Some writings on art. I put this together in an hour last week--books and writers that have influenced me over the years. Not that they have to be
your books--but a good indication of why Dubovsky says some of the things he does... I may keep adding to this--and of course, some will come up for discussion in class. This dates me, no doubt--but you should understand how and why...
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James Schuyler, his reviews in Art News, 1950s (Thomas Hess, editor).
Published more recently in book form, from Black Sparrow.
Read for the way Schuyler's
sensibility guides his writing--the ideas follow from seeing and feeling. His diaries have this quality as well. A revelation.
Frank O'Hara (The Day Lady Died). O'Hara worked in the curatorial department at the MOMA in New York in the 1950s. One of the younger poets who also knew the younger artists of that time. O'Hara's poems, John Ashbury's poems, James Schuyler's poems. Paintings of Larry Rivers (in the end, uneven), Fairfield Porter, and Jane Freilicher.
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| Jane Freilicher, Dark Afternoon, oil on canvas, 2001 |
Fairfield Porter. Edition of his writings edited by painter Rackstraw Downes. An extremely clear-minded writer as well as a painter. In the 1950s Porter was better known for his writing than as a painter.
And the modernist bible: Clement Greenberg,
Art and Culture.
Read his chapter, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Hard to believe today, but there were
decades in which Greenberg's views ruled supreme. If your work didn't conform, you were outside. Hence (much later) the term, "outsider artist"? And counter-movements like Fluxus--artists who
knew--or at least sensed--that modernism was only one point of view...
Susan Sontag's essay, "Notes on Camp," followed from this. 1964. Also a revelation when we first read it. (I was 19.)
John Berger,
About Looking along with his other collections. 1970s and on. Berger's views always interesting. He started as a painter, wrote essays for many years, and then turned to film...
Earlier, mid-20th century: Roger Fry on Cezanne. Adrian Stokes.
Richard Wolheim's The Art in Painting.
Notion of "seeing in." This book was Wolheim's answer to the theories of Richard Arnheim and Ernst Gombrich.
The Warburg Insitute, London.
It's history, intellectual roots, and view of art history. Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Gombrich, Gertrude Bing, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky, Rudolph Wittkower... Charles Hope on Venetian painting...
And Frances Yates,
The Art of Memory (1952. A Warburg classic, of continuing interest...
Walter Benjamin.
Hannah Arendt edited a collection of his earlier essays, under the title of Illuminations. Her introduction important. Unpacking My Library, The Storyteller, many others...
Paintings of R.B. Kitaj, and his writings that accompanied them, especially in the 1960s and 70s.
Kitaj's sensibility, his way of working, and his attitude... what he was able to
reach...
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| R.B. Kitaj, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1960 | |
George Kubler,
The Shape of Time.
Kubler's ideas about
form classes--and his rejection of Panofsky et al. What can we say when we know
nothing about the scoial context in which a work of art is located? Kubler's field was Pre-Columbian art--whereby he wrestled with this question. His "contrarian" observations will almost always make you re-think what you know...
Eric Auerbach,
Mimesis.
A collection of essays on the history of consciousness as understood through particular moments in literature, beginning with Homer ("Odysseus' Scar") and running to Virginia Wolfe...
Paintings
of Philip Guston, and his sporadic oracular notes. Especially from late
1960s and on. Guston died in 1980. His later paintings influenced a
generation. "The hand needs to be a little ahead of the idea..." (my paraphrase)
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| Philip Guston, lithograph, print dated 1980 |
Today? Maybe Jed Perl. Maybe the English painter, Julian Bell. Maybe Michael Kimmelman...
Everybody's trying to sort it all out, the work produced today, in relation to the
wave of absolutely everything else...
