MEMPHIS FURNITURE

Above, you'll find a room full of Memphis furniture (above) from the 1980s. That was the trendy furniture style of its day, the thing we 80s people all longed to have. Gee, 30 years later some of the pieces look like shag cat toys, and a whole room full of it seems like clutter. Even so, I retain an affection for it. Maybe it's worth examining to see where the movement went wrong.

First, lets talk about what they did right. How do you like these Cliff Sterrett / Picasso-style vaces (above)?  Probably flowers didn't look good in them, but who cares? They look great!

And the iconic bookshelf (above) by Milan designer/Memphis co-founder Ettore Sottsass (yes, that was his real name) was marvelous.  Everybody in the 80s wanted one.

The problem was that, although it looked good as a stand-alone, it didn't integrate into a whole furnished room very well. The fact is that nobody had an idea of what a Memphis-style room should look like.

That's a photo of Sottsass above. Yikes! He doesn't look very happy.

I suspect that the man had enormous problems with production and quality control.  I'm guessing that people who did knock-offs of his ideas made a lot more money than he did.

Some of his studio's designs were misfires (above)...

...and some (above) looked downright uncomfortable. That's okay...nobody bats a thousand. If he'd had more time to iron out the kinks I think Sottsass would would have dominated furniture design well into the late 90s, but time was running out.

Memphis was grounded in 80s rock culture but rock was quickly giving way to hip-hop and that movement had no use for Memphis influences like Matisse and Picasso, Miro and Leger, Klee, Stella, Gris and Mondrian.

Boy, poor Sottsass!

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BTW: A couple of the pictures I posted may not have been of Memphis products per se, but I included them because they were close enough to be relevant.

PICASSO THEATRE

The set design in "Rabbit of Seville" is great, but who did it? I'm guessing Maurice Noble designed it and Phil DeGaurd (spelled right?) painted it, but maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, whoever did it was obviously referencing Picasso.

[Thanks to Roberto who commented that Gribbroek was responsible.]

Even before Picasso some set designs looked like they were made of cardboard. They looked like blown-up versions of the little paper tabletop models designers liked to make. Picasso seems to have taken a like to that look and accentuated it rather than covered it up.

You see that in Picasso's theater sketches. The sets look like paper dollhouses.

I couldn't find any sketch that looked exactly like the one in the Jones cartoon, but I came up with some similar ones.

Geez, that chandelier looks obscene!

MORE ABOUT PICASSO AND MATISSE

As the title suggests, this is about Picasso and Matisse and how their competition with each other helped to spur them both to greatness. I'm not an expert on this subject so if a reader catches a mistake I hope he'll let me know about it so I can change it. 

Anyway, a good place to start is this painting (above) from late in Picasso's Cubist period. He must have gotten bored with Cubism by this time because he seems to be flirting with representational painting again and with brighter color.

I think what jolted him out of Cubism was this picture (above) by Matisse. It was shockingly flat and colorful, and suggested a whole new way of depicting figures.

Picasso responded (above) by going even farther down the road Matisse had taken. Picasso flattened out his characters even more than Matisse had, and intensified and abstracted his color fields. I think he was also influenced by newspaper comics.

Actually this picture is probably from his slightly later "Heroic" period, but it still makes my point.   

Matisse (above) responded to Picasso by introducing colorful patterns into his work. The whole canvas was now vibrant with pattern.

Picasso followed Matisse's background-as-pattern idea (above) and upped the ante by abstracting the background more than his rival. It didn't exactly work. Matisse's backgrounds were warm and inviting, Picasso's were clever but cold. 

Maybe sensing that Matisse was beating him, Picasso devoted himself to making his  shapes and color more rounded and pleasing (above). Finally he hit on the marvelous color and line patterns that we call his "Heroic Period." In my opinion this was when Picasso did his best work.

Finally Matisse died. Without the Frenchman's ideas to spur him on Picasso lapsed into abstraction (above) for its own sake.

These new canvases (above) were cold and lifeless. You see Matisse's influence but Picasso can't find a way to make it work for him.

Interesting, eh?

PABLO PICASSO: CARTOONIST

What do you think of Picasso? A lot of animation cartoonists don't like him because he was the inspiration for U.P.A., which indirectly wrecked traditional full animation.  He certainly planted the idea in the public's mind that anything representational, even cartooning, was obsolete and old-fashioned.

I like him because he was a cartoonist at heart, even though he tried to refashion cartooning into a purely graphic art.

He colored his pictures (above) the way newspaper comic artists colored theirs.....well, somewhat. It was more of a caricature of the way newspaper cartoons were colored.

I wonder if the picture above influenced the way Dedini used color?

Without Picasso we wouldn't have had Virgil Parch, Cliff Sterrett, and Steinberg. We wouldn't even have had Searle.

Thanks to Amid Amidi and The Modesto Kid for the Steinberg-type picture above.

This (above) is a better example of what I meant when I said Picasso was influenced by newspaper comic color. He even added the dot pattern that newspapers used.

Picasso had a great sense of humor.  The figure above is magnificently ignorant (I mean that as a compliment).  It's really goofy and funny.

Sometimes I can't believe that he managed to get critics to accept stuff as overtly cartoony as this (above).

Really, is it so hard to see the influence of cartooning on his work (above)?  The man was a cartoonist. He was one of us, though you could argue that he undermined cartoon art by abstracting it and removing it from acting and storytelling.

Picasso's mission seemed to be to liberate cartoon technique from cartoons. He seemed to think we cartoonists had a bag of tricks that was too valuable to be entrusted to us only. 

The man obviously read newspaper comics. It could be that he was influenced by Herriman and Sterrett, Opper and Fenninger, maybe even funny animal comics, and simply didn't admit it.  He may have had closets full of comic pages that were thrown out after his death by custodians who didn't think they were important. 

BTW, I'm aware that some readers are saying, "Wait a minute! Herriman was influenced by Picasso, not the other way around!" To that I say don't be so hasty.  My guess is that Herriman and Picasso influenced each other. 

So what do ya think?

MATISSE vs. PICASSO

I don't expect readers to like these pictures. They're not really the best work of these artists. Even so, they're useful for illustrating one of the most intense rivalries in the history of art and for showing how competition stimulates artistic growth.

Usually the back and forth started with Matisse. He'd paint something and Picasso would try to top it. Matisse had a reputation for being drastic and cutting edge and and that's the way Picasso wanted to be regarded. What better way than to take whatever the most drastic artist did and do something similar that's even more drastic?

Here (above) Picasso takes the Matisse picture of the woman surrounded by pattern (topmost) and does his own, even more stylized version of the same subject. It's not one of Picasso's best, in fact, it's kitsch in my opinion. The picture has no conviction. It's drastic for the sake of being drastic.

I imagine that Matisse must have been mad when he saw it. How irritating to have someone following you up, repainting your pictures in their own shallow "look-at-me" style.

Or maybe Matisse wasn't mad. He's on record as having exchanged pictures with Picasso and he was always enquiring about his health. Maybe Matisse valued the stimulus of the competition.


Eventually Picasso's knock-offs became more and more confidant, so much so that Matisse would sometimes copy Picasso. Compare the Matisse (black and white above) with Picasso (immediately above). Somehow Picasso made the knock-offs into a coherent style. Well, whatever works.


In an effort to out-do his imitator Matisse sometimes went to far. In the picture above Matisse tries to be mathematical and cold like Picasso and succeeds too well in a sense. This picture has none of the warmth we normally associate with Matisse.


Picasso (the picture above), on the other hand, for once succeeds in being more warm and appealing than Matisse. Amazing!

The reason I put these pictures up was to suggest that we can learn something from their painters' rivalry. Maybe it's a good idea to pick an illustrious target and try to beat him at his own game. The idea isn't to steal another person's ideas but to use them as a springboard to create your own ideas. Sometimes new ideas have to form around the nucleus of an old idea.

I hope I don't create monster copiests by talking like this. I used the word "copy" to describe what Picasso did but as you can see from the examples, Picasso did a lot more than copy. The man was heavily influenced but he didn't steal.