Starting with Anthony Powell and ending with De Kooning via Hegel

 

Several weeks ago I was invited to lunch by a good friend,Addison Parks, who asked several mutual acquaintances to join us. I recalled that one of the guests in his role

of gallery director had shown the work of a friend of mine, Don Shambroom,whom

I had met at college almost forty years ago. I told the gallery director,John Wronoski,

that this friend had appeared and disappeared in my life and had

recently reappeared after an absence of ten years by being highlighted

as someone I might want to link up with on LinkedIn. The gallery director, 

who is also an antique book dealer, said that my description of this

 relationship reminded him of the Anthony Powell twelve volume book

”A Dance to the Music of Time”, that follows the lives of a group of Oxford

 graduates over a lifetime as their movements conjoin or pull apart.

 Recently I decided to make the leap from virtual reality to

 the real world and actually get together to chat with this artist friend.

 We arranged a visit at his home in Massachusetts.

 One thing we learned in our five hour talk is that there

 were other people, whom we both knew, who were participating in

 this dance, some, in particular, art professors from College whom we

 both knew and others whom we had become friends with separately. The first

 of these latter connections was our visits with Norman Rockwell in the

 Sixties as aspiring young teenage artists. We both got the same

 advice from him to go to art school and not college, which

 we both ignored.Our conversation touched briefly on my blog and in particular the piece on

 the “Humpty Dumpty Effect”. My description of this process had a strongly

 entropic bias to it. As Yeats said in "The Second Coming: ” Things fall apart
 the center cannot hold”. De Kooning’s name came up as someone who took
 things apart and then tried to put them back together again. Cubism allowed him
 to tear  apart but the holism of the human body and the force of his gesture
 allowed him to tie everything back together in a way that the human body had
 never before been subjected to: centripetal and centrifugal

 at each others throats. Last night I came across a book on Heidegger’s late

 writings entitled “Four Seminars” that are transcripts and analyses of

 gatherings of Heidegger and his students in the South of France to discuss

 in particular some portentous Hegelian sentences. All of this is off the cuff.

 His references range from Wittgenstein to Marx to Norbert Weiner. A quote

 from Hegel becomes the source material for a long discussion, which I think is

 relevant to what has been said above in regards to de Kooning.The original

 statement by Hegel goes as follows:” A mended sock is better than a torn one”.

  Heidegger transforms it into his preferred form:” A torn sock is better than

 a mended one.” His discussion revolves around unity. When the sock is whole

 and being worn we are not aware of its unity. When it is torn we become aware

 or self-conscious of what holds it together in its being as sock. Therefore the split

 points to a preceding wholeness. To mend it brings it whole again but with a

 self-awareness of an underlying unity. Is this not what de Kooning does: he

 takes the world apart and then tries to mend it. Hegel says that the scission

 points to a need for philosophy. I think that this bringing

 back together is explosive in two ways: #1 the effort to tie things back, the

 mending. #2 The force that resists this mending and wants to dissolve again.

 His work participates in a dialectic as it moves back and forth between

 the whole and its parts and back again to a new whole.

      

Impossiblity of transcendence in American Art

I remember an artist, who had recently lost his wife to cancer,  telling me of his inquiry into what various religions had to say about the afterlife. All I remember is what he had to say about the Mormons, for whom heaven is just like the world we live in on earth,  just permanent.When you die, you will be greeted by all your dead kin and I assume go on pretty much as you did here, but, forever, as one big happy family. Such a belief doesn't make the real inferior to the ideal, but in a strangely counter-intuitive fashion reinforces the validity of the here and now. It is as though the higher realm of heaven gives its divine seal of approval to life on earth. I wonder if this belief is quintessentially American. I read recently in the diary of Bataille, where he described the arrival of the American soldiers in Paris at the end of WW11, and how with their swagger seemed to epitomize a certain immanence of the ideal in the real. Americans don't struggle to transcend the real but are masters of manipulating it and reinforcing it. It explains the predominance of Pragmatism in American philosophy.There are problems to be solved and social injustices to be abolished. Pragmatism  dominates the airways: on cable TV with their shows on loggers,truckers, fisherman. There is no time for meditating on the meaning of the universe when you got a lien on your equipment and have to produce to make the payments. The strangeness of existence, the why and wherefore of our individual life is not an issue, except as raw survival.  I think the sitcoms we see today and those of the past show American Families shoehorned into a kind of eternal present and through the magic of film are eternally young in the endless reruns,(is that the Mormon heaven on earth?) until you see somewhere that the actors have died of drug overdoses or god forbid die of old age.Whether the family is traditional or not,  the story is the same old notion of trying to get along despite one's differences.

Richard Rorty, an American Pragmatist philosopher, is sympathetic to deep thinkers who problematize everything as long as they don't get in the way of the liberal agenda of according  more and more rights to more and more social subsets. We have to be above all good citizens. Strange thoughts of our origins and destinies are to be kept to yourselves. He sees them as intriguing mental exercises, which when applied to society, result in the violence of German and Japanese politics between and during the two World Wars. The Nazi's fell under the spell of Nietzsche and the Overman and the Japanese fell under the spell of Zen. On the one hand you had the will to power and on the other the will to nothingness. On the one hand you had the Holocaust, on the other Kamakazi pilots. A nuanced study of Nietzsche's thought and Zen Buddhism find that both belief systems can be interpreted to be heuristic attempts to control excesses of self-assertion, that Nietzsche thought the German's prone to, and infatuation with the void, which Zen tries to disabuse its adherents of. Because they put the region of that struggle within the individual's consciousness and not in the self as part of a community, makes them susceptible to thymotic excess. No more drama of the saints trying to be at one with God. No more struggles with right or wrong within the soul; the battles are all societal. Heidegger deconstructs consciousness as too wrapped up in Christian theology and wants through Dasein to place it back in the world. Our sitcoms do the same as they disabuse us of any notion of individual superiority to the group.The dads are all either castrated clodhoppers or bigoted buffoons.

I have been reading a book by Malcolm Bull. Never heard of him until I stumbled across his book on Nietzsche at Barnes and Noble. Browsing in bookstores will soon be a thing of the past,alas!!
He seems to be a student of Deleuze and  contemporary social theory. He quotes on several occasions  Kojeve, the famous interpreter of Hegel, who was responsible for introducing Sartre to the work of Hegel and Heidegger, an enounter which generated Sartre's "Being and Nothingness". Kojeve sees humanity in the modern world as  resembling more and more a herd. Unlike Nietzsche, who was horrified by this process toward a mass culture, Kojeve embraced it as inevitable, beneficial and sees it as a sort of negative transcendence. We would now transcend our humanity by becoming more animal. Malcolm Bull says:"Becoming animal is becoming modern, perhaps as Kojeve suggests the future of modernity".  Kojeve imagines  this new humanity(if "human" would even apply any more to this new species)would "perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas." No more solo parts.No more tension between the hero and the chorus. Maybe we will all look like "Swamp People" who in the latest ad are made to resemble their prey.By the way, Kojeve is one of the fathers of the European Common Market.

Not a very pretty picture:the Mormon happy family as sclerosis of the ideal in the real and on the other hand an animalization of the race which is masked as humanism. All that science does with its logos is to provide a rationale for this herding of the species.It makes it more reasonable.

see my essay on Heide Hatry







  

"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