heist

I have made a resolution not to read any crime novels which feature the word heist in the publisher's blurb.It seems to me that a heist story now means something like a robbery involving a comic and risible mcguffin. I have had enormous pleasure reading Ian Rankin's Rebus series several times over but rather less from one of his latest offerings, "Doors Open". In this an unlikely trio of successful people decide to commit the perfect crime within Edinburgh's art world. Not much time is wasted on the process by which each one decides to join the plot. The success or failure of the heist partly depends on an accomplice being able to reproduce exactly a group of paintings which belong to the National Gallery of Scotland. There are problems with this conceit:it is impossible to make reproductions such as these. And secondly they have to be made within a short-but unspecified time. Neither is likely to happen but for the purposes of the story we must believe that they did happen and that the results were convincing.
This objection may seem like pedantry and I suppose that any zoo-keeper looking at a crime story which featured the practices and procedures associated with looking after animals would be likely to find weaknesses in a complex plot involving the treatment of the same.The general reader will presumably overlook the details and move on.

Doors Open, Ian Rankin, Orion 2008.

euan uglow

The recently published catalogue of Euan Uglow's oeuvre contains  some surprises. Firstly it confirms that  he is a much more competent painter within his own very narrow focus than his friend and mentor Coldstream was in his. (There was an artist whose reputation came because he was well connected and one of the great and the good rather than for any quality  as a painter.) Uglow's portrait work lacks any attempt at insight into character, but you could say the same about Cezanne's portraits which are also exercise in style.The faces in Uglow are often a little too mask like. Some of the nudes hold strikingly memorable poses and no doubt he will have been accused of sadism towards models. There are a few works which will be long remembered- the diagonal nude is perhaps the most successful and any artist should be satisfied  with that. What I frequently like about the later work is the colour which is something  personal and striking. He had no feeling for landscape whatsoever and the formalism/parallelism is to be seen early on.

Seurat

I have been interested in Seurat since my schooldays. I cannot recall if my art teacher , Mr Hunter, mentioned his quasi scientific attitude, most probably he did. This interest was greatly helped when the Northumberland Library Service bought two books on the artist which I  requested and wanted to consult. They were Herbert's book on the drawings which was a very attractive book design for its time and Homer's book on Seurat's use of colour. I'm not sure how much of the latter I understood. I have been re-reading Homer and can see why it occupies an important but much criticised place in Seurat studies. It is too dogmatic  but it is also a useful collection of material for anyone interested in colour in C19 art. 

Discussing colour is extraordinarily difficult and optical mixture/fusion is as tricky as they come. One problem is that Homer, and most writers on Seurat do not seem to understand the importance of the size of the dot and the fact that this is crucial to the greying effects said to be observed in The Models and other  late works. We have problems in perceiving the colour of dots: they can only appear to be greyish at the distance where  fusion may be expected to occur. In other words the colour of dots seen at a distance cannot be clearly perceived by the human eye, at increasing distances their true colour cannot be observed and they will tend to look grey. Juxtaposed dots of differing colours will  function in a similar way and it seems to me that there will be a fusion of coloured greys. The importance of dot size has been known for almost 40 years though it is not mentioned in any of the standard works which I have to hand.Webster, in his well known article on Impressionism has nothing to say on this matter.

Homer is obsessed with the ideal viewing distance for paintings and may have derived this preoccupation from Webster. On that score I can only say that we experience paintings as we can. A wall-painting may force a distant viewpoint, a large canvas allows one to move about and to experience it in different ways. It would have been useful if he had avoided sentences like this.

"As a result of the growing  uniformity of Seurat's pointillist technique,  optical mixture could take place much more easily, and thus  his paintings tended increasingly to operate as luminous screens that emit colored light". (page 165)

 

"Seurat and the Science of Painting",William Innes Homer, The M.I.T Press, 1964

   

the iraqi picasso

Boucher Diana
Originally uploaded by baroque.rococo

The painting, originating in Iraq, was not painted by Picasso. It is not of museum quality and probably dates from around 1900 . The pose is derived from a painting by Boucher in the Louvre-Diana leaving the Bath. This would be obvious to any first year art-history student.