The Paris Papers: Part Two

Exotic, Ecstatic, Erotic

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - Three Musicians, or Musicians in Masks, 1921

The movement of abstract art . . . bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture.

Meyer Shapiro

Musique Du Jour: Six toe-tappers by Django Reinhardt

L'après-midi D'une Peinture

Georges Seurat (1959-1891) - Bathers at Asnieres, 1883-84 (retouched 1887)


'There are moments on hot summer days when we are prepared for a miracle. The stillness and the gently vibrating haze give to our perceptions a kind of finality, and we wait listening for some cosmic hum to enchant, like Papageno's bells, the uncouth shapes and colors which surround us, so that they all dance to the same tune and finally come to rest in a harmonious order. In life the miracle doesn't happen, and it is rare enough in art, because great painters have usually created imaginary worlds, outside the range of our ordinary visual experience. But it happens in Seurat's Baignade. As I catch sight of this large canvas at the end of the gallery, framed by a door so that the illusion of reality is increased, I feel that the haze and stillness of summer have at last fulfilled their promise. Time has stopped, everything has become its proper shape, and every shape is in its proper place.'

Kenneth Clark

'Admirers of Seurat often regret his method, the little dots. But the dots are not simply a technique; they are a tangible surface and the ground of important qualities, including his finesse. Too much has been written, and often incorrectly, about the scientific nature of the dots. The question whether they make a picture more or less luminous hardly matters. A painting can be luminous and artistically dull, or low-keyed in color and radiant to the mind. Besides, bow to paint brightly is no secret requiring a special knowledge of science. Like Van Gogh, Seurat could have used strong colors in big areas for a brighter effect. But without his peculiar means we would not have the marvelous delicacy of tone, the uncountable variations within a narrow range, the vibrancy and soft luster, which make his canvases, and especially his landscapes, a joy to contemplate. Nor would we have his surprising image-world where the continuous form is built up from the discrete, and the solid masses emerge from an endless scattering of fine points - a mystery of the coming-into-being for the eye.'

Meyer Shapiro

'Bathing has never been labeled "Monday"; yet its tranquil assembly of men and boys resting against the backdrop of a working factory must have been inspired by the all-male work-stopping rituals of Saint Lundi. The link between bathing and the celebration of Saint Lundi in the 1880s reveals the simultaneous contemporaneity and chronological incongruity (which I will call "anachronicity") of Seurat's social awareness and descriptive practice . . .

By the time Seurat completed Bathing in May 1884, the working class tradition of Monday off was changing. Workers had come to associate its celebration not with resistance to employers or to wives, but rather with the resignation and frustration of admitting to being a worker. During the Second Empire, for example, workers preferred to take off Monday because, unlike Sunday, there was no need to dress up. But, by the 1880s, workers dreamed of escaping from their blue smocks and dressing like the middle class did. Indeed, more and more workers managed to do precisely that: analysis of worker's budgets in the later nineteenth century, shows that an increasingly large percentage of income was expended on leisure-time clothing in order to reduce the sartorial distinctions between the classes on Sunday.

[In] its early stages, Bathing was conceived as a proletarian picture but was transformed into an image of shopkeepers and artisans in the course of the development of the project. In the final canvas, knee-length white cloaks, tabbed leather boots, bowlers, and straw boaters (shopkeeper's garb) were substituted for the blue smocks and casquettes worn by the men in earlier sketches. Seurat updated the subject of his first major painting by replacing a working-class population with members of the ascendant class of the day, the lower middle class . . . '

S. Hollis Clayson

The Ballad Of Jack The Dripper

Jackson Pollock in his studio (1950) - p. Hans Namuth

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about...It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

Jackson Pollock

"Modern painting is the first complex style in history which proceeds from elements that are not pre-ordered as closed articulated shapes. The artist today creates an order out of unordered variable elements to a degree greater than the artist of the past.

In ancient art an image of two animals facing each other orders symmetrically bodies that in nature are already closed symmetrical forms. The modern artist, on the contrary, is attracted to those possibilities of form which include a considerable randomness, variability and disorder, whether he finds them in the world or while improvising with his brush, or in looking at spots and marks, or in playing freely with shapes - inverting, adjusting, cutting, varying, reshaping, regrouping, so as to maximise the appearance of randomness. His goal is often an order which retains a decided quality of randomness as far as this is compatible with an ultimate unity of the whole. That randomness corresponds in turn to a feeling of freedom, an unconstrained activity at every point.

Ignoring natural shapes, he is alert to qualities of movement, interplay, change and becoming in nature. And he provokes within himself, in his spontaneous motions and play, an automatic production of chance."

From Recent Abstract Painting (1957) by Meyer Schapiro

"[The] drip paintings are clearly implicated in a whole informing metaphoric of masculinity: the very concepts that seem immediately to apply to them - space, scale, action, trace, energy, 'organic intensity', 'being in the painting', being 'One' - are all, among other things, operators of sexual difference."

From Jackson Pollock's Abstraction by T. J. Clark

"The catalyst that brought to a head Pollock's self-consciousness of his masquerade was the film Hans Namuth made of the artist at work in the late summer and fall of 1950...After the completion of the painting-on-glass scene, Pollock, who had been sober for more than two years, walked into the house and poured himself a large drink. At the dinner that followed, a drunken Pollock repeatedly shouted at Namuth, "I'm not a phony, you're a phony," before overturning the dinner table. He never got back on the wagon; the drip paintings, and his career, were effectively over."

From Pollock and Postwar Masculinity by Andrew Perchuk

Reading:

This is My Body - Jan Avgikos

'Her Dress Hangs Here': De-frocking the Kahlo Cult - Oriana Badderley

Theory and Art Criticism - Terry Barrett

Of Sculpture and Painting - David Bachelor

Gauguin's Tahitian Body - Peter Brooks

New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race and the Origins of Cubism - Anna C. Chave

Gauguin: On Primitivism (in Theories of Modern Art) - Herschel B. Chipp (ed.)

Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism - Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Modernist Painting - Clement Greenberg

Culture, Politics and Identity in the Paintings of Frida Kahlo - Janice Helland

By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Hoch in Context - Maria Makela

Notes on Sculpture, Part 2 - Robert Morris

The Imaginary Orient - Linda Nochlin

Pollock and Postwar Masculinity - Andrew Perchuk

Picasso in the Light of a Marxist Sociology of Art - Max Raphael

Picasso and Braque: 1909-1911 - Robert Rosenblum

Orientalism - Edward Said

Recent Abstract Painting (1957) - Meyer Schapiro

Beautiful Beasts: The Call of the Wild (in Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time) - Marina Warner

Reluctant Brides: Beauty and the Beast I and Go! Be a Beast: Beauty and the Beast II (in From the Beast to the Blonde) - Marina Warner

In Purgatory: The Work of Felix Gonzales-Torres - Simon Watney

Viewing:

King Kong (1933) - d. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

RKO Production 601: The Making of King Kong: Eighth Wonder of the World (seven-part documentary series) - d. Phil Savernick (2005)


Listening:

Bleed Like Me - Garbage

beautifulgarbage - Garbage

Garbage Version: 2.0 - Garbage

Garbage - Garbage