Art in History

I'm going to go back 100 years or so to an artist I passed over: Goya. In the spectrum of artists from those of structure to those of feeling, Goya is definitely the latter. But what is remarkable is the way he anticipated the romantics and 20th century expressionists, working at the height of the Enlightenment. The Enlightment thinkers of the 18th century believed in the ultimate and inevitable perfectability of man through reason. They largely ignored the existence and power of the bestial side of man, a fatal mistake. The Greeks were wiser: thouogh they elevated reason as man's great gift, they never forgat the other side of his nature. Their image was of the horse and rider - today the Id and Ego - and understood the need to respect and control the bestial side… Continue reading… 1 comment

My most recent post in this series was on Claude Monet, who so completely redefined the artistic enterprise that he set a new benchmark against which future artists had to define themselves. By limiting his focus to the facts of perception he created an unusually direct interaction between the artist and the visual world, but in doing so he effectively excluded the interests of most artists preceeding him, whether "classical" or "romantic". There was, predictably, an almost immediate attempt to blend his new vision with the traditional concerns of artists. I have already discussed Cezanne, who in this context must be seen as a "classicist": concerned with the structure and order behind our perceptual world, what we KNOW as opposed to what we SEE… Continue reading… 4 comments

I turn now from Degas and Manet to Claude Monet - THE Impressionist. This is another of those artists, like Leonardo, whom I would not really call a "favorite", but whom I recognize as a towering figure in the development of artistic vision in his time. I respond more to the works of Degas and Manet. But as with Leonardo, no artist in the period following Monet could work without coming to terms with his redefinition of painting. You could follow him or reject him, but you had to deal with the terms which he had established. Monet redefined painting on several levels: the enterprise, artistic vision, palette and technique. First, he finally stated that the work done directly on the scene was an end in itself… Continue reading… 5 comments

I am turning from Degas to Manet, the other "older" Impressionist, though - unlike Degas - he never accepted the term as applied to his work. Like Degas, he had a strong traditional background in form and composition which he used to great advantage. Paradoxically, Manet is in many ways the most radical of the group, certainly the most confrontational. It is fascinating to compare Manet to Courbet, the great revolutionary of the previous generation. It was Courbet who broke with the Academie, setting up his own competing exhibition, thus blazing the trail which the Impressionists then followed. But while Courbet's revolution was all about class warfare and social justice, Manet's is all about art itself. Manet uses confrontation to force the viewer to look at art in a new way… Continue reading… 4 comments

I'm coming back around to where I started, which was with Cezanne...and more generally with late 19th century European painting. I find more to excite me in that period than in any other. As I think about the Impressionists, and the generations that followed, I definitely learn something about myself and what satisfies my artistic soul. I like structure. I am more excited by Degas and Manet, the two artists who had an "academic" training, than I am by most of Monet, and I like Monet better than Renoir. I can feel the lightness and joy of Renoir's work, its wonderful softness, but ultimately it leaves me wanting more. In Degas' work, the feeling of carelessness in framing belies the artfulness behind it… Continue reading… 10 comments

I seem to be moving from artist to artist in a natural progression, and I will continue that with this post. I looked last at Dutch 17th century work, including still life, with its strong sense of organization and selection, and most recently at Vermeer, where every element in the frame is meaningful and carefully chosen. That leads me naturally to the 18th century Still Life master, Chardin. Chardin seems to me to have the same sense of careful selection and organization, with another element which makes him special: being "of the earth". His still lives seem to grow out of the earth and to be made of the same substance. The compositions are always rock solid and immovable, seemingly built on a slab of living rock… Continue reading… 1 comment

Having written about the "Little Dutch Masters", it is a natural step to move on to Vermeer. He was certainly one of their number - in fact, if you were to judge by the dimensions of his works he could be the littlest of them all - but he is also too great to be lumped among them. He also had a primary specialty - light filled interiors with figures - but also produced exquisite works in other genres, like the "Street in Delft" above. All with a sensitivity to ambient light never equalled before or since. He is, of course, the center of a huge controversy, because of the strong evidence that he used a camera obscura to view his subjects and perhaps to project them on the surface… Continue reading… 5 comments

Hey, I've got a new computer and I'm back in business. I'm going to continue the theme of my last post: artists who may not be great, but who are wonderful in their more modest endeavors. This time I am going to consider a group: the Dutch 17th century painters who have come to be known as "the little Dutch Masters". The environment for painters in Holland in the 17th century was unique, and it led to a new and "modern" way of conducting business. For the first time in European art, the creation of paintings was not dominated by the church and the nobility. Instead, art was purchased in quantity by the rising mercantile class, and they were looking for art that expressed their wealth to be sure, but also reflected underlying Calvinist values… Continue reading… 3 comments

On to Constable, my kindred spirit. Perhaps not as great in the fullest sense as Cezanne or Rembrandt, but wonderful in his sensitivity to the familiar in nature. He never left England, and did not travel very widely there, going only to Brighton, Weymoutn or Salisbury, within easy reach. How different his subjects are from those of his contemporary Turner, who always sought out the magical transforming moments in nature: sunrise, sunset, monumental storms. Constable made his art from that which was most familiar in his surroundings, seeing it with a sensitivity which was unmatched until the next generation. Yes, he did break new ground, despite his unambitious enterprise… Continue reading… 0 comments

I have been picking out artists who are my favorites, and who also deserve to be called great because of the nature of their enterprise. Many of my favorite artists are not "great" in this sense; they are modest and unassuming in their scope and intentions. A good example is the artist with whom I feel the greatest natural affinity: John Constable. But before turning to Constable, I thought I should give homage to his truly great English contemporary, William Turner. It is hard to like Turner as a human being; he was rather a nasty man, secretive, suspicious, paranoid… Continue reading… 10 comments

The decision to include Leonardo is not based on the impact of the work on me viscerally and emotionally; in fact, on one level you could say he is not a "favorite" artist at all. It is more that I stand in awe of what he accomplished as an artist, while so much of his energies and imagination were focussed on other things. And of course, after a piece on Michelangelo, it is only proper to give Leonardo equal time. Michelangelo and Leonardo were the towering figures of the Renaissance until the younger Raphael rose to join them, great rivals, driving each other to greater heights… Continue reading… 5 comments

In each of the previous posts I have asked the question "What challenge did this artist set himself that sets his work beyond good to great?". Not all my favorite artists have such an ambitious enterprise, but I will show one more; Michelangelo. For me, the remarkable thing about his work is how often he rose above crippling external limitations and turned them into glorious oportunities. The "David" is an excellent example, especially if we accept the story about its creation. According to contemporary sources, a truley magnificent block of Carrara marble, intended for another sculptor, was tragically damaged in transit, with a chunk broken off in the middle almost to the center of the block… Continue reading… 7 comments

This will be the third in my series of favorite artists, and I am still following the theme of the major challenge in an artist's enterprise which raises the work from good to great. In this case, however, it is a quiet artist working on a modest scale without earthshaking impact. Klee's work is nothing if not unpretentious and personal. There is no sense that he was speaking to a wider audience than the one which would seek him out in his artistc seclusion. So why do I put him in a category with someone like Rembrandt? For me, Klee's work is a marvellous marriage of the analytical and the intuitive… Continue reading… 4 comments

This is the second in my new series of my favorite artists, and what it is in their artistic enterprise that sets them above the merely very good. After having started with a self-portrait by Cezanne in my last post, I can't resist starting this post off with another self-portrait, one of many by Rembrandt. How different they are! The Cezanne self-portrait, though it can captivate you as a work of art for hours, in the end shows you almost nothing about the man beyond his physical exterior. Cezanne clearly was not trying to explore his inner self at all. The Rembrandt, on the other hand, shows you infintely more than a thousand words could tell you about his soul, his humanity, and most importantly our humanity. Just look into his eyes, and get lost in them… Continue reading… 6 comments

The other day I was in for treatment at my chiropractor, and he asked me if I had seen "that guy who paints on TV" and what I thought of him. I said I had, that he had mastered the skills of his craft, and had developed visual ideoms for natural elements which were now second nature to him. Then, in an effort to explain why that did not make him a great artist, I told him about Cezanne. Later, I decided that might make a good series of posts to do: artists whose chosen enterprise was such that the challenge of it elevated them way above the norm. I told my chiropractor that Cezanne, far from whipping off images that he could do in his sleep, set himself a goal that is arguably the most challenging ever set by an artist… Continue reading… 4 comments

I have discovered over the years that one of the things that turns me on most in my visual environment is accidental composition: the unplanned conjunction of elements into a grouping that has balance, energy and meaning. I find this in nature in abundance, but also in the works of man gathered together at random, or changed by alterations or decay over time. What results is composition which takes me beyond the familiar rules into new possibilities. Historically, I find this same fascination in Impressionists like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. With the aid of candid photography, which created arbitrary slices of the world, they revolutionized the way artists could think about composition in painting… Continue reading… 2 comments

In my last post I explored the conquest of the description of solid form and deep space in European painting. That was a glorious ride of 400 years in Western art, and is still a major option and a powerful tool in art up to the present. However, one of the most significant shifts in the 19th century, leading to what we think of as modern art, was away from the use of the surface as a window into an illusionistc space, back to the recognition of its intrinsic aesthetic values. This was a return to what had been the norm in two-dimensional art in all cultures before the great discoveries of the Renaissance… Continue reading… 2 comments

I decided that, before leaving the topic of the Renaissance, there was more to say about the mastery of the depiction of solid form and three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. This was a major thread in my last blog, the Annunciation of the Renaissance, as part of an exploration of the birth of Humanism. But the rendering of solid form and space is fascinating on its own. The work I am leading off with is clearly not the seminal moment; rather it represents the culmination of three centuries of trial and exploration. I start with it because it is one of my alltime favorite works, and arguably the most complex and subtle exploration of spatial ideas of the period… Continue reading… 3 comments

This is the first in a series of posts on seminal moments in the history of western art. The flowering of the Renaissance in Italy was certainly one of these moments. One way to see its emergence is through changes in the handling of the annunciation theme. Two of the primary impulses that define the Renaissance in Italy are the triumph of Humanism and the mastery of the depiction of real space. The first emerged in the late medieval period, with the rise of the cult of the virgin. The change in emphasis from the depiction of a forbidding Christ to the depiction of Mary is by definition humanist; Mary is human, approachable, sharing her nature and feelings with all of us. Thus, the rise of the annunciation theme is in itself a humanist trend… Continue reading… 1 comment

It is not a new idea that nature herself is a rich source of abstract pattern and design. Examples of pattern are all around us, in the forms of flowers, the lacework of branches against the sky, and the geological expressions in rock. In the last hundred years, we have been able to see the patterns of nature at the macro and micro scale as well: The fabulous swirling forms of nebulae, and the intricate ordered patterns of crystals. I have always had a powerful response to these natural patterns, while never having a strong urge to work abstractly. My compulsion in art is to record what excites me in the outside world. In the last eighteen months, that has often been rocks and rockfaces. Most recently, I have found myself responding to the most abstract examples I see… Continue reading… 9 comments