Pictures of nothing 2006

It's not only a book that changed me but it brought me a new kind of life into the already-known one with abstract art I was walking with and discovering from the new always

When I first came across the lectures of Kirk Varnedoe I was more than just sad to find out He is not physically on earth anymore with us.

I quickly ordered a book from Amazon and waited a month for its delivery

Meanwhile, I went through all the recordings from the Mellon lectures I could find.

Still reading the book thanks to Adam Gopnik was a completely different experience for me not only from being an abstract thinker and a so-called artist or a painter but also someone who carried strong love and passion to its origin and the whole abstract art life history of it all. Together with Kirk, I was discovering many others great historian and writers but the way Kirk shared all and talked about each art had a completely different meaning and approach or a more to say consistency of the sensitivity He carried inside of Him and the unique way He was able to share it all through His language that was already an art itself. A Man with a huge heart for an art and respect bringing back the worth and the meaning of abstract art. The golden times of abstraction this is how the period during which I was researching more about it somehow was synchronized with the times of abstract art from the now.

The tradition and the abstract art of the present seemed to have a new arrival, Back in the year 2013 when I encountered Kirk's mind for the first time the world was filled with exhibitions all over the place that were bringing back Abstract art and a new kind of recognition both from the past and the time of the now highlighting the continuation of it and the new language taken from the giants of Abstraction like Pollock for example.

New artists were translating His way injecting into new and coming with a new solution of their own this way continues up to the times of the now.

When I found Kirk Varnedoe I felt like I finally found a proof to what I have been feeling but missing to be written in the history of an abstract art

I was more than happy to find Him and a moment later more than disappointed to know He won't be able to write more and go on with it.

So the only connection was through what He left in here and through the people who made it possible to collect and write after delivering of his last lectures.

To read or to listen to the Mellon lectures by Kirk Varnedoe one needs to experience it.

I can really add nothing more about it or to it, it does change the way You create and approach Your own way in art and life. There is no way of not being inspired or influenced by Him whether You are a historian, critic artist, designer, poet, or writer carrying a love for art and humanity.

However, I met some who admitted They were not interested in going through His teachings later on reading my own writings including Him. They were publishing it without even mentioning who introduced Him to them but mostly this is what happens to students at the Academy of Fine Arts where all the real fires are quickly shut down and burnt out to be a supply for the ones who carry the title and no brain of their own and mind not telling about heart.

Art professors can be just unfair so If You are a new student of Art this book can be your number one for a start.

Kirk was one of these people You just wish to meet in life and listen to His lectures without feeling bored or surprised How He does act as a Human in real circumstances of life. He was so passionate and involved in Art that He didn't take a breath to improve and recover His health and taking a pause to deliver the lectures was not only challenging but the most important to Him. He passed away just three months after giving the last Mellon lecture on 14 August 2003.

The lectures He gave You could feel are His last ones with the way He carried Himself in there freely speaking as if the best advocate bringing the abstract art to its right and its light

He will always be One of the examples for me if it comes to the history of abstract art in modern times.

The one that I was so inspired for quite a while coming back and discovering a new kind of a state, approach and seeing the art feeling it from another kind of mind that carried huge love and passion and to spread it all over the world with the words of world that not many historians could carry with like a hero of modern times giving the full exact picture about abstract art in the very of the now.

I will add some fragments from a book so that You will have a preview :

''The Mellon Lectures were formally inaugurated on December 6, 1949, by the Board of Trusters of the National Gallery of Art. Their purpose was to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thoughts and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the fine arts. Kirk had a strong sense of the historical tradition of the Mellon Lectures, and referred to this often. It was important to him that, in keeping with the original charter by the trustees, he was addressing a broad public, not only academic specialists. John Kirk Train Varnedoe was the fifty-second A. W. Mellon lecturer at the National Gallery of Art. Between March 30 and May 11, 2003, he delivered six lectures under the general title " Pictures of Nothing Abstract Art since Pollock.'' The book is the only written echo of what was delivered by him during this series of lectures that gathered crowds from all over the country of students, critics, artists, etc ''. - You can read in the Foreward of the book written by Earl. A Powell III Director of the National Gallery of Art

''As Kirk Varnedoe talked about these lectures, He meant a reply, an answer to the Mellon Lectures of Austrian-English art historian E.H. Gombrich almost fifty years earlier, which produced Art and Illusion - one of those rare books that deserve the much-abused adjective ''seminal'', since almost everything that has been made out of the philosophy of representation descends from it. For Gombrich, the rise of abstract painting, which was in its heyday as he wrote, was a return of the irrational, a romantic rebellion against that rational humanistic tradition of representation - impressive in it's achievements at times, but essentially ''primitivizing'' and limiting in it's expressive range and vision of the world. The abstract artists could say only one thing, again and again.''

"Varnedoe wanted to show something opposite, that abstract art was not an undifferentiated wave of negations or calls away from order, but a series of unique inventions - situated in history, but responsive to individual agency, and immensely, varied in tone and meaning. He wanted to show that, like the history of representation, the real history of abstract painting shows the continuous evolution of a new language for art. The language that might be coded and ''corrected'' changed, in various ways and different from what the Renaissance language of art had been changed and corrected, but still connected and continuous with that language. - You can read it in the preface by Adam Gopnik

Kirk Varnedoe divided these lectures into 6 series :

1 Why Abstract Art ?

2 Survivals and Fresh Starts

3 Minimalism

4 After Minimalism

5 Satire, Irony, and Abstract Art

6 Abstract Art Now

''In the first one titled Why Abstract Art ! - where He explains the main title of this year's Mellon Lectures " Pictures of Nothing '', comes from an essay by William Hazlitt about one of his contemporaries, the early nineteenth-century English painter J.M.W Turner. His essay reports the remark of a viewer about one of the vaporous and indistinct conjurings of atmospheric effects as in the landscape of the 1840s Snowstorm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth by Turner.

The viewer harrumphed, "Pictures of nothing," - and very like ''.

This attitude, skeptical at best, dismissive at worst, seems as premonitory of modern reactions to abstract art as Turner is of abstraction itself ''.- says Kirk, describing to talk in this lecture about the abstract art for the last fifty years writes Adam Gopnik.

Mellon's lectures were the response to the more than just dismissive and disrespectful lectures delivered by E.Gombrich a book that I could simply grab in any Italian bookstore I went into in Europe. While I wasn't able to grab Kirk's book just like that in there.

I don't carry hate to it but a big misunderstanding and promotion of what is not a real art lecture is more taking away from the already challenged abstract art to bring its real meaning history and worth.

His way of being and delivering the knowledge for sure has changed my art and approach to it for years and it will never stop amaze me whenever I discover more of his words and the way he truly felt art, experience it, and the artist's life that was always synchronizing in his talk.

He was like a hero that was taking the stage and was coming with all like nobody really did before at least is what I have experienced on my own through His being and a way. You get to remember every artwork and detail because the way Kirk was able to translate it for the public makes it long-lasting not just in the experience of a listener but also art itself and the whole order around it that slowly gets its renewal from the new start of the mind.

Discovering art and its history on my own I am very greatful to come across such a gem as Pictures of Nothing and its author Kirk Varnedoe

All of His lectures and books adds so much to my life for which I am more than grateful and will be entirely coming back to save me from the scepticism and irrationalism of human mind about the misunderstanding of abstract art

Even though with years I got to discover a new history and reason of it and a state of arrival in terms of abstract art and its history He was the only one able to arrive with what He did and all abstract creators are finding a new land and a lost home in his space and the world he left for us to dive in again and again from the new.

Kirk Varnedoe in Wikipedia :

John Kirk Train Varnedoe (January 18, 1946 – August 14, 2003) was an American art historian, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 1988 to 2001, Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Professor of Fine Arts at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.

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