Mani de Li is wrong on Cezanne's "skill"
spino...@msn.com
Mani de Li refers to Paul Cezanne as a "fumble-klotz." Here's what
Philip Callow says about the artist (Callow 1995):
"Those who maintained that he [Cezanne] couldn't draw have only
to look at the careful academic studies from the nude and from casts
at Aix and the Louvre. THE SLUR IS FATUOUS [emphasis mine.]
He could turn out the cliche with the best of them. They are
sensitive, competent drawings done in obedience to a formula."
Callow goes on to quote from a famous essay by D. H. Lawrence on the
artist:
"But when the drawing was conventionally all right, to Cezanne himself
it was mockingly all wrong, it was cliche...he wanted true-to-life
representation. Only he wanted it MORE true-to-life. And once you have
got photography, it is a very, very difficult thing to get representation
*more* true to life..."
Callow points out that unlike a camera we have feelings and intuitions
and we live in three dimensions. The fact that the mass media of today
are doing their best to destroy our inner life by celebrating it in order
to cash in, and the fact that TV encourages a flatness as opposed to
three-dimensional movement and feeling, should not blind us to this. In
the dawn of photographic reproduction, Cezanne sought a new way of seeing
that would not make painting a waste of time.
REFERENCE
Callow 1995: Phillip Callow, LOST EARTH: A Life of Cezanne. Chicago
1995: Ivan R. Dee.
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Bob Cantor
spino...@MSN.com wrote:
>
> Mani de Li refers to Paul Cezanne as a "fumble-klotz." Here's what
> Philip Callow says about the artist (Callow 1995):
>
> "Those who maintained that he [Cezanne] couldn't draw have only
> to look at the careful academic studies from the nude and from casts
> at Aix and the Louvre. THE SLUR IS FATUOUS [emphasis mine.]
> He could turn out the cliche with the best of them. They are
> sensitive, competent drawings done in obedience to a formula."
>
Based on what I saw at the major show in Philadelphia a year or two ago,
I'd have to disagree. They had quite a few examples of his early
drawings which I think showed an accomplished sensitivity to the
materials being used but which by no means demonstrated ability to turn
out traditional academic studies according to formula. There were
obvious distortions in his figure drawings that did not seem intentional
but rather resulting from either the lack of ability to get it right or
just unfamiliarity with the the proper proportions.
Don't get me wrong - I think Cezanne was a fantastic painter. This
doesn't mean that I think he was a master of every possible skill
associated with painting. He mastered the skills that mattered to his
work. Academically accurate drawing was not one of them. Many people, I
think, mistakenly equate that one skill with all skill. I know nothing
about Callow, but he sounds like he has made that mistake. Since he
knows Cezanne to have incredible skill, therefore he assumes that
Cezanne must have mastered all aspects of academic drawing, and I this
then affects his judgements of the early works.
Either that, or the drawings I saw were not at all typical of his work.
Since I'm not even close to being a professional critic, I suppose
that's at least an equally plausible explanation.
> Callow goes on to quote from a famous essay by D. H. Lawrence on the
> artist:
>
> "But when the drawing was conventionally all right, to Cezanne himself
> it was mockingly all wrong, it was cliche...he wanted true-to-life
> representation. Only he wanted it MORE true-to-life. And once you have
> got photography, it is a very, very difficult thing to get representation
> *more* true to life..."
>
I've always had a problem with the idea that the impressionists and
other artists of that time were painting in ways that were more "true to
life" or painting what they "really" saw. This is what I was taught at
an early age, but I think it was just a crutch to get people to accept
this type of art after having been conditioned all their lives to only
value that which appears photographically realistic. I still
occasionally hear people at galleries thinking they are complementing a
painting by stating that it looks just like a photograph!
What Cezanne and his contemporaries were doing was emphasizing different
aspects of experiencing reality, but at the expense of having to
downplay other aspects. So it ends up being no more or less true to life
and no more or less painting what they really saw than anything which
came before them.
- Bob C.
mdeli
On Wed, 17 Dec 1997 14:08:30 -0500, Bob Cantor <bob...@erols.com>
wrote:
>spino...@MSN.com wrote:
>>
>> Mani de Li refers to Paul Cezanne as a "fumble-klotz." Here's what
>> Philip Callow says about the artist (Callow 1995):
>>
>> "Those who maintained that he [Cezanne] couldn't draw have only
>> to look at the careful academic studies from the nude and from casts
>> at Aix and the Louvre.
I'm familiar with these drawings and I think they are second class art
student quality. However they are better than the reams of trash
produced by most of today's fifth class art students who have learned
almost nothing. So when these students compare themselves to Cezanne
they think he could draw well. Few of these students have ever bother
to look at fine drawings and compared them with what they have been
taught is great. They abhor and then ignoremany exhibit of skill
which there teachers have taught them to ignore and dismiss with the
excuse that it is just commercial kitsch.
> There were
>obvious distortions in his figure drawings that did not seem intentional
>but rather resulting from either the lack of ability to get it right or
>just unfamiliarity with the the proper proportions.
Distortion isn't a lot of formless misproportion ed schmier. All
artists distort, see el Greco, Breughel, even Ingres to Dali and you
will see artistic distortion.
>Don't get me wrong - I think Cezanne was a fantastic painter. This
>doesn't mean that I think he was a master of every possible skill
>associated with painting. He mastered the skills that mattered to his
>work.
What skill is that?
His painted humans are all an abomination of color, composition and
especially drawing. His still-lifes are totally over-rated and full of
formless schmier. Look at the drapery. His landscapes look better
because if you draw a branch going off in any odd direction it can't
be criticised. His composition in spite of all the ravings is really
simple conventional. His pallet does anticipate that of Matisse's and
etc. jelly bean colors. Its green and orange doesn't impress me. I
think Cezanne is an over-rated imitatable hack
Soon I'll be doing a criticism of one of Cezanne's 'outdoor scenes
with nudes hopping around.' on my web page with some lusciously
idiotic details. Check it out
>Either that, or the drawings I saw were not at all typical of his work.
>Since I'm not even close to being a professional critic, I suppose
>that's at least an equally plausible explanation.
>
Go through a Cezanne book and see if you can find better. I doubt you
will.
>> Callow goes on to quote from a famous essay by D. H. Lawrence on the
>> artist:
>>
>> "But when the drawing was conventionally all right, to Cezanne himself
>> it was mockingly all wrong, it was cliche...he wanted true-to-life
>> representation. Only he wanted it MORE true-to-life. And once you have
>> got photography, it is a very, very difficult thing to get representation
>> *more* true to life..."
.and what is this supposed to mean?
> I still
>occasionally hear people at galleries thinking they are complementing a
>painting by stating that it looks just like a photograph!
>
Does Dali or Norman Rockwell really look like a photograph? Would
anyone mistake at as such?
>What Cezanne and his contemporaries were doing was emphasizing different
>aspects of experiencing reality, but at the expense of having to
>downplay other aspects. So it ends up being no more or less true to life
>and no more or less painting what they really saw than anything which
>came before them.
When you think about it carefully you will find the phrase 'true to
life' has no real meaning.
Mani DeLi http:/www.interlog.com/~hugod/
...no skill no art
Brother Alphabet
On Thu, 18 Dec 1997, mdeli wrote:
> Distortion isn't a lot of formless misproportioned schmier. All
> artists distort...
I agree completely.
All art, regardless of style, even photorealism, is abstraction.
If it were reality, it would not be an image, but the actual item.
Art is rendered with a self-conscious eye, even that which claims to
be sterilized of such influence. The artist can not avoid including
psychic signatures as well as outright personal references in his or her
work. This may be seen by color choice, brushstroke, canvas size, and even
subject matter or lack thereof. (These are 2-d references, and I apologize
to any sculptors...the same principles apply, but in regard to the third
dimension, I prefer not to elaborate...I have not had enough personal
experience developing my ideas in 3d to speak with any credibility)
> When you think about it carefully you will find the phrase 'true to
> life' has no real meaning.
Agreed here also. "True to Life" could only apply to a singularity, for we
all carry around our own versions of reality. Our versions might collide
or overlap in places, but none are duplicate. There is no way an artist
could render a work that was completely 'True to' the life of anyone but
him or herself.
This is not a pipe.....Rene Magritte.
I'm an advertisement for a version of myself.....David Byrne.
Hutto
spino...@msn.com
>Subject: re: Mani de Li is wrong on Cezanne
>From: nsw...@aol.com (NSWEISS)
>Spinoza wrote:
>"This is because we have turned over our notions of truth and life to
>institutions. The south of France and the Mediterranean managed to..."
>Not sure why I am responding to this post...and unwilling to trace a logic
>through the thread, as well as uninterested in entering an arguement that >holds
Please take responsibility for entering a dialogue. If you were indeed
"unwilling to trace a logic" and "uninterested in entering an argument"
then you would not, or should not, have entered the dialogue.
>little interest or relevance to me, however...
>...and granted I am no expert on Napoleon...but my understanding is that >he was
>a rather sophisticated individual having been raised in an environment and >with
>family relations holding extensive experience in organization and >manipulation.
True, as far as it goes. His family was heavily involved in Corsican
politics. But the ancients as described in Plutarch were also
experienced in organization and manipulation. The difference from our
times is that the individual Caesar imposed his personality on events in
a way that Bill Cliniton, or for that matter Robespierre, could not. One
gets the impression that Caesar did not have "handlers" (a curiously
dehumanizing term), and although the men of the Terror tried to model
themselves after the ancients, one gets the impression that they were
subject to the pressure of the mass in a way that the ancients were not.
Spartacus was a tragic blip on the screen: the forced move of the Royal
Family from Versailles to Paris at the behest of the sans-Cullotte was a
critical event.
Whereas it appears that the more primitive situation in Corsica of the
1790s was such that individuals could influence events as did the
ancients, and today, Corsican politics still lag behind that of the rest
of the world in a unique way.
>He was trained and educated in a sophisticated environment...and was no >product
>of 'time warp'. A time of triple revolution (1. political (French Revolution,
>2. industrial (urban culture, mass production etc., etc., 3. intellectual [the
>Enlightenment: History replacing theology and the Bible, etc.etc.). Indeed >the
Huh? although Napoleon was indeed a man of the Revolution and had read,
or was influence by, Enlightenment texts, #2 is simply not on. The
Industrial Revolution had not happened in France at the time of Napoleon
and had only begun in Britain. Of course, since economic development is
a continuous process, handicraft manufacture was evolving in the France
of Napoleon's time, but the situation in Corsica was probably unchanged
since that of the ancient world, for the most part.
It is understandable, given the ways our educational system purposely
ignores material bases, that you've made this error. Boom...Industrial
Revolution, happened all over Europe 'round about 1800...NOT. France
lagged behind Germany and Britain and is still not quite in sync (which
may explain the greater attractiveness and higher morality of its public
life and social welfare provisions vis a vis US and Britain.)
>inception of 'Modernism' (politically, intellectually,and industrially{granted,
>stronger in England}) was just occuring, and part of Napoleon represented >a
>reaction to certain changes in modern life, and other elements in him, an
>embrace of Modenism (his relation to politics and secular v.s. church >power for
>example).
>Time warp? Hardly. Track the radical restructuring of the world occuring at >the
>time, at which France was THE center (and which the inheretance of the
>European Enlightenment has shaped so much of the contemporary >Western world).
France thought itself the center only to find out that it was not on the
field of Waterloo. Wellington won the battle not because England was
more industrialised (for in 1815 the scale of industry was not yet ready
to influence military events, as it began to in the American Civil War),
but partly because his men behaved on the field in a proto-industrial
fashion. They manifested a fire discipline at critical moments which the
French did not: this was the origin of the phrase "the thin red line."
Fire discipline resulted from careful training and a subservience of the
individual to the needs of an organization which was already occuring on
the factory floor in England, and the same sort of fellows were recruited
to the Army and to the factory. Aspects of the military discipline
co-evolved with the factory discipline and had started out in Cromwell's
New Model Army of the 17th century. Whereas the French pictured
themselves as ancient Greeks sallying forth as more or less individual
heroes to meet the foe (Marshal Ney's charge in absence of combined arms
support an example) and it was this that lost the day...not only at
Waterloo, but at other critical battles of the later Napoleonic wars.
>Napolean was as much a construct of the needs of France and the forces >and
>contradictions that was her fabric, an Aristocratic Reaction to the cultural
>changes (additianllty France has always exhibited a need for a "Strong >Man":
True as far as it goes...more work does need to be done in seeing how
these "great men" (actually, big criminals) are constructed by the
subservience of ordinary men, and there is a difference between
Napoleon-the-Corsican-mobster and the Idea of Napoleon (parallelling the
difference between Stalin-the-thug-from-Georgia and Uncle Joe.)
>the French argue, bicker and intellectalize endlessly but cannot reach an
>agreement on action...they are childlike [not ment as an insult] in this
>respect, they need the strong authority to direct them to action(De Gaulle).
Perhaps, but they are not different that much from Russians or even us:
we need, it seems, some Trickster figure, embodying elements of good and
evil, who can lead us with a grin. Think of our Presidential successes:
Reagan (suspending judgement on his awful policies), FDR, even Clinton:
versus our Failures, like Nixon. The winners lead us with a wink and a
grin, but under that there's strong authority manifest in Reagan's
disregard of the law, FDR's attempt to pack the Supreme Court, and
Clinton's light-hearted attititude towards sexual harassment.
>What ANY of this has to do with drawing, Mattisse, or Cezanne I have not >a
>clue...perhaps it was triggered by the notion of "This is because we have
>turned over our notions of truth and life to institutions."
>Perhaps a closer , in-depth examination of those institutions will provide a
>better vantage point from which to view those men, and their >actions....and
>eliminate some of the misty bullshit, which in the end, is just another
>institutional ideology-mythology, albeit less critically applied. I mean the
>myth of the Natural-Man, unadulturated, unaffected, media-free (i.e.
>Hippies...no media knowledge???), 'self-taught' (not just a BIT of J.J.
>Rousseau {a, if not the, seminal figure of the French Enlightenment)...pull
>back the misty bullshit and one gets a better perspective of the men, their
>times, thier achievements. This isn't the N.G. to get deeper into this
>though...
The way you get rid of misty bullshit is through a look at the material
base, and by carefully separating what really is fog from the fog in
one's own brain. You are right, the myth of the Natural Man is bullshit.
But Rousseau provides a way of criticising education and institutions
which at one and the same time proclaim that they are scientific and
value-free, and enforce a Puritan notion of original sin. As such,
Rousseau becomes a critique of modern-day educational practice in
America, which claims to be scientific but encapsulates a Protestant
world view. My specific observation, derived not from misty bullshit but
from having children, is that in our educational system, children are
corrupted, and corrupted deeply, from day one.
As to the relevance of this news group, I for one am irritated by the way
in which computers impose hard boundaries on discussions. Theodore
Adorno writes "one of the disastrous transferences from the field of
economic planning to that of theory, which is no longer really
distinguished from the ground-plan of the whole, is the belief that
intellectual work can be administered according to the criterion of
whether an occupation is necessary or reasonable." That is, the movement
of Taylorist industrial thinking (in which the common laborer was
directed to work and focus on things he would not naturally work on) to
intellectual work directs the intellectual to focus on specific labeled
topics. It assumes that if the intellectual gets off-topic he is engaged
in a detour and frolic of his own (charming phrase from employment law!)
from which he will return hung-over, or not at all.
The possibility that the tangetial discussion may have, in terms of
computer science, a "stack like" structure is unraised: that is, the
exploration may be of problem-solving in another field that will yield
useful tools for the "main" issue. The prejudice named by Adorno,
paradoxically, results in much waste motion even in technical fields:
"unstructured" computer programs, to take an example I am familiar with,
are written in an all-at-once, continuous fashion inspired not by the
indiscipline of the programmer, but by his industrial discipline: his
training to the effect that he must at all costs focus on the business
problem. This makes him unwilling to solve problems unnamed by
management except in the most casual fashion.
The discussion relates to art: for the common judgements on traditional
versus modern art assume that both types of artists work, or should work,
"alla prima." It is unknowing of the fact that traditional "skill and
craft" were a result of laborious underpainting. In our modern society,
in which Taylorist notions that it is good to focus on practical business
goals, a traditional artist, when seen making a finished monochromatic
"grisaille" on a canvas for a paying client, is assumed to be in someway
wasting the client's money (if paid by the hour) or unnecessarily making
the client wait (if paid for a finished work.) Pope Julius, in a modern
recounting of the life of Michelangelo, says "Michelangelo, when will you
make an end!" This is also the cry of the modern business manager.
Adorno's point is that intellectual work cannot be taylorized without
paradox, for the very decision on what is relevant is ALSO intellectual
work. This is not airy-fairy bullshit, or if it is, then I am a glad
fairy. The schizophregenic consequences of this split are on display in
ordinary life, from Mani's Web page to Dilbert. The largeness and
generosity of the explanatory power of the notion of this split should
not put us off: indeed it does so because of the ways in which we've been
stunted by the struggle for existence.
mdeli
On Fri, 19 Dec 1997 21:21:14 -0600, in rec.arts.fine you wrote:
>
>>>spino...@MSN.com wrote:
>>>>
>The language of "excuse" is the language of surplus repression, the
>buried notion that if we are tuff guys and seek no excuse from
>difficulty, we do not have to master the world...as did Cezanne. The
>paradox is that in so replacing engagement with the world with being tuff
>guys who seek no excuses, we are seeking to be ... excused.
>
You may not agree with me but If you have anything to say you should
be able to do better than your usual convoluted filibuster of
bullcrap.
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art