"...But is it Art?"
That seems to be the question everyone is asking these days, and it applies
to a broad range of creative endeavors. As an artist I am often asked by
friends and relatives, "what happened to art in the twentieth century?"
Well, what happened to art in general probably began with what happened
in the art of painting at the end of the 19th century.
For centuries painters used their talents to illuminate
ideas and communicate the beliefs and practices of society and religion.
In this process they dealt with how best to represent the physical and
spiritual realms of reality. Methods were often influenced by the mediums
being used and the message being communicated. But all painting was founded
in representation of recognizable imagery. It was, so to speak, some form
of realism, or representational art. With time, the advent of oil painting,
and an increased observation of nature and its laws, painting developed
into a high art able to convincingly represent three dimensional space
and form with dramatic effect.
Training was strenuous. Young men were apprenticed
in their early teens to a master painter. They worked for years grinding
paints, stretching canvas, and practicing drawing from statues and eventually
from live models. When they were thought competent in their mastery of
form and fundamentals, they were allowed to pick up a brush and begin to
paint. They would aid the master by painting in backgrounds and secondary
elements. Then they would move up to painting figures, ultimately to begin
independent work as master painters themselves. They would then become
teachers to a new generation, passing on the acquired technical knowledge
of those who had worked before them. Eventually this apprenticeship program
was replaced by state run art schools, or academies, the most famous of
which were in 19th century France and England. These schools passed on
four hundred years of accumulated knowledge to men who created some of
the most convincing representations ever produced in paint.
But with the invention and use of photographic
technologies, art changed. While some artists welcomed the greater precision
and time saving benefits that photographs allowed, others sought to beat
the camera at its own game. Realizing the limitations of (then black and
white) photography to reproduce the color effects of light, a group of
academically trained artists began to work exclusively outside of the studio.
Their focus was on studying the way light altered perceived color and,
when sifted through dense atmosphere, diffused and distorted images. These
were not entirely new ideas, but ones which artists had dealt with in different
ways in the past. This new group based their methods on new scientific
investigations into the way the eye perceives. They were interested in
capturing the impression of light seen in a fleeting moment rather than
in representing the mind's intellectualized combination of many moments
of sight. These "impressionists" therefore moved away from academic
studies of contour and form used to communicate ideas, to a study of the
way the eye sees the effects of light in a given moment.
To quote Paul Signac, a painter who helped to
transform the Impressionist style in the 1880's, "the entire surface
of the [Impressionist] painting glows with sunlight; the air circulates;
light embraces, caresses and irradiates forms; it penetrates everywhere,
even into the shadows which it illuminates." It was light, perceived
in a flash too quick to permit the eye to focus on detail, judge contours,
enumerate elements, and assess weights and densities, that the Impressionists
tried to capture.
(Frederick Hartt ART: History of Painting · Sculpture · Architecture
Vol. II,
Page 840)
Thus form took a backseat to color, and the art
of ideas was replaced by an art of the senses.
Nonetheless, these first impressionist's efforts
were grounded in a strong academic training that enabled them to paint
nature. They had learned the basics of drawing and painting in the academy
and were then able to expand on that foundation. For decades, young artists,
inspired by impressionism, went to Paris to study, not with other impressionists,
but with the academic masters! Thus these schools of representational art
have forever been linked. The academician perhaps most noted for his influence
on this generation was Jean Leon Gerome. Gerome was a friend of Degas,
teacher to Eakins, and tutor to Mary Cassat. The Boston painter William
MacGregor Paxton was among his students, bringing his teachings back to
America where he shared them with others, including a man named R.H. Ives
Gammell. But we will return to Gammell's influence later.
Unfortunately for painting, Impressionism's departure
from historical painting led down a slippery slope of subjectivism and
away from a careful study of form controlled by masterful draftsmanship.
In retrospect, the opening decade of the twentieth
century impresses us today as an era of revolution. Fundamental changes
transformed the relationship between art and nature that had been traditionally
accepted ever since the beginning of the Renaissance....the Impressionist
and Post-Impressionist movements had already deprived visual reality of
its permanent properties of color, shape, and space. The artist himself
now assumed the prerogative of determining these qualities, either as his
eye saw them (Impressionism) or as his ideas, emotions, or fantasy might
dictate (Post-Impressionism). So the path had already been prepared for
even the most radical of twentieth-century artists. (Hartt, pg.882)
The early twentieth century was overwhelmed by
the advances of the industrial revolution, leading to forms of painting
that attempted to depict the nature of a new society and life within it.
The darkness and dirt of industrial cities run by machines had replaced
the clear skies of the more agrarian past. And
with idealism shattered by two world wars, the nature of beauty and reality
itself were challenged. While on other fronts, artists continued their
investigations into the nature of painting as illusion, as composition,
or as simply paint and nothing more. Each new challenge to the old way
of thinking took its place in the avant-garde. The writing of explanatory
manifestos replaced clear visual communication of the known world and,
ultimately, the power of the avant-garde movement made it impossible for
an artist to become critically acclaimed in the major art centers unless
his art was viewed as a rebellion against or rejection of the past.
Though the impressionists once built upon their
academic training, overturning the academy's power and influence destroyed
that foundation for future generations. Training once taught by Masters
in ateliers and then in academies was lost. Colleges and universities that
specialized in training the mind were now challenged with instruction in
the art of painting. But few if any artists who had been trained in the
academies were available to teach, and universities developed methods of
teaching art in line with their other studies. Students were thus taught
drawing by one professor, composition from another, color and value theory
by a third, and painting by still a fourth. With this division of teaching,
unified application was and is difficult. So young fine artists, ill equiped
to produce masterpieces in drawing and painting, and seduced by the pressures
of the art world, compete to see which can produce the most dark, perverse,
outrageous, or otherwise rebellious expression of human existence.
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