Johannes von Gumppenberg

A Fare-Well until We Meet Again

9/9/2016

I have spoken to you in these little written compositions of some rather weighty matters. Other inclusions meant to provide a bit of drollery and fun as a respite for both you and me.

Here I want to offer you a final picture – not specially related to this or any text – but solely shown to you for your enjoyment.

Ahead of me now lie writing tasks which I cannot fit into a tight-spaced deadline plan.

I hope you liked my weekly series of reflections, as I surely treasure your attention to it.

Modern Art -- Forbidden Art

8/26/2016

In Hitler’s Germany Modern Art was a forbidden art.

In the first years following the war I saw samples of this art with only uncomprehending eyes. Then in the USA took place at Rhode Island School of Design my first meeting with the art of my own time. It was “love at first sight.” I felt I had arrived to take a part in a sun-rise burst of color and an unprecedented inventive excellence of form.

Sometimes that fulfillment seemed in reach just around the corner. Hitler’s stranglehold was the obvious tyranny. Many tyrannies of fashions advancing ever like invasive weeds into the art community bring to us a slyly sneaking, but also more enduring, trouble.

The Art Student and the Art School

One kind of art in vogue or another dominates from time to time. There is also a seeming plenitude of variety. We note, however, a fashion in our schools which has grown a weighty burden. It is, contempt for what we name “academic learning.”

From Modern Art can arise – and partly have arisen – insights of fundamental learning useful to the valuation of any period.

In our time all profess admiration for the excellence of Paul Cézanne. That achievement was three-fold: composition, solid form, and color. These are the essentials of the painter’s art.

At Yale Josef Albers set up the course for a right study of color and composition. This gain, now lost mostly to neglect and then oblivion, needed to be cultivated and enlarged.

Solid form has been my chosen work. This was not a mere modeling in light and shade. Instead, the aim was the precise description of the volumes while taking possession of each surface as a field of action to be creatively explored for free display.

It is an oddity that all our art community talks admiration for Cézanne but treats negligently that to which Cézanne gave his industrious care.

There are several helps where our talent is not quite enough.

My illustration demonstrates that any shape arrangement can be made to fit the perspective situation of any form. Thereby, every surface is made usable as the designer-artist’s personal field of action.

Form Description

Alert and sharpened eyes must contribute here accurate observing. So is made available a treasury of shape and color combinations our brain cannot invent. These serve best when we re-design in order to improve, not copy, them.

By the simplicity of overlap and by seeing background and figure separations, we can discern near and distant. Solid structures in precise perspective and in the perspective of intervening atmospheric mist supply the facts of actual space.

Shaping Lines and Tone Here or There as Intervening Mists

The space of picture-making is not a featureless void. Ruled by inventive purpose, the mist of atmosphere may overlay what is our will to keep somewhat – but not wholly – out of sight. Thus we remind the viewer of these two perspectives, that of the vanishing point and that provided by the atmosphere, but employ them entirely to carry to completion a creative goal.

We step forward with our best designs.
The nearest point of the sphere lies in the center of the circular perimeter. But the weight of this display shows well above that middle point.

Our burden is not the occasional dominance of one art form in short-lived vogue. It is that our schools have enslaved their students to a needless ignorance. Yet the learning that I speak of might have been unfolded excellently with a modern outlook on shape and color and design.

Because our schools have been thus negligent too often, their students abide still in chains – less visible than those of past dread times – but I think they do exist.

The art of the galleries may inspire us, but must not lead. For the galleries are a commercial corner-cutting world. Composition, solid form, and color, supported by a treasury of profound observing, are the indispensable-best study plan.

Note: The structure of forms and the causes by which we judge near and far derive from observation. These may therefore be joined in one class of learning with the pattern-play of shapes and colors on the surfaces of solids.

The Indivisibles

7/15/2016

Whatever thoughts bounce in and out of our brains or tumble from the lips as speech all belong to their area of interest and purpose of expression.

Once my dictionary fell open on the word “atomic,” meaning – not the “super-bomb” – but the least element within each area of enterprise.

In visual art the least discernible parts are lines and shapes, and shapes in tones or colors. These can be as small as pen strokes or dots painted with a pointy brush. These “atomics” or “indivisibles” of picture-making are put in place by the artist with deliberation. They are visible to the viewer who may ponder why the artist chose them for their setting in his work.

The “indivisibles” are thus precisely determinable and also visibly and clearly separable.

Areas of painted colors and lines of varied weight can be more than their material properties. We therefore have here a cube and cone and a dense gathering of furnishings – not as physical facts, but as sights we really see.

Whatever appears and unmistakably takes shape inside the picture plane is reality and truth, but such creation is real and true solely within the realm to which it is bound – that of “pictorial art.”

Herein we are guided and helpfully instructed in two ways: One is that each path of learning and of progress belongs to its own domain.
The second leads us to the just surmise that these truly separate paths will each likely go a rather parallel course.
By their differences, and only through those differences, can the diverse disciplines make their indispensable and united contribution to the productivity of the vocations.

In a future essay I will try to tell what this can mean to the calling of art.

Relationships

5/20/2016

When I say this word I am more often ignorant whereof I speak than comprehending. Talking, for example, of “orthographic projection,” we name a discipline which underlies the classical mechanics of our early industrial action. Our discourse on relationships means not nearly the clear insights and precision that are the implied sense of the descriptive geometric term.

If I think of shape and color relations in visual art only as appealing or not appealing, we close down the mind. In an able black and white design, the black renders with care also the white spaces, so that black and white separate and simultaneously unite at their common boundaries. How inventively this is done interests the discerning viewer.

We meet with relationships in ubiquitous diversity. The most fateful are those of human people. What we feel and think about, what we speak and do to one another, will either build strongly, or derail, relationships.

Preceding all will be a motivating cause. Out of this completeness of succession – of cause, of feeling, thoughts, and speech and deed, each one is not shown always visibly and truly, nor perhaps, at all. So our demeanor towards one another is a path of pitfalls and of obstacles which frequently we jointly misconstrue.
Therefore I do blunder on the path of life I share with others and name those several ignorances my relationships. So I do not much like this word. For it reminds of too much I cannot understand.
I make, however, handy use and hide behind “relationships” each time I know too little and want to say it loud.

Josef Albers

5/6/2016

If you read my log you will have met one of my great teachers. Josef Albers is a second.
Albers’ color course at Yale was then the sole basic design study really foundational to our work to follow. Colored papers – torn or cut – gave more color learning than paint and brush could have supplied.

Colored papers taught also the “simultaneous contrast color-change.” One color may so alter upon different grounds that we give this single color different names – here, once “purple” and, once “ochre.”

Albers did not waste his words teaching us not to allow one content or another into the middle of a work, nor on recommending “balance.” What he said was more weighty and a deal more useful. Of a student’s painting he remarked, “I can read this. This is FLOWERS in a bowl.” It was not neglected bitsy pretties in a BOWL. To thus serve the theme and striving of a work teaches how inclusions either damage or support our effort.

        “I do not believe in self-expression.” Albers’ utterance here causes me to remember another by a friend to a foreign friend, both figures of fiction: “If you can’t be yourself, you’ll have nothing to put in the pot.” We easily miss that the two sayings tell the same meaning from opposite directions of regard.
        Albers held that the unimproved, uncorrected self was not the equal of educated and industrious creative individuality.
        The friend said to the friend, “Let not one of our bad examples tempt you. But bring to us the good you own and join it to the good already here in place.”
        It is what Albers once said to me of German and American traits – and said it in his native tongue: “Man muss beide im Guten vereinen.”   “One must unite the two in that which is good.”

Rule of the Road

3/11/2016

In my advertisement redesign, I could not misspell a word. But in the work-a-day . . .

. . . errors are the Rule of our road.

I deplore my -- and others' -- missteps, our slipshod haste and corner-cutting self-accommodation. Some follies I have ventured need forgetting . . . .

There are failures that ignite the brain with comprehension. Those dead-endings become roadside lanterns shining very piecemeal upon the path ahead. Such errors have a value that deserves reporting to save a later worker needless wanderings and time.

A century ago, aircraft seemed the miracle of their time, yet were full of aeronautical mistakes. Thus -- we fly today frequently and safely and at speed.

Schoolboy mathematics can be a perfection, if the schoolboy knows the answers. Beyond the lecture hall and classroom, we build short-falls upon a fundament and ground plan of successive short-falls.

This is never easy going. So, give yourself, and give to me, a liberty to celebrate each time we gain a pace or two ahead.

Emoting and Receiving

3/4/2016

Feeling as EMOTION

Live beings emote because they will to live. That is, they own a drive to outward action whose always purpose is to repair a deficit: when we are hungry we seek food, in peril -- safety.

Along the path of labor on his pictures, an Artist learns the burden of emotion. For a work still incomplete is a wish not yet come true -- a short-fall to be mended.

. . . and as RECEIVING

Speaking of happiness emotes a need to reach a hearer -- perhaps a sharer. Happiness itself, however, enters the accepting heart as a near-celestial blessing and perfection of fulfillment. Emoting nothing, we partake wholly of a most liberal receiving.

When art works render depths of grief and dire misadventure, they will not make happy. Yet, if they engage all our attention and whole participation, they afford fulfillment.

We are not strong enough to endure for long this all-demanding state of being. The spirit wanders. Our attention must soon divide, and the lacks of our world require care.

The Identity of Meaning

2/19/2016

In daily use a wooden board or a black line have but the meaning of their thickness and their length, and are only what they can be within these limits.

Many boards and many lines will multiply, but cannot better the result.

But, when boards are shaped handsomely to make a thing of use, or line joins line to render a design lovely to behold, we are rewarded with a wealth of meaning.

That meaning will be greater than the number of the parts by the exact measure of our labors of the hand and brain.

Johannes Speaks