Classifcation/Compartmentalization -- Guy Tal Asks the Right Question
And answers it correctly
Terms like Impressionism, Romanesque etc. enable those who don't know how to look at pictures to talk about something, anyway. They provide ready-made commentary--the more someone knows, or thinks he knows what a term means the more ready-made comments at his disposal. "Oh, Mannerism. See the distortions? The elongations? The most famous example is Peruginino's Madonna with the Long Neck. You know, the one with the long, long leg coming in from the left edge?" Even artists' names can provide ready made commentary. "Michaelangelo always left a piece of un-worked Smarble in his statues. See it, down there by the pedestal? He liked to honor the raw stone out of which he carved the form."
And so on.
All of which takes one farther and farther from the work itself.
This is convenient for most people because it relieves them of the hard work of looking and, by looking, seeing, and, through seeing, feeling and, while feeling, putting both the feelings and what it is about the work that provokes them into words.
Sometimes it helps seeing, though. I'll never forget the painter Jane Dixon saying "Oh, Bruegel. Not a generalized figure in the whole body of work." So now, when I stand in front of a crowded Bruegel painting -- and what painting by Bruegel isn't full of to crowded with humanity? -- I can immediately see that no matter how many human figures are represented on the canvas, and sometimes there are over 50 and in the great Netherlandish Proverbs, Childrens' Games and The Battle Between Carnival and Lent there are in each canvas over a hundred, I think...I can immediately see that not one human figure in the lot resembles another in any way. This is also true of Garry Winogrand's figures, of Henri Cartier-Bresson's crowded pictures, and so on. And when one can see that each of these human figures is a distinct form, and when one then contemplates the forms as forms as well as "people", one begins to feel the power of the artist's imagination and love of life...Yes, love, to be able to look at and represent life full of its particulars, without generalizing about anything, and put all those things into a composition that expresses a relationship unique to the picture...That is, a relationship that comes only from the artist's sense of what the relationships between and among people can be, and between people and the physical world around them. When you get that far into a picture, Netherlandish Baroque (Bruegel) or, say, Surrealism (Henri Cartier-Bresson) have very little use...
Except as reference points. Knowing the Baroque generally gives deep insight into how Bruegel handled its terms -- into Bruegel's individuality and unique genius as an artist. Knowing Surrealism generally gives deep insight into how Cartier-Bresson handled its terms -- insight into Cartier-Bresson's unique genius. For example, knowing Andre Breton'searly 1930s novel "Nadja"(illustrated by Brassai's photographs), which is both a novel and a handbook of Surrealism's program, and knowing its important last sentence -- as all artists in the 1930s did: "From now on Beauty will be convulsive--Or not at all!" One can start to see Cartier-Bresson's 1930s pictures as his expression of just that: All that beauty occurring suddenly (the decisive moment is the convulsive moment), convulsively: People bursting into the scene, jumping through it, leaning out of their windows into it, dashing on bicycles right into the middle of it: hatred leaping out of the eyes of 2 Berlin railroad station porters, two gypsies blowing cigarette smoke at the camera, four Spanis prostitutes preening and grooming each other but what"s this? Isn't one of them about the cut the other's throat? Three Spanish prostitutes in an arabesque brothel improvising a sudden burlesque dance off kilter off balance, will that woman fall? All that energy., Those boys bursting through a damaged wall and taunting their comrade on his crutches.
But the pictures would be convulsive if we didn't know Andre Breton's sentence. It just takes looking to see it. But one must look long and carefully.
I understood all this at a Metropolitan Museum (NY) exhibition of the 17thC Spanish painter Zurburan. In the bottom right corner of an otherwise weak painting (Madonna with Infant Jesus and Infant John the Baptist) was a small wooden table holding a still life about 18 inches high by 12 inches wide: beautiful yellow apples in a beautiful silver bowl. There was hardly anything so beautiful in the whole exhibition as that few square inches of canvas with those silver and yellow colors and forms. How, I wondered, can this be? What is the explanation? How did Zurburan get so much beauty out of so little? It must be knowable: those effects can be explained by art experts to the general public.
So I went over to the side of the painting and read the wall label.
All it said about the still life was
"The apples most probably symboliz the fall of man."
So much for wall labels. So much for iconography -- the interpretation of a picture's symbols.
That stuff doesn't explain the beauty.
Nor do terms like Impressionism, Dada, Pop Art. They don't tell us why a work is good. They just tell us where, in the course of time, it belongs.
So Guy is right. Trust the eye (or, with wine, the palette).
But the eye must be informed.
But that takes years and years of looking. Very careful looking. Long and careful. At original works whenever possible.
Late in life, Duke Ellington once said about listening critically to jazz, i.e. judging a piece, an improvisation, etc.
"If it sounds good it is good."
But it was Duke Ellington who said that.
Think of how much music he had heard, his own and others, by the time he said it.
So Guy is right. We must trust our eye rather than rely on labels and terms. But we must inform our eyes, and terms like Impressionism are a good way of doing this for they help relate an individual artist to. and distinguish him from, the art and artists of his time. They provide a context within which we can see certain aspects of an artist more clearly than we can if we consider him in isolation.
At some point everyone wants to be able to say something like -- take Impressionism, but it's true of any art movement, e.g. Big Band Jazz, or BeBop small groups... Everyone wants to be able to say something like "Well, Yes, Monet did THAT and certainly the work is grand but Pissarro got to THIS and that's a very special aspect Impressionism that Monet never touched on and probably didn't understand..."
Or something like the following. "Yes, in 1910-1913 or so Picasso and Braque were so close together, even painting on each others' canvases, that it's hard to tell them apart at first. But when you look carefully you see that Picasso painted aggressively, living out a quarrel with paint, canvas and reality, but that Braque was tender: sweet, tender, delicate and gentle, caressing canvas and reality w/ his paint; Picasso went off into endless complexities but Braque stayed simple. So really, they aren't anything alike at all."
And for that, more looking -- throughout Impressionism, throughout Cubism.
For what are we after if not to get close to the individual sensibility, be moved by the individual emotions, be elevated by the individual unique genius of this artist or that?