Aristos finds TNC ’Lack’ing

Dec 11, 2006 05:13 PM

It looks like the online magazine Aristos has it out for TNC’s coverage of the ’back to first principles’ art phenomenon known as classical realism. This all comes as a bit of a surprise. Attentive armavirumque readers may remember (ok, even I barely remember) that we first wrote about Aristos--in a positive light--here. Now, consider this: in the past several months, we have dedicated positive critical attention to an art movement--classical realism--that Aristos has long supported. You would think we’d be on the same page here, right? Guess again. As is inscribed above The New Criterion’s office door: ’no good deed goes unpunished.’

In its latest online issue, Aristos dedicates more space that you would think possible to splitting hairs over my piece for the September issue, my interview with the classical realist painter Jacob Collins, Maureen Mullarkey’s review of Jacob Collins in The New York Sun, and Roger Kimball’s catalogue essay for Collins and his web post on the classical realist Andrea Smith and her Harlem Studio. Aristos even goes so far as to make the absurd claim that Collins himself knows "too little" about a movement he now supports through three (up from two in September) separate painting schools, and which he represents as an artist at Hirschl and Adler galleries.

Yet what first comes off as the ’we were here first’ complaint is really a defense of the sillier extremes of this movement. Here is a small portion of the Aristos editorial, critiquing the conclusion to my September piece:

Though [Panero] begins by noting the movement’s explicit rejection of modernism, he ends by claiming, in an almost conciliatory vein, that "the modernism of The New Criterion and the Beaux-Arts radicalism of the Classical Realists are responses to the same ruinous state of contemporary art."
Panero thereby appears to assume that anyone who opposes postmodernism must be an ally in the defense of modernism. In so doing, he fails to recognize that Classical Realists tend to view modernism--presumably including "the modernism of The New Criterion"--as not merely one among the forces that undermined traditional art in the twentieth century but as a primary cause of that lamentable outcome. (I should point out that "contemporary art," as that term is properly understood, includes contemporary abstract painting.) Though to my knowledge [Richard] Lack has never explicitly referred to "abstract art," he argues in "On the Training of Painters" (1967) that such modernist genres as "minimal art" (in effect, a form of abstraction) were in part to blame for the loss of traditional painting skills in the twentieth century. Similarly, in an essay in Realism in Revolution: The Art of the Boston School (1985), which Lack edited, Stephen Gjertson--a leading Classical Realist who was one of Lack’s students in the early 1970s--cites the "absurdity and destructiveness of Modernism," naming among the culprits the abstract painters Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Motherwell.

I have nothing against the founders of this movement. In fact, I hope to have the opportunity to write about Richard Lack and the origins of classical realism in the future.

Anyone who gets their underwear in a knot over Pollock, Reinhardt, Motherwell, and a reductivist history of abstract art, however, is going to sound pretty stupid. I feel the hurt--decades of getting forced out from the art schools, couldn’t get reviews, off the invite lists--but doesn’t classical realism now have more to offer than that?

Here is a movement that is just about ready for its close up. If it breaks, it will undoubtedly benefit from positive, energetic forces like Jacob Collins of the Grand Central Academy and Andrea Smith of the Harlem Studio, and whoever else is ready for prime time. I like to think it might even get a nudge from critical attention in publications like The New Criterion. Of course this attention will inevitably benefit the movement’s founders and their long-time supporters (even you, Aristos). Infighting, however, won’t help. Who cares about a movement that only accepts true believers?

Sure, I approach this movement as an outsider, and offer my advice as a sympathetic observer. Take it or leave it. But isn’t it time to let the magnolias go? Wouldn’t classical realism be best served by dedicating itself to the pursuit of beauty and idealism through traditional painterly means, and not to maintaining some gnostic ’Da Vinci Code’ legacy of "true" artistic technique? Why not accept beauty wherever beauty might be found? Why make this a negative referendum on the art of the past 150 years or some crypto-purity cult of ancient artistic secrets? I mean, c’mon guys, it hasn’t been all downhill since Courbet, right?

In answer to the Aristos accusation of "muddying the waters," yes, I think some reconciliation with modernism might do classical realism some good. You’re right. You’ve been burned. But if you (Aristos, others) want to come out like a winner--and not a perennial loser--a little attitude re-adjustment wouldn’t hurt. No one likes a Jacobin.

Such was the cautionary note I sounded in my September article. Thank you, Aristos, for the amplification.