Can We Say, ‘Primitive?’
Posted on 21 September 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings, France
In the 1990s, I recall watching Sister Wendy Beckett, the demuring celebrity spokesperson for a popular PBS series on art appreciation. This sequestered nun, who for decades had lived under a vow of silence, had gained notoriety for her views on famous works of art and now stood in her nun’s habit waxing vociferously before the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings. Self-taught and passionate about the history of art, she gestured at the figures of stampeding bison and elk behind her and said, “These images are 15,000 years old. In the millennia that followed, art didn’t get any better than this, just different.”
In a few words, she summed up the argument for why we should not apply the word, ‘primitive’ to any artistic or material object from cultures far removed from our own tastes and values, simply because we do not understand them. Read more
Analyzing the ‘Strange Art of Today’…Vintage 1948, New York City
Posted on 13 September 2011 | By Richard Friswell
September 12, 2011
Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror (1932). Collection MOMA
In late summer of 1948, a strange gathering took place on the top floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Distinguished men (all men) from the fields of arts, letters, academia and the publishing world were invited by LIFE Magazine to discuss and debate the then-current state of the “modern painting” movement. The Round Table—part of a magazine-sponsored series on the post-war American lifestyle—consisted of such notables as Brave New World author, Aldous Huxley; Clement Greenberg, avant-garde critic; Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Met; Sir Leigh Ashton, director of London’s Victoria & Albert; Meyer Shapiro, professor of fine arts at Columbia University; Alfred Frankfurter, editor and publisher of Art News; Charles Sawyer, of Yale’s art department and James Thrall Soby, chairman MOMA’s painting and sculpture department, among others. Read more
It’s Not Easy Being Green
Posted on 1 May 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Green is the color of life returning. As the earth’s annual cosmic orbit once again swings our northern climes into the direct and warming rays of the sun, nature’s life-blood, chlorophyll, begins to flow through the budding leaves and plants around us. We associate this awakening with physical and emotional viability—our own and that of the other living things that we share space with in our world.
Green is easy on the eyes. Its place on the light spectrum is smack-dab in the middle and the many shades of green, from yellow-green to forest, register primally on the brain in ways that conveys calm and the certitude of life-renewed. As a result, green is used worldwide to represent safety. Read more
Finding Words to Describe Great Art
Posted on 1 April 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Powerful writing about the visual arts in fiction is no easy task. Occasionally, I find a particularly beautiful example of an author incorporating observations about a particular painting or artist’s work into the fabric of their novel. Such an example follows. It is from Muriel Barberry’s, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (translated by Alison Anderson); New York: Europa Editions (2008). It constitutes a short chapter in a charming and witty story of a woman and girl unknowingly bound by profound intellectual gifts and a cautious view of the immediate world around them.
Whence comes the sense of wonder we perceive when we encounter certain works of art? Admiration is born with our first gaze and if subsequently we should discover, in the patient obstinacy we apply in flushing out the causes thereof, that all this beauty is the fruit of a virtuosity that can only be detected through close scrutiny of a brush that has been able to tame shadow and light and restore shape and texture, by magnifying them—the transparent jewel of the glass, the tumultuous texture of the shells, the clear velvet of the lemon—this neither dissipates nor explains the mystery of one’s initial dazzled gaze. Read more
