Rubens was Delacroix's hero. And who can blame the emotional Eugene for being such a groupie? During the years that the stiff and polished group of Neo-Classicists ruled the roost there was hardly any room for emotion and movement to enter into the visual dialog. Their form of Neo-Classicism was immobile and sterile - David, Canova, Ingres & Poussin - froze the visual art world onto prosceneum stages. In contrast Rubens, the extraordinary eyeballer, could whip up a stew of baroque human torrents without batting an eyelash. The Baroque was all about visual touch and passion and for those artists - like Delacroix - who experienced the swirl of political upheaval in the 19th century - there was little of the life they were experiencing portrayed in those false neo-classical stagings and porcelain portrait figures. The Romantics' disdain and dissappointment with this sort of art began the Modern movement and strains of Romanticism have coursed through its works ever since. In the late 1970s and early 1980s as the neo-expressionists became the dominant painting force Romanticism quickly devolved into little more than a hipster attitude, and worse, it lost its intellectual and visual credentials as Postmodernism became ascendant. POMO became the final leveling tool of the Romantic impulse in Modern painting, and left us with a visual dialetics intended to create a milder form of participation in the viewer. Desire rather than passion became the subject of art. As you can see in Rubens' painting of "The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus" desire has given way to passion. Passion is always dangerous and in the late 1980s - politically, financially, sexually and physically - passion of any sort could have serious repercussions.

Post modernism is our version of neo-classicism. It..." appears to be a natural expression of a culture at a certain moment in its career, a culture that is highly self-aware, that is also confident of its own high mainstream tradition, but at the same time feels the need to regain something that has slipped away." It is about signs and systems. It reexamines technique and composition. It is retardaire and rear garde. It is conservative and reactionary. It describes desire and distance rather than passion and proximity. POMO manifests itself in its familiarity, ease, stability, structure and cultural understanding. Its vision of enforced physical and emotive distance is directed through the hegemony of the lens, reproduction and programming. "Novelty, improvisation, self-expression, and blinding inspiration are not neoclassical virtues; neoclassicism exhibits perfect control of an idiom. It does not recreate art forms from the ground up with each new project, as modernism demanded. "Make it new" was the modernist credo of the poet Ezra Pound." POMO theory states that nothing can be new.

to be continued...