How Creation Happens

I began to understand how creation happens a long time ago.  While I attended classes at the BarnesFoundation in the 1970’s, I taught the children enrolled in my painting classes what I learned each week. Everything Violette de Mazia and Angelo Pinto taught me, I taught them.

 

 

During one class, as an example of creative distortion in portraiture, I showed them this Picasso picture: 

Picasso,Portrait of Madame H.P. (Hélène Parmelin),

Collection Edouard Pignon, 1952

They hated it.

(Those of you diligently reading these posts will recall I spoke about this picture before in “What to Look for in Art, Cont’d.”  Click here to reread it.  You are right if you conclude this story gets better every time I tell it).

My then 8-year-old daughter Alisa declared it the “ugliest woman she had ever seen.”

I valiantly tried to show that the picture orchestrated color on a flat surface; no woman was sitting there.  I showed them the color patterns: the overlapping bands of hair, the repeated lines in the blouse and skirt, the drama of the spatial rhythms.

They refused to budge.  They renamed it “Spaghetti Hair,” and they left that day mumbling about how artists could make such disgusting pictures and still get famous.

Months later, as they made pictures using two Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls placed on a chair, I watched as my daughter created this watercolor:

When I complimented her on her adaptation of the visual ideas I showed her in the Picasso portrait, she angrily replied: “What Picasso portrait?”

“The one I showed you months ago,” I sweetly responded.  “The one you called ‘Spaghetti Hair.’”

“Oh, that one,” she said.  “Never. I never would do anything like Picasso did.  I hate that picture.  My picture is exactly what I see, exactly the way the dolls look.  I don’t make ugly pictures.”

This, in essence, is how an artist creates.

She made her picture, whether she acknowledged this or not, by the possibilities Picasso’s picture presented her.  No one else in her class overlapped the banded strands of hair into spatial patterns; no one else brought the back legs of the chair into the frontal plane; no one else constructed spatial rhythms.  No one else in that class, in other words, tried to adapt Picasso’s discoveries to their own expressive needs.  That takes a spark of originality and courage, an ability to make connections.

Whether she “liked” Picasso’s picture or not, he provided new visual ideas she needed.  She manipulated her means (color, light, line, space) and re-worked her subject (the dolls on the chair) based on Picasso’s visual ideas (which he derived from African sculpture and cubism—aka the traditions), and she made HER picture. 

My daughter-in-law did something similar with a clothesbasket.  On a snowy day, she wanted to take my then 5-month-old grandson for a sleigh ride, but she did not have a sled with a seat, and he could not yet sit up himself.  She did have a plastic clothesbasket. 

She lined it with large plastic garbage bags, stuffed it with blankets, attached a rope to one end of it, dressed him in his snowsuit, and off they went.

Think of it this way: Cezanne asks his wife to pose for him.  He looks at his wife, but he wants a solid, weighty, set, powerful, volume to zigzag in and out in space.  That’s what interests him.  So he adapts Michelangelo’s bigness and power, the arid, restrained, color of the Florentines in general, and the solid, massive, stable and rugged qualities of early Egyptian sculpture.  The resulting picture expresses solidity, monumentality, rigidity, and power equivalent to the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Cezanne, Woman in a Green Hat, 1894-95, Barnes

I bet you are now asking this question: you mean an artist consciously thinks about this?

Some do, many do not.  However, all artists, in every medium of expression, build on the work of previous artists.  This is no different from scientists studying literature housing the discoveries in their field, and then experimenting to add their findings to it.  It is what we mean when we say “pushing the envelope.”  For visual artists, it means using relevant ideas from the traditions of art to help them say what they have to say.

USE is the operative word, not steal or copy.

In these next posts, I will ask you to determine the sources in the traditions as an additional element in your analyses of each work of art.

I ask you to do this for two reasons: (1) when we understand how and why an artist adapts relevant visual ideas from other artists, we determine originality; and (2) when we can articulate an artist’s adaptations, we make specific for ourselves exactly what we are seeing and others can verify the accuracy of our perceptions.

To get started, here is your assignment.

Examine this painting, My Father, the Bishop, by Edward L. Loper, Sr. 

Edward L. Loper, Sr., My Father, the Bishop, 1975,

  Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, University of Delaware Collection

List everything you see.

If you wish to share your list, send it to me here by e-mail or insert it as a comment at the end of this post.

Next week, I will summarize your responses.  Then I will explore the visual ideas Ed Loper used, what he achieved by using them, and what he gave back that makes his picture creative.

Seeing is Believing, Part II

Thank you to all who responded to my contest.  Given this hot summer, I am impressed so many of you were willing to ponder the question I asked.

Diana Myers-Bennett Roberts won the prize for the following essay:

If I see a painting on a gallery wall and, without seeing the label, I instantly recognize its author, then I give kudos to that painter. My assumption is that, whether I like or dislike the work, the consistency of expression on that artist's canvas indicates that it comes from within. 

Twombly's "scribbles" are unique and easily recognizable. Poussin's paintings stand out as uniquely his as well. Among narrative painters of Poussin's era, few can fill a canvas with his combined delicacy and fluid energy that rises above the event being depicted.

Beyond recognition of the art of each painter, there is little I find to compare and only lots to contrast. The classicism claimed by Twombly's titles and words subtly inscribed among his gestural pencil-like doodles do not classicism make. Without labels, Iliad, Odyssey, Arcadia are not there. Twombly fails to convey through his chosen medium what he claims to be depicting.

Poussin, on the other hand, paints bodies that would easily translate into Greek statues. But he gives us much more than the classic beauty of the human figure. By modeling his figures with light and shadow and color, and diffusing them with the delicate energy unique to his style, Poussin has created paintings that are a pleasure to dwell on. 

While Twombly's canvases have an overall sameness and flatness that is frankly boring, Poussin creates areas of dark and light, lines that vary in intensity and in curviness, and a handling of paint that is masterful.

 "Even in Arcadia I exist" may be taken to suggest that some things will not stand the test of time. I predict that Twombly's work will be soon stored in a cabinet of oddities.

Consider Diana’s main argument: “Twombly fails to convey through his chosen medium what he claims to be depicting.”

Not so, Poussin.  While Poussin adapted visual ideas of the Italian Renaissance, he gave back to that tradition a unique lightness of color, airiness in space, and a novel rhythm in the distribution of masses. 

Miss de Mazia described the process this way: an artist goes to the bank of visual ideas (a k a The Traditions of Art) and borrows from it.  He then MUST pay back his debt with INTEREST (a k a his personal vision). 

When we determine exactly what an artist borrowed and how he adapted it (adapted it, not adopted it), we then can evaluate the level of creativity of that artist.  

 Let’s turn Poussin’s painting upside down and examine it:

Poussin, Arcadian Shepherds, inverted

1.     The figures, while closely grouped, exhibit graceful and subtle intervals of space varied in position and height. 

2.     Look at the spaces between the legs, for instance, and you will see gentle movement in and out of space created by light and dark and by nuances of color (look particularly at the light orange lines edging the two men’s legs).  Look at the serpentine curves of the legs and arm.

Poussin, Arcadian Shepherds, inverted, detail

3.     Examine how the long arm and twisted back of the sitting figure curves back into space and, because of its illumination, pushes back the other three figures.

4.     Notice how the background tree connects with the sitting figure in a rippling curve, connecting the figure’s backbone and side to the background with a dark/light rhythm.

5.     Now notice how that dark/light rhythm connects the sky with its horizontal peach-colored clouds to the clothing folds, the highlights on the jug, the spilling water, even the ripples of muscle on the sitting figure’s back.  Follow the whites: the highlights on the jug and water; the sitting man’s head; the folds of the woman’s garment; the edges of the clouds.

6.     All the areas in this painting harmonize with adjacent areas and into the far recesses of space. The color flows from one figure to another, aided by the serpentine line and rhythms of light. 

7.     The entire picture displays a gentle, pervasive glow.

8.     Forget the subject for now, and enjoy the lightness of each glowing color mass, the delicate solidity and glow of the color volumes, the gracefulness of the rhythms around the central masses, the clean-cut planes of the lighted and shaded color-areas of the fabric and flesh folds.

Given all this, Dr. Barnes argues Poussin was rather “the last of the Renaissance than a constructive factor in post-Renaissance painting. . . .This general classic and Renaissance feeling makes Poussin seem less modern than his contemporaries, Rembrandt, Claude, and Velásquez, or even Rubens. Poussin must be considered as a fine flower of the Renaissance, to the traditions of which he added a quality of choiceness made up of charm, suavity, and delicacy reinforced by strength.”

In other words, as Diana argued, Poussin contributed specific, identifiable and important visual ideas to the traditions of art.  Remove the subjects he used, and his pictures exhibit individual creations grounded in the Italian Renaissance, French in spirit and equally Poussin.

While Twombly may have wished to be Poussin, or to have lived in Poussin’s world, his work shows no visual connection.  He does not create masses, structural or otherwise.  His color does not glow or charm.  His lines do not curve or become rhythmic. Every reason given for the comparison of their work has nothing to do with the medium of painting, color, and everything to do with what is outside the medium, coincidence and marketing.

 
In the next few posts, I will explore how an artist creates by using the traditions of art and how we evaluate his achievement.  I will do so by examining the work of Edward L. Loper, Sr.

Seeing is Believing

In the last post, “The Comb in the Museum,” I described the differences among works of art, art, andeveryday experiences.  I suspect I do not have to convince you, the dedicated readers of these posts, that your own perceptive analysis of a work of art will produce aesthetic understanding of the color statement embedded in its subject.

That said, I also suspect you may still have questions about how to assess creativity or determine originality.

I have not directly tackled these concepts yet, although I have hinted at them.

I wrote this post because I recently read a piece in the New York Times that said Cy Twombly (who died this past Tuesday, July 5) was influenced by Nicolas Poussin. It said that the two artists had the following in common:

1.     Each artist was around 30 when he moved to Rome: Poussin in 1624 and Twombly in 1957.

2.     Each spent a majority of his life in Italy and became a famous painter of his era.

3.     When each was 64, he created canvases of the four seasons.

4.     Poussin is one of Twombly’s heroes.

5.     Twombly’s painting, Arcadia, made in 1958, features the word Arcadia scrawled across the canvas.

6.     Poussin’s painting, Arcadian Shepherds, from about 1628, depicts shepherds coming across a sarcophagus and deciphering the inscription etched on it, “Et in Arcadia Ego” (even in Arcadia, I exist). 

7.     Nicholas Cullinan, curator of international modern art at Tate Modern, who curated the Twombly retrospective there in 2008, said both artists “are dealing with death’s omnipresence in life.”

The idea for the current exhibit of work of Poussin and Twombly at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London originated with Cullinan who said Twombly spoke of Poussin repeatedly.  Twombly is quoted as saying, “I would have liked to have been Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time.”

Perhaps Woody Allen will write a sequel to “Midnight in Paris” and portray Twombly slipping back into the seventeenth century so he can meet his idol.

I ask you to examine the following two paintings.  Write an objective analysis comparing and contrasting them.  Send me your response via e-mail (click here for address).  I will select one response, post it here (with your permission), and mail the writer a copy of my book Edward L. Loper, Sr.: The Prophet of Color.

The deadline for your entry is July 21.

Since both images are digital reproductions, take into consideration the impossibility of seeing the nuances of tiny detail—scratches, penciled fragments, etc.—in Twombly’s picture.  I am asking you to consider objectively the reasons given for the comparison of these two artist’s work.  If you think they are good reasons, say why.  If you think they are not, say why not.

Here are the pictures:

Nicolas Poussin, Arcadian Shepherds (Et in Arcadia Ego)

1630, Oil on canvas, Chadsworth (Derbyshire)

Collection of the Duke of Devonshire

  

Cy Twombly, Arcadia, 1958, Oil-based house paint, wax crayon,

                                                    coloured pencil, lead pencil on canvas, Daros Collection,

                                                Switzerland

Once I post the response, and you have a chance to review it, I will begin a series of posts describing the role the traditions of art play in the development of an artist’s form.  I will use Edward L. Loper, Sr.’s paintings as the objects of study.

The Comb in the Museum

 During a class this past spring, I assigned Harry Sefarbi’s essay, “The Clue to Klee,” (The Barnes Foundation Journal of the Art Department, Spring 1972, Vol. III, No. 1, pp.27-44) because one of my students, as her final project, studied Klee’s painting Animal Terror in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I had no idea the resulting debate would not be about Klee’s picture but about Duchamp’s Comb.

Sefarbi’s essay begins with his description of a class he taught at the Barnes Foundation.  He asked his students if they had seen the Marcel Duchamp “Comb-in-the-Museum” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  He then took out a pocket comb and told them, “Duchamp’s comb is a comb as this is a comb.”  He went on to say his comb had form, shape, pattern, unity, variety—all characteristics of art objects. 

Sefarbi then listed the aspects of a work of art: a work of art is creative (shows us something never before seen in this way); a work of art is unique; a work of art expresses the aesthetic visual meaning of an artist’s experience—all attributes I have discussed in these posts. Sefarbi concluded that Duchamp was largely concerned with stunts.  He said, “‘The Comb in the Museum,’ ‘The Cubes in the Cage,’ ‘The Wheel on the Stool,’— [were] stunts that are at once comical and mischievous, absurd, and extravagant.  Although intending to nip and tease, he [succeeded] only at being obscure because the meaning is not in the object but, rather, in the situation. . . the comb removed from the museum reverts to its combness and loses its satiric meaning, because the situation has been destroyed.” He bolstered this conclusion by reviewing the tenets of dada, “ready-mades,” “found objects,” and surrealism.

Then, in 19 footnotes at the end of the essay, Sefarbi objectively described the meaning in Klee’s painting, “This Flower will Fade,” showing how a work of art differs from Duchamp’s Comb. Take Klee’s painting out of the museum or stuff it in a closet or use it as a placemat, it remains Klee’s “This Flower will Fade.”  Its meaning is in it.

One of my students felt “irritated” by Sefarbi’s conclusion, saying he missed the aesthetic value in the “comb.” She rightly argued that ordinary things possess aesthetic qualities, and the objective method teaches us how to appreciate the art in everyday things as well as in paintings, sculptures, etc.  

I have no argument with this.

However, I do have an argument with this statement: “Sefarbi’s dismissal of the possibility of any visual aesthetic (i.e., “art”) in the Duchamp comb, on the grounds that it was utilitarian and ubiquitous and found on the street, is wrong.  Sefarbi said, just because an object is in a museum, that does not make it per se “art,” but I could not find any justification for his presumption of the corollary: that just because a utilitarian and multiply reproduced object is not in a museum, it is per se “not art.”

This brings us right back to that pesky question: what is art?

To address this question, I will distinguish between “art in” something (like a football pass, a teapot, or a beetle shell) and a work of art.

Here’s why.

During my class, the “comb” debate focused on the comb my husband supplied from his pocket.

Here are two digital images of it:

Don’s Comb, scünci Firm and Flexible ®, Walgreens, 2010

My student wrote this statement as a follow up to the class discussion.  In it, she makes an apt comparison between this Google digital image I had e-mailed to all the students after the class and Don's comb: 

The comb in class had a kind of architectural elegance and simple grace.  The play of graceful lines and shapes was reinforced by its plain solid black color.  The top part of the comb is wider in the middle and the ends taper more gently as they bend and sweep down to the bottom of the teeth, enveloping and containing the teeth section on the two sides.  This substantial top piece is sensuously rounded and more voluminous.  This elongated volume formed along its edges mirrored parallel sweeping, gently curving lines tapering along the top and then flowing in a continuous volume where they progressively narrowed down on the sides to the bottom of the teeth.  This curving elongated voluptuous volume was juxtaposed against and enveloped the series of close formation marching uniform straight lines of the teeth.  The length of the teeth with their overall delicate linear texture, taken as a whole shape, were a perfectly balanced equivalent against the narrower size of the solid voluptuously curving top/side piece. 

The teeth in the class comb were all the same width from each other, whereas the ones in the picture I think are two different widths apart, a fairly typical comb feature.  Even though there is overall more variety (different width of the spaces between the teeth, top broken into two crescent shapes) than the comb in class, I would agree the comb in the picture just does not do much for me…it could be monotony, but I think that it is related to the fact the overall comb lacks aesthetic line and shape.  I do not get grace, elegance, or anything else like that from it.  The teeth in the comb in class were totally uniform, so you could say that was monotonous, but I did not feel that.  Rather, the totality of the texture of the marching lines of teeth, balanced against and enveloped by the solid voluptuous elongated roundness and taper of the top/sides, were an exquisite balance of equivalents—an elegant simplicity of line and shape. I do not think that it is a question of the amount of unity and variety….as in more is better…but rather the composition as a whole.

A mind educated by the objective method can see art in a grain of sand.  This is a good thing.

Rather than re-state all the points I have already described in these posts, I will add only this: a work of art is something made and in it lives the meaning of an aesthetic experience.  If the maker is a visual artist, he records an aesthetic visual experience by transforming it into a picture (color on a flat surface).  When we learn how to read color, we discover and understand the visual message.  As a result, we learn a new way of seeing.  The work of art has no practical use or significance or, as I have said before, is good for nothing but that delicious aesthetic feeling that accompanies full understanding.  Artists plumb the essential meaning of life and express that meaning in clear and understandable terms via a medium of expression.

For instance:

Dorothy Wordsworth (William’s sister) took a walk with him one day, and she wrote this in her journal:

... When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side.  We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up.  But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.  I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.  This wind blew directly over the lake to them.  There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway.  We rested again and again.  The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea. (Journals, Thursday, 15 April, 1802, Oxford University Press, 1958. Reprinted in Eyewitness to History, John Carey Avon Books, 1987, pp. 257-258).

William wrote “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” a poem:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in a never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay;
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Dorothy had an experience, and she reported its salient features.  William transformed the meaning of his aesthetic experience into a medium of expression, poetry.  He perceived meaning, he mastered the art form called poetry, he learned poetic traditions and adapted those that suited his interest, and he recorded in word sounds (the medium of poetry) the meaning he discovered as he encountered a field of daffodils.  He also freely borrowed some of Dorothy’s perceptions.  I say borrowed, not stole, because he paid back everything he used with interest: his images, his meter, his rhyme, his rhythms, his perceptions. 

Compare these two pictures:                                          

Wassily Kandinsky, Circles in a Circle, 1923, PMA,

                            © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris       

Mineralogie, fabrique de la poudre a canon,

1770, Hagley Library

                                                                                                                        

One is an engineering drawing for the making of gunpowder.  The painting is by Kandinsky.

The engineering drawing, like the comb, is a practical thing.  It, like the comb, has aesthetic qualities.  In fact, many of my students argue it equals the Kandinksy in aesthetic interest.  However, Kandinsky organizes his color units, not to show us how to build a machine, but to invite us to explore the qualities expressed through the relationships created by color, light, line, and space and their organization into a coherent visual idea.  When I asked you to consider how does a picture mean, I asked you to do just this.  Discovering the how is an adventure in perception or, as John Dewey calls it, an experience. 

To put it more simply, one of my students said: “Duchamp did not make the comb. Therefore, it is not a work of art.” 

Or as Sefarbi said, take the comb out of the museum, it reverts back to being an ordinary comb, not a work of art, no matter how much pleasure looking at it may provide. 

Another way to think about this is to consider the arrangement of the collection of paintings, antique furniture, ironwork, and other objects in the Barnes Foundation.   Dr. Barnes does include everyday things and manufactured things in the collection. However, the aesthetic content of these objects are in the objects; their meaning does not result from the fact that Barnes collected them and placed them in his galleries.  In other words, there is “art in” them.

Violette de Mazia sums up the difference this way:

From its inception, then, the Foundation’s collection was intended to serve the purpose not of a museum, but of a particular kind of school—a drastic difference: a museum strives, as a rule, to acquire representative examples of as many periods of art, as many artists, as many “isms,” etc., as it can and exhibits its acquisitions, for the most part, according to the historical niches in which they belong; a school such as The Barnes Foundation, in contrast, selects and assembles its materials primarily according to their ability to foster understanding of objective investigation and to help in demonstrating the principles of aesthetics.  (Vistas, 1981-1983, Vol. II, No. 2, p. 108)

I suspect if Dr. Barnes had a say in how the PMA displayed the Duchamp steel dog-grooming comb (see image below), he would place it near this High-Back Windsor Armchair, also known as a Comb-Back Armchair.  His intent would be to demonstrate transferred values, an educational principle intended to assist aesthetic appreciation.

High-Back Windsor Armchair (Comb-Back Armchair), 1750-70, American, PMA

                                                                                                                

Duchamp, Comb,1916, PMA, © 2011 Artists Right Society (ARS),

New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp

Finally, in an essay titled “Aesthetic Quality,” Violette de Mazia described a sunset.  For six pages, as her perceptions become more specific and meaningful, she shares her experience of this sunset, pressing out its meaning, thereby allowing us to understand what she found so interesting in it.  She concluded this way:

As I select the words, I further develop my own experience and clarify it; for I then undergo the effect of the words themselves, their pattern, their sound, their cadence, as well as their factual significance—as a painter, too, undergoes the effect of his dabs and a composer the effect of his musical sounds—and I foresee the consequences of my actions as the very experience of expressing unfolds.  In my experiencing the words, as in the painter’s experiencing the dabs, I may change them, alter their relationships according to the guiding interest, the intent, which in the process of the experience becomes clearer and clearer.  When I am through I may close the window and draw the shade, for I have, as an artist, embodied, give a body to, the meanings, the feelings, the identity born of my adventure in perception, my experience of the sunset.  I know more completely what my sunset is….

The artist is a teacher; he calls in the whole world of neighbors, to whom he reveals by his created piece what he discovered of aesthetic interest in his adventure in perception, what he re-created of broad human value and which, unaided by the artist’s coherent expression, no one could see so well, so fully, so richly, so specifically or, in fact, at all." (The Barnes Foundation Journal of the Art Department, Spring 1971, Vol. II, No. 1, pp. 6-13)

The next post challenges you to enter a contest. The contest asks you to analyze two paintings, and I promise to post the most objective, compelling response on this blog. I will also award a prize. I hope you will feel motivated to show how two artist's paintings help us see, as Miss de Mazia says, well, fully, richly, and specifically.

   

  

   

Loper's Link

In the previous post, you examined a Cézanne painting, The Allée of Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan.  

In this post, I will compare that Cézanne painting to one by Edward L. Loper, Sr.  In the spirit of full disclosure, however, I must tell you I know Ed Loper.  He taught me to paint, he insisted I attend Violette de Mazia’s class at the Barnes Foundation, and I wrote a book about his life and his work: Edward L. Loper, Sr.: The Prophet of Color.

That said, examine the following picture:

Loper, Tree Lined Street, Wawaset, 1999, Collection, the Artist

What do you see?

I suspect you readily agree that both artists started with strikingly similar subjects.  Let’s look at them side by side:

Cézanne, The Allée of Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan,
1888, Oil on canvas, Barnes Foundation       

Loper, Tree Lined Street, Wawaset, 1999, Collection, the Artist

Before you read any further, make a list of the differences you detect, and think about what those differences reveal about each artist’s design.

Here is my list:

1.     The Loper painting makes the Cézanne painting look dull, cold, and dry.

2.     The Cézanne painting expresses rigidity, power, weight, order, and massiveness while the Loper painting expresses warmth, glow, iridescence, colorfulness.

3.     Cézanne, as I described in the previous post, builds a dynamic relation of planes and solid color volumes in deep space.  Cézanne’s picture says solidity, weight, equilibrium, and balance, and you, the viewer, do not feel seduced by the illustrative aspect.  In other words, Cézanne’s picture reveals an austere, abstract composition of opposing forces not an orchestration of the charming qualities of sunshine sparkling through the foliage of trees. 

Let’s focus on the Loper picture.

Here it is upside down:

Loper, Tree Lined Street, inverted

And you thought you saw similarities between this picture and Cézanne’s, didn’t you? 

Upside down, Loper’s picture is not about planes and solid color volumes in deep space, is it?  In fact, deep space hardly enters the equation.  What we see is a colorful, glowing wedge now on the upper right that actually moves down into the foreground plane as much as it “points” back into a slice of space to the right of center.  This flattened wedge sets up a series of triangular units that all point to the two white rectangles buried behind the puff of brightly glowing “foliage.”

The four slim “tree trunks” now on the right hang from a strip of diagonal patches of viridian and yellow-orange, while the five to the left bend, and curl in an awkward dance in and behind floating tufts of rectilinear strips of cool cerulean blue, orange, gold, and green.  The cool/warm contrasts create an in and out pulse, like ripples in clouds.  You do see spaciousness, but the space happens in pockets, not in a deep, dramatic push as in the Cézanne.

Loper’s picture merges elements from Cézanne and, surprisingly, also from Renoir. I say surprisingly because, when I was studying with Loper, he praised Cézanne constantly, and he never had a good word to say about Renoir.  This caused numerous, heated arguments, especially after I had studied at the Barnes Foundation and had some ammunition to bolster my position. 

As you can deduce, I loved Renoir’s work.  Cézanne left me cold.

Now that I have studied Loper’s body of work, I can mark the transition from his powerful, dramatic, dark, cubistic and fractured earlier work and his relatively new (the change occurred  about 10 years ago) lighter, warmer, richer recent work.

The transition happened because Loper derived visual ideas from both of them, and has developed his aesthetic insight through this adaptation.

Here are a few examples of the Renoir adaptations.

Notice the application of the pigment in this detail of Loper's picture:

Loper, Tree Lined Street, detail

Loper applies color in small dabs—sometimes the dabs are dots; other times they have a boxy, square look.  Like Renoir, each color unit is made of multiple colors.  The tree trunk enlarged above is built out of dark red, blue, black, green on the left and light pink, ochre, beige, orange on the right.  Like Cézanne, a line compartmentalizes the vertical, solid, three-dimensional color unit.  Unlike Cézanne, the color unit sparkles and glows, as do the “shrubs” and “foliage” behind it.  Those color units of shrubs and foliage look soft as clouds.

Here is an enlargement of one of the Cézanne tree trunks: 

Cézanne, The Allée of Chestnut Trees, detail

 Cézanne’s “tree,” built out of both strips of vertical color bands as well as hatches of strokes, expresses a “pattern” of color units that are more angular than the Loper’s as well as less rich and glowing.  Line compartmentalizes the vertical, solid, rigid, units, setting each dramatically separate from the other because of the dark relationships of cool greens and blues between them.  Their repeated split branches stand like forked tongs.  The “foliage,” constructed out of the same hatched brushwork, moves in and out more like chiseled slate than rippling clouds. They march back in space.

For further verification, look at this paining by Renoir:

Renoir, Nourmotiers, 1892, Barnes Foundation

Here is an enlargement of the tree on the left:

Renoir, Nourmotiers, detail

You can see the multi-colorfulness of the tree trunk and branches.  The paint, applied in pulled ribbons of color, glow and sparkle.  The foliage organizes into soft tufts, cotton-ball like in their lightness.  Color shimmers from light within.  Some outlining of color units occurs, but mostly one color volume flows into another.  All the units gently curve.  Space recedes because of the peek-a-boo settings of color units and the pushback of the connecting tree units on the left and the right as they join the shadow in the foreground.

Consider the following:  Loper has merged visual ideas from both Renoir and Cézanne to which he has added qualities that have interested him throughout his long career (he is 95 years old and has been painting since he was 20). 

During the summer, I will explore Loper’s use of the traditions of art.  Understanding the role the traditions play helps us, the appreciators, determine creativeness.  Creativeness determines the level of an artist’s contribution.    

However, in the next post, I set the stage by returning to a familiar question: what is a work of art?