Morandi at the Met

Morandi really is about the making of the modernist surface. This Modern suface is really as old as painting itself.






The color and light of Morandi is related to the color of fresco, say Piero della Francesca.

We often think fresco, especially Piero is modern because of this hard surface.

Massacio seems a bit older because of the use of brown maybe but the figures are set solidly like Morandi, see the figures standing behind, like in Morandi, but all apart of the frontal surface.



This is what is thrilling, how the bottles stand in for the abstract painting surface and are still there as bottles.

This is an existential exercise philosophers in Bologna must have loved .

By the end of the show I thought, how easy then the steps to our contemporary paintings of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden.



It makes me wonder though, as we stand on the other side of this, whether we need to see the bottles again or not.

The mind twisting struggle to equate abstract surface and subject (bottles) gives such satisfaction that we feel Morandi really lived and saw in a powerful way.

The fact that he spent most of his life in that little studio makes it all the more poignant that what he found there was so satisfying and made his reality still beyond our own.

There is a great painting that has three boxes with three bottles in front of them. This painting is similar.



I thought it like the picture plane was blown up with air and was made a theater or exaggeration of the plane, as Guston does.
It made the subject profound in its clumsiness, to describe such awesome being in such seeming simplicity.

When the positive negative aspects are shown so equally one knows the picture plane is being forwarded.

Cezanne, where it begins

I think it is all about the surface.

A critic today has his pleasure in saying how little the picture plane means.

But that is why we have little that resembles the rigor of these paintings.

I understood a lot about this by seeing how the Morandi paintings subject exactly is not the lowly vase he paints but the surface that the vase can camouflage as the real subject.



Here the image was still also of importance and it seems to me the best painting has a strong back and forth between form and content.

Meaning there is a picture surface and a subject.

Johns also is very strongly camouflaging the fact it is all about that surface. The subject having left us for the moment until we are bored of this surface for itself.

This may be what the critic means?

Little Harlequin ceramic at Met

I guess this is what spawned the thoughts below

Harlequin Diamonds

There is a Chia show at Charles Cowles. Haven't seen one in years.




It picks up the idea of Harlequin in art, or Arte I should say, through Cezanne. The idea permeates his work, in I guess what would be called an Imaginative poetic manner. I wish he would slow down a bit, the work seems borderline and so commercial?

Commedia del Arte is what I was reaching for. It figured big in Picasso by way of the Theater and Dance stage decoration.

There are some other posts from Europe about Derain I saw at La Orangerie. ( They seem to have been deleted?)

This all culminates in J. Johns.



I made diamonds, myself, as reference to an Ideal likened to the height of the sun, as figure, in 1990.

There is much more to it, but..



I was refering to Wallace Stevens and his jangling regalia of diamonds in the Notes towards a Supreme Fiction.

"I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal."

Funny that I should pick that phrase--

"summer, jangling the savagest diamonds"

from Examination of a Hero in a time of War, by Stevens, was more what I meant.

Here's Johns.