The Mani Poem

Anyone can contribute to this poem. I will post the first verse.

1. Go far away, Mani Or I'll spank your fanny Spank it so hard that you won't have any.

Intolerance rules Where Dilettante drools He constantly loses his internet duels.

Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer

Mani the martyr Who realizes that artists are getting dumber and not smarter Who is crucified for his passion Defending talented artists whose work is merely out of fashion

Jane

You fail to note that Mani posts over and over for no reason except to attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of artists he is defending. I am not following Mani or you, for that matter, doing this. Mani is doing this. Someone missed the course on having a brain at cooper-union.

Here's one and some mentions and I'll follow it up with more. You can see B'S work and some of the artists mentioned below in hi-rez at http://www.artrenewal.org/

I saw the Bouguereau show in Montreal many years ago. It was among the finest I have ever seen. When I visited Paris in the 70's he was not to be seen. This show had his greatest large pieces. They are unique, entirely original, and technically unmatched by anybody.

What you see of B's work on the web or in books is a mere indication of the quality of his work. Unfortunately looking at detail is out of fashion. If books or the net showed detail one would get some sense of the painterly quality in his and much of the best 19th cent. work.

The best of B. is in his amazing detail. Nobody, and this can only be seen in the original, painted flesh like B. Not Rubens, Ingres, David, Raphael, or any 19 cent. academician, etc..

Look at his masterly drawings or the preliminary studies for his paintings (many are pure impressionism) Compare them to Picasso and Matisse.

The student of modern art learns to rant about the awfulness of B. and 19th cent academic art by seeing a slide and listening to some utter nonsense about academic evil and the lurking dangers of kitsch in politically correct art history courses. Few can name ten academic painters or have ever seen any of their work. About all they learn is that it was evil and the Impressionists revolted against it and held separate shows. Little known to artzy fartzies is that many academics also took up Impressionism and exhibited it in the in the salons.

As I indicate in my book, the present view of nineteenth cent. art history carefully avoids mentioning about 98% of its artists. It is as if a history of the 20th century contained one paragraph each about Hitler and Stalin and only got into detail about America's triumphs over communism.

It is no wonder Picasso and Matisse hated B. By the way a load of Academic paintings were found among Picasso's art collection. Dali also owned a B. and admired the finest of 19th cent. technique.

There are hundreds of very fine Academic painters. Among the best are Gerome, Bonheur, Meissonier, Bargue. Vibert. Detaille, Fortuney. There are so many more. They are hidden away and are as hard to find as originals by Norman Rockwell or Leyendecker's are in any museum. The artzy fartzy curators of most major museums keep these artists out of eyes reach lest the viewer stray from Modern Academic Art or Impressionism.

B. is a kind of immortal zombie of modern art. He keeps popping up. Book covers, post cards, puzzles, posters, etc.; (On stuff that sells) and an occasional a well attended show. He is popular without a well known name. His paintings haven't earned a Modern critic's word in his favor. They don't need one.

Tired of Modern Art? check

I wrote a bit before but check out Tamara's work. Here's is a good example of artwork which is familiar while the artist's name is unfamiliar. One can see 2 originals at the Royal Ontario Museums at the Art Deco exhibit. It is interesting to stand and watch viewers take careful notice of an artist I'm sure most have never heard and see how fast they bypass Picasso and Leger. Ideas and beautiful technique don't need fashionable Artspeak to attract the viewer.
http://www.goodart.org/artoftdl.htm

'Tamara deLempicka is perhaps the most famous painter of the art deco period. She was born in Poland and moved to Russia where she lived until the Bolsheviks arrested her husband during the Russian revolution. She secured his release and they fled to Paris. there she learned to paint, enrolling at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere and studying privately. She was quite a prolific artist (in part facilitated by her spare simple style) and was much sought after as a portrait artist. If you are interested in learning more about Tamara deLempicka I highly recommend Passion by Design by her daughter, Kizette deLempicka-Foxhall.'

Modern art at its best!

Tired of Modern Art? check

This is true, and far more appealing to me than Boug (not that he's modern). She's one of the more under-appreciated artists of the last century, IMO.

Taschen has a reasonably priced book of her work by Gilles Neret.

They are listed on his website. The presentation [of his ideals] on the newsgroup is a little harsh sometimes but they are my values that he is defending.

Totally ironic that you would have to break out with this after faulting Mani for attacking.

Thanks for the link Mani. I've forgotten her name and it came at the right moment. At the oil painting forum of WetCanvas we'll be doing a so called 'Master of the Month' (starting at January 2004 with Zorn) in which we'll copy a selected painting of a master to collectively study the technique (sounds like a pretty good idea to me). I've added her name to the suggestions and I think she has a good chance.

Just for fun, here's the list of suggestions so far :

Alma-Tadema Beaux Botticelli Bouguereau Caravaggio Dali van Dyck Dürer El Greco Fechin Holbein Hopper Ingres Leighton Lempicka Manet Matisse Morisot Picasso Rembrandt Rosetti Rubens Sargent Schmid Serow Sorolla Titian Velasquez Waterhouse Weistling Zorn

Could be interesting, at least 90% is worth studying IMO

I don't agree. Sprinters cannot outrun a car but still people pay to watch them run. This is all about how good people can perform, not how much better technology is.

She's popular with the Asian art-factory copy centers; most of them offer Lempicka pieces. 'Adam and Eve' and 'Andromeda' are common ones. It appears her work is somewhat of a challenge to copy effectively; when they post pictures of their actual works for sale rather than images of the original, it's invariably a blunt and heavy-handed imitation. Maybe not a surprise, given the assembly-line aspect.

A friend of mine came back from Thailand with a copy of a Kandinsky piece that was very nicely done, but copies of abstracts are not so obvious unless held up next to the original.