Forgotten Delights

On a high-school trip to New York, I stood in front of Malevich’s “White on White” and laughed aloud. I couldn’t believe anyone expected me to consider such a thing art, even though it was prominently displayed in the Guggenheim Museum.

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STOP! If you think the happy ending to this post is me realizing how provincial my tastes were, you should toddle off before you’re disappointed. If you are convinced that the quality of art depends on how many critics praise it, you should toddle, too. If you think discussion of art (or anything else) consists of posting fragments of sentences IN ALL CAPS, go join those others. Here will do.

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In the years since I first visited the Guggenheim, I’ve become an art historian but not an academic. My goal is to describe art and comment on it in terms that non-academics can understand. No jargon, no appeals to authority, no stream-of-consciousness ranting. I base my understanding of art on Ayn Rand’s esthetics: see why here.

Which brings us to “The Steins Collect,” on view through June 3, 2012 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I went to this exhibition because I was charmed by Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and was curious to see paintings I’d glimpsed on the set for Gertrude Stein’s home. Halfway through the exhibition I started wanting to kick something. Since I have better manners than that, I calmed myself down by resolving to turn into a Kindle book an article from 2006 in which I discussed what went so wretchedly wrong in the art world over the course of the 19^th century.

Here’s the Amazon blurb for the Kindle book, which has far more illustrations than the original print version did.

Seismic Shifts in Subject and Style: Nineteenth-Century French Painting and Philosophy

What caused the seismic shifts in subject and style over the course of the 19th century – from Madame Recamier, by Jacques-Louis David (1800), to Luxe, Calme, et Volupte, by Matisse (1904)? Dominant artistic trends are not the result of a collective consciousness working its will. They are simply the styles that the majority of artists choose to embrace – and each of those artists makes his own choice of style. This 30,000-word essay seeks the reasons for the changes in a combination of art analysis and philosophical detection.

During the 19th century, France was the epicenter for artistic change. We survey the works of 18 French artists: Neoclassicists David, Ingres, and Corot; Romantics Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix; Naturalists Millet and Courbet; Manet; Impressionists Monet, Renoir, and Degas; Post-Impressionists Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin; Pointillist Seurat; Symbolist Moreau; and Academic Bouguereau.

In the philosophical-detection sections of the essay, we read what these artists plus a few influential art critics (Baudelaire, Ruskin, Zola) had to say about four issues crucial for artists: the role of training; the role of reason vs. emotion in creating art; the importance of style vs. subject; and qualifications for judging art. Then we see how these statements relate to the subject and style of these artists’ works, and to the philosophical context of the time, particularly the ideas of Immanuel Kant.

I’m issuing as Kindle books 2 articles on analyzing and appreciating sculpture and painting that appeared in The Objective Standard in 2006-7. New to this version are close-up views and comparative material that didn’t appear there.

Getting More Enjoyment from Art You Love

A favorite artwork can provide you with enjoyment and inspiration, help you recall important events of the past, and help you project a course into the future. Get even more enjoyment from a work of art you love by approaching it with an active mind: studying its details and asking questions about its meaning. This essay illustrates that process for Henry Kirke Brown’s George Washington and Anna Hyatt Huntington’s Cid (both outdoor sculptures in Manhattan), and then explains how to judge these and other works re content, style, and the emotional reaction they evoke.

How to Analyze and Appreciate Paintings

Via discussions of Holbein’s Sir Thomas More and Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, we work through a series of questions to help you systematically observe the details of a painting, state what effect they have, and set them in the context of the rest of the work. As we go, we work out tentative themes and then a final statement of the theme. Then we evaluate the works in emotional, esthetic, philosophical, and art historical terms. As practice for doing this independently, a series of questions is included on Vermeer’s Officer with a Laughing Girl.

You could think of this essay as part 2 of Getting More Enjoyment from Art You Love (which dealt with sculpture), but it can also be read on its own. The paintings illustrated are mostly in the Frick Collection, New York.

I’ve just created my first Kindle book, an informal transcription of a short biography of Alexander Hamilton that I presented in 2004 during a walking tour of Manhattan’s four sculptures of Hamilton. Hamilton is the only big-name Founding Father who was a New Yorker and who favored business and urban life. The bio is about 17,000 words, with 18 illustrations and a timeline, $4. It’s available here.

Why “Mayor of Starnesville”? The 2012 presidential election is a referendum on socialism. In Atlas Shrugged, Starnesville is a factory town near the Twentieth Century Motor Company. The heirs of the company’s founder institute a socialist system: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. First the company loses its men of ability; then it loses its hardest-working employees; eventually the factory shuts down and the town is left to a few aimless derelicts. (“Why didn’t you move?” “Where?” “Anywhere.” “What for?”) Obama’s policies are putting America on the rutted road to Starnesville.

The proper political system – laissez-faire capitalism – recognizes that for man to survive, he must be free to think, free to act, and free to enjoy or to suffer the consequences of his own actions.

If you don’t know this, now’s the time to read Atlas Shrugged.

If you do know it, now’s the time to start telling others. We hope the “Mayor of Starnesville” ad will provoke such discussions.

Shirts, mug, tote bag, postcards, stickers are available at http://www.cafepress.com/obamamayorstarnesville

If you want to pay your respects to a truly monumental figure, New York City has 6 over-life-size sculptures of Washington: 7, if you count the 2 separate ones on the Washington Arch. read more »

[3rd in a series of excerpts from an unpublished book]

Eyes are called “the windows of the soul,” but in these two sculptures, hands are as revealing as eyes.

Keck, Father Francis P. Duffy, 1937

Duffy grips a Bible so tightly that if his hands weren’t bronze, they’d be white-knuckled. Sheridan, in contrast, rests one hand casually on the hilt of his sword. It doesn’t matter that by the time the Civil War began, swords were mostly ceremonial. Even if Sheridan is not likely to draw his sword while rushing into battle, he’s definitely willing to wield a weapon. The difference between Sheridan the general, and Duffy the chaplain is obvious even in this minor detail. read more »

Although these two sculptures stand within a few hundred feet of each other in New York’s Central Park, they’re light-years apart in what they present as the important details of Alice in Wonderland.

Frederick George Richard Roth, "Sophie Irene Loeb Fountain," 1936

The octagonal Loeb Fountain is dominated by adults: the Mad Hatter, the Duchess, the King and Queen of Hearts, and Alice holding her flamingo croquet mallet. At their feet, smaller and definitely subsidiary, are the White Rabbit, Father William balancing an eel on his nose, the baby who turned into a pig, the Frog-Footman, and a wild-looking cat. Below these, in turn, are four edifying messages, including “Spare me from judging harshly” and “In the depths of despair may I never lose hope.”

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