Lebbeus Woods, Architect. At The Drawing Center, NYC

On Drawing.

In the last few years the art of drawing has become more and more of an all consuming interest for me. First: I make a distinction between drawings and prints: a drawing is the living record of the progress of the marking device over the ground; the use and the texture of the materials engender a felt presence of the artist’s hand. They are the record of the development of an idea. Prints, by contrast, are a conceptualized commodity made for the marketplace. More often than not they are on the very edge of being overworked and in every case suggest the presence of machinery and industry. With the exception of those by Goya and Picasso I do not like prints. Nor do I make an exception for Rembrandt: I find his prints far less interesting, engaging, and moving than his drawings.

            Over the last four hundred years art students in Europe were trained in a specific, academic, discipline. Once recorded contour was modeled to create the perception of three dimensional form. Thus drawings and paintings present a dual perception: the perception of the surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. When an academically trained artist allowed himself to express his response to the form presented, to the anecdote or to the legend, as opposed to his adhering to the rigidity of the doctrine, his work assumed a personal character.

            While visiting a Seurat exhibition at MOMA a few years ago I was amused to observe a middle aged, artistic, female visitor swooning over one of the artist’s academic nudes. She was swept away on the wings of rapture. Had she been less inclined to publicly give herself up so completely to the stimulus of a moment she might have reflected that the drawing was merely a fine example of what everyone at the Ecole de Beaux Arts had been trained to produce. And indeed most artists of note have in their portfolios work of a similar kind.

            In our time mastery of the academic study or the academic nude, even if they are still taught in the schools, is no longer the striven for destination. Now it is the personal experience that matters and that is often achieved with an individual penmanship. In order to succeed one must make iconic marks and in such an abundance of work as to constitute a style that cannot be duplicated without there being a charge of plagiarism. So much so is this the demand that the artist today need not even be proficient in draftsmanship …no prior study or training, apparently, is necessary. Nor, according to Sol Lewitt, is there any need for the involvement of the artist in the manufacture of the product.

            In the art of this era those marks often seem to me to be arbitrary and the fame of the successful artists often seems equally arbitrary…one has the sense that in this day and age good marketing by the right people produces great artists. Most art of this kind is accompanied by long essays explaining to the general public the subtleties of the artist’s intellect. In this environment it is easy to forget that drawing and painting are visual experiences.

            Generally when one confronts a large display of a contemporary artist’s oeuvre, as the art world likes to call it, belying the fact that the center of the universe shifted to New York from Paris over half a century ago, the work is so one noted that one often wonders if the artist in question ever had a desire to draw the nude, a landscape, or a generic scene. Often one is curious why a person of “artistic” bent could be so satisfied by a decade’s long repetition of similar marks. The question of repetitive work, as the stuff of a career, arises and suggests its contrast to the psychic content propelling one’s pen. The greatest exponent of the latter is of course Picasso who never tired of letting his pen empty the roiling turbulence of his imagination …and in any number of styles. Mondrian is a great example of an artist who never paused long with the successful creation of each succeeding innovative achievement. It’s a shame more contemporary artists don’t follow his example.

            Despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary in contemporary art a great classical drawing indicates the mastery of craft by the maker. And I suspect that most of us go out of our way to look at great drawings in order to be in proximity with the expertise of an individuated voice, just as the Ladies Who Lunch most likely go to museums in order to be in proximity with great wealth. That the subject of the drawing is a Greek legend, a religious moral, a tourist’s experience, or the face of a loved one has less interest to us than the opportunity to experience great draftsmanship.

            But there can come a moment sometimes when the sheer abundance of the work makes us begin to suspect that the mastery of craft has become merely a display of bravura, an activity in and of itself: the subject then comes to the fore bringing with it a sense of boredom. This best describes those whose work we acknowledge as “nice” or “very nice” and which is set apart from the works of those major artists which are rarely ever less than fascinating. It is the work most often seen in second tier Nineteenth Century artists and of those early Twentieth Century artists who turned their backs on modern art.

            Thus in our own time the question arises: what does one draw? How can the superior draftsman express his individuality? What gives a drawing authenticity? Representational drawings no longer sustain the interest of the viewers. Abstraction runs the risk of falling into Gombrich’s description of “matching”: as we can see, the world is awash with collage. Finding the crack in the wall that leads to liberation from the prison of conventional wisdom is extremely difficult. Few succeed.

            It was with this question in mind: what does one draw, that prompted me to go out of my way to see this exhibition. I have known the name, Lebbeus Woods, from my readings in modern architecture …along with drawing and painting one of my preferred art forms… but had I been asked specifically who he was or what his work was like I could not have said.

            I am well aware of architectural drawings. I know that every office has its preferred and consistent presentational style. Those works were never intended to be exhibited in a gallery retrospective but to assure the buyer that the work was indeed the work of that architect and his staff. But as the works in this exhibition were publicized as “drawings” as opposed to architectural renderings, I was curious to see it.

            My initial response was very positive: almost all of these are in graphite …pencil, at present my favorite medium. It was extremely pleasant to note the pressure that had been exerted to create the specific marks on the paper. …and very fine paper it is. It was pleasant to discern that pencils of different hardnesses had been used to create a mix of tonal values. The blacks in particular are very deep and rich. (At present my favorite pencil is a Derwent-9B. You can’t get blacker than that.) I was also pleased to see the use of colored pencil, the medium of choice of Frank Lloyd Wright. Colored pencils are a very interesting medium but generally neglected by mainstream artists, I suppose because of the association with the bourgeois subject matter in the work of those in the CPSA (Colored Pencil Society of America). In the work here the colored pencils are used so delicately as if to suggest that the color had been gently blown onto the surface. (Some of the color is softly brushed pastel.) It is gentle but at the same time absolutely controlled. In fact this sense of absolute control becomes the paramount impression created in the execution of all these works.

            A series of drawings, San Francisco, Inhabiting the Quake, plates 56 through 63 in the catalogue, stood out from the others. They are listed as graphite and pastel on paper pasted onto prepared wooden grounds. Some of them include bent piano wire. Small sculptural objects arranged in front of them incorporate the piano wire as well. There is a sense of play with the dual perceptions teased into the actual third dimension though the use of the wire. These are lovely and well made. But what stood out for me in this set was the fact that they are mounted on board, what I suspect is three quarter inch birch veneer plywood. The edges have been softly rounded with a router, the corners are rounded. The thickness of the wood and the collage of drawn material surmounted by the wire, and with the pieces in front and below create a lovely sense of an organic and growing object. However, because the central object is so similar to that in the other drawings my focus remained steadfast on the wood, its dimensions and its finish. I love beautiful paper; in this case I loved the beautiful wood.

Clearly Mr. Woods has something to say. But what he has to say has not to do with drawing, contemporary art, or with the nature of human experience; that there are no, or very few, human figures in the drawings giving the projects a sense of scale makes this apparent. This work has to do with architectural concepts, the drawings being the means of communication of those ideas, or, and this I think of as a fault, these are illustrations of those ideas. In my world an illustration is not as exalted as a fine art drawing. Compare, for example, the work of N.C. Wyeth with his son Andrew’s.

            And for the most part this theoretical architecture is the subject of the gallery and catalogue interpretation as it seems to have been the nature of Woods’ work, teachings, and influence. That’s perfectly fine. Unfortunately I had gone to a lot of time and trouble to get to a gallery where I was disappointed to find that the art of contemporary drawing was not to be either the subject or an elucidation of the way forward …in this particular exhibition.

            Certainly this is not modern art. It was immediately apparent to me that two primary influences were reflected here. As for concept and execution these are really latter day Piranesi Imaginary Prisons…the sense of the labyrinth, the gloom, the implied monumentality. But in regard to the conceptualized central edifice it is almost pure 1950’s comic book science fiction …in fact many of the more intricate drawings and the models especially look to have been inspired by the underside of the mother ship in the film, 2001, A Space Odyssey. Woods was a year my junior and so I am certain we were subject to the same popular cultural influences. In fact to this day I rarely see a photograph of the space station without hearing echoes of The Blue Danube Waltz.

            The works in the exhibition were made between 1980 until near Woods’ death in 2011. For the most part they have a sameness of concept and execution as if the same architectural structure was being presented in various situations and locations. I was disappointed to see that what was new to Berlin could be new as well in Zagreb, that neither of those locales inspired or required an individual design. I began to suspect that this sameness was being suggested as the newest international style.

The drawings themselves, and the models, are so intricate and detailed, and so finely wrought, that despite their being fascinating individually, in sum they exhibit the obsessive/compulsive character of outsider art. That too is fine: I like outsider art. This becomes especially obvious when, upon looking at four small notebooks filled with carefully executed, intricate drawings, we read that these are only four of over two hundred similar notebooks in the archives. But that suggestion emphasizes that these drawings are less about drawing or architecture than they are about the making of them, about the artist’s intensive labors in making them.

One of the most laudable characteristics in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and Rem Koolhaus is that for each man each project had a distinctive character. Rarely did those men repeat themselves. I couldn’t help but wonder that if Woods had actually built something other than scale models would he have produced drawings of structures in which the forms evolved from one thing into another over the thirty years of his career, that there might have been more visual variety in the central object.

But as I have said, I was only interested in seeing drawings. These are illustrations. But of course so much of modern art is in fact only the illustration of a polemic, one polemic or another, many of them highly touted by persons with vested interests,  and few of them really all that interesting. These are splendid drawings, the work of a master draftsman. I am sorry that they were not what I had hoped they might have been. And so my question remains unanswered: What does one draw? That, of course, is answered by the question: why does one draw? Does an artist only want to master and repeat what has been done by others, as in the case of Albrecht Durer, or does he want to explore beyond the realm of the tradition, as in the case of Picasso?

Yet another question is raised: who is the viewer and what is his part in this process? Or does he have a part? No play is fully a play until it is in performance before an audience. Is an unseen drawing not a drawing? 

A great novel is a profound human experience often not otherwise available to us. However much slighter it might be, shouldn’t a great drawing be as profound an experience as well?

Energy That Is All Around. At the Grey Gallery.

On Painting.

After seeing the Woods exhibition I walked up through Soho to Washington Square Park to see this exhibition at NYU. Presented here are five San Francisco artists known as The Mission School.  All of this can be described as anti art in the respect that it is contrary to the established western tradition, or strains to be so. Almost all of it is painting although there are sculptural pieces that are painted as well. Every effort is made to avoid creating likenesses with which the viewer might be familiar…paint is splashed onto old pieces of found scrap wood, or utilitarian objects, a contrast created in some of the works by the use of some very tightly controlled brushwork. While I understand and support the attempt I was unsatisfied with the results.

Unfortunately works similar to much of this can be seen in the canon of Picasso, Arthur Dove, Charles Biederman, and Kurt Schwitters. So much so that where we were to have seen something new we see, alas, an ongoing straining for innovation. And while there were some interesting pieces, for the most part it looked like student work. This kind of thing is fine, if it is a series to which one devotes a few months or a year, such as the few years of analytical cubism or the decade of surrealism, but when it goes on and on as a lifetime’s preoccupation it becomes less and less interesting. It really only emphasizes that the release from academicism forged by Picasso, Braque and their confreres has created an insurmountable obstacle over which most of the rest of us are unable to clamber, that we know not what to do with our freedom.

http://www.drawingcenter.org/

http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/

Picasso and Truth, T.J. Clark. The Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art

T.J. Clark; Picasso and Truth.

The Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art.

Gary Martin



In preparation for my visit to The Metropolitan Museum later this year to see the Lauder Cubist bequest, I have undertaken a study of cubism, building in the process a library of 15 or so books devoted exclusively to that subject, ranging from Kahnweiler to Karmel, and augmented by another 15 or so books already on my shelves ranging from Richardson to Arnheim. At the present time my Picasso library requires approximately five feet of shelf space.

My most recent acquisition is the book at hand, Mr. Clark’s Picasso and Truth. Some time back I had received notice from The National Gallery that these Mellon Lectures were available as audio lectures and after struggling with the first I gave them up as useless. In all of their audio lectures there is so much reference to specific art works that unless the works are viewable the lectures are practically meaningless. I don’t know why some enterprising young person at the museum doesn’t create a visual component timed to show the works as they are discussed in the recordings. (I am not young and I do not want the job.) More recent lectures have been made on video, or in a present format that the word video still defines. Good.

But I gave up on this specific lecture series not just for the lack of evidence but because I found the lecturer’s performance so off putting. Mr. Clark presents himself as a man who loves himself in art; he seems to relish the opportunity to strut and banter his hour upon the stage wowing his audience with his vast erudition. A former art historian at the University of California, Berkeley, this is his East Coast moment. I wish I could say that he rose to the occasion.

But wanting to understand the subject I relented, listened a second time, was less critical than I had been at first, or inured to what I knew was to come, I bought the book, just recently published, and slogged my way through it …three times. I have sat with the book and followed the audio for an hour through the Guernica discussion. In conclusion I can say that I think the excessive verbiage, the celebration of self, the meandering often because of a lack of focus, diminishes the argument. There is probably only about two hours worth of lecture here; one for Guernica, because of the interesting way it is presented through the Dora Maar photographs, and one for the other material.

From the subtitle, From Cubism to Guernica, one might assume that the lectures were a survey of Picasso’s development of cubism. But that is not the case. Little is said here regarding cubism as a style nor is there any elaboration on Clark’s part as to what its history and origins might have been. Many who write on cubism eventually confess that they do not understand it: Clark avoids the issue altogether. Whether he understands it or not remains a question. There is in the subtitle as well an implication that Guernica is not cubism. This is simply misleading. He does identify Guernica as a cubist work. Perhaps a better subtitle might have been: Cubism to Guernica as this is the author’s area of investigation. It is still bothersome, however as the works are never discussed as examples of what cubism is or might be. In the end I think a better subtitle, if one was really needed, might have been: Picasso: An Overview: 1921 to 1937.

It is Mr. Clarke’s premise that for Picasso picture space must be contained, a room. He further implies that the interior/exterior of so many of his works establishes a world view having to do with the twentieth century being the century of catastrophe. It’s a theory but I can’t say I buy it. There are so many contradictions in his presentation that I find the argument suspect.

In his explanation of cubism Kahnweiler tells us that rather than begin with a subject and create around it a setting within deep pictorial space, Braque and Picasso established an arbitrary shallow picture space and layered the planes forward to the picture plane. As most of these were still life paintings the sense of the far wall of a room is not so much a philosophical conceit as it is a pictorial device. Furthermore, based on what I know from the biographies, I would think the containment was necessary because of the incessant flow of Picasso’s tremendous creativity: as I understand it he could only get the work done, he could only focus, if he shut everything else out. He also worked at night within a pool of light surrounded by darkness.

But that implies biography. And in his prefatory remarks Mr. Clark lets us know that there will be no biography, or very little biography, in these talks especially of the celebrity kind: this is to be art considered strictly from the perspective of its historical socio/political relevance. And he does a good job of describing what he sees in the paintings. Yet whenever his interpretive suppositions run the risk of seeming possibly too subjective, he has no hesitation about bringing in Francoise Gilot with a tale or two or three to buttress his authority. So right away we’re in the realm of celebrity biography.

The value of that authority however might be questioned. While Clark cites her as having said that Picasso quoted this philosopher and that to her, he omits telling us that Gilot concluded, in her book, that in the years she spent with him she never once saw Picasso pick up or read a book and as to how he got that knowledge she did not know.

In Lecture/Chapter Three, Window, the work cited is The Three Dancers, and we all know who the dancer is. In Lecture/Chapter Four the work is The Artist and the Model, the model again Olga, the castrating female at that time in his life. I thought it was common knowledge that during the twenties the monster in Picasso’s work was always Olga. We might also recall that Picasso once described Demoiselles d’Avignon as “my first exorcism”. I believe it is generally accepted that the Olga paintings are subsequent exorcisms. When a group of paintings have such a very strong and widely accepted association it is an uphill battle to ask us to see them in a different light.

This so called lack of biography is continued in Lecture/Chapter Five, Monument, suggesting that the muse, Monumental as She is, represents Picasso’s fear of his reawakened sexuality. (This completely subjective inference is based on the biographical data that Pablo and Olga were by that time estranged and he had just taken up with Marie Therese…as we all know). Here he does tell us that this is Marie Therese, even showing us a pen and ink sketch of her in a representational style as if none of us would recognize someone Picasso had presented endlessly in a variety of styles in hundreds of paintings and drawings for over ten years. If so much biographical material, Khokhlova/Walter/Maar/Gilot, was in fact not going to be avoided, why then did he open the lectures with that disclaimer? And why choose works that are guaranteed to summon remembrance of the second rate celebrity biographies if that is what he wanted to avoid?

In Lecture/Chapter Six, the work is Guernica and although Mr. Clark names and identifies almost everything in the painting he does not identify a dying pigeon. This appears in the painting high up to the left of center. Originally the body of the bull filled that space. Then, from state six (state five is not shown) the body of the bull is twisted to the left of his head and in the blank space in the original position on the right there is either a house or a table added on which a pigeon lies dying. Knowing the biography we know immediately that “the pigeon” has to do with Picasso’s father. (We are likely to better infer a socio/political oedipal moment as the theme of the painting as well.) But without that biographical meaning, that passage is the weakest area of the painting: Picasso would not have left it had he felt it lacked significance. Did Clark not see the pigeon or is he finally avoiding biography?

If we consider for a moment that as an artist Picasso was working in this painting as in all of his paintings toward expressiveness Clark’s breathy hyperbole on his theme of interior/exterior space seems to spiral beyond the vital import of the painting. And in the concatenation of Picasso familiars …Masson, Malraux, Leris… it becomes a public recitation establishing the breadth of Clark’s scholarship, and his preference for the intellectual elite of the biographies rather than the gossips, more so than an interpretation.

The only painting in the lecture series that seemingly does not elicit the biographies overtly is Guitar and Mandolin on a Table, 1924, Lecture/Chapter 2 and I disagree with his understanding of it. I suggest this alternative view: Picasso was an avid photographer; he documented much of his work on film, as did Kahnweiler who photographed, dated, and filed everything that came into his gallery. Picasso made many paintings from photographs especially those with children. His paintings of his son Paul, also made in 1924-25, were made from his photographs.

A painting presents a dual perception: a perception of surface and a perception of depth created on the surface. In oriental perspective that at the bottom of the format is understood to be near, that at the top is understood to be far. In linear perspective, a shape is understood to be near if it is large and far if it is the same shape repeated smaller.

In the painting the open window with railing at the top of the format is repeated in miniature at the bottom. If that bottom image, made rectangular framed as it is by the space under the table, is understood as the viewfinder of a camera, (holding the camera at the waist and looking down into the viewfinder, the floor and the far window can be seen simultaneously), Picasso, using oriental perspective, is able to reverse the conventional wisdom of linear perspective: the large is far the small is near. The establishment of near and far creates the perception of depth on the surface and that is played off by the emphasis on surface. That, in its turn, creates a sense of vibrancy so common in the work of Cezanne. It locates the stage for the layering of planes between near and far. And through this device Picasso is able to create a trompe l’oeil painting sans verisimilitude, he creates a visual pun. Picasso said: I do not explore, I find. I think this is exactly what he meant.

This discovery, the viewfinder as a cubist device, must have given him tremendous pleasure …which carries over into the energy of the painting. More often than not the joy of a painting is the artist’s joy in making it, often it is the sheer arrogance of “I made it because I can and I can do it better than anyone else!” And in this case the other objects on the table, the child’s toys, should be read as another indication of Picasso’s endless love of play. To miss the sense of play in Picasso’s work, his humor, is to completely misunderstand his achievement.

As for the meaning of the open window I think it is merely an homage to Matisse who might have been living just down the street in Cannes that same summer.

Now: in regard to the verbosity of these lectures I did not need an hour to help you see this. But I did need biography in order to interpret the image. For the moment this interpretation satisfies me. But aware of Picasso’s superior intellect I am willing to admit that some time later I might yet find still more meaning in his work. In the meantime Clark’s interpretation doesn’t sit well with me, perhaps because at 75 I am wary of being told …The Truth! I am also allergic to absolutes having seen how, throughout history, their limited shelf life results in change from century to century.

Clark has built his Picasso premise on some lines from Nietzsche that he himself read one summer day while sunning on the beach. He applies this to the work, claims an understanding (which is fine), and to verify that influence on Picasso, tells us that as a young student/artist in Barcelona Picasso likely overheard many discussions regarding the works of Nietzsche at Quartre Gats. Perhaps he did. I recall that when I was young most of us in my crowd in the West Village praised Nietzsche as well. I encountered still more Nietzsche when I read the biographies and complete works of George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill. As evidence of influence, however, I find the possibly overheard barroom mutterings of young drunks and wannabes a rather flimsy scaffold on which to hang a major premise.

Nor do I think Picasso’s stature needs to be enhanced bracketed within quotations from Wittgenstein. As far as I am concerned he can stand on his own. It is a given that Picasso was a genius. It is a given that he had a superior intelligence despite his poor formal education. But having a superior intelligence and a genius does not imply that those have a correlative familiarity with or a comprehension of modern philosophy or modern physics either directly or through osmosis. Intelligence is manifest in many ways. The intelligence of a genius is a unique field of knowledge; a study of his achievement should be limited to that field.

When Frank Lloyd Wright is the subject of a monograph that study is limited exclusively to his use of the principles of architecture and the principles of design. Biography is included only when it elucidates the project under discussion. The Wright monograph by Robert McCarter, who has also written on Louis Kahn and Carlo Scarpa, is an excellent example. Furthermore, to my recollection there is in none of the Wright literature that I have read any parallel drawn to the work of philosophers, physicists, or psychologists living or dead as a suggestion as to what has made his work relevant or modern.

Thus the question raised by the Clark lectures is this: What makes an artist’s work important? Is it just the work? Is it the influence of the work? Or is it that he has enunciated a truth that only a limited few are able to discern, his near parallel to the loftiest philosophical thought of the day? When we stand before his work do we marvel at what he has presented, do we gasp at the mastery of its presentation? Or do we shout: I’ve never seen Philosophy so boldly illustrated! Is there a bit of a something for everyone in an art work or must the proletariat await the pronouncements of an academic elite?

After the experience of the work I suspect that it has a lot to do with influence. As soon as the first cubist experiments were made public, through the courtesy of Kahnweiler, all of the artists in Paris who agreed with Picasso and Braque …and Matisse …that the academic tradition was decadent and completely dead, and who seem to have comprehended what those men were doing despite the art historians’ perplexity, leapt to their easels to adapt the insights into their own work. I think that had to do with empowering the artists and breathing fresh life into art more so than anything at all to do with a twentieth century that had not yet come into being. Thirty years later Pollock and others were still exploring cubism. That they and not the naysayers have survived can be understood by the fact that today one cannot find, even on Amazon dot com, books that claim cubism a fraud

That Picasso, as per Clark, anticipated the century is simply wishful thinking on Clark’s part. In enumerating Picasso’s many aptitudes prescience was not one of them: in fact none of us can “anticipate” the future with certainty. And Picasso was too devoted to his long term success to have gambled on that possibility. Instead, occultism as a valid philosophical worldview should be understood as simply a midcentury California phenomenon.

The period of cubism that I am most interested in understanding is analytical cubism. Mr. Clark does not use any of those works as an example of his thesis. In fact, in a book filled with a great many illustrations, over two hundred, only seven of them are from this period and they are only briefly cited. This raises questions: because it is so hermetic does the work from the analytical period not illustrate Clarke’s interior/exterior thesis? Does he, like so many other authorities, not understand it?

The other cubist periods are not so difficult. Proto-cubism, when Braque and Picasso realized they were on the same course, can be understood as directly under the influence of late Cezanne. Synthetic cubism can be understood by reading Moholy Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes, and Rudolph Arnheim: the dynamics of the plastic elements. Late cubism, the works studied here are from the 1920’s, as well as the work Braque did for the remainder of his life, can be understood from Kahnweiler’s comment that cubism is lyrical painting in that it deals with the lyricism of shape and form.

But none of these understandings, and very much so Clark’s, explains what makes Picasso’s works so fascinating, so iconic, so arresting. That missing element in all of this is expressiveness, Picasso’s passion. And that passion is the essence of his life and work. He is the most autobiographical of painters and to exclude his biography from the work is to miss the whole point however brilliant the analysis. Thus I think what Clark shows us here, contradicting his disclaimer, is that the biography cannot be excluded.

I came away from these lectures with the impression that Clark wanted to tell us as much as he could about himself in the six hours allotted more so than what he wanted to tell us about Picasso. So be it. And I suspect Clark is using Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, et al, to enhance Clark’s image, to suggest that through his superb analysis he stands as an equal, or near equal if his pose of modesty is at all sincere, with the master. If so, let us note: image is the bullshit we want others to accept as our truth.

Some of his self revelation is amusing.

One peculiar characteristic of this lecture/book is an odd, and silly, politically correct habit Clark has of speaking of the third person as feminine “…the reader with find, if she perseveres…” and it plays throughout like the pipes of Pan “…follow me, follow me, follow me, this way to liberation”.

Nor is he shy about letting us know the low opinion in which he views the work of others writing on Picasso. In fact he views most of the Picasso literature as irrelevant. He makes coded (and obvious) references to some writers and names others. I found that petty and professionally discourteous. (A national forum is not the proper arena for academic infighting. I hope the NGA was embarrassed by this. Apparently not; they published the remarks.) In defense of the other authors I can add that I find this work, far too long and scant on gist, almost as irrelevant as Clark views the rest of the literature. He is guilty of over intellectualizing a visual experience: Picasso does not need to be spared the celebrity gossip as much as he needs to be spared the intellectual crap.

On one occasion he is out and out wrong. He writes that in Picasso’s work the body is almost always female. This is a common misconception. And here the over-reliance on certain aspects of the biography is likely the fault. Picasso has given us a great many male bodies, both draped and nude. In fact I have often wondered why no one writes about this aspect of his work, why there have been no exhibitions specifically on this subject. My suspicion, as Clark notes in regard to Picasso’s attitude about the male figure in Guernica, is that this subject might have so much homoerotic content as to frighten most commentators away. I would think, however, in this era of same sex marriage that scholars would have moved beyond such concerns. However, the material would be found to be voluminous should the time be taken to bring it together. In analytical and synthetic cubism the male subject is plentiful and they are likely all of them, aside from the portraits, Georges Braque. Had these lectures been illustrated with the paintings of male subjects the lessened interference of Picasso’s biography likely would have permitted a clearer, and let’s hope more focused, exposition resulting in a newer or better understanding of Picasso’s achievement. Or perhaps they would have shown us yet another and a completely different way in which Picasso configured pictorial space.

Pablo Picasso was a master shape shifter; he was an artist capable of the most astounding inventions, transformations, distortions, playfulness, irony, sarcasm and wit. In every work he brought to our understanding his joy, his love, his hatred, his sadness, his pathos, his despond, his sense of shared brotherhood. Like Shakespeare he is an intensely human experience. The biographies, and especially the second rate celebrity biographies, humanize him, for many of us they are our entre into the deeper significance of the work. I grew up in 1950’s Kansas, in the smack middle of nowhere, and with only Life Magazine as a life line to the fine art culture. Life introduced me to Picasso in a barber shop when I was twelve. Shallow as that publication might have been, in my gratitude I am compelled to defend the superficial.

Attempting to limit a man’s protean achievement within a unifying theory is probably a mistake.

Mr. Clark tells us by the by that he is a socialist and an atheist. That’s perfectly fine with me. (But did we need to know that?) In his subsequent work, and whatever his politics or religion might then be, I would hope to find less author and more subject, more insight and less reference. A lecturer should always have the courage to speak in her own voice.



“A man’s philosophy tells me nothing about the world but everything about the man.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

D.W. Griffith in Cuddebackville.

D.W. Griffith in Cuddebackville.



As the crow flies Port Jervis New York is 75 miles northwest of New York City, at the very end of the commuter rail line and on the far edge of exurbia. Ten miles north of Port one passes through Cuddebackville, New York. It is decidedly …in the country. For the most part it is a collection of derelict buildings although here and there one can find a convenience store, an auto repair shop, an old church, a new modern school, and a country auction gallery. Less a very few exceptions there are no houses and it is rather odd to see signs posted for a village where there are so few indications of human habitation.



Behind the schoolhouse is a lovely park along the old D. & H., Delaware and Hudson, Canal, made obsolete by the railroads, and in addition to picnic facilities there is the Neversink Valley Museum. Seth Goldman is the director as well as the chairman of the Early Films Committee. Seth is a weekender living full time in New York City and at present very much engaged in building what he plans will be a very fine restaurant.



His interest of many years has made him an authority on the silent films made here. Clearly this is a passion. Thus during this program he was able to tell us that when the railroad supplanted the canal as the navigation of choice some of the old water ways, water sources and aqueducts were converted to hydro electric plants by John Roebling, builder of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the workmen on that renovation later made his way to New York and found work with the Biograph Company. In 1908, knowing that they were looking for film locations, he suggested that they visit Cuddebackville as it had farm lands, mountains, the river, the canal and the tow path, as well as all the manifestations of community life …a school, a church, a cemetery and large and small homes. All of this, I suspect, was so generic that it could be read as Anywhere USA and thus perfect for a hopefully wide market. It was also served by a railroad spur north out of Port Jervis and was merely five hours away from the city.



The area also provided the large Cuddeback Hotel which could accommodate actors and crew. Today the registers of the hotel are in the museum and given the date of film productions it is possible to find the cast and crew members who worked on those particular films through this source. One can also verify that these locations were used by the Thanhauser and Pathe Film Companies.



For this program the four recently acquired films, Willful Peggy, The Little Darling, The Life Cycle, and Muggsy Becomes a Hero, this one directed by Frank Powell, were presented to the members of the Historic Society in order to ascertain the specific locations used in the films. There was an audience of about twenty five local enthusiasts …no one that I could see was less than sixty. Without exception there was unanimous agreement that the sites named were indeed the sites as seen.



The films came to the Society from the Library of Congress. Somewhere along the way Seth had crossed paths with Ben Model. Ben is a well known composer and piano accompanist for silent films affiliated for over twenty five years with the Museum of Modern Art and for many years with the Library of Congress. Knowing of Seth’s interests he found films in the Library collection that had Cuddebackville as their location. He was able to get digitalized copies made. At the moment not everyone can do this with every film in their collection…but that will be possible sometime in the future. They were shown via a digital projection machine.



One of these films, The Little Darling, was made from a nitrate negative, which, despite the common belief, can be successfully preserved if stored correctly. The other three films were made from paper prints. In the early days of film making the Library did not have the facilities to copyright films …they could copyright scripts and archival materials…and so paper prints were sometimes made of the films frame by frame. The Library has over 3000 motion pictures in this format. The prints were contact prints made on strips of paper the width of the film. The present copies are digitalized versions of those prints. The quality is excellent …very sharp and with good distinction in the tonal values.



The films are typical of the escapist nature of the genre, what Debbie Reynolds in Singing in the Rain called “…just a lot of dumb show”. And while some of the actors later had fame and following, i.e.: Mary Pickford, for the most part the characters all read as dramatic stereotypes. There is also the sense of a passel of New York actors up in the country having a lot of fun.



What stands out in these films is the cinematic technique. Where the action cuts from one location to another, whenever the story returns to an earlier setting the camera is always in the same position as previously seen. Thus I would understand that all of the scenes in each location were shot from one position at one time, out of sequence with the storyline. This accomplished two goals: it reduced the time required to make the films …as ever time was likely money. But for the audience the return to a setting seen from the same earlier camera position established a sense of familiarity and reduced the opportunity for visual confusion; after all, these narratives were only two to twelve minutes long.



It was also interesting that while the cinematic approach was so “head on”, presentational, in all of the interiors, shot in the 14th Street New York studio, there is always a wall to the left or to the right making a corner with the back wall that indicates the depth from the picture plane. Showing only the one corner reduces the sense of our looking into a box; thus that “open” side creates a sense of air as well. This sense of depth is enhanced by having a table or chair in the center of the space around which the actors work. The exterior scenes with buildings always show those buildings obliquely, suggesting that their parallel lines meet at a distant vanishing point.



Many authorities on the development of cubism mention the influence movies had on the imaginations of Picasso and Braque, both of whom were avid movie buffs. It is often stated that they were impressed by the ability of film to make rapid cuts, change points of view and to see an object, or person, from many sides. Seeing these films, all of which were contemporary to the development of cubism, I think I would disagree with that. These films are too static to have had an influence that only later films would have had. (Birth of a Nation was made after the Cubist years.) But what these films do have is that pronounced sense of the flatness of the two dimensional formant and the perception of depth specifically created on the picture plane…which was exactly the pictorial challenge that interested those two artists. Being in black and white they also have a pronounced sense of having been designed from tonal values, another element of cubism.



As to who was responsible for the cinematic technique, Griffith or Billy Bitzer, the cinematographer, requires further research. Film is often spoken of as a collaborative enterprise but it also has the potential to have its contentious power struggles. We are most commonly aware of the power of the star to have his/her way or of a director with callous disregard for the producer’s money. What we rarely hear about is the struggle for dominance between the director and the cinematographer. With thirty years experience in the industry I am well aware that this aspect of film making is extremely common. I have known Directors of Photography, DP’s, who are interested only in furthering their careers and who do as they damn well please, others who are truly collaborative, and those who are simply journeymen photographers making a day’s pay. I also know that most DP’s whatever their level of achievement merely repeat the acclaimed techniques they have known others to use …while they might successfully create a look or a style, very few of them are really very innovative. Perhaps this further justifies our speaking of film as a director’s medium.



But to give credit where credit is due it behooves us to ascertain the exact contribution each participant made to a film. John Ford is reputed to have told the twelve year old Steven Spielberg that when you know where to put the horizon you will know how to direct films. What all the great film makers have in common …Eisenstein, Ozu, Fellini, Ford, Almodovar…is their understanding that fine art photography is the basis of motion picture ….moving picture …art. Did Griffith bring this photographic awareness to his filmmaking career or did Bitzer introduce the concept to him? Did G. make the cinematic innovations or did B.? Will there come a day when these will be seen as the early films of Billy Bitzer? Is he the unsung railroad to Griffith’s canal?



The other aspect of silent movies is the silence, or as we sometimes experience it, the musical accompaniment. At the commencement of the films I was initially startled that the tinny sound of the old upright piano was so loud …and more Scott Joplin than Erik Satie. But I remembered that early movie theatres were often only converted storefronts, likely the size of the room in which we were sitting, and I realized that this initially overbearing piano was probably very right for recapturing a sense of a rowdy past. (Ben Model did confess that piano accompaniment only came to films many years later.) In any event it was right on “in sync” with the action on the screen and I soon shifted my focus to the fluidity and ease with which Mr. Model played his part melding the two into a single event.



After each film was shown there was a brief discussion to ascertain the locations and then and later during the general discussion Ben Model quietly and respectfully displayed his confident and graceful character and the depth of his knowledge on the history of musical accompaniment of early films and the making of those films …all of which knowledge is so readily at hand for him: this is his niche, his world. He knows it inside and out and is so pleased that you have asked him to share it. It is very rare, despite the egocentricity of so many of our fellows, to realize that one is in the company of a very interesting and important person; so rare I will say as to be a privilege.



On this link there are three entries regarding the early films made in the area:

http://www.neversinkmuseum.org/



Here is the link to the Library of Congress Motion Picture Reading Room:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/



This link is Ben Model’s web site. The “Videos” link will take you to his You

Tube postings for his Preserved by Accident series:

http://www.silentfilmmusic.com/

Zane Grey and Tom Mix at the Port Jervis Free Library

Inspired by a recent internet B Western Movieland Mystery Photo Contest I responded to a flyer posted on a community bulletin board and went to the Port Jervis NY Free Library this past Saturday, April 20th, for a showing of the 1925 silent Riders of the Purple Sage starring Tom Mix and his Wonder Horse Tony. The library has a weekly film program in which movies are shown free to the public. Most of these I believe are the old silent films although I think there have been more recent films as well. This particular program was co-sponsored by the Zane Grey’s West Society. Robert Lenz was their spokesperson.

Mr. Lentz explained the mission of the society …I have enclosed a link to their web site and so I will not duplicate that information here. He displayed a copy of the most recent edition of The Riders which the society painstakingly edited to be an accurate facsimile of the original edition, replete with embossed cover art and dust jacket. It includes five essays on Grey’s love of the west, a map showing where the story took place, and program notes of the five filmed versions of the novel. Printed in an edition of 300 it sells for $70.00. A paperback edition has been under consideration.

One of the interesting facts presented by Mr. Lentz was that Mrs. Grey served as her husband’s business manager. It was she who suggested that they move to California so that he could sell the movie rights to his work and thereby multiply his income from each. It was her idea as well that the sale of the rights would be limited to only seven years. Thus the rights could be resold any number of times and this explains why this title has been remade five times, most of the versions are seven years apart.

Setting the record straight Mr. Lentz also let it be known that Zane Grey and Tom Mix, at one time neighbors on Catalina Island, Were Not Friends.

The screening was held in the recently renovated community room in the basement of the library. This is divided into two rooms with a large opening between them, each room about the size of the average family living room. The renovation includes new sheet rock, dropped ceiling, and new carpeting. The reception room’s muted gray walls were lined with six foot folding tables on which were displayed 26 reproduction one sheets in various sizes from many of the Zane Grey Movies …a surprisingly large number of them produced by Herbert Yates and starring Scott Brady. Another table displayed the books written by Bob Lentz; biographies of Lee Marvin, Gloria Graham, a history of Korean War themed films, etc. I purchased a copy of the last of Lentz’s printed newsletters dated 2009. Since then it has been an internet web site under the name of Filmbobbery.com. At the door to the screening room a table offered popcorn and potato chips in large paper cups, a one-fold Playbill with the art work, cast list, and a synopsis of the film, and a two-fold informational brochure of the ZGWS.

Films are screened in the adjoining room on a wide format LG digital screen. This particular film was on VHS cassette. (There was much consternation getting the film to play until it was realized that the cassette merely needed to be rewound.) The audience included three members of the Society, the library representative, and seven members of the movie going public, none of whom I believe were under seventy. On Sunday, April 21, the Society presented a free screening of The Riders, the 1996 Ed Harris version, in the basement meeting room of the Pike County Historical Society in Milford, Pennsylvania. Milford is about 8 miles below Port Jervis on the Delaware River.

To explain my proximity; I live across the river from Port Jervis in Matamoras, Pennsylvania. It is a twenty minute walk from my door across the bridge to Port. Matamoras is on the eastern border of the state at exactly that point where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet. That point is marked by a surveyor’s plaque on a rock at the edge of the river. This, as you might guess, is known as The Tri State Rock.

Being shown the facsimile copy of the novel I was intrigued as to how so much information would be distilled into a one hour film. In fact I was intrigued that Grey had written such a lengthy tome. My first experience with his works was seeing my father read them back in the late forties and early fifties. My father was an iron worker in the construction industry and so this should answer the questions as to what people did before there was TV. TV came to our Kansas town in 1954. As I remember them those editions were the cheap five cent paperbacks. And of course I have seen thousands of hardcover editions at yard sales over the years. In fact they are about the most ubiquitous items at a yard sale and prove without a doubt Grey’s one time immense popularity. Despite this constant exposure, I have never read a Zane Grey novel.

This was not the first Tom Mix movie I have ever seen: as a kid I remember going to see a rerun at a local movie theater some sixty years ago. My father was born in 1914 and my grandmother once told me that it had been his boyhood ambition to go to Hollywood and become the new Tom Mix. I took a look/see back then because I was curious as to the look and character of his heroes. During this screening I observed Mr. Mix with care, finally deciding that my father was likely odder than even I remember him.

In the film, which flirts with the bizarre as most silent films seem to me to do, there is a key plot development and new characters introduced in every scene. It is an understatement to say that the film is a rapid fire condensation of the book. Tom Mix plays a man who spends many years searching for his sister and niece. In the end he abandons his quest for revenge in the name of love. (The parallel to The Searchers was astounding: it hints of plagiarism.) During all these many years Tom Mix always wears the same black costume that is never less than immaculate. Occasionally he breaks the narrative to perform a few rodeo tricks with his lasso, induces his horse to be deceptive, and fashions for himself a device with the rope and the horse in which he literally rides the sage. When challenged he is always the fastest draw in the west, although this is implied but never shown until after the smoke has cleared.

What makes the film so very odd is that this stout middle aged man wore what appeared to be black painted sideburns from the Groucho Marx School of make up as well as lipstick that was perhaps a shade too dark. (This bizarre make up caused me to questions my father’s boyhood aspirations. Prior to this I had not had any suspicions…)

About twenty minutes into the film I longed for it to be over. Then, suddenly, an element of movie magic was introduced: finding himself trapped by his pursuers the young juvenile lead discovers climbing aides carved into the rock walls of a high mountain and climbs up to the top not knowing where he is going and disregarding the obvious that he has become an ideal target for the gun totting varmints hot on his tail. At the top he finds the ruins of ancient Indians’ abandoned cliff dwellings with a beautiful view of Yosemite Park that looked to me to be an inserted Carlton Watkin photograph, herein proclaimed the Lost Canyon. This episode had the dreamlike visual quality of a Murnau film.

Somehow the handsome young man was able to get back down off the mountain top. He returned with plentiful supplies, telling the ingénue that they now had enough provisions to live there the rest of their lives, ( I interpreted this as late adolescent bravura), and later still he climbed up again followed by the ingénue, Tom Mix, the damsel in distress, and all nine members of the Riders of the Purple Sage. As we had been lead to suspect, Tom saves the day by tipping over the balanced rock the Indians had placed there for protection many years ago and which, literally, in one fell swoop wipes out the band of evil men on the cliff face.

I have to confess that I was greatly impressed by the magnitude of that shot. It did not appear to have been done with models or other special effects. I was impressed by the evidence of such disregard for the environment …the destruction was extensive …in the name of commerce. Surely this was the first of the disaster movies. I could only assuage my consternation by wondering if that shot too might not have been stock footage, like the Watkin photograph, and from some more commendable topographical alteration.

Although the ZGWS arranges programs in various other parts of the country the reason for doing so here is that Zane Gray and his wife Dolly lived 26 miles further up the Delaware River in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. And despite their subsequent lifelong wanderlust …the Grey’s owned a number of homes in points west, as well as a yacht, shades of John Ford …their ashes are interred in the Lutheran Church cemetery right next door to this former home. When I first moved here in 1980 the house was an inn, The Zane Grey Inn, and in the late 80’s it was sold to The National Park Service and has since become a maintained tourist attraction. Late in his life when my father paid me his only visit after I had left home, and my not knowing what to do with him, I drove him and his wife to the Zane Grey House. He was surprised that I had remembered his earlier interests and was visibly and awkwardly pleased.

I explained to my father that Grey had moved here because of the opportunity to fish at his doorstep. Grey was a renowned fisherman. I wonder now if Grey might not have been the source of my father’s love of fishing. Living in Kansas, which is dry as a bone and where the rivers when they run run about twelve inches deep, I had always been curious what had inspired my father to take up the rod.

The equivalent of two blocks to the south of the Grey house in Lackawaxen the Roebling Bridge crosses the Delaware from Pennsylvania to New York. This is one of about eight suspension bridges Roebling designed and built in the area and it is the only one of them extant. All of them were maquettes, trial runs, for his larger construction, The Brooklyn Bridge, in New York City. This structure, still in use, is protected as a National Landmark. My father was equally pleased to have been given a walking tour of the bridge, a sort of bus man’s tour as it was. Two days earlier, after a whirlwind tour of New York City, we had driven under the Brooklyn Bridge and over the George Washington.

For about seventy miles, from the Delaware Water Gap in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania north to Narrowsburg, New York, the Delaware is a protected waterway. From Stroudsburg to Milford, about 30 some miles, and for one mile inland on both sides it is a National Recreation Area. Over two million people a year take advantage of this natural environment. This parkland, begun in 1980 after the cancellation of the Tock’s Island dam project, a project that had resulted in the removal of the population of several villages and many private farms, all of which were later razed, has exempted this area from over-development. From just above Milford to Narrowsburg it is classified as a National Scenic River. All development in the river and along the sides here is prohibited. By contrast from below Stroudsburg to its estuary into the Atlantic below Philadelphia the riverbanks resemble a revolving diorama of Camden, New Jersey.

During the 1980’s and 90’s Pike County, the area of Pennsylvania that includes all of these mentioned Pennsylvania towns above Stroudsburg, was the fastest growing county in the eastern United States; when I moved here in 1980 as a summer resident the population was 5,000 with a summer population of 10,000, and during those years of unprecedented growth increased to a year round population of 55,000. That this long, beautiful riverscape with crystal clear waters has been preserved just as it was when the Greys lived here convinces me that big government is the solution not the problem.

The notable literary distinction in Port Jervis is that it was here that Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage. As for Milford it was the home of the retired New York City school teacher Frank Mc Court while he wrote Angela’s Ashes; in the 1970’s Milford was the home of The Science Fiction Writers of America.

When the early Biograph Studios were still on the east coast the area in and around Milford often served as film locations. A number of films…seven or eight…were shot here entirely. D.W Griffith worked here along with his star Lillian Gish and others whose names I can not recall off hand. I remember Lillian because at one time in the 80’s she was invited to a function at the Historical Society but, alas, her speaker’s fee was beyond our means. John Barrymore filmed and vacationed here and is reputed to have patronized the local bars. Local resident Farley Granger recently died at his home here. The Pike County Historical Society has a good archive of those early film days including many photographs. For the past ten years or so Milford has presented an annual film festival that maintains the tradition and with aspirations of similar greatness.

The only literary distinction of Matamoras is that it is the present home of the author of these long blog entries, Gary Martin.

A tip of the hat to The Zane Grey’s West Society for their efforts in keeping alive the name of a culturally significant literary and film personality, a man who, whatever his level of genius might have been, engaged in two forms of public art that spurred many a private fantasy and no doubt several worthwhile causes such as a love of and respect for the native land.

Thanks as well to the Port Jervis Library and the Pike County Historical Society for promoting film as a significant cultural experience.

For other film programs at the Port Jervis Library:

http://www.portjervislibrary.org/portjervis/


For other film programs at the Pike County Historical Society:

http://pikecountyhistoricalsociety.org/news.html


The Zane Grey’s West Society:

http://www.zgws.org/index.php


The Bob Lentz website:

http://www.filmbobbery.com/


The Zane Grey House in Lackawaxen:

http://www.nps.gov/upde/historyculture/zanegrey.htm


The Movieland Mystery Photo website:

http://ladailymirror.com/


The Black Bear Film Festival

http://blackbearfilm.com/

Albrecht Durer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina.

At The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Eight years after the thirteen year old Durer made his 1484 self portrait in silver point, Columbus set sail for and discovered the new world. Durer died in 1528 and so we should understand that the whole history of the western hemisphere since Columbus has happened after Durer’s lifetime. Furthermore: other than art works these drawings and prints should be seen as objects from another time and place, these still fresh sheets of paper, a relatively new medium at that time, were worked on in rooms amongst persons who spoke a language that no one alive today likely could understand. In fact, when these drawing were 100 years old William Shakespeare invented the English language and wrote a play entitled “Hamlet”. These works were three hundred years old when George Washington took the oath of office as President of the United States. It is a testament to the esteem in which they have been held and the care they have been given that they are as fresh as the day they were made. They have survived floods and fires, famine and plague, war, war, war and still more war.

This is a very rare exhibition: there are only 49 Durer drawings outside of Europe; there are 91 in this exhibition. It should also be noted that every one of the works has been beautifully framed and presented to the public using illumination in which there are no reflections or glare from overhead lighting fixtures. This is one of the best museum installations I’ve seen in quite a while….why they all can’t be this thoughtfully presented is a mystery to me.

Albrecht Durer grew up as the son of a successful goldsmith and we can assume that he had a comfortable early life and an early and constant exposure to the fine arts and an ease with and understanding of the society in which he lived. Thus when he told his father that he wanted to be an artist/draftsman rather than a smith, the father could sufficiently assay his achievement in order to acquiesce to his son’s wishes. And so off he went to study with a local painter Michael Wolgemut and later to Colmar to study painting with Martin Schongauer who unfortunately, died before his arrival. But while there the surviving members of that man’s workshop allowed young Durer to study his work. It is clear that Durer had a high regard for the work of these men and wanted to emulate their achievements. And this raises a first question: Durer wanted to conform, to master the prevailing style. Why? Why didn’t he want to draw like Durer? Or, like most young men, to do something “new”?

Sometime thereafter he was able to go off to Italy and he was able to study with and among the well known Italian renaissance artists of the day. And soon his work took on the character of theirs incorporating the latest styles of figure drawing and linear perspective. At no time in the early years of his career, as presented in this exhibition, was there any indication that Durer wanted to master the art of drawing …in order to express himself. To be the best or an equal among a very talented few seems to have been his greatest ambition, that and the desire to be commercially successful…I sense in these catalogue notes that young Durer was as self centered and as ambitious as the young Ruiz Picasso of a later Barcelona. (In his striving for perfection one might suspect that he was somewhat insecure as well.) And in order to be successful he had to make drawings that catered to the prevailing wisdom. There was no daring do in this early career.

Now there is a remarkable parallel here to the life of Picasso. In his youth Picasso realized that the academic tradition was decadent and exhausted and that it was up to him and his generation to reinvigorate it. Once he and Braque had set off on the voyage of Cubism, all of the other ambitious young artist of his day fell into step behind them. In Durer’s day it was the rise of the new in the Italian renaissance that summoned the followers, of whom he was one. So we have good examples here of Gombrich’s matching and making and perhaps an insight into the psychology of representation…one masters craft not for self expression but as the means to personal and professional success: the life of an artist, often more bourgeois than one might suspect, is rarely without its for-profit motivations.

While he did work successfully as a painter Durer is usually thought of as a master draftsman; it is his drawings that resonate and lodge in the mind of the viewer. And although many might stare blankly at the mention of his name, when shown his works almost everyone will admit that his drawings are among their favorites. He is known for having done figure drawings and portraits, nature studies, landscapes, and designs for decorative objects. He worked in pen and ink, pen and brush, watercolor, charcoal, woodcuts and engravings. Examples of all of these are included in the exhibition.

His pen and ink drawings are lovely and spontaneous although not quite as spontaneous as the later Rembrandt’s. And his brush and ink, in which the tip of the brush is used as a pen, requires more explanation than the exhibition curators have given us. American museums are teaching museums and too often we are fed, as we are here, an over abundance of provenance as well as anecdotal back story. As the pen and ink and brush and ink look so much alike in the final presentation, it would be satisfying to know why he chose one over the other for the various works. (I believe his diary entries are extensive and I suspect they probably contain the answer.) It would also be nice to know what is meant by “pen”. I assume it was a goose quill, third from the wing tip was always the preferred feather, but it might also have been reed or metal. And as for the ink, was it a cake of ink such as Chinese or India ink? It would certainly be nice to know which brand has this kind of permanence.

There are questions raised about the various printing media as well. Both woodcut and engraving were new to the 1400’s, they were the photo shop and digital printing of their day, and apparently Durer was one of those artists who raised the process to its highest level of achievement. But I’m curious why he sometimes chose one over the other. In the catalogue it is mentioned that after he had drawn the picture on the wood it was sent to the woodcutter to be prepared for printing. So I think we can assume that there was a printing industry in Nuremburg that was much like that in Japan about which we know so much. Do we not know so much about the industry in Nuremburg or is it considered not important? I think it is important. Did the different printing media have to do with the price of the finished prints: were those prints that were the process of an industrial establishment cheaper than the engravings which were carved by the artist himself?

Engraving is a completely different way of drawing from pen and ink and I wonder if Durer did engrave the plates himself or if they too were sent to the “cutter”. I know that both methods are used and accepted and that some artists achieve their best work through the making of engravings themselves.

The woodcuts are charming and are steps above rustic, but the engravings enter into a whole different realm with their beautiful range of tonal values. Generally that is achieved by incising lines that are sometimes deeper here and there and sometimes lighter. And it is for that reason that I wonder who cut the plates. I would think that the artist would want to control the process: however, in the field of photography I know that both Richard Avedon and Yosef Karsh sat down with a work print and a pencil and described to the printer how they wanted every square inch of the final print to look. I have seen these work prints in exhibitions. Is there any written documentation or other evidence that Durer did the same in these engravings?

In his lectures, The Nude, Sir Kenneth Clark tells us that of all the subject matter of art it is the nude that elicits the most critical response and that this is because each of us has in his mind an ideal image of the human form. In the book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the beginning artist is encouraged to stop using language i.e.: foot, hand, back, leg, etc …and encouraged to see lines that are edges of contours giving each line the proportions that can be seen and that all the subsequent lines should be related in like manner to one another. Drawing is simply a process of coordinating our hand to record what our eyes see. When we use language …hand, foot, elbow…we tend to draw not what we see but what lies buried in our mind.

The dominant subject of Durer’s work is the human figure. As a young man he was convinced that there was a mathematical formula for creating the ideal human figure in art and he spent many years trying to discover it. Perhaps the closest he got was the Adam and Eve of 1510. Other than that his nudes are very obviously problematic…Clark places him squarely in the Alternate Tradition …the Gothic. And so we might assume that in his youth he had been so imbued with the conventions of Gothic art that it was almost impossible for him to cleanse it from his mind… he draws what he knows. For us it doesn’t require more than just a little study to realize that his problem was that he did not understand human anatomy. There are highlights and shadows that he has copied from the Italians to give interest to the interiors of the outlined forms but it is readily apparent that he does not understand for a moment that those geographical bumps and hollows and ridges and valleys are bones or muscles or ligaments.

And there are two areas where he has absolutely horrendous problems: the buttocks and the chin. Consistently over the years he evidenced his confusion as to how the chin was constructed and settled eventually on creating a generic mound that looks very much like a small pubescent breast. I cannot understand why that did not bother him.

I have never known an artist who has had more trouble drawing the buttocks than Durer does. In drawing after drawing he seems to get further and further away from any resemblance to the human figure and what is so amazing is that when he transfers the pen and ink preliminary drawing to the wood or copper plate, i.e. Adam and Eve, Plates 70 and 72, he does not see or correct his mistakes!

Now I have seen this before in works by other German artists, as recently as December when I saw the exhibition Durer to de Kooning, One Hundred Master Drawings from Munich at the Morgan Library. In German works that are beautifully executed with flawlessly depicted surrounds, details and ornamentation, you see in work after work the most grotesque distortions of the human anatomy. Why is that so persistently so? Is it a convention? Or do the German artists not see it or not care if they do see it? Is finish everything?

To give credit where credit is due, in the catalogue pages 102-103 we see the Durer buttocks at their worst, The Four Witches, and then on the facing page in the pen and ink Female Nude Praying, in the National Gallery Collection, a back view that was likely a three to five minute drawing from the model, we see an almost perfectly depicted female form …almost perfect but not quite …her right leg is too short. But other than that he has captured the form and the energy of someone who could easily be mistaken for a contemporary American working class housewife. Both of these are dated 1504.

And it is in drawings like these that we realize Durer main fault, especially in his prints: his human form is never presented as expressive form. His subject/figure is always an actor in a well known tableau and in its serenity it is statuesque, statuesque in that it is rock like. Most of these woodcuts and engravings are religious illustrations with a few Greco-Roman mythological scenes thrown in to acknowledge the southern Renaissance.…there’s really very little here that is other than a commercial product made for a target audience (he is preaching to the converted.) …which partially explains why I do not like prints. (They’re contrived.) The expressiveness and the symbolic  experience of these works come from our previous understanding of the moral of the tale depicted, our ability to translate the meanings of the symbols surrounding the subject, and our predisposal to continue to support religious iconography…to conform to the status quo. As I am not religious, as I am not a Christian, I am not inclined to be so tolerant especially as I am aware that it was the target audience for Durer’s work that within one hundred years turned neighbor against neighbor, Christian against Christian, who clashed in violent civil war and devastated the countryside and decimated the population.

When Durer gives up the pursuit of the ideal and just draws what he sees, one line after the other, he creates beautiful drawings of hands, including the well known Praying Hands, feet, and portraits of old men …his portraits of old women are less successful. Of the old men the portrait of the 93 year old man from the Netherlands, Plate 105. is one of his great masterpieces…better even than the painting which followed.

But at all times throughout his career he was most at ease and at his best in recording nature …landscapes, rugged mountains, and the flora and fauna of home and the lands he visited. And among his masterpieces are The Young Hare, The Oxen’s muzzle, (neither of which are included in this exhibition), and The Great Piece of Turf, which is shown. Aside from being a tour de force of brush mastery the Great Turf is likely one of the few great works which blend water color and gouache. And having it at eye level, one is able to analyze the composition, deconstruct it, and study how the two media, which can often be a problematic combination, are so beautifully blended that neither the one nor the other is obvious, are used to create a sense of deep picture space.

All considered this exhibition is a virtuosic display of draftsmanship. If I had any misgivings they began to surface when I studied a work such as the etching, 1514, The Desperate Man. (here one of only two, I believe, works in the new etching process at that time). This is one of the few works lacking a clear cut religious or Mythic reference, (Knight, Death, and Devil is almost as ambiguous but is ultimately merely Medieval.) In fact, we are uncertain what is depicted and what is meant…it almost seems to be the image of a dream world. (It might simply be a series of exercises in the new medium combined on the same plate.) But it is also readily apparent that in its technique, its composition, its finish and its ambiguity it bears a great similarity to Picasso’s Minotauromachie.

Why are there not more works like this one in this exhibition? Did Durer not make them? Did he only concern himself with the straight forward here and now? If we ask ourselves about his contemporaries or what had come before this we are reminded of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch. Then suddenly a whole world teaming with life and animation rouses itself in our memories…I remember seeing last January a Peter Bruegel pen and ink drawing at the Frick Museum, Kermis at Hoboken, 1559, from the Courtauld Collection, in which almost one hundred figures in every imaginable human involvement fill a page to overflowing with their exuberance. Looking back at the Great Piece of Turf I tried to imagine what Bruegel would have done with it …the flies and bees and frogs and toads and snails and snakes and worms that would have found a paradise in this moist square of sod. Imagine the fun in its death and decay that Bosch would have shown us. And I wondered why Durer …left them out? For all its virtuosity, suddenly I missed them.

Because he died young, at 58, there are none of those late works in which a well seasoned older artist slashes paint across a canvas in a shorthand gesture that conveys a world of meaning…there are no late Rembrandt self portraits, no Capriccios or Dreams of Life.

In the end this exhibition raises a question the answer to which would seem to be obvious but is not, especially as this is shown in the East Building, the National Gallery’s home for modern art: What is the value of an exhibition such as this? The obvious answer is that it is of interest to art historians, collectors, connoisseurs and the general public. It might also be of interest to artists although I am not sure in what respect that would be true. It was Picasso who said I don’t draw what I see I draw what I know. And since the day when Agnes Martin took a ruler and a pencil and made of straight line from the top to the bottom of a well prepared canvas and said “this is it, this is all there is left to do” …where does an artist go from there, from here…from anywhere…what is the future of drawing? Does this exhibition give us a clue? No, it does not. Downstairs we see some colored squares by Ellsworth Kelly and the papiers colles of Matisse and while that might give us a suggestion it also tells us that that too has been done and that unlike Durer, we no longer have the freedom to draw like others or to use the ready subject matter of others or even to reference others. Arthur Dove saw this as a liberating moment wherein one was free to draw from his imagination. But how many artists really have interesting minds?

I enjoyed this exhibition tremendously. I attended the Sunday lecture; I had lunch and then saw the exhibition. I returned Monday morning at ten and saw it a second time for several uncrowded hours. On Tuesday evening when I returned home from the trip to Washington my preordered copy of the catalogue was at my door. I read it cover to cover. I continue to be of the opinion that the desire to draw and to paint is as inherently human as is the desire to sing and to dance, and I have come to the conclusion that this exhibition is not heuristic. Now I am even more emboldened to repeat my question: despite the fact that I enjoyed all of this, what is the value of an exhibition like this? It doesn’t suggest the way forward and, if we like to draw….

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/durerinfo.shtm

Angels,Demons, and Savages. Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet

At the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Those who read these blog posts with any regularity have known me to write on several occasions about my dismay with the conformity of American museums and their universal policy of presenting only the same 37 modern artists and only the iconic image for which each of those artists is “famous”. It is as if the 50,000 annual MFA graduates of Institutions of higher learning do not exist. Rarely in fact do they even give space to local artists of some renown: The Philadelphia Museum does have a nice Thomas Eakins collection on view, as does the Boston Museum with John Singleton Copley, and Kansas City’s Nelson Atkins’s has  the nice Thomas Hart Benton galleries. But as a rule one American art museum is much like any of the others and it can truly be said that if you‘ve seen one you’ve seen them all. So when I read that an exhibition relating the works of Dubuffet, Ossorio and Pollack was to be presented it can safely be assumed that I would make an effort to see it.

My primary interest was in discovering why someone whose name I do not know, Ossorio’s, is being featured alongside two better known names. My questions being: how does his work compare to what is usually shown, how similar or dissimilar is it, and is there anything about the work that makes me think it is a good solution to the problems of contemporary painting that should be better known or is it justifiably better left unseen.

My secondary interest was in seeing more work by Jackson Pollock that is other than his “famous” drip paintings, which I know he made only during a brief period and then moved on, but which the American art establishment would be happy to have us think is all he ever did. There’s a sort of snobbery exhibited by some museums; those who have examples of the drip paintings are, of course, museums of the first rank, and those who have only his earlier of later works are merely confessing that they are second tier institutions.

Finally, I would not have been motivated in seeing an exhibition of Dubuffet’s work alone: the Hirschhorn has a large gallery, perhaps two, of his works and for the most part I find them to be without interest. When I see one or two of his representative iconic works in other museums they all seem to me to be only more of the same. (If he is not in company with the standard 37 modern artist always shown, he is at least in the standard expanded list of 43.)

The focus of this exhibition is the four year period between 1948 and 1952 when, or so we are asked to believe, the work of these three artists shared a common ground. As he is the seminal player, it helps to know who this Mr. Ossorio was. Born into a wealthy Philippine family he was educated from a young age in American schools. Settled in New York and having an interest in art he took up painting and having disposable income he took up art collecting; we might think of him as a latter day Caillabotte. With these interests and living in New York City and the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, he made himself known to the members of the New York School of painters and became friendly with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. In discussion with his friends the Pollock’s regarding the work of Dubuffet Jackson suggested that Ossorio go to Paris to meet him. And so he did.

Now Dubuffet was apparently delighted to meet Ossorio and eventually came to New York to meet the New York School and when a meeting between he and Pollock was set up on Long Island, Pollack was being famously difficult and failed to show up. As little direct exchange of ideas resulted during this period one might think that this is a tenuous thread on which to base an exhibition. Perhaps so, but there were intellectual concerns that have some bearing on the episode.

Of the inspirations for modern art two of them are presented here. One has to do with the influence of non-traditional art, as in the case of Picasso and Matisse with their interest in African art and, for Picasso, early Iberian art. From that influence both of those artists made the shift from perceptual art to conceptual art using the human figure as expressive form. From that influence there later occurred an interest in Jung’s collective unconscious which included Joseph Campbell’s work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This latter influence was especially important amongst members of the New York School …Jackson Pollock’s work Keepers of the Secret being a manifestation. In his Mellon Lectures, Paths to the Absolute, Phillip Golding expounded on this line of thinking. (Scroll down to see my review of his book, this blog 2012.)

By 1948, when Pollock had begun to make the drip paintings, but was still committed to figurative art, and likely impressed with deKooning’s new series, Woman, in which he combined figuration with abstraction, but which Pollock might not have wanted to emulate, Ossorio’s introduction of Dubuffet’s work, influenced as it was by art brut or outsider art rather than primitive art, might have seemed to Pollock a possible solution to this temporary crises/stasis.

Thus while there seems to have been a common dilemma (figuration vs. abstraction) there appears to me to have been little cross fertilization. Pollock’s solution was to create the sense of the human figure through poured compositions, black on white. Ossorio drew child like figures lost in a swirl of all over color abstraction, and Dubuffet created hard line expressive forms each shape within the format having a distinct non representational painterly surface.

The second common consideration was the presentation: how does one create an all over abstract composition that has the sense of a spontaneously made painting without making something that looks like the floor of one of the painting studios at the Art Student League. Alfred Barnes has written that all great paintings have in common a sense of “something”. What is that something and how does one achieve it without copying what has gone before?

One of the problems to be resolved in the making of a painting is the question of the decorative: because they hang on walls in well cared for spaces every painting has the inherent character of being a decorative object. Likely the origin of this was the requirement that a commissioned work be compatible with the home of the collector or patron, a person whose quarters were generally highly decorated spaces. Thus, in creating a harmony of expressive form, how far can one go without lapsing into the merely decorative? When Picasso and Braque first worked in analytical cubism one of the considerations for making a new art was the question of finish: it was mutually determined that the works would not be varnished. And indeed that eliminated a sense of fussiness and this further set them apart from what had gone before. For many years the art they created did in fact seem new and compelling. But now that we are many years beyond their creation much of it looks to us now as “decoration” and especially the work of Braque. But this might also have to do with the fact that Braque was first trained as a decorative painter and only later studied the academic tradition. On the other hand Picasso, who had been trained in the academic tradition, more successfully avoided the merely decorative and as a result created far more complex and interesting works than did Braque: little that Braque created has the depth and intrigue of The Three Musicians.

As to why I object to the decorative I see it as defined by Corbusier, and you have read this here before as well; decoration is the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. If we like to think of modern art as a new way of seeing, seeing the old in a pleasant new arrangement is hardly new and hardly “art”.

E.H. Gombrich described the impetus in painting as being of two states of mind: matching and making. For many with a desire to paint an academic training and working within that discipline is an acceptable process: one has the certainty that what he was doing was sanctioned by others of a like mind, and that in order to produce good work one had only to observe the conventions. Work of this kind progresses with the stately pomp of religion. Other artists have stood back from the work, they have seen that what they are doing has been done before, and they have asked: “What else can I do, where can I go with this …in order to make what I want to express more readily felt and apparent.” Often the clues to that progression are found in the work of the immediately preceding generation: Cezanne was the inspiration for cubism …The dominance of cubism as the gateway to modernism was the inspiration for Jackson Pollock to find another opening.

Overall Dubuffet’s work reads as the exercise of a technique. As one example in a museum gallery of modern art works, it is fine, but in larger installations, such as at the Hirschhorn Museum it fails to sustain the interest. Dubuffet searched for his technique, his “style” outside the confines of the western tradition, but in attempting to emulate art brut, outsider art, the non-academic, he conformed nonetheless to a different aesthetic. In the end it is still matching but to a different tune. Lacking a heartfelt passion, expressive form, ultimately it became the repetition of a decorative technique. This is augmented by his wonderful color sense, his unique palette, and his ability to create harmonies of tonal balances. In addition his work has real charm.

As a rule I am unimpressed by art that references a foreign, to the artist, culture without, as Picasso did, making it one’s own. In Tacoma I once saw the work of a glass maker who had made tromp l’oeil objects that looked just like the objects from a northwestern Indian tribe. Some people seem not to understand the difference between the tribal collective unconscious and the archetype. Images from the tribal collective unconscious relate specifically to that particular tribe, to which none of the others of us can relate except as to foreign cultural objects whereas archetypes subsume the cultural.

I don’t see much in the Pollock works here that would indicate that had he lived longer he might have experienced another break through. This all looks to me like a person who was suffering writer’s block and who was biding his time hoping to be surprised by the joy of a communication from his unconscious, something with the magnanimity of Autumn Rhythm rather than the also ran character of Lavender Mist. And each of the works presented here have a strong sense of “finish”. I have the sense that his end of life unhappiness was in part because he wanted to make something other than that.

In every clutch of modern painters there are legions of followers whose work is ultimately nondescript. The problem with Ossorio’s work is that I feel that I have seen it in many other venues under the name of many other artists. This is not to say that his work does not display intelligence, commitment, and a high degree of professionalism. If I have any criticism of it it would be that it is too intellectual. This is one of my common complaints about modern art and because of that I find that modern art is too often exclusionary, it is only a dialogue among the initiates. This continues my recent insights which are contained in my post on the Menil Collection, see below. Then there are several examples of his shaped canvases…which always read to me as a too self conscious attempt at modernism, despite my belief that a contemporary artist is entitled to rebel against the tyranny of the rectangle.

And whereas Dubuffet’s color is always so pleasant Ossorio’s is too acrid …too primitive, as if the palette had been borrowed from ritual preparations in a tribal village. Several years ago I became aware that in the art of primitive people the color palette is always high chroma with a strong liking for orange and black, yellow, red and green, white, red, and black. I don’t know from this exhibition, and there is no discussion of color in the catalogue, whether Ossorio used the colors he did in reference to Dubuffet’s philosophy or whether that color choice was inherently his because of his early exposure to ethnic Philippine art.

All three of the artists show a concern for the dual perception created by a painting: the perception of surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. But that concern and the work it required feels unrelated to the primary interest in figuration; the figure is either fore or aft but rarely, if ever, dancing on the surface, rarely if ever the actual subject …whereas with Picasso one is never in doubt as to where his interest lies…the beautiful Marie Therese sleeping is always the beautiful Marie Therese sleeping regardless of the artist’s style of the day.

It’s a nice exhibition and much larger than I would have imagined it would be. I like exhibitions like this that are other than blockbuster money makers of the big names. But in the end it all seemed so long ago and far away. Later that same day I passed in front of a late Dubuffet at the National Gallery, wherein a number of colorful, primary colors colorful, drawings on paper had been pasted to a large canvas. Like Ossorio’s self consciously shaped canvases it looked as if many years after this meeting of the minds he was still looking for somewhere to go, something to do. I prefer that to the work of those who have given up and just repeat a commercially successful formula. But it emphasized why I was not more favorably impressed by this exhibition …it is an interesting little byway but it was not the beginning of something big.

I saw as well at the NGA an early Marsden Hartley painting, Maine Woods, 1908, in which he captured the chaos of a wooded landscape with a masterful all-over surface from which after some contemplation one begins to sort out the elements of the natural order. (Sorry, there is no photograph of this painting on their web site.) Immediately I understood it to be a statement of his comprehension of the late Cezanne works. Further, it seemed to me that he had achieved what Pollack, Dubuffet and Ossorio had attempted to do here. Shortly after having made that painting and a number of others similar to it, Hartley went to Germany and devoted his time to understanding the modern painting he saw there. It was as if he had admitted that the all-over technique had a limited shelf life. I agree with that and that too might have something to do with my response to this same kind of painting that I recognize as having come along fifty years after the fact.

http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/2013-02-09-exhibition-pollock-ossorio-dubuffet.aspx