Canaletto and Gauguin

I went to DC this past weekend to see both shows at the National Gallery. I did this despite the fact that I do not like Gauguin and because I thought that I like Canaletto more than it turns out that I do.

I do not like Gauguin's colors, subject, stories–anything. Because I feel this way, I thought it was important to look at a large collection of his paintings and really consider this dislike. Unfortunately, my dislike is such that I do not particularly want to look at his paintings. In this situation, I wander through each gallery letting anything that catches my eye be a reason to approach that work. Each time I then found that I liked it no more up close, or even that I actively disliked it having examined it more closely. earlier that week someone had told me how much she enjoyed Gauguin, she thought because it reminded her of her childhood in Hawaii. This appreciation, and my fondness for her, I brought with me to the viewing but alas could find no grip on which to attach my own appreciation.

The Canaletto show was a mixed bag for me as I absolutely adored the early works. I could stare at them for so long and some of them I did, letting my mind wander through the painting, up stairs to doorways inside of which led to room where there were windows out of which to look back out, down the canal to a curve at the end, or through the piazza to see the groups gathered here, and there. They were filled with stories that my brain likes to tell myself when I sit alone in museums. The whole middle period is very cold in comparison. As my companion pointed out, it is all business for them. Indeed it shows. Fortunately, he pointed me towards the Guardi's at the end of the show and sweet, small piece by Canaletto at the end of his life that is framed by the shadows of the archway under which he looks out at the bright piazza beyond.

Visiting shows is not merely to see what you like but learn more about what you do and don't like and this visit was a great success because I know myself better by watching my own responses to art that is there for the viewing.

The Center of a Revolution

Since 1727, astronomers have defined a revolution as a body rotating around its own axis. Surrealists define a revolution in exactly the opposite way. They see it as an interruption of the monotonous rotation of Western civilization around itself, to do away with this self-absorbed axis once and for all and to open the possibilities of another movement: the free and harmonic movement of a civilization of passionate attraction.

But a revolution needs a center around which to spin... we need a center it seems, some axis that allows us to know we are spinning, confused perhaps disoriented, but not lost. I was surprised to see how even the pictures of revolutions below are centered. I wonder if perhaps particularly in times of upheaval, there is an inclination towards a focus as all spreads out in search of the new.

John Trumbull-The Committee of Five presenting their work to the Congress on June 28, 1776

Petrograd, 4 July 1917-Street demonstration on Nevsky Prospekt.

Jacques Louis David- Tennis Court Oath

Seeing what you saw

Only by art can we emerge from ourselves, can we know what another sees of this universe that is not the same as ours and whose landscapes would have remained as unknown to us as those that might be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of a single world, our own, we see it multiply, and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds will we have at our disposal, more different from each other than those that circle in the void...
Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Time Regained

And so why "escaping" into a book, or wandering randomly in a museum, can be the best thing for me when I am distressed. But it would be a mistake to think that Proust is simply suggesting subjective differences here, or that all we are to get is another point of view.

Deleuze covers this point very well in Chapter 4 of his Proust and Signs by explaining that "each subject expressed the world from a certain viewpoint. But the viewpoint is the difference itself, the absolute internal difference. Each subject therefore expresses an absolutely different world. And doubtless the world so expressed does not exist outside the subject expressing it...But the world expressed is not identified with the subject...It is not reducible to a psychological state, nor to a psychological subjectivity, nor even to some form of a higher subjectivity".

Which then brings me back to Proust, who is so clear to each of us that we want to explain him, our vision of him, to everyone else. "These worlds that we call individuals, and which without art we would never know" he says and I wonder if I know you better because your frustration reminds me of Bloch, your desire of Andrée, or your grace of the Queen of Naples. I wonder if I see what was painted or imagine a painting that conforms to what I am capable of seeing. Likely your Proust is different from mine so that he knows the secret of all our hearts and whispers them to us as we read. Proust goes on endlessly, a pleasure for some, not for others and having read him through again I saw something else, as he wanted, and I saw myself, somewhat differently from last time, because I find myself through art too.

Shifting Perspectives

The avant-garde proclaimed that an entirely new era in art was succeeding the age of the representational easel painting, yet by regarding its own works in contrast to traditional ones it assumed a place in the history of art that it had declared to be terminated as of its own appearance. Avant-garde reductionism arises out of the aspi­ration to reject tradition and begin from zero, but this very rejection is meaningful only insofar as tradition is still alive and serves as its background or alter-ego.

What exactly is being fought and why? Why must there continue to be this opposition between representational work and so-called abstract work? At best, both are explorations by artists of their respective abilities to present what they "see", their vision shifting and changing as the topic or situation of life or the world demands. We don't see without our minds and we don't think without an image-ination.

What would happen if these two were not in conflict and audiences were not required to like either this or that type of art, but could instead learn to approach pieces individually as we might another person at a party? I may say that actors are crazy, but I am happy to have the ones I know as friends. I wonder what it would be like if I approached art visually instead of ideologically, and tried to understand why the piece was created as a work of art instead of as a poem, film or not at all. I am at such times insistently naive, a friend in an art department told me recently, but that is the luxury of not being a scholar. I don't have to buy what I am told just because I bought a ticket to the museum.

Trees

Writing a paper on the trees in The Odyssey had me looking at cedars, poplars, palms, alders, firs, figs and olives. Right now the trees in New York City are a soggy mess, as they were when I was in Vancouver earlier this Spring. Despite the rain, I got to the famed Museum of Anthropology and then back into the city to the Vancouver Gallery of Art.

Current exhibits meant that the Emily Carrs had been displaced, which was disappointing since I am not quite sure what else would take me back to Vancouver. Her images of trees are a part of the aesthetic ethos of the place that is so keenly aware of its wilderness that the museum had an exhibit specifically focusing on the city rather than the environs, which is something like going to New York City and seeing a show on the wildlife rather than the architecture.

One of these days, I would actually like to see these painting rather than images of them since their fluidity is undoubtedly even more striking in person. I am told Emily Carr, herself, is exceedingly warm and welcoming which means that if I can think of a good project she is precisely the type of person I would love to interview. So many things to do.

I have a tree house here in New York that is one of my favorite places to go. I don't use my phone there and only sometimes check my email. It is dark since there is only one window but exceedingly cozy. As a little girl, I always wanted a Swiss Family Robinson tree palace, and when I was older was satisfied to live in the forest, walking barefoot, and climbing into the branches to read the afternoon away. Eventually, I decided that I really had to return to civilization and I largely have though I still like to escape, sneaking away in silence to my make shift tree house.

The reason I like Carr's trees is mostly because they move in my mind, reminders of the soaring conversations I have had wandering among trees that I got to know over my time living with them. I get bored with the forests of people in the social world of the city and just looking at the Carrs carries me away.

An Odyssey for the real thing

The last week has been largely spent delving into The Odyssey, and quite specifically the trees therein, which is exceedingly uninteresting to describe outside an academic context. One of the more famous scenes involving trees is Penelope's trick to ensure Odysseus is truly who he says he is.

When they were newly weds, or at any rate when he was building their home, he carved their bed from an old olive tree. When she calls a maid to bring him the bed, he turns on her furiously wondering how this could be. Only they know the secret steadfastness of their bed and so she is convinced that it is truly her twenty years long-lost, much beloved husband, Odysseus.

The description of the bed is rather detailed but I still can not conceive of how it is built.

A bush of long leafed olive was growing within the court, strong and vigorous, and in girth it was like a pillar. Round about this I built my chamber, till I had finished it, with close-set stones, and I roofed it over well, and added to it jointed doors, close-fitting. Thereupon I cut away the leafy branches of the long-leafed olive, and, trimming the trunk from the root up, I smoothed it round about with the adze well and cunningly, and trued it to the line, thus fashioning the bedpost; and I bored it all with the auger. Beginning with this, I made smooth the timbers of my bed, until I had it done, inlaying it with gold and silver and ivory, and I stretched on it a thong of oxhide, bright with purple.
Bk. XXIII.190-201, Loeb Translation A.T. Murray, Revised by George E. Dimmock

A friend in college who had successfully built bars in all his friends' apartments, decided to use his carpentry skills to make his girlfriend a bed. In the end, by which I mean graduation, the relationship did not last, but then they were not mythic characters for whom a greater purpose is dictated by fiction.

I went looking for images in the hopes that some creative individual might have made an effort to produce this bed which can not be moved. I could find nothing, but mostly noticed how uninteresting the vases, statues and sculptures appear in two dimension. The vases, which granted have never been my favorite, are nonetheless far more interesting when you have to walk around them to see the story told unfold. The beauty of the marble work is really lost if you can't gaze into the shadows of the detailed carving.

So, without knowing when, and despite the rain, I must somehow get myself all the way, to that far distant terrain of the Upper East Side,  into the Met to see some of these beautiful pieces in the incredibly gorgeous and well-lit new Greek and Roman Hall.

Civilization

An artist does not cease to be an artist, nor a scientist a scientist, because some of his fellow citizens have lost a battle, or even many battles. An artistic knack, a political conception, or a piece of scientific lore may survive frommfather to son, and from one generation to another. But no civilization can subsist intact over a long period of disorder, change, or migration of peoples. By civilization we mean, do we not, a continuous and individual development of ideas?

So spake Carleton Stanley in 1936 in a book on Ancient Greece. I mention it here for several reasons, not least of which is the easy tone that this scholar published by Oxford University Press uses to converse with his reader. It is quite lovely and if only there were more of it these days, our academics might be more interested in development than declaration of knowledge.

I was also struck by the casual way in which he places artists and scientists as the basis of civilization. We take this idea so much for granted now that we are dismissive of it, as if in fact generations of humanity have not endeavored, over the cycles of history, to ensure that the artists and scientists have a space despite the efforts and battles of their fellows. Civilization can stand rude shocks, revolutions, famine, but some inventions, ideas, are not compatible with a current institution and so it undergoes a change. Sometimes a radical change. Change can appear to destroy a civilization but so long as there are a few quiet souls willing to putter away for their own satisfaction since the public will not permit it, civilization can not die.

The Church first burned Lucretius then dismissed him as a madman. One copy was found in the ninth century and over the next millennium he was slowly reincorporated into our conception of our own cultural history. A great poet, a curious scientist forgotten and recalled from oblivion. How wonderful to have found him, but I also wonder who were those silent monks who dedicated themselves to copying the manuscript, preserving it and their own creative stenography for history. Individuals develop ideas continuously harvesting from their personal and collective past, we disseminate them in recognition of some personal or collective value they contain. That is civilization.

When we are all pacified to do as another, satisfied to learn for the test, content to see only what we are shown then we can certify that civilization is ailing. We need independent thought, curious creativity, but also a passion for the past to provide our future.

Dedicated to a friend

Louis Boulanger  
The Witches' Sabbath (Souvenir of Victor Hugo) 1828

The first poem in Gaspard de la Nuit by Louis Bertrand that is dedicated to someone appears in the second book (of six), Vieux Paris. "Les Gueux de la Nuit" is dedicated to Louis Boulanger, a successful painter of the period whom Bertrand would have known from his time in Paris, having escaped the small town irritations of Dijon.

Boulanger illustrated many of Hugo's books including the very famous Notre Dame de Paris. This painting illustrates a poem from Hugo's collection of Romanticist Verse, Odes and Ballads, published two years earlier. A lithograph of the piece also exists, Ronde du Sabat, from which it is guessed that Bertrand did get the inspiration for his poem "La Ronde Sous La Cloche" (The Circle Beneath the Bell). Oddly, Bertrand does not dedicate his poem on "Départ pour le Sabat", but chooses to address Boulanger in the context of a poem of soldier's conversations regarding their gun escapades.

Callot

The 'gueux' of Paris were a group of mendicants during the Middle Ages. Bertrand writes about them in one of the poems in the second book, Vieux Paris, "Les Gueux de Nuit". A good image of such are the ones by Callot above, who was an aesthetic inspiration for the poem series as well. The war of the 'gueux' refers to a battle of 1566 in which the Netherlands opposed Spanish rule while also defending their rising Protestantism. The poem conversation has one man mention their having killed two night thiefs, where the previous poem has a band of houligans kill two Jews, including a rabbi, who are out at night, past curfew, with a few coins. The poem "Les Gueux de la Nuit" then suggests night beggars, but ones who are nonetheless respectable, in complete contrast to Bertrand's portrayal of them.

The lithograph, however, seems likely to have inspired his poem about the bell at the church of Saint Joan. This is particularly humorous since he knew that the better part of the church had been destroyed in 1810 to enlarge the Place of Saint Joan. Additionally, he has the devil worshipers faint to their death and a fire rage. The flames of hell cast shadows back onto the church walls, while shadows from the enormous statue of Saint Joan, which never existed, are cast on the neighboring buildings.

The poems focus on the medieval period. The wars, anti-semitism, gallows, mercenary soldiers of the time are all alluded to through literary and geographic references. The witch-hunts and convictions that fairies, gnomes and elves were ever-present tricksters allow the narrator's voice to appear uncertain of time, place and sanity. The poems play with the possibility of all that might be more than this world while laughing at such lunacy.

Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantaisies à la mannière de Rembrandt et Callot par Louis Bertrand

Felicien Rops, frontispiece 1868 edition

Art has always two antithetical sides, as if of a medal where one side would show the likeness of Paul Rembrandt, and the reverse, that of Jacques Callot. - Rembrandt is the philosopher with a white beard which spirals as it ends, his mind absorbed in meditation and prayer, who closes his eyes to gather himself, talking to the spirits of beauty, science, wisdom and love, and burning to penetrate the mysterious symbols of nature. - Callot, however, is the lancer and saucy braggart strutting about the place who makes noise in the tavern, who caresses the daughters of gypsies, who swears by his sword and his gun, whose only concern is to wax his mustache. The author of this book has considered art under this double personification.

In 1842 Bertrand's book of poems was released, after the efforts of several faithful friends, including the rather famous Sainte-Beuve who wrote the introduction to this first edition, but especially the concentrated efforts of David D'Angers. His book would become a cornerstone for Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the symbolists, Breton and the surrealists. Baudelaire acknowledges his influence on his prose poem text Le Spleen de Paris because Bertrand is largely considered the founder of the form, even if unknown and ignored. 
 

The strange text folds over and over on itself so that the voice of the narrator becomes confused among characters and authorial presences.

Bertrand's strange prose poems embrace the pictorial as the Romantics generally did, but all the more so for claiming to be inspired by two great artists and opening with a discussion of art. After a quote from Sainte Beuve and a poem, the next page presents a shaggy dog story in which the narrator recounts being told that art is not many things by a man who starts off seeming friendly, becomes increasingly strange, and then thrusts a book on him. The man, he discovers the next day, who had offered his name as he was leaving, Gaspard de la Nuit, is the devil. The narrator, unable to return the book, wishes him to burn in hell and decides to publish the book. We get the next Preface from which the above quote is excerpted, followed by a dedication to Victor Hugo dated 1836, then finally the title page of the 'devil' book simply titled Les Fantaisies de Gaspard de la Nuit.

Beyond the issue of art within the contained text of the poems, he also imagined the art of the published book. He specified directions not only for the layout of the text, but the illustrations he desired and where they might be placed. Three pages of notes included with the manuscript to the editor were ignored. He was not a great artist but he did produce some drawings that give a sense of what he imagined the artist could do better. Unfortunately, despite his interest in ensuring the role of the visual in his work, it would not be there, except for the occasional frontplate, or page ornamentation.

Tower of Nesle

Israel the younger Sylvestre, Tour de Nesle

A poem in Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit is about the Tower of Nesle, a popular subject at the time he was writing, in part thanks to a scandalous play written in 1832 by Dumas and Gailladet.

According to the play, the "Tour de Nesle" would have been the scene of the orgies of a queen of France, obese ogress who attracted students for her pleasure. After having enjoyed them,  she had them thrown into the river during the night. The philosopher Buridan would have failed in his youth, a victim of the ogress. The queens? Jeanne de Navarre, wife of Philip the Handsome and Margaret of Burgundy, wife of Louis X. 

 

The play chose to ignore the other woman Blanche, wife of Charles, the youngest son of Philip IV. The scandal, started in 1313 during the visit of Philip's only daughter Isabelle with her husband, Edward II of England. It permanently altered the attitudes and manners French royal society after the 14th century. The accusations apparently started by Isabella after seeing her small woven purses, gifts to her two sisters-in-law, in the hands of men who were not their husbands. The Tour de Nesle was the name of the tower in Paris where much of the adultery was said to have occurred. The story, as stories do, developed once Philip placed the couples under investigation. Eventually, the two men were arrested and the story made public. The scandal led to the torture (including castration) of the two accused male lovers, their subsequent executions (either drawn and quartered, flayed, or broken on a wheel and then hung), and lifetime imprisonment of the two young women. Jeanne of Burgundy, the third sister-in-law who was accused of potentially being present and perhaps having participated in the festive orgies of her two sisters, was saved from such a punishment by her husband Philip V. Their marriage seems to have been the only happy one; he wrote her love letters, if uninteresting ones, throughout their life together. His will shows her interest in the school, but nothing except the legend suggests that there was more to it.

More info on this can be gathered in the book by the excellent writer Alison Weir.

Weir, Alison. (2006) Isabella: She-Wolf of France, Queen of England. London: Pimlico.

Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art

Trotsky asked Breton to draft a manifesto as a founding document of the organization FIARI (Federation for Independent Revolutionary Artists International), which Trotsky could then review and the two could edit together. Despite Breton’s initial block, and the fight between the two on Breton’s lack of production, by mid-July Breton had written a draft to represent their mutual thoughts on art and politics. This was no easy task given that Trotsky refused to consider that conflicts would still exist in the classless society of the future and Breton was shocked that Trotsky should believe that art would disappear. The first draft is only minimally revised from the final version.

Breton’s first paragraph is however entirely rewritten, removing the Marxist language of superstructures, economic development, and historical basis. His language is ponderous, a trait that ill serves the necessary enthusiasm that a manifesto uses to encourage its audience. The text that is replaced is exciting. The first sentence denies its own exaggeration in saying: “We can acknowledge today, without exageration, that never before has human civilization been menaced by so many dangers as it is today." The paragraph ends insisting that science and art have never been in greater peril. Likewise, the final version of the text eliminates a passage in the ninth paragraph objecting to an artist’s potential hostility to the revolutionary cause, or limiting “all license to art; except against the proletarian revolution”. The final version says only, “all license to art”.

Changing the language from the obvious Marxist tone permits the manifesto to be the platform for all those seeking a revolution, whether communists or anarchists. The manifesto wishes divergent ideologies to mix as long as everyone rejects the “spirit of a policing revolution” of Stalin or Garcia Olivier, an anarchist. Though the group is to represent all artists, the manifesto states little about the anarchist groups other than to welcome them, and is most focused on rejecting Stalin’s socialist realism, “The official art of the stalinist period reflects a cruelty without compare in history of their derisive efforts to produce change, and their masking of their actual mercenary role.” Socialist realism is an extension of the cruelty established throughout the Soviet Union and “terribly degrading.”

True to their Marxism, Breton and Trotsky believe that the artist can only produce art that serves the revolution “if the artist is subjectively overwhelmed by its social and personal content”. The artist must understand and embody the ideals of the revolution in order to produce work that can declare them.

This independence of the artist, however, is not to suggest that the artist has no political role. Indeed, both Breton and Trotsky object severely to the concept of “art for art” and insist that the artist not only has a political role but must engage in that role “conscientiously and actively”.  The artist must be free to express revolutionary ideas in the manner true to their own work and style.

For intellectual creativity, the revolution must from the very beginning establish and maintain an anarchist regime for intellectual liberty. No authority, no constraints, not a trace of commandment! 

In two paragraphs added by Trotsky, the manifesto presents the parallel roads of social revolution and individual creation. Using the political language of the day, the society must be communist but the artist must be allowed an anarchic space to create. Constraints are antithetical to the freedom that Marxism wishes to provide all members of the society. To subjugate artistic creation to political ideology is to alter the very nature of the revolutionary movement. The attempt by Stalin to dictate art is a betrayal not only of the revolutionary cause, but also the one of freeing man from his current condition.

In an article by Mark Polizzotti, he quotes Heijenoort, Trotsky’s personal secretary, who described the composition of the manifesto, finally dated  July 25, 1938.

Breton gave Trotsky a few sheets of paper covered with his tiny handwriting. Trotsky dictated a few pages in Russian, to be combined with Breton’s text. I translated Trotsky’s pages into French and then showed them to Breton. After more talk, Trotsky took all of the texts, cut them, added a few passages, and pasted everything into a long roll. I typed the resulting French, translating Trotsky’s Russian and keeping Breton’s prose. This was the text on which they reached final agreement.

Breton embraced Trotsky’s own prescription for the complete freedom for art, excepting any works against the proletariat revolution. Trotsky, however, eliminated the final clause, likely aware of how it had been misused by the authorities of Socialist Realism but also believing that the strength of the revolution was dependent on the freedom to dissent since the community could respond in kind. The successful revolution would not fear opposition since all would inherently be in agreement. The manifesto served to establish the organization FIARI, which would give voice to all those who wished to participate in a true revolution:

The independence of art–for the revolution
The revolution–for the liberation of art. 

Celebrations

Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party

May is a wonderful month for celebrations. Everyone is out again, ready to mingle after the long and cold winter. We seem more inclined to meet strangers, resume old friendships, toast to everything from good weather to a birthday. The number of parties in the last week assures me that Spring is really here, and all the woolen sweaters may truly be put away for the next season. We may not be in short sleeves yet, but sun hats and smiles have returned.

I know many May Queens which means that beyond the expected pleasures of fine weather, I also have lots of fêtes to celebrate their years of life lived well. Today is one of them and though she is not particularly fond of this annual event, I wish that we lived at the end of the 19th century when she might have planned a musical evening such as the one below. I would have gotten there early just as Tissot shows in order to enjoy every moment of the night party, request my favorite dancing music, and show off my new dress. In the meantime, I can only imagine what my own fête might be like this year, last century and for years to come!

James Tissot, Too Early

Picture and Poem

Peele Castle, in a storm, by Sir George Beaumont

The Elegiac Stanzas were inspired by the above picture, freeing Wordsworth to write about the death of his brother John. The poem subtitled Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm Painted by Sir George Beaumont includes in the fourth stanza his own wish that he might express what ,"then I saw": "The light that never was, on sea or land,/ The consecration, and the Poet's dream."

He wishes that he could paint a world "how different from this". Once, before the pain of his brother's death, he would have offered a picture different from the one he knows now, the one now that is so turbulent and anxious:

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

Such, in the fond delusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made:
And seen the soul of truth in every part;
A faith, a trust, that could not be betrayed.

But his brother's death brought a shadow, "The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old". And yet, as the storm will pass but not be forgotten, the poem too begins to pass to this moment no longer consumed by his brother's death, if still affected by it.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here. -
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

Beaumont was a friend to both Wordsworth and Coleridge. It would be simplistic to say that his his picture allowed a certain catharsis in Wordsworth. It would also demean the more interesting element of ekphrasis to say that his poem describes the picture. Ekphrasis does not want merely to re-present what another artist has done. Instead ekphrasis is the term we use to acknowledge how one art has been the inspiration for another, different work. A work that can be interesting in its own right and maybe allow the history of art to continue to cycle through all the muses, building and shifting across forms to produce new elements for new works at new times. The death of one state of being, after all, only means the birth of another.

The form

Bertolt Brecht in The Struggle Against Formalism wrote: "the inability to do something, the inability to do something specific, really is a precondition for being able to do something else".

He does not glorify this unconditionally but rather tells the story of the Impressionists whose works were judged as efforts by idiots who could not paint. Painting was something specific, which required training of a specific type, not merely the application of paint on canvas. If this was not done then the person could not paint. They replied, unfortunately Brecht says, by adding insult to injury and claimed that these people who did not understand their pictures could not see. Eventually, Brecht continues, the Impressionist too had the opportunity to see the products of artists about whom they could only say they had no idea how to paint. "In the end, this game became so well-known that the most stupid philistines began to speculate in painting, only buying paintings as they did not like, because they were the ones that quite obviously had a future".

Depressing story. And seemingly true. A couple years ago I attended the wedding of a financier and was seated at a table with a number of her work colleagues. One explained how he was collecting art. I asked him what he liked, to which he replied that he was not sure but was buying many good pieces that he was told were excellent by the curator who was leading him around by the nose rather than helping him develop his own sensibility.

True, not knowing how to do something as it has been defined before, can indeed lead to doing something different and therefore interesting. But it seems to me, and I think I hear it in Brecht as well, that a complete lack of knowing does not however become a successful something, even if it does become, can not help becoming, a something else.