Cubism and its Kin

I greatly took to Cubism,
right from when my brain started to function properly.

Ok, that was no straight-forward event in itself, more a spasmodic, sporadic, an occasional kind of development. Retrograde at times, too.
But the point is, Cubism did it for me.

Look at those early Picasso’s and Braque’s: the regular rectangular picture frames; the muted, limited chromatic palette.
It all spelled out Ordinary, and Normal.
The colour-scheme was deliberately mimicking the faded, un-retouched, colours of Old Masters, of Renaissance art.
This was part of the point – Picasso’s ego was towering, as usual, and he was laying down his statement: We Are The New Renaissance Artists

Of course, what those regular frames and muted colours contained was something else again. This set-up was all part of the effect, the impact.
Set-up, and punch-line.

As to the new content: we were so used to older art having a narrative, of even being the adjunct – although as a very established and authoritative one, of a pictorial experience.
Decorative art was taking off, though: think of those gold panels of Klimt. Painting was calling its own bluff:
I am a flat surface. What you see as multidimensional is really just graded marks in two dimensions.
Art is illusion.

The novelty of this was paramount: the emperor has no clothes.
Think of stage magicians showing how a trick is done.
Ah, but they always hold something back.

The new ‘thing’ was to break with narrative, and be Art: painting, colour, volume, shape,  all owning their own identities, in their own rights. Abstract Art. Balancing colours, volumes, shapes, created on the field.
Think of Mallarme, and the breaking away of words, language, from its narrative. Words as decorative, or, if you like, freed.

Art always moves on, seeks further expression; the meeting of one’s slice-of-time, and psychological make-up, interact, feed into each other. They are made from each other.

There is always this dialogue.

Art does not exist in isolation, no matter how hard it tries. The multi-cognitive nature of painting depicts all the aspects of the human imprint.
Cubism was a dialogue with what went before, and also with what might come.
Cubism, authorities agree, had its roots in the later Cezanne’s cubic, conal, spherical, dominated landscapes. Those and ancient African and Iberian works.

But it was also grounded in the intellectual ferment of its period: give it a name, for convenience: Relativity.
I refer you to this stimulating blog:
https://richlynne.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/cubism-and-relativity/

Those cubist multi-angled, part-depictions, the objectivications, of that most intimate subject, the  human portrait, also imply – and this is what excited me – the painter’s response to, if not a proper understanding of (but then, what in the public sphere ever has a full grasp of its subject?) the new theories coming from out of physics and the sciences.

The meeting point between Picasso and Einstein is given in an stimulating article on the  book, ‘Einstein, Picasso‘, by Arthur I MIller, in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/miller-01einstein.html .
The meeting point was Poincare’s book La Science et l’hypothèse.
The book introduced ideas of non-Euclidean geometry, multi-dimensions, multi-perspectives.
– Einstein read it and was fired up.
– Picasso heard the theories at around the same time (third-hand), and was freed.

It was this hidden, though implied, back-story that I responded to in Cubism. I did not know it at the time, and am incapable of understanding the mathematics, and would probably struggle and fail with the concepts now. But the need for tantalising dimensions of deeper meanings has always been my life’s ache.

There are currently writing practitioners who pronounce Writing Is Words. Nothing else (see Mallarme again). This goes for all types of writing.
Are they trying to create a form of decorative art, in words?
In art, some track all this from Duchamp, this breaking the art-and-meaning bond.
Post-War American artists, writers, took to it large-scale. It was one way, perhaps, of dealing with the War horror, by defusing it, scattering it. Meanwhile Korea, then Vietnam, were tearing at the heart of it all.

Painting, sculpture, music, without some grand narrative has never been enough.
Is it part of a cluster of synapses were developed by my response to my-period-of life in the world?
Do other generations not have this? Or other clusters that I do not detect?
There are no cut-off points. No generation ends and another begins.
As an analogue, try this:
I was investigating oral traditions of legends, tales. One source pointed out, quite pertinently, that writing and oral traditions, especially in Western Europe have co-existed for a long time. It is perhaps impossible to conceive of a solely oral tradition. All cultures have connected elements, whether painting, carving, weaving as well as some forms of written.
Some Native Australian groups now will not allow, for example, a piece of their music, or picture-making, to be copied, on the grounds that it cannot be divorced from the complete event of dance, song, music, making, that is their whole ceremony.

Now, off to bed with you.

PEARBLOSSOM HIGHWAY

 after David Hockney

Beyond the cross roads, sage scrub,
stone packed hard on hard shoulders
furred black by tyre rubber, is the strewn
necklace of the highway, lined by boulders
like beads on pale desert.

At sun up the sky litters light down
like diamonds on glass; a swathe of heat.
Furnace Creek cracked under a four-year drought.
She had followed tail lights as they snaked
from San Andreas Valley; drove east from L A.
The night still crackled circuits; owls flickered
like B-film UFOs; but none came her way.

The Cronkite News had shown highlights
of the Tet Offensive raising a casual hand
to shoot point blank: how the blood pumped
from his temples, he slowly fell and —
memory replayed in slo-mo — slumped….

A static of blue-grass guitar; a rusted truck
parked up. The road read Stop, Ahead;
the sky speckled with cloud. A patrol car sped by
windows open for cooling air, a trade-off
for not investigating. Ahead
Chuckawalla, gila, stopped in mid-sidle
scuttled off.

Her city was collapsing in on itself,
she said. It superimposed its networks,
the personal memories of lit streets,
onto the open dawn desert. Like circuits
in a silicon chip.

She was the current through both; her red car
the bead of energy, like blood, sparking
beer cans, glass, metal of a wrecked car
lit up by her passing.

THE PAINTINGS OF HOWARD HODGKIN

Reblogged from 2011

To view a Howard Hodgkin painting is like being in on some event, but with the sound turned off. Everything is happening at once, but there’s this gap.

His paintings are visual ‘events’; you feel the churn of intensities.

It works by being so tightly contained. Most of his paintings are comparatively small: 37×38 cm (Still Life), 26x30cm (Venice Sunset). It’s only in later works he takes on size: 196x269cm (When Did We Go To Morocco?); but these are the exception.

The fierce overpainting objectifies emotional responses. The technically assured range of brushstrokes persuades us into seeing the harmonics of the piece.

So what soundtrack would we put here, then?

Harrison Birtwistle (Sir), for his layered textures and sense of theatre? Because Hodgkin is dramatic, his “emotional responses” (ie his paintings) lift and shape, throw into relief, subjective experience onto an objective plane.

But also for both their idiosyncratic Englishness. Unmistakable. Hodgkin’s focus is mostly domestic, the interior: we, the public, look either into frames into the picture, or out of an interior. Our sense of perspective is jeapordised to such an extent whichever way we look, that Hodgkin’s intensity becomes ours.

The unmistakable overpainting of the frame, and the painted frame within the painting (see Snapshot) is to “protect from the world” the at times fleeting emotion of the painting.
SNAPSHOT, 1984-93

His paintings are deeply figurative; witness the quantity of portraits. At their heart (the canvas level, or, as he uses mostly board, the wood level) is generally a figurative leitmotif, before arpeggios of response, a polyphony of tonal qualities, describe their way out.

Ok, joke over, but you get the idea.

Painting for Hodgkin is about creating “illusionistic spaces” through the use of a specific vocabulary: colour is to create depth, the richly textured surfaces that allow underpainting to show through create counterpoint; patternings and obliquities help suggest space, while other techniques defeat space, keeping our eyes on the surface of the painting.

He has learned, surprisingly, from Sickert: “one way to make a painting exciting is the intimation of a human drama through psychological and sexual innuendo”. He does this through his tightly controlled focus, an almost keyhole perspective. Hodgkin himself writes: “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations”, that is, not emotions themselves. He also writes: “Pictures result from the accretion of many decisions, some are worked on for years, to find the exact thickness of a feeling.” (to Susan Sontag).

But is the Sickert so surprising? Hodgkin studied at Camberwell School of Art 1949 to 1954. Camberwell at that time was very influenced by the Euston Road School, in reaction to avant-garde’s pure abstractionism, and Surrealism. The Euston Road School (William Coldstream, Graham Bell, Victor Pasmore) was all about disciplined realism, observation, everyday life. And deeply influenced by Sickert and the Camden Town Group.

You also need to consider early Vuillard for the mood and interior scenes. Later, of course Hodgkin’s peers, Matisse, Derain, and who were to become fellow travellers: the neo expressionists.

His focus has always been intimacy, the understated; his figuration cubist, similar to de Kooning. Hodgkin’s observation is very much a consideration of remembered moments, his disciplined realism the veracity of the self.

Of It Can’t Be True (1987-90)

Michael Auping writes, it is “echo-like in its composition. It is composed of tilting frames jostling each other for position within the whole.” So, a constant tension set up by structural elements: the bright yellow frame in the centre is stopped short by a series of abrupt brush strokes that “violate its containment”.

And the title: what can’t be true? I question the need to know. The painting stands, for us; it emerges out of the personal life of the painter. As with all creative works there are always the unknowable elements: the subjective self’s containment is challenged, maybe compromised, but never wholly claimed. The titles are at times oblique because they are commentaries, jokes even, on the self, the legislated life, the legislators of life.

Auping comments, on Snapshot (1984-93), “We are given an inside view…  how the artist allows the marks to show through other marks, how he half buries and obliterates, leaving only what is necessary to re-engage his memory of the subject, though that memory and its relation to the title remains mysterious.”

As with all things, we have to learn to read paintings, their vocabularies, their aesthetics. Those who praise Old Masters for their perspicacity only see, in fact, a fraction of what they look at.

And so we begin to hear the soundtrack to these paintings (and it is not Birtwistle) in the dramatic tensions of the canvases, the emotional sweeps and uncoverings of colour, the personal chiaroscuro.

What has not yet been addressed is Hodgkin’s purpose in using the technique of the overpainted frames. It is a constant feature in his work, this bleeding out from the canvas onto walls, into the room’s light, but most importantly, into the viewer’s own existence.

There is something Derridean in this, how Derrida interrogates Kant and his logic of the parergon: “those things attached to the work of art but not part of its intrinsic form or meaning” eg the frame of the painting, the colonnades of a palace, drapery of statues…. The strict demarcation between one thing and another.

Derrida’s ‘indeterminacy’ informs Hodgkins’ sense of self; sexual orientation, and a sense of community are all implied here; hence a democracy of being, of being in the world. Hence, also, the personal quality, the familiarity, of some of his titles, implying a relationship with the viewer. Like all relationships it has to be worked at, constantly renewed, updated, changed.

The Paintings of Howard Hodgkin

To view a Howard Hodgkin painting is like being in on some event, but with the sound turned off. Everything is happening at once, but there’s this gap.

His paintings are visual ‘events’; you feel the churn of intensities.

It works by being so tightly contained. Most of his paintings are comparatively small: 37×38 cm (Still Life), 26x30cm (Venice Sunset). It’s only in later works he takes on size: 196x269cm (When Did We Go To Morocco?); but these are the exception.

The fierce overpainting objectifies emotional responses. The technically assured range of brushstrokes persuades us into seeing the harmonics of the piece.

So what soundtrack would we put here, then?

Harrison Birtwistle (Sir), for his layered textures and sense of theatre? Because Hodgkin is dramatic, his “emotional responses” (ie his paintings) lift and shape, throw into relief, subjective experience onto an objective plane.

But also for both their idiosyncratic Englishness. Unmistakable. Hodgkin’s focus is mostly domestic, the interior: we, the public, look either into frames into the picture, or out of an interior. Our sense of perspective is jeapordised to such an extent whichever way we look, that Hodgkin’s intensity becomes ours.

The unmistakable overpainting of the frame, and the painted frame within the painting (see Snapshot) is to “protect from the world” the at times fleeting emotion of the painting.

His paintings are deeply figurative; witness the quantity of portraits. At their heart (the canvas level, or, as he uses mostly board, the wood level) is generally a figurative leitmotif, before arpeggios of response, a polyphony of tonal qualities, describe their way out.

Ok, joke over, but you get the idea.

Painting for Hodgkin is about creating “illusionistic spaces” through the use of a specific vocabulary: colour is to create depth, the richly textured surfaces that allow underpainting to show through create counterpoint; patternings and obliquities help suggest space, while other techniques defeat space, keeping our eyes on the surface of the painting.

He has learned, surprisingly, from Sickert: “one way to make a painting exciting is the intimation of a human drama through psychological and sexual innuendo”. He does this through his tightly controlled focus, an almost keyhole perspective. Hodgkin himself writes: “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations”, that is, not emotions themselves. He also writes: “Pictures result from the accretion of many decisions, some are worked on for years, to find the exact thickness of a feeling.” (to Susan Sontag).

But is the Sickert so surprising? Hodgkin studied at Camberwell School of Art 1949 to 1954. Camberwell at that time was very influenced by the Euston Road School, in reaction to avant-garde’s pure abstractionism, and Surrealism. The Euston Road School (William Coldstream, Graham Bell, Victor Pasmore) was all about disciplined realism, observation, everyday life. And deeply influenced by Sickert and the Camden Town Group.

You also need to consider early Vuillard for the mood and interior scenes. Later, of course Hodgkin’s peers, Matisse, Derain, and who were to become fellow travellers: the neo expressionists.

His focus has always been intimacy, the understated; his figuration cubist, similar to de Kooning. Hodgkin’s observation is very much a consideration of remembered moments, his disciplined realism the veracity of the self.

Of It Can’t Be True (1987-90) Michael Auping writes, it is “echo-like in its composition. It is composed of tilting frames jostling each other for position within the whole.” So, a constant tension set up by structural elements: the bright yellow frame in the centre is stopped short by a series of abrupt brush strokes that “violate its containment”.

And the title: what can’t be true? I question the need to know. The painting stands, for us; it emerges out of the personal life of the painter. As with all creative works there are always the unknowable elements: the subjective self’s containment is challenged, maybe compromised, but never wholly claimed. The titles are at times oblique because they are commentaries, jokes even, on the self, the legislated life, the legislators of life.

Auping comments, on Snapshot (1984-93), “We are given an inside view…  how the artist allows the marks to show through other marks, how he half buries and obliterates, leaving only what is necessary to re-engage his memory of the subject, though that memory and its relation to the title remains mysterious.”

As with all things, we have to learn to read paintings, their vocabularies, their aesthetics. Those who praise Old Masters for their perspicacity only see, in fact, a fraction of what they look at.

And so we begin to hear the soundtrack to these paintings (and it is not Birtwistle) in the dramatic tensions of the canvases, the emotional sweeps and uncoverings of colour, the personal chiaroscuro.

What has not yet been addressed is Hodgkin’s purpose in using the technique of the overpainted frames. It is a constant feature in his work, this bleeding out from the canvas onto walls, into the room’s light, but most importantly, into the viewer’s own existence.

There is something Derridean in this, how Derrida interrogates Kant and his logic of the parergon: “those things attached to the work of art but not part of its intrinsic form or meaning” eg the frame of the painting, the colonnades of a palace, drapery of statues…. The strict demarcation between one thing and another.

Derrida’s ‘indeterminacy’ informs Hodgkins’ sense of self; sexual orientation, and a sense of community are all implied here; hence a democracy of being, of being in the world. Hence, also, the personal quality, the familiarity, of some of his titles, implying a relationship with the viewer. Like all relationships it has to be worked at, constantly renewed, updated, changed.