Art Blog - Art In History

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… 2 comments

The moment at the beginning of the 20th century when artists made the lead to pure non-representational art is a fascinating one. It is the culmination of a number of trends over the previous 100-200 years, each interesting in itself, and together creating a uniquely self-aware moment in art. First, I would like to register my complaint about the term "abstract", which has come to be applied indiscriminately to non-representational art. The term describes very well the process which led up to the leap, but is misleading when applied to "pure abstraction". Abstraction implies a process of generalizing and simplifying from the specific; it presumes a reality from which essentials are being drawn… Continue reading… 4 comments

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