But I Know What I Like
Painting is the branch of the arts in which I feel the sharpest division between what I admire and what I respond to emotionally. For example: I admire the mastery, the skillful re-creation of reality of the painting Ivy Bridge by J. M. W. Turner, and God knows I could never duplicate it. But, honestly, it leaves me cold.
Likewise: Titian, Caravaggio, John Constable – I admire them all, and for the same reasons, but I wouldn’t make a special trip to see their paintings. No, the works that stir me tend to combine simple forms with vivid color, to eschew photograph-like realism — the trompe l’oeil style — in favor of bolder statements. At the same time, I generally require some element of representation — exceptions to this rule being the work of Kandinsky and Pollock. (I feel about abstract and, particularly, conceptual art the way Robert Frost felt about free verse, I guess — that it’s like tennis without a net.) I suppose that is what I aimed for with my own paintings on this blog.
The painters I respond to, then, tend to be Impressionists and — especially — post-Impressionists: Picasso, Matisse. And check out this 1919 painting by Kees Van Dongen, titled The Corn Poppy. Or Matisse’s Nono Lebasque, from 1908, and Laurette in a Green Robe, from 1916.
Maybe what I like — this is just a theory — is that these works allow me to form a partnership with the artists, in a way that conceptual art is supposed to but never does. With conceptual art I feel I am doing all the work (there are some pieces that truly make me feel as if the artists have done none). With a work by Turner or Vermeer, there is nothing for me to do but marvel. But viewing a work like Laurette, armed with Matisse’s bold impressions of this woman, I can imagine her in full myself — I feel on my own that I know her, or at least know something about her.
Who’s with me? Or would you like to defend the artists so summarily dismissed above?
Tell Cliff!
2 Responses to “But I Know What I Like”
But of course one can play tennis without a net, Cliff. Do you really think what we have come to call tennis sprang fully-formed with net, ball boys, and bratty superstars, from the mind of some supernatural Gamemaker? I believe the point of such art is to force us to go back in time to the moment before art acquired its similarly codified trappings. You may say that such work is “pre-art” but I caution you that contemporary viewers of Picasso and Mattisse had the same objection.
A worthy defense, Georges, and an interesting theory of conceptual art. I can’t help feeling, though, that when a work of art needs a position paper beside it in order to be understood or even enjoyed, something essential has been lost. And how many times does the point about the codefied trappings need to be made?
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