Art Blog - Art In History

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

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

Back in my days as a student of Architecture, I read with interest the writings of Charles Jencks on Le Corbusier, one of the giants of the modern movement in the 20th century. In advocating for the greatness of Le Corbusier, Jencks did someting much more ambitious: he propounded a theory of value to be applied to all art, based on multiple levels of meaning. All works of art, he says, fall somewhere on a spectrum from "Univalence" (single-leveled) to "multivalence" (multileveled), and truly great works are always multivalent. He compares in detail Le Corbusier's apartment block in Marseilles, the "Unite d'Habitation", with a contemporary church design (of which I could find no image) in the form of a cross of thorns… Continue reading… 4 comments

This post is another in my series on the origins of modern art, and my last, at least for a while: I'm not sure who is listening. I hope the title at least is intriguing. I could easily have called it "Modern Art and the Problem of Style", but this title seems sexier! The problem with a sexy title is of course the letdown. What is the innocence whose loss I see as a major impetus toward modern art? It is the innocence of the artist of his place in the history of art. The villain is historical awareness, and the consequent impossibility of producing art "innocently", without the burden of an everpresent knowledge of one's artistic past. This became a huge concern in the 19th century in Europe… Continue reading… 8 comments