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378 BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN AND ... Ingrès said to his detractors, "They say I am not of this century." and then he continued, "If I don't like my century artwise, must I belong to it?" And I say that about myself: if that is the art of this century I would rather not belong to my century. I paint the way IO paint. BLDD: Did it ever occur to you to experiment with abstract expressionism? RS: No, it wasn't too much of a challenge for me, because as I said before, these abstract expressionists, I knew them all, they were my contemporaries, and I knew what they were before they became abstract expressionists. BLDD: What were they? RS: What were they? They were, well, not geniuses, to be polite. Some of them were a little mediocreish. I knew them all, I liked them all as people. I knew especially Arshile Gorky, whom I liked very much, and I think that he was probably the most poetic of them-he had a certain lyrical quality in his earlier work; no matter whom he emulated, there was always this element of Arshile Gorky in his paintings. I always defended him, and I just deplored the fact that he finally became an abstract expressionist. BLDD: Are there more and more people that are accepting representational art today? RS: Maybe. I think that some young artists became a little sick and tired of what was going on, and they are trying very hard to get back to representationalism, but they have lost a lot time, and it shows. It will take a little while. If that trend goes on it will take a little while for them and for art to redevelop again. BLDD: Do you think that profound, thematic, contemplative painting is something that is becoming extinct? [[note]] 203/204 [[/note]] RS: I think what is really the problem is that what the artist used to do, what was expected of the artist, is done technologically today. At one time a person went to Van Eyck or Van Dyck and said, do my portrait. Now they can go to the photographer. When the inauguration of Napoleon took place, Jacques-Louis David painted this great painting that is now in the Louvre. Today, when the inauguration of a president takes place, there is a camera, there is television, there is everything else, but not the artists. When the war in Vietnam took place-at one time artists would go and make drawings, like Winslow Homer during the Civil War. Today there's nobody but the photographers. In other words, our technological society can do without an artist. The artist is not needed in our society, and therefore I think he has lost his function, and he does not know what to do with himself. BLDD: Is there anything that you haven't painted that you would like to? RAPHAEL SOYER 379 RS: Well, I would like to paint the Justices of the Supreme Court. Like Franz Hals painted those huge paintings. Why not? It would be wonderful. BLDD: How do you know when a painting is finished? RS: I really don't know. That's a problem. At times I overdo a painting, I work too much on it, and I lose the initial quality of spontaneity. BLDD: By contemporary standards, you may be conservative in your choice of painters, but surely you are not in your choice of writers. Why do you not apply the same standards to experimental writers as you do to experimental painters? RS: Well, I think the experimental writers make more sense than the experimental painters, because I haven't seen just a blank page and someone would call it a piece of writing, but I saw a blank canvas and someone would say this is a work of art. BLDD: Your work has been known to be very sympathetic to the female figure. RS: Yes, I like the female figure. I like it very much. I like the architecture of it, if you can say that. BLDD: And the male figure? RS: The male figure does not interest me very much. The face, yes, but not the figure. For some reason it has a way of embarrassing me. I am never embarrassed in front of a female figure, but in front of a male figure I have a vague sense of embarrassment. It's interesting. From audience: You describe the International Style as being contentless. What do you mean by content? RS: What is content to me? Again I must say the simple word "people." People-that's content to me. People within the context of their daily life, or the objects that the human hand touches. Humanity, humans, people. That's what I consider content, and I think that if you just put a lot of brush strokes and maybe a nice color or sometimes a disagreeable color, to me that is contentless, no matter what name they give to those pictures. From audience: Isn't it true that either the abstract or the representational could adopt classical art as their founder? RS: Yes, well, you see, a Vermeer or a Rembrandt-and I can add other artists too-they had many elements in one painting: the abstract element, the storytelling element, the human element, the quality of the paint, so many things. They say that Vermeer is probably the most abstract of all traditional painters, of all classical painters-well, he even paints a pregnant woman reading a letter: isn't that a story? The element of abstraction is present in all great works, certainly. But the abstract painters extract this element and they make it into a big thing-they make it the painting, and nothing else is there, just that.