Posted: March 31

Right on Time

(Rome) Sunday evening I was sitting in my room listening to folk music over the internet when I heard the acoustic blues guitar player Eric Bibb introduce his song “Right on Time.” He wrote it after performing for an audience that included John Cephas, one of his folk-blues heroes. Cephas came on stage later and said that he was getting old but he was content knowing that some younger musicians treasured the music to which he had given his life. He said that Bibb had come along, “Right on time.” Bibb turned the remark into a song, but his explanation got me thinking about art.

Yesterday afternoon I was just finishing a still life painting in my studio. I was at a stopping point and the light was failing, so I decided to head off down to Trastevere. One of my friends mentioned that he had been to the Museo di Roma where he saw a wonderful exhibit of watercolor paintings by Ettore Roesler Franz, who created 120 paintings between 1876-1896. Franz documented Rome as it was before the development sparked by the unification of Italy began a process of modernization that Mussolini ultimately pushed forward. Many of the old city scenes are long since gone, but some remain, or at least bits of them. If you live in Rome and know the city well, it is fascinating to see these paintings and compare what you see now and what once existed. The museum was packed, partly because this was the end of a special culture week during which all the city’s museums were opened for free.

Most of the people looking at the watercolors saw them as literal documents and focused on the subject matter. I looked at them as amazing pieces of art. For one thing, they were big, roughly two feet by three, if not larger. The colors were luminous, an effect that great artists can get from a difficult medium. I remember seeing lots of Winslow Homer watercolors in the vault at the Brooklyn Museum. Art at this level grabs your attention just by itself. A few of the paintings veered towards being illustrations that literally captured facts of life at that time. But most were beautiful paintings in their own right, with a soft color palette that captured the Mediterranean light that makes Rome so special. He also managed to maintain a wonderful balance between capturing details of the urban landscape and preserving a loose sense of the scene with big color shapes that formed patterns that caught my eye. One painting perfectly captured the pearly grey of a rainy winter day, while others had the warm ochre glow that characterizes the faded paint on Roman walls. I overheard one woman say, “Each one is more beautiful than the last.” Amen, I thought.

This exhibit might not have caught my attention so much had I not just read an account in Time magazine of a new exhibit of works by avant-garde artists Marcel Duchamps, Francis Picabia and Man Ray who worked a few decades after Ettore Roesler Franz. The three of them pioneered the ironic idea that any thing can be art and that traditional notions of craftsmanship and technique no longer mattered. The article was illustrated with a photo of Duchamps’ famous upside-down urinal which he simply signed “R Mutt 1917” and declared it to be art. (Ironically, the original was recently destroyed by a contemporary artist who was making his own performance art statement by hammering the urinal into pieces. Fortunately, it was not difficult to get another urinal and recreate what had become a very valuable “art” piece.)

The Time article said: “If ‘anything goes’ then skill, craft, sensuous handling, emotions, the artist’s personal expression and artistic originality are all optional—‘art’ can be any object untransformed, just presented in a gallery and given a title. Andy Warhol ran with this idea in the 1960s and so do Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst today. Art students are in awe of it.”

I sometimes feel apologetic about my own paintings because they are representational, which is so out of style. I care about color and technique and I feel closer to Eric Bibb than to Duchamps. Art is a conversation as much as music is, and it is important that people come along who are still interested in methods of artistic expression that have an inner life that continues to be recreated by new generations. Painters that I would like to engage in this conversation include the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla (February 27, 1863 - August 10, 1923), and John Singer Sargent. Obviously I cannot paint just like they did, nor do I want just to imitate their work. But they had a language of brush strokes, color notes and visual forms that intrigues me and makes me want to see what I can do with it. Metaphorically, I would like to make my own music that plays off theirs. Sargent’s treatment of water in his Venice watercolors echoes Franz’s treatment of the Tiber River, and Sorolla captured Spanish cityscapes as deftly as the Roman artist.

One of the side notes in the Time article was the fact that Duchamps secretly he devoted himself for two decades to an ambitious project: an installation “with sparkling light, an invisible motor and a nude woman made of plaster casts of body parts covered in calfskin” according to Time. No one knew about this project during his lifetime. His ironic pose that the actual way of creating art did not matter was contradicted by his devotion to this project that he took more seriously than he could publicly acknowledge. The good thing about music is that musicians still take their craft seriously and care about the traditions—the conversations—to which they dedicate themselves.