Modern Art By Paperstore Essay, Research Paper
Modern Art
For The PaperStore – April, 1999
Introduction
It’s been said that “Matisse was no more an abstract artist
than Picasso. No abstract painter can claim descent from their
work without acknowledging that fact. The worldly motif,
especially the human body, and in particular the female body, was
as basic to Matisse’s art as it had been to Delacroix’s or
Titian’s. His paintings vividly communicate a tension between
what he called ”the sign” and the reality it pointed to. He
had learned about this tension and its anxieties from Cezanne.
But there has never been a great figurative artist who did not
feel and exemplify it. It can be as poignant in Giotto or even
in Poussin as it is in Cezanne or Matisse. For Matisse it was of
prime importance, whereas in abstract art it tends to fall away,
because one end of the cord is no longer anchored in the world
and its objects. This is not an argument against abstraction,
but it helps explain why, in those abstract paintings that derive
from Matisse, one so rarely feels the urgency of their great
exemplar.(Hughes 70).
An individual’s personal relationship to art can be
dichotomized into two responses: either one is repelled or one is
drawn into the work. It can be a symbolic interaction such as
one experiences with Jasper John’s DEVISE, an emotional response
such has been reported with Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen
From Bibemus Quarry and Matisse’s Blue Nude or, perhaps, it is
the literal interaction of stepping on a floor sculpture by
Andre. Whatever the individual’s relationship or response, the
reaction is not based on the piece’s similarity to anything in
the traditional art world nor it’s lack of similarity to anything
in the real world. Response to the art discussed in this paper
is based on an individual level and is specific to the piece.
Paul Cezanne
“In 1877, the critic Georges Riviere described him as “a
Greek of the great period; his canvases have the calm and heroic
serenity of the paintings and terracottas of antiquity.” And
Renoir, in 1895, compared Cezanne’s paintings to “the frescoes of
Pompeii, so crude and so admirable.” The watercolor-like
freshness of so many of Cezanne’s landscapes of the 1880s and
1890s, which feel both deliberate and spontaneous, is one of the
miracles of modern art. … Academic ideas about composition and
modeling and perspective that had already been transformed into
the gloriously mannered idiom of Ingres and then sunk into the
kitsch of Bouguereau and Meissonier turned out to be miraculously
new. Doric pediments or classical shepherds were not part of
this radical classicism, but Cezanne instinctively understood
that his birthplace and lifelong home, Aix-en-Provence, made such
allusions unnecessary” (Perl 32). If it is true that nature is
more depth than line, that color is reality and spaces and solids
are merely illusion, then Cezanne is the embodiment of the
modernist thought.
Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From The Bibemus Quarry
(1897). at:
www.west.net/ youth/dl/yard/OM/impressions/cez2.html
The first thing one notices with this painting is the
richness of the color combinations and the effect it has in
elucidating the emotional feel of the quarry. Contrasting the
green against the red-ochre-orange of the quarry with the dark
shading of the cracks and crevices of the rocks and the shading
in the trees and then using a bland, overcast looking sky, brings
the vibrancy of the yellow/orange hues to the fore. Upon closer
inspection, there is a balance of light and dark that is mediated
by a center crevasse and poles that offset the cliffs and draws
the eye to the middle. Once that is taken in, the view expands
to include the more subtle colors of the trees and, finally,
rests at the mountain and skyline. The dark of the tree trunk
frames the right side while the dark streak on the left side of
the mountain triangulates the scene. The bushes in the
foreground “ground” the picture with the use of shading and
contrast. The orange is repeated in the tree and in the mountain
while the sky is mirrored (just a tiny bit) in the sun lit spots
on the cliff tops. It looks as though it was brushed on, that
is, no palette knife or excessive texturing. The emphasis in on
the light and dark contrast of shading in the style of someone
like Vermeer, in that it is startlingly noticeable. The painting
is not realist, nor does it appear to be impressionistic or
abstract; rather, a mixture of the three, with impressionism
being the closest to the rendition. Again, it is the color and
use of color techniques that make this painting so pleasing and
compelling.
Henri Matisse
“Matisse, paladin of modernism, is a long way from us now.
Almost a generation older than Picasso, his counterpart, he was
born in 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened and Gustave Flaubert
published L’Education Sentimentale. Everything that looked
modern in Matisse’s environment is now ancient … The idea that
Matisse and Picasso, like Gog and Magog, are the founding
opposites of modern art has left us a partisan scheme for looking
at their work — and for thinking about it. Picasso drawings,
Matisse color; Picasso anxiety, Matisse luxury; Picasso the
restless inventor, Matisse the calm unifier; Picasso in conflict,
Matisse rhyming with peace; Picasso the bohemian Spaniard,
Matisse the detached French bourgeois. There is something to
these oppositions, but the closer you look at them the more
tenuous they get. Matisse was just as challengingly inventive in
his Fauve paintings in 1905 as Picasso became, with Cubism,
around 1912″ (Hughes 69).
Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907). at:
www.sfi.co.kr/Virtual_Libraries/ArtHistory/fauvism9-1/fvs3
1.htm
This is another painting that defies automatic
categorization. On first look it seems to be within the same
genre or style as Picasso, but it has more emotive value and less
chaos. The simplicity of the color scheme brings the essence of
the form to the viewer as the first consideration and then one
notices the fluidity of the background and the feel of motion it
gives the painting. It is far from realism: the body is neither
proportioned correctly or in a feasible position, however, it has
a sense of body awareness and form that has an undeniable truth
to it – as though the painter knew from the inside out what it
meant to be this person in this place and in this position.
There is absolutely no detail outside of space and non space, but
it is able to express emotive value through color and form alone.
There is an element of abstraction and part of the form (the toes
especially) bring to mind Gauguin. The name suggests a
monochrome, but in reality it is a combination of hues and light
(as in very little) shading that give depth to the form. The
lines are not necessarily ‘crisp’, as though the painter allowed
a bit of dry brushing on the edges that may be reinforced by
small brush strokes.
Jasper Johns
“Jasper Johns, … may be the most influential artist of our
time, as well as the most elusive. He seems, indeed, to be a
figure of almost infinite paradox. Johns and his work have again
and again been associated with such Apollonian virtues as
wryness, remoteness, and intellectualism. … Johns is drawn to
the concepts of duality, ambiguity, translation, transposition,
and memory. The two big new paintings, … are densely layered
compositions, full of images and abstract patterns, that appear
to be grand summations of virtually all of his themes, from the
maps and figure fragments of his early days to his most recent
punning motifs” (Liebmann 162-168).
Jasper Johns’ Device (1962). at:
209.132.4.118/art/johns/device.jpg.html
Whoa! We are talking monumental. Monumental use of color,
use of symbolism, texture and, not least of all, size. This six
foot by four foot painting is difficult to take in all at once.
The first thought is the force of weight – in the paint (which
might have been put on with a six inch house painting brush,
dripping with Sherwin-Williams) and the weight of the oppression
of machinery. Color is drawn between the two large wheels,
compacted and crushed, then thrown out. Closer examination
(actually walking away from the painting for a more overall view)
shows that the lighter color splatches resemble human forms in an
all-out abstract kind of way. This adds even more meaning to
both the painting and the action within the painting. The first
thought was, “fallen angels’, then the idea of machinery clicks
and it becomes a metaphor for technology, and, finally, the word
and the technique used in painting the word, ‘DEVICE’ at the
bottom brings to mind graffiti and urban decay, violence and
mayhem. DEVICE in this context may refer to the machinations of
society that ’sucks people in’ to the class distinctions and
chaos of industrialization, only to send them through the machine
and spit them back out onto the ground. All these thoughts and
yet the painting is done in bright colors. The orange and yellow
that Cezanne used to portray rocks is now very indicative of fire
and motion. The paint is thick, even literally dripping, and it
looks like it was applied with a putty knife as opposed to a
palette knife. This is one of those paintings where every glance
brings a new meaning or a new form to the foreground of
consciousness. Meaning is both symbolic and personalized. (Did
you notice the man on a ladder between the two wheels? – or the
blood on the wheel? or the way the legs of the person/angel are
lengthened as they approach the ground?).
Carl Andre
Andre’s sculptural work is classical in feeling, defined by
its simple geometric forms. A few of his more popular works from
the same period as Zinc Magnesium Plain (1969) include: 17 Copper
Triode (1975), a floor piece consisting of flat copper plates in
a T-square configuration; 2 x 18 Aluminum Lock (1968), another
floor piece composed of aluminum plates, its considerable length
demanding to be walked across; and Fall (1969), made of
hot-rolled steel plates bent at right angles, their surfaces
reddish-black with rust and other markings. “Together these
works demonstrated just how aware Andre is of the spatial
dialogue that occurs between not only the viewer and his
sculpture but among the works themselves; all three of the
sculptures subtly played off each other in terms of form, color,
material and scale. Two new pieces, the horizontal Sand-Lime X
Axis and the vertical Sand-Lime Y Axis, were … utterly simple
form — 18 small rectangles of grayish-green stone placed back to
back across the floor or rising toward the ceiling … Even when
Andre works small, as with these recent efforts, he always
suggests the monument and its ability to memorialize through
unembellished repetition of form” (Goodman 100-102). There is an
element of usefulness in the floor sculptures, albeit in an
abstract manner. The use of metal and the size of the pieces
also speak against use, however, the pieces have a worn look, are
open to be walked on and, in the strictest definition of the
word, are “floorcoverings”.
“Andre was one of the earliest Minimalists but, born in
1935, was decidedly younger than Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd (b.
1928) or Robert Morris (b. 1931). And, indeed, from the outset
he was essentially another sort of artist, a Romantic among
Neoclassicists. Now, the essence of Minimalism, … is its
commitment to modularity. One form this takes is an emphatically
regular geometry. Thus, a 1989 work in Cor-Ten steel by Judd,
recently shown in London, is a topless box, 100 centimeters high
and 200 long and wide, its interior bisected by a divider half
its depth rising from the bottom anti one of the halves bisected
in turn by a similar divider descending from above. But
Minimalism’s most explicit form of modularity is, of course, its
repetition of uniform units, whether by construction or
assemblage. An arrangement of bricks tells us at once that it
consists of modular components; so does an arrangement of square
metal plates set on the floor or a stack of metal shelves mounted
on a wall. Here, too, there is of course great scope for
numerical games: in Andre’s installation of eight different
configurations of 120 bricks, first set up in 1966, the
configurations give two layers of – length first – 20 bricks by
3, 3 bricks by 20, 15 by 4, 4 by 15, 12 by 5, 5 by 12, 10 by 6,
and 6 by 10. The commitment to a form of standardization is the
great link between Minimalism and Pop art” (Goodman 100-102).
Andre uses the art of repetition in almost all of his works, from
the columns of bricks to the identical interlaced pieces that
make up a number of the floor sculptures.
Much of the work done by Andre is a representation of
physical conditions. He alternates space with mass – bricks,
wood and metal – in constructions either stacked or laid on the
floor. His metal “rugs,” are made with plates of iron, zinc,
and aluminum, the neutral raw materials in standard units.
Through their participation in a repetitious pattern they
exemplify a given the minimalist concept of standardization and
simplicity. The abstract component is seen in the representation
of utilitarian use (the traditional) in a medium that disallows
the functional value.
Conclusion
These four works, three paintings and a sculpture are
seemingly very different. However, they represent an era of art
wherein, like the Renaissance, change and improvement are
combined in creative melding of past traditions. All of them
escape strict categorization. They may have aspects of
abstraction, impressionism, modernism and even hints of cubism
and minimalism. The value they all share is the ability to bring
the viewer into a new reality, based on the art and encompassed
by the art.
Goodman, Jonathan. “Carl Andre at Ace.” Art in America, (1998):
January, pp. 100(2).
Hughes, Robert. “Art: Matisse The Color of Genius.” Time, (1992):
September, pp. 67(4).
Liebmann, Lisa. “Jasper Johns Unplugged.” Harper’s Bazaar,
(1996): August, pp. 162(7).
Perl, Jed. “Cezanne: Landscape into Art.” The New Republic,
(1996): August, pp. 30(2).