Do Poets understand Painting?
A couple of days ago I questioned whether the poets in an artist’s social circle have any greater understanding of their friend’s art than we do. I am always surprised by how art historians give so much credit to the opinions of poets in the first place. They do not have a good record. All three of Manet’s great literary friends - Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola and Stéphan Mallarmé – wrote complete nonsense about his art.
Here is just one example. Mallarmé analyzing Manet’s paintings towards the end of Manet’s career wrote:
‘But the chief charm and true characteristic of one of the most singular men of the age is, that Manet (who is a visitor to the principal galleries both French and foreign, and an erudite student of painting) seems to ignore all that has been done in art by others, and draws from his own inner conciousness all his effects of simplification, the whole revealed by effects of light incontestably novel.’1
It's just not true. Manet's compositions are heavily dependent on other art as all recent Manet specialists have shown.
So, beware. Art is not a language poets understand, at least not those who lived before the age of computers and cheap reproductions. They did not have the time nor ability to study painting in any depth. To be fair, I should probably shut up myself. Dürer warned that only artists can understand good painting because its meaning “is denied to others, like a foreign language.”2 And I, unfortunately, am not an artist.
………I was a photographer, if that counts.
1. Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet” in The Art Monthly Review I, no. 9, Sept. 1876, reprinted in A Painter’s Poet: Stéphane Mallarmé and His Impressionist Circle (Hunter College of the City University of New York) 1998, p. 40
2. Jane Campbell Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography (Princeton University Press) 1990, p. 111
Posted 30 Aug 2011: Durer
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