Quote of the day

It is the plea for immortality beyond the illumined wrack where the sun goes to sea, a life within a liquid and diaphanous sun propped out of sight by waves. We can look at the sun at its going, and thither we are drawn in fantasy, forsaking the eastern dark for some low, nocturnal day lit by occidental beams to which the wandering sun returns for plenitude.

The Greeks, too, created myths from such emotion, but neither the sun nor any other elemental power had the exorbitance in that climate to submerge their poetry with over-compulsive longing. Theirs was the full life, theirs the life-giving poetry for which each element of Nature was loved for its seemingly wayward and informal behests. Man will make of them formal gods, statues for the sea and the rain, and even for the momentary lightning, eyeless statues of human stature. As sculpture are the lands, as sculpture the mountains and their vales, as sculpture the promontories and the tesselated seas.

And when Plato again set his thoughts upon the west, upon Atlantis, he was questioning the whole egocentric position on which Greeks and Romans in particular constructed Mediterranean culture. In the Renaissance, that culture attained its potent affirmation: its final affirmation; for already men were moving further west: soon America, soon Copernicus and his theories by which the astronomical foundation of egocentric feeling was destroyed, leading away from grandiose fantasies based upon the senses, leading on to pure science and the industrial age. Science has tracked the western sun: it is true that it does not set.

But what Atlantis is this that we have found?

How you should endeavour to copy and draw after as few masters as possible

As regular readers have probably gathered by now, my two big influences (or models) are Piero della Francesca and Francis Picabia. I have been big fans of them since I was 22 and 15 respectively. My friends sometimes express surprise at this combination.

Here is Cennino d'Andrea Cennini on the subject:

Now you must forge ahead again, so that you may pursue the course of this theory. You have made your tinted papers; the next thing is to draw.

You should adopt this method. Having first practiced drawing for a while as I have taught you above – that is, on a little panel – take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where great masters have been, so much the better for you [Ha! Thank you industrial capitalism for cheap, high quality colour reproductions!].

But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation [this bit only holds good if the reputation-making process is sound]. And if you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some of his style and of his spirit.

For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of either one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man's way today, and in the other's tomorrow, and so you will not get either of them right.

If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence will have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted you any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good – because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gathering flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns. [Emphasis added.]

Something to aspire to

Every great passion, be it love or hate, will in the end generate an authentic work. One may deplore it, but one must recognise it: Lovecraft was more on the side of hate, of hate and fear. The universe, which intellectually he perceived as being indifferent, became hostile aesthetically. His own existence, which might have been nothing but the sum of banal disappointments, turned into a surgical operation, and an inverted celebration.

The work of his mature years remains faithful to the physical prostration of his youth, transfiguring it. This is the profound secret of Lovecraft's genius, and the pure source of his poetry: he succeeded in transforming his aversion to life into an effective hostility.

To offer an alternative to life in all its forms constitutes a permanent opposition, a permanent recourse to life – this is the poet's highest mission on this earth. Howard Phillips Lovecraft fulfilled this mission.

– Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the world, against life

A problem

A gentleman has given his daughter in marriage, and to complete a necklace he needs 100 stones made up of pearls, rubies, sapphires, and balas rubies. He summons his agent and gives him 100 ducats and says: go to Genoa and lay out these 100 ducats in buying pearls, rubies, sapphires, and balas rubies; and make the total number 100 and do not spend more than one-third of a ducat per pearl and one-half per ruby and one per sapphire and three per balas ruby. I ask how many pearls, how many rubies, [how many sapphires,] how many balas rubies he will have.

This is a problem in Piero della Francesca's Trattato d'abaco. Oh, what a problem to have. The answer is 51 pearls, 8 rubies, 22 sapphires, 19 balas rubies. It is solved by the method of double false position, which Piero explains by solving another problem:

There is a plain on which there are two towers, one 40 bracci high, the other 50 bracci, and from one tower to the other it is 100 bracci. And on each tower there is a bird, which birds, flying at the same speed, set off at the same time to drink; and they arrive at the same moment at a fountain that is between one tower and the other. I ask how far the fountain is from the tower that is 40 bracci and how far from the tower that is 50.

What you do is assign a length to the fountain from the first tower (say 60 bracci) and calculate the flight path of the first bird (or rather its square) using Pythagoras' theorem. You then calculate the length to the second tower and the square of the flight path of the second bird. The two squares should be equal, because the birds arrive at the same time, but they probably won't be, because you're guessing.

You note the difference between the squares of the flight paths (1100) and make another guess of the length from the first tower (55 bracci). You then find the difference between the squares again (100) and use the two guesses and the two differences to calculate the correct lengths:

The excesses must be taken one from another; take 100 from 1100, there remains 1000, which is the divisor; now multiply 55 by 1100 [which] makes 60500, and multiply 60 by 100 [which] makes 6000, take this from 60500 there remains 54500, which you divide by 1000 and the result is 54 and one-half. And that is the distance from the fountain tower of 40 bracci, and [so] 45 and one-half from the fountain to the tower of 50 bracci.

This is all standard fare, derived from Islamic sources. Piero's big contribution in the Trattato d'abaco, which he casually introduces with no fanfare (just like how he casually provides the first mathematical proof of perspective in De prospectiva pingendi), is the first rediscovery of Archimedean solids:

The disintoxication

Picabia:

Our ideal is 'the disintoxication'. We want to become an antidote for all the Immunised from our fallen art. We tend towards the White considered as a psychic entity or, in order to concretise this tendency thanks to innumerable rapports of colour and music, we tend toward the 'la' pure = 435 vibrations.

'Well-known occultist' Vivian du Mas:

I recognise in the paintings of Picabia the translation in aesthetic language of a part of that other world. I can vow that the representation of it is exact. I affirm that these paintings are not a simple fantasy, but a representation of the astral world.

Gertrude Stein:

Picabia has conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be the result of conceiving the human form and the human face in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it. It is his way of achieving the disembodied...

All his life Picabia has struggled to dominate and achieve this conception.

Should I be worried that this all makes complete sense to me?

And, speaking of being worried, I'm becoming increasingly concerned at this incursion of the neighbours' into my studio, which is growing at an alarming rate:

I might have to do something about it. I assume that, if anyone saw me trying to get round the back of the neighbours' place with a knife in my hand, they'd realise there's a reasonable explanation.

In other news, on Saturday, a couple of friends and I went to see Steve Ignorant and his Crass tribute band. It was excellent. On the way out, I heard one old punk say to another 'He's wearing glasses. You can't hit him.'

I looked around and, sure enough, there wasn't anyone else wearing glasses evident. When I related this, Rose's daughter Wendy helpfully pointed out:

Well, you do have one of those faces that people just want to hit.

Good painting

Good painting is not what sells ... good painting does not exist; what exists is the man who has something to say and who uses the medium of painting ... to externalise his personality...

The personality which springs from a system can no more interest us than that of a maniac who could only write with orange ink...

Ah! Certainly I prefer the cubism of Picasso and Braque in 1913 ... the pity is that many people do not yet see how much creative spirit there was in the cubism of these two men; they often confound them with the group of idiots cast in their wake...

Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Cezanne, Sisley, Pissarro, Seurat, Gustav Moreau, Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, these are men who have laid bare life, their life: their pictures have real pollen and their names can only be asserted under the nose of those who think that an epoch is great because it lasts a long time and those who participate in it are numerous. Such is the idea of the small school of the beaux-arts-cubists founded by L'Esprit nouveau; they know the why of everything, they have their laws, they know good and evil, they imitate God driving Adam and Eve out of paradise, God not being able to endure sin! Sin, the serpent, that is Dada!

L'Esprit nouveau will only be new when it is dead. At least then it will have evolved!

In several weeks 'the Salon of good painting', the Salon d'Automne, will open. In finishing, may I offer a word of advice to the members of the jury: to refuse pitilessly all that they like and accept only what horrifies them; in this way we might perhaps have an exhibition less stupid and less monotonous and some innovators would run the risk of having the great luck to exhibit in a palace consecrated to the glory of French art and decreed a public utility.

That's Picabia in 1922. I might have to steal 'beaux-arts-cubists' – but change it to 'beaux-arts-conceptualists'. Here's the artist Picabia'd like to see:

A man who would not be influenced by anyone, who would not be preoccupied with modernism or cubism or dadaism; who would not be socialist or communist or the contrary; a man who would simply be himself ... A man who would succeed in communicating to us the desire for a life of openness and full activity ... A man, finally, who would lead us to the new world to discover: the world of love which the mediocre have no desire to enter and which frightens the 'intellectuals' for fear of ridicule.

Jesus Christ invented that manner of life long ago; I would prefer it to the present dilution.

Sharp motherfucker

Entitled An exhibition of caricatures, absolute and relative, de Zayas' third and last show at 291 in the spring of 1913 reflected his scientism.

In the catalogue text he outlined the distinction, derived from 'experimental analysis', between absolute and relative works: 'I call absolute caricatures those in which the individual influences time by the whole of his actions; and relative, those in which time influences the individual – that is to say when the individual has to make abstraction of his real self to adapt it to the character of a given moment of circumstance.'

He believed the spirit could be represented mathematically by 'algebraic formulas' and that matter could be represented by 'geometrical equivalents'. Moreover, de Zayas found that 'man in relation to his own life and to mankind, forms a third psychological entity, which is not an arithmetical addition, but a chemical combination'.

Another footnote

In the second part of [Alfred Jarry's The Supermale], the Supermale dismissed the act of love as a machinelike action which could be repeated indefinitely when fortified with 'perpetual motion food', a compound of alcohol and strychnine. An experiment was arranged to verify his claim, and while 'science' (represented by a doctor) recorded the data of the experiment the Supermale proceeded to surpass the world's record for intercourse.

Complications arose when his partner, a young American girl, fell in love with the indifferent Supermale. To stimulate a reciprocal carnal desire in the Supermale, the girl's father (determined that his daughter should have her man) appealed to an engineer to make a love-inspiring machine.

The machine was hastily constructed and strapped to the Supermale despite warnings by the engineer that it might not do what it was intended to do. 'So much the better, this will be an experience,' interrupted the girl's father, as he pressed the commentator.

In a bizarre turn of events, the love-inspiring machine fell in love with the Supermale, overheated, short-circuited, and killed him.

Tee hee

On appearances alone the probability of sexual content [in French impetuosity] cannot be overlooked as the phallic shape thrusts into an opening defined by the looping lines and concentric bands. The title causes some pause by attributing impetuosity to the female, but that may have been Picabia's intent. In fact, the male part can be seen, not as the aggressive element, but as a dumb, defenceless form drawn into a trap bristling with aggressive objects.

Whatever Picabia's intent with French impetuosity, this watercolour does appear to be charged with sexual content which had become a major ingredient of his work since early 1913. Then and later those themes revealed a man who sometimes viewed himself as a passive victim of sex, but was more often burdened with an insatible desire for woman as mother, muse, and mistress.

Yet his paintings rarely operated as indulgent autobiographical documents; the conditions of his personal life were transformed into abstract compositions suggestive of more universal longings, frustration, and despair.

Now, if you can be arsed, go and read the quote in this post, except where it says 'lyric poetry' read 'Picabia's abstract paintings of 1913–14'. (It is also worth noting in this context that Apollinaire made 'an intriguing, unexplained reference' to Picabia's 'painted poems' in his article 'Simultanisme-Libbrettisme' in June 1914.)

It is always nice to have one of one's mad theories confirmed. It makes up for when others get destroyed.

And, incidentally, this transformation of the quotidian into the universal is a major connection between Picabia and Piero – that and certain stylistic affinities.

1912

In poetry, physics, practical life, there is nothing ... that is any longer moored to a certainty, nothing that is forbidden, nothing that cannot be stood on its head and glorified. The indefinite, the uncertain, the paradoxical is the scarlet paradise of intellectual intoxication.

Anarchy? No. It is the triumph of discrimination, the beatification of paradox, the sanctification of man by man...

Nothing that lasts is of value ... That which changes perpetually lives perpetually. Incessant dying and renewing, incessant metamorphosis, incessant contradiction...

I desire as many personalities as I have moods ... I desire to be ephemeral, protean...

I find my greatest joy in my estrangements ... I desire to become unfamiliar to myself ... I cling to nothing, hope for nothing. I am a perpetual minute.

More hijinks

One evening around July [1912], after numerous cocktails with Claude Debussy at the Bar de la Paix, Picabia proposed to Apollinaire that they drive to Boulogne and take the boat to England, where Gabrielle was vacationing. The poet immediately agreed, noting that they should have no trouble since he spoke English. The next morning they arrived, famished owing to the inability of English waiters to understand Apollinaire's particular dialect, which he described as 'ancient Irish'. [Picabia wrote later: 'That trip is still one of my best memories. I never had such a gay, witty, and enterprising companion as Apollinaire.']

After an amusing adventure or two in English nightclubs, Apollinaire and the Picabias returned to France, pausing for dinner in Boulogne where Gabrielle recalls a serious discussion about 'pure painting'. In her memory, Apollinaire recoiled from the prospect of totally abstract art, calling it 'an inhuman art, unintelligible to the sentiment which risks remaining purely decorative'. 'Are blue and red unintelligible?' responded Picabia; 'Are not the circle and the triangle, volumes and colours, as intelligible as this table?'

Gabrielle also wrote:

I think I should point out that it was as a result of this trip, and despite these apparent misunderstandings, that Apollinaire modified some of his points of view and added to his "meditations esthetiques", which had not yet been published in book form, several corrections regarding the history and evolution of the new painting ... In Picabia he had discovered an aspect of that evolution which he found rather disquieting, but the strength and impetus of which he could not deny.

Here's another quote from Gabrielle, about visiting Barcelona on her honeymoon:

We had brought some of those pastilles that make you lose all sensation of scale and distance. Francis wanted to play a joke on [his young cousin] Manolo, but with such unfortunate results that the poor boy mistook a window for a door and nearly broke his leg.

A footnote

During the early twentieth century, smoking clubs were not uncommon for the 'social' use of opium among well-to-do Parisians, and both Picabia and Apollinaire participated in them (conversations with Mme. Buffet-Picabia, October 1962). That practice was apparently more important for Picabia and continued by him until ca. 1918–19.

Efforts by this author to detect an influence of the drug in Picabia's art have failed to isolate any demonstrable feature in either the conception or execution of his paintings.

The effect of opium on artistic creation is largely unexplored.

More Piero

If Piero bore psychological consequences of his father's aggressive behaviours, they are not discernible to us today. The son did construct a life that replicated his father's behaviour of labouring to elevate himself from his modest beginnings.

Piero is important in the history of painting and mathematics because he strove to surpass customary conceptions of painting and to record his geometric and mathematical calculations. He was neither the product of his family ambience nor Florentine inventions in perspective and naturalistic depictions of the human body.

His cultural production has a curious dual nature of the traditional and the innovative. His meticulous scientific reconstructions of space and humans were often placed in traditional altarpieces. His writings on painting, mathematics, and geometry reveal a striving for meticulous precision and original constructions, but he betrays his modest origins in his use of the dialect of San Sepolcro and lack of elegance. Such a duality is not customarily a choice of the individual but a result of the circumstances of one's formation.

Quote of the day

Gabrielle Buffet has recalled that, when she first met Picabia [in September 1908], he was bored with his past work; small drawings of monstrous figures and abstract designs* flowed from his pen, and he talked animatedly about liberating art, about producing 'painting situated within pure imagination which recreates the world of forms according to one's desire and imagination'.

Though initially astonished by Picabia's application of that idea to painting, her study with Vincent d'Indy had already exposed her to similar theories in music. That fostered a stimulating intellectual rapport between Gabrielle and Francis which flourished alongside a headlong romance.**

As his personal and artistic aims became focused, Picabia took dramatic action to cast off the past and start off anew. In the course of a few months he broke with the Galerie Haussmann, auctioned off all his older paintings, jilted a mistress of long standing, and married Gabrielle Buffet.

*

**

Some maths

In the early 15th century, there were no standard weights or measures. This meant that people had to quickly and accurately estimate proportions, areas, and volumes.

They also had to carry out quite complex mathematical operations several times a day, just to go about their everyday lives.

In his book On the abacus, Piero gives an exercise:

There are two men who want to barter; one of them has cloth and the other has wool. The piece of cloth is worth 15 ducats and he puts it up for barter at 20 and also wants one-third in money. And a cento of wool is worth 7 ducats in money. What price must [the man with wool] put it up for barter so that neither will be cheated?

This is the kind of thing you'd have to do in your head, on the spot, in public, while bargaining with an opponent.

You'd do it using the rule of three, which Piero gives as follows:

The rule of three says that the thing one wants to know must be multiplied by that which is not similar and the result it produces must be divided by the other; and the result is of the nature of that which is not similar, and the divisor is always similar to the thing one wants to know.

That clear?

I think it's fair to say to that your average person in the 15th century West had a set of skills that your average person in the early 21st century West doesn't. As Michael Baxandall has pointed out, this has implications for how they looked at pictures, particularly early perspective pictures.

Quote of the day

Highly significant for Piero is that he emerged from a family unskilled in the figurative arts. Rather than being totally enveloped within the inherited procedures of a family of painters or a strong local artistic tradition that provided a set of procedures, Piero matured in an artisan family with mercantile aspirations; his father sought to distance himself and his children from the family's origins as leather-tanning artisans. With this orientation Piero early adopted the practice of careful reflection evident in all his paintings and writings, and rejected the habitual practice of local painters of accepting repair work and minor commissions.

Two copies of Goya and some trash talking by Ensor

My fighting spirit kept me at Les XX, but even within the group I was surrounded by hostility and excessively criticised (even though the benefits of some of my experiments had spread across the group). I enjoyed painting masks. My predilection for them has never left me. I could thus reflect in a philosophical way on the hypocritical, hidden, calculated, and sneaky faces of all the cowards who were crushed by my disapproving evolutions. It was a carefully chosen path. He logically required excessive or hefty colours. He reflected the calculated criticism of colleagues. The ignorance, the bad faith, the incompetence of the critics, the low and narrow-minded attacks from ex-imitators helped me greatly in continuing down this exceptional path of light and extravagance where imitators and pasticheurs dared not follow me.

I always had to contend with unfortunate circumstances at the Salons of L'Essor and Les XX. My experiments were pure, absolutely personal; my imitators numerous and malicious. Subsequently, my development was interpreted condescendingly. Yet my vision was personal and new, and I was able to work in the most diverse genres, for I always understood the importance of light and invariably the line was influenced accordingly. This personal vision has no doubt maintained me in the higher spheres.

I was incorrectly characterised as an Impressionist, a pleinarist, devoted to light colours. The form of the light, the transformations that it imposes upon the line, has never been understood before me. It was not considered to be important, and the painter did not trust what he observed. I was indifferent to the Impressionist movement. Edouard Manet never succeeded in transcending the old masters. Nice, bright, and distinguished colours, contrasting with large opposing fields, as in Japanese art. A great elegance of line, but a total absence of the effect of light. In other words, too much of a meretrician! My enquiry is also far removed from the great fluencies of Claude Monet, a jovial and sensual painter, and user of thick pastes. Accomplished colourist. Plump maker of paintings. Rather vulgar vision. Except for the 'cathedrals'.

The experiments of the pointelleurs left me cold. They merely wanted to capture the vibration of light. They coldly and methodically placed their stipples in between two correct but cool lines. The uniform and all too restrictive procedure is not conducive to further experimentation. This explains the absolute lack of personality in their work. The pointelleurs succeeded in capturing just one facet of light: i.e. its vibration. The formal aspect is not discussed. My experiments and vision are different from those of the aforementioned artists.

I daresay I am an exceptional painter.

The flat and round painter

Once upon a time there was a painter-chap who painted his paintings in the air – not plain flat figures with flat paintbrushes on flat canvas, which were painted so flat that they looked really flat and plain – but he painted round figures round in the air.

So he painted a queen. She had an enormous velvet skirt on her legs, and a crown on her head, and a shock of hair under the crown, which looked like a cake, so beautifully was it done. And her graceful arms with slim fingers and the big brilliant rings on her fingers moved, as the fingers of a queen used to move.

Then the wind came and blew Her Majesty the Queen away, and the painter observed this display with anxious eyes. The queen wobbled and bubbled in the air., and swayed and waved just as the air under her waved and swayed. Suddenly she grew quite thick round the middle, blew herself up, burst, and fell in two pieces. The skirt with the legs by itself, and the bosom with the crown by themselves. When the painter-chap saw this, he got very serious, and painted, in a great hurry, a page-boy in the air. Not a plain flat page-boy with flat paintbrush on flat canvas who was painted so flat that he looked really flat and plain, but he painted a round page-boy round in the air. He had a tightly fitting dress on his legs, and big longing eyes under his page-crop, and his fingers were as graceful matches.

Then the wind came and blew the page-boy in the direction of the queen who had burst. He trembled and scrambled in the air, and he shivered and schwittered, like the air under him schwittered and shivered. And his eyes and fingers were longing to put the queen in order again. Therefore, he kicked his little legs in the air so that he might get ahead a bit more quickly, and he slipped several times and fell, for it was cold, and the air was slippery with ice.

Suddenly, as he reached the parted parts of the departing queen, he grew thick round the middle, blew himself up, burst, and fell in two pieces.

The tightly fitting dress with legs by itself, and the longing eyes with the fingers by themselves, for he was quite near his beloved queen.

Now, his legs and his fingers had still kept the direction of the fast chase. And thus his legs put themselves under the fat bosom of the queen, and the longing eyes with the match fingers put themselves on top of her enormous skirt, and they grew on there.

But it looked so horrible that the painter, full of fright, decided to paint himself in the air in order to rearrange them in the right order; for his brush was not long enough.

He did not paint himself plainly flat with a flat brush on flat canvas like the other painters who used to paint plain, flat figures – as you already know – on flat canvases, which were painted so flat that they really looked flat and plain, but he painted himself with his round brush round in the air. Then the wind came and blew him in the direction of the two figures. He kicked his legs in the air as much as he could, because he wanted to get to the place of the accident quickly; he slipped several times and fell, because nobody had strewn ashes on the air.

Suddenly as he reached the two figures, he grew quite round in the middle, blew himself up, and burst not in two pieces, but in so many small parts that he could no longer be seen, and with him burst the ability of the painters to paint round figures round in the air with round brushes.

Therefore, painters now paint plain, flat figures with flat brushes on flat canvas.

– Kurt Schwitters, 1941

Quote of the day

A culture does not form all individuals in the same manner. Representations in image or word differ according to purposes, talents, and personal experiences. A culture begins the formation of an individual by endowing her or him with categories and screens to filter the millions of perceptions of reality and fantasy. At a certain point, however, artists and others make conscious choices that counteract or mitigate a culture's traditional organisation of perceptions. This combination of the tradition and conscious choices endows the artist with a specific style.

– James R Banker, The culture of San Sepolcro during the youth of Piero della Francesca

And another

Jupiter's eagle, with the lightning in its claws, is an attribute of the mighty king of heaven, and the peacock, his stately queen. They do not, like logical attributes, represent what lies in our concepts of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but rather something else – something that gives the imagination an incentive to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words.

They furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves the above rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations beyond its ken.

- Immanuel Kant (emphasis added)