Lunatic Fringe of Art
KALES, DAVID S.
Lunatic Fringe of Art THE GRAND ECCENTRICS Edited by Thomas B. Hess ARTnews Annual. 180pp. $5.95. Reviewed by DAVID S. KALES Author of the forthcoming "Masters of Painting" The Grand...
...but the main preoccupations of American artists were panoramic landscapes and empirical realities "rather than...
...Hess attempts to provide some coherence, some "ground rules" for the following disparate chapters...
...Fortunately Hess' stage directions do not gready interfere with the lucid essays and excellent plates (both color and black and white) that follow...
...But new light is shed as well on a few familiar faces including the Medieval-Surrealist Hieronymus Bosch and the demonologist William Blake...
...and the sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt, who in the 1760s would pinch his ribs before a mirror and sculpt his grim-macing image on busts with titles such as "Lasciviously Languishing Fop," "Hypocrite Slanderer," and "Peevish Man...
...He fails to help us to discriminate between what should be taken seriously and what is a joke...
...In all...
...Ultimately The Grand Eccentrics leaves us with the intriguing question...
...One can find a greater rebel in Mario Praz's essay, "The Canticles of Hieronymus Bosch...
...Moving from left to right the first panel shows the Garden of Eden and the sin of Adam and Eve...
...Hess cites the admittedly bizarre but artistically dubious pseudo-art of modern-day eccentrics like Paul Anthony Greenwood who sculpts giant epoxy seductresses sporting scanty costumes of real fabric????and then presumes to compare it with the art of a traditional master like Matisse...
...Redon was not only attacking the Philistinism of the French official academy, but also Courbet and Corot's optical reality and its avant-garde extension?9th century Impressionism...
...Salvador Dali...
...Even 19th century America had its eccentrics, particularly Albert Ryder...
...Certainly Bosch's anal tortures, armored flying fish, giant sexual birds juxtaposed surreally with humans in erotic love play in a painting like "The Garden of Earthly Delights" seem eccentric if nothing else...
...For the eccentric, the image tends to merge with Life...
...For the artist in the tradition," says Hess, "the image tends to merge with Art...
...The Grand Eccentrics touches on five centuries of eccentrics...
...the third is Hell where the unrepentent sinners are damned to excruciating tortures...
...Are the self-indulgent Pop and Op anti-artists of today, like Bosch, Blake and Messerschmidt of yesteryear, the visionaries and prophets of the future...
...an interior world of private fantasy...
...or are they, as Horace Walpole said of Henry Fuseli, a turn-of-the-19th century surrealist, simply "shockingly mad, madder than ever, quite mad...
...A tryptych like "The Garden of Earthly Delights" reads very well as Christian catechism...
...Instead of dismissing the painting as merely eccentric, however, it is quite possible to analyze it in terms of a conventional Medieval Christian conception of the world in the manner of Dante's Divine Comedy...
...titillator of Westchester matrons...
...In between Bosch in the 15th century and flocks of 20th century "kooks" are 18th century oddities like William Blake, whose numerous engravings and drawing of tormented man in a silent cosmos has art historians wondering whether he antedates the contemporary "God is Dead" theology...
...and in our own day...
...Despite their idiosyncrasies, even perversities, all the artists discussed are rebels????smashers of sterile esthetic formulas and defiers of the dogmatic academies????who put their individual freedom of expression and spontaneity of vision before artistic recognition and personal welfare...
...Among them are Victor Hugo, who drew Rorschach-like ink washes of crumbling Medieval architectural fantasies while quipping "I dash them off between stanzas...
...If this is the correct interpretation of the painting (it is becoming more accepted), then Bosch could be considered one of the most daring eccentric rebels of all times????a religious iconoclast who challenged the basic cannons of the Church, in his time a nearly omnipotent earthly power...
...Reviewed by DAVID S. KALES Author of the forthcoming "Masters of Painting" The Grand Eccentrics is not a museum tour of the great eccentric artists...
...and Gustave Moreau, who kept a room cluttered with exotic plants, "male friends," and a boa constrictor, while applying an impasto on his canvases which produced an effect identical to the strokes of Abstract Expressionism and which Gaugin described as "jewelry covered with jewelry...
...The only weak point flawing the tidy simplicity of this 10 chapter anthology is Thomas Hess' introduction, entitled "Eccentric Propositions...
...mad Van Gogh...
...It focuses such shadowy unknowns as Max Klinger...
...Instead he supports Wilhelm Fraen-ger's theory that Bosch was a member of the Free Spirit or Adamite society????one of the many heretical sects which flourished in the 15th century...
...indeed to tell whether these eccentric "grop-ings of the self" in contemporary art have any artistic validity at all...
...Michael Benedickt, in his chapter...
...There is also the fantasist Odilon Redon who painted reveries by putting "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible" and claimed that "The artists of my generation, for the most part, have looked at a chimney flue and have seen only a chimney flue...
...To make this point, however...
...But the task is difficult because as he admits, "eccentric art is, by nature, undefinable...
...The Visionary French," discusses several French artists who undoubtedly appeared eccentric to their contemporaries, yet today are accepted as precursors of modern art...
...the fop-dandy Whistler, who in a temper tantrum pushed his brother-in-law through a glass window...
...Hess' introduction thus becomes still another example of the modern critical tendency to substitute description for analysis and judgment...
...the 19th century German engraver, who with fetishistic obsession illustrated the peregrinations of a glove, creating in graphics an effect similar to W. W. Jacob's famous macabre short story, The Monkey's Paw: and Jean-Jacques Lequeu, a French architect who during the Revolution proposed a municipal plan for "total satisfaction" which anticipated by 160 years Lefrack City's "Total Living...
...Hell, then, in "The Garden of Earthy Delights" is for the uninitiates who had turned away from glorifying the flesh and "drinking the waters of life...
...There are some fascinating studies of eccentric artists, which point to another motif binding together the individual chapters...
...Praz, however, does not accept this conventional interpretation...
...The Adamites, a nudist cult, believed in the salvation of the flesh and a return to an "Adamite state of innocence...
...Messerschmidt's heads were indeed perverse, but they were created in deliberate revolt against the prevailing Baroque opulence of the age and in fact moved toward a neo-classical realism...
...The unifying theme of these essays is that "eccentrics" have something to tell us about "the infinite capacities of man," and that it is thus important to keep alive at least the dialogue about them...
...He goes on to say that the eccentrics capitalize on their personal whims and neuroses to create a new and "different realm where another magic is invoked...
...Conspicuously absent from the list are wildly eccentric masters like Caravaggio, who murdered a man over a game of tennis...
...Instead The Grand Eccentrics digresses through murky back corridors of museums and musty archives...
...the second, man's abandonment to sensual pleasures?fornicating, eating and dancing...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 2
