Coplans glorified aging

Misconceptions of Van Gogh

In Modern Painters, Matthew Collings writes about the longstanding misconceptions of Vincent Van Gogh in “Think About Van Gogh In a Different Way, but don’t Foreget we can never be like him.” Collings, reflecting upon the recently found letters written by Van Gogh contradicts man conceptions of his personalities. Collings disputes that Van Gogh’s works come from the “hallucinations” whose qualities included “sincerity, saintliness, naivete, and the failure to be grow up, to be tough, to be mature psychologically.” These traits no longer seem to hold merit. It seems that one can deduce from his letters, that Van Gogh was actually quite sociable. In fact, Collings describes Van Gogh as a talkaholic. His conversations were lively, exhilarating and filled with enthusiasm. This flies in the face of the image that Van Gogh is sad, and reclusive. Unlike the perception that Van Gogh is excluded from society, he is actually earnest to be connected. His conversations show his interest in society, the way people take their leisure, humanity, nature, literature and of course art. Van Gogh who is traditionally seen as a mad, and tortured artist, shows a an earnest interest in the world, and even a comedic side to him. He is entertained by business and is shows that he has a knowledge for the business aspect of his profession. Van Gogh also has a surprising comedic side to his personality. Also, the paintings which many have overlooked seemed to have had a deeper meaning to Van Gogh. According to his letters Bedroom in Arles is about his inner torture and claustrophobia. Even so, his inner torture may not have as all-consuming as many believed. He has been portrayed as the cliché of mad genius, but he does not mad man at all. He shows an interest of the world, and delight in words, and enjoys intellectual stimuli. Overall the author utilizes many examples from Van Gogh’s life, and testimony to point out the universally relatable aspects of his personality. Collings concludes that Van Gogh was very much like us, that he may not have been as inclined to lunacy or as tortured as we see him. At the same the Collings makes clear that despitethe fact that he may have been like us, we are in no way like him. Despite this new discovery of “normalcy” in Van Gogh, he is no less a genius than we thought he was. By Myanh Ta

Unit 3 Project: Premonition

Unit 3 Final: The Hundred Guilder Print

Feeder 3.1: Tactile Translucence

Joan Miró is unique as in artist in how much presence he bestows upon the backgrounds of his paintings. One hesitates to even call them backgrounds because the eye is drawn to them as much as it is anything that is in the foreground. In the 1920s Miró broke away from his Cubist colleagues and developed a personal style that would define the rest of his career. One of the most important characteristics of this style, that of his textured backgrounds, is discussed in the MIT Press Journal article Tactile Translucence, by Charles Palermo. He makes his thesis easy for the reader to find:

“My claim will be that, in Miró’s paintings of the early 1920s, pictorial space

becomes a surface in which the activity of a surrogate offers a metaphor for the

painter’s bodily entry into the surface of the painting. As I shall explain, this allegory of painting can be understood as Miró’s radical response to the Cubist pictorial sensibility—a response that he articulated in cooperation with his closest comrades, such as Michel Leiris.”

Throughout the article, understanding the role of texture in Miro’s works is of vital importance. His paintings were as much about reminding the viewer of a certain tactile feeling as they were about depicting a set of objects or scenes. The background of Head of a Catalan Peasant IV is examined thoroughly in the article. The author points out that changes in pressure and direction of single strokes bring about a sort of wishy-washy anti-pattern in the background. On top of this, Miró used a technique called scumbling, where one applies pigment with a dry brush to lighten up a color and create a glaze over it. Beholding the background of this painting and many others of Miró’s, the viewer gets the impression of translucence. Like the surface of a body of water, the expanse of the canvas seems to stretch over the contents of some fluid, giving it depth. As the author puts it, stacking these effects creates a visual “thickness” to his work.

However this translucence goes beyond the visual: it has an encompassing tactile feel of clarity and boundlessness; the translucence is physical. Again, if you think of the background as the surface of a body of water, it yields a look into the contents below, but if you penetrate that plane with your finger, while the physical water may make room for your bodily entry, there isn’t a physical rupture made by your hand in the concept of “the surface.” Your finger is a part of the surface. In this way, the fluid’s surface exhibits visual and tactile translucence. Just as sight is allowed to pass through a clear object, or rather, the surface gives way yet remains unbroken, the tactile surface that Miró creates seems like it would give way but remain unbroken if we extended our bodies to it.

Sight tends to objectify more than touch. That is to say, when you see a table, you tend to think of it being located there. When you feel it, it is there. It feels more like a continuous segment of your consciousness, much more than when your interaction with it was limited to its appearance. The importance to Miró of feeling his surroundings and having continuity between subject and object is documented by Michel Leiris.

(In fact, while Leiris was preparing the essay, he asked Miró for a few autobiographical notes. In his brief response, Miró featured an anecdote about his early artistic training, in which he was taught to improve his draughtsmanship by drawing objects he had only touched and had never seen.)

Michel Leiris was a ethnographer and writer during the Surrealist years in Paris. He was one of the few people Miró was close to, and has some of the only direct quotes from Miró documented in the essays he wrote on his paintings.

“I see Miró’s exploration of the surface of the canvas, as it is documented in his backgrounds, as calling forth a surface that it’s important to think of as being continuous with his “bodily space.” In other words, in such backgrounds, Miró may be said to have painted something like the horizon of “bodily space,” itself.”

So the paintings we see document Miró’s physical encounter with the canvas- the brushstrokes and stretcher bars and traces- but more than that, they, for a brief moment, were his body, his physique. To view his translucent, shimmering background is to be connected to his bodily horizon, thanks to the tactile translucence. The author uses this phenomenon in Miró’s paintings as a metaphor of the painter’s bodily entry into his paintings.
Art historians seem unusually friendly in their discussions on Miró’s spaces. Maybe it is because the movement and style he painted in were so personal, that different interpretations don’t evoke the same controversy they do elsewhere in the art world. The historian Michael Baxandall believes that Miró used his pictorial space, including a dreamy background and loss of true form, to comment on the civil war and political strife in his home country of Spain. And even if Palermo were entering into a hotly-contested debate, many times his points seem so ambiguous (to the layman at least) it is hard to tell if he’s trying to make a stand or go with the crowd. This was a line delivered toward the end of a paragraph, in a pivotal position that the author had been obviously leading up to: “The lack of gestural quality in the traced shapes makes them a new kind of motif, a new kind of “line” that seems to be prior to, or at least separate from, the exploration that reveals them.” However, he does not explain which “gestural qualities” he is talking about, nor what makes a “line” prior to its own revealing. These sort of ambiguities became frustrating when trying to wade through his argument. I did enjoy learning a bit about the physical process of painting though, such as the use of scumbling, tracing, stretcher bars.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.31
http://joanmiro.com/style-of-joan-miro/

Andy Warhol and Elvis

VanGogh--Transitioning through work