A timely reminder of what criticism attempts to achieve. I include the whole essay because the arguments used indicate the framework that the opinon evolves from.


I disagree with the conclusion as always being accurate - there are many instances in history that disprove it, including examples from some of the artists mentioned. Equally, there have been others who were applauded but are now forgotten, who have faded out of our current tastes and fashions - who may return in another age, possibly the result of a completely fresh reappraisal of them that is unimaginable to us now in the context of our era.


I certainly agree that an elitist attitude that seeks a position of superiority through deliberate exclusion is definitely unacceptable.









Giotto
Scenes from the Life of Joachim: 4. Joachim's Sacrificial Offering
1304-06
Fresco, 200 x 185 cm
Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua














The Mystogogue
G K Chesteron






Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.


















Fra Angelico
Coronation of the Virgin
1434-35
Tempera on panel, 213 x 211 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris






Thus Giotto or Fra Angelico would have at once admitted theologically that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint Him. And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a rather quaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard, like a king of the elves, was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Him in some way. That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy pictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, more blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of good is always towards Incarnation. But, on the other hand, those refined thinkers who worship the Devil, whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the salons of Paris, always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness, the unutterable character of the abomination. They call him “horror of emptiness,” as did the black witch in Stevenson’s Dynamiter; they worship him as the unspeakable name; as the unbearable silence. They think of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind; the cloud on the brain of the maniac; the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endless corridors of nightmare. It was the Christians who gave the Devil a grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. It was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanists never drew him at all.






And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity and mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we may separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt from mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outree or specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.








Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the thing called Art, and the people called Art Critics. It is obvious that an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy cunning that has made them what they are. It is equally obvious that a landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape; a portrait painter only half of the person; they are lucky if they express so much. And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of the pictures can only express half of them, and that the less important half. Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken that connects God With Nature, or Nature with men, or men with critics. The “Mona Lisa” was in some respects (not all, I fancy) what God meant her to be. Leonardo’s picture was, in some respects, like the lady. And Walter Pater’s rich description was, in some respects, like the picture. Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature, in the last resort, can express something other than its own unhappy self.











Botticelli
The Birth of Venus
c. 1485
Tempera on canvas, 172.5 x 278.5 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

.






Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. But if there is any good in Botticelli (there is much good, and much evil too) it is emphatically the critic’s business to explain it: to translate it from terms of painting into terms of diction. Of course, the rendering will be inadequate—but so is Botticelli. It is a fact he would be the first to admit. But anything which has been intelligently received can at least be intelligently suggested. Pater does suggest an intelligent cause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli’s “Venus Rising from the Sea.” Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for Turner destroying forests and falsifying landscapes. These two great critics were far too fastidious for my taste; they urged to excess the idea that a sense of art was a sort of secret; to be patiently taught and slowly learnt. Still, they thought it could be taught: they thought it could be learnt. They constrained themselves, with considerable creative fatigue, to find the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been clone in Italian painting. The same is true of Whistler and R. A. M. Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez. They had something to say about the pictures; they knew it was unworthy of the pictures, but they said it.










VELÁZQUEZ
The Fable of Arachne (Las Hilanderas)
c. 1657
Oil on canvas, 220 x 289 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid












Picasso Autoportrait
Winter 1899 (1900)
Charcoal on paper 22,5 x 16,5 cm
Museu Picasso, Barcelona
Copyright © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York













Now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is untranslatable—that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements: that “the public” does not understand these things; that “the likes of us” cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords.











Rembrandt Self-Portrait
1669
Oil on canvas, 86 x 70.5 cm
National Gallery, London






















I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simple test mentioned above. If there were anything intelligent in such art, something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature. Man is made with one head, not with two or three. No criticism of Rembrandt is as good as Rembrandt; but it can be so written as to make a man go back and look at his pictures. If there is a curious and fantastic art, it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantastic literary expression for it; inferior to it, doubtless, but still akin to it. If they cannot do this, as they cannot; if there is nothing in their eulogies, as there is nothing except eulogy—then they are quacks or the high-priests of the unutterable. If the art critics can say nothing about the artists except that they are good it is because the artists are bad. They can explain nothing because they have found nothing; and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be found




















** I know I’ve used the Rembrandt Self Portrait before but his expression speaks volumes and I make no apology for repeating him here.

One of the many questions that come to mind exploring Hirst’s body of works concerns the validity of subjective interpretation - does it matter if the viewer comes up with some interpretation that is wildly different from the artist’s intentions? Does that make the interpretation irrelevant?


These extracts give some of Picasso’s thoughts about the interpretations offered about Guernica. Also interesting to note how his tone changes over a period of years (I would have liked to have known the years he said these remarks but that information was not provided at the Source)















Picasso never committed to a specific explanation of his symbolism: “…this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”





“Picasso made a very poignant personal statement about the horse in Guernica being connected to the idea of the suffering of the people,” adds Failing[1]. “And since it’s an animal with a big lance wound through its center, certainly that’s a connection many people would find quite plausible. But Picasso was maddeningly inconsistent about what he had to say about these particular characters, although he didn’t like to say very much at all about them. He knew that it’s better to not say something and allow the interpreters to fill in the space. That gives them something to do. It makes them think about you more.”




Years after the completion of Guernica, Picasso was still questioned time and time again about the meaning of the bull and other images in the mural. In exasperation he stated emphatically: “These are animals, massacred animals. That’s all as far as I’m concerned…” But he did reiterate the painting’s obvious anti-war sentiment: “My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. In the picture I am painting — which I shall call Guernica — I am expressing my horror of the military caste which is now plundering Spain into an ocean of misery and death.”





[1] Failing, Patricia. “Picasso’s ‘Cries of Children…Cries of Stones.’” Art News 126, 7 (Sept 1977): 55-64.

Damien HIRST
Papilio Ulysses (detail)
213.4 by 213.4cm.; 84 by 84in
Copyright © Damien Hirst







Book IX

Odysseus relates [...] how he was used by the Cyclops Polyphemus.




‘So soon as early Dawn shone forth, the rosy-fingered, then did the rams of the flock hasten forth to pasture, but the ewes bleated unmilked about the pens, for their udders were swollen to bursting. Then their lord, sore stricken with pain, felt along the backs of all the sheep as they stood up before him, and guessed not in his folly how that my men were bound beneath the breasts of his thick-fleeced flocks. Last of all the sheep came forth the ram, cumbered with his wool, and the weight of me and my cunning. And the strong Polyphemus laid his hands on him and spake to him saying:




‘”Dear ram, wherefore, I pray thee, art thou the last of all the flocks to go forth from the cave, who of old wast not wont to lag behind the sheep, but wert ever the foremost to pluck the tender blossom of the pasture, faring with long strides, and wert still the first to come to the streams of the rivers, and first did long to return to the homestead in the evening? But now art thou the very last. Surely thou art sorrowing for the eye of thy lord, which an evil man blinded, with his accursed fellows, when he had subdued my wits with wine, even Noman, whom I say hath not yet escaped destruction. Ah, if thou couldst feel as I, and be endued with speech, to tell me where he shifts about to shun my wrath; then should he be smitten, and his brains be dashed against the floor here and there about the cave, and my heart be lightened of the sorrows which Noman, nothing worth, hath brought me!”





‘Therewith he sent the ram forth from him, and when we had gone but a little way from the cave and from the yard, first I loosed myself from under the ram and then I set my fellows free. And swiftly we drave on those stiff-shanked sheep, so rich in fat, and often turned to look about, till we came to the ship. And a glad sight to our fellows were we that had fled from death, but the others they would have bemoaned with tears; howbeit I suffered it not, but with frowning brows forbade each man to weep. Rather I bade them to cast on board the many sheep with goodly fleece, and to sail over the salt sea water. So they embarked forthwith, and sate upon the benches, and sitting orderly smote the grey sea water with their oars. But when I had not gone so far, but that a man’s shout might be heard, then I spoke unto the Cyclops taunting him:




‘”Cyclops, so thou wert not to eat the company of a weakling by main might in thy hollow cave! Thine evil deeds were very sure to find thee out, thou cruel man, who hadst no shame to eat thy guests within thy gates, wherefore Zeus hath requited thee, and the other gods.”




‘So I spake, and he was mightily angered at heart, and he brake off the peak of a great hill and threw it at us, and it fell in front of the dark-prowed ship. {*} And the sea heaved beneath the fall of the rock, and the backward flow of the wave bare the ship quickly to the dry land, with the wash from the deep sea, and drave it to the shore. Then I caught up a long pole in my hands, and thrust the ship from off the land, and roused my company, and with a motion of the head bade them dash in with their oars, that so we might escape our evil plight. So they bent to their oars and rowed on. But when we had now made twice the distance over the brine, I would fain have spoken to the Cyclops, but my company stayed me on every side with soft words, saying:


{* We have omitted line 483, as required by the sense. It is introduced here from line 540.}




‘”Foolhardy that thou art, why wouldst thou rouse a wild man to wrath, who even now hath cast so mighty a throw towards the deep and brought our ship back to land, yea and we thought that we had perished {*} even there? If he had heard any of us utter sound or speech he would have crushed our heads and our ship timbers with a cast of a rugged stone, so mightily he hurls.”


{* Neither in this passage nor in B ii.171 nor in B xx.121 do we think that the aorist infinitive after a verb of saying can bear a future sense. The aorist infinitive after [Greek] (ii.280, vii.76) is hardly an argument in its favour; the infinitive there is in fact a noun in the genitive case.}









TURNER, J M W
Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey
1829
Oil on canvas 132.5 x 203 cm.
copyright National Gallery London





‘So spake they, but they prevailed not on my lordly spirit, and I answered him again from out an angry heart:


‘”Cyclops, if any one of mortal men shall ask thee of the unsightly blinding of thine eye, say that it was Odysseus that blinded it, the waster of cities, son of Laertes, whose dwelling is in Ithaca.”




‘So I spake, and with a moan he answered me, saying:


‘”Lo now, in very truth the ancient oracles have come upon me. There lived here a soothsayer, a noble man and a mighty, Telemus, son of Eurymus, who surpassed all men in soothsaying, and waxed old as a seer among the Cyclopes. He told me that all these things should come to pass in the aftertime, even that I should lose my eyesight at the hand of Odysseus. But I ever looked for some tall and goodly man to come hither, clad in great might, but behold now one that is a dwarf, a man of no worth and a weakling, hath blinded me of my eye after subduing me with wine. Nay come hither, Odysseus, that I may set by thee a stranger’s cheer, and speed thy parting hence, that so the Earth-shaker may vouchsafe it thee, for his son am I, and he avows him for my father. And he himself will heal me, if it be his will; and none other of the blessed gods or of mortal men.”




‘Even so he spake, but I answered him, and said: “Would god that I were as sure to rob thee of soul and life, and send thee within the house of Hades, as I am that not even the Earth-shaker will heal thine eye!”




‘So I spake, and then he prayed to the lord Poseidon stretching forth his hands to the starry heaven: “Hear me, Poseidon, girdler of the earth, god of the dark hair, if indeed I be thine, and thou avowest thee my sire,–grant that he may never come to his home, even Odysseus, waster of cities, the son of Laertes, whose dwelling is in Ithaca; yet if he is ordained to see his friends and come unto his well-builded house, and his own country, late may he come in evil case, with the loss of all his company, in the ship of strangers, and find sorrows in his house.”




‘So he spake in prayer, and the god of the dark locks heard him. And once again he lifted a stone, far greater than the first, and with one swing he hurled it, and he put forth a measureless strength, and cast it but a little space behind the dark-prowed ship, and all but struck the end of the rudder. And the sea heaved beneath the fall of the rock, but the wave bare on the ship and drave it to the further shore.








THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE

by S. H. Butcher, M.A. & A. Lang, M.A.

April, 1999 [Etext #1728]
[Date last updated: June 5, 2004]

Seated Colossus of Ramesses II
Entrance to Temple of Luxor
ca. 1279-1213 B.C.
Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

Hepworth’s singular way of seeing was triggered by a lecture she heard on Egyptian sculpture as a seven-year-old schoolgirl. The lecture was given by her headmistress at Wakefield Girls High School and, as Hepworth put it, “fired me off”. From then on, she wrote, everything was “forms, shapes and textures”. When her father drove her across the countryside in his car, all she saw was sculpture. The car became her hands as she “felt and touched the contours of the hills”.



Source
















Colossi of Ramesses II at Memphis

















How these master carvers achieved perfect surfaces on this scale with simple tools was beyond my comprehension. My own twenty years’ experience provided no clue. But clearly this was not the work of slaves. This forty-foot length of stone could only have been brought to life through the sensitive hand and watchful eye of a master sculptor, and with a great deal of loving care.




Stuart M. Edelson




More about the Colossus of Ramesses II




























Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley


I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And Wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.



More about Ramesses II







Colossal bust of Ramesses II, the ‘Younger Memnon’
From the Ramesseum, Thebes
Egypt 19th Dynasty, about 1250 BC

“I found there was such beauty in the co-ordinated human endeavour that the composition – human in appearance – became abstract in shape. I became completely absorbed by the extraordinary beauty of purpose between human beings all dedicated to saving life; and the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work.”

[1]


HEPWORTH 1903-1975
Fenestration (The Microscope)
1948
Pencil and oil on gesso-prepared board
14 x 18 inches; 35.5 x 45.8 cm.











Barbara Hepworth
Mother and Child
1934
Wakefield Art Gallery
copyright Bowness, Hepworth Estate







I recently visited the Moore | Hepworth | Nicholson - A Nest of Gentle Artists in the 1930s exhibition where I saw this Hepworth Mother and Child and was struck by the tenderness of the composition. It brings to mind those heart stopping moments when babies are learning to stand - and spend more time falling down, that precarious moment of poised success before the wobbling legs collapse into a surprised heap of giggles.





Reducing the forms to this simple expression emphasizes that moment and the universality of the experience. Most of us have seen something like this and though it’s unlikely we remember it, we will have been that tiny form trying to stand. The process of de-personalizing the moment through simplification has paradoxically made it more accessibly, individually personal at the same time as emphasizing the universality of the experience. And, taking the analogy a step further, is a wonderful reminder about the persistence of effort.





The image doesn’t do the piece justice, it can’t because one aspect of it is that it’s actually two pieces with the baby being removeable - it ’sits’ on a peg, though it fits in only one position. There is another piece also titled ‘Mother and Child’ by Hepworth in this exhibition but the one shown here outshines it for me.




Exhibition tours to the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield from 20 May – 29 August 09



































“I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.”













Two Rocks
1971
Irish black marble
Height: 116.8 cm /46 ins

























“One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.”















Group of Three Magic Stones
1973
Silver
Edition of 6
7.6 × 35 × 31 cm / 3 × 13 3/4 × 12 1/4 ins


















“components fall into place and one is no longer aware of the detail except as the necessary significance of wholeness and unity.”
[2]



















Disc with Strings (Moon)
BH484
1969
Aluminium with strings, edition 4 of 9 + 0
Height: 18 inches


















A few Quotes





And a few more Quotes





More examples of works by Dame Barbara Hepworth at the New Art Centre



















[1] An extract from her autobiography that relates to her watching a team of surgeons operating, quoted by Will Gompertz in his article My life in art: Barbara Hepworth and the art of alchemy, further information about her autobiograhy is not provided.



[2] source as [1]