Ha, would cost a bomb now. I don't think artists nowadays can afford to live where 19th-early 20th century artists used to live in Paris (St Germain, Latin Quarter, Ile de la Cité or Montmartre)...Originally Posted by stlukesguild
For me living an artist's life means not being overly preoccupied with material aspects of life but giving importance to aesthetics: trying to live as beautifully, or at least as gracefully, as possible. Not being "petit-bourgeois" in mind.
That's good, Bitter, I like that. Beauty is so, how should I put it, so beautiful. I love beauty. I love beautiful people, children, music, paintings, Raphael and Ginevra Benci. Still there is a devil in me howling for absinthe, blood, outrageous acts like walking a lobster down our high-street, useless, fruitless friendship with servile, self-seeking, ignorant snobs, the insolence of office, the pangs of desprized love, all things self-destructive, to be like
Ainsi qu'un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d'une antique catin...
Then there is the dandy. Oscar Wilde, Stephen Frye. Stephen Frye as Oscar Wilde:
Wow! Debauchery and sphistication incarnate. Rimbaud and Lord Alfred Tennyson rolled into one! There are so many different ways of 'living the literary life'. I chose to choose nothing! I just want to be. I just want to love beauty and occasionally let this love overflow into a tiny poem. I want time, to read and read and read. I want to read everything. I have a book in my head, a novel. I used to write occasionally but feel a lot distracted during this last year or so. (been falling in and out of love with the same person which has left two thoroughly confused souls on a planet where most of the inabitants seem to know where they are going!) More often than not, I hear a scream inside my head like Joh Keats's angushed cry in:
I cry your mercy -- pity -- love -- ay, love!
Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmask'd, and being seen -- without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole, -- all -- all -- be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss, -- those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast, --
Yourself -- your soul -- in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom's atom, or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life's purposes -- the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!
I used to think I was Horatio, I am bloody Zhivago from the toe to the top of my head! Some literary life indeed! Where is the next big novel of human endurance and of love? Where is the next Hugh Kenner? Why did Keats go on living? Where have all the diciples gone? My kingdom sold, sold for a mole on that beautiful face! (khal i rukhsar i yaar i man!). When asked by the Sultan of Ghazna about the price of his huge kingdom, the blind poet Rudki answered, "just a mole on my beloved's face!". I think this is all it was worth. All gone in a frenzy of madness. But boy, don't I love that one mole that I got for all my dreams and all my ambitions! If I had ten empires, I would have given them away. Beautiful to live two, three or even four lives simultaneously!
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
That's beauty as well. Beauty of self-destruction/violence/provocation. I can't say I live like that though - too much morality has rubbed out my streak of cruelty, for instance. But I like the idea of debauchery (wonderful French film, by the way, called Le Libertin, which could perfectly illustrate that line from Baudelaire). But still, that's why I don't think people who are anxious about eating healthy food, not drinking or smoking, going to bed early, buying a flat and saving up money for their retirement before they're thirty etc live beautiful lives. They're too careful with themselves - and if I understand you well (i'm not sure I do though), that's where you're going too, no?
And I was thinking about the dandies. I think I associate the artist's life with them and the decadents.
And yeah, read read read...
That's good, Bitter, I like that. Beauty is so, how should I put it, so beautiful. I love beauty. I love beautiful people, children, music, paintings, Raphael and Ginevra Benci. Still there is a devil in me howling for absinthe, blood, outrageous acts like walking a lobster down our high-street, useless, fruitless friendship with servile, self-seeking, ignorant snobs, the insolence of office, the pangs of desprized love, all things self-destructive, to be like
Ainsi qu'un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d'une antique catin...
Then there is the dandy. Oscar Wilde, Stephen Frye. Stephen Frye as Oscar Wilde:
Wow! Debauchery and sphistication incarnate. Rimbaud and Lord Alfred Tennyson rolled into one! There are so many different ways of 'living the literary life'. I chose to choose nothing! I just want to be. I just want to love beauty and occasionally let this love overflow into a tiny poem. I want time, to read and read and read. I want to read everything. I have a book in my head, a novel. I used to write occasionally but feel a lot distracted during this last year or so. (been falling in and out of love with the same person which has left two thoroughly confused souls on a planet where most of the inabitants seem to know where they are going!) More often than not, I hear a scream inside my head like Joh Keats's angushed cry in:
I cry your mercy -- pity -- love -- ay, love!
Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmask'd, and being seen -- without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole, -- all -- all -- be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss, -- those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast, --
Yourself -- your soul -- in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom's atom, or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life's purposes -- the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!
I used to think I was Horatio, I am bloody Zhivago from the toe to the top of my head! Some literary life indeed! Where is the next big novel of human endurance and of love? Where is the next Hugh Kenner? Why did Keats go on living? Where have all the diciples gone? My kingdom sold, sold for a mole on that beautiful face! (khal i rukhsar i yaar i man!). When asked by the Sultan of Ghazna about the price of his huge kingdom, the blind poet Rudki answered, "just a mole on my beloved's face!". I think this is all it was worth. All gone in a frenzy of madness. But boy, don't I love that one mole that I got for all my dreams and all my ambitions! If I had ten empires, I would have given them away. Beautiful to live two, three or even four lives simultaneously!
My heart is fraught with yearnings deep concealed,
With strivings of a spirit unresigned--
Ye burning thoughts! O be ye confined,
Lest in too fierce a fire my soul be steeled!
- James F. Cooper, Jr
(okay, it's telling me my message is too short. Better?)
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
This is the kind of artistic life I had yearned for: Youth, beauty, creativity, danger and risk. Youth has disappeared but I go on, I can't go on, I will go on!He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the
strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs
were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out
over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the
advent of the life that had cried to him.
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word
had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called
him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall,
to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared
to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy
from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant
of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.
On and on and on and on!
He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How
far had he walked? What hour was it?
There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne
to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and
already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and
ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach,
reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring
of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence
of the evening might still the riot of his blood.
He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm
processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him,
the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
Oh, some wonderful, wonderful stuff here, the Wilde, the Keats, Baudelaire, Joyce thoughts like these:
For me living an artist's life means not being overly preoccupied with material aspects of life but giving importance to aesthetics: trying to live as beautifully, or at least as gracefully, as possible. Not being "petit-bourgeois" in mind.
And these:
And yeah, read read read...
And these too:
Beauty is so, how should I put it, so beautiful. I love beauty. I love beautiful people, children, music, paintings, Raphael and Ginevra Benci. Still there is a devil in me howling for absinthe, blood, outrageous acts like walking a lobster down our high-street, useless, fruitless friendship with servile, self-seeking, ignorant snobs, the insolence of office, the pangs of desprized love, all things self-destructive.
Surely the only life to live is the literary one? Stuff the life of the pettie bourgeois and stuff the life of the wage slave. Stuff “reality” it is to my books that I turn to tell me what is truly real, things of this nature:
It will be a marvellous thing - the true personality of man - when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. An yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. An yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It ill be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
"The Soul of Man Under Socialism" Oscar wilde.
Must say I have a few lost illusions of the artist's life. I still haven't managed that garret in Paris... right on the Seine.
Ha, would cost a bomb now.
Tell me about it. I couldn't even afford to do the grungy American Abstract Expressionists' variation and have the bombed-out old factory live-work studio in Manhattan. Such space is now reserved for high-end corporate lawyers and investment brokers.
Kafka... you wax poetic today... and you sing the praises of that which has been outlawed by many Modernists: beauty. Personally... as I have aged... I find that ugly expressionism is less and less interesting, while beauty... well surely Keats had it right all along. Keats and Wilde. (And isn't Wilde always right about everything?). Yes... Raphael and Ginevra de Benci with her flawless full moon face enthroned before Leonardo's unearthly landscape of spiky juniper plants. And Botticelli's Primavera. God! That's beauty!
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 never liked modern art, to be honest. Literature, yes but modern art is too stark for my liking. Literature has beautiful things to offer: James Joyce (specially the passage quoted above), Pound's Cantos, Eliot, even the bare landscapes of Samuel Beckett's works offer lyrical beauty at times. But modernist painting hasn't got that for me. Please point me towards one truly beautiful modernist painting. The poppies of Flanders are mentioned repeatedly in literature but why painters overlooked the persistent, resilient, unmissable presence of beauty in the midst of all the horrors that their times required them to depict? Why did Picasso fail to make that one flower beautiful that seemingly blossoms near the broken sword of the fallen warrior in Guernica? It is drab and uncouth charcoal lines like everything else in the painting! It is there, beauty can never be excluded but don't let it blend and disappear in all the other rubbish, please. Make it stand out, give it its due place, i-e on the pedestal. Bring it out. Crisis sells, death sells, disaster sells, pain sells, pleasure sells, ecstasy of the flesh sells. Good news does not sell, peace and calm do not sell, ecstasy of the mind does not sell, beauty in its essence does not sell. That's what is killing beauty, its inability to become a commodity. All you, who dream of a life artistic, make Pound's Canto xlv (With Usura) your mantra. This poem has the answer for us:
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling
http://reactor-core.org/usura.html
I love this poem and read it whenever my heart yearns for an "artistic life" or beauty and love. It tells me what went wrong.
I was, actually in love with Ginevra de Benci for many, many years. Then I met a woman who looked like Ginevra. It was nice having her around but she was married and had two children! Didn't Leonardo paint that portrait at the time of Ginevra's marriage? I was a little late then! 'Too much water has passed under the Butt Bridge in both directions', since then (as Samuel Beckett would say. Butt Bridge is actually a bridge on River Liffey in Dublin, I thought Sam Beckett was taking the piss. Very factual, very humorous!) I once wrote a poem about the Lady and the juniper tree. I read La Vita Nova at that time. There are so many ways you could fall in love with beauty. I posted this poem in the 'Personal Poetry' section of this forum the other day. It sums up my ideas on love, beauty, risk, self-destruction and life:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ght=revolution
Last edited by Kafka's Crow; 11-12-2008 at 11:58 AM.
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
I never liked modern art, to be honest. Literature, yes but modern art is too stark for my liking. Literature has beautiful things to offer: James Joyce (specially the passage quoted above), Pound's Cantos, Eliot, even the bare landscapes of Samuel Beckett's works offer lyrical beauty at times. But modernist painting hasn't got that for me. Please point me towards one truly beautiful modernist painting.
Pierre Bonnard-Perfume Bottle
Gustav Klimt-The Kiss
Pablo Picasso-Girl at the Mirror
Henri Matisse-Still Life and Open Window
Edouard Vuillard-Still Life on Mantle
Henri Rousseau-Snake Charmer
George Tooker-Couple in Window
Of course we could argue endlessly as to what exactly constitutes "Modernism" and what constitutes "beauty"... and there is no way to convince someone into recognizing or appreciating the beauty in a work of art if they cannot see it. To my mind these are just a few examples of the wealth of "beauty" that exists in Modernism. If "beauty" is missing from art, it is missing since the demise of Modernism... since aesthetics and form were rejected in favor of the idea as the center of art. Indeed... it is only under certain theories of Post-Modernism that beauty itself has become suspect... almost considered proof of the shallowness of a work of art or an artist.
It has been suggested by some critics that "beauty" and concern with aesthetics have been dismissed as shallow because they imagined as being inherently feminine... as opposed, no doubt, to the more rigorous art that is more focused upon rigorous thought. No doubt such a criticism is somewhat valid. It echoes the thoughts of the contemporary British painter, Howard Hodgkin, who points out that the focus on color has long been imagined as proof of the less-than-serious nature of one's art. By the same token, a recent examination of Matisse pointed out that many of the critics of Matisse suggested that his paintings were too colorful... and too beautiful to be considered as serious as the more "masculine" work of Picasso.
The poppies of Flanders are mentioned repeatedly in literature but why painters overlooked the persistent, resilient, unmissable presence of beauty in the midst of all the horrors that their times required them to depict? Why did Picasso fail to make that one flower beautiful that seemingly blossoms near the broken sword of the fallen warrior in Guernica? It is drab and uncouth charcoal lines like everything else in the painting!
I would suggest that the beauty which exists even in the shadow of the most ultimate ugliness and horror is indeed there... and it has been recognized by many artists... including Picasso:
In the darkest days of the Second World War Picasso presented a still-life with a bull's skull against the absolute pitch black of night. And still he suggested the regal cloth of honor in the royal purple... demanding that this dark scene be recognized for its link with the regal art of the past.
Max Beckmann presented horrific scenes of torture... alluding to both Hieronymus Bosch and the nazis... and yet presented these scenes in a brilliant, luminous color anchored with a bituminous black that suggested a gorgeous Gothic stained-glass window.
Francis Bacon imagined the mortality and meanness of humanity in the most ghastly scenes... staged with the most exquisite sensitivity to design and composition... as if he were composing a Renaissance altarpiece.
It is there, beauty can never be excluded but don't let it blend and disappear in all the other rubbish, please. Make it stand out, give it its due place, i-e on the pedestal. Bring it out. Crisis sells, death sells, disaster sells, pain sells, pleasure sells, ecstasy of the flesh sells. Good news does not sell, peace and calm do not sell, ecstasy of the mind does not sell, beauty in its essence does not sell. That's what is killing beauty, its inability to become a commodity.
There are some artists who have taken a contrary philosophy... fearing that what we define as "beauty" is too easily commodified... coveted and fought over at the marketplace. Their thoughts... with which I do not agree... is that art must offend the bourgeoisie... it must be, as Picasso once put it... a finger up the bourgeoisie a$$. Personally I find shock for the sake of shock far to easy... while true beauty is far more difficult than it may first appear.
All you, who dream of a life artistic, make Pound's Canto xlv (With Usura) your mantra. This poem has the answer for us:
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling
I love this poem and read it whenever my heart yearns for an "artistic life" or beauty and love. It tells me what went wrong.
Perhaps... but then again it may also convey the inability of those who are "experts"... even artists within a single genre, to recognize the beauty in other artistic forms when these go beyond the accepted forms that beauty took in the past. I have pointed out to my studio-mates that their inability to appreciate the more jarring "beauty" of Gorecki, Ornette Coleman, Osvaldo Golijov... or any Modernist/Contemporary "classical" composer is certainly not unlike the response that many others have when responding to Modernist/Post-Modernist painting.
I was, actually in love with Ginevra de Benci for many, many years. Then I met a woman who looked like Ginevra. It was nice having her around but she was married and had two children! Didn't Leonardo paint that portrait at the time of Ginevra's marriage? I was a little late then!
This sounds like something out of Gautier. Surely you have read Omphale and/or The Fleece of Gold?
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/
Where's the distinction? Is Klimt a modernist or a Secessionist/symbolist?
You can still buy cheap houses in Toronto Suburbs!
Where's the distinction? Is Klimt a modernist or a Secessionist/symbolist?
It depends upon how one defines "Modernism". The broadest definitions begin with Courbet and continue through Abstract Expressionism. Other definitions are more restrictive and begin with Picasso's Les Demoiselle d'Avignon and exclude anything not meeting a certain Modernist criteria (whatever that may be). I am somewhat tempted to place the start of Modernism with the Post-Impressionism. Impressionism... for all its brilliance and innovations... is still rooted in the notion that a painting presents an illusionistic picture of the visual world. The primary shift of Modernism... far more central even than Pound's dictum to "make it new"... is the move away from the notion that a fundamental and essential element of art (especially painting) is this illusionistic rendering of the visual world. Post-Modernism... Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Munch, etc... begin the process of overturning this notion which had been held since the Renaissance. Of course Cubism and Picasso would provide the true break... establishing the notion that painting is but an organization of color, shapes, lines, and sometimes images upon a flat surface. Klimt, like many early Modernists, benefited greatly from an intense academic training... but he certainly made great us of Modernist vocabularies. His use of flat patterns and designs owe much to non-Western traditions (Persian and Islamic) as well as to pre-Renaissance art (especially Byzantine mosaics)... but none of these artistic traditions would have been seriously embraced prior to the shift of Modernism.
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/
Yes, I have the very same illusion. Surely it will be like that once I have 'Dr' in front of my name
Yes but Toronto, honestly, is not exactly what I'd call a beautiful city...
Et l'unique cordeau des trompettes marines
Apollinaire, Le chantre
Charming sentiment, that to some degree fits my own, but I always needed specific-rendered role models, somewhat less lavish than Kafka's exuberance for Wilde. Decadent wit and art for art's sake was quaint when I was an impressionable underclassman. Looking at it through my current lens, it moves down a notch to nearly chirpy. I always looked at my professors. The pragmatist who studied the impact of technology and its intersection with the power of Empire, whether Roman or American, who conveniently died of cancer about a year after I made the terrible error of asking him if he wanted to go out to dinner. Some students can turn mentors into partners, but that fate always eluded me. His cultural education was admirable, and his ghost sat on my shoulder of embarrassed grief for a long time, almost identical to the fate of my Grecian-American editor, who did so much to give my work exposure in my locality. I did not ask her out to dinner, but did ask for a critique of my best poetry manuscript, some months before she was defeated by breast cancer. I had heard she was ill, oddly enough, in my disability-activist circles, but had no idea it was terminal, and her loss to me is equally tinged with shame for that.
They both had qualities of containment and discipline worthy of following, and I could never quite manage the degree of imitation aspired to, being a stumble bum gaffe prone disabled poet who could never quite cut it into the career being the aesthetic.
It isn't beauty with a capital *B*; it is a refined sensibility, a reticence as a way of living your art, which my recent essay in Breath & Shadow is somewhat preoccupied with. Beauty can be found in any moral paradigm, as luke points out.
Last edited by Jozanny; 11-15-2008 at 07:10 AM.
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