A Brief Respite

The Abbeville Manual of Style will be on a weeklong hiatus starting today, as one of the Arbiters of Style heads off on a jaunt to Florence and Rome. We will return next Thursday to regale you with tales of wine and colonnades, starlight and the Spanish steps. In the meantime, try not to devolve into helpless gaucherie without us. If you need a quick daily style infusion, we recommend tuning in to WSP1 Art Radio. See you again soon!

Marginalia: Get Your Modern Kicks

Our website recommendation this week is Modern Kicks, a blog with a project not unlike our own: to bestow the gift of the writer’s good taste upon the world at large. However, while our tastes run strongly to books, and Abbeville books in particular, J.L. of Modern Kicks is happy to point you toward everything from really fun kid-friendly art museum exhibits to groovy contemporary renditions of English folk songs. The stylish reader may not always agree with his judgments, but she would be doing herself a disservice to ignore them. You can visit the site here.

The Universe

Astute readers may have noticed that while the subheading of our site promises coverage of “the universe,” we haven’t delivered any style guidance on that topic thus far. Never ones to renege on a promise (at least, not since last week), The Arbiters of Style have taken a good, hard, appraising look at the universe and decided the following:

This…

…Should go over here.

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Overall, the design’s a little “busy,” but we’ll accept it.

Gustave Courbet: The Origin of Style

The publication of Abbeville’s monumental Courbet volume having coincided neatly with this spring’s Courbet exhibit at the Met, we decided that we owed our readers our expert unsolicited opinions on the man, the art, and the exhibit. To that end, two Arbiters of Style took a field trip to the Met this weekend to mingle with the hoi palloi, browse the show, and jot down our reactions.

The verdict? Gustave Courbet is a man after our own heart. He once cheerfully referred to himself as “the most arrogant man in France,” and the self-portrait gallery with which the exhibit opens does nothing to contradict that claim. In his early pictures of himself, as he fixes the viewer with a cocky glare and dangles his signature pipe from his mouth, Courbet bears a passing resemblance to the young Bob Dylan—an artist equally fond of playing the consummate bohemian:

 

Image from Abbeville’s Courbet                                Image copyright C. M. Dudash

Spurning the popular Romanticism of his day, Courbet coined the term “realism” to describe his artistic style and aims, but was unafraid to push the limits even of his self-invented mode. In his 1846 Self-Portrait with Pipe (above), the pipe, a symbol of masculine and artistic potency, looks slightly unreal through its haze of tobacco smoke, evoking the artist’s dreamlike state as he smokes and imagines. (Needless to say, Courbet’s dandyish pipe, not to mention his unbridled arrogance, had a defining influence on the young Blad J. Garamond.)

Courbet’s theatricality and self-absorption were so limitless that they approached, in Keats’s phrase, the egotistical sublime. Even his 1843-45 The Desperate Man, which apparently captured a moment of legitimate crisis in his life, strikes us today as less a terrifying vision of private torment (like those of Van Gogh or Francis Bacon) than a wonderful piece of playacting. Here is the mad genius fully conscious of himself as such, bulging his eyes and tearing his hair out in handsome despair. Of all Courbet’s self-portraits, this is the one in which the artist is most obviously gazing in the mirror. And yet there’s a loneliness to the painting (what audience does he have besides himself?) that makes it genuinely unsettling and justly famous.

After this first self-portrait gallery, which like a hall of mirrors left the viewer somewhat dizzy, the next wing of the exhibit highlighted the artist’s masterful and often affectionate portraits of friends and family. (One woman beside me, exiting the previous wing, asked her friend, “Are these of his sister? Oh good, he’s not selfish anymore.”) Among this group, my personal favorite was the Portrait of Baroness de M…, in which the artist’s sister Juliette smiles as she strikes an awkwardly aristocratic pose under overbearing drapery. This gentle parody of the formal portraits of the era reminds us that Courbet, underneath all the self-aggrandizement, was a pretty funny guy.

Which brings us to The Origin of the World (L’origine du monde), whose title, it should always be remembered, is hilarious. Maxime du Camp called this meticulously rendered close-up of female genitalia “the last word in realism,” and in fact, judging by people’s reactions, it was clearly the alpha and omega of the exhibit despite being featured almost casually midway through. There was nothing casual, however, about the way Origin was actually situated: the curators stashed it in a narrow side space, away from plain sight, under dim, sordid lighting. My fellow Arbiter scoffed at this evidence of Americans’ prudishness relative to Europeans, who of course display the work openly, but the Alley of Shame did at least approximate the wink-wink, hush-hush conditions under which Origin was viewed for over a century. (Even the scandal-loving Courbet never so much as mentioned the work in his letters.) Just outside the Alley were the artist’s other great depictions of female nudes, including The Sleepers, about whose lolling women the Met’s bashful caption remarked, “The implied lesbianism must be considered in relation to the intended male audience.” Presumably that audience included both me, dutifully standing there considering it, and the man who hauled his son to the next room, saying, “You’re seventeen, you should be looking at landscapes,” as both of them grinned.

The rest of the exhibit raised further questions about the easy application of the label “realism” to Courbet’s work. It may be that in Origin, he really did take his style and its principles to their logical extreme, leaving him no choice but to venture down other avenues afterward. In several of his later landscapes, especially The Rock of Hautepierre, the handling of light seems to anticipate Cézanne, a passionate admirer of Courbet. And in his final self-portrait, the great realist takes some (cough) creative liberties, declining to paint the gray hair and paunchy belly his contemporaries describe. But it was another detail that struck me most about this portrait, which depicts the artist’s incarceration as a result of his political views. More even than in the Self-Portrait with Pipe of his younger years, the pipe Courbet is smoking seems faded and unreal. There is a clear visual echo of it in the latch of the barred window by which he sits, yet the latch is rendered much more solidly, as though the potency of his imprisonment were greater than—or had even in some sense stolen—his potency as an artist and a man.

It’s touches like these made Courbet more than just a novelty act or a one-note stylist. If he were just a realist, he might not be remembered today, but instead he was a great and idiosyncratic personality who couldn’t help seeing himself in everything he painted. So many of his subjects—from close friends to stags and trout—are oblique self-representations, and it may be that (bear with us here) in the defiant frankness of its “gaze,” even The Origin of the World is a kind of portrait of the artist. Gustave Courbet may have set out to paint the world as it is, but he ended up painting it grandly in his own image. As Arbiters of Style, that’s the kind of achievement we respect, and we’re only a little sorry that we got to enter the world afterward and remake it in ours.

Friday Odds and Ends

Another of our books has received a detailed and flattering review at Art Blog By Bob; this time it’s The Art Atlas, which we mentioned a couple posts ago and which seems to be having its well-deserved day in the sun.

The Wall Street Journal featured another thoughtful art essay last week, in which two subjects we’ve touched on recently—the epidemic of jargon in the modern art world and the diminishing returns of ”shock art,” as highlighted by the Aliza Shvarts controversy—dovetail nicely, and prompt some tough questions about whether today’s art students are learning enough (or anything) about the history and techniques of their field before learning to discard them.

Finally, a month or so ago we promised a much-belated entry on the College Art Association conference in Dallas, which two Arbiters of Style attended on behalf of Abbeville. We now concede that the conference, which happened in February, is ancient history and that we’ve broken our promise like an icy winter twig. Our coverage would have boiled down to three essentials: the weather in Dallas was surprisingly cold; people liked our books so much they just about bought out the booth; and the folks at the Liquitex company are really, really nice. Incidentally, while all of the art museums in the Dallas/Forth Worth area are fort worth checking out (yowza!), we especially recommend the Dallas Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum. But we feel we owe our readers a little bit more than this, so we’re planning some extra, and extra-special, coverage of BookExpo America in June. We swear by our grandmother’s principles.

Happy Friday and enjoy the weekend! (Readers of this site may have noticed that we are now doing our best to update every weekday, but we’ll always be off Saturdays and Sundays. In the life of the truly stylish, leisure time is sacred.)

Who’s a Pretty Kitty? Who is?

Before I Can Haz Cheezburger, before Stuff on My Cat, before Cute Overload and all its legions of imitators came the grandkitty of them all: Abbeville Press’s Cats Up Close.

Though not quite as famous as its online descendants (which at this point account for roughly 85% of all Web traffic), Cats Up Close was to these sites what The Velvet Underground was to so many bands in the decades after it: the original cult favorite that launched a thousand mainstream acts. As today’s pampered kittens bask, yawn, and stretch in the limelight, few of them realize that the stars of our volume—including the little Abbecat below—were paying their dues and epitomizing cute back when the word “blog” was just a horribly misconceived twinkle in someone’s eye:

Ah, those were the days. Cats were cats, dogs were dogs, and just having a cute face wasn’t enough; you had to have style. Just look at this paragon of feline elegance, perched atop a lacquered wooden desk worthy of Blad J. Garamond:

Fortunately, Cats Up Close did spawn at least one imitator (or should we say copyc—no, we absolutely shouldn’t) worthy of the original: Abbeville’s own Tiny Folio edition of Cats Up Close. That’s right: all the outrageously adorable cats from the first volume, peering out from a book that’s as tiny as they are! No need for shameless plugs here; you might be able to resist our salesmanship, but can you resist this face? Or this one?

…Or maybe you’re a dog person?

Marginalia: Brainstorm, Artblog.net

Today’s “Marginalia” is a double feature, as we highlight two blogs worthy of any stylish reader’s attention. The first, Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind, is a blog about “ideas, culture, and the arts,” produced by The Chronicle Review and authored by a crack team of eight thinkers in fields ranging from literature to science. The entries are eclectic, thought-provoking, funny, and as the title suggests, not afraid to brew up a little intellectual controversy. We’ve especially enjoyed recent posts by Laurie Fendrich on the firestorm surrounding the now-infamous Aliza Shvarts senior art project at Yale. Fendrich, wisely choosing to leave the ethical debate to other commentators (as we will also, pure aesthetes that we are), judges the project instead as art—and by this standard, finds it to be less an outrage than a yawn:

“For those of us in the contemporary-art business, the Yale squabble isn’t all that interesting. Ms. Shvarts’ undergraduate project sounds so, well, so undergraduate. Contrary to what a lot of people may think, her project wouldn’t make it into a serious contemporary gallery and, if it did, it wouldn’t get much traction with the press or the public…Almost everyone in the art world has been there and done that, a long time ago.”

Given the nature of Shvarts’s project, this last comment might raise some eyebrows, but to prove the point, Fendrich has compiled a list of similarly ”shocking” conceptual/performance art pieces that are two, three, and four decades old. (Warning: readers who are easily offended may wish to skip this link and wait for tomorrow’s post on incredibly adorable cats!)

Equally enlightening, and enlightened, on the subject of art is Franklin Einspruch of Artblog.net, who holds a healthy suspicion of “art that has other agendas” [i.e. beyond the aesthetic] and whose site conducts what he describes as an ongoing conversation about art with readers worldwide. Here at Abbeville, we’re such fans of his blog that we sponsored a giveaway contest for his readers, putting free copies of our new tome The Art Atlas in the hands of three lucky winners. The contest was over almost as soon as it started, but don’t worry if you missed out: non-free, but equally enticing, copies of the book are available at our main site (click that big beautiful cover image below):

Abbeville Family

 

By now, if you’ve been reading The Abbeville Manual for a while, you’ve gotten a strong apprentice education in the fundamentals of style. But what about your family? There they are, mired in the same dreary, styleless life you led before Abbeville. Don’t they deserve the same benefits you’ve enjoyed? Couldn’t your mother use some artistic guidance when she’s snapping photos at family gatherings? Couldn’t your little cousins use a little culture? And hasn’t Grandma seemed a bit…unprincipled lately?

Fortunately for you (and them), Abbeville Press has recently launched its Abbeville Family division, which gathers together such popular titles as Armin Brott’s New Father series, Colleen Carroll’s How Artists See books, and Patrick Ewing’s In the Paint, and combines them with a raftload of new family titles due out this fall, including the first two volumes of our educational Dinosaurs comic book series and the first four volumes of the long-awaited How Artists See Jr. series. It’s a big step in the evolution of Abbeville, and we’ve honored it with a jazzy new logo and a special page on our website. It’s also caught the attention of Publishers Weekly, as you can read here.

Make your next family reunion an Abbeville Family reunion…and have Mom send us the pictures.

Coming up on The Abbeville Manual of Style:

Tomorrow: Shocking (and Shockingly Passé) Conceptual Art Exhibits!

Thursday: Adorable Cats!

New Video and Podcast!

Being the scrupulous editors we are, we generally eschew exclamation points except where absolutely necessary, but sometimes it’s hard to resist.

First of all: we have a new video! In this episode, “Europe in Your Hands,” our intrepid (and unfailingly dapper) host guides the viewer through four of Abbeville’s finest Europe-themed volumes: The Great Country Houses of Central Europe, Venice and the Veneto, St. Petersburg, and The Pocket Louvre. Each makes a handsome traveling companion for the European tourist—or a perfect, picturesque escape for the armchair vacationer. Not featured in the video, but of equal interest to the Europhile, are such Abbeville titles as Great Monasteries of Europe, Munich, The Art and Spirit of Paris, The History of Venice in Painting, Tuscany, Travels with Van Gogh and the Impressionists, and many others available in the Travel section of Abbeville.com.

Second: we have a new podcast! With Armin Brott’s classic parenting guides The Expectant Father and The New Father due to enter the world (like a twin bundle of joy) in audiobook form this May, we’re pleased to offer preview clips of each book on our Media page. As America’s “Mr. Dad” and the host of the weekly radio show “Positive Parenting,” Mr. Brott is a natural at the microphone; dispensing warmth, humor, and fatherly expertise in equal measure, he brings as much style to the subject of potty training as Ségolène Le Men does to a discourse on the finer points of the oeuvre of Courbet.

Enjoy the updates, and check us out on YouTube as well!

Those Interstitial Spaces

Recently a minor hullabaloo erupted in the art world, and the art blogosphere in particular, over the dense curatorial writing that accompanied the Whitney Biennial exhibition of contemporary art here in New York. Eric Gibson of the Wall Street Journal recaps the controversy here; to put it simply (as this story sort of forces us to do), the text was called everything from “impenetrable” to “unalloyed gibberish,” and was quoted as providing descriptions like this one:

“. . . invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial . . . inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion.”

Unless we’re inhabiting those same spaces, it sounds to us like the author’s just not sure what to make of the piece. Richard Lacayo surmised as much on his art blog for Time:

“But the industrial strength rhetoric of so much museum writing is also, I suspect, a defense against anxiety by curators and catalogue essay writers afraid simply to say aloud and in plain English what they suppose the work might be getting at. What if they get it wrong? Better to fall back on cliches that stand in for thought without furthering it.”

True enough—no one wants to be the wet blanket who misunderstands genius in its own time. Another possibility, of course, is that the art itself doesn’t hold up to the close scrutiny of plain English, forcing the writers to bluff and bluster their way through the descriptions. Finally, the artgoing public who wades through the verbiage could just be nodding along, pretending to understand as the writer pretends to interpret what the artist has pretended to express. The whole table could be bluffing.

But most likely the situation isn’t that dire. Writing of the kind quoted above may set our editorial teeth on edge, but we’re longtime fans of the Whitney Museum, and we know from experience that when their curatorial skills are joined with a concise, illuminating text, the results are dynamite:

All in all, Lacayo is probably right. There’s nothing wrong with contemporary art, but evaluating new art in concrete terms is risky, so many writers choose to tiptoe around that risk. In any case, the problem is an old one—much older even than those Calvin and Hobbes cartoons that satirized it so brilliantly in the ’90s (”I wanted to be a neo-deconstructivist, but Mom wouldn’t let me”). Gibson in the WSJ looks back fondly to the age of post-WWII criticism, but as George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” reminds us, impenetrable art writing dates back at least that far:

“In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,’ while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,’ the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.”

The jargon words themselves may have changed, but the epidemic of jargon hasn’t. What to do about it? As Arbiters of Style, we’re not suggesting that art writers go to the other extreme and describe things only in terms of the literal and concrete. There’s nothing wrong with waxing verbose about art, but as long as you’re going to fly off into that stratosphere, you might as well do it full-throttle, à la Walter Pater on the Mona Lisa:

“She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.”

If art museums ever featured captions like that, we’d never miss an exhibit.