discarding the forced, formal and faked

Orgasms of nihilism. A typically contrarian view, and one that labels Picasso as a minor artist. Essentially, an attack on the formalism intrinsic to modernism which entails a crowding out, indeed suffocation of the spiritual content. Cubism, was after all, according to Picasso, “a sum of destructions,” a collapsing of the individual into component parts, like a Lego toy, assassinated and resurrected into a new monster, and one without a soul.

Donald Kuspit ( see link at end ): In contrast, Modigliani was a desperate Don Juan, reluctant to become involved in the complex interpersonal transaction that love is, although shortly before his death he was finally able to love a woman in all her particularity and be loved in return. Until then, he seemed to confuse sex and love, but I would contend, on the evidence of the intimacy that emanates from his portraits, he had great capacity for the reciprocity of love. But he clearly loved better in his art than he did in his life, if the issue of love is to unite tenderness and lust (and maybe tilt more toward the former than the latter) as Freud thought….

---Otto Dix Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Fritz Glaser 1921 Private Collection, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn--- Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/otto-dix3-24-10_detail.asp?picnum=2

In other words, with modernism, we were sold a bill of goods? A promise about a new golden age of art reflecting a golden age of mankind, which was always just around the corner. What the art did reflect was an inherent nihilism that defines modernism. To destroy and present something as the new, only to send it to the scrapheap for the latest and greatest again; the consumerist cycle of art that reflects what has been termed the “creative destruction” of our economic system; the tricks of the trade that gives the impression of forever outsmarting time.

In a literary sense, this could be expressed in D.H. Lawrence, where the love hate relationship was canonized as the modern normal, the new normal, where all is separate and passionate unions, without any in-betweens or free passage between boundaries. An absence of dreadful wonder requiring courage, no rich fear pushing one across a threshold. Just a deep sense of inferiority shivering, waiting for a warm embrace of something coming out of eternity. A fatalism having faith in the incomplete, like trusting a demon like Picasso to construct the human after cubism collapsed the individual into a thousand pieces. The modern condition: sensuality as violent and extreme as death, lust and the intimate, like the Death of Socrates and his hemlock, a maddening intoxication of the sense, and a reluctant passion of death, the end-game in this glorification of the incomplete where strange, unknown and primitive individuality is welcomed into the fold as part of passing desires and good taste.

---Jack Levine. King Saul. 1952 Read More:http://03varvara.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/jack-levine-king-saul-1952/jack-levine-king-saul-1952/


Kuspit: One may recall that the first commandment requires one to love God — love is the important human word here. It is a moral injunction: loving God one comes to love the human beings who are Gods creation. To love human beings means that one does not destroy them, even in the name of art, as Picasso does. It may seem absurd to say so, but in a sense from a Jewish point of view his formal analysis of the figure is a crime against humanity. It cannot help reminding a Jew — Modigliani — however unconsciously of the persecution of the Jews and their dehumanization and distortion into grotesque devils. It may be artistically progressive and revelatory, but it is also humanly regressive and malevolent. I submit that Modiglianis art is a loving Jewish art — certainly in contrast to Picassos Cubism, which is a loveless and at times a hate-filled art — which is why it has been regarded as a minor art, for those who love and who are Jewish (even if they fail at love and are not the most religious Jews) are in the minority in the world. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit7-27-04.asp

---Portrait of Beatrice Hastings 1916 by Amedeo Modigliani---Read More:http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Amedeo_Modigliani/Portrait-of-Beatrice-Hastings/

Its hard not to escape the sentiment of living under constant bombardment that invokes a fatalistic existence. That peddles intellectual fantasy, self-loathing and suffering within a context of youth where death is somehow an enigmatic idea, stylized and stylish, aesthetically refined, forced and faked and not an everyday reality….

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