One Year in the Art Library

"Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found..."

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 23:11:08 +0000

“Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.”

- Zadie Smith, in the New York Review of Books. (via thebronzemedal)

Bosch details. I think I feel like this sometimes.

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:53:01 +0000

Bosch details.

I think I feel like this sometimes.

Early Chagall VS…

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:48:35 +0000

Early Chagall VS…

late Chagall

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:48:12 +0000

late Chagall

wonderfulambiguity: Herbert List, Reflections of St. Marco,...

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 21:48:47 +0000

wonderfulambiguity:

Herbert List, Reflections of St. Marco, Venice, 1953

Photo

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:45:38 +0000

"In short, every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his..."

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 12:19:04 +0000

“In short, every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people’s hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.”

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando.

"I think there is a desperation for people with art; they find it hard to just enjoy it, they have to..."

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 21:52:53 +0000

“I think there is a desperation for people with art; they find it hard to just enjoy it, they have to kind of ‘interpret’ it and ‘understand’ it. They don’t just sort of ask themselves, do I think it’s beautiful? I think there should be more of that.”

- Grayson Perry

‘When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its...

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 14:27:00 +0100

‘When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking. In the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.’

(The Metaphysical Poets, T. S. Eliot.)

I was thinking about this T. S. Eliot quote, and his poetry in general in relation to collage, the principles of collage, particularly that last bit - the idea about ‘forming new wholes.’ I was thinking of Max Ernst but it was all wrong, looking at Ernst and thinking about Eliot. I was stretching how I felt about Eliot in order to fit a (tenuous, barely thought out) idea of his work. Anyway, thinking of Ernst was just a lazy comparison, revealing nothing.

Then suddenly I remembered Andre Kertesz, the Hungarian photographer. I remembered that looking at his photographs for the first time I was reminded of Eliot without really thinking (which is key): they seem to speak the same language to me; a language that acts directly on the nervous system. Ernst’s early collages, in contrast, speak like Beckett.

There is much more to be said here.

‘I see my own worthlessness and failure so clearly; and...

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 12:06:33 +0100

‘I see my own worthlessness and failure so clearly; and lie gazing into the depths of the misery of human life; and then one gets up and everything begins again and it’s all covered up.’

- Virginia Woolf, written in a letter

The Mural Painters of Tuscany: from Cimabue to Andrea del...

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:31:24 +0100

The Mural Painters of Tuscany: from Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto.

This is a book that has a lot of text at the front and then series of beautiful, uninterrupted black and white photos. There is something about black and white reproductions that I particularly like. I think it is that the eye can focus on the formal properties of what it sees. Colour ceases to be a distraction; something which, so often, I find hard to get beyond, for if something contains colours I don’t like I quickly move on. Hockney says something on this subject I think. Maybe I’ll dig it up.

It also brings out the texture, and this being a book on wall paintings it works particularly well.

I think the mural on the front cover is particularly nice.

Photo

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:36:01 +0100

From the same book (see previous post). These were my absolute...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 22:50:42 +0100

From the same book (see previous post). These were my absolute favourite: allegorical frescoes by Francesco del Cossa at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. The photos here do the book little justice at all really, I quite taken aback by what I was seeing.

Wikipedia tells me that the name “Schifanoia” is thought to originate from “schivar la noia” meaning literally to “escape from boredom” which describes accurately the original intention of the palazzo and the other villas in close proximity where the Este court relaxed.

There is a temptation, I think, to consider art that is very old as unquestionably magnificent and exquisite. Time gives it value; it becomes a historical document. Objectively speaking anything is interesting after time, perhaps, as whatever it may be helps us to understand the past. But these considerations seem to also override subjective opinion. It becomes almost a universal truth that these things contain greatness. Is it the case that the older something is, the less room there is for subjectivity? Sometimes I think all you can see is its age, just as all you can see with some art is the price tag. Is it possible to separate the knowledge and appreciation of its age from your own personal, aesthetic engagement? Can I look at a Renaissance fresco without thinking how old and therefore ‘important’ (and valuable) it must be?

I always try make a concerted effort to look at things out of context in order to give my own feelings the best possible chance, though this is hard sometimes. I want to strip everything back to a simple awareness of myself as a person looking at a thing and feeling something.

In this book there were some things that jumped out at me as wonderful and strange (like these particular frescoes), and others that I just couldn’t pretend I even liked. With this realisation came a feeling of hesitation that I rarely get when looking at contemporary art: I suddenly felt I needed to re-assess my opinion. Were my feelings of self doubt the result of this cultural trend that unquestionably accepts old art and readily dismisses art of its own age?

Italian Frescoes, the early Renaissance 1400 - 1470. Steffi...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 21:46:15 +0100

Italian Frescoes, the early Renaissance 1400 - 1470. Steffi Roettgen. Abbeville press publishers.

This book offers a glimpse into particular palaces, churches and public places throughout Italy that are home to frescoes of a certain period (created between 1400 - 1470). You can take them as they are, each place in isolation; you can compare and contrast with one another. Again, no reading, only looking (though I have since looked a few things up on wikipedia).

I generally like best the ones that are most visibly worn away - I like the way that distress becomes a part of the aesthetic; that chance has a part to play in making patterns or distorting figures.

The frescoes here are part of a famous cycle at the Magi Chapel in Florence, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli from 1459 - 1461. The book includes a wall plan (pictured) as well as several pictures and details. According to wikipedia, the religious theme of the frescoes (the journey of the Magi to Bethlehem) was a pretext to depict the procession of ‘important people’ who arrived for an occasion of the Council of Florence.

"Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order."

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 20:56:25 +0100

“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”

- Samuel Beckett

Renaissance Faces; Van Eyk to Titian With an hour to spare...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 20:47:34 +0100

Renaissance Faces; Van Eyk to Titian

With an hour to spare today, I returned to the library for the first time in 3 months, and, approaching the first section on the first floor, west wing (painting), set about pulling out all the interesting looking books on a single shelf. I was quickly knee deep. Happily for me I discovered books on Italian frescos, icons and Renaissance wall painting. I barely read a word, I only looked. Here are my top finds, starting with one that concentrates on the depiction of faces throughout the Renaissance. Probably a very interesting read too, but there wasn’t the time.

Here were my favourite.

Photo

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:55:19 +0100

Quitting the Paint Factory by Mark Slouka, from Essays in the...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:33:07 +0100

Quitting the Paint Factory by Mark Slouka, from Essays in the Nick of Time; a poem by ee cummings.

I don’t have this book but I am ordering it on amazon this very minute.

Everyone (everyone) should read this essay:

http://adamantine.wordpress.com/texts/quitting-the-paint-factory-by-mark-slouka/

Everything I am reading at the moment seems to be (or rather, is) part of one great big wonderful and terrifying conversation.

Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focussed; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task…idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure - particularly is it involves some kind of high prices technology - is as American as a fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn’t shave; it’s not a member of the team; it doesn’t play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracised.

(Or put to good use. The wilderness of associations we enter when we read, for example, is one of the world’s great domains of imaginative diversity: a seedbed of individualism.)

…

At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we’re attached to, this mechanism we labour in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such magnitude can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its shape and mark its progress, like Lon Chaney’s Invisible Man, by its effects: by the things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of discarded notions it leaves behind. What we’re leaving behind today, at record pace, is whatever belief we might once have had in the value of instructed time: in the privilege of contemplating our lives before they are gone, in the importance of uninterrupted conversation, in the beauty of place. In the thing itself - unmediated, leading no where. In the present moment.

Things to look at in my new room; a pile of October...

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:02:40 +0100

Things to look at in my new room; a pile of October acquisitions: 5 Oxfam purchases, 1 Age Concern and 1 extravagantly full price; 2 borrowed, 1 a present. Walking along kicking leaves, reading with cold hands.

From the erotic stories I have liked best Mitsou (Colette) and Marcelle (Simone de Beauvoir, one of her earliest stories of which she wrote ‘I had fun drawing a picture of piety gradually shading off into shameless appetite.’). And also the Katherine Mansfield, Leves Amores, though liking Katherine Mansfield is nothing new. Edith Wharton’s My Little Girl was almost ridiculous (penis analogies include ‘muscular trunk’, ‘strong fiery muscle’, ‘third hand’). Highlight of Poe is so far The Man of the Crowd. Too many good ee cummings poems to mention, I read half of them in bed this morning, but I have just flicked though again and landed on this one which I feel is speaking the right language for the present moment:

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

— ee cummings

Photo

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:10:33 +0100