I have always held on to a quote from Baudelaire concerning criticism, that the critic’s job is to “understand the intention “ of the artists and to “communicate this understanding to the reader” while attempting to “evaluate if possible the artist’s success or failure in achieving their stated goals.” In other words, don’t judge an artistic work by your own standards, try to look at it through the eyes of the artist. This protects the validity of aesthetic individualism but not at the expense of internal logic and rational vision.
The only quote from Baudelaire I can find that relates to criticism is, “To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.” This quote asserts the critic’s right to be subjective but it retains the inherent duty to open the reader to the “widest horizon” possible, to give an opinion that is passionate and thoughtful but to elucidate the intention of the work as well.
Then, I see words like violence, ugliness and aggressiveness applied to the painting of Matisse and Picasso in the early years of the Twentieth Century. Although these words were applied by contemporaries, I wonder if we can understand that perspective fully? Pre-WW1 Paris had not witnessed the overwhelming violence and ugliness that was to come and even the most aggressive paintings of those years seem exuberant, adventurous and perhaps jarring to some sensibilities, but ugly?
If you look at two pictures from 1906-07. you get an idea of the point-counter-point that Matisse and Picasso were taking part in and you can see the clear contrast between two intentions. Matisse did his bucolic and sensuous painting Le Bonheur de vivre (the goodness of life) in 1906 and showed it at the Salon des Independants in March of that year. It was fundamentally, apparently, received as a summation and a repudiation of painterly tradition, mocked and howled at by the crowds that attended the salon (as Matisse’ picture of his wife in a large colorful hat had been mocked the year before) and noted for its clashing of colors and tension of line, figure and space. What Matisse did in this painting very successfully and for the first time was to make color the equivalent of light rather than a description of it.
Contrast Le Bonnheur with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which was done the following year as a sort of response to Matisse .… or, at any rate the two paintings have been juxtaposed by critical tradition. There are enough similarities between these two large canvases to make comparison fruitful yet they are clearly from two different creative universes.
Comments