modern art
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In the autumn of 1889, 41-year-old Gauguin received a distraught
letter from his young friend after a particularly harsh critical
reception of Bernard’s paintings. In a reply found in Paul Gauguin: Letters to His Wife and Friends (public library), the painter writes to his 21-year-old friend:
Your disconsolate letter reaches a countryside as
sorrowful. I understand the bitterness which sweeps over you at the
foolish reception of you and your works… What would you rather have? a
mediocrity which pleases everybody or a talent which breaks new ground.
We must choose if we have free will. Would you have the power of choice
if choosing leads to suffering — a Nessus shirt which sticks to you and
cannot be stripped off? Attacks on originality are to be expected from
those who lack the power to create and shrug their shoulders.
As for me, I own myself beaten — by events, by men, by
the family, but not by public opinion. I scorn it and I can do without
admirers. I won’t say that at your age I was like this, but by the
exertion of sheer will power, that is what I am like to-day. Let them
study carefully my last pictures and, if they have any feelings at all,
they will see what resigned suffering is in them — a cry wrung from the
heart… But you, why do you suffer, too? You are young, and too early you
begin to carry the cross. Do not rebel; one day, you will feel a joy in
having resisted the temptation to hate, and there is truly intoxicating
poetry in the goodness of him who has suffered.
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“It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.”
The Dead Bullfighter
1864-1865, oil on canvas
76 × 153.3 cm (29.9 × 60.4 in)
by Édouard Manet
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In fall 1977, Sherman began making pictures that would eventually become her groundbreaking “Untitled Film Stills.” Over three years, the series grew to comprise a total of seventy black-and-white photographs. Taken as a whole, the “Untitled Film Stills”—resembling publicity pictures made on movie sets—read like an encyclopedic roster of stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. But while the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s “Stills” are entirely fictitious; they represent clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, vamp, housewife, and so on) that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. While the pictures can be appreciated individually, much of their significance comes in the endless variation of identities from one photograph to the next. As a group they explore the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images, and refer to the cultural filter of images (moving and still) through which we see the world.
Untitled Film Stills, 1977 by Cindy Sherman
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We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.
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by Natee Utarit
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Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? BBC Documentary 2016
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TateShots: Yves Klein – Anthropometrie
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“The only thing I feel like I know is that I want to make things. Other
than that, I feel like I don’t know. So the problem is in trying to make
something without knowing what I want. […] I think it’s all to do
with wanting to communicate. I mean, I think I want to make
things because I want to communicate with people, because I want to be
loved, because I want to express myself.”
Martin Creed – Members Artist 2015-2017
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Rothko’s Room – The Life and Work of an American Artist
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“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no
collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all
had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the
same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which
condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to
discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life
are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root
and grow. We must all hope we find them.”
Untitled (1963) by Mark Rothko