Always the Model, Never the Artist | Hacker News Reader

Always the Model, Never the Artist

theparisreview.org

57 pointsprismatic12 comments

I use Berthe Morisot in my teaching, to address the difference between a great painter (which she undoubtedly was) and a great artist. It’s a hard topic to address... but even as an undergrad, I always found her work a bit hollow. She was a master of the craft, but did not have the analytical prowess of Manet, the Colour craft of Monet or the verve of Renoir (an artist of far less craft).

Never addressed is the fact that she was a graduate of the academy, whereas most of the key impressions artists came from the atelier system... two entirely different educational systems.

If anyone is looking for an ignored genius, try checking out Gwen John. Her biggest disadvantage was her unique British under understatedness, but for her single-minded vision she has few peers.

Since I understand very little about painting, am I correct in understanding that you are saying that she is very technically adept, but not good at creating art per se. I guess an analogy would possibly be that someone can be a great pianist and play all the notes exactly correct but doesn't understand how to play the inflection of the notes correctly?

more like: someone can be a great pianist but not necessarily a great composer, someone can be a great coder but not necessarily a great software engineer...

It's those additional stacks of human interface skills above a specific craft.

I've spent quite a lot of time in graduate art training and I'd go further: this isn't about a high level of technical skill or performance, it's about personality. A composer is not a pianist writ large; a software engineer might be a coder working at a high level of abstraction. But an artist is someone who works with their whole personality, engaging with the craft of painting (in this case). To have a "whole personality" that is compelling is very rare, and it's not something that happens by stacking up skills. It might manifest through an appearance of highly analytic vision or graphic composition but it is not quantifiable in those terms. It has to do with wit.

I'm going to cheekily (not in a sexist way) link this to something said by the fashion photographer who discovered Melania Trump, because I think it is exactly the same ineffable quality that is under discussion:

'Jerko thought at first that Melania had a very good future in modeling but after two sessions, he lost enthusiasm. “Her exterior was very good to be an excellent model, but she lacked energy, a certain charm that if you have, you transmit it through your eyes, through your personality. If you have something that, shall we say, comes from the heart, it shows in the photo,” the photographer said.'

Yes, exactly, charisma.

An example is Orianthi.

She's a massively technical guitarist - she can shred as hard as any man.

But some of her songs have a high-frequency "girl sound" (I give her male guitar tech equal blame) instead of a "brown sound", and her albums don't sell.

Having said that, her live concert version of Michael Jackson's "Give in to Me" is stunning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbB8Eo3NLp4

Another amazing female guitarist is Mel:

Buckethead - "Soothsayer" cover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k-7aR1xVdg

Yes... thats pretty much exactly what I am saying. I would say that one thing she lacked is a consistent sense of self. Her work was stylistically diverse. Though some artists (e.g. David Bowie, Gerhard Richter) can get away with this, for her it comes across as an uncertainty of self.

Another thing was that she was very well trained in the academic tradition. This gave her a set of skills which she could not un-learn, but were at odds with the spirit of the time. Another artist mentioned in this article was Henri Fantin De Latour. He was similarly skilled, but was also deadly focused on still life as subject matter. Though he was never a hip impressionist, still-lives were very much in agreement with much of the impressionist 'project'.

This isn’t uncommon at all. There are plenty of people today who are technically impressive but unremarkable. Just look at Instagram. Excellent composition, rendering, anatomy, etc. But then all they draw is the same portraits over and over.

> the bare edges of the canvas suggest that the woman has agency, physical and otherwise; in Morisot’s garden scenes or beflowered interiors, the dresses melt into the background, refuting the viewer’s possession of the figure. Morisot’s messy brushstrokes—some of the most daring among her contemporaries’—suggest that “woman” is pure fiction, an idea bursting at the seams of the experience it supposedly names.

Seems like the author is projecting their own opinions onto Morisot's art.

That being said, it's incredibly sad that women were so devalued and minimized in that time.

Can you explain which part of that quote is projecting their own opinions?

Can you also compare and contrast with another, more objective art criticism?

> more objective art criticism?

That made me smile. :)

> That being said, it's incredibly sad that women were so devalued and minimized in that time.

This might be traced back to the 'first' art critic, John Ruskin campaigned vigorously for a better education for women and girls than was available. However, a big motivator for this was his fear of industrialisation. He saw woman as the counter-balance to this force, and strongly positioned them as the centre of family life: feminine and (importantly) uncompetitive.

Much art criticism that followed inherited these assumptions.

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