As I play around with color and shape, I am ever more amazed at how Van Gogh could get away with such strong color. He didn't choose all pure colors, though. In L'Arlesienne (Madame Ginoux) the yellow background does not have to fight against the dark green table or the dull flesh tones of her face and hand.

The portrait seems to be all angles and directions - the books, the curvy chair, the yellow shapes under her right arm and between her back and the chair - and most interesting to me, the eyelashes projecting from the outline of her face.

Elsewhere, Van Gogh wrote: "I want to paint men and women with something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings."

Should we be depressed or inspired to read that this picture was "slashed on in an hour"? (p. 88, Van Gogh, Meyer Schapiro)

Here's another I wasn't familiar with. Have you seen it? (Maybe not - just noticed it's in a private collection in South America.) Really interesting use of perspective, position of the legs, and means of pulling together the lower and upper halves of the painting by use of color and line. Again there are those little jigsaw bits seen in the first painting - under his right arm and between his hat and shoulder. He's always looking around for a shape to delineate, but somehow it seems right and inevitable.

This one probably took a full 90 minutes. . .

Cezanne's Still Life with Apples, 1890-94

Ever since seeing Milton Avery's work about 5 years ago at the Hammer in UCLA, I've long been fascinated by him. (I realize there's a Cezanne posted above - getting to that.)
I'm still trying to figure out why. His work looks so simple - but there's something not so simple going on. In Milton Avery, The Late Paintings, there's a whole lot of erudite analysis of Clement Greenberg's view of Avery's work along with a lot of speculation as to the degree to which Wallace Stevens poetry may have influenced him. . . but for my money, the best insight comes from the words of the artist himself:

To the so-called conservative art lover, a picture is beautiful if it looks just like the subject, and, of course, the subject must itself be pretty. Then again if the subject is a poetical landscape, a lively snow scene, or if, in a nude, the model is voluptuous and pretty, this viewer has gotten his thrill and is satisfied that he has seen and knows what is "great art."

With this attitude there is no argument, for it is [as] futile to argue about art as it is about religion. But I cannot help but feel that this attitude is unfortunate. The so-called modern artist (and I insist the work "modern" is as confusing and ambiguous as the word "beautiful"" looks for plastic values where the conservative seeks representation. that is, the modern looks for design of form, line, color and spatial arrangement, where the conservative looks for "soul," "beautiful expression," and so-called "realism." Personally, I can see as much if not more, spirituality and soul in a painting of apples by Cezanne as in a Madonna and Child Surrounded by Angels and All the Hosts of Heaven by Murillo for the reasons I have expressed above. If people do not agree with this conception, well and good. All I can say is that they do not get the same experiences out of life and art as I do. (p. 26, Milton Avery/The Late Paintings, Robert Hobbs)

His paintings are known for their interlocking forms, design stripped to essentials, achievement of depth through the use of color instead of linear perspective, and focus on seizing "the one sharp instant in Nature, to imprison it by means of ordered shapes and space relationships." (p. 53) I struggle a lot with what to leave out. He just seems to know.

Here's Breaking Sea (1952):


His daughter, March, was a frequent subject of his paintings. Here's Adolescence, (1947). The reproductions do not have the same presence as the originals. What do you think of his work?

Here's Velasquez' The Surrender at Breda (1634-5).

I remember seeing this at the Prado some years ago. Honestly, I think the only reason I stopped is that I lived near Breda (in Holland) as a child. To the contemporary eye it looks so conventional, with the Mona-Lisa-like plains in distance, all that attention paid to uniforms, the spears of the winning side thick and vertical, the ceremony of the vanquished handing over the keys to the city, etc. But the soldier on the left staring at the viewer strikes a more modern chord. Kind of arresting in his gaze. Almost steals the painting. There's another face looking out from the far right -- who is it? Some have suggested it's Velasquez himself.

I started writing this post last week, and lo and behold in today's NY Times there's a review of a show at the Metropolitan in NY about Velazquez and the controversy surrounding the painting, Portrait of a Man. The questions are two - who is it? and was it painted by Velasquez or his pupil, son-in-law Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo? Although you practically need a magnifying glass to compare the figure on the far right of the Breda painting to the figure in Portrait of a Man, there definitely is a resemblance. A Facebook page for Velazquez would be really handy right now - or would he have been a MySpace guy?

Experts are leaning toward attributing the Portrait to Velazquez. By examining other paintings known to be created by his pupils, they point to those lesser paintings flaws: less confident brushwork, a less-taut shape of the collar, a muddiness around the jaw. To my untrained eye the Portrait certainly does seem to have been painted with an air of authority. Nothing equivocal about the choices made. What do you think?

(All the pictures on-line are muddy looking because the picture has just been restored; this one I took with my camera from the newspaper, so you can see the crease in the paper- sorry.)

I love what Michael Kimmelman, art critic for the NY Times, has to say about Wayne Thiebaud's work. In his book on the consolations of art he talks about why they appeal to us, and I think he nails it. What do they possess that other deceptively simple works lack? Above is Pies, Pies, Pies from 1961.

Kimmelman says:

After a while Thiebaud's pictures prompt something more complicated than plain joy -- as with Chardin, closer to the nature of memory, which is always a tricky affair. This reaction slowly registers in our minds as the gap between what actually was -- between those cloying Boston cream pies that we really ate nad the gum-ball machines that ate our pennies - and the world as we wished it to be. Thiebaud gave us not real cheese but Platonic cheese, as the writer Adam Gopnik once put it. And this gap between reality and desire ushers in, in Thiebaud's art, even more than in Chardin's a sadness after the first leaping rush of pleasure. Thiebaud's art is not about the perfect world. It is about the fact that the world never was and still isn't perfect, except perhaps the little imaginary part of it to which we can briefly retreat in these paintings and thereby glimpse the way all things ought to be. (p. 222-3, The Accidental Masterpiece)

I think he may be right. He goes on to consider the artist's depictions of people and explains his view that Thiebaud's people are more like Vermeer's than Hopper's lonely figures. They may be minutely described, but we can read just about anything into those faces. We cannot ever really know more about them than we can about strangers we pass in the store or on the street. Here's Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring along with Thiebaud's Two Kneeling Figures.


What do you think? Do you agree? Are they ciphers?

Charis Wilson died November 20th at 95. The LA Times carries the obituary of this free spirited woman who met Edward Weston when she was 20 and he was 48. She became his wife and muse for many years, and used her writing talent to edit many of his books and write several of her own.

This photography still seems compelling after so many years. Why is it so intriguing? Is it better not to see her face?

I would love to hear a few comments. . . .are you out there? Bill M.? Pamela? Julie?

A short post so you can start peeling those potatoes. . .

In On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, Michael Kimmelman says:

Most artists, like most people, have one good idea or maybe two in life, and that sustains them. In the best circumstances, that's plenty for a career. George Morandi, the great Italian still life painter, quietly toiled away in Bologna, in the home he shared with his mother and three unmarried sisters, in a bedroom that doubled as a studio, seemingly oblivious and immune to shifting tastes, painting little bunches of bottles, bowls, and biscuit tins. His message - look slowly and hard at something subtle and small = was simple but turned out to be plenty. It sustained him.

What do you think? Are you in the middle of exploring an idea that will sustain you?

"If art isn't playful, it's nothing." David Hockney

It seems that I am still struggling to understand the problems of perspective and how they relate to Cubism when David Hockney comes along and explains it so well I can finally get it through my thick, many-sided head. Above is Picasso's Portrait of Emilie-Marguerite Walter, 1939, alongside her photo.

Hockney asserts that the "major problem with traditional perspective, as it was developed in fifteenth-century European painting and persists to this day in the approach of most standard photography, is that it stops time. For perspective to be fixed, time has stopped and hence space has become frozen, petrified. Perspective takes away the body of the viewer. You have a fixed point, you have no movement; in short you are not there, really. That is the problem. Photography hankers after the the condition of the neutral observer. But here can be no such thing as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it has to be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction should be an account of the experience of that looking." (from David Hockney, A Retrospective by Tuchman and Barron.

As he explains in much more detail, there's really no going back once you understand that the viewer is part of the view, or as Juan Gris said that "Cubism wasn't a style, it's a way of life." He also points to the words of Pierre Daix who explained that this revolution in the understanding of pictorial space was "in all probability linked to the simultaneous fact that physics was simultaneously destroying our three-dimensional space time perception." (from Neuchatel: Ides et Calendes, 1979, 184; translation: "Vogue par David Hockney," Vogue, Paris, Dec. 1985-Jan. 1986. 256.

Endless inventive, Hockney has been finding new ways to break up space, eliminate borders and include the viewer for decades now. And in all this, he sees a way to be free and play, without the constrictions of one-point perspective. Not sure if I'm encouraged or discouraged by all this ability and originality. What do you think?

Here's his current website where you can view the photocollage, Prehistoric Museum Near Palm Springs, 1982, as well as one of his more recent works painted in England, Garrowby Hill (1997).