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.

John Howard Benson -- Artist, Thinker and Teacher

8/5/2016

I entered Rhode Island School of Design – RISD, sounded with affection always “RIZ-DY” – in 1951. At that time John Benson, due to failing health, no longer offered lettering instruction. He continued, however, to teach a course scheduled for the entire sophomore class:

There has been a vogue of recording “great lectures.” These tended to be only middle-depth in content, rather neatly put together and a little too “dynamically” delivered. John Benson was much different and much better.

The course was constructed with exceptional lucid care. Singly, the talks were given with measured calm and very clear exactitude. The pace of progress was always exceedingly reliable, but never hurried. These readings by John Benson were the finest I have ever heard. Swarms of words tend to evade, not master, difficulties.

In Benson’s concentrated thinking power, and his patient and incisive discourse, lay our path ahead. The course achieved its excellent success meeting once a week for merely one semester.

I never exchanged a word of conversation with this, the most revered of all my teachers – nor did many of my classmates, for we were more than one hundred students in a great lecture hall.

A few years later John Benson died, and some years after that I became once more his student. I have two books written by John Benson: one is the translation of the La Operina, Arrighi’s “little work” . . .

. . . a great Renaissance cursive writing manual. By Benson’s masterly penmanship the whole is now a most beautiful work of art.

The second was The Elements of Lettering, written with Arthur Graham Carey. These two works gave to me a more insightful, and useful, instruction on the lettering art than any others I have tried.
In this essay my samples bear doubtless witness to the limitation of my craft, but witness also, I do hope, to the excellence of my preceptor.

The monumental stone-carved inscription was John Benson’s especial calling and he was, besides, wonderfully skilled and learned in all parts of the lettering craft.

Practice-Scroll

Though knowing much is surely very good, it is measurably better to comprehend deeply and exactly. Owing to that great talent, John Howard Benson – in his task field and at his time – was the best in the world.

The Dwarf in the Center of His World

6/3/2016

The panorama of the world ranges all about me – I am the unimportant midpoint of the whole.

Millennia ago a dwarf, my ancestor, faced four main tasks.

1. For mutual benefit, life in community with others.
2. To gather experience and to learn.
3. Productive creativity – craftsmanship.
4. To render care to personal love.

Around this sparse field of action lay – imagined infinite and eternal – a domain of spirit beings. The best known became the Indo-European sky gods and the single deity of revealed religion.

From occasions of good will and fellowship in the community and particles of time of happiest love, the dwarf reasoned – not provably but quite logically – a perfected heavenly abode.

That land “unknowable” is not the modern dwarf’s chief concern. His once tight field of endeavor has expanded by community growth, research and study, and by manufacture. A widening belt of philosophy, learning, and of know-how now separates me and fellow dwarfs from the transcendent realm.

Nature has set us bodily into the center of our world. Through Renaissance and Humanism, Enlightenment and Modernity, we have made that our own resolve.

Fundamental Learning

3/25/2016

Of the several fine teachers who instructed me as a young man, three were truly great. One, to those who did not know him, Charles Sylvia, the Swimming Coach of Springfield College, will be a surprise. At the start of summer over an extended weekend, Professor Sylvia conducted an aquatics school to sharpen our craft for the summer’s work of teaching aquatic skills to kids.

With lucid intellect and with concision – the need to save time obvious – Charles Sylvia complemented and gathered into clear coherence the particles of our comprehension. Sylvia then named that coherence “Basic Knowledge.”

Insights and aptitudes acquired singly come together as principles – that is, as rules we use in the work we do. If from such rules is built a useful whole, we will have gained a body of fundamental lore or Basic Knowledge.

My sketch below was drawn to explain descriptive geometry to a one-time student. The rendering is a model of Orthographic Projection, the enabling tool of the early industrial age.

In level-drafting, the model delivers the three views we mostly want, thus:

By their ground plan and elevation renderings, and deep perspective views, we might mistakenly suppose the architects and artists of the Renaissance to have mastered descriptive geometry already – not so. The work was done three hundred years later at the time of Napoleon by Gaspard Monge.

Through his edifice of fundamental learning, Gaspard Monge made himself preceptor of the progressive world, and saved that student time – not to squander, but to build and to create. His is a most excellent example of that Basic Knowledge that Professor Sylvia wanted us to learn and put to use.

You might comment on a teacher whose "fundamental" teachings went well beyond the announced course subject matter . . . .

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

Johannes Speaks