July 08, 2008
complete bastard, damn good portrait painter
The British painter, critic, and novelist Wyndham Lewis was a monster of intolerance - yet Walter Sickert once called him "the greatest portraitist of this, or any other time". What is more, an exhibition of Lewis's portraits at the National Portrait Gallery reveals that Sickert was very nearly right.I dislike everything about Lewis, and, if you want to know why, all you have to do is glance at his famous self-portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro (1920-21). In it the artist looks out at us with an expression somewhere between a sneer and a snarl.
Curling his upper lip to bare his teeth, he swivels his hard and suspicious eyes round to fix us with an angry glare. The face is made up of flat planes and sharp angles. The points of the chin, cheek and nose look like knives.
more from The Telegraph here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:29 AM | Permalink
Comments
The vorticist movement lasted only three weeks and Salvador Dali delivered the shortest speech in history.
For unknown reasons both phenomena endure more that most pundits can explain...
Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | Jul 8, 2008 4:28:05 PM
Felix, I know a reason why vorticism still matters 100 years later. Then as now, what endures in art often boils down to the ability of a legendary personality to compel the imagination of generations of later comers. In Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, you have such a personality -- he even obliged posterity by dying in battle at a Byronically young age. But not before hooking up with Ezra Pound; their mutual infatuation with Chinese calligraphy went far to establish the sinicizing strain in modern poetry that remains fruitful to this day, even though many contemporary poets can't name it. Gaudier-Brzeska -- like his work or not -- was seminal in his insistence that sculpture, or any art, show the marks of the tools that made it, that something so intimate to the process of art needed not to be hidden. This led directly to painting that, inside a very few decades, became more about the possibilities of paint than about subject or content, which led in turn to multiple new meanings arising from art across many disciplines that referenced its own creation.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 8, 2008 11:44:11 PM
was seminal in his insistence that sculpture, or any art, show the marks of the tools that made it, that something so intimate to the process of art needed not to be hidden.
Does Gaudier-Brzeska really get credit for this idea for merely acknowledging what Rodin and Van Gogh (to name just two) so masterfully demonstrated before he was even born?
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 9, 2008 8:31:21 PM
Carlos, my point of view is needless to say that of a lay person, not an art historian. I merely look and think and read. What I believe you're talking about, however, is the difference between a future direction in art being adumbrated in practice and codified into theory. Practice is always ahead of theory.
I think Rodin was looking at Michelangelo's "Slaves," and incorporating into his own sculpture the feeling of immanence that an unfinished-looking work has, the sense that the figure in the sculpture is struggling free of the rock and in danger of subsiding back into it. Tremendous energy came from this dynamic, as well as a gesture to equal if not greater forces of entropy -- it took the "static" right out of the "statue." While this involved showing traces of the tools of sculpture, it's a philosophically different matter than thinking of the tools as integral to the appearance of the work because so doing reflects on the artist's process; Rodin was thinking of effect, not process, of the work and not the making of the work. To achieve the effect he intended, there had to be a large amount of calculation -- no bad thing. But total involvement in a process can be antithetical to the calculation of an effect, although it needn't be. It's a matter of emphasis, one that undergirds art to this day.
I'm not sure a precisely parallel argument could be presented vis-a-vis Van Gogh. By virtue of his genius and his tragic life, he is so...alone, even though French painting of the 1880's was getting plenty brushy, with him or without him. Knowing it or not knowing it, he painted about the possibilities of paint, but I'm not sure that's why his art speaks to us -- it would be a shallow world, that judged his contribution on the basis of his being a proto-modernist. Some artists are never exceeded, never superseded, no matter what comes after them.
As you say, there are other artists one could bring into this discussion. Also, Rodin and Van Gogh as well as some of the others we could mention are great artists in a way that Gaudier-Brzeska managed not to be. If theory is a turning point, however, then I think his work and thought and placement in history made that turning point run through him.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 9, 2008 10:09:20 PM
Yeah, I follow your point. Funny, I too was thinking of those unfinished titans in Florence. I completely agree with what you said about Vincent, but not sure about Mssr. Rodin. His thumbprints are in that bronze, and the way he pulled and raked the clay is so visceral and intense. That he chose not to disguise his hands and tools and even to celebrate them was different than what Michelangelo was doing with his slaves, whether they were unintentionally unfinished or he finally found he just couldn't bear to set them completely free.
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 10, 2008 10:09:14 PM
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