Supreme Fiction

Brian Lehrer WNYC: James discusses the new Loft Law

Here is a discussion of the new Loft Law and its impact on artists living in the outer boroughs of New York. Comments here. My essay on the subject will appear in the summer 2010 issue of City Journal.

The Jacob Collins Interview

 

James writes:

He’s a figurehead of Classical Realism, a painter with anticipated exhibitions at Adelson Galleries, and the dean of his own art schools. He’s also the very accommodating subject of my September 2006 article in TNC called ’The new old school.’ Here is an interview I conducted with Collins in late Summer 2006 in anticipation of my article.

James Panero: What do you call your style of painting?

Collins: I would say Traditional Realist. That refers to the period that begins in the end of the Renaissance and goes to the end of the academic period. Or maybe Classical Realist, which is an interesting label that was coined about thirty-five years ago. It’s a useful word because it’s a paradox historically. The classicists and the realists were very opposed to one another 150 years ago. But the two of them could have constituted the heart of the dialectical mode in traditional painting, especially in pre-modern painting. So I think Classical Realist works. In fact, the Classical Tradition may be as good as a label as any.

JP: In part you are following in the tradition of the French academy.

C: Absolutely. The influence is very strong. I have a lot of respect for French academic painting. One of the arguments that I make is even if 19th century French painting is not a perfect example of Classical painting, it is at least the most recent case of it; it’s where Classical painting was before the great tradition began to fall apart. It’s something we can connect to most easily because it’s not very far away temporally; it’s only a teacher’s teacher’s teacher, and then we’re right back into the nineteenth century. So the message of French art and the ideas underlying their message are part of the cultural memory.

JP: And at the same time, you’re not a history painter. You’re empirical, in the model of Thomas Eakins.

C: That American tradition is a very strong influence on me. Eakins, the Hudson river painters; then the American painters who came after this: the Luminist painters, and the Tonalists—these art forms are both empirical and aesthetic and not narrative at all. I think there is something very American about that.

JP: Do you see what you’re doing then as more American, or rather, as following in the French model. How do you position your art in terms of national style?

C: Well for one thing, it’s a very American phenomenon. There are schools of traditional painting in Europe, but Americans are running most of them. I think this has to do with the fact that after the war, New York City took over the world as the center of art. Maybe in some ways, the Americans feel confident, or are less worried about falling behind in the art scene; maybe the Europeans are still trying to catch up. Personally, I think its time to move forward, and I don’t see post-war modernism and post-modernism as moving forward. I’m very happy to move on.

JP: How does your art relate to the tradition of modernism: specifically, what you saw growing up in New York? Does your art relate at all to postmodernism?

C: On some levels, I’m sympathetic with parts of the modern program, especially when you compare it to postmodernism. I’m very fond of the modernists’ idea of the art object as a powerful thing: that art is transformative to both the artist and the viewer, that art experiences could cause emotion. One of the negative things about postmodernism is that it’s just smart-ass, and that’s not something I’m interested in. It’s not overtly, or purely political, but it makes a smart political stance that’s not about the intrinsic quality of the art.

I think that’s one of the ways in which you can trace the history of postmodernism—that is to say, in terms of the sacrifices it made in the quality of the art work. I believe in a traditionalist approach to art. Even the modernists valued the art object in itself. One of the misfortunes with postmodernism is a loss of qualitative value.

So I grew up with those influences and with the idea of art being magical, or artists having some mysterious talents. I love that idea—belief in the art object, in itself—the aesthetic of the thing—even after so much was desecrated and people stopped caring about the art object. And certainly in the 1950s the New York artists cherished the idea of the art object, which was the influence of an earlier period.

JP: Realism has come to be associated, in the modernist view at least, with kitsch, or low art illustration. It’s not tough minded. Have you encountered such reaction to your work?

C: I encountered that, though I had some very wonderful instructors who would have called themselves modernists. One of the things I noticed when I was an art student was that a lot of artists or young art students were made to feel very culturally insecure—even in a socially or socio-economically way. In light of this, they tried to pursue a kind of art, like modernism, that seemed to push forward.

Traditional art was, essentially, the art of provincials or hicks, not intellectual or significant. I heard a lot of that and I had trouble with it, but it didn’t effect me very much. I guess I was confident that I was trying to become an traditional artist, despite the mainstream view of traditional art. And also, I didn’t feel like I was anybody’s intellectual inferior because of the fact that I wanted to draw and paint classical art.

JP: How did your history studies at Columbia university relate to your aesthetic development?

C: I was already committed from an early age, 14 or 15, to doing exactly what I’ve always been doing: art. But when I went to Columbia, I didn’t know about other people who were interested in traditional art like me. Later on, I found a lot of wonderful people who were. When I considered going to an art school for college, I didn’t really know, but my assumption was that they would be running either a modernist program, or an illustration program; something in me didn’t really want to do either of those.

So I studied history, but I wasn’t a deeply committed historian.

JP: You found your direction before your college years.

C: Right, though college probably influenced more than I’d like to admit. But I wanted to do art and I had already done a couple of things that got me very excited about doing art—some art programs in my summers off from college. I also took time off in the middle of college to go to Europe.

JP: At what age did you start to paint in the manner that you paint now?

C: It was basically what I was trying to do in high school. I wasn’t good at it, but I was trying to do it. I spent an awful lot of time copying. I copied, as a kid in my room, artists like Michelangelo, and others. I gradually got better, and I had teachers when I was young who were good, so I received good direction. It was right after college, in the very late 1980s, that I started to meet up with other artists. That’s when I started to discover that they, too, were doing this kind of art that related to the traditional art forms.

JP: Why is the nude so central in your form of Classical art?

C: I think the nude is central because it is at the core of the Classical tradition. In this regard, the Humanist tradition and the Classical tradition go together. When you go to 5th century Greece, you see the beginning of Classical Humanism. The human figure in the aesthetic center. That’s the crucible of it all, and even the architects I know will say that the architecture back then is Humanist Classicism. The Renaissance was the original return to the Classical Tradition. The renaissance artists focused on the human figure—and since there is now a return to Classical Humanism, the nude is naturally central.

One of the definitions of art is ‘us representing ourselves,’ and in a broader sense that’s what’s happening in art right now. That’s what you know about painting when you look at Egyptian art; they’re representing themselves. When you think about Renaissance painting, they’re representing their values and their proportions, from the way they dress, to the way they hold their head, to the way they look with their eyes; it’s who they are, it’s who they wish they were. And as we are now engaged in another form of this tradition, we try to find something in the art, maybe some kind of picture of ourselves.

JP: Is there something about our culture today that would necessitate your kind of investigation?

C: I’m not sure that I have a coherent philosophy that could address that question. But it seems that, in the twentieth century, a lot of energy went into dismantling traditional art forms. I don’t particularly love that. Whether it was good or bad, this spirit has definitely wound down. So much of the energy of Modernism came from the electricity of breaking the pieces of the art object apart. I’m certainly not claiming that there are no pieces, but that now, in Traditionalism, it’s about putting the pieces back together.

JP: Are you part of a movement?

C: I would say yes, When I was a kid, I felt like I was isolated in my pursuit of traditional art forms; and this despite the fact that I am a social person and I do love the idea of sharing and doing things together. There’s a certain amount of regret that I experienced when I was launching into a career where I was pretty isolated: I was doing Traditional art in the 1980s, not postmodern art with references to the past. I really wanted to make a claim, and gradually, one by one, I found other people who were interested in the same thing—in the beginning I was quite amazed and excited to find another person who also wanted to draw a figure with a coherent structure, or to learn how to put together a painting with paint and glaze. It was all a total mystery when I started. Little by little, I started randomly bumping into other people, and there was no planning in it at all—especially when I began teaching, I started finding people in very mysterious ways: people popped up and showed up at the door. I was very inspired. I found that I was meeting a whole lot of people who had the same strong desire for Traditionalism as me.

JP: Why did you found two new schools of art? Why teach and paint; why not just paint?

When I was a kid, I looked at art and I recognized that all of the artists that were really great came out of dense little worlds of artists. They all evolved in and thrived in communities where there were piles and piles of artists who often all lived within blocks of each other. And this is true for the Spanish school, for those in Rome, in Paris, in Amsterdam, and in the New York of 1880s. I realized that all the artists I really loved were friends with other people who were important in the art world. I recognized that I wasn’t going to be who I really wanted to be without help—and I was really ambitious, I wanted to be a great artist. I just looked at it historically and empirically and realized it wasn’t going to happen all by myself. Nobody gets it all by themselves. That inspired me to a great extent to start building the community that I wished I had been born into. I knew I needed to be among like-minded peers; to share and compete, to take turns raising the bar. I came across some artists with similar goals, but I didn’t find that energy we associate with the historical schools. So I started teaching and trying to build a scene. I felt like I was young enough, I was in my 20s, to be a student in my school as well as the teacher. If I was going to inherit the place in the art scene that I wanted, I should be starting at it myself by teaching. It’s not just like I have been teaching other people, these really gifted artists have taught me as much as I have given them.

Right now, there are people in my studio who are really gifted and hard working and are trying to be better than me. I don’t want to be left behind by this truck; I keep on getting pushed along by it. In the other schools of this larger world, I see how it happens from the outside. A lot of people have the insight to develop skills and techniques—they’re all drafting off of each other.

JP: How has the public reception been for Realist art?

C: It’s very interesting, I didn’t expect there to be very much public reception to it, and gradually all the little pieces are starting to come together; more artists keep showing up, training each other, inspiring each other to get better; more galleries start catching on and wanting to be involved; more collectors start to be curious about it, and the more collectors there are, the more respect the artists get.

For quite a while when I was starting out, most of the market in New York was for Modern art. The market for Classically oriented Realism was out of town—and it was mostly in galleries out in California and around the middle of the country. In New York, there seemed to be an anti-Traditionalism with respect to art. Part of Modernism, from the beginning, has been anti-traditionalist; in fact one of its defining factors. Because New York was historically coming out of a commitment to modernism, it was hard for New York galleries to come around and embrace really traditional art. But now it’s changing, it’s changing fast. The galleries are really recognizing the passions of the artists and the interests of the collectors.

JP: What are some of the gallery names where we might be able to see this art?

C: One of the galleries is a gallery I’m with: Hirschl and Adler. It’s exciting that they’ve made a commitment in the last 5 or 10 years to get behind this kind of art, which is important because they’re a blue-chip gallery.

The John Pence Gallery shows this kind of art, you see it at Forum Gallery, Eleanor Ettinger, Arcadia, and Spanierman. More and more galleries of all different types are showing and selling the artists that have been moving in this direction.

There’s a lot of Realism at the Chelsea galleries too, but most of it verges on Post-Modernism because the art seems be to kidding; it does not have the desire to be serious. Its not making a go at the Classical tradition.

JP: So if you were to make a sales pitch for your new school, would you tell artists that you could be a success by pursuing traditional art?

C: I’ve been interviewing students for years. The one thing that I tell them is that it’s crazy. They’re often very capable and talented people who could do all kinds of other things, and they would be guaranteed success, and would be able to make mortgage payments and raise a family, so they should probably not do traditional art. But if they are going to do it—and this is not one hundred percent true, but it’s mostly true—the people who get really good at it, do well and sell their work. It’s not some sort of art world crapshoot where you have to have an angle and know the right people, though there is some of that. There are people who get spectacularly good at painting too; these are the people who are subtle and aesthetic and somehow manage to speak in their own voice. Traditional art has worked, and so far it’s been working, and it may be that fashion dumps us off to die, but there’s a growing response for the works to get better. It feels like Traditional Realism is a little more on solid ground these days.

'Conservative Wunderkind' Writes for 'Conceited Cultural Troglodytes'

From "Magazine Rack" by Grant Mandarino, Artnet.com:

Even though the conceited cultural troglodytes at The New Criterion are pretty much irrelevant -- they hate art so much, why are they even in the business? -- it’s good to check in occasionally just to see what they’ve got going. The staunchly conservative "review of the arts and intellectual life" was launched in 1982 by art critic Hilton Kramer after he left the New York Times in disgust at the appalling state of criticism then in practice -- you know, all that multicultural hogwash. Kramer edits the magazine in collaboration with Roger Kimball, an unrepentant toff who reviews art for The National Review and heads Encounter Books, publisher of such fine titles as How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security, and In Praise of Prejudice.

The February’s glowing panegyric for Irving Kristol, "godfather of modern conservatism," is no great surprise. Love is blind, after all. More surprising for a journal otherwise devoted to limited government and free markets is a review of the latest biography of Ayn Rand that compares this capitalist paragon to Stalin. Rand is described as a paranoid megalomaniac whose verbose faux-philosophic novels are as enjoyable and intellectually stimulating as eating your own face off (I’m paraphrasing). For once I agree with a New Criterion author, but given that the article has drawn over 24 pages of reader responses on the magazine website, plenty of Rand loyalists remain ever ready to defend their mad, dead queen.

As for the art reviews, they’re a mixed bag. Wall Street Journal art critic Karen Wilkin nitpicks her way through an exhibition of works by Cézanne, Picasso and Mondrian on view at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, while painter and professor Mario Naves unloads his spleen on Gabriel Orozco, whose work is of course the subject of a major retrospective at MoMA right now. Nitpickery and insults, typically at tedious length and generally without intelligence or wit, this is the right wing’s idea of "art criticism." Showing a bit more promise is conservative wunderkind James Panero’s brief visit to the burgeoning art scene in Bushwick, Brooklyn (where "pigeon coops are common. . . and birds often circle above the rooftops"), but alas, although nice, the prose is a bit prosaic.

The artist Gabriele Evertz: a documentary

Last June I wrote about the painter Gabrielle Evertz and the legacy of Optical Art. The filmmaker Michael Feldman, who created the wonderful segment on Thornton Willis, now has a new documentary on this artist, with some additional commentary by me.

Gabriele Evertz Paints a Color Study from Michael Feldman on Vimeo.

'Criterion for Success'

James writes:

A 2009 senior at Trinity School, George Alpert, has written a profile of me for a tricentenary publication produced by the school. I could not have said it better myself. Click the first two pages below for the complete article.

The Culture Crash on WNYC

James writes:

On August 31 I discussed my article "The Culture Crash: How Risky Investments Have Endangered New York's Leading Arts Institutions" on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Here is the audio recording and below is a video of my studio appearance.

I encourage you to listen in and posts your comments about the broadcast on the show's website here. Let's keep the discussion going. Since I am in the process of writing a short online follow-up article for City Journal, your comments are all the more appreciated.

Some Like It Haute

PSYCOLOGY TODAY
May-June 2009

'Some Like it Haute'
by Adelle Waldman

Field Guide to the Snob: Some Like It Haute

by Adelle Waldman

When James Panero was 13, he decorated his room to resemble his conception of an English gentlemen's club—a writing table with an ink blotter, old nautical prints for the walls, club chairs, dark striped wallpaper, a working gramophone, and leather-bound classics.

The next year, when his private school eliminated its dress code, Panero continued to wear a jacket and tie—an outfit he favors to this day. "I don't own jeans," says Panero. "I like pants with creases."

In college, Panero briefly smoked a pipe. He majored in classics, reflecting his long-standing love of Latin. Now 33, he's an art critic in Manhattan and managing editor of The New Criterion, a self-consciously highbrow journal devoted to the arts and intellectual life. When he's not working or taking in museums and galleries in Manhattan, Panero spends weekends with his wife in the country.

Given his lofty tastes, Panero has long been accused of being a snob. "Even my parents call me a snob," he says. Yet he demurs. "A snob is someone who is a social climber," he says. "I am not that."

Psychologists agree: Snobbery is not a question of tastes—no matter how old-fashioned or expensive. What makes someone a snob is the tendency to look down on others and treat them with condescension, says Leon Seltzer, a clinical psychologist in Del Mar, California.

"Snobbery comes from the inside out; it's about how you view other people," Seltzer says. It's one thing to spend your Saturdays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, quite another to look down on the people at the multiplex around the corner.

At its most extreme, snobbery can be a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder, a condition marked by grandiosity, a need for admiration, and a preoccupation with power and prestige. But unlike the garden-variety snob, narcissists have impaired relationships because they're unable to enter anyone else's world.

Panero's rarefied aesthetic preferences fall in line with a bygone societal upper crust—the kind of world in which Edith Wharton characters lived. But his love of bespoke suits doesn't make him a snob. After all, he doesn't disdain people who buy off the rack. What it makes him is a member of an elite, a small group with more knowledge or talent than others.

"Snobs are actively malevolent, albeit usually in minor ways," explains David Kamp, author of four books about different types of snobbery, the most recent of which is The Wine Snob's Dictionary. Think the goateed guy at the video store who scorns customers for renting the latest romantic comedy or the sommelier who snickers at your choice of wine.

Scorn Makes the Snob

What drives someone to treat others as inferior? Conventional wisdom holds that overtly snobbish behavior is born of insecurity. That is, that goateed video clerk with the beret feels bad about himself, so he derides patrons' taste in movies to make himself feel culturally superior.

But research shows that snobs have no doubts about themselves; they genuinely believe they're better than others, says John Mayer, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire. Far from being insecure, they have higher self-esteem than others—though they're unusually sensitive to criticism and rejection.

Snobbery may also be tied to valuing hierarchy and a drive to belong to the "better" group, which is distinguished from hoi polloi. People who behave snobbishly, says Ilan Shrira, a psychologist at the University of Florida, may exhibit "high social dominance orientation"—a belief that some groups of people are innately superior to others and should therefore hold more power in society. Snobs are more likely to prefer a stratified class system to an egalitarian one that allows for greater social mobility, explains Shrira. People who are snobby do not like to rub elbows with those they believe are their inferiors, he says.

Genetics may play a role. Traits such as intelligence are heritable. But the development of taste and aesthetic interests is also influenced by parents, who provide the tools and inspiration that may lead to exceptional knowledge and skill. And though being superior isn't the same as acting superior, it can be a first step toward condescension.

There may be a genetic predisposition toward snobbish behavior itself, but "one's parents could also model that behavior, and it could easily be picked up by osmosis by the child," says Seltzer. "Nature works through nurture."

The Seinfeld Effect

Taken too far, snobbery can be isolating and lead to what Shrira calls the "Seinfeld effect," referring to the television character's tendency to latch on to any possible reason to break up with someone. "The problem arises when you're unable to form satisfying relationships or achieve other goals," he says. Someone who's unable to relate to people unless they share identical taste in books, film, music, wine, and art may have a hard time finding a partner who meets their exacting qualifications.

Shared tastes, however, can enhance relationships. Panero feels it would have been impossible to become involved with a woman whose taste in art he found objectionable. A mate needn't have the exact same judgments, he says, but an affinity for certain artists—namely trendy, postmodern ones—would be a deal-breaker. Luckily, he married a woman whose taste he admires. "We share a sensibility," he says.

Panero doesn't lose sleep over the people who mistake him for affected. He probably wouldn't like them any more than they like him, he says. "I've always been this way."—Adelle Waldman

An evening with Thornton Willis

James writes: 

This Monday evening I will be leading a small group of young New Criterion supporters on a studio tour with Thornton Willis. The ability to visit the working studio of an excellent abstract painter like Willis is a great perk of my job. It will be a pleasure for me to share it with others. There's very limited space, but if you would like to join our tour, please contact Callie Siskel, assistant editor, at 212-247-6980.

Thornton's latest exhibition is now on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea. I've written the catalogue essay for the show. You can read it here.

The young director Michael Feldman has also directed a top-rate video profile of the artist featuring additional commentary by me. Check it out.

 

A profile of the abstract painter Thornton Willis from James Panero on Vimeo.

NPR: James Panero on Classical Realism