"The Humpty Dumpty effect": once the veneer of reality is broken in 20thc art by the analysis of the a priori visual structure that shapes that reality, the whole cannot be reconstructed.I accept this as having been inevitable but it still haunts me as the burden of the Modern condition.You can't go back to the garden.

I sent this to someone who wanted to read an excerpt of my drawing book.I edited it some more and as always amazed at how infinite the editing process is.

Pedagogical use ofthis information

In our perceptual experience value is first level, lines second. Historically this is the case from the end of the universal use of chiaroscuro in 19thc Salon paintings to the primacy of lines in the Cubism and Abstraction of the 20thc. However, the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque went in the opposite direction And in art education this sequence from the Renaissance to the Baroque defines the method that is followed in constructing a drawing: construct the drawing first with linear measurement and insert value into that structure. Value in minute increments provides the veneer or the surface of the world that we call Reality. Courses that used to be advertised on  matchbook covers and your standard drawing class at the college level, all start with measurement. This is not to say that it does not work but by skipping over the level one of perception it ignores two truths:#1 the hierarchical relation of value to linear structure and #2 the notion that an object is part of a whole visual field. It isolates the figure from the ground in which it is embedded and jettisons a priori the role of light in the uncovering of the world.

Moreover, the use of line as measurement in classical drawing is very different from that derived from perception and the art of the 20thc. It imposes a top down order from rigid laws concerning the construction of the human figure and the use of systems of perspective. They both trap the visual world in a sort of intellectual vise.

Moreover, my method works. I have observed again and again students, who never internalized the rigid process of your typical beginning drawing class, get a fresh start studying my method. It becomes a sort of cognitive therapy where the linking of the way we see to drawing results in a drawing style that is natural and provides a base that can be built on.

At higher cognitive levels we interpret the values as recognizable things. In mid to late 19^th c French landscape painting, chiaroscuro was used not only to give enough detail to make a world of recognizable objects but described the social classes by the styles they wore and locations of the objects in the landscape. I recall seeing in a show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1996 that interspersed salon paintings with Impressionist paintings done contemporaneously. In order to add even more specificity to the represented scene, one artist wrote the provenance of the boats on their sterns in a seascape. There is no doubt on the artist’s part that this representation is only a representation and not reality. The Impressionist artists of the the late 19thc became conscious of the a priori structures that made the world real, and cured art of the lazy notion that what is painted is in fact reality. We create reality from the a priori structures of the eye. In fact drawing and painting in the 20thc, undergoes what I would call the Humpty Dumpty affect. Whereas in the classical period all the analysis of the visual world supports a finished product that looks like the world we move in, in the 20thc the underlying systems for shaping the world, once separated out and used by themselves, lead to the reductionist trope toward abstraction that defines our century. ” All the kings horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty together again.” Lines end up constrained in Mondrian’s verticals and horizontals or are liberated as gesture in Kline and Joan Mitchell. Value ends up in Rothko’s numinous masses. Color perception ends up first in Matisse’s color patterns and finally in color field painting, or just the color panels of Ellsworth Kelly. Occasionally one finds a movement that takes an abstract language and moves it toward verisimilitude as in the work of the Macchaioli of Italy in the early 20thc, who used the pointillism of Seurat combined with the volumetrics of Caravaggio to create some heavily realistic work. Much of Picasso’s work never uses the surface of realism but except for the cubism done with Braque assumes a viewer placed in front of the scene depicted. In the hands of other artists his discoveries suffer what philosophers call reification: it is assumed that the language is reality. Like the Machiolli, that approach has a leaden quality to it.

 The following is a series of three drawings that show the genetic connection between value and line. I did these last Fall as a demonstration for the book I wrote on drawing of how the two are connected: Value as a lower order structuring of the visual, and line as a higher order that is built on top of the valuing of visual data. It also shows the separating out of line after the values is removed. At that point the line is free to be used in a totally self-referential way. Mondrian followed this process in his Apple Tree series which goes from value to purely linear in which the apple tree is no longer recognizable.

Jason Travers, as a student at AIB, did the last drawing. It is followed by a drawing by Twombly. Jason’s drawing shows the lines beginning to break away from the original value drawing and interacting with each other self-referentially. In the Twombly drawing the lines are free to "do their own thing.

Value drawing done with charcoal

Lines added at value shifts

Values erased and lines enhanced

Jason Travers drawing moving from value to linear approach

 .

Cy Tombly drawing with liberated lines

Just stumbled across this reply to my Lester Johnson piece on Berkshire Fine Arts by the poet Rosanna Warren. Google every gallery on earth and you will find 99% are exhibiting "one show": a found object(ersatz sculpture ) on the floor, photo-document on the wall and a pseudo-profound statement about some group in need of uplift into the Hegelian dialectic.Global group think!!

Figurative Expressionist:Lester Johnson -->

Dear Martin,

What an extraordinary piece. I wish I could have seen the Johnson

show; I'm living in New York this year, on leave, writing.

You put your finger precisely on the problem: the coercive Hegelianism

of Greenberg's vision, and the intolerance it institutionalized. Great

image too, about the media world of Pop (and post-Pop, conceptual art)

as a vast  pyramid built by an army of slaves (us!). It's refreshing

to have you articulate so strongly and lucidly the fact of mass

dehumanization in which our culture of mass advertising and

consumerism collaborates. And to set Johnson's art as a

counter-phenomenon, of highly intelligent (not romantic) response and

analysis.

I never studied with LJ, but have admired his work over the years, and

am sorry to miss this show. Good for Acme-

Warmly,

Rosanna

As artist we live mostly surrounded by incomprehension of various varieties. Sometimes there is disdain and resentiment or pure philistine disgust for someone who dedicates their life to the pursuit of a private vision. This article reinforced this notion.There is a happy end to the story:at least over time the writer met me half way.I have added a few more slights to make my point.

The Weekly Dig 2006

Martin Mugar at New England School of Art and Design

KATE LEDOGAR

A few summers ago, my sister and I took a week-long class with Martin Mugar at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. It was a sort of paint-what-you-will situation. Mostly, I was just happy to be out at the beach, surrounded by fishermen and drag queens, and eating lots of Portuguese pastries. I gave the painting I was working on a sort of good-natured, half-hearted attention. OK, I dabbled. The only part of the class that truly caught my interest was Mugar’s slide show presentation of his own work.

At that time, he was painting dots: vaguely patterned, and in a few repetitive colors. His slides—which spanned a good 25 years—traced his development from exceptionally lifelike figurative works, to a transitional period where he broke down the subtle colors forming surfaces, to the dots-only approach he currently practices.

In my own painting experiences, there were instances where I found myself nearly mesmerized by surfaces. Expanses of walls and skin started breaking down into moving particles of color the more closely I looked at them. Eventually, I felt unable to reproduce their colors at all. In Mugar’s interim paintings—which fell stylistically between the realism of his early work and his most abstract canvases—he was painting surfaces as I saw them, and doing it well. His paintings gave me a mixed feeling of awe and resentment by showing me that it was possible to do what confounded me.

His current paintings interested me less. I was suspicious that he had worked into abstraction in order to appear more contemporary in style. Plus, I was probably too distracted at the time by the promise of some local delight (perhaps a late afternoon "Doggies in Drag" parade) to give the matter much further attention.

Now in the bleak of winter, up from the slushy, grey streets of downtown Boston, I'm in a much more focused frame of mind to view Mugar's paintings. Along for the trip is my sickly boyfriend, who wanted to get out of the house.

In the small pass-through lounge/gallery at the New England School of Art and Design, Mugar's paintings look like sherbet-colored globs of icing on the wall—something that a little kid would like to eat. They consist of large globs of paint in bright, chalky hues repeated in different combinations on rectangular and square canvases. I watch the sickly boyfriend out of the corner of my eye. From the abrupt way he stops in front of each painting, gives it a couple of seconds, then moves onto the next, I can tell that he's decided he's been duped. He says, "Well, when you seen one, you seen 'em all, right?" and slips out into the hallway to look at the student assignments pinned to the wall.

But Mugar’s paintings are meant to be gazed at for extended periods of time; they offer a sort of mute conversation for the eyes about the act of looking. The paint sticks out a good half-inch from the surface; pastel smears poke out from the sides and drip off the bottom. This texture buildup creates a topographical landscape that would challenge an ant trying to get from one side of the painting to the other. Due to the subtle variations of color, each painting—though similar to the ones on either side of it—offers a unique visual experience.

After studying them closely, I no longer think that Mugar's abstract works are contrived solely to attract attention—in fact, just the opposite. I suspect these paintings represent an obsessive attention to sorting out a visual "problem" that fascinates Mugar, which he has pursued whether galleries and critics notice or not.

If you visit the show, I recommend that you visit Mugar's website (www.martinmugar.com) beforehand—it gives some good context and background to appreciate his work.

MARTIN MUGAR’S WORKS WILL BE ON DISPLAY AT THE NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF ART & DESIGN THROUGH 2.5.06. 75 ARLINGTON ST., BOSTON. 617.573.8785.

Here is a recent example of stupidity: I was accepted into a group show into a NY gallery (First St Gallery)  only to be told to remove the painting ASAP after it was dropped off. I had to hire an art mover as I had already returned home to Boston. 

In the first decade of the Millenium I was grateful to Charles Giuliano for including me in several group shows at the New England School of Art and Design. One show there was favorably reviewed in the Boston Globe. That kept my work in the eye of the Boston art goers after commercial galleries Crieger-Dane on Newbury St and the Rising Tide in Provincetown closed at the end of 2000. Charles had reviewed my work and I always had the impression he thought highly of it. During the second decade I was included in a series of show at the Danforth Museum. Katherine French was the director of the Museum and the shows purported to represent the New England art scene. In the nineties I had participated in similar shows at the Fitchburg Museum and the Brocton Museum to favorable reviews. French left the Danforth a few years ago and took over the art center in St Johnsbury VT where she recreated the same sort of group show bringing in New England  based critics to select the work. Covid 19 has brought an end to this annual event. My last encounter with French was before the last show when I dropped off work in Boston to be shipped by her to Vermont. I was still smarting from the unceremonious treatment at the First St gallery and was hoping that she might promote a piece that represented my work at its best.Yes it was heavy. I sensed her unwillingness to take it and when I explained the rejection of my work by the New York gallery that had been selected by Ronnie Landfield after I had dropped it off  she started in a  long litany of complaints of having to hang my work over the years. I dawned on me she had never complimented me on my work. It was just a heavy burden. So much for respecting my 50 years of showing and contributing to the art scene in Boston.

The late Addison Parks's blog was always worth reading: Especially this response to de Kooning's letter to the editor written upon the death of Arshile Gorky

http://artdealmagazine.blogspot.com/

here is a recollection of Addison
https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-recollection-of-addison-parks-will.html

An excerpt from a book I am writing on drawing in particular some points on Erwin Hauer's sculpture class at Yale

Al Held from 1965

link to my book on Amazon

To say as I did earlier that I learned most drawing techniques on my own is true only in part. In some cases what teachers conveyed often in passing only made sense years later. Or there was something in the professor’s own work that was unclear to me at the time. This was particularly the case with Al Held, whose mid career work was for the most part unknown to me when I studied with him at Yale. It generated its energy by reversing figure and ground thereby upsetting our normal relationship to the world, where we are interested in the objects in front of us not the negative space behind it.  Someone who gave me the facts like Sergeant Joe Friday in the TV show ”Dragnet” ("Nothing but the facts Ma'm")was Erwin Hauer sculptor professor at Yale, whose architectural screens from the 60’s are being rediscovered. He conveyed to me how in sculpture to express the pneumatic aspect of living beings. It all started in his figure sculpture class where my initial efforts to sculpt showed no respect for the surface tension of the human form in the clay model. He kept repeating that representing what is seen on the surface is how you understand what is underneath. He told me to abandon the figure sculpture I was working on to sculpt a rhinoceros thighbone , a relic from the zoology department. Continuity of surface became the mantra as he had me physically touch the contours of the bone to feel the movement of the surface in space.

Erwin Hauer Screens from the 60's

                                

Surface tension is conveyed in drawing with directional parallels as shown in this drawing of Durer