Writing About What you Hate.

[zi...@interport.net]

Ove the years, despite my built in truculence and anger, I realized
that it is not possible to have true insight into work or works which
you dislike. The less I like something and the less it is close to my
art the less I know about it. I try and most of the time succeed in
not writing about anything but the work I love.

Please, if any of you think my satiric letter if the other day meant I
don;t love the Mannerists or Michelangelo, be disabused. I think they
are just fine. I also believe that the Comtesse d'Haussonville
portriat by Ingres is his greatest portrait. Partially because of the
pictorial effect of the low shoulder.

Would I ever have noticed that hidden form if I had not loved the
painting and spent a great deal of time studying it?

Other paintings whihc have meant a great deal to me and gotten
studied very seriously at length. Watteau's Embarkation for Cithera
-the Berlin version, his Shoips Sign for Gersaint and his Gilles.

Any Chardin I have been fortunate enough to see. I saw the great
Chardin show in Boston, I believe. It had not only many great early
and middle period paintings, but the later oval paintings [two of
them] which I think particularly great, especially the one with the
cut melon, which of course is metaphoric for the oval canvas. The
other one, though is about relating the oval to the rectangle on a
formal level and great too. The late work is weirdly proto-Cezanne! He
has a wildly enriched palette with both warm and cool lights and
darks. And in a number of his paintings it is possible to notice what
we would call distortions as to the beginning and the end of planes.
Look for example at a late still life painting and you will see that
the back edge of the plane on which the objects sit changes location
vertically from left to right as in Cezanne. There are many subtle
changes like this throughout sat work which make it pictorially
stronger thasn ever. Unfortunately the late pastels did not come, but
I saw the self portrait and the portrait of his wife at the Louvre.
They blkew me away. Still lifde painting as a genre laregely died
after Chardin's death anbd he was not revived until the mid nineteenth
century. Francois Bonvin, a new still life painter, became one of the
early experts who helped identify Chardin's when they were found.
It boggles the mind to think that this greast painter disappeared from
view for nearly 100 years.

Just a short list in which I do give examples of the insights which
come from close viewing and study of something an aretist likes.

It does no good to spend much time looking at the other stuff. You
won't get it and you won't have anything to share with anyone else.

Gabriel