Since 2/1, we've been looking at the ideas in A Fine Disregard, Kirk Varnedoe's book on what makes modern art modern. He believes "the modernity of Degas's picture (Place de la Concorde, left) does not lie just in some step it provides on the way to Matisse and to Stella."

Varnedoe combed through scores of stereoscopes to see if Degas would have "found" something similar to his Place de la Concorde painting and appropriated it. He concluded that nothing available to him in the world of photography had the same "sense of reality, this world of the odd and contingent, of the accidental and the ephemeral,this offbeat sense of the crazy street." Varnedoe believes that his painting is "neither the product of photography's nature nor a given of modern society, but a construction willed into being by an artist." (Keep in mind that Kodak did not come out with a camera capable of producing snapshots until 1888. Place de la Concorde was painted in 1875.)

Here's The Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888 and Munch's Evening on Karl Johan Street , below, (1892):

Varnedoe feels this Gauguin work is clearly indebted to Degas: "the near-space enlargement of the peasant woman beholding this hallucinatory vision of Jacob wrestling with the angel is a modified transcription of Degas's cafe-concerts and theatre pieces. He feels that those large, confrontational foregrounds in this and in the work of Munch are not really rejections of Realism; it's a tweaking of Realism's conventions, a way of turning up the volume on selected aspects of Realism --not so much a break with tradition as an offshoot.

In this matter of traditional versus modern spatial structures, and borrowed versus created innovations, The Vision After the Sermon helps us focus on some basic questions of originality. The composition here is taken from Degas, the line quality owes a lot to Daumier, the branch comes out of Hiroshige's plum branch, the wrestling couple is lifted from Hokasai's sketchbooks, and the flat planes of color and bold outlining derive from contemporary stylistic experiments by Gauguin's younger associate Emile Bernard. Yet the picture was boldly original. It's a "cobbling together of something new out of a grab bag of local and imported pieces." (p. 94)




And what about Matisse? Looking at Harmony in Red, Varnedoe sees it as a reimagining of an old theme - the comforts of home. I could paraphrase, but he says it better:

By enlarging the repetitive simplified swags of the wall pattern, and giving both that design and the intense red such dominion over the relatively thin and spindly imagery of nature seen through the window, he imparts a near-ecstatic pulse of life to what others might see as a quiet modest moment of decorative table preparation. In every respect, the opulence in this picture, the thrilling, engulfing energy that spills out of its borders, is tied to the simple act of arrangement at its center; it has to do with the immense enrichment of human life through culture, conceived not in terms of the additive piling-on of acquisitions, but in the attentive reconsideration of what lies to hand. (Apparently he had owned that piece of fabric for years, using it in other paintings as a backdrop.)

The eliminations and simplifications - the reduced detail, or most notably the minimized cues for depth - are pursued with this end in view - of reopening, rather than narrowing, the play between what we know and what we discover, between our awareness of a limited set of conventions and our ability to enlarge our response to life through their manipulation. (p. 95)

Are you at the blah, blah, blah point? Does this make any sense to you? Or is this heading off into rather high-flown, enigmatic realms of philosophy?

While most of this makes sense to me, it seems what matters is whether you need all this critical background to feel that expansiveness when you look at Harmony in Red, or whether it just works and you're transported, engulfed in that strong color. What do you think?