Artist I Loved and Now... Don't

There are things in life that we love, and things in life that we, well, could do without. Usually, when I hear about what people love, it makes me like them more.¹ Hearing about what people hate can be enjoyable, but sharing your own hates is risky. Your “hate list” reveals a whole lot about you. For Hobbes, reading Calvin’s list made him see his friend in a lesser light.

For the record, I do nurture my own hate list:

1. Three foods: rabbit, watermelon, and bread pudding

2. Apple watches and doodle dogs: because everyone has one they make the world less interesting

3. Excuses: things go wrong all the time, it’s often your fault, admit your role, and get on with it.

4. Margarita mix: mix an orange liquor² and lime juice with your tequila, mezcal, or sotol, and you get something better than what comes out of those God-forsaken plastic bottles.

5. The classic toy soldier nutcracker: it’s my list, I don’t need a reason.

What I find more interesting than lists of dislikes are lists of what people once loved but have grown to hate. These lists reveal what the list-keeper thinks about and how they have changed over time. Because I spend a lot of time in museums, I’m keenly aware of a few artists that I once adored and now don’t.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

In 11th grade, I was taking a survey-style art history class. One day, while we were waiting to review Greek urns, our teacher accidentally slipped the wrong carousel into the projector.³ What appeared was a series of terribly buxom, mostly naked women. Like any self-respecting, heterosexual, sixteen-year-old boy, I was smitten. I might have suggested that we skip the Greeks that day and learn about Renoir instead.

Of the impressionists, Renoir is the easiest to like and understand. It is all there: the visible brushstrokes, the light sparkling in diverse ways across a single work, the movement of leaves, light, water, and figures, the quotidian subjects. Once you’ve seen a few Renoir paintings, though, they begin to seem formulaic. While other impressionists rewarded my growing familiarity with discoveries, the more I saw of Renoir’s work, the less I liked it. These days, each new Monet, Sisley, Morisot, or (of course) Cézanne I discover presents an opportunity to more deeply understand the artist. A new Renoir just gets me out of the gallery faster.

The end for Pierre-Auguste and me was my latest visit to the Barnes. The wealth of mediocre Renoir painting in that collection did me in. Mary Cassatt famously commented that his works are filled with “enormously fat red women with very small heads.”⁴ I couldn't stop thinking about this as I walked through the galleries.

I’ve now reached the point that even the masterpieces, Bal du moulin de la galette at Musée d’Orsay, for instance, look cartoonish to me.

Andy Warhol

Sarah and I were recently lucky enough to spend a morning at the Tate Modern. We were awed by the collection of Giacometti sculptures and unaffected by some of the other art. We discussed whether the word art has too broad a definition. We agreed that, considering everything, art can be challenging, enigmatic, labor-intensive, and requires great talent. Our conversation centered on whether art that exists solely to make a point, while making no effort to please (acknowledging the subjectivity of pleasing), should be called something else. Are these pieces more visual essays than art?

This is where Warhol lands for me now. I get the point he was making – believe me, I have taken too many art history classes not to get it. I even find some of his work terrifically pleasing – believe me, if someone gave me a Campbell’s Soup Can to hang in our living room, I would not say no. Mostly, though, I find his work a bore. Sure, what is considered disposable and mass produced is actually worthy of attention, but the aspects of his work that make the point, the reproducibility, the invisibility of the artists, that a Factory created it, also make it less than art for me.

I used to marvel at the thesis and look forward to seeing Warhol pieces. Now the paintings, a must for any 20^th-century collection, just induce a shrug, whether it is a Jagger, or Jackie, or Debbie. Perhaps Marcel Duchamp is a better example, but does anyone still argue that his urinals are art?

Georges Rouault

I once loved Georges Rouault. His art is museum-quality versions of paintings that a friend of my father’s painted, which hung in our apartment and his office. I even almost purchased a small, 2nd-tier (or possibly even 3rd-tier) Rouault at Art Chicago in the late 1990s. (The $2,000-$3,000 price tag scared me off.)

Now I find his work impossibly dull: every-one-exactly-the-same. The only thing that I do find interesting about him is that there exist other artists, who are equally monotonous, whom I adore. Georgio Morandi is the leader of this group. Another deceptively simple still life of jars and bottles painted in muted tones, and I go striding briskly across a gallery, and I am lost – in a good way.

I am not enough of an art historian or intellectual to know why some painters — painters who would likely be categorized as experimentalists by David Galenson, artists whose “innovations develop slowly over a long period of experimentation and refinement” — have staying power with me, while others I find tiresome. Morandi, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline each created similar canvases repeatedly. I’ve stood, transfixed, before their works for years. Rouault, Tahitian Gauguin, or even Mondrian, no thank you.

A list of six things I hate, and three artists I used to love and now don’t. Help me feel better about myself; please add something you used to enjoy but now could do without.⁵

1. Maybe this is why I gave you 95 of my loves early on in this space.

2. We’re big fans of Combier Liqueur D’Orange. I share this tidbit in case Combier would like to consider sponsoring me.

3. If you don’t understand that sentence, you’re probably too young to be reading my ramblings.

4. This quotation makes me laugh every time I read it.

5. Anything other than somewhat self-important, moderately personal Substack essays.