Author: Ethan Pinch

Ethan Pinch is an artist from Northern England and co-founder of the The New House art collective. His YouTube channel can be found here.
Art by Ethan Pinch
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A drawing by Pablo Picasso of Picasso and Manuel Pallarès looking at the Eiffel Tower.

Pablo Picasso and Apostate Cubism

The painting I want to talk about is this one: “Guitar and Mandolin”. It’s one of Pablo Picasso’s biggest still lifes and a prime example of what’s generally referred to by art historians as synthetic Cubism. It’s not as beloved or as famous as works such as “Guernica” or “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” but I would argue it’s a masterpiece and one that summarises something uniquely Picasso’s own.

Having invented Cubism, Picasso was probably the first artist to lose faith in it. For years he and George Braque had been a double act. Following the breakup came an odd shuttling back and forth of different styles across the next decade, of feints and impostures. But what precisely do these differences in style-type represent? Do they represent different prospective audiences? Different social attitudes to taste? It’s difficult to say. But perhaps they represent some deeper change or retrogression within the artist.

The most frequent point of comparison for “Guitar and Mandolin” is Matisse’s “Still Life after Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘La Desserte'”. The similarities are intriguing when one considers the famous rivalry between Picasso and Matisse. But is it true that “Guitar and Mandolin” was intended as a kind of avantgarde diss track? Was Picasso really attempting to send-up what is Matisse’s least successful cubist venture? Admittedly I am not at all very interested in the veracity of this claim. But at the same time, it establishes an interesting line of inquiry. After all, if “Guitar and Mandolin” is a caricature of Matissean Cubism the question becomes whether the mockery of the mockery holds any kind of actual authentic status. Who in the end is actually being subverted? Is it Matisse or is it Picasso himself? […]

Film by Ethan Pinch
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A close-up shot of Neytiri's (played by Zoe Saldaña) face in James Cameron's "Avatar: The Way of Water".

WASTE OF WATER: Reviewing James Cameron’s “Avatar” (2022)

Ten years after people stopped caring, Avatar: The Way of Water has ejaculated into cinemas. Have you seen the original? Of course you have. Everyone has. It was a phenomenon. And then, all of sudden, like a bad dream, it seemed to evaporate with little traceable influence on the industry. This so called revolutionary’ film from ‘visionary’ director James Cameron is mostly remembered today as a kind of high concept spaff. Smurfs in Space by way of Enya.

It’s a deeply conventional narrative plucked straight from nineteenth century literature. In essence, a soldier and double agent ends up going native and becoming the de facto leader of an army of colonial insurgents. But not before winning their respect, having wrangled and tamed the most untameable of alien stallions and falling in love with the alien chieftains daughter. The obvious comparisons have already been made by sundry critics about the propinquities between Avatar and Dances with Wolves. But most neglect to mention the most obvious comparison: John Carter of Mars, the original populist pulp science fantasy. But even just in terms of visual window dressing and ‘effects’, Avatar didn’t deliver much that felt authentically new. Much of the alien biology and futuristic hardware was plucked straight from the pages of Métal hurlant and any given number of prog rock record sleeves. It’s a particularly dated and dare I say passé approach to sci-fi aesthetics. […]

Art by Ethan Pinch
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Edouard Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass", which depicts figures of technically "incorrect" proportions.

Edouard Manet And The Mystery Of The Crowd

Everything was changing in late 19th century Paris. A series of disastrous wars and failed uprisings had precipitated the forming of a public works commission to rebuild the city. But this rebuilding was nothing on its own. It was meant to be the emblem and agent of a wider economic transformation – the emergence of modern day capitalism and consumerism. Suddenly gone was the old Paris of narrow streets and quartiers. The new Paris of cosmopolitan boulevards cut up into little pieces the city’s pre-existing world of fragile appearances – its traffic of class segregation and urban life. And this awareness of change was to be crucial for the emergence of an artist such as Edouard Manet. The elusiveness of the social world, the precarian nature of being in it, and being of it, are central subjects of the paintings he produced at this time. […]

Art by Ethan Pinch
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Gustave Courbet's "The Painter's Studio", featuring the artist and his canvas in the center.

Gustave Courbet & The Allegory Of The Studio

In 1855, three of Gustave Courbet’s paintings were rejected by the Exposition Universelle, something which Courbet took as a personal affront. It was, after all, the single largest exhibition in the history of the salon with a projected attendance numbering in the hundreds of thousands. In retaliation Courbet erected and promoted an exhibition all of his own, situated just across the road from the Exposition itself. It was called the Pavillion of The Real and inside the public were treated to over forty paintings by Courbet. Among them was a painting was called ‘L Atelier’ or ‘The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life’ (1855).

The artist’s studio is today considered a genre in its own right. It is a genre which lends itself well to allegory in that it offers a means of representation of the practice of art and offers up the artist as a personification of that practice. Variations of this genre can be informative illustrations of arts changing social history, the artist’s professional character and his production in relation to a market economy. Common features include introspective self-portraits such as Gericault’s ‘Portrait of an Artist in his Studio’, or the gallery of a dealer/connoisseur such as we find in ‘The Artist’s Studio’ by Amelie Legrand de Saint-Aubin. Images of poverty, power, fame, success and failure occur alongside images of the artist’s technical and iconographical resources. Sometimes we see the artist as he wishes to be seen; other times he sees us seeing him. In the paintings of Vermeer and Velasquez the studio is a site of encounter, between the artist and his model as well as other value systems. In the work of Braque, Matisse and Picasso, the studio is a metaphor for the psyche, a private world of individual creative passions. […]

Art by Ethan Pinch
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A stylized photo of Paul Cezanne

Cézanne, Now

Even for the gods, backlash is an inevitability. At one time considered the cutting edge, Paul Cézanne is often now conflated with artistic conservatism and the ‘rappel à l’ordre’. Bring up his name among any of the various plutocrats and brainless artists-in-residence striving to keep up the pretence of modernistic radicalism and you’ll see what I mean. It’s like brandishing a crucifix in a vampire’s face. Surely, nothing could be more unfashionable or un-hip as to talk about Cézanne in the year 2022.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, various ‘litterateurs’ who claim to admire Cézanne’s work can often be doubly guilty of superficiality; adopting a pose of soi disant aestheticism whilst simultaneously accepting all the ludicrous things produced by broadsheet art critics and authors writing history books on holiday. Sentiment, clerisy and derogation-as-vice continue to exasperate Cézanne’s reputational stability. Appropriated and excommunicated in equal turn, he is again and again subjected to the same rotary of clichés and tabloid mythology. A primitive, a prig, a homely gentleman. All middling attempts to make sense of Cézanne’s work in a self-reflecting art world where consensus has vanished and ignorance reigns supreme. […]