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On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:40:47 -0500, (gu)stav <no@hushmail.rightnow> wrote:
> Very interesting to read -- thank you very much for taking the time for this.
You are most welcome.
> I wouldn't have thought of the Rockwell-Joubert comparison. Maybe I
> don't know enough about Rockwell but I think of him as a faux-naive
> artist and illustrator whose primary audience was sentimental adults.
> Joubert seems to be aiming at an audience of boys of about the same age
> as those he depicts in his illustrations.
> Nonetheless one might argue that some of Rockwell's work shows
> considerable painterly sophistication (even when the thematic content
> is shallow).
This seems to be the consensus in regard to Rockwell's work, which was
for the most part magazine covers for *The Saturday Evening Post*, which
was a weekly aimed at the (unashamedly sentimental) American middle class;
in later years, hovever, he touched on more serious matters, particularly
the Civil Rights movement, and received more favourable critical opinion.
so on the theory that he was not so closely associated with the Boy Scout
movement; indeed, I had entirely forgotten that he had illustrated the
'Tempelritter' books, which are of course pure Spiederbund, and thought
of his work as being mostly portraiture, and that primarily Knabenackten.
I have posted separately seven 'Tempelritter' illustrations taken from
the 'Otolo' Web site -- http://www.otolo.eu/Index2.htm -- in which the
similarities -- and differences -- between their styles are easily seen.
> in that both have plainly identified the homoerotic current inherent
> in this Boy Thing. Their conception of ideal young-male beauty seems
> similar ...
I would phrase this somewhat differently: both, I would say, have plainly
identified those particular forms of each of the various physical aspects
of early-adolescent-male bodies which most please the eye, and given each
feature of each of their figures one of those forms.
Whilst 'erotic' can be understood to mean no more than "giving pleasure",
its general connotation is "causing sexual arousal", and, notwithstanding
the considerable overlap between *what pleases the eye* and *what wakes
the snake*, I find it difficult to see anything sexually provocative in,
for example, PJSG-JEU_14.jpg.
(By 'the Boy Thing', by the way, I mean *what Boys do* -- which comes down
essentially to *Doing* and *Making*, as agaonst the Girl Thing, which can
be epitomised as *Relating* and *Having* -- and involves BoyBodies only to
the extent that Boys use them in the course of doing the Boy Thing.)
In PJSG-JEU_14.jpg, the Fox -- for this is, I am almost certain, a game
of Fox and Hounds -- is given a slender body, an unlined face with small
nose and jaw, and a full head of thick hair: Boy features, pleasing to
the eye. And if that eye remembers doing the Boy Thing -- being a Fox,
running before the Hounds, and the joy of running, and the joy of being
able to run, and earth flying beneath feet -- then perhaps the eye will
feel a surge of simple affection for a kindred spirit, going where it
has gone, doing what it has done.
And perhaps the eye will sting.
But the Snake will, I trust, sleep soundly on.
> ... Rockwell never seems all that interested in making his painterly
> subjects so physically attractive, indeed seems to enjoy exagerrating
> their physical akwardness.
Whatever Rockwell might personally wish to paint, the readership of the
magazines for whose cover art he is now best known wanted to see "folks
just like us", and so his subjects could neither be unusually beautiful
But it worked, and still works: it doesn't make Grownups uncomfortable.
Print collections of Rockwell's art are common; print collections of
Joubert's art are not.
Hurrah for the Internet.
> On 2009-02-24 01:21:46 -0500, nesScitur@husShmail.com (Ronin) said:
>> Pierre Joubert (1910-2002) was to Le Scoutisme in France what
>> Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) was to Scouting in America: the
>> illustrator who not only recorded its early years, but also
>> strongly influenced the way the movement saw itself.
>> But where boys as Rockwell drew them were mostly unexceptional,
>> the boys Joubert drew -- at least in his realistic art -- were
>> slender, flat-bellied, and as graceful as cats: to no small
>> extent, his drawings defined *the* ideal body form for several
>> generations of French boys.
>> Joubert's drawings celebrate the Boy Thing -- adventure, in a
>> word -- more exuberantly than possibly any other artist: his
>> boys are almost always *doing* something, and frequently doing
>> it quite enthusiastically, strenuously, seriously, desperately,
>> and/or heroically; Rockwell's boys are, by comparison, seldom
>> more than figures in a Christmas tableau.
>> And to those who object that some of the celebrants of the Boy
>> Thing in these pictures do not appear to be... exactly *boys*,
>> one can only observe that if the Boy Thing is defined as being
>> What Boys Do, might it not be useful to treat anyone who does
>> What Boys Do as a Boy? Why should a Pink Blanket be Destiny?
>> And do Joubert's girls please the eye any less than his boys?
>> Ronin
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