|
|
|
 |
|
|
WD_197/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0197 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"EDMONTON INTERVIEW" (1991) by CLEMENT GREENBERG.
THE EDMONTON CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS' SOCIETY NEWSLETTER Vol 3, Issue 2 & Vol 4 Issue 1
"In each issue, the Edmonton Review features an interview with an artist, critic or collector whose views are of particular interest to our readers. In this issue, we present an interview with Clement Greenberg, recorded over a two day period during the critic's last visit to Edmonton in 1991. In part one, reproduced here, Greenberg talks with Russell Bingham, Graham Peacock, and Michel Smith in an informal evening discussion in his room at The Four Seasons Hotel."
An interview with artists rather than art-journalists or critics. It starts with a bang with a characteristic disagreement about a revered old master... -- TF
---------------------------------------------------
CLEMENT GREENBERG The trouble with Michelangelo's sculpture is that it's too slick. He was damned good, but he was too arty. He introduced artiness, and I could have said -- that wouldn't have been talking precisely about Michelangelo -- that European sculpture began to slope downhill after Donatello (who was a better sculptor than Michelangelo). After Michelangelo there was Giambologna, who was ok, and the famous sculptors who came after: Canova, Thorvaldsen in the early l9th century...
RUSSELL BINGHAM. Rodin?
CG. Rodin began it all over again -- somewhat. Rodin, Maillol, Despiau. Kolbe in Germany. And then of course there was the great rebirth of sculpture with Picasso's 1913 construction "The Guitar" in the Museum of Modern Art that started sculpture on a new trajectory. OK, let's look at famous Michelangelo. The best Michelangelo I've seen are the unfinished 'slaves' in the Borgo. They're the best. In order to be good as a sculptor, Michelangelo had to leave things unfinished. And they're still not as good as
Donatello.
RB I'm curious. Around the time of Michelangelo, painting didn't drop off?
CG Oh no! It got better. Well, I won't say it got better. It kept going; it wasn't a question of getting better. There's no progress in the arts, except within a tradition. Within a tradition there's a certain kind of progress, although I'm not sure that it's progress. We see Giotto as the beginning of the Renaissancenaturalist tradition; I happen to think Titian and Raphael are better painters than Giotto, but I'm not so ready to say there was progress. That's tricky.. A tradition does get itself fulfilled, or whatever. Whether or not it gets better it evolves, which doesn't necessarily mean progress. [I would say] the modernist tradition in painting started with Manet.
RB Can you define what you mean by modernism...
CG You point to it. You don't define it. A lot of people have that, anyhow, and I don't want to rehearse my own words. A piece I wrote, 'Modernist Painting': "Self-criticism through the means of art itself". God, it's fancy, but I'll stick by it.
Manet, I think, was the beginning of modernism in painting, as I think Flaubert and Baudelaire were in literature. To say there's been progress since then? No, there's been evolution since then, but not progress.
RB Is the issue really less about making progress and more about putting pressure on art to maintain standards?
CG Right! Well put: to maintain a level. Baudelaire, Flaubert and Manet felt that literature and painting were falling off. That there was a threat of decadence -- they used the word 'decadence' -- and the avant garde became a rescue operation. The notion of modernism, innovation for innovation's sake and all that. But the great innovators in literature and the visual arts at that time were reluctant ones. Their hands were forced. They wanted to create art or literature that would come up to the level of the great masters of the past. And they found they couldn't get to that level without innovating.
MS And they were keen to continue a tradition, as you were saying before.
CG Not keen. They had no choice. They looked back at the old masters and they thought 'Look how inferior the salon art is in comparison.' They saw that they had to meet the level of the old masters. But they couldn't imitate them. So if you couldn't imitate them you were forced to innovate, as it were.
And Mallarmé was a reluctant innovator. Monet certainly was, and Cézanne. Cézanne didn't put it into words, but it's implicit in the reverent way he spoke of the old masters. Manet said he was fed up with the 'soups and gravies' of the salon painters, meaning the shading, the grays and browns and the neutral colors which academic painting did abound in. He thought it shut out color. He saw a small picture in the Louvre that was attributed to Velasquez -- it turned out to be by his son-in-law Mazo -- and that's when he made this remark: 'No more soups and gravies.' And then he went to Spain to see more Velasquez and he caught on to Goya... That, as I said, was the beginning of modernism in painting.
It worked differently with Flaubert and Baudelaire. It's harder to put your finger on just what occurred, but they were dissatisfied with the literature around them in their time. This was all in the 1850's, 1860's. And in France, nowhere else. Although you could say the Pre-Raphaelites decided to go back before Raphael because they wanted color too, but somehow they didn't have the boldness of the French. And color does come out in Pre-Raphaelite painting, but they kept on shading and modeling as before. They stayed more academic.
GP More linear in their draughtsmanship.
CG And more conventional, though I think that some of the Pre-Raphaelites were good. Cézanne was going to get the effect of volume without having to shade with neutral tones. He was going to do it with the Impressionist method, with color, so he innovated perforce, trying to get the effect of volume with color all those facets. Late Cézanne was probably the best Cézanne. He was already quasi-Cubist and all he meant to do was to get the effect of volume, the illusion of the third dimension by using color
RB This brings up the idea of innovation. We tend to look at the history of art in terms of the innovations. Is that maybe a modern notion ? I'm wondering if innovation was so important during the Renaissance and before that.
CG I don't know enough to say, but reading Vasari, he doesn't talk about anything but... He talks about increasing verisimilitude, progress in verisimilitude, for example. In spite of himself, though, he often praised artists that weren't always the more realistic ones.
RB So in a way he was finding an explanation, but it didn't necessarily
CG Apply. He had too good an eye to just accept the fact that these were more lifelike.
RB Now to get back to this idea of modernism, are you saying that it really does not have as much to do with the way of structuring the picture or setting up the space in the picture?
CG What did happen was that Manet started flattening the picture. Fromentin said he was painting playing cards. And Cézanne said about Gauguin and Van Gogh that they painted Chinese pictures because they didn't deal enough with the illusion of the third dimension, that they were too flat. Cézanne, who wanted to get that third dimension, turned out in his last paintings to get terribly flat. And then the Cubists came along, and then the Fauves. The Fauves... ah, that's a special chapter, the Fauves. And it happened... well, it's this way: you painted to make as good a picture as you could -- no program -- you might have a program for making good pictures but no program beyond that. You wanted to paint as good a picture as you could, as all painters try, and you found that it wasn't good enough if you continued to shade and model. That's what happened. I mentioned before: Pollock wanted to model and shade and he found out he couldn't. It didn't come out good. He had to go flat relatively. Nobody wants to paint flat pictures, it's tougher to make them good...
RB Where did 'literalness' fit into all this?
CG What 'literalness' do you mean?
RB Well, having the picture look more like what it physically was, not what it was about.
CG Nineteenth century. In about the mid-nineteenth century. In the pursuit of literalness, I think... Courbet and after that, Fantin-Latour's wonderful flower pieces. But then the Impressionists wanted to do light the way it actually was, to be true to light for the first time. And they got flat, too.
RB So almost in spite of themselves they became less illusionistic.
CG Yes. Their hands were forced by their desire for quality.
RB But why did quality push them in this direction and not in another direction, in the direction of deep space and illusion?
CG Why did Giotto break with the kind of Byzantine painting that was there in Italy in his time. I think because the pictures didn't look good enough unless he modeled them full of sculptural relief.
GP How were the Fauves a separate case?
CG They took off from Gauguin and Van Gogh, going flat with high color. Matisse didn't admire Gauguin, by the way. He shocked the Germans when he said Gauguin was overrated. The Fauves... the Fauve way of painting-alla prima, no underpainting, no glazing, and so forth-became the lingua franca by 1910. In South America when I was there in '64, the best painting I saw was not the hot shot modernist stuff but landscape and figures done in the essence of the Fauve manner. Like all alla prima painting, it was Fauve. And the same thing in Japan. Their efforts to do Western painting weren't so hot except when they went Fauve. I should have written about that. And when painters around here and elsewhere do landscape they paint in essence the Fauve way. I haven't reflected on that I'd have to reflect in order to write about it. There was this Fauve landscape show at the Metropolitan and I thought this is my chance to really deal with the Fauves. But no, I'm too lazy.
RB John Elderfield wrote a book about the Fauves in which he discussed the symbolist content of the paintings or the sort of pagan aspects, which makes me think about how preoccupied in this century a lot of the early abstract painters were with Surrealism.
CG That's a different chapter- Surrealism. The abstract painters took their Surrealism from Miro and Masson. Not from... and that seemed a liberty for them. And then they didn't paint like Surrealists. But, oh, automatic writing, oh sure. You start off free with a scribble and a few marks... you got started from that. And that was a Surrealist method.
RB So it was just a way to get going?
CG Yes.
RB Karen Wilkin did a show called "The Collective Unconscious" that included people like Gottlieb with the "pictographs" and things like that... But that made me think that the impulse to go that way was really just a way to find for
MS and images that weren't tie to conventional representation. That still had some connection to it because they hadn't found a way to be completely abstract.
CG That's partly true. They wanted to invent and so they would sit down, a Gorky did, and do Picasso. That's putting them down, because when Gorky did Picasso it turns out he did some damn good stuff. Automatic writing, automatic painting became almost a matter of course in New York on 8th Street at the end of the '30s. It was a way of working up invention, as it were, without worrying about figuration, representation, or symbols -- whatever. The Surrealists were a great encouragement in that respect.
RB So it was a case of minor art inspiring...
CG Well Miro wasn't minor art and Masson wasn't a great artist but he wasn't a minor artist.
RB To get back to narrative...
CG Courbet alludes to narrative and so forth, and certainly Delacroix, but for an ambitious painter by the 1860's... who cared about telling a story in visual art?
RB I sometimes wonder whether the fact that photography came along at that time somehow took the burden off of painting to tell a story because photography could do it so much better.
CG I think that's exaggerated, too. I think that if you did a still life or a figure, or a landscape, whatever, what did you need to dress it up with narrative for? That's where the question of painting well lay. And even Courbet... all right, 'The Burial' or his 'Painter's Studio' which is a great painting... You painted what you saw before you and that was it. You were sophisticated. Fantin-Latour was and Courbet. And Manet was, too. He didn't want to tell stories. Maybe he did in his prints, and it's true Cézanne wanted to tell stories in his youth, but nobody could recognize them as stories. I can put myself in the place, presumptuously, of an ambitious painter in the 1850's who could look at salon art with all its narrative as sort of hoked up and not really about painting. And the salon painting, and all its narrative, was unsatisfactory. As it was for Manet for formal reasons - too much neutral shading that swathed and muffled color.
The artists I've known -- I use the word 'positivist' -- they've wanted something that would hit your eye, the way Titian hit your eye. Or Velasquez. Or Goya, or Ingres, or Delacroix. They wanted to hit your eye whether they were painting narrative or not. And when I say hit your eye, I don't mean that they had spectacular innovation or anything. It's the same thing the gentlemen here mean when they like something in painting, You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye..
When you're young and you maybe can't see art, you're interested in the story. Sometimes, though, there are great story-tellers, like Bruegel in Jesus on the Way to Golgotha. The way Bruegel paints the two thieves in their separate carts. He's such a great illustrator and illustration can be great. And you see the monks anachronistically preparing the thieves for death, and you see on their faces they want to believe and they can't quite. God, does Bruegel do it well. Or there's the picture in the National Gallery in London of The Death of St. Peter Martyr. It has a lot of green on one side and then the martyrdom on the left hand side of the picture : it's great illustration, and a great picture at the same time. That's Bruegel*. But you'll see pictures, especially in the 19th century where good narrative is done by painters that are not that good.
* That's not Breugel, it's Bellini (or "attributed to"), but Greenberg's argument still hold's. His memory of the name failed. As he admitted, attribution wasn't his long suit.
RB Are there any good narrative painters now?
CG I don't know of them, but I won't exclude the possibility. Can you think of any?
RB No I can't, but I sometimes think that the best photography has narrative.
CG Oh, I've written that already! I've got to write it again, got to do it better I said that photography depends on its content, as it were. No, content is the wrong word. It's got to, not tell a story, but not compete with painting. Or else if the photographer wants to compete with painting he's got to be a good painter.
RB Who would be an example of that?
CG Man Ray was a pretty good painter. His photography is too modernistic, though. It's not good enough photography.
RB Ben Shahn was a better photographer than a painter.
CG No! Well, yeah, he was a good photographer and he could be a good painter. Now -- after the 60's -- I think better of his painting. I used to think he was too minor. That's part of the fun of watching art: you change your mind.
RB Do you think photography is art.
CG Of course it is. You're making me rehearse things I've already written. Anything can be experienced aesthetically and the line between art and non-art is so indefinite
RB Major art, would you say ? Have you seen any photography that is major art?
CG I've never been asked that question before. I don't know. The photographer I admired most in my own time was Walker Evans because in a manner of speaking he told a story. The other was Atget, in the early part of this century, who everybody admires, and they're right to. His pictures don't exactly tell a story, but what I've noticed about good photography is that a good photograph always has some evidence of humanity in it. So you can get a good photograph of a road because humans have built the road. And here's where the subject matter determines everything and not formal qualities.
RB I'm trying to think of some examples of photography that don't have humanity in them...
MS Well what about those Edward Westons like the "Green Pepper"...
CG He's too arty. I don't like his stuff
RB Did you say before that you're not writing any more?
CG For the time being. When you say 'any more' it's too final. I stopped writing about ten years ago or more, and I love not writing
RB But you still like going to studios?
CG And looking at art, yes.
MS What do you think about the contemporary scene?
CG More good sculpture and painting are being made right now than in my time back in the '30s and '40s and '5Os.
GP Doesn't that make you feel a need to write about that or participate in that, because you're seeing it?
CG All I can say -- and this is not because I'm talking to you here -- I say when I'm talking in public that the best painting and sculpture now are being done in western Canada. And in Syracuse -- and there's no sculpture in Syracuse, just painting -- and of course the audience say 'What do you mean, western Canada? Who's ever heard of it?' They don't even know where Edmonton or Saskatoon are. I have fun saying that because it's the truth. I'm not being provocative.
MS And if there's more good painters and sculptors working today than there was in your time it indicates that this is a very healthy situation.
CG I think so. And then I...
RB Why doesn't it look that way, though, you know when you look at the art magazines and you look at who sells art and who...
CG And then I come out with my standard lecture. You forget that that's the way the best new art has fared since Manet's time. The best new art is rejected. Manet, the Impressionists, they had to wait ten, fifteen years before being accepted. And that pattern has been repeated ever since. The fact is the best new art gets rejected now as it did in the 1860's and ever since, and it waits its time out and after a dozen years or twenty it goes over. There are exceptions. Picasso was an early success, I read. For some reasons in those marvelous years before1914 things happened. But Picasso didn't get well off until just before 1914. And there was Matisse whose wife had to keep a millinery shop to keep him going until just before 1914. And then in my time, there were Pollock and David Smith, the best artists of their generation, who were hard up for money for oh so long. Pollock until just a year or two before his death, and Smith up 'til his death, hard up for money. That was standard and it was taken for granted; the artists complained about it. The first Abstract Expressionist to get into a Whitney it was '49. And it was only in the early 50's that the others began going in and by that time the afflatus was out of Abstract Expressionism. And all these guys were in their 40's by then
RB Before, when you explained this phenomenon, you said it had something to do with middlebrow taste... Do you still feel that way?
CG I didn't feel it had to. I said that's what seemed to have happened.
RB Because the audience for art is larger now than it's ever been.
CG That's true. But not for the best new art.
RB So then, how do you feel about your role, then? Do you feel that you and people like you who go to studios and give artists feed-back, do you feel that you play an important role to help to maintain standards?
CG No. No I certainly don't. I've had no effect at all. Despite the myth...
MS Do you think it's important for artists to get critical support ?
RB Yes, or criticism or critical feedback.
CG Whether you're a writer or a composer you need critical feedback.
MS And if you're not getting economic support, as we've talked about, maybe this critical support is more important?
CG No. No. First money. Artists are as human as anyone else. You have to eat.
RB So you don't see what you do as being something essential?
CG Essential? No. I think writing about art livens things up. Zola said if you keep repeating an artist's name long enough, as I did Pollock's -- now I don't claim credit for Pollock's success -- but if you keep insisting, as Zola said, those who insist win out in the end. I kept repeating Pollock's name and it had some effect in the end, I'm told. But the artist has to live long enough, and Pollock didn't live long enough.
RB So the act of art criticism is more of an intellectual activity?
CG No, don't put it that way. No -- intellectual nothing
RB ... or an aesthetic...
CG No! Oh, it's keeping the activity going. Not keeping the art going, but directing attention. Look, I could say "Olitski's the best living painter" over and over, and people will say "Isn't it sad. He once liked Pollock. Isn't it sad. And now it's Olitski.' (laughter) And all the same, Olitski's prices are going up. So. I get more opposition when I talk and I get asked from the audience "who do you think's good' and I say "l'll just give you one name. Olitski." And I get more opposition... People get up with confidence and say "You're all wrong." And the confidence they have in saying I'm all wrong impresses me.
MS Didn't that happen with Pollock ?
CG I wasn't asked to talk so much then. (laughter) I wasn't in demand then. Not that I'm in demand now, but with seniority you outlive a lot of things so you get asked to talk.
GP But if criticism plays an encouraging role in the development of things now... there are very few people who can write about art now.
CG There never were many... There's one good art critic for every ten good artists.
RB There's that many good art critics?
CG One for twenty. You're right, you're right. Because if you look back, I can think of writers... We'll include Baudelaire, Thore Burger, Fairfield Porter, Felix Feneon and we won't include Apollinaire because he's not a good art critic -- he's a good drum-banger.
RB And not Ruskin ?
CG Ruskin was great, but when it came to contemporary art he was nowhere. He was for the Pre-Raphaelites, and all that. He couldn't see what was going on in France. As I said before, the Pre-Raphaelites got underrated, but compared to what was going on in France they were minor, so minor.
MS 'major' and 'minor' -- do you see them as very distinct categories, or do you see them as having shades of grey in between?
CG Oh, there should be shades of grey, of course. But I insist on the distinction in order to say that, well, David Smith was better than... no, I don't want to name names. David Smith was a major artist just as some others in England weren't. And in France.
MS Does being major have anything to do with having an influence on what's happening?
CG No it doesn't.
GP Henry Moore wasn't.
CG Henry Moore wasn't. He was overrated, he's still overrated.
GP He was very important in the development of sculpture but not
CG No, he's not important in the development of sculpture. I don't think so. I think a major artist like Caro was helped by Henry Moore, working for him, but had to go far away from him in order to become major. And that's how it happened.
RB What about Rodin ? He was a major artist, but he didn't influence sculpture.
CG No he didn't. He was the end of something, and yet a kind of beginning. I haven't thought about it. I think Maillol was a better sculptor in the showdown. Maillol came out of Rodin all the same.
Note: Continued on the following "page" as "WD_198".
-www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/interview.html
| | | send price request |
|
|
|
|
|
Gallery opening
500 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1820 (Between 42nd and 43rd)
...
|
|
more
|
|
