Some thoughts about some Art

I often feel like art is misunderstood and it makes me a little sad. My art history classes were some of my favorites. It was so enlightening to learn what happened behind the scenes of great artists and art pieces. Knowing the history and the evolution of ideas considerably helped me to appreciate even the commonly (or perhaps especially) misunderstood pieces of art; for example, the ones that look like your 6 year old brother could've done that (admit it, you've thought it). I'm just going to highlight some of my favorite little tid bits that have encouraged and aided my understanding/appreciation/love of art all the more.

1. Realism: obviously a movement all about depicting what was real. Artists were done being dictated by the high and mighty and started to show all the itty gritty details of real life for the majority of people. They were the demonstrators of the labor-intensive, sorrow-ridden, religiously-devoted lives of the average person. Below is an example by Gustave Courbet titled Burial at Ornans (1850).

2. Impressionism was a movement in contrast with Realism. Claude Monet is perhaps one of the most commonly known impressionists. You might know him best for his paintings of gardens such as :

His Cathedral Series is also worth note:

Here's why it's worth note.

(I don't know how many of these he did but I don't think I'd be wrong to assume that there are more than these) I find these images fascinating not only because to me they are beautiful but also because for Monet it was a scientific study. Interesting. Never before when I had looked at and appreciated Impressionism did I ever think it was scientific or concerned in the slightest with reality. It seemed to be about, well, impressions - feelings and thoughts - more so than reality. However, it is my understanding that Monet when he looked at the Rouen Cathedral he didn't see the Cathedral but rather saw light, shadow, and colors all of which were constantly changing. Impressionism was just as concerned about reality as Realism, only its primary emphasis or concern was with visual reality - the fact that shadows are not black but rather purple and blue and green. Impressionism was not concerned with the object but with what was happening to the object such as the way it receives/responds to light. This is what Monet did. He studied the Rouen Cathedral until it wasn't about the Cathedral anymore....the object disappeared and light and color were revealed.

3. Cubism ensued Impressionism and adopted with it a similar take to this idea of breaking down an object until it is not about the object. Cubism is also actually very scientific. Georges Braque's The Portuguese (1911) is a wonderful example of this. (You thought I was going to mention Picasso here didn't you...)

This is an image of a Portuguese guitar player. Cubism is all about flatness. However, this flatness is combined with perspective. As you move around a 3-d object your perspective of it changes. Cubists merely put all these perspectives together on one flat plane. This piece of Braque's is an interpretation of his theory of reality....Isn't this how we perceive experiences, ideas, objects, and others...all of our perspectives superimposed to comprise our reality? Just a thought.

4. Have you seen Duchamp's Fountain (1917)?

Yup. Marcel Duchamp was actually scoffing at the god-like perspective artists were having about art.....mostly that anything an artist says is art is therefore art. He entered this piece into a show under the name of R. Mutt (basically a nobody) to surface the much needed discussion that is unresolved today of who gets to say what is art. I just think it's great that he knew it was ridiculous and was essentially calling them all yahoos. Regardless, it has become a huge art icon and I think with reason.















5. Artists started to use the new ways in cubism of portraying reality to convey their ideas and agendas. For example, Ernst Barlach's sculpture titled War Monument (1927).

With this - a lingering deadman somewhere between life and death - he is making a statement about the unresolved state of things that existed after the war.

6. Then Surrealism. A creation of the subconscious, a disconnection from reality. Salvador Dali is a good example. The Persistence of Memory (1931). Honestly not my favorite movement and I don't know if it merits to be among my tid bits but it did play a role in modernism and post-modernism which are movements I find endlessly interesting....hence why it's among my tid bits.

On to Modernism. It shouldn't be hard from here to see where we get works like Warhol and Pollock. Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1914) shows how all the previous ideas have been built upon each other: the flat perspective combined with the conveying of a message combined with the subconscious...

I can't remember what it was about Marxism and Communism that he is trying to say here but you are looking at an airplane from 6 different views. All are the same rectangle. This was a religious piece for him, again I can't remember why, but it was very utopian because it deals with pure color and pure shape. It is easy from here to see how the following developed.

This was done by Piet Mondrian (1930) and is called Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow. For him true beauty was in perfect form and primary colors. This was a piece of purity.

The main values were simply shape, composition, and color. This became narrow and dictated among the artists to the point of exclusivity. Greenberg even declared that they had achieved their goal of Modernism.....flatness. This he probably shouldn't have said. This unintentionally declared that art had no where else to go and the purpose was closed.

7. Post-Modernism rebelled! Other artists revolted against the hegemony and declared that meaning, wholeness, ideas themselves are more important! One of my favorite pieces is by Joseph Kosuth titled One and Three Chairs (1965).

You see he asks the question of which is real? Is it the actual construction of the chair? Is it the photograph of the chair? Is it the dictionary definition of the chair that makes the the construction mean it is a chair? What is a chair? Mind you, this is a discussion that has gone on since the ancient greeks....I could see how something like this could be seen as elitist as in to suggest that one must be deep and say meaningful things and wear black to be real and truly alive. Or it could also be a way to remind large quantities of people of some good or interesting or thought provoking ideas.

Another reason I like Post-Modernism is because the process started to become significant. The how an artist arrived at the end was just as important as the end product. I agree with this. Even with paintings, pictures, sculptures, whatever the piece...I think the process is important and therefore the artist is....who they are what they believe and what they think all matter because it all contributes to the art piece...or can.

If you have any thoughts, ideas, contributions, corrections I'd love to discuss whether via blog or face...