Mid-Morning Art Thread

Shell Building Site
Leon Kossoff

I saw this work at The Courtauld Gallery, which is an absolutely magnificent small museum in central London. Regular readers of this thread will recognize several pieces in the museum, and some other very well known art. It's also a well designed space which allows visitors to enjoy the art without the cramped and rushed feeling of so many other museums.

Hell, they even had a fascinating exhibition called Art and Artifice: Fakes from the Collection, which was exactly that, and wonderfully interesting and informative. I don't find most special exhibitions in most museums to be of much interest, because they often seem to be the personal tastes of the curators (or donors), and they are often politically charged, but this one was perfect!

Oh..yeah...they also had that piece up top, and while the gallery doesn't claim to be a comprehensive look at art, they have a wonderful progression through the ages. Some of their 20th century art is interesting and thought-provoking, so I was willing to take seriously their other choices.

Here is the museum's description of the work...

Leon Kossoff drew and painted the bomb sites and building sites of London extensively after the Second World War. This remarkable painting depicts the massive construction works undertaken on London's South Bank to replace the pavilions of the 1952 Festival of Britain with one of the city's first skyscrapers, built for the Shell oil company. Kossoff's painting is a vision of volcanic eruption as the new structures wrestle their way out of the deeply excavated earth. His vigorous working of the thick paint gives a palpable sense of creative energy.

I will not mock the artist or his art. From the reading I have done about him (here's a sample), he seems to be a serious artist without the pomposity, smugness and pretense of the more typical modern artist. And he certainly was dedicated to his profession and took it very, very seriously.

But this work fails some basic tests for my art appreciation. It does not elevate the subject, it does not demonstrate technique, and it is not pleasing to the eye. It is however interesting, in that the technique is different, and the viewer is forced to look deep into the painting to see something...anything...that the artist intended. From that perspective it is a success. And I will grant that there was some effort involved...this is not merely dashing layers of paint on a canvas and trotting down to the dealer to drop off the next installment of "Fleece The Art Snobs."

However, it exposes the limitations of much modern art! It seems as though the conceit of modern art is the creation out of whole cloth of new techniques that are independent of 3,000 years of artistic development. And while I appreciate some of their efforts, the rejection of that history and the assumption that new is by definition better is a curious way to look at art, and one that I believe is doomed to fail. In 500 years, will art museums be filled with experiments in art, or Caravaggios and Raphaels and van Goghs and Wyeths and Delacroixs and...

posted by CBD at 09:30 AM

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