Posts
"Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?" ("What shall I love if not the enigma?") - Giorgio de Chirico
"The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult, because the amusement always has to be newer and on a higher level. So we are on a kind of spiral. The higher you go, the narrower the circle. As you go ahead the field of choice becomes more meagre, in terms of self-entertainment. In the end, working is good because it is the last refuge of the man who wants to be amused. Not everything that amused me in the past amuses me so much any more" - Saul Steinberg.
Giorgio de Chirico - Metaphysical Interior (1917)
Robert Hughes' book of art criticism Nothing If Not Critical has been looking out at me from my creaking bookshelves for some years now. It's not so much that it's unloved, I regularly peruse individual essays for art research, so much as I've never fully committed to it.
On 9th May 2018 that all changed when I decided to read the thing in its entirety. Essays devoted to over eighty different artists stretching from 'Ancestors' like Hans Holbein, Caravaggio, and Goya to the 'Nineteenth Century' (Degas, Whistler, and Pissarro) and on to 'Contemporaries' like Sean Scully, Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer), along the way stopping off to take in 'Americans' (Warhol, Pollock, and Rothko), 'Europeans' (Picasso, Magritte, Kandinsky), and a section titled 'Into Modernism' which covers artists such as Rodin, Manet, and Gauguin.
That's just a few names in a book that proved to be a mammoth, but worthwhile, undertaking. While I've enjoyed the television shows of Andrew Graham Dixon, Waldemar Januszczak, and James Fox I'd been led to believe, mainly by my friend Neill. that Robert Hughes knocks them all into a cocked hat, and as Neill is one of the people that opened me up to the wide world of art (I'd dabbled with Dali and others before but Neill showed me how much wider, and how much more available, the world of art was to me) I take his opinions pretty seriously.
Salvador Dali - Sleep (1937)
Hughes was born in Australia in 1938 and became best known for being TIME magazine's art critic and for his 1980 documentary series The Shock of the New in which he looked at how modern art had developed since the days of Impressionism and how modern technology had played a role in that. Nothing If Not Critical came out eleven years later in 1991 and kicks off with an introduction called The Decline of the City of Mahagonay which tells the story of how the centre of the art world shifted from Paris and Rome to New York in the post-war years and then to - nowhere at all!
It takes in the Abstract Expressionists, the Pop Artists, the invention of photography and television, Baudelaire, Karl Marx, the critic Clement Greenberg, the Cultural Cringe, and Hughes' own upbringing in Australia before castigating the eighties (then only months gone) for that decade's "cycle of gorge and puke", "driven consumption", and "the victory of promotion over connoisseurship". All signed, sealed, and delivered under the aegis of "the glitzy triumphalism of Reagan's presidency".
Artists like David Salle, Gilbert & George, and, most of all, Julian Schnabel are sneered at as emblematic of all that was wrong with those times/is wrong with our times. An inflated market and an inflated sense of self worth makes of the contemporary art world an ouroboros, an irrelevance to all but a small coterie of invited delegates clinking champagne flutes and scoffing vol-au-vents behind a velvet rope in a soulless upmarket hotel bar.
Hughes goes on to compare the hobnobbing milquetoasts of his era with artists like Courbet who threw his lot in with the radical left and was even blamed (unjustly writes Hughes) for toppling the Vendome Column. In a memorable line he writes, of Courbet and his fellow travellers, that "they may have been wrong but at least they were decently wrong" and he sees the problem from a linear perspective. Art, in the world of mass media and shorter attention spans, no longer has primacy. In 1989, it's said the average American spent half of his or her conscious life watching television. How much time did they spend in galleries do you think?
Gustave Courbet - Burial at Ornans (1849)
In its attempt to keep up with the instant gratifications provided by mass media, Hughes posits that art had lost its way, had forgotten what it was for. He singles out artists like Robert Longo, John Heartfield, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer for particular opprobrium on this front. They eschewed cultural vitality for the market (run, in Hughes' words, by "finance manipulators, fashion victims and rich ignoramuses"). They made art for the galleries and not for the people. To put it bluntly, they sold out.
That wonderful essay is just the introduction to the book. Hughes shows us how we got here and what we lost along the way. The first of many fine essays (most originally printed in Time of The New York Review of Books) dedicated to individual artists is given over to Hans Holbein, "one of the best minds of the Northern Renaissance" and a man, Hughes predicts, that nobody will ever surpass in their drawing of the human face.
Hans Holbein - The Ambassadors (1533)
Caravaggio - Supper at Emmaus (1601)
Praise, too, is given to Caravaggio ("one of the hinges of art history:there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same"), Chardin (by general consensus "one of the supreme artists of the eighteenth century and probably the greatest master of still life in the history of painting"), and, of course, Picasso ("the most prodigally gifted artist of the twentieth century" - reasonable enough). George Stubbs is called "the best horse painter that ever lived", Poussin "the greatest French artist of the seventeenth century", Constable and Turner "define the supreme achievements of landscape painting in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century", and Thomas Eakins is "the greatest realist painter America has so far produced". Lee Krasner's work is, quite simply, "intensely moving".
Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin - Basket of Wild Strawberries (c.1761)
Lee Krasner - Cobalt Night (1962)
Arshile Gorky - The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944)
Francisco Goya - The Third of May 1808 (1814)
Less favourably received are the likes of Gilbert & George (their work dismissed as "pederastic banalities"), the later work of Marc Chagall (he painted "nothing but cloying ethnic kitsch" for the last thirty years of his life), and Thomas Hart Benton ("flat-out, lapel grabbing vulgar, incapable of touching a pictorial sensation without pumping and tarting it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle").
It is said of Sandro Chia, a minor artist who Hughes warned, correctly, could be in major difficulty, that when "he paints a crocodile, you suspect the model was a handbag" and the 'pathetic' Jean-Michel Basquiat (an artist I like very much and have written to say so) gets an essay dedicated to him subtitled "Requiem for a Featherweight". Ouch!
Despite the essay wonderfully, and correctly, skewering the "racist idea of the black as the naif and the rhythmic innocent", and the slightly more questionable belief that Basquiat's admirers saw him as "an urban noble savage" and his death as a shrewd career move, Hughes' contentions that Basquiat was "absurdly overrated" hasn't aged as well as that idea of Sandro Chia's 'major difficulty'. Basquiat's work has grown in both popularity and critical appraisal in the ensuing decades. The same cannot be said of all artists who have invoked the wrath of Hughes.
Jean-Michel Basquiat - Untitled (1982)
The essay on Julian Schnabel is particularly interesting. It begins with Hughes taking himself out of Schnabel's memoirs after Schnabel had written that Hughes's request for Schnabel to chain him up had been denied. Schnabel went on to write that Hughes had responded with "antisemetic (sic) babbling and personal attacks". Hughes goes on to deny ever having met Schnabel, disses his poor spelling, and then makes a very strong case for him being both a fraud and a braggart.
Which isn't difficult when Schnabel himself describes his memoirs as "a cross between Charles Dickens and Gertrude Stein". It doesn't even seem to come from a place of rancour, or at least not entirely - you'd be pissed off if someone you'd never met accused you of propositioning them, when Hughes describes Schnabel as "megalomaniac" with a "painfully sincere belief in his own present genius and future historical importance" and soon Hughes moves away from castigating Schnabel as the mediocrity he believed him to be and casts his net further to denounce hype sodden culture of eighties America and the New York money men and shysters who put that mediocrity on a pedestal. Those who fell for the bluster. Those who fell in line behind a bully. Maybe the fact that Schnabel ended up painting an album cover for the Red Hot Chili Peppers will be the ultimate mark of the man. A mediocre artist paints a mediocre sleeve for a mediocre band.
There are fantastic and bizarre stories about Caravaggio cutting open a waiter's face in a "squabble about artichokes", George Stubbs painting a lemur sent to London as a gift for George III from a former governor-general of Madras, Norman Rockwell hypnotising chickens, Nam June Paik dragging a violin along a sidewalk by a string like a "scraped and protesting pet", Guido Reni abstaining from sex due to a fear of women being witches , and Marcel Proust purloining one of Whistler's gloves after his death for a souvenir.
Norman Rockwell - Painting The Little House (1921)
The story of Giorgio de Chirico is bizarre, not because of surreal anecdotes but because of the strange career turn he made in his early thirties. When he turned his back on the 'metaphysical' painting that inspired Picasso, Dali, Magritte, Grosz, and countless others and aimed to became a classicist, an "heir of Titian", and spent the last six decades of his life producing unremarkable dross.
Other artists are even less fortunate. We read about Emile Zola and Claude Monet carrying Edouard Manet's fifty-one year old syphilitic corpse to the grave, how Henri Rousseau proudly wore a violet rosette sent to him as a decoration in error by the French military for the rest of his life, and the story of Arshile Gorky's life and death is so notorious that if you don't know it yet I won't depress you now. Hughes is not sparing when he describes Rothko's suicide:- "he lay, fat and exsanguinated, clad in long underwear and black socks, in the middle of a lake of blood".
Henri Rousseau - The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (1905)
Some essays are less about individual artists and more about eras and movements. One, France in the Golden Age, covers 17c artists like Nicolas Poussin and Georges de la Tour (as well as writers like Moliere and Racine) and touches on the idea that great art often thrives under terrible, ruthless leaders - in this case Louis XIV, the Sun King. The section devoted to English Art in the Twentieth Century makes a case for the greatness of Paul Nash, David Bomberg, Frank Auerbach, and, most of all, the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis whilst, I think correctly, decrying the "weak pastiches" of Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry's snobby Bloomsbury set.
Paul Nash - Landscape From a Dream (1936-1938)
Frank Auerbach - Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning (2004)
There's another on German Romanticism that takes in Caspar David Friedrich ("soaked in allegory"), Lovis Corinth, and Philipp Otto Runge who is described as "perhaps the closest equivalent to William Blake that Germany produced". Yet another, on Futurism, remarks on how Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (the self styled 'caffeine of Europe') became a prototype for avant-garde promoters by understanding how newspapers wanted to run stories about weirdos doing weird things rather than "virtuously tolerant reviews" of modern art before going on to show how that movement, along with the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis, took from, and adapted, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque.
There's a couple of intriguing essays that are neither, specifically, about individuals, movements, or eras. Deco and Fins assesses a Brooklyn Museum show of bullet nosed locomotives, jumpsuits, aerofoils, and architectural models of skyscrapers. "Everything is streamlined, even objects that are screwed down and cannot move, so that America's breathless rush towards utopia is clearly signified". It's the last word in retrofuturism.
Other essays see Hughes warming to his favourite themes of slagging of the neo-geo arts scene of eighties NYC and chastising the bankers and money men who purchased, and in doing so elevated and promoted, that work. Ever eager to show that he's far more knowledgeable than them, Hughes is never afraid of, and in fact relishes, a literary reference. Throughout the course of the book we run into Balzac, Baudelaire, Voltaire, Mallarme, Proust, Walter Benjamin, and Montaigne. Although when Flaubert, in defence of modernity and what was seen as the debasement of language, wrote that "contemporary ideas must be expressed using the appropriate crude terms" I wondered if Hughes agreed.
Some of Hughes' turns of phrase are exquisite, painting pictures as vivid as the artists he waxes lyrical about in your mind's eye. An excited Whistler prances about "like a peahen on hot bricks", de Chirico's 'city' is one of "the capitals of the modernist imagination", Jackson Pollock is a "harsh, barely articulate existentialist from the West, full of chaotic energy and anal aggression", and an essay on Toulouse-Lautrec suggests "the stream of life is divided into an infinity of fleeting moments".
James Abbott McNeill Whistler - Red and Pink:The Little Mephisto (c.1884)
Jackson Pollock - Autumn Rhythm (1950)
Edward Hopper "sensed, but did not agonize over, a profound solitude, a leaning towards Thanatos that lay below American optimism", Warhol climbed "from face to face in a silent delirium of snobbery", Francis Bacon was "an utterly compelling painter who will die without heirs", and, amusingly, Rene Magritte's life was so ordinary that "by the standards of Surrealist bohemia and Surrealist chic, he might as well have been a grocer".
Edward Hopper - The Martha McKean of Wellfleet (1944)
With all this verbosity it was no surprise that, as ever, I had to reach for the dictionary more than a few times:- adumbrated, agonic, aleatory, alizarin, appurtenance, autophagy, bilk, bolus, borborygym, boscage, carceral, catamite, clyster, coeval, colophon, contropposto, corybantic, cynosure, damozel, demimondaine, demotic, descant, dinkus, donnee, dropsical, elecampane, entasis, epicene, expiatory, feuilleton, fixity, fugleman, fulgid, goyim, gueridon, hierophant, imbrication, labile, limned, lineament, macaronic, ophidian, orrery, ort, pasquinade, poetaster, positivistic, prebendary, prolixity, quatrefoil, retardataire, sublunary, tambour, thaumaturgic, swatch, and, perhaps best of all, steatopygous being a few examples. Apotropaic, chthonic, exequy, haptic, hieratic, hortatory, integument, oneiric, panegryic, and rodomontade crop up more than once.
But it wasn't just new words I learned. Or even facts about artists and paintings that I'd been hitherto unaware of. I learned, I think, what it is to put together sentences and paragraphs that express one's true feelings about those artists and paintings. How to be truthful to one's self in one's writing and to not feel cowed into following the herd and their opinions. I could never wish to be half the writer Robert Hughes was but by reading Nothing If Not Critical I feel I have, and will, improve as a writer myself. As an exequy to him I present this panegryic.
No comments:
Post a Comment