FORT WORTH, Texas – Our beloved sport continues its mid-year recess, a deserted time before the mania of September. There were no fights here Friday or Saturday. There will be none here next weekend. What is here, though, are collections – those of The Modern, Kimbell Art Museum, and Amon Carter Museum of American Art – so detailed, well-presented and complete, only an ambitious, energetic fool would traverse them in seven hours’ time.
But indulge anyway, why not, because you must attend works of art the same way you must attend fights. A piece of fruit tastes nothing like a picture of a piece of fruit. There are art books and exhibition catalogues galore, works of careful photography and prose, but they encourage what literary critic Harold Bloom termed “misprision” – a sort of fundamental misreading that, if imitated, will cause an original interpretation. Original interpretations by dilettantes are mostly rubbish.
How many trainers in how many American gyms have seen dilettantes’ original interpretations of Floyd Mayweather, recently, and of Roy Jones before him, and of Muhammad Ali before him? These are the artistic equivalents of one who sees the works of a single artist in a book, goes to a supply store, and begins hurling paint that same afternoon.
Much contemporary American art, like much contemporary American prizefighting, looks haphazard and improvised, when seen upclose, like the work of people trained by people who watch videos but never put themselves in the loneliness of a ring with another man then consign themselves to a week alone on a heavybag to solve technical problems. It is a derivative of a derivative; a shallow misreading of another’s shallow misreading of an original style.
These are what thoughts happened as I walked through a different collection – Dallas Museum of Art’s abstract expressionism – Saturday. Works by people more concerned with being artists than making art; persons who sought the straightest possible line to acclaim, men who suffered from a want of solitude, seeking companionship and affirmation at every turn – with a work by their patron saint, Andy Warhol, supervising the entrance.
There was a Warhol self-portrait, too, at The Modern, thirty miles west of Dallas. It was neon, lineless, loud and famous but suffered a genuine misfortune: It hung outside this city’s astounding new exhibition of Lucian Freud’s portraits. Warhol and his t-shirt-ready screen prints of Marilyn and Jackie look insubstantial set beside a contemporary like Freud’s works (if perhaps not Freud’s early, is-that-a-Modigliani efforts).
Walking round Saturday, I thought of Marco Antonio Barrera, as I often do. I thought of the rarity of what he did to “The Prince” Naseem Hamed in 2001 and the three years and seven fights that separated Barrera’s second loss to Junior Jones and only loss to Erik Morales – the solitude of those matches in Caesars Tahoe and Fantasy Springs. I thought of his stylistic overhaul in the three fights between Morales and Hamed, the solitude of New Orleans Arena or an opponent like Jesus Salud. Then I thought of how, after undressing the astonishingly overrated Hamed for a half hour, Barrera summoned the fury of those years in the woods to ram The Prince’s goofy face in a turnbuckle, risking disqualification, caring not a whit.
The careless chance-taking of a master craftsman; that is what one sees in Freud’s 1997 work “Sunny Morning – Eight Legs,” hung expertly at The Modern adjacent to 1993’s “And the Bridegroom.” In both paintings, a dressing screen stands in the background, and when one looks at the way the middle of the piece is protuberant while its floor and ceiling distend, one sees what Freud was after: He is behind the screen, painting what is reflected by a large, convex mirror. In Freud’s work one sees a thing most rare in contemporary paint: a direct link to Van Gogh and his collapsed space between foreground and back; the Spanish master, Velazquez, and his use of mirrors; the Italian master Caravaggio and his genius for human form; and the German master, Durer, and his compulsion for movement. The grandson of another and more famous genius, Freud had the influences and resources and talent to absorb masterworks then retreat to solitude, puzzle them out, and repeat their techniques. Only then, his toolbox complete, did Freud set about going where the daemon took him.
Great artists fail. One sees dreadful works by Cezanne and worse by Picasso. Failure in boxing is different from losing, just as artistic failure is sometimes subjective. There are informed critics who see genius in Pollock’s works like “Cathedral,” which hangs at Dallas Museum of Art; but if one has been to Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and seen young Pollock’s attempts at more academic painting, he can be forgiven for saying “That’s why he evolved to drizzles and splatters.”
Barrera’s failures were not his knockout loss to Jones in 1996 or Manny Pacquiao in 2003 or unofficial loss to Rocky Juarez in 2006. Barrera’s failures were his too-cautious performance with Juan Manuel Marquez in 2007 and his cash-on-delivery, rematch showing against Pacquiao seven months later.
But indulge anyway. Attend the fights; attend the canvases. You can see a prizefighting masterpiece on television no better than a Rembrandt in a book, after all. Plan trips. Do not worry about outcomes. A master’s failure is ever more informative than a dilettante’s triumph.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
