Art Blog - Art In History

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

It is arguable that, as artists, one of our primary goals is to produce a reflection of what we understand as reality. If we are artists working in the Western Tradition, or simply raised in it, we are heirs to 600 years of realism. Though much Western art in the last 100 years has rejected this tradition, it is still a very powerful force. Whether it is a photorealist like Tennett, or the pervasive legacy of the impressionists, art dedicated to reflecting the real world is everywhere. But there are lots of choices, because there is no single definition of what is real. The strongest thread since Renaissance times had been to define reality as the world as it appears to us from a certain viewpoint… 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

In my last post, I promised to put out some additional posts on the major trends which led up to the phenomenon of Modern Art. One of these was a new way of looking at paintings, one which isolated the aesthetic qualities of the work and appreciated them independent of the subject matter. In 2000 I did an article called "The Aesthetic Attitude" in which I looked at this phenomenon, and I will include a big chunk of that post here: [QUOTE]One of the most fascinating of the developments that occurred during the 18th century was the recognition of an independent aesthetic attitude toward art, and indeed toward the world. Of course, this is not the first appearance of such an attitude in mankind's artistic history; far from it… 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