This review from November 28th of a new collection of essays by American poets on painters contains an Ashbery essay on Fairfield Porter. (English translation from Spanish courtesy of Google Translate)
Poets and Painters: Plastic Hands
Poets and Painters (Fadel & Fadel) is a short and powerful compilation of texts by Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and others on some artists.
There is an essay by Ezra Pound that is at the same time an attempt to establish the history of pictorial vorticism through its correspondence with poetic “imagism”, which he himself had defined (“direct treatment of the thing”, “not using words”. that do not contribute to the presentation", "compose following the musical phrase") and the story, even anecdotal, of the emergence and formation of one of his exemplary poems, the one that says "The appearance of faces among the crowd:/ petals in a black and wet branch.”
“Gregorio Valdés,” is the title of Elizabeth Bishop 's article . She relates her personal connection with a Cuban amateur sign painter who lived in Key West, and whom Bishop, fascinated by some of his paintings that she has seen in businesses and shop windows, goes to see to commission a portrait of her house. Valdés is an eccentric, and sees no difference of merit between his paintings; Whether a painting is good or bad ends up being a matter of luck for him.
It has been said of WH Auden that his poem “Museum of Fine Arts,” which analyzes Peter Brueghel's The Fall of Icarus , is a kind of poetic art of his writing. His is a commentary on the Correspondence of Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh, says Auden, lived in times of transition rather than realization, he believed that the only true subject for the art of his time was the life of the poor, and he knew how to remain calm even in catastrophe. That was for the poet the best definition of a “great” work of art.
Marianne Moore 's text is a review of an exhibition by Robert A. Parker, an artist who would shortly later illustrate a plaquette of her poems. Moore ponders in her paintings the singularity of her gaze, the precision, and the love for the subject, genuine, “free of contempt.” During his collaboration for the plaque, Parker visits Moore's house, not surprised by “the quality, the attention to detail, the perfection of everything” he sees there.
Kenneth Rexroth writes about Fernand Léger. He describes him as a practical man, a mechanic capable of finding a simple, rational and immediate (and not “mental, verbal or expressive”) solution to painting problems. He is the one who has a popular approach and does not resort to plastic subtleties. “His highest spiritual experience of him is the sense of absolute competence in the face of the problems of the conquest of matter,” Rexroth notes.
Gertrude Stein assures that she is going to talk about modern art paintings, oil paintings and frames, and to get into the topic she describes a detailed diorama of the Battle of Waterloo. Although she assures that “slowly she will say everything,” the impression prevails that the referents of her text are becoming increasingly distant and the writing is revealed as an oceanic language game. “An oil painting is an oil painting, and one reaches anyone through anyone else,” she says.
John Ashbery 's article was taken from the catalog of a retrospective of Fairfield Porter in 1983. It is a quotation article, a wonderful text full of ideas against ideas. Ashbery quotes Porter writing about Willem de Kooning: “The meaning is precisely that paintings have no meaning. They leave a void behind them, a void of achievement, transcendence and authenticity.” Porter, Ashbery says, loathed the artist “for whom art was the raw material of a factory that produces a commodity called understanding.”
More than a formal or academic analysis of the works, of historical context, what prevails in these essays is the adventure of writing poetics. The risk of trying to define poetics applies to both painting and poetry, so it is inevitable to think that when poets talk about painters they are talking about poetry.
Ashbery said that poetry has no content, that it is its own content. Poets don't write about anything other than poetry. If defining the nature of poetry may be the highest degree to which a poet can aspire, the articles included in this book are surely among the best attempts that have been made in this regard, at least during the 20th century.