By the end of the 20th century, that wave was moving on, depositing those powers into new laps– – the laps of film makers, video gamers, digital artists, animators.
The places illustrations once dominated–- books, magazines, newspapers – were fading away. The money that once fueled illustrations migrated to the internet. The huge popular audiences that were dazzled by the arrival of illustrations in the 19th century were now ensorcelled by virtual reality phantoms and pictures that moved, talked and glowed, sparking with new kinds of color.
But at the beginning-- when images could be accurately and inexpensively reproduced on paper and widely distributed for the first time-- a huge economic transformation took place. In 1857 a publisher complained, "The illustration mania is upon our people. Nothing but illustrated works are profitable to publishers."
No artist was better positioned at the starting line than the great Gustave Doré. A talented, ambitious, prolific visionary, he took full advantage of the new opportunities and became probably the most famous artist in the world during his lifetime. In the early formative years of modern illustration he changed the nature, the social status, and the economics of illustration for the next century. It would be a huge mistake to forget about him.
Before George Lucas, Peter Jackson and James Cameron, Doré thrilled the world by demonstrating that the most extravagant, epic, mind blowing images could be achieved with a simple black line on white paper.
67 comments:
Hi David, love seeing Dore. Can't find much about his work process, I've always wondered what his studio setup was, given the staggering amount of work. Would you or anyone have an idea regarding that, how many assistants he had? There must have been some sort of setup with more than just him, I'd imagine.
dermot-- Doré's working arrangement changed over time. In the early years he did his own wood engraving, but with the passage of time, as he became hugely popular (and rich), he gradually groomed his own stable of engravers who he trusted and who understood his work. At his peak, he had as many as 20 engravers working in that stable, trying to keep up with his prolific output.
Many thanks! I've been curious about that for a while.
It's amazing that Dore could create such epic, cinematic compositions as well as quiet intimate ones. In addition to the great images you posted, I especially like this one from Fontaine's Fables. The new book from Prestel is a real treat and there is a lot of information on his working methods.
Yes, something in these examples makes them look like engraved versions of paintings. Perhaps it's just this is painting material.
My favorite Doré is his first plate for Don Quixote. Something in it being an illustration of a man drowned in novels fancies me.
(all painterly except the crow and the death, which is a very turn-of-the-century illustration but is also in a different technique?)
dermot-- One of the ways that Doré was such a pioneer in the field of illustration (in addition to his entrepreneurial deals with publishers, his mastery of the copyright laws for multiple editions of his works-- there were 700 editions of the Doré bible!-- and his international marketing) was his leveraging of his creative talents by delegating the more time consuming, mundane work to engravers. But this was not always a simple process. Early in his career, Doré was on deadline and got tired of drawing numerous repetitive windows in a large building facade so he just just scribbled a note to the engraver on the drawing, the French equivalent of "etc." He wanted the engraver to add the rows of remaining windows, but you guessed it-- instead of adding the additional row of windows, the engraver carved the word for "etc." into the picture. Back in the early days, there was a lot of trial and error to find efficiencies and test the limits of the new practices.
nodnarB-- Thanks, I agree that's a great owl picture. I had not seen it. What can you tell us about the quality of the images in the Prestel book? I've found a huge variety in the clarity of the line in books about Doré. Even some of the more expensive books have very smudgy images.
xopxe-- I almost used that Don Quixote picture, which I also love, but decided not to because I was trying to make a narrower point: that Doré was able to create such grand vistas using such fairly primitive drawing tools. Those epic scenes from Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost and the Bible dazzled a world where most families still had no pictures in their homes. Don Quixote was near the top of 50 great pictures I would've loved to use.
Thanks again for the details - I'd long suspected there must have been a pretty serious studio setup there. The 'etc' detail is hilarious!
I used some Dore illustrations as examples of strong diagonal / triangular compositions in one of my courses, but I was only scratching the surface for sure.
The plates have been copied for generations. As you note even in dedicated clip art collections they are often not very well reproduced (which in any case is hard to do with wood cuts). Seeing good, crisp reproductions is often a revelation. There was a good large-size edition of the "Ancient mariner" a couple of decades ago, and the fantastic "London" book has also been nicely reprinted. The technical skill of the engravers is extraordinary, and not only for Doré: you can do a similar entry on Tenniel and many others.
Doré was also a highly skilled humurous cartoonist, caricaturist and sculptor. The art world never warmed to him...
I'll add this link to some Doré humorous stuff:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14550/14550-h/14550-h.htm
As good as any of the great 1850s caricaturists.
Some of this vast Doré collection (but not all of it) has been properly scanned:
https://essentiels.bnf.fr/fr/arts/arts-graphiques/1442cf57-b2a3-4fb3-a8e7-7f76b70589a5-dessinateurs-et-graveurs-19e-siecle/personnalite/18911651-1a9c-4912-90dc-6fefd5a31f7e-gustave-dore
Zoom in at "Les contes de Perrault". These are excellent scans, but still a far cry from seeing a good print.
Block divisions are apparent here and there (the blocks might be physically divided up among different engravers).
Anonymous-- Thanks for all your excellent help, these are wonderful!
Yes, there is wide variety in te quality of reproductions, which spoiled Doré for large audiences. Even during his lifetime there were deluxe portfolio editions of his work and cheaply printed versions for lower class audiences, not to mention bootleg and counterfeit editions around the world.
You're right that the art world never warmed to him-- Ruskin positively foamed at the mouth, writing condemnations of Doré's sensationalist art, arguing that Doré shouldn't be allowed to illustrate a sacred book like the Bible. I think much ofthe antipathy from fine artist stemmed from the fact that he was so much more popular and richer than they were. He elevated illustration, which necessarily put him on the first battle lines between fine art and illustration. That weighed heavily on Dore until the end of his life, and he tried for years to make it as an oil painter.
By the way, Vincent Van Gogh modeled his picture of the prisoners on Doré's drawing.
@DavidApatoff - yes, the Newgate prison image.
There's often a melodramatic staginess about Doré's work, as of a performer working the audience for maximum impact. I can see why that kind of surface sheen wouldn't be popular everywhere. (There's lots of Doré in Will Eisner, by the way.)
This bio is interesting, detailing how Doré used collaborators when developing the London book (assistants would sketch up parts of scenes which he might alter and integrate):
https://www.amazon.fr/Doré-Limaginaire-au-pouvoir-Collectif/dp/2081316412/
David, the reproductions are on the whole very good. On a flip through just now I only saw a few (the series from Poe's 'The Raven' being the worst offenders) that had the softness problem. The vast majority of the hundreds of images in the book compare favorably with the images you posted here as well as a book I own titled ' Gustave Dore: Engravings' Published by Alpine Arts Collection (UK) LTD. Many of the full page illustrations are printed so that the image extends to the edges of the page with no border which I think works surprisingly well. There is also a small section in the back which feature his paintings which I had not seen before and are excellent. I especially like his landscapes. The reproduction on the paintings are not quite as good as the bulk of the etchings, though.
Now that I have zoomed in on the images in your post, I would still say the Prestel book on the whole has very good, clear reproduction that satisfies a picky illustration lover such as myself, BUT is not quite as good as the ones you posted. Are they early edition prints from your collection?
Anon: "There's often a melodramatic staginess about Doré's work, as of a performer working the audience for maximum impact.”
The examples David has posted are largely made out of second hand conventions culled from 19th century Romantic, French Academic painting, with its obsession with Biblical stories and classical myths. These would have looked creaky even by 1883 (when Doré died) to the young modern upstarts, the impressionists.
When you look at the cartoony work however (the link which you posted above), the work is so much more fresh and lively. Probably because he is actually working from real life observation rather than a set of shop-worn visual clichés. Also helps drastically that they appear to be actually drawn by his own hand, rather than his team of technically proficient engraver-bots, who mechanically render the life out of everything.
Not only is illustration passing the torch to new technologies, but everything could be going the way of the new technologies.
The apocalyptic is a fitting theme to Alan Greenspan’s comment that in the future people wouldn’t be able to think because they would lack the contrasts that make thinking possible. Zbigniew Brzezinski said the same. Dore’s engravings obviously lack the facile dynamics of Coll’s pen and ink drawings a few posts back, but they do capture a curious lack of light and life which is sometimes their subject.
In physics there are corresponding harmonic tones above and below every vocal utterance, which we cannot hear. Similarly, invisible harmonic colors exist for everything we see. In Rockwell’s, Freedom From Want, joy is heightened with a high register of light found in its slightly veiled light source. The next register up, which we can’t see, but can imagine to be blinding. Going down register finds the unsatisfying landscapes of Dore’s bleak epics. Even law itself, derived from metaphysical heights across millennium while wrestling with earthly powers, was meant for the lawless and never quite reflected the tenderness of its source. Yet law too may be passing the torch to solutions and mechanical enforcement of the encroaching AI world. I hesitate to think this is a good thing.
A funny story about E.F. Schumacher’s journey, it began after WWII when he was sent from England to join some American economists in developing the economy of Burma. Schumacher was so taken by the joy and happiness of the local people that he asked the Americans, how can we possibly help these people who are so much happier than we could ever be? They agreed, but said, this is what we were sent to do.
There’s something about bleakness and inevitability that’s very hard to dress up.
'curious lack of light and life which is sometimes their subject.'
Depends on expectations - these are illustrations, non-realist, somebody said 'theatrical', the most obvious thing is their similarity to stage sets. The same light tricks, bad foregrounds suggesting flat planing, overt set-ups and so on. But these type of criticisms seem petty. The weaknesses in Doré's work are obvious. But they thrive and excel at what they do.
Ruskin's criticism of him is totally correct, but as usual with Ruskin his brilliant, penetrating understanding for many of the very highest achievements in art were accompanied by the setting of absolutes and perameters that sometimes seem like blinkers (and which he was entirely capable of transcending when he attended to other qualities, eg, like the grotesques of medieval art).
Doré is brilliant. He uses light beautifully but artificially. His forms are often beautiful sometimes stiff, etc.
His fecundity leapfrogged and outstepped his imagination (and attention to some important requirements) occasionally, but the frequency of his imaginative Illustrative achievements is astonishing.
Not sure about 'facile dynamics' in relation to Coll. He doesn't rely on them, but, also, primarily on imagination and his brilliant ability to convey form in light using just black ink, and in suggesting the unsaid (in both the way things need to be winnowed down when using just black-on-white, and also in how much 'scene' is portrayed and used). Was the dynamics meant in reference to the animation in his pictures or to the penwork/rendering ?
Bill
The examples David has posted are largely made out of second hand conventions culled from 19th century Romantic, French Academic painting, with its obsession with Biblical stories and classical myths.
Agreed. What pictures were you thinking about in particular? I think just as Doré was getting started John Martin's The Great Day of His Wrath was selling prints by the Louvre-load. And that image must have been highly influential on him, with the grand spectacle above and the smaller writhing and thrashing figures below. And of course he surely grew up staring at Rembrandt prints.
'Conventions' is the key word. Doré is a constructor not a believer; his lumber the standard idealized symbols of his time. Including the melodramatic posing and staging, yes, but also the "visions" themselves (all piecemeal symbolic constructions) and then down to the anatomic lumps, leaf greebling, drapery folds, cloud masses, and simplified faces; each having been standardized into repeatable dogma from insufficient observation. Which results in the pictures being torrents of insistent fakery: Every tree is fake, every hand is fake, every cloud is fake, all the structural form and lighting is fake, every rock is fake, every pose is fake.
With ~10,000 illustrations crammed into a working life of ~13,000 days, did he ever go outside? Did he ever draw from life? Did he ever stop to people-watch?
The birds in the shown examples alone are intolerable. Every bird is a repeat of the one static mental conception, the output stuck in the same pose with every iteration as if rubber-stamped onto the page. Thus none of his birds actually fly, because they don’t animate together to give the sense of movement.
Maddening to think that every time he drew one of these birds he didn’t once go to his window and look outside. Did he not know how beautiful and true the animative flow of a real bird in flight compared to what he was doing?
It's all so obsessive and cloistered, so obstinate, even the grandeur. He didn't believe any of it in his imagination. He just forced it all into realization by authoritarian will.
Others in this Mannerist vein: William Blake, Edward Burne Jones, Gustave Moreau, Burne Hogarth, Thomas Kinkade, Rob Liefeld.
Bill,
I appreciate David posting the engravings and how he moves from subject to subject.
To the Coll drawings; The gestures, rhythmic interweaving of shapes, lines and different patterns functioning as forms and light. They’re daring and resolved without being tortured. The handling of line had me thinking of someone like Rembrandt. Not the subjects, but his freedom of line.
As per Dore, I was referring to Noah’s Ark. The promise of light behind the arc does little to comfort the overriding despair in the foreground. The engravings are epics that behave like opening or closing scenes. They offer little help in understanding what was violated. I’m thinking of the humanity we see in Rembrandt as an example of the tenderness violated by selfishness.
I brought back Schumacher because to his credit, he spent his life searching for the source of the happiness he observed as a mystery.
Anonymous/Bill said: "Ruskin's criticism of him is totally correct, but as usual with Ruskin his brilliant, penetrating understanding for many of the very highest achievements in art were accompanied by the setting of absolutes and perameters that sometimes seem like blinkers"
Ruskin wrote that Doré's pictures were "loathsome...as if seen through the distortion and trembling of the hot smoke of the mouth of hell." Reviewing a book with 425 illustrations by Doré, Ruskin alleged,"there is not one which does not violate every instinct of decency and law of virtue or life, written in the human soul."
It sounds like Ruskin's "brilliance" mostly took the form of recognizing that his own days were numbered. Ruskin had every reason to be shrill; his thin, conservative concept of what was tasteful could offer nothing to compete with the virility of Doré's lurid, histrionic style of images. Doré was embraced around the world by viewers both high and low. Ruskin would never come close to the fame, fortune, or influence that Doré enjoyed. Popular illustration had arrived and there was no turning back.
The Roman poet Horace wrote, Odi Profanum Vulgus Et Arceo -- "I detest the common crowd, and I rebuff them." He could rebuff all he wanted, yet rock n' roll is here to stay and Horace is not.
Kev: "What pictures were you thinking about in particular? “
None in particular. Rather, the total set of off-the-shelf formulas that French Academic painting became very quickly, and made it look stale by 1900; the broiling clouds, shafts of light from the heavens, the U-shaped compositions with towering cliffs left and right, the distant city, the ‘classical’ posing etc.
To reiterate; I don’t think ALL Doré suffers from this problem. As I said, he looks like he’s actually having fun with real, contemporary observation in the cartoony work linked above.
Nor do I think that clichés (or even 'melodramatic staginess’) are entirely avoidable or bad. The challenge for the artist is to breath fresh life into them, via new insight or formal innovation.
In they year of our Lord 2024, I'd be a bit hesitant to use this man's opinions on what is "loathsome".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effie_Gray#Relationship_with_John_Ruskin
Others in this Mannerist vein: William Blake, Edward Burne Jones, Gustave Moreau, Burne Hogarth, Thomas Kinkade, Rob Liefeld.
I'd disagree Kev with "this mannerist vein" in the case of Burne Jones whose work is so completely about evoking an ideal world rather than assembling pictorial conventions to illustrate real world imagined scenarios.
dermot-- You can add his wife's pubic hair to Doré's illustrations on the long list of things that confused and disoriented Ruskin. By comparison, Doré was reputed to be a passionate lover, whose many partners included Sarah Bernhardt and other well known women of the day. (One more way in which Ruskin was literally and figuratively a gelding).
The pre-Rapahelites he cherished rejected the direction and value of art following Raphael, so it's not surprising that the new world of modern illustration would upset him. Me, I see both good and baad in it.
I am currently on the long road home from last night's grand opening of the new exhibition at the Norman Rockwell exhibit: The Art of Mad Magazine. I recommend it to all. But until I make it home I won't be able to respond to many of the meatier comments about Doré.
"It sounds like Ruskin's "brilliance" mostly took the form of recognizing that his own days were numbered. Ruskin had every reason to be shrill; his thin, conservative concept of what was tasteful could offer nothing to compete with the virility of Doré's lurid, histrionic style of images. Doré was embraced around the world by viewers both high and low. Ruskin would never come close to the fame, fortune, or influence that Doré enjoyed. Popular illustration had arrived and there was no turning back."
Doré's weakness seems to me due to his working within eroded and misunderstood forms of classicism that had degraded into tropes. His strength seems to me due to his ability to produce lively and imaginative works that mostly succeed despite this hindrance.
Not sure about measuring comparative wealth, but Ruskin - as a writer - must have been at least as influential as Doré if not more in his time. But that's not such an important gauge of anything in itself, anyway.
He is infuriating to read, all the setting up of standards and rules and so on in Modern Painters. But - and he overthrew and discarded a lot of his earlier pronouncements as the work progressed through the successive volumes - while he was often decrying one work or artist to show how another had achieved more, a closer reading usually shows a subtlety not immediately apparent in the evangelism that acknowledges the achievements of the former.
To be honest, I haven't read the full criticism he wrote about Doré or its context, but I would be interested in seeing it. Those quotes are repeated in a few Doré books published recently.
What was he criticising with
"loathsome...as if seen through the distortion and trembling of the hot smoke of the mouth of hell..." ?
Doré's subject matter or achievement of his aim ?
(contd. - Bill)
If it's the second, I think it's justified.
Here's what David Barrie wrote in his introduction to Modern Painters:
'Ruskin also has much to say about style and handling. He is often supoosed to have been the high priest of a kind of photgraphic realism and it is certainly true that he was strongly drawn towards artists who shared the passion for minute detail which is apparent in many of his own drawings; conversely, he detested the 'idealisation of [Sir Joshua] Reynold's 'grand style'. But [....] the famous passage at the end of Volume I in which he calls for 'simple bona fide imitation of nature' ... concludes by saying that 'when [the artist's] memories [i.e. of nature] are [thus] stored' they can give rein to their fancy and 'show us what their heads are made of'.
In fact, Ruskin makes it clear early in Volume I that he has nothing but contempt for deceptive imitation, mainly because he regards it as a kind of trickery.
[...] The difference between 'great and mean art', he says, lies 'not in definable methods of handling, or styles of presentation, or choices of subjects, but wholly in the nobleness of the end to which the effort of the painter is addressed'. [...] he argues that it is precisely because a picture differs from reality that it becomes 'the expression of the power and intelligence of a companionable human soul'. As Sir Herbert Read first observed, [Ruskin was] one of the most eloquent proponents of the theory of expressionism, even though the term itself was not coined for another 40 yeats or so. One of the great mysteries for Ruskin was the qualitative difference between truly imaginative art and the work of the skillful but uninspired poldder. ...
He did however believe that imaginative powers of a great artist depended on the possession of an exceptionally retentive visual memory and revealed the working of unconscious processes of selection and combunation which he described as 'dream vision'.
The reader should perhaps be warned that Ruskin was in the habit of using the word 'truth' very freely. In fact, he came to regard the products of high imagination as the most profound truths of all, even though they might bear little relation to everyday reality. [Yet] He regards any distortion of reality that results from the influence of the artist's emotions as a sign of weakness ....[but yet again] makes an exception for those who 'are submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, bevause what they see is inconceivably above them'. 'This last,' he says, 'is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration'.'
Which is (inevitably) contradictory. But should be enough to dispel the usual caricatures which arise when someone reads one of his declamatory-sounding statements of objectionable absolutes. He was the antithesis of much of what we reject in our impressions of the Victorian age, not its representative.
I'll give a quote from vol 2 that has some relevance, both, I think, for the aspects of Doré under discussion and the contradictoriness mentioned above.
But I've broken up the comment to make this all less interminable (hopefully)
Bill
The work referred to in the excerpt from Ruskin I'll give below is the Jason from Turner's Liber Studiorum
- https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/382911
Take, by way of comparison, any of the plates from Doré's Danté, hell or purgatory probably.
As mentioned earlier, don't expect absolute consistency in Ruskin. And I'm not alleging that Doré is guilty of every criticism, or always falls short of every quality mentioned. But have a think about the two images, the one you've chosen and the Turner.
'Now it is necessary very carefully to distinguish between that character of the work which depends on the imagination of the beholder, and that which results from the imagination of the artist; for a work is often called imaginative when it merely leaves room for the actiin of the imagination; whereas though nearly all imaginative works do this, yet it may be done also by works which have in them no imagination at all. A few shapeless scratches or accidental stains on a wall, or the forms of clouds, or any other compkicated accidents, will set the imagination to work something out of them; and all paintings in which there is much gloom or mystery, possess therein a ceryain sublimity owing to the play given to the behokder's imagination, without, necessarily, being in the slightest degree imaginative themselves. The vacancy of a truly imaginative work results not from absence of ideas, or incapability of grasping and detailing them, but from the painter having told the whole pith and power of his subject and disdaining to tell more; and the sign of this being the case is, that the mind of the beholder is forced to act in a certain mode, and feels itself overpowered and borne away by that of the painter, and not able to defend itself, nor go which way it will: and the value of the work depends on the truth, authority, and inevitability of this suggestiveness.
Now observe in this work of Turner that the whole value of it depends on the character of curve assumed by the serpent's body; for had it been a mere semicircle, or gone down in a series of smaller coils, it would have been in the first case, ridiculous, as unlike a serpent, or in the second, disgusting, nothing more than an exaggerated viper; but it is that coming straight [italicised] at the right hand which suggests the drawing forth of an enormous weight, and gives the bent part its springing look, that frightens us.....'
(Contd.)
Bill
[contd. .....] Again, remove the light trunk on the left, and observe how useless all the gloom of the picture would have been, if this trunk had not given it depth and hollowness [emphasised].
Finally and chiefly, observe that the painter is not satisfied even with all the suggestiveness thus obtained, but to make sure of us, and force us, whether we will or not, to walk his way, and not ours, the trunks of the trees on the right are all cloven into yawning and writhing heads and bodies, and alive with dragon energy all about us;
note especially the nearest with its gaping jaws and clawlike branch at the seeming shoulder; a kind of suggestion which in itself is not imaginative but merely fanciful; but it is imaginative in its present use and application, for the painter addresses thereby that mkrbid and fearful condition of mind which he has endeavoured to excite in the spectator, and which in reality would have seen in every trunk and bough, as it penetrated into the deeper thicket, the object of its terror'.
As said, it would be interesting to know what Ruskin was referring to with his 'loathsome distortion..trembling' etc. Some of his criticisms read as petty and cantankerous at times.
But maybe the foregoing might be enough to make us cautious about hasty assumptions on this one.
Bill
Ruskin was allegedly a gelding? So what? Dore lived with his mother? Who cares? Dore made more money than Ruskin? Or was more famous? Whoop-de-doo. You gossips have the weirdest heuristics that pretend to be arguments about art.
Well why not ask: Who drank more? Who had the bigger johnson? Who could hold their breath longer? Who donated to charity? Who was stingy? Who was the biggest anti-semite? Who was mean to bar maids?
These personages are phantoms now. They died over a hundred years ago. None of this gossip matters.
~ FV
And thanks, Sean.
Very interesting on the Doré, cheers. I agree with you both on that and the Coll, I'd thought you meant 'facile' in the 'superficial' sense.
Coll - and many of the best of the illustrators I've encountered mostly from here first, thanks to David - were a revelation to me. They're a real and enormous achievement; and I don't think, for the best, animated figuration, narrative pictures...not sure how to describe it...was ever achieved so well in earlier painting in europe.
Bill
Maddening to think that every time he drew one of these birds he didn’t once go to his window and look outside. Did he not know how beautiful and true the animative flow of a real bird in flight compared to what he was doing?
It's all so obsessive and cloistered, so obstinate, even the grandeur. He didn't believe any of it in his imagination. He just forced it all into realization by authoritarian will.
Others in this Mannerist vein: [...] Thomas Kinkade [...]
I agree with your analysis of Dore. I also agree that Kinkade never drew a living bird.
But I think a major difference is that Kinkade's work doesn't look like someone was tortured nearly to death to make it. Totally the opposite. It's all painter candy.
Every area of his painting makes me think, "Oh yeah, that felt good. I see why he wanted to do that. I like adding pinhole lights through leaves too. I also like the feeling of laying down super-saturated colors. I also like adding sparkles on water." Is that masturbatory? Maybe.
But Dore I can't even look at because all I can think of is the poor soul who made it having an exceptionally bad time.
Do you mean the engraved lines ? When you see the actual prints, rather than the reproductions no matter how detailed/clear, they're very different. The lines shimmer and vibrate, and the white areas really sparkle.
But, yeah, they're also like minute versions of the pyramids. Dazzling, but 'I pity the poor bastards who...,' etc.
And the close knit rendering has intrinsic problems - while it creates tones beautifully, it's not the best method for every element. Things to the fore shouldn't have such a similar close-knit treatment as things further off.
The few of his drawn and painted things I've seen are appealing. And even in the engraved stuff, some of them look like they were less of a chore to the engraver than others, and have more life in them as a result (a lot of these are signed by the engraver as well as Doré, but I've never looked to see if this is down to particular individuals).
I broadly agree with Kev on the mannerism and inadequate attention to nature, but there are exceptions. There are some lovely animals among those in the 'contes' and fables. Even some of the birds.
Bill
But I think a major difference is that Kinkade's work doesn't look like someone was tortured nearly to death to make it. Totally the opposite. It's all painter candy.
That's true, a la Bob Ross. It's all conventions, but they're ready-to-hand in a way that conveys ease. It's a real shame that Kinkade's early landscape work isn't available online, so people can see how talented he actually was.
I broadly agree with Kev on the mannerism and inadequate attention to nature, but there are exceptions. There are some lovely animals among those in the 'contes' and fables. Even some of the birds.
Well, to be fair, even among those works posted here, Samson Berzerking with a Chicken Leg has enough spectacle parts to recommend perusal. The horses and foreground figures, I think, are pretty good. He constructs pictorial space very well generally. And the heroic effort involved in the picture's creation is impressive.
But every time I look at the melee area I think, how could any of this come to pass just so? It symbolically represents a crowd locked in a wild struggle without actually portraying that struggle sensibly at the person-to-person level. Did Doré not understand how sequential time works in tandem with cause and effect? Or did that even matter? Because it sure seems like he was just filling in compositional areas with properly-shaped figural masses. Like Hitchcock thinking of actors as cattle.
Anonymous/Bill wrote: "Ruskin - as a writer - must have been at least as influential as Doré if not more in his time."
I was serious when I wrote that Doré was probably the most famous artist in the world, and that's crucial to the central point of this post.
Mark Twain referred to Doré in the novel Tom Sawyer because he was confident every reader would recognize the name. When Doré traveled to the Netherlands he lost his passport and the border guard wouldn't believe he was talking to the famous Gustave Doré until Doré drew a sketch for him. When he saw the drawing, the guard removed his hat, bowed low and let Doré pass. Traveling theatrical troupes attracted audiences in small towns by dressing up and posing in scenes from Doré. Cecil B. DeMille based his Hollywood Biblical extravaganzas on his favorite book, Doré's bible. In fact, in Daniel Malan's biography of Doré he too makes a respectable case that Doré "was literally the most famous artist in the world," better known to a mass audience than Rembrandt or Michelangelo.
I'm sure many art graduate students knew about Ruskin, but he was mostly known to the public for getting in trouble for criticizing Whistler (almost as harshly as he criticized Doré). Ruskin seemed to have trouble with a lot of "modern" artists.
My point here is that Doré was at the beginning of mass audiences for illustration. Everything changed. Not only did his 3,000 book editions reach an unprecedented audience, but it was the beginning of the transformation of the economics of illustration that delivered Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Harvey Dunn, Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell and everyone else. A mass audience meant that magazines could charge far less than the cost of commissioning art, by selling advertisements. The Saturday Evening Post sold for a nickel with dozens of illustrations by the greatest illustrators of the era.
Doré's art galvanized that audience for the first time. The majority of homes around the world had never had any art, and they seemed unconcerned about whether Doré's rousing images betrayed the influence of French mannerists. Once the economic foundation changed, there was an explosion of images in homes all around the world.
For those who wondered about the source and context of Ruskin's criticism of Doré:
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NOT18670614.2.15?items_per_page=100&page=5&query=dore&snippet=false&sort_by=byDA
Thanks David, I'll read that later.
On Whistler, well, it wasn't a good painting (Whistler was enormously talented but produced some things which feel like very sleight 'aesthetic' poses with little substance to them, and that was one of them) but Ruskin's criticism always seemed to me just the unhelpful type of mudslinging you can get from someone in an established position. And Whistler's reaction to it I think was due to the damage that such an established critic could have caused him.
Ruskin, though before his decline, had earlier championed art that was considered very 'modern' and was condemned as vociferously as was Doré.
But any reading of his work shows that his praise is for real qualities, and his condemnation is for weak work.
My own range of appreciation certainly encompasses Doré, but it has real faults, like those Kev has mentioned. He was overpraised, which may have been the chief factor in the Ruskin outburst.
But not, I think, because he 'seemed to have trouble with a lot of "modern" artists.' Whatever about how his uninhibited (sometimes incontinent) imagination was able to create scenes where that inhibition made them feel novel, Doré was very, very old-fashioned in many even most respects, by the standards of his own times.
Bill
['as vociferously as was Doré' - shd. be 'as Ruskin did Doré', and one or two others] / Bill
Well, having read that I suppose it's how some people today might react if they heard that the guy who directed Hostel was making a Mother Theresa biopic.
Bill
Oh, on Ruskin - he went far beyond art graduates/specialists in the sales of his books. Modern Painters would have been in the homes of every middle class household where there was someone with an artistic interest, admirers included George Eliot, Charlotte Bronté etc.....'Stones of Venice' was responsible for turning it into a tourist destination and so on. His writings went well beyond art/architecture (250 books I think), was famous as a lecturer and appeared in papers. He was the more famous party in the Whistler tiff which was fodder for the popular press. He created the popularity of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose works as a result were in many homes as popular prints (I think they made more from the prints than the paintings).
Your point about Doré reaching beyond classes is important though.
Bill
(Sorry for the scattergun comments)
Found the loathsome tremulous thynge -
https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/split-in-two/
It's only silly. (Was it a joke that went over Ruskin's head ?)
Bill
(Other) Anonymous-- Thanks for your link to "some Doré humorous stuff." That's a great treasure trove of pen and ink work. Doré was a child prodigy who began doing those humorous drawings for the French humor magazine Le Rire at age 15. Daumier also drew for Le Rire, but by age 17 Doré was being paid more than Daumier for his drawings because Doré's drawings caused such a sensation in Parisian cultural life. In his most recent book art historian Alexander Roob wrote, "In comparison with the firework bursts of new graphic ideas set off by the young Gustave Doré, the earlier style of caricatures by Honore Daumier and Paul Gavarni now looked antiquated and bland."
Richard-- That's an interesting standard: how much fun did the artist have making the art? I don't have any problem with looking at work through that lens, but I'm not sure you've applied your own test properly. I agree Kinkade's paintings looked like candy but Kinkade himself seemed to be a sour drunk and drug addict who mistreated women and used Christianity as a selling tool to manipulate the credulous. By comparison, Doré's wood engravers seemed to have led a happier and more fulfilling life.
You write, "Dore I can't even look at because all I can think of is the poor soul who made it having an exceptionally bad time." I agree the life of a wood engraver seems grueling and awful to us today, but if you read accounts of 19th century wood engravers in England, they took great pride in their craftsmanship and their contribution to art. They found what they did quite meaningful, and when their services finally became technologically obsolete, there was great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sentimental essays were written about the end of an era, and how these dedicated craftsmen would be forever remembered. I highly recommend the books about the great wood engraver Thomas Bewick for a taste of this side of life.
David,
Thanks for the link to the Ruskin quote which gives us a better idea of the collection of illustrated Balzac stories he was criticizing. Making the jump from there to illustrating the Bible would have seemed unlikely to a lot of people I would think.
Your post and the link gives us an idea of the world that was and places its challenges between those of the 19th century hypotheses that changed the worldview from the top, and its wrestling with conformity by way of the passions. It’s a combination that brings to mind the worldview of David Hume.
Given that Dore was the original in the field and so successful, it makes sense that others would take it further.
Laurence John wrote: "The examples David has posted are largely made out of second hand conventions culled from 19th century Romantic, French Academic painting, with its obsession with Biblical stories and classical myths. These would have looked creaky even by 1883 (when Doré died) to the young modern upstarts, the impressionists."
It shouldn't surprise that Doré, working at the same time in the same country with the same subject matter (Biblical stories and classical myths) should have similarities to French Academic painting. Still, I think there are important distinctions. The characteristics you look back on and call creaky conventions had been seen by only a tiny percentage of the total population-- those living in a few large cities with a museum or gallery, with the time and money to be interested in culture. The French academic paintings couldn't be photographed and put in books until later; to the extent they could be reproduced and spread at all, it was through relatively crude techniques. As illustration historian Alice Carter wrote, "The Doré Bible was ubiquitous in the late 19th century and inexpensive editions were a fixture in many American homes." In small towns and villages around the world, Doré's Bible was often the only book, and sometimes the only pictures, in a home. Of course, much of that had to do with Doré being in the right place at the right time. Who knows what Ingres would have done if he'd been exposed to Doré's technological opportunities. Would he have had the entrepreneurial vision?
I agree with you that the upstart impressionists (who had an even smaller audience than the Academic painters) would've looked down on Doré. Perhaps they would've been jealous of his wealth, fame and influence. Perhaps they would've viewed him the way abstract expressionists in the 1950s viewed the popularity of pulp magazines and comic books. But remember, Van Gogh admired Doré and based one of his paintings on one of Doré's drawings.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Maddening to think that every time he drew one of these birds he didn’t once go to his window and look outside."
I think we've already established that you're more easily maddened than I am.
Your reference to Rembrandt's precedent raises an interesting point. Rembrandt was a pioneer in making an extra buck (or an extra gilder) by reproducing a drawing with the best available technology (etching) and selling multiple copies. He had to make compromises (such as working in reverse image) but he managed it. He (and his apprentices) might ink and pull 50 or 75 images before the plate degraded. That had a significant impact on the economics of being an artist, but nothing like the change in Doré's day. Doré too had to make compromises, being translated by engravers, but the scale of the mass audience created huge differences in impact. Rembrandt's etchings were prized in the cabinet collections of dukes and counts, but Doré's illustrations brought images to the world. People who used to see pictures only as triptychs over their church altars could now own and obsess over glorious, dramatic pictures in their homes. For example, the young Franklin Booth, living out in the country with no museums or art galleries nearby, revered Doré and was influenced by him all his life. Doré also influenced Aubrey Beardsley, Maxfield Parrish and NC Wyeth who apparently failed to notice that Doré's work was just "repeatable dogma from insufficient observation."
But the point to which I keep returning is that Doré, more than any other artist, used the new technologies of the 19th century to launch the popular obsession with pictures that gave rise to the golden age of illustration.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Maddening to think that every time he drew one of these birds he didn’t once go to his window and look outside."
I think we've already established that you're more easily maddened than I am.
In matters of art, probably.
Did you notice (before I mentioned it) in that particular picture that all the birds were repeated Ms and not birds?
And now that it has been drawn to your attention, do you still not care? I mean, you are a lover of great drawing, yes? Isn't a bunch of Ms floating in the sky the exact opposite of high quality and considered draftsmanship? Isn't it amateurish and ruinous to the piece?
For example, the young Franklin Booth, living out in the country with no museums or art galleries nearby, revered Doré and was influenced by him all his life. Doré also influenced Aubrey Beardsley, Maxfield Parrish and NC Wyeth who apparently failed to notice that Doré's work was just "repeatable dogma from insufficient observation."
Many artists have youthful influences that fade or fall away. As artists grow they see quite clearly the failings of their early influences (as well as the problems in their own early works). The older they get, the fewer artists still interest them. And the more artist they feel antipathetic toward. That is the usual case.
For my own research, I'd be interested in your sourcing on Parrish's and Wyeth's name-checking of Doré. There's no mention of Doré in either Michelis' N.C. Wyeth biography or N.C. Wyeth's collected correspondence. But I'm sure Howard Pyle looked at him as he was starting out, because, well, what else was there to look at?
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Did you notice (before I mentioned it)...that all the birds were repeated Ms and not birds? And now that it has been drawn to your attention, do you still not care? .... Did he not know how beautiful and true the animative flow of a real bird in flight compared to what he was doing?"
I plead guilty to not caring. Doré was drawing a great civilization reduced to rubble, with long rows of monumental statues of elephants lining abandoned avenues, and great collapsed buildings slowly returning to nature. All this taking place under a dark and foreboding sky with crashing clouds. And here you are, complaining that Doré didn't capture the true beauty of those birds in flight, the way he might have if he'd studied the feathers of birds in nature.
There is magic to Doré's ability to convey such immensity in a compact space, using just a black line. One important way he achieved that was to establish a clear, strong set of priorities. This picture was not the time for him to imitate Audubon. He needed to make birds identifiable enough only to suggest that the city was returning to nature. His point was only that flocks of wild birds could careen down that deserted canyon. Nothing more. Any additional detail or focus on the birds would've distracted from the theme of the drawing and diminished the size of the city.
And let me hasten to make the same point about the dove from the picture of Noah's ark. Doré did what was necessary to eliminate the unnecessary and prioritize a masterful picture. That tiny dove is the centerpiece of an image containing other, far bigger and more dramatic elements, not because Doré captured the details of the wing structrure but because it's the whitest spot on the picture, surrounded by the darkest black. It had a silhouette of a bird that everyone recognized. More would've been less. The immensity and symbolism of the subject didn't require the complexities or details of an actual bird in flight.
I also see that you'd like to write off Franklin Booth's love of Doré as a childhood fixation which faded away. As I recall, Alice Carter's biography of Booth for the John Fleskes book, Silent Symphony, contains several references to Doré in a very different light. (I looked at several books in the Kelly library when I was writing the Society of Illustrators essay accompanying Doré's induction into the Hall of Fame this year, but unfortunately I won't be able to go back to that library in order to retrace my steps until August.)
Sean Farrell -- I meant to note that I agree with you completely about the difference between Coll and Doré. Some part of that difference-- although not the majority, I think-- is attributable to the improving technology. By the time Coll came along, Doré's wood engravings had been replaced by photo lithography. I think every ten years following Doré's death, we saw significant improvements in the technology for delivering better images to the public. The photos became sharper, the paper became better, color arrived on the scene and quickly got more accurate and cheaper. (Once industry figured out that there was money to be made in illustration there was no shortage of publications happy to pour more money into it.) So Coll was freed from many of the shackles that restricted Doré's line, just as Doré had been freed from many of the limitations on his predecessors.
Can you say a little more about your David Hume connection? I'm not sure I followed that.
"I also see that you'd like to write off Franklin Booth's love of Doré as a childhood fixation which faded away."
No. I was speaking generally, and more in reference to Wyeth and Parrish. I can certainly see Booth, because of his technique and penchant for grandeur effects, retaining appreciation for Doré. Despite not building his work of symbolic conventions, as Doré did.
The main point of what I wrote was that good artists could grow up with Doré and yet still come to understand his narrowness and their own work largely in contrast to his.
I don't dispute that Doré was formative in the illustration tradition.
There is magic to Doré's ability to convey such immensity in a compact space, using just a black line. One important way he achieved that was to establish a clear, strong set of priorities. This picture was not the time for him to imitate Audubon. He needed to make birds identifiable enough only to suggest that the city was returning to nature. His point was only that flocks of wild birds could careen down that deserted canyon. Nothing more. Any additional detail or focus on the birds would've distracted from the theme of the drawing and diminished the size of the city.
"His point was only..." is exactly the kind of spotty thinking that causes art to become linear and conventionalized like text symbols. Nothing in art is every just what it is, or only representing a singular idea unto itself. Except when it some symbol affixed to the surface like postage.
"...detail or focus on the birds would've distracted from the theme of the drawing"
I don't think that necessarily occurs
https://www.themorgan.org/sites/default/files/images/collection/drawings/download/108906v_0001.jpg
I can certainly get huge pleasure from Doré, and while I can see some of the same problems that Kev drew attention to (others passed me by unnoticed before he did), a lot of the time the viewer will just go, 'hum, that's something the artist thought was unimportant / wasn't able to do / skimmed over' or whatever, and enjoy it for its achievements, what it has excelled at doing.
Like with the Blake mentioned (that's an extreme example for his work exists in the strange narrows of his personal idiom, grafted on to mannerism...or perhaps an offshoot from the mannerist trunk that has part-reverted to something more primal and archaic. But lots of kids scratch their heads at first when they're told he's a great artist).
Other 'flaws' are like stumbling blocks and niggle at you and impair enjoyment. I don't care if the various trees in purgatory have unconvincing roots, they're used as simplified clawing shapes; or if they're not properly modelled in the round - the flattening, set-like look weaves in and out of more fully three-dimensional treatment in a way that has its own appeal.
But the branches in the wood of suicides are wavy lines that look bad beyond their being stylisations rather than accurate, natural forms.
These type of things are scattered through his work and can sometimes spoil it.
He could draw better than this. The reminder about the engraver taking the written note as an element to carve rather than an instruction suggests that the necessity of the workload may have prompted occasional visual shorthand and inattention. Mbirds.
Overall, though, I have to emphasise that I can get a lot of enjoyment from the stuff.
The Ruskin quote has been in a few books, etc., now, and is used like a blurb. I presume, as these days the Danté plates probably get the most attention, the intention was to suggest some doddery old guy shocked to the core by Doré's hellish visions or whatever, which is irksome because Ruskin had a keener sense for the terrible and how it could be successfully conveyed, beyond that of Doré. And he always had room for the rough, the grotesque and the terrible.
But thanks for showing us the source of the quote, which puts a new spin on things.
I doubt Ruskin was really appalled at the cartoons in the Balzac on any deeper, theological level for themselves alone (a lot of his complaints have an Old Testament air...), but was offended by his sense of priorities in relation to art - the sublime and the spiritual. And of course his conviction that the work of the man responsible was innappropriate to the Bible. I imagine a considerable number of those who later had Doré Bibles in their homes would have reacted the same way (before they saw the Bible plates, at least.)
Bill
And let me hasten to make the same point about the dove from the picture of Noah's ark. Doré did what was necessary to eliminate the unnecessary and prioritize a masterful picture. That tiny dove is the centerpiece of an image containing other, far bigger and more dramatic elements, not because Doré captured the details of the wing structrure but because it's the whitest spot on the picture, surrounded by the darkest black. It had a silhouette of a bird that everyone recognized. More would've been less. The immensity and symbolism of the subject didn't require the complexities or details of an actual bird in flight.
It had already dawned on the art community during Doré's time that Art was highly self-resonant. That good works of art, the elements within them, chimed together, altogether. The shapes chime together, the handwriting chimes, the ideas reverberate, colors, gestures, etc.
Thus Howard Pyle taught - correctly - that putting in a strong red didn't make the green in your picture strong, by contrast or opposition. Rather a strong red actually made all the other reds more vibrant and interesting. Because like pings like.
Everything in a picture is relative. And everything relative reverberates. So Pyle taught that if a particular quality of light is obtained in one part of the picture, every other quality of light must be in reference to that previously-achieved quality - either more or less of that quality - but decidedly somewhere on the scale of that quality. Otherwise we get a break in resonance, that which holds the narrative as well as graphic unity tight.
Similarly, Harvey Dunn said that if you get something really beautiful in your picture, everything else in the picture must come up to that. If it doesn't, again, we get disunity.
For this same reason Pyle said that "a little bad drawing in your picture puts the whole picture out of drawing." Because a bit of bad drawing emphasizes other bits of bad drawing, or even weak drawing, or even not-so-wonderful drawing.
This is a strange fact that goes even for seemingly inconspicuous elements. Thus drawing really matters to starkly emphasized and centralized elements, as with Doré's bad dead-center bullseye birds. Such is a beacon to the rest of the picture, a lighthouse which shines its light onto all else, coloring it. Doré's bad birds emanate bad drawing.
"Similarly, Harvey Dunn said that if you get something really beautiful in your picture, everything else in the picture must come up to that. If it doesn't, again, we get disunity"
That's, for me, the best summation of this. And clarifies the cause.
Bill
Anonymous/Bill and Kev Ferrara-- year after year, the single most fun thing about this blog is the unpredictability of the direction these discussions take. If someone told me that the blog post about Doré would take the direction of birds, I wouldn't have believed them.
I agree with what Pyle and Dunn said about maintaining uniform standards of quality for even small parts of a drawing, as long as we don't misconstrue their advice as requiring a uniform level of detail and focus for every part. Uniform excellence often means that less important element of a picture should be dashed off with a quick gesture, such as Mbirds.
What is your view of the Mbirds in Rembrandt's masterpiece etching, "three trees"? I believe you can see a close up of them in the fifth image of this old blog post:
https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-many-lines-does-it-take-to-draw.html
Also, Anonymous/Bill, I want to make sure I understand your point with your link to the Morgan library collection (which happens to be my favorite museum in Manhattan). I assume you were directing my attention to the Ruskin watercolor "From Sairlock." Are you saying that the birds in that picture are significantly superior to the birds in Doré's picture of Babylon?
They have about the same level of detail, but are a little more realistic, a little better overall. Less posed, certainly, but the more artificial posing in the Doré is deliberate and goes with the, or at least his, Biblical.
But they're (Ruskin's) more organic and natural feeling in flight.
But you're right - you were talking about 'detail and focus', not naturalism.
I conflated the two.
If there's anything I can salvage....maybe that attention can be given to all lesser parts without shortcuts taken, and that this won't interfere with the overall thrust of a work (you've brought well-drawn electrical plugs in a Mort Drucker to peoples' attantion, which I had certainly missed !)
The birds in this Doré weren't an issue for me, but shortcomings in other works.
Bill
It was very polite of you to say 'fun'.
Bill
I agree with what Pyle and Dunn said about maintaining uniform standards of quality for even small parts of a drawing, as long as we don't misconstrue their advice as requiring a uniform level of detail and focus for every part.
I am talking about resonance - aesthetic qualities - not "standards of quality" in the sense of technical regulation.
Every aesthetic quality resonates; reverberating and resounding with similar aesthetic qualities. Squares vibe with other squares, reds ping other reds, joy finds joy, similar styles self-associate, suffusing moods register as a self-similar tone lurking beneath the liminal entities, errors flag up other errors, and so on.
To translate Pyle into your home language, if we take all works of art to be putting forth a kind of case; Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
The absurdity of tiny isolated Samson swinging that tiny chicken leg out of arm’s length of any foe - in the center of the picture - makes the whole picture suspect in a comic way. That a mass of writhing worm-like humanity spills away from this silly chicken-slinging figure makes it all even sillier. To the point of feeling Monty Python-ish. (Which is a shame, because the foreground area is quite nice and anticipates J.C. Coll’s aesthetic to a large degree. The picture's figural scope and intensity feels like it should make a masterpiece, even as it reeks of absurdity.)
Aesthetic feeling (intuited visual meaning) soaks in from the edges and out from important spots or elements.
Uniform excellence often means that less important element of a picture should be dashed off with a quick gesture, such as Mbirds.
Is that an em dash?
AkTuAlLy... Since IT IS TRUE that a bit of bad drawing in a picture pings bad drawing throughout - thus emphasizing the bad instead of the good in the work overall -, sloppily or lazily "dashed off" anything wasn't the right choice. Neither being loose nor abstracting (in the proper sense of that word) includes rubber stamping duplicate cliché-symbols over a part of a work that otherwise purports to have some level of realism to it.
What is your view of the Mbirds in Rembrandt's masterpiece etching, "three trees"? I believe you can see a close up of them in the fifth image of this old blog post:
Again, the scale of articulation matters. The Rembrandt flock exists at the level of rendering. You aren't supposed to look at rendering. The birds in Doré are rendered as individuated objects, evident to the eye, regular in arrangement and offered for clear inspection like white moths pinned in a black display case.
Thank you David for explaining the technical contributions to the limits Dore was dealing with. I do see that as engravings the line is going to be limited somewhat by the engraving tools and style. I thought of Rembrandt afterwards because he did both prints and direct ink drawings and retained a certain fluidity that Dore possibly had to sacrifice in dealing with such epic pictures.
David Hume came to mind because the 19th century and its influence on the 20th century can be traced back to Hume. He inspired a type of higher learning, but also saw the passions as ruling man while the mind was its slave. So he was attached to two currents of thought that persisted through the 19th and 20th centuries; a scientific skepticism and yet a type of resignation about human nature regarding the passions.
Such a resignation to the reality of human nature wasn’t unknown to the previous world which also persisted in Dore’s illustrated bible whereby within a mystery or by receptivity, there was an opportunity to see another end to this mess known as human nature. So there were these different currents of thought and Schumacher mentioned that the people who were arriving at new hypotheses on life in the 19th century were themselves within in and were beneficiaries of the former world, which withered away somewhere in the mid 20th century, in good part due to their adopted theories.
Obviously Dore’s work is filled with skill, vision and is epic in scale. I was merely commenting to Bill that I thought he missed the intimacy, and to me, the greater power of the stories, which Rembrandt captured so well. Thanks for the very thought provoking post.
<<<<"how much fun did the artist have making the art? I don't have any problem with looking at work through that lens, but I'm not sure you've applied your own test properly. I agree Kinkade's paintings looked like candy but Kinkade himself seemed to be a sour drunk and drug addict who mistreated women and used Christianity as a selling tool to manipulate the credulous. By comparison, Doré's wood engravers seemed to have led a happier and more fulfilling life."
Kinkade's work doesn't look sour even though he had problems. It looks happy and easy. But stupid. A lot better looking than Jon McNaughton's awful Trumpist paintings. Speaking of bad political paintings, Hunter Biden's paintings also looked happy and easy and stupid, though he probably didn't paint them.
Kinkade sold his to Christians because they liked it. Jon McNaughton probably had a lot of crossover with Kinkade's market, gun-toting downmarket Christians. Hunter, a cracked out pedophile who also mistreated women, sold his paintings for five and six-figure sums to still-anonymous buyers who were *secretly* (shhhh) purchasing access to the highest office in our nation. This blatant money laundering and access scheme was assisted by flattering cultural articles in the nytimes and wapo. Such great and revered newspapers. Bad reviews for bad christian paintings, good reviews for money laundering access schemes among high placed Democrats. (The swamp is real.)
You should do a post on Hunter's paintings, given today's guilty verdict. After all, don't you want a change at the top? Somebody not senile and corrupt who can beat trump?
~ FV
Seán - I first saw Doré, or noticed, rather ( I must have seen bits in magazines or tv befote that) in an old mildewed book with the originals.
It was either Milton or a collection including some of the Bible plates (but the book wasn't the bible). I was completely carried away by both the skill of the engravings and many of the scenes. The qualities far outweigh anything I've moaned about, and I can step into their spell and suspend dissatisfaction at any of their conventions or shortcuts when doing so, as much as if allowing a stage performance to become a reality.
The deeper things you've painted for us are from a closer engagement and with things I'm unfamiliar with, and I want to take another look at them. I'm moved by the myths, but don't know much else. Thanks
Bill
Christopher Panzner's illustrations for Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” are a mash-up of French illustrator Gustave Doré’s collected works. The idea was to imagine how Doré would have illustrated “Zarathustra” had he lived long enough (the work was published shortly after Doré died). The illustrations were done in ink to resemble engravings. There are 103 illustrations in all, corresponding to the approximately 90 chapters of the work (as well as title page, frontispiece, chapters, etc.).
https://evergreenreview.com/read/donald-trumps-operation-mindfuck/
"Christopher Panzner's illustrations for Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” are a mash-up of French illustrator Gustave Doré’s collected works."
Those are so bad I'm rethinking my criticisms of Doré.
Bill,
Inspired by your enthusiasm I will look for more work by Dore.
Peace, humility and tenderness are quite unpopular today given everything is an affront to someone’s sense of person and ironically, the result is a general loss of confidence. But they are worthy adversaries to the lack of impulse control on display and threats of war. They are more challenging than they appear but still, cultivate well in light of a deep sense of beauty.
Thanks for the accent on my name. They don’t use it here in America, but it reminds me of visits of my elder Irish in-laws who pronounced the name with a deliberate soft accent on the a and n. Same with my son’s Kieran, accented on the second syllable as if lifted in the air. They don’t have time for such here, where even efficiency is being truncated for the sake of efficiency.
Sean
I didn't realise I added it. Must be muscle memory !
Bill
Kev has ruined it for me now. When I look at the the Samson, all the Philistines abandon the battle & become a chorus of baritones doing I'm a Lumberjack.
Bill
"Kev has ruined it for me now."
If that's true, I regret that. It is certainly the most compelling of the presented images. And the most impressive. I'm vacillating in forcing myself to see its good qualities. But the absurdity, if it strikes you, is hard to shake. Every time I flip it to see it fresh, the little berzerking surfer dude threatening with the chicken leg just cracks me up.
I guess the core of the issue is inherent in the attempt to make the symbolic literal. The same thing that makes Zack Snyder's superhero films by turns ugly or risible.
There's an early Walter Everett picture titled Battle of the Ark God that is an interesting contrast with the Doré Melee. In that whatever suggestion of violence there is is achieved almost entirely through suggestive abstract patterning.
'If that's true...'
No need to worry, just some puerile humour on my part.
I had to raid Lumberjack from the wider 'Python' oeuvre, the sole musical number in Life of Brian didn't cut it. The choirboys of Philistia demanded something more, uhm, 'butch'.
Bill
Kev's comments are so bad I'm rethinking reading this.
You're welcome.
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