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Re: BIG

Hi
----- Original Message ----- >
> Who he? European spelling of "Degas"?

Yea, dear, that was his name. "De" as in "of"  "Gas"  family name. (And it's
not pronounced "daygass" either.) However I think it's pretty telling that
you, a person who accused me of "contumely", should stoop to insult over a
disputed spelling.


Read this again-


> The central, and oft repeated, misconception is that painters were trying
to
> imitate reality ... (instead) .... They were using a complex visual
language............to
> create metaphors and equivalents

(Me)

> one tends to see what is *in* an Old Master before
> seeing it as a picture, one sees a modernist painting as a picture first."

(Greenberg)

See any similarity between the two statements? I think it's a little odd
that you try to rebut me with a quote that agrees with me.

The central tenet of your first sweeping generalisation was that photography
had  removed from painters the requirement to depict the real world. This
widely promulgated, incorrect view is piece of pure 1950's revisionism
cooked up, at least in part, by the same Greenberg, who was himself a
promoter- indeed _the_ promoter of Abstract Expressionism. Now I happen to
enjoy AE a great deal, but that does not make Greenberg's attempt to
manipulate history any more reasonable.

The true birth of abstraction (as far as Western art is concerned) was in
the early part of the 20thC when Cubism was developed by Picasso and Braque.
But photography was pioneered in the first third of the 19thC and was
widespread by 1850. That is over half a century before abstraction appeared.
What were these painters who had been "liberated by photography" doing all
those years? Figuring out the exposure?

In fact the effect of photography was to make painters try to depict reality
more accurately, not to break away from the depiction of it.

The notion of a simple causal link between the introduction of photography
and the development of abstraction is debunked by that _two generation_ gap
between the two events, and no amount of "semantics" by the supporters of
Greenberg can change that. We have to look elsewhere to find the roots of
abstraction.


Rod