Robert Hughes at ALA splitter 00

The late, great art and culture critic, Robert Hughes, was the Opening General Session speaker on June 15, 2002 in Atlanta. His talk, months after the September 11 attacks continues to resonate. ALA President John W. Berry in 2002 posts this video, with permission, as a tribute to our friend and colleague. 'Free Libraries Free Society' was the title of the talk.

Edvard Munch, Mass Media and Photography

There are a substantial number of blog entries that deal with painting: from the Renaissance painting to contemporary abstraction. This may seem odd to the casual viewer of a blog that is called Digital Imaging and Photography. Many of these entries are here due to the painter’s use of photographic and sometimes digital technologies or it is about the abstract nature of its piece and its influence on abstract film and digital art. Others are there simply because they deal with concepts or are part of a broader cultural movement like Romanticism or Modernism.

 

Detail from Edvard Munch's Self-Portrait "A la Marat" at Dr Jacobson's Clinic in Copenhagen (1908-1909)

The inclusion of Munch here has been prompted by the exhibition Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye that runs at the Tate Modern until 14 October, 2012. Edvard Munch can be seen as the heir to Van Gogh and his paintings of self-expression, the last breadths of Northern Romanticism. Van Gogh was famously described as “the hinge in which nineteenth-century Romanticism finally swung into twentieth-century Expressionism” (Hughes, 1991, p.276). Yet Munch seems forever associated with the fin-de-siècle and the symbolist counter culture that expressed their anxiety of metropolitan culture and the coming new century and horror it would and did eventually bring.  A.S. Byatt recently observed that “like Van Gogh” Munch “wanted to make passionate images of human beings and nature for a secular world  to replace the old religious images” (2012, p.16). This exhibition however, aims to make Munch seem more modern with curators Angela Lampe and Clément Chéroux pointing “out in there catalogue that three quarters of Munch’s output dates from after 1900, most particularly from between 1913-1930” (Byatt, 2012 p.16). 

 

Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
The Scream (after Edvard Munch) 1984

The exhibition “tries to make us see Munch as modern in several ways: his repetition and serial repainting, his interest in photography and film, his use of theatrical lighting” and according the critic Adrian Searle, Munch was “aware of the opportunities and limits afforded by these different media (Searle, 2012). Searle explains that “we always cast the art of the past in ways that always suit us. There is always new research" he reminds us, “new ways seeing” (Searle, 2012).  In the late 20^th Century Munch’s art seems to return in the form of many stylistic borrowings. His angst ridden canvases were the template of much neo-expressionist art and as Searle points out, Warhol “re-worked Munch” (Searle, 2012) with his cool touch, while later artists like Peter Doig quoted him (Doig’s painting always seemed to be the product of the reimagining of an art history, where Munch travelled to Tahiti instead of Gauguin).

Artists’ use of technologies other than brushes and paint is nothing new. Renaissance artists to Vermeer and perhaps most famously Canaletto beyond used the camera obscura: those pioneers of New Media Art.  Arts relationship with the “popular” and mass culture and mass media may have a shorter history, but it is important to take it into consideration when looking at Munch with fresh eyes. It is amazing that Munch is categorized as a Post-Impressionist.  His near contemporary Seurat (Seurat was born in 1859, Munch 1863) and fellow Post-Impressionist “was not shy of taking his motifs from the wild compositions of the most popular advertising artists Jules Cheret” (Hughes. 1996).  That other  Post-Impressionist Van Gogh was 80 years ahead of Warhol, with his love of newsprint: Van Gogh “loved not only Japanese prints, whose colours was highly sophisticated, but also the crude discordant and even brutal colours of mass industrial printing, which could give his work, he said, the effect of a chromolithograph from a cheap shop” (Hughes. 1996). And what of Bonnard, who produced posters advertising French Champagne in the 1890s and of course there was Toulouse Lautrec whose depictions of Parisian nightclub life not only portrayed people as if there faces were  masks, but promoted night clubs and cabarets or James Ensor who depicted modern life as a kind demonic carnival. This cultural mix would have had a profound influence on the young Munch. 

Munch’s modernity perhaps should not be questioned; even though his use of photography as Adrian Searle has recognized is far less extensive or as apparent as say, in the work of Degas, Bonnard or Vuillard (2012). Munch’s modernist consciousness may be close to Baudelaire’s description of modern experiences where alienated souls swarm like ants in the city, “City full of dreams/Where ghosts in daylight tug the stroller’s sleeve!”  However, the explorations of alienation and his expressionist credentials have been questioned by critics. Richard Dorment argues “that Munch always had more to do with the controlled sensuality you find in a Post Impressionism or Symbolism”, while “any idea that The Sick Child represents a morbidly expressionist cry of anguish is dispelled by the very existence of the numerous replicas Munch was willing to paint to order or knew he could sell” (Dorment, 2012). Laura Cumming (2012) has suggested that the exhibition’s catalogue “may be in danger of making a postmodernist of him”. Did not the expressionist Kirchner cynically alter the dates of many of his paintings to suggest that he painted them earlier, therefore influencing the price? Artist’s like de Chirico reworked there art, as did Duchamp. What about Dali’s work in the last couple of decades of his life? Well, perhaps  Munch's repetition was the only way of exorcising trauma, but suffering does seem to sell all the same and countercultures are eventually brought to bear under the pressure of markets.

Egon Shiele, Self-Portrait, 1914

Lucas Samaras Photo Transformation c Mid-seventies

The critics do not seem that convinced by Munch’s photography.  Dorment states “that although Munch took photographs and made films these are of little aesthetic importance” and Searle sees their relationship to Munch’s art as “extremely limited”. Perhaps Munch does not have that incredible relationship with film as Edward Hopper whose imagery, influenced by theatre design and film then goes on to inform the landscape of a Hitchcock and infuse Wim Wender's vision of America in films like Hammett. Munch does adopt in his photographs theatrical poses so perhaps his photography is part of that traditional of self-portraiture associated with expressionists concern of the self.  One thinks of Egon Shiela’s self-portraits from 1914 with there ridiculous level of vanity. Perhaps they, like Munch’s work are a kind proto-performance art, a forerunner of the art that emerged in the 60s and came to dominate the nineteen seventies art scene. We may live in the age of the narcissistic self where we begin with Expressionism and then the photography of Lucas Samera or Anulf Reiner and end here in the 21^st Century with Facebook, iphoto, iphone and mobile media that is producing endless examples of self-inspection, on the web, in spaces not too dissimilar from this one. The clumsy casualness and unfocused nature of some of Munch’s photography with its almost web-cam like aesthetic, shares something with so many of the artefacts produced in this age of the amateur. 

The cover shows a detail of Munch's The Sick Child

 The cover shows a detail from a lithogragh by Edvard Munch, The Death Chamber (1896).

Munch's connection with a broader modernism may be found in his involvement other media. Munch had ventured into stage design and “in 1906 he worked in Berlin with the great theatre director Max Reinhardt”, where he designed sets for Ibsen’s Ghost’s and Hedda Gabler (Byatt, AS, 2012 p.17). One may wonder how much he influenced Expressionist theatre (he may have found himself competing with Edward Gordon Craig). Munch is now irrevocably linked to both Strindberg and Ibsen, not least because of Penguin Classics designer, Germano Facetti, who before Warhol copied Munch and used his pictures for the covers of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Other Plays and Strinberg’s Three Plays in the nineteen sixties.

Why a Munch exhibition now? Well there is  the rise of 'Nordic noir' which, like Munch's art, explores Scandinavia's dark soul. One thinks imediately of the TV series, The Killing, which has proved immensely poular in the UK, so may explain why London has hosted these paintings.

Sources:

Byatt, AS, (2012), "The mean  reds" The Guardian, Review, 23 June, 2012 pp. 16-17.

Cumming, Laura,  (2012), "Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye- review", The Observer, Sunday 1 July, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jul/01/edvard-munch-modern-eye-review

Dorment Richard, (2012), "Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, Tate Modern, review", The Telegraph  Monday 25 June 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9354262/Edvard-Munch-The-Modern-Eye-Tate-Modern-review.html

Hughes, Robert (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson

Hughes, Robert (1996) The Myths of High and Low, International Society of the Performing Arts, December 15, 1996.

Searle, Adrian, (2012), "Edvard Munch: a head for horror", The Guardian Monday 25 June 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jun/25/edvard-munch-tate-retrospective

The Shock of the New 2: The Powers that Be

At the end of the first episode and chapter of Robert Hughes’ Shock of the New, we are told that “The Mechanical Paradise” that modernism promised “would soon be less evident.  After 1914”, Hughes explains “machinery was turned on its inventors and their children. After forty years of continuous peace in Europe, the worst war in history cancelled the faith in good technology, the benevolent machine. The myth of the Future went into shock and European art moved into its years of irony, disgust and protest (Hughes, 1991 p.56).

                The second episode “The powers that be” opens at the site of the Butte de Walencourt above the Somme Valley. In these places, Hughes explains, “our fathers and grandfathers tasted the first terrors of the 20^th Century. There that joyful sense of the promise of modernity, the optimism born of the machine and of the millennial turning point of the new century, was cut down by other machines”   (Hughes, 1991 p.57).

                Art and language Hughes argues “could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable” (p.56).  Total war until this time was basically beyond human experience and the naivety in which Europe entered the conflict was reflected in the propaganda that basically described the experience as somewhere between a joust and a cricket match.  More profound was the gap between experience and official language.  Those who had experienced grew aware that their leaders: the generals and politicians had lied about the war, its causes, its nature and length and the press had described very little of the realities of the conflict. A whole generation would be lost and traumatised. It was up to the artists and poets to challenge this official language and what separated them from official culture, was that that culture belonged to the elders. Some artists rejected authority and nationalism and the patriotism of their fathers. The children would become pacifists and internationalists and would seek a way out of the madness of the Great War and seek out exile.  The main haven for intellectuals in Europe was Zurich in neutral Switzerland.

The café was the natural home of the exiles and a very potent public sphere where many cultural, revolutionary and political ideas formed. In Zurich’s Café Odéon we saw Lenin plan that violent revolution in Russia, it was also the place where Cabaret Voltaire and Dada was born.  From here the revolutionary nature of art is explored from dada in Berlin to the constructivists in St Petersburg and Moscow. Of course both revolutionary art movements are doomed to fail as Stalinism and Nazism took hold and dismissed such things as degenerate or bourgeois and punished those artists who practised it with humiliation, exile, imprisonment or death. The idea of a revolutionary art linked to modernism does not disappear and certainly is not all liberal or left-wing.  Futurism was all patriotism and warmongering before and after World War I and became quite influential on the young Mussolini as he shifted his politics from socialism to something else.  Not long after he came to power Mussolini made futurism fascism’s first official style. Was there a difference, Hughes asks at one point, between Russian Agitprop art and photo-montage, cubo-futurism and futurists use of the same techniques? That other dictator, Hitler generally rejected modernism was favoured classicism and the work of Albert Speer. In the 1930s Mussolini would adopt classicism under Speer’s influence.    

Hughes compares Mussolini’s use of classicism and his architecture of state power with the “Architecture of Democracy”, with the scariest example being Albany Mall, the government building of New York State.  We have no architecture of freewill, Hughes declares!  As for the art of descent, we are left with Picasso’s Guernica and the remnants of the Dadaist strategies in the neo-dada of Jean Tinguely whom Hughes seems to dismiss as rather tame an un-revolutionary: harmless. Art then is out done by mass media and photography in their ability to morally influence the world: “it is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say, This saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian. Specific books perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920s is that they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naiveté that made them think so. But it is certainly  our loss that we cannot”  (Hughes, 1991 p.111).

Sources:

Hughes. R, (1991) The Shock of the New London: Thames and Hudson.

On Contemporary Painting (Sean Scully & Robert Hughes)

The above is from "The New Shock of the New" where Robert Hughes interviews the painter Sean Scully.   Although my interest has shifted slightly away from abstraction, within Scully's work there is something representational and he seems to engage with the language of urban environments without resorting to the visuals of mass media.

Shock of the New 1: Mechanical Paradise

The television series “Shock of the New” was first broadcast in 1980. The above episode was last broadcast in on Sat, 27 September 2008, at 20:00.

The series explores the development of modern art from 1880 to the present or at least to 1980 with the series and the first addition of the book based on the series. The first episode “Mechanical Paradise” (see above) shows how the development of technology transformed art and culture between the years 1880 and 1914. 

The key word was modernity and its emblem was the Eiffel Tower: its creator an engineer and not an architect.  This emblem signalled the end of one kind of history and the birth of another as the 19th moved into the 20th Century.

Hughes discusses Paul Cezanne and his works curious if sometimes contradictory relationship to Cubism. Hughes explores Cubism and its “inventors” Pablo Picasso and George Braque. Cubism according to Hughes was the first time artists confronted these cultural changes, shifts in contemporary philosophy and science and the birth of mass media. The transforming urban experience was explored by artists as diverse as Delaunay, Juan Gris and Leger and the poet Apollinaire.

The Marinetti and the Futurists seized upon the transforming poetry of the machine and speed, while the work of Picabia and Duchamp seem to suggest something less romantic about technology.
   
This episode concludes with the outbreak of World War One and the end of the hopes and dreams of the early machine age.
 
Credits
Presenter: Robert Hughes
Producer: Lorna Pegram
 
BBC Time-Life television series.