Art Blog - Art In History

In my piece on Monet I said that, while he was not as resonant for me as Manet or Cezanne, he was an artist whose inventions were so powerful that all later European artists had to react in some way to their implications. I realize that I have left behind another artist about whom the same can be said: Caravaggio. Coming at a time when the schism in the Christian church was dominating the European political and social scene, and when the implications of Renaissance naturalism were opening new avenues of artistic exploration, Caravaggio, in is short career, was a towering force. Caravaggio had three great inventions. The first was to abandon the idealizing classicism of the Italian Renaissance in favor of an uncompromising realism… Continue reading… 3 comments

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… 5 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… 11 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

As we approach the new year, I am realizing that it is now ten years since ArtId took birth (as MindsIsland), and just how many articles I have written and posted over that period. I took a look, and discovered that many of the older ones were not presentable, having been crudely converted from native HTML to our present platform. I have just completed a process of spiffing them up, in high hopes that someone out there might care. This post is for those who have enjoyed my writings, and are interested in poking around among the many I have done in the past. It is a summary of the main topics I have dealt with, and some instructions on how you can find them. Because if you don't know they are there, you can't even decide whether you care or not… Continue reading… 3 comments

A new artist has joined our community at the Indian Orchard Mills this year who has me stunned and envious. She is Christina Mastrangelo, recently returned from three years of study in Florence, study in the age old tradtion of Academic Realism, such as would have been practiced 200 years ago. She is young and very,very good; one source of my envy. The other is that she practices an approach which I admire greatly, but know I could never emulate. In one way our vision is very similar: we are both seeking to capture what we see in the world, the truth of form, color and light. On another level, our vision is totally different. Christina paints what is permanent and eternal in reality; I paint what is immediate and transitory… Continue reading… 1 comment

This post is in some ways a response to Gary's post on Raphael's "Descent from the Cross". I agree that Raphael represents a perfect moment in the High Renaissance: fully realized, harmonious and sublime. I then had to ask myself why, of the great masters of his time, he is the least interesting to me. I decided the answer lay in the limitations of perfection itself. "In praise of Imperfection" is a bit misleading; this post is more in praise of striving, of asking the questions instead of finding the final answer. For the Renaissance, the primary questions were those raised by Humanism, both in the arts and in thought in general (Gallileo, Copernicus, and of course Leonardo)… Continue reading… 4 comments

I'm getting into this idea of successive "French Revolutions"; it's a bit too neat, but it reveals some interesting patterns. The first (David) was primarily a social/political revolution, with Neo-classicism as the engine. The second (Delacroix) was primarily artistic, a reaction against the strictures of Neo-classicism, though it clearly had its social side as well. With Courbet we will see again a primarily social/political revolution, that took Realism as its engine. The fourth would be Manet, whom I've already discussed, and his revolution once again is in the realm of art. The lead image is Courbet's "manifesto", titled "The Studio: a Real Allegory"… Continue reading… 1 comment

So at last I am getting to Delacroix, as promised several weeks ago. Though in fact, I am going to feature Delacroix and his great rival Ingres, inheritor of the Mantle of David as the defender of classical orthodoxy. As I've said before, I think the art of this period is vastly enriched by its context in history, both social and aesthetic. I've called the period the "second French revolution"; in fact, in Paris at least, it was a period of continual upheaval. The Parisian populace took to the streets at the least provocation, tearing up the coblestones and bringing the city to a halt. Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the people" marks the major uprising in 1830. In fact, so ungovernable was the city that in mid century Housmann was commissioned to build the great Parisian avenues..… Continue reading… 2 comments

In his comment on my post about Rubens, Zander reminded me of his influence on Delacroix, and I decided I should take him up next. Then I realized that before looking at his work, I should set the scene with the generation that preceeded him. Because the fact is, no matter how interesting the work of any one artist at this period may be, the art scene in France as a whole is much more fascinating. I am leading off with the "Oath of the Horatii" by Jacques-Louis David, the "painter of the revolution". Since the work seems "mainstream" and "old-fashioned" to our eyes, it takes a huge effort of empathy to understand what it meant at the time: it was a bombshell! First we need to realize that the classicism we see in the David was long gone in French art… Continue reading… 4 comments

My most recent blog featured the work of Caravaggio, an artist whose inventions were remarkable and whose influence was enormous, way out of proportion to his brief working life. At that time I mentioned that my next blog would be about another artist whose work was influenced by Caravaggio: the spanish master Diego Velazquez. I am leading off with an image which is not typical of his best know work, but which shows how strongly he was influenced by Caravaggio, and how much farther he was able to carry his realism. The "Watercarrier of Seville" is one of my favorite works. It has the presence of a caravaggio - massive figures close to the front - but with a subtlety which Caravaggio never acheived in his tumultuous career… Continue reading… 4 comments