Jacob Collins at the Dahesh

This season’s batch of Salon Thursday lectures, created and hosted with customary aplomb by the Dahesh, continued on a high note last night when Jacob Collins -- New York City artist, teacher, and founder of the Grand Central Academy – came to discuss the foundation of his contemporary art school, patterned on the model of the 19th-century atelier. 

My long-standing admiration for Collins as an artist, an arts activist and a teacher is without bounds.  He has been at the forefront of a strong, pervasive and ever-growing movement to correct the course that art (and art history) has taken after its disastrous, dehumanizing collision with Modernism.  For Collins (like your correspondent and millions of others in an invisible majority), the break from the Academy was not an explosion of new freedoms, but an invitation to hollow, ridiculous and often offensive amateurism and self-indulgence. 

Aside from the beauty of his work, Collins also joins such diverse figures as Graydon Parrish, Ted Seth Jacobs, Anthony Ryder and Ephraim Rubenstein as an important teacher to new generations of artists who aspire to virtuosity.

Collins spoke to a packed house last night (April 3), in a relaxed and conversational forum.  After telling us about himself and his mission to rescue art from Modernist muddle-headedness, he opened the floor for questions, charming the crowd for more than an hour.  Any man who says, unashamedly, I love stuffy, old fashioned humanism.  Many have argued that the world that I’m in is lonely, but the rest of the world that I am fleeing is moving so quickly that I cannot apprehend it is a kindred spirit to these pages.

Though not explicitly stated as such last night, what Collins is seeking is a return to a Renaissance Ideal; another Age of Enlightenment.  Modernism has robbed art of its human element, and the fundamental connection between great art and great emotion has been lost in a morass of irony, ‘theory’ and hucksterism.

As Collins said during his opening: What got me here?  As a kid in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, I grew up in a time from which I felt distanced.  Something gave me a sense of loss.  I recognized that something was missing when I looked at the work of the great Renaissance masters through the 19^th Century, which is really the Renaissance arc.

I was outraged in my youthful way by its absence, by a lack of continuity.  What happened, I wondered?  Why can’t we have that art?  And why am I discouraged by teachers and experts rom pursing that ideal in my own studies?

Of course, Collins realizes that an engagement with the past does not mean living in the past.  As he said, the problem with that is that it’s reactionary.  But there is clearly something wrong with the 20^th Century.  And that there is some cultural suppression of the humanist impulse is fairly obvious.  I’m at a point where fixing something that is wrong is a big part of my life.  That, and I want to make beautiful art.

One would think making beautiful art was part of the agenda for any art student, or any art school.  But Collins did not find that to be the case.  First, I had to learn how to draw and paint decently.  That was very hard.  Years later, I started an atelier because I kept bumping into people who wanted to do this – become part of the artistic tradition – under a coherent structure.  When I was a kid, I wanted to fix things and make them look good.  And that, in a way, is what I’m doing with the Academic Tradition.  My great ambition was to be a marvelous artist; not by contemporary standards, which I thought were false and ugly, but by the high standards of the 19^th Century.

I thought we would change the culture, which was a charming fantasy.  My goal isn’t to step into some throne of art culture, but to open up space for artists working in this tradition.  And that is slowly happening.  This culture and ideas and philosophy is more advanced than it was 20 years ago.  What is missing is the patronage, a way of having some kind of nexus with the culture.

Collins is acutely aware that the very language of the current art establishment is against him.  He says, This revival of interest seems natural in that reconnecting to drawing and painting is natural.  There is today an “institutional avant-garde,” to use a contradiction in terms, but there it is.  There is a deep, false, association of art with the notion that, as progressive politics are morally good, and regressive politics are morally bad, regressive art is bad.  It’s a cultural value that’s universally accepted – ergo, progressive art is morally good and regressive art is morally bad.

If you want to bring back that art, the argument goes, you are bringing back the culture that went with it.  If you want to go back to that type of art, then you want to go back to a culture that preceeds progressive politics … but I think that is a specious argument.  It should be, instead, couched in terms of Modernism vs. Humanism.  But Post Modernist thought rejects that because it bound to its own irony. 

The context and the language of art – so many people have created a language of art that has, built into it, a value system that is antithetical to this art.  You need to have a new language to discuss it.

How we have gotten to this impasse is also a topic that animates the artist:  The phenomenon of the last 100-150 years is unusual.  It’s like the Renaissance in reverse.  There was a “scrap that” attitude of the 20^th Century that is almost historically without precedent.  That has led to a fragmented art world.  My hope is that some patronage would evolve to support these artists and this type of art.

The question of why it happened – I’ve spent my life thinking about it.  There is a sort of taboo for people who advocate on behalf of pre-Modernist art… but, part of me feels that’s just too bad.  All I want is to collect around me people who are interested in this.  It’s a different world.  As I say, if you want to play the piccolo, and connect with people who like it, don’t spend time in heavy metal concerts.

It was an extraordinary evening with an extraordinary man: gifted artist, philosopher, and activist.  Kudos, as always, to the Dahesh for providing an ongoing forum for art scholarship and outreach.

One last brief word about The Grand Central Academy of Art.  This is the school founded by Jacob Collins, located in mid-town Manhattan.  To quote their Web site, The Grand Central Academy of Art … is built on the skills and ideas that have come from the classical world, the Italian Renaissance and through to the Beaux-Art tradition of the nineteenth century.   The Academy is a center for the revival of the classical tradition where a new generation of artists is supported in the pursuit of skill and beauty.  Interested readers can learn more at: http://grandcentralacademy.classicist.org/index.html.

The Preening Peacock by Jean Georges Vibert

The selection a new Pope is an occasion of great pomp and ceremony – which can also be seen with an awe-stricken eye not unmixed with amusement.  The great solemnity of the time seems to tweak the pawkish humor of many of us, as commentators, historians and artists seek to see the complete, fallible human being behind the exalted figurehead. 

One of the most amusing critics of the church was master painter Jean Georges Vibert (1840-1902), who used his genius to eviscerate church hypocrisy with wit and panache.  His meditations on churchmen demonstrate the growing democratization of Europe, and illustrate the start of a Continental movement away from superstition and servitude.

Like many of the artists we’ve covered in The Jade Sphinx, the young Vibert was a mediocre student.  He spent most of his school time drawing rather than studying; he did know that his ultimate goal was to be an artist, and he began training with his grandfather Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet, a celebrated engraver.  Later on he would study with Felix Joseph Barrias, and would enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts when he was 16.  He would study there for six years, working mostly with artist Franciois-Edouard Picot.

In the 1860s, Vibert traveled to Spain with his friend Eduardo Zamacois, a young Spanish artist.  Vibert collected Spanish clothing and objects, which he would later use to create scenery for many of his ecclesiastical paintings.  The two men would work together in 1866 on their Salon entry, Entrance of the Torenros, an unusual move, as most artists did not work collaboratively at that time.

Vibert made his solo debut three years earlier with two works, The Siesta and Repentance.  In 1864, he was awarded a medal for his Narcissus Transformed into a Flower.  It was also around this time that Vibert started painting the clergy in a manner both humorous and contemptuous.

Both the humor and contempt are on display with this wonderful picture, The Preening Peacock.  First, let’s look at all the aspects of the picture that immediately stamp it as a work of great technical skill.  Vibert highlights the figure of the priest by placing him against a neutral background, here muted trees and a nondescript classical stairway and railing.  The neutrality of the background brings to life the vivid hues of the reds and blues of priest and peacock, respectively.  It may also be significant that the trees are wintery and dead and the staircase slightly worn – a symbol, perhaps, of the internal decay of the priestly figure.

The priest is rendered in splendid detail, with each fold and drape of his robes depicted with precise technique.  His medals and ornamentations are richly painted, as are the gold embroidery of his hat band and the shine on his shoes.  Look, too, at the gold tassels dangling from his girdle and the red tassels at the knob of his cane.  Red socks are visible above his highly-polished patent leather pumps, and white ruffles are visible at his cuffs.

But best of all, look at how the priest stands: back up, chin up, chest puffed out.  He is not posing, he is preening.  Vibert then underscores this with the look of smug self-satisfaction on the priest’s face, as well as a certain … vacuity.  His religious fever seems to go no further than fashion.

To make the joke complete, Vibert places a strutting peacock behind the priest.  But who is following who…?  And to illustrate that the priest is not a unique case of silken soft-headedness, there is another peacock in the background.  This priest is one of a flock.

More Vibert tomorrow!

The Narrative of Philetas by Rodolfo Amoedo

Today a painting connected with two rather mysterious people – both painter and subject.

Few people remember Rodolfo Amoedo (1857 – 1941), a Brazilian history painter born in Salvador, Bahia.  Today, many of his paintings still hang at the National Museum Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro.  He was something of a prodigy, starting in 1873 as a student of Victor Meirelles.  A short five years later he won the first prize at the Brazilian Academy, which allowed him to travel to Paris, where he lived from 1879 to 1887, studying at the École des Beaux Arts.

Amoedo was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and also worked with Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry. He was a professor and later director of the Brazilian Academy, where he taught Eliseu Visconti, among others.  When the Brazilian monarchy fell in 1889, many of the most traditional masters at the Academy were replaced by the new Republican Government with the last wave of Academic artists, Amoedo among them.  Amoedo continued to teach in the classic Academic style, but changing tastes led to replacing the old guard with masters of a more impressionist bent.  Very soon, the Academic artists were forgotten (as was the case in France and America), short-changed by the Modernist victors of Art History.

Sadly, Amoedo lived to be quite an old man, completely forgotten by the art establishment.  He left behind so little money that his widow had to ask friends to pay for his funeral.

Today’s picture, The Narrative of Philetas, was painted in 1887, a more prosperous time in Amoedo’s life.  It depicts Philetas (or Philitas) of Cos, a poet-scholar who lived during the early Hellenistic period of ancient Greece.  He was associated with Alexandria and was selected to tutor to the heir to the throne of Ptolemaic Egypt. 

Philetas was a frail man, bent and wasted by age; he is often portrayed as an academic so consumed by his studies that he literally wasted away.  As a poet and scholar, his fame continued for centuries; sadly, most of his poetry and scholarship (which included a text defining the meaning of rare literary words) has been lost to the mists of time.  He was a “poet and a scholar,” combining great learning with artistic sensibility and poetic vision.  According to legend, he was one of the driving forces behind the great library of Alexandria, where there stood a stature of him.  Neither statue nor library survive.

Your correspondent finds it poignant that a poet whose works are lost to time is here depicted by the painter who reputation has also suffered the same fate. 

One of the loveliest things about this painting is how Amoedo compares youth and old age, life and death.  The colors, from the leaves scattered about the earth to the moss-covered stones and the overall gray tones of the background, are largely somber except for the vibrant pink flesh tones of the principal figures.  Amoedo also contrasts the beautiful and supple figure of the reclining youth against that of the loosely-fleshed and gnarled old man.  (Amoedo also wisely highlights the body of Philetas with dead white, further accenting the differences between old and young.) 

Notice, too, the blossoms under the torso of the youth and the how the vibrant pink-and-white flowers behind the young people seem to lose their coloration the closer they are to Philetas.  Amoedo also poses the youths on a rock opposite from Philetas, creating a literal chasm between them.

Also striking is the face of Philetas, who is depicted with greater care and attention than that of the young couple – though the young woman is clearly drawn with grace and color, her bland and lovely brow is no match for the real “character” of the picture, the old scholar.

There is a great deal I admire in this picture, starting with how delicately Amoedo drew the old man’s hands and the courage he had in showing an old body in all of its compromised flesh.  Though neither supple nor young, Philetas overwhelms the picture with his presence – there is power in his old flesh.  Amoedo also creates a classic triangle between the reclining boy, the old man and the gray tree to trap our eye and maintain our interest as a viewer. 
 

I find the figure of the woman to be interesting – almost as if it was added as an afterthought.  The figure seems to be too bathed in white, as if Amoedo blocked out a white bit on the finished painting and put her there; also, her feet seem to be added to the stone, rather than obscured by it.  She even skews the triangular frame of boy, man and tree.  I may be wrong – but something to my eye says that she is a latter addition to the composition.

If the picture has a misstep, it would be the brownish tree in the immediate background between Philetas and the woman.  It seems to me a miscalculation on Amoedo’s part – it intrudes on the remote nature of the background, and looks as if he did not trust his own best instincts.  But it is a small flaw in an otherwise beautiful work, not just for the skill of its drawing, but its beautiful and delicate coloration, as well.