Portraits: Kimmelman's Conversations With Modern Artists

Introduction: Art in Words

Attempting to put art into words can be like trying to capture lightning in a bottle: art often seems to defy description, however earnestly critics attempt to do so. Even artists themselves frequently struggle with articulating the concepts behind their works. Various attempts over the years have been made to render art — particularly abstract modern art — more intelligible, including the famous effort to film Jackson Pollock painting one of his celebrated "drip" paintings from below the surface of a piece of glass. In the book Portraits: Talking With Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman adopts a different technique: he asks prominent modern artists to talk about art while standing in front of paintings and photographs at various museums. He invites them to discuss not only their own work, but also the art of others that inspired them.

Kimmelman's Method and the Book's Scope

By using this technique, Kimmelman creates a broad and far-reaching portrait of what high-quality modern art entails. Even highly abstract artists, it turns out, can be inspired by representational works. Categories of art — such as "modern" versus "traditional" — are never absolute. First published in 1998, the book also functions as a historical treasure trove, preserving the thoughts of many older artists, such as the Polish-French painter Balthus, whose reflections on their craft near the end of their lives might not have survived had Kimmelman not taken the time to record them for posterity.

Breaking Down Artistic Categories

The irreverence of some modern artists can be quietly amusing. The photorealist Chuck Close, for instance, freely expresses his disdain for Renoir, whom he regards as kitschy — something you might find reproduced above a table in an Italian restaurant. Close, who was paralyzed following a spinal collapse, was forced to completely reinvent the way he created art after losing fine motor dexterity in his hands. He adapted his technique to his disability, including strapping brushes onto his hands, but in his conversations with Kimmelman he ruefully expresses frustration that he can no longer replicate the work of the painters he truly loves — artists who retained their fine motor coordination until the very ends of their lives.

This challenges the common notion that modern art is sharply different from traditional art. Contemporary artists, even the most radical among them, do not define themselves in opposition to older works; rather, they see their art as engaged in a productive and healthy dialogue with it. It is museums themselves that tend to segment art rather artificially into categories such as "modern" versus "traditional," or "Impressionism" versus "Post-Impressionism." Even artists long confined to fixed categories make surprising choices in Kimmelman's interviews.

Conclusion: Dialogue Between Past and Present

Contemporary art movements are not a rejection of the art of the past. Rather, as Kimmelman's interviews collectively demonstrate, they reconfigure the rules of art in new ways in order to express new truths and the individual, particular vision of the artist. Kimmelman's method — putting artists and artworks in direct conversation — makes this argument more compellingly than any conventional critical essay could. Portraits remains a valuable document of how serious artists actually think, and a persuasive case that the boundaries museums draw around artistic movements tell only part of the story.

Works Cited

Kimmelman, Michael. Talking With Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere. New York: Random House, 1998.