“… But I know what I like”
by David Benjamin
“Mona Lisa looks as though she’s about to be sick.”
— Noel Coward
PARIS
— As I was passing an art gallery yesterday on rue St. André des Arts, a
painting caught my eye. It depicts three female figures sculpted in
stone against horizontal panels of black and white.
Momentarily,
I thought this image exceptionally artful and crossed the street for a
closer look. At second glance, I saw it as merely decorative. Neutral in
color and subject, it would blend into almost any interior decor. It
would look nice over the sofa, denote its owner’s good taste and never
wear on the senses.
As I changed my mind, I suffered the
realization that — after all these years — I still “appreciate”
different art for different reasons that clash violently. Smartass
though I claim to be, I have no visible philosophy of art.
Some art I like for its clarity of representation and sheer drama — like Gericault’s oils and Rodin’s bronzes.
Some
art gets to me because it brazenly defies bourgeois convention:
Modigliani’s nudes, Monet’s slapdash lily pads, Picasso’s cock-eyed (and
cock-nosed) portraits, the madman grotesquery of Hieronymus Bosch.
There are artists who captivate me with their unique mastery of technique, like Winslow Homer’s brilliant watercolors.
And then there’s stuff I like just because I like it, from Rubens and Manet to Reginald Marsh and Walasse Ting.
But
I wouldn’t have reached even my present stage of aesthetic irresolve
without the influence of a teacher named Liddicoat and, unwillingly, a
girl named Quigley.
The Quigley Episode: My only “elective” class
in four years of high school was Roy Liddicoat’s basic art class. Roy
was prone — as was I — to the occasional passionate outburst about the
perversity of the human condition. This became manifest one day as he
leaned over the shoulder of a sophomore named Quigley and inspected her
work. Most of my classmates were in awe of Quigley’s talent for
reproducing romantic images from popular magazines. Quigley adorned each
perfectly rendered line-by-line enlargement in soft pastels, lending it
an air of sentimentality that virtually dripped treacle off the pages
of her sketchpad.
Mr. Liddicoat watched her draw for a while, took in the oohs and ahs from the girls surrounding Quigley and, finally, snorted.
“That’s not art,” he said.
He
followed by stating the obvious. Quigley’s draftsmanship was both
flawless and rigid. She lent to her forgery neither honest feeling nor
even a whiff of imagination. Her choice of subjects was appalling. Her
inability to interpret the image and her reluctance to alter a line even
as much as a millimeter revealed a creative vacuum that might someday
prove — Roy lamented — both commercially lucrative and artistically
criminal.
Roy walked away, leaving Quigley stricken and her fans
bewildered. I suspected that I’d just found a new friend. As the year
progressed, I proved myself not nearly as skillful as Quigley. But Roy
was much more tolerant of my style — which was primitive and disorderly,
a sort of abstract expressionism with dark shades of Dante.
Eventually,
Roy gave me the run of the art room, with unfettered access to all the
art supplies I felt like squandering. Mainly, I exploited huge rolls of
white butcher paper and gallons of tempera paint, covering the brick
walls of LaFollette High with 20-foot posters promoting football games,
sock hops and theater productions. I invented a typeface for this, of
which Roy approved.
Besides all this, Mr. Liddicoat convinced me
that art is not merely an elective in life. It’s a piece of the whole
person that leaves a cold and toxic void if it’s not there. So when I
had a chance in my third semester of college, I signed up for Art
History with a softspoken half-blind prof named Dedrick. We, his
students, spent weeks studying Mr. Dedrick’s lovingly shot slides of the
fragments of art that survive from the ancient Sumerians and Persians,
Egyptians, Phrygians, Parthians and Babylonians. It was all old and dry,
but Mr. Dedrick’s love made it breathe.
This led, inevitably, to the Oriental Institute Incident.
The
Oriental Institute, on Chicago’s south side, was a sort of shrine for
Mr. Dedrick, which meant that we all got a field trip one day to Hyde
Park. Barely had we reached the wondrous Mesopotamian rooms when one of
the museum’s U. of Chi. MFA interns spotted Mr. Dedrick and somehow
deemed him easy pickings. Might’ve been the Coke-bottle glasses, the
tweed suit, the scuffed brown shoes. Or maybe just his air of amiable
grace.
Once buttonholed, Mr. Dedrick followed the voluble intern
meekly, listening to the kid rattle on about this papyrus scroll or
that bug-eyed votive figure. Never once did he interrupt. As his
students lurked nearby, smirking at the irony of this postgrad naif
lecturing the Midwest’s foremost expert on the art of the ancient
Orient, kindly Mr. Dedrick waved us away. He nodded encouragement to his
infant mentor and gratefully took in the Reader’s Digest condensed version of lessons he had dispensed from his lectern — with a joy that never faded — a few hundred times.
And
I was convinced all over again of the power of art to bridge eons,
unite strangers and fill the air with patient contemplation.
Since
Mr. Dedrick, I’ve followed art casually but steadily, discovering a
useless knack for identifying many artists at first glance. I can spot a
Mary Cassatt at 50 paces and distinguish a Steinlen from a
Toulouse-Lautrec without breaking a sweat.
(By the way, I know where Steinlen is buried, in a Paris grave that can be found only by accident.)
Still,
for all my superfluous art knowledge, I can’t explain my preferences. I
can’t shake the conviction, for instance, that the Mona Lisa is one of
Da Vinci’s lesser achievements. And I’ve never warmed up to Cezanne —
and feel guilty about it.
On the other hand, I grew up with Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers and I won’t tolerate anyone speaking ill of Norman. I think Will Elder’s “Little Annie Fanny” strips in Playboy
deserve a wall in the Guggenheim, along with Al Capp and Walt Kelly. I
don’t know why but I prefer Wright to Van Der Rohe, Matisse to Miro and
Thurber to Durer. And I like Durer, but just a little bit less. In a
tossup, I’d go with Brancusi over Henry Moore, but I’d object to the
tossup. I prefer Diego to Frida, Willy Ronys to Robert Doisneau and
J.M.W. Turner to just about anybody.
Why? Who knows?
None
of my choices are empirical, aesthetic or even artistic. I’ve tried to
get my mind right by reading art magazines about art, but all I figured
out was nobody that should ever read art magazines. After a half-dozen
glutinous paragraphs, you start pondering an amendment to the First
Amendment.
As a lifelong know-it-all, I’m frustrated by this
persistent uncertainty about the meaning of art and the way it fuzzes up
my sensibilities. I should like Rembrandt more than Delacroix. Shouldn’t I?
There’s
a cliché that covers my dilemma, but I can’t even get that straight: “I
know quite a bit about art, but I don’t know why I like what I like.”
Thursday, November 2, 2017
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