CHAINED TO THE GOAT-GOD OF ART

They invented perfect beauty, those ancient Greeks.

Of course people made beautiful things before the Greeks, but it was the Greeks who dreamed there could be a perfect version of beauty out there waiting to be attained.

Aristotle made the first serious attempt at defining "perfection" but even before him Pythagoras and other pre-Socratics speculated about an ideal beauty. They pursued it with the language of mathematics, asserting that objects look better when proportioned in accordance with the "golden ratio." They believed objects would appear more "complete" and "perfect" if they were symmetrical, with clean shapes in harmony with classical archetypes.



They hoped these principles would lead them to perfect beauty. Unfortunately, they didn't get very far before the goat-god yanked them back.

The Greeks were so confident that their culture was superior, imagine their surprise when the good citizens of Athens began to lose interest in high culture and stray back to the more earthy, passionate cults of their barbaric neighbors. Historian Arthur Koestler claims that Athenian gods lost their attraction as they became more formal and detached from base human emotions:

At an unknown date, but probably not much before the sixth century, the cult of Dionysus‑Bacchus, the 'raging' goat‑god of fertility and wine, spread from barbaric Thracia into Greece. The initial success of Bacchism was probably due to that general sense of frustration ... [that] the Olympian Pantheon had come to resemble an assembly of wax‑works, whose formalized worship could [not] satisfy truly religious needs.... A spiritual void tends to create emotional outbreaks; the Bacchae of Euripides, frenzied worshippers of the horned god....

The Greeks discovered that their lofty aspirations were chained to their earthy goat-god origins. High culture could only take them so close to "perfection" before they ran out of chain.


Greek poets bemoaned the effect of Bacchism on their womenfolk: "Theban women leaving/Their spinning and their weaving/Stung with the maddening trance/Of Dionysus!"

Today we still admire the Greeks' smooth, classical ideals of beauty but we too remain tethered to the goat-god part of our nature. Art becomes less satisfying as it becomes too orderly, smooth and formal. We cannot polish and refine our way to perfection; beyond a certain point, perfection begins to weaken art rather than strengthen it.

Koestler described how the savvy Greeks absorbed and blunted the threat of wild Bacchism:

The outbreak seems to have been sporadic and short‑lived. The Greeks, being Greeks, soon realized that these excesses led neither to mystic union with God, nor back to nature, but merely to mass-hysteria.... The authorities seemed to have acted with eminent reasonableness: they promoted Bacchus‑Dionysus to the official Pantheon with a rank equal to Apollo's. His frenzy was tamed, his wine watered down, his worship regulated, and used as a harmless safety‑valve.

The Greeks' wise technique for co-opting wildness is still employed by artists today. A carefully controlled picture often includes an uncontrolled splatter or eruption or rough line-- not enough to lose control of the picture, but enough to show that wildness still has a seat in the artist's pantheon:


Jeffrey Jones carefully captured facial features, but then indulged in a frenzy for her hair


Note how the great Ronald Searle gains power with from uncontrolled spatters and ink drops.



This sensitive portrait by Jack Unruh would not be nearly as potent if he had not gone back and roughed it up with that dense black and spattering.


Even the erudite Steinberg bows to the virility of non-cognitivism: he draws the icons of civilization with a light and lacy line, but adds strength with a rough, black scrape of a brush.

Pictures still pay tribute to the goat-god, and are rewarded with his strength and vitality

A FEW THOUGHTS ON AN EMPTY STUDIO

When the great illustrator Howard Pyle died in 1911, his heartbroken disciples gathered in his studio. Pyle had been a phenomenal creative force, the illustrator of over 125 books (24 of which he had written himself) and hundreds of stories in the most popular magazines of his day. Vivid images of pirates, knights, soldiers and lovers flowed from his boundless imagination.

Pyle's students struggled for some way to prolong their master's presence. One student, Ethel Leach, painted Pyle's studio exactly as he left it, with his last painting unfinished on his easel.



Another student, Frank Schoonover, took that final painting and attempted to put some finishing touches on it.



Other students went on to imitate Pyle's techniques or use the same paints. But his magic was gone, and nothing they did could prolong it. Pyle had tried his best to pass along his artistic secrets to his students, but no one really knew where his gift came from. No one could say whether it resided in his eyes or his fingers or his brushes while he was alive. Now, no one could extend it after his death.

Comic artist Jack Kirby worked at this ratty, stained drawing board next to this crummy, battered credenza.



He stared at that brick wall and summoned up thousands of images of Norse gods in ornate armor, intergalactic empires swarming with alien creatures, super heroes and cosmic villains. The images he composed on this worn piece of lumber entranced millions. Then Kirby too was gone. Without his spark, Kirby's studio seems so sodden and inert we can scarcely believe it was ever the platform for such creativity. Whatever the source of Kirby's greatness, it won't be found amongst the tools and furniture he left behind.

Like Pyle or Kirby, Bernie Fuchs was another radiant sun orbited by epigones and myrmidons over his long career. Fuchs too kept coming up with fresh and beautiful ideas that none of his imitators could match, despite their long hours trying to duplicate his approach. If they went to his cluttered studio on the day he died and searched for clues in what Fuchs left behind, they'd be no closer to understanding the magic ingredient.



His empty studio, without his creative presence, has a particularly hollow echo.

Yesterday, the great Frank Frazetta passed away. Over a long career he used his formidable talent to create persuasive worlds of sorcerers and barbarians-- worlds where the four points on the compass were heroism, strength, adventure and great asses on women. What could be better than that?

Frazetta's hundreds of imitators wished they could inhabit that world but their colors were somehow never as perfect, their reptilian gods were never as convincing, their compositions were never as dramatic, their poses were never as striking.

If you look for the magic ingredient that distinguished Frazetta from his peers, you won't find any clues left behind in his studio.



Art like Frazetta's should have been created in a cave with flaming torches and skulls. Instead, it was created in a messy little room by a grandfather wearing short sleeve polyester shirts over his paunch, an artist who spilled coffee on his work as he raced to make deadlines. Frazetta's studio, like the studios of other great creators before him, was a place where a temporary and unexplainable breach in the laws of physics permitted true alchemy to occur. When the creative presence was extinguished, the familiar laws of physics closed in once again, and now weigh more heavily on us in that spot than they did before.

Co-posted with my friends at Tor.com.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 31

Watch the design skills of the legendary Alex Toth in action.



Here, Toth had to squeeze a complex, vertical scene (an unscrupulous dealer in antiquities negotiating with a smuggler) into a tiny, horizontal space. He had to juggle an excess of dialogue. He needed to convey details about the nature of the character (so a drawing of small figures in a room would not do).

Many people think the artificial constraints of the comics medium-- size limits, word balloons, panel borders-- deprive artists of the freedom necessary for a legitimate art form.

But in any art medium, freedom (in the words of Sartre) is merely "what you do with what's been done to you."

I love Toth's imaginative solution to his challenges. Rather than whining about all that text, or using his constraints as an excuse for a weak drawing, look how Toth seizes on those constraints and incorporates them in a beautiful design, especially the aggressive way he loops the connections between those word balloons and the speakers.

This is a lovely drawing by a talented, tough pro.

STEINBERG'S CLOUDS

The great Saul Steinberg never learned to paint clouds.

Compare Steinberg to English landscape painter John Constable, who became famous for painting clouds using techniques he developed through careful research. Constable's approach was based on his philosophy, "you only see something truly when you understand it."

Perhaps Steinberg smiled in doubt at Constable's notion that we can ever "truly" understand clouds. An artist with boundless curiosity, Steinberg worked in a state of perpetual inquiry and never found a formula for clouds that satisfied him for long:


All images © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Most artists refine their techniques over their careers, eventually settling on an approach that satisfies them. For example, Rubens gradually developed his distinctive treatment of human flesh until he settled on his mature style. Winslow Homer slowly mastered his famous approach to painting water. Georgia O'Keefe improved her method of painting flowers, each stage building on the last, until she arrived at the approach for which she is known today. But Steinberg's mind was too restless to linger over polishing his technique. Concepts interested him more than implementation, and he refined his technique just far enough to diagram those concepts.

Look at his wild, anarchistic variety of clouds.  Each picture views clouds with new eyes:

















At an age when other artists worked hard to discipline their perceptions of the physical world, Steinberg's perceptions snuck out the back door to elope with his conceptions. You see the fruits of their marriage all over these pictures.
 


How can we take Steinberg seriously when his pictures all look so playful?

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz imagined the wild fun at the beginning of the universe when the gods began creating something from nothing. Milosz asks us to envision the hilarity when the celestial "Board of Projects" invented such things as hedgehogs:

Celestials at the Board of Projects burst into laughter,
For one of them has designed a hedgehog,
Another, not to be left behind, a soprano....

It is superb fun in the ocean of seething energy...
Buckets of protocolors gurgle, protobrushes labor,
A mighty whirl of almost galaxies beyond nearly windows
And pure radiance that has never experienced clouds.

They blow conchs, somersault in protospace....
The earth is practically ready...and every single creature
Waits for its name....

To invent length, width, height,
Two times two and force of gravity
Would be quite enough, but on top of it panties
With lace, a hippopotamus, the beak of a toucan,
A chastity belt with its terrible teeth,
A hammerhead shark, a visored helmet,
Plus time, that is, a division into was and will be.

Gloria, gloria sing objects called to being.
Hearing them, Mozart sits down at the pianoforte
And composes music that has been ready
Before he himself was born in Salzburg.

I tell you friends, when Steinberg calls clouds into being it's a goddamn exhilarating thing.

WORKING DRAWINGS

Watch the great Dean Cornwell collect the information he will need for a painting.



Cornwell has drawn thousands of hands in thousands of pictures, yet look how hard he still works to get the facts right:



The information in this drawing is different from the type of information that could be collected by a camera. Here is where Cornwell starts to select and digest certain facts to assimiliate them in his own personal style. Here is where he finds the contours of his future design. Here is where he establishes priorities.



Fritz Eichenberg once said, "what makes an artist create in his own particular style is an indefinable gift, almost a state of grace."

Maybe so, but I especially like preliminary sketches where you can see honest artists put that "state of grace" to practical use constructing a picture the way a carpenter might use tools to build a house. I love the candor and unpretentiousness of working drawings. Here is a nice selection by some extremely talented artists:


Frank Frazetta tries out two different positions for the leg of this rider. Yet, his attention always seems to stray back to the same thing...


In the final version of this image, Bernie Fuchs' lines will seem very spontaneus and natural. But here you see him explore, at a slower pace, how the width and variety of lines might work out.


Here, William A. Smith was not content with the break in the crease on that pants leg, so he went back and did it again. Below, we see him going back with white paint to reshape the lights and shadows in a dynamic fight scene.





This is a preliminary study by Oberhardt for an ad for Fatima cigarettes. Despite the briskness of the drawing, he manages to capture a surprising amount of the subtlety of the form. But he is clearly not collecting information the way Cornwell was (note the difference in the treatment of the hand). Instead, Oberhardt's primary interest is in the overall shape of the lights and darks.


Like many artists, Oberhardt apparently continued to work on images in the back of his mind even while he was reading the newspaper.

This concept sketch by Rockwell may be tiny, but he meticulously plans all of the ingredients of a Post cover, including his signature and the trademark Post bars.

I love the vigor of this sketch of Katie Couric by Thomas Fluharty. It may seem as if he drew it at 90 miles an hour, but look at how he slammed on the brakes to capture the information he wanted about those teeth.

Another terrific example from Fluharty, cut and pasted with no pretensions. Look at the bold use of that soft charcoal to take chances with the shape of Obama's cheeks or ears. Yet, observe how he came back with a computer to test color and add such insightful expression to those eyes.

There are many interesting stopping points on the road to a completed picture. In recent posts, we have spent a lot of time discussing critics, curators and gallery owners who project their fanciful notions of what the artist had in mind. As far as I am concerned, the most reliable way to discern the inner thoughts of an artist is to spend some time with the working drawings that led up to the final product.

A HAND, AN EYE AND A PIECE OF CHARCOAL

Last week we enjoyed the work of glitzy art superstar Jeff Koons, who employs a factory of artists to create his supersized art. Koons is famous not for his personal hand or eye, but for his "enigmatic otherness" which conceives wry social statements (which others then execute in the form of giant balloon animals).

This week, for a change of pace, we leave Koons and look instead at a talented artist.

This lovely drawing is by the illustrator William Oberhardt.



Oberhardt did not specialize in wry social statements. He did not write the specifications for teams of workers to produce huge ironic paintings. Instead, he specialized in taking a single piece of charcoal in his own hand and drawing portraits which combined sensitivity with boldness and vitality.



After my last post about Oberhardt, I was fortunate to be contacted by his family. Today's images are from their personal collection.



To get a sense for the strength of this drawing, take a closer look at some of the details:




You can't achieve this kind of power if you stop to draw the eyelashes.
In the next picture, note how Oberhardt's hand floated above the picture, alighting from time to time apply darks for emphasis. These strange jottings are the language of visual abstraction:



It's a language I like.

So much of contemporary art is dependent on concepts and ideas for its validity. Armies of critics, pedants and grad students armed with thesauruses compete to explain the meaning of such art (and thereby demonstrate their own sensitivity). If you linger too long in front of their carnival booth, they will trap you into endless discussions of why an object is different, or more complex, or better than it looks.

I confess I like some of that art, and have even written some of that pedantic persiflage myself. But when I step back, no matter how immense or shiny or expensive it is, art that must be propped up with words seems etiolated in comparison to what an artist can achieve with just a hand, an eye and a piece of charcoal.

The great Walt Whitman put verbal rationalizations in perspective:

I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,
Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the earth.

THREE THINGS I LIKE ABOUT JEFF KOONS

Has every bad thing that can possibly be said about the art of Jeff Koons been said already?

It is worth revisiting this question at regular intervals because you don't want to let an opportunity go by. You never know when someone might invent a new word for "stinks."

There are many reasons for disliking Koons' work. My personal favorite is that he pilfers images from honest, underpaid commercial artists, sprinkles them with an invisible layer of irony and resells them as "fine" art for huge sums.

Nevertheless, a person would need a pretty good excuse to expend fresh energy attacking Koons' work. By now most sensible people recognize that Koons' true talent lies only in his ability to mesmerize the tasteless rich. To revisit such well trod criticisms might cause one to be ejected from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Horses.

Well, here at the good ol' Illustration Art blog, we believe in accentuating the positive, so I have attempted to come up with three reasons to like Koons' work:

Reason no. 1: I like his attitude. Koons seems to have genuine fun with what he is doing. He takes explicit photographs of himself having sex with a porn star and displays them to the world. He spends lavishly on art by artists with more talent (but less marketing skill) than himself. He lives life large, taking full advantage of his superstar status. It's difficult not to respect that.

Cheeky, sold for $4 million

Reason no. 2: He inspires others to new heights of creativity. Koons' work is so bad, his marketing machine is forced to be highly imaginative to persuade people to buy such twaddle. Take for example the following frothy persiflage from Sotheby's shameless Alex Trotter promoting the sale of the painting "Cheeky:"

An outstanding example of [Koons'] satirical commentary on late 20th-century society, this work has his traits of technical excellence and common subject matter while invoking lingering questions of irony versus sincerity-- what is the intent of the artist? Is he serious or is there an element of mockery? This oil on canvas work is composed of disconnected images and high definition colors, executed with photorealistic perfection. The random association of food, landscape and sex is a metaphor for the bombardment of stimuli present in modern life, while the size and fragmentation of the images further impedes their comprehension.

Trotter bastes the painting with irony like a pastry glaze, preparing it for consumption by investment bankers (who only achieved their rank in life by being impervious to genuine irony). Koons of course insists that there is no irony or agenda beneath the surface of his images-- that is, until someone sues his ass for copyright infringement, at which point he reverses himself and swears under oath that his work was not theft because it was intended as a "parody." See, for example, Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992); See also UFS Inc. v. Koons, 817 F. Supp 370 (S.D.N.Y. 1993); Campbell v. Koons, No. 91 Civ. 6055, 1993 WL 97381 (S.D.N.Y. Apr 1, 1993).

Reason no. 3: Koons' art performs an important social function. A private art market within a free society is one of the most finely tuned instruments for exposing the morons among us.  Art is so broad and subjective, and means such different things to different people, it is almost impossible to find an objective truth in art.  Koons' art can fill this vacuum, serving as an objective, unerring compass needle for identifying decadence and bad taste.  The Koons needle is not misled by commercial success; it is not confused by Wall Street quants who have outsourced their taste to consultants. It performs a valuable social function by pointing out those art "experts" who gush about the enigmatic otherness of a puppy dog sculpture, and who persuade credulous corporate moguls that if they spend millions on such crap they will be entitled to brag (as Mr. Brandt did recently), "my whole philosophy of life revolves around aesthetics."  With Koons as our lodestone, we will always have a surefire detector of artistic fraudsters.

The lesson of today's post is: you might not think it is possible to find something good to say about Koons, but if you keep a positive mental attitude, you can find some good in everyone.

GIRLS GATHERING FLOWERS

The surest way to breach the dividing line between gods and mortals is with girls gathering flowers by a stream.

Vassar college girls practicing their Greek dances, circa 1923

When mighty Zeus spied the beautiful Europa picking flowers by a river, he fell crazy in love and-- adopting the shape of a white bull-- carried Europa off across the waters to Crete (causing pandemonium amongst both mortals and gods).

Titian

Zeus and Europa gave birth to three legendary children and gave rise to the continent of Europe, a moon of Jupiter named for Europa, and a constellation of stars named for Taurus (the bull).

Who would have guessed that a simple girl gathering flowers in a meadow would transform the stars?

The story of Europa and the Bull is hardly unique. Roberto Calasso observed that gods have repeatedly been lured down from heaven by girls picking flowers:

How did it all begin? A group of girls were playing by the river gathering flowers. Again and again such scenes were to prove irresistible to the gods. Persephone was carried off "while playing with the girls with the deep cleavages." She too was gathering flowers... mainly narcissi, "that wondrous, radiant flower, awesome to the sight of gods and mortals alike." Thalia was playing ball in a field of flowers on the mountainside when she was clutched by an eagle's claws: Zeus again. Creusa felt Apollo's hands lock around her wrists as she bent to pick saffron on the slopes of the Athens Acropolis.

And those were only the beginning. In the tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Roman god of love broke the rules by falling in love with the mortal Psyche who, depending on the version of the story you read, was either picking flowers or receiving flowers given in tribute to her beauty.

Cupid and Psyche by Bouguereau

Meanwhile, over in Mexico the gods spied Princess Iztacihuatl taking "long walks picking flowers along...a lovely mountain spring" and were so smitten that when she came to a tragic end, the gods intervened and "turned her into a beautiful white mountain to watch over the Mexica people and bring joy to their sight with her beauty."

Princess Iztacihuatl and her mountain

Why do gods repeatedly abandon heaven to chase after mortal girls picking flowers? The gods are clearly unimpressed by earthly assets such as power or wealth, yet they are moved by the most gentle, delicate things-- sunlight on a particular face, or flowers in someone's hair-- to come down to earth and wreak havoc, creating whole mountains or scattering constellations across the night sky.

Sometimes things that seem small and mortal are in reality immense and divine. It's just that they can only be experienced in small and mortal increments.

You may wonder why any of this is relevant to a blog about art (apart from the fact that this is the first week of spring and at such a season, no topic other than girls and flowers is conceivable).

The answer is that the same types of inspiration that lure gods down from the heavens seem to raise artists up to divine heights.   Titian's loving depiction of Europa, her thighs spread and her helpless arms flailing, is nothing short of exquisite.  

In fact, history is full of scruffy lowlife artists who were inspired by  girls and flowers to create timeless works of beauty.  When Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy, first saw his beloved Beatrice he felt certain that a god had come to earth. He famously declared, "Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi" (Behold, a god stronger than I, who coming, shall rule over me.) There's that crazy multiplier again: a humble artist's brief glimpse of a (probably not very bright) teenage girl sparks one of the greatest works of literature in the history of the world.

Such transformations by artists might even be more miraculous than Zeus transforming another of his mortal lovers, Callisto, into the stars of the heavens.

Artist Gaston Lachaise spotted a woman he declared his "goddess" when she was strolling through gardens by the river Seine. He (accurately) said, she “immediately became the primary inspiration which awakened my vision...." (and transformed him from a bum to an internationally renowned artist). Bonnard spotted a young woman who made wreaths and who went on to transform his artwork and his life. Gustav Klimt's affair with a housewife led to a $135 million portrait (the most expensive painting in history up to the time of the sale) and a quarrel among nations. Time and again the smallest, humblest most mortal experiences are transformed by this thaumaturgic process into something universal and divine.

Experiences that blur the dividing line between gods and mortals can be so slight and unobtrusive they sometimes escape the attention of humans, but it's pretty darn clear they haven't escaped the attention of the gods.

It's springtime. Pay attention.