art ongoing: Picasso and the Camera, at The Gagosian Gallery, NYC.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Picasso and the Camera, at The Gagosian Gallery, NYC.

First things first: this is a beautifully designed exhibition. The whole of the gallery has been left open …at the center there is a small enclosure created by four free standing walls for four movies projected overhead on the inside of that enclosure. Otherwise the whole interior of the large room is visible …there is no meandering path projecting the visitor on a predetermined course. Floor to ceiling constructions suggest an inner and an outer perimeter with diagonal entrances and exits. But for the most part one is free to go immediately to those things that catch the eye …groups of never before seen photographs, the films, and a number of really first rate Picasso paintings: i.e.; Instruments de Musique sur un Gueridon, once owned by Yves Saint Laurent. I would say that the exhibition design suggests a pinball machine. But I don’t mean in the noise and the gaudiness of it all, rather in the chance and spontaneity of the path.

Picasso’s use of the camera has been well documented for us in John Richardson’s multivolume biography, in Kahnweiler’s history of cubism, in the record made of Picasso’s various life experiences by well known photographers, and in the exposition of his developing work by Dora Maar …the photographs on the making of Guernica. As most of these are rarely shown to the public this exhibition serves a purpose of making Picasso more familiar to us …on a more immediate and personal basis…like looking at family snapshots. In fact I was impressed by the short films, the home made movies. Watching the middle aged Picasso in the 1920’s mugging in front of the camera I was for the first time impressed by the strength of the first impression he created. He was indeed a little bull, something the still photographs have never successfully conveyed. (Neither is it obvious in the Clouzet film.)

I say small bull because displayed here are two hands, one a cast of Dora Maar’s hand and the other a cast of Picasso’s. Hers seems to be a common, small, hand of a woman, his is the same size. Putting my hand next to the vitrine I saw that the hand was hardly three quarters the size of mine.

But I was even more greatly surprised by the impression made by Madam Picasso, Olga. Almost always known as The Ballerina Who Became a Shrew, in these few short moments mugging in front of the camera and attempting to calm her overlarge, boisterous dog, she was immediately seen to be a proud, attractive, socially conscious person, with a lovely bearing and commanding demeanor. She seems to have had that quality most old money people have: in the company of others she was extremely amiable. While she has always been something of a cipher in Picasso’s life …why would he marry her if she was so horrible? … it can be seen in her deportment that she was quite a prize for a young bohemian as he was then.

If I had any regrets in this visit it was that I did not get to see Picasso’s actual camera. I believe it was a Leica. (Was it there and I missed it?) Nor did I get to see more of the Dora Maar photographs of the making of Guernica. Granted I have the book in which they are all reprinted, but seeing them as actual photographs would have made them more personal for me.

But it was very nice to see the Christian Zervo’s book, L’art en Grece, and to see the photographs of ancient sculptures that inspired Picasso and what he did with that inspiration. And it was especially nice to see the photograph that Picasso made with Andre Villers in 1962 in which cut-out figures and animals were laid over other photographic backgrounds and rephotographed. I had no idea that Picasso had ever made anything like these. But then again, I should have guessed that if he had been such a committed photographer all his life, and knowing the people he had known, Brassai, Lhote, etc., he likely had.

During his lifetime Picasso made photographs, he made paintings from photographs (I had hoped to see more of them here), and he used photographs to document his life and those who shared in his life. It is quite possible when looking at his paintings to ascertain how the camera has been used specifically in the work. I wrote about this earlier this year in my comments on T.J. Clark’s Mellon lectures …scroll down to the same.

Just when one thinks he knows everything about the man and his work new layers of his experience are presented to us. For those of us who love Picasso, we thrive on this.

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/picasso--the-camera--october-28-2014

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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

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Picasso and the Camera, at The Gagosian Gallery, NYC.

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