ARTISTIC PRECEDENCE IN "OLD MASTER" PAINTINGS

I often go to see great “masters” for reasons that are not about beauty, innovation, transcendence, etc. but rather to find their “mistakes”, slip-ups, sloppiness, laziness, and pure incompetency that reinforce my idea - especially in regard to representational painting - that NO ONE is a “perfect painter”, even if all the art history books say so, and declare that those old guys and gals achieved excellence. Ingres is a great example - beautiful drapery with noodle fingers delicately placed on sumptuously painted fabrics.

Too many years of teaching and developing my eye cannot be shut off when I “eye” major exhibitions - So here goes with the terrific - yes still terrific - Manet/Degas pairing show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There are many images here and some paintings are wonderful just as they are, and I include them. Manet knocked out Degas in the 3rd round but Degas still got in some punches not that there was a competition though the Met might have handled it that way - making them competitors thematically. Manet has a luminosity and serpentine hand that can dance and punch its way around a canvas. Degas is softer - these oil paintings show why he loved pastels so much - they began crisp and became fuzzier around the edges as he developed - blending into the background. They both employ narrative and in my opinion, could have been edited….but alas I was not around almost two centuries ago.

With these photos (which include wall labels and details) I apologize for being too lazy to edit or remove the glare to peak culmination, I show some of the painting gaffes that distracted me. Manet loved to smush out a toe and fingers here and there; Degas would allow a pant leg to be as flat as an ironing board; canvases were literally torn /sliced away from the original works and I believe Manet just got too bored to finish up the less finer point of a piece. Also interestingly Manet was not afraid of using dark tones in even the whitest of draperies, but rarely would he model a person's particularly a woman’s face with darker tones. so some of his greatest depictions of women are very pale and delicate. The exception is a great Berthe Morisot portrait.

I loved seeing the show - don’t get me wrong - but I also love to search for the eccentricity and the humanity in the work.