Tag Archives: painting

November 15, 2012 · 10:59 am

What Really *IS* Going on with Contemporary Art?

The New York Times asks a very pertinent question this morning: “What Is Going on with Contemporary Art?”  Unfortunately, despite the eye-catching headline, the article does not actually attempt to answer the question.  It gives us a good opportunity to ask the question ourselves, but before that I hope the reader will indulge me, if I first take a detour through the increasingly dense and dank malaise known as Contemporary Art.

If we look at the Christie’s Contemporary Art sale, which concluded last evening in New York, as the article reports the final hammer prices were simply extraordinary.  Yet doesn’t it seem rather odd that, despite its moniker, the auction contained so little that is actually contemporary? Yes, gentle reader, this means that I am going to split hairs, so hang on for the ride.

Take a look at some of the artists whose works fetched top prices, and the date that the works in question were created:  Warhol (1962); Kline (1956 and 1957); Diebenkorn (1971); Basquiat (1981); Rothko (1957); Lichtenstein (1995).  What do all of these artists have in common, apart from their profession and the fact that all were American? The most obvious answer is that they are all dead.

It is true that there were the works of a few artists in the sale, such as Jeff Koons and Ellsworth Kelly, who are still alive and working today.  However, the aforementioned artists and their works were produced decades ago – and in the case of Warhol, Kline, and Rothko, more than half a century ago.  This begs the question as to what the term “Contemporary Art” actually means:  would you consider yourself a contemporary of someone old enough to be your grandfather?

Common sense would seem to dictate that an artist living and working today is creating art contemporaneous with his existence, which therefore could be considered “Contemporary Art”.  Regrettably, common sense has had increasingly little to do with the art world.  Many in the black turtleneck brigade would absolutely refuse to adopt such a stiff definition, preferring instead something so fluid as to be laughable.  Jackson Pollock has been dead since the Eisenhower Administration, and yet some art critics would consider him to be a Contemporary Artist.  The term simply has no connection with reason.

Going back to the Times’ original question, the rather obvious answer to their query is that the works of many artists produced within the last several decades are achieving greater and greater prices these days, because these works are proving to be increasingly popular with art collectors.  What is not obvious however, is why they are becoming more popular in the first place.  I can only attempt to address some ideas on this point briefly, at least in the space of a short blog post.

Whether you are purchasing an electronic gadget, a car, or a coat, generally speaking we humans aspire to buy what is popular, so that we will have the approval of our peers.  This is something which we in the West have ingrained in us from the first, as part of our consumer culture. If you ever whined to your parents about owning a particular brand of athletic shoe, because you wanted your school friends to like you, then you know how consumerism takes an early hold of the psyche.

The rich may be different, but they are subject to the same peer pressures: they simply indulge in it on a vast scale, because their peers are different, too.  Generally speaking, those buying the types of works featured in this sale are looking to show off to other rich people, thereby expressing the same, very human desire to be well-thought-of.  Few of these types of buyers actually take the time to question the art experts who are telling them what they should purchase, or to ask themselves whether the art which everyone is telling them is so wonderful, isn’t really rather awful when looked at in the cold, hard light of reason.

Please do not mistake my meaning, gentle reader: I am not of the “all paintings must look realistic” school.  In fact, I collect art in a wide variety of styles, both representational and otherwise.  What I do mean, and which the Times does not have the courage to state in its piece, is that the answer to the question, “What is going on with contemporary art?” is, “Insecurity.”  Such astronomical sales figures as these, for art of such questionable merit, gives a very public, quantifiable example of the inherent weakness of human nature – particularly when that nature employs no rudder by which to steer itself.

Detail of “Untitled” by Franz Kline (1957)
Sold for $40.4 million at Christie’s New York on 11/14/12

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August 22, 2012 · 10:53 am

Wipe Out: A Lesson in Being Human

While I read the news from Spain every morning, I often cannot share the stories I read with a wider audience, since not all of my readers are fluent in Spanish. Fortunately however, a story about an attempt at art restoration gone horribly, horribly wrong in Spain has attracted enough international attention to warrant reporting in English. According to news reports, a 19th century fresco painting of Christ at the moment when Pontius Pilate declared, “Ecce Homo,” located in the historic 16th century church of Our Lady of Mercy in the Aragonese town of Borja, was horribly “restored” by an elderly parishioner acting without permission.  She began by scraping off huge sections of loose paint, and then re-painting what can only be described as a rather blobby substitute over the bits she had ruined.

The fresco had begun to flake due to some moisture problems in the building, and was in need of preservation and restoration. Ironically, the local center for cultural studies had recently received a donation from the granddaughter of the artist, Elías García Martínez, to undertake restoration of the painting. Experts will now have to assess whether anything can be done to bring it back: though from the look of things, I suspect they cannot.

The woman responsible, who is in her 80′s and lives in the neighborhood, has come forward and admitted what she did. It was not intended maliciously, but rather she appears to have been unaware that efforts to raise funds to restore the painting were underway. It is telling that the effort to undertake this restoration began in 2010, and yet no one noticed what this woman was doing until August 2012. The church is apparently left open all day long, but there must not be many people visiting it if this ongoing work of hers passed unnoticed for such a long time.

Much of the reporting describes this painting as a “masterpiece”, when it fact it is not. More to the point this alleged “masterpiece” is really just a fresco version of the highly sentimental, colorful, holy card designs still sold everywhere. The fresco is – or was – a pious work of art, but it is not a great painting by any means. In this respect the continued inability of the secular media to understand the Church, let alone art, comes shining through in this story.

That being said, once we get past the images of the destruction of this work of art and calm down a bit, we come to look more clearly at the woman at the heart of this story. It seems to me that most of us do a pretty good job of making a mess of our own lives, without having to look to this woman’s actions in horror and say to ourselves that we would never have done something so stupid. In fact, we do stupid, self-destructive things all the time. Sometimes we do so with the best intentions, but more often than not we are simply selfish.

We have all sat down to eat something like pizza, knowing it was too hot and had to cool off a bit, but decided our appetite was more important than being prudent. The end result is that we scalded the roof of our mouth, suffering pain for days. What’s more, we don’t limit ourselves to self-inflicted harm as a result of own stupidity. No, we go out and spread it around to others, acting recklessly or foolishly in what have become accepted parts of our everyday life.

Take driving, for example. Do you speed, scream at other drivers, or sail along through heavy commuter traffic or intersections while talking on the phone, thinking you can perfectly control a gigantic pile of metal traveling at speed because everyone else is operating under the same delusion? How many more times will you be lucky, and avoid injuring or even killing someone?

Being human means we are going to do stupid things. We are going to eat pizza that is too hot, drive 90 mph in a 65 mph zone, and yes, even some rare percentage of us will wipe out a work of art. We will say and do things in our personal or public lives, that we will all regret.

The point is, when that happens – and it will – we need to stand up, admit what we have done, and ask forgiveness, and accept the consequences. We also need to make amends, if possible, by putting ourselves last, and those we have injured, first. To do otherwise than admit to one’s shortcomings and mistakes, is to have an over-inflated sense of ego, not worthy of any of us. And while in this case there is not much that can be done by this woman, on a practical level, to save this work of art, perhaps in the example of her failure we will all learn something.


Original, Underway, and After images of
“Ecce Homo” by Elías García Martínez (c.1890)
Santuario de N.S. de la Misericordia, Borja, Spain

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May 10, 2012 · 9:14 am

New Art Discovery Shows Why Practice Makes Perfect

As regular readers of these pages know, just about any time there is a press report regarding the discovery of a previously unknown work by a master painter, I get somewhat more excited about the news than perhaps the average person would. I hope the reader will indulge my interest in a story from the Spanish press about the recent identification of a painting by one of that country’s most important artists, for it is a lovely work in and of itself. The story affords us the chance to explain a bit about what the academic tradition means in art, and why on the whole it produced far better painting than, on the whole, we see today in much of contemporary art.

Although today he is probably less well-known than he ought to be, the Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923) was the most popular artist in Spain at the turn of the previous century, and was celebrated across Europe and the United States as well.  A painter of great skill in capturing light, movement, and the elegance of the human form, his work hangs in many public and private collections, including at the White House here in Washington.  Stylistically and thematically, his work is comparable in some respects to American painters John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), among others, and like them he received many commissions for society portraits and paintings with historical themes.  Arguably Sorolla’s greatest facility, and the work of his which is the most highly sought-after by collectors, was found in his portrayal of beach scenes. Using the glowing light of the Mediterranean, he captured elegant ladies in billowing dresses and veiled hats promenading or resting languidly at the seaside, or groups of naked, suntanned children laughing and frolicking about in the surf.

Before he developed his signature style, Sorolla was educated in much the same fashion as all other aspiring painters of his day. The academic tradition insisted that an artist learn how to draw and to paint by looking at art history and tradition, as well as observing nature and what he saw around him. Sorolla dutifully studied and copied the works of the Old Masters, traveled to see the work of other artists, and completed countless drawings and studies, so that he could become a better artist.

The “Study of Christ”, which was identified this week by experts at the University of Lleida in Catalonia as being from the hand of Sorolla, is an example of the type of training Sorolla engaged in to understand how to paint. The existence of an early work by him depicting Jesus was known to the compiler of the artist’s “catalogue raisonné”, which in art history means a comprehensive listing of works known or believed to be by a particular artist. It was also known that Sorolla had inscribed it, along with the date and his signature, “To Mrs. Clotilde García”, but its whereabouts were unknown until now.

Before this investigation took place, the painting had been identified for many years as the work of an unknown 19th century Spanish academic painter. It was put up for auction in 2006, when it entered a private collection in Madrid. The new owner subsequently had the piece examined by experts, and after a thorough cleaning the signature, date, and inscription to his patroness appeared in the lower right-hand corner. This in combination with the use of modern investigative methods such as x-rays, infrared light, and microscopic analysis, allowed the researchers to determine that this was indeed the lost work of the Valencian master.

Because interest in Sorolla has long focused on his large-scale society and seaside pictures, his work as an art student is not as well-known or documented. At the time he painted this “Study of Christ”, Sorolla was only 20 years old and was living in Madrid.  Two years later, he would travel to Rome for the first time, on a four-year academic scholarship to study painting at the Spanish Academy there, which was followed by a lengthy stay in Paris. Thus, this work represents the young artist absorbing all he can from his native environment, before going out into the wider world to see what his contemporaries were doing.

While in the end this is not a painting that screams “Sorolla” when you look at it, its real importance lies in documenting Sorolla’s training. He did not simply sit down one day and decide to splatter some paint across a surface and call himself an artist. Rather, he studied his craft and practiced it, taking the time to educate himself so that his work could improve as he did more of it.

Today it seems that we too often indulge those who are little more than untalented publicity hounds when it comes to contemporary art, which is an area of human creativity that has increasingly lent itself to such behavior in ways we would not tolerate elsewhere. For example, imagine you went to a supposed three-star restaurant where the alleged master chef held no training or standards other than what he “felt” like cooking.  And then, said master chef throws various, random ingredients together at will, cooks them (or not) for a few seconds, and puts the concoction on a plate before you, expecting not only that you will eat it, but that you will be positively enraptured by it, and honor his supposed genius in breaking conventions. You might get lucky, of course, and find something unusual but tasty, but on the whole it is far more likely that you would simply get food poisoning.

This is not to say that all contemporary painting is bad, of course: merely because something is non-representational or unusual does not make it a bad piece of art. You can still be a great artist and not work in a realistic or traditional style. However the idea that one must have the humility to learn from the masters before one attempts to hold oneself out as a professional artist has been lost. The celebration of mediocrity as achievement is perhaps the inevitable result of a society where all is relative, and there is no good or bad, simply opinion.

Looking at this newly identified work of a then-twenty-year-old painter, we can see that Sorolla took the time to become a craftsman, and worked hard at his craft, in order to become good at what he produced. The rediscovery of this piece represents what we used to believe was the way in which great artists were made. An accomplished athlete, musician, writer, or painter is not someone who is great solely because of any natural talent they may have, but rather someone who takes that talent and achieves something with it, by following the mantra of practice, practice, practice.


“Study of Christ” by Joaquín Sorolla (1883)
Private Collection, Madrid

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April 25, 2012 · 11:54 am

Our Body of Work

Regular readers know that I often encourage you to look more closely at the environment you live in, and observe the details around you. This is part of your ongoing duty as an educated adult. I realize that a number of my readers are not Christians, let alone Catholics, but I hope you will bear with me in today’s post, and consider some of the points I raise herein about why it is so important to continue to educate yourself, if we are to preserve the body of Western culture which has been handed down to us as a priceless gift from previous generations.

The more you study subjects such science, architecture, literature, and so on, the more you realize that you are surrounded by reminders of our collective past. For example, if you give yourself a break with a Kit-Kat bar, you are eating something originally invented in England in the 1920′s, but named for a prominent London club of the 18th century. Or you might live in a town named for a Catholic saint, such as St. Louis, Missouri, or San Francisco, California. And since today is the Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, he is a good jumping-off point for our consideration.

We can point to many works of art, musical compositions, schools, buildings, streets, and even entire towns named for this 1st century Jewish man, who became an important figure of the early Church. For example, Saint-Marc is an important coastal city in Haiti; Saint Mark’s Place is a popular tourist trap in the East Village in Manhattan; and the oldest military fort in the United States, the 17th century Castillo de San Marcos or “Castle of St. Mark”, is located in the city of St. Augustine, Florida – which of course is named for another Catholic saint. Bach wrote a Passion Oratario based on St. Mark’s Gospel, which composition sadly has been lost, while Irish composer Charles Wood wrote his own version while at Cambridge in the 1920′s.

For those of my readers who are not familiar with him, St. Mark was one of Jesus’ youngest disciples, a friend to St. Paul, and author of one of the Gospels. Although St. Mark was martyred in about 68 A.D. in the Egyptian city of Alexandria and buried there, in the 9th century his remains were stolen by a group of Venetian merchants and taken back to their city. The legends surrounding how this took place are interesting in and of themselves, but more importantly they created a narrative for Venice and for its empire, which was reflected in things such as city planning, public celebrations, music, literature, poetry, architecture, painting, sculpture, and so on.

As a result, there is probably a greater concentration of art related to St. Mark in Venice than in any single other city in the world. Not only is the city Cathedral, the Byzantine-Gothic style Basilica of San Marco, dedicated to him, as is the famous piazza or square in front of it, with its flocks of pigeons pooping all over the tourists, but he represents the Venetian Republic as well. Throughout Venice and in the territories which it used to control, the winged lion of St. Mark was used as the emblem of the old empire on the Adriatic, much as the bald eagle represents the United States, today.

In the books of Ezekiel and Revelation in the Bible, their respective authors wrote of heavenly visions involving four winged creatures which surround the throne of God. Christian interpreters of Scripture came to believe that these represented the four canonical Gospel writers. That which is believed to represent St. Mark, the winged lion, was chosen because St. Mark begins his Gospel with the voice of St. John the Baptist crying out in the desert, like the roar of a desert lion. Thus, Venice adopted this symbol of its patron saint as its own.

When it comes to Venetian art portraying St. Mark, the great master Tintoretto (1518-1594) is not one of my favorite painters, truth be told. I do not generally care for his work, since I often find his pictures too messy and busy, and his palette can sometimes be rather muddy. That being said, I recognize his importance in art history, both in the influence he had on the work of subsequent artists I do like, such as El Greco, but also in that he did paint some interesting works from time to time.

In the mid-16th century, Tintoretto produced a rather brilliant series of four paintings on scenes from the life of St. Mark for the Scuola di San Marco charitable institution, which of course was named for the saint.  One of the paintings from this series which has always fascinated me is Tintoretto’s portrayal of the stealing of the Evangelist’s body from its tomb in Alexandria.  It is a dramatic scene, but an example of how the artistic imagination can take a story and run with it, not seeking to portray reality but rather to explore different ideas and concepts in art, architecture, and science.

Rather than have the figures in the scene carrying a coffin or reliquary containing the bones of St. Mark, Tintoretto portrays them as carrying the full-sized body of the saint, who is looking rather buff despite being dead for over 800 years. Alexandria itself looks nothing like 9th century Egypt, and more like the stage set of an idealized city by the great Venetian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, a contemporary of Tintoretto’s – all perfect proportions, arcaded palaces, and vanishing sight lines. A further dramatic touch is provided by having the night sky split with threatening thunderstorms against a blood-red sky, including a rather spectacular display of lightning which is causing passersby to flee to the colonnades for shelter in what looks like a choreographed dance.

After considering all of the forgoing, the reader can see my point about why there is so much more to be seen in something like a painting than might first meet the eye. If you were to go to the Accademia and admire this painting, you might be able to appreciate it for what it is, and decide whether or not you like the picture based purely on aesthetics. However, a student of cultural history realizes that there is a great deal more at work here than simply the creation of an image. In this one piece one can point to all sorts of threads that led to its creation: The Bible, optics, linear perspective, anatomical study, Mediterranean trade routes, the decline of the Byzantine Empire, and so on.

This is why it is important not just to accept what you see at face value, but to take some time to think about what you are seeing. Otherwise, we reach the point where people wallow in their stupidity, being unwilling to acknowledge with humility that they have more to learn, rather than seeking to do their best to overcome it. We have been given a rich inheritance of human achievement, which will be lost if we do not study and preserve our culture for future generations, and by adding to it ourselves. Otherwise, the body of work which we hand on to them really will be putrid and decayed.


“The Theft of the Body of St. Mark” by Tintoretto (1548)
Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice

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April 24, 2012 · 10:51 am

The Genius of Studious Creativity

A piece in Art News caught my eye this morning, regarding two exhibitions in Hartford that will no doubt appeal to those of you who love photography, as well as those who love painting.  American photographer James Welling has assembled a group of photographs he has taken that are related to the work of the great American realist painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), and they are being shown in juxtaposition with an exhibition of Wyeth’s paintings at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Both shows run until July 22nd, though I want to focus particularly on how Welling’s creativity as demonstrated in his show, was in part fostered by his study of Wyeth’s own creative output, and how this is a not-uncommon feature of the arts.

Some of Welling’s photographs depict locations which will be familiar to fellow admirers of Wyeth, such as the old farmhouse that appears in the distance of Wyeth’s iconic painting, “Christina’s World”, which is probably his best-known work.  Other photographs are not directly related to a specific painting, but rather represent elements or passages that are thematically reflective of Wyeth’s way of looking at his environment.  Welling therefore is not simply trying to record for posterity a particular place, but rather to show Wyeth’s influence on his own artistic process, and how he has taken that example and gone off in his own direction.

We see this pattern of reference, variation, and creation in many areas of artistic output.  For example, the mid-19th century French composer Charles Gounod took the early 18th century composer Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1st Prelude from the “Well-Tempered Clavier”, and improvised his version of the “Ave Maria” to be sung over the top of it.  Similarly Picasso studied Velázquez’ masterpiece, the enigmatic “Las Meninas” of 1656 which is now in The Prado in Madrid, and in 1957 produced a series of paintings disassembling it which now fill the “Las Meninas Room” at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

One aspect of Welling’s work that viewers will find particularly interesting is not only its documentation of the places Wyeth saw and how they have and have not changed over time, but also the fact that Wyeth did not always paint exactly what his eye saw. In “Christina’s World”, Wyeth rearranged the farm buildings from where they stood in real life, in order to make his composition more pleasing. This a technique used by many artists over the centuries to bring balance to their pictures.

As it happens, this is something that photographers have done from the beginning of the development of their craft as well, and long before the invention of tools like Photoshop to make such manipulation easier. Yesterday in fact, I had a conversation with a senior magazine researcher about the influence of Samuel F.B. Morse on American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. Morse is probably better-known to my readers as the man credited with inventing the telegraph and Morse code, yet he was also a talented and formally-educated painter. As was common among all academicians of his time, Morse spent a great deal of time observing, sketching, taking life drawing classes, and re-arranging objects to create his compositions.

Brady studied painting with Morse in New York prior to the Civil War, who himself had studied classical composition in Europe and was admitted to the Royal Academy in London. It is not a surprise, therefore, to learn that in many of the battlefield photographs attributed to Brady and his studio, the elements of the images were moved around or re-positioned in order to make a more compelling final product. For example, men who had died face-down were turned over, or their eyes and mouths might be closed. Artillery or vehicles were rearranged to create a balanced composition, even though as a result it would not be an accurate record for the military brass of how their soldiers had used or left these items.

In some ways the egalitarian nature of photography, as compared to the seemingly elitist nature of painting, has led to the idea in some quarters that painting realistic subjects is irrelevant. For example over the weekend I was watching a report about a new show on abstract portraiture opening at an art foundation in Paris, in which the curator of the exhibition opined that the main reason portraiture changed was the advent of the photographic camera. When a camera could quickly and more cheaply capture the image of an individual, he reasoned, the need for realistic painting evaporated.

Yet this rather flippant assertion overlooks the genius of what great art has always been, if my bluntness will be forgiven, regardless of the medium employed, and that is the fact that you yourself cannot produce it. Anyone can sit down at a piano and plunk out “Heart and Soul” given a little instruction; a scant few of us could sit down and employ the technically complicated leaping and bounding required for the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto with anything approaching competency. Similarly, anyone can take a photograph, but not anyone can produce a competent one, let alone a great one.  The relative ease of photography as a process does not mean that all photographers are capable of producing great images: there has to be an artistic eye, and an understanding of light and composition.

In this case of course, Mr. Welling is indeed a great photographer, not just your Dad taking snapshots of your 8th birthday party. He is someone who has had the way he looks at his environment shaped by great painters like Wyeth. In this he is a part of a tradition which includes predecessors like Morse and Brady, Bach and Gounod, and so on, where creative minds from different generations or even from different centuries employ both observation and their own unique creative skills to come up with something wonderful.


“Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth (1948)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

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