Baren Digest               Monday, 4 August 2003       Volume 24 : Number 2328


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From: James G Mundie <jimandkatemundie@juno.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2003 23:35:10 -0400
Subject: [Baren 22436] Re: 'gracelessness' 

Myron wrote: 


> To apply the term "graceless" to Munakata, a master of the graceful, 
> is equivalent to calling Matisse greaceless. > 


Matisse had plenty of grease.  ;-D

Myron, I think you've misunderstood me.  I'm not slagging off Munakata -
I love his work.  In fact, if you check the archives I wrote a rather
glowing review of the exhibition of his work here in Philadelphia, the
catalog for which I believe you said you later purchased.  

I was speaking of my early formative impressions and work that I first
found attractive, which for me meant clean and controlled cutting.  It
was only later that I came to appreciate the beauty of bolder 'choppier'
cutting.  Of course, Munakata falls into the latter category, but his
work is anything but clumsy.  It only appeared so at first to my younger
uneducated eye.

***

Regarding soviet-style design, there are some Russian and Chinese posters
that amaze me with the beauty of their design, even though they might
have been intended to motivate for something as mundane as increasing
turnip or tractor production.  There are others that leave me cold, or
promote ideas I find repugnant.  But you can't blame all soviet artists
for the horrors committed by Stalin.  Those designers had to eat, and I'd
say that many of them produced beautiful work _despite_ the oppression of
the regime.  Some of the best wood engravers working today learned their
craft in eastern European design schools where they were trained to
perpetuate a soviet ideal.  Most have moved beyond the politics, but the
principals of form and color remain. 
 
Jim


> >Likewise, it took me time to invite brash German expressionists with
> >their "clumsy" "hacked" marks into my select club, but Kathe Kollwitz
> >knocked on my door and invited in all of her messy Die Brucke and Blau
> >Reiter chums.  Through them I learned to accept a certain amount of
> >rawness or "gracelessness" into the my ideas of what constituted good
> >design.  Prior to understanding that, I likely wouldn't have accepted
> >Munakata as worthy of attention, or for that matter, Frasconi.
> >
> >James Mundie
> >http://www.missioncreep.com/mundie/images/index.htm


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From: Myron Turner <mturner@Ms.UManitoba.CA>
Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2003 07:43:28 -0500
Subject: [Baren 22437] Re: 'gracelessness' 

Jim,

Truly sorry if I misunderstood you--I took as grudging approval your statement:

      ' I learned to accept a certain amount of  rawness or "gracelessness" '

It's the "certain amount" that I took as grudging, and of course I wouldn't 
personally think of applying the term "graceless" to his work though I can 
understand "rawness", a term he might himself have accepted--but "raw" only 
in the sense that one might say Walt Whitman was raw--ebullient, 
affirmative, instinctual, embracing.   And for me, it's when that "rawness" 
becomes too self-indulgent that Munakata loses me, as does Whitman.

I guess I also was responding (in the background) to a tendency among some 
members of the list, to give supremacy to meticulous craftsmanship over 
what seem to me more important values.   My own view on craftsmanship is 
that all good artists achieve the level of craftsmanship necessary to the 
realization of their work.   There's a wonderful line in Sir Philip 
Sidney's "Defense of Poetry"  (one of Shakespeare's contemporaries), namely 
that the excellence of a work of poetry consists in the "Idea" behind "the 
work, and not in the work itself.  And that the Poet hath that Idea is 
manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellencie as hee hath imagined 
them".   This is my own view, that the idea is paramount.  Craft is the 
means--the midwife--that delivers the new-born work into the world; its 
secondary but essential.

Myron

At 10:35 PM 03/08/2003, you wrote:

>Myron wrote:
>

> > To apply the term "graceless" to Munakata, a master of the graceful,
> > is equivalent to calling Matisse greaceless. >

>
>Myron, I think you've misunderstood me.  I'm not slagging off Munakata -
>I love his work.  In fact, if you check the archives I wrote a rather
>glowing review of the exhibition of his work here in Philadelphia, the
>catalog for which I believe you said you later purchased.
>
>Jim
>

> > >Likewise, it took me time to invite brash German expressionists with
> > >their "clumsy" "hacked" marks into my select club, but Kathe Kollwitz
> > >knocked on my door and invited in all of her messy Die Brucke and Blau
> > >Reiter chums.  Through them I learned to accept a certain amount of
> > >rawness or "gracelessness" into the my ideas of what constituted good
> > >design.  Prior to understanding that, I likely wouldn't have accepted
> > >Munakata as worthy of attention, or for that matter, Frasconi.
> > >
> > >James Mundie
> > >http://www.missioncreep.com/mundie/images/index.htm



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End of Baren Digest V24 #2328
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