The Infinite Art Tournament, Round Two: Giacometti v. Gilman!

It's been a while since we had a First Round tie, but behold! Ghiberti and Ghirlandaio fought to a standstill and will be be seen next in tiebreak contests. The bracket shakes itself a little, and we proceed with a contest of Big Name modern sculpture versus Medium Name British Impressionism.

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Alberto Giacometti
1901 - 1966
Swiss; worked in Paris

Scorched Florentine sculptor Giambologna in Round 1

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Harold Gilman
1878 - 1919
British

Beat Gilbert & George in Round 1 by a two-vote swing. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!!!

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting.

The Infinite Art Tournament Turns 2

So that pairing, Guardi v. Guercino, was #99.  Next week will be the hundredth First Round pairing, and our exciting introduction to artists whose last name begins with the letter "H."  Indeed, we are only three First-Round matches from the bottom of the third sheet of our eight-page bracket.  Meanwhile, the Play-In SubTournament has moved into its second phase and within a month or two will actually launch a few artists out into the main bracket.  It is an exciting time to be alive.

People still occasionally find ways to let me know that the Tournament is dumb.  Well, duh.  It should be obvious that the Tournament is not trying to be particularly smart.  The Tournament is just a machine for art appreciation, and I daresay it works pretty well if you let it.

This is the kind of thing we pass on, because we have an embarrassment of riches.

Nevertheless, I had more sympathy than usual for the naysayers a few weeks ago, when I had the opportunity to spend several hours at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  It was instructive, for instance, to spend some time with the paintings of Daubigny.  He inspired no affection among us at all.  With only four votes for and 26 against, he has the worst relative score of anyone who has left the Tournament to date.  But in person, his proto-Impressionist landscapes are gorgeous, beautifully executed and -- this bugged me, somehow -- much, much smaller than I had expected.  Jean Arp, a flash in the Tournament pan, is puckish and charming in a museum setting.  Derain, a recent 2-and-out, was magnificent.  The Boston MFA has a huge American collection, and it seemed that every time I stopped in front of one to say "wow," it turned out I was looking at an Allston, the very first artist we voted out of the Tournament, or a Copley, one of the most recent.

(Note: since I wrote the first draft, Domenicino -- a painter once designated by a fairly representative critic as the fourth best of all time, before he fell out of fashion -- passed Daubigny as the artist with the most painful Tournament record.)

Well, the nature of a tournament is that competitors get eliminated, I guess, and since this is a tournament of acknowledged masters there shouldn't be too many we are downright delighted to see booted out.  (Naturally there are a few.  For me, I look forward with unseemly glee to taking Gilbert and George and, even now, Roy Lichtenstein off of the brackets; I'm sure you have a few artists you are looking forward to seeing on the Wednesday Post yourself.)  But for a few days, I admit I felt like this little Tournament was somehow a negative little thing, trivializing the art through its own triviality.

Don't worry, I'm back now. We've got some topsy-turvy madness coming up in the brackets this week!!  Plus, at least one of us will enjoy some gratifying schadenfreude.  It's gonna be great!

Domenichino tallied a vote total of 3-21 and suffered the Tournament's first shutout
on the way to a hasty exit.  His St. John the Evangelist, however, was auctioned
in 2009 for £9.2 million. Somebody still loves him.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round One: Guardi v. Guercino!

Francesco Guardi
1712 - 1780
Venetian

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Guercino
1591-1666
Italian

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Vote for the artist of your choice!  Votes go in the comments.  Commentary and links to additional work are welcome.  Polls open for at least one month past posting.

Saint of the Month: St. John Chrysostom

A Fifteenth Century icon of
St. John Chrysostom

St. John Chrysostom

AKA: Giovanni Crisostomo, sometimes just "Chrysostom," familiarly. Chrysostum is literally "Golden Mouth."
Feast Day: September 13.

Really Existed? Certainly.
Timeframe: c. 347 - 407
Place: The Roman Empire.

Credentials: Recognized by tradition since the fifth century.
Martyrdom: Exiled from Constantinople on two occasions; died in exile.

Patron Saint of: Orators, epileptics, preachers, Constantinople.
Symbolism: Shown with or around bees, a dove, or a pen. As a Doctor of the Church, likely to be shown with a book.

St. John Chrysostom was the best preacher ever. Like, literally. Which is to say, he is often cited in summaries of his life as the most successful Christian orator in history. He is considered a very important figure in the history of Christian thought. I have to admit I had never heard at him before I began looking into hagiography, but it turns out he is on the shortlist that will show up on any saints’ roster of any length. Like a word newly learned, now that I’ve heard of him, I notice him everywhere.

As a bishop in two high-profile posts, his hometown Antioch and Constantinople, the Imperial capital, Chrysostom was obviously an important public person in his own day. A prolific writer, he left a large body of work that managed to survive through the Dark Ages. In Orthodoxy, he was one of the original three Doctors or “Hierarchs” of the Church, which means he was deemed one of the three people who were thought to have made the strongest contribution to doctrine and practice. In 1568, Pope Pius V declared that the three Eastern Doctors (plus one, for symmetry) could join the original four Doctors of the Western Church (Saints Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, and Ambrose). So theologically speaking, St. John Chrysostom is a really big deal.

The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia waffles a little bit, though, on exactly what points of theology Chrysostom contributed to Christian tradition. “Chrysostom's was not a speculative mind, nor was he involved in his lifetime in great dogmatic controversies,” it says, adding that with a few exceptions of omission the Saint’s teachings were pitched pretty much right over the plate of Catholic thought. He seems to be well-regarded for his works of exegesis, which is to say interpretation and commentary of the gospels and Psalms. A darker line of opinion about Chrysostom holds that he advanced anti-Semitism, or at least left writings that have been mined and exploited by anti-Semites.

Chrysostom has traditionally been revered for his exegesis of the letters of Paul.  This icon
represents a story about a servant boy who witnesses the image of St. Paul whispering
truth into Chrysostom's ear as he works.

Now, when I look into some of the more obscure Saints, I sometimes dig very hard to find out as much as possible about them, and sadly, for a few of them my write-ups immediately become the most definitive, most scholarly resources available in English online. With somebody like St. John Chrysostom, on the other hand, you could get your doctorate in Theology without ever running out of things to read about him, especially if your classical Greek is less rusty than mine. This is one case where we can be very confident indeed that the Wiki article on our Saint of the Month is more authoritative than mine.

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Did you know? One rule of Michael5000’s Saint of the Month project is that he never looks at the Wikipedia article on a Saint until his own piece is finished. 

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From our extremely sketchy outline of Chrysostom’s role in Church history, however, we can ask one interesting (albeit unanswerable) question. That is this: Given that he was not involved in “great dogmatic controversies” – which would imply that he was not instrumental in influencing any great theological decisions – then why is he a Doctor of the Church? I wonder about his well-preserved body of writings, and I wonder how many other leading Christian figures of the First Millennium wrote or spoke great libraries of theological wisdom that did not survive into the modern written record. If somebody else’s work had survived, and Chrysostom’s had not, would modern Christianity be substantially different? Would Chrysostom be remembered as anything more than a footnote? Would the guy with the extant body of work be the alternative Doctor of the Church? Clearly, this would be a promising topic for an incredibly erudite novel of science fiction.

St. John Chrysostum flanked by St. Paul (left) and St. Basil (right).  Carlo Crivelli, c. 1493.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Left Bracket Second Round: Brancusi v. Delvaux!

Constantin Brancusi
1876 - 1956
Romanian; worked in France.

Lost an early lead and lost to Cubist master Georges Braque by a single vote in Round 1! YOUR VOTE COUNTS!!!
Languished for the better part of a year after the victory was miscalculated as a tie.
Broke living American Jim Dine's heart in First Round Elimination.

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Paul Delvaux
1897 - 1994
Belgian

Beat Maurice Denis in a down-to-the-last-vote contest in Round 1. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!!!
Lost to Richard Diebenkorn in Round 2.

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting, but likely much longer.

The Wednesday Post

Art From My Phone
Text messages are a kind of "post," right?

If you were reading this online entertainment in September of 2008, you would have seen my announcement of the arrival of frequent voter Chuckdaddy's first child (he is now up to two, and holding).

Since then, there hasn't been much mention here of "Baby ChuckDaddy" -- now RobustLittleBoy ChuckDaddy -- although he did vote once or twice, I believe.  But he's quite an interesting chap.  His interests have included classical mythology and hopping on a miniature trampoline with an almost preternatural persistence and physical stability, like some kind of bouncy human gyroscope.

Lately he has taken to drawing.  He seems to have inherited his father's taste for Chagall, to judge from the angels and other mystical figures that he captures in spare but lyrical curves.  Not one to agonize over the details of a piece, he works fast and determinedly, sometimes pounding through a dozen or more works in one sitting.

And now, he has joined the ranks of those inspired by the Infinite Art Tournament:

 

 

Apparently one of these is a father-son collaboration.  You can test your art-historical and art-critical skillz by trying to determine which ones are pure Chuckdaddy Junior, and which one also betrays work of someone else from the Circle of Chuckdaddy Junior.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 3: Feininger v. Foujita

Lyonel Feininger
1871 - 1956
American; worked internationally

Crushed Jean Fautrier in Round 1.
Held off Carel Fabritius in Round 2 by a two-vote swing. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!!!

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Tsugouharu Foujita
1886-1968
Japanese; worked in France

Lambasted late medieval Frenchman Jean Fouquet in Round 1.
Beat Argentina's Lucio Fontana in Round 2.

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting.