Showing posts with label paul cézanne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paul cézanne. Show all posts

16 Apr 2014

Lawrence Contra Matisse

 Henri Matisse: La Musique, (1939)

Whilst I share Lawrence's high regard for Cézanne, I do not share his loathing of Matisse whom he accuses of being nothing but a clever trickster in paint; one who admitted Cézanne as his master only so that he might betray and then bury him all the more successfully beneath a new form of abstraction that disguised drab cliché with gay colour.

For Lawrence, Matisse's very virtuosity is grounds for contempt. If he succeeds in producing "grand and flamboyant modern-baroque pictures" thanks to his supreme technical ability, nevertheless his skill means he needn't be humble or even honest as a painter. Instead, Matisse could falsely pride himself on being "a clever mental creature who is capable at will of making the intuitions and instincts subserve some mental concept ... in a sort of masturbation process". 

Whether this criticism is fair or even meaningful is open to debate. But the fact remains that I'd sooner have one of the Frenchman's lovely-looking - and, yes, intelligently conceived, skillfully executed - pictures hanging on my wall, than one of Lawrence's canvases which, whilst not hideous, are - to be fair to the prosecution - often gross as well as inept.           


Note: See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

25 Mar 2014

All Hail the New Flesh! (On D. H. Lawrence's Impure Pictures)

D. H. Lawrence: The Rape of the Sabine Women (1928)


D. H. Lawrence's great faith is in the flesh, to which he makes an insistent appeal throughout his writings. 

His paintings too, as critic Keith Sagar rightly points out, were a bold - not entirely successful - attempt to capture something of the meaty reality of the body and to make manifest the invisible flows that model and shape the flesh, sometimes cruelly, via a non-representational depiction of their effects. 

But Sagar is mistaken to think of this, as he does, in terms of an art of human anatomy. For in attempting to paint the fleshiness of the body and its forces, Lawrence does everything he can do to paint out those personal and ideal (all too human) aspects which overcode the corpo/real and establish the familiar hierarchical structures of the organism.

Lawrence does not wish to reduce his figures to the level of optical cliché; he is not trying to capture a likeness! Rather, he's attempting to express an objective (albeit intuitional) perception of substance. His painting is therefore, if nothing else, consciously post-Impressionist; a refusal, as he puts it, to be transmuted into the purity of light and colour.   

On occasion, it might be said (somewhat generously) that Lawrence almost pulls off what it is he believes only Cézanne amongst the moderns has achieved and what he terms appleyness - that is to say, the partial revealing of the thingliness of the thing, be it a piece of fruit, a wooden table, or the body of a naked woman.

However, at other times his less-than-subtle attempt to rub our faces in the obscene beauty of the flesh via a continuous parade of ample breasts, round buttocks, and giant limbs simply becomes tiring. Only one of his paintings is called Close-Up, but many of them lack what is usually considered appropriate perspective and their shocking character lies precisely in this as much as the actual content (as Lawrence was well aware).

His Rape of the Sabine Women, for example, ironically fails for much the same reason that he suggests Van Gogh's landscapes fail; too wilful and too much of a surging assault upon our sensibilities. Of course there's a certain comic aspect to this particular picture (made clear by the alternative title suggested by Lawrence: A Study in Arses), but this unfortunately fails to compensate for its somewhat repulsive subjectivity. 

This is not to say that painting shouldn't be joyous and even a little vulgar. Nor is it to argue that there is no place for ugliness and obscenity in art. Indeed, as Deleuze points out, it is never enough simply to reveal the flesh, one must ultimately push it in the direction of deformation and disfiguration, producing monsters and abstraction - and monsters of abstraction - in the process.