27 July 2006
Easy art
There's a photo of a sculpture in the 31 July 2006 New Yorker:
The scupltor is Gaston Lachaise; here's a better photo of the work.
Certain subject matter in art is difficult to execute successfully because of its strong primary connotations. Religious subjects are probably the most perilous. For the spiritual person, icons in themselves have potency and therefore little is expected of the artist. Another difficult subject is nudes. The human form can so often lend itself to such a simple and balanced image that any skillfully executed composition need not necessarily have any artful expressiveness. Consider Manet's Olympia next to a Rowena:
To get past the prurience, the artist has to make some additional effort that, say, a landscape or group portrait (think Rembrandt's Night Watch) doesn't. All art involves the difficulty of being artful, but some subjects cary more subjective baggage. Look at Rouault's image and a standard airbrushed Christ:
I don't think I'm being too unfair to call the second one crap--skillfully executed but compositionally inept and expressively void.
The Lachaise sculpture had stuck in my head since the magazine arrived. The stout proportions are matched with oddly muscular arms, and the weight of the component forms--exaggerated at the hips and thighs--seem to force the mass as a whole upwards. There's also a greater dynamism than normal from the contrapposto. Look especially at the space between the arms and legs to get a suggestion of how the figure occupies its space. Lachaise has created a sly manipulation of mass that I don't quite understand but that presents a compelling question to be answered.
- Music from the Sonic Generator concert, 6 May 2015 posted by sstrader on 7 May 2015 at 11:01:42 PM
- The strangely enduring power of kitsch posted by sstrader on 21 December 2014 at 4:34:46 PM
- Nowhere Men phantom issues posted by sstrader on 22 April 2014 at 11:55:50 PM
- Where was I? posted by sstrader on 22 February 2014 at 11:54:34 AM
- New comic books discovered in Denver in October posted by sstrader on 7 December 2013 at 11:06:53 AM