One of the many things triumphantly demonstrated by "Inventing Abstraction" is the sheer volume of second- and third-rate art... that was generated by the rise of the abstractionists. The imitability of so many key figures of the movement never ceases to fascinate me.If I were in NYC today, I would scamper over to see the big show before it closes. But I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, where the corresponding spectacle is "1934: A New Deal for Artists" at the Chazen Museum. Here's the museum's propaganda:
During the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “new deal for the American people,” initiating government programs to foster economic recovery. Realizing that Americans needed not only employment but also the inspiration art could provide, the administration created the Public Works of Art Project, the first federal program to support the arts. Although short-lived, the PWAP employed thousands of artists to paint regional, recognizable subjects—from portraits to cityscapes and street scenes to landscapes and rural life. These artworks were displayed in schools, libraries, post offices, museums, and government buildings, vividly capturing the realities and ideals of the era. 1934: A New Deal for Artists celebrates the 75th anniversary of the PWAP, presenting 56 vibrant paintings from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection."Vividly" and "vibrant" are words. So are "dully" and "dreary." The one painting you can see at the link is far better than nearly everything else in the show, and I can only imagine the looks of the thousands of other paintings that were cranked out in this government jobs program and foisted on the schoolkids and library-goers of America. I moved quickly from one painting to the next, and — unfortunately or fortunately — I was alone, because much cynical mockery went unsaid.
I realize only now that I could have worn my iPhone with its headset and a recording app running and muttered my lines as if talking to someone by phone. Would that be wrong?
What would you prefer to have inflicted on you in the form of way too many paintings — New York City's snobbish adoration of the Bloombury Group or Madison, Wisconsin's politically medicinal devotion to FDR?
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68 comments:
What they mean by "Institutional Art".
A lot of paint was expended in the name of Uncle Joe and Dolf for the same reason.
"1934: A New Deal for Artists" at the Chazen Museum.
Link not working on my end.
Bad government art is no surprise.
The surprise is how good some of the government-sponsored writing was--at least in the couple of guidebooks I've read.
Link fixed. Sorry. Thanks for the heads-up, AA.
I'm impressed with the art inside the art.
Moma site
Scroll down just a tiny bit and on the right hand side is "Moma Multimedia"
click on that and then click on "Explore Connections". I'm impressed.
"The surprise is how good some of the government-sponsored writing was--at least in the couple of guidebooks I've read."
Writing is different from painting, I can see. I've studied painting and done a lot of it. Writing, for people who can write, is much easier.
Consider the way the raw material is processed. You send a government painter and a government writer out to, say, a steel mill and ask them to convey their perceptions. The writer has a much better shot at producing something readers will think is pretty good. If it's bad, close the book. Don't read it. The painter is likely to produce something mediocre and hard to relegate to the trash pile. It's a nightmare. I have written and painted, and I know what I'm talking about here.
Good artists create good art even when they work for the government. Mediocre artists create mediocre art even when they're related to Virginia Woolf. Those hacks that ground out crap for the Medicis are the really overrated ones.
No cigarettes, no salt, no soda: Will we never be rid of the snobby blight of the Bloomberg?
We have government-supported arts: the subsidized artists make anti-smoking ads etc etc.
I think it's unfortunate that our culture has created this false easy value for art, and simultaneously downgraded other pursuits of more accessible quality. Some people should just pursue other things. I'm not saying give up on your dreams; I'm saying analyze them. Are they really your dreams? Are they they just means to an end, which could be gotten other ways? Is the value really there for you and others or just a manufactured idea only made possible by refusing to consider other options, other kinds of beauty and other pursuits. Don't be so quick to buy into the memes of your day, or your circle, or even those you respect at a particular time in your development. Think of others, and what they may need from you, rather than just how you wish to be seen by them.
I guess I just have poor taste. I kind of like the subway painting at the link and have liked a number of paintings in that style.
I like paintings of things that are recognizable.
Nevil Shute had a nice section on modern art in his book "The Far Country"
http://www.nevilshute.org/Misc/nsart.php
I feel much the same way.
John Henry
What would you prefer to have inflicted on you in the form of way too many paintings — New York City's snobbish adoration of the Bloombury Group or Madison, Wisconsin's politically medicinal devotion to FDR?
Neither.
"I guess I just have poor taste. I kind of like the subway painting at the link and have liked a number of paintings in that style."
I like that one. I wish I could show you the other 55 paintings in this show and presume there are many thousands of paintings that were not selected for the show. Do the math.
"Neither."
No credit for not answering the question asked.
So I finish on Althouse and go over to see what is happening at the Ace of Spades HQ. www.ace.mu.nu
He heads today's book thread with a modern and meaningless painting having nothing to do with the thread. He just liked the colors.
He also likes graphics that are wider than tall so, this picture being taller than wide, he simply turned it on his side.
It makes no difference to the quality of the picture either way. I wonder if Ann or any other art aficionado could tell which way the artist intended it.
I see no indication. Of course I am a Philistine so I probably would not.
John Henry
I see two paintings at your link. The vaguely impressionistic one at the top of the web site isn't bad, though I wouldn't part with a nickel to buy it. The one at the bottom, of a wheat farmer and his children, is more along the lines of the PWAP art I've seen in my lifetime -- sort of Soviet realism.
Last time I went to my childhood home to see my sisters I discovered that environmentalists had forced the tear-down and destruction of the timber and stone picnic shelters that my Dad and others built when they belonged to the CCCs. No one is allowed to drive out to the woods for a picnic anymore. What's the point of having woods if no one can enjoy them?
"Good artists create good art even when they work for the government."
I would distinguish a government jobs program (making work for artists) from government spending aimed at getting the best art. Even the latter can produce atrocious crap, of course.
I really wish I could do photographs at that Chazen exhibit so I could demonstrate my points. There are pictures of miners and cotton field workers that are intended to make the most banal statement, over and over, about the nobility of the labor of the common people.
There are pictures of miners and cotton field workers that are intended to make the most banal statement, over and over, about the nobility of the labor of the common people.
Which is of course why you hate them.
I would prefer to see the New Deal for Artist show. At least the artists were making an attempt to reflect reality or make some order out of the world in front of them. Very little abstractionist art is really art. Just chaos or naked geometry.
So many times when I see abstract art, I'm reminded of an episode from the Batman TV series from my childhood. An "artist" was riding a tricycle around on a canvas on the floor with paint on its wheels and throwing more paint on the canvas with his brush as he did it. I was four or five and had no idea at the time what abstract art was, but it made me laugh, and the image has stayed with me.
I wish I could show you the other 55 paintings in this show and presume there are many thousands of paintings that were not selected for the show. Do the math.
90% of everything created is pure crap. One shouldn't assume that government-funded art is immune from that or has a worse failure ratio than that. Though I'd agree that the end result is worse if the bad art is inflicted upon the public in places they have to go to, like City Hall or the DMV.
"... to make the most banal statement, over and over, about the nobility of the labor of the common people."
But isn't the whole point you are making really about the banal statement of the entire project and it's implied nobility of the labor of the artist?
Most art sucks, experimental art doubly so. If you're an art lover, you don't mind slogging through the dreck to find the gems. If you aren't an art lover, NYC has plenty of safe museums that won't strain your limited interest.
...or what somefeller said.
I haven't seen either show, so to level the field I will proceed with the assumptions of Teachout and Althouse that neither of the exhibits are very good.
That said, I find poorly done abstract art more intriguing to view than poorly done propaganda scenes.
A banal painting of workers in the field generally comes down to a question of technique. Bad abstract art often invites the 'what were they thinking?' thought into the process.
With writing I'll take a good idea, poorly articulated, over a bad idea done with eloquence. In painting I hope the 'inarticulate' at least stumbled onto something worth a second view.
Separate from bad art, I am a Paul Klee fiend, myself.
Why that Chazen website is so slow and so lacking in images, I don't know.
It's a damn shame. You can't take photographs, and they are not giving us a photo gallery. All that stuff should be on line. It was produced for the government, with our tax money, 80 years ago!
"I haven't seen either show, so to level the field I will proceed with the assumptions of Teachout and Althouse that neither of the exhibits are very good."
Not correct about the MoMO show. Teachout is insulting 2 walls in a huge exhibit. Most of what's there is great. That's why Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant don't belong.
But my question does relate only to those 2 walls.
There are pictures of miners and cotton field workers that are intended to make the most banal statement, over and over, about the nobility of the labor of the common people.
Banal to some and perhaps it is OK to mock the dignity of labor.
I would point out though that it is that labor that pays your salary, makes the food on your table, invented your I-Phone and so on.
Why not celebrate people who actually do and make things?
That is not to say that physical labor is necessarily better than mental labor (management, teaching etc) Both are essential to human survival.
All art is, at most, entertainment. We need that too but who contributes more to the betterment of society: the cotton picker, miner, factory worker, professor, manager, Walmart cashier?
Or the artist?
John Henry
"Separate from bad art, I am a Paul Klee fiend, myself."
I have a notebook of drawings/writings done at a big Paul Klee show, done in London in about 2003, just before starting this blog. I'd like to copy the pages and blog it. I was analyzing/riffing on the the ideas that he used.
Wonder where I put that.
sydney said: "Just chaos or naked geometry"
Chaos and Naked Geometry sounds like an exhibit I'd love to see.
The painting that incorporates both those ends could be very great indeed. In my opinion "Arches of the Bridge Break Ranks" does precisely this.
"Banal to some and perhaps it is OK to mock the dignity of labor.... Why not celebrate people who actually do and make things?"
The labor we see is the artist's labor, on assignment from the govt, which is trying to say something about the labor of the cotton-field workers, whose own expression is utterly irrelevant to the project.
So it is a badly mushed expression containing nothing that any human being actually believes. That's what is disgusting.
There was an exhibition (it might be a permanent exhibition) of that 30's propaganda art in the American Art Museum here in DC, and it was awful. The sad thing about the public works art from the 30's is that they are so bad. Sure they're not great art, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be decent art, pleasing to look at, offering some level of visual interest, or at least fine technique. The other sad thing about the WPA art is that Nazi art was so much better -- graphically, more striking, visually more interesting. Admittedly, I'm mostly comparing Nazi posters with WPA paintings, which may be an unfair comparison, but come on -- look at this poster -- simple, solid blocks of colour, but nevertheless wonderfully dynamic, and interestingly truncated around the edges. Or the original "Yes, we can!" poster. Or this Dutch recruitment poster for the Waffen SS. Or these two fine homoerotic young fellows.
The great thing about abstract art is the artist can blame the viewer for not appreciating it. The same with lots of inaccessible music and even some science, where expansive experimentation is used to prove the obvious. Sometimes it's just easier to claim value rather than to prove it.
Then again, I don't expect anybody to appreciate my art as much as I do in making it. I do it for myself, only faintly hoping others will like it. If you take that approach then it's hard to be crushed. I also never consider myself an "artist". That's just asking for it.
We need that too but who contributes more to the betterment of society: the cotton picker, miner, factory worker, professor, manager, Walmart cashier? Or the artist?
Depends on the individual case and what society (and how does one define that word?) needs and values at a given moment, naturally.
Re: Ann "But my question does relate only to those 2 walls."
That was the framework to which I was referring -- was imprecise in my stating "exhibit". Used too big a brush, as it were.
RE: Ann - "have a notebook of drawings/writings done at a big Paul Klee show, done in London in about 2003, just before starting this blog. I'd like to copy the pages and blog it. I was analyzing/riffing on the the ideas that he used.
Wonder where I put that."
NOW you are teasing me.
I want that post.
the wall of paintings by Kazimir Malevich was good enough all by itself to justify a visit to MoMA
the WSJ guy is right, I think. Malevich is kinda awesome.
I'm a big fan
Love the Christianity. And the sun!
But really I just love the passion of it
I took an art history class, it was really fascinating how artists draw a distinction between line and color. Line being masculine control, while color being passion and out-of-control.
Abstract art is--for me--all about passion and emotions. And I respond to the art in an entirely subjective and emotional way. But a lot of this art is also controlled, very specific. Mondrian being an amazing example of that.
The imitability of so many key figures of the movement never ceases to fascinate me.
Actually, from what I've read, Mondrian is one of the hardest guys to copy with a forgery. Anyway, copycats have always been boring and lame. What does that have to do with the original genius right before your eyes?
Re: John:
Banal to some and perhaps it is OK to mock the dignity of labor.
Paintings celebrating the dignity of labour are fine and good -- there's several paintings of Russian peasants at work that are very good (I wanted to find a particular series of paintings of Russian peasants plowing, but all that I can find is Tolstoy making believe he is a peasant).
It would have been better to have a handful of great works celebrating the American worker and had them reproduced across the country by a thousand hack artists than pay a thousand of hack artists to produce their own original crap representations of manual labourers.
Re: "We need that too but who contributes more to the betterment of society: the cotton picker, miner, factory worker, professor, manager, Walmart cashier? Or the artist?"
I understand the point, but it made me think of the following:
Would a painting of a Wal-Mart cashier at work be as dynamic as a painting of a cotton picker, both executed with equal talent?
My guess is that we would respond more appreciatively to the cotton picker because of the mental distance between the subject and viewer.
We just had seen a real WalMart cashier when buying pink socks.
Balfegor said...
"It would have been better to have a handful of great works celebrating the American worker and had them reproduced across the country by a thousand hack artists than pay a thousand of hack artists to produce their own original crap representations of manual labourers".
Agreed. It would also be interesting to walk through THAT exhibit -- to see endless variations of the same work, with disparate skill and spark.
Good artists create good art even when they work for the government.
That might be true stylistically (think of the Odessa steps sequence in Eisenstein) but it's not true substantively (Battleship Potemkin is boring, predictable, and stupid).
This is not to say that a Commie or a Nazi can't make some amazing art, but the feeling has to come from inside the artist. If it's from a government committee, it's going to suck.
And politics, in general, tends to ruin art. See what happened to Godard, to give one major example.
Betamax's Paul Klee Bridge Arches reference. Heh. The arches look like legs without torsos marching forward. Witty, but it wouldn't take a lot of artistic ability to produce that.
Re: "Witty, but it wouldn't take a lot of artistic ability to produce that."
The quality of line, the positioning and shape and interplay: much harder than you might expect. Simple lines take greater confidence and ability. Might not take a lot of ability to make poor copies of it, that I would agree. Applicable also to Mondrian, say.
In regarding line, also see "Twittering Machine"...
Also could apply to Warhol's Soup Cans. You need the idea, first.
The loss of the Republic is encapsulated in that one word: inspiration. What business does government, that deeply feared but necessary institution, at least as the founders saw it, have to do with inspiring me? In other words how is it any of government's business what goes on inside my sacred entrails? It's none of government's business. Even a government as compassionate and full of the milk of human kindness as Barry's son of an Eleanor government. Stay off my grass, government! Don't tread on me with your fucking inspiration.
that era of art is interesting to see in the post offices that were built at that time, but both the buildings and the are are dreary. Perhaps if you were collectivist, you might find it cheerful, though.
Many years back I painted seriously, before a career in Graphic Arts packaging consumed my soul.
Was lucky enough to work along with several talented friends.
A local art space had a program wherein you had the run of the space for a month, with the condition that the work you created in those weeks was on exhibit for the last week of the month.
One of those months the group I was involved with made a series of paintings based on individual frames from the Zapruder film, hung sequentially around the room (the Tiger Woods 'conspiracy' post brought it back to mind)...
"90% of everything created is pure crap"
I'd say that percentage is accelerating upward with each passing year. New good writing is extremely difficult to find. New good film is almost non-existent. Music seems to have the ability to always somehow regenerate itself but even so, most of the young musicians I know look to the fabled past (the '70's!) for inspiration.
Re: "most of the young musicians I know look to the fabled past (the '70's!) for inspiration."
I first read that as "the faded past..."
The percentage of crap is increasing because artists no longer give themselves permission to consider the work of old dead white guys as the standard to aspire to. Artists today have literally primitivized themselves. Anything not to be square.
Here are a couple of non-sentimental Russian paintings of the laboring class: Arkhipov's Washerwomen and Savitsky's Repairing the Railroad.
I remember (years ago in Sacramento) attending an exhibit of Wayne Thiebaud's work.
I received some funny looks because I would compare the painting in front of me with the corresponding reproduction in a book on his work. Amazing how some reproductions can capture a painting very well, while others lose the life and spirit.
With Thiebaud this was especially apparent on many of the 'cake' paintings -- the reproduction couldn't convey how much the physical texture of the 'frosting' paint-strokes contributed to the overall work.
The way the Vatican overpainted genitals with fig leafs, someone should overpaint the laboring figures of Thomas Hart Benton with white robes. As we have nw learned, the white working class were not true members of the proletariat but were, instead, rednecks and stumbling blocks to the revolution. Every time I go into a Manhattan courtroom and look at the WPA murals, I am embarrassed to see that there is not a single representation of the early settlers killing Indians or selling slaves. And this in a place where justice is dispensed.
Ann Althouse said...
"Neither."
No credit for not answering the question asked.
Then things have changed at UW, since the early 1970's.
True story.
Freshman year. Final exam essay. I read the question, and panicked as I realized that it was about an area of the subject matter that I could not remember a single thing about, though I loved the course and knew quite a lot.
So I took a shot. I wrote at the top of my paper, the truth. That I was drawing a blank on that question, so rather than write nothing, I was going to ask myself a different question, in the 'spirit' of the official question, I hoped, and answer that instead.
So I did. Got a B-. Probably mostly for chutzpah.
Thiebaud's work reproduces quite well. Probably because he eschews muddy colors, stays close to the primaries and makes them play off against each other with ejaculatory vibrancy. There, you see the word vibrancy actually still applies in certain non-political contexts, has not yet been totally murdered by Barry's goonsquads. Not that Thiebaud isn't capable of subtlety, just not dullsville subtlety.
Re: "ejaculatory vibrancy."
I could look at a Thiebaud painting for more than four hours.
Betamax asked:
Would a painting of a Wal-Mart cashier at work be as dynamic as a painting of a cotton picker, both executed with equal talent?
My guess is that we would respond more appreciatively to the cotton picker because of the mental distance between the subject and viewer.
First, I think that the walmart cashier could be portrayed as dynamically, or at least as well, as the cotton picker. Depending on the artist, of course.
Here is an iconic picture of a counterman and 3 customers in a late night lunch counter. I would say that it is pretty dynamic.
http://shadeone.com/nighthawks/Edward_Hopper-Nighthawks-1942.jpg
The other comment about seeing the Walmart cashier frequently vs perhaps living our entire lives never seeing a cotton picker may be right.
Perhaps the lack of familiarity helps make the picture more meaningful. The cashier would be "banal:lacking originality, freshness, or novelty" for just that reason.
Finally, what are you doing with pink socks? Are you planning to harass Ashley Judd?
John Henry
Someonehastosayit said:
So I took a shot. I wrote at the top of my paper, the truth. That I was drawing a blank on that question, so rather than write nothing, I was going to ask myself a different question, in the 'spirit' of the official question, I hoped, and answer that instead.
In 79, to graduate from my school, one had to take a comprehensive exam. Twice a year, full day. Morning 5 questions, answer any 4, on any course in the core curriculum. Afternoon, 4 questions, answer 3 any course in your major. Didn't matter whether you ahd taken the course or not.
50-60% first time pass rate.
A professor told us the parable of the elephant:
A zoology student was sitting his orals for his doctorate and was asked to discuss elephants. His expertise was snakes and he knew nothing about elephants.
His answer:
Elephants are large grey mammals with long thin trunks. The trunks look a lot like snakes. Snakes are reptiles (and then discussed snakes for an hour)
I took sort of that approach on my CE and wrote a full blue book for each question then stopped and went to the next one.
I was physically sick for 2 days knowing I had flunked it.
A few weeks later I found that I got low 80's on each section and had passed.
John Henry
Re: John Henry:
"The other comment about seeing the Walmart cashier frequently vs perhaps living our entire lives never seeing a cotton picker may be right."
That was the main point I was trying to arrive at -- had trouble out of the starting gate.
Agree on the Hopper painting. However, I think the dynamic aspect (for me) is the emotional charge of solitude in a public space. The working man behind the counter is doing something that we cannot see (washing hands? cleaning dishes? petting a cat? performing CPR on the slumped cook?) but that is not the driving force of the painting -- a different context than the cotton picker in the full view of picking cotton.
"Finally, what are you doing with pink socks? Are you planning to harass Ashley Judd?"
I thought about it in the Nineties.
A bit more on familiarty:
I love pictures of factories. Paintings or photos, recent, 200 years old or anything in between. I like seeing things get made.
I am also very familiar with the inside of factories as it is what I have been doing professionally for the past 35 years. I've probably been in more than 1000.
So the pictures are often familiar to me at some level. Sort of like the cashier. But I never get tired of looking.
John Henry
"Would a painting of a Wal-Mart cashier at work be as dynamic as a painting of a cotton picker, both executed with equal talent?"
It would be ironic, and it would display the artist's pity/anxiety/contempt, so it would be more dynamic. The cotton pickers could only ever be noble. There nothing to grasp onto except the soullessness of government.
Re: "It would be ironic, and it would display the artist's pity/anxiety/contempt, so it would be more dynamic. The cotton pickers could only ever be noble."
The painter of the cotton picker might be patronizing their subject by attempting nobility, but I believe there is -- at some level -- an appreciation of the importance of the picker's work and -- importantly -- a sense of the work receding to a different time, the human hand soon to be replaced by machines: the painter is Modern, looking back, in much the manner of many 'Old West' paintings of the Native Americans on horseback.
I believe a currently-produced painting of undocumented immigrants picking vegetables in a field would be approached in much this same manner, with much the same palette, while the same-era WalMart cashier would indeed be rendered "ironic" through "pity/anxiety/contempt".
However, a modern painting of the workers in the back warehouse of that same Walmart, lifting heavy boxes on the receiving bay, would -- I suspect -- still get the 'nobilty' treatment.
That frission is what I keep circling around.
Though experiment: it is twenty years in the future and most WalMarts have no cashiers -- customers scanning their own items, swiping their cards, the only human presence at the front end of the store being the Greeter and the Shoplifter Watchmen: would the vanishing Cashier now be painted in the 'noble manner' without irony?
I think you're on to something, betamax. And someday bloggers, and even their commenters, will be seen as brave freedom fighters back before The Cleaning was enacted by popular consent.
Somewhere there must be a painting of "Behold! The Exalted Soviet Typist!"...
Ann, whatever you do, go see the movie on April 25, "King of the Hill." it is an incredible film, not to be missed. I am not a real fan of Steven Soderbergh but he knocked this one out of the park. It almost makes me want to make the 2500 mile trip to see it.
Vicki from Pasadena
I would like inflicted upon me the recorded bon mots unedited with thumbnails of targeted items. Those phones are handy.
The museums around here don't let you. Maybe I should go surreptitious like you.
That was a thorough review. He gave one example at each paragraph, but by opening a tab for each name I could see immediately what he is saying. It was like a decade of Smithsonians all at once. His comment about over/under tautology, and especially the music is good. I started to open a tab and whoa, there it is already at the bottom. And I can hear the music alone would have driven me right out of the place. Awful awful awful awful awful.
[Yesterday I entered a business that I know controls their music and said, as a customer I feel free to say this, "Oh! It's saccharine sap from the '80's day. They go on themes there. And attention was diverted to a new employee who I hadn't met. ? Something about him not complaining.]
Have we praised James Agee yet?
"I was alone, because much cynical mockery went unsaid."
That never stops me. Of course, I'm touched in the head.
PLease not every work of art will be great, if you look at the hundreds of photos taken by WPA photographers, as I have, you will see some great ones and some bland ones, but to have this record is incredible. And so too the WPA paintings make an interesting record of the time when labor was more valued than today. And the projects supported artist, modestly, some of whom went on to be well known later in life.
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