Talk:Portrait of Madame Cézanne (Lichtenstein)

concerns about copyvio

This article contains too many quotations, all from four sources. I'll list them here:

• "by Erle Loran explaining Cézanne's compositional methods."
  • reworded.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 04:19, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
• entitled Cézanne's Composition."
  • Seems to be a stray quote mark.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 04:19, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

• "The drawings fascinated Lichtenstein, if for no other reason than the attraction of outlining a Cézanne when the artist himself had noted that the outline escaped him. To make a diagram by isolating the woman out of the context of the painting seemed to Lichtenstein to be such an oversimplification of a complex issue as to be ironical in itself."

• "...that the quotation of popular culture was not the sign of intelligence suspended but rather the shape of thought."

• "The angrier of the two tracts appeared in Art News, where Loran openly expressed his contempt for Lichtenstein's work and hinted at his desire to sue."

• "In a recent sell-out exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, he [Lichtenstein] gave the title of Portrait of Mme. Cézanne to the black and white line drawing on bare canvas reproduced here. Sale price: $2000, or more. I suppose I should be flattered that a diagrammatic sketch of mine should be worth so much. But then, no one has paid me anything—so far."

• "about the charges of antagonistic critics 'that Pop Art does not transform its models."

• "...another of his comments on the way in which we view art."

• "I wasn't trying to berate Erle Loran...but it is such an oversimplification trying to explain a painting by A, B, C."

• "The Cézanne is such a complex painting. Taking an outline and calling it Madame Cézanne is in itself humorous, particularly the idea of diagramming a Cézanne when Cézanne said, '...the outline escaped me.'"

• "Loran wrote his two article after Lichtenstein's first Pop exhibition in Los Angeles, which included the artist's life-sized versions of images from Loran's book."

• "The idea of using a closely linked subject matter within a unified style of treatment is obviously suggested in the various paintings deriving from modern masters. Man with Folded Arms and Portrait of Madame Cézanne (both 1962) are quotations of outline diagrams by Erle Loran explaining Cézanne's compositional methods and are similar in the linear black-and-white handling of the imagery."

• "Portrait of Madame Cézanne and Femme au Chapeau, both of 1962, were among the first paintings in which Lichtenstein based an image directly on a picture by an illustrious predecessor, introducing the theme of art about art. Both are presented at two removes from the original. Cézanne's portrait of his wife is transposed, with significant but subtle alterations, from a diagram book, Cézanne Composition, published a quarter of a century earlier, Lichtenstein was amused by the oversimplified and paradoxical idea that a flat diagram consisting solely of thick black outline could be used to represent the Frenchmen's work, given Cézanne's insistence on eliminating contours from his paintings as incapable of suggesting the corporeal reality of the three-dimensional motif from which he was working."

• "Erle Loran, the author, had attempted to dissect the portrait of Madame Cézanne by using an analytic diagram – this was a recognized art historical method at the time. Loran redrew the outlines of the painting's figure, and used small alphabetized arrows to signify areas and directions. The arrows were supposed to be an aid in analyzing the balances and counter-balances intended by the artist. Although diagrams like this could be confusing, they were meant to be scholarly."

• "In contrast to both his earlier comic-strip paintings and his more recent paintings, Lichtenstein's centralized images of objects in black and white (1962–63) look extremely formalistic...It is the diagrammatic aspect rather than the use of color in these works that visually persuades. The formal discoveries inherent in this group of paintings led to the two provocative images quoting Cézanne: Man with Folded Arms and Portrait of Madame Cézanne (both (1962). Both images derive from outline diagrams by Erle Loran explaining Cézanne's compositional methods. The drawings fascinated Lichtenstein, if for no other reason than the attraction of outlining a Cézanne when the artist himself had noted that the outline escaped him. To make a diagram by isolating the woman out of the context of the painting seemed to Lichtenstein to be such an oversimplification of a complex issue as to be ironical in itself."

• "To be sure, all of Lichtenstein's images pre-exist in a flat form and are therefore 'reproductions of reproductions,' but by making paintings of these two images Lichtenstein raised a host of critical issues concerning what is a copy, when can it be a work of art, when is it real and when fake, and what are the differences. Lichtenstein's attitude was as startling to the art audience as Warhol's paintings of soup cans, which provoked similar questions; both artists challenged the art establishment—Warhol by ironically humanizing mass-produced products, and Lichtenstein by dehumanizing a masterpiece."

• "Even more extreme, and typically Pop, was a twice-removed painting — after a published diagram after a Cézanne canvas (Ill. 73), whereby Lichtenstein went further than Duchamp had in 'decorating' the Mona Lisa (and provoked two irate articles by the author of the diagram — Erle Loran)."

• "The contradictory character of the Pop object was central to an unusually lively and revealing debate late in 1963. It was Lichtenstein's earliest Pop paintings that provoked this controversy which led critic Brian O'Doherty (also an artist, under the name Patric Ireland) to identify completely new class of object: the 'handmade readymade.' Reviewing the artist's second Pop show in the New York Times, O'Doherty labeled him 'one of the worst artists in America.' Nonetheless, he also credited him with creating paintings that 'raised some of the most difficult problems in art.' O'Doherty took note of an argument that had just erupted in the art press: the September issues both of Art News and Artforum had run angry features about Pop art in general and Lichtenstein's work in particular."

• "Loran charged Lichtenstein, in articles appearing in Art News and Artforum, with having copied, with the aid of a projector, his diagrammatic sketches. His Portrait of Madame Cézanne (a six-foot "hand-made copy" taken from page 85 of Cézanne's Compositions) might have value "from the standpoint of increased legibility" but not from the standpoint of art. "We cannot accept soup can painting as art" because "it contains no transformation." Loran maintains that "a copy of anything, even when blown up to the monumental size of a billboard, is still a copy. Copies are not transformations.""

• "...Erle Loran, who had targeted two paintings by Lichtenstein, Portrait of Mme. Cézanne and Man with Folded Arms (both 1962), in order to excoriate some of the salient features of the new art. Each painting was a characteristically brazen blowup of a diagram from Loran's book Cézanne Composition, then twenty years old."

• "Both Loran and O'Doherty thought it absurd that so many supporters of Pop were defending Lichtenstein by insisting that he 'transformed' rather than 'copied' his sources. Claiming that only an expert could discern the difference, O'Doherty found this hairsplitting quite beside the point. After all, it had been possible to classify direct appropriation as art since 1913, when that 'old master of innovation ,' Duchamp had 'started it all by setting up his readymades...and calling them art, leaving on us the burden of proof that they were not.' Both Loran and O'Doherty found the transformation alibi doubly annoying since it clinched the matter of Pop's high-cultural status by resorting to an altogether academic and contradictory dual defense. On one hand, Pop was art because it 'put a frame of consciousness around a major part of American life...we take for granted.' On the other, Pop was art because an artist like Lichtenstein transformed his sources 'like a good artist should'—a clichéd view of fine-art production."

• "For Loran, the 'transformation' or 'copy' debate was spurious: since the Abstract Expressionists had ventured 'far beyond the process of transforming nature' to produce paintings that presupposed 'no conscious source but have an identity and imagery that is autonomous,' transformation—even were it detectable in Lichtenstien's art— could only constitute aesthetic regression."

• "For different reasons, Lichtenstein himself shunned the transformation defense."

• "Lichtenstein replied that transformation seemed a strange word to use since it implied that art is a transforming agent. Art 'just plain forms,' he replied. 'Artists have never worked with the model—just with the painting.' What is really being said is that an artist such as Cézanne creates a painting that reveals the way he thinks something should look rather than the way we think it should. Cézanne worked with paint, not nature. In making a painting he was forming. 'I think my work is different from comic strips, but I wouldn't call it transformation.' And he added: 'What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have shapes but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified.' There is a difference in purpose—one intends to depict, whereas 'I intend to unify.'"

• "Commenting on the matter, Max Kozloff observed that Lichtenstein's Portrait of Madame Cézanne 'is a cynical anagram.' His message exposes itself in a the very choice of subject matter. 'It is no accident that Cézanne, the monstre sacré of modern art, the fountainhead of all its transformations, is the point at issue.' However, Kosloff suggests that Erle Loran, 'who in his nice American way is trying to explain what those transformations of reality are all about,' is being mocked. 'Lichtenstein is saying here that art is not transformation—he copies.' Kozloff does recognize that this work has didactic content in a footnote suggest that it may present an argument about transformation itself. There are 'perceptible difference' found between the original and 'copy.' However the rationale for the change is questioned:..."

• "...he explained that since the Cézanne was such a complex painting, a diagram with A, B, C, and arrows, etc., was an oversimplification. Although he was not trying to berate Erle Loran, 'taking an outline and calling it 'Madame Cézanne' is in itself humorous, particularly the idea of diagramming a Cézanne when Cézanne [himself] said, 'the outline escaped me.'"

I believe these quotes are too lengthy, too detailed, unnecessary to the article and almost all could be reworded by the editor in his own words. Only two of the quotes are by the artist of the work that is the subject of the article, Lichtenstein.

MathewTownsend (talk) 22:58, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

ps I think only one of the two Non free use images is justified. MathewTownsend (talk) 00:25, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

The images are all justified.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 04:24, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

I am a bit puzzled why you want me to attend to this article since you are reviewing another one. Do you really expect me to explain each and every quote. The purpose of my suggestion that we go to Wikipedia:Copyright problems was because it would be more efficient. If you intend for me to respond to each quote, then I would prefer to have a discussion at Wikipedia:Copyright problems.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 04:24, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

As I understand that Wikipedia:Non-free content says "Brief quotations of copyrighted text may be used to illustrate a point, establish context, or attribute a point of view or idea." is acceptable. Each use does "illustrate a point, establish context, or attribute a point of view or idea". I also understand that "Excessively long copyrighted excerpts." are unacceptable. You posted a long list of quotes for discussion. It does not seem to me that any of them is excessively long. All the quotes are of commonly accepted lengths for wikipedia articles. Can you please present your interpretation of applicable elements of that guideline for this situation?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 05:12, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

excessive quotes from the work of particular authors in this article

ok. Looking at it from another way, just looking at the footnotes, you have quoted excessively from some sources:

Deitcher, David (the first two are in the article body, but demonstrates the extent this article "borrows" from copyrighted work by Deitcher)

• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".) "The angrier of the two tracts appeared in Art News, where Loran openly expressed his contempt for Lichtenstein's work and hinted at his desire to sue." (footnote says Deitcher is the source)
• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".)In a recent sell-out exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, he [Lichtenstein] gave the title of Portrait of Mme. Cézanne to the black and white line drawing on bare canvas reproduced here. Sale price: $2000, or more. I suppose I should be flattered that a diagrammatic sketch of mine should be worth so much. But then, no one has paid me anything—so far. —Quote from Erle Loran's September 1963 "Pop Artists or Copycats?" ARTnews article,(footnote says Deitcher is the source)
• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".) "Loran wrote his two article after Lichtenstein's first Pop exhibition in Los Angeles, which included the artist's life-sized versions of images from Loran's book."
• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".) "Portrait of Madame Cézanne and Femme au Chapeau, both of 1962, were among the first paintings in which Lichtenstein based an image directly on a picture by an illustrious predecessor, introducing the theme of art about art. Both are presented at two removes from the original. Cézanne's portrait of his wife is transposed, with significant but subtle alterations, from a diagram book, Cézanne Composition, published a quarter of a century earlier, Lichtenstein was amused by the oversimplified and paradoxical idea that a flat diagram consisting solely of thick black outline could be used to represent the Frenchmen's work, given Cézanne's insistence on eliminating contours from his paintings as incapable of suggesting the corporeal reality of the three-dimensional motif from which he was working."
• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".) "The contradictory character of the Pop object was central to an unusually lively and revealing debate late in 1963. It was Lichtenstein's earliest Pop paintings that provoked this controversy which led critic Brian O'Doherty (also an artist, under the name Patric Ireland) to identify completely new class of object: the 'handmade readymade.' Reviewing the artist's second Pop show in the New York Times, O'Doherty labeled him 'one of the worst artists in America.' Nonetheless, he also credited him with creating paintings that 'raised some of the most difficult problems in art.' O'Doherty took note of an argument that had just erupted in the art press: the September issues both of Art News and Artforum had run angry features about Pop art in general and Lichtenstein's work in particular."
• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".) "...Erle Loran, who had targeted two paintings by Lichtenstein, Portrait of Mme. Cézanne and Man with Folded Arms (both 1962), in order to excoriate some of the salient features of the new art. Each painting was a characteristically brazen blowup of a diagram from Loran's book Cézanne Composition, then twenty years old."
• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".) "Both Loran and O'Doherty thought it absurd that so many supporters of Pop were defending Lichtenstein by insisting that he 'transformed' rather than 'copied' his sources. Claiming that only an expert could discern the difference, O'Doherty found this hairsplitting quite beside the point. After all, it had been possible to classify direct appropriation as art since 1913, when that 'old master of innovation ,' Duchamp had 'started it all by setting up his readymades...and calling them art, leaving on us the burden of proof that they were not.' Both Loran and O'Doherty found the transformation alibi doubly annoying since it clinched the matter of Pop's high-cultural status by resorting to an altogether academic and contradictory dual defense. On one hand, Pop was art because it 'put a frame of consciousness around a major part of American life...we take for granted.' On the other, Pop was art because an artist like Lichtenstein transformed his sources 'like a good artist should'—a clichéd view of fine-art production."
• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".) "For Loran, the 'transformation' or 'copy' debate was spurious: since the Abstract Expressionists had ventured 'far beyond the process of transforming nature' to produce paintings that presupposed 'no conscious source but have an identity and imagery that is autonomous,' transformation—even were it detectable in Lichtenstien's art— could only constitute aesthetic regression."
• (Deitcher, David. "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist".) "For different reasons, Lichtenstein himself shunned the transformation defense."

Coplans, ed.

• (Coplans, ed.) "The idea of using a closely linked subject matter within a unified style of treatment is obviously suggested in the various paintings deriving from modern masters. Man with Folded Arms and Portrait of Madame Cézanne (both 1962) are quotations of outline diagrams by Erle Loran explaining Cézanne's compositional methods and are similar in the linear black-and-white handling of the imagery."
• (Coplans, ed.) "In contrast to both his earlier comic-strip paintings and his more recent paintings, Lichtenstein's centralized images of objects in black and white (1962–63) look extremely formalistic...It is the diagrammatic aspect rather than the use of color in these works that visually persuades. The formal discoveries inherent in this group of paintings led to the two provocative images quoting Cézanne: Man with Folded Arms and Portrait of Madame Cézanne (both (1962). Both images derive from outline diagrams by Erle Loran explaining Cézanne's compositional methods. The drawings fascinated Lichtenstein, if for no other reason than the attraction of outlining a Cézanne when the artist himself had noted that the outline escaped him. To make a diagram by isolating the woman out of the context of the painting seemed to Lichtenstein to be such an oversimplification of a complex issue as to be ironical in itself."
• (Coplans, ed.) "To be sure, all of Lichtenstein's images pre-exist in a flat form and are therefore 'reproductions of reproductions,' but by making paintings of these two images Lichtenstein raised a host of critical issues concerning what is a copy, when can it be a work of art, when is it real and when fake, and what are the differences. Lichtenstein's attitude was as startling to the art audience as Warhol's paintings of soup cans, which provoked similar questions; both artists challenged the art establishment—Warhol by ironically humanizing mass-produced products, and Lichtenstein by dehumanizing a masterpiece."

Mahsun. "The Issue of Transformation".

• (Mahsun. "The Issue of Transformation".) 'that Pop Art does not transform its models." (footnote says Mahsun is the source)
• (Mahsun. "The Issue of Transformation".) "Loran charged Lichtenstein, in articles appearing in Art News and Artforum, with having copied, with the aid of a projector, his diagrammatic sketches. His Portrait of Madame Cézanne (a six-foot "hand-made copy" taken from page 85 of Cézanne's Compositions) might have value "from the standpoint of increased legibility" but not from the standpoint of art. "We cannot accept soup can painting as art" because "it contains no transformation." Loran maintains that "a copy of anything, even when blown up to the monumental size of a billboard, is still a copy. Copies are not transformations.""
• (Mahsun. "The Issue of Transformation".) "Lichtenstein replied that transformation seemed a strange word to use since it implied that art is a transforming agent. Art 'just plain forms,' he replied. 'Artists have never worked with the model—just with the painting.' What is really being said is that an artist such as Cézanne creates a painting that reveals the way he thinks something should look rather than the way we think it should. Cézanne worked with paint, not nature. In making a painting he was forming. 'I think my work is different from comic strips, but I wouldn't call it transformation.' And he added: 'What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have shapes but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified.' There is a difference in purpose—one intends to depict, whereas 'I intend to unify.'"
• (Mahsun. "The Issue of Transformation".) "Commenting on the matter, Max Kozloff observed that Lichtenstein's Portrait of Madame Cézanne 'is a cynical anagram.' His message exposes itself in a the very choice of subject matter. 'It is no accident that Cézanne, the monstre sacré of modern art, the fountainhead of all its transformations, is the point at issue.' However, Kosloff suggests that Erle Loran, 'who in his nice American way is trying to explain what those transformations of reality are all about,' is being mocked. 'Lichtenstein is saying here that art is not transformation—he copies.' Kozloff does recognize that this work has didactic content in a footnote suggest that it may present an argument about transformation itself. There are 'perceptible difference' found between the original and 'copy.' However the rationale for the change is questioned:..."
• (Mahsun. "The Issue of Transformation".)"...he explained that since the Cézanne was such a complex painting, a diagram with A, B, C, and arrows, etc., was an oversimplification. Although he was not trying to berate Erle Loran, 'taking an outline and calling it 'Madame Cézanne' is in itself humorous, particularly the idea of diagramming a Cézanne when Cézanne [himself] said, 'the outline escaped me.'"

I don't have a word counter like the editor does at Wikipedia_talk:Good_article_nominations#length_and_number_of_quotes_-_when_does_it_become_a_copyvio_problem?, but I think the quoted material is longer than the article is. MathewTownsend (talk) 15:48, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Categories

Should this article be included in the categories "20th-century portraits" and "Portraits by American artists"? One might not consider these true portraits, but... --Another Believer _(Talk) 15:26, 20 June 2013 (UTC)