PERSONALITIES,PROFILES AND PRODUCTS (in reference to Ansell Adams, Paul Caponigro ,George

Rouault and Winslow Homer)

IT seems to me that it has taken me a very long time to come to the fairly secure conclusion that people DO what
they ARE ( or strive to become what they think they should be) . In fact, I have learned to trust some of the very earliest
statements made by people whom I may have just met. They make statements about themselves and their intent
toward me. Within the first two or three sentences they often tell me exactly what I should expect of their behavior.
If they tell me they will hurt me…they do, that they will steel, they do, that they are devoted to me, they are…
although there haven’t been too many of those.

Now, that information they impart, may not be a known (to them) threat and it may be couched in inoffensive
phrases, but the information is there none the less….and it probably is “information” rather than an expression of
intent. It may be, in some fashion, the outspoken recognition of a destiny based on their quite nearly instantaneous
recognition of certain functioning interrelationships over which, in their conscious lives, they have no power to alter,
or, to put it another way: the physical entities that stand before us and seem to speak to us are only mouthpieces
for unincarnated entities.

This, it seems to me, is related to what a badly behaving musicologist once said to me in defense, or so I thought at the
time, of a newly arrived colleague who was proving to be a most shockingly and devastatingly dishonest man. This
new colleague, Marvin Montvel-Cohen, by name, had presented himself as an arts administrator and I, naïve me,
had believed him. Well, if one considers that the negative of a photograph is still the photograph of the subject then
Marvin had not lied about his administrative interests. But I hadn’t known he had presented his negative side until
he and another malicious individual had maneuvered me out of the way.

For the twenty years he had been employed by the University of Guam he did administrate aspects of the arts
program to benefit his own special interests not those of the ideals of educators. A comment by one of his Ph.D.
advisors very carefully outlined the same evaluation. He must have been an excellent role model, however, for his
son, Evan, has been implicated in millions of dollars worth of deceit even of charitable organizations such as at
Gloria Wise Boys’ and Girls’ club in New York and of other groups in Hawaii. The musicologist. Kennedy, had told me
two things, the first was that the Jews contributed more to culture than anyone else and that creative people did not
lie.

It was this last statement which, consistent with what I years and when I had the opportunity to test the idea in a
controlled experiment, I did so. At the time I didn’t question musicologist Kennedy about it because the nature of
the moment prescribed that I was to be merely informed, not a participant in a conversation with full democratic
rights. Besides, there are moments when listening to another speak you actually do learn more than if you try to
reason with them for their words are not deliberately chosen but are snatched out of the blue in a frantic moment of
haste to protect an uncertain flank.

After I had moved my professional activities to the University of Northern Iowa I tested this hypothesis that creative
people did not lie and, surprisingly, found that it was true. Fortunately, the study also provided me with some other
relationships that helped to rationalize that discovery mentioned above about involuntary comments seeming to be
messages from some ethereal source, remained in my consciousness for several more.

Basically, it amounts to this: anyone working with a medium, whether it be paint, sounds, rock, or fabric must
honestly respond to the characteristic of that material as well as to respond to their own responses. Such a
situation is a highly charged, complicated, eternally introspective and questioning process and it is the real subject
matter of art criticism…and tricky.

When creative efforts fail to achieve that level of honesty the failed work stands as a testimony to the inadequacy,
in some fashion, of the worker. That is why Leo Steinberg could say what he is reported to have said about the work
of Paul Brach which much of the rest of the world had nominally accepted as that of a contributing genius. When
asked that Brach’s work exhibited Steinberg responded “the invisibility of an encompassing, undifferentiated
homogeneity." I must confess to a thorough enjoyment of Steinberg’s use of words.

In short, one’s creative works do reveal who we are, what we are thinking, and how we editorialize the reality we
perceive.

When symbols, words or signs were a part of the general intellectual commerce there was no problem as, for
example, there seems to be no problem in most vehicular drivers from understanding a road side sign which shows
a curved arrow and eventually other road side signs are added to the enlarging vocabulary, but show a Picasso or a
Monet to the same driver and, I suspect, there may be a problem.And it may be that this realization explains how
someone, like Maurice Dixon, could both paint and then exhibit a work such at this one. Here it becomes an
objective case in point.

Maurice Dixon, “Curve at Comizozo”

That, however, is my explanation and it is not based on any knowledge about what the artist may have had in
mind. I just hope he had something like that in mind rather than something else even less worthy.

For the purposes of this study I have selected three artists who, it would seem, have some substantial comments
to make about how they relate to their environmental experiences.

portrait of Ansel Adams

Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son
of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house
set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906
threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the
financial panic of 1907, and Adams's father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup.
This description provides, it seems to me, excellent biographical material to explain the describable characteristics of Adams
work, “grand” “imposing”, “cumulative in detail” and may demonstrate how Ansell succeeded where his father failed.
One question might certainly be, if this theory is correct, that, in Adams’s case, does the photographer’s success in
“conquering” a natural reality adequately compensate the father for his material loss?
John Szarkowski, Photographer & Curator: The reason that he is as important to us as I think he is is because he was a good artist, and on his best days he was a terrific artist, and
he found some way to put together those little fragments of the world in a way that transformed them into a picture. In the same way that, you know, a poet uses the same dictionaries
that the rest of us do. All the words are in there...all the words in the poem are there, they're in alphabetical order so you can find them ... and it's just a matter of taking a few of them
and putting them in the right order, and that's all there is to it. And so why is it that some lines of poetry, some sentences grasp us, you know, grip us, and we think, "That's, that's
right, that's true, whatever, I don't know quite what that means, but whatever it means it's true." And a good picture does something like that. ... the best of Ansell's ....are part of our
memory, part of our sense of what a picture might be made out of, what it might look like and what it might ultimately be about, which is the part we can't explain.

Personally, I need John Szarkowski to explain in rather some details what he means by “good artist” and “terrific artist” but when he states that “he found some way to put together
those little fragments of the world in a way that transformed them into a picture.” However, while that statement means something to me I cannot be certain that it means the same
thing to Szarkowski. In short, I can’t be certain I “get the picture” Szarkowski is taking about When Szarkowski goes on to further elaborate and uses the actions of poets as an
example he adds a dash of confusion for poets, I had thought, used a word and then, somehow, in its context, it got tweaked, For example, when Wilfred Owen in lamenting the deaths
of youths in WWI asks the question “Was it for this that clay grew tall?” I see no “tweaking” of this nature in the work of Ansel Adams. Rather, I see a great deal of enumeration, item
added to item, to item to item until, at the end, we have such an accumulation of detail upon detail that the sheer volume of material accumulation is awesome. It is not unlike that of a
miser counting his coins of gold, singly they have importance, together they represent great wealth indeed.

But herein lies, I think, the difference between Adams and Caponigro who does tweak images as poets tweak
words. Considering this matter from yet another point of view, would Ansel Adams not have photographed
the way he did had his father no lost his fortune? To what extent do our priorities of values determine
what we do with an expressive medium?
Born in Boston in 1932, Paul Caponigro is renowned as one of America’s most significant master photographers.
When he was thirteen, he began to explore the world around him with his camera and subsequently sustained a
career spanning nearly fifty years. He is currently regarded as one of America’s foremost landscape photographers.

Acclaimed for his spiritually moving images of Stonehenge and other Celtic megaliths of England and Ireland,
Caponigro has more recently photographed the temples, shrines and sacred gardens of Japan. Caponigro also
inspires viewers with glimpses of deep, mystical woodland of his New England haunts.

photo bY Ted Orland

Frost on Window Pane…Paul Caponigro

Perhaps of all Paul’s images this one of the frosted glass, more than any other, brings to mind one of the more
lasting memories of my childhood when I would lie in bed in the morning as I slowly got my wits together and gaze
at the window pane which, before we could afford storm windows, often in the winter would be covered with the
frost trails of my breath…an objectification of my other life as a dreamer and a reminder that I was leaving one
existence to begin another with a whole new set of rules. An existence, however, somewhat related to the one
where, in the distress of childhood fever, I would imagine vast landscapes where there were only the folds of my
bed blankets.
Paul and I did not know each other in Boston and Caponigro and I only rarely talked when we lived in Santa Fe and
never at length. What I recall of those very infrequent moments was that there was some sort of occult, but
mutually shared understanding thatwe were, somehow, very close…intimate even His responses to New England,
where, I too, was raised , may have been profoundly influenced by the attitudes of the poet Robert Frost who,
perhaps, spiritually forming a third part of a creative triumvirate, saw comforting reassurances and intriguing
developments in nature’s variations. In the suburbs of Boston at that time the various ethnics groups were not
seriously separated so that the Anglo/Scandinavian neighborhood might well have an Italian or two family scattered
here and there and the few close friends I had throughout my school career were Italian, Campobasso, Corsetti,
Ardolino. Had I known at that time that early in my genealogical chart there were some Italian names I may have
treated the matter more seriously than I did later when, as it turned out, one family of cousins were named
Montescaglioso, after the locale, and I am still very much amused by the musicality of those syllables. Judging from
Caponigro’s subject matter and his treatment of it I would assume that he and I, at that time, would have had some
sensitivities in common. Of course, such a judgment is highly subjective and gets its conviction from the richness of
the information the choice carries to the observer just as the phrase in Frosts’ poem “In A Yellow Wood”, “and I
chose the one less traveled by” speaks so eloquently of personal needs.

In Adams, reality is what it seems. In Caponigro reality is in the magic wish like Merlin appearing before Arthur.

But as we draw up a short list of qualities Caponigro seems to respond to we see the following: primarily a
patterning of surface qualities not associated with what might be considered the primary subject matter and
tending to gently veil that primary subject matter as, perhaps, a bride might be veiled on her wedding day…
obscuring an anticipated beauty. And that anticipated beauty being diverted from the subject of anticipation to that
which is performing the obscuring. This is a subtle, but effective, displacement of focus and not, I think, unlike
Salome’s dance of the seven veils.

It is possible. I think, to pair Adams and Caponigro together if we introduce the aesthetic sensibilities of George
Rouault. There are some who may immediately object to introducing a very different medium into this discussion,
but if we remind ourselves that the real discussion is not the medium alone, but the artist’s reaction to it as a
vehicle for expressing whatever, may be his visual insights, those very insights which promote his own occult
aesthetic agenda which, I maintain, is not a known quality until, perhaps, a long time after a work is complete. The
artist is involved in a process of (self) realization and may not be expected to explain to you what he is doing until
long after he has done it and maybe not even then. This responsibility, is, in part, the responsibility of the
commentator on works of art and my contention, to some degree, is that the more commentators there are the
better for the culture.

photo of George Rouault

Georges Rouault: According to Wikipedia which is the handiest source in this point of time Rouault was “born in Paris
into a poor family. His mother encouraged his love for the arts, and in 1885 the fourteen-year-old Rouault embarked on an
apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer, which lasted until 1890. This early experience as a glass painter has been suggested
as a likely source of the heavy black contouring and glowing colours which characterize Rouault's mature painting style”

It has been, at least for a half millennium, that those individuals who comment upon an individual’s style often do so in a context
which compares the work to the work of someone else. This is certainly a legitimate procedure for the discussion of differences and
of similarities often help to clarify meaning, but this analytical process fails to tell us what meaning the style, whatever it may be,
might have for the artist himself and Wikipedia’s rather elementary comparison between the painted black lines of Rouault’s
paintings and the leading of stained glass windows is not, I would judge, a high level observation, nor was it intended to be.
Any discussion of the relationship between technical manipulation and the possible communicative intent of these
three artists must take into consideration that there exists, at the moment, more quantifiable limitations with the
camera than with most media available to artists who are not photographers. It may well be that the artist, as
opposed to the photographer, has a greater range of freedom of expression and may be subject, only, to the
dictates of the society he accepts as his peers. The artist is not bound to the image of his subject matter, if he has a
subject matter, and can cast and recast the subject in any way he chooses. The photographer must deal with the
various predetermined technical parameters of his equipment, chemicals and the like.

Some rather superficial commentators have suggested that Rouault used the medium the way he did because he
did not know how to draw. In an attempt to answer this opinion I should like to offer as evidence the last work in
this row that show a nude woman arranging her hair. This work very successfully shows the anatomy of a somewhat
over weight woman drawn with great sophistication and awareness and clear observation of what happens to
human flesh under these circumstances. It is a work of a working intelligence and highly admirable in its execution.
It is, furthermore, not unique, which suggests to a serious observer that Rouault must have had some other reason
for employing the heavy lines used universally throughout his work. Proactive in stressing the awkward, the painful,
the hard should not indicate ineptness.

Having established these differences at the outset it might be timely to ask whether, or not, it is appropriate for the
works of these artists to be judged along similar, dissimilar or pre-determined and consistent criteria. Is it proper, or
even possible, for us to identify criteria that might be fairly applied to all works of art of a particular period or locale
or of all locales and periods? Is it appropriate for one to determine whether artist A is better than artist B? Is it
reasonable to be able to weight the values of aesthetic characteristics..and are such characteristics perceived in the
same way by all people? I have pondered these vexing questions from time to time over many years and the only
fairly constant conclusion I have been able to come to is that the degree of growth detectable in the work of an
artist is the only criteria that seems to leave room for the inclusive and exclusive decisions the artist may or may
not make. If we accept that as an workable analytical structure then, it would seem that the relative standing of an
artist among other artists would be along the lines of the degree and nature of his development as seen from the
view point of his origins. What were the choices open to him and why did he choose them over others and how far
was he able to go with these choices. Answers to such questions might tell us to what extent the artist was
creative…certainly excellence in technical execution alone will not do it.

There have been periods in the history of western art when the private attitudes of the artists were of no concern
whatever and his development would properly be measured only in terms of what was then determined to be an
acceptable representative technique and later historians, accepting that premise, made chronological and
aesthetic judgments based on it. It is true that individual artists were able to interject some evidence of personal

preference, such as Phidias, Scopas and Praxitiles But, by and large,

they all held to a canon of representation that focused on the ideal. But by and large interest in the personal
development of the artist himself seems not to have fully emerged until the mid 19th century.
It may well be, as has been frequently indicated, that Rouault was, in the way he painted, greatly influenced by the
brilliant appearance achieved in leaded stained glass, but for critical comments to be arrested at that point would
promote an injustice. We might begin a serious enquiry by asking who is it that populates the work of Rouault. They
are, most assuredly, at the extremes of a normal bell-curve distribution. In terms of social status they range from
the clowns and prostitutes to kings, carnal or saintly and crucified with seemingly few of the morally average in
between. His range of human worth is thus, like some medieval text book on moral behavior then encased, or is it
enshrined?, and somewhat reminiscent of Christ’s response to his critics who found fault with his associating with
undesirable social elements. And all this in a format traditionally reserved for sanctified use…a stained glass
window, or a variant thereof.

One is reminded of Christ’s claim that he came not to save the righteous of the world, but the sick and the unholy,
to make just what was not. This is a message about spiritual salvation. It is very Roman Catholic, It is very central
and southern European and not at all like the straight forward, take it as it is, reporting of the American Winslow
Homer who was, in point of fact, a real-life reporter during the civil war and who was, not at all incidentally, an
excellent watercolor technician.

While Homer does, certainly, depict drama the drama he injects into his compositions appears to be no more than
what the situation depicted would suggest without editorializing. And, at this point, we should be reminded that he
was, after all, a reporter…he described what he saw.

Now, I will leave it up to the reader to decide, if he must, which of the four artists, Adams, Caponigro, Rouault or
Homer was the most creative.