“I want an art of balance, of purity, that neither harasses nor worries. I have chosen to keep worries and torment inside me and only paint the beauty of the world…I go to meet my feelings; I go towards ecstasy…I’m waiting for the love at first sight that I know is out there.”
- Henri Matisse
I. Signs of Divinity
Matisse isn’t much in vogue among the culturati these days; their tastes seem to run to rotting fish and ‘fly-ridden’ cow carcasses, not beautiful paintings. The meaning of Art as a result of this seismic shift was fractured forever, and as reflected in Ad Reinhardt’s mot, became “everything else.” As Tom Wolfe brilliantly states the case in The Painted Word, Art “disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory!” But that’s not the worst of it, according to curator and former museum director Julian Spalding, holding forth in his enlightening critiques of the modern art scene, Con Art and The Eclipse of Art. Spalding sees little merit in much of what is presented in art galleries today and expresses a view now widely shared among art lovers that the whole spectacle “may be heading into a cul-de-sac,” along with, I might add, the rest of what we erroneously call “civilization.” Unfortunately, much modern art is a cartoon of forms that had once been valued as legitimate expressions of what it means to be a human being engaged with the mystery and beauty of the world. “Real art,” says Spalding, “has been eclipsed by con art…We reserve the word art for those rare visual creations that stir our emotions and stimulate our thoughts profoundly and elusively…Art in the end, is not an illusion but a revelation.” Lamenting art’s post-war march toward content deemed shocking and offensive rather than what is considered “recognizable and enjoyable,” Spalding points out that “no modern artist worthy of the name could aspire as Van Gogh had done, to produce art that would be all embracing, popular, loving and profound and art today is the lesser for it.”
Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy Kevin Snow, Unsplash.
In The Eclipse of Art, Spalding suggests that real art expresses our deepest truths and connects across the ages into our own time, maintaining continuity with the art of the past. “The quality that links the paintings of Vermeer and Matisse, Gruenewald and Pissarro and that earns them the status of works of art,” he says, “is the aesthetic light that appears to shine out from them…the greater the art is, the more detached it becomes from private meanings or small social circles, and the more freely it stands as its own interpreter, to speak to all humankind.” The aspiration to create the caliber of art described by Spalding is spiritual rather than conceptual, and seeks to express in some measure the same “draught of joie de vivre” and beauty that inspired the old masters, an aesthetic which “floats in sparkling air,” as Winston Churchill characterized the work of Manet, Cezanne and Matisse. But even in the absence of such lofty ambitions, the creative process can be a transformative refuge from the vicissitudes as well as a guide for envisioning new ways of being in the world as we celebrate the dance of life.
“This is the Quest,” as the wonderful Irish abstract painter Anne Madden (above) imagines is the case for most artists “trying to uncover or discover a reality beyond actuality, trying to make visible invisible aspects of the world, however they conceive or perceive them to be.” In addition to painting’s “abstract qualities, space and color and formal passion,” she says, it is the “structure of light” and the “aura great paintings shed’ that inspired her work; these qualities emanating from the Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca in the National Gallery of London, she confesses, made her hair stand on end. “It was the painting’s aura and radiance that were, and remain, so affecting,” she writes. “The figures appear to be inhabited by a light that permeates the silvery colors peculiar to that artist.”
Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca
Reading Madden’s comments I’m reminded of the ancient Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, the compelling story of how the world came into being out of liquid chaos at the juncture of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowing into the Persian Gulf. In the watery world of ancient Mesopotamia, as in the modern painter’s fluid space of possibility, luminous atomic structures of color and light arise spontaneously out of the infinite flux of a random, ceaselessly changing universe, glittering images of cosmic light. In the paintings of Claude Monet, one of Winston Churchill’s favorite impressionists, the focus is mainly on the visual impact of light rather than the narrative, or as a critic in Monet’s era put it, rendering “not the landscape but the sensation produced by the landscape.” Emile Zola defined such art as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” The imagined or felt effect transcended the importance of the visual facts recorded. Monet launched this “impressionistic” experiment in communicating the effects of light with his idea of “all-over painting” which anticipated today’s breakthroughs in Quantum Theory and the revelation that everything we see consists of atoms spinning in empty space. “I am pursuing the impossible,” said Monet in conversation with Herman Bang in 1895. “Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat…I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, and the boat are to be found—the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible.”
The Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874. Claude Monet
The mysterious mystical light that penetrates the paintings of Claude Monet is also apparent in the work of the great visionary artist William Blake in which light has the power of a cosmic force, penetrating everywhere in the picture at once. Seeing this powerful light in the work of these old masters or in Anne Madden’s beautiful paintings for that matter, is not just another metaphor for the revelatory power of art. There is a dynamic process at play wherein light mysteriously exposes itself, revealing what Goethe called the “archetypical phenomena” that is the essential nature of light. “The eye owes its existence to the light,” said Goethe. “Out of indifferent animal organs the light produces an organ to correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light, for the light, so that the inner light may meet the outer.” In other words, the work of these great artists exposes the viewer to an awareness of light revealing itself, or as contemporary artist James Turrell says, “Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.” Matisse is another artist who recognized light as the link to the spirit when he said “The artist or poet possess an inner light that transforms objects to create a new world, one that is sensitive and organized, a living world that is in itself the infallible sign of divinity, the reflection of divinity.”
Christ in The Sepulcher Guarded By Angels. William Blake, 1805
II. The Aesthetic Value of Art
The aesthetic value of a painting derives from several qualities. One example is texture. As Bernard Berenson famously said, a painting must have tactile values. Color is another quality widely cited by collectors and connoisseurs as an important value determinant. One great American collector known for his love of colorful paintings was Duncan Phillips, a man who critic Robert Hughes once described as the “compleat optical collector.” Phillips craved the “delight and radiance and sensory intelligence that is broadcast by an art based on color,” wrote Hughes. “Color healed; it consoled; it gave access to Eden…He came to see the significance of modern art largely as a narrative of color, of agreeable sense impression laden with thought, a joy-giving, life-enhancing influence, assisting people to see beautifully as true artists see.” I suspect Phillips would agree if he was around today that the great Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky got it right when he said that color is the key the artist uses to “get the human soul to vibrate,” and especially with Vincent Van Gogh’s take on color in a letter to his brother Theo. “Man is not placed on this earth merely to be happy,” Van Gogh wrote, “nor is he placed here merely to be honest. He is here to accomplish great things through society…to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on. The uglier, older, meaner, sicker, and poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant color, well arranged, resplendent.”
Sower at Sunset, 1888 by Vincent Van Gogh
But even when championed by a great artist like Van Gogh, color isn’t everything; art is much more than retinal sensation; a painting also constitutes the artist’s inner vision, “Not what you see,” as Picasso put it, “but what you know is there.” Picasso recognized that authentic art is intuitive and arises out of the creative process that he once described to the photographer Brassai. “If it occurred to man to create his own images,” he said, “it’s because he discovered them all around him, almost formed, already within his grasp. He saw them in a bone, in the irregular surfaces of cavern walls, in a piece of wood. One form might suggest a woman, another a bison, and still another the head of a demon.” D.H. Lawrence thought along the same lines, describing artistic design as an act of seeing the reactions between various elements at play in a given situation. “You can’t invent a design,” Lawrence said. “You recognize it in the fourth dimension. That is, with you blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.”
For Robert Motherwell, a painter considered by the media pundits of his era as the most articulate member of the abstract expressionists, the challenge was to find a “creative principle…a method of rightly conducting the brush.” Above all, Motherwell sought to cultivate what he called a “principle that is not a style,” an attitude that is open to chance, an approach to graphic expression he labeled “psychic automatism.” His goal was akin to the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s idea to “paint not the thing, but the effect it produces.”
“To express the felt nature of reality is the artist’s concern,” Motherwell said. “By feeling is meant the response of the ‘body-and-mind’ as a whole to the events of reality.” Motherwell was not alone is his acquiescence to the higher angels of human existence. The great Paul Klee, for all his knowledge and skill as a painter, deferred in the end to a power greater than himself to account for the miraculous effect described by Motherwell. I think all visual artists, great and small, eventually realize the truth of Klee’s insight that creativity is really a gift from the Almighty rather than a volitional act. “The best pictures cannot be willed,” Klee famously said. “They just come into being.”
III. The Post-Wharholian Nightmare
“Success in the art market is measured in terms of rising prices rather than rising sales.”
- Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices
In 1990, a can of artist Piero Manzoni’s kaka sold at Christie’s London for $67,000. Many art lovers construed from this transaction that the art market had degenerated into a global shit show, a consequence of crony corporate capitalism that was documented back in 1985 by the writers of the Whitney Biennial catalog. “We have moved into a situation where wealth is the only agreed upon arbiter of value,” the catalog stated. “Capitalism has overtaken contemporary art, quantifying it and reducing it to the status of a commodity. Ours is a system adrift in mortgaged goods and obsessed with accumulation, where the spectacle of art consumption has been played out in a public forum geared to journalistic hyperbole.”
And there you have it, the global art market, an evil racket designed by rich people to ensure that they don’t take losses on pictures, enshrined in an overpriced can of capitalist poop. Thus informed, you’re now ready to buy that expensive New York apartment at Gramercy Park and commence to fill it with selections from the plethora of Toni galleries in the Big Apple, a conspicuously upscale venue that quickly dispels William Blake’s pious notion, as reported by critic Robert Hughes, “Where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on.” Art is not only being carried on, in some instances, it’s transcending reality. Like modern agriculture, modern art is big business. “Modern art in America did not emerge gradually from cold-water walk-ups and obscure studios,” wrote Ariella Budick in the Financial Times newspaper. “It sprang into the public consciousness on a factory scale.” Budick was referring to the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York City that launched an unprecedented era of dynamic growth and expansion in the nation’s art world, a phenomenon that has driven prices to ever rising heights.
The explosion of commercialism was poignantly described in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol by the money man himself: “Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting,” Warhol wrote. “I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.” It’s worth noting that when he was producing his iconic images in the 60s and 70s, Andy Warhol was known as the “Pope of Pop,” but his legacy as an artist may be more substantive than the sobriquet suggests. In the years since his death in 1987, his influence has extended far beyond the so-called “Pop” movement. As biographer Arthur Danto pointed out in his enlightening writings about the artist, Warhol transformed the very concept of art itself. According to Danto, “He changed not so much the way we look at art, but the way art was understood.” Before Warhol, the assumption was that art is supposed to be beautiful, but that definitely was not the case in Warhol’s Duchampion world in which anything under the sun qualified as art. His silkscreen paintings of celebrities, for example, or the famous Brillo boxes aren’t beautiful in the traditional sense at all. Nor was the environment in which these works were created, an industrialized, mechanistic version of the traditional ideal of the “artist’s studio,” aptly named The Factory, a milieu where uniformity, not beauty in the classical sense, ruled. Warhol openly admitted that he aspired to be a machine, citing repetition as a key element in his aesthetic. “I like things to be exactly the same over and over again,” he said. Warhol’s approach proved to be a lucrative usurpation of Art’s traditional foundations rooted in the virtues of elegance and beauty.
Money, of course, has nothing to do with beauty, at least not Beauty with a capital “B” so as not to confuse it with glamour. Glamour is merely stoking the fires of desire through the allure of fetishism and fashion. Beauty in the classical sense emanates from a much deeper source. Agnes Martin, in a brilliant essay on the subject, describes beauty as an awareness in the mind of the mystery of life. Being an artist, according to Martin, is being concerned with beauty and happiness. “Beauty illustrates happiness,” she says. “The wind in the grass, the glistening waves following each other, the flight of birds—all speak of happiness. Happiness is being on the beam with life—to feel the pull of life.” Matisse expressed the same idea when he stated that his intention as an artist was to “reconcile man to himself by means of aesthetic harmony.” Ugliness, by contrast, the opposite of the happy mind state induced by beauty, lacks the power to please us. It saps our energy and sullies our creative relationship with life. The bland uniformity of the typical urban landscape is a case in point, a monstrous modernist expression that has an inharmonious, spiritually deadening effect because something vital is missing from the scene, namely, the wild element of nature that makes the human heart sing.
In our greed-is-good culture, consumers are held in the grip of relentless, media- manufactured desire where style lacks content, form is without function and commerce is devoid of integrity because only things that serve egotistical purposes are admitted. The moral or aesthetic ideal is excluded in favor of the stylistic hook. This condition of moral bankruptcy is especially evident in our fractious political realm judging by the insane spectacle that now passes for democracy with thugs and criminals running for office all across the nation. The art world today is a fraught oasis from a society that worships wealth as the arbiter of happiness. The mad rush to catch the gleaming product de jour proceeds at a frantic pace in a cultural milieu that Robert C. Morgan calls the “post-Warholian nightmare,” a context in which art has lost its traditional sense of spiritual and aesthetic necessity and become just another “product.” The purpose of the modern art marketing process is to foster a state of being that the Surrealists called le merveilleux, a heightened state of desire that’s impossible to satisfy. “When seeking the object of fulfillment,” wrote André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, “the demands of desire exert a strange power over external phenomena, tending egoistically to admit only that which can serve its purpose.”
“The post-Warholian nightmare is precisely this,” writes Robert Morgan. “Art has become irrelevant to the art world except for the dinners, the parties and the discos. It is one big, mindless bash where money talks and no one listens, and where even fewer see the art.” In postmodern terms insists Morgan, “The art of the spectacle conveys little in the way of heightened emotional awareness and no transformation of the audience’s idea of the world through feeling. The result is a psychic deadness that characterizes much of today’s art, a calculated coldness that mirrors the morose, alienating effects of television and the porn dominated internet.”
A final thought on this theme comes from art critic Donald Kuspit, who says “art has to facilitate our belief that we can be spontaneously creative selves. It is necessary for psychological survival in our society, which however materially wonderful—and clearly it is not materially wonderful for everybody—is hardly fit to live in psychologically. If art doesn’t help us believe in ourselves, it will become another wretched part of our unfit environment.”
Wow, what a trove of aesthetic wisdom! I'll need to spend more time to read and reflect with this one. As a photographer I especially liked the observations about light.