Look, See

Schjedahl on Matisse biography

I read the first volume of Hilary Spurling's Matisse biography, “The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years 1869-1908,” and look forward to the second, “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954,” which will be published in the US in September. Below is the first paragraph of Peter Schjeldahl's review of the second volume in the current New Yorker, "Art as Life."

ART AS LIFE
The Matisse we never knew.
by PETER SCHJELDAHL

Henri Matisse, unlike the other greatest modern painter, Pablo Picasso, with whom he sits on a seesaw of esteem, hardly exists as a person in most people’s minds. One pictures a wary, bearded gent, owlish in glasses—perhaps with a touch of the pasha about him, from images of his last years in Vence, near Nice, in a house full of sumptuous fabrics, plants, freely flying birds, and comely young models. Many know that Matisse had something to do with the invention of Fauvism, and that he once declared, weirdly, that art should be like a good armchair. A few recall that, in 1908, he inspired the coinage of the term “cubism,” in disparagement of a movement that would eclipse his leading influence on the Parisian avant-garde, and that he relaxed by playing the violin. Beyond such bits and pieces, there is the art, whose glory was maintained and renewed in many phases until the artist’s death, in 1954: preternatural color, yielding line, boldness and subtlety, incessant surprise. Anyone who doesn’t love it must have a low opinion of joy. The short answer to the question of Matisse’s stubborn obscurity as a man is that he put everything interesting about himself into his work. The long answer, which is richly instructive, while ending in the same place, is given in Hilary Spurling’s zestful two-volume biography, “A Life of Henri Matisse.” The first volume, “The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years 1869-1908,” was published in 1998. The second, “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954” (Knopf; $40), completes the job of giving us a living individual, as familiar as someone we have long known, who regularly touched the spiritual core of Western modernity with a paintbrush.

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Image used without permission:
Henri Matisse. The Piano Lesson. Issy-les-Moulineaux, late summer 1916. Oil on canvas, 8' 1/2" x 6' 11 3/4" (245.1 x 212.7 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. © 2005 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

George Rodart: Color correcting digital files

George Rodart wrote a page about color correcting digital images, and in particular, digital images of paintings. Plainly written, easy to follow, very handy.

In my stats I noticed a referrer from Google for a Chinese translation of my weblog, which included the follwong, which I include here mostly for kicks, but also as a reminder that my referrer stats often indicate that someone- or perhaps a robot- has translated what's here into, typically, Chinese, Spanish, and German, though also occasionally Dutch, French, Arabic, and Russian:

George Rodart 写了页关于颜色改正 数字图象 和特别是, 绘画的数字图象。简单地写, 容易 随后而来, 非常得心应手。

Yve-Alain Bois: "On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman"

On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman (PDF, 26pp), by Yve-Alain Bois, in October Vol. 108 - Spring 2004

The two texts that follow are part of a project that some might consider an impossible challenge—that of writing an independent essay, not your usual catalog entry, on every single painting by Barnett Newman. This self-imposed challenge—much more exacting than I expected at first—is not as absurd as it may seem. Newman’s oeuvre may be extraordinarily small by twentieth-century standards—he painted only 120 works on canvas and his overall output, all media included, consists of fewer than 300 works—but this restraint was intentional. This last point was often stressed by his widow, Annalee Newman, during the multiple conversations I had with her throughout the second half of the 1990s. Whenever the issue of the exceptionally poor productivity of Newman would come up—when she was making comparisons between his career and that of his fellow abstract expressionists or when she was protesting, still vehemently so long after the fact, against Clement Greenberg’s pestering request that “Barney” churn out more canvases — Annalee would always insist that her husband hated redundancy, that he wanted above all to avoid repeating himself and that each painting had to be for him like a person, a unicum...

...My contention is that Newman’s pictorial oeuvre should be considered as something like a deck of cards. (I am only speaking here of his post–Onement I production, for the eleven canvases that precede this inaugural work, a limited corpus in itself, partake of a different conception of art.) In such a deck, each card has a distinct role to play while forming specific links with various other cards—the King of Hearts is directly connected to all the cards of the same color though perhaps more closely to the figures (Jack, Queen), as well as to the three other kings: such is my working model. Newman might not be the only artist for whom such a model proves valid, but, thanks to his limited corpus, he might be the only one for whom it can be tested. I promised to myself—and to Annalee Newman—that I would try doing so. Those two entries—neither the longest nor the shortest—provide an example of the manner in which I attend to this task.

Users within UC Berkeley or other academic and research domains with subscriptions to Ingenta can also download the PDF of Mark Godfrey's Barnett Newman’s Stations and the Memory of the Holocaust, which is reprinted in Reconsidering Barnett Newman / edited by Melissa Ho. Philadelphia, PA : Philadelphia Museum of Art ; New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press, c2005.

Brain of the Blogger

I rarely post comments about weblogging anymore, however this is interesting (Via the PhillyArtBlog ): Brain of the Blogger. The authors, Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, "are physician-parents with a national referral practice for children with learning difficulties. They are strong advocates for neurologically-based approaches to learning and learning differences." It's a nice long but not too long article with five topics points. This is stuff many of us have been saying for years (for example, Lloyd), but with the added authority of the good doctors.

1. Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.
2. Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.
3. Blogs promote analogical thinking.
4. Blogging is a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information.
5. Blogging combines the best of solitary reflection and social interaction.

This little gem (since this is an "art weblog" I think of this in terms of art practice):

Blogging is ideally suited to follow the plan for promoting creativity advocated by pioneering molecular biologist Max Delbruck. Delbruck's "Principle of Limited Sloppiness" states we should be sloppy enough so that unexpected things can happen, but not so sloppy that we can't find out that it did. Raw, spontaneous, associational thinking has also been advocated by many creativity experts, including the brilliant mathematician Henri Poincare who recommended writing without much thought at times "to awaken some association of ideas."

Jersey

Updated photo of Jersey, 2005: