The Bad Art Cafe

Munch, continued

In keeping with the theme of the Femme Fatal, "Vampire" (1895), shows a long red haired woman, hair flowing, sinking her teeth into a male victim, against a dark background, her white arm wrapped around the man she's gnawing on, and has him in a head lock.  The man is resigned, maybe even turned on like some men are by women who suck blood out of them - he's curled up into her arms. 

Could it be an expression of erotic love, and how a woman has the upper hand in personal relationships? 

The familiar lines of Munch's, the wavy, curly, lines, the contrast of dark colors, and the woman's red hair - the Symbolist's loved red hair on women, it meant they were ever more lustful and crazy - covering up her bitten man are all traits of Munch's paintings.

To conclude the works of Munch, I was once dragging my self through the Art Institute of Chicago (where I live), pacing beyond the Renoirs, the Monets, etc. etc., and into another, more modern gallery, when I turned around and saw a Munch painting.  Pretty small, maybe a foot by a foot & 1/2, and it was the only painting taking my attention.  In spite of what Munch said about interiors, this painting was an empty interior, and the focal point was a large rectangular of yellow light coming from the window.  It was simple in form, but it screamed to be looked at, (but there was no one screaming in the painting).

Once in a great while that happens to you when you're in a museum.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

Edvard Munch (1863-1944} was a beloved Symbolist in the same way Baudelaire was a beloved poet of the Symbolist literary movement - (the suffer for art's sake, the poor starving artist).

"No longer should you paint interiors with men read, and women knitting. These must be human beings who breath life & feel & love & suffer."

This would sum up Munch's life, who often spent time in a sanatorium for nervous attacks.

"The Scream" (1893), oil on canvas, is a painting adored by many starving artists to this day. It sums up a lot people's life, even though it was painted over 100 years ago. The painting shows a distorted figure on a bridge suddenly consumed by an anxiety attack. The face is distorted into a head that is a scream its self, puffed up forehead, hands on either side of the face to show complete helplessness.

It is dusk, there are straight lines crossing through the painting and also the lines of wavy ness that reflect the unbalanced mind. The guards of the bridge seem to hold the scream in with its straight lines. The rest of the painting is famously wavy, into colors of dark and darker - outlined, orange and dark blues, they do not fade into each other. There are two shadowy black figures in the background of the bridge, and the bridge its self might even be thought of as the bridge from sanity to insanity.

The scream of the man looks like it might dislocate his head. "One evening I was walking a long a path . . . . I felt silk and ill . . . . the sun was setting and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream pass through Nature. I seemed to me I heard this scream . . . . the color shrieked."
- Edvard Munch

Symbolism

Symbolism was an art movement of the late 19th century that repelled against the Iron Age - the Industrial Age - by moving back into time by dreams, myths, old poetry. It is an art movement directly opposite of Realism, and is the forerunner of Surrealism of the 20th century.

Symbolism combined a paramount of artists, from the French, the English, the Netherlands, the Austrian/Czech/German. Even an art artist like Toulouse-Latrec, normally grouped with the Post-Impressionists, could be considered a Symbolist because of his use of flat garish colors. "Flat" being the primary look of the paintings.

The painting colors lacked depth, yet were colorful and fanciful. Dark colors were employed, and woman portrayed not as simple elegant nudes, but Femme Fatales, witches, scary castrating ugly sexually hungry, predatory women. For the first time, I do believe, women are shown with distinct nipples in red color. This was a kind of revolution in itself.

Solome, the Biblical dancer of the 7 veils, is a favorite. Paintings show her with John the Baptist, his head on on it's infamous silver platter. Sometimes she is shown just dancing her evil dance. Her image is repeated over and over, carrying into the Art Nouveau movement which followed on the heels of the Symbolist moment.

This is the movement that began the "Art for Art's Sake", the Starving Artist, the bitter, unhappy artist, and suffering for your "Art" at any cost. These tendencies seeped into the art world, and never quite left them, as we embrace the image today.

Gone are the days of the Impressionists painting pretty women outdoors at a picnic.

Goodbye Andy

News Item:

in today's Almanac (Chicago Tribune)
"In 1987, Pop Artist Andy Warhol died in New York at age 58"

I thought I'd post the lyrics to "Hello, It's Me", a heartbreaking song Lou Reed and John Cale wrote about Andy as Lou and John's final tribute on Songs for Drella; a fiction LP (1990)

Download it for Andy, Lou & John if you can, (but it works as a poem too):

Hello It's Me

Words and music: Lou Reed & John Cale

Andy it's me, haven't seen you in a while
I wished I talked to you more when you were alive
I thought you were self-assured when you acted shy
Hello it's me
I really miss you, I really miss your mind
I haven't heard ideas like that in such a long, long time
I loved to watch you draw and watch you paint
But when I saw you last I turned away
When Billy Name was sick and locked up in his room
You asked me for some speed, I though it was for you
I'm sorry that I doubted your good heart
Things always seem to end before they start
Hello it's me, that was a great gallery show
Your cow wallpaper and your floating silver pillows
I wish I paid more attention when they laughed at you
Hello it's me
"Pop goes pop artist," the headline said
"Is shooting a put-on, is Warhol really dead?"
You get less time for stealing a car
I remember thinking as I heard my own record in a bar
They really hated you, now all that's changed
But I have some resentments that can never be unmade
You hit me where it hurt I didn't laugh
Your Diaries are not a worthy epitaph
Oh well now Andy - guess we've got to go
I hope some way somehow you like this little show

I know it's late in coming but it's the only way I know
Hello it's me - goodnight Andy...
Goodbye, Andy

When I made a tape of Songs for Drella, after the end of this album, I started in with the Velvet Underground's "If She Ever Comes Now". You can download that one too.

ALL THAT WE DO NOT KNOW IS GREATER THAN WE ARE

A sante, mes amis.
(To health, my friends.)

Sa nou pa konè, pi gran-n pase nou.
(All that we do not know is greater than we are.)

A Short Guide to Writing about Art by Sylvan Barnet

if I had taken this guy's class, or a class using this text book, I would have been informed to drop out. you would never see the bad art cafe in this book as referance.

this book is written in the old style. the formal style. the old school of art critque, the reason most art critique is BORING beyond hell. it was the first book on the subject I bought trying to school myself for the standards of writing art crit. I put it down, and looked for something else

now I glace at it. is there anything of of value for me?

(there's a great picture of Jackson Pollock flinging his paint on an unstretch canvas on the floor, so famously captured by Life Magizine in in 1950)

art critiques are harder to write than book critiques.

I liked:

"he knows all about art, but does he knows what he likes?" a James Thurber cartoon

a n unknown critic from the days of yore wrote about Picasso's, The Young Ladies of Avignon (1907): " the drawing is hasty, the color unpleasant, the compostion is confuse . . . . too much concern for effect . . . . in the figures" but then he manages to humble himself: it was famous for what it opened rather than what it achieved.
ok.

Some More Formalism from Class (but I swear, I won't only write formal stuff)

Impression received its dubious title from an art critic reviewing Claude Monet's painting "Impression: Sunrise" (1872) oil on canvas. The painting is simply brush strokes capturing the dawn light on a river with the focal point of the red sun set off in the right hand side. What made the critics so incensed was that the painting appeared to be a sketch, rather than a whole painting. And so, Impressionism, one of the biggest breakthroughs in art history, was born.

Impressionism included many different styles and painters. Degas, Renoir, Monet, et al.

But all painters concentrated on light, color and "impressions" of the moment for their paintings.

Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917) was an artist known for his ballerinas, and Impressionist look at painting, but it could be said that his was a gap between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, because incorporates light, color and substance in his work.

Unknown to most people who love his ballerinas so much, Degas used pastels to capture nudes in the bath, another quick moment of impression. "Woman Drying her Feet" (1885), although a simple colored pastel portrait, is imbrued with lines unseen in his other art, because the other works are so complicated. I picked this pastel of Degas's because there is such an interesting curving line effect of the nude, while she bends down to dry her feet. The white towel on the chair behind her mimics the sinuous lines of the nude.

Degas captures the claustrophobic feel of a little apartment. The nude is a winding line contrasted with the straight up and lines of the little bath's wall paper. It is not the Prima ballerina accepting her bouquet, but it is an original work of art, little known by Impressionist's fans.

The Cafe Terrace, Arles at Night (1888), oil on canvas

early draft of Post Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh
The Cafe Terrace, Arles at Night

Van Gogh admired the French Realist school of painters. The French Realists rejected indoor artificial light, working from mannequins, and represented the nude as a deity of the French Academy art. They worked from outdoor light, and painted real objects in the light of day.

Van Gogh quickly moved beyond Realism, and is classified today as a "Post-Impressionist". This is a title much like "Post Modernism" in that it describes little, but is a movement after the fact. He was much admired by the younger French Symbolist painters.

The paintings of the Dutch artist were so original that he never showed once during his life time, and sold only one painting to his doctor at the asylum where he lived off and on. It is true that Van Gogh was given to bouts of insanity and self-hatred, and once cut of his ear lope and presented it to a local prostitute in a brothel. Then he painted a self portrait with his head heavily bandaged.

He live until he was 37, died of a self inflected shot to the head, and it took years for people to recognize his painting genus But when it happened, the rest is a history of brush strokes.

The Cafe Terrace, Arles at Night (1888), oil on canvas, 32" X 26"

The layers and shapes and blocks that define this painting makes it one of Van Gogh's masterpieces, in my opinion. Upwards in the painting is a the starry nighttime sky, and downwards in the middle, the mini cafe people, barely detectable, as if they did not matter.

There are empty chairs and tables, at the cafe, a cobblestone street of multi-colored brush strocks. And inbetween, a draftmanship one normally does not associate with Van Gogh's work. The presents of architecture in perfect detail: a sloping cafe roof, square door frame, all in perfect balance.

The entire painting is like the photographs of it's day. Photographs that were not snapshots, but shot from a huge cameras, in silver gelatin plates, catching all the details, and giving the viewer a panoramic view of the cafe and street, and night sky that points down into a vanishing point.

The difference is the colors, the garish, harsh colors, and choppy brush strocks. Blues, dark blues, blacks, muddy yellows, reds criss-cross through the painting. The starry sky above is the focal point, not really the cafe, because the eye is always pulled up to the luminous sky.

It's a nighttime sky in a small version, that would become so famous in his late painting, "Starry Night"