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COMPOSITION_UNITY_AND_CLUELESSNESS

                                              December 22, 2002


From S.S. van Dine's "The Greene Murder Case" (1928):

  "Y' know, Markham," he began, assuming a lazy, unemotional
  air, "there's a fundamental difference between a good
  painting and a photograph.  I'll admit many painters
  appear unaware of this fact; and when color photgraphy is
  perfected -- my word! what a horde of academicians will be
  thrown out of employment! But none the less there's a vast
  chasm between the two; and it's this technical distinction
  that's to be the burden of my lay.  How, for instance,
  does Michelangelo's 'Moses' differ from a camera study of
  a patriarchal old man with whiskers and a stone tablet?
  Wherein lie the points of divergence between Rubens's
  [sic] 'Landscape with Château de Stein' and a tourist's          
  snap-shot of a Rhine castle?  Why is a Cézanne still-life  
  an improvement on a photograph of a dish of apples?  Why
  have the Renaissance paintings of Madonnas endured for
  hundreds of years whereas a mere photograph of a mother
  and child passes into artistic oblivion at the very click
  of the lens shutter? ... "
     He held up a silencing hand as Markham was about to speak.
     "I'm not being futile.  Bear with me a moment.-- The
  difference between a good painting and a photograph is
  this: the one is arranged, composed, organized; the other
  is merely the haphazard impression of a scene, or a segment
  of realism, just as it exists in nature.  In short, the
  one has form; the other is chaotic.  When a true artist
  paints a picture, d' ye see, he arranges all the masses
  and lines to accord with his preconveived idea of
  composition -- that is, he bends everything in the picture
  to a basic design; and he also eliminates any objects or
  details that go contr'ry to, or detract from, that
  design.  Thus he achieves a homogeneity of form, so to
  speak.  Every object in the picture is put there for a
  definite purpose, and is set in a certain position to
  accord with the underlying structural pattern.  There are
  no irrelevancies, no unrelated details, no detached
  objects, no arbitr'ry arrangement of values.  All the
  forms and lines are interdependent; every object --indeed,
  every brush stroke-- takes its exact place in the pattern
  and fufils a given function.  The picture, in fine, is a
  unity."

                              GREENE_MURDER


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