Art Blog - Art In History

I decided I would do one more post in this series on the origins of Modern art, because without talking about the notion of the avant garde, something is definitely missing. Of all the ideas which led to the phenomenon of Modern Art, the Avant Garde idea is perhaps the most fascinating and revolutionary. What is the avant garde idea? It is the attitude that artists are an elite in society, specially equipped to sense the pulse of the times and reveal it to their contemporaries. Artists on the cutting edge of stylistic development will be "ahead of their time", will be rejected in their time, but will be vindicated by history. This is huge! This idea upends the relationship of an artist to his patrons… Continue reading… 5 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