1000 Paintings of Genius. Victoria Charles

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the same time, broke down barriers by obscuring the edges of things and by making the paint surface an end in itself, with its own lighting, texture, and colouring. Vincent van Gogh built on Impressionism and imbued it with his mystical spirit. Paul Gauguin sought subject matter in the primitive areas of France and the South Pacific and painted with patches of sometimes barely mediated colours. Georges Seurat’s art theory returned to some of the rhetoric of early Impressionism, as he set out to give an impression of reality through his novel technique. In his case, it was based on points of colour and optical mixing of colours to create the sense of reality, except that, like Cézanne, he gave his figures an almost neoclassical calm, presence, and moral gravitas.

      The explosion of styles that had set in during the later nineteenth century continued in the twentieth century. The freedom and individualism of modernism found expression in a riot of painting styles. Thinkers in a number of fields in the early-twentieth century discovered the essential instability of form and existence: atonalism in music, the theory of relativity in physics, and the destabilising tendencies of psychoanalysis all pointed to a world of subjectivity and shifting viewpoints. For their part, the Cubists, led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, systematically broke down (“analysed”) reality in their Analytic Cubism, almost eliminating colour, direction of light, texture, and even the singularity of viewpoint and, for a while, they turned completely away from narrative in favour of immobile subjects of still-life and portraiture. In the history of styles, it can be said that the Cubists demolished the Renaissance project – a project accepted by the Academic painters of the nineteenth century – of constructing a spatial box in which meaningful events unfold with convincing space, colour and light. Never painting in a pure, non-representational abstraction, the Cubists relied for artistic success on the tension between what one sees and what one expected to see. Picasso, who had earlier painted in an academic narrative manner as a youth and in poetic and rather representational Blue and Pink periods, later experimented almost endlessly, at times dabbling with Primitivism, Neoclassicism, and Surrealism. Not since Giotto had a single painter done more to change the field of his art. The works of the French painter Fernand Léger and the Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp were by-products of the styles of Picasso and Braque, an expansion of an idea into more dynamic settings of figures in an architectural environment.

      Picasso’s art was often witty and clever. A good deal of twentieth-century painting was more serious, and works like Picasso’s Guernica, portraying the tragedy of war, were his own advance away from the playfulness of his early Cubist styles. Surrealist art, such as the dream paintings of Salvador Dalí, or the forbidding settings of the works of Giorgio de Chirico, capture some of the alienation and psychological intensity of modern life. The Futurists, Italian painters beholden to the Cubists, turned to dynamic, even violent movement in their paintings, and their art presaged the unpleasant mixture of modernism, urbanism, and aggression that, not by coincidence, fuelled the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. Quite unlike the outwardly intense Futurists, some modernists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries included a group of painters set on exploring inner subjectivity, and the period of civilisation that gave us Freud and Jung was bound to include a group of painters willing to explore the psychological states of the human race. Edvard Munch’s psychological insight and expressionism were matched in their intensity perhaps only by those of the German painters Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. A religious sentiment, also deeply emotive, flourished during this time in the abstracted art of the Catholic Georges Rouault and the Jewish Marc Chagall.

      Modernists rejected tradition in architecture, literature and music, and painting was no different. The rise of abstraction has been much heralded, but it is arguable that no such thing is possible. The Dutchman Piet Mondrian saw in his abstractions various theological, gender, and existential categories, and his Broadway Boogie Woogie is suggestively titled. Kasimir Malevitch’s abstract, geometric paintings carried ontological and divine connotations, while Wassily Kandinsky’s abstractions are fraught with mysticism and secret messages. Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist drip paintings contained in them a strong human presence in the very kinesthetic style itself, and he labelled his works with telling titles such as Autumn Rhythm and Lucifer. The Dutch-born Willem De Kooning’s canvases are filled with an explosive and frantic application of the paint, often illustrating highly charged subject matter. Mark Rothko’s fields of bleeding colours sprang from the artist’s philosophical notions, and he wanted his viewers to be deeply moved by his pictures. Colour and shape had come to fill the gap left by the departure of the Virgin Mary and martyred saints, classical gods and triumphant generals of earlier artmaking. The older technique of oil painting was supplemented in the twentieth century with new or reborn substances: acrylic, aluminum paints, encaustic, enamel, and other binding agents, with the occasional quotidian object mixed in or glued onto the surface for good measure.

      A reaction to the psychological intensity of the Abstract Expressionists was inevitable, and it took two forms. One was in a new objectivity and minimalism, championed by sculptors such as Donald Judd and David Smith, but also painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, who set out to take a good deal of the human emotion, mysticism, and moral subjectivity out of painting. Another response was found in Pop Art, which vividly brought back the represented object, often in mirthful ways. Andy Warhol’s soup cans, the collages of Richard Hamilton, and the comic book style of Roy Lichtenstein, works often carried in large scale, were serious in their intents. The commercial products of modern societies come spilling out on to the canvases of the Pop Artists, who ask us to consider the nature of consumerism and mass production as well as issues of artistic representation.

      In the end, painting has triumphed in Western art over a host of opponents. In the Renaissance, the debate raged over the paragone, that is, the comparison of the visual arts, and Michelangelo and his camp proclaimed that sculpture was more real, more literally tangible, and less deceptive than painting. Leonardo and others fought back, with words and deeds, and one can argue that painting remained the preeminent art from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. It is telling that the average viewer can only name a few prominent sculptors of the Renaissance, but might easily name a small army of painters from that period. The same is true of the nineteenth century: in the nineteenth-century French context, for example, beyond Rodin, and perhaps Carpeaux and Barye, the sculptors are paled by the schools of painters who came forth with innovative ideas. Painting has overcome the cheap supply of prints that flooded the markets beginning in the fifteenth century, the attempts by some Baroque artists to merge painting with other visual arts, the promise of greater verisimilitude claimed by photography in the nineteenth century, and the competition offered by moving pictures in the twentieth. Digital media threaten a challenge once again in the early twenty-first century. But painting is too powerfully present, too flexible in results, and too rooted in our sensibilities to give way easily to upstarts. Even in practical terms, paintings can be rolled up and shipped, or when not in use they can be stacked, while, on the other hand, they can fill a blank wall or a ceiling with great effect. You cannot turn a painting off with a switch or an easy click of the mouse. They are flat, like the pages of our books and the screens on our computers, and can be reproduced in a compatible, two-dimensional format, without necessitating the difficult decisions of lighting called for in the reproduction of sculpture or with the questions of viewpoint as in the photography of architecture. Renaissance thinkers said a painter can exercise divine powers and, like God himself, create an entire world, and thousands of different pictorial worlds have been created since then.

      The works chosen for this book demonstrate the variety of great painting to be found in our public museums. Surely, painting continues to have a lasting appeal in a changing world. Will the field continue to produce masterpieces? That is a more difficult question to answer. The works collected here indicate that physical craftsmanship is an important component of successful painting. It is also clear that painters succeed when they “stand on the shoulders of giants” and respond to art of the past, be it in admiration or in rebellion. Perhaps the world is awaiting the next great painter who, like Raphael, Rembrandt, and Picasso is steeped in the art of the past, and has the knowledge, sincerity, and technical skills to create something new and outstanding. If painters of the future produce works that are little more than sarcastic one-liners, or are by nature СКАЧАТЬ