Keats and Ut Pictor Poesis
Mary,
!. ....There should be plenty going on [poetry], figure-ground relationships and complex figure-ground relationships, beauties of form, small unexpected pleasures waiting to be discovered.
Same for pictures. Figure-ground relationships and complex-figure ground relationships are among the chief means that a picture (even an abstract picture) creates the feeling of deep space, for the depend in large part on planes appearing to be either in front of or behind other planes.
Eugene Atget was a master of figure-ground relationships. Paul Strand was very good at them.
Beauties of form? Of course, throughout.
Unexpected pleasures: again of course. To see how Charles Negre, in about 1852, made a complex figure group out of four large umbrella trees on a plain outside of Cannes, each tree being many yards away from the trees to either side of it is a pleasure, but when one sees that it's actually a five-tree group, the fifth being very small because tens of yards in the background yet still joined visually to the fourth tree to the right is a sudden, unexpected and delightful surprise, revealing unsuspected possibilities of form in an un-prepossessing landscape and unexpected aspects of Negre's virtuosity.
A similar surprise occurs in a Garry Winogrand photograph when one discovered that a figure group of three figures -- one tall blonde woman in a white sheath dress with miniskirt and two men about 8 feet behind her and ogling her -- is instead a five-figure group, the additional two figures being in deep shadow tens of yards behind the woman in the white dress and connected to her by three or four strands of her blonde hair blowing out to the left of the photograph by the wind.
2) Poetry should not overwhelm the reader. There should be a continuum, leading the reader in and onward with an arc (to use Asher's word) of beginning, climax, and completion.
Yes again. Garish, sensation, over-stated photographs pale and cloy quickly. Most of William Klein's pictures are examples of this, as are most of Sally Mann's and Nan Goldin's. "Popper art" some people call it, after popper drugs, a whiff, a rush, a high, a comedown, in quick succession.
Yes to climax and completion. In a complex picture, e.g. many by Cartier'Bresson, there are several stories being told at once, a story about line, about form, about gesture, about darks and lights, each one coming to a climax but at different places in the picture. This makes not only for completion but for drama and a series of climaxes each with its own emotional impact but each impact different so that the picture inspires and holds in equilibrium several dissimilar and even contradictory emotions at once.
Contradictory emotions: the terror and pity of Othello's murder of Desdemona and the beauty and pleasure of the verse.
3) If poetry does not come as naturally as the leaves to the trees, it had better not come at all.
And you ask:
In other words, should the making of pictures and viewing of pictures not come as naturally as the leaves to the trees?
I don't know. I don't think so. Picasso struggled hard and long over his portrait of Gertrude Stein -- tens of sittings and he couldn't get the head and face right until he saw an exhibition of ancient Iberian sculpture. He was often very quick, mind you, and highly prolific, which gave him a reputation of having great facility. Late in his career this began to be held against him in reviews and articles...As though his facility made him and his work facile. It stung him once and he shouted, "What facility? What are they talking about? You know that green and black striped blouse in that portrait of Jacqueline? It took me four months of painting it in and scraping it out and painting it in and scraping it out to get it right. Four months! Where's my facility?"
Proust worked how many years on A la recherche du temps perdu? And was revising up to the his death?
Pope took the Essay on Man (or was it the Essay on Criticism) through 17 revisions, the sixteenth in the carriage on the way to the printer's and the seventeenth while the typesetter was setting type. And we all know the story of The Dunciad.l
Thomas Mann started The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man early in his career, wrote a certain number of chapters and knew that he didn't have the skill or knowledge to go on so he put the manuscript away. He took it out again very late in life and finished it -- the last book he finished, I think.
When I was a young small camera (35mm, 6x9 cm) photographer in the days of film, most of the photographers I knew, both young and masters, knew that four to six hours' photographing a day, shooting at least six or seven 36-exposure rolls of film a day, was minimum practice and we didn't expect very much from any of those c. 200 pictures/day. We were glad at that rate to net 12-20 good photographs a year.
Robert Frank's The Americans, c. 84 pictures, came from something like 750 rolls of film, which we all considered an amazingly high yield.
Then there are amazing periods. When Walker Evans was working for the FSA in 1936 it was, said John Szarkowski, former Director of the Photography Department, Museum of Modern Art, "as though all he had to do was walk out of his hotel room every morning and there were pictures everywhere." (For Szarkowski's exact words, see the PBS film Walker Evans, America, which I wrote.)
And Eugene Atget seems never to have made a bad photograph in his life -- but of course we haven't seen them all, he made thousands.
How long did it take Milton to write Paradise Lost? But Keats is right about the appearance of ease. The War in Heaven section of Paradise Lost reads like the work of a man who has lost interest in either his theme or his verse, or is tired, very tired. I asked a Milton scholar about this, who said that scholarship to date (this was 1993) points to the composition of this section late in the composition of the poem. If so, no wonder it reads like the work of a tired poet.
It's the appearance of ease that counts. In the very, very good Manet of the woman in the pink peignoir, with a parrot on a stand next to her, the neck to floor peignoir looks to have been painted very quickly -- thin paint (a lot of white beneath it), wide fast-looking brush strokes, overlapping hapazard-looking brush strokes as though the paint had been slapped on. But the brush strokes also make a beautiful composition of their own within the peignoir's contours and the management of pink over white and white breaking through pink is both virtuosic and thrilling, so it may have taken a very, very long time to paint so that it merely looked haphazard.
You know, in 17th-century portraits, especially Netherlandish ones, those high ruffled collars and all that lace? Very intricate, yes? They look so intricate, so detailed, as though they took a very long time. Well they would take us a very long time. But in many cases they weren't painted by the painter himself Ruff collar and lace experts came in and painted them, very, very quicklly. They had the method worked out to a formula... they were specialists. Why should the master sweat to do it when a specialist could do it quickly and make it appear intricate?
So it's hard to say. The appearance of ease, yes. But that's where the composition comes in, too, which assists in the sense of flow...
The appearance of ease in good and great photographs is part of what makes people think that no effort or special skill went into making them.
But we do know that Cartier-Bresson would sometimes wait for half an hour or more for the right person or thing to come into a street or a courtyard to complete the composition that was only almost there. The decisive moment had nothing to do with anything like a story or drama or human behavior, it was always about the moment when the composition came into being, the moment that decided the composition.
As for the viewing of pictures, it is very difficult at first. Like taking pictures, it requires hours and hours a week if not hours and hours a day. One must only look, not read. Months and Months, even Years, must be devoted to this, just as an undergraduate, you had to devote many years to learning how to read a poem. Then, suddenly, it becomes much easier.
In the Metropolitan Museum one day, after many months of going there every day and struggling to learn how to look at a picture and other works of art, I was walking briskly to get to some gallery, Dutch, I think, and passed a big Italian Renaissance painting, The Blinding of Samson. Huge. I glanced at it and said to myself "The only good thing in that painting is the figure in the top right corner" and walked on. Then I stopped and said, "How can you say a thing like that after just a glance?" So I went back and looked It was a dull, dry, academic, formulaic painting, everything predictable, the light falling just right, the diagonals just right, the musculature just right...And the only thing that had that "unsuspected pleasure waiting to be discovered" was that incidental figure in the top right corner I can take you there and show it to you and show you exactly why it stands out from all the other figures.
Does this begin to answer your questions?
yrs in good faith
ben
www.benlifson.com