1 L a c k o f i r o n y Note: you are reading an excerpt from: James Elkins, “Failure in Twentieth-Century Painting” (unpublished MS) Revised 9.2001 This page was originally posted on: www.jameselkins.com Send all comments to:
[email protected] Part Two – 2 – 3: Lack of irony I cannot tell you who told me or in what footnote it sat hidden. This and other disjecta membra, the abused here drawn together with pain for their further dis- memberment, I offer to the presiding judge of our art, self-pleasured Ironia. — Geoffrey Hill1 There are only a few times I have laughed out loud in an art gallery. When I saw Hofbauer’s Poutnik (Pilgrim, 1905) in the Veletriní Palác, Prague, I took in the rounded grassy hillside topped by a prehistoric dolmen, and I noticed the little fire burning in its passageway. I saw the bowed figure in the purple cape walking slowly up toward the dolmen. He looked intent on his druidical mysteries. That would have been enough, but then I focused on what was behind just behind him: a black panther, following along like an overfed housecat. That is when I laughed—it was just too much. Hofbauer (1869-1944) was the same generation as Frantisek Kupka (1871- 1951), and the two of them shared a humorlessness that has vanished from more recent Czech painting: but that fact doesn’t help me see druids (or religion, or painting) as Hofbauer did. I also laughed (though not so loudly) at the Bulgarian painter Boris Georgiev (1888-1962), who painted Eternal Road (1925, National Museum of Art, Sofia), where a semi-nude hero rests, adopting Hippolyte Flandrin’s famous pose, on a clifftop in an exotic arctic panorama that looks like a Fredrick Church composition painted by Puvis de Chavannes.