Searching for Bouguereau

[Peter Dransfield]

Originally Posted by Marvin Mattelson

You presume? Quite the compelling argument! Peter do you actually believe that having never heard of something is reasonable cause for assuming it's insignificance? How could any artist, unknown to you, be any good, let alone great? I have no response.

I think this discussion has gotten to the point of pointlessness. Christy, you can now go back to work.

The Boston School is marginal outside of the US Marvin as I think you know. As a point of fact it was contemporary more less with groups who in my opinion were doing far more interesting work including the Vienna Secession. That does not mean that they do not merit interest since they were virtually the only inheritors of the French Academy style but most artists did not reject modernism in the way that they did.

In terms of my own country I find the work of the Euston Road school, Victor Pasmore, Coldstream and Rogers more stimulating. Different traditions and matters of Taste I know Marvin but what is a guy to do?

As far as allegory goes would anyone care to argue that B is more profound or pictorially interesting than Klimt? I would be very happy to compare selected works of B with the University murals or the Beethovan Freize.

[Marvin Mattelson]

Originally Posted by Peter Dransfield

From the 15th-19th centuries perhaps but for several thousands of years before and for the last 130 years no.

No! Said with such certainty. Have you polled every living artist working today? I guess early 20th Century artists such as William McGregor Paxton, Edmund Tarbell, Joseph Rodefer DeCamp, Pietro Annigoni, and John Koch didn't really exist. You continue to make ridiculous broad sweeping assumptions, parroting the old party line. If you repeat it enough will it actually come true?

I do accept the fact that the moderns and post moderns existed with their own set of goals. I don't dismiss the fact that the works they created have some marginal merit, but to me, they are akin to assignments I had done in my color and design class and I don't take them too seriously. As far as finding great and fulfilling masterpieces, I think not.

Again, I state all my conclusions as mine alone and they are truths for just me. I wouldn't be so naive to think that by blasting my point of view, just for the sake of blasting it, it becomes the ultimate truth for everyone. And If my thinking goes against the common accepted contemporary 'truths' regarding what and what isn't great ART, so much the better. Ugly, muddy, grotesque, heavy handed, simplistic, shocking, confrontational, conceptual, repetitious and formulaic pap just don't float my boat.