The Times, 26 September 2008
Sometime in the early summer of 1961 the Whitechapel Gallery staged an exhibition of Mark Rothko, then quite recently famous, and well into what is known as his “signature style”: large, unframed canvases of vertical format, painted with symmetrical rectangular blocks of contrasting colours. Rothko had hit on this idiom some 14 years before, when he often used the colours of spring fields, autumn woods and sunsets. By 1961 he had settled into gloomy mauves, blues, browns and purples - an effect from which he hardly shifted until his death, by suicide, nine years later.
This exhibition had a special meaning for me. I was 17, had recently run away from home, and would walk each day from the Lyons Corner House in Leadenhall Street, where I washed up and cleared tables, to the slum in Mile End where I slept on a floor. I was anxious, lonely and unsure of myself. And I survived by creating the image of another and less sordid world. This other world was pure, serene, its silence broken only by the footsteps of hidden friends. There was a cool ambient light, and the shadows were soft and still like pools of water. .
For the full article go to The Times
September 29, 2008
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Piccaso’s signature, just as much as any of his paintings, drawings, sculptures or ceramics--i.e. his gesture, the individuality of his handwriting in the largest sense--once carried a charge impossible to appreciate today, at least in the domain of Art. It evaporated in about 1973. I was a privileged witness to this phenomenon as a young aspiring painter who had grown up in the New York bohemian milieu. This charge, which belonged not only to Picasso, but also Matisse and many other modernist artists, was an ecstatic mixture of awe and delight. It could provoke reverence. In hindsight it can only be understood in terms of fashion--which certainly degrades the phenomenon but also may uplift, at least a little, the concept of fashion.
To react as well to the previous article, and the comments; Duchamps’ work was part of an on-going reaction to the deformation and degradation of Art at the hands of what we now call the “academicians”, who have--in a predictable backlash--become the models for the ‘classical realists’, a ‘conservative’ movement coming powerfully on, mostly under the radar, which talks boldly of beauty and blatantly imposes standards, but which is often overtly linked with militant materialism and Ayn Rand. It is not, therefore, enough to reject relativism to escape materialism or resurrect taste.
What is now called Modern Art, in many ways a necessary and laudable reaction to deplorable developments in the 19th century, was also a dangerous trajectory which led inevitably though “abstraction” to conceptualization (the evaporation of Art), with the inevitable consequence of Post-Modernism--which, each year, seems to drift closer and closer to classical realism.
The Abstract Expressionists, and Mark Rothko in particular, were a definite step in this deplorable development.
We use the word “Art” loosely. Art, when it is not merely a concept, takes definite forms. Painting is a large but it is not infinitely extensible category. The original Modernist critique of the academic disaster makes an important distinction between ‘decoration’ and ‘illustration’. These have both become terms of denigration. Originally they were verbal tools to clarify how true painting was a tension between the two. The original Modernists, just as they taxed Bouguereau with being too illustrative, would have, or would ought to have, taxed Rothko with being too decorative.
The original Modernists, indeed, understood decoration as the core of painting, and their work was the restoration of an attitude--then a century old--which they inherited from painters who, today, do not count at all, like Boucher or Luca Giordano, the most important artists of their fecund times.
But the core of painting is not the totality of painting. The essence of a peach is not the pit. True painting, the painting which can be Art, is about human experience--including and particularly visual experience--and also about beauty, or as the early Modernists said, 'decoration'. Today we talk of ‘abstraction’ but this is not what the early Modernist meant. Abstraction is abstraction from something; it is illustration more or less absorbed into decoration. The early Modernist would say that real painting is always more or lest ‘abstract’.
Decoration is pure Beauty which comes to us through the eyes. ‘Abstraction’ came to mean ‘rejection of illustration’, and thus absence of illustration, and thus replaced ‘decoration’ with a prestigious word which legitimized a way of painting which had become pure decoration--however austere--in the early Modern sense.
The sorts of essentially clumsy or cute symbols which Contemporary Art has indulged in since pop-art (or the ironic or cynical rebellion against abstractionist interdiction of illustration in the 1950-60 period), does nothing to restore human experience and visual experience to painting in any proper sense.
The philosophical trajectory and incoherence of the Modernist crisis in non-Art areas certainly affects Art. Art, and particularly painting, is even the most reactive of all human phenomena to this influence. But Painting also has its own logic which is merely deflected, not absorbed, by this vast force.
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