still more than you wanted to know about art history

The preceding entry having been limited by the time it takes my laundry to finish its cycle at the apartment's laundry room, I left out the Blaue Reiter and a whole host of side issues. Of course the tangle of diminished expectations and altered opinions of the European psyche was characterized by appalling relations between all the sexes, hypocrisy as bad as that practiced by the colonizers, wrongheaded opinions about other cultures, unwarranted denigration of the classical inheritance, and so forth. All of this is worthy of its own exploration, and I've done a lot of it myself. But I'd like to get straight in my own head and on a virtual gallery wall just what visual sources were available to and being used by the early modernists. Kandinsky went to German glass painting, a previously denigrated folk genre, for inspiration (en route to the invention of geometric abstraction). Which, by the way, means that the grumbling about the rip-off of Southern folk artists by neo-expressionists of the early nineteen-eighties is fairly ignorant of history, unless one is to complain that Russian emigres oughtn't to have been stealing ideas from German peasants, and we all know what ***that*** would sound like.

And now I shall shut up for today since no one knows yet that this blog exists. It is time to track down what the "Introductions 06" shows of the Atlanta Gallery Association are all about, for a Thursday deadline.