Ravels in Review

This week will no doubt go down in your minds and blogger history as being that of my birthday. Good–please remember that next May 26.

  • As I learned in doing historical research, historically few great things have happened on May 26 aside from my birth.
  • I wrote about my experience buying art (none) and some of the difficulties of buying art on a budget. Just a note: the gallery called my boyfriend back yesterday to say that the work in particular that I had liked was available.
  • The Hernan Bas show at Lehman Maupin predicts the future to be lush and lonely, and that says a small part of how much one could say about the artist’s most recent paintings.
  • Lastly, I was so struck by an old book that accidentally came into my hands that I had to share the artist/author Eugene Fromentin’s extremely dated travel book of Dutch painters with you. He is in rapture over Rubens and Rembrandt. Hero worship like his doesn’t exist anymore in criticism, maybe to our loss.

On the other hand, Fromentin is not so kind to his contemporary (1870s) art scene in France. The Impressionists, apparently, have no sense of value or line or color, and only Corot and Delacroix are worthy of respect. In fact, let me leave you with a few more of his words;

Landscapes make every day more proselytes than progress. Those who practise it exclusively are not more skillfull in that account, but there are more painters who try it. Open air, diffused light, the real sunlight, take today in painting, and in all paintings, an importance which has never before been recognized, and which, let us say it frankly, they do not deserve.

Photographic studies as to the effects of light have changed the greater proportion of ways of seeing, feeling, and painting. At the present time, painting is never sufficiently clear, sharp, formal, and crude.

The abuse of useless roundness has driven into excess flat surface, and bodies without thickness. Modelling disappeared the very day when the means of expression seemed best, and ought to have rendered it more intelligent, so that what was progress among the Hollanders is for us a step backward; and after issuing from archaic art, under pretext of new innovation, we return thither.

Hero Worship is Passé

Falcon Hunting in Algeria, Fromentin

Eugene Fromentin‘s The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland sounds more like a textbook than memoirs of an artist’s 1875 trip to Holland to see Dutch paintings, which is why I borrowed it from the library. I quickly discovered my mistake. It might sound charming, but this book is actually full of long-winded, vague descriptions and similarly long, vague rhapsodies over the genius of Rubens and Rembrandt. (With some sleights to the new Impressionist school in France.)

Fair enough, you might say. Rubens and Rembrandt are generally thought to be great and important painters. But when I say rhapsodies I mean full-blown, adulatory praises ala:

that morose and witty dreamer, who without living apart had no relation with any of them; who seemed to be painting his epoch, his country, his friends and himself, but who at bottom painted only one of the unknown recesses of the human soul. I speak, as you must know, of Rembrandt.

[Rubens] fills the last division of the gallery, and there sheds abroad the restrained brilliancy, and that soft and powerful radiance which are the grace of his genius. There is no pedantry, no affectation of vain grandeur or of offensive pride, but he is naturally imposing.

Hero worship of this sort if dead. In every artistic field, we practice new forms of criticism that analyze structure or context or socio-political aims. Anything but pure, old fashioned worship. We use more naunced words that genius, and we certainly don’t assume the great art stems from souls of great moral worth, as Fromentin does. He sees valour and searching wit and genorosity of spirit in the lines of Rembrandt’s drawings. I see lines–and maybe it is my loss.

Arabs, Fromentin
Fromentin was no great critic, not like Matthew Arnold or Baudelaire who practised and preached. But when it the last time you read a review that put the artist on a pedestal? We treat artists as cultural specimens to be dissected. The only critic not afraid of the term genius is annoying Harold Bloom, and I suspect that’s only because he wants to be able to include himself in his self-defined pantheon. I wouldn’t mind hearing a little simple admiration. I don’t mind the damming reviews, as they tend be better written and more intersting. Yet with all the snark floating about, earnestness can seem almost too exposed, too simple.

Maybe more appreciation would be appropriate. That is what moves us to write about and talk about these things in the first place.