HOME: My learnings from the famous artist quotes:
- personal short remarks, comments, discoveries, surprises, reflections, deep thoughts, etc. which I got and still get provoked by collecting and editing the artist quotes.
Fons Heijnsbroek
From time to time I will give here -with date - my own remarks and discoveries I made on the artist quotes, I collected and edited. This page becomes a kind of QUOTES-diary, so to speak.
I learned - and still learn - a lot by the artists quotes. Here I like to express my learnings and also my honor to the artists who expressed themselves. Partly it is because of their existence that I now paint as I do. They gave me the pictorial languages they have developed, and on my turn I develop my variation now. That is how I collected their quotes which fascinated me; to get my art-food out of the kitchen of art, to have the necessary swamp of modern art.
I write bad English, I realize. Please excuse me for that. I do my best. And for sure: all the cited quotes you find here on the website - with their official sources - are truly placed in correct English, I can guarantee. I just follow the sources! But on this page I am free to use my own Dutch-English mix.
My remarks and discoveries on the fruitful clash between Cubism and Futurism; 21-03-2011
I was really astonished by reading the vivid and powerful quotes of the Futurist artists for the first time. In them I read such unusual strong yearning and longing for. I read it already in the writings of Theo van Doesburg, but much more sophisticated and intellectual, with a wild and dark irony under it, from time to time. Also I didn’t realize that strong that the battlefield between Cubism and Futurism was in fact Paris; there was the fruitful battlefield which I already could read in the writings of Mondrian: the impressions of the energy in the streets, the movements of the traffic and the sounds, the circulations on the squares. He even tried to catch it in primitive poems!
Cubism and Futurism gave a lot to the other. And also the dynamic itself which arose between the two art directions by their continuous intensive debate was very fruitful for both sides, I believe.
Reading the quotes of most pronounced Futurist artists like Carra, Boccioni and Russolo give me the impression that they want to energize the spectator; the painting must set him into movement. I think there longing went far more than that. I believe the painters wanted to dissolute the distinctions between subject and object, completely, absorbed by motion, movement, speed and energy. The street absorbs the driver and the car, and the spectator who is walking there. Almost there is no spectator at all, any more, because distinction isn’t possible, the same distinction which is the champion for Cubism and dictates most Cubist paintings. In Cubism there is a observer, a spectator. I remember how well Leger describes his emotions and his senses working while riding in a car in the country. He loved to look with his senses that way (as a little later Willem de Kooning loved to drive on the landscape of the highways). I think it is the eye which is most important for the Cubist,and then of course the eye in moving positions. It is more the dimension of space which rules in Cubism. In Futurism it is movement, so the dimension of time which dictates the artist and his senses.
Sometimes I experience during my looking in Futurist paintings a kind of asking by the artist: that I am willing to believe his absorption with the subject (by all movings things around him in the modern city). Then the painting gives me a scene before my eyes and I am watching, I am the observer of the experience of the painter. Other times I experience that the painter wants to pull me in, he wants to break the distinction between me and the painting and wants the painting is swallowing me in the dynamic he gives. I have to be in it! I must become part of it. Otherwise the painting failed. I experience both options.
In Cubism the artist hates both options of the Futurist. He would loose his world and the world. For him the Futurist is cutting the world under his feet in small pieces, so he will sink in the earth and melt.
Braque, as well as the more expressive Picasso, are to much on the side of Cézanne; there must be a moment of quietness, how little it might, there must be one little piece of time for the spectator to do his job: perception! This little piece of time allows the observation; the spectator has to learn, while looking the painting. I believe, for the Cubist he even must not come in the painting, but I am not sure, because also the Cubist artist wants an involvement by the spectator. There is for him an emotional as well as an intellectual option… (will be followed, fh)
Remarks and my discoveries on Futurist art & painting; 23-03-2011
Sometimes I think Futurist was exaggerating a lot! Even more in words than in the pictures. If I read the experiences of the rolling horse-tram through the street in the city I can not imagine that the melting down of all boundaries of the subjects in this selected piece of daily life - the stones in the street, the horse, the cabin, the people in the cabin, the cut by the wooden frame of the windows of the cabin, the walking man seeing the sitting people in the cabin, cut by the wooden frame of the windows, etc…. - gave a good emotional portrait of this daily life scene. How fast was this horse-tram riding? Ten miles an hour,maybe even eight or six miles?
To me their description of movements express the impressions of the trains in the 1930′s or even later the cars. And even more their expression in words than in their paintings. Because in Futurist painting there are boundaries which are overturned in the words.
I don’t mean to say that the Futurists art is a lie! Of course not, because they expressed what they believed to express and to experience. But it gives me the idea that the Futurist artist were unbelievable sensitive, so sensitive that they enlarged the movings and rapidity of the motions in the scenes which surrounded them. It is more a longing for than a portrait of an experience of modern reality. That’s why Futurist poetry or writing seems so modern to me; it describes my own experiences in the tube or the train, with all the reflecting materials of this time, which dynamize and multiply the movements visually much more. I understand their longing because now we have reached that stage. And by them I can discover the futurist aspects in my own art. Also there is in my own art a longing for other spatial and motion dimensions, which are not here in the world. They still have to come! And also this yearning and longing has to do with the desire to be a essential part of the whole, but in the same time, be able to be consciousness of my position. It is he struggle Cubism-Futurism in a new way.
The problem with many Futurist paintings is that they are very often rather flat. So they try to express movement from left to right, but there is little depth. There are some very convincing Futurist paintings which are really concentrating on depth, and then there appear really comes all kind of depths, but it is more the depth of caves in the rocks: there are holes in the streets. It is not the depth of the urban city, it is archaic depth of the caves. Also the objects themselves in the streets are not very plastic or sculpted in their paintings, an aspect which was picked up by Cubism much more. Cubism opened the thing itself, gave the thing an inside and an outside. (will be followed, fh)
