Who? and Why?

[stlukesguild]

A discussion came up upon the poetry forums related to Shelley and Keats and others who died far too soon and whether they might have achieved far more than they did. Thinking upon this hypothetically... knowing what you know of any artists... which artist in any genre or artistic form would you grant another 10 or 20 years (if you had the power) with the aim of assuring the greatest further artistic achievement? Who and why?:confused:

[billl]

I'll second mortalterror's Hendrix pick. (I just checked over that last post over there at the other thread.)

I hesitated to pick Jimi Hendrix, because I'm not sure how much further he could have taken his art. It seems to be as far as it could go. But, all he'd have to do is prove me wrong in order for me to be proven wrong, and then what an incredible advance in his art we'd get (and I'm generally fine with being proven wrong--in such a case as this, especially).

Leaving the possibility of his advancing his art aside, I think it'd just be great to hear 10 more years of him expressing himself at the level that he had already reached. So, either way, Hendrix would be a good one, I think.

He was a genius at squeezing and chasing out music from a wooden and steel guitar, and using it to direct the electronic wizardry of effects, amps, and cabinets into making strikingly organic sounds.

(On a side note, are we looking for people who died early, or could I have picked, for example, Picasso?)

[Jozanny]

I would say John Gardner. Grendel is as it is a minor master work, and my instinct tells me that motorcycle accident took him in the stride of his maturity. Had he stuck around he might have surpassed Byatt, and Mitchell might not have hit the NYT book review pages with such an umph; then again, this is just my writer's intuition.

[mayneverhave]

A discussion came up upon the poetry forums related to Shelley and Keats and others who died far too soon and whether they might have achieved far more than they did. Thinking upon this hypothetically... knowing what you know of any artists... which artist in any genre or artistic form would you grant another 10 or 20 years (if you had the power) with the aim of assuring the greatest further artistic achievement? Who and why?:confused:

Besides the Romantics, the obvious answer is Christopher Marlowe. Harold Bloom claims in The Anxiety of Influence that Marlowe, even if he had lived past 29, would have never evolved past the bombastic writer of blank verse dramas, but this seems to be another example of Bloom being a prig.

Given Shakespeare's somewhat outrageous early plays, there's no reason to think Marlowe might not have developed along the lines that Shakespeare did - doubtfully to the extent that Shakespeare did, but perhaps beyond the relatively forgotten level he exists at now.

[Paulclem]

the obvious answer is Christopher Marlowe.

That would have cleared up the Shakespeare is Marlowe debate.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I can't really see passed the obvious in boringly naming John Keats. Nobody else springs to mind that I think would have done greater things than Keats if given longer. Other than that, I would like to have seen Emily Bronte's later work if WH was her debut effort. Poor Wilde was finished that's for sure, unless by some miracle he could have recovered and taken to writing dark and bitter prose on the continent; though I don't think so. Marlowe as well yes.

Interesting pick of Hendrix. I think he could have gone either way, personally though I think he would have faded, burnt out, following the lead of a lot of music icons, particularly rock ones. Who knows though?

[Paulclem]

I suppose the World War 1 poets my have gone on to greater things as Robert Graves did. Owen may have blossomed with the recognition his poetry got in the nineteen-twenties. It is difficult to know.

[Helga]

many come to mind, Marlowe,Lennon and about 10 others but I would like it to be Gene Roddenberry so he could give someone who knows ST the right to his work instead of a company that has the ability to ruin things!

[meh!]

Any i'd pick it would just be out of curiosity, 'what would they have done?'.

In that case... Wes Montgomery. He played with such musicality I would love to have had his career go on another twenty years. The downside being that he would have had to go through the 80s, which can never be a good thing.

I'd also like to have seen what van gogh would have done with his extra 20 years.

[bluosean]

Robert Louis Stevenson. He is one of my favorite authors. I wish he would have finished Weir of Hermiston. He would have written a lot of great things if he would have lived 10 more years.

It is too bad that Stephen Crane did not live 10 more years. Like Stevenson I think he would have written a lot of great things. Probably he would have gotten better.

[andave_ya]

Judy Garland for music, and Wilfred Owen for poetry.

[JBI]

Judy Garland for music, and Wilfred Owen for poetry.
I was going to put Owen too, but, then, all things considered, I can't conceptualize him outside of the war - it seems that he is the poet of War, and not the poet, because of his death, of anything else - what would he have amounted to, without the war? That is a mystery, and one of the reasons this question is a little bit (quite a bit) tough. I think the only fair answers are authors who didn't complete their works, but then again, how do we know the endings would be good?

[stlukesguild]

Among literature I can't think of anyone with more potential than Keats... although Hart Crane might be a good second choice. In the visual arts Raphael's death before 40 may have been the greatest loss... although Van Gogh suicide is also among the greatest losses.

When speaking of any artistic form, however, I believe I would need to go with Mozart. As he stands, he is already one of the "trinity" or "immortals" (along with Bach and Beethoven) who stands at the pinnacle of Western music... and in this his achievements may be second only to Bach... this in spite of the fact that his life span was only 35 years... 30 years shorter than Bach. His artistic output was incredible in terms of depth and breadth. He composed masterful symphonies, string quartets, piano concertos, choral works, operas, and any number of other chamber and symphonic works (trios, quintets, concertos, divertimenti, etc...). The vast majority of this output was achieved during the last ten years of his life... as he matured and as he began to explore the possibilities seen in the works of Handel, Haydn, Gluck, and Bach. At the very end of his life he was at a fevered pitch that showed no sign of letting up. His final symphonies are undoubtedly his best. His last 4 operas are absolutely sublime. One even suspects that with the example of The Magic Flute Mozart may have more fully realized, with more time, the very real potential of a native (German) opera and even more so, the possibility of a music that geared toward the larger audience rather than toward the aristocratic patrons... as per the example of Handel's oratorios, Haydn's successful "London Symphonies" and "Creation", etc...

The only other possible rival, to my mind, might have been Schubert... but without the mastery of symphonic form as well as the access to orchestras and performers that Mozart had, I somewhat doubt his ability to continue to produce on a scale to rival what Mozart might have achieved.

[The Comedian]

Thoreau died at 40; would he had lived to 80. I would have loved to read the world through his eyes for more pages than he produced.

[mortalterror]

I'd rather have Georg Buchner than Keats.

[Virgil]

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!!

http://www.capricorn-astrology-software.com/example_reports/mozart/wolfgang-amadeus-mozart.jpg

Oh if he could have finished his Requiem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gx-N-kdIXk&feature=related

Oh and just one more symphony. How could he leave us with the Jupiter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcly8-RGhgw&feature=related

And another piano concerto, just one more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df-eLzao63I&feature=related

And another opera. Please just one more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64p_Tnnj0FU&feature=related

Or one more of his wonderful chamber music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WnnPJzckss

God if there is a heaven Mozart is the first soul I will seek out. :)

[billl]

Mozart is a great choice.

[stlukesguild]

Oh if he could have finished his Requiem.

Even unfinished it is one of the greatest... along side of Faure's, Brahms' Deutsches Requiem, and a few others...

[JuniperWoolf]

Poor Wilde was finished that's for sure, unless by some miracle he could have recovered and taken to writing dark and bitter prose on the continent; though I don't think so.

Yeah, that makes me sad. Some things are very unfair.

He wasn't an artist, and he wasn't very young, but I would have liked to see what Nietzsche'd have done with the twentieth century if he hadn't had that mental breakdown and then died.

Also, Kubrick was obviously pretty old but I wish that he had lived a liiiiiitle bit longer. He'd have done more, I'm sure.

[mono]

Years ago, from a very inspiring psychology professor at my former university, I recall her telling of artistic qualitative creativity peaking between the years of 40 and 55 - a difficult thing to measure empirically, and we, the students, read it in our textbook, too, but I cannot remember who conducted the experiment, yet it based itself mostly off of literature and music more than any other arts. Interesting to think about, regardless.
It does not seem uncommon for me to wonder what literary artists like John Keats, Percy Shelley, Emily Brontë (good call, Neely), D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Arthur Rimbaud, Heinrich von Kleist, Christopher Marlowe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, Sylvia Plath, Dan Turèll, Franz Kafka, and Khalil Gibran could have done with 5, 10, or 20 additional years. In the same way, I wonder about Chopin, Mozart (as Virgil and stlukesguild mentioned), Jimi Hendrix (as mortalterror suggested), John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Buddy Holly, Jeff Buckley, and our most recent Michael Jackson. Very often, I wonder these things.
What else could they have given us, however? Writers like Harper Lee, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Thomas Pynchon, Milan Kundera, or Gustave Flaubert created quantitatively smaller amounts than early-deceased writers like D.H. Lawrence or John Keats. Qualitatively, not accounting for their other life projects, non-literary in nature, in contribution? All a matter of opinion. What I intend to say matters that I believe some writers have the ability to surpass that psychological statistic that qualitative creativity reaches its peak between the ages of 40-55. I cannot hypothesize what a poet like Rimbaud could have written had he lived past age 37, but something to consider seems that he wrote enough, enough to impress generations beyond what an individual his age could have unlikely fathomed, just as well as Hemingway (dead at 61) and Camus (46) wrote enough qualitatively to earn themselves Nobel Prizes. This does not imply that I do not consider Lee, Kundera, or Flaubert great, but qualitatively they have compensated in terms of quantity; writers like George Bernard Shaw (94), Leo Tolstoy (82), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (82), Jean-Paul Sartre (74), or Charles Bukowski (73) created an impressive amount of literature, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, that, some would consider, surpassed the hopes and expectations of the achievements of writers their age.
Perhaps some writers could have lived longer, some lived long enough, and others could have lived without writing this-or-that, whether published posthumously or not, but each and every one wrote enough to immortalize themselves, as well as their literature, and, more importantly, their thoughts. Few things seem quite as honorable or reverent as allowing a wise individual's words to survive generation after generation, despite the composer's age.

[mayneverhave]

Also, The Brothers Karamazov was just fine on its own, but I would have loved to see Dostoevsky live to finish The Life of a Great Sinner.

[stlukesguild]

Mono... I agree with your overall thesis that some artists who lived rather long lives created a comparatively small body of work in contrast to some of the "shooting stars"... but I must question some of the examples you used to illustrate this thesis. Goethe? Goethe??!! A small body of work? He takes up well over a foot on my book shelf and I only have access to the works in English. Just glancing at my shelf there's The Sorrows of Young Werther (short novel), Torquato Tasso (play), Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (a rather lengthy novel or romance), Iphigenia in Taurus (play), Goetz von Berlichingen (play), Egmont (play), Clavigo (play), Stella (play), Prometheus (verse drama), Propserpina (verse drama), Elective Affinities (novel), The Italian Journey (diary/travelogue), Essays on Art and Literature (essay), My Life (autobiography in 4 parts in two volumes), Verse Plays and Epics (more plays from the English edition of the Collected Works), Maxims and Reflections (collected brief comments), Faust (verse drama), Faust II (verse drama), Roman Elegies (poetry), The West-Eastern Divan (poetry), Selected Poetry (a collection of just the shorter and lyrical poetry alone would comprise several volumes). This does not even begin to touch upon his voluminous writings which also included various scientific treatises including the famous theory on color, as well some 50 volumes of letters and other correspondences. According to the Goethe Institute the publication of the complete writings of Goethe is 142 volumes!! Keats can compare with that!!??

I would also suggest that you look into the volume of Solzhenitsyn's writings which includes more than a few rather long novels, a number of shorter novels and novella, plays, poetry, speeches and other political tracts.

[stlukesguild]

Oh...and Bukowski??!! Someone should have shot him years ago.:D I'd take one more year of Mozart over his entire oeuvre plus another 500 years.

[islandclimber]

yes Bukowski should have been shot before he even started writing hahah..

Mozart would be my choice, imagine what he could have created with just a few more years.. and although Requiem is one of my favourite pieces of Music, I can say I wish it had been completed...

or how about Pushkin, no one has mentioned him yet.. to die in a duel at 38.. what a tragedy...

would Proust have written another work as magnificent as "In Search of lost Time" had he lived past 50?

what could Fernando Pessoa have completed had he not perished in his 40s?

or Lorca who died before 40? a death Neruda so strangely foretold...

I also would have liked to see Dostoevsky live long enough to finish his "Life and Times of a Great Sinner", but I am much more than content with what he did produce..

Hendrix would have been interesting to see live longer, but like another said I think he would have faded..

Tchaikovsky is another who died fairly young at 53...

[PeterL]

Marlowe is a fine choice, and the world would be a better place, if G. C. Edmondson had written more; but perhaps the top spot for another twenty years goes to Jim Morrison.

[Paulclem]

top spot for another twenty years goes to Jim Morrison

He was a candidate for burnout surely...

[stlukesguild]

top spot for another twenty years goes to Jim Morrison

He was a candidate for burnout surely...

He was pretty much there already, wasn't he? But then can we really even begin to place him anywhere in near the realm of Mozart, Schubert, Keats, Shelley, Pushkin, Marlowe, Van Gogh, or any number of the others mentioned? I say this even though I'll admit to loving the Doors first album.

[Paulclem]

I like their stuff too, but I agree with you StLukes. Died in a time when he could have lived his lifetime over again, unlike Motzart and others in history who succumbed to natural causes. Such a waste - the rock star's hedonistic folly.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

The first name that entered my mind was Hendrix. I would love to see where his music would have gone. Second would be John Lennon.

For literature, it would be George Orwell. Kind of surprised no one mentioned him.

[Paulclem]

For literature, it would be George Orwell. Kind of surprised no one mentioned him.

He would have been an intersting ommentator on the 60's and 70's.

[PeterL]

top spot for another twenty years goes to Jim Morrison

He was a candidate for burnout surely...

He was pretty much there already, wasn't he? But then can we really even begin to place him anywhere in near the realm of Mozart, Schubert, Keats, Shelley, Pushkin, Marlowe, Van Gogh, or any number of the others mentioned? I say this even though I'll admit to loving the Doors first album.

You may have a point. He may so overshadow those that it would be embarrassing.

[Pecksie]

All the Brontë sisters died young --- Anne and Emily before 30, I think, and Charlotte before 40. Anne in particular seems to have been perpetually overlooked by critics and readers alike, and is only recently getting a bit more recognition.

Federico García Lorca, who has already been mentioned, was murdered at age 38. His poetry and plays were in constant development, absorbing all kinds of influences and styles. It's hard to think of improvements, considering the beauty and maturity his work had achieved by the time he died, but he would certainly have been one to watch --- as would his countryman Miguel Hernández, dead at 32 in a Fascist prison.

No one seems to have mentioned Thomas Chatterton, the poet-cum-forger who died at 17, probably of starvation. Was he just a bluff, or would he have become a great poet had he lived?

[mmmmmm]

Mozart is the best choice out there. He died at 35, and accomplished such a body of work in those short years.

Emily Bronte, if only she had survived longer...could have produced more masterpieces like Wuthering Heights. Wilfred Owen is an interesting prospect, because, as has been said, I'm not sure what else he could have written about besides the war.

Marlowe deserves a place among the pantheon of universally known English writers, and he would have likely achieved that with ten or twenty more years.

Poe could have probably cranked out a couple more immortal poems and short stories with ten or so more years.

I'm surprised nobody named Jane Austen, my favorite writer, even though she probably wouldn't have expanded her writing beyond the manners of the English countryside. Had she lived to a ripe age of 60 or so, her number of significant books probably would have increased greatly in quantity, even if the subject manner of future books wouldn't have changed. It would have been a treat if she had written a Bronte-like work, where the characters cry over real tragedies.

[promtbr]

Great great topic for a thread. Props and kudos..

I agree that it would have been great to play god with those mentioned. Possibly excepting Rimbaud, as he had given up literature some 30 years before he succumbed to cancer.
Proust for the very reason so he could have completed "In Search of..." last three volumes instead of the pastiche he left that umpteen editorial hands finished...Kafka living a full life, just think!

I would throw out some lesser knowns...Bruno Schulz who was offed by an SS officer in his prime. Isaac Babel (Stalin's people got him) there are some that say Nathanael West would have taken Fitzgerald's place as an iconic American novelits. The works he left translate well to contemporary sensibilities...


---

[Mathor]

top spot for another twenty years goes to Jim Morrison

He was a candidate for burnout surely...

He was pretty much there already, wasn't he? But then can we really even begin to place him anywhere in near the realm of Mozart, Schubert, Keats, Shelley, Pushkin, Marlowe, Van Gogh, or any number of the others mentioned? I say this even though I'll admit to loving the Doors first album.

yeah i don't know if you've heard any of the unrelrased tapes he recorded in the last couple months before he passed. They were altogether terrible. But he's a genius, and the world would be a lot better if he was here.

[andave_ya]

George Gershwin.

[stlukesguild]

George Gershwin

Oh please, no!!! One of my idiot studio mates has only one CD in the studio... that of George Gerschwin's solo piano music (Did you know that the great Rhapsodie in Blue wasn't even scored by Gerschwin, but rather by Ferde Groffe?). He's been playing that thing every day... sometimes more than once. I'd have to shoot the man myself.:lol:

[Paulclem]

yeah i don't know if you've heard any of the unrelrased tapes he recorded in the last couple months before he passed. They were altogether terrible. But he's a genius, and the world would be a lot better if he was here.

Is genius overrated? There seems to be a lot of casualties from it. Perhaps some of them are so bad at life that they can't have been geniuses.

[meh!]

Blue Rhapsody has always jarred with me. It's always played better by jazz musicians. And it's always played better by Jazz musicians who shirk Gershwin's rhythms and actually swing. People go on about how he was 'doing jazz' and it's just bleh. Bad syncopation mixed with other jazz sensibilities. altogether an unsuccessful mesh of two approaches. J

I do like bits of it and I'm being a little harsh (the opening glissando into the first chord is quite nice) just thought i'd have a wee rant and also take the chance to big up:

Emily Remler. She was an excellent jazz guitarist and could have gone on to settle down a bit into more of her own style, she was like a hectic wes, if she hadn't died (32).

[stlukesguild]

Gershwin was essentially a tin-pan-alley song writer... and certainly he wrote some lovely songs. I agree that his "serious" music is something of a mesh of high and low... not that such is particularly bad... but his jazz elements don't "swing" enough... and his classical skills are perhaps even more limited. I recently came across a picture of Gershwin at some musical soiree with Erik Satie and Rubinstein and Ravel at the piano and I was struck at how out of his depth he appeared. Still he certainly had the potential for real growth... especially at that time when Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Howard Hanson, etc... were establishing the first real American sound in classical music... and figures like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington were setting examples of a real cross-over between popular and classical music.

[mmmmmm]

If I'm not mistaken, the clarinet gilssando was actually not written by Gershwin but improvised by the 1st chair clarinet.

[meh!]

Gershwin was essentially a tin-pan-alley song writer... and certainly he wrote some lovely songs. I agree that his "serious" music is something of a mesh of high and low... not that such is particularly bad... but his jazz elements don't "swing" enough... and his classical skills are perhaps even more limited. I recently came across a picture of Gershwin at some musical soiree with Erik Satie and Rubinstein and Ravel at the piano and I was struck at how out of his depth he appeared. Still he certainly had the potential for real growth... especially at that time when Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Howard Hanson, etc... were establishing the first real American sound in classical music... and figures like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington were setting examples of a real cross-over between popular and classical music.

I don't think it's intrinsically bad but, specifically rhapsody in blue, this jerky kind of almost swing frankly just puts me on edge. The melodic invention really wasn't inventive enough to pull it all together, for me.

Though yeah, I imagine he could have grown as a composer.


Things like duke ellington's translations of classical pieces (sugar plum fair, ...mountain king and so on) are much more successful, if less grandiose. Obviously there are much smaller barriers when taking the chords and tune of a classical piece and jazzing them than trying to actually meldtwo distinct and, some would say, opposing styles. They're worth a mention though. The laziness of the saxs on Sugar Plum Fairy is great.


If I'm not mistaken, the clarinet gilssando was actually not written by Gershwin but improvised by the 1st chair clarinet.


I thought gershwin played it on piano first? He plays the same run on the recording of him performing it on piano. Maybe he recorded that afterwards?

[Desolation]

I really wonder what Nietzsche could have accomplished had he not gone completely insane when he did. He completed some of his best wrok in the year prior to his insanity, and it's been stated many times that he was on the verge of creating his magnum opus, 'The Revaluation of All Values', of which only part 1('The Anti-Christ) was completed.

Although he's not dead, I also wonder what could have been had Bob Dylan not crashed his motorcycle in 1966. Lennon and Hendrix have been mentioned, and I have a really hard time imagining them as old men. But, I generally think that the wrong half of the Beatles died.

Hunter S. Thompson didn't die young, but I think that he died too soon nonetheless. It would be interesting to hear his opinion on the current state of the world, and the Obama presidency.

[stlukesguild]

Although he's not dead, I also wonder what could have been had Bob Dylan not crashed his motorcycle in 1966...

Uh... how did this seriously affect Dylan as an artist? The accident was largely used as an excuse for him to escape from the pressures of touring and constant PR events. He spent the next few years recording a marvelous body of music... much of it leaking out in covers by other performers before the actual Basement Tapes were released. He came out of his "retirement" with John Wesley Harding which I feel is among his strongest albums... although certainly quite different from the Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61, etc... But then Dylan was never one to keep churning out more of the same. Personally I find John Wesley Harding a magnificently understated album with near visionary passages and a sound firmly rooted in American folk music. He continued to produce some strong works into the 70s (but commonly only a song or two here and there... but it is rare for any artist... especially within the realm of popular arts... to maintain the level of production). Nevertheless, I find Blood on the Tracks to be a marvelous album... as were several of his most recent works. Certainly I'd love nothing more than another Highway 61... but people grow and the world changes. Its no longer the mid-1960s and Dylan is no longer in his mid-20s.

[mono]

Mono... I agree with your overall thesis that some artists who lived rather long lives created a comparatively small body of work in contrast to some of the "shooting stars"... but I must question some of the examples you used to illustrate this thesis. Goethe? Goethe??!! A small body of work? He takes up well over a foot on my book shelf and I only have access to the works in English. Just glancing at my shelf there's The Sorrows of Young Werther (short novel), Torquato Tasso (play), Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (a rather lengthy novel or romance), Iphigenia in Taurus (play), Goetz von Berlichingen (play), Egmont (play), Clavigo (play), Stella (play), Prometheus (verse drama), Propserpina (verse drama), Elective Affinities (novel), The Italian Journey (diary/travelogue), Essays on Art and Literature (essay), My Life (autobiography in 4 parts in two volumes), Verse Plays and Epics (more plays from the English edition of the Collected Works), Maxims and Reflections (collected brief comments), Faust (verse drama), Faust II (verse drama), Roman Elegies (poetry), The West-Eastern Divan (poetry), Selected Poetry (a collection of just the shorter and lyrical poetry alone would comprise several volumes). This does not even begin to touch upon his voluminous writings which also included various scientific treatises including the famous theory on color, as well some 50 volumes of letters and other correspondences. According to the Goethe Institute the publication of the complete writings of Goethe is 142 volumes!! Keats can compare with that!!??
Oops, thanks for pointing that out, stlukes. I meant to add Goethe to my list of people who wrote a lot quantitatively and qualitatively in a long life, especially a long life according to most life expectancies in his era - a mere typo. I guess I deserved that for not proof-reading my post! :D

To my small list of musicians, I could not call myself a Portlander without adding Elliott Smith. When he died (age 34, concluded as suicide, knife wounds to the chest - ouch!), the entire city mourned; fans still hold a huge commemoration every year on the date of his death.

[Desolation]

Although he's not dead, I also wonder what could have been had Bob Dylan not crashed his motorcycle in 1966...

Uh... how did this seriously affect Dylan as an artist? The accident was largely used as an excuse for him to escape from the pressures of touring and constant PR events. He spent the next few years recording a marvelous body of music... much of it leaking out in covers by other performers before the actual Basement Tapes were released. He came out of his "retirement" with John Wesley Harding which I feel is among his strongest albums... although certainly quite different from the Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61, etc... But then Dylan was never one to keep churning out more of the same. Personally I find John Wesley Harding a magnificently understated album with near visionary passages and a sound firmly rooted in American folk music. He continued to produce some strong works into the 70s (but commonly only a song or two here and there... but it is rare for any artist... especially within the realm of popular arts... to maintain the level of production). Nevertheless, I find Blood on the Tracks to be a marvelous album... as were several of his most recent works. Certainly I'd love nothing more than another Highway 61... but people grow and the world changes. Its no longer the mid-1960s and Dylan is no longer in his mid-20s.
While John Wesley Harding was a great album, it would have been interesting to see how Dylan followed up Blonde on Blonde had the accident not happened...But then we wouldn't have 'All Along the Watchtower', and Dylan probably would have died.

[NickAdams]

I would grant both Joyce and Kubrick an additional twenty years.

I'm curious to know what Joyce would have followed the Wake with. There are rumors of a book of waking and also a smaller work about the sea.

We could use another Kubrick film now.

[Paulclem]

We could use another Kubrick film now.

Did you like Eyes Wide Shut?

[NickAdams]

We could use another Kubrick film now.

Did you like Eyes Wide Shut?

Eyes Wide Shut happens to be my favorite Kubrick film.

[JuniperWoolf]

yeah i don't know if you've heard any of the unrelrased tapes he recorded in the last couple months before he passed. They were altogether terrible. But he's a genius, and the world would be a lot better if he was here.

I disagree, I think that they were good.



I agree that it would have been great to play god with those mentioned. Possibly excepting Rimbaud, as he had given up literature some 30 years before he succumbed to cancer.


Yeah, that's what I figured on the other thread. He was more into business and engineering concepts when he died, right?

[Frankie Anne]

I'm late chiming in here, but my vote would go for Stevie Ray Vaughn. Tragic loss for his genre of music, in my opinion.

[stlukesguild]

After returning from my trip to Washington and New York where I spent much time in the museums I feel I must change my response to which visual artist I would most desire to see with another 10 or 20 years. Van Gogh's early demise was certainly a major loss to art... but I now wonder if Giorgione's was not an even greater tragedy.

Giorgione... or Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco... was a Venetian painter of the Italian Renaissance who died at age 32. In spite of his youth he was unquestionably one of the most influential artists of the period. Painters traditionally needed to justify the "seriousness" of their art by painting images that represented important personages or accepted narratives from literature, history, religion, and mythology. To merely paint a still-life, a landscape, or a pretty face simply because one found it "beautiful" was not acceptable... except in work intended as practice... or one's own personal work.

From the very start, Giorgione began to challenge the notion that painting must be subservient to literary narrative. One of the artist's most influential paintings was the splendid Sleeping Venus. It was quite common during the period for an artist to rationalize or validate an erotic subject matter... a nude... by clothing it within the accouterments of a legitimate mythological or religious subject matter. An artist might be permitted to paint a nude in the guise of Eve, Bathsheba, Venus, or some such other subject matter. Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, however, is a Venus in name only...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2576/3872274084_7fd552aef6_o.jpg

There is nothing to connect her with the goddess in any way: no swans, no doves, no Cupid, no allusion to any of the narratives relating to her. In reality she is but a painting of a beautiful naked contemporary Venetian woman sleeping in the hills outside town. The daring of such a painting is hard for us to fathom today... but even as recently as the late 19th century a painter such as Manet was struck by the audaciousness of what the painting essentially entailed.

Another similar painting (that would have the most profound impact upon Manet) is the famous Fête champêtre. The attribution of this painting is still in dispute with Bellini, Titian, and Giorgione or even another rather minor figure, Domenico Mancini (as well as any combination of the three) being proposed as the painter. The painting, however, clearly shows the influence and quite probably the hand of Giorgione.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2500/3871491685_1a8369fb3b_o.jpg

Again, this painting shows no sign of the usual "legitimate" subject or narrative. What we are presented with are two young men, stylishly dressed in the fashions of the day, sitting in the hills outside of Venice. One strums on a lute or mandolin while the other leans into toward him as if in conversation... or to better hear. In the distance a shepherd gathers his flock. Accompanying the two men, however, we find two beautiful naked women. One holds a flute or recorder while the other a picture of water. Again we are left wondering what exactly is going on. Are these women invisible muses... or is this simply some sort of erotic fantasy? The entire image is presented in the most sensuous and poetic manner that one imagines something like the pastoral poetry of Virgil, Ovid, Sappho, or Theocritus. Manet was struck, however, with the realization that essentially what Giorgione(?) presented was a scene of two dressed men and two naked women having a picnic in an urban park setting. His own response to this painting, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, in which he presented the same subject, albeit in the setting of an urban Parisian park, shocked the critics and public and is often seen as the heralding of Impressionism and even Modernism:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2484/3871588807_7ddbcba7ab_o.jpg

Among Giorgione's other "poesies" we find the paintings The Tempest and The Three Philosophers...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/3872274614_bd3d25e707_o.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2530/3872274458_b0750e0d1f_o.jpg

In both instances the painter has presented the audience with an ambiguous image in which he has essentially invented his own iconography. In the Tempest we see a young nearly nude mother sucking her child while a Venetian guard stands looking on to the side. Near the center there are two fragmentary columns and in the distance a looming thunderstorm threatens. We get the general feeling of threat... with the suggestion of the protective guard... but these people are exactly (surely no one would dare paint the Virgin Mary in such a suggestive... irreverent manner?:eek:) and what the narrative is...? We are left guessing.

The Three Philosophers is equally ambiguous. The title, undoubtedly, relates to the scroll grasped by the oldest figure as they stand before the opening of a darkened cave. Many surmised this was an allusion to Plato's cave. Others have suggested that the three figures represent that different ages of man... or different temperaments: the dreamer gazing into the distance as he clutches an architect's square, the man of action in his turban, and the elderly man who has attained wisdom. Or is the cave merely an image of the unknown... the unseen... the future than all men strive before?

There is a similar cave in Giorgione's painting of The Adoration of the Shepherds...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2589/3871491577_816cf244ac_o.jpg

In this instance the central iconography is immediately recognizable... but still there are ambiguous elements. What is this invention of the blackened cave as opposed to the stable? The most obvious allusion is to Christ's future in the tomb from which he will arise. But who are the other figures lounging in the distance and where are the rest of the symbols and images common to the subject matter?

Beyond Giorgione's influence upon artists in audaciously taking it upon himself to invent his own iconography, Giorgione's method of painting may be even more influential. Along with Bellini and Titian who both show his influence, Giorgione is at the center of the development of the Venetian manner of painting. Where the Florentines and Romans focused upon line and the illusion of sculptural form, Venetian art would focus upon color and atmosphere. Due to the intense humidity and frequent flooding of Venice, Venetian artists were drawn to oil paint (as introduced by the Flemish painters) as opposed to fresco and egg tempera. Where the Flemish developed a manner of painting in thin, transparent layers upon small wooden panels, the Venetians discovered that oil paint was flexible enough to be applied to canvas (properly primed) stretched over wooden stretcher bars. The new approach to this medium allowed the artist to make major compositional changes, to develop the painting as it evolved, and to build the painting up slowly.

Giorgione's paintings glow with an intensity and a luminosity that rivals that of Vermeer. Like the great Dutch painter, his paintings virtually overwhelm anything placed near to them. The colors radiate a brilliance worthy of stained glass. I must admit that confronting an exhibition of his paintings several years ago led me to eventually abandon my efforts in collage and abstraction simply because I recognized the passion for color. His paintings convey a masterful sense of sensuality and atmosphere as edges become softly blurred. The Venetian manner of painting developed by Giorgione (and later Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, etc... would eventually dominate painting. It would eventually lead to the painterly techniques of Breughel, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Turner, the Impressionists, etc... One cannot even begin to fathom what the result might have been had Giorgione lived another 10 or 20 years... developing along side of Bellini and Titian. Had he lived as long as Titian he just might have rivaled that artist.. if not Rembrandt and Michelangelo.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"" In the Tempest we see a young nearly nude mother sucking her child while a Venetian guard stands looking on to the side. Near the center there are two fragmentary columns and in the distance a looming thunderstorm threatens. We get the general feeling of threat... with the suggestion of the protective guard... but these people ..."

stlukesguild,
I can't offer much other than to say you are very informative. Well crafted.

One brief comment regarding "The Tempest". My take is that the threat is the guard. There is a sense of anxiety or outright fear in the mother's face as she looks straight into your eyes as if seeking help or at least hoping that you will stick around until the tempest has passed.

Gilliatt

[mal4mac]

Shakespeare, on the off-chance he might have come out of retirement.