Infinite vs. finite

Yves Tanguy was one of those guys whose lifespan is easy to calculate, born in 1900, dying in '55, at the age of 55. When I was young there were a lot of such figures, including my maternal grandfather, who were born around that time. It was always easy to know how old they were when they died. Now it takes better math skills to calculate lifespans.

I hadn't thought of Tanguy for some years, but his paintings were intriguing and important to me early on. Even when I was 7 years I gazed at this enigmatic painting, featured in a small art book:

The title, too, was strange:

"Mama, Papa is Wounded!" (1927)

Why are his paintings so accessible and intriguing to even the youngest minds? Perhaps it is because he used a variety of traditional strategies. He created a real world, full of great detail, sculpted with a uniform light source. Perspective is also uniform and linear, most evident in the shadows of the biometric forms.

This posting is actually inspired by reading an article by the art critic Herbert Reed, who interpreted this era while it was still avant guard. I especially like this photo of him gazing at a strange sculpture.  "Biomorphic form" was big then; we were fascinated by archetypes and the world of Carl Jung and the surrealists. We invented and distilled forms, rather than merely copying and quoting images as we tend to do now, in this post-modern time.


The visual world sure had a lot of bite in those days. The space in paintings looked infinite.  

Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker who liked to use artists who mastered this infinite sense of space, as shown here, a backdrop by Salvador Dali. He used backdrops and hanging miniatures to great effect in his films. That they were painted made his films not less real, but more real. The impression was visceral. I have the feeling now, when I look at art or film, that space is not so much infinite, as it is finite: numerical.

Many of the image-makers who come to the forefront now have some keenness as artists, but I have the increasingly common suspicion that they have gotten to their position not through their experience with the painter's palette, but more through their experience with number-crunching and codes. 

For example: the current series Spartacus, despite its wish to impose a visceral feel (certainly enough guts splashed about!), leaves us with a removed, gray feeling. Space is digital, numerical. No longer are video games looking more like movies; movies are looking more like video games!

Monster Museum

It's a foggy, cold Sunday afternoon in November--in Norway, no less. Brrr--good to settle down in my library and read a few stories in this old book, Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum. Got the little table lamp on--certainly not enough light coming in through the windows. All nature is like a dark cave, or a mineshaft (call it a mindshaft.) 

This book has been fondly engrained into my memory, since childhood days, when I checked it out of my school's library. Clearly, the illustrations were what made it special, so uncanny. I ordered this book not too long ago, when I learned about it from fellow bloggers, similarly impressed by it. It seemed to be a popular book for libraries back in the day (Twelve Shuddery Stories for Daring Young Readers), so the tome is easily bought used for a few dollars. It was published in 1965, my own "publishing date."

The above illustration, for the story Slime, may be my favorite.  Earl E. Mayan was a classic illustrator, master of many pulp and mainstream magazine covers. But the bizarre collage/expressionist drawings for this book are unique, unlike anything else he did. One little addition to the mystery of this illustration is that his signature is upside-down. All the other plates in the book are upright. Was this an oversight, or an editor's belief that the work functioned better? As published the grimacing heads are upright, but the gravity of the drawing is defied, drips running upward. If seen as Mayan intended, the effect would have been much different, the victims fully immured within the depth of a monstrous entity with cat-like eyes. 

It's interesting that the book was envisioned as something for young readers.  Several of the tales have a humorous, or gallows humor bent, so perhaps that qualified. Actually, they are simply a variety of good tales reprinted from various horror and sci-fi publications of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. It would be interesting to see what kids would think of this volume these days. Would it make a strong impression on daring young readers?