Matisse Invented 'Red'
Posted: 08 April 2021
Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.
I don't know how much of this is cultural post-irony zeitgeist and how much is intimately personal brain worms that I have, but a lot of things I do that make me laugh feel like weird long-form art projects. Things that I am 100% sincere about, but at the same time, feel like a joke that I am telling myself. Someone who I am certain has no ironic intent in their soul wrote "very cool" in a work slack channel a week ago and I am still reeling.
I deeply regret not including one of these last week.
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Index
A * means I can see myself listening to the album again at some point in the future (for fun). Everything else can be anywhere between great and not so great. Music is more condensed and less of a focus now.
Art
Rectangles and Buildings
Matisse Invented “Red”
Movies
The Kid Detective
Music
Stone Temple Pilots
Alice in Chains
Neko Case
* Molchat Doma
Piebald
* OWLS
Wow, Owls!
Art
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Rectangles and Buildings
I had the pleasure of seeing some of Katherine Parker’s work at the Spanierman Modern gallery years ago and this one painting has haunted me since. Her work is outstanding in general, but this first one in particular is… I can’t stop thinking about ladders in art. It’s an unbelievably powerful painting. There’s a little hole in the ceiling on the top right for you to run away into.
I really like paintings of building facades, maybe because growing up there was one I would see multiple times a day at my parents’ house. I like Francesco Conti’s work a lot in this regard; unfamiliar buildings usually feel distant, but he makes them look homey and inviting.
Matisse Invented “Red”
Before the early 20th century, Cadmium Red was not a color painters had access to. They generally used Vermillion, a toxic red derived from Cinnabar (a Mercury ore), or Carmine (also called Crimson Lake), a red made from cochineal insects (which is still used in some food dyes, like natural red 4!). These were excellent colors, but fade over time. It’s hard to find images online comparing the colors (this isn’t really true - there are one million images comparing reds. But they’re almost all watercolors, which look a little different, or they don’t have the colors I’m looking for), but this was the best I could do, showing the faded colors:
We can see that Cinnabar(is) (Vermillion) is a little more orange and Carmin(e) is a little deeper and more purple. A color close to Carmine is still used to this day, albeit using syntheic compounds, and now called “Alizarin Crimson.” Anyway, with those as context, imagine how people felt when this bad boy, who does not fade over time, busted onto the scene:
And now imagine being Matisse. He wonders: how do we, once and for all, make a painting a painting? What does it mean to represent something in paint? What is the relationship between an object and its representation? How do we understand it as a viewer? He simplifies form and abstracts color, which can be seen in his Fauvist-era paintings:
Where the impressionists attempted to break colors down into vibrant fragments, which, pieced together, formed colorful, but accurate representations of light, Matisse and the fauvists abandoned accuracy altogether. Colors were substituted with whatever they felt like using. Matisse really wants to push this further, to make his paintings understood as paintings first, and as representations second. This new red gives Matisse a clue, it permeates his thoughts:
"Where I got the color red—to be sure, I just don't know," Matisse once remarked. "I find that all these things . . . only become what they are to me when I see them together with the color red." [source]
He sees this bright, new Cadmium red, and decides that it is exactly what he’s looking for to make great work. He takes this painting, originally intended to be titled “Harmony in Blue,” and changes it to “Harmony in Red,” smothering it in this new Cadmium shade:
What a gift this bright red must have been for an artist devoted to abstracting color, to separating a painting from reality! The color becomes the focus of the painting, the dinner scene is secondary.
He takes this idea and this red and runs with it, creating a painting that manages to overcome the illusion of space; a painting first, and a representation of a room second:
The success of his work and the short-lived Fauvist movement is undeniable. It took post-impressionism and dialed them up to 11, abandoning accuracy in both form AND color. Cubism and expressionism followed short on its heels, as paintings developed past representation into pure expression. Matisse was a massive figure in the progression of art, constantly pushing his vision of artwork breaking free from its canvas. And he had a brand new color to help him out. What grander entrance can paint hope for than canvases coated in red?
Movies
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Evan Morgan - The Kid Detective
I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to write about this movie, so it wound up being mostly summary. I dunno. I try to extract what I can concerning the themes of suspended adolescence and trauma. I don’t think I wrote anything interesting here, just, fair warning. If you want to know whether I think this movie is worth your time without reading anything else, it’s only ok. The humor doesn’t really land, drama-wise it has interesting ideas but they aren’t realized very effectively. [3]
Our protagonist is Abe Applebaum, a 32 year old detective, kind of a loser, who is stuck in the past. He smells terrible, breath reeking of alcohol, teeth un-brushed. Nobody respects him. A teenage prodigy, he solved over 200 cases in his youth, ranging from petty schoolhouse thefts to identifying car hit-and-run perpetrators. His streak grinds to a halt as he is unable to find out what happened to Gracie, his 14 year old schoolmate. She just up and vanished one day (the movie’s opening sequence hints strongly at a kidnapping). We cut to his present, run-down self, solving the same petty mysteries as he did in his childhood.
It is never made clear, but, presumably, his lack of meaningful cases is representative of his inability to grow up. The world around him is tinged with the same bubblegum nostalgia as his memories of youth. Mrs. Willowbrook wants him to find her missing cat for the nth time. His parents want him to find a serious career and for him to stop leaning on them financially. His life seems securely Not In Order, and a 32 year old man’s should at least bear the semblance of Getting It Together.
We’re supposed to understand that the cases he does take are beneath his abilities — he was a gifted child, praised by everyone around him, and now he’s stuck with an uninspiring job, same as anyone else. The dream of being great lies eternally around the corner. Except he doesn’t seem all that talented. Abe pines for greatness, imagines what it might be like, but can only dream — in his detective work, he is constantly either wrong or spineless, shielding himself from the present-day facts with the success of his childhood. One must imagine him unhappy, his days a blur; alcohol, uninspiring cases, and recollections of youth, too afraid of failure to try to do anything new.
His big break appears in the form of a high school girl named Caroline, asking him to investigate the murder of her boyfriend. A serious case, an opportunity to prove himself. He bumbles through, revealing an inability to realize that, unlike him, the world has moved on. He is out of touch. The investigation draws leads that seem to go nowhere, in sync with jokes that seem out of place. Caroline drives him around, and he goes through the same motions that he learned years ago. Something needs to change, or the case is hopeless.
We wait to see what Abe does, how he transforms, what kind of event rattles his ego and forces him to grow, but nothing like that happens. After a clue-hunting mission goes awry, he is labeled a pedophile by the local newspaper and secludes himself, indulging in drink and drugs. A call from Caroline brings him back to reality, and he goes back to work. By chance, Abe finds out that in one of the cases from his youth, he accused an innocent person of theft. Abe is forced to return to the unsolved kidnapping case from his youth.
Using this new fact, Abe figures everything out and confronts the criminal, abandoning his rose-tinted goggles and plunging into cruel, uncaring reality. The kidnapper has commited horrifying acts. His victim is traumatized. The tone of the movie shifts from being a surreal dark comedy to a really brutal detective drama as we learn the details of the crimes. After solving the case, finding his five minutes of fame, and making his parents proud, the movie ends with Abe breaking down into tears.
This can’t be a movie about overcoming adolescence, because that never really happens. We never see Abe standing on his own two feet; things just happen around him and push him around. He leans on Caroline for advice and encouragement throughout. She holds him accountable, she drives him around and tells him to go on when he’s afraid of screwing up, she helps with his sleuthing. Without her, he messes up so badly that he hides from society for a week. It’s weird that his closest confidant is a teenage girl, but he takes her advice because he still feels like a teenager himself.
Because it’s not a movie about refusing to grow up, we’re left with a movie about trauma — the crushing expectations of others, blaming yourself for horrible things that you think you could, nay, should, have prevented. Of course the first thing he asks the officer when they talk is why he never got a call back about the Gracie case, twenty years ago. Of course he doesn’t realize that the reason the principal tricked him so easily was that he was just a kid. Nobody expected a teenager to solve a murder. Finally, Caroline tells him that Gracie is still just a kid, and perhaps this is the final push Abe needs to look at himself honestly. He has been crushed by guilt for twenty years. He never needed to be so hard on himself: he was just a kid.
Now if only there was a movie that took these ideas and really committed to them instead of spending forever setting up uncomfortable jokes! Ha - ha - ha - ha - haaaa (in the voice of The Count).
Music
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Stone Temple Pilots - Greatest Hits (Grunge)
I always thought “Plush” and “Interstate Love Song” were Eddie Veder joints with the “yeaahhhuuuhhhuhuh” type singing, but now I know better. The more experimental stuff, less Veder-y stuff was more up my alley, like “Trippin’ On a Hole” or “Big Bang Baby.”
Alice in Chains - Greatest Hits (Grunge)
One of the two “Alice” bands alongside Alice Cooper. There’s also the song “Living Next Door to Alice” by Smokie, which has the alternate, live-version only lyrics “Alice? Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?” Wouldn’t we all like to know! Anyway, I listened to this, and I’ve had this invasive thought multiple times since: Yeaahhah they come to snuff the roosterrraaahhhhh, aw yeahah. Yeaaaahhhh here come the rooster, yeaaahhh. Ah yeaaahhhhh---heyyyaaahhh.
Neko Case - Blacklisted (Country?), Furnace Room Lullaby (Country?)
I don’t have a lot to say here, I liked Furnace Room Lullaby more than Blacklisted, but have also learned that Case’s more recent work takes a different direction from the earlier records.
* Molchat Doma - Etazhi (Synthwave/Doomer)
Doomer music seems like it came and went very quickly. It’s still cool! Kino meets New Order. But I wonder what was up with that blip of popularity.
Piebald - We Are the Only Friends We Have (Emo)
Hey! You’re part of it. “American Hearts” kind of makes me think of that one song (I had to google “song set in a mall” because I can never remember this song name), “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals. This is kind of alt-y, kind of punk-y emo closer to Third Eye Blind than anything else. I like the vocalist, I’m on board with Piebald.
* OWLS - Owls (Math Rock/Emo)
This rules, very post-y, math-y emo, kind of makes me think of Polvo or Unwound. “What Whorse You Wrote Id On” is such a sick track to open on. It’s a little self-indulgent the way math rock and post-rock get, but overall a really cool album.
AAAAHHHH I just looked this band up and it’s Cap’n Jazz minus the guitarist?????? Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!! I would’ve never guessed. With The Promise Ring it’s obvious, but OWLS not so much. Interesting how that works.
Wow, Owls! - Pick Your Patterns (Screamo)
I thought it would be funny to listen to two “owl” bands this week. These guys are post-hardcore-y screamo that lean more hardcore than post. Their big walls of sound are, unfortunately, a little too much for me.
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[1] Fragment I cut from the Matisse essay:
Generally speaking, paint is colorful glue. Pigment (tiny little fragments of colorful matter) is mixed together with a binder (oil for oil paint, plastic resin [2] for acrylic paint, and so on) to form paint, which makes it easy to spread the color around before the binder dries and sets, creating something more permanent.
Historically, most colors have come from physical objects found in nature, like the aforementioned sea snails. Ivory Black was originally made from charred bones, Ultramarine was made with lapis lazuli. Many paints were made from metals: Cobalt Blue, Raw Umber, Lead White. Some paints are just specific blends of other colors: Hooker’s Green is a particular mix of blue and yellow paint, and does not come from any one physical source. But there is a limit to the amount of colors you can create by mixing, and some colors have been completely missing from paintings because they just didn’t exist in pigment form. This makes new colors exciting! They’re colors that were not present in anything manmade prior to their creation.
[2] Acrylic paint is basically just colorful plastic that hardens when it dries. I was googling “latex paint vs acrylic paint” and a bunch of house painting companies write about how latex is water-based but acrylic is chemical-based, which is absolute nonsense. These days they’re the same thing.
[3] I originally started this essay off with a paragraph about how 23 of the top 24 grossing movies of the 2010s are sequels or extensions of already popular franchises, and about how I think saying “adulting” sincerely should be a crime.
After writing and thinking a bunch, The Kid Detective stopped making sense as a movie about growing up and treating yourself seriously. If anything, it’s the opposite of that, a movie about making peace with and forgiving yourself, and looking at the wreckage around you.
[4] I kind of want to write a little bit about what’s going on with new colors in our contemporary times too, but I think I’ll save it for next week. Naples yellow is still sold but is a completely different color now than it used to be. There’s relatively recent drama involving a man who has exclusive rights to a very dark shade of black called “Vantablack” and people who strongly disagree with this.
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That’s it for this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts, tell your friends, have a great day.