Johannes von Gumppenberg

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 Lady Who Said, "Damn the Greeks!"

6/24/2016

Our friend Natasha industriously nurtures a conceit she is “allergic” to exercise. When I sang the praises to her of the Greek ideal of bodily excellence joined to a clear and incisive mind, the lady told me, “Damn the Greeks!”

Now great Ajax and Achilles grimly frown. Almighty Zeus from Mt. Olympus thunders wrathfully. Athena the Grey-Eyed and Bright Apollo are in tears. All Hellas mourns, and even Stony-Hearted ’Hannes grieves.

Yet there was a better and more winsome way I could have offered my appeal. Because the Greeks prized Beauty.

Our Natasha owns and travels with a store of lovely clothes to all parts of the world. For she is a pretty princess, and I think she knows it.

So, let me recommend – with humble duty – exercise as BEAUTY-TREATMENT.
Yr. Obednt. Servant,

Pride of Fashion -- again

2/8/2016

                             When Waves of Vogue Drown Every Common Sense

                                   Charles the Seventh, King of France,
                                wore shoes so long
                                        he had to tie them to his knees
                                        that he could walk.

                                       Today we laugh at him
                                        and,
                                        repeat that Folly time and time again.

                                                                       2015
                                                                        After reading Mark Twain’s lengthy and beautiful Joan of Arc

Pride of Fashion

1/9/2016

Visual design is visual speech. To learn to speak it well is better than the pride of fashion.

For, to be up-to-date is second-hand already and shopworn in your action and mine . . .

Curling Leaves, 1980s

. . . unless we do it excellently better.

Johannes Speaks