Another art post— continuing the theme of artists I’ve hated, and loved, and here, grown less in love with.
Jackson Pollock
I studied him very intensely for a few years, his work is what gave me permission to start painting— it looks like anyone can do it. You’re supposed to be into art you think you can do. I still like Pollock’s work, generally, though a lot of it seems a little thin. And there’s a lot circulating that wasn’t necessarily that good. He was never an overwhelming talent as a painter, he had a personal charisma, and he did some very radical work that got over, that broke out American art in a big way as a modern thing.
His star quality doesn’t work in his favor, with me. I can’t help but connect him with a kind of charismatic, moderately talented, highly ego driven New York artist that has become a thing in his wake. Maybe he’s the prototype of that kind of artist. To an extent I blame those lesser artists for me cooling on him, like oh, he’s one of those guys. That rock & roll New York thing.
He gets into severe trouble with people, due to the nature of the art market, and the outlandish amounts of money involved. They’ll see a painting made out of dripped house paint priced at tens of millions of dollars, and revolt. The reality is, there are some people who are wealthy on a scale you cannot conceive who want this stuff, and who trade in them like they’re stocks, and it drives the prices to insane levels, vastly out of scale with the actual work. Then we get people who love the work trying to justify the absurd price tag, not very credibly— overselling its amazingness, the difficulty of making it, and the talent of the artist. None of which matters. It’s like music. Nobody had to claim Gene Simmons was fantastically gifted to justify his millions, his fame. Or Lou Reed, to choose an example with actual artistic merit.
Art is art, money is money, fame is a grossly distorting influence.
Looking at his stuff, you can look for influence of: Picasso, Miro, Ryder, Siqueros, some small amount of Matisse.
Francis Bacon
Putting aside the art itself, after years of reading his own words about his work, basically living and breathing his book of interviews with David Sylvester, I’ve concluded the man was quite full of shit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Much of his commentary about it is simply contrary to the obvious content of his work. He did a lot of kind of horrific looking stuff, while claiming to be purely a formalist. Putting in a swastika armband or syringe in an arm, and claiming they’re there only for formal reasons. I can see a good reason for him to do that— you want people to try to see beyond the obvious— but he gets a little fatuous about it.
He was self taught as a painter, and looking at his pictures now it’s hard for me to not get stuck on his lack of drawing ability— both the figure and spaces, landscapes— and lack of real design sense— his paintings start with an improvisation, and then polishes it, tries to work around it to make a finished design. Which is not a good way to get good design. I know because I’ve worked that in the past, and I can recognize it in others. He developed a style forming simplified environments that kind of look like good design, but aren’t— clearly done ad hoc, at the end. It’s like bad intonation, the way the things sits is just slightly off.
I was always attracted to the quality of his paint, it’s not about the clean application of paint, his surfaces were heavily messed with, and a little mysterious. Having copied his style for a few years, and learned his techniques, they’re not as mysterious as they once seemed. Now it seems too easy.
Which is all fine, none of those things are deal breakers, my own problem is that in many of his paintings, it’s all I’m able to see now.
Pablo Picasso
I mentioned in the other post, I have been around his work all my life, he’s the definition of an artist to me. A lot of my childhood was spent looking at his paintings and trying to figure them out, and learning to accept irreducible ambiguity. But a lot of his pictures I see now just look like production, meeting consumer demand. I’ve seen a lot of things where he seemed to just be exercising his style. Painting a bull or a dove because that’s your product. And you want to feel a picture is being done for a reason other than feeding the market for the work, and that there’s some reflection going on, that this is a special individual art work.
There are also a lot of mid career items— portraits of women, mostly— that are pure routine style, with the familiar kind of distorted features, but there’s a level of polish to them that really sits wrong. He took them to the precise point where all you can see is the fault in the premise, connecting these displaced planes in a naturalistic way. If you compare the bad Picasso with the good Bacon here, both of which have similar types of displacements, with Bacon it feels like something happening optically, or as something internal to us, it’s some kind of other reality. The Picasso looks like a painter not solving a problem.
Anyway, he sold a lot of those, that end up getting loaned or gifted to the smaller museums, so you see a lot of them around.
Still, Picasso is the major artist of the 20th century, through the 50s at least. Other artists had a very difficult time escaping his influence in the 30s and 40s— at that time it really seemed that he had done everything there was to do, and they all felt they were doing commentary on him. Seeing his works in museums you’re struck by their mass— they’re massively constructed, there’s a level of power that is rare, like Coltrane’s sound, or Freddie Hubbard’s. A lot of things will look feeble in comparison.
A lot of people actually
I have difficulties with a lot of art. I have been stunned to learn that most paintings in history were not made to please me. For a long time I liked looking at paint enough to sustain me through a lot of suspect artworks, now I can hang with about one out of fifty things I ever see.
Partly, there really aren’t that many legitimately creative works to begin with. For the greater part of art history the kind of creativity we admire today was not valued as a thing. The reason there are relatively few artists we know by name now, is that they were really the only people doing things that satisfy our modern interest in creative exploration, and who had a really individual voice, and put a really living spirit in their work. There is a lot of run of the mill work out there, contemporaneous with Titian, El Greco, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Manet, et al, that’s pure cardboard. The Doria Pamphilj gallery in Rome is my prime example of that— the museum contains hundreds of art works, I think there were exactly three of them I wanted to look at at all— by Bruegel, Velazguez, and Bernini. Everything else was mid-baroque mythological swill, acres of it.
We know what musical theater is like, that sort of small, artificial, hackneyed thing— weepingly meaningful to the people participating in it, and self-referential to that. For us tourists it can be a momentary entertainment, but at its center, we can’t get too invested in it. At the point you start sensing oh, it’s this, you disengage— catastrophically, for the work.
A lot of art, old work and new, looks like theater for an audience whose interests are not yours— for prevailing schools of art making, for critics, for a conception of art history, for a scene, for a clientel. I don’t want to be thinking about those people while looking at a painting. The world created within the picture frame itself can become bad theater, it’s not a movie you want to watch. Within the lines of a work, there’s also this theater of illustration. It can be hard to make a drawing of a person that doesn’t look theatrical in some way. It needs a particular touch to either succeed as theater, or to get beyond it, and succeed as a real, true thing. And not just some guy’s bad poetry.
I don’t want to be sensing other people, it should just be the artist, their studio, this work, and me. No third parties. For that matter, the artist himself isn’t real welcome a lot of times. Like I don’t need a Julian Schnabel painting to be always telling me about Julian Schnabel. It’s like having Quentin Tarantino barge into your bedroom. Go away.
A lot of things, too, look like decorations for a large bank. As artists get some monetary success, the scale of the work increases, calling for more assistants and fabricators, and the art becomes more a product of light industry than of a single artist. Dividing up the creative process from the manufacturing process. there’s no possibility of uncertainty there. All the decisions had to be made up front. It ices the thing down completely, makes it more anonymous, deliberate, commercial, and all you can see is the big pile of money needed to support it.
There are a couple of more of these kicking around the old drafts folder— artists I’ve grown to like, artists I never did get one way or the other. Having said all this about the ways I don’t like a picture, I should say something about what makes a picture good, in my humble opinion. More coming…
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