I have not always had an open mind about art!
But the more you see, the more you read, the more you learn – the more your mind is able to assimilate and suddenly you discover that paintings you didn’t like before make sense and begin to speak to you.
Or perhaps better: you find a meaning, en expression – or something else that engages the mind.
So, when I look at a painting today, I put my senses in blotting paper mode; just sucking it up. It is a totally intuitive process: does the painting give me an immediate feeling of ‘something’? Anything’? It could be the colours, the composition, the technique applied, the theme or an immediate ‘beam me up, Scottie’ feeling that pulls out long lost memories and associations.
If any of these feelings don’t appear within a couple of seconds, I immediately begin to feel lost. I know the moment has passed when I start intellectualising the object, plastering mental arguments and comments all over the canvass.
In science, politics, philosophy and even religion, an idea must be distinct before you can let reason loose on it.
That doesn’t work for art, although some balance can be achieved through a deeper level of understanding the artist and his or her specific language.
You can dislike a picture intensely, but still approve of it. A picture can be beautiful in both colour and composition – but you may still not like it.
It is strange to experience how Canaletto’s almost photographic Canale Grande in
Venice, Van Gogh’s twisted brush strokes (e.g. crows over a corn field), Kandinsky’s almost mathematically constructed paintings and a twisted abstraction like Picasso’s Guernica, despite their incomparability, are able to pull out an immediate sense of joy and awe.
My like or dislike is decided within the first 2-3 seconds. Any further analysis is conscious after-rationalisation, which in my case invariably starts in the case of ‘dislike’.
And yet – the limits of my acceptance have widened considerably in the past 30-40 years! In other words, I have both consciously and
imperceptibly broadened the area of the art world that gives me pleasure.
And that is what happens with art – just consider impressionism, derided and laughed at in the beginning and now my absolute favourite period, in particular some of the Americans (Carlsen, Low, Hassam).
Childe Hassam - woman at the coast
There is no formula for liking a painting or not. You cannot find the key in any art-book, only within yourself. Try a visit to the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Exhibition in London to understand what I mean. The amount of what I call nothingness and smear-work being exhibited in 2009 is beyond comprehension – but in the back of my head a small voice keeps saying “remember the impressionists”.
Good examples of accepted “nothingness”, meaning expensive, are:
- Malevich’s black cross, white on white, i.e. nothing, or black square. He got away with it, probably on the back of the fact that he had a lot else in his basket that appealed to a wider public.
- Rothko and his endlessly, monotone, superimposed squares-on-squares; red on yellow, on black on blue and gray and - - - squares squares squares. He too got away with it and people drool over his 'geniality'. He didn’t have anything else to say, though - Oh yes, perhaps: "There is more power in less than in more".
- The naïvists, who made a virtue out of either being unable to draw or possibly returning to their childhood’s unbarred expressions, and got away with it –sometimes ending up producing a variety of charming happiness, e.g. Mary Fedden (Nature morte on the right).
- The colourists, expressionists, abstract painters and pop-artists, whose cacophony of abstract forms in all possible hues
and shades, or simple cartoon reproductions, have opened the world for anyone to call themselves ‘an artist’. Examples are the COBRA painters (Asger Jorn – my favourite), avantgarde expressionists (Georg Baselitz, whose innovation was to paint everything upside-down and Emil Nolde’s wonderful colours) and the later works of a totally overrated Andy Warhol.
It is a world of immediate like or dislike.
Asger Jorn's trolls and fantasy world
Emil Nolde's beautiful wave
Nevertheless – there is some invisible wall, beyond which art becomes the Emperor’s New Clothes.
It is obviously difficult to establish the criteria for this and therefore difficult to criticise, in particular when one considers the examples above.
In Cybernetics a simple definition of Artificial Intelligence can be expressed in this way: If you communicate with a machine through a hole in the wall and you are unable to ascertain whether it is a machine or a human being, then you are communicating with a perfect Artificial Intelligence entity.
My subjective assessment of the naked art follows the same lines: If it doesn’t pass the 3 sec. test, if I intuitively dislike it (in form, colour, technique, etc) and I am unable to determine if it was made by a painter, a child or a chimpanzee, then it approaches the undress
ed definition. This will clearly be strongly exacerbated if the price tag runs into 5 or more digits, $s, €s or £s.
The RA’s 2009 summer exhibition flows over with this kind of waste products.
$150,000 for one of Tracey Emins miserable drawings, a mouse and some unreadable scratched text, can only indicate that someone is willing to pay for the artist’s autograph. In that case it doesn’t matter what the painter produces. Try to look for Ms. Emin’s production in Google Images. Nothing. No further comments should be necessary. Once raised to become an RA (Roayal Academy member), a readable signature is enough. At that stage in the artist’s career it is only a question of keeping the marketing machine going.
Tracey Emin's naked womanIn 2008 there was a delightful exhibition in the RA of the Danish painter Hammershøi. Not everyone’s cup of tea, as he excelled in a simple gray/brown palette – but indisputably an accomplished painter and a favourite of mine.
One of the English art critics cut him down to his socks.
However, he made a fatal mistake: he didn’t do his homework and hence got the sharp end of my pen. You will find my letter below as well as the key picture that supported my arguments:
A Response to Waldemar Januszczak.Not to like a painting, or not being fond of an artist, is everyone’s prerogative. Being an art critic and ignorant of the subject matter is not. WJ must have had a bad day when he set out to criticise Vilhelm Hammershøi and the exhibition at the RA (Sunday Times 13 July 2008). The least one can expect from a presumably well paid Sunday Times contributor is a level of objectivity, information that may enlighten the reader and a language that provides us ordinary mortals with the insight of a specialist.
What WJ means with “anally exact bipolar moods” is unclear to me, but one surely cannot accuse Hammershøi of not being creative.
All artists throughout the ages have taken inspiration in both past and contemporary works of art and added their own style and interpretation and so did Hammershøi, in a rather unique way, from both Vermeer and Eckersberg, but without falling into the trap of copying either of them. Perhaps WJ should read the subtitle to the exhibition: “the Poetry of silence”, so excellently conveyed in Hammershøi’s pictures.
There may well be a strong element of Scandinavian melancholy in his pictures. But is that a crime? Is it really melancholy? Or does it really detract from the artist’s skills? As an art specialist WJ may have heard of other ‘gloomy’ Scandinavians like Ibsen, Munch, Strindberg, Carl Th. Dreyer and Bergman? And when WJ talks about the ‘Danish outback’, perhaps a quick ‘Google’ of PS Krøjer, Eckersberg, Willumsen and a whole raft of Hammershøi’s contemporary Skagen painters could help alleviate WJ’s ignorance?
‘The fact is that Hammershøi couldn’t do faces very well’ is a remark WJ should feel ashamed about. It shows that WJ hasn’t done his homework. The portrait of Hammershøi’s sister Anna is a good example of a brilliant portrait, but perhaps WJ is unaware that Renoir found it extraordinarily splendid? WJ obviously hasn’t seen the monumental 1902 painting of 5 of Hammershoi’s artist friends – not exactly outback personalities with smudged faces either? By the same token perhaps Ken Howard, R.A., could be accused of being unable to paint portraits. Just have a look at his excellent picture of his atelier with a basically face-less woman on a chair, presently exhibited at the RA. Or Picasso’s triangular heads and Henry Moore’s headless women sculptures?
Anna, Hammershøi’s sister
The ‘coma’, as WJ expresses it, into which Hammershøi’s reputation fell in the time after his death, caused the Danish Art Museum to return a donation of 28 pictures to the noble donor, an act they deeply regretted, when Hammershøi’s pictures woke up and began to sell at $500,000 a piece.
Of course, price is not an indication of great art, just compare Matisse’s 15 sec charcoal sketch of a woman recently seen for sale in London at £35,000 or Tracy Emin’s unmade bed, which no doubt is everyone’s envy as a ‘piece de salon’. WJ’s admiration of Emin, expressed in his highly appreciative review of her selection at the RA’s summer exhibition, is perhaps an indication of a taste that never would endear him to Hammershøi anyway. WJ is obviously artistically attracted to the exhibited photos of a menstruating woman, which reminds me of the 1950s Danish hard-core porn magazine, Rapport, which excelled in depicting genitalia and various explicit and juicy uses of same. It helped teenagers like myself understand some of the mysteries of the propagation of life, but the target audience was clearly what for decennia thereafter in the UK would be characterised as ‘dirty minds’.
It is a pity I didn’t keep a couple of them. With time, and WJ’s help, they obviously would have transformed from filth in the drawer to serious art on the shelf.
If WJ is really so ignorant about the background of Hammershøi’s expressions and unable to understand Hammershøi’s less-is-more philosophy and his deliberate eradication of clutter from the streets in the ‘fin-de-siecle Copenhagen gloom’, then he should perhaps stay within his sphere of appreciation and continue reviewing Emin’s sexual paranoia.
