How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art by David Salle

Author:David Salle [Salle, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Criticism & Theory, Individual Artists, Essays, American, General
ISBN: 9780393248142
Google: wNmaCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0393248135
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

THE GRAPPLERS

Marsden Hartley, Philip Guston, and Clyfford Still

Marsden Hartley. Granite by the Sea, 1937.

Philip Guston. Cabal, 1977.

All were big men. Guston and Hartley were fully fleshed, meaty. Men of the earth, the sea. One looks at their wide faces and feels the heft of the man. Clyfford Still was a lean tree-trunk of a man, tall and upright with rectitude. All three painters carried forward the lineage of American painting, the one concerned with the physical, materiality of it—paint as creational clay, or fire. Painting joined to nature. They took painting head-on, a little brutally. There’s a truculence in their attitude—why try to hide it? Wrestlers of paint. A painting is something grappled with, brought to ground. It’s a Promethean effort. The artist prevails, but at a cost.

The effortfulness of their painting is meant to show; it has a purpose, which is originality. They paint with the loneliness that must be borne if one is to achieve uniqueness. Their story is one of independence achieved; the American character redeemed. They are part of the creation of a new aesthetic identity, from the trauma of its birthing to the triumph of its independence, and later, with Guston, its painful self-examination. They are different versions of an American type: the self-created individual of tamped-down grandiosity, artists before art was popular. As Sanford Schwartz once wrote about Guston, “His painting says, ‘Am I a genius, am I a fraud, I’m dying.’”

Their origins were various: the West; New England; small villages and also the cities. The built-up verticality of the metropolis in contrast with the open air, the horizon line and the sea—that was a part of their common story. They lived like frontiersmen—someone who expects little from society. Craggy-faced, cranky, man-mountains, stoical in their separateness even from others like them—each one a kind of lonely peak.

A jagged clot of paint made by a slashing palette knife; a heavy, worried black outline that lassoes its subject; an impacted thicket of wide, assertive brushstrokes, wet into wet, black paint defiantly dragged into red—these are the terms of engagement, alternately lyrical and militant, with which each artist defines himself. Guston and Hartley also wrestle with their own lofty self-images. Each one’s style is a snapshot of the American character: rough-hewn, scratched from hard soil, or cut from stones. A glacial lake discovered after a long climb; a fire of mesquite wood, its fragrant trail of smoke rising through the night air.

Hartley’s clouds, mountains, wharfs, roses, sailors—painted as if hacked from dirty marble or granite; Still’s craggy cliff faces and promontories; Guston’s blunt caricatures, the scrum and mush of outlines lost and found again—all externalizing an inner gloom. As in nature, disaster is always close to grandeur. Their painting is sturdy, durable—it rests on thick beams of wood, or of steel, a bulwark against the taste of the committee. In this way, it is romantic, adolescent. The story of the individual against the many. This is what is meant by existential painting.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.