As I get back into the swing of things after traveling, here is another one of those ranting things written some weeks ago for my own amusement.
A pointless screed, venting some things that have bothered me for years, when looking at certain artists’ work. You have to grant me these little outbursts. A certain amount of irritability is good for you. How can you love if you don’t also know how to be really annoyed by creative outrages committed by others? And I’m very tolerant— it takes a lot to actively piss me off with a painting— but these guys are abusing the situation.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The sappiest of the Impressionists. Really the only truly sappy major Impressionist, the rest are unfairly maligned. All of Monsieur Renoir’s pictures are permeated with this cloying rose lake color so they look the way your grandma’s 60-year old Avon perfume smells. He can’t resist making his women all look like kewpie dolls, with these wooly, dewey eyes, and then applying that to the whole painting. The artist Francis Bacon admired his landscapes, and I keep looking for something in them, and not getting it.
Trademarks: Looks like the nail polish section at Walgreen’s.
Georges Mathieu
Exhibitionist Parisian scribbling. Mathieu was a mustachioed (see above) abstractionist with a flamboyant performative thing happening, and nothing else. The only thing saving his paintings from total pointlessness was that he was able to give them some variety, so they aren’t purely repetitive, even as they’re dominated by these same senseless hyperactive scribbles— executed by running around with his pants down squirting the paint directly out of the tube, in a Gallagheresque late-capitalist theater of the waste of resources. It’s pure formula, basically street art.
My large scale painting professor, Frank Okada, said it more succinctly: “It’s nothing. It’s a piece of shit.”
Trademarks: Looks, tellingly, like Tr*mp’s signature.
Jusepe de Ribera
Looks like a bowel movement feels: grossly visceral, cruel, thoroughly unpleasant. I must see a doctor. Caravaggio’s realism and pictorial style drained of all appeal, cranked up to a filthy, grinning, screeching intensity.
Trademarks: Torture, paintings of martyrs looking like plucked disarticulated chicken.
Gustave Courbet
Like having a shirtless Rod Steiger order you around the house. Mid 19th century bearded French egomaniac, credited for inventing realism, and in some sense our modern concept of an artist as a lone individual— French art was dominated by the academies at the time, and he was outside of that. Courbet’s pictures look grossly heavy, centered entirely in the pelvis in every sense. There’s a little bit of the tone of Melville there, that mid-19th century turgidity, drained of all wit.
Trademarks: Likes making pictures of people paying tribute to him. Excessive use of black. Chauvinist-looking trees.
Julian Schnabel
Humorless striving Jonah Hill type cat. Theater for a scene. There’s this rock & roll New York thing where the pictures look like pure will to money, cocaine, pussy, and status, while being basically mediocre. I get especially annoyed because, it leads me to seeing that quality in artists I like, like Jackson Pollock. I guess Schnabel is the best of that ilk of artist, without actually being anything I want to look at. I get burned the same way every time I give him a shot.
Trademarks: crummy portraits painted on broken crockery sunk in Bondo, stupid looking swooping lines.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Sternly unforgiving middle class protestant 18th century French morality painting, calculated to shame you for the many small children you have disappointed, with your thirst for gin and indolence. The priggishness hits you like an air raid siren, and is all the more annoying for being so slickly rendered. The British painter Hogarth does the same shit a little less well, and less abrasively.
Trademarks: Porcelain-finished looks of judgement and disapproval.
Alexej von Jawlensky and Georges Roualt
Two expressionist painters, Russian and French, who perhaps don’t deserve the level of rancor I’ve directed at the other artists here. Their primary offence is taking up space. They made a lot of pictures, which a lot of people bought, and they’re completely unrewarding to look at. Every little museum in the world has a bunch of them, and their primary purpose is to wear you out and make your walk to the good paintings longer. Same function as the endless 15th century Madonnas in Italian museums. And 18th century Venetian ship scenes, and Poussinist mythological scenes. Lithographs by any post-war American artist. Jules Olitski.
All 17th century Dutch still life painters
…and those God damned riotous tulips and piles of exquisitely rendered luxury items— there are acres of them blanketing the planet, and all museums try to waste your time with them, to distract you from how few worthwhile pictures they have. Created strictly as emblems of status and wealth for their lowlife nouveau-riche owners— the crypto scammers of their day, the mentality of whom was better attuned to the also-popular genre etchings of drunken louts vomiting and urinating on things.
that off-puttingly drunk and stoned?
Honorable mention: Robert Henri portraits
A great painter, writer of a great book, The Art Spirit, but his portraits are horrific. Executed with terrific facility in the manner of Frans Hals, who is almost as awful but saved only by his more subdued palette, which is blessedly sooty in comparison. Henri’s subjects seem to be in the throes of some repulsive emotion, showing excessive gums, flushed looking to the point of bursting. I can’t do it.
Trademarks: Looks like saliva.
All right, that ought to do it. Next time I’ll write about some art I like. Get my book Rants, vol. 1 for more hilarity of a similar nature.