Braque, Cezanne, Van Gogh and the Hatch

Hart Crane in Ave Maria, "The first palm chevron the first lighted hill"

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.

Guston and Cezanne

I saw this sleeve in a Guston up at the Modern. Earlier this week I made this crop from a Cezanne Bather Painting.

Ive seen this similar idea in Hockney and in Johns. Cezanne's surface had some simile as a Harlequin figure, the figure of Harlequin as the surface of painting.

Cezanne used these flat brushstrokes to turn the form of an orange and at the same time make the surface of the canvas non illusionistic and physical.