Anyway, here I am, and what's prompted me to write tonight is a discovery on a site about John Singer Sargent the artist, who's work appears severally at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where Nick, Brenda, Josh, Molly and I went for a few hours when I was in London recently.
I did a few sketches, I like to stand in front of the paintings and sketch. It's a sort of hallowed ground - a gallery. You can do 'weird' things like draw stuff in there without people particularly noticing, so it's a golden opportunity. The other thing is that it makes you dwell a while, something that I'm not very good at to be honest. The pic below is an example...
I'm also really crap at remembering who the artists are... so I can't tell you who those are by... but I think one of the subjects is WG Grace the cricketer, the bloke with the hat is Rudyard Kipling... and I can't remember who the woman is.
So...I digress...again! Singer Sargent is prolific. He's all over the place there. He's done some very complex group stuff and some really iconic single sitter portraits too. For me, his stuff is notable because it's masterful... i.e. he's competent technically and conceptually. I found this site http://jssgallery.org/ and one of the first things I noted was that the site has over 1000 paintings by the fella! Not an inconsiderable effort that I'm sure you'll agree?
Now, the point is, when I say he's competent, the question has to be asked... is he, by current measures of artistry, an artist? I mean, he's not 'painting emotion' as they say. If i sound a bit tart, it's because I heard from Molly a couple of weeks ago that an art college she'd interviewed at had given her a bit of a hard time. The panel of one that interviewed her was, by all accounts, mildly acid in her comments and blunt enough to tell Molly that she felt that Molly would learn nothing with them... or at least she'd learn 'something' but that it would be by accident! She picked up Molly's 'silk vest' painting and said '..and what's THAT supposed to be?'
I thought Nick said it well when he said 'you're work is as valid as anything that the interviewer calls valid... and she should know that!' We all nodded and agreed...as we tried to massage her hurt. It's certainly a tough and hard to understand business.
But then it got even harder to understand... when last week they offered her an unconditional place! What do you make of that?
In the meantime, I was wondering what they'd have made of painters like Goya, Caravaggio, Renoir, Titian, Vermeer and others who 'paint'? Would she have dismissed them for not having a mission statement at 19 or for painting things that looked like the painting? Would she classify this as art?
Lah-di-dah... so I was looking at this Sargent web site and I came across a bit about Whistler, who was a contemporary of Sargent's in Paris. The snippet mentions that Whistler had exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, showing a painting that was called 'Nocturne in Black and Gold - The falling rocket'.
The gallery was an alternative, especially to artists who were rejected by the Royal Academy exhibition (as Whistler was) and it would often exhibit paintings that were a bit avant guard. Ruskin, the very epitome of establishment in terms of art critics (hiss) was in attendance, and after waxing lyrical about a pre-raphelite painter of the day, slammed the Whistler effort thus:
'For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.'
Meeee Owww!
Whistler, being the vain but otherwise normal human that he was, felt compelled to sue for libel (well he WAS an American!). Not good. Ruskin was represented by Sir John Holker who was the chief counsel of the British Crown! Their aim was to defame further the name of Whistler by discrediting him 'as an artist'. They called Edward Burne-Jones (the pre-raphelite that Ruskin had praised in the same exhibition review) as a witness, who described the painting as 'one of a thousand failures to represent night, and therefore not worth 200 guineas'. This is one of Burne-Jones's paintings:
So what was going on here? This argument was based on a concept of 'worth' in art that was based at least in part on monetary recompense for 'skill' and later in their argument on 'labour' as in the time it took to paint it. But it was most importantly about 'meaning'.
Bear with me... I'm going somewhere with this! But before I do... Molly this is for you... it's Whistler's comment about Ruskin's review of his work:
“Art, that for ages has hewn its own history in marble, and written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still, and stammer, and wait for wisdom from the passer-by? – for guidance from the hand that holds neither brush nor chisel? Out upon the shallow conceit! What greater sarcasm can Mr. Ruskin pass upon himself than that he preaches to young men what he cannot perform! Why, unsatisfied with his own conscious power, should he choose to become the type of incompetence by talking for forty years of what he has never done!”
... and whilst we've got the claws out... It's worth mentioning that Ruskin was a complicated chap. He was brought up in an evangelistic household with no toys, no friends and sever discipline. He married Euphemia Gray in July 1848 only to be sued for annulment on the grounds of non-consumation 6 years later! She married John Everett Millais after an almost indecent interval and had millions of kids. Here's a painting he did of her:
...and THAT is the Australian connection my friends... since this is a blog about living in Australia! She was from Perth and is buried there. Interestingly, the painting used to have their youngest child on her lap, but he was scraped off... and now she's cuddling a copy of the Cornhill Magazine instead!
So what's my point?
Well art prior to Ruskin's period and the kind of art that he (and the establishment of the time) supported was the kind that was 'about' stuff. It was 'historical' painting and it idealised literary, mythical, historical and biblical events, usually involved the concept of truth, or of God in nature. Ruskin was a God propounder of sorts (after his mother) and felt that there was a moral point to great art. He wasn't in opposition per se to impressionism or even abstraction, provided that there was an underlying 'message' and some evidence of a grueling creative process that reflected the current belief in the privation of self and Victorian work ethic.
There was a transition from concrete rules and procedures, from embedded meanings and deep sh*t, to abstraction and non-representation. Society was resistant to this. For the establishment position typified by Ruskin and others like him, there needed to be a strong intellectual backbone to the work that suggested depth, theological musings and philosophical nuance.
Whistler was part of the 'aesthetic movement' which stated that 'art is for art's sake'. Their relativist theoretical standpoint led them to believe that one should not look 'through' a picture, but 'at' a picture. They believed that art was about beauty, not meaning or symbolism. 'Beauty is in objects that give pleasure because of their being well made. Beauty is in the line, colour, and brushwork itself, INDEPENDENT of the subject matter. To the Aesthetes, an artist rendered understanding and rationality subservient to to imagination and creativity! Their work had a spontaneity and speed that rubbed Victorian values up the wrong way.
Does any of this strike a chord?
So Molly goes into the art college, is confronted by a 'tutor' aka the embodiment of an established perspective that propounds that art is 'about meaning' and tosses her 'art for arts sake' stuff onto the table, to be told that she's missed the point. (S)he wasn't in opposition per se to representationalism, provided that there was an underlying 'message' and some evidence of a grueling creative process that reflected the current belief in the need for personal expression of inner torment and the 21st century belief in romantic concepts of rational intellectualism. Somewhere along the line, it LOOKS like the worm turned... but really it didn't. We're told that 'contemporary art' is a free flow thing, that it is not bound by rules and that anything goes. But the reality is in fact the complete reverse. Contemporary art and it's custodians are so bound up in their own intellectual faeces that they forgot about 'Art for Art's sake'. Now they discern on the basis of bullshit - pretty much like Ruskin et al did all those year ago.
So how far have we really come?
The funny thing here is that Ruskin sounded like a realist slagging off a modern artist today...
'In an Oxford lecture in 1873, Ruskin speaking of Whistler’s paintings, declared that he had never seen “anything so impudent on the walls of any exhibition, in any country, as last year in London. It was daub professing to be a ‘harmony in pink and white’ (or some such nonsense); absolute rubbish, and which had taken about a quarter of an hour to scrawl or daub – it had no pretence to be called painting.”
He could have been talking about Tracy Emin.
But ironically, he was talking LIKE Tracy Emin, Saatchi, Hurst, etc etc boring boring.
Whistler wrote 'The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' in which he said "“Art should be independent of all clap-trap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like."
That's my point... so I just wanted to say:
GO MOLLY!
...'Give a little 'Whistle(r)'' - and always let your conscience be your guide !
Click here to go to Molly's web site
By the way, Whistler won the libel, but was only awarded a farthing damages and no costs. He was bitter about it. He was considered by 'society' to have brought the action in bad taste. Ruskin was considered to be a coarse intellectual bully. So as per usual, the only ones who gained were the lawyers. How history repeats itself.
Wow Chris..such a thoughtful post. Poor Molly! I remember the same thing happening to me in 1970-71 when I was granted a full art scholarship to Kent State University in Kent . Ohio..yes the infamous 4 dead in Ohio campus. At the time it's art school was considered very good. My work was constantly trashed because it was too representational. Literally the teachers would tear it off the walls during critiques and throw it on the floor. As a sensitive 17 yr. old I was devastated and it stayed with me a long time. At that time we were riding the Jackson Pollack coattails and swimming in Warhol. and that was where I was supposed to go..but I did not. Years later..2006..I am now accepted into the University of Utah on the basis of my representational portfolio. But again..several teachers try the same thing Molly experienced.
ReplyDeleteThey wanted me to go to that deep dark place and dredge up some ugly paintings that mean something. Well I got my courage finally and I announced..I bought that t shirt, earned the right to wear it out and now I am in another place in my long life..which by the way was longer than just about all the art teachers there! I do what I feel like doing, I represent what I want and I was successful. I am definitely not Whistler or Ruskin in my skill but I realized that art is personal and once it hangs on the wall anyone who sees it will have their own reaction to it. Or walk by. It took some years of therapy and life to come to the place I am in. Yet I still do wonder if I can do something meaningful enough to have people stop and view my work and maybe even buy it.
So hopefully I haven't bored with my little personal story. But the longwinded point I will make is that there are art instructors, curators, art historians, art writers who think that their job is to push and pull us all screaming into their college thesis about someone's trash art stapled to the wall. They think they will bully us, and when they find they can't..the instructors usually become allies of the student and do what they are paid to do..teach and mentor. Good luck to Molly..she has a rare talent.