Lily... where did the rest of your post go off to? You declared a love for "modern" art, and as a contemporary art I surely share a love of a great many Modern and Contemporary artists... although they might not be my absolute favorites from among the entire history of art.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Lily... where did the rest of your post go off to? You declared a love for "modern" art, and as a contemporary art I surely share a love of a great many Modern and Contemporary artists... although they might not be my absolute favorites from among the entire history of art.
I deleted it because the mods merged that other thread with an art thread that I posted in previously and I mentioned much of the same stuff in it.
Hence the ^^;
Tomorrow always holds the promise of something new and exciting. I am the Jetsons meet the Flintstones.
Are you sure you had mentioned all that previously Miss Lily? I'm certain you didnt mention one or two of those before. should have left it to refreash our memories! I do that all the time!
"Come away O human child!To the waters of the wild, With a faery hand in hand, For the worlds more full of weeping than you can understand."
W.B.Yeats "If it looks like a Dwarf and smells like a Dwarf, then it's probably a Dwarf (or a latrine wearing dungarees)"
Artemins Fowl and the Lost Colony by Eoin Colfer my poems-please comment Forum Rules
Last summer I went to a modern art museum and it blew my mind and I really got into modern art. I was brought up on impressionism because of my parents, and I still like it. But I like modern now, too, even though my parents hate it. At that museum there was a piece of art that was a black room with a projector showing a single sine wave progressing along. That was great. You could walk into it. Awesome. I like abstract stuff because you can get so much from it. Usually it's nothing, like just images or sounds, but I like it. I like the look and sound of things falling apart.
Andy Warhol is a given.
I don't really much care for cubism, though. Some of it is alright. I like Dada.
I like cartoons, too. That's one reason why I like Keyth Ryden so much.
Tomorrow always holds the promise of something new and exciting. I am the Jetsons meet the Flintstones.
I must admit that as a contemporary working artist I certainly have been interested, prodded, even inspired by endless modern and contemporary artists. Again, it would be more than challenging for me to select a list of the modern/contemporaries whom I imagine to be the best (although Picasso is certainly a given), but I can reasonably offer up a selection of the artists who have had (and continue to have) the greatest impact upon me.
6. Paul Klee-
Paul Klee was the first true Modernist artist whose work I admired. As a first year art student I worshiped the great old masters (still do) and struggled to grasp the innovations of Impressionism... and Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh, Gauguin, etc...) Modernism, however, was another beast altogether. With my love of the well-rendered figure or landscape what was I to make of the distortions and fragmentations of Picasso, Matisse, and Beckmann... to say nothing of the absolute abandonment of imagery with Abstract Expressionism?
In spite of this I attended a major Paul Klee exhibition that had come to Cleveland. Logically, I should have disliked everything this man did... but for some reason it piqued by curiosity... I actually found I liked it,,, even without knowing why. Today I am certain that it had something to do with the manner in which Klee played with many of the same influences that were central to me: books, writing, games, music, etc... Klee continues to stand as one of the greatest influences upon my work, and I am happy to see that his reputation within the history of art has also continued to grow. I can hardly come across a well-stocked selection of art books without there being at least one or two books on Klee. One artist wrote that Klee had virtually invented the whole of 20th century art... on a miniature scale. It would be hard to refute this. I can think of no other artist, not even Picasso, that has conveyed himself masterfully in such a varied manner.
Writing/Texts/Books- Klee was one of those artists who are not locked solely into a single genre. He was trained and quite talented as a musician and was also deeply in love with books, reading and literature (His own journals are certainly worth reading for anyone interested in the artist's thought process). From the start Klee struggled to find a visual language that might blur the boundaries between painting and other art forms. He was long fascinated with writing and from early on in his career made attempts at infusing the written word with a visual impact:
In Once Emerging from the Gray of Night... Klee took a poem he had composed and not only infused them with a visual element, but building upon some of the theories of synchronism currently being explored by the French artist, Robert Delaunay, he sought to also convey something of the movement, rhythm, counterpoint, and harmony of music.
In the painting, Ad Marginum...
Klee playfully echoes the flora and fauna grotesques that were commonly slipped into the margins of medieval illuminated manuscript.
The simple pictographic form was an element that would fascinate Klee for most of his career. In a painting such as Arrow in the Garden...
Klee built up the surface of his painting with plaster (or some such material) into which he scraped simple pictographic forms reminiscent of some ancient writings... like a tablet from Mesopotamia. In other instances, such as the painting, Contemplating...
... the pictographic forms dance across the filed-like surface in a manner that would have a profound impact upon Abstract Expressionism. Late in his career Klee would reduce his images to a single bold pictograph...
...painted in a manner that suggested Asian Zen painting and surely influenced painters such as Gorky, Gottlieb, and Motherwell.
Geometry/Architecture- One of the most fascinating aspects of Klee's work is the manner is which he could freely move from total abstraction to figurative work... and from playful biomorphic imagery to hard-edged geometric abstractions at ease... and yet always maintain an ineffable something that was clearly his own.
His earliest breakthroughs as an artist came in responding to the landscapes/cityscapes of Tunisia...
... in which forms began to shatter under the blinding light as if the colors were seen through a prism.
These geometries of architecture became more and more complex until they danced across the surfaces playfully:
Color itself could lend a variety of mood to these images... such as the more mysterious Dream City:
Architecture was a key element of his most famous... perhaps his most important painting, Ad Parnassum...
...in which the ancient mythic worlds of the Egyptian and Greco-Roman Empires are reduced to the architectural elements of the arch, the pediment, and the pyramid... all seen under the brilliant red Mediterranean sun as if shattered into a million points of light... like a Byzantine mosaic.
... to be continued...
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Music- Music was a central element of Klee's entire life. He had studied as a musician himself, and his wife supported him early on in his career through her own efforts as a music teacher. Klee was highly fond of musical theater, and produced any number of paintings based upon the opera or puppet theater, such as the mysterious Carnival in the Mountains...
the silly Bavarian Don Giovanni...
or the Battle Scene from the Comic-Operatic-Fantasy, "The Seafarer":
Music had an even more profound impact upon Klee than merely the subject matter of operas or theatrically staged scenes. Klee was very much of the same belief as Walter Pater who had declared that "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music." Music, unlike any other art form, was seen as having succeeded in attaining a perfect merger of form and subject (or content). Klee stated early on, "What an attractive destiny it would be to master painting today (just as musicians once did)...Achievements made in music by the end of the 18th century remain (for the present) in their infancy in the visual arts." Klee's notion of a visual art that might convey ideas, movement, passion, emotion through the purely abstract elements of color, form, repetition, rhythm, texture, line, etc... were reinforced by the writings of others with whom he was well aware. Tieck and Wackenroeder spoke of a "poetry" that might be attained by elimination the imitative element in art and replacing it with the purely formal organization of colors and forms. The French painter, Robert Delaunay, and his compatriots at the Bauhaus school, especially Vassily Kandinsky were exploring similar concepts.
Much of Klee's geometric work was inspired by musical concepts of repetition, counterpoint, gradual transition, variation, and harmony. The titles themselves often made this link obvious:
Color Table in Gray Major:
Nocturne:
Fugue in Red:
Aeolian Harp:
New Harmony:
Harmony in Blue=Orange:
... to be continued...
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Poetry- Klee was certainly inspired by poetry... read poetry... even wrote poetry... but his works also have a constant poetic strain that runs through them. Like a great lyrical poem they are often quite small in scale, and yet display a heightened sensitivity to the most subtle nuances of visual form. The images themselves are often quite suggestive in symbolic or metaphoric ways. Klee also made great use of the poetic title. While many artists are somewhat ambiguous... even hostile toward the idea of titling their works... many feeling that the visual image should not need words to clarify or explain it... Klee, on the other hand... took full advantage of the use of the title. Certainly the paintings succeed without any recourse to words... nevertheless, in many cases the title seems just as much a part of the work and an element key to its understanding as the title might be in certain lyrical poems. One cannot look at the title of some paintings without arriving at that state of "Aha!" where one nods in full agreement with the artist... acknowledging that what his title spells out is just exactly what the image conveys:
Twittering Machine-
Ghost of a Genius-
Ancient Sound-
Wintry Mask-
Refuge-
Fire at Evening-
The Art of Children- Children develop their artistic abilities at set stages. There are certain abstractions... certain stylizations or ways of attempting to depict objects, people, and space that in the large sense follow observable stages of development. Obviously even the greatest old masters once drew like a child. Rembrandt and even Michelangelo must have produced drawings like this at some stage of their development:
Children's art certainly lacks a certain finesse of finish, and surely we accept that it will not display a mastery of anatomy or illusionistic depictions of form and space. Children's art is also often erratic... largely because the child lacks the experience to recognize when something is truly brilliant. On the other hand... children's art has a certain audacity... a willingness to try anything... simply because "they don't know any better". In other words... they haven't reached that state that most people eventually head toward around the age of late-middle-school (and that most never abandon)... the state in which they begin to master certain rules for "drawing well" ... for achieving a degree of veracity to the visual object they are depicting. The younger child doesn't yet think this way. Objects are often depicted pictographically or symbolically... The scale of images and objects will often have little to do with the logic of perspective and everything to do with the "importance" of that element to the child. Colors need not have anything to do with reality, and people, animals, objects can be readily bent, twisted, or otherwise deformed in order to make them fit the confines of the space. I find it almost miraculous that none of these elements of children's art were ever appreciated prior to the 20th century. We have little or no examples of children's art from the past... even from the most talented artists. There is almost no mention of children's art... and certainly none that is in any way appreciative... until the last century. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and Klee is that they recognized the value of children's art. Conversely... their art was profoundly influenced by the art of children... and through them, the whole of Modern art.
Western artists have long been inspired by the notion of the "other"... the Moor or Turk or Japanese or African or Native American Indian whom they imagined as something more savage... but certainly also closer to the real passions and emotions that inspire "real art". Gauguin found such inspiration in the art of the peasants of Breton and the natives of the Pacific Islands. Matisse was profoundly inspired by Islamic and Asian art. The Surrealists sought out inspiration from any source outside that of the logical/rational world: the art of the insane, self-taught artists, the art of "outsiders" such as William Blake and Henri Rousseau. Pablo Picasso, Matisse, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, and Jean Dubuffet were all profoundly inspired by the art of children. Klee saved art by his own children and children in the family... but also collected art by other children. There is an element in children's art that is almost impossible for the adult to mimic. Almost any experienced art teacher can discern the art of a child from that of an adult mimicking the look of children's art. The strength of Klee (and the other Modernists inspired by children's art) lie in his/their ability to synthesize the influences of childrens art and make it his/their own.
Paintings such as Ventriloquist and Crier on the Moor...
...Adam and Little Eve...
...or Portrait of Mrs. P. in the South...
... as well as any number of paintings posted above, were profoundly influenced and informed by the art of children... an fact that has often led to the comments of certain Philistines that "a child could draw that"... but they also display elements... a mastery of color harmonies... a certain sureness to the surface and materials... a compositional control... a crispness of line... a sophistication of pattern, design, balance... that is unquestionably adult... and quite masterful.
Klee's influence upon my own work is quite obvious. His impact upon subsequent art has been profound. The Abstract Expressionists, the Surrealists, Joan Miro, Adolf Gottlieb, Matta and certain other South American Modernists, Jean Dubuffet and the "Art Brut" movement, the CoBrA, Geometric Abstractionists, Henri Michaux and other "text/calligraphic" artists, and many more have had to acknowledge Klee as an important predecessor.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
I have this one on my stairs, (not the real one obviously)
I really love Matisse and the Fauves, and he's the only artist Picasso was ever professionally concerned about, wanting to know what he was doing etc.
I'll be back, I just want to check these links have worked, as I'm finding it difficult to add the pics.
I've removed some of the links that didn't work.
Last edited by wessexgirl; 06-29-2008 at 07:15 AM.
https:/.../Assets/4creati1_michaelangelo4.jpg
I have this in my lounge.
I love the Pre-Raphaelites too, I have a really eclectic taste in art, loving lots of schools, periods, styles etc. I have lots of PR stuff around the place.
You can simply make an account at a hosting site such as Photobucket: http://photobucket.com/login/?link=topmenu
At that site you simply download an image that you have saved to your hard-drive. You can then simply copy the IMG code beneath your saved image (all you have to do is click on it at Photobucket) and paste it to your post here at LitNet. Of course you always have to worry about some Puritan with nothing better to do sending in a complaint for the least nude posted and Photobucket will delete the image.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Stlukesguild, I agree with what you have said about Rembrandt - human beings... I am excited when I look at almost every single one of his paintings. I love ''Man with a golden hat'', and now I've read it wasn't made by him.
Attribution of older art is a slippery game. The "experts" far too often have reasons that go beyond a mere search for the truth (establishing their own reputations as "experts" often being foremost among these) for attribution of works of art to one artist or another... or for questioning such attributions. Certainly Rembrandt had a number of very talented followers and students... the best of whom could certainly imitate the master's manner quite well. Willem Drost, for example, produced some exquisite paintings that echo Rembrandt's manner quite well:
Starting in 1968 and continuing through the 1980s the Rembrandt Research Project sought to make the most trustworthy catalog raisonne of Rembrandt's paintings utilizing the state of the art scientific techniques. They brutally de-attributed endless paintings such as The Man in the Golden Helmet and even the Frick Museum's great Polish Rider. Obviously if one discovers a painting pigment or canvas or some such material that does not fit into the proper time-frame (or documentation proving the creation by another artist) then attribution is an easy matter. In many case, however, the proof is not conclusive. One expert or group of experts feel a painting does not display the artist's signature manner of applying paint and attribution is called into doubt. This often ignores equally persuasive arguments in the opposite direction. The Polish Rider, which the Frick refused to list as "Attributed to Rembrandt" or "School of Rembrandt", insisting all the time that it was authentic... now appears to be seen as an autograph work by the majority... with the possible assistance of efforts by students. The Man with the Golden Helmet still seems to remain as a work from a follower of Rembrandt, in spite of the fact that it has long been, and still is, a greatly revered paintings among art lovers. Then again, as an article in the New York Times put it "Hamlet is Hamlet whether it was written by the shadowy figure known as Shakespeare or by Sir Francis Bacon or even by one of those lesser claimants like the Earl of Oxford." Unfortunately the "cult of personality" in art is always such that even those who should know better... even those institutions that act as caretakers of our cultural heritage... are often more interested in the name than in the actual art. Most museums would rather own a really bad painting by a great or important artist, than a really good or even great painting by a mediocre... or unknown artist.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Although there are a number of Modern artists I prefer to Cornell (Picasso, Matisse, and Max Beckmann being the most obvious) I thought I'd throw something out here about ol' Joseph because he was such a fascinating figure. Cornell was born in 1903 and died in 1972 and lived most of his life in Flushing, Queens. He never left the U.S. and probably never traveled further than some 40 miles from his own back yard during his entire adult life. In spite of this he created a body of work that evoke a magical, poetic, old world charm, and yet remain uniquely American.
Cornell was born into a wealthy family and attended the Phillips Academy, Andover. Cornell had no formal art education but was exposed to a good many literary figures, especially the French Symbolist poets, who would be deeply influential upon him. At age 13, Cornell's father died and several years later Joseph went to work as a textile salesman, and became the virtual head of the family that included his mother, sister, and brother who had been stricken with cerebral palsy. Cornell's job entailed constant trips through Manhattan, during which time Cornell took up the habit of collecting a vast array of bric a brac, Victorian chintz, and other paraphernalia. The small Cornell home that he would live in all his life was overrun with books, classical music recordings, old reels of film, magazines, and all the "prizes" found by Cornell on his various journeys into the city.
At some point in his 20s Cornell began to assemble various objects and images together into three-dimensional collages (or "assemblages") which acted essentially as toys to entertain Cornell's mentally handicapped brother. He also began to create his own two-dimensional collages drawing imagery from various old Victorian book engravings. These images were combined in a manner that created a new fantastic dream-like image that defied any logic and certainly echoed what the Surrealist artist were then doing at the same time in Paris.
In 1932 Joseph Cornell witnessed the unloading of a collection of Surrealist art objects and collages, most importantly Max Ernst's La femme 100 têtes, which was essentially the first collage novel... constructed of 100s of steel plate engravings reassembled in a disconcerting manner. Cornell went up to Julian, the proprietor, and announced that he had similar works himself. Thinking to humor a mere eccentric, Levy invited Cornell to bring them by the gallery. Upon doing so, Levy was immediately enthralled and offered to exhibit the artist in his gallery along with the work of the Surrealists. By 1940 Cornell was largely able to leave his full-time job and focus solely upon his art.
Cornell has been passed off by many as something of an "outsider artist"... a talented lunatic, an uneducated visionary poet, etc... The reality is that although Cornell was certainly eccentric... and deeply protective of his privacy... and although he had no formal training in art and could not draw, paint or sculpt, he was nevertheless a highly educated and culturally sophisticated figure. He kept a vast library which included endless books of French poetry, Victorian novelists and story-book writers, writings by visionaries such as Novalis, Nerval, and Mary Baker Eddy, books on astronomy and botany, etc... He owned thousands of classical music recordings and regularly attended the opera, the theater, and the ballet. More importantly, he maintained continual contact and friendships (often via the mail) with many of the central figures of Surrealism, Dada, and Abstract Expressionism... as well as talented figures in other artistic fields: photographers, film-makers, poets, writers, ballet dancers, actors and actresses.
Cornell's real breakthrough occurred upon the discovery of several empty shadow boxes initially used to mount butterflies. Cornell utilized these shallow boxes in creating what essentially was a collage within a stage. The various objects he collected were carefully selected for their poetic resonance... for their metaphorical suggestiveness... and for the way in which they triggered various associations in his mind. In a way, he used objects like actors on the stage in a magical miniature theater... but also in a manner that echoed the way in which poets...especially of the Sybolist/Surrealist strain... might use a specific word or verbal image. Cornell's works have been repeatedly refered to as visual poetry or "poetic objects". It should be no surprise then that Cornell has been one of the most beloved artists among poets. Octavio Paz, Elizabeth Bishop, Raphael Alberti, John Asberry, Richard Howard, Stanley Kunitz, etc... have all written poems in homage of his work:
Hexagons of wood and glass,
scarcely bigger than a shoebox,
with room in them for night and all its lights.
Monuments to every moment,
refuse of every moment, used:
cages for infinity...
Joseph Cornell, inside your boxes
my words became visible for a moment.
Octavio Paz-from Objects and Apparitions-tr. Elizabeth Bishop
Any apartment lobby is a necropolis,
every dresser drawer a forbidden city-
so much you taught me, intimated, warned:
colors are trite, edges not to be trusted,
textures behind glass, refuse to explain
a world where fate and God himself have grown
so famous only because they have nothing to say.
The tiny is the last resort of the tremendous.
-Richard Howard from Closet Drama
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated, began his literary career with A Convergence of Birds... a collection of writings edited by Foer that were "inspired" by Cornells "aviaries" or "dovecotes." The poet Charles Simic offered up the greatest homage, acknowledging that his own initial attempts at poetry (which admittedly failed) were attempts at combining "found" verbal images in the same manner as Cornell constructed his physical "poetic objects", ended in writing an entire book of poetic meditations and poems upon Cornell, entitled, Dimestore Alchemy, one of his most lovely works.
Cornell's boxes drew inspiration from a world of source materials... artistic, poetic, historical, literary, etc... He was repeatedly inspired by astronomy... the stars and the heavens, and repeatedly combined old astrological and astronomical maps with spheres (suggesting the sun and moon and planets) and old pipes through which one might smoke... or blow soap bubbles... either act suggestive of the passage of time in the face of infinity:
-Soap Bubble Set
Untitled (Solar Set)
Untitled (Solar Set)
...continued...
Last edited by stlukesguild; 06-30-2008 at 10:33 AM.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I'll try again.
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