Barnett Newman Canto II 1963
“Looking at Athena, her Breast fringed with snakes, her clear-cut monochrome face, we get a sense of what the classical is: a hybrid between the barbaric and the neoclassical.”
Roberto Calasso
The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony chapter VIII
Lennart is a NeoClassicist. Perhaps I should say he is a NovoClassicist. I could get away with the Latin prefix here as he primarily interested in the Italian and Iberian penisulas. Lennart is a NovoClassicist in that not only does he prefer just a class of paintings (His four guys.. three maybe) But he is also a NeoClassicist in that he comes out of a tradition. Not to say he paints traditionally. Foucault might say that it is impossible to draw a line of tradition from one epoch to the next. We can’t say that we as his art students follow a line of traditionally Neo-Classical painters from David and Ingres on down as we do not have a direct line of contact to these disparate civilizations. We are not Western Civilization insists Said. We are 21st century Americans, perhaps only just that.
Though perhaps, heavily qualified, I am of a ever tightening circle. As I am a member of an elite class of urban-bound jet set yoga instructors. Barely any relation to that silent majority, that swath of rural Uhmerica that nods in agreement when it is suggested that perhaps Globalism is anti-American. Perhaps suspect. Here in the mountainous time zone, Christ is Lord and gefilte and zaftig and other modest value differences are, to put it lightly, a little icky.
Lennart The Jiffy Pop (please forgive the unkindest cut, the circumcision of this beauty and its Classical scale)
Yet practically speaking, structurally that is.. Lennart is similar to 17th century French still life painting. He aspires to 16th century Italian multi-figural compositions. He’s not though. Idyll is painted for one in acrylic. His essential position is also different. His is not of a Christian ethos. His sensibility is to be painterly and to be about painting. He refuses to tell History. History Painting in NeoClassical Art is a top.
Anderson is sincere as an artist though not folk as a Christian. He has, surprisingly, a hippie ethos. It is not like Massaccio to imbue painterly paintings with free love and idealistic sensuality. Maybe its like Poussin or Titian (Though maybe there are two more?!?) Though the premise of its History is always present.
Titian Bacchus and Ariadne at the National in London. Lennart’s favorite painting. As aspirational as a fridge magnet for a Hick from Detroit.
Classical painting is something else. The sensibility of order and control. Perhaps in response to the other. The Orientalist or the sensualist. What could be more sensual than an Ingres? A Delacroix? The pervert who reeks of Sulphur?? Quoth Ingres.
The sensation of surfaces is the whole of it. The surface of God’s chest and genitals insults the Lutheran. (Of which my mother was born, though converted to Judaism. Though now she says she is all good with Christ again) The sensual indulgence of.. how though, how can we say the anything of Classical without defining it? NeoClassical painting is a very controlled very tight window of art making activity. I’m not sure Chardin even falls into this window. OR Velasquez. They are Baroque as defined by period, though they are retinal painters as defined retroactively by what we call our tradition of painting.
The Baroque connotes a spare and refined and even unnecessarily complicated argument. (Not unlike my own here) It stems from the Verucca. That is.. the Post Rennaissance art in Lutheran protest to vulgarity was itself seen as a painful and contagious wart on the sole.
Rocaille then, and also any bourgeois indulgence like the Roccoco, is Joy. Any hamfisted attempt to throttle the prurient is an obscenity to Art they said then. Men died for this position.
I believe Lennart might also have been constrained and conflicted by the self imposed restraints of disciplined painting and the zeitgeist of the time which was Moderne.
Restraint was sacrosanct. Not like now.
History is like watching an epic Story out of the Mahabharata between the families of Rockers and the Clans of Mods. Or as the Stanford Daily reported recently on their profile of the Magnificent Ambersons: “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
As a peer and fellow student to Al Held Lennart is a Modernist. As a Romantic devotee to period painting, like myself he is a Post Modernist. He has choice you see. Al Held was at the front end, bonded and tied on the cattle guard on the train to History, and then run over by the Avant Garde, a six gun to his head, just like Rothko, a prisoner to fashion.
Ingres Jupiter and Thetis (notice Thetis in a salute to the Sun King) (And the Neck!)
The Lennart school.
Titian, Chardin, Velasquez, Ingres, Degas, Edwin Dickinson, (Who?!?) Lennart. That’s how we define the tradition. But there is no line. They are a grouping, an arbitrary category of lonely painters looking at stuff in separate cultural value shaped periods painting on canvas. Enamoured with light. Perhaps impervious to Modernism.
Manet doesn’t do this, and misses this group of excellent painters (Or just good artists said William T. Williams) because he uses too much white. And he doesn’t tonk.
( https://sites.google.com/site/rachelshirleypaintings/tonking-painting-technique )
So fuck him.
Fantin Latour is a much better painter. A perfect painter. (And yet possibly a more mediocre artist as Williams might say) Though Manet for his Modernism will always be a greater artist.
Lennart when he paints still life is within this classic group. Lennart when he paints the Idyll is certainly Classical in his aspiration, but actually, and unfortunately Twee. And, therefore Neo Classicist.
So.. as within the Republic we might start to understand civilization by defining Justice, here perhaps we can understand the malapropic Classical tradition by defining Twee and also therefore the Classic.
Classic is perhaps easier to start with. Less a sensibility then Classical or Twee. The ic as I have described before in earlier writings is denoted linguistically as a category. Class itself means set. Though to have class is again a sensibility and leans into Twee. “Very Classy.. nice. We got the best of everything, here.” So Classic is to say that I have here in my set my favorite things. It is like a museum. It is like a collection of ephemera.
Portlandia Classic knot collection with twee jacket and bowtie
(not a twee knot collection with a classic jacket and bowtie)
In Part III we will delve deeper into the sensibility of Twee to help us define the Classic as opposed to the Neoclassical style of the Empire. (Though we might always have classic neoclassical objects.)