The Visual Arts: Exploring the History of "Fine Art" and Beyond

[stlukesguild]

Art is "worth" whatever somebody is willing to pay. Are the professional athletes paid millions to throw a ball around "worth it"... especially in comparison to the pitiful salaries paid to police officers, firemen, soldiers, nurses, teachers, etc...?

[ftil]

I have noticed that stlukesguild has made a post today but I can't see it posted here.. I looked at his posts.......and I found that he indeed has made a post.

Art is "worth" whatever somebody is willing to pay. Are the professional athletes paid millions to throw a ball around "worth it"... especially in comparison to the pitiful salaries paid to police...

Strange indeed......


I have noticed that after I posted .........his post appeared.......

[Emil Miller]

Here is one abstract art fact I found earlier.

A painting by abstract artist Mark Rothko has fetched $75.1 million (£47.2m) at an auction in New York.

Attachment 8466

Is that a fine art worthy of the money?

As Stlukes has said, art is worth whatever someone is prepared to pay for it, i.e. it's about money. Now let's imagine a scenario in which artists, art critics and auctioneers tacitly decide to deceive the gullible into believing that a black square painted onto a yellow square, choose your combination of colours, is worth millions of dollars/pounds/yen/euro ...choose your own currency, according to who has either been deceived into buying or is part of the scheme to sell nonsense to a sucker: who may not be a sucker because he realises what is going on and will recoup his outlay when he sells the painting to another 'sucker' who, in turn, will sell it at at an increased price. I believe the word racket is what the ignorant uncultured masses might apply to what is really a laughable attempt to sell unsubstantiated, except by ingenuous or compromised art critics, rubbish on the basis of what cannot be readily understood must contain some mystical quality known only to the initiated.

[stlukesguild]

As Stlukes has said, art is worth whatever someone is prepared to pay for it, i.e. it's about money. Now let's imagine a scenario in which artists, art critics and auctioneers tacitly decide to deceive the gullible into believing that a black square painted onto a yellow square, choose your combination of colours, is worth millions of dollars/pounds/yen/euro ...choose your own currency...

The reality is that there are elements of collusion, conflict of interest, fraud, hyperbole, etc... rampant in the art industry... but I doubt these are unknown in other fields of marketing. Major works of art dating prior to Impressionism still in private hands are a rarity. Thus, as the number of millionaires and billionaires... and art collectors increases, the price of major modern works has also increased. Combine this with the reality that many collectors buy only for investment purposes... and many collectors have no real eye for art, or grasp for art history... and you are presented with a scenario in which a fool and his money are soon parted.

The problem with your scenario, however, is that it would assume a collaboration worthy of the most fantastic James Bond narratives. The reality is that Mark Rothko has withstood some 70 years of history and remains a central figure to a major 20th century artistic development: Abstract Expressionism. You may see little of merit to this artistic development... (and honestly, it's not my favorite)... just as you may see nothing of merit to jazz or blues music... but that does not make it inherently a fraud. I have seen the entire group of Rothko's Seagram's paintings together, and I found that they resonated the sort of feeling one might take from a Japanese Zen garden. Is this worth $75 Million US? I could think of far better things to spend such money on... even far better art... but it's not my money. I'm not the one who's spending it. I'm far more offended by cities offering tax abatements in the millions... or spending hundreds of millions of dollars on stadiums built for overpaid football players because this is public money... money that could be spent on the schools, and road repair, and proper police and fire protection, etc...

I believe the word racket is what the ignorant uncultured masses might apply to what is really a laughable attempt to sell unsubstantiated, except by ingenuous or compromised art critics, rubbish on the basis of what cannot be readily understood must contain some mystical quality known only to the initiated.

Ultimately, the monetary value of all art cannot be substantiated except by the "experts": art critics, art historians, curators, dealers, collectors, art lovers, and artists. The fact that the masses cannot "get" why Rothko can demand such a high price is meaningless. Neither can the masses grasp why Vermeer is infinitely superior to hundreds of other "Little Dutch Masters", nor can they grasp why Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, and Coleridge are preferable to William Congreve, Thomas Nashe, Colley Cibber, or James MacPherson.

[ftil]

I have been looking at contemporary surreal art.

Michael Hussar has been featured in Metamorphosis 2 (beinArt Publishing).
The Metamorphosis series provides exposure for artists who express themselves imaginatively with exceptional technique and uncompromised individuality.

Driven by love, hate, sin, redemption and death, Michael Hussar's oil paintings present the viewer with a contextual maturity that is both confrontational and evocative. Hussar describes his work as "a voyeuristic snapshot of perceived humanity, complete with freaks and fakery; a gothic wonderland illuminating the gray area between truths and lies." Hussar's attachment to his paintings runs deep; each piece is a journal of sorts, allowing him to come face to face with his demons and exorcising them with each new stroke of the brush. Hussar's paintings are in the private collections of Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppolla and Leonardo Di Caprio.
http://beinart.org/artists/michael-h...ry/paintings/#

Well, one of the ugliest paintings I have ever seen. Because they are so ugly, they deserve attention.
Unfortunately, he is not alone.


Michael Hussar gallery

http://www.michaelhussar.biz/pages/main_menu_pg.html


More of his paintings at BeinArt International Surreal Art

http://beinart.org/artists/michael-h...ry/paintings/#

[stlukesguild]

Michael Hussar is a representative of an artistic movement commonly termed "Pop Surrealism", "Neo Surrealism" or "Lowbrow Art". I have a degree of empathy... even admiration for the movement because I am quite in agreement with Pablo Picasso's suggestion that art is best produced in the same manner in which the Aristocrats of the Renaissance produced their children: a merger of the low-born and the high-born. Picasso went on to further suggest that either culture... the high or the "low"/popular culture... left on its own, was prone to degenerate and/or stagnate. Looking at some of the artistic developments since WWII, one cannot help but sense that Picasso was quite on the mark. I cannot imagine the development of Minimalism...






or Conceptual Art...



... outside of the insulated world of academia.

Pop Art in the 1960s rejected the excessively high-minded "seriousness" and "purity" of Abstract Expressionism...

]





... and drew their attention from popular culture: advertising, Hollywood movies and celebrities, pop and rock music, television, pin-ups, etc... "Pop Surrealism" or "Lowbrow Art" builds upon this tradition. They draw imagery from the same sources: Hollywood, rock music, film and television, popular celebrities, popular literature (Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings, etc...) fairy tales, pin-ups and pornography. This later movement, however, tends to be more intentionally sarcastic and satirical... a lot "darker"... and at a time when the dominant "Art World" of New York and London is really controlled by a few super-rich dealers and collectors, these artists have little interest in appealing to or being taken seriously by this market. Just as the Impressionists openly embraced the term intended as an insult and staged their own exhibitions (the Salon des Refusés), so the Pop Surrealists freely embrace the term "Low Brow Artists".
What I especially admire is that the artists make an attempt to deal with the culture in which they live, and to engage with a larger audience.

Having said this much... I find most of the work of the Pop Surrealists to be mediocre at best... but then again, 90%+ of all art is mediocre at best. Personally, I find Michael Hussar's paintings juvenile and over-the-top in their effort to shock.





They strike me as an equivalent of illustrated covers to heavy metal albums or cheap "slasher" horror films. There are far better alternatives to Hussar IMO.

[ftil]

Thank you for your introduction.

I have found his art ugly. I don’t make any comment about his artistic talent but I look what feelings the paintings evoke and whether they uplift my spirit with beauty or I pick up very dark and disturbing energy. I have brought his art here because an occultist posted his paintings on another forum. I didn’t know his art except of a few his paintings. Lots of occult symbolism.

Anyway, the king of the most ugly and disturbing art is HR Giger, and of course, a favorite of occultists.


Tribute To HR Giger - Dark Surrealist Art

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

[stlukesguild]

I used to participate in a game on the art site that I frequent which involved identifying a mystery painting posted by another member. The game largely dies out after the development of reverse image search programs such as TinEye allowed anyone to cheat. While I personally have a broad and deep background in Art History, having done honors work and independent study in the field as well as tutored other students and worked as a research assistant to a couple of art historians during my art school days... and having continued to study the field since then... there were still those works of art that completely left me baffled... and I would spend hours on Google searching from every imaginable direction. Beyond the "thrill of the hunt" I greatly valued the experience because of the sheer number of interesting artists that I would stumble upon who were unknown to me up to that point.

I don't stumble upon as many artists who are "new" to me today... except when I have been spending a good deal of time looking around on Google for ideas or reference images for a new painting. Just this week I came upon two fascinating painters that I had never heard of before. Both employ ideas and visual elements that I find quite intriguing... and that may possibly lead me to some ideas for my own work. Surprisingly... both of the artists are women. I'd like to offer a look at the work of these two painters... starting with the more "quirky" of the pair: Tabitha Vevers.

Tabitha Vevers

Tabitha Vevers is the daughter of Tony Vevers, an artist, curator, critic who was active in the Provincetown, Massachusetts arts community. She studied art at Yale where she took a BA cum laude in painting in 1978. She also did a post-graduate residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting, Maine. Among her professional work, she has been a visiting artist at Provincetown Art Association, the Art Institute of Boston, the New England School of Art and Design, and the Massachusetts College of Art. She has won numerous awards, her paintings are in any number of collections, private and public, including several museums, and she has been given frequent one-person exhibitions since 1983.

Vevers' work builds upon several art historical sources. She is clearly inspired by early Italian Renaissance painting by artists such as Giovanni di Paolo, Fra Angelico, and Duccio, among others:







Like these early Renaissance painters, Vevers prefers to work on small panels and has a penchant for gold leaf. She also frequently employs fantastic mythological imagery and a suggested or implied (yet open-ended) narrative:


Eden-Eveandadam


Eden-Expulsion


Eden-Gynandromorph


Eden-Intelligent Design


Eden-Limbo


Eden-Mammaesupial


Eden-The Three Graces

Her paintings often clearly reference Christian and classical Greco-Roman narratives common to painting: Adam and Eve, the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Christ in Limbo, St. Jerome and the Lion, and the Three Graces. Vevers, however, often metamorphoses these narratives... and the characters in her paintings... in a manner suggestive of Surrealism. The painting, Eden-Limbo, alludes at once to Christ in Limbo and St. Jerome in the Wilderness with his lion... except that man and lion have now become one. In Eden-The Three Graces the subject matter that historically portrayed three nude graces admired for their fine breasts and derrière are now reduced even more so to mere body parts... yet in a most unsettling manner.


Lion-Aftermath


Lioness-What?


Lioness-Dehibernation


Lioness-Quieting the Night


Remorse

The morphing of Human and Lion is a favorite theme in Vevers' work. Eden-Expulsion, Remorse, and Lion-Aftermath give the phrase "dragging his tail between his legs" and entirely new, yet pertinent, meaning. In Lioness-Dehibernation it is now a human/lion as opposed to a wolf raising two Romulus and Remus-like infants who hang from her tail like monkey-bars... while she stares back over her shoulder at the viewer with an expression and pose laden with potential erotic meaning.


Amoebayouba


Amoebayouba at Dusk


Trouble in Paradise

Vevers' morphed or mutated humanoids allude to her concerns for the environment and her thoughts of a post-apocalyptic world. Among the humanoid creatures she imagines a new being that combines both male and female... thus eliminating the tensions and warfare between the sexes.


Double Escape


Flying Dream-Irene


Flying Dream-Levitation


Flying Dream-Marja


Flying Dream-Anonymous


Flying Dream-Claire


Flying Dream-In the Dunes


Flying Dream-Mary


Flying Dream-Norris


Flying Dream-Suzanne


Flying Dream-The Bakery


Flying Dream-The Lesson


Flying Dream-The Professor


Flying Dream-Water Ballet

Vevers' created a series of paintings based upon dreams of flying that she collected from some 200 interested individuals. She often added written narratives of the dreams to her paintings. The dream narratives vary in setting and detail, but the majority involve nudity... and intimation of sexuality or eroticism... which is true of the whole of Vevers' oeuvre.


Bananaman to the Rescue


Bananaman-Transported

Building upon the cycle of flying dreams, Vevers' offers a satirical look at the tradition of flying male superheroes in the form of Bananaman.


A Parable for Our Time-Big Fish Eat Small Fish


Seaweed Collector


Shell Boat


Untitled

Growing along the Atlantic Ocean, Vevers was long attracted to nautical themes. She began painting on shells in the same manner in which fisherman and sailors often painted and carved on shells, whale bone, and other sea-related objects.


Rapture


Rapture


Rapture


Reunion


Shell Love


Wild Ride

Perhaps the most intriguing... and certainly the most unsettling... of these shell paintings is a series of images of women sexually cavorting with various sea-creatures: squid, lobster, seal, etc... The poses often allude to Japanese and Indian erotic paintings... and the theme of women sexually pleasured by sea-creatures such as squid or octopus owes its inspiration to Japanese Shunga prints and erotic carvings:





This theme of the woman pleasured by the octopus is so often repeated in Japanese art as to amount to a genre of erotica. The subject continues to intrigue artists... high and low... today:





Vevers' continued to explore the theme of women involved erotically with various sea-creatures in more traditional painting formats... combining elements drawn from various non-Western mythological/religious narratives:


Shiva-Exodus


Shiva-Fire and Ice


Shiva-The Art of Survival

Another body of work by Vevers is a series of paintings of "Lover's Eyes"... all alluding to eyes drawn from art history:


Lover's Eye after Bronzino


Lover's Eye-Judith, after Cranach


Lover's Eye-Magdalena, after Titian


Lover's Eye After Benvenuto


The Pearlmaker

Personally, I find Vevers' paintings quite compelling. The imagery is quite suggestive... and yet open-ended... leaving the viewer to offer up his or her own interpretation. Her technique is quite exquisite... building on examples of early Italian Renaissance painting, the fantastic narratives of Bosch and Bruegel, and the Surrealism of Dali and Rene Magritte.

[stlukesguild]

I promised a second female painter, and I have finally gotten around to having enough time to follow through.

In spite of the thinking of many hard-core Modernists, a good majority of artists are inspired by more than the art of the immediate past. Indeed, a good many artists and entire movements rejected the art of the immediate past. Of course there are "dangers" to building ones art upon past styles. An art built upon a single past era often comes across as little more than a pastiche which is one reason that artists drawing from the past tend to pick an choose from across the entire spectrum of the art history... like choosing at a buffet. But there are pastiches... and there are pastiches. Without a doubt... this was a pastiche:



Following the almost total destruction due to burning in the 19th century, the Houses of Parliament were rebuild after the design by Charles Barry in a pseudo-Gothic style. The historical-style in which modern buildings mimicked the look of various historical styles was quite popular in the late 19th century... especially in architecture... but it can also be seen in the works of painters such as the Pre-Raphaelites and the Nazarenes of Germany. Most major European and American cities can boast of banks, churchs, cathedrals, and college/university buildings that are essentially pastiches of historical styles such as the Gothic and Greek & Roman Classicism. Not far from where I live stands a lovely Neo-Romanesque cathedral: St. Ignatius of Antioch:



While the building is clearly a pastiche of a dated style... it is also a marvelously beautiful work of art.

This brings me to my artist in question... the painter Catherine Abel:





Catherine Abel was born in 1966. She developed a passion for the art of the early 20th century: Art Deco, Futurism, Cubism, and the work of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. She began her professional career in 2000. She spent three years living in Paris and San Francisco and making repeated visits to Italy where she studied the techniques of the "old masters" and honed her abilities. Since3 then, she has returned to her home in Australia where she has become a highly successful painter.

Abel works in a number of genre. Her still-life paintings commonly draw upon the work of painters such as Fernand Léger, the Futurists, and the Cubists...


-Fernand Henri Léger


-Maiden Voyage


-Still Life with Teapot

She also frequently paints floral still life paintings... drawing upon the exotic and tropical flora common in the paintings of Diego Rivera:


-Diego Rivera


-Palm Leaves


-Deux Lllies

Abel is also appreciated for her city-scapes and images of machines and forms of travel that clearly build upon the pre-WWI ideals of the city and the machine age:


-Ships in the Harbour


-Bon Voyage

Abel's images of modern travel by ship are clearly rooted in Art Deco era images of ships and travel:



Her views of the city are just as much rooted in a fantastic idea that owes more to the art of the 1920 than it does to any reality of the urban landscape:



A painting such as The Beauty of Her (above) speaks as much of an idealized beauty of the American City... of New York... as it does of an idealized beauty of women.


-La Rive Gauche

Abel's view of the modern city, lacks any of the undercurrent of darkness that one might find in the work of Max Beckmann, for example:


-Max Beckmann: View of the Harbour, Genoa

Yet there are undeniable stylistic similarities... such as the use of bold, graphic, simplified forms. Abel has made it clear that her interest is not at all in portraying the seamy underside or ugliness of reality... her interest is "beauty"... and first and foremost is an attempt to convey an idealized feminine beauty that owes to various Renaissance masters such as Raphael... but more than anything else, is rooted in the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka:





Abel's paintings of women include clothed and nude figures, allegorical figures, and portraits. In these paintings of women the artist is able to explore all of the other interests already mentioned: still-life, the city, travel, flora, etc...

Abel's portraits... or those paintings of women based upon observation of real women or models are among her strongest works:


-Willow


-Tea, Late Afternoon


-Evening Primrose


-Reflections of Grace


-Olive, Satin Dress


-Girl with Scarab Ring

This may owe to the inherent tension between the real human being... painted from direct observation... and the invented/fantastic setting. Paintings such as Olive, Satin Dress (above) and Chez Suzy (below) come closest to conveying something of a dark side... rooted as they are in the paintings of the German Expressionist movement known as the New Objectivity... especially the work of Christian Schad:




-Christian Schad


-Christian Schad



Of course Schad, for all his similar mannerisms, could be far more brutally honest... and real.

One of Abel's most exquisitely beautiful paintings is the portrait, Belle du jour:



Here Abel has captured a little melancholia... something that verges on the bitterweet.

Abel's nudes are among her finest paintings. Whether focusing upon the nude in "nature"...


-Bird of Paradise


-Renoir's Garden


-Kiki Among the Poppies


-Eden


-Opium Dreamer

... or whether the nude is seen in a more "modern" setting:


-Sun Worshipers


-Red Scarf



... Abel's nudes are ever artificial... idealized fantasies... and ever beautifully decorative. Such criticisms would be seen my many tied-in-the-wool Modernists as damning... but I am not of that strain of thought. While I don't find paintings such as Abel's to be profoundly moving or emotionally charged... I don't think that all art must edgy or have a dark side. For what they are... beautiful decorative bon-bons... Abel's paintings are quite good... and sometimes that's enough.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Amazing.
This artist appeals to me, particularly those with Cubist elements.
Thanks

[stlukesguild]

I thought I'd cross-post this here on the art thread:

Anselm Kiefer is quite likely the strongest artist (painter/sculptor) since the 1970s. He was born in Germany in the last days of the Second World War, and history... particularly German history... has been the primary focus of his work. Kiefer studied with the conceptual artist, Joseph Beuys and the painter Peter Dreher. His sources of inspiration include Abstract Expressionism, German Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism, Richard Wagner, German History, the Kabbalah and Hebrew mysticism, poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, the Bible, the Nazis and their interest in the occult, Nazi architecture, Velimir Khlebnikov, Robert Fludd, etc...

I'll offer you a look at a few of his works:

Margarethe is an early work of Kiefer's mature style:



The painting is clearly rooted in the tradition of American Abstract Expressionism... especially Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles:



Where Pollock's painting was all paint, Kiefer employs collage elements... in particular, straw. The painting alludes primarily to Paul Celan's poem, Death Fugue:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined.

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink you and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith

-Trans. Michael Hamburger

Celan contrasts the blonde Germanic Margarethe (from Geothe's Faust) with the "ashen haired" Shulamith, from the Hebrew Song of Songs:

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me...

Not only does the term "ashen hair" suggest the dark hair of the Hebrew lover... but it also conveys... horribly... the hair of the Jews turned to ashes in the crematoria of Auschwitz.

Kiefer's painting suggests a German Romantic landscape... strewn with straw by farmers. But the straw is also hair... the blonde hair of Margarethe... the "ashen hair" of Shulamith burnt by a blow torch in the lower regions of the painting... topped with a flame. It also suggests the hair shaved from the victims at the death camps. All of Kiefer's paintings are layered with such multiple allusions.

German philosophy, literature, painting and music all came of age during the period of Romanticism. The landscape was the subject matter of choice... conveying the German love of the land...

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht?
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! dahin
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.

Kennst du das Haus? Auf Säulen ruht sein Dach.
Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,
Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! dahin
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Beschützer, ziehn.

Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg;
In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut;
Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut!
Kennst du ihn wohl?
Dahin! dahin
Geht unser Weg! O Vater, laß uns ziehn!

(Do you know the land where the lemon trees blossom?
Among dark leaves the golden oranges glow.
A gentle breeze from blue skies drifts.
The myrtle is still, and the laurel stands high.
Do you know it well?
There, there
would I go with you, my beloved.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X9-Qd7JA9w

The landscape also conveyed a sense of the sublime... and the infinite:



In Kiefer's mature paintings, his metaphor of choice was the "Wasteland"... the landscape now burnt and charred and forever sullied by the horrors of WWII. One of the finest of such paintings resides in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The work is entitled, Lot's Wife:



In J.M.W. Turner's great landscapes or the Romantic era, it is nature... the blinding light of the sun... that devours humanity:



In Kiefer's paintings... which certainly owe much to Turner... it is mankind and history that devour nature. The landscape becomes a wasteland.

In Lot's Wife the surface of the painting is encrusted in mud and clay and putty and paint suggesting the very land itself... a mire. Train-tracks cut their way through this landscape like the train-tracks cutting across Poland on the way to Auschwitz. The painting itself is on lead as opposed to canvas. Kiefer repeatedly employed lead in an allusion to alchemy and the desire to turn lead to gold... just as the artist struggles equally in vain to convert the leaden history into a golden ideal. The cloud hovering above the charred wasteland is made of salt... which clearly alludes to the story of Lot's Wife... who was told... like the German population... "Don't look back".

A later landscape that continues the "Wasteland" theme is entitled: Velimir Chlebnikov



Velimir Chlebnikov was a Russian Futurist poet (1885-1922) active in the avant-garde before and after the 1917 revolution. Chlebnikov was a mystical theorist, and among his odd ideas was the notion that climactic naval battles occurring every 317 years had cosmic significance for the course of human affairs. He also put forth ideas suggestive of modern TV, Radio and the internet. Kiefer envisions this "future" as a charred landscape choked with brambles and briers of razor-wire

Kiefer is almost even more powerful when he breaks from painting. One of the first images to have grabbed my attention by this artist was the huge woodblock print, Grane:



The form of this work is deceptively simple. Kiefer employs the woodblock... again alluding to the great achievements of German culture: Gutenberg's movable type, and the German tradition of print-making from Durer's Knight, Death, and the Devil (with its similar iconic use of the horse)...



... through the great German Expressionist woodblock prints of the early 20th century... a literal Renaissance of German art brought to an end by the rise of Hitler:


-E.L. Kirchner


-Kathe Kollwitz

Kiefer's print takes the scale and the cruciform shape of an altarpiece. The subject, Grane, is the horse belonging to Brunhilde in Wagner's epic operatic cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer. He reveled in the Ring's great Teutonic narrative. But of course Hitler failed to grasp the meaning of the Ring's final opera, Götterdämmerung... the "Twilight of the Gods" in which all comes crashing down on the rulers of Valhalla due to greed and avarice. This collapse is presaged by the famous Immolation Scene in which Brünnhilde is to place her dead lover, Siegfried. She then rides her horse into the flames which flare up and catch fire to the halls of Vahalla signalling the death of the Gods. Undoubtedly, Kiefer grasped the link between the Götterdämmerung and the final days of the Nazis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0PpTPvbr-4

Kiefer is well-known for his huge, lead books... which often refer to various occult and hermetic writings:



One of the most powerful works that I have seen in person involving books is Shevirat Ha-Kelim:



The piece alludes to a dominant part of Kabbalistic and Hassidic thought formulated by Safed Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-72). The term means "The breaking of the vessels" and tells of a notion that the Divine Light of God was once held on earth by 10 containers... vessels... or books. The upheavals and evils of mankind resulted in the vessels shattering... and the name and Divine attributes of God being forever scattered. Kiefer imagines the Light of God in the form of transparent glass pages fallen from the bindings of leaden books... shattered across the floor. Of course the link with Kristalnacht and the burning of books cannot be ignored.

Another powerful work employing elements of the book is West-Eastern Divan.







The title is taken from a collection of poems by Goethe influenced by Muslim poets and poetry. Writing in German, he set out to capture the spirit of the East through sensual descriptions of flowers and plants. Kiefer’s interpretation is based on all these sources. 54 identically sized paintings are sited on two facing walls... each presenting delicate configurations of branches, seeds and pressed flowers set against a background of cracked earth and lead. Some panels include white floating shifts, like lost souls. The coloration is dissonant, conjuring up storms or fires, or just a pale or dark void.

The last painting I'll look at is entitled Andromeda:



Here Kiefer returns to the landscapes of Romanticism and away from the references to WWII. This vast canvas places the viewer, much like Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea (above, near top) standing before the vast expanses of sea and sky... or space. In the sky we are presented with two contrasting forms of mankind's attempt to understand the unimaginable infinite spaces above... both equally doomed to failure. Kiefer has delineated the astrological system of Andromeda... and contrast these with numbers... assigned by NASA... to identify the stars. Like Andromeda we are chained to this rock before the vast expanses of infinity... a sacrifice to our own kind's hubris.

[mortalterror]

Bad art that alludes to good art is still bad art, and all those layers of meaning, though they may delight the critic, just make it very intelligent bad art.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

After scrolling though your images, there was something familiar in the media, technique, “ashes”, fire, plants, and then I recalled the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. Last year I dropped by the museum and was captivated by Kiefer's Ashenblume and not so much by A Book With Wings

A not so good photo I took of Aschenblume:



^Note the large inverted sunflower stalk the roots of which extend above the top edge.
Other materials used include clay, ash and dirt. Here’s the blurb from the museum website:

http://themodern.org/collection/aschenblume/913


A Book With Wings (photo from museum website):
A book taking flight on wings made of lead




http://themodern.org/collection/book-with-wings/915


Pope Alexander VI: The Golden Bull (photo from museum website)



http://themodern.org/collection/paps...olden-bull/914

The resemblance to Nohoch Mul Mayan pyramid is uncanny:




lastly Quaternity (from museum website)

http://themodern.org/collection/quaternity/912

[stlukesguild]

Bad art that alludes to good art is still bad art, and all those layers of meaning, though they may delight the critic, just make it very intelligent bad art.

Thus its probably a good thing that the judgments concerning what is good or bad in art don't rely upon individuals lacking any real grasp of visual art.

[Cioran]

Here is one abstract art fact I found earlier.

A painting by abstract artist Mark Rothko has fetched $75.1 million (£47.2m) at an auction in New York.

Attachment 8466

Is that a fine art worthy of the money?

This is a meaningless question.

Rothko's art, like all art, exists in a broader context: the rest of the art that he created, the climate of the times, politics, economics, trends, visions.

All art is contextual. Abstract art, which I prefer to call non-representational art since all art is abstract, no matter how realistic, had its roots in the mid-ninteenth century rebellion against a stifling classicism. It's worth reading about the travails of the Impressionists and especially Van Gogh, who was not an impressionist but a majority of one, to see how hard it was to break the dead hand of tradition in art.

As irony would have it, by the 1950s the abstract expressionists had become just as dictatorial as the classicists of the mid-19th century, declaring that all art that even hinted of the figure or of "literary" or "real-life" concerns was to be abjured. A new art church had developed with its own dogmas and its own way of excommunicating heretics.

Happily, that too is history, and in post-modern art anything goes. We'll see how long that lasts.

The pictorial arts, like all arts, cannot be classified. You might as well try to nail a blob of mercury to the wall. Art always eludes our classificatory schemes.

ETA: Er, why is this thread in "General Movies, Music and Television"?