An Idyll: What is Classic?
An introduction to Classic Twee, Classic Cars, and Classic Jumpshots.
Starting with Lennart Anderson’s Idyll III as an example
Part I: Disinterest
Lennart Anderson Idyll III (in progess) 1977- 2015
“Such draining of interiority in favor of external signs, this exhaustion of content by form, is the very principal of a triumphal classic art.”
Roland Barthes
I have a painting here I like. It’s called Idyll by Lennart Anderson and he spent the better part of 38 years working on it. It’s not finished though. Even now that Lennart has passed it should be considered his easel work. (The painting that remains as the artist has now faced an untimely demise.) My friend the great NY colorist (on both gouache studies and the Swamp Thing) David Hornung once said of the Idyll that it is a kind of portrait of Dorian Gray. This thing in Lennart’s attic that kept him young. And Lennart might add… humble. Lennart would say to us that his little still lives are the humble pie, and this thing in the attic was the Pie in the Sky.
Lennart, like me was Swedish and grew up in Detroit near my birth city of Pontiac, Michigan. (And, I honestly will be from where ever you’re from if it pleases you.) Lennart was as sweet as a boy, just as cutthroat and competitive as any 8 year old, but he astounded me one afternoon by taking on some painterly advice from me 50 years his junior. I had said the guitar (in the painting above) was bending in space and needed to lie flat. (Notice where the guitar meets the long skirts of the women in front.) And then one day up in his studio I saw he had changed it. And that it was perfect. For me, It was like being Reagan’s body man and seeing the USSR crumble because you had idly mentioned one afternoon in 1983. “They budget ain’t gonna keep up wit us, sir.”
What Barthes says above could be interpreted as critically scathing to the Classical though I also am inclined to believe it disinterested. He says in his Mythologies that Classicism is the exhaustion of content by Form. He means perhaps, that Classicism is the art of remote disinterest in one’s efforts. I don’t mean uninterested. I mean interested and invested in one’s work with detachment. With critical editorial oversight one manifests the original passionate vision now exhausted through immaculate revision. Disinterest is a ruthless accountability of one’s self and one’s own aesthetic. In examining a work or structure like a building the architect and builder should beg the question. “Is this facet of the work important? Is it useful?”
I saw this very mindset in the Netflix documentary of the best restaurant of 2017 Eleven Madison Park. The restauranteur Will Guidara brought this excruciating line of questioning to every aspect of his business, including the direction of the stamp under the plates!
The Bauhaus and the modernist movement might very well fall into the Classicist category for their own ruthless determination of value. They pursued, perhaps to an apocalyptic degree—and still pursue, disinterest for its own sake over beauty. They ask “Does this serve Form?” While a Classicist with judicious disinterest asks the question “Does this serve beauty?”
Who is Howard Roark?
Lennart was my advisor for my MFA at Brooklyn College- a program founded post war by Mark Rothko and long, long ago in the 70’s was quite formidable with such teachers as William T. Williams, Phillip Pearlstein, and Ad Reinhardt as tenured professors. To be honest no one thought of Lennart as an advisor. Lennart was something else altogether. He was a Guru. And like the best gurus completely self-effacing and humble. His spirituality was something like vagal tone, that you felt when you sat next to him. The system calms and the light of understanding awakens nearby a person like this. Coming into the chapel of his awareness wasn’t to be enslaved to his charisma nor his will. No that is a fakir’s realm. An enchantress does this. An Andrew Cohen or a Jim Jones.
Lennart, like Ramana Maharshi, Neem Karola Baba or Sri. K. Pattabhi Jois drew students to him like rolling marbles through his love for the material. His essential joy. That was why I was there.
The Head of the Painting dept. Tony Phillips at SAIC in Chicago said that there was something different about me, a little quirkiness that wouldn’t be satisfied with nailing highlights on glass. But my graduate advisor Dan Gustin told me to go to NY because it would suit me perfectly. Lennart and I would connect and I would just adore him.
Dad suggested to me “Give him a little bread roll on the first day. Watch how excited he gets.” I did do just that and his excitement over how this little piece of crust caught the light, the Napolese nature of the yellow thing was exquisitely infectious. He rolled it over and tilted it and pointed out to me where the brightest part of it was. “Maybe you want it back now?” he said, all at once pained at his own intolerable generosity. “Now that I’ve shown you. Maybe you would like it for yourself?” I could see in his eyes that he was worried I would take it back, though he was concerned he would hurt me by taking it. I just laughed awestruck and said no.. though fuck, I did really want it back and I wanted to paint it now.
Lennart 2002 This is it.. This is actually the fucking piece of bread I got him.
Lennart is a Classicist. As Dan said to me he likes like four guys. Chardin, Velasquez, Degas. Maybe that’s it.. maybe just 3 guys. Everybody else falls short. Maybe Ingres is ok. He would read from Ingres.
“It takes 25 years to learn to draw, one hour to learn to paint.”
Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres
I would point out to Lennart the obvious affectation of Ingres’s necks needling him about self-conscious contrivance in art. “That’s just a mistake.” He would say. There was such a naiveté about Lennart. A sincerity of purpose. He was a wonderful handler of paint. His brushwork virtuosic, and yet not self-conscious. He applied paint beautifully with lyrical arcing flourishes in the pursuit of form. He was a hard core formalist. Yet exquisitely and essentially beautiful. Not like a Dan Flavin or a Richard Serra beautiful where you really have to go to school and study Design a long fucking time to appreciate the disparate category and tenor of “feces formalism.”
No, just beauty in the way that any child or a grandmother inhales and is shook in the presence of his painting, his lightness, his rapturous saturation.
My brother finally clued me into to Albert Brook’s pedigree. His brother is Super Dave Osborne. His stage name is Super Dave. Just like Al’s stage name is Brooks. They are both Einsteins actually. Their father Charles Einstein a specialist in Greek dialect comedic impersonation.
(who knew there was such a thing? What art forms lost to history? Is there a specialist in Redneck dialect comedy? Ebonics? Ah.. of course Jeff Foxworthy and Chris Rock. Also completely affected.)
Einstein famously killed at the Friar’s club Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball roast, slayed them, sat down, and died at his table in Milton Berle’s lap. So funny, he killed hisself.
His son Albert Einstein in the 3 minute clip above with the very unstable genius that is Rip Torn carefully illustrates the nature of mastery.
Those of us who have mastered a sensation, (As my step father Jim can hear tones for example.) they hear what to the rest of us or to children is shit. Steely Dan is shit to my ears. Just as Barnett Newman might be garbage to your eyes. The ambrosia that Rip Torn eats, Shiva like, is shit to Albert. And the effort to turn, the effort to learn, to Master is forever suspect. Albert was a funny kid. Garry Shandling was a funny kid, so was Seinfeld. They might say if you’re not funny you will never be funny. And yet, ask them. Ask me about painting. We believe we learned it and worked fucking hard to do so and we even believe we could teach you. And yet as like conspirators, in our Krishna heart of Krishna hearts, we suspect it can’t be learned.
We know now that we use almost all the brain all the time, not just 3%. The brain interacts comprehensively when it is quite young like a child’s brain or when it is bathed in LSD. Only when we are older do we use it with efficiency. The brain’s disposition changes as we attend to its function. In that when we use amphetamines like Ritalin, the Pre Frontal Cortex increases in circulation and therefore increases in size. Likewise when we are bathed in fear the amygdala also increases in size. The brain is plastic. And yet I still can’t sing. And while I paint I sing a lot in my studio. Actually my brother thinks I sing better when I sing louder. But I fear I will never sing well quietly.
Pallas Athena
In the following sections we will continue to explore the dichotomy of normative behavior within the sensibility of the Classic. Part II NovoClassicism