davidm wrote: ↑Sat Jun 24, 2017 11:00 pm
I could have predicted that Cezanne would leave you cold.
There are no “vibrations” and there is no “objective art.”
You still have given no reason to classify the sphinx, Notre Dame and The Last Supper as “objective art” outside of mere assertion. I am also confident that when you draw your exclusionary circle and claim that the stuff inside the circle is “objective art” and the stuff outside the circle is “subjective art” or not art at all, that the stuff inside the circle is all stuff that you like and the stuff outside of it is all stuff that you dislike. IOW, entirely subjective!
I’m different. I don’t like Renoir’s work. His colors are too sickly sweet for my taste and his bourgeoise subject matter bores me. But I know perfectly well that he is a very fine artist and I know why he is. For me it is possible to dislike art that I know is great. This kind of thinking must be outside your artistic authoritarianism.
What post-Revolutionary Russian art are you talking about? There are two distinct kinds, the Russian avant-garde movement exemplified by such movements as supermatism and constructivism, which was then quashed and replaced by hideous Socialist realism. The avant-garde that was snuffed out produced some brilliant works. Socialist realism was and remains grotesque (it is still practiced in North Korea). Such art is little more than glorified propaganda posters, though of course it is still art.
Of course I understand the story being depicted in your Ninth Wave. The story and the symbolism are just
obvious — one of the reasons I don’t care for the work. Such emotional manipulation is facile. Also, because of my education in modernism in the visual arts, I am disinclined to favor visual art that tells any stories at all. Understanding this is one of the keys to appreciating Cézanne and those who came after him, so many of whom he inspired. I think it is fair to say that Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin were the three founding fathers of 20th century art. I also think it’s fair to say that you don’t like 20th century modernist art. Am I right?
The Cézanne painting I linked to is one in a series of increasingly nonrepresentational paintings that Cézanne made of the mountain and the landscape and village at the foot of it. For me, these mountain paintings are like a transitional fossil between different artistic species: the species represented by your Ninth Wave, and the species of the modernist art to come after Cézanne. There is, for example, a direct lineal line from Cézanne’s mountains to Braque and Picasso’s Cubism.
Cézanne’s achievements in the mountain painting(s):
He abandons storytelling. Unlike in your Ninth Wave, there is no story here, facile or otherwise. It is just the art speaking for itself and brilliantly so. The mountain and the village are not actually the subjects of the painting.The subject is the paint itself, arranged in a pattern on a two-dimensional surface. Cézanne abandons
illusion — the idea that art consists, or should consist, of fooling people into thinking that they are looking at reality when they are just looking at paint. This insight, btw, goes back to Socrates, who wondered about the usefulness or efficacy of representational art.
He abandons local realism. There is no attempt to slavishly copy reality here; he
interprets the reality before him and transfigures it in the service of his free, creative visual genius.
He abandons local color. His colors are a symphonic orchestration of his own free visual imagination; they have contact with the real color “out there” to be sure, but mainly the colors are invented. He thus brings visual art closer to its nearest relative, which is music.
He flattens the picture plane. Foreground, middle ground and background are essentially as one, the mountain barely distinguishable from the sky! When one squints one’s eyes down while looking at the painting we see at a glance the birth of nonrepresentational art, the rise of the Modern. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.
What Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and others of that era did was to
liberate art from the shackles of brute realism, of slavish representationalism. They free it like a bird from a cage, so that art can soar. Your Ninth Wave painter brilliantly depicts water pouring off surfaces — it’s great technique — but it’s also fundamentally enslaving to bother depicting that in the first place. One marvels at and yet is bored by the result — all this artistic talent, to depict water realistically? But he was an artist of his time, and we live in much different times.