Repesentational or abstract?

[Keith Russell]

Originally Posted by jemmett

If it's art it's the essence of the thing itself.

I disagree. As A is A, the essence of a thing, is the thing itself, in toto.

[Keith Russell]

Originally Posted by Viking55803

I don't think anyone believes we must develop the skill of a Rembrandt before attempting a De Kooning approach to creativity.

And yet, given Rembrandt, why would anyone "settle for" (or "accept") DeKooning?

[jemmett]

Originally Posted by Keith Russell

I disagree. As A is A, the essence of a thing, is the thing itself, in toto.

Brancusi said, "What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface."

And yet, given Rembrandt, why would anyone "settle for" (or "accept") DeKooning?

Yet you're comparing apples and oranges.

[stlukesguild]

Brancusi said, "What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface."

Such may have been Brancusi's belief... but it doesn't represent some universal truth. Any number of artists would have wholly disagreed with him: Van Eyck, Monet, Courbet, Caravaggio, etc...

given Rembrandt, why would anyone "settle for" (or "accept") DeKooning?

Yet you're comparing apples and oranges.

This is the usual argument... but does it make it true? If I can compare Praxiteles to Rubens to Degas... why can't I compare DeKooning as well? What must be realized is that you do not make comparisons in art starting from an assumption that one artist or one period represents the ideal against which everything else must be measured. Rather, you compare the similarities, the strengths and weaknesses of each, and the stature, innovation, etc... of a given artist within his or her own era and style. I think Keith brings this up in response to another member's earlier suggestion that technical skill was in a way detrimental... less expressive and likely to shut out the viewer. I personally love a well-done, well-rendered and polished painting ala Ingres as much as I admire a painterly canvas ala Monet or Van Gogh. I suspect, however, that the vast majority of those who look down upon highly polished paintings and speak of them as cold or inexpressive simply lack the skills or the discipline to create such themselves.

[jemmett]

Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Brancusi said, "What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things...

Such may have been Brancusi's belief... but it doesn't represent some universal truth. Any number of artists would have wholly disagreed with him

I've heard, that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

It seems to be a universal truth.

Originally Posted by stlukesguild

given Rembrandt, why would anyone "settle for" (or "accept") DeKooning?

Yet you're comparing apples and oranges.

This is the usual argument...

I stand by it.

[stlukesguild]

This is the usual argument...

I stand by it.

If a work of art is worthy of any serious consideration, it must be able to stand up in comparison to the art of the past... and the future. As the poet and critic, T.S. Eliot well knew, art involves a dialog with the art of the past as much as it involves a dialog with life. Eliot argued this eloquently in his classic essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other.

In other words, the art of the present will inevitably be judged in comparison to the art of the past... not judged solely by the standards of the past, but judged with recognition that the "meaning"... the interpretation of all art involves a dialog with the art of the past... the eventually the future.

DeKooning does not stand isolated from the whole of art history. Art historians and critics recognize in his works a dialog with the tradition of painterly painting going back especially to Rubens and Hals (the artist's Netherlandish predecessors), Fragonard, Van Gogh, Soutine, etc... His incisive line clearly echoes Ingres, John Graham, and Picasso... while clearly his fragmentation of form owes much to Turner, Impressionism, and Cubism. By the same token, DeKooning will be looked at in comparison with subsequent artists such as Lucian Freud, Cecily Brown, Joan MItchell, and Jenny Saville.

[jemmett]

Representational and abstract are apples and oranges.

[saje]

Originally Posted by jemmett

Brancusi said, "What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface."

totally agreed upon...

truth is in the smile of the beholder!

[stlukesguild]

Representational and abstract are apples and oranges.

Can't argue with that logic.

[Clive Green]

Nope, not logical so can't argue with it It's hardly one versus the other, as foolish an assertion as any we come across.

Brancusi may have thought about the essence and even expressed the essence but he did it with real things. His work 'flight' is a prime illustration. Art without artefact or audience is like dancing on your own in a dark room and calling it a performance, an empty gesture. Brancusi's abstractions represent things as do most

[jemmett]

Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Representational and abstract are apples and oranges.

Can't argue with that logic.

Context:

Originally Posted by fritzie

the question of why some artists choose to create abstracts and others representational or realistic work.

Originally Posted by Viking55803

I don't think anyone believes we must develop the skill of a Rembrandt before attempting a De Kooning approach to creativity.

Originally Posted by Keith Russell

And yet, given Rembrandt, why would anyone "settle for" (or "accept") DeKooning?

In the same way it wouldn't matter a poet is not good at prose.

de Kooning and Rembrandt are both perfect at what they do.

[Keith Russell]

Originally Posted by stlukesguild

I personally love a well-done, well-rendered and polished painting ala Ingres as much as I admire a painterly canvas ala Monet or Van Gogh.

I'm probably not going to surprise anyone, but I greatly prefer Ingres, David, Courbet, Van Eyck over Monet, Van Gogh, deKooning, etc.

[jemmett]

Originally Posted by Keith Russell

I'm probably not going to surprise anyone, but I greatly prefer Ingres, David, Courbet, Van Eyck over Monet, Van Gogh, deKooning, etc.

I'm sympathetic but cautious, the latter painters are beginners of something new. Art is evolving....

[Keith Russell]

Originally Posted by jemmett

I'm sympathetic but cautious, the latter painters are beginners of something new. Art is evolving....

I disagree; I don't view deKooning as an "evolution"...perhaps a devolution. But then, I don't recognize a teleological direction for art. To eschew certain of the basic fundamentals of art (as nearly every 20C art movement did to some degree or other) isn't [r]evolutionary, and it certainly isn't "progressive".

A great many of the "major" painters of today (Yuskavage, Saville, Nerdrum, Currin, Cotton, Hale, Hirst, Koons, Helnwein, Rosenquist, Murakami, Nara, Richter, Hockney, Theibaud, Katz--even Ofili!) are representational painters, and most of them would be considered "realists".

Abstract Expressionism, indeed most of Modernism in general, may be the dead end its detractors always claimed it was...

[jemmett]

Originally Posted by Keith Russell

Abstract Expressionism, indeed most of Modernism in general, may be the dead end its detractors always claimed it was...

This forum is the dead end....