Art Wars

Birth of Venus, ca. 1484–1486 Sandro Botticelli - La nascita di Venere - Google Art Project.jpg

Do artists argue among themselves the way writers do? Why writers argue, squabble even, is understandable; their medium is language. If one can write a clever book, how much better the bon mots and musings? Great entertainment. But what do artists do for their edification–other than drink too much and sleep around a lot? There are similarities.

While Proust was describing memories of madeleines in boyhood, what would a visual artist of that fin de siècle be about, what deep memories might she embed in a painting, what sly remembrances?

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

I had avoided Proust like the plague. Who wants to read an 3,000 page early modern novel?

Who finally persuaded me was another author–Jonah Lehrer. His book’s title was what caught my attention: Proust Was a Neuroscientist. A writer who could competently bring an early Modern writer’s novel into a deep dive regarding the brain was too tempting not to read. Not that Proust’s name isn’t well known, but neuroscience isn’t understood by more than a handful outside of the field itself. A writer who can describe linkages between art and science should be taken seriously. New York Times Book Review by D. T. Max gives an idea of the book.

And in spite of Proust’s long-winded unwindings, like slow moving glaciers, he still left an indelible impression on me.

Reading Lehrer, I was reminded of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Pirsig theorizes that there are two types of people, classicists (technologists) and romantics, and argues that neither side is totally right–or wrong–only limited to their particular inflection. Even Pirsig’s book title makes the argument. I picked it up on a whim—and a title.

Whether my own training as an architect forced me to synthesize these two separate modes of seeing the world (intuitively vs. rationally) or I just fell into a field that fit, I have no idea, but it fit. Finding an author like Lehrer came like good smack. D. T. Max says Lehrer is no Oliver Sacks, but the inverse can be said of Sacks. Where you read Sacks because he’s a lucid writer and an authority in his field, you read Lehrer for the delight of it, like watching Lindsey Vonn handle a downhill with aplomb.

Lehrer got into hot water by his third book, Imagine, which was yanked for plagiarism. In his article, Why Imagine Is Worth Reading, Roy Peter Clark makes a counterargument:

“Imagine that you are reading a seriously flawed book. Its flaws have grown into a scandal, so you decide to read it to find out about all the hubbub. As you read, you come across this much-publicized problem, and then that one…

“You like the book, really like it, but you can’t even recommend it because you don’t want to sound like a sucker, and, besides, the publisher, after sales of 200,000 in hardcover, recalls all the unsold copies. But you find two copies at a local bookstore, and you begin reading it, and liking it more and more. Imagine that… Imagine that the reader is me.”

From Roy Peter Clark’s Why Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine Is Worth Reading Despite the Problems

I ordered my copy of Imagine.

So when does ‘borrowing’ become plagiarism? And while it’s true, if all that’s being created in a painting is imitation, then just as equally the new ‘new thing’ (Tom Wolfe’s expression, I believe) can land you in shallow waters.

Lehrer has been compared to Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point and Blink fame. What they have in common is an unusual eye for the under-observed things of the world. I get the impression that between the two of them, they started a whole new wave of authors seeking readers of revelatory wisdom.

Birth of the Modern

Newspaper art critics get caught in the minutia, the nth degrees of separation (and fractions thereof). Art historians have but one advantage; they know how the story plays out. Or runs out, as the case may be. In either, it seems a drying stream to follow, seeing as the artists have done the original (and harder) work. And whatever arguments the artists may have been having among themselves, what the critics opine—on and on—and frequently doesn’t enter into it.

One well-known shift in art history happened at the start of the so-called Modern movement away from Victorian era—revivals and Romantic last throws. Well-known possibly because it developed so rapidly, but also because World War I thoroughly shattered European cultures, ethics, institutions along with the pre-war governments. It was hard to maintain Victorian propriety–or Prussian–in the trenches at Verdun. The American Civil War fractured this country; forty something years later, World War I fractured Europe and the Middle East.

Late French academy painting was florid and technically very much gasping for favors from heaven. Running out of steam. Case in point, Botticelli’s painting from the Renaissance, Birth of Venus, painted so long before, had ridden out centuries since.

Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel, 1875 ]

You might notice a certain amount more exuberance in Cabanel’s painting than in the earlier one by Botticelli.

Birth of Venus by Adophe Bourguereau, 1879

And to go Cabanel one better… look at them—little puttie buzzing round that girl!

Nah, it’s art, she’s just a stand-in for a myth. You blow that thang, boy!

The Storm by Pierre-Auguste Cot, 1880

Finally, what they’d wanted to express from the beginning. The big C church said it was a sin, but it was way better than a bodice ripper, it was the whole dress flung over the heads of two young lovers.  The French Academy at its zenith. Can’t complain about the technique…

Plate 2 from Croquis Pris Au Salon par Daumier (1864), Honoré Daumier The cartoon reads:“- Still more Venus this year… always Venus!… as if he had failed women like this!”

Concluding this part of the essay,Venus on a Half Shell was written by the infamous Kilgore Trout, according to Kurt Vonnegut who should know.

Was Manet as Kinky as the Painting?

Édouard Manet, “The Luncheon on the Grass”, 1863 image from Wikimedia Commons

So for an entirely different take on Manet’s “The Luncheon on the Grass”–which has to be one of the weirdest paintings of its era, and no wonder why it scandalized Paris. Two middle-age men dressed for the theater, at a picnic in the woods lounging next to a naked lady, with neither paying her any attention, though one of the men is gazing off, maybe fantasizing about yet another woman who’s bathing close behind, and to the left, another perspective view shooting off like an astigmatism. Left the bread loaf in the dirt, but I hope they paid her well.

Today, The Luncheon on the Grass hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and is described by that museum as “testimony to Manet's refusal to conform to convention and his initiation of a new freedom from traditional subjects and modes of representation—can perhaps be considered as the departure point for modern art.”

The two men are grim; the woman is indifferent, and who can say what the hell the background bather is thinking other than washing herself in a swamp. Far out, man.

Art historians and critics agree that Manet was a rudimentary modernist. They claim it’s one of his first ‘grand’ works, but it’s still a damn weird scene. And I’d approve of the technique, except it appears he set out to paint a bucolic nature scene and got caught up with painting a naked lady or the other way around. I can appreciate the desire to spend lots of time hanging out with the model, but what are the dressed for theater dudes about? Kinky in any age. Et voila, Modern Art!

It may not sound like it, but I like Manet’s work. He painted way better. Take his redo of Titian’s Venus, titled Olympia, wherein he drops the façade about mythology and gets down to showing us a beautiful, unclothed lady of the evening, reclining if not declining. Titian, then Manet, progress made over four centuries.

Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 1532-1534 Google Art Project.jpg

Manet’s Olympia 1863 Edouard Manet - Olympia - Google Art Project.jpg

Strange Dialectic

“Daddy, what’s a prostitute?”

“A what?”

“Prostitute, what’s a prostitute?“

“Have you been watching Netflix?”

“No daddy–you were watching Pretty Woman again.”

“Oh yeah, well, little girl, uh…”

“They make lots of money, and wear pretty clothes, right?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“How come everybody hates them?”

“Not everybody–I suppose people look down on them.”

“How come, daddy?”

Mother of an Art 

Piazza d’Italia by Charles Moore & Perez Architects photo by Colros - Flickr photo, 1990

Photo was taken before the fountain had been put back into operation

Architects are known to ‘borrow’ from other architects, and on occasion critics say they take ironic positions in contrast to who’s died and now can’t sue them.

I heard tell that, for his high-rise housing for the elderly in New Haven, Charles Moore chamfered the building’s corners to mock the nearby Knights of Columbus office building designed by Kevin Roche. Separated by a no-man’s land of a highway off-ramp that had come with urban renewal. The brutalist K of C’s four corner towers bear a striking resemblance to a medieval castle on steroids and deserve the mockery. Most of Kevin Roche’s work strikes me as lacking in Vitruvius’s virtues, “strength, utility, and beauty”–particularly the last.

Knights of Columbus Headquarters photo by Seth Tisue, 2008

Kevin Roche was an avowed big M modernist. “Out of sight, man” meets ‘out of scale.’ His adjacent New Haven Coliseum done in the same time frame has the dubious distinction for a failing structure requiring its demolition a few decades after it was built. Preceded by the destruction of a perfectly charming section of row houses to make way for the Chapel Square Mall, the Coliseum-Knights of Columbus complex destroyed an adjacent neighborhood as well. An entire section of New Haven was ‘urban renewed’ to death, but seeing as so many hungry architects passed through Yale, it wasn’t surprising.

New Haven Coliseum with the K of C tower to the left unattributed photo from Atlas of Places website

Charlie Moore helped lead the Post-Modernists’ attack. His best argument was against the ‘out of scale’ projects inspired by so-called urban renewal replacing traditional, better-scaled streetscapes.

If you’re curious about the extended ‘canopy’ garage in the old photo, Roche claimed a high water table prevented the garage from being place underground. Did he con his clients into believing that? In fact, he liked the drama of the building’s inversion.

Problems arouse with the “cor-ten” steel trusses. US Steel developed a kind of steel patina of rust, a la copper’s green patina, that was supposed to protect the underlying steel. In this instance, the steel never ceased rusting, causing the steel to fatigue and ultimately bring on its demolition.

Charlie was still preaching his modest best when I was at Yale, (we called him ‘Charlie’) and he was preaching to the choir far as I was concerned. Scale matters; proportion matters. My Clemson roommate, Lewis, and I had a saying “out of scale, man” mocking the Modernists and the stoners in a single breath. In the same way that the Italian Futurists rebelled against late Victorian architecture, Post-Modernism in the U.S. rebelled against the sterility of Modernism–at least as it was practiced by 60s corporate American firms.

“In New Haven, Mayor Richard C. Lee’s Redevelopment Agency, headed by Edward Logue, coordinated with the Connecticut Department of Transportation to plan highway construction and urban redevelopment in the center of the city. With 1955’s Church Street Project, the Redevelopment Agency sought to demolish a large swath of the city center between the Green and Union Station. At the time, the area was populated with mixed-use commercial buildings, warehouses, wholesale markets, small homes, and a dense network of irregular streets. To replace this viable though declining area, city planners envisioned an indoor shopping mall on the Green, downtown parking garages, highway ramps, office buildings, a civic center, a police headquarters, and a new high school, medical buildings, and commercial park lining a new boulevard extending Church Street to Union Avenue.”

from New Haven Independent article by Jonathan Hopkins, 2015

When compared to the playful urban space Charles Moore designed for New Orleans, the grim drama of the K of C building and the New Haven Coliseum becomes eve more glaring.

Piazza d’Italia night view photo by Mabu2, 2010

Ultimately, the one-note affectations of Post-Modernism became obvious when applied to strip malls from Virginia to California and all parts in between. Charlie was enough of a creative designer that he went beyond Post-Modernism, but as it became more widespread, the movement took on the cheap irony of ‘classical’ adornment with little of Charlie’s wit. It became the movement’s downfall.

I say cheap because real classicism required sculptural detailing that costs, and America had been conditioned by Modernism’s earlier soul-sucking lack of expression–and equally its lack of human scale.

I’ve never had a desire to design a strictly classical building. Nor a strictly any-style building, preferring allusions and references at most. The Parthenon on the Acropolis is a striking building, but we don’t need any more of them–even in Tennessee.

“Originally built for Tennessee's 1897 Centennial Exposition, this replica of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece serves as a monument to what is considered the pinnacle of classical architecture. The plaster replicas of the Parthenon Marbles found in the Naos are direct casts of the original sculptures, which adorned the pediments of the Athenian Parthenon dating back to 438 B.C. The originals of these powerful fragments are housed in the British Museum in London.

from the Nashville website.

So Nashville copied the Elgin Marbles–named for the English thief who stole them from Greece–though those details doesn’t lend themselves to gentile Southern discussions.

Do we need a second Parthenon, regardless of how admirable the fragmented one still standing on the Acropolis is? Do we need another Federalist Style townhouse in Old Town, Alexandria?

Copying the past has always seemed a lame attempt to tag onto a bygone time and place. I can dislike much of the built environment I’m living in without wanting to fall back on a Disney recreation of the good old days. And one day, I’d like to attempt a piece of fiction about a prostitute, even if I haven’t hired one as a model to paint, and I can’t say I’ve ever known one.

The Parthenon in present day photo by William E. Evans, 2014