Crazy old coots make the train ride to the cubicle that much more enjoyable, especially if they are French, because they take themselves so seriously, of course…Wait, I do that…does that make me French???¿ So, I’m reading this book Colours by David Batchelor…Oh, and if you haven’t bought the book already go out and by it because I’m not going to key in the whole goddamn thing for you because that just wouldn’t be right, even though this IS the internets and nobody reads this thing anyway, I’m just plain lazy, who wants to do all that typing. So just buy the book, I mean I know we’re in THE RECESSION, and you lost all your monies to those fancy Wall Streeters and their ponzi schemes, but David Batchelor is an artist, even though he puts together these fancy books, and could use your money just like those guys at Merrill. And if you have some extra monies in your pocket buys a few copies for all your starving artist friends. But they have to be painters, because otherwise if it doesn’t have fancy words like Baudrillard or Roland Barthes or Julia Kristeva or Derrida or Adorno or Deluze or Yoko Ono or post-modern, then they won’t be interested. Oh, but they’re in here? Who knew that they had anything interesting to say about colour? Is everything always already colourful? How pomo!

Anyway, I digress….where was I…oh yes, crazy old french coots named Max Nordau who HATE colour and have giant stiff things rammed up their cooters.

…The curious style of certain recent painters – ‘impressionists,’ ‘stipplers,’ or ‘mosaists,’ ‘papilloteurs’ or ‘quiverers,’ [this guy is so gay isn't he?] ‘roaring’ coulourists, dyers in grey and faded tints – becomes at once intelligible to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot school into the visual derangements in degeneration and hysteria. The painters who assure us that they are sincere, and reproduce nature as they see it, speak the truth. The degenerate artist who suffers from nystagmus, or trembling of the eyeball, will in fact, perceive the phenomena of nature trembling, restless, devoid of firm outline, and if he is a conscientious painter, will give us pictures reminding us of the mode practised by the draughtsmen of the Fliegende Batter when they represent a wet dog shaking himself vigorously. If his pictures fail to produce a comic effect, it is only because the attentive beholder reads in them the desperate effort to reproduce fully an impression incapable of reproduction by the expedients of the painter’s art as devised by men of normal vision.

…Thus originate the violet pictures of Manet and his school, which spring from no actually observable aspect of nature, but from a subjective view due to the condition of the nerves. When the entire surface of walls in salons and art exhibitions of the day appears veiled in uniform half-mourning, this predilection for violet is simply an expression of the nervous debility of the painter… {Read More…}