Legendary animator Richard Williams chased his masterpiece, The Thief and The Cobbler, the way Captain Ahab chased Moby Dick. "The path to my fixed purpose," cried Ahab, "is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run." Neither man could swerve from the rails which led ineluctably to their fate.
The story of Williams' obsession with his film has been well documented elsewhere. For 24 years, from 1968 to 1992, Williams exhausted one backer after another (including a Saudi prince) in his heartbreaking pursuit of perfection. He spent 14 years on the first ten minutes of film alone, reported to cost about $31 million (adjusting for inflation). But what an astonishing ten minutes they were.
To scratch together funding for his project, Williams had to spend much of his time on commercial assignments and negotiating with lawyers and bankers. Ultimately the film was taken out of his hands. To cut their losses, Warner Brothers and a financing company sold the pieces to Miramax, which re-cut them and released the movie in a simplified form as Arabian Knight.
Before he died, Williams said, "What have I got if I haven't got those awards? I've got nothing; I've got the building and the staff that's in it. And an unmade picture."
I'd disagree with Williams' valuation of his assets.
These are some of the preliminary drawings that Williams made over the years as he was working on his masterpiece.
In them, you can see him teasing out the designs and shapes that would later be incorporated in his animated film.
These small drawings are miles from the corporate funded and globally distributed artwork that Williams wanted. On the other hand, they're also miles away from bankers and lawyers. The time he spent doing them, and the talents he summoned to create them, had to be more artistically satisfying than the time and talents he spent with corporate backers.
I'd say that these building blocks of design are a whole lot more than "nothing." Their perfections are different from the perfections of an animated feature film, but as the great Walt Whitman instructed us, "I do not call one greater and one smaller, that which fills its period and place is equal to any."
52 comments:
Thank you Mr. Apatoff for devoting one of your articles to Richard Williams and this project. The movie is a work of art.
What Williams needed from the start was a solid production team with an objective eye (who he trusted), who could keep him on track, rein in his excesses, tighten the storytelling, control the quality, oversee the budget and schedule etc.
Such a huge mis-spent use of talent, time and money.
Anonymous-- Thanks, I agree the movie as Williams left it was truly beautiful. When it comes to graphic design, I can't think of a better one.
Laurence John-- Ah, but that's the trick isn't it? Williams did hire a talented team and repeatedly laid them off each time he ran out of funds. If your ambition is a corporate work of art, then managing the staff, meeting payroll and leasing space become as important as character design. Time that you could've spent drawing must be spent with shareholders and dealing with licensing contracts.
At some point near the end Williams must've figure out that this was "a huge mis-spent use of talent, time and money" but like Captain Ahab he could do no other.
David, for me, the film (I'm talking about the 'Recobbled cut' which is most of the existing original footage) looks a bit like a director / animator experimenting, trying things out, and finding his voice. The character design is wildly inconsistent, and there are jarring shifts in tone and style. The middle section in the desert with the troll army (whatever they were meant to be) was just pointless, and should never had made it past the ideas stage. Basically, he was too eager to start, hadn't worked out exactly where his strengths were, and didn't have a producer to say 'no'.
Kev, regarding your deleted critique; I don't think conventional narrative was the point. The strongest scenes in the film - the pole vault sequence and the war machine sequence - are almost like extended Roadrunner-esque sketches pushed to the point of absurdity. I think if Williams had made the whole thing in this silent-film / Roadrunner way, it would have worked (but not for a young mainstream audience). Unfortunately he decided to build it around a much more conventional plot.
The 'war machine' sequence is unbelievable though. Its like a Heath Robinson meets Bosch in hell fever dream.
I can even imagine the best bits working as a 30 minute length short, centred just around the thief's attempts to steal the golden balls culminating in the war machine sequence.
Anyway, a real exercise in learning the hard way.
The point about a producer is a valid one. Generally, especially in the modern age, behind every successful creative person, there's a person who helps them navigate the business aspects of their field.
Musicians have managers, directors have producers, etc. The Beatles and Brian Epstein. A theatre director and a producer I knew remained completely dedicated to each other for over 20 years as they became Artistic and Managing Directors at a couple of large theatre companies. In film, directors who enjoy rare creative freedom such as Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Terrence Malick each have producers behind them who barely, if at all, work with other directors. In Nolan's case it's his wife!
Richard Williams could've used a person like that. Perhaps being a successful self-made man gave him a blind spot. Or perhaps he simply wasn't lucky enough to find the right person.
Laurence John-- I don't think we should be surprised to find continuity problems in an incomplete movie developed by various hands over a 24 year period (a period in which animation underwent growth spurts that took it through Roger Rabbit and up to the beginning of Toy Story). I suspect that Williams planned to homogenize the final version, given enough time and budget. But the part of the film that made me sit up and take notice was the parade when Zigzag is first presented. Zigzag's shoes that uncurled and curled back up again as he walked, that cluster of flagellating guards, that bright orange checkerboard ground in the marketplace-- what a marvelous, imaginative scene! When you compare it to Disney's better funded, contemporaneous Aladdin, you get a sense for how truly superior Williams' fragment was to Disney's completed film.
We will never see the completed, unified symphony that Williams had in mind, but just like the preliminary drawings, scenes such as the war machine or Zigzag's parade or the op art chase scene can be artistic statements of great quality.
I understand that at one time Wiliams' producer, Omar Ali-Shah, was embezzling from the project. That's enough to put you off producers for a while. Another benefit of making personal drawings instead.
Benjamin De Schrijver-- well, sometimes you get Brian Epstein and sometimes you get Allen Klein. That's the gamble when you commingle the DNA behind. There are some directors, such as Orson Welles, Terry Gilliam, and yes, Williams who just can't bear to share their vision. They've all left a legacy of incomplete films and broken crockery, but they were each indisputably brilliant.
Benjamin, I agree with your points.
Creators are sometimes blind to the problems in personal projects they've fallen in love with, and invested lots of time in. William's work on Roger Rabbit was pretty much flawless, which proves that he could work under much tighter constraints.
I’ve taken a fresh look, through a “cobbled” originalist version (4) and it was a much better film than I remember. I was certainly more impressed this time with all that was good and even great in the animation. And I had some fun watching. But it took my breath away in between long stretches of boredom bejeweled with clever business. We don’t enter the narrative spell merely to be alternately impressed and distracted. If the idea is to simply offer a two hour parade of witty trifles and gigantic set pieces, why bother with the narrative at all?
So, I would say, the great failing of Thief and Cobbler is mostly narrative, though some of its failings are inconsistencies in the artistic thinking. For example: Sometimes the floors are flat, sometimes in perspective. Sometimes people walk on top of a flat surface, sometimes they walk on them as if they were dimensional. Another example; everything is rendered as flat graphic except for the band of lazy ogres in the desert with their book who are full of dimension lumps and bumps, which immediately attract much more attention than a brief contrast in style should.
The narrative mistakes are more prevalent, and they’re so basic the governing principles have, by now, been reduced to mantras: Don’t hit the same beat twice, late in early out at every scale (beat, scene, sequence, act), don’t get so lost in ‘business’ that the audience loses track of the point of the scene, before showing a ‘third use of the knife’ show the first two uses to establish the basic nature and use of the thing, no Deus Ex Machina (a lucky bounce of a tack takes down an entire mechanical war machine), make sure all the characters have motivations for what they do, set up the physical joke before executing it, there should be a variety in the traits of the characters (two characters who don't speak is a bad redundancy in the ensemble), etc.
What Williams needed from the start was a solid production team with an objective eye (who he trusted), who could keep him on track, rein in his excesses, tighten the storytelling, control the quality, oversee the budget and schedule etc.UK VISAS & IMMIGRATION SERVICES
Kev, regarding your deleted critique; I don't think conventional narrative was the point. The strongest scenes in the film - the pole vault sequence and the war machine sequence - are almost like extended Roadrunner-esque sketches pushed to the point of absurdity. I think if Williams had made the whole thing in this silent-film / Roadrunner way, it would have worked (but not for a young mainstream audience). Unfortunately he decided to build it around a much more conventional plot.
It is because there is a conventional plot holding everything together that I reject Williams' claim that the movie was 'intended as a kind of dream' with a dream's logic. In fact, the 'rules of his story world' once set out are strictly followed. (The op-art effects have no meaning narratively, they only seem like offhand jokes or, sometimes, distracting mistakes.)
There's definitely some Road Runner in there, but there isn't much dream-like in it. Not even much supernatural; I think it is implied that Zig Zag's a fraudulent sorceror except for having some weak powers of persuasion (which, with the crocodiles, first work then don't.) So that leaves only the idea that 'prophesies come true' as the lone supernatural 'rule' to the movie. Until the Deux Ex Machina ending, that is. Which suddenly abandons all the prior physical and narrative logic and runs off into the land of the surreal with brand new rules for gravity and coincidence.
Such a delight to read a post from your dedicated to this gem of a movie (albeit left incomplete).
In this day and age, when the critics and audiences seem to have surrendered to "adherence to the formula" as the only valid measure of a movie's worth, Richard Williams uncompromising quest for perfection, beauty and wonderment is something to be celebrated.
speaking of animation I wonder if you are familiar and would mind to write about the work of one of Richard Williams' role models: animator Milt Kahl.
It's a curious thing, but I find looking at these drawings far more fulfilling than the animation sequences they were tasking for.
Maybe it's because when plastic expression gets in the way of temporal expression, or visa versa, there is a problem.
Maybe an article about the Media’s reaction to the Hopper studies would be in season?
“The graduate student’s discovery [that early Hopper works were actually studies] cuts straight through the perception of Hopper as an American original, a Whitney curator said.” -NYT
The Hopper "scandal" is typical media/culture idiocy. So sick of these self-regarding fake sophisticates treating twitter level hot takes as cultural theses. Nobody starts out original, except for people who grow up in the woods or locked in a room. Everybody starts out copying the surfaces and surface features of other people's works. The miracle is that anybody goes deeper than that, gets at the underlying principles, learns to speak the language like a poet, looks at the world afresh, and keeps plugging until they develop a new tack... especially given how much art there is already. Hopper did exactly that.
There's always a standpoint to criticize anything, and just because you find one, doesn't make it a salient or interesting critique. Fake sophisticates taking cheap shots at great popular artists is just vandalism. They have nothing better to do except tear down their betters.
Well said Kev.
And Richard, Hopper had nowhere near the painterly chops of even journeyman talents, let alone people like Sargent, Homer, Rockwell or Wyeth, but he is as great an artist as they were. In other words; he managed to realise his vision out of his formal limitations, even to marshal them into an expressive asset to say what he had it in him to say.
Chris—
I personally can’t stand Hopper, but I thought the idea that doing studies makes him lose his “American original” status was beyond the pale and it would make a good teaching moment for any young people stumbling on the blog.
(Do young people will stumble on blogs?)
Richard:
(I hope some do. Most probably skip deftly past them with a megateenth flick of a thumb.)
I'm interested as to why you can't stand Hopper. Not in order to have a barny about the issue, I'm just curious as to whether the reasons are the painterly shortcomings I mentioned or if they are to do with something else.
I think his colors are too pure, his values are reliably incorrect, his form modelling is lazy, his appreciation for subtlety leaves a lot to be desired (e.g. no ambient occlusion, no reflected light, no subtlety of color), his brushwork is too sloppy to retain any interesting lines from his drawing (so the people get smudgy and ugly, the directness of his initial statement false apart), and so on.
He's too much of an amateur for me to appreciate him as a painter, and too famous for me to forgive him as an amateur.
Thanks Richard.
I agree with everything you have written, it concurs with my own thoughts about Hopper's artistic drawbacks. And I like your last line epitaph.
Yet, for me, when considering Hopper's finest works I believe him to be a great artist. In this regard he is very like David Inshaw (a painter from my own land) who I imagine you would draw the same conclusion about. So to expand a little on what I said earlier; when I behold Inshaw's 'The Badmington Game' and Hopper's 'Night Hawks' the technical shortcomings seem to be the very thing that makes the deep structuring of these pictures speak with a force that would not operate as effectively if they were painted by a more skilled or deft hand.
All to say, Hopper and Inshaw see the world as they do and the somewhat ponderousness with which they realize their poetry, when they are profoundly moved, speaks with a sincerity which is almost touchable. Whether our gifts are great or slight I believe we must behave morally and honourably in our use of them. Great works of art never hide nor pretend. In my opinion anyway.
Chris: "...the technical shortcomings seem to be the very thing that makes the deep structuring of these pictures speak with a force that would not operate as effectively if they were painted by a more skilled or deft hand"
Chris, can you clarify what you mean by the term 'deep structuring' and why would a more skilled hand be at a disadvantage (in this case) over someone with less technical skill ?
I have my own idea about why a painting like 'The Badminton Game' works, but I'll wait for your reply.
Hi Laurence,
I'm glad you've asked me this question because I'd considered expanding on what I meant but did not want to overburden my reply to Richard.
'Deep structuring' just means all those things that go to make up composition: the composing and orchestration of all plastic elements along with their intrinsic emotional evocations.
So to answer the second part of your question:
There is a 'wooden', archetypal, toy-like, almost heraldic quality common to the forms in both Inshaw's 'The Badmington Game' and Hopper's 'Night Hawks'(albeit manifested in different ways according to each artist's temperament and fantasy life). Now, if Sargent's 'Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose' had been painted using these forms the result would have been less than convincing, disconcerting (if not down right weird) regardless of the masterful composition. Now put it the other way around and imagine Sargent painting 'The Badmington Game' or 'Night Hawks' using the same compositions as 'blue prints'. Although the results would not be unconvincing, disconcerting or weird, one would, I think you'd agree, sense a deep mismatch between the intuited 'physics' implied by the mise en scene of each picture's fictional world and the rendering of the forms within them. The forms in the original pictures are in their own ways components of parallel universes to the ones we know. Each is a dream story crystallizing a certain kind of experience, and as such overly mimetic forms would, I think, break their spell.
his values are reliably incorrect.
Painful, painful ignorance asserted with mind-gnashing surety. (Ignorance + Arrogance = ARRRGGGHnorance.) Hopper's values are phenomenal, evocative and effective, and one of the keys to his poetry and imagism and his renown. (And that includes ambient occlusion.)
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Chris, I was going to post this response earlier, but then decided to ask you to clarify first (above). Turns out we're in agreement:
I don't think it's the 'technical shortcomings' exactly which give Inshaw's 'The Badminton Game' it's power. He's using a simplified, pared down form with a very detailed surface. Rather than the realistic 'impression' you get from an alla prima painter, you're seeing the world remade or 'transfigured' in the Inshaw.
Why 'transfigured' ? ... because he's basically rebuilt reality like a miniature model builder, omitting a lot and obsessing over other areas. It's like seeing reality anew, since it looks familiar yet oddly different (a 'magic realism' some might call it, similar to some of Grant Wood's landscapes).
When i look at the work of a skilled alla prima painter like Sargent or Sorolla, I never feel that same mental quality. I usually feel that I'm seeing a snapshot of reality through a 'filter' of paint, but not a transfigured reality that has been rebuilt to exist within the picture.
We might differentiate these two artist types (Alla Prima vs Imagist) as between Captors and Conjurers.
With the Captor, they are suddenly arrested with the sense that there is a wondrous poetic quality to the effect of some experience they witness that is allied to the objects and environment. And then they seek to capture that effect via those elements by hook or crook; clearing away what doesn't help the effect, clarifying what does, and adding judiciously only what is absolutely needed.
Whereas with the Conjurer, the meaning-effect of the work proceeds from synthetic imagination, a much less conscious process. Most of what goes into the work - memories, emotions, appreciations, reference, metaphors, moods, color and value ideas - is merged together without willful action and at once to form the image idea. And that image idea provides the composition and tone and suggests details, without specifying them.
There is a power to Images melded in the mind that cannot be attained in any other way. Opposite to the photo, where expression is severely limited at every turn, with imaginative work, the possibilities blossom and proliferate. So much so that, only proceeding from a strong internal vision can prevent sprawl and fingerpainting.
Kev,
I gave Richard the benefit of the doubt regarding his statement that Hopper's "values are reliably incorrect". I took this to mean that Hopper was not chasing mimetic 'plein air' effects. However, Richard, I hope, will clarify the issue.
Laurence,
We are in exact agreement about what makes 'The Badmington Game' work in the way it does, but you have expressed it far more vividly than I did. Your analysis was insightful and a pleasure to read, so thank you for that.
What you say about sensing that the 'alla prima' painters are seeing the world through 'a filter of paint' is also something I agree with you about. It's why the paintings of William Waterhouse intrigue me so much, being as they are a balance between this 'inner' and 'outer' vision.
Kev,
Picking up from mine and Laurence's discussion about these two modes of picture making, your interpretation of them as the productions of two artist types; the 'captors' and the 'conjurers' was extremely illuminating. So thank you very much indeed for that.
I believe there is some meeting or blending between the two, but it is rare. Most of the history of art contains work by the 'conjurers', whereas the 'captors' only properly arrived in full force during the latter half of the 19th century. There were landings prior to this of course, in 17th century Holland for example or artist studies and portraiture in general, but the pictures never quite have this 'through a filter of paint' that Laurence referred to regarding the modern masters.
Although the invention of photography is quite possibly an influence for this 'look of the modern captors' it is by no means applies to all of them because I would cite artists such as William Coldstream, Giacometti and Anne Gale as belonging to this type.
My own assessment of these two modes, inner and outer vision, conjurer and captor, is that the former is fundamentally the deeper, even though some of my most loved images belong to the latter.
Chris,
I agree that there is blending between alla prima picture making and imagism, particularly among the best practitioners. However, I think, fundamentally, the core predicate is either one or the other.
Though, I neglected to mention, I believe there is a third 'type' of art making which is also in the mix. And which I would argue has been the most prolific in Art history. And that is The Constructor. Basically the Constructor, lacking both an exterior inspiration and an interior vision, attempts to build a good picture by sheer will, using simple mental models, visual conventions, reference, 'rules of design', stock ideas, and hope. And, quite naturally, without some kind of meaningful aesthetic force complex undergirding the whole, these pictures tend to suck. (Which is why most art sucks.)
When this third type of artistry infiltrates the work of either the Captor or Conjurer, the picture is that much compromised for the intrusion.
thanks Chris,
Chris: "My own assessment of these two modes, inner and outer vision, conjurer and captor, is that the former is fundamentally the deeper, even though some of my most loved images belong to the latter"
This is an area that interests me a lot. I've noticed that most of my favourite painters purely on a technical / surface mark-making level belong to the 'captor' type, but then it's obvious why: they have all the info in front of them. And they spend all their time and energy on translating what is in front of them into passages of paint (they are usually the types referred to as "Painter's painters"). The 'conjurers' are doing more inventing and re-shaping, so more of it is coming from their imagination and this can easily lapse into a sort of over-used personal shorthand. It can tend toward the 'cartoony'. They are often disparagingly seen as 'illustrators'.
Personally I use the terms 'painter' and 'image maker'. A 'painter' will paint anything. They'll paint a scrunched up sock on the floor just as an exercise in observation.
'Image makers' aren't happy with reality as it appears. They have to re-stage it to incorporate some inner-psychological state that is lacking from objective observation. Or maybe just to visualise a fanciful daydream.
It's the rebuilt reality work of the 'image makers' that really interests me these days. As much as i admire the interpretive eye-to-hand skills of past (and some contemporary) 'realists' who can pull off a subtle portrait or figure study, I really want to see reality restaged and reconfigured.
'Image makers' aren't happy with reality as it appears. They have to re-stage it to incorporate some inner-psychological state that is lacking from objective observation. Or maybe just to visualise a fanciful daydream.
At the risk of boring those with a long memory, let me point you back to this quote by Herbert Read: The function of art is not to transmit feeling so that others may experience the same feeling. The real function of art is to express feeling and transmit understanding.
Laurence and Kev,
The question of the 'two modes of picture making' has also preoccupied me for a long time and has led me to one or two provisional conclusions (which I could of course be wrong about):
The 'outer vision' artist, the 'captor', is realizing, as passages of paint, some phenomenon outside of themselves. If this is all they are doing then the aesthetic appeal will depend on keeping visible this process of painterly translation. This is why many 'captors' are preoccupied with 'painterliness', that is to say; preserving the distinction between the grammar of the paint and what it represents or evokes.
This can be thought of as a form of 'mimetic conjuring' which, in effect, is only a step or two up from trompe l'oeil, and any captors worth their salt always go beyond it. In other words this localized 'mimetic magic of painterliness' is a currency that can be exchanged in the broader magic realm of the 'conjurers', the artists who realizes an image synthesized inside themselves.
But I believe the process, in reverse, applies to the 'conjurers' in that it is used to evoke a degree of reality into an inner vision.
So while I agree that the core predicate for a picture is either one or other of these two modes, I believe the success of either lies somewhere in their meeting (the point at which will vary depending on the circumstances of each aesthetic undertaking)
The evident lusty courage of painterliness would have little value without concomitant expert suggestiveness. The difference between DeKooning's paint handling and Sorolla's is the difference between a circus fortune teller's briefly distracting patter and the seemingly offhand precision of a master storyteller.
The difference between Trompe L'Oeil and a Sargent portrait is the difference between somebody who thinks art is about briefly tricking the eye and fooling the mind versus someone who realizes that Art is Poetry, and the aesthetic mind-punch of its effect must last beyond the viewing. Sargent understood that saying the most with the least plastic material is better poetry - poetry period - compared to saying nothing with everything (in the photorealist's way) which is literalist/apoetic. So I disagree that this difference is merely one of degree. A scientist's descriptive data-driven accounting of a summer day is bound to be a different thing entirely from a great poet's evocation of that same day.
The overlap between the painter/alla prima/captor and the imagist/conjuror, it seems to me, can be accounted for by understanding that: The captor must select, edit, bolster, and pose the moment in order to be able to paint it. And in order to make a picture of it, schematic/gestalt questions of design and composition come into play. So the initial observation is crucial as the starting point, but insufficient; it needs a great deal of help to become something more than painterly journalism.
Meanwhile, the imagist must justify his vision with objective information in order to realize it (to make it real), which means deeply appreciating real experience and glazing it into the work without destroying the pure force of the idea. This entails the same kind of absorption of nature in its particulars and in the abstract as with the painter.
Both are poets. Even The Constructor is a poet, albeit a bad one.
The difference between Trompe L'Oeil and a Sargent portrait is the difference between somebody who thinks art is about briefly tricking the eye and fooling the mind versus someone who realizes that Art is Poetry, and the aesthetic mind-punch of its effect must last beyond the viewing. Sargent understood that saying the most with the least plastic material is better poetry - poetry period - compared to saying nothing with everything (in the photorealist's way) which is literalist/apoetic. So I disagree that this difference is merely one of degree. A scientist's descriptive data-driven accounting of a summer day is bound to be a different thing entirely from a great poet's evocation of that same day.
Regarding the question of the aesthetic limits of mimetic painterliness, this is why I included the word 'all' in my sentence: "If this is all they are doing then the aesthetic appeal will depend on keeping visible this process of painterly translation". Which was to distinguish mimetic skill from the grander part of the poetic imagination. So I thought it would have been implicit that I well understand that the difference between a trompe le'oeil and a Sargent painting is of course that the latter is a poem manifested by the composed and orchestrated ensemble and made plastically grammatical by the passages of paint. Which was a point contained in the second part of my post. Your subsequent paragraphs, as far as I can tell, are only repeating that point.
Ah, apologies. Missed a clause in haste.
Chris, this is getting confused when I think you've highlighted the main point already when you said:
"...the technical shortcomings seem to be the very thing that makes the deep structuring of these pictures speak with a force that would not operate as effectively if they were painted by a more skilled or deft hand"
To reiterate; I don't think it's the technical shortcomings that 'make the picture'. I think that for the 'image makers' the quality of paint handling isn't the most important thing. What matters to them is the re-configured world; the new form, staging, mise en scene, lighting, art direction, acting, psychological mood / narrative drama etc. You can actually be quite weak in the painterly chops department (e.g Hopper) and still make a powerful image if you're strong in those other areas.
I largely agree with that Laurence, but my point (which I illustrated with the idea of imagining someone like Sargent painting Hopper and Inshaw's respective masterpieces) is that these two artists found a way to utilize their technical drawbacks to poetic advantage in the universe they are evoking. That is to say 'Night Hawks' and 'The Badminton Game' would lessen in the force of what they are expressing if painted more 'eloquently'.
I don't see in what way an inability can be used as an ability.
I think artists pursue the techniques they need to accomplish their artistic impulses, leaving aside what will not. Howard Pyle pointed out in his teaching that overt technical facility was actually a drawback because it attracted attention away from the believability of the whole. It was a misplaced concentration compared to the internal matter of disciplined dreaming (mental projection.) But this was from his perspective as an Imagist.
Hopper was an Imagist, so mastered how to make images, and learned technique only insofar as it would assist his particular brand of artwork.
Sargent was a painter, so mastered how to manipulate paint, but seemed to have no deep knowledge of what the brandywine illustrators were putting into their works to make them so transfixing, emotionally impactful, authentic, and memorable.
“ I gave Richard the benefit of the doubt regarding his statement that Hopper's "values are reliably incorrect". I took this to mean that Hopper was not chasing mimetic 'plein air' effects. However, Richard, I hope, will clarify the issue.”
I don’t think it’s fair to reduce having artful, dramatic and emotionally evocative light effects to “plein air”, as if they’re just replicating the world. Andrew Wyeth was “about” correct values, artful values/light, and his pieces were thoroughly conjural.
Yes, Hoppers drawings are arresting. His lack of mastery can be easily hidden when the picture can hang on his lines and the form they suggest. But when painting, the fact that he never mastered rendering/value ruins the pictures.
If Wyeth worked from a Hopper drawing, he’d conjure a greater world, not small and ugly, peopled in miniatures, but a living and breathing world of light, still a built world, but built by someone with a sensitivity for beauty.
You misteach. Being petulantly negative with a veneer of confidence is no substitute for being sensitive to the actual artistic matter at hand.
Every relation in art can have truth and beauty to it. And relations exist at every scale, nest within one another, and form complexes of relations. Since every work of Imagistic art is necessarily concise in its poetry, it must concentrate solely on the narrow suite of entangled meaning-effects that will tell its narrative succinctly and with breadth of effect, avoiding all distractions. This means that some relations that would appear in the depiction if it were real have no place in the imagistic version of that same event and setting. This goes especially true for values. Poetry requires both selectivity and synthesis to a high degree. There is no poetry without mimetic distortion.
You 'understand' Andrew Wyeth about as well as you 'understand' Hopper. Andrew Wyeth was an imagist, working in a unique mode of brandywine picture making that he evolved of his own accord out of his father's teaching. If you don't notice that he is working with the same degree of aesthetic editorializing as Hopper, I can't help you. Yes, he is a far more tactile artist than Hopper. He found meaning in that. Hopper lived in the city and found meaning in the relationships between structures or enclosures, the strange surface color choices of city-dwellers, sunlight, garish artificial light, and caged humanity. But both composed images with emotional charges and filled them with sublimated thought.
It is shockingly obvious that Hopper's paintings aren't any more line dependent than any great imagist's work since silhouettes are the indispensable technology in such work.
“ Since every work of Imagistic art is necessarily concise in its poetry, it must concentrate solely on the narrow suite of entangled meaning-effects that will tell its narrative succinctly and with breadth of effect, avoiding all distractions.”
Absolutely. But the value of an artwork is not just in its facility with which it created poetry, but the value of the poetry itself.
I agree with your description of Hopper here:
“ Hopper lived in the city and found meaning in the relationships between structures or enclosures, the strange surface color choices of city-dwellers, sunlight, garish artificial light, and caged humanity.”
I would merely add to your equation that these qualities make his work worse. He was saying things that were not worth saying, that would have been better left unsaid because they were untrue.
I don't see in what way an inability can be used as an ability.
In the general sense I would of course agree with you. And I am not suggesting that Hopper (or Inshaw's) paintings are an exception to this, although I do admit that the formulation of my argument does perhaps imply such an idea. Your following statements come to my aid:
I think artists pursue the techniques they need to accomplish their artistic impulses, leaving aside what will not... Hopper was an Imagist, so mastered how to make images, and learned technique only insofar as it would assist his particular brand of artwork.
I believe there is a sense in which an artist's aesthetic impulses are in some sort of causal relation to the parameters set by their gifts, and visa versa. If this is understood and accepted by the artist deep in their guts then I think it generates something like a feedback loop of creative focus.
Also, the limits of one's abilities defining the area of distillation. So, meager technical gifts, if understood and accepted, naturally rule out other areas of endeavor and ensure concentration on the most fertile soil for the individual concerned. This can be an advantage in that it will focus their talent early on in their career. On the other hand a fellow with abundant gifts is a) more prey to the seductions of displaying them and b) spoiled for aesthetic choice. As such they can take longer to settle on a field in which to mine deeply. (An example of this would be to compare the work of Gwen John to that of her brother Augustus.)
However, the above paragraph is something of an corollary. The thought experiment of imagining someone like Sargent painting 'Night Hawks' is what I think substantiates my initial point. (Though it's a slippery one, I admit!)
TYPO ALERT: I should have written:
'...the limits of one's abilities define the area of distillation.
Your opinion that "Hopper's poems aren't worth saying" is a different assertion.
If you don't like certain subjects, that's your personal issue. But every poetic idea is valid, as truths encompass or comprehend experience at every scale and level of complexity, at every speed and in every mood, and all are equally true.
A small simple truth is just as true as a cosmic truth, a human truth, or a truth of nature. The truths of folly and cowardice are just as true as the truths of heroism and competence; the truths of war just as true as the truths of peace. Love is just as true as bitterness. Daintiness is as true as brutality. Ignorance as predictive as Wisdom; the essential dynamics and results of each recur and recur, echoing through time. Gravity causes both waterfalls and lava flows. Every truth is a moral lesson of some kind or other, if one can only see it.
Truths weave everything; our experience of the world is a suffusing confusion of interpenetrating truths. But a picture can only drill down on one idea. And so, in art, many truths are necessarily dispensed with for the sake of the expression of those few that synthesize the idea.
I believe there is a sense in which an artist's aesthetic impulses are in some sort of causal relation to the parameters set by their gifts, and visa versa. If this is understood and accepted by the artist deep in their guts then I think it generates something like a feedback loop of creative focus.
Then we are in agreement.
> “ But every poetic idea is valid”
How surprisingly modern of you. I’d be surprised if anyone who says this actually believes it deep down. When presented with poetry they know at an instinctual level is wrong they find an excuse for it breaking the modernist “all poetry is equally valid” rule.
If Winslow Homer, Howard Pyle, Andrew Wyeth, Walter Everett, Harvey Dunn, Tennyson, Poe, Yeats, and Pound are 'Modernists', then I guess I'm one. But I don't see any connection between them and Modernists such as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Modigliani, Motherwell, et al. Such a haphazard grouping would break the meaning of the category/label. Therefore, I can't agree with your lumping attempt.
Of course we do agree that just because something is called a poem doesn't mean it is poetry. I long ago joined the crusade against cultural fraudsters and their pseud enablers. But I have a structural understanding of how poetry works, and how it differs from babble, vandalism, nihilism, mere sensationalism, pornography, pastiche, dogma, journalism, and so on.
And I believe it is this structure that makes poetic art moral, rather than some reference to a self-appointed outside moral authority's "gut instinct" about content. Therefore, that you believe Hopper's paintings "aren't poetic" because "you know at an instinctual level" that they are "wrong in content" means nothing to me. If you want followers, well good luck with that. But sell crazy someplace else.
Richard,
You answered me with:
I don’t think it’s fair to reduce having artful, dramatic and emotionally evocative light effects to “plein air”, as if they’re just replicating the world.
You have misunderstood my post, because this is the opposite of what I was agreeing with Kev about. Artifice is necessary to poetry. But to be effective it must be both hidden and felt at the same time, invisible and visible, together. Like magic.
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