Archie Rand - Part 5 Visual Language/Heritage

How sure your line is directly related to visual language.

I am convinced Picasso didn’t rip off African art, he looked at the art because it emanated spirit and belief. The logical progression of spiritual, ritual symbolic art is the irrational and anarchic. 

Van Gogh started drawing at 27 years old. But his teacher was Pisarro. Pisarro had 2 students and many people in the impressionist movement were influenced by his revolutionary work. Cezanne and Van Gogh. Rand showed us before and after pictures of van gogh’s. A lot can happen in a year!

1881 van gogh

1882 van gogh

Rembrandt loved the Bengal Indian school of art. He would copy their works, and look how they created space with the line.

Rand then took out some charcoal. An artist at Columbia had left all his belongings to the university. Hand made brushes from the 1940’s, paints, and individually wrapped charcoal. Rand then symbolically passed the torch to us by having us use the charcoal. Like Matisse or Picasso or whomever, we were using paper wrapped charcoal. He explained how he visited de Kooning’s studio once, and while de Kooning went to the bathroom, Rand held deK’s brush and could feel the artistic energy being passed to him.

There was a time where art wasn’t commercial and artists communicated their admiration of each other through visual language. (I.e., friendship between de Kooning, Pollock, and
Kline). Rand read from 2 books. One, an art historian’s view on Pollock, and then and understudy of Fran’s Kline’s. The art historian basically bullshitted about Husserl’s phenomenology and the philosophy of paint, etc… whereas Pollock was just dripping paint between his legs. The understudy gave a poignant view of Pollock. P was 6’-2” and strongly built.. and a wise ass in the bars.he then told the story of Kline and Pollack, and de Kooning’s relationship… the wrestling, walking in the night, the joking, etc… and about the night Pollock was killed by a car crash. And how Kline said I’ll miss how he painted the birds and the trees and everything on his canvas.

Rand then showed us a book of Giacometti’s drawings. Most were in blue ball point pen or pencil. In it he imitated Cezanne, Duhrer, etc… he drew the way they drew just to become familiar with their visual language. He would draw ancient primitive masks. His thought process: “Somebody spent time on this work of art. There is meaning in this mask, but the culture has been lost to me. Still without anthropological perspective and history I can appreciate the meaning of the mask. I can feel it’s necessity and purpose and it was a part of a lost culture’s visual language. By drawing it in 2d the illusion of these forms will maybe rub off on me”.

Pisarro descended from the classical school of Ingres but was the father of impressionists and Picasso. All the objects, even the negative space is important in his drawings.