The Art Thread

[stlukesguild]

William Beckman doesn't execute that technique as well as Raphael or Vermeer. He may be trying for the same thing but he's not getting there for some reason. I've offered a hypothesis as to why he's not achieving that level of excellence. Why don't you offer a reasonable hypothesis of your own if you actually disagree with me. Or do you really think he's as great a painter as those masters?

Your hypothesis is based on what? A crappy online reproduction? You've never seen a William Beckman in person... and I doubt you've even seen a Vermeer in person... but you are making your assessments of the painting merits from second-hand knowledge.

Certainly I will agree that there are dozens of realist painters of equal merit. Lucian Freud was far better, and Will Cotton is no less good... albeit his approach owes less to Ingres or Neo-Classicism and more to the light touch and playfulness of the Rococo. However, I have seen a good dozen of Beckman's paintings in real life... in his New York Gallery as well as in a couple of museums. His paint handling is absolutely stunning. No... the work doesn't exhibit the fluidity of the Baroque... or even of a painter like Sargent... it is far closer to the Neo-Classicism of William Bailey. Unfortunately you critical assessment of contemporary... and even modern art is as useless as your assessment of modern and contemporary literature... for the simple reason that you are biased against it as a whole... and only admire that which pastiches the work of the old masters.

But then, Mortal... you have ftil on your side with her brilliant grasp of art... and her mastery of emoticons... so you might just have the upper hand.

[mona amon]

StLukes, I liked all the paintings you posted, except the one by William Beckman. To me it looks like an uninteresting painting of a not particularly beautiful or particularly ugly woman. What am I missing?

That reproduction... the best available on the net (good reproductions of contemporary work is often difficult to find due to issues of copyright and the desire of galleries to maintain control over images by artists they represent) is undoubtedly not the finest. I have seen the particular painting... a portrait of the artist's wife... several times in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. The painting is rendered in an exquisitely polished manner. It is at once "painterly"... and yet the sense of detail and the polished surface are stunning. I am reminded of Ingres. The color is equally exquisite. The background... which appears as little more than a muddy brown in the reproduction, in real life reveals layers of color. One especially notices the subtle mauve or lavender beneath the surface color... which contrasts the warm flesh tones beautifully.

Ah, I thought it may be that. I've seen paintings that seem unimpressive in the catalogue but look amazing when you see them in the gallery.

Interesting that it's a portrait of his wife. One of the problems I had with this painting is that the face and figure were so individualized - like someone you'd bump into in the supermarket, but without her clothes on. A bit disconcerting!

[stlukesguild]

ftil... since you obviously find my taste in Modern and Contemporary art so laughable, I think we'd all be pleased to see your idea of what constitutes some of the finest paintings by living artists.

Interesting that it's a portrait of his wife. One of the problems I had with this painting is that the face and figure were so individualized - like someone you'd bump into in the supermarket, but without her clothes on. A bit disconcerting!

Actually... that was quite the feeling that I initially got upon seeing that painting in person. I had just finished art school... and in many ways this painting... and the nude by Lucian Freud in the same gallery left me absolutely disconcerted. Coming out of years of study of Modernism and Post-Modernism, these paintings didn't look at all like what we had been taught art was like. But I kept coming back... and looking again. Later I found myself thinking how the experience was not unlike the sort of disconcerted... and even outraged responses that Courbet had faced. Quite honestly, my own taste leans away from this sort of realism, and toward something more stylized... abstracted... "artful". But I still found the work quite powerful.

I have an early morning class and then I'm off to the studio, but later tomorrow I'll try to dig up some reproductions of work by a number of artists active over the past few decades... regardless of subject matter or style... whose work I quite like.

[ftil]

Originally posted by stlukesguild
But then, Mortal... you have ftil on your side with her brilliant grasp of art... and her mastery of emoticons... so you might just have the upper hand.

Hehehe…..have you missed Scheherazade’s post about not making personal comments? It was on a previous page.
You can do better than that…..

Let’s go back to Egon Schiele.

Originally posted by stlukesguild

Neither does Egon Schiele offer a candy-coated view of the world. As might be expected of a Viennese artist, he was well acquainted with many of the ideas related to sexuality and angst that were circulating among Viennese artists and intellectuals. He was also cognizant of the hypocritical nature of the view of sex among the Viennese middle-class who expected men to be sexually experienced... through prostitutes or their servants, while demanding that women remain ever virginal. The very idea that women might have sexual desires was considered outrageous and blasphemous.

Schiele offered a view of women as femme-fatales and vampires... seductive... and yet dangerous and reeking of death.


Yes... Schiele could offer a view of sexuality that was disturbing... angst-laden... dangerous... such as the images you posted. But he could also offer a view of sexuality that was turbulent and passionate.

Let's look at his art and his life.

The new York Times:The Wider, Not Wilder, Egon Schiele
By KEN JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/21/ar...pagewanted=all

The Viennese Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) had only two urgent interests: himself and his sexual fantasies. Out of such limited preoccupations and by means of a preternatural gift for drawing and graphic design, he created artworks that still burn with narcissistic yearning, erotic desire, bohemian dissent and existential anxiety.

Black-haired girl with high skirt

Was Schiele a pornographer? In some sense he surely was making art with the purpose of provoking sexual arousal - in addition to shocking the bourgeoisie - and there were people who purchased his work with that purpose in mind, so the answer is yes. (There is also enough evidence to get him charged, if not convicted, as a pedophile by today's standards.) But there have been few pornographers who drew as well as he did. At his best, Schiele was in Toulouse-Lautrec's league as a draftsman. His ways with composition, line and color and his responsiveness to paper were nothing short of exquisite.
Then there was the issue of Schiele's personal life: his interest in underage girls who often modeled for him, and his arrest and 24-day imprisonment in 1912 on charges - eventually dropped - of abducting and molesting a 13-year-old girl. The catalog is circumspect about Schiele's personal life, but the myth of his transgressive predilections remains intact.

Woman With Blue Stockings

Unlike Toulouse-Lautrec, however, Schiele takes little interest in women as people. Women for Schiele are almost always archetypal; in portraits they have severe, masklike faces; in full-figure drawings they are interchangeable objects of desire. There is a certain pathos to his depiction of women, as there is in his portrayal of himself. The body may be a source of ecstatic pleasure, but it can also be an affliction to be endured - see, for example, the studies of nude pregnant women made in a maternity hospital. There is often something overripe in his female figures, as though the body were a barometer of moral degeneration.

Lying woman





Reclining nude with black stockings

In self-portraits Schiele glamorizes himself, exaggerating his soulful eyes, his lithe and skinny body, his long, prehensile fingers, his high forehead and his mass of standing-up hair. He grimaces and gestures dramatically; in some cases - haloed as he is by touches of white gouache, so that he seems to radiate electric energy - he looks positively satanic. He never looks very healthy. He has the emaciated, fiercely hungry look of a spirit starved by the industrial brutality of modernity.

Self-Portrait with Black Earthenware Vessel





Self-portrait standing


In writing about Schiele, scholars and critics dwell on how syphilis killed his father, which he had contracted from a prostitute during his honeymoon and had fatally passed the disease on to four of his children. An older sister died, probably of the disease, when Egon was three, and his father finally succumbed in 1904, when the artist was fourteen.





Sitting male act 2

During his late adolescence Schiele's emotions were directed into an intense relationship with his younger sister, Gerti, which was not without its incestuous implications.
"In 1909 he left the Academy, after completing his third year. He found a flat and a studio and set up on his own. At this time he showed a strong interest in pubescent children, especially young girls, who were often the subjects of his drawings.

Already a superb draughtsman, Schiele made many drawings from these willing models, some of which were extremely erotic. He seems to have made part of his income by supplying collectors of pornography, who abounded in Vienna at that time.
In 1911 Schiele met the seventeen-year-old Wally Neuzil, who was to live with him for a while and serve as the model for some of his best paintings. Little is known of her, save that she had previously modelled for Klimt, and had perhaps been one of the older painter's mistresses.

They then moved to the equally small town of Neulengbach, half an hour from Vienna by train. just as it had been in Vienna, Schiele's studio became a gathering place for all the delinquent children of the neighbourhood. His way of life inevitably aroused animosity, and in April 1912 he was arrested.

"Schiele's narcissism, exhibitionism and persecution-mania can all be found united in the poster he produced for his first one-man exhibition in Vienna, held at the Galerie Arnot at the very beginning Of 1915, in which he portrayed himself as St Sebastian.
From Edward Lucie-Smith, "Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists"
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/S/schiele.html

Two Female Nudes One Reclining One Kneeling Aka The Friends





Pair of Women (Women embracing each other)

Originally posted by stlukesguild

In a painting like Death and the Maiden, Schiele explores an old Germanic theme linking death and beauty... death and sex. The subject was one employed by Franz Schubert in both one of his best known lieder... and a late string quartet... composed as he was aware of his own impending early demise... due to syphilis.

Well, his father died from syphilis.

Sunday Times art critic and specialist in German Expressionism, Frank Whitford remarked:

Schiele was obsessed with his own image like no other 20th century artist. It’s true to say that a great many 20th century artists, particularly in the German-speaking countries, were concerned with the self-portrait, with the Self, but none of them really can be compared with Schiele, who was, not to put too fine a point on it, a narcissist...
Schiele was not only fascinated by sex, indeed obsessed by it, he was also fascinated and obsessed by death, probably in equal measure.


Schiele’s painting was the latest in the long line of images linking sex and death. The theme of Death and the Maiden, coupling a beautiful girl with a skeletal figure, had been recurring in north European paintings for 500 years.



It goes back as far as the 16th century, south German, Hans Baldung Grien. You see it over and over again, you see a skeleton embracing a nubile young woman, gorgeous tight skin, touching her often in a very suggestive way.

[mortalterror]

William Beckman doesn't execute that technique as well as Raphael or Vermeer. He may be trying for the same thing but he's not getting there for some reason. I've offered a hypothesis as to why he's not achieving that level of excellence. Why don't you offer a reasonable hypothesis of your own if you actually disagree with me. Or do you really think he's as great a painter as those masters?

Your hypothesis is based on what? A crappy online reproduction? You've never seen a William Beckman in person... and I doubt you've even seen a Vermeer in person... but you are making your assessments of the painting merits from second-hand knowledge.

I see your ridiculous quibble and raise. If you in fact saw all these paintings at a museum, as you claim, then you were either standing too close or to far away to fully appreciate them. If you saw them at every range then the lighting was wrong. If the lighting was perfect the frame was lousy. If the frame was fine, the gallery director put it between two other paintings which made it look funny. If they were all by the same artist, then it wasn't in the correct series. If they were all by the same series then they weren't in a proper phase of restoration and you should go back because they all look completely different now.

You and your seeing everything in person business. Bah! As if this painting looks like this online



and this



in real life. And before you fire a barrage of different looking Mona Lisa reproductions at me; let's just agree that for the purposes of internet debating there are many fine reproductions out there of famous artworks and a reproduction is often sufficient to get everybody on the same page.

Certainly I will agree that there are dozens of realist painters of equal merit. Lucian Freud was far better, and Will Cotton is no less good... albeit his approach owes less to Ingres or Neo-Classicism and more to the light touch and playfulness of the Rococo. However, I have seen a good dozen of Beckman's paintings in real life... in his New York Gallery as well as in a couple of museums. His paint handling is absolutely stunning. No... the work doesn't exhibit the fluidity of the Baroque... or even of a painter like Sargent... it is far closer to the Neo-Classicism of William Bailey. Unfortunately you critical assessment of contemporary... and even modern art is as useless as your assessment of modern and contemporary literature... for the simple reason that you are biased against it as a whole... and only admire that which pastiches the work of the old masters.

But then, Mortal... you have ftil on your side with her brilliant grasp of art... and her mastery of emoticons... so you might just have the upper hand.

I don't care if ftil is an expert or how many emoticons she uses. I don't think we see eye to eye on everything any more than you and I do but if someone makes a point and they are right they are just right. I know a few smart well educated self-declared experts who get a hold of a bad idea and there is no shaking them. They are really good at defending their erroneous beliefs and justifying it to themselves or others. You have to look at the argument and the chain of reasoning. Though, of course things can be true and still have faulty reasoning, but let's not go too deep into that.

Besides that, I get the impression much of the time that we agree on more than we disagree about and you just like to be a contrarian. You argue both sides of an issue because you are good at it, it keeps you sharp, and you can't stand anyone looking smarter than you. I mean if you really thought that subjects were value neutral you wouldn't paint so many female nudes. All those guys who you say draw ugly things so that all the credit for any success goes to their skills are handicapping themselves. There are good subjects and bad subjects, and if you don't like saying so from a narrative point of view, how about from a visual one? Some shapes look better, some colors look better. Art is a sensory experience and our biology craves things. Nothing is neutral. If a painter wants to paint a solid yellow square that's fine, but it doesn't have the same effect as a man of equal talent drawing a figure. You could paint with mud and urine if you want a challenge, but oils on canvas are just better materials. How can you champion standards on one hand and then have no standards for subjects in art? How can a blank wall be equal in your eyes to rivers, trees, castles?

Besides, a lot of those new age theories you throw around to explain why your picture of broccoli is better than any Madonna and child are usually convoluted up in your head type things produced by people over thinking their craft. There might be something to your "painterly" mumbo jumbo, but I bet a lot of it is just stuff you do so that other professionals know that you can do it and don't laugh at you, not something that genuinely adds to the work. Some of that stuff is just getting graded on the difficulty of execution which is a technical 10 but a visual 4. Picasso could dash off a quick sketch of a bull fight and it might be better than something Daumier worked over for a month layering and repainting.

[stlukesguild]

I see your ridiculous quibble and raise. If you in fact saw all these paintings at a museum, as you claim, then you were either standing too close or to far away to fully appreciate them. If you saw them at every range then the lighting was wrong. If the lighting was perfect the frame was lousy. If the frame was fine, the gallery director put it between two other paintings which made it look funny. If they were all by the same artist, then it wasn't in the correct series. If they were all by the same series then they weren't in a proper phase of restoration and you should go back because they all look completely different now.

You and your seeing everything in person business.

That is the most pathetic argument. The fact that you really cannot discern the vast difference between a work of art in reproduction... and a work of art seen in reality... or have never had the experience... pretty much illustrates the limitations of your visual acumen.

I cannot begin to count the number of paintings... and other works of art... that changed greatly in my esteem as a result of having seen the works in person. Attending an exhibition of Seurat's works I found myself absolutely enthralled with his drawings... that had such a richness and subtly that never came across in any of the reproductions I had seen. The richness and transparency of the colors in Vermeer is wholly lost in reproduction.

I can offer up a single example: Matisse's Music is one of a pair of mural-sized paintings created for the Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin. The other being the famous Dance:



Looking online, one finds a slew of reproductions of Music... which all look quite different in terms of color and value (of course Mortal doesn't grasp the concept that it is these visual elements that are key to a work of visual art).:










The painting is currently housed in the Hermitage in Russia. I was lucky enough to see it some years back as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the time I wasn't a great fan of Matisse... but I had missed a couple of stellar art exhibitions by artists I wasn't enthralled with at the time... but who I later came to love... and I swore not to miss out on such again.

Looking at the reproductions, one cannot be certain which color scheme is closest to the original... and for Matisse, color is paramount. The reproductions are also limited... as most photographic reproductions are... in that they only convey that which a viewer might see from a distance... but they wholly fail to suggest the actual look of the actual surface... the paint as built up in layers which can be "read" in a painting in real life. One of the criticisms leveled at contemporary painting is that it is all about image... that the artist's lack a sensitivity to the painting as an actual, physical object. This is a result of the fact that the vast majority of art students attend art school or college art departments far from any museums, and their entire concept of painting is based upon what they see in reproductions... in books, slides, and on the internet. Sounds like someone we know.

Contrary to Mortal's belief... based, undoubtedly, on his vast experience of having seen art in person... the experience of the art object in reality can be vastly different from what one gets from reproductions. There is relationship between the physical scale of the work of art and our own being. The experience of seeing Vermeer's precious, jewel-like canvases from inches away or standing dwarfed by the vast scale of Rubens' or Veronese's epic, mural scale canvases in which the figures are life-sized or larger... in which brush strokes that look like the most delicate little marks in the 3X5" reproduction are seen to actually be broad sweeping strokes... these are essential to the experience of painting.

The first museum exhibition I attended was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC featuring dual retrospectives of Titian and Van Dyck. The Titian exhibition was largely limited to minor works... except for the last painting. In a room by itself stood The Flaying of Marsyas.



The painting was a late work by the artist. The loose, bravura brushwork won't be seen again until Rembrandt... and Impressionism. This may be the result of it having been left unfinished, although Titian's works became increasingly "expressionistic" as he grew older. The painting in some 7 feet square and absolutely glows... or rather "smolders". None of the reproductions I have seen have even hinted at the glow... the richness... the burgundies and blood reds in the shadows that reinforce the theme of the martyrdom of the artist. I was so stunned by this painting... housed in an obscure collection where I will likely never again see it (Kroměříž Archdiocesan Museum)... that I spent nearly an hour before the work.

[stlukesguild]

Let’s go back to Egon Schiele.

I'm waiting for your idea of what constitutes great art by living artists... not rather useless attempt to undermine Schiele... or another artist whose work has now been in the museums and the art history books for nearly a century.

[ftil]

Let’s go back to Egon Schiele.

I'm waiting for your idea of what constitutes great art by living artists... not rather useless attempt to undermine Schiele... or another artist whose work has now been in the museums and the art history books for nearly a century.

Useless attempt…....in your opinion.

I usually don’t waste my time looking at artists whose art is ugly and disturbing but I am glad that I was inspired here to do so.

Let’s connect the dots. If we want to make changes in society, we need to bring a few morally corrupted and perverted artists. We need to create a theory that would justify those behaviors, and of course, we need to bring a few art critics who will deliver their interpretation of art based on that theory. And a few who will heavily promote it.

Psychiatry and psychology has always been used as a tool of mass manipulation and control. Freud and his fraudulent theory was very handy. Even thought his theory was criticized by psychiatrists and psychologists, it is still used by many to justify all perversions. The rest will blindly follow without questioning…….


There is a good documentary movie done by BBC that explains how psychiatry and psychology was used for mass manipulation and control. This video has many layers.

The century of The Self

The Century Of The Self 1 of 4 Happiness Machines

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prTarrgvkjo

The Century of the self:- 2 of 4 The Engineering of Consent

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tenfbDqiDns

The Century of the self - 3 of 4 There is Policeman Inside all our Heads

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...78873186559982


Century Of Self Part 4 The Century of the self:4 of 4 Eight people sipping the wine

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...87027796578107

Let’s look how it is done.

I have already looked at Schiele’s and Bathus life and art. I have also learned here about Félicien Rops.

Like the works of the authors whose poetry he illustrated, his work tends to mingle sex, death, and Satanic images. Felicien Rops was one of the founding members of Société Libre des Beaux-Arts of Brussels (Free Society of Fine Arts, 1868–1876) and Les XX ("The Twenty," formed 1883).

Félicien Rops was a freemason and a member of the Grand Orient of Belgium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9licien_Rops

Félicien Rops - Saint-Thérèsa

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...9r%C3%A8se.png


Engraving by Félicien Rops . Published in 1865 in Le Diable au Corps

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...en_Rops_69.jpg


Lesbos, Known as Sappho Félicien Rops

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ca_1890%29.jpg


Félicien Rop, Illustration des Diaboliques

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...s_Le_Crime.jpg

Rops met Charles Baudelaire towards the end of the poet's life in 1864, and Baudelaire left an impression upon him that lasted until the end of his days. Rops created the frontispiece for Baudelaire's Les Épaves, a selection of poems from Les Fleurs du mal that had been censored in France, and which therefore were published in Belgium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9licien_Rops

Illustration cover for Les Épaves, by Baudelaire's friend Félicien Rops

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ro...paves_1866.jpg


Felicien Rope’s a few quotes.

"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil.


"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'."

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
Louise Bogan





Let’s look at Baudelaire.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire ( 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translatorof Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil),
Baudelaire began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. Baudelaire began to run up debts, mostly for clothes. Upon gaining his degree in 1839, he told his brother "I don't feel I have a vocation for anything."

Baudelaire became known in artistic circles as a dandy and free-spender. During this timeJeanne Duval became his mistress. His mother thought Duval a "Black Venus" who "tortured him in every way" and drained him of money at every opportunity. She was rejected by his family. He made a suicide attempt during this time.

He smoked opium, and in Brussels he began to drink to excess. Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire

The Flowers of Evil was inspiration for another Belgian occultis, Carlos Schwabe

Carlos Schwabe, The Flower of Evil

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...es_damnees.jpg



So, let’s look how interpretation and justification have been done. Let’s look at Beardsley.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustratorand author. His drawings in black ink, influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic.

Although Beardsley was associated with the homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and other English aesthetes, the details of his sexuality remain in question. He was generally regarded as asexual—which is hardly surprising, considering his chronic illness and his devotion to his work. Speculation about his sexuality include rumors of an incestuous relationship with his elder sister, Mabel, who may have become pregnant by her brother and miscarried.[9][10] During his entire career, Beardsley had recurrent attacks of the disease that would end it.

Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grotesque erotica, which were the main themes of his later work. His illustrations were in black and white, against a white background. Some of his drawings, inspired by Japanese shunga artwork, featured enormous genitalia. His most famous erotic illustrations concerned themes of history and mythology; these include his illustrations for a privately printed edition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and his drawings for Oscar Wilde's play Salome, which eventually premiered in Paris in 1896.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley, Aristophanes Lysistrata

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...istrata-01.jpg


Aubrey Beardsley, Aristophanes Lysistrata

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...istrata-04.jpg

And his art has been interpreted based on idiocy of Freud.

Beardsley also depicts women who do not willingly conform to their role as mothers. This challenges the Victorian idealization of motherhood, where all women are expected to naturally conform to their roles as mothers, and enjoy bearing and raising children. However, Beardsley was aware that many Victorian women feared pregnancy because of the high number of maternal deaths in childbirth. In responding to this anxiety, he created a series of drawings of women with fetuses. In all of the pictures, the fetuses resemble diminutive monsters, and the women seem to express limited delight in their motherhood.

The Salome drawings played upon the latent fears and anxieties of Victorians concerning the New Women. For example, Salome is portrayed in perverse extremes. Many of her gestures are masculine and unattractive, her sexuality is calculated, and her motives are evil in their nature. This is how many Victorian men felt women would emerge once they had achieved all of the objectives of the women's movement. Because male dominance and superiority was being challenged by this movement, men subconsciously feared their social order would be replaced with an equally repressive system of female superiority. As a result, these fears can express themselves in visions of monster-women such as Salome.
http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journa...-3/smith-e.htm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Puderquast.jpg

In what were his most shocking illustrations, Beardsley portrays women who are clearly unashamed about their bodies and sexual needs. Some of his drawings show women with their backs facing the front who appear to be masturbating (illus. 8). In the drawing, Two Athenian Women in Distress, both women masturbate openly (illus. 9). This drawing, however, was suppressed by the 1857 Censorship law because of its obvious suggestiveness.

image can be seen at the link bleow.
http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journa...-3/smith-e.htm

Beardsley expressed a sexuality in his drawings which mocked. the prudishness of the Victorian age, and advocated full freedom to explore sexuality. He shocked Victorians with his grotesque and highly unnatural style, and drawings of nude bodies which were not idealized. Nonetheless, his drawings do not explicitly depict fornication or denigrate women. For these reasons, Beardsley's art can arguably be placed in the sphere of erotica rather than pornography.

Through his criticisms of Victorian vices, Beardsley offers an alternative vision to the hypocrisy and patriarchy of Victorian society. In many of his fantastic and grotesque designs, he creates a world where gender lines blur, and women are depicted as aggressive, powerful, and sexual. This accounts for the erotic themes in much of Beardsley's art. Like the other Decadents, Beardsley was tired of Victorian social pretensions which censored sex in art and literature, and treated women as sexual objects. Rather, he portrays women who he feels are symbolic of the "New Woman" in Victorian society.

Beardsley expressed a sexuality in his drawings which mocked. the prudishness of the Victorian age, and advocated full freedom to explore sexuality. He shocked Victorians with his grotesque and highly unnatural style, and drawings of nude bodies which were not idealized. Nonetheless, his drawings do not explicitly depict fornication or denigrate women. For these reasons, Beardsley's art can arguably be placed in the sphere of erotica rather than pornography.
http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journa...-3/smith-e.htm

So, we may ask from where those idea of mass manipulation and control comes.

Well, I need to bring a C. Jung quote.

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense - he is 'collective man,' a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.
(Carl Jung, Psychology and Literature, 1930)

But from whom he got his idea. Well, we need to go to Giordano Bruno. Renaissance occultist and magician.

At Oxford University, Giordano Bruno’s brief, obscure but very profound work, De vinculis in genere, is considered a cornerstone of modern political thought – on the par with Machiavelli’s Prince. In fact, many Anglo Saxon and Middle European historians and intellectuals consider De vinculis in genere modernity’s most intelligent and insightful political work.

These academics, and among them Dahrendorf, and the now deceased Eliade and his disciple Couliano, are just the latest scholars to consider the De vinculis in genere a masterpiece. The first to recognize the importance of Bruno’s text were the Rosicrucians, as indicated in the texts of P. Arnold and F. A. Yates on the movement’s history.

Bruno knew as he said in De vinculis in genere that love and sex is “bond of bonds’, the most powerful tool of mass manipulation and control.

Public nudity, pornography, prostitution, all sexual perversions , including pedophilia and incest are the tools to make change in society. We have already see the photos a naked siblings in a sexual context.

We may ask where we are going. Today, 20 millions people in America suffer from major depression. Similar number of people suffer form anxiety. When we can add 51% people of divorce and all addiction, we may see the seriousness of the problem.

And a few Goethe's quotes.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So true.

[stlukesguild]

I usually don’t waste my time looking at artists whose art is ugly and disturbing but I am glad that I was inspired here to do so.

Art is an individual's expression inspired by his or her experiences. Unfortunately, the world is not always pretty... and considering that art mirrors the world, art is not always going to be pretty. Art is more likely to tackle the ugliness in the world over the past couple hundred years than in the more distant past due to the fact that the themes or subjects of art are no longer dictated by aristocrats and the clergy.

Let’s connect the dots. If we want to make changes in society, we need to bring a few morally corrupted and perverted artists. We need to create a theory that would justify those behaviors, and of course, we need to bring a few art critics who will deliver their interpretation of art based on that theory. And a few who will heavily promote it.

Only a few idealists among artists ever looked to art to change the world. Artist's may comment on issues and offer criticism of the same, but very few imagine that they have any real impact upon the course of history.

It may be of interest to point out that your moral judgments passed upon "perverted" and "corrupted" artists are not far removed from those passed by the Nazis upon "Degenerate Art". Indeed, it would seem that your opinions of just which artists qualify as perverted correlate to a great extent with those identified as "Degenerate Artists".

Psychiatry and psychology has always been used as a tool of mass manipulation and control. Freud and his fraudulent theory was very handy. Even thought his theory was criticized by psychiatrists and psychologists, it is still used by many to justify all perversions. The rest will blindly follow without questioning…….

First of all... I will reiterate the suggestion that your excessive use of emoticons tends to work against you. The constant use of this laughing icon comes off as ridiculous... like one who keeps laughing assuming that others are laughing with them... when in reality they are laughing at them.

Hitler didn't like Freud either. There's a lovely site here that echoes many of your attacks on Modern Art as nothing more than "perversion":

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...moon-ArtI.html

There is a good documentary movie done by BBC that explains how psychiatry and psychology was used for mass manipulation and control. This video has many layers.

So the whole of Modern Art... or the majority of Modern Art that you find "ugly" has only succeeded due to the brainwashing of the masses. Of course the "masses" have largely been irrelevant to art. So it must be the "decline of art" must be attributed to the degeneracy of the "elites"? This is not to say that there aren't problems with the "art world"... the system of art education and the art market. But ultimately the vast majority of all art has always been mediocre at best. Discerning what among the art of the recent past is the finest work, has always been the challenge... and open to debate. As with the judgment of literature, it ultimately all comes down to opinion... but some opinions are better than others. Many would question the opinions of any individual who is quick to dismiss any art that doesn't meet his or her ideals of "beauty" as the product of "perverted and corrupted" artists... especially when said artists have been long recognized as important figures in the history of art.

Let’s look how it is done.

I have already looked at Schiele’s and Bathus life and art. I have also learned here about Félicien Rops.

And to what end? Rops was a minor figure, at best... just one of many artists/poets/composers among those known as the "decadents": Franz von Bayros, Ferdinand Hodler, Franz von Stuck, Harry Clark, Jean Deville, Alfred Kubin, Odilion Redon, Gustave Moreau, Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, J.K. Huysmans, Comte de Lautréamont, Theophile Gautier. Algernon Swinburne, Edgar Allen Poe, etc... There was a preoccupation with an exploration of the dark side of human nature throughout much of the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Much of this dates back to the Romantics: paintings by Goya, Coleridge's Christabel, Frankenstein, Dracula, horor and ghost stories.

Let’s look at Baudelaire.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire ( 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translatorof Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil),
Baudelaire began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. Baudelaire began to run up debts, mostly for clothes. Upon gaining his degree in 1839, he told his brother "I don't feel I have a vocation for anything."

Baudelaire became known in artistic circles as a dandy and free-spender. During this timeJeanne Duval became his mistress. His mother thought Duval a "Black Venus" who "tortured him in every way" and drained him of money at every opportunity. She was rejected by his family. He made a suicide attempt during this time.

He smoked opium, and in Brussels he began to drink to excess. Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed

The Flowers of Evil was inspiration for another Belgian occultis, Carlos Schwabe

Somehow I think you're undermining your arguments against the "perversion" in Modern/Contemporary art when you include a figure such as Charles Baudelaire among your list of "perverted artists". Baudelaire is one of the greatest poets of all time... perhaps the finest writing in French.

But from whom he got his idea. Well, we need to go to Giordano Bruno. Renaissance occultist and magician.

At Oxford University, Giordano Bruno’s brief, obscure but very profound work, De vinculis in genere, is considered a cornerstone of modern political thought – on the par with Machiavelli’s Prince. In fact, many Anglo Saxon and Middle European historians and intellectuals consider De vinculis in genere modernity’s most intelligent and insightful political work.

These academics, and among them Dahrendorf, and the now deceased Eliade and his disciple Couliano, are just the latest scholars to consider the De vinculis in genere a masterpiece. The first to recognize the importance of Bruno’s text were the Rosicrucians, as indicated in the texts of P. Arnold and F. A. Yates on the movement’s history.

Bruno knew as he said in De vinculis in genere that love and sex is “bond of bonds’, the most powerful tool of mass manipulation and control.

Public nudity, pornography, prostitution, all sexual perversions , including pedophilia and incest are the tools to make change in society. We have already see the photos a naked siblings in a sexual context.

We may ask where we are going. Today, 20 millions people in America suffer from major depression. Similar number of people suffer form anxiety. When we can add 51% people of divorce and all addiction, we may see the seriousness of the problem.

And a few Goethe's quotes.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I suspect that I'm not the only one who feels like most of this is just aimless rambling. Your point is?

I might add that I also suspect that outside of the quotes you found on the internet, you actually have never read Goethe. If you had... you'd be aware of his vulgar Walpurgisnacht as well as a any number of erotic poems that surely challenge his quote on "taste". Or one might alternatively suggest that it is likely that Goethe's concept of "taste" may not be at all in line with what you think of as "taste".

[ftil]

{edit}

You haven't addressed my points regarding mass manipulation and control that has been clearly presented in The Century of The Self I posted.

The documentary movie I posted was a key to understand the depth of mass manipulation and control. I didn't criticized painters but I quoted art critic who applied Freud theory to explain art, theory that was heavily criticized by psychiatrists and psychologists.

Second, I looked at private life of a few artists. I have found pedophilia, incestuous relations, prostitution, contracting syphilis, and alcoholism. It is not a secret. I am glad that I have done it...... everything become crystal clear.

I am not going to add anything else....{edit}

I want to end our discussion since I feel uncomfortable when my points are ignored.



Enjoy LitNet

[Pierre Menard]

...

Thanks for the recommendations. I'll get cracking

[stlukesguild]

You can find many of these books... or similar volumes on art history... in most good used book stores for considerably less than new.

[stlukesguild]

Well... let's start posting some work by some of the most interesting artists who have been active over the past 30 or 40 years.

Francis Bacon falls at the extreme of that time limitation. He first garnered some degree of attention in the 1930s and 1940s, but really didn't gain any real notoriety until the 1960s when he was oddly clumped along side Pop Art. Bacon's work was profoundly influenced by the fragmentation of Picasso, by film and photography; icons and altarpieces... and by his own personal life. By his own admission, Bacon was into the Sadomasochistic Homosexual scene... the "rough trade", and his erotic obsessions are given clear voice in his paintings where coupled with the forms and colors and themes (especially the crucifixion) of religious icons and altarpieces, and images of struggle and violence drawn from photography, the paintings have been recognized as a comment on the horror and violence of the 20th century:





The triptych, Three Studies for a Crucifixion, completed in the early 1960s and currently housed in the Guggenheim Museum, NY, is quite possibly, Bacon's strongest work. Bacon employed the triptych format... historically reserved for religious altarpieces... quite likely inspired by the German Expressionist, Max Beckmann. The painting employs a rich, painterly handling of paint, a brilliant glowing red that undoubtedly alludes to blood and to the background of many crucifixions, including that of the Flemish Renaissance master, Rogier Van der Weyden:



In the central panel, Christ's martyrdom is echoes in the agonized torture of a figure writhing in pain. The bed is blood-spattered and the body contorted and having the appearance of rotting flesh.

In the left panel, we are given a glimpse almost as from the point of view of the tortured figure on the bed. Looking down his own contorted body, past his legs, stand two onlookers... figures in suits. We are left wondering whether they are friends... faceless bureaucrats, or his torturers. I find myself leaning toward the idea of the horrific bureaucrat ala Franz Kafka or those who organized and documented the "final solution".

In the right panel we see a hanging cow carcass which undoubtedly alludes to Rembrandt's famous painting:



...as well as that of the more contemporary Expressionist, Chaim Soutine:



But there is also a suggestion of the horrific "still life" paintings made by Gericault during the height of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror:



Bacon has admitted a certain fascination with meat... and the butchers' shop. He has spoken of the hanging carcass as perversely akin to the image of the crucified Christ: so much hanging, dead flesh.

Bacon remained obsessed with images of horror and violence staged in an iconic manner. In the painting, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, humanoid figures are staged in a stark setting not unlike the artifice of a classical Greek play. The central figure... Agamemnon... sits hunched over on his throne... behind him the typical "cloth of honor" often hung behind images of the Holy Virgin or the Pope. Blood runs through the open doorway on the left as the image of the Fury hovers in the air. On the right... a headless muscular figure suggests the "hero", Orestes.

Perhaps the most disturbing of Bacon's triptych's is his Triptych- May-June 1973:



In this painting we are presented with an iconic view of the death of Bacon's long-term lover, George Dyer. Dyer is seen rushing to the sink in the right panel where he vomits. In the central panel he staggers in the dark... beneath a burned out single light bulb... the shadow hovers over him like some great bird of prey... until he collapses... and dies on the toilet. Only bacon with his cruel sense of irony could have appreciated... and painted the pathetic death of a loved one in such a manner.

Bacon's paintings are certainly not "pretty"... but they are stunningly gorgeous... "beautiful" in aesthetic terms. I had the chance to see nearly the whole of his major works at the retrospective recently staged at the Met in NY. The colors absolutely glow... and there is a freshness to the work that appears as if it were just painted yesterday and was still wet. He's not an artist whose work I would want hanging in my living-room... but then again, I don't want to look at many of Goya's paintings everyday, nor watch Schindler's List repeatedly.

The next artist I offer will be something quite removed from the harrowing aspects of Bacon.

[stlukesguild]

You haven't addressed my points regarding mass manipulation and control that has been clearly presented in The Century of The Self I posted.

I want to end our discussion since I feel uncomfortable when my points are ignored.

I don't really see how these have anything to do with the purpose of this thread... or with Modern Art.

Second, I looked at private life of a few artists. I have found pedophilia, incestuous relations, prostitution, contracting syphilis, and alcoholism. It is not a secret. I am glad that I have done it...... everything become crystal clear.

It is the art I judge and not the artist. Caravaggio pandered homoerotic images of young boys to high-ranking clergy with similar tastes, and was a known murderer. That doesn't effect my assessment of this painting:

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Bacon is a new one on me and judging by what you presented I must say he was "out there".
I can't quite discern what is depicted in the first triptych example, comes across as a smoked oyster.

While you prepare for the next artist, here’s some miscellaneous time filler.

Regarding books for Pierre, there is one that I picked up several years ago titled Medieval Art – Painting, Sculpture, Architecture 4th – 14th Century by James Snyder.

Philosophical quotes:
I tend to defer to Will Rogers
"There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves. "


Something related to your next period.
I had visited “The Modern” museum of Fort Worth last year. I wasn’t aware of what was currently on exhibit before entering. As it turned out they were featuring paintings by Richard Diebenkorn (1922 – 1993) including his “Ocean Park” series. I was not familiar with Diebenkorn prior to that visit, but I was impressed enough that I can at least recall his name along with a lasting impression of Ocean Park No 54:



I was drawn to the palette of colors used and their tones as they are similar to those I instinctively use in watercolor. Beyond the use of color, there is a subtle three dimensional “layering” aspect that is interesting parts of which appears as folded paper.

Another by Diebenkorn I admired is Cityscape:



I see it as creating tension along the well defined edge between urban sprawl and the unspoiled landscape on the right. I was drawing similarities, between Diebenkorn and these images I rediscovered from Charles Macintosh (from the name the painting game):






Speaking of The Modern, Tadao Ando’s architecture ain’t half bad either:

From museum website


http://www.themodern.org/