Posts tagged painting

Say what you will about Andrew Wyeth, he introduced at least one ten-year-old to seriously looking at art. At my request, my parents framed a print of Wyeth's "Faraway" and it hung over my bed for many years. Today I am more intrigued and moved by Wyeth's watercolors than his every-brown-blade-of-grass realism, but who knows—without that accessible and yet mysterious painting, I might not have started noticing what artists like Wyeth made of our world. RIP.

art, childhood, painting

Andy

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I suspect that once the shouting dies down, Wyeth’s oeuvre will undergo at least a partial revaluation, and that it will center on his watercolors. Like so many other American artists who came to prominence between the end of the 19th century and the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, Wyeth profited greatly from the immediacy of watercolor, an on-the-spot medium that does not allow for second thoughts: What you paint is what you get. It forced him to be free. To look at a watercolor like “Benjamin’s House,” which hangs in San Francisco’s de Young Museum, is to see what Wyeth meant when he claimed that “I honestly consider myself to be an abstractionist.” All narrative content has been stripped out of this bare, washy winter scene, leaving only the essentials: a wall, a window, a handful of branches. The result is a masterly little glimpse of the visible world, executed with self-effacing virtuosity.

Artistic echoes of a primordial cultural project gone awry, but to this day remembered, resonant, and perhaps—in the beauty both of our varied tongues and non-disastrous buildings—redeemed.

architecture, art, babel, europe, museums, painting, primordial stories

Nate

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The Tower of Babel is a vision of architecture as anthill madness. As the British Museum’s exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality reveals, Brueghel is not the only artist driven to imagine this fabulous building. Towers of Babel proliferate in this show, be they painted with miniaturist precision or exploding in apocalyptic doom; there’s even one made of shoes, in a 2001 painting by Michael Lassel. Martin van Heemskerk’s, however, is square, in keeping with old sources he studied, but his attempt to visualise what the tower was “really” like does not stop him showing its top smashed apart by divine lightning. In an anonymous Dutch painting—one of a series that riff on Brueghel—the city that surrounds the tower is on fire, the summit of the hubristic edifice menaced by an eerie light coming through the storm clouds. Perhaps the strangest is by Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century scholar whose light, airy spiral looks prophetically modern, like a blueprint for a skyscraper.

I've seen this article cited in a number of blogs this past week; generally the take-away seems to be what Gladwell starts with, that some artists (or writers, or whatever) do their best work seemingly right out of the blocks, while others are comparably late bloomers. What's perhaps most interesting in terms of culture-making, though, is the article's later sections, which deal with just what sort of necessary conditions allow for the emergence of a late bloomer. Such success is, indeed, "highly contingent," which I think you can take two ways: on the one hand, to despair a bit about the difficulty of any artistic or cultural greatness to ever get off the ground; but on the other, to rejoice that for every Cezanne who we know about, there must be scores we never will, going about their business in our midst.

3 12 120, community, europe, france, horizons of the possible, painting, patronage, visual arts

Nate

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But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons. The first three—Zola, Pissarro, and Vollard—would have been famous even if Cézanne never existed, and the fourth was an unusually gifted entrepreneur who left Cézanne four hundred thousand francs when he died. Cézanne didn’t just have help. He had a dream team in his corner.

This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.