Look at this wonderful sketch by Harvey Dunn:
It's so broad and loose, it almost could've been painted with his elbows. Yet look at the subtle way Dunn captures the tilt of the woman's head, leaning into the man. She has no facial features but her hairline gives us all the information we need.
Dunn strategically places both heads together at the horizon line, so the contrast against the white background leads us right to the heart of the painting. Elbows or not, Dunn has performed microsurgery in this sketch.
Next, check out this sketch by Austin Briggs.
It might've been drawn with a cigar butt. There are no details, no eyelashes or buttons or shoelaces yet Briggs has perfectly captured the hang of the man's head, and that's enough to shape the whole character of the drawing.
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| You'd need a micrometer to measure the swell of his cheek, yet Briggs has it absolutely perfect. |
For other examples of what Rockwell achieved with a mere tilt of the head, consider these two young girls:
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| On the way home from a birthday party, a girl senses that a boy is mustering the courage to sneak a first kiss. |
My point today is that we've lost some of the highs and lows in a draftsman's repertoire. You'll often see today's artists depict necks as a simplistic, straight vertical platform for the head. Sometimes they can't even manage to get the neck straight, with sternocleidomastoid muscles wandering off in orthogonal directions.
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| Artists may use a lot of fine lines rather than a crude broad brush, but it won't save them from getting the neck horribly wrong. |
In previous years we saw a subtle tilt of the head as one in a rich and complex field of communication tools.
51 comments:
One unforgivable crime is when illustrators have to draw a full figure using someone's likeness and rely on a photo reference for the head, but the body doesn't quite match. The neck always gives the game away.
Thank you for such a nice, thoughtful and reflective post David.
The neck is of course what connects the head to the rest of the body and is the literal and metaphorical path by which cognitive attention transmits to embodied action. Carry this relationship into the surroundings, as so marvelously happens in the Harvey Dunn 'sketch', and you have a meaningful, beautiful painting.
The 'Eleven Angry Men and One Self-reliant Young Woman' Rockwell painting is a real treat to look at BTW.
Good old Aretha. She had her skin flayed from her face but kept on singing.
"Good old Aretha. She had her skin flayed from her face but kept on singing."
Aretha Fascia
Another example of becoming so involved in a technique that one loses sight entirely of the sense of the image, as with the recent Dolly Parton hair-as-the-whole-point-of-the-artwork debacle. Though the Times' artist claimed that the ballpoint pen technique she was implementing was somehow expressing Aretha's great performative singing. Where was the AD?
Speaking of the Golden Age, Joseph Clement Coll and Arthur I. Keller were particularly attuned to the import of head-orienting and situating in their works. Neal Adams brought the same expressive integrity to comics, with the additional factor of extreme closeups.
There's seemingly an inexhaustible supply of different angles, attitudes, lighting, styles, and approaches one may take to bring unique noggen emotion to bear on a picture. The neck can twist from any which way into any particular orientation of the head. And just by that fact a single head oriented just so can be the capper to a hundred different body poses. So much opportunity for expression through anatomy that to ignore it seems an artistic dereliction. Every muscle evidences a command of the mind.
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Not a fan of that Rockwell, which now resides at the Lucas. In my opinion, it is too clinically rendered from overposed photos to an unnaturally frozen state of finish. I don't believe the imploring outstretched arm pose at all, given how expressionless all the faces. (It looks like he's asking her to spit out her gum.) Even the smoky "atmosphere" is dropped in as a kind of convention. It is all so very literal. Which is weird because the same year 1959 is when he made that family tree ode to Howard Pyle.
"One unforgivable crime is when illustrators have to draw a full figure using someone's likeness and rely on a photo reference for the head, but the body doesn't quite match. The neck always gives the game away."
If you can't make a good mind-body connection, Jean-Gabriel Domergue is the necks best thing.
Kev: "I don't believe the imploring outstretched arm pose at all, given how expressionless all the faces”
Me neither. Of all the things that I could criticise in the painting; the almost Renaissance-like too-perfect-to-be-possible blocking, the slightly too much fill-light, the slightly too tight rendering, the only one that really niggles me enough to be distracting is the unnatural gesture of the hand.
That Harvey Dunn is incredible.
Kev Ferrara and Laurence John-- while that Rockwell painting of the jury room isn't his most artistic work, I view it as a master class in staging a narrative. Look at the myriad tools he uses to direct our eyes: he uses high contrast (her stark white against solid black), he uses sharp angles (her 90 degree, straight backbone as opposed to the curves and soft angles of the group encircling her), the lines of the composition all subliminally steering us (that table top leads us straight to her, as do the lines of those folding chairs, and every other line, including yes, that starkly silhouetted arm reaching out to her), the eyes of every face in the room (except the sleeping man) are looking at her, she is the yin surrounded by yang, etc. etc.
Is the rendering too tight for its own good? Probably, although we can point to a hundred paintings where he has proven he is sensitive to the difference. Does the cigarette smoke look artificial? Maybe, but that's not the focus; as an academic study in orchestration, it's great to watch Rockwell flex all those muscles.
Richard-- I'm glad you agree. And it's a beauty because of, not in spite of, its speed and loose quality.
"I view it as a master class in staging a narrative."
It is like a class in "staging a narrative." "Academic", as you said. It is a conventionalized intellectual exercise that puts everything on the surface for demonstration purposes, blocked like a 50s stage play, and makes it simple, surfaced and clear so students (and visiting continuing-ed folk) can easily "understand."
It reminds me of a composition teaching demo that made the rounds a few years ago, where all compositional ideas fell into two categories; pointing or framing. So; pointing at the main figure/s or framing the main figure/s. So easy!
It also reminds me of Steve Huston's book where he taught that whatever is in the focal center, everything around it is the opposite. In this case, she's ramrod straight, morally upright, head in the light, young female, and self-possessed. Versus everybody around her; gestured, older male, head dimmed and oblique to the viewer, morally exhausted, and in some way affected by or trying to affect her.
The very problem with the picture is that it is constructed of just such schooly ideas. A host of individual thoughts. Easily check-boxed during inspection. Which means; He didn't imagine it wholesale, he built it piecemeal from knowledge. Even the coloring and values show Rockwell's applied intelligence and experience with picture making protocols. But as Pyle taught from the very start of the Golden Age, knowledge is only good to correct with. You can't make a picture out of it.
Rockwell was a genius, with countless wonderful, culture-shaping images to his credit; and obviously knew better. Just not that week, on that deadline.
I want to add that; yes of course I know how well it is painted. And that in this era of Manga and Ai and Photoshop, such real skill is gold in the mountain. I well appreciate that fact.
That Aretha portrait is pure shite next to the five earlier pictures. No wonder illustration is in disrepute today.
>>>>>>"Speaking of the Golden Age, Joseph Clement Coll and Arthur I. Keller were particularly attuned to the import of head-orienting and situating in their works. "
Everett Shinn too.
~ FV
The Aretha cowpat is pure shite even without the other five pictures next to it!
Harvey Dunn vs some random Instagramite, I get. It’s a lazy way to get pretty much any point across. Funny thing happens when you add Rockwell to the table of comparison, though. The tricks and glamour of mimesis is undone, and the true nature revealed, plain for all to see.
Pure kitsch.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"The tricks and glamour of mimesis is undone, and the true nature revealed, plain for all to see. Pure kitsch."
What's your definition or criteria for "Kitsch" and how would Rockwell's picture qualify or meet those deficiencies?
Postmodern Anonymouse-- can you say more about this?
Is she supposed to have vinyl record muscles? (Serious question)
No, this was the artist's 'style' for a while (she seems to have moved away from it more recently)
https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/behind-the-cover-toyin-ojih-odutola/
Well, the seemingly flayed Franklin is immediately more interesting (even if entirely due to the friction of the piece!) than the Rockwells, which are prettier, but come served entirely predigested. Beyond the surface lookalikeliness, they offer the same subtlety and complexity as storytime with a flannelgraph. Comparing both artists with the Dunn draws attention to the amateurishness of the flayed woman, but also to the banality of Rockwell, as Dunn is vastly superior in complexity of expression and suggestion.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
My primary complaint with the Rockwell is that the walls can’t possibly be that high saturation orange with the current cold white balance on the figures. That orange would be filling the room.
I think he either should have done a cool dark wood for the walls, or brought that orange high saturation bounce into everything else, like this;
https://imgur.com/a/GH0kbU8
As for the rest of your complaints, I don’t see it. I think the rest of the picture is great, color issues aside.
Postmodern Anonymous: “….the Rockwells, which are prettier, but come served entirely predigested. “
You’ve obviously taken ‘predigested’ from Clement Greenberg’s ‘Avant-Garde & Kitsch’ essay. For anyone unfamiliar, here’s a quote. He's comparing an 'avant-garde / modernist’ Picasso with a ‘realistic narrative’ Repin:
Greenberg: “ But the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not immediately or externally present in Picasso’s painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities. They belong to the “reflected” effect. In Repin, on the other hand, the ”reflected” effect has already been included in the picture, ready for the spectator’s unreflective enjoyment. Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art “
The gist of Greenberg’s argument is that if narrative art serves the viewer things like - realistic characters ‘acting’ in recognisable scenarios which have an obvious narrative point and / or emotional message - this is ‘kitsch’ because it is essentially just a form of feel good entertainment or propaganda / messaging however well done.
According to him, high quality (‘avant garde’) art is interested in the formal or ‘plastic qualities’ only, which don’t spell out an obvious narrative message to the viewer, is much more ambiguous, and demands that the viewer come to their own interpretation (hence ‘difficult’).
He was talking mainly about early abstraction up to the beginnings of abstract expressionism, but you can see how this idea has permeated culture with the expectation - among certain circles - that high art should be difficult, edgy, ambiguous, nonsensical, ugly or disturbing.
Greenberg spares Picasso effort. And fans the vanity of the 'cultivated spectator.'
Thanks for the reminder and excerpts, Laurence. As painful as they are.
Again and again the spectrum-y "intellectuals" of modernism were able to get away with being insensitive and ignorant of the principled poetic complexity of the prior finer art in public because those who knew better were too busy in their studios creating to correct them. And so the snowball of political inertia and mass cretinization under the guise of intellectualism rolled downhill, getting bigger and dumber every second, until the whole rarefied art world was sick with sniffy dunderheaded pretension.
Richard,
When you make a piecemeal design change in fingerpainting mode, you only get a tradeoff. You don't get a synergy. Through your Ai rejigger, you've increased the contrast, neutralized the colors, and made it more "realistic" to your personal take of the moment, but in the meantime you've made it more murky and somber and less fun. You've made it even less like art. Which only perpetuates the flagged-up problem of the original. What's wrong is not a design issue. It's an imagination issue.
Photography has no imagination. Photography cannot, for example, express somebody imploring because imploring is an act. Acts move through time, through a sequence of mental states; from the recognition of a problem, to the development of a plan and a strategy to correct it which includes an emotional valence to the involved rhetoric; and a timbre; to the moment of courage to act on the plan, to the implementation of the first stage of the strategy, which canonically garners an unexpected reaction which also has an emotional valence, which requires further tactical and emotional adjustment. And so on. This is all suggestive stuff, a poetic movement. None of it can be directly indicated. Which is to say...
To implore is not an instant's worth of light rays bouncing off a held pose.
The piecemeal building of the image from individual photographs was not, in may view, overcome. Howard Pyle taught that when expressing a crowd it was very important to understand it as a unified character, acting as one. He said you don't build it out of Tom, Dick, and Harry. You first understand it and execute it as a mass, so that the viewer first appreciates it as a mass, and then afterward recognizes within it - via metonyms - Tom, Dick, and Harry.
Rockwell was well-versed in these poetic ideas, and clearly tried to implement them via careful compositing of the faces in this picture, so just so much would be revealed. All too consciously and mechanically. The synthesizing fun of his imagination is absent.
Anyway, my personal understanding of Kitsch is that it is the result of a high-ambition but low IQ marketing scheme that fails badly pretending to be art. This is not that.
In partial defence of the Rockwell Jury picture:
That concerning the imploring gesture of the foreground man. Yes, he can be said to resemble someone requesting that the young woman spit out her gum onto his palm. But in my view this makes no difference to the plastic intent of the move because both this and a reading that sees him in the gestural act of trying to change the woman's mind are symbolically the same, that of her being asked to give something up.
Postmodern anonymouse, Laurence John and Kev Ferrara-- I think the Clement Greenberg vs. Rockwell issue is a little more complex than that.
Greenberg came along with some exciting new ideas in a time of rapid change. Nobody knew where art was going (or where the world was going) in the 1930s, and Greenberg jumped in, using his intellect to wrestle with an unprecedented situation. We forget that at the time he was part of a tiny, much ridiculed minority; today we resent him as the iron dictator of establishment taste he became after his eloquence had transformed the landscape.
I agree that Greenberg undervalued Rockwell and Repin (who he viewed as a second rate Rockwell) and did so using the kind of snarky irresponsible language that young radicals toss around when they have nothing to lose. ( Svetlana Boym wrote that Greenberg's attack on Repin was based on a painting that didn't exist: "Greenberg's example of kitsch is Ilia Repin's battle scenes which, he claims, merely imitate the effect of artistic battles.... however, the fact is that Repin never painted any battle scenes. Possibly Greenberg is confusing Repin with another painter or rehearsing someone else's cliches..." )
I think Greenberg came up with some good and interesting ideas, the flaws of which became hideously apparent after he and his acolytes tried to enforce them as a system. But don't forget that Rockwell tried to put aside representational art and study modern art in Paris. He gave it up, not because he found it worthless but because he felt that he lacked the aptitude, and that his real strengths lay elsewhere. Rockwell was trying to understand modernism in good faith at the same time Greenberg was.
After Greenberg had become old and weakened, the person who challenged him with the very same criticisms of formalism voiced here was the celebrity artist Julien Schnabel, who was even more snarky and insufferable than the young Greenberg had been a generation before. The Reptilian Schnabel claimed to be the new face of representational art, and an advocate for historical/mythological narratives rejected by Greenberg. Schnabel's proof that his ideas were winning: Schnabel got to fly first class while Greenberg had to sit back in coach.
The reason I took the time to bore you with this little sidebar is that when it comes to understanding the art world, I think we should turn to manichaeism only as a last resort.
I think that Greenberg’s logic is consistent within the essay, and explains why he thinks ‘avant-garde’ art affects the viewer differently to ‘realistic / narrative’ art. I just disagree with his conclusion - that the stripping away of illusionistic content, and the reduction of imagery down to simplified graphic shapes and / or gestural marks - is more ‘sophisticated' in some way, that only his fellow ‘cultivated / sensitive spectators’ can see - and that everything narrative-illusion-based is ‘kitsch’.
Agreed. Also, invoking Boym is a good countermeasure against fixation on the word «predigested» as a blinder, as nostalgia is essential to kitsch.
Consider The Crying Boy series of paintings and prints, the innumerable copies of alluring Gypsy women on innumerable walls, yellowing copies of images of cherub-like children praying to or being saved by angels or Christs, the myriad Kinkadesque pastorals, Nerdrum’s anachronisms, Rockwell’s narratives…
…and tell me they do not have more in common among themselves than with the likes of Dunn (and Repin).
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Postmodern Anonymouse
chris bennett-- I agree, and I think that some of the criticisms of the jury picture are picking lint. Whatever else we might want to imagine is going on in the narrative about the man with his hand extended, from a formalist perspective the shape of that white hand against a solid black background is perfectly designed to direct our eyes where they need to go in what could otherwise be a scene too complex for a magazine cover on a newsstand.
"Yes, he can be said to resemble someone requesting that the young woman spit out her gum onto his palm. But in my view this makes no difference to the plastic intent of the move because both this and a reading that sees him in the gestural act of trying to change the woman's mind are symbolically the same, that of her being asked to give something up."
I don't agree. I think the imploring gesture says to the target; reconsider the offer of reason being extended to you. A metaphoric movement requiring a physical action to execute. The open hand, I think, is meant to suggestively symbolize that it contains the proffered idea. Possibly coupled with a subtle threat of physical violence.
Whereas a hand waiting expectantly under a mouth is a static symbol. It holds still just there. Thus the static nature of the photo-frozen figure involved feels more like waiting for gum than moving toward the target with an offer-threat.
"nostalgia is essential to kitsch."
No it isn't.
Either way the girl in the picture is meant to convey a modern independent girl of 1959 who gives no deference to the preponderance of surrounding males that oppose her. A scenario perfectly contemporary to the moment the picture was made.
"He gave it up, not because he found it worthless but because he felt that he lacked the aptitude, and that his real strengths lay elsewhere."
See: The Connoisseur. Took Rockwell two weeks to figure it out once he made the effort.
Nobody’s comparing Rockwell to Damien Hirst. Kitsch, like its antithesis (of yesterday, Art, is a floating signifier. In the context of the present topic and context, nostalgia is essential to kitsch of Rockwell..
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Postmodern Anonymouse
The issue of the Post with The Connoisseur cover quotes Rockwell as saying that if he was a younger man he'd paint like Pollock.
Why though ? Perhaps he meant "because it would be a hell of a lot easier than the paintings I make”
According to David’s anecdote he did try (in Paris) but gave up. Again, why ? Because it felt meaningless ?
Postmodern Anonymouse : "…and tell me they do not have more in common among themselves than with the likes of Dunn (and Repin).”
Why are you singling out Dunn and Repin ?
Dunn would absolutely be in the kitsch category according to Clement Greenberg’s thesis, and Repin is used as an example of kitsch in the essay, which i quoted above.
Because I’m commenting specifically in regard to the initial post & my previous comments to it. I am also not nostalgically fixated on Greenberg as the sole authority on kitsch.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
You used the word ‘predigested’ … obviously taken from his essay, and which is the the cornerstone of his argument in describing how ‘kitsch’ functions…
"Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art"
… but then you decide that Repin isn’t kitsch for some reason. Why is that ? not enough crying orphans ?
"from a formalist perspective the shape of that white hand against a solid black background is perfectly designed to direct our eyes where they need to go"
That you, a layperson, can so easily identify the purpose of the hand as an eye-directional and name it as such lays the issue plain. Good pictorial composing isn't the same as Commercial Graphic Design, nor Modernist Formalism, nor Information Design. If you can see the suggestion plainly, it isn't suggestive. It's graphics. Surfaced poetry is indication, merely.
Repin's art is so forceful - aesthetically, emotionally, physically, mimetically, psychologically, politically, etc. - that my guess would be that Greenberg simply couldn't tolerate it. It is not uncommon that the hypersensitive literary intellectual type eschews truly powerful art in favor of cooler visual experiences out of a very real concern for personal equilibrium.
I too may sometimes find it overpowering to the point of being unpleasant to consume in quantity. Sometimes I find his coloring garish or cartoonish. But I don't mistake that for Kitsch. The only picture of his I would consider overt Kitsch is Sadko (1876)
That any number of Kitschy works do not partake in nostalgia means that nostalgia is not necessary to Kitsch's definition. Emotional falsity, whatever its cause or type, may be the underlying criteria.
The problem with defining kitsch is that everyone has a slightly different idea of what they would personally call kitsch, plus some kitsch is just enjoyable in a guilty pleasure kind of way. But, at the end of the day, it’s a taste thing. The viewer is saying “I consider this to be bad taste compared to my more refined taste”.
There’s almost certainly a type of modern art snob who will view the entirety of the new Lucas Museum’s collection as ‘kitsch’ and feel that the Rockwells fit right in there with the props from Star Wars and the pulp novel covers, because they’re all of the same kitschy-popular-entertainment-for-the-masses quality.
Having said that, I think the ‘kitsch’ effect happens because:
It can feel cheaply manipulative, completely unsubtle, and somewhat shameless when the aesthetic of a work is so obviously* designed to produce an instant emotional / sentimental response from the viewer. The cringe or squirm feeling you get is your good taste being embarrassed for the maker of the kitsch artwork that thought it could win you over.
*obviousness dialled to 11 often induces the feeling we call ‘vulgar’ which is related to kitsch.
Do we all agree that this is kitsch: https://i.etsystatic.com/66569036/r/il/7910e4/8635759392/il_340x270.8635759392_fije.jpg
~ FV
FV, yes that is pure kitsch. It doesn't offend me though. I find its ridiculousness quite amusing and almost surreal or dreamlike.
Yes for me too. A canonical low IQ marketing scheme that fails badly pretending to be art.
To flesh this out. Part of kitsch is that it must be poorly done, I think. But also forceful or forced. Whatever absurd notion or artistic solution has possessed the creator, they've seen it through to the end. (Keane paintings, Boris' muscular Jesus breaking the cross, clown portraits on black velvet, Battlefield Earth, Plan 9 From Outer Space, political dolls, etc. ) And I believe that's where and why the artistic naiveté becomes dogmatic, and we get a stiff mannered - but also comical - result.
Also, like you say, the kitsch creator really wants to grab the emotions to sell the product, but via ineptitude we instead get the heavy-handed cloying emotionalism. (Which may be related to Nostalgia, but by no means necessarily so.)
We also get heavy handed poetic and aesthetic effects, which become obvious and cartoonish because of the lack of any finesse or sense of restraint. Artistic boorishness; too much sensation for too little justification, thus melodrama. Or whatever analog of melodrama would apply to over-amped poetics, aesthetic, dramatics, symbolics, etc. (One hears of art house cinema wags in the 1960s shouting "Symbol" at obvious symbols during the screenings of pretentious European films.)
What about an intentionally kitsch work, like Jeff Koons' Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture in his "banality" period. https://www.billboard.com/wp-content/uploads/media/koons-michael-jackson-bubbles-billboard-650.jpg
~ FV
If you knowingly use kitsch you’re getting into the area we call ‘camp’ which comes with a large degree of sarcasm / mockery / irony. True Kitsch - popular prints of cute crying orphans that your grandma might have on her wall - is sincere, it’s not trying to be clever or ironic.
"What about an intentionally kitsch work, like Jeff Koons' Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture."
The various plastic media are so sensitive to the slightest quivers of the hand or changes of mind that they cannot help but reveal embodied character and thought in the work, or the lack thereof.
When one looks at Koons’ MJ & The Chimp product, it is immediately apparent that it was factured without love, humane sensibility or thought in its immediate creation. The form is vacuously realistic. There is virtually no art in the form, no artistic opinion. The color choices are also peculiar and unnatural. But such that it immediately appears intentionally so. Nobody would accidentally or earnestly color such a sculpture just so.
I say this because, as I keep emphasizing, you cannot know the mind of the artist, except as it manifests in the work. It doesn’t matter what the artist originally intended, it doesn’t matter what the assignment was or their grand plan, it doesn’t matter what they say or what the work is entitled, it doesn’t matter what anybody else says. The work basically speaks for itself through the hypersensitive plastic material from which it was wrought. If we can read that, we can experience the effective consciousness of the artist as the making happened.
"If you knowingly use kitsch you’re getting into the area we call ‘camp’ which comes with a large degree of sarcasm / mockery / irony."
You have me thinking about the idea that camp is intentional kitsch. Camp, as we know, is associated with a certain type of person that enjoys making fun of the kind of people who like kitsch. It might be that camp is a farce about kitsch.
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