Lynd Ward's 1929 book, God's Man, came out at the wrong time and place.
At a time when full color reproductions on glossy pages in books and magazines were new and wildly popular, God's Man was made exclusively of black and white woodcuts, a medium that predated Durer in the 15th century.
In a decade when the country was celebrating prosperity and citizens were wallowing in new luxuries and promiscuity, God's Man was an unwelcome admonition about selling your soul for material gain and the pleasures of the flesh.
Lynd Ward made his powerful book, consisting of 139 woodcuts-- no words-- when he was 23. He had just returned from training at the State Academy for Graphic Arts in Leipzig Germany. There, he developed an appreciation for German expressionist graphics and he brought that aesthetic back to the US in this remarkable book.
Shortly after Ward's book was published, the stock market crashed, hurling the world into the Great Depression. This caused many to reflect on the excesses of the "roaring twenties" with a different perspective.
Whatever the reason, Ward's book beat the odds and became famous. It made his reputation as an illustrator and it encouraged successive generations of artists to experiment in similar ways. It was reprinted several times, although the recent paperback reproductions have none of the charm of the original book, which was beautifully printed on thick paper.
Living in an era of digital art and AI, it's easy to conclude that this is not the right time or place to attempt certain kinds of artistic efforts. But Lynd Ward had strong artistic views and was rewarded for taking chances.
The stripped-down boldness and stark, children's picture book or medieval-folk-tale simplicity of the scenarios sets the action in a kind of symbolist mind space rather than the real world. A similar thing was happening in movies of the same period such as Lang's 'Metropolis', and Murnau's 'Sunrise' (both 1927).
ReplyDeleteI have a love hate relationship with this sort of style. When it works it can feel very powerful, as if you're being shown the subtext beneath everyday reality. When it doesn't work it can feel clunky and faintly ridiculous.
Agree with Lawrence above. Didn't he do another similar book, more Blakean-looking, or was that someone else?
ReplyDeleteThese are primal designs, communications reduced to the glyphic; the universal typography. Iconic human emotion-moments, hyper symbolized; abstracted and stylized away from facts that would bind them to any particular time and place. Such that they lift off the real world and echo back to the ancient, and up and beyond to the mythic. A worm could understand these pictures.
ReplyDeleteLaurence John and Anonymous-- agreed. There's a limitation to woodcuts as a medium (unless the artist is a natural phenomenon such as Thomas Bewick or Albrecht Durer) that oftenn makes certain subjects feel ungainly. That was certainly the case with the work of Rockwell Kent. But the flip side is that the same characteristics helped to convey a feeling of strength and monumentality.
ReplyDeleteWard later did painted work with a soft, molded feel to it, but I think woodcuts are the right medium for a book like this. Ward is not at all ashamed of the rough look of the woman and the sailor, or the cop beating the artist with the truncheon. He sees no need to go back and polish these pictures or smooth out their lines.
It was reprinted several times, although the recent paperback reproductions have none of the charm of the original book, which was beautifully printed on thick paper.
ReplyDeleteConsider the loss of presence of the artist’s hand from from woodcut to woodcut print, from woodcut print to mechanically reproduced books, from scans of reproduced book to nth editions, from photographs of nth edition pages to lossy jpgs digitally reproduced on the internet. We’re looking at copies of copies of copies of Ward’s work. By the time the photons from the screen on my small iPhone hit my eyes, Ward is far gone.
AI possibly merely shines a brutal light on what Benjamin proposed, namely that the auratic quality of art is inversely proportional to the democratization of access to art. With AI art, this process is super-accellerated and taken to a perverse conclusion - the copies no longer merely signal, replace or obfuscate the original, but instead precede the (absent) original. As Baudrillard pessimistically observed, under current conditions the distinction between original and copy is thus made meaningless.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Between 1800 and 1930, illustrators spent a great deal of time and effort dealing with the benefits, problems and shortcomings of reproduction.
ReplyDeleteEverybody knew and knows that an original work of art has an "aura" that reproductions don't have. It was also well known that the more one looks at a work of art, the more the power of the work weakens; in any form, whether in the original or in reproduction.
Because of this known fact, artists developed many ways of looking at their in-process works once they go stale on them to prevent the graying-out of familiarity. So they can see the effects of it truly, in place of a first-timer audience: Looking at them in a mirror, or through a lens, upside down, is usually the first method. (Now we use our phones to take shots in process to get a different perspective.) Also taking a break and going for a walk. Looking at wholly different types of art also works. Half jokingly some artists talked about "sneaking up" on a work to see it fresh. Or facing the other direction and suddenly turning around to view the piece.
Why is there this graying-out problem in the first place?
Pictures that have aesthetic power are built of suggestions, and those suggestions, to be effective, require the audience's sudden intuitive/imaginative "closure" to function. Which is to say, there is an element of surprise to the interactive production of an effect between artwork and viewer. As the lay viewer continues to look at a work of art, no matter how great its ability to control the viewer for the purposes of artistic effectiveness, its structural compositional/expressive surprises - sooner or later - go away. And therefore so does its effectiveness. (This is much easier to appreciate consciously in the less abstract movies or jokes. "Oh, I know how this scene ends." Or, "Oh, I know the punchline to this joke." )
Since only a portion of an actual real work of art's effects can ever be successfully duplicated in reproduction, the original always retains surprises with respect to non-reproducible effects. Thus "aura." (aka Aesthetic Effectiveness.)
To truly enjoy original works of art, one should avoid looking at reproductions of them weeks or even month in advance of attending them on display. So the whole suite of effects, reproducible or not, can be experience at full blast.
Additionally, because lay people don't know how art actually works, if they are zealous art fans, they can be quite awed by art's effects. And may succumb to revering them in a quasi-religious way, particularly favorite works. Such circumstances result in an auxiliary "aura" for some people beyond the picture's effects. One which is not interactively produced.
We must forgive Walter Benjamin for not knowing any of this long after artists did. As he wasn't an artist.
You’re reading too much of your own theory into Benjamin. He wrote about the withering away of an original artwork’s uniqueness, of singular contemplation of art objects becoming secondary, in a culturally sense, to the mass exhibition value of their reproductions.
ReplyDeleteAnd anyway, the Golden Age illustrators weren’t the first to grapple with any of this - consider the impact of Gutenberg’s disruptive technology on illuminating scribes and woodcut artists, and also how what effects the the democratization of the Bible had on history.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
I'm well aware of Benjamin's claims and their limits. As with Heidegger, who also didn't understand anything about aesthetics, Benjamin's only understanding of art is cultural/political. He's not an artist and had no training in the arts. That's why I'm adding in this other missing material, which is more direct to the question and of probable interest to artists..
ReplyDeleteWhich, anyway, isn't my theory. This is aesthetics at the state of the art circa 1860-1930. I understand you know none of this material; you've stated as much. Which is why I'm sharing it with the audience reading along.
I'm unaware of artistic discussions on reproduction vs original art prior to 1820 or so; around the time that photoengraving was invented. If you have some examples of prior discussions I'd be interested.
We’re talking about entirely different things. I have no interest in the Brandywine School’s thoughts on the cultural impact of mechanical reproduction of art, and the mentioning of Heidegger in this context is curious.
ReplyDelete- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
It's much older than the american illustrators. Take a look through Delacroix' diaries for some good examples of related insights
DeleteSimilarly, I have no interest in Walter Benjamin's superficial understanding of the effects of mechanical reproduction. It is boring to hear him cited often by the predictable types, who share his ignorances. Mentioning him prompts a corrective, which I have offered. Not for your sake, of course. But for the readers.
ReplyDeleteFyi, the "Brandywine school" didn't really hit stride until 1899. For 80 years or so all the major developments in art that surrounded that fin de siecle moment pulled on similar aesthetic-poetic threads to arrive at a widespread understanding of composition, visual poetry, expression, tropes, etc. With lots of arguments and variants, all to the good, across the globe. In that regard I'm as interested in what the French Academes (Beaux-arts, Les Lycées, etc) were teaching as the Russian Academy... as Eakins in Philly as Pyle in Delaware. Von Stuck in Germany, and so on. It is all of a piece, ultimately, even with the arguments. And to the best of my abilities, I try to make the case for that era's most efficacious teachings and views through generalizations of their collective discoveries and considerable achievements in art.
"the copies no longer merely signal, replace or obfuscate the original, but instead precede the (absent) original."
ReplyDeleteI used to say that digital art is the first reproduction of an artwork that doesn't actually exist. Then I realized there was a problem with what I call digital lubricity. A hyper-slick artificiality - a lack of evidence of physical consequence - to all the relations that shows that there was no presence involved in the making. A disembodiment.
AI images aren't even that. They're lacking consciousness and "spirit" entirely. (reposted from a previous thread.)
I don't think concept artists, comic book artists and illustrators turned to software like Photoshop because we thought it'd make us better artists — or because George Soros paid us to do so. At least I know I didn't.
ReplyDeleteWorking in Photoshop always felt like playing a flight simulator. Not matter the amount of RAM, the fidelity of colour on the EIZO monitor, how many levels of sensitivity the newest Wacom could boast, no matter how many carefully constructed brush sets you had in your library, you we're never really flying. There was no actual risk. You could freeze time. You could move bacwards in time. You could explore parallel realities. You could mirror-flip, ctrl-z, copy-paste, save and reload. You never really had to be mentally or physically attentive because the nib would never catch, the ink would never spill, the paper would never warp. No ride could every be bumpy. Everything was smooth. Smooth and dull. Not like flying at all. Not like drawing or painting. Obviously just a simulation of it.
But neither the art editor nor the buying public cared about the reality of your flight experience. The risk and thrill and skill involved wasn't really relevant, because the process of creation was not the end result, the reproducible product. No, what mattered was the end product, the flight record. And if that data could be produced more efficiently through a simulated flight, then that is what the market would prefer. And so, gamers gradually replaced pilots.
And when any number of flight recordings now can be immediately produced entirely without a gamer at the controls, having to simulate her way through a simulated flight to produce a painting, that is what the market will prefer.
And so, will there still be pilots? I think so, at least. The illuminating scribes gradually lost their gig to the Gutenberg press, but without this there'd be no Lynd Ward flying by his ability and feeling for the right time and place to do so.
And for every Lynd Ward as for every Red Baron, there are countless unknown others. Some flew commercial, some were jet fighters. Some flew sucessfully, but below the public's radar — some crashed and burned in the night. Pilots all.
As for whether or not there still will be gamers now that the simulations are running themselves, well,
I couldn't care less.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Well written post.
DeleteI too used photoshop for illustrations for a number of years. I found it thrilling, until I realized I was, while using it (with all its tricks to emulate real physical media without risk), a fraud. Which returned me to real paint.
With its wholly nerd-written code circumscribing its affordances, from my perspective, Photoshop has caused a kind of holocaust against two generations' artistic individuality. It was the ultimate multipolar trap, the cheat code that entered the market and sent a thousand competing artists into the wasteland.
As such, in the fields it came to dominate, the public never got a chance to decide whether they liked it or not. Sort of the like the endless bland Studio Ghibli-ripoff memes AI has covered the internet with.
I think rebellion against all this stifling sameness is inevitable.
Thanks David, didn't know this one. The plot is very German, indeed. It could work as a storyboard for an impressionist film.
ReplyDeleteThe discussion on reproductions is funny because the reason woodcuts exist is to be reproduced, and that's why it looks like it does.
I agree with Laurence that it is a risky style. I think it's because it is 100% serious (humorless?) and thus depends a lot on whether we believe the artist is being honest or not.