On the "realism" of the Old Masters
spino...@msn.com
One of the notions that underlies the neo-traditionalist view of art (on
display in Mani de Li's Web Page) is that correspondence with reality is
a criterion for quality and that this correspondence was more on display
in the Old Masters. The following experiment, however, shows that this
notion is mostly a mistake.
Take a digital copy of a work of art pre-1900: for example, the group
detail from Poussin's very fine Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice. One
good thing about Mani's Web page is that it provides links to a sort of
"Texas museum of art" which is a file of many traditional and new
paintings (no Boogeroo, thank the Goddess.)
To make a quick digital copy while the painting is on your screen, you
can press shift-alt-PrintScr when using Windows 3.1/95 (press and hold
shift, press and hold alt, tap PrintScr).
Open the Paint accessory (in Windows 3.1/95. Press control-V to paste
the digital art into a bit map. Then, on the menu bar of the Paint
program, select Edit..Select All to draw a selection around the entire
painting or detail.
Then, to see how "realistic" this Old Master was, choose Image..Invert
Colors (or press Control+I.) On a good monitor, you will see almost
nothing but white and electric blue.
This shows that this Old Master's pallete was unrealistically biased
towards warm colors, and this was one of the charges of the
Impressionists: that the Old Masters were unrealistic in that they
painted using "brown soups." It does not detract from the grandeur,
nobility and excellence of Poussin in the slightest, because we don't
look for the thing as such in Poussin (only the most naive would use
Poussin to determine how the ancients looked like): we look for Poussin
in Poussin.
Art is a language, as in the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman, and
privileging the language of Poussin (warm soup, serene geometrical
composition) over Matisse (bright color and musical ryhthm in place of
spatial composition) is the same sort of pernicious cultural mistake
nineteenth-century linguists made when they praised their country's
language (English, French, Serbian) as "more natural" in its
correspondence with a "reality" that it was necessary for the racist to
take as a given. These unfortunate cultural memes persist, in
"English-only" legislation, and in Mani's neo-traditionalism.
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Charles Eicher
> One of the notions that underlies the neo-traditionalist view of art (on
> display in Mani de Li's Web Page) is that correspondence with reality is
> a criterion for quality and that this correspondence was more on display
> in the Old Masters. The following experiment, however, shows that this
> notion is mostly a mistake.
>
> Take a digital copy of a work of art pre-1900: for example, the group
> detail from Poussin's very fine Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.
[snip details of putting the painting on your computer monitor]
> Then, to see how "realistic" this Old Master was, choose Image..Invert
> Colors (or press Control+I.) On a good monitor, you will see almost
> nothing but white and electric blue.
That is an extremely bad method of analyzing a color pallette. RBG images
have virtually no correspondence to actual painted colors. And don't forget
these images probably began as photographs, before they were scanned. There
are many printed or photographed colors that just won't come up with
anything other than a vague relationship to the original colors. I won't
even get into transmitted light (slides and TV images) vs. reflected light.
I'll give you a good example. I once had a client come into a shop where I
worked as a color separator, with an image of a DeKooning painting for use
in an art magazine advertisement. I was quite familiar with that particular
painting, because I saw it often in the local museum. Another color
separator made the negatives at her direction. They came out too contrasty,
blowing out all the subtleties and making the yellows way too intense and
harsh. I pointed this out to the client and insisted that we would make
appropriate corrections at no cost, and that we SHOULD make appropriate
corrections. She refused, saying that this was just exactly how she
requested it to look. I objected, and said that this painting deserved a
better rendering, and DeKoonings just don't look like that. She said that
this was exactly how it looked to HER, and in the future, she'd be taking
her work elsewhere. Fine with me, I don't want to be associated with such
shoddy work.
> This shows that this Old Master's pallete was unrealistically biased
> towards warm colors, and this was one of the charges of the
> Impressionists: that the Old Masters were unrealistic in that they
> painted using "brown soups." It does not detract from the grandeur,
> nobility and excellence of Poussin in the slightest, because we don't
> look for the thing as such in Poussin (only the most naive would use
> Poussin to determine how the ancients looked like): we look for Poussin
> in Poussin.
Well, this doesn't have so much to do with their color preferences, but
more with the availability of pigments. Ochres and sienna (etc) were easy
to get, but bright colors (especially blues and reds) cost a lot more, and
were mostly used to highlight areas. It sometimes amazes me how much range
of color could be shown only using the "brown soups" with touches of
brighter colors.
> Art is a language, as in the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman, and
> privileging the language of Poussin (warm soup, serene geometrical
> composition) over Matisse (bright color and musical ryhthm in place of
> spatial composition) is the same sort of pernicious cultural mistake
> nineteenth-century linguists made when they praised their country's
> language (English, French, Serbian) as "more natural" in its
> correspondence with a "reality" that it was necessary for the racist to
> take as a given. These unfortunate cultural memes persist, in
> "English-only" legislation, and in Mani's neo-traditionalism.
I think you're making a mistake here. There never was such a tradition as
Mani insists upon. In their times, Mani's favorite artists were considered
anti-traditional, and loathsome radicals, shattering the aesthetic of their
times. To uphold these artists as a model for contemporary artists to
emulate strikes me as rather quaint and naive, and terribly retrograde. It
is a wish to avoid the complexities of the modern age by taking refuge in
one's own nostalgic notions of the past, a past that was NOT like he
imagines. Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.
| Charles Eicher |
| -=- |
| cei...@inav.net |
spino...@msn.com
>Subject: Re: On the "realism" of the Old Masters
>From: cei...@inav.net (Charles Eicher)
>In article <882798884...@dejanews.com>, spino...@msn.com >wrote:
>> One of the notions that underlies the neo-traditionalist view of art (on
>> display in Mani de Li's Web Page) is that correspondence with reality is
>> a criterion for quality and that this correspondence was more on display
>> in the Old Masters. The following experiment, however, shows that this
>> notion is mostly a mistake.
>
>> Take a digital copy of a work of art pre-1900: for example, the group
>> detail from Poussin's very fine Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.
[snip details of putting the painting on your computer monitor]
>> Then, to see how "realistic" this Old Master was, choose Image..Invert
>> Colors (or press Control+I.) On a good monitor, you will see almost
>> nothing but white and electric blue.
>That is an extremely bad method of analyzing a color pallette.
It is extremely crude, Charles, but enough information is preserved to
get an overall idea of the way the pallette of Poussin and the masters
was biased towards an ideological and "unrealistic" brown soup. The use
of burnt sienna and the umber groups for shading was a well-known
practise of the old masters and it was intended to give a high
seriousness to the work. The crude experiment, which might be
appropriate in an art class where computers are available, is just meant
to point up how Poussin used warm colors for shades.
And if you take some of the Impressionist works, such as Berthe Morisot's
marine painting at the Texas museum of art web site or a common Monet,
and complement their colors using the technique described, warm colors or
violets predominate.
I think electronic reproduction is an extremely poor way of appreciating
art, apart from the occasional relief given to the eyes by a screen
saver, and I think the Philistinism of RAF lends credence to my view.
But numerate and computerised studies of art and literature, even using
crude tools, have their place. Rather than showing the absolute
qualities seen in the presence of the real painting, numerate studies,
even if inaccurate, show important differences, and undermine our
preconceived notions by giving us a new look at the artistic phenomena.
Knowing from a laborious study done before computers that Shakespeare
used 25,000 distinct words, and Racine only 12,000, is NOT appreciating
either author, but it does illustrate the difference between Tudor drama
and French classic drama.
>RBG images
>have virtually no correspondence to actual painted colors. And don't forget
>these images probably began as photographs, before they were scanned.
As to an absolute guide to what Poussin's Landscape with Orpheus and
Eurydice looked like, of course the best digital reproduction is worse
than the worst paper reproduction, and the best paper reproduction is
nothing like the real thing. I have seen Orpheus and Eurydice in the
Louvre and it is quite unlike its reproductions, for it shows that
Poussin was like Cezanne in lacking a certain natural facility (giving
Mani Yet Another thing to think about), yet this very lack makes the work
more powerful, precisely as Cezanne's visible labor makes his work more
powerful. I have seen the very fine collection of Matisse's work at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, and that is one reason I was offended
by Mani's attacks on the 1907 Blue Nude, for the physical presence of the
dried paint shows us a musical composition in color and form...whereas
Mani sees only shit.
>There
>are many printed or photographed colors that just won't come up with
>anything other than a vague relationship to the original colors. I won't
>even get into transmitted light (slides and TV images) vs. reflected light.
>I'll give you a good example. I once had a client come into a shop where I
>worked as a color separator, with an image of a DeKooning painting for use
>in an art magazine advertisement. I was quite familiar with that particular
>painting, because I saw it often in the local museum. Another color
>separator made the negatives at her direction. They came out too contrasty,
>blowing out all the subtleties and making the yellows way too intense and
>harsh. I pointed this out to the client and insisted that we would make
>appropriate corrections at no cost, and that we SHOULD make appropriate
>corrections. She refused, saying that this was just exactly how she
>requested it to look. I objected, and said that this painting deserved a
>better rendering, and DeKoonings just don't look like that. She said that
>this was exactly how it looked to HER, and in the future, she'd be taking
>her work elsewhere. Fine with me, I don't want to be associated with such
>shoddy work.
A very interesting story about the labor process. I have a copy of an
article (from Adobe Magazine) about the difficulty of color matching with
computers, for each monitor and each printer can give a different color
depending on its age, ambient light, and so on. What this shows, I
think, is that humans have a historically conditioned and quite infinite
ability to see differences in color and form. Now, "studies" "prove"
that our ability to discriminate colors is actually granular, but I feel
that these studies are infected with the methodological mistakes of the
behavioral sciences as practiced: they don't take into account that the
ultimate "grain" of perception can be coarser or finer given specific
material and historical factors (Homer refers to the "wine-dark sea", a
beautiful phrase but one that makes us wonder about his eye for color,
existing as it did in the ancient world.)
While I applaud your discrimination and your courage, I'd suggest that
art reproduction may be a futile venture if it is to be measured against
the presentation of the real thing, for some of the same reasons
unreflective thought is mistaken on the "realism" of the old masters.
Art reproduction misses both the physicality of paint (on display in the
Louvre, in Poussin's Orpheus) and it misses the specific context of
gallery going. It may be significant, for example, that we look at art
standing up and walking around, whereas we look at reproductions sitting
down. The former gives us better circulation and releases endorphins and
enhances the process of looking at art. It's a *mitzvot*, or Judaic
blessing, to take one's ailing granny to the picture gallery for this
reason (always assuming the old bird doesn't have a broken hip.)
Phaidon press in the 1960s published a high-quality series of monographs
on artists and explicitly refused, at the price-point of these books, to
reproduce the art in them in color. This was an example of intellectual
honesty, for today all art books are in color, and the lower-priced
examples fraudulently deceive the public about what art looks like.
I'd add that because it's impossible for the reasons I've set forth to
really reproduce art, it's not worth losing your job over your
principles. I am convinced, *pace* Mani de Li, that art is NEVER made in
the business world because of the necessity to make money.
>Well, this doesn't have so much to do with their color preferences, but
>more with the availability of pigments. Ochres and sienna (etc) were easy
>to get, but bright colors (especially blues and reds) cost a lot more, and
>were mostly used to highlight areas. It sometimes amazes me how much range
>of color could be shown only using the "brown soups" with touches of
>brighter colors.
Good point! However, the mediaeval egg tempera painters up to Carlo
Crivelli labored under the same and worse cost restrictions and also,
like the old masters from Leonardo to Sir Joshua Reynolds, restricted the
bulk of their pallette to the earths. According to Daniel Thompson of
Yale, a typical egg tempera pallette restricts itself to yellow ochre for
yellow, whereas the modern painter thinks of this earth tone as a sort of
high brown because of the availability, nowadays, of cadmium yellow. The
typical egg tempera pallette used a very small number of colors.
Nonetheless, the mediaeval painters were able to achieve with this
limited and earthy range a lightness of color that foreshadows the
impressionists, because they used readi;y available white gesso as the
underpainting, and not the middle grey or brown tones favored by Poussin
et al. The difference lay in the Old Master's renaissance-inspired
desire to inject seriousness and classicism in their works, as opposed to
religious feeling.
And by the 18th century brighter colors were being developed, especially
in England, by tradesmen. There were very unfortunate results such as
bitumen, as well as a color made out of Egyptian mummies, and the
poisoning of several generations of artists by lead white. But you can
paint impressionistically without using the coal-tar bright colors
available to the Impressionists, because if you adjust the structural
relations of colors and use your expensive stuff (like lapis lazuli) cut
with white, the result will be highly-keyed. Especially after cleaning,
Canaletto and Guardi (Venetian scene painters of the 18th century)
foreshadow the Impressionists by keeping their earth-based palette at a
high overall "key."
>I think you're making a mistake here. There never was such a tradition as
>Mani insists upon. In their times, Mani's favorite artists were considered
>anti-traditional, and loathsome radicals, shattering the aesthetic of their
>times.
While Dali managed to shock and scandalise Americans, who came to modern
art through the Armory show, he was quite derivative of the REAL
surrealists, especially the literary surrealists. In terms of the
development of high modernism, Dali is a commercialised and unpleasant
dead-end. Rather than struggling for acceptance, Dali was in th 1940s
something like Andy Warhol, or Camille Paglia. This is a person,
normally an employer of completely anonymous (and often exploited)
slaveys, who expropriates a half-understood cultural zone predeveloped by
others, and who makes an industrial process out of its production. The
end-product is more appealing to the emotionally stunted and
underdeveloped, because it is informed by the same sort of
aggressiveness that informs traditional commercial practice.
Dali, unlike Picasso and Pablo Casals, never objected to Franco's
repression in Spain from the 1930s to the 1970s (with the death in 1989
of thug Communism, I am unapologetic about using Left convictions as a
guide to morality.) Dali also never acknowledged his real debt to Andre
Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and the other real surrealists. Similarly,
Warhol, an interior decorator originally, never seemed to even know that
synthetic Cubism incorporated commercial products in high art with a
greater imaginativeness than his soap boxes, and Camille Paglia quite
shamelessly borrows literary critical tropes from French theory while at
the same time engaging in the fashionable mockery of deconstruction.
The monopolistic aggressiveness of these half-educated parvenus emerges
in strikingly violent episodes, from Paglia's buffoonery on the lecture
circuit to the shooting of Warhol by a woman, Valerie Solanis, who he may
have exploited. Meanwhile, REAL artists are generally characterized by a
greater refinement of manner, support for philanthrophic and left causes,
and a work that lives after them: the late Roy Lichtenstein's works, I
predict, will hold their value, whereas those of Warhol have already have
been reappraised downward by his estate.
The difference, as I have pointed out in a related post, is between High
modernism, a principled modernism which engages the tradition in a
dialog, and a Low modernism which proclaims that it is sui generis, using
a misunderstood tradition only as a phallic signifier. Low modernism is
especially appealing, in its stunted flatness and the amazing violence of
its attacks on father-figures like Matisse, to Lost Boys.
When I first saw Cezanne, I had Mani's reaction: I was 15 years old, and
I saw daubs of paint on canvas. But the art books said he was great. So
I looked again, and again. And then, space opened up for me in the same
way it did at the Bay of l'Estaque for Cezanne and I saw the magnificent
space presented in a way that a photograph could not, because this was
not the bald facts (the computer bits, as it were) of the scene. It was
the scene as it presented itself to Cezanne.
Most people who think at all about the matter today are convinced, as
*bien pensants* that perceptions cannot be communicated. Identity
politics are based on this notion: since the 1960s, it has been
considered suspect for a man to enthusiastically support feminism,
because "you cannot know what it's like to be a woman in our society."
This has a great deal of truth, but taken to extremes it means that
political life is a clash of interests, nothing more, and that in both
the family and the society, empathy is impossible. People's pain becomes
something private for which they cannot be compensated except in cash:
the very idea, for example, that elderly survivors of the Holocaust
should waste their remaining years in court to get Swiss bank accounts,
never mind the disproportionality between a world-historical crime and
the cash nexus, stems from this.
However, Edmund Husserl and other philosophers working in the Continental
phenomenological tradition rejected this view, which plagues modern
philosophy in England and America: the belief that between scientific
"facts" and private sensation there is ... nothing at all. If the
AngloAmerican philosophers are right, then there is no reason to look
twice at Cezanne if his "daubs" don't immediately appeal. But if Cezanne
taught a new way of seeing apart from mere vacant perception, and if
Husserl and others were right, then it's very important to at least try
to see what he was about.
Now, Mani would say that in following the lead of art books, I was, many
years ago, just a pretentious little shit who wanted to have some sort of
edge over the athletes at my high school. Perhaps. All I can say is
that after my divorce I found that looking at art ancient and modern was
a serene and healing experience. The very pretense of wanting something
finer than the daily horse puckey of going to work, the very excess of
feigning, may itself be most human.
mdeli
From spino...@msn.com Wed Dec 24 02:51:32 1997
From: spino...@msn.com
>I have seen the very fine collection of Matisse's work at the
>Museum of Modern Art in New York, and that is one reason I was offended by
>Mani's attacks on the 1907 Blue Nude, for the physical presence of
>the dried paint shows us a musical composition in color and form...whereas Mani sees only shit.
You see shit I see lousey painting. Anyway am glad you were offended.
"Blue Nude" is an early prime example of no-skill-fumble-klotz
realism. Now every art school incompetent can paint similar stuff and
imagine himself a genius. that is until he tries to sell it.
>While Dali managed to shock and scandalise Americans, who came to modern art through the
> Armory show, he was quite derivative of the REAL surrealists, especially the literary surrealists.
Utter nonsense. Name one artist who painted a double image anything
like Dali. Take a good Look at "Spain" or "Voltaire" and tell us who
it is derived from. Dali's technique is a fusion between impressionism
and classical technique. His form lighting is unique and even the most
conservitive artzy-fartzy critic reluctantly admits its excellence.
>development of high modernism, Dali is a commercialised and unpleasant
>dead-end. Rather than struggling for acceptance, Dali was in th 1940s
>something like Andy Warhol, or Camille Paglia.
The only difference being that Dali was skilled and had original
ideas.
>Dali, unlike Picasso and Pablo Casals, never objected to Franco's
>repression in Spain from the 1930s to the 1970s (with the death in 1989
>of thug Communism, I am unapologetic about using Left convictions as a
>guide to morality.)
Try studing Picasso,s "Portrait of Stalin" and his "Massacre in Korea"
for the great art you approve of. I don't judge Picasso's work bad
because he was a communist. It is hardly worth mentioning. Its bad for
artistic not political reasons.
>Dali also never acknowledged his real debt to Andre
>Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and the other real surrealists.
Dali out-goofed all the surrealists because he was more intellegent,
creative and knew how to paint. Duchamp gave up on painting and Breton
never achieved anything. Real surrealism embarrassed the surealists
most of who were political hacks and incompetent Dadaist erzatz.
Long filibuster snipped
>When I first saw Cezanne, I had Mani's reaction: I was 15 years old, and
>I saw daubs of paint on canvas. But the art books said he was great.
And having no mind of your own you believed them ever since.
Snip
>However, Edmund Husserl and other philosophers working in the Continental
>Phenomenological...
Philosophical gas snipped. Gee You didn't mention Heidigger or
Feurabend yet. Getting tired?
>Now, Mani would say that in following the lead of art books, I was, many
>years ago, just a pretentious little shit who wanted to have some sort of
>edge over the athletes at my high school.
Snip... You aren't pretentious just flatulent.
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art
Jerry
It seems to me it is a big waste of time talking about whether you like
Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne or Dali and who is better. Each man spent
their life making their art and telling us something about the nature of
our world as they saw it, so that we could expand our own vision if we
want to do so.
I taught art for 30 plus years and looked at their works over and over
again in an effort to explain what they were doing to my students. The
more I learned of each, the more I liked what I saw. In many cases I
had experiences that mirrored what these men created. I remember
sitting in a boat on a small lake looking at a small tree filled island
and the water was as smooth as glass so it mirrored almost perfectly the
trees on the island. Immediately I was reminded of one of Cezanne's
paintings and how he captured that moment so beautifully. In many cases
a real life experience that I had was made richer because of the tie
that I was able to make between the real world and what these (and
other)artists were able to communicate.
As part of a photography class, I once went to a dumping area behind a
factory after the rain and took dozens of pictures The next day in the
dark room as I experimented with the images I had taken I realized that
by changing my focus I could make wet dirty plastic look like a rich
velvety surface.
Many times I took groups of students to the art institute and afterwards
the world would take on a magical characteristic because of something
that was communicated to me as I viewed the artwork inside the musuem.
As the teacher in the group I never asked anyone to like or dislike a
piece of artwork that we saw. No one really cares whether you like or
dislike something. If it touches you that is what important. If not,
it just might be your inability to take it in or to be open to what is
in front of you. No one ever said Picasso's work is for everyone. I
have grown to love the spontaneity of what he does and tried for years
to imitate what I saw and in the process learned a lot about myself.
It does not take a genius to be negative about something, just read a
newspaper or watch the evening news or listen to what a politician says.
After a while it all sounds the same...boring.
I will read what you write if I can learn something from the experience.
But once I start seeing the same old "rantings" I just hit the next
button the way I do with spam.
mdeli
On Sun, 28 Dec 1997 15:07:38 -0800, in rec.arts.fine you wrote:
>It seems to me it is a big waste of time talking about whether you like
>Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne or Dali and who is better.
Not everyone lacks opinions like you do.
> No one really cares whether you like or
>dislike something.
Then you have nothing to say on the matter.
>It does not take a genius to be negative about something, just read a
>newspaper or watch the evening news or listen to what a politician says.
>After a while it all sounds the same...boring.
And it often takes an idiot to be positive about some things. That is
why we investigate and discuss matters of fact and opinion.
In fact your statement gives me the impression that you are a big
bore.