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a critic attempts ...

 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.  

Vedanā

This little word means something like "raw sensation" in Pali, an ancient Indian language. It is only through observing physical sensation that a person can observe one's self and one's emotions and mind. And it is only through the observation of body, emotion and mind that one can understand the truth of things.

this is fundamentally what artists do. Observe. And I like to think this word captures everything that makes up what we call "art" along with our conceptions of it and the world .. which is everything. Sort of.

“Evil is done without effort. It is natural and the working of fate. Good is always the product of an art.”

    “Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation”

    “The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find”. 

    “The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated”. 

    “We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose”.

    “Champagne, with its amber hue, its éclat, its sparkle and its perfume, arouses the senses and produces a cheerfullness which flashes through the company like a spark of electricity. At the magic word "Champagne", the guests, dull and torpid with good feeling,awake at once. This lively, ethereal and charming beverage sets in motion the spirits of all; the phlegmatic, the grave and the philosophic are surprised to find themselves amiable; in the wink of an eye (or the pop of a cork) the whole banquet has changed its physiognomy”.

     Charles Baudelaire

Picasso and Matisse

Art is a transformative activity. 

It may seem like an artist looks at a thing and uses pencil or paint to portray an image of the thing. It may seem that what is going on is recording. But no two “recordings”, even of identical things turn out the same under an artist’s hand. Clearly, there is interpretation and transformation going on. And what does that say about the work of art? what the artist is hoping to achieve? and what we as viewers are supposed to make of it?

In every artistic work (sculpture, dance, piece of music etc.) there is something that germinated in the artist’s sensibility to create the work. Something that may be a very direct product of physical experience or an emotional or psychological experience but, in any case, something that cannot ever be entirely separated from reality. To say that a work of art is entirely fantastic and nonsense denies its reality as a work of art. Rather, it is a transformation of reality through the imagination and technique of the artist and we as viewers make sense of the work by linking, as the artists did, the reality with the transformed image. 

“Great” art can take many forms but its greatness is in the relativity of its connection to a common sensibility, its ability to communicate directly or to introduce a new way of communicating.