James Panero's put-downs of the brave new artists who are trying to revive tradition - easel painting, the importance of drawing, beauty and composition, careful but not overwrought attention to color, in short:
Classical Realism...referring to an artistic movement in late 20th century painting that places a high value upon skill and beauty, combining elements of 19th century neoclassicism and realism.which has also branched out to:
The Hudson River School for Landscape [which] aspires to build a new movement of American art, modeling itself after the artistic, social and spiritual values of the Hudson River School painters.is as jaded as the critiques who couldn't see what Matisse was doing when he started out on his "rebellion". I've written about both these revivals here and here (the latter being part of my last post critiquing Panero's critique).
Rather than praising these brave artists, and their talented leader Jacob Collins (the one with all the inherited money - which to Panero opposes everything"traditional" about the poor, garret-living artist), Panero wears his blinders so effectively that he cannot even see that Collins is following a tradition of sorts.
Collins is not only reaching far back to the Renaissance, but to the tradition of the more recent modernist painters, who were the antithesis of "Classical Realists", but who still believed in the canvass, its array of colors and some attention to form and drawing. We almost lost all of this in our gradual rejection of painting, which even Matisse and his ilk didn't completely abandon. By citing them in his own works, Collins is insisting on the continuation of painting, which may have had some breaks in our very recent past, but which is still part of a long stream of centuries of influences.
His themes of art vs. real-life abound in modernists' paintings.
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The ephemeral interior (untitled), with the curtain-covered windows suggesting a bright exterior, and the slightly ajar door letting in a gentle light, are juxtaposed against the painted canvass and the empty frame (soon to frame a landscape?). Windows and doors become frames and canvasses in an almost abstracted rhythm of squares and rectangles. This is nothing less than what many modernists were painting. They were incorporating art, or the making of art, as a subject of their paintings, rather than painting pure landscapes, portraits or still-lifes and interiors.
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There is Matisses' The Piano Lesson, the balcony rails mimicking the music stand of the young boy, with his "canvass" of music in front of him, and the doorway and window framing their subjects (the woman and the exterior shrub.)
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Right: Photograph of the studio as depicted in the painting
In Childe Hassam's The Room of Flowers, where there's an endless rhythm of squares and rectangles, from the frames of paintings leading to the framed (by windows) exterior, and the white canvass-like table cloths and square books, also white. Everything is "art" there, from the busts at the end to the walls crammed full of paintings. Even the girl reclining on the sofa and hidden amidst the clutter has on a white dress which blends in with all the other flurries of white in the room. She's another symbol for an empty canvass and who then becomes a subject painted on Hassam's the real canvass.
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Right: Paul Strand, Window, Abandoned House, New England, 1944
There are also photographers who played with this inside/outside, art vs. real-life theme, such as Strand's peeks into a rectangular slit of a porch door suggesting a framed exterior. Or his window panes which create their own landscapes pane-by-pane, faithfully reflecting the exterior view.
This is what Panero should be writing about. That the search for Jacob Collins and his company may come from the past, but the movement is definitely moving towards the future.