Date: Mon, 29 May 1995 08:57:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: vance <vance-AT-CWU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Simon Ford's article




On Mon, 29 May 1995, Malgosia Askanas wrote:
> Vance wrote:
> > If, for instance, Monet hadn't come along when when he did--so reason the 
> > postmodernists, and I have to agree with this--the culture would have 
> > generated another very like him who would have synthesized similar ideas 
> > that were rampant thoughout the soceity at that time.

Malgosia replies:
> This view seems to me too reductive.  I don't believe that art can be
> reduced to a synthetization of ideas, or that it submits very well to the 
> concept of "another very like him".  These notions disregard what I think 
> is paramount: the material, sensual, concrete, immanent experience of 
> each artwork.  I am a great lover of conceptual art, but its charm lies 
> precisely in its being a reductio ad absurdum.  

This is a good point, Malgosia. Well taken. It is not a point that I 
would attempt to argue is right or wrong. I too am interested in the 
"immanent experience" of *some* individual art works: certainly the way 
Monet's Lilly Pad series moves many viewers is not to be overlooked, and 
it certainly fits nicely into my own Exlax theory of art--If it moves you 
it's working :)
 
However, *my* own principal interest runs more toward something like 
epistemology--ideas and and their continuity and influence on work that 
comes after them--just as your interest lies in the other direction. 
Monet's part in my view of the changing images in art runs something like 
this (simplistically):

The 17th-century "debat sur le coloris," between Le Brun and De Piles 
(the Poussinists and the Rubenists), was extended--but with new leaders, 
Ingres and Delacroix--through the first half of the 19th century.  This 
argument had split art into two opposing factions:  those who considered 
color to be superficial and drawing to be the most important structure in 
painting, against those who believed color to be paramount.  The constant 
inversion of the status of these two basic opposites then continued to 
initiate new images for the next hundred years.

Finally, at the end of the 19th century, Monet and several other artists 
discovered--with the help of such precedents as Tiepolo and Delacroix--a 
method that promised to unite rather than oppose these two dichotomies. 
The use of color temperature as a device for achieving a sensation of 
volume, and later its use as a compositional element, and then a spatial 
device, began to fit color into the same formal structures that had 
previously been reserved for dark-light relationships. The consolidation 
of three major concepts furnished a fertile ground for the equality, even 
perhaps the supremacy, of color as practiced by painters such as Monet 
and Cezanne. These three concepts were:  

1) new adaptations of the classic color theory (briefly the tendency for 
warm saturate color to advance while cool greyed color recedes). 

2)Kant's successful advocacy of the respectability of that consciousness 
which was necessarily developed through the senses, thus imbuing color 
for the first time with the respectability of human reason. 

And 3) the newfound formal structures of volume and composition through 
the use of color; Delacroix had written in his journal: "remember the 
simple effect of the head.  It was laid in with a very dull grey tone.  I 
could not make up my mind whether to put it more into shadow or to make 
the light passages more brilliant.  Finally, I made them slightly more 
pronounced compared with the mass and it sufficed to cover the whole of 
the part in light with warm and reflected tones.  Although the light and 
shadow were almost the same value, the cold tones of the shadow were 
enough to give accent to the whole."

Monet's direction might begin to seem inevitable, and its influence on 
those who followed, especially Cezanne, is hard to deny.

My point is that I am not advocating the supremacy of such a view, only 
that it is definitly a valid point of view. After all, absolutely no one 
understands all aspects of art. But I would hold that my description of 
the ear of that elephant is quite defensible.

vance


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