![]() He flattened out the “pieces” and organized them spatially. Abstract painting had taken root.Ĭézanne lifted the Impressionist art-making method, skimming it off the top, leaving all the softness behind. These magnificent realist paintings were plain evidence that realist painting was breaking up the materials of painting were taking over, and would thereafter disqualify the depiction of any reality outside of painting for ambitious art-making. Though they defended realism in theory, and produced realistic paintings, the Impressionists, by using an art-making method the basic conformation of which was in terms of the materials of their craft, provided for the destruction of the realist method. This method brought abstraction to the surface, and yet it produced the most realistic paintings seen in art to that time, and, to my mind, the most beautiful and complete. The abstracting of painting and the new habits of seeing jibed the new processes operating in painting had a discoverable equivalent in nature which the Impressionists attributed to painting to rationalize their radical method. This is how they resisted abstraction-not in their paintings, but off the top of their heads. Afraid of the route their art took, they set up an ingenious system of defense, consisting of theory, contending in sum that what was happening to painting was actually happening to nature, and that they were only nature’s faithful servants, recording her every whim. The Impressionists got the best of both by seeing nature in such a way that abstraction was accommodated. The free use of painting materials inclines away from depicting real things, because this activity locks up the more expressive use of paint, or at least makes the passage to expression a long and hard one. The evolution toward abstraction was impelled by consciously giving materials the power to bear art quality having this power, materials make painting come around to material terms. This is exactly what the Impressionists did. But if the artmaking attitude assumes that art quality arises from the use of the materials of painting to make the painting, then the artist will strive to equip himself with a method of picture construction contrived in terms of these materials, and develop, discover or invent material units of construction-pieces or parts from which the painting can be made. If a painting depicts something real, or expresses an idea, or serves any artmaking attitude other than that which assumes the combined materials make up the whole of the picture, then the units of construction will be in terms of the subject or idea of the picture, and paint, color, shading, modeling and all other natural painting materials bend to fit the need at hand. As this became apparent to the 19th-century painter his attitude toward his materials changed, which in turn affected the way he made paintings. Art quality became, or was discovered to be, an internal feature of painting it was seen to arise from the materials and how they are put together. From Manet to Monet, from Seurat to Cézanne, materials and visible conventions were slowly pried away from the subject and set into the painting. For the history of art style this is the most important single fact about 19th century Western art. Sometime in the 19th century, possibly around the 1820s, with Constable and Corot, a type of painting appeared which became, or was labelled, Impressionist, featuring a certain kind of conscious use of the natural materials of paint which forced the paintings thus made to assert themselves as objects made of paint, and which forced the elements of painting away from the subject into more or less obvious visible relationship with each other. The Impressionists were the first materially abstract painters. ![]() The second was the innate human tendency to organize visible and tangible things in terms of space. The first, emerging with increasing vitality and clarity throughout the 19th century, was the realization that art quality is a property of the art work itself, existing apart from any external measure. This essay is about Cubism, its problems and promise, and its formal variety in the work of two recent American artists: Jackson Pollock and David Smith.Ĭubism was precipitated from the mixture of two attitudes. Cubism offered us a chance at abstract art, but in the course of its first growth it destroyed, or seemed to destroy, or seemed to render unimportant to art many of the materials, activities and effects natural to painting and sculpture. Both bring violent change, vast destruction and technological “advance,” and make conditions which must be reckoned with as the rebuilding proceeds. ![]()
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