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December 1, 2003
TT: Two kinds of people
Our Girl and I have been batting the great-art-we-don't-get ball back and forth, and in my most recent return service I took a couple of shots that stirred up the natives. In seeking to explain my own lukewarmness about Picasso, I quoted these lines from my Wall Street Journal review of MoMA's "Matisse Picasso" show:In the visual arts, the race has always been between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and Picasso has always been the front-runner. Certainly Americans, with their puritan distrust of beauty, have typically favored his relentless experimentation to Matisse's less obviously innovative stylistic pilgrimage.
Then I signed off with this bit of wholesale nose-thumbing:
I wouldn't lose a bit of sleep if all the German paintings in the world vanished first thing tomorrow morning. Poof.
Second things first. A persnickety reader writes:
What do you include under the rubric of "German paintings"? Is it too pedantic to remind you that Germany dates from 1871? Do you exempt German engravers who also painted (Dürer, Schongauer, Pencz and many others, down to Kollwitz)? Do you include Giovanni d'Alemagna, Hans von Aachen, Elsheimer and Johann Liss? Adolf Menzel? What about German speakers who were from Switzerland or the Habsburg lands (Josef Heintz, Maulpertsch, Mengs, Klimt, Schiele, Kubin)? Just curious. I respect your opinion and wonder whether this is a considered or a wanton bit of judgment.
Actually, it's both (though perhaps I should have said "German-speaking painting," if I may mix a metaphor). Note, for instance, that I didn't say I wanted all the German paintings in the world to vanish first thing tomorrow morning, much less that I hate all German painting. All I said was that if such a catastrophe were to occur, I myself wouldn't lose any sleep over it, and I'll stand on that. As a general rule, with lots and lots of exceptions, I'm not notably fond of German-speaking art of any kind.
Why not? Well, it so happens that I've been thinking about writing a piece about Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, up through Feb. 12 at the Jewish Museum in New York, and to that end I recently read Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey, a superb little book about my least favorite composer. (If only Schoenberg's music were one quarter as good as Shawn makes it sound!) In it, I ran across the following paragraph:
While Schoenberg was trying to continue the Germanic tradition of thematic development, which valued internal qualities of coherence, substance, and human expression over external charm, Stravinsky's work sprang from Russian and French roots, music of a less obviously "emotional" cast in which beauty seemed to issue more directly from sound itself than from the working out of its ideas, the tradition behind impressionism and the world of ballet: a tradition in which the composer was more inspired artisan than musical philosopher or intense visionary, a music in which, ideally, the composer practically disappeared....In this music the strivings and mystical yearnings of the individual creator were subsumed in the object that was the work itself.
I never expected to find in an apologia for Schoenberg so beautiful (and so fair) a summary of the reasons why I prefer Franco-Russian art to Austro-German art--as a general rule, with lots and lots of exceptions. I couldn't have put it any better myself. Thank you, Mr. Shawn, for doing my work for me.
Moving right along to the Matisse-Picasso problem, Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, my favorite visual-arts blog, posted this crisp response:
I don't agree that Picasso was better received here than Matisse. While most of the Euro-moderns received, shall we say, delayed appreciation in the U.S., Matisse caught on first....At the very least, they were received equally in the first half of the century.
(Read the whole thing here.)
In fact, I don't disagree with Tyler in the slightest. What I meant to say, and should have said, was that Picasso is now the front-runner, and has been for a long time, even though the two painters started out more or less even. Furthermore, I believe this is the case for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the relative merits of their work as art qua art. As I suggested in my Journal review, I think Picasso has gone over bigger in this country because he seems more serious than Matisse. Most Americans prefer sermons and spinach-eating to high art with a light touch, and Picasso, unlike Matisse, rarely lets you forget that he means serious business. All of which goes a long way (though not all the way) toward explaining why I prefer Matisse to Picasso--and Stravinsky to Schoenberg.
P.S. Apropos of nothing other than our shared liking for the greatest Italian painter of the 20th century, allow me to mention that Tyler recently posted this link to an online catalogue of a gorgeous Giorgio Morandi show on display through Dec. 20 in San Francisco. The only problem is that it's at a gallery, not a museum. Grumble, grumble, grumble. When will I get to see the comprehensive Morandi museum retrospective for which I long? And when will some rich reader of "About Last Night" get around to buying me a Morandi etching out of gratitude for the sheer brilliance of this site? I'd even let Our Girl borrow it from time to time, maybe....
Posted December 1, 2003 12:01 PM
