Slide 6. Sacred and Profane Love (1515)
Titian is 30.
It’s the early period of learning the tradition and finding one’s style…
                For Lindauer… The descriptors for style in youth are “refined, stylistic, skilled, finicky… well formed, composed, follows rules, pictorially structured…”
                Well, I’m not going to take time to analyze the pictorial structure and rules of composition this painting illustrates, but you can see for yourself that if Lindauer’s terms for youthful style are correct, this painting has it— 

                But, for the artist and the owner, this was a marriage painting to teach a young man how to grow up…
                Profane Love is on the left— “Profane,” that is of this world where a woman richly clothed holds the fruitful vase
as the knight enters the castle and the rabbits (Venus’ sacred animal) breed.

                Sacred Love is on the right— Sacred, that is the radiance of the light and the flame held into the heavens…
while beyond the hunters chase the hare, the shepherd tends the sheep, and the world spreads into infinity.

                The Sacred and the Profane
—the two opposites we each must live each day if we would keep our lives whole—
they sit on an old Roman sarcophagus (by Titian’s time, the old sarcophagi had either been lost or become water troughs for livestock).
The front is carved with the taming of the stallion and of the satyr which every young man must achieve to reach maturity.
The infant Eros stirs the water  and the fresh waters of life pour forth from a golden spout as flowers bloom.

Slide 7. The Weavers VI, The End.
                Kollwitz is 25 years old, and it’s been more than 300 years since Titian died.
The Church and Emperor, his chief patrons (who told him what to paint) had gone down with the end of the 18th C.
Kollwitz was brought up in the 19th C. world of her grandfather and father who organized for social justice
against the rising tide of the most in-humanly exploitive forms of industrial capitalism.

                Kollwitz wrote in her diary, “From my childhood on my father had expressly wished me to be trained for a career as an artist...
But when in my 17th year I became engaged to Karl Kollwitz (who was then studying medicine),
 my father was very skeptical about my intention to follow two careers, that of artist and of housewife…
Shortly before our marriage in 1891, my father said to me, ‘You have made your choice now.
You will scarcely be able to do both things. So be wholly what you have chosen to be.’ ”

 ***

                “I saw the first performance of Hauptman’s The Weavers in 1892.
I was very moved and decided to make a series of prints drawn from images in the play.
[The play was about the revolt of the Silesian hand weavers against the capitalists’ new machine weaving mills. The hand weavers lost.]…
It was arranged for The Weavers to be exhibited in the major show and it was given the small gold medal.
The Kaiser vetoed the recommendation, but from then on, I was counted among the foremost artists of the country. “
                “This triumph came to me as a surprise, but by then I was beyond the temptations of success.”

                For the artist, it was her first significant achievement.
And it said her social conscience and her series of prints sent that message to the world.
And they also said Death.

Slide 8. Fred Martin, “The Great Gate,” probably fall 1948. I was 21 years old.
                Vincent Van Gogh said somewhere, “Like every work of art, a self portrait.”
I don’t have an early self portrait to show my face; this will have to do—
it shows my soul. We never used that word then, and I hadn’t read Van Gogh’s remark.
                All I knew was (and I had learned it by accident) that if I mucked around in the paint for a while or maybe a long while,
an uprush would come with an image that meant—well, it depended.
That first time—the accident a year before this painting—it was a man with enormous genitals battling a giant snake
(and, yes, looking back now and I certainly knew it then, that was my problem).

                This time in 1948, it was male and female that came up in the muck (he’s left and she’s right).
A title came in my head along with the image—The Great Gate
(I was probably thinking of The Great Gate at Kiev in Moussorgsky’s Pictures..
And that gate I did not know what it was, was the woman I would soon find that fall and then marry two years later.

                And as for Lindauer’s descriptions of style—due to “Modern Art,” even when we were kids in 1948,
we used our medium more as Lindauer’s old-age style,
because “rough, bold, etc.” had become the characteristic rules of the day
as we learned them from our teachers and the Museum of Modern Art.

Click to Continue with Maturity for Titian, Kollwitz and Martin