SOME AESTHETIC REALISM TALKS ON THE VISUAL ARTS

In reality opposites are one; art shows this. — Eli Siegel

 

 

American Realism to Pop Art

From American Realism to Pop Art: What’s Going On?
by Donita Ellison

“Years ago as an art student in Missouri, I saw no relation between the work I would spend hours doing in the studio and the facts of my life, which like most people’s, were often confusing….Today I am going to discuss some aspects of the work of four American artists, all realists who, in their individual ways, show that what is going on in art is a means of understanding the opposites in ourselves and the world we live in.”

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Bernini; or, Art & Life—What Do They Have to Do with Each Other? by Anthony Romeo, AIA, NCARB

“One of the artists I’ve come to love is the great Baroque sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini….The opposites of warmth and coolness, so central in the life and work of Bernini, bring up ethical questions which are crucial in every person’s life….In his art, he achieved an astonishingly beautiful relation of intensity and accuracy: he could make cool marble take on the subtlety and warmth of flesh.”

Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli and What Will Make You Happy
by Carrie Wilson

“About 1490  Botticelli painted this Annunciation scene, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum catalogue describes this small panel—it is only 9 3/8” by 14 3/8”—as ‘One of the jewels of fifteenth-century Italian art.’ As I thought about why I care for it so much, I came to see it makes a one of opposites on which our immediate and lasting happiness depends: the self separate and in relation, repose and energy, heaviness and lightness.”

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

How Can We Be Composed?: Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow
by Nancy Huntting

“I love this painting, Hunters in the Snow, by Pieter Bruegel, the great Flemish painter of the 16th century. Bruegel shows a vast, snow-covered landscape….With all this diversity and activity, surprisingly, a person feels composed looking at this painting—and in this talk I’ll try to show why.”

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder: Art Answers the Questions of Our Lives!
by Marcia Rackow

“One of the most popular artists of the 20th century, Alexander Calder revolutionized sculpture, added a new dimension to it—motion! He was, said Eli Siegel in his great lecture on sculpture, Weight As Lightness, ‘[one of] the people who just play topsy-turvy with the older notions of sculpture’….Calder’s work puts together joy and depth, lightness and heaviness in a way that makes for what people everywhere are yearning for.”

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

Chardin’s Soap Bubbles—and How I Saw the World Has Meaning
by Lore Mariano

“I learned how heaviness and lightness, the moment and what is lasting, are beautifully one in this painting, and that these opposites could be better composed in my life. I began to feel the whole world had meaning when I saw that opposites I had used to feel the world didn’t make sense were the same opposites that, seen as one, make for beauty.”

Egyptian Art

Can We Be Serious & Lighthearted at Once?—What We Can Learn from Egyptian Art! 
by Carrie Wilson

“In elementary school I loved studying the pyramids—the way they rose from that wide base to that pointed top, so grandly and mysteriously, out of the sands of Egypt….I didn’t know that the reason I loved the pyramids was because they did what I wanted to do—that what people for four thousand years and more have wanted, is expressed in their form.”

Gee’s Bend Quilts

Freedom and Order: The Quilt Masterpieces of Gee’s Bend
By Alice Bernstein

“The class I tell of took place at the Whitney Museum exhibition….These quilts, astounding in their variety and ingenuity, were made by descendants of slaves in rural Gee’s Bend, Alabama….Said Marcia Rackow, ‘There is a terrific sense of symmetry and order in the quilts, and also something very unexpected, free, even mischievous.’

 

Phillip Guston

Philip Guston: The Man, His Life, and His Work
by Dorothy Koppelman

“I have been greatly affected by the work of Philip Guston and I think his drawings, his paintings, and what he says about himself can be a means of understanding some of the largest questions artists, and all people have about ourselves….”

Winslow Homer

We Can Learn about Ourselves from Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream by Daniel Reiss

“The tumultuous sea and whitecaps, the sharks, broken boat and waterspout in the distance on the right—all have motion and turbulence. Yet the man seems strangely at ease as he rests on his elbow, looking out. Homer’s composition shows that both man and world are a relation of ‘repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir.’”

Robert Indiana

What Are You Looking For in Love? Robert Indiana’s LOVE
by Ken Kimmelman

“When, in the 1960’s, I first saw Robert Indiana’s Love, it really took me, as it did people across America — it was the design for the biggest selling US postage stamp ever issued and also the best-selling Christmas card ever put out by the Museum of Modern Art….”

Dorothea Lange

“What Does a Person Deserve?”: The Answer Found in a Great Photograph by Dorothea Lange by David M. Bernstein

“I think Dorothea Lange’s 1932 White Angel Breadline is one of the great photographs in this world. Its power, its beauty, its message, can be understood, felt more valuably, deeply through this principle of Aesthetic Realism…: ‘All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.’…”

 

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier & the Debate in People between Coolness & Warmth by Dale Laurin, RA

Presented at 2013 Conference on Architecture at the Athens Institute for Education & Research in Greece. “As I studied Le Corbusier’s work, I was affected to see that these opposites, so painfully divided in his life, are central in his architecture. Logic & control, which are on the side of coolness, are paramount in his Villa Savoye of 1929.”

Leonardo da Vinci

Is Art Really & Urgently About Life?: The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci by Marcia Rackow

“Art has been loved, treasured, and the museums these days are overflowing with people hoping to see beauty in this world—and be moved by it, as was seen in the show at the Met, Leonardo Da Vinci: Master Draftsman. But people haven’t known what Aesthetic Realism… explains—the urgency art has for our lives!”

Rene Magritte

The Surreal Is Everyday: The Art of René Magritte by Chaim Koppelman

“Men and women all over the world, including artists, will love Eli Siegel as I do for the absolutely new and crucial distinction he made between two kinds of imagination: one that is for the world and art, and the other that is against both….This…is the means for understanding what was central in the life and work of René Magritte…”

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse—or, The Technique of Art & the Questions of Life: What’s the Relation? by Marcia Rackow

“Henri Matisse, one of the great painters of the 20th century,­ shows we need to be affected by the world—to see things freshly in order to really express and be ourselves. He wrote: ‘The effort needed to see things without distortion takes something very like courage and this courage is essential to the artist….'”

Henri Matisse

The Joyous Drama of Outline and Color: Icarus by Henri Matisse by Marcia Rackow

“Looking at Icarus, one of the simplest and most moving plates in Jazz, we can see the subtlety of Matisse’s art, his love for color, and its meaning to him. His book Jazz, he said, ‘was the closest thing to an autobiography.'”

Claude Monet

Does Art Answer the Questions of Our Lives?
by Marcia Rackow

“In a landmark radio interview, Mr. Siegel described the great, new thing Monet accomplished, when he said: ‘Monet made the vague, the uncertain, the trembling triumphant. We have a tendency to give edges and tidiness to reality when, it could be felt, reality says: I am not that tidy, and I don’t have those glaring edges….'”

Berthe Morisot

The Technique of Art & the Questions of Life—What’s the Relation? by Marcia Rackow

“As I studied the work of Berthe Morisot I was taken by the energy and motion in it, at one with its form and repose. And I was moved to see how deeply these opposites affected every aspect of  her life….In the very technique of her paintings, she solves a question that has troubled people greatly, as it did me, and the artist herself: restlessness.

Pablo Picasso

Can We Have Pleasure & Self-Respect at Once?: Picasso’s Two Women Running on the Beach by Devorah Tarrow

“When I first saw Picasso’s Deux femmes courant sur la plage at the Museum of Modern Art, I thought it was wonderful, with those massive bodies in swift, ecstatic motion. I felt also there was great respect….”

Pablo Picasso

Art Opposes Injustice: Picasso’s Guernica—For Life by Dorothy Koppelman

“Picasso’s great mural has been seen as the symbolic painting of the horrors of war — its destruction, its cruelty. The beauty of the painting, however, has another source….”

Pablo Picasso

Picasso’s Dora Maar Seated—or, Full Face and Profile: How Do They Show the Self? by Meryl Simon

“It is likely Dora Maar could feel, as I did, like a different person looking at herself than she did looking at the world, but Picasso, as he depicts her simultaneously facing us, and looking within, shows a coherence among various attitudes in Dora Maar, and that is one reason I feel this portrait is so kind. She is presented both profile and full face. Then, one eye is shown looking inward….”

Pablo Picasso

Power and Tenderness in Men and in Picasso’s Minotauromachy by Chaim Koppelman

“Power and tenderness, opposites that so often fight in men, are made one beautifully, richly, movingly both in subject matter and technique in Picasso’s 1935 allegory, the Minotauromachy…”

Piero della Francesca

The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca: Their Meaning for People Now by Dorothy Koppelman

In English & Italian, as presented at the Piero della Francesco Foundation in Sansepolcro, Italy. “What is the large meaning of this work, The Queen of Sheba Adoring the Holy Wood? I see every detail of it to be centrally about two opposites—high and low, or pride and humility—opposites crucial in every person’s life…”

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock—and True and False Ambition: The Urgent Difference by Dorothy Koppelman

“I shall be talking tonight about my life, what a woman learned in Aesthetic Realism Consultations and about the famous 20th century American artist whose works, as one critic put it, ’embody the supreme level of pictorial ambition’…”

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948; or, How Can We Be Abandoned & Accurate at the Same Time? by Lore Mariano

“From the moment I first saw them, I felt Jackson Pollock’s action paintings had something I was yearning for—something deeply composing and satisfying to me. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that these paintings have something every person is looking for….”

Beatrix Potter

“Wonder and Matter-of-Fact” Meet; or, The Imagination of Beatrix Potter
 by Marcia Rackow

“For over a century, Beatrix Potter’s art, her wonderful imagination have affected children and adults all over the world. There’s hardly a person who doesn’t know The Tale of Peter Rabbit! Her pictures and stories while charming and delightful, are also deep — and they show something vital and thrilling about imagination which every person, every parent, every child needs to know….” [PDF version of reprint]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

What Can Art Teach Us about Love?: Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party by Carrie Wilson

“Every woman wants to feel proud of the way she sees a man. Every woman wants to feel that love is beautiful in the same way that she can feel, looking at a painting, “This is beautiful!” But we haven’t known what would make us able to…”

Rembrandt van Rijn 

Pride and Humility in Ourselves and in Rembrandt’s Last Self-Portrait
by Barbara Buehler

“I felt, as I have learned many people do, both superior and inferior, and I didn’t see there was any relation between the two. Then I came to see, through my study of Aesthetic Realism, that Rembrandt’s painting, in its technique, answered one of the largest questions of my life. In this painting, as he looks at himself, Rembrandt is both modest and proud, and we feel his humility is the same as his grandeur.”

Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair, and What I Learned about Rest and Motion in Myself by Anthony C. Romeo, RA

“In 1918, the architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld designed a chair that affected not only furniture design, but the history of architecture. Rietveld’s ‘Red and Blue’ chair is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and it is a chair I love…”

Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin; or, The Technique of Art & the Questions of Life—What’s the Relation? by Donita Ellison

“Every person has the question of how to make sense of ourselves as strong, powerful, and also considerate, kind. These opposites are dealt with beautifully in the work of Rodin in a way that makes for a large emotion of respect for reality, and can give us hope about our own individual confusions.”

John Singer Sargent

Sargent’s Madame X; or, Assertion and Retreat in Woman
by Lynette Abel

“In A Woman Is the Oneness of Aesthetic Opposites, Eli Siegel writes about 15 pairs of opposites in women. This is what he writes about Advancing: Recessive: ‘Towards something is in the feminine mind importantly….But how much retreat is in woman, too, the unseen sinking, the leaving for a previously chosen background.’ I think Sargent’s Madame X is an opportunity to study these opposites, which all women have…”

Joseph Mallord William Turner

Light and Dark, Hiding and Showing in Joseph Mallord William Turner
by Dorothy Koppelman

“Opposites as beginning as any for the visual arts are Light and Dark….The reality question of the luminous and hidden is crucial in the work and life of Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great English painter who lived from 1775 to 1851…”

Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles; or, The Outside World Is Friendly
by Dorothy Koppelman

“My whole life changed when I began to study Aesthetic Realism with Eli Siegel in 1942 and I learned that art was not to the side of life, but at the center of it. We can learn from the great art of the world what we are alive for: to like the world…”

Vincent Van Gogh

Can We Be Expansive and Contained Like Van Gogh’s Starry Night?
by Miriam Mondlin

“I first saw Van Gogh’s Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, and I kept going back to look at it again and again. I loved the intensity of the sky, with its tremendous energy and bright, swirling stars, yet the valley below with its snug houses seemed so peaceful. I thought it was beautiful….Technically, beautifully, this painting answers the central question of my life…”

Diego Velazquez

What Will Make Us Truly Proud of Ourselves? A Study in the Art of Diego Velazquez by Dorothy Koppelman

“I am going to talk about what I learned which has had such a tremendous effect on my work and myself. I shall also talk of the 17th century Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez whose study of objects and great paintings of the Spanish court put together those opposites without which, I have learned, there would be no art: pride and humility…”

Johannes Vermeer

Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher—and What Men and Women Are Hoping for in Marriage  by Julie and Robert Jensen

“Aesthetic Realism shows that the questions of marriage are aesthetic questions, answered in art. As we look at Jan Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, we will be showing how…”

Johannes Vermeer

What I Learned about Kindness: Looking at a Painting by Vermeer by Ruth Oron

“I will describe what I learned about kindness from the philosophy Aesthetic Realism….My consultants asked me: ‘Do you think in this painting, Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, Vermeer was kind?—was he kind to the objects in the room—say, the window? Was he thinking deeply about each object and their relation to each other?’ I was surprised, but I felt, Yes.”

Edouard Vuillard

Edouard Vuillard; or, How a Woman Wants to See and Be Seen by Dorothy Koppelman

“I am considering the work of Edouard Vuillard as a lesson in paint showing how deeply an artist has looked at women and their lives. The early paintings by Edouard Vuillard put together the opposites in every woman’s life—the intimate and the large, closeness and distance, thought and motion or energy and repose…”

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