POST #183: Back to the Drawing Board

 

I was recently ruminating, (having nothing better to do waiting for the plague to end) on why artists stay with one style (or why they change their style.) And the more I thought about it, the more answers came to me. I’ll run some by you, but I’m sure you have explanations of your own.  

The main reason an artist is famous for work in one single style is usually the obvious one:  he or she died before they got around to exploring new ideas: Seurat, Modigliani, Kline, Basquiat, Haring, just to name a few who never lived long enough to move on (assuming they even would have wanted to.)

“Imaginary View From a New York City Window”
Oil on canvas 68”x46”

Then there are artists who stay with a style because it is their nature, their rigid personalities discourage experimentation. Mondrian, for example, once he achieved his signature rectangular grid, often worked on the same paintings for years, making minute changes, rarely achieving the perfection he sought. But he was rigid in all aspects of his life; contemporary photos show him working in a spare, immaculate studio, in suit and tie, moving pieces of colored tape millimeters to the left or the right.  Some artists find a formula early on and stay with it. They’re probably the same way about everything they do: what they eat, what they wear, how they make love.  They draw comfort in achieving “perfection” in a narrow band, not in experimenting with something new.

….and then there are artists like Chagall, a genius who was capable of invention but found a formula early on that his buyers wanted: floating lovers, rabbis, scenes of Vitebsk and farm animals (don’t forget the cows.) You knew a Chagall the minute you saw one and his admirers gobbled them up. He never changed because he was successful, financially and otherwise.

On a more mundane level: a highly successful painter I know from my Music & Art High School days (he exhibits in major Madison Avenue galleries and invests in New York real estate) has been painting the same semi-abstract Vermont landscapes for over forty years.  They’re not exactly the same: sometimes the view is from the North, sometimes South, East or West. But he has a wonderful color sense and his “faux Cezanne” daubs do look like they belong in a museum.  There’s enough variety to keep his clientele buying what they think is new work. The so-called “gurus of the art world” either ignore him (or hate him) but, as he once told me: “I cry all the way to the bank.” He’s especially popular with Texas zillionaires who love to decorate their homes with art work that looks sophisticated, but is “easy on the eyes.” They grab up everything he does. He’s a businessman first, he admits, and a businessman stays with a product that sells.

City Scene
18”x12”. Oil on Panel

But why are Monet or Cezanne, who remained with the same subject matter for decades considered great artists and my Vermont scene painter always a hack? My theory is that it has to do with intent. A true artist, like Monet, who painted the same subject over and over, sought some intrinsic truth that only repetition could bring. It’s like a meditation mantra. To get to the essence of an object or a place one had to do what psychologists call “break set,” break down a formulaic way of seeing something by staring at it intently for a long period of time. The goal was to see better not sell better. Cezanne’s multiple views of Mont Sainte-Victoire were a perfect example of an artist using repetition as a way of penetrating deeper into a subject’s essential identity, its solidity, its changes with weather, time of day. He didn’t do it because he thought there was a market for mountain scenes.

During my decades as a working artist, I’ve learned how hard it is to generalize about art and artists. There are geniuses like Mark Rothko (an all-time favorite) who committed suicide - possibly because he found himself “stuck in a style.”  Like Jackson Pollock, success didn’t allow him to move on. The public wanted to buy paintings by Rothko and Pollock that looked like they were done by Rothko and Pollock. They were among the many artists who got rich and famous only to discover their creativity hemmed in by dealers, debts, houses in the Hamptons, ex- wives and wayward children. Forced to keep producing the signature work associated with their names, they killed themselves.

And on the other hand, another of my gods, Philip Guston, walked away from the fashionable art world, locked himself up in a farmhouse in Woodstock, New York and created powerful, disturbing and original work that was only appreciated decades after his death. Like Alice Neel who is only now getting her due, his time has come and his greatness recognized.

 

Lovingly submitted

Renee Kahn