Stuckism

Sir Isaac Newton, in one of his famous laws decreed that, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." He was speaking in terms of physics, of course, but social scientists have long noted that what he had to say often, if not always, applies to the affairs of man as well. They might have to modify the statement slightly to say that "For every action there is, eventually, an equal and opposite reaction." And it seems to me, that the same law could also be applied to art. A movement develops, thrives, dominates, and in so doing angers a significant bloc of individuals who formulate their own pendulum swing back in the opposite direction. And so it goes, from Academicism to Impressionism, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Dada, from WPA art to Abstract Expressionism then to Pop, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The pendulum swings, the clock keeps ticking.

The first Stuckist show, 1999, Shoreditch,
(east end of London)

Postmodernism is about a generation old now, and it's not surprising that "eventually" has finally come upon it. The opposite reaction, though not equal by any means, seems to be a sort of anti-movement art movement which  developed in Britain as the result of some of the worst excesses of Postmodernism as identified mostly in conceptual art. In some ways it's not too unlike Dada movement of a century ago. Like the Impressionists, they take their name from an intended insult--Stuckist--though in fact they hate the term. They claim not to be an "ism." The "stuck" part they seem not to mind. The co-founders of the non-movement were Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. The group got their name when Tracey Emin (remember, her unmade bed at the Tate) screamed at her then boyfriend, Billy Childish, that his art was stuck, stuck, stuck! Along with Emin's work, Stuckists also hold in extremely low regard that of Damien Hirst (embalmed sheep), whom they also accuse of plagiarism, and Chris Ofili (no need to elaborate on him).

Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an
Acquisitions Decision, 2000,
Charles Thomson

Personalities aside, I don't intend to discuss the art on either side of the fence. However, the most interesting aspects of Stuckism is its manifesto. A few lines are especially compelling. "Artists who don't paint aren't artists." That leaves out a lot of artists. "Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn't art." That leaves out a lot of art as well. The Stuckists believe art should be displayed in homes with tables and chairs and sofas and tea, not in sterile, all-white surroundings. I can see the logic in that. "Success is getting out of bed in the morning and painting." I rather like that one. "A Stuckist is not a career artist but...an amateur." The point this one makes is that professionals fear failure; amateurs don't, because they have nothing to lose. There may be some truth to that but I've known a lot of amateurs who were also inhibited by a fear of failure. Stuckists abhor novelty, shock, and gimmicks. Postmodernism tries to ape the past and foresee the future. Stuckists try to ignore both. Stuckists champion process over cleverness, realism over abstraction, content over void, humor over wittiness, and painting over everything else.

The Stuckists are perennially critical of the Tate's Turner Prize purchases.

Notwithstanding their blacklisting of many of their British counterparts, the Stuckists hold in greatest contempt not so much the Hirsts and Ofilis of their generation (and especially Britain's annual Turner Prize) but the educational establishment which fostered them; not to mention the Saachis (a London art gallery) and government subsidies which have isolated such artists from the "real" world of human artistic expression. The Stuckists deem commercial success as the death of personal expression in painting. And they see the educational institutions that gave birth to the iconoclastic aura of conceptual art as nothing more than bureaucratic money machines trapping untalented students and milking their wealthy parents in the name of "success" in the art world rat race. A valid observation. Stuckists call for all art education institutions to make their facilities and faculties available during off-hours for the enrichment of the community at large. Sounds like a good idea to me. Like all art manifestos, there is much in the Stuckist's document that is pure B.S. (not bachelor of sciences). But there is also a fair amount of C.S. (common sense) as well. Stuckists take as their motto, "We only denounce that which stops at the starting point--Stuckism starts at the stopping point." As a self-confessed Postmodernist, I make no claim to being a Stuckist, but I do get stuck sometimes. And sometimes, stuck ain't bad.

Tags

Look Mickey!, 1961, Roy Lichtenstein

It's unfortunate, but we all tend to do it. We pigeonhole artists, even those of us who should know better. We forever think of Grant Wood as Gothically American. We associate Picasso with Cubism 70 years after he painted his last Cubist work. We think first of de Kooning's butt-ugly, buxom broads, Cezanne's mountain, and Norman Rockwell is forever tagged an illustrator. Roy Lichtenstein suffers the same fate--Comic strip paintings--that's what we think of first and perhaps solely as Roy's work. He painted his first one, Look, Mickey! (above) in 1961. He painted his last one in 1969. That's eight years. He was born in 1923. He died in 1997. What did he do before 1961 and after 1969? If you're drawing a blank, even one with his trademark Ben Day dots, you're not alone in your ignorance.

Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1951, Roy Lichtenstein

After the Second World War, like millions of other GI's, Roy went to college. He studied art at Ohio State University, receiving a masters degree from there in 1951. One of his earliest works is a childlike, nearly abstract parody, Washington Crossing the Delaware (above)--not a Ben Day dot in sight. He worked for a department store in Cleveland, doing window displays; for Republic Steel doing metal designs, and all the while made frequent trips to New York City to sit in the Cedar Bar, too shy to introduce himself to the likes of de Kooning, Pollock, Kline and the other New York School stars of that period. He was finding his way, imitating Picasso, Fragonard, Klee and other art icons, always with tongue firmly planted in cheek. He painted everything in every style, from medieval subjects to anthropomorphic vegetation. Before the decade of the 50s was over he was teaching at Rutgers University and becoming acquainted with fellow Pop artists such as Klaes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Then, with Look, Mickey!, he completely abandoned expressionism. In fact, one might say he actively combated it.

Nude with Yellow Flower, 1994,
Roy Lichtenstein

We know what happened in the sixties. His style became set. He never abandoned that. What he did abandon was the comics. He moved on to parodies of other artists' work, Cezanne, Manet, Monet, even artists from the Renaissance such as Leonardo and Raphael. He painted brush strokes, taking popshots at the free brushwork of the Abstract Expressionist his Pop Art had dethroned. He even sculpted brush strokes out of painted stainless steel, always with his heavy, cartoonish outlines, brilliant, primary, solid colors, and his ever-present dots. As time went on, he began to abandon the flatness of his earlier work in favor of a stylized chiaroscuro, varying the size of his dots to create curved surfaces. In the nineties, he began to paint nudes, as in his 1994 Nude with Yellow Flower. In it, he plays, somewhat illogically with chiaroscuro, not so much in modeling his figure but in suggesting areas of shadow in an otherwise linear design traditionally associated with his work. There are no speech balloons. It's a female nude with a cordless phone, contemplating what appears to be a carnation. It's nothing like you what would ever find in a comic book.

Southwestern Style Architecture

Eastern architecture adapted to the Southwest (and not very well, I might add)
seen here in the ghost town of Bodie, California.

As we've studied architectural styles the past few months, we've looked almost exclusively at the eastern United States, as if the frontier west of the Mississippi didn't exist. It's time to correct that. One of the reasons we've neglected this area is not that distinctive architectural styles didn't exist in the West (they did); but because they weren't applied to any great extent to private homes until well after the Civil War. Before that, western houses were either too crude to reflect any distinctive styling, or simply imitative of the eastern styles we've discussed. As easterners migrated west, they took their plan books with them and tried to recreate that which they'd left (as seen above). It was only in the 1880s as a second generation of native Texans and Californians in particular began building homes, that they were influenced by native Southwestern styles. Thus in the Southwest, there began to be felt the strong Spanish architectural heritage.

The Mission style

To make matters complex in this case, we're talking about not one but four distinctive Southwestern styles. The earliest we call the Mission style. Think stucco, think red tile roofs, think the curvilinear tops of Spanish missions in Texas and California. Remember what the front of the Alamo looks like? That and their red tile roofs are the most distinctive details of the Mission style. They can become very large and in their purest manifestations, quite Baroque, or sometimes look almost like a mission church.

Spanish Eclectic in two story version

The second style we call Spanish Eclectic. It's the most common. Again, you'll see lots of red tile roofs, but this time more likely stucco over adobe brick, or just adobe brick. The design is usually one story, often in an "L" shape with a porch, featuring low-pitched roofs with little or no overhang. The occasional use of arched windows, doors, and porches is about the only architectural enhancement to this style. It is a no-nonsense ranch type dwelling ideally suited to the Southwestern environment. Larger versions are fairly rare and may borrow lightly from the Mission style, but even at that, there's a tendency toward plainness in this style.

The Monterrey Style--more western than Spanish.

The third style is such a minor variation of the Spanish Eclectic it's almost not worth mentioning. It develops as one moves from southern to northern California. It's called the Monterrey Style and it's basically a two-story rendition of the Spanish Eclectic with a cantilevered balcony in front over the entry. Its only other difference is that it may be somewhat more often built of brick or wood than its southern cousin.

Pueblo Revival--little house on the desert

And the forth style is maybe the least Spanish of them all. Perhaps more accurately we might call it Southwestern Native American. Architects prefer Pueblo Revival. We all have some idea in our minds what a pueblo looks like, right? Very well, simply transfer, translate, and improvise that image into one of a private home. Of all these, this is the most recent development. Few (other than authentic pueblos) existed before 1900. They are often tan stucco made to look like adobe with cylindrical rafters extending beyond the walls, which may or may not actually support their always flat roofs. These two elements, and their rounded edges, are their most distinctive traits. Because they are so practical and well adapted to the harsh, hot, arid climate of the Southwest, they've remained popular through most of the 20th century and are still being built today.

For those keeping track of such things, we've now covered all the American housing styles having their roots in the 19th century and overseas. We're done with revivals. From this point on, while there may be a little "neo-eclectic" flavoring to what we see, everything else is modern or postmodern. Of course, "modern" especially, is a horribly ineffectual term to apply to architecture because it's been widened to the point almost anything can fit inside its broad understanding. In architecture, at best it means only 20th century. It says nothing about style except for the revivalism it excludes. As for postmodern, for the most part that means simply eclectic modern, perhaps hinting at past styles but never bowing to them.

Sports Painting

Lascaux sportsmen
13,000 years ago.

With the possible exception of the sculpted nude female figure, it's the oldest subject in art. As I've pointed out many times before, man has always painted that which is most important to him. When we look back at the very first and most archival paintings on earth, those that adorn the walls of caves, often dating back some 20,000 years, we find men bearing spears in pursuit of wild animals. He needed their meat to survive; but such hunting scenes also bear witness to the joys of the hunt. So, whether enjoying the pleasures of the nude female figure in his cave, or that of hunting animals on the outside, we find in his art the two most important elements in his life. Thousands of years later, portraits by Velázquez of King Philip IV of Spain and others by Gainsborough all depict their male subjects bearing arms, ready for the hunt. So it was up until the nineteenth century.

Hunt in the Forest, 1460, Paolo Uccello

Aside from some ancient Egyptian wall paintings and those mentioned above from the walls of the caveman's abode, Paolo Uccello's Hunt in the Forest (above), dating from around 1460, may be the earliest sporting painting to survive. It's a broad view of a group of Florentine huntsmen and their servants, horses, and dogs as they surround a small group of deer. With its idealized, mostly rather flat figures, and prevalent symmetry, the whole work seems rather staged. But Uccello's amazing grasp of perspective and one or two exceptional images, seemingly drawn from life, lift this work above the genre of mere decoration.

Bullfight in a Village, 1815, Francisco de Goya

In Spain, Francisco de Goya turned to the native sport in his Bullfight in a Village painted around 1815. There's no stadium, such as we are accustomed to seeing, only a ring of spectators and a modest, and seemingly inadequate, wooden fence separating them from the action as the mounted picador takes aim at the bull with his lance. The sharpness of the focus, as everyone faces the confrontation between man and beast, heightens the drama of this intensely exciting moment. Goya seems to treat the figure of the bull with far more dignity and strength than he does the animal's human enemies in this lopsided version of the hunt.

Doncaster Races, Horses Starting for the St. Leger, 1831, James Pollard




By the early nineteenth century, another sport had overtaken much of Europe--horse racing. Around 1831, James Pollard, in his Doncaster Races, Horses Starting for the St. Leger (above), painted us a broad panorama that captures the entire scene: horses, spectators, track, and the surrounding structures. The only problem is, he has painted us the entire scene: horses, spectators, track, and the surrounding structures. Even though the work is quite large, there's simply too much there for the eye to focus upon any one thing in the painting. Even the larger elements, the coaches in the foreground and the sizable, Neo-classical structures in the background, all of which are relatively unimportant to the sport of racing, fail to capture our attention. Though the starter is dead centre, he is so small as to go quite unnoticed in the overall scheme of the scene.

Jockeys Before the Start, 1879,
Edgar Degas

In France, Edgar Degas went to the opposite extreme in his Jockeys Before the Start (left), painted around 1879. In a composition no doubt influenced by the rising art of photography (if not, indeed, copied from a photo), he divides the canvas vertically and slightly off-centre with the starting pole itself in what appears to be an early morning, pre-race workout. The major mounted figure in the painting is far to the right of this extremely vertical composition while two other misty riders occupy the background. Yet, because of this, we see and feel the immediacy of racing, the pending excitement, the motion, and the dynamic action that makes racing the sport of king and commoner alike.

Right and Left 1909, Winslow Homer

In the twentieth century, we find Winslow Homer returning to the hunt as he explores the sporting life with his Right and Left (above) painted in 1909. In nearly all previous painting involving hunting, even the work of Delacroix with his fantasy lion hunts painted from studies of zoo animals, there is seldom seen the moment of the kill. Instead, we usually see depictions just before the hunt or just afterwards. But Homer shows up the practice of double-barrelled shooting as the hunter apparently nails first one, then another duck as they fly by, although there is an ambiguous tension as one ponders if, perhaps, only one duck has actually been hit while the other attempts to avoid death. Despite the title, visually, there's even a question as to which duck, the right one or the left one, may have been struck. Because of this, Homer causes us to reflect upon the fragility of our own lives and our "sporting" struggle to survive.

Golub and Spero

Leon Golub and wife, Nancy Spero

A couple weeks ago (12-20-12) I wrote about the working marriage partnership of Susan Rothenberg and Bruce Nauman. As I pointed out then, it's not as uncommon as we might expect for artists to marry each other. It happens in every other field, why not art? It is a little more unusual for them both to be equally well-known. Usually the male of the species has tended to overshadow the female in such cases, though there are exceptions.  Georgia O'Keefe, for instance, was much more well-known than her husband, artist-photographer, Alfred Stieglitz. And time has a way of evening things out too. By now, Frieda Kahlo is probably as well known as her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. But that certainly has never been the case insofar as Lee Krasner is concerned, though outshining Jackson Pollock would be a difficult feat for any artists. And, though Elaine de Kooning was good, Willem was better. Howver, another couple from that same generation did work on a pretty much even footing insofar as fame and fortune was concerned in the art world--Nancy Spero and Leon Golub.

They Will Torture You, My Friend, 1971, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (joint work)

They got married in 1951, and in the early years, these two fifties, radical, beatniks lived and worked together out of a garage in an alley in Chicago. They were alike in many ways. They tended to dress simply, in dark colors, one might even say they dressed alike in an asexual sort of way. They thought and talked a lot alike, ever deferential to one another as to their thoughts and opinions. But there the similarities ended. Nancy's work is delicate, narrative, not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics. It's elegant, sensitive, and as thoroughly feminine as it is feminist. (She all but banned male figures from her art.) Her husband's paintings, on the other hand, could most kindly be called "brutish"--dealing with anger, violence, rape, torture, and war. His works are large, overpowering, well-passed masculine to the point of macho extreme. Both started from the same source, Abstract Expressionism, and both fled the movement toward figurative painting in an instant once the art world began to appreciate such work.



Interrogation III, 1981, Leon Golub

But the road wasn't easy. In the 1960s they departed the New York art scene after Golub's show at the Museum of Modern Art was severely denounced by critics unready to sound the death knell of Abstract Expressionism. They spent a decade in Europe, where both picked up an appreciation for the art of ancient cultures, which today is one of the few things that link their work, though Golub leaned toward Roman and Etruscan art while Nancy's work has a much more Phoenician and Egyptian context. Both found inspiration in Greek sculpture. She worked with collage, ink, and relief prints on paper while Golub painted using acrylics or did large-scale drawings on paper. Though they shared a Greenwich Village studio for years, their success came separately. Only during the early years of the 21st century did they begin showing together internationally in exhibits held in Hiroshima and Paris (Leon Golub died in 2004 at the age of 82, his wife in 2009). As one can see in his brutal, 1981 Interrogation III (above) and her cartoonish, 1990 Myth (below), their work is vastly different, opposites in fact. Yet in many ways, they were opposite sides of the same coin.

Myth, 1990, Nancy Spero

 

John Ruskin

John Ruskin Self-portrait, 1861

A little over a hundred years ago, on January 20, 1900, the British artist, Walter Richard Sickert rushed into a men's' club in London brandishing the evening newspaper crying , "Ruskin's dead! Ruskin's dead!" He then collapsed into a chair with the words, "Thank God, Ruskin's dead! Give me a cigarette!" It was the end of an era as well as the end of a century. Actually the writer and art critic, John Ruskin had already been dead from a literary standpoint for some eleven years, suffering from progressive dementia, but his actual death just twenty days into the new century seemed symbolically a fitting close to the Victorian era which did officially end a year later with the death of the 82-year-old monarch.

The Garden of San Miniato near Florence, 1845, John Ruskin

Ironically, John Ruskin was born in London in 1819, the same year as his beloved Queen Victoria. His father was a prosperous wine maker, his mother a devout evangelical Protestant. His father collected art and encouraged his son's literary bent while his mother dedicated herself to seeing that her son dedicated himself to becoming an Anglican bishop. His father's interests won out. Schooled at home until the age of twelve, early on he showed a talent for drawing as well as writing. He published his first poem at the age of eleven, his first prose when he was fifteen. He began watercolor lessons when he was sixteen. When he was seventeen, his mother accompanied him to Oxford where he studied art and literature. By then he was an accomplished watercolorist who later did much to popularize his chosen medium.

J.M.W. Turner Self-portrait, 1799

It was at Oxford, in 1836, that Ruskin met fellow student, Joseph Mallord William Turner (45 years his senior). It was from Turner, whom he later popularized and defended religiously in his writings, that Ruskin learned art criticism. After Turner's death in 1851, Ruskin replaced his affections for Turner's atmospheric proto-impressionist land and seascapes with the hard edged, often sentimentally symbolic depictions by the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As much attracted to the predominantly male brotherhood itself as the paintings they produced, Ruskin's writings did much to bring their work to light and defend it from the majority of other critics who attacked it for its iconographic aridity and forced profundity.

Effie Gray, 1851,
Thomas Richmond

In 1848, Ruskin married Euphemia "Effie" Gray. By all accounts it was a disaster from the first night. In 1854, she obtained a scandalous annulment charging a failure, to consummate their marriage (attested to by a physical examination). Despite the public ridicule stemming from the proceedings, Ruskin never challenged the claim. A year later, with Ruskin's eager acquiescence, Effie modeled for, and later  married their good friend, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Everett Millais, with whom she later had eight children.

Order of Release, 1853,
John Everett Millais.
The woman is Effie Ruskin. 
 

Ruskin was something of an artist, and certainly a very vocal and insightful art critic, but we would be remiss in discussing him if we were to limit him to these two areas. Ruskin was a social critic as well, and as he grew older, a forceful writer for socialist causes. Many socialists in England, in fact, well into the 20th century, were much more influenced by his writings than those of Karl Marx. And unlike many other critics of his time, Ruskin's art criticism was always couched in a social context, believing that art was the province of every man, not just the social elite. He was the champion of the single craftsman and the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement in England at the time; and though a forceful defender in his writings of the lower-class factory workers themselves, he was a loud, even vicious critic of the factories in which they worked and those of his own class who profited from their labors.

Nocturne in Black and Gold:
The Falling Rocket, 1875,
James McNeill Whistler,
Ruskin: "...flinging a pot
of paint in the public's face."

Given Ruskin's early love of the swirling environmental work of Turner, and despite his affections for the Pre-Raphaelites, one might expect him to embrace the work of the Impressionists whom Turner influenced and work by later artists such as Whistler and Sargent. But the famous lawsuit in which Whistler went broke suing Ruskin for libel (for which he won a single farthing) was only one instance in Ruskin's loathing of such modern painting movements. (Whistler's near-abstraction painting, which Ruskin so hated, is at left.) Despite this, Ruskin was by far the most important art critic of the Victorian era with books and articles on the subject so numerous as to fill a small library. More importantly however, his writings served to frame not only the ways and means of art criticism for his time and ours; they also served as the literary backbone behind many of the most profound social changes marking the 20th century.

The Origin of the Portrait



Nefertiti, 1300 BCE

Some time ago I mentioned one of the axiomatic rules having to do with art. That is, artists have always tended to paint or sculpt that which is most important to them. I pointed out that man's earliest works, as seen in surviving prehistoric art, reflected the relative importance of two topics in his life - sports and sex. As any "football widow" will tell you, not much has changed in 20,000 years. Dating almost that far back we find a few other extremely ancient art content areas, one being superstition and primitive religious images, another being representations of human figures - God and man. These too have persisted into contemporary art, though, in recent years, the prevalence of religious art seems to have waned to an even greater degree than religion itself. Or, perhaps it is just that we have so internalized our faith in a supreme being that we no longer need religious images as we once did.

Alexander the Great coin bust, 320 BCE

Primitive figural art first evolved into portraiture, in its earliest surviving form, probably in ancient Egypt. Though much Egyptian figural art is formalized and stylized, the sculpted bust of Nefertiti, dating from 1348 BCE (top left), is so remarkably realistic we can only make the relatively safe assumption that it was also a portrait likeness. Several other pieces from the same period bear similar traits. But such portrait likenesses in Egyptian art were but brief flares of genius. It was another thousand years before Greek sculpture reached such heights of representational audacity as to approach our modern day definition of portraiture. And, even at that, as I mentioned a few days ago, so much regarding portraiture depends upon our definition of the term. Is the image of Alexander the Great on a Greek drachma coin dating from 320 BCE (above) an actual likeness, or merely a symbolic one? Although we have no way of knowing whether the Greeks mastered the art of portraying sculpted or painted likeness, those of their Roman predecessors are so individualistic and naturalistic as to make such judgements much more certain.

Emperor Lothair I (detail), 849 CE,
grandson of Charlemagne

But just as the fall of the Roman Empire set western civilization back a thousand years, the same must be said of the art of portraiture as well. The Imperial portrait of the Emperor Lothair I, dating from 849 CE (left), while impressive in its detail, is, in its own way, nearly as stylised and symbolic as those of ancient Egypt. Even as late as 1317, we see in the religious paintings of Italian artist Simone Martini, especially in his donor portraits, much of the same stiff, stylized rendering and only the barest suggestion that his static profiles might bear some actual resemblance to his patrons. Yet as little as 43 years later, an unknown artist (probably of Italian origin) painted a profile portrait of King John II of France (below, right) so strikingly individualized and accurate in its facial anatomy that we might consider it the first true portrait likeness of any consequence since Roman times.

King John II of France, 1350

Strangely, considering the many hundreds of years in which the painting of portraits languished in ineptitude, once artists began to again seriously study the human face and strive to reproduce its anatomical similarities as well as its individual differences in paint, the movement to modern day, highly characteristic portraiture was amazingly rapid. In little more than a hundred years after the unknown artist captured the likeness of King John II, Robert Campin in the Netherlands was routinely turning out subtle, three-quarter view portraits as accurate as any we might find today, and not just of kings and noblemen, but those of such middle-class individuals that their likenesses have survived long after their names have been forgotten. And while the importance of religious art may have waned in modern times, portraiture has become so vital to our daily lives that we must carry such likenesses with us to drive a car, to cash a check, or to, in many cases now, report to work.

Portrait of a Man, 1430, Robert Campin

Portrait of a Woman, 1430, Robert Campin