On the streets the shortest path to coin was all. Here, among the beggars, he could be welcomed rather than tolerated, a violinist rather than a fiddler. The girls and the children would enjoy it, though the men would need more drink, drink they didn’t have, to slacken their scowls. Music alone wasn’t nearly enough to salve their problems. The man in the top-hat had only just recently found himself among their number. He clung to that hat the way a tick clung to a mongrel’s skin, as though a few inches of good quality felt were all that stood between him and final heartbreak. Today the old musician would play for him. He’d play a bit from “The Beggar’s Opera,” a piece he’d learned while in England all those years ago. Yes, today he’d play for the man in the top hat but he’d sing for himself-

Facts: The Old Musician

From a 1984 edition of the hardcover devoted to the collections of The National Gallery in Washington-

“The principal pleasure to be gained from Manet comes from the beauty of his brushwork. He mixed on his palette the exact tone he needed and with swift and certain dexterity delineated on the canvas each area of light and shadow. In The Old Musician this virtuosity of handling can be seen most clearly in the trenchant strokes that define the folds in the shirt and trousers of the boy with the straw hat, or in the more caressing feather touch on the shawl of the girl holding the baby.

Manet’s method of direct painting caused him to suppress the transitional tones of modeling which particularly suggest volume. Like Velazquez, who was also a master of brushwork, he chose an illumination which would flatten form as much as possible. Thus the light falls directly on the figures from behind the artist’s head, and the shadows are reduced to a minimum. Through this arbitrary elimination of shadow Manet was able to state local color more freely. He attained, especially in such early works as The Old Musician, the most subtle harmonies of yellowish white and faded blue, here contrasted with warm browns and blacks and soft grays. This color scheme was as far as possible from the high intensities and broken colors of the Impressionists, which he adopted at the end of his life.

For Manet, in spite of a strong instinct for the traditional, became a leader of the Impressionists’ revolt. The public attacked his pictures, as they attacked the other Impressionists, but less because of his method of painting than because of a certain outre quality in his subject matter. In The Old Musician, for instance, what is the meaning of the brooding octogenarian on the extreme right, who is bisected so unconventionally by the frame? Perhaps he was put there simply to balance the composition, for Theodore Duret, who knew Manet well, said he painted this troupe of beggars merely because it pleased him to preserve a record of them and for no other reason. And yet one senses a significance which just escapes, a hidden meaning which is baffling. In Manet’s pictures these recurrent and tantalizing affectations infuriated his contemporaries and were in part the reason he never attained the popular admiration which he so desperately desired.”

However

On seeing his two most recent pieces, a life sized blue whale and a reconstruction of the command area on the bridge of an aircraft carrier… well, I’ve gotta give it up to him. These pieces are fantastic, not least of all because they are made of his trademark “low” materials. The whale, Balaenoptera Musculus, for example, is made mainly from foam core and hot glue, a conservator’s nightmare and in as much a flagrant “fuck you” to his own legacy, and by extension, Art history.

You can see them, and the rest of his most recent show, here, for more check out his homepage or at the following: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Mutation

And rather than being a whiny little douchebag about it I will do my best to continue posting as always. I only mention it so that if I go a few days here and there without updating you will know why without my having to post some longwinded self-involved explanation. Alright? Business as usual commencing now.

From Chapter 4, How do substances occupy the mind?, in reference to the image which served as thumbnail to this post-

Rembrandt is well-known for the buttery dab of paint that he sometimes puts on the ends of the noses of his portraits, and this nose is certainly greasy and has its little spot of white. But touches like that do not stand alone: when Rembrandt was interested in what he was doing, as he was here, he coated entire faces in a glossy, shining mud-pack of viscid paint. The skin is damp with perspiration, as if he were painting himself in a hot room, and he slowly accumulated a slick sheen of sweat. It is impossible to ignore the strangeness of the paint. If I looked at my face in the mirror and saw this, I would be horrified. The texture is much rougher than skin, as if it is all scar tissue. As a painter works, the shanks of the brushes become repositories for dried paint, and flecks of that paint become dislodged and mix with fresh paint, rolling around on the canvas like sodden tumbleweeds. They are all over this face, forming little pimples or warts wherever they end up. (There is a large one halfway up the nose.) Among contemporary artists, Lucien Freud has made an entire technique out of these rolling flakes and balls, and he lets them congregate in his figures’ armpits and in their crotches. In short, the face is a wreck, much more disturbing than the unnaturally smooth faces that most painters prefer.

Although historians tend to see Rembrandt’s method as an attempt at naturalism, it goes much farther than portrait conventions have ever gone, then or since. Consider what is happening in the paint, aside from the fact that it is supposed to be skin. Paint is a viscous substance, already kin to sweat and fat, and here it represents itself: skin as paint or paint as skin, either way. It’s a self-portrait of the painter, but it is also a self-portrait of paint. The oils are out in force, like the uliginous oozing waters of a swamp bottom. The paint is oily, greasy, and waxy all at once—even though modem chemistry would say that is impossible. It sticks: it is tacky and viscid like flypaper. It has the pull and suction of pine sap. Over the far cheek, it spreads like the mucilage schoolchildren use to glue paper, resisting and rolling back. On the nose—it’s rude, but appropriate—the paint is semi-solid, as if the nose were smeared with phlegm or mucus. On the forehead, it looks curdled, like gelatin that is broken up with a spoon as it is about to set. There is drier paint around the eyes, and the bags under the eyes are inspissated hunks of paint, troweled over thin, greyish underpainting. The grey, which is left naked at the corner of the eye and in the folds between the bags, is the imprimatura, and the skin over it is heavy, thick, and clammy. The same technique served for the wings of the nose, where dribbles of paint come down to meet the nostril but stop short, leaving a gap where the grey shows through. Of course, the nostril is not a hole, but a plug of Burnt Sienna with Lamp Black, and it also lies on top of the grey imprimatura. Rembrandt’s thin moustache is painted with wiggles of buttery paint, almost like milk clinging to a real moustache. Over the eyes and eyelids there are thick strips of burned earth pigments -Lamp Black and Burnt Sienna— covering everything underneath. The tar spreads up and inward, and then falls into the hollows between the eyes and the nose in dense pools like duplicate pupils.

There is no limit to this kind of description, because Rembrandt’s paint covers the full range of organic substances. It is more fully paint, more completely an inventory of what can happen between water and stone, ⊕ than the other examples in this book. And that means it is also more directly expressive of qualities and properties: it is warm, greasy, oily, waxy, earthy, watery, inspissate. It is not dried rock, like Monet’s cathedral, nor water, like his marine paintings. The thoughts that crowd in on me when I look this paint have very little to do with the underlying triad, or with the named pigments or oils. They are thoughts about qualities: I feel viscid. My body is snared in the glues and emulsions, and I feel the pull of them on my thoughts. I want to wash my face.

-James Elkins.

“I want to wash my face.” Ha. Love it.

More to come…