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As an artist, I would disagree. I could spend a week studying the painting, by which I mean attempting to redraw it accurately, drawing variations on it, etc, and I am confident I would be a better artist at the end of that week, and art I made drawing on the lessons I learned from it would be better drawings than what I would have produced before.
The linework is very definitely not naivestic scribble. You can do really neat things with the techniques he's using there, whether you agree that he's done neat things with them or not.
Could you perhaps explain some of the technically impressive or interesting elements used? I'm curious, because people keep saying it's technically interesting, but in the many thousands of words I've seen written about this painting, I've never seen anyone actually describe anything specific about Klee's technique. 90% of the commentary is just people randomly ascribing some facial expression or body language to the bird monster, then engaging in a psychoanalysis of the bird monster.
@gattsuru
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Sure. It's the strong linework, and specifically what I guess might be called Economy/Confluence of line.
Strong Linework Are you familiar with Blind Contour drawing? Take a piece of paper and a pencil, pick something you want to draw, look directly at it, and while keeping your eyes fixed on it, start drawing the outlines ("contours") of your subject without looking at your paper or pencil. This will result in a really bad drawing but surprisingly good linework, because it focuses all your attention on the exact nature of the contours, going from eye > line without the usual perceptual filters that kick in when you go eye > memory > line. With no spatial points of reference, the lines get all scrambled on top of each other, but with a bit of practice the individual lines themselves get smooth, strong, confident, and the skill gained carries over to non-blind contour drawing.
I want to stress that "smooth, strong confident" aren't just arbitrary labels being deployed for glazing purposes. Compare this drawing to this drawing; to my eye the former drawing is much, much more interesting than the latter, despite the latter being far more detailed/rendered. Look at that former drawing, and try to figure out how many actual lines there are. Is that just one line?
This, incidentally, is why a lot of "fine art" linework, including angelus novus, look "childlike". When kids first grab a pencil, they have very strong linework, but no form at all. As they learn, usually they chase form, and lose the linework strength in the struggle to get control of where the lines go, and you end up with something like the daredevil drawing above, where the lines are all sorta-kinda in the right place but overall they just feel blah. To get good, they need strong lines and good control. Fine artists who focus on very simple, very strong lines with less emphasis on being in the right place feel very childlike. think of it as a game to get the most impression out of the least amount of lines. It's a game you can play yourself, and it's both a lot of fun and does a good job teaching art technique.
Here's another example, and another; you don't need a lot of lines/rendering, you need the right lines in the right places, and less can be much, much more. Any snapshot of reality includes infinite detail; one of the basic things art can be is to boil that infinity down to the minimum number of details needed to capture as much of the original image as possible, ideally triggering the viewer's own imagination to fill in the rest better than any artist ever could.
Economy/Confluence of Line
Okay, so less can be more. How much less, and how much more? Consider this stained glass piece. See how the characters' contours break them up into a relatively small number of simple shapes? Note especially how countours flow into each other; the contour lines framing the right edge of the priest's beard continue to frame the edges of his hand. there's a line running up Mary's back, up and over her head along the back of her shawl, and then down to her arm. There's another line that starts with her jaw, down her neck, and then down the whole front of her body, demarcating her cloak. Real contour lines can line up like this, but usually don't... but simplifying a bit, nudge them a bit, and you get this really pleasing confluence where one shape flows into the next. Our eyes naturally follow contour lines, and so when the contours flow into each other, the eye naturally flows around and around with them, and picks up much more of a cohesive impression of the whole of the image, rather than only focusing on one part.
Take this idea and push it a bit, and you get the art style of the animated film The Secret of Kells, where the whole point is to imitate stained glass in the character designs.
As mentioned, Mike Mignola is one of my favorite artists. If you look at his sketches, you'll see his characters often have this weird, lumpy nature, but they still feel weirdly evocative, expressive, alive. His style leans hard on economy/confluence of line. The shapes are simple, but still organic, details are strongly subordinate to the basic forms: on the Inger von Klempt sketch, note how none of the detail on her shoulder breaks the shoulder's contour, how the contour of her far arm bridges breast to hip and thigh. Note the minimal linework used to render the faces and hands. The lines aren't cleanly straight, and they're not cleanly curved; there's lots of little kinks and wiggles in them, and yet the total effect is significantly more pleasing to me than other artists dedicating themselves to the style but with more precision and detail. I think it's because the cruder linework gives an impression of detail without compromising the actual simplicity, giving the best of both worlds.
My favorite example is the cover illustration from Mignola's Art of Hellboy book. Zoom in on hellboy's face, and study the shading. Note the sort of checkerboard pattern between the shadowed blacks and the lit reds? See how that checkerboard is built out of confluence of line, and how few lines there are to build up a strong, contrasting expressive face? See how the contours flow into each other? It's amazing to me how he does so much with so little.
Now back to Angelus Novus. The painting looks like a terrible mess on first impression, but dig in and you'll see that that the whole thing is built out of strong linework and economy/confluence of line. Actually trace the lines and try to figure out how and in what order they were drawn, and you'll get a sense that the whole mess is actually built out of very simple components and rules compounding on each other. He's trading more strength for less precision than Mignola, and he's using a lot more abstraction. Some of his other pieces are more restrained and precise, some more abstract, but this idea seems like a major part of his style.
And it IS a style, and quite an effective technique. Mignola shows what one can do with it if they latch on to it and never let go; The difference between Klee and Mignola being, it seems to me, that Klee was obsessed with developing and exploring new techniques, and Mignola is obsessed with using the best of those techniques to express his ideas. Think of it like the symbiosis between science and engineering.
I don't actually like Angelus Novus much as a painting; like I said, it's a mess. I definitely don't think it's beautiful, quite the opposite in fact. The expression reminds me of the Dungeon Soup barbarian. The fingers and toes look like dicks. The overall effect is not great, IMO. But the technique it's built out of can do some absolutely amazing things, and the people who've done amazing those amazing things got it either from this painting or from similarly-goofy paintings. Even if I don't appreciate it much, it's undeniable that others did appreciate it greatly, and used it to make things that I do appreciate greatly, so I'm pretty confident there's something of actual substance there, even if I can't really grok it.
Finally, I think a lot of this discussion works a lot better if you shear away all the connotations of "Fine Art" as this grand pinnacle capstone of civilization that typifies "True Culture". This dude figured out a neat way to go about constructing a drawing. Other people built on it and made lots of neat drawings. That's how I tend to look at it; I understand that Academics would generally foam at the mouth at the idea of thinking Klee is okay but Mignola is the real shit. I'm even a bit leery of that conclusion myself, given that Mignola seems to depend on Klee. But at the end of the day, I only care about Klee at all because I love Mignola, and the Academy has too little influence on me to make me ashamed of that fact.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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Your reply illustrates my first point, about definitions of words. You seem to use "kitsch" as if, "studying the work will elevate my skill as artist". I think of "kitsch" as a word that describes social or emotional context, ie, vibes. According to Wikipedia, it is a some sort of lithograph, so I have little technical skill to judge. (It is also quite telling that Wiki has lots of text about the history of the painting and nearly nothing to say about the printmaking technique. [1]). So I concentrate on what I see. Big, vulnerable eyes. Large mouth. Small wings, tiny legs. It looks like the artist tries to be naive, and present something that is simultaneously weird and cute. Child-like, but I agree the artist had more skill than a child. It is not a scribble that child would make. Evocative, true, but quintessential kitchy reproduction paintings of kittens and dogs are also evocative.
[1] But if I would study printmaking, I hazard a guess I would benefit more from studying Durer and Rembrandt.
P.S. I feel I should add an exemplar of work that has naivist vibes.
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