return to homepage Relevance as Shibboleth The portraitist Stuart Pearson
Wright gave a lecture [text published in The Jackdaw]
this year at the National Portrait Gallery in London entitled “How Can Portrait
Painting be Made Relevant?” My answer
to him is that it can’t be and shouldn’t be, not by his definition of
relevance. He has asked the wrong
question. The publisher of The Jackdaw, David Lee, is always
attacking the avant garde for demanding that art be “challenging”, but from
where I sit the difference between “challenging” and “relevant” is not very
great. In fact, the avant garde uses
the two words almost interchangeably.
To be challenging is mainly to be politically relevant, and it is clear
that Wright intends much the same thing.
He may be a realist and a portraitist, but he has accepted the theory of
the avant garde right down to its roots.
For him a painting—whether it is a portrait or not—must be judged based
on how well it responds to current culture.
If it fails to address current attitudes and expectations, it has failed
to be honest. Any work that is not
honest fails to be good. I agree with him that honesty is important, but disagree
with all the rest. Let us begin where
he begins. Wright opens his argument by
dismissing Annigoni for “refusing to accept that human self-perception had
evolved.” For him, Annigoni’s treatment
was passe, an attitude from another time.
From Annigoni’s straightforward portrait of the Queen it is difficult to
tell much about an overall attitude, but taking his oeuvre as a whole, Wright’s
claim is simply false. Annigoni played
with many little modernisms—in much the same way that Claudio Bravo still
does—putting classical or Biblical themes in modern settings and other “clever”
juxtapositions. Wright himself is in
this line, although he finds a different set of juxtapositions poignant. Annigoni and Bravo tweek one set of
conventions and Wright another, but they are not so far apart as Wright appears
to think, especially in their use of realism “to make the viewer think.” For myself, I find
Annigoni and Wright tiresome for precisely the same reason, though I would be
the first to admit that they are very different in some ways. Since I don’t believe in art “as making the
viewer think”—and since even if I did, I wouldn’t believe that facile
juxtapositions were thought provoking in any important way—I can’t possibly
sign onto Wright’s claim that relevance is the proper adjective to apply to
visual art. Put simply, when either
Wright or Annigoni is trying hardest to be relevant is when I believe they are
furthest from the true calling of the artist. Wright’s next two examples are contemporary portrait
painters, and they are both pretty much beside the point, as Wright
admits. They are bad not because they
are passé but because they are bad.
They would be bad even if they were au courant. In fact, Richard Foster is often quite up
to date in his portrayal of ordinary clients looking pretty ordinary. Red
Sash is not really representative of Foster’s oeuvre, in my opinion. Wright blames Foster for poorly updating
Sargent in this painting, meaning he thinks it is a mistake to attempt to
transfer high portraiture into the modern age.
Conversely, I would say Foster has failed most noticeably in pose,
background, brushwork, color and facial expression. He has failed to bring Sargent into the modern age simply by
failing to approach him as an artist.
Sargent tried to make his sitters look very good, and he almost always
succeeded. Foster is better at making
his sitters look average, which is probably what they were and what they
wanted. He fails only when he attempts
to make them look really good, since neither they nor him are up to it. But by Wright’s method of judging, by
honesty alone, Foster could easily claim he is right where he should be—a
journeyman delivering the goods. Wright’s other example is George Bruce, and I have little to
add. He is correct to point out that
Bruce’s settings ring false in every possible way, and Bruce’s technique only
corroborates this falsity. Even more
obnoxious than Bruce’s chosen settings is his handling of those settings, and
of his sitters. He could bring the
settings up to date in every way, and yet the paintings would still be
awful. He would then have badly painted
mannequins trying hard to be relevant but they would still be badly painted
mannequins. For proof, see Eric Fischl
or Jeff Koons or John Currin, etc. 
Wright now jumps from negative
examples to a positive one. He provides
a slide of Phil Hale’s portrait of Thomas Ades, a portrait hanging in the
NPG. In this portrait both Ades and
Hale are doing everything they can to be odd.
Hale is looking down on his subject, as if he painted him while hanging
from a light fixture. Ades is dressed
in a white suit, white shirt, black socks, and comfy shoes. He is sprawling in a modern comfy chair and
the background is empty. Ades is doing
very odd things with both hands, one looking more arthritic than artistic and
the other half inside a pocket in an uncomfy way. His head is cocked hard right and he is looking off camera either
very dejectedly or with great malaise.
A shot glass appears to balance on one of his shoes, but is actually on a glass table above it. Wright finds this to be one of the best contemporary works
in the collection. I agree that Hale is
a much better technician than either Foster or Bruce. In some ways he is better even that Annigoni. Hale’s technique is completely married to
his expression and his idea and his subject.
Hale is more innovative, more courageous, and better able to juggle all
the technical issues involved, from composition to color to pose to
brushwork. If this had been Wright’s
contention, I could not have disagreed.
But this is not his contention.
According to the central thesis of the lecture, he considers Hale better
because Hale has accepted that portraiture must be relevant. Meaning that this portrait is good not
because Hale is a good technician or because his technique is consistent with
his attitude, but because Hale is deconstructing all sorts of things. All the clever things going on here are
important to Wright. Ades is not trying
to look good or even presentable, he is trying to be as expressive as
possible. Expressive has come to be
synonymous with artistic, so how could either sitter or artist go wrong? They are accepting their humanity, not
trying to transcend it. And yet something has gone terribly wrong here. What the viewer is left with is not an idea
of truth or humanity or expression.
What an honest viewer is left with is this: “a phony painting a
phony.” Everybody is trying just too
damn hard. Despite succeeding on all
the levels I mentioned above, the portrait is still a crashing failure. It is not appealing to anyone now, except
other phonies, and will not be appealing to anyone in future generations. Ades comes off as a self-obsessed fake
prodigy in love with his own mannerisms.
After a few initial question marks, the portrait immediately becomes
tiresome, in the same way that living with self-obsessed fake prodigies
undoubtedly does. Now, it might be argued that the world has been taken over by
fakes and phonies, and that an honest art must come to terms with that. If the world has become a glitzy spectacle
of poseurs and their products, it would be naïve to ignore it. Wright might argue that a sane and sober man
who found nothing of interest in gaudy simulacra and who retired in some
seclusion to pursue his non-current pastimes was an anti-intellectual
throwback, one who deserved to be ignored.
In fact, although he never states it like this, Wright implies exactly
that. Annigoni is chastised primarily for existing in a “cultural
vacuum.” Wright has borrowed that
phrase from the avant garde, and I think the two words together demand a closer
look. As they are used, they must imply
that current culture is the only road to personal and artistic
fulfillment. Since everything authentic
exists inside current culture, it must mean that to be outside current culture
is to be in a vacuum. But what if
culture itself has become a cultural vacuum?
What is the honest and authentic response to a cultural vacuum? What is the genuine artistic response to
culture as a vacuum? Wright suggests that all artists who do not accept the main
tenets of modernity and of modernity in art must be “unthinking.” But what if any deep analysis of those
tenets required that they be rejected?
Wright never entertains that possibility. I strongly recommend he look into it. Even more, I will give him a number of reasons why he should,
taking my examples from art itself, just as he has. I always like to test art
theories by applying them to works that both sides admit are great. Certain examples always seem to be used by
both sides to bolster argument, and those examples are the ones I like to
return to see how they affect disagreement.
Let’s go first to Michelangelo’s David. I notice that the avant garde never uses this sculpture as an
example of art that is passé, dishonest, tacky, inauthentic, or any of the
rest. Or, to be precise, very few have
made that claim, and none have made it stick.
Let us ask why that work is great and continues to be great. Is it because it was relevant, then or now? No.
It may have been more relevant then than now, since its initial viewers
were Christian and Florentine, and since it is a sculpture of a Biblical figure
representing the strength of Florence.
But even then it was not relevant in the sense that Wright means in his
lecture. It was not au courant
in any way. Relevant now means
dismissive of the past and of past ways of thinking. Wright says so, explicitly.
But Michelangelo and his Florentine viewers could not agree. They were accepting stories and morals
created thousands of years earlier.
Even more, they were accepting ways of representation that were already
thousands of years old. Michelangelo
was lifting both his subject and his treatment from the distant past and
assuming that it was still relevant to himself and his contemporary
viewer. And he was right. It was relevant not in the sense of being
up-to-the-minute; it was relevant in being meaningful. What was even more relevant, then as now, was the fact that
the work was beautiful, powerful, deep and subtle, regardless of its theme, its
subject, or its technical pedigree. A
proper viewer was and is not much interested in the fact that this is David
from the Old Testament, or that the city-state of Florence is represented and
glorified. One must assume that even
the ignorant tradespeople of the time were mostly wowed by the beauty and power
of the work as it is. They may have
asked who it was supposed to be, just to know, but it is hard to believe that
it ever mattered. The Italians have
always been honest enough to admit it: they dubbed it Il Gigante, and
the name stuck. Obviously, this name
applies to the stone object, not to its subject. David is not the Giant, he killed the Giant. But the Italians have always been more than
willing to advertise this confusion to the world. Psychologically, they could have found no better way to show that
they don’t care who he is. The only way
they could have been more transparently and gloriously unconcerned with
non-artistic matters is if they had named him that thing in our plaza that
we love. Now let’s move on to Rembrandt, another artist generally
conceded by all to be great. Was
Rembrandt relevant to his time or was he not?
By Wright’s definition, he was not.
He was relevant only to the extent that he was interesting to enough
people not to starve to death, but he was not relevant enough to have ever been
bought simply because he was up-to-date, or the equivalent of “cool”. Wright might say that it wasn’t hip to be
hip back then, but Rembrandt wasn’t even stylish by the terms of his own
time. Like Michelangelo, he looked to
the Bible for themes; and he didn’t find the sexy themes, like Rubens or Van
Dyck did. He “wasted” a lot of time
with etching, which gave him works that were neither big nor profitable. He slummed around in the Jewish quarter,
looking for models for his Dinners at Emmaeus and other naïve and passé
subjects. In a nutshell, his PR was
abominable. He was the sort of person
that a 21st century gallery flees like the plague. Why is he considered to be great, despite
all this? Depth, subtlety, power, and
an idiosyncratic technical virtuosity.
Nothing to do with relevance, not to his own time or ours. How about Van Dyck?
Were his portraits relevant, in the way Wright means? No, not even in his own time. He was more popular than Rembrandt, and more
stylish. But he had very little
interest in being relevant. Only in
his late portraits did he begin to betray “relevance” and these are the portraits
that have hurt his reputation. That is
to say, he began to introduce cleverness into his portraits in various ways, to
impress his clients’ mental faculties—to make them think, or to make them think
that he was a thinker. History has seen
this element in his late portraits as pollution, and rightly so—which turns
Wright’s argument on its head. Van
Dyck’s greatest mistake was trying to be relevant. In his early portraits he is more straightforward. He puts his sitters in contemporary costume
not to make a statement or to be current, but because that is what they had in
the closet. Besides, it was more than
serviceable artistically—lots of white ruffle and lots of serious black. The same can be said of his best middle or
late portraiture, like the portrait of Frans Snyders in the Frick Collection or
the portrait of Philippe le Roy in the Wallace Collection. Nothing clever is going on here, no winking
at the audience, no juxtapositions, no contemporary asides, no politics, no
signs or non-signs of modernity. Just a
sitter in fancy dress, maybe with a handsome dog, with columns or drapery in
the background. What makes the portrait
great is none of this, though. What
makes the portrait great is that Van Dyck pulled all these elements, and the technical
elements, together into a perfect harmony of expression and character. Color harmony, line quality, paint quality:
all exquisite. Lighting, background,
design: all effortless, all nearly invisible.
And the overall effect is calm and subtle, high without announcing
elevation. All art may be manufactured,
in some sense, but the Van Dyck does not feel manufactured like the Hale. Van Dyck (usually) does not allow his sitter
to overreach himself, to play a game or look absurd. Van Dyck’s sitters desired gravity and seriousness and beauty,
and they achieved it. Hale’s sitter appears
to want to be a fascinating character, but does not achieve it. Now let’s move on to Van Gogh, quite different in some
respects from my other examples. Very
honest, by all accounts, but relevant?
Hardly. He is loved much more
now than he was then, and he is not relevant now at all. By contemporary standards, his landscapes
and flowers and fruit trees and muddy shoes and girls at the piano must seem
hopelessly naïve and “unthinking.”
Someone painting them now would be dismissed out of hand. And by the standards of his own time, Van
Gogh was backwards in almost every way, in taking religion seriously just as
God was being pronounced dead, in reading books that were considered regressive
even then (like Tolstoy and Michelet and Stowe), in preferring the country to
the city. What was Van Gogh’s fleeing
Paris for Arles except a flight into seclusion and a dismissal of current
culture? Of course Vincent gets points
for accepting the cutting edge brushwork and colors of the Impressionists, but one
must ultimately ask if he did this to be modern. It certainly didn’t do him any good in the markets, and he never
thought to use it to do him any good; therefore it was more of a technical
accident. Vincent wasn’t the sort to
think of a painting as a novelty, or even as a cultural expression. And so, to be fair, Wright would have to
deny him credit. Vincent used some
Impressionist tricks to express his own personal feelings about nature,
feelings which were culturally marginal at best. He wasn’t responding to the milieu and to the subjects in the
newspapers. He was responding to his
own feelings, feelings that were often sentimental, nostalgic, and
romantic. In fact, this is why he and
Gauguin couldn’t get along. Gauguin
found him to be an awful rube, hopelessly introverted and out of touch. Which brings us to Gauguin—civilized to his fingertips
compared to Van Gogh—and yet what did Gauguin do but run off to live on a
desert island with naked young girls.
Did he ever try to be relevant for a moment? He thought so little of current culture that he erased all signs
of it from his life and art.
Contemporary critics now use that fact to give him relevance points, as
if he did all that just make a statement, to be “challenging.” But this is preposterous. An artist can either flee current culture or
embrace it. He cannot do both. If every negative response counts as a
positive, then the argument cannot be falsified and it has no content. Critics will say that Gauguin found culture
important enough to resist: it proves he was intellectually aware of it. But this can be said of anyone, Annigoni for
instance. Annigoni sometimes dismisses
current culture—he is thereby in a vacuum.
Gauguin dismisses culture and he is fabulously progressive, a man before
his time. The standards and words are
completely arbitrary, and can be used to include or exclude anyone you
like. If Gauguin was not in a cultural
vacuum in Tahiti, I don’t know who was. Of course I do not hold it against him. I remind you that I think an honest artist
must flee his milieu and this milieu especially. All great artists fled or resisted their milieu, and part of
their greatness was their ability to do it successfully. They existed without that support that is
necessary for most people. They did not
give a damn what everyone was doing or thinking, whether it was the majority or
the lettered minority. They did what
was artistically and personally necessary and let the rest go to the
devil. As further examples, think of Blake, or Goya, or Caravaggio, or
Rodin, or Munch, or Delacroix, or Courbet.
Courbet was asked what group he belonged to and he answered, “I am a
Courbetist, that’s all.” Whistler was another such.
He could outwrite and outthink any critic of his time or ours, but he
had no time for relevance. He had his
own agenda and could not be bothered to care what current culture thought of
the matter. He told current culture what
a booby it was, in no uncertain terms.
He would also have had an answer for Oscar Wilde, whom Wright quotes
thusly: “Being natural is only a pose, and the most irritating one I
know.” Whistler would answer that
anyone who considers Wilde an authority on being natural deserves the advice he
receives. Yet another example is Degas. Degas is used in current theory as a progressive type, as if his
shopgirls and tarts are meant to be challenging and relevant. But in fact Degas was a misanthropic recluse,
an elitist, and a tory. He thought very
little of democracy and nothing at all of public opinion. Current culture was beneath his notice, and
he would not have found it worthwhile to make comment on it for or
against. His subjects were the surest
form of escape he could think of.
Gauguin went to Tahiti and Degas hid away in the brothels and backstage
at the ballet, surrounded by a world that was visual only. How much thinking would you say is required
to paint young women taking off their tutus?
Once again I remind the reader that I am not criticizing Degas here, I
am extolling him. He knew how to find
his obsessions, and his politics is beside the point. Backstage you cannot tell a tory from a communist. What I want from an artist is great
paintings, not treatises or propaganda or jokes or puzzles. The last part of Wright’s
lecture is given over to Lucian Freud and himself. Freud is called the Ingres of existentialism “for his sensitivity
to the interior world of the subject.”
If in fact all of Freud’s subjects’ interior worlds are rotting, flaking,
miscolored corpses, then maybe this is true, but it still begs the question why
Freud meets no one but zombies. Perhaps
he should try a different neighborhood.
I must ask, if flattery is dishonest, does that make anti-flattery
honest? I would think that both are
equally dishonest, since neither one is true.
Rodin might point to nature when sculpting the Helmet Maker’s
Beautiful Wife: she really did look like that. But what Freud has done is make beautiful, or at least average
people, look ghastly. How is this
“getting to the essential qualities that make them human”? Yes, we will all die, we are all rotting
away slowly inside physically, or at least those of us over 30 are, but is this
our essential quality? Was the
essential quality of Einstein that he lost his teeth and had bad
digestion? Was the essential quality of
Marie Curie that she had thinning hair and once suffered from warts? Was the essential quality of Goethe that his
legs were bitten by bedbugs? Is the
essential quality of Meryl Streep that she has spider veins and carries
microscopic vermin in her eyelashes? Freud has deceived us.
We may not be as princely as Van Dyck made us, but none are as awful as
Freud has made them. Kate Moss’ spirit
may be a wretched thing next to her body, but until it is thrown forcibly into
the pit it cannot match the horror of her portrait. I do not see the honesty or the courage in all this. We are told that Nietzsche is the father of
existentialism, but he would dismiss Freud as a despiser of life. Only a despiser of life would call
everything ugly true and everything beautiful false. He who implies that all beauty is false is a liar. Freud is either a liar or he must be accused
of selective editing. He paints only
the ugly. To retain his honesty, all
his subjects must be ugly inside.
Knowing the crowd he runs with, this is a distinct possibility, but even
so he still falls to the selective editing critique—a critique invented by the
avant garde. All the “shallow rejects”
in history have fallen, cut by this sword, from Raphael to Poussin to Canova to
Bouguereau to Sargent, and on and on.
They have seen and painted only the young and beautiful and perfect, and
perfected that which was not already perfect.
OK, but, mutatis mutandis, Freud has done the same thing,
painting only the ugly and rotting, and making ugly all that was not already
ugly. How can lying against beauty be
authentic when lying for beauty is inauthentic? What we have is a contradiction.
Nothing as interesting as paradox, mind you, just a contradiction. A mistake in reasoning. Wright himself is not
interested in ugly for the sake of ugly, at least not in his own painting. He says he wants “to place the viewer in an
awkward and unfamiliar place between belief and disbelief. It is my own kind of ‘distancing
effect’”. Fair enough, but surely this
requires further explanation. I ask,
“Why? Distance to cause what? What does the journey to the unfamiliar
place achieve?” Wright appears to have
accepted the “critical distance” of modern art uncritically. It has been around since the time of Walter
Benjamin and Roger Fry, so it no longer requires explanation. We are expected to go, “Ah yes, distance,
always a good thing. Carry on!” But is it a good thing? I don’t think so. In my own paintings I don’t want any critical distance, thank
you, and you can keep the critic, too.
I want the emotional response of my viewer right on top of my painting,
my naked woman sitting on his Id like a cheek pressed on a pillow. If my viewer has time or inclination to
think, I have done something wrong.
This is not because I want my image to read like pornography, but
because I want it to read like a purely visual thing, an immediate passionate
response. All the artists I have
mentioned above wanted precisely the same thing. Think of Starry Night as the purest example. The painting grabs you and hugs you so
tightly you haven’t time to take breath, much less think. Once you break free, you may ask how and why
this is so, but all that is after the fact.
The artistic response is the first one, and it is the one Vincent was
after. He could have cared less about
where you went after that. He was not
in control of where you went after that.
The artist is responsible for his paintings, not for your book
reports.  Wright finds some faults with his portrait of Prince
Philip, but this fault-finding is not terribly convincing. It is interesting to note that he didn’t
choose to find faults with a painting of a less famous person. This paragraph can be passed over mainly as
a reminder that he did paint Prince Philip and had four hours with him,
which is four more hours than you had.
He appears to want to apologize for making Philip look “clownish” or
“like a public idiot” or like a person “not given any accolades for his ideas”,
but I note that he is not above reminding the listener that the Prince is
thought to be all these things. This
sort of misdirection in speaking is actually an ancient rhetorical device
called litotes, in which the speaker affirms what he seems, on the face
of it, to be denying. Wright denies
that the Prince is an idiot, but this denial gives him another chance to say,
“that the Prince is an idiot.”
Rhetorical devices are common among sophists and other people who can’t
just say what they mean directly. For myself, Wright’s fake self-criticism further damages a
portrait I was not prone to like in the first place. It seems a cutesy
conglomeration of artsy poses, none of which attach to the Prince
himself—except that he allowed himself to be subjected to it. I only hope that Wright paid well for the
privilege. He seems to be paying for it
still. Wright claims that the painting veers off course into satire
and caricature, but could it have any other course? Are we to imagine that a fly on the shoulder and flowers growing
out of the finger were meant for serious commentary? I am not defending the Prince here. As an American I know nothing and care nothing about Prince
Philip. But I do know a dishonest
paragraph when I read it, and an uninspired portrait when I see it. Wright has already told us that he thinks
portraits must be modern, and nothing is considered more modern than irony and
satire, except maybe double speech posing as depth. After all that, only now do I
descend into the whale’s belly. The
speech as a whole is not just wrongheaded, it is insidious. It is not just one man’s opinion, take it or
leave it. It is a sign of a deeper
malaise, both the artist’s and the culture’s.
And it is a clue to an almost sinister alliance, or capitulation. The longer I studied the speech, the
angrier I got. One reason may be seen
in this line: “Achieving a likeness is, to a degree, a trick with a brush or
pencil, one that can be taught to almost any individual with a modicum of
innate facility.” Here Wright has
proven himself to be a mole, an enemy in poor disguise, one of Lee’s State Art
people spreading the lie from inside the cathedral. At a cursory glance, Wright might be seen to be playing the
humble card, but it is a confidence trick.
Humble or not (I would guess not) he is re-planting the seed. One of the first seeds and first lies of the
avant garde is that painting realistically is easy, common, and banal. Once mouthed daily by Greenberg and the rest
back in the 40’s and 50’s, the chorus has returned to full strength. This lie has once again been given priority
in the war. Hockney built a new career
upon it and it re-entered the university on his authority. It has been reconstituted as the Maginot
line against ability. Because large
numbers of people can create terrible portraits from slides, we are to believe
that the abilities of Van Dyck and Titian have been downgraded. Because the lowest levels of contemporary
realism are tacky and ill-conceived, we must believe that tackiness is
avoidable, if at all, only by reading the right tracts and thinking the right
avant-garde thoughts. The fact is, achieving a likeness is damned difficult, and
most people can’t do it even with slides, tracing paper, and every trick known
to man. Hockney himself proves this in
his own book. Even among well-paid
portraitists, a good likeness is a rare thing, and an attractive likeness is
almost unknown. A subtle and graceful likeness
is extinct. Many painters try to
flatter their clients, but very few can do it.
You may argue about whether Sargent’s talent for flattery was shallow or
not, but you cannot argue that it wasn’t rare.
If it had been common then he couldn’t have demanded such huge
prices. Not one living painter matches
Sargent’s ability, despite a market for it, and despite huge efforts in that
direction. This makes Wright’s statement misleading at best: it is true
to such a small degree and false to such a large. The statement has been made by so many people for so long that
most now look at all realism and go, “Pah, anyone can do that. It is all a trick, like performing magic.” And now a realist painter confirms it, in a
lecture at the National Portrait Gallery.
He has pulled the curtain away and shown us the mirrors. But painting is not a trick like sawing a lady in half. As a “trick” it is more like dunking a
basketball. If you can do it, then you
can do it; if you can’t, you can’t. Some
small percentage of people can add an inch or two to their vertical leap, and
can learn it. But the vast majority of
people are not tall enough, and that is all there is to it. Of those that can dunk, only a small
percentage can do it with any style. They
are very rare, so rare that we can gather them all together for a yearly
contest, and watch them all compete in an hour or two. This rarity is why they are paid so well. Wright’s statement takes none of this into account, since he
uses the idea just like the avant garde uses it. He uses the very lowest end of the scale to dismiss the entire
spectrum. A majority in the arts have
accepted this, but it is an argument without merit or sense. We can teach eight year olds to dribble and
shoot, but that does not call into question the ability of a Michael
Jordan. An avant garde logician would
watch Michael Jordan score 60 points and say, “Well, so what, my grandmother
can shoot a basketball.” Yes, but she misses. It is hardly equivalent. By the logic of the avant garde, Michael
should be forced to justify his game with some off-court relevance. The NBA should be forced to tart up the
game with gratuitous political references or undercut it with ironic
self-commentary or self-parody. Wright
implies, by the movement of his speech, that because a couple of mediocre
artists he found on the internet are mediocre, he must eschew straight quality
and begin tarting up his works with some species of cleverness. But the central reason Wright’s
speech is insidious is that he says this: “I feel an increasing ambivalence
toward portrait painting. . . naturalism itself is but a code. . .I am still
indulging in artifice.” To most this
will seem a pretty tame confession, but to me it is the clincher. For it leads me to ask why the National
Portrait Gallery could not have hired someone who believed in himself and his
art. Why was Wright chosen to be the
representative of the opposition? He
was chosen because he agrees with current theory at almost every point, and
those few points where he strays give him serious pause. He is a realist and a portrait painter,
which take him about as far from Tracey Emin and the Saatchi people as you are
now allowed to go. But it turns out
that he hasn’t the balls to actually disagree with them on anything. He obligingly repeats all their mantras and
apologizes for his own work. They
hardly need to attack portraiture when he will do it for them. They hardly need to police his mind when he
has set up the internal guards and cameras already. He sums up with two more central tenets of the avant garde:
“What it means to be human is a perpetually shifting idea,” and, “each period’s
portraits hold a mirror to their time.”
Both contain a kernel of truth but are predominantly false. Things do change, hair, clothes, politics,
and so on. But what it means to be
human does not change, until we stop being human. That is why, despite losing some of the details, we can follow
the events of history with compassion and understanding. We can read of ancient Egypt or Rome,
knowing that they were people much like us, who ate, raised families, dreamed,
questioned, and created. The portraits
of history do tell us things about the specific time periods, but they were not
created to do so, and their main value then and now was not to mirror
society. The timeless aspect of all art
is more fundamental to it than its quotidian aspects, and this is true of
portraiture as well. When I look at
Titian’s Man with a Glove in the Louvre, I am looking at an immediate
communication across five centuries.
Artistically, the chronological variances are of no import. His hairstyle is something I might see on the
street, and his gloves could be bought at the corner store; and even if they
couldn’t, so what? It is the way Titian
has captured this man that should interest me, that does interest me. If I am looking at gloves and other details,
then Titian has failed. The gloves and
such are secondary matters; they exist as part of the harmony and should not
interrupt the main line of music, which is from eye to eye. Wright clearly understands none of this. His lecture serves the entrenched status quo
as another brick in the wall. It is
another piece of propaganda that the avant garde can use to deflate the
ambitions and passions of young artists.
If they are attracted to realism, they will fear to "indulge in
artifice." If they encounter any
genuine emotion, they will feel the need to deflect it or undercut it or
distance it. If they propose to paint
in any straightforward way, they will chastise themselves as unthinking and
irrelevant. Wittingly or unwittingly,
Wright has offered up his neck to the chopping block, and with it the heads of
the next generation of artists. If this paper was useful to you in any way, please consider donating a dollar (or more) to the SAVE THE ARTISTS FOUNDATION. This will allow me to continue writing these "unpublishable" things. Don't be confused by paying Melisa Smith--that is just one of my many noms de plume. If you are a Paypal user, there is no fee; so it might be worth your while to become one. Otherwise they will rob us 33 cents for each transaction. |
