Special Forces: Is Specialization Killing Art Today?

The 18^th century French Neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres played the violin well enough to hold his own with “Sold His Soul to the Devil” good musicians such as Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt. Ingres took that intimate knowledge of music to add a different kind of beauty to works such as The Turkish Bath (from 1862; shown above). That little piece of trivia came to mind as I read an interview with The Moderna Museet’s new director, Daniel Birnbaum, in the October 2010 issue of The Art Newspaper. “Specialization is a problem of our time,” Birnbaum complained in response to a question regarding his interest in literature and philosophy as well as art. “There are many artists who work in different fields. A big museum such as the Moderna can tear down the walls between art and literature, for example, and I want to try such things.” What is the cost of specialization today, when art schools prepare artists who may know the techniques of their discipline but little else? How do we get back to the “good old days” of Ingres? Have artists today sold their souls to art schools at the risk of never being “true” artists? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Special Forces."

Monster Mash: Picasso Meets Degas at the Clark

Growing up, I spent many a rainy or wintry Saturday afternoon watching classic old horror films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man or Dracula Vs. Frankenstein. It always seemed that one monster inevitably ran into another. Modern museum blockbuster exhibitions often have the same feel as they try to pit one monster talent versus another in their galleries. For example, in 2003, the MoMA’s Matisse Picasso squared off the two modern heavyweights so closely even the “versus” was superfluous. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s current show Late Renoir could easily be retitled Renoir Meets Matisse or Renoir Vs. Picasso. Pablo Picasso enters the art history ring again in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s Picasso Looks at Degas, the first exhibition to pair those two artists and study the latter’s influence on the former. This monster mash of influence and difference illuminates both artists in a fresh way that’s downright scary. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Monster Mash."

[Image: The Blue Room (The Tub), 1901, by Pablo Picasso. Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 61.6 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1927 (1554). © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

[Many thanks to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute for providing me with the image above from and a review copy of the catalogue to Picasso Looks at Degas, which runs through September 12, 2010.]

Print the Legend: “Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey” at the NGA, London

In the classic Western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, James Stewart’s character confesses that he wasn’t a hero only to hear the newspaper man he’s confessed to respond, "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." When Lady Jane Grey met her end on the executioner’s block in 1554 after once serving for nine days as the Queen of England, the facts of her death soon became a legend of martyrdom. Nearly three centuries later, French artist Paul Delaroche revisited the legend in his 1833 painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (pictured), which became the sensation of the 1834 Salon exhibition. In Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey, the National Gallery of Art in London reexamines that moment in history when a French artist used the legend of an English monarch to say something both about art and about French society in the nineteenth century. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Print the Legend."

[Image: Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833. Oil on canvas © The National Gallery, London.]



[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art in London for providing me with the image above and other press materials for Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey, which runs through May 23.]

Not Just a Pretty Face

“For me, a picture, since it is easel paintings that we have to paint, should be something lovable, joyful, and pretty: yes, pretty!,” Pierre-August Renoir once said in self-defense. “I know how difficult it is to get people to admit that a picture can be joyful and still be a very great painting.” Ever since rising to prominence with the generation of the Impressionists, Renoir has felt the sting of the beauty without the brains label. Anne Distel’s Renoir, a mammoth new monograph from Abbeville Press, wants to prove that Renoir is much more than just a pretty face.



[Image: Renoir, By the Seashore (1883)]



[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for providing me with a review copy of Anne Distel’s Renoir.]

Drawing Inspiration

Like any good Romantic artist, Eugene Delacroix drew his inspiration from many sources of his time, including classic Romantic (or Romantically interpreted) literature. Born April 26, 1789, Delacroix did seventeen illustrations for Albert Stapfer’s 1828 French translation of Goethe’s Faust. Delacroix’s Mephistopheles in Flight (above, from 1828) shows the devil flying through the night sky above the sleeping city. “I like to see the Old Man now and then,” Mephistopheles says, referring to God, with whom he has just met, “and take good care to keep on speaking terms.” Delacroix was on more than just “speaking terms” with the familiar tropes of the Romantic movement, including the seductively attractive Mephistopheles of Goethe’s masterpiece as well as the doomed doctor of the title. The sense of great movement in Mephistopheles’ flight and the loving attention paid to his wings make you almost overlook the wonderful sense of depth Delacroix achieves in his depiction of the city upon which the sun is about to rise. This is the first of the seventeen images Delacroix created for the story and grabs you immediately with it’s otherworldly charm.

For the Romantics, regardless of nationality, William Shakespeare became an honorary member of their circle. Keats never traveled anywhere without a picture of Shakespeare to hang above his desk. The early nineteenth century saw a renaissance of Shakespearean acting and performance. On a trip to London in 1825, Delacroix saw the great Edmund Kean play the lead in Richard III. In 1827 in Paris, Delacroix watched Charles Kemble play the lead in Hamlet, with Harriet Smithson in the role of Ophelia. Hector Berlioz attended that same performance and was so taken with Smithson as Ophelia that he began obsessively wooing her over the course of several years, even writing his Symphonie Fantastique for her, which helped him win her hand in 1833. Smithson and Ophelia lingered in Delacroix’s mind as far as 1843, when he published a series of thirteen lithographs based on Hamlet, including The Death of Ophelia (above). The same naked eroticism of Smithson’s performance that attracted Berlioz finds its way into Delacroix’s print. Delacroix twice painted the theme of Ophelia’s death, showing that he never felt he could satisfyingly depict the pathos and eros of the scene.

Delacroix’s The Abduction of Rebecca (above, from 1846), which shows a scene from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe falls right into Delacroix’s sweet spot. Scott has two Saracen slaves of the Christian knight who has lusted for Rebecca carry the beauty off on horseback. "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion,” Charles Baudelaire once wrote, “but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." Despite the amazing contrasts of light and dark, motionlessness and action, color and colorlessness in this painting, Delacroix keeps it all together in a neat package full of meaning without overflowing into chaos. Ingres set himself up as the neat freak Neoclassical foil to his contemporary Delacroix’s “messy” Romanticism, but there’s nothing messy about Delacroix ability to convey meaning. If anything, Delacroix takes the raw material of Scott’s story and amplifies the drama without crashing into cacophony. Delacroix the reader and Delacroix the playgoer helped make Delacroix the painter the great artist we know today.

Hyperinflation

What Amedeo Modigliani is to necks, Fernando Botero is to bodies. Born April 19, 1932, Botero inflates his figures with the same freedom with which Modigliani elongated esophagi. Modigliani drew his inspiration from African tribal art, but Botero took his inspiration from the Baroque style of the Catholic churches of his native Columbia. The religious fervor of almost Medieval Catholicism still active in twentieth century South America not only preserved a macabre, bizarre style but also fostered in Botero a love of manipulating the human body for ends both serious and humorous. Botero’s The Musicians (above, from 1991) shows how he puffs up his people almost into cartoon characters. By inflating them this way, Botero deflates any sense of self-importance in the figure. He pokes fun at authority with every balloon-like visage. Critics try to burst Botero’s balloon with accusations that he’s not a “serious” artist, in every sense of the word. Such critics, however, willfully ignore Botero’s great range of comedy to tragedy that mirrors the double-sided coin of Columbia itself with its long, colorful history and sad, violent, drug-dealing present.

Perhaps art critics and historians take aim at Botero because he takes aim at them first, specifically by poking fun at great artists of the past. Botero’s blown up Mona Lisa is a laugh riot, a visual embodiment of the overblown hype surrounding the original. Botero’s Mademoiselle Riviere, after Ingres (above, from 2002) is a send up of the super-serious Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, one of the most humorless artists of all time, at least to me. Ingres’ original belongs with his many other portraits of super-self-important people posing without an ounce of humility or restraint. Ingres painted Napoleon on his throne, but Botero wants to knock the emperor and his image-maker off it. Of course, Botero studied all of these great artists obsessively during his youthful studies and travels in Europe. His attacks are more affectionate than iconoclastic. By showing these works of art puffed up, Botero tries to restore the humanity hidden by the hype of art history. Botero wants comrades rather than deities, and pulls them down to his level—in a good way.

Like any great comedian, Botero is also a great social commentator. When other artists shied away from the idea of painting the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, Botero made use of the notorious photographs almost immediately. His painting above (from 2003) belongs to a suite of works that document the atrocities in almost too graphic detail. Botero’s use of his signature inflated figure style helps soften the cruelty somewhat but also harks back to the bloody side of his Baroque Catholic upbringing. The victims of these abuses become bubble-faced Christs tortured on a modern cross equivalents. Botero took a great deal of heat for painting these works and actually had much difficulty finding venues in America to display them. The political climate couldn’t (and still can’t) fully come to grips with the implications of those images, especially interpreted through the penetrating eye of an artist with Botero’s sense of both dark humor and social justice. Perhaps as time passes these images will find a place in the museums and, eventually, the art history canon as the twenty-first century’s version of Goya’s Disasters of War. Whether Botero would allow himself to become part of history unremarked remains a different story.