Picasso, Duchamp, Hoffman Root of Modern Art

Farmerman, thanks for your very insightful post....and welcome to
a2k, great to see that you made it! Any sighting of 400?

I was unaware that Picasso had any kind of addiction, except perhaps workaholism. I need to reread his biography.

I cant imagine that abstract expressionism will ever be passe!

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art
Shepaint, from your mouth to God's ear.
BUT if everyone in the world should become disinterested in abstract expressionism (also in its neo forms)--including artists and viewers, but not so much gallery owners and museum directors--then it will have died an appropriate death. But Resurrection is never out of the question.

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she- (mind if I call you by your first name?). I have not seen nor heard from 400 for a few weeks. I remember we had posted on abuzz re:his series of "artists Studio" threads. It just sort of stopped. Hes probably travelling.

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Modern art is influenced by inabilities as much as abilities. Duchamp did some work that was good but, he had no feeling for paint and the figure. I lkie his Estopages(sp)? Years ago I could have bought his suitcase for 100.oo $ at the Rose Fried gallery. All of the Hoffmanites ,mention Toulouse Lautrec for example," well thats illustration" ,they made illustration a dirty word . Most Western Art has illustration as a part of any image making. Many abstract artist went to the artof the East for inspiration .Chinese painting and the Art of Islam.Ad Reinhard for example was something of a Chinologist :shock:Reinhard was one of the better artist as a person .Duchamp was known in NY as sympathetic to young artist.His stature was greater than Dekooning. Many artist got so absorbed with Bill's work thatthey died and dried up.

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art history
Sodabred, thanks for reviving this deserving but neglected thread. Oh 400,where are you?

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picasso
Farmerman, you know by now, of course, that 400 is back, and he has initiated a thirteenth reincarnation of his thread on abuzz.

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Be my guest Mapleleaf. Lightwizard and JLNobody throughly disagree with my observations - but what the hell.

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Lightwizard wrote:

I think artists purposefully avoided influences of Picasso -- the style was too identifyable and the theme and variations exhausted.

It depends on whether you're talking about experienced artists and historians, the art world, or the teeming millions.

For the millions (people who just dab in art), I'd say picasso. He's one of the most highly rated, farthest reaching artists in history. I'd be hard pressed to find someone in a civilized country who hadn't heard of him.

Historians love Duchamp, he's the kind of artist everyone likes to read about. Mysterious, tricky, playful, and always the life of the conceptual art party. Art historians love to read about and analyze art, it's what they do.

For the art world (what sells and for a lot) I might be pressed to name some of the color field painters like Rothco, maybe earlier. Like lightwizard said, the established are forbidden in the conceptual generation from directly quoting old styles (as in, impressionism and cubism). However, Iv'e seen many people quote ideas directly from color -field painting, and it's the must have for people with no traditional art skills, and no where else to turn. You can also make a lot of money, with little input. (These are generalizations, of course.)

For artists, I'd say cezanne/Impressionists to be very general. Artists have been very pre-ocupied with color since the invention of the camera, and they paved the way with the paranoia to find a new direction for painting, lest art have no reason to continue. (If you want to take that back even farther, like sodabred mentioned, the impressionists were influenced by asian, especially Japanese art.) The same can be said for the pattern and design resurgence in the 60's, and many conceptual themes. Artists refer to these movements for ideas about where they want their art to go, and what function and place their own work will have in the greater sceme of art as a whole.

Hofmann I had to look up, and I'm assuming he isn't as well known among the art community and thus wouldn't be as influential, although the book (phaidon art book) says he influenced pollock.

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Hoffman: He said: arp,Miro,Kandinsky,Mondrian were the greatest innovators of Modern Art.He always insisted to everyone that one must work directly from the subject (stillife,nude or whatever),this was his big argument with Pollock. Pollock"I am nature" As far back as the late Nineteenth century painters were breaking from this insistence that the subject had to be in front of you.Seurat,Rousseau were already working from their imaginations. When looking at Han's late work can anyone see an Identifiable thing, a pot ,a dish ??? One sees color,surface, the subject isn't there for us to apprehend.It was only important for Hoffman's spiritual needs. H.H. played it down but ,he also admired R. Dufy. In his case ,any subject would have elicited his Bavarian joy. To the day he died he still looked the Bavarian . A neighbor from Bavaria from the rear evokes Hoffman to me his haircut.One of these days someone is going to write a book on the German influence on American Modern art. Beckmann, Hoffman and his legion of advocates.Its funny somehow I don't think of Marcel as a French artist. His critique of values was of this continent as m uch as Europe, he started there but it is here that he made his mark.

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Sorry, but I disagree with you about Pollock being a genius. He got drunk, and dumped paint. People did similar things before him, but he was discovered, and flung into the art world.

I think the reason for the decline of abstract non-objective in the art world is it's easily reproducable. They don't require training to do, are made quickly, and flood the market. Many popular non objectives are crap, but survived for awhile in the art world b/c they were popular. I do like the non-objective artists people think are sissy (b/c of their color sensitivity and attention to composition)like: Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and .. Sam Francis, although he doesn't exactly fit into that category. Non objective abstraction is a result of the deconstructivist movement, which I think was necessary for it's time but is getting passe'. After one deconstructs, it is time to reconstruct. Iv'e had enough of color field paintings, blank canvases, and badly done non objective abstracts. I am ready for art to take a new turn, preferably towards objecitivism. Making representation of objects allowed in art has so many more possibilities than just shape and color.

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Portal Star wrote:

Sorry, but I disagree with you about Pollock being a genius. He got drunk, and dumped paint. People did similar things before him, but he was discovered, and flung into the art world.

I think the reason for the decline of abstract non-objective in the art world is it's easily reproducable. They don't require training to do, are made quickly, and flood the market. Many popular non objectives are crap, but survived for awhile in the art world b/c they were popular. I do like the non-objective artists people think are sissy (b/c of their color sensitivity and attention to composition)like: Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and .. Sam Francis, although he doesn't exactly fit into that category. Non objective abstraction is a result of the deconstructivist movement, which I think was necessary for it's time but is getting passe'. After one deconstructs, it is time to reconstruct. Iv'e had enough of color field paintings, blank canvases, and badly done non objective abstracts. I am ready for art to take a new turn, preferably towards objecitivism. Making representation of objects allowed in art has so many more possibilities than just shape and color.[/quote

[color=#9100ff]there is room for a multitude of ways into painting - I would consider myself a colourist and in my own work i like the brush marks, scratches etc to show - but i can appreciate good tonal work that has few marks if it is exciting and good.

Rembrandt dripped paint and globbed it and the painterliness is very exciting - yet stand back and the character is totally mind blowingly amazing.

Old frescoes are flat and mark making has no place in them, yet they are beautiful and full of mood and emotion.

Turner paints light and his sketchbooks are absoloutely wonderful and could have been done today they are so contemporary.

Rothko's colours float and sing.

There is a wonderful world of variety out there to learn from. [/color]

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Pollock rarely painted when he was drunk -- in fact his best canvasses were when he was sober and his worst when he was hung over from one of his binges. One can joke about "Jack the Dripper," but all those drips are in the right place and the right color! Who are these artists who utilized this technique before him?

Stand before a Pollock, Rothko, DeKooning, Kline or any of the great names of abstract experessionism and I defy you to name any artist who is anywhere near their genius and who hasn't consciously copied them. We're back into that debate on the other thread about art marketing. There are a flurry of look alike commercial abstract painters who are producing strictly decorator art without the control of the gestural action on the picture plane, nothing of the sense of chroma and evoke the response of "what is it?" instead of the cerebral and emotional firecrackers that go on in one's brain when the artist has got it right. I do have an artist I've shown and who is a personal friend, Seikichi Takara, who has produced works inspired by the abstract expressionist and who is commercially viable but there is a defining quality to his work (also paints incredible seascapes).

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BTW, there was a documentary on Hoffman on PBS, Bravo or Ovation (can't remember which) recently that confirmed just about all I've said and placed him at the stature that I have placed him here.

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art
I respect and partially agree with Vivien's position here, but I totally agree with that of Lightwizard.

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cerebral and emotional firecrackers that go on in one's brain when the artist has got it right - quote LW

what a lovely way of putting it - I totally agree with this statement.

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Pollock was like the girl in the nursery rhyme -- when he was good, he was very, very good and when he was bad, he was horrid.
If anyone caught the Today show, a lady bought a large canvas in a thrift shop for $5.00. It turns out after having it in storage many years, it has been authenticated by one art expert as a Pollock. Couldn't tell from the reproduction on TV if it was a good Pollock -- it looked like a later canvas rather than an early work. His early work has depth and dimension and, as I've said before, has to be viewed in person in a museum setting. The scale of the canvas in all abstract expressionism is extremely important for the visual statement being made. Seeing small reproductions (inaccurate as they are) It's like seeing a model of a skyscraper and then seeing the actual skyscraper. Pollocks chroma. tonal control and mastery of a tactile surface make his canvases literally pulsate in front of you. This can be disturbing, something like a drunken nightmare I expect. Some of the canvasses are not meant to be beautiful in the traditional sense but that's what modern art was all about. It is more cerebral than emotional, relying more on color for any emotional impact that any objective visualization (like "Guernica," for instance).

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art
Lightwizard, when you refer to beauty in the traditional sense, and that that was not what modern art was about, are you suggesting that modern art pursued a different kind of beauty or that it was not about beauty at all? I grant you that much of contemporary art is not about beauty of any kind, but then I can't tell what it's about. My feeling is that modern art was steeped in beauty, the beauty of pure aesthetic light or power, but not so much the beauty of a conceptual message like that of Guernica. The works of Motherwell, deKooning on the east coast) and Diebenkorn and Hassel Smith on the west coast were very modern yet agonizingly beautiful.

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Beauty in the traditional sense involves a subject (a beautiful woman, for instance, even if rather Rubenesque!). Abstracts have no objects and therefore if the painting is to be beautiful, it has to be nearly all in the chroma and that has to be pleasing to each of us individually. One may not appreciate the color palette of an old master but consider the subject matter as beautiful. I really shouldn't use that word -- its opposite is ugliness. I can't really see dealing with catagorizing any art as beautiful or ugly because it's such a personal thing. Yes, the lyrical painters and even some of the op artists have created some images that could be called sublimely beautiful. This kind of beauty could be synonymous with being decoratively pleasing. I find abstract art has to be interpreted abstractly -- there's a spirituality in its message and sometimes it is that all is well with the earth.

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art
LW, "decoratively pleasing" seems a bit weak as a characterization of successful abstract art. But I won't pick since I'm not sure what you mean by "pleasing." But on the whole your response is illuminating. The spiritual message of abstract art,that all is well with the world, parallels Stendal's characterization of successful art as the promise of happiness. I take this to mean the essential potential of happiness in reality (i.e., it can't be all bad if beauty is part of it.

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I said "could be" in reference to abstract art being decoratively pleasing. Abstract art is definitely "one's man meat is another man's poison" for most. Those who don't understand it are those who have little or no education in appreciating art, not to mention that art history is also important because one has to learn how abstract art came to be. One of my art history professors in college could not even relate to abstract art and told the class it would be better if I prepared the class (!) He was a painter and when I visited his home, I was astonished at the naive folk art paintings on large figures in very muted colors (they weren't very good). An example of an instructor in the venue of higher learning that hadn't learned how to appreciate abstract art. On the other hands, some of the art establishment who go on and on with artspeak to explain abstract art are sometimes laughable. Abstract art has a tendency to be art for artists. The major collectors have tuned in and now it appears that the public is warming up to abstract art. Unfortunatly, I believe the motivation is for decorator art that has colors which fit into their decor.

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Picasso, Duchamp, Hoffman Root of Modern Art

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