Meldrum Student: Clarice Beckett

[@artistedeparis]

Love these Meldrum/Tonalism posts you are doing Mr. Ingbretson. Job well done! :D It's great to see that Meldrum's work and his students are finally getting some recognition and you do a great job of presenting other works to give the viewer a perspective. I was taught his method and know alot about how Meldrum thought so let me give you my perspective if you don't mind. To understand Max Meldum you have to look to where he spent his most formative years. Both Meldum and Picasso came to Paris at the turn of the 20th Century. I believe both were there for the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. This is where and why the Eiffel Tower was built and presented to the world as then, the largest building on Earth. It was where electricity and the Modern Age made it's triumphant debut. It is where we first saw escalators, moving pictures, fountains lit by electric light, moving sidewalks like the kind you see at airports. And of course the very first Line 1 of the metro was engineered to bring the world to it's doorstep. It is also where Sargent and a host of Salon painters exhibited and the Expo was the shining jewel of the Belle Epoche. Max Meldrum spent over a decade in France and left before the start of WWI. And the year he departed back to Australia with his french wife Jeanne Nitsch, a former singer at the Opera Comique, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Lourve! This is important because in an instant the eyes of the world were on Picasso and his band of cohorts who lived at and around a place in Montmartre called the Bateau Lavoir. The police rounded up Picasso and all of his friends and interrogated them on the whereabouts of the stolen Mona Lisa. Max Meldrum knew of this Modern Art movement and he more than detested it. It was more than vulgar to him. It was decadent! So Meldrum perused a counter position to this 'evil' turn the art world had taken and embraced this idea of 'the science of appearances', (inspired by the Paris Expo 1900? We'll never know for sure...) This was proof that Realistic Art had an inherent 'truth' while Abstract Expressionism was for the less intelligent or for children. You mentioned that Meldrum might consider Monet a 'moron' for the way Monet painted. I would say Meldrum would have called Monet and the French Impressionist 'color jockeys' and the distinction is this. The eye is designed with cones and rods. Rods (95%) see tone. Cones (5%) see color. In Meldrum's mind to put all your focus like the French Impressionists on only what 5 percent of what the eye sees is unscientific, un-artistic and a fool's errand. In his mind, you could take a subject like a wood chair, accurately place and paint not with earth tones but with blues and purples and you still would have something that would look like a chair. But however if you were to place the tonal structure of the chair randomly in the wrong places you would have something you could not identify. And that's how I believe Meldrum saw things. Color was an after thought because the science of the eye dictates you have one major objective and that was to own the tone. Science over Expression. Tone over Color. Good over Evil. At any rate that's where I think Max Meldrum was coming from. Once again so glad you are having Max Meldrum and Tonalism up for discussion in these posts. Below is a link to a Media/Ed Kit put together by the Art Gallery of South Australia for the recent 'Misty Modern's' exhibition held in Australia. It covers alot of ground. You and your subscribers might find it interesting. Should be downloadable. If not, let me know. drive.google.com/file/d/1XChiwC9O1wxBBYUd29T5uZdgt5dGy40C/view?usp=sharing Once again, thanks so much for all these great posts for all that you do. Keep up the great work!!! :D

[@PaulIngbretson]

That is very clarifying per the rod/cone point. Thank you.

[@plopploplplop]

"Clarice Beckett:The Present Moment" Exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia opens this weekend.

[@PaulIngbretson]

Nice, forward a shot or two if you're so inclined.

[@rossmcleod7983]

Clarice was widely imitated and like Corot (who had 3000 confirmed works, 15,000 of which made their way to America) her reputation has been savagely tarnished by forgeries. Think I saw one or two in some of the examples you presented there Paul. There was a superb retrospective of her work in Melbourne, Australia and for only the second time in my life, I was bought to tears. Sublime is an understatement (no pun intended) she was one of those rare painters whose command of their craft was commensurate with her vision. A touch of Morpheus about it perhaps. I also lived very close to where she painted and she completely nailed the genius loci of early suburban, bayside Melbourne.

[@PaulIngbretson]

One of the unfortunate problems of the internet images: Certainty of attribution. Thanks for the infromation.

[@andrelloyd4010]

A pleasant analysis Paul

[@normatorti4295]

Great to see great examples of landscapes painted in the visual order. Thanks, Paul!

[@lovepastel]

Enjoyed this segment a lot. Really appreciated the use of great paintings as examples of point.

[@AnnaAnnaTT]

The exhibition of Clarissa Beckett's work said that she would depart from her home at 4am in the morning with her painting supplies so that could reach the beach area to catch the morning light which she especially liked to paint and how the water looked in the early morning

[@PaulIngbretson]

And there aren't better colors than that time of day. Light angling through the thicker filter of the atmosphere.

[@janemorrow6672]

Ooh thanks for doing this!

[@danaesquires7571]

Hi. I think a good thing to keep in mind when looking at Clarice Bekkect, is to really look at the light in which she painted. Melbourne light and Australian light in general, is white, often painfully white. It tends to flatten colours and shapes in its glare, which makes it great for Clarice's tonal manner. :)

[@PaulIngbretson]

Interesting!

[@journeymantraveller3338]

Thankyou Paul for your sympathetic review of Clarice and the comparison with endpoints of other artists. Beckett's images seem to emerge from a dream state or memory, perhaps that's a result of the tonalist method, and leaves much for the viewer to imagine and wonder. She often worked at crepuscular hours, some nocturnes and some mid day beach blazing sun works come to mind. I have had a go at doing some copies and it's not too difficult. In-situ plein air execution of the tonalist process is another matter. Hope you can revisit her works again. Better attributed images can be obtained from online gallery catalogues e.g. Menzies and Deutscher Hackett, also AGSA, NGA and NGV galleries.

[@PaulIngbretson]

Thank you very much for this, JM.

[@anndavenport4477]

Enjoyed this. Great to have the discussion on technique.

[@michaelshark1]

Very nice presentation on the history and importance of tonal painting. I have a request for a analysis on the Great painter Claudio Bravo.

[@PaulIngbretson]

I did share that opinion of him when I was very young. Shanks, too. No now. But not sure I want to go into the reasons on video, though they are sound. Wonder how I could discuss maybe his/their ways of thinking and approaching painting as compared with the more visual ways effectively. Thinking about it.

[@airenneaire1106]

I don't understand why this video is called "Meldrum Student: Clarice Beckett", because Paul I. Speaks about her for 2 minutes and a half, even less.

[@PaulIngbretson]

Fair enough. Labeling is important as Mr. Producer reminds me.

[@israeldiegoriveragenius2th164]

The paintings you show feel are very flat, which i think is the problem with how you think about painting. Painting is not about putting optical shapes like a jigsaw puzzle, we in fact feel form through our eyes. This concept of feeling with your eyes is something you do not understand, i talked before about the feeling weight and different surfaces , that are felt by the eyes. Our eyes are not detached from our other senses like touch, and other senses. To simply think painting is about shapes and colours is wrong and your paintings will always feel flat. You do not seem to understand the difference between illusion and the feeling depth. A Cezanne is not illusionistic but does not feel flat. Sorolla and Sargent never gave up the feeling of form.

[@PaulIngbretson]

Surprised you say that since with every value transition I see I wait to 'feel' as you say, the form. the same with light and the same with color relations. I work not just with the simplistic what value to what but what they are saying in relation to each other. Do consider that the greater part of what you may have looked at was under either colorists with little form or academics who emphasized flatness. Look deeper.

[@PaulIngbretson]

By the way, G2, it just occurred to me to say that the form will appear 'flatter' to the viewer when using a wide light. Spotlights, narrow ones, give a very different quality of form.

[@israeldiegoriveragenius2th164]

@@PaulIngbretson Thanks for your reply Paul, I watch all of your videos, i am here in Uk , and it is interesting to hear your ideas and history.

[@carlosdommar]

@@PaulIngbretson "with every plane changes, comes a color changes" or something like this was said by the great Cézanne (or I've hear he said so)

[@canalcerrado2433]

I still dont buy this philosophy 😅, is much an aristotelian one, based on the senses and experiences,.. that is objective and scientific, but poetry is not only describing things but saying truths subjectively and with feeling... i do understand the argument of naming things...but one names a “bicep “ to understand its form and outline so one can see it better, the old idea of parts to the whole... I do agree with seeing “relationships” but how cam you relate a thing such as a bicep to the tricep and to the abdomen and to the sartorious amd eventually every part of the body if you cant see it and recognize it in the fisrt place? We see not only with our eyes but our brains... I do get one must appear brainless and take pieces of reality such as value color etc... but that is just information... human beings are subjective we can just be objective about the world we see. It is proven that vision is not only rays of light and the way our receptors hit that retina, but much of the way we construct what we see and how we “paint” is ultimately dictated by our ideas ... it is why we can be taught to paint like an impressionist or like Gammel... but how would you paint if you painted how you saw, how you felt and what you knew about nature and undesrtood it? Anatomy is the study of the body... while you might not agree that Is useful but it was adopted as an aid to not only understand nature beyond the visual , is a science as useful as visual Perceptions, color theory, and other sciences that a painter needed to know. We probably will never agree LOL, but I am here to learn how you see the world and how can I as painter find your ideas useful for my practice ☺️🙂

[@PaulIngbretson]

You have pretty well summed up the 'alternative' thinking. And I do laugh with you about perhaps not ever entirely agreeing. For me it is just that the longer I live the more I jettison of the 'subjective" model.

[@hmmmph3578]

Mmm. I've seen works by both artists in person. Beckett is incredible. Meldrum is pretty meh..

[@chrisschilling7585]

I tend to agree. There is a poetic dimension to Beckett's best work that Meldrum's lacked. In one sense, Beckett took only what she needed from Meldrum's teaching, but ultimately transcended any limitations in his insistence that painting could be reduced to a 'science.'