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William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), The Painter’s Triumph,
1838, Oil on Panel, 19.5 by 23.6 in., Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
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Painters don’t necessarily subscribe to a trade magazine for
the arts because they like its content.
Some just enjoy being tortured emotionally from a distance. How else can I explain renewing for a second
year my subscription to The Artist’s Magazine?
Almost nothing in its current issue was of genuine interest to me and almost
all of it annoyed me.
Take the cover of its current issue, for instance. It celebrates as “breathtaking” an oil
portrait made to look like a photograph, but without the seamless unity of
same. The result is something that
almost resembles a human face, but not quite, when given more than a momentary
glance. All the little changes in color
and value are carefully executed and fused.
But they are slightly out of sync and distracting from the whole,
resulting in that “humanoid” look all photographic oil portraits convey when
examined more closely than is warranted. A flat facial plane showing no sign of the
creator’s involvement in the process via exciting brushwork or beautiful flesh
color are the main characteristics of such work. In this portrait, for example, the nose is
lying flat against the cheek, with no sense of the inch or more of air space that
separates the two. All the areas where
discrete accents would bring life and dimension to the face are mushed together
indecisively. The flesh color is bland
and generic. A blow-by-blow examination
of this portrait would be tedious in the extreme, so just give it more than a
momentary glance yourself and you will see what I mean. But why bother, would naturally be your
response to my suggestion. Should be
good advice for me, as well, but I hate effusive praise of the objectively unworthy
with a passion.
The American Impressionist Robert Philipp, one of my
teachers at The Art Students League, used to bluntly admonish his students when
painting from the model that “you gotta make ‘em look human.” That’s
all. You can’t get your portrait to look
human by painting from a photograph or painting photographically from life. You have to will the portrait to come alive
on your canvas as you observe, and feel empathy for, the living, breathing characteristics
of the sitter posing in front of you, for as long or as short a time as it
takes to reach your goal of a lifelike portrait. A quick head sketch executed from life, even
if it borders on caricature, often has far more human qualities than a polished
portrait that took many days to accomplish, with or without the sitter in place. That point was made in the only article in
the current issue of the magazine that interested me. One 18th Century British portrait
painter used to put down his brushes as soon as he heard an on-site witness
utter, “that looks just like her.”
No oil portrait created in the last 75 years or so can
honestly be characterized as “breathtaking.”
Sargent, Zorn, Sorolla, et al are long gone, and the art world is a much
different place now. Painters today
either can’t paint as well as the aforementioned, or wouldn’t have the
slightest interest in doing so. But critical
judgment is cast aside when you have to fill the pages of a periodical with
articles on substandard art in order to give your faithful readers the confidence
that they also can create substandard art.
The situation is worse than ever now, since American Artist magazine was
taken over and eliminated by the publishers of The Artist’s Magazine. So this is the last industry magazine of its
kind, other than that Professional Artist magazine, which used to hawk outdoor
art shows and juried competitions under a former name and is now gearing up for
prime time.
When I read these magazines to recharge my annoyance
battery, I tend to forget that art is a business like any other and the passion
painters felt in former times to chronicle their world is no longer of
paramount importance.
A good case in
point is an article in the current issue of The Artist’s Magazine that
celebrates paintings of isolated houses and barren interior rooms that look
just like snapshots taken by a photographer who couldn’t seem to find any
worthwhile center of interest through his viewfinder. The rather large paintings have no intrinsic
visual interest in color, form, brushwork or subject matter, at least in reproduction, and apparently exist
merely to prove that the artist can copy all the straight lines of a clapboard
wall or all the segments of an old cast-iron radiator under a window. How exciting is that! Repeat after me, “Just take a photograph.” Apparently the only passion evoked in these trivial
exercises was in the artist’s yeoman struggles with
the elements as he lashed his easel to the ground to tepidly copy some of his subjects
en plein air. It’s hard to believe that while
standing on terra firma in the great outdoors, surrounded by the beauty of the
natural world, he was inspired to paint photographically. The artist accompanies his paintings with a
turgid essay on “fertile metaphors” and the like in an attempt to obfuscate the
intrinsic visual blandness of the work itself.
What can I say? It’s an art world
I never made. But it’s just like the sage
advice given for all bad things foisted on the great unwashed by
mercenaries. “If you don’t like it, just
ignore it.” That certainly narrows the
field for me.
