The Thrill Of It All

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, Giacomo Balla

‘The Futurists…drew on primitive cinematography and on the sequential photos which had been taken in the 1880s by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. By giving the successive positions of a figure these images introduced time into space. The body left the memory of its passage in the air. Four centuries before, Leonardo had bought birds in the Florentine market and let them go in order to observe the beat of their wings close up for a few seconds. Now the cameras of Muybridge and Marey could describe this world of unseen movement. Some of Giacomo Balla’s paintings were almost literal transcriptions of these photographs…’

- from The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes

La Fille Nee Sans Mere, 1917, Francis Picabia

‘Picabia was obsessed by machines, partly because their efficiency and predictability were in such soothing contrast to the neurotic vagaries of his own life, but mainly because he saw myth in them. In 1915, on a visit to New York, he declared that ‘upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression…I mean simply to work on and on until I attain the pinnacle of mechanical symbolism.’ Picabia wanted to laugh the idea of traditional painting to death…but painting was the only objective outlet he could find for his machine fantasies…Picabia was rich and owned, at one time or another, scores of cars and at least a dozen yachts…He even had a racing car installed on top of a tower he owned in the South of France, and attached the chassis to a radial arm, so that he could whiz round and round like a man in a centrifuge, admiring the landscape…’

- from The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes

Murdering Airplane, 1920, Max Ernst

‘Some of Ernst’s early Dada collages are astonishing revelations of dread, and perhaps none conveys it with more intensity than his Murdering Airplane. Hovering above the flat horizon, which is the shell-flattened landscape of northern France (Ernst had served in the trenches as an infantryman), the chimerical aircraft is half machine and half bad angel, and the aura of fear that it suggests is very far from the metaphors of angelic modernity that Robert Delaunay had extracted from Bleriot’s innocent monoplane. Its female arms give it an air of monstrous coquettishness, and the three tiny figures of soldiers are powerless against its visitation.’

- from The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes

Tatlin At Home, 1920, Raoul Hausmann

Tatlin’s belief in technology earned him the respect of the German avant-garde… At the Berlin Dada Fair of 1920, Georges Grosz and John Heartfield were photographed holding a placard that read: ‘Art is dead, long live Tatlin’s new Machine-Art.’

Raoul Hausmann made a collage-portrait of him, the artist as engineer, his head full of mechanical dreams…with a map to suggest the internationalism of Tatlin’s aesthetic.

- from The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

”In 1919, two years after the Revolution, the People’s Commissariat for Education asked Vladimir Tatlin to design a monument to the Third Communist International… It was to be a slanting tower, thirteen hundred feet high - three hundred feet higher than the Eiffel Tower. As Eiffel’s structure had been the symbolic climax of nineteenth-century technology, so Tatlin’s would be the emblem of twentieth-century skills: in fact, the banner which hung above his model of the tower, bearing the words, ‘Engineers create new forms’ was later carried through the streets of Moscow by crowds of chanting students…The Tower contained three chambers. A cubic hall at the lowest level… would turn one degree every twenty-four hours, a complete rotation every year. Above it, the pyramidal executive block would rotate once a month. Atop that, Tatlin placed a cylinder, meant to be an information centre, turning once a day; and surrmounting the whole, a half dome…From antiquity the spiral had been a symbol of triumphant aspiration, and a list of the tower’s precedents would include Trajan’s column, the tenth century tower of Samarra in Iraq and Breughel’s painting of the Tower of Babel. But none were industrial symbols and they did not move. In designing a monument of clearly articulated parts, and relating it at every point to utilitarian logic and the processes of the machine, Tatlin had virtually defined what Constructivism meant and what its political role might be - if the politicians were committed to it. But they could not be. There was not enough steel in all Russia to build the tower and it was never built. It remains the most influential non-existent object of the twentieth century…”

- from The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, Georges Seurat

”Seurat was a child of late nineteenth century scientific optimism. Thanks to the periodic table of elements it seemed that man now knew all the constituent parts of reality - the very building blocks of matter. Could one dissect sight down to its minutest particles, and so construct an objective grammer of seeing? Seurat believed one could, and his theory was based on scientific studies of colour analysis and visual perception. Of these, the one that influenced him most was The Law of Simultaneous Colour Contrast, 1839, by Eugene Chevreul. Local colour, Chevreul had shown, was mixed on the eye. A spot of pure colour gave the retineal impression of a halo of its complementary around it: orange rimmed with blue, for instance, red with green, purple with yellow. The interference of these aureoles meant that each colour changes its neighbour. Colour perception is therefore a matter of interaction, a web of connected events, rather than a presentation of one hue after another to the eye. Seurat resolved to make this explicit by making his colour patches tiny, reducing them to dots: hence the name, Pointillism. Stippled side by side, the dots grew by the million like coral polyps, and (like those tiny creatures) coalesced into a stiff deposit, a composed reef of form…In La Grande Jatte, the vision of pleasure takes on the gravity of historical painting. In constructing this large, elaborate space, Seurat gave every detail the degree of thought one might expect from Raphael or Piero della Francesca. It is linked together by rhymes and chords of shape…The monkey’s tail emulates the hook of the dandy’s cane. The decorum of posture and gesture, the distances people preserve between one another on that green abstracted lawn of Paradise, are turned into the decorum of classical art itself: manners elevated to aesthetics.”

from The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

”With Matisse and Picasso, Braque was the last great European artist to use his own studio as a subject. It was natural for him to paint his own work-place and to praise it, as a kind of secular chapel, a condenser of refined feeling. In the past this subject had always implied the dignity of the artist’s thought and work; so it was with Braque. Besides, to the layman, the artist’s studio tends to seem a mysterious place, less explicable than a laboratory or a factory, although it has something in common with both, thought goes on there, things are made, ‘researches’ conducted, but not by the logic of science or manufacture. The studio is a sanctum, imagination’s cave, and its clutter of bottles, pots, tools and oddities suggests the alchemist’s cell. Such, at least, was the image of the atelier de l’artiste in France fifty years ago. The image of the studio as a privileged place of transmutation, memory, and contemplation is the key to Braque’s Ateliers of 1949-54 with their calm transparency and baffling layers of images, their space that keeps opening and shutting like a concertina, and their mysterious cut-out bird, an emblem of imagination set free in the room.”

- from The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

”Kenneth Noland’s paintings were based on the simplest patterns, target, chevron and stripe. In the best of his target paintings, like Song, he could set a splashy grey rim whirling around concentric circles of red, black and blue with an airy energy that few American painters could equal. Like gigantic watercolours his targets and chevrons bloom and pulsate with light; they offer a pure, uncluttered hedonism to the eye.”

- The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924, Max Ernst

”Why should a nightingale frighten anyone? And what kind of world could contain, as part of casual narrative, the idea of a ‘menacing’ nightingale? What disturbs the viewer, knowing the title - Ernst’s long, mystifying titles were an integral part of his work - is the utter disproportion between cause, the bird’s song, and effect, the terror it inspires. One cannot know what is happening in this little world within the frame - nor, the collage implies, in the big one that includes the picture.”

- The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes 1938-2012

Just heard of the death of Robert Hughes. Paul Morley once argued that great critics through ‘their opinions, approach and rigour’ become artists in their own right, demonstrating ‘that they deserve to evaluate and document the work and art of others by writing in such a way that the work makes more sense, sometimes only makes sense, because of what they write and why they write it.’ He goes on that ‘without the great critic, the world, and the worlds of those that made up the world, was never properly finished off…because they seemed to complete the shape of everything, the work of art…the mind itself…’ This is how I thought of Hughes. Not just his ideas and observations but the poetic authority of his language, the gruff oratorial relish of his voice, its masterful cadences, the boyish glitter in his eyes as he delivered another perfect sentence. He was a giant amongst pigmies and we’re infinitely the poorer for not having him around any more.

Woman at the Piano, 1917, Elie Nadelman

Elie Nadelman was a gifted Polish artist who settled in Paris in 1904. During his ten years there he evolved a mellifluous sculptural style. Nobody could call him one of the pioneers of modernist sculpture and yet what an eye he had, what a sense of quotation and paraphrase, and what integrative powers…His finest achievements as a sculptor unfolded in America and were inspired by its folk art…Between 1923 and 1928 he spent more than half a million dollars buying American folk art and was the first collector to do so systematically. Folk art then was despised as barn-junk by ‘cultivated’ Americans. It was left to Nadelman to appreciate its concision, directness, lack of pretension, its blunt grandeur, and to bring these qualities into the enchanted circle of his own wit and sense of form. Thus, his wood carvings, like Woman at the Piano, with her long, slightly prissy head (Modigliani meets Brancusi meets schoolmarm) her hands briskly poised in an interval of silence, her foot cocked on a nonexistent pedal, and the lovely swell of her skirt finished by a wire loop that echoes the wire ribbon in her hair.

                                                    - from American Visions, Robert Hughes

Wake of the Ferry II, 1907, John Sloan

‘…the beautifully composed The Wake of the Ferry. Black stanchions and a tilted line of roof frame the cold blue evening sea from the stern of the Staten Island Ferry, as the blue in Whistler’s Thames was framed by Battersea Bridge. Daringly, Sloan counterposed the dark mass of the lone woman gazing astern against an open, swiftly brushed diamond pattern of the safety rail running out to the left, giving both balance and a sense of exposure: you see the wet light on the steel deck and feel the cold.’

- from American Visions, Robert Hughes

Pennsylvania Station Excavation, 1909, George Bellows

‘The Penn Station railroad terminal was one of the biggest urban projects ever started in Manhattan. To bring the trains into Manhattan meant boring miles of tunnel under the Hudson and the East River, razing four city blocks excavating a vast pit, and then constructing the terminal itself. No hole of this size had been dug in America before. It was a homegrown Grand Canyon, heroic engineering to match Roosevelt’s call to strenuous life. George Bellows painted several versions of it. Pennsylvania Station Excavation is the most dramatic of them: an evening view, probably in March,  with late snow still on the floor of the crater, a glare of fire, and steam and smoke billowing up. This, and the rocky sides, knocked in with turbid brushstrokes, associate it in one’s mind with a volcano. The tiny spectators in the foreground fix the scale, and their presence, peering gingerly over the edge, conflates the view with earlier scenes of gorges and mountains in the American West. The dark bulk of the building looms on the far side, silhouetted against a bright turquoise sky with lurid slashes of evening cloud. Culture as nature.’

- from American Visions, Robert Hughes

The Great Swamp, 1868, Martin Johnson Heade

‘Instead of seeking out grandiose panoramas, Heade made a number of sketching trips to the coastal salt marshes of Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island: a flat landscape of boggy ground and tidal channels, where salt hay was gathered in round stacks. Heade’s paintings of this unpromising scene could be hauntingly beautiful. He chose a low horizon line to stress the pure plane of the sky and under its benign light the haystacks act as spatial markers. The result is a very minimal landscape, wide and low, in which space and interval are used with the utmost deliberation, and each element acquires a perfect clarity. They are the images in American art closest to those of European Romantics, with the same sense of quiet awe at boundless space; light turns matter into spirit. Horizontality equals sublimity.’

- from American Visions, Robert Hughes