August 5, 2022
THOSE WHO CAN'T DO mODERNIZE:
The Disappearing Modernists: Where did it all go wrong for so much music of the 20th century? (Mark N. Grant | August 4, 2022, American Scholar)
When Pablo Picasso was 18, his immortal greatness was not yet self-evident. As the historian and painter Paul Johnson writes, the artist lacked "full academic training," and his drawing was "sometimes weak in consequence (one of the myths most consistently spread about Picasso is that he was a superb draftsman)." According to Johnson, "Picasso seems to have grasped, quite early on, that he would not get to the top of the field of conventional painting." In Barcelona, "he was up against Ramon Casas i Carbó, fifteen years his senior and far more accomplished in traditional skills." Johnson maintains that Casas was "a draftsman on the level of Ingres" and that "Picasso's portraits invited comparison with Casas's and are manifestly inferior (both can be seen in Barcelona)." Picasso left Spain for good in 1904, "to get away from life under Casas's shadow and ... endless disparaging comparisons with Casas," and he saw "that Paris, with its preoccupation with novelty and fashion, was the place where he could shine and rise to the top."
No one actually liked Modernism, a truth captured by Tom Wolfe:
O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth
where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they
detested as within they blessed borders today?
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 5, 2022 6:34 AM