But give credit where it is due that some recognize geniuses when they see them and that they support their efforts, as well as the efforts of those who show only “a spark”. Here’s to the Steins! Hip hip…

The exhibition web page:
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/steins-collect

Naked Before the Camera at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

On my last several visits to the Met I have turned out of the long Rodin Gallery, in reality a corridor on the east west axis, (every gallery at the Met is now in reality a corridor), into the galleries of 19th Century French Art where, two galleries away, a very large Courbet female nude, Woman with a Parrot, confronts the oncoming visitor. My interest is in the persistence of black in the work of Courbet, who I think of primarily as a landscape artist, and this painting seems to me representative of that aspect of his work.

Each time I see it I am reminded as well of the central role the nude has maintained in the art of Western civilization up until the mid twentieth century when the claim was made that abstraction successfully terminated any further need for or interest in figurative work. With that shift in emphasis I have concluded that the place of the nude in modern art probably lies in the field of photography. And as I am rather familiar with the nude as the subject of photographs I am aware as well that there are very few photographs of the nude on strictly photographic terms that have the presence or the power of a Picasso, a Courbet, a Rubens, or any of the other masters of fine art painting who used the nude as expressive form. Clearly an exploration of that subject would seem to be in order.

This exhibition might seem to be a welcome attempt but it does nothing to elucidate the subject beyond an academic overview. In large part that might well be because it is a small exhibition and that in turn is occasioned by the fact that the Gilman Gallery, the designated museum space for photography exhibitions, has been greatly reduced in size. Originally it was five small rooms that opened off a long corridor on the north south axis connecting the grand stairway to the Rodin Gallery. Now the first three of those rooms have been taken over for works on paper and the Gilman Gallery is but the last two small rooms from which one formerly exited into the Rodin Gallery. I don’t know if this is a permanent or a temporary reconfiguration but in either case it is indicative of the Met’s low regard for photography. Another indication of that low regard is that the lighting, as usual here, is really bad: every one of the photographs reflects the lights all around the room as well as the shirt fronts of the gallery visitors. As a final insult this thin offering is scheduled to run for almost six months. (Perhaps the photography department is on extended leave.)

In this overview we see that the nude as the subject for photography began as an effort to create works like fine art painting and drawing, the reference to Ingres is unmistakable, then offered itself as a helpful tool for artists, including a photograph that might have been an aid to Courbet in creating the above mentioned painting. In the modern era we are shown two works by Edward Weston who resolved the problems of photographing the nude by posing the models in contorted and uncomfortable positions, optical distortions created by Brassai, Kertesz, Brandt, et al, and two straightforward Harry Callahan photographs of his wife Eleanor. Evidence is presented that the effort to revive the male nude as subject verifies the assumption that that is but a lot of borderline homoerotic/ pornographic work, and then it concludes with some work from medical journals. In keeping with the smallness of the gallery all of these are small, mostly eight by ten, prints. One of the Callahan prints is a square two and one half inch contact print. But Harry Callahan made many small prints and in most cases I believe that he was right to do so.

Apparently unbeknownst to the curators, or to the Met, is the fact that there has been a rebirth of the male nude as the dominant subject of the nude in art since the 1980’s and that in the digital age a very large body of work has been created using Photo Shop. Ink jet prints are being made in large formats now. I wouldn’t say that all of it is good work but just a quick Google search will lead the interested person to web sites of well over a thousand photographers who only photograph the male nude. Not a word of that is mentioned here. But as I said, the gallery space is small and the interest in photography at the Met is nil.

This exhibition reads as filler biding the time of the staff until the next touring blockbuster show can be booked for the gallery. I hope the staff is outraged by that offense on the part of management …or that the management is outraged to find it has such an uninspired curatorial department. In either case it was a disappointing day at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Other Than Photography.

Considering the really poor lighting at the Met which obscures the character of the paper on which the photographs are printed, one is probably best advised to see the exhibition on the internet. The web page for the exhibition:
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/naked-before-the-camera


Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot:
http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110000435

Pictures of Nothing. The Kirk Varnedoe Mellon Lectures as The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

One of the truly great uses of the internet is the development of museums posting videos, lectures, biographical materials, et al, free to the public. Because I am on the National Gallery emailing list, every month I receive their newsletter letting me know how they might be of further assistance in my ongoing education of the fine arts. A few weeks ago I was informed that the 2003 Kirk Varnedoe Mellon Lectures, Pictures of Nothing, were being made available on the internet and as iPod broadcasts and that the six lectures were being posted one per week.

Prior to this announcement the only one of the Mellon Lectures known to me was Kenneth Clark’s, The Nude, which I have had in book form for many years. By coincidence I had just finished reading it for about the seventh or eighth time when this announcement was received.

Kirk Varnedoe was a name known to me for many years but a person I knew little about, despite my thirty years working in the New York City arts. On the website I learned that he had been the curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA as well as the curator of several exhibitions, none of which I had seen. I won’t list his full resume here, it is impressive, as that is available on the museum web page. I can also direct you to an archive of the Charlie Rose Show and to the interview in which Kirk Varnedoe explains how he made his decision to leave the museum and present these lectures. It has much to do with the fact that he died, at age 56, only a few months after having delivered them.

In his opening remarks he refers to the Mellon Lectures of 1956 by E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, a survey of the psychology of representation in art, and he states that it is his intention to do for abstraction what Gombrich did for representation. Because Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures were so inspiring, after hearing the third one I went to the internet and bought a copy of them so that I could follow the slides he was presenting which are reproduced in the book, and so that I could quickly read them all. And at the same time I bought as well a copy of the Gombrich lectures. When making art every gesture, every motion, every movement an artist makes requires the making of a decision and the dilemma of Representation versus Abstractions is perhaps the first brick wall the young artist comes up against in his career, if it is not indeed a career long preoccupation, as in the work of Will Barnet. How that crisis is resolved is one of the first steps toward the creation of a personal voice.

On a broader view the dilemma between representation and abstraction has been an unresolved ongoing debate in the fine arts in general. Neither Matisse nor Picasso forsook representation and neither made purely abstract art works. They remain the undisputed giants of the modern art world and their influence remains as strong today as it was during their lifetimes. But because abstraction was for so long considered the legitimate end game of representation subsequent artists have had to find their way. The exemplar here is Jackson Pollock who, when he studied with Thomas Hart Benton made drawings that looked like Thomas Hart Benton’s, or when he studied Picasso made paintings and drawings that looked like Picasso’s, and who one day dribbled the paint directly onto the canvas and achieved a moment that is probably only slightly less important to subsequent art than was cubism.

From the moment he begins to speak Mr. Varnedoe is a charismatic presence. He is charm personified and he addresses his audience respectfully as a congregation of well educated intelligent persons. His knowledge of art history is encyclopedic and he brings information and personal experience to the surface faster than a computer with dual processors. But what is so truly remarkable is that he speaks in complete sentences with a majestic command of the English language. Because his delivery is so fluid and easy I wondered if he was speaking extemporaneously and indeed the introduction to the book states, with a wonder equal to my own, that he was; he referred to only note cards and slides. As a depth of knowledge and a command of the language are achievements I appreciate, after the first lecture I was committed for the duration.

Each of the lectures is devoted more or less to one of the decades of the last half of the century. Without going into them in detail, I urge you to hear them on your own, I will cut to the finale and ask the obvious question: Did Mr. Varnedoe achieved his aim of making the case for abstraction? Sadly, and despite this wonderful theatrical performance, I have to conclude that he did not.

Beginning with Pollack’s drip paintings, Varnedoe uses that as the locus of the New York art scene, referring to them constantly during all of the lectures. He contrasts that with Jasper John’s Flag, which he considers a reaction to Pollock’s work and proceeds to insist that abstraction of the last half of the century was created within this dichotomy of those two ways of thinking.

I was surprised that there was little retrospective summary of the years 1900 to 1950, that nothing was said about the dichotomy of the Munich/Paris art world of the beginnings of the century. Abstraction had, when these lectures were given, a one hundred year history and we are guided through only parts of it during the second half of that history. Because so much is missing these lectures read, ultimately, as an example of cultural relativism, as an advertisement for the New York School, and very likely, even if unwittingly, as an apologia of his tenure at MOMA.

In the late 1940’s Henry Luce, the publisher of Time/Life, made his pronouncement: This is the American Century. And indeed when we consider the same years that Kirk Varnedoe covers in these lectures we can see that it was the American Century; we had the world’s strongest economy and the most powerful military. In that environment our culture would obviously have world influence as well …think Hollywood films, rock and roll, and blue jeans, etc.

As the only world class city in the United States, New York would of course be the self proclaimed cultural fine arts center of the American Century, (Chicago was our only other possibility) Having lived in New York from 1959 to 1992 I can attest to the super abundant and rich fine art cultural life there. But I have often questioned the claims made for the superiority of the New York cultural world and have just as often considered it merely the self aggrandizement of those who thought of themselves as King of the Hill. I have found it hard to believe that a society that is outside this urban elite would produce, by inference, only second rate art, whether domestic or foreign, when the truth is to the contrary …think Francis Bacon, Fellini, Peter Brook, Pedro Amodovar, Pina Bausch, Shoji Hamada, Samuel Beckett. I believe that New York was the art capitol only because of its combative New York self assertiveness and its propinquity to corporate wealth. When the world situation changes the cultural capitol will move.

In defense of my view I can point out that some have already proclaimed the 21st Century as the Chinese Century and if you follow the pages of the current art journals you will see that Chinese modern art is quickly achieving the status of Cultural Capitol and that the prestige, and more typically, the money, the corporate money, is shifting to the Far East: let us keep in mind that China will soon be the world’s largest economy, that the Chinese army now numbers in the millions, and that China will likely have the first colony on the moon. Will that dominance make modern Chinese art good? Better than other art?

This narrow focus on the New York art scene brought to mind Bernard Berenson’s far broader work on the Italian renaissance. During the Italian renaissance the world of painting and sculpture fell into several schools of thought; the school of Florence, the school of Rome and the school of Venice. If he had set out to make the case for Italian renaissance art and had spoken only about the school of Venice, we would know nothing about Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Raphael. From these lectures we know nothing about Kandinsky, Diebenkorn, Calder, Morandi, Hans Hoffman, Lucian Freud, Joan Mitchell, et al, nor is there a whiff of a mention of the Latin American painters who have produced some of the greatest art of this same period.

In 2007 I happened upon an exhibition of the Bank of America photography collection, Made in Chicago, formerly the La Salle Bank Collection, at the Chicago Cultural Center and I was stunned that such great photographic works existed and without wide, national, public recognition. One of the photographs in particular interested me and through the internet I was able to contact the photographer and I bought a copy of that work. In a series of exchanges with him through the email I asked why he thought those Chicago photographers had such low name recognition, Harry Callahan was among them, wondering if perhaps it was because they worked outside the boundaries of the New York art scene. He replied that that might have been the case but that more than that he thought it was because of their inherent Midwestern reticence …all of them were Midwesterners.

I am a Midwesterner, I am socially reticent, and so I could accept that easy explanation as probably the most likely answer. When I considered if any of the artists Mr. Varnedoe describes might have been Midwestern, I realized that they were not. Wherever they might have come from to New York, reticence was not their style. Indeed, they had that New York energy and drive that can best be described as a will to power. And so when I ask what these artists might have had in common that created a bond between them and that bundled them together into an art movement, I was aware that the will to power is the best easy explanation. And while Kirk Varnedoe describes in detail the work and the world in which these artists lived I was too much aware that he was omitting this psychological component in their success: they are well known not just because of their work but because they were driven to make their mark in their professional field, they were driven by self aggrandizement, aided and abetted by dealers and critics with a vested interest; none of them was surprised by having the mantle of greatness laid upon them.

I specifically mention Harry Callahan because I think few of the artists featured in these lectures, contrary to their publicity; have achieved a level of fine art in their work the equal of Mr. Callahan’s. Let me ask again: Why isn’t he as famous as they are?

That makes me wonder if there might not be undiscovered artists of great stature outside the New York School. Varnedoe briefly mentions the Design Institute in 1940’s Chicago, where Callahan taught. Founded by Moholy Nagy as the American Baus Haus the influence of that school and that art philosophy has had wide ranging dispersal in the United States; the Black Mountain School, RISD, Alfred University, Parsons, The Art Student’s League in New York, the Santa Fe community, and through generations of students from there and elsewhere through those associations. It is very likely that the art produced by those persons is the American art that Alfred Stieglitz championed. I am certain it exists. Where is it?

I suspect the answer lies in the fact that the United States is a land of conformity and that museums toe the mark and walk the walk with the same modus operandi; they all show similar works by the same 37 modern artists in the same museum configuration. Neither originality nor individuality is an objective of any American art museum. (I have visited 100 American art museums.)

Although the artists within the camp Kirk Varnedoe describes concerned themselves with developing a signature image, we learn here that nothing actually stands on its own, nothing “good” that is. As here described this is an art that is incestuous and shallow; Judd: what you see is what you see: Johns: my work isn’t about anything. If it is about anything it is only about the work of others in the New York school. However: if indeed it truly is about nothing I can’t understand why we have been asked to sit through six hours of lectures in which nothing else but that will be discussed. Mr. Varnedoe counters by saying that when confronted with what seems to be nothing, we need to learn to look more closely. I don’t know that that works every time. I see many, many pictures of nothing in my local small town art gallery year after year and frankly few of them are worth more than the statistical thirty seconds of attention. In thirty years of gallery going in NYC I have seen my share of pictures of nothing unworthy of the same thirty seconds.

It is regrettable that he has ignored a broader view, regrettable because he speaks so well for modern art.

In his favor I can say that art does beget art and Mr. Varnedoe insists that the only way to evaluate modern or abstract art is to ascertain if it references other art. I agree with that; a genre of painting only has validity if it is contemporary to the time in which the genre came to the fore; the genre itself only has validity if it enters into a dialogue with the larger tradition, i.e., the tradition in western or eastern art.

Outsider art uses the materials and the techniques of professional artists but it references only the compelling mental content that motivates the work. There are some truly great art works in the outsider movement, many of them visual experiences with great impact, but thus far the art world has not found that a sufficiently valid argument for awarding the outsiders work with the status of fine art.

T.S.Eliot has written that it is the artist’s responsibility to bring forth order where none seems apparent. I have always disagreed with that. The social conservatives tell us that if we do not impose strong law and order we will live in a state of social anarchy. While I am a liberal to the left of Nader, I do accept that: anarchy is our natural state. Furthermore, as a result of the Big Bang, the universe, despite its randomly clumping into patterns, is nothing but an immense field of chaos. I believe it is the artist’s responsibility to help us live in that chaos.

When I visited the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh a few years ago I was made aware that Andy Warhol, who is respectfully included in these lectures, was a proponent of chaos. His works are a thumbing of the nose at the rules of art making and art theory. His art works are art works despite the rules….he shows us that it is possible both to live with chaos and to be successful. For all of his posturing as an art world village idiot he was extremely well versed in art history and each of his works is a dialogue with western art equally as much as are Picasso’s works. One of the hallmarks then of any fine art is that it references other art, the canon, not exclusively Pollack’s, and that it engages in that ongoing dialogue.

The secret to understanding Warhol’s achievement, I am convinced, is to see it, not as individual pictures of nothing, but as I did …in large numbers. As isolated works, one here, one there, the breadth of his understanding cannot be grasped. The opposite is true of Jasper Johns: standing alone, each of his works has visual interest and an intriguing presence. But seen in large installations, such as Jasper Johns Gray at the Metropolitan a few years ago, or Johns 40 years of Printmaking, which I saw in San Francisco, the work soon cloys, it is seen to be indeed about nothing, and in a exhibition in several galleries, by the middle of the second one has had enough.

Dan Flavin also works best in large installments: I saw the career retrospective in Chicago in 2005 and thought it one of the most exciting art experiences of my lifetime. But one of his fluorescent fixtures leaning against the wall by itself in any other art gallery looks ridiculous. That is the fault of museums and galleries who should know better.

Cy Twombly alone of this school works well alone or in a grouping.

If I have any complaint about Mr. Varnedoe’s commentary it is that it is too often rendered in the over wrought museum speak of the contemporary art world … wherein the Guggenheim staff can always be recognized by the over use of the word “fraught”. While I was delighted by and carried along with his enthusiasm, works here are too often over described in an emotional exuberance that borders bombast.

In particular I heard with near disbelief the comments made about Donald Judd and Frank Stella. I know that Judd was a prominent figure in the New York art world. I know that he promoted himself to a very lofty plane. Yet when I see his work it raises the question cited here by Mr. Varnedoe: “Is this a joke?” and while I think the work was not intended as such it has that feeling about it. For the most part Judd …and Stella …made decoration …Le Corbusier defines decoration as the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. And in the end I see Judd’s work in particular as merely the illustration of a polemic written during a not very interesting moment in art history.

In Art and Illusion Mr. Gombrich asks two questions: why is representation different in different ages and cultures, and why does art have a history. The answer, he shows us, is that art is the result of two impulses; matching and making, matching that which is accepted within each culture and making something that goes beyond that accepted norm, which is the rarer impulse, conformity being the rule always and everywhere it seems.

Mr. Varnedoe asks essentially one question: why abstraction? As it regards the works he describes I am unconvinced that abstraction is a valid art form. I can’t say that I dislike it. I admire a lot of it …Martin, Twombley, Flavin, Warhol, Turrell, Serra. Other than those I see it primarily as an area of exploration that is generally too subjective and of such narrow focus, especially as here presented, that its achievement is less than the claim that is made for it. Among artist who are not discussed here …Rothko, Stuart Davis, Clifford Still, etc …I often feel that once they have created an iconic image they have concerned themselves with merely churning out product for America’s many collectors and museums. It is always sad to me to see people who have locked themselves in boxes. By contrast I admire other intellectuals …Darwin, Freud, Jung, Karl Jaspers …who show us in their work that their worldview is endogenous and that their intellectual curiosity is its unfolding.

Gombrich makes it evident to us that the most engaging art works are those that require the viewer to participate in the completion of the work. By telling us everything Varnedoe has left nothing to the imagination. When it is such an easy evening of homework to know everything explains, perhaps, why the abstraction he champions creates no lingering iconic image; knowing now what it is all about, we are ready to move on to the next historic episode.

While listening to the conclusion of these lectures, I recalled that Clement Greenberg, the pre-eminent critic and champion of this school of art, defined the easily digestible as kitsch. I think we might infer from his essay that kitsch has an appeal not only to the pettite bourgeois but in a different form to the cultural elite as well.

I offer my comments because I would like to encourage others to hear these lectures, and to read the book if so inclined. I am aware that the arguments for or against them are likely in the past. But I would remind you that they were delivered in 2003, nine years ago and that not much water has gone over the dam in the interim: everyone mentioned here is now old or dead but no young Turk has since usurped the throne. Perhaps that nine year period should be seen as a period of stasis, the lull before the storm of China ascending the throne. (Should I pronounce this lull the decadent end of the western tradition?) When seen from that different perspective, the Chinese, what will we think then of abstraction? Or, for that matter, representation? I believe familiarity with Mr. Gombrich’s lectures will help us appreciate Eastern art both old and new, but if abstraction has validity as a universal form of human expression that subsumes cultural differences, Mr. Varnedoe has failed to tell us why.

Despite my disclaimer, I urge you to hear them.

The Museum Mellon Lectures web pages …scroll down about half the page.
http://www.nga.gov/podcasts/mellon/index.shtm

The Charlie Rose Interview:http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/2442