Q.  So I take it that you’re basically opposed to 20^th century art, that you find nothing of value in it?

A.  No, that’s not an appropriate interpretation. In a sense, though, the 20^th century is the best of a bad idea. I think it’s a process we had to go through, but that’s something you see by looking back. I don’t think it could have been predicted from what happened in the 19^th century. The 20^th century begins with this self-conscious idea of aesthetic revolution. But, in many respects, the idea was culturally implicit – a function of history rather than the art. There’s a place, culturally, where we might have viewed the late 19^th century art as a fulfillment rather than a revolution. But the changes are embedded in a cultural transition that defines itself, intellectually, as radical or revolutionary.
            The lost thread of connection with Idealism is the key. My own interpretation – and I think it’s culturally valid across the board – is that the change is revolutionary. But you have to see its real origins. The problem is that everything from the Napoleonic Wars onward stands in between the originating impulse and the Impressionists and post-Impressionists. And that includes the rise of socialism and Marxism, Darwinism and social Darwinism, and so forth. You have the pan-European revolutions of 1830 and 1848. So, if you’ve ever watched how the popular sense of history moves and follows the times, you’ll understand how Idealism, with its strange, figurative language, gets buried under the detritus of the times.

Q.  Speaking of cultural drift, we seem to have drifted away from my question. I’d like to get specific about the 20^th century and your attitudes toward it.

A.  What I’m saying is that by the end of the 19^th century, you have this sense of revolution, but no understanding of where it comes from or what it’s actually against. It’s a revolution against air, so to speak.
            Deconstruction began long before the term appeared. And it may be somewhat paradoxical that it began in the visual arts. For example, you have a Mathew Arnold with his poignant atheism. And while the specific expression is peculiar to the era, it could have appeared, under a slightly different guise, in many other eras. The French go through a sequence from Hugo to Rimbaud, but in retrospect, we’re looking at baby steps. Why does Gautier’s green vest cause a riot at the opening of Hernani? And, in the same retrospect, the road from Baudelaire to Nerval and Rimbaud looks basically evolutionary and perhaps even orderly. So, in terms of the literary frame, as much as the culture has changed around it, you don’t get the same radically deconstructive force until the visual artists begin to engage in it. Pointillism and the technical theories of color form the gate of the Fauve. And the Fauve-Pointillist nexus really begins to dissolve form. You had Gauguin’s injunction to ‘dream before nature’. And his use of pure abstract line within the frame of the figurative points to both Surrealism and abstraction. But, of course, the pop / intellectual nexus, historically, is Picasso’s putative reference to Cézanne in the development of Cubism.

Q.  Yes, this is where I’d like to go. So what do you do specifically with Kandinsky or with Picasso or Matisse?

A.  Well, Kandinsky is an event. So I’m not particularly interested in talking about him now. The literary / historical that we’re in right now is about causes. You really can’t deal with these intuitive leaps, except in terms of how the history itself unfolds. It explains the context that allows these leaps. The whole process explains what Kandinsky could intuit.
            But look at the evolution of Cubism. According to the tradition, Cubism evolved from Cézanne’s brushwork and his dictum that all forms in nature can be resolved to the cone, sphere and cube. But the aspect of the brushwork that Cubism replicates is one of the weakest elements in Cézanne’s style – his willingness to use repetitive brush strokes to define forms, particularly in his underpainting. And his reference to the sphere, cone and cube is precisely a statement about the essentially mechanical nature of rendering. He is saying that ‘art’ must be more than the mere mechanical rendering of nature.
            This being the case, the intellectual justification of Cubism falls to the ground. It’s not just that Picasso and Braque were the only ones who could sustain it. The Philadelphia museum used to have a Cubist room. And the once or twice that I remained in the room for any time, the atmosphere of tangible self-doubt made me almost physically ill. That is, apart from Braque and Picasso, Cubism was an almost purely intellectual exercise with the brush. And in that room one could feel the incessant question, ‘Is this it? Is this it?’

            As Henry Miller said, Picasso was the great acrobat leaping from style to style. We can argue that every style has the mark of Picasso. But I look at an old movie, and I can tell at a glance whether the car is a Chevy or a Ford. Does this make them Picassos? Or, as I’ve said in another context, even sheep have uniqueness. The shepherd can tell one from another. Arriving at the point where the artist puts his signature on every image is not necessarily ‘style’ in the full sense. Picasso’s boy bather is a direct ripoff of Cézanne’s. It has the mark of Picasso on it. But if I had to choose, it’s no choice at all.
            The only things I’ve seen of Picasso that could hold my attention are some of his pen or pencil portraits of friends. In these he starts to arrive at that organic sense of the transposition of space and form from the naturalistic to the two-dimensional, four-square sheet, the peculiar power of Cézanne’s ‘surrealism’. But the paradox here is that if you go to the early student portraits by Rothko and Pollock, you find exactly the same moment of surrealism. And you find the same basic stylistic renderings in the sculpture of Henry Moore.

Q.  So you’re dismissing Picasso?

A.  No, I’m not dismissing him at all. You can’t avoid him, in fact. But what’s his legacy? He’s a brilliant stylist. He’s an incredible talent. But that’s precisely why, ultimately, I can’t look at even the things that might attract me. I can see the talent. But he never really broke through to the most basic place of self-expression. When he touches it, it just brings up all this poignancy for what might have been. How he might have really changed art.

Q.  How can you attack his legacy?

A.  It’s precisely his legacy that I’m attacking. His superabundance of talent justifies everything that follows. The best you can say about him, in that respect, is that he opens the door to the primitive. But, on the one hand, I don’t think he really understood the primitive. Much of the primitive depends on a raw spirituality that, at this point, is essentially alien to anything in western art. And, on the other, what is the primitive, even in terms of the western understanding of its abstraction? The modern pivots on surrealism, a conscious entering into the sources of realism in the nature of consciousness itself. And this depends on an elevation into consciousness of the nature of realism as a function of awareness, the history of the Renaissance.
            So maybe you could say Picasso opens the door to the primitive as a resource for this new understanding of ‘surrealism’. But, at this stage, it’s not really a door we’ve gone through yet, at least not in terms of accepted 20^th century art.

Q.  Well what about Matisse, then? 

A.  Matisse is a strong talent, but relatively shallow.

Q.  I don’t understand this. How can you dismiss Picasso and Matisse?

A.  I’m not dismissing them. I’m saying that the weakness of the culture causes them to be essentially overrated. I’m not saying they’re not legitimate artists, in some sense. Gérôme and Cabanel are still hung in the museums, and not just because of the history of art – although that’s part of it. And you can’t ignore the dominant figures of the 20^th century.
            In this case, though, the history is the deconstructive process. Slicing open the goose to find the golden source. The revolution becomes self-devouring. Because the culture lacks the historical context that could explain the change, and thus buoy the artists up and sustain them in an essentially forward movement, the art cannibalizes itself over the course of the century, particularly in the first half.

            There’s a certain strange brilliance to Matisse. But it’s not a full personality. I suspect you could find some Hockneys or figurative Diebenkorns, when they paint in that self-consciously simplistic mode, and some lesser known Matisses, and if you mixed them together, you might be hard pressed to tell them apart. Perhaps the differences in motif might give it away. But the point is that it’s based in the technical and not the aesthetic. With Matisse, it’s graphic arts in a high key. The color is overpowering, so we are deluded into thinking that we’re seeing more than we are. But once you get past the hook, what’s left? It jumps once. But then I have no further desire to look at it. It makes a nice calendar on the wall, a bright spot of color.
            So, if I compare a Matisse with a Bonnard, I’d much rather spend some time with the Bonnard. It sits there and vibrates – truly resonates – in a way that the Matisse does not. And I can sit there and bathe in the resonance, and more and more of the basic aesthetic intelligence comes out to me. And if I sit there long enough, I realize that it’s endless – it’s bottomless. I can’t get around it or replicate it. So I come face to face with Cézanne’s assertion, ‘If you copy me, you do not love my work.’
            Cézanne is saying, ‘The only way you can copy me is by finding yourself – doing what I did – in terms of the art.’ And, in this context, any assertion that Cubism references Cézanne is a travesty.