T h e   V i s u a l   A r t s : A History
                    - Hugh Honour & John Fleming

INTRODUCTION

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In every human society, art forms part of a complex structure of beliefs and rituals, moral and social codes, magic or science, myth or history. It stands midway between scientific knowledge and magical or mythical thought, between what is perceived and what is believed, and also between human capabilities and human aspirations. As a means of communication it is akin to language, with the aim of making statements of a didactic or morally instructive nature; but at the same time it is often a means of exerting control, akin to magic, with the aim of imposing order on the physical world, of arresting time and securing immortality.... The manner of representation is restricted by the availability of materials and tools by the skills passed on from one generation to the next and by what can only be called’ tribal' conventions though they are often of great sophistication. Yet art is constantly regenerated like the living organisms of social and cultural structures, which are always subject to modification, as a result either of internal growth or of external pressures. In stable societies, or those that seek stability, artistic changes often take place so gradually as to be barely perceptible. Even in more dynamically expansive societies artistic change may take place at one level while continuity is maintained at another. Western ideas of 'progress' have tended to distort our view of the art of the world.
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Pictorial Representation

Throughout the world delineation, whether incised, drawn or painted, has been a means of attaining one of the prime aims of pictorial art: the isolation of an object from the array of colored patches the eye sees in nature. The earliest known paintings, in French and Spanish caves, are profiles of animals unrelated to earth or sky or one another. Composite groups came later and the defined image filed - that is to say, an enclosed are within which all the forms are interrelated - later still with the invention of framing devices. Even in some of the most sophisticated forms of two - dimensional art, the images are all that count, the filed on to which they are projected being no more than part of an undefined ground, not a background in the Western sense. In ancient Egypt it was often covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions. On Chinese scroll paintings poems are often written in the 'sky'.

Images have been drawn and painted conceptually (according to what the minds knows) or perceptually (according to what the eye sees at a particular moment). A conceptual image can, in theory, record the salient characteristics of any object by taking it apart and reassembling it - front, back and sides - so that all are visible. (The recent term 'Conceptual Art' has, of course, an entirely different meaning.) Perceptual images are attempts to record the truth of visual appearances, though in practice they are inevitably influenced by what painters know about not only the physical properties of a subject but also the ways in which it has previously been depicted. And they, too, may be combined in a conceptual manner. All images are to some extent both perceptual and conceptual.

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Context: Function and Meaning

Techniques of painting and sculpture, and skills acquired for representation, were rarely employed as ends in themselves. Most large-scale works of art were created for a purpose, whether religious, social, political or, exceptionally, to express an artist's inner vision. And few objects were made by human beings without some regard for qualities that appeal to the mind as well as the senses. An almost universal demand for symmetry, patterning and color combinations can be felt in the simplest household articles dating from the earliest times. They answer two basic human urges: to impose order on nature and natural forms, and to assert individuality by marking the differences between one human being or group and another. Objects are made and decorated in accordance with preferences for certain forms and colors developed within a social group as part of its traditional way of life. Shields are a case in point. They are found in nearly all cultures throughout human history. Yet despite their simple unitary purpose, they differ far more widely in shape (round, ovoid, hexagonal, etc.) than explained by function or medium - modes of combat or types of material available. A particular shape of shield couldn't for instance, be a distinguishing mark for a group or tribe or clan....

However accessible their formal qualities may be to us, however engaging their subject-matter, works of art cannot be properly or fully understood unless related to their original context - to the beliefs, hopes and fears of the people by whom and for whom they were made, which may differ widely from those prevalent nowadays in the West. In many works of art there are several superimposed levels of meaning, which cannot always be recovered. For meanings have been conveyed visually in a variety of interconnected ways, from the most direct (in representation of deities and rulers) to the symbolic (by the use of conventional colors or of such nonrepresentational signs as haloes) and the allegorical (by the personification of abstract ideas, for example a blindfold woman holding a sword and balance to represent justice). Iconography, the study of visual images, is devoted to elucidating the original meanings of works of art by reference to the literary sources of narrative compositions and by investigating the symbols and types of allegory used by artists in different places and periods.

Pictorial devices used to enforce meanings are so familiar that they can often be taken for granted, symmetry to suggest a stable order, for instance, asymmetry to convey dynamism or violent emotion. As already mentioned, scale may emphasize a figure's importance, often together with a central position, as in groups of these which recur in the art of the world. The larger central figure is normally posed frontally, looking straight ahead, whi8le those on either side may be in profile. When symmetry is avoided, as in narrative art, and figures are scaled naturalistically, the protagonists are distinguished more subtly by placing them against a blank background, or by arranging the scene so that the spectator’s eye is directed to them by the dominant lines of the composition.

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Foundations of Art

Like the Woman from Willendorf, the Woman from Brassempouy and the animals from the Vogelherd Cave, the Mother Goddess from Laussel is rendered naturalistically. This is one of the most extraordinary of all the extraordinary features of prehistoric art and it becomes even more evident in cave paintings of animals. They are visualized, not conceptualized; that is to say that, unlike children’s drawings and other so-called 'primitive' attempts at visual presentation, they are based on what the eye sees and not on what the mind knows. It can only be supposed that their original purpose, whatever it may have been, as in some way linked with their lifelikeness. What is still more extraordinary is that a conceptual art of symbols was practiced in the same are at the same time.

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The Art of the Hunters

Like the Woman from Willendorf, the WOman from Brassempouy and the animals from the Vogelherd Cave, the Mother Goddess from Laussel is rendered naturalistically. This is one of the most extraordinary of all the extraordinary features of preh8istoric art and it becomes even more evident in cave paintings of animals. They are visualized, not conceptualized; that is to say that, unlike children's drawings and other so-called 'primitive' attempts at visual representations, they are based on what the eye sees and not on what the mind knows. It can only be supposed that their original purpose, whatever it may have been, was in some way linked with their lifelikeness. What is still more extraordinary is that a conceptual art of symbols was practiced in the same are at the same time.

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Cave Art

Knowledge of prehistoric art is dependent on what has been chance preserved and recovered. We have no means of knowing how typical or exceptional these often quite accidental survivals are; no generalizations can be made from haphazard evidence from a period about which its extraordinary light is its only certainty - an immense its extraordinary length is its only certainty - an immense tract of time to be measured not in centuries but in tens of millennia. .....

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.... Many attempts have been made to probe and uncover the meaning of Paleolithic art. It was generally assumed, at first, to have been merely decorative, made to satisfy an innate human desire for adornment. But this view was difficult to maintain after the discovery of paintings in the deepest recesses of caves unused for habitation. More elaborate theories were subsequently propounded, and support for them has been drawn from the arts and rituals of surviving tribes of hunters and gatherers in Africa, America and Australia - although perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from ethnography is that interpretations based solely on visual appearances are often vary wide of the mark.

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The Art of the Farmers

Increasing population probably encouraged the domestication of livestock and the cultivation of cereals to supplement food obtained by hunting and foraging, and this initiated what is often called the Neolithic Revolution. The great change brought about by the introduction of agriculture, which led to land - ownership, to the formation to great technological advance, is certainly one of the major turning - points in the history of the human species. It is recorded in innumerable myths and fold-tales. But it took place gradually and at different periods in different parts of the world. Farming began in the middle of the eighth millennium in Palestine and western Iran, later in Egypt; in about the sixth millennium in Greece and the Balkans, early in the fifth millennium in China and also in central South America have survived by hunting and gathering without the need for agriculture to the present day. So Neolithic is sometimes used, rather tendentiously, as a cultural as well as a chronological term.

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Chapter Two
The Early Civilizations

It is unfortunate that the word 'civilization' has acquired such strong qualitative overtones. For the first so- called 'civilized' cultures were not necessarily and in every way superior to those of the hunters and subsistence farmers, which had preceded them. The transition from pre-civilized to civilized societies depended first of all on the production of a surplus, that is on farmers producing enough food to permit a substantial section of the population to engage exclusively in other, non - productive activities - trade, administration and, of course, warfare. The development of specialized crafts led to improved agricultural methods such as artificial irrigation and the control of floods, the use of the wheel and the plough, which, in turn, made possible the growth not only of large urban communities but also, eventually, of states. Clearly stratified social structures emerged more or less simultaneously with administrative organizations requiring permanent records, hence the invention and development of writing. New ways of paying for goods and labor by a standard medium of exchange were also introduced. Thus, a 'natural economy' based on barter was replaced by a money economy; which facilitated the storage and manipulation of wealth. ....


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Chapter Fifteen
Romanticism to Realism

In the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, attitudes to the arts, as to life in general, underwent a profound change, which has influenced Western thought to the present day. Out of the turbulence of the revolutionary epoch there emerged ideas which soon became basic assumptions for artists, architects, writers, musicians and the public for whom they worked - ideas about the artist's individual creativity, the uniqueness of his work and his relationship to the rest of society, about artistic sincerity and integrity, about he relative importance of expression and representation and, above all, about the power of the artist to transcend logical processes of thought and break through to states of mind beyond or below conscious control. An art based on the optimism of the Enlightenment and of its faith in reason and human perfectibility could not long survive the French Revolution. The insufficiency of reason, the power of fanaticism and the role of chance in human affairs, the bewildering internal contradictions which make such rational concepts as those of liberty and equality irreconcilable, had all been made painfully apparent by the course the Revolution took.....

....Science now seemed revolutionary changes in philosophy. Science now seemed to make the universe more, rather than less, mysterious. Isaac Newton's mechanistic conception of creation - an orderly system set in motion by ' a divine clock-maker' - gave way to one that was dynamic and organic. The classification of natural species by Linnaeus (Carl Voin Linn, 1707-78) and others led to the dawning realization that they had not been created in definitive form but were the products of a long evolutionary process. Speculative theories of evolution were put forward in France by Jean Baptiste Lamarch (1744-1829) and in England by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), grandfather Charles Darwin. At the same time philosophy was given a new direction by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who shifted its focus away from problems amenable to empirical investigation and rational deduction from self-evident axioms to an analysis of the most general concepts and categories. He brought to an end the heroic attempt to make philosophy a branch of natural science, breaking completely with traditions of both rationalism and empiricism. The distinctions he made between types of statement, according to the evidence they require and the interconnection between the concepts they presuppose, provided a new basis for the discussion of religious beliefs, morals and also aesthetics, which, for the first time in Western philosophical systems. ....

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The Industrial Revolution began in England in the 1780s with the mass production in mechanized factories of goods for mass consumption. Here industry was unhampered by the guild restrictions, trade unhindered by the local customs barriers, which had survived on the Continent Expansion was made possible by the exploitation of overseas markets, especially in the still growing colonial empire. Classes enriched by industry were placated by parliamentary reforms.....


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Chapter Eighteen
Indigenous Arts of Africa, The Americas, Australia and Oceania

The term 'primitive art' was confined at the beginning of the present century to categorize objects which had not previously been regarded in the West as 'works of art' at all, that is to say objects from areas on the margin of or beyond the cultural influence of Europe, the Near East, India, China and Japan. In a pioneer study of Primitive Culture (1871) Edward Tylor, the first professor of anthropology at Oxford mentioned the arts only in so far as they illuminated his problem of 'determining the relation of the mental condition of savages to that of civilized man'. Ethnographical museums founded in the nineteenth century - Copenhagen 1841, Berlin 1856, Leiden 1864, Cambridge, Mass. 1866, Dresden 1875, Paris 1878 among others - all adopted the same attitude. Their aim was to illustrate the ground base from which Western civilization had supposedly ascended and they can now be seen as monuments to that cult of progress enshrined in Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), subtitled The Preservation of Favored Raves in the Struggle for Life.


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Chapter Nineteen
Art from 1900 to 1919

By the beginning of the twentieth century the revolt against al forms of naturalism was in full swing and the decade before the First World War was to be one of the most daring and adventurous in the whole history of Western art. Fundamentally new ideas and methods were put forward - in painting, sculpture and architecture, in literature and music and in philosophy and science as well and the radical innovations of these years underlie al later developments, even today. Two opposing tendencies which had been increasingly felt towards the end of the nineteenth century, the subjectivism of the Symbolists and the objectivism and transcendent 'otherness' sought by C'ezanne, were intensified and explored ever more self-consciously. Each was to be taken to its ultimate extreme, bringing to an end artistic traditions going back to Giotto and the early fourteenth century. Already by about 1912 the limits had been reached in one direction with the first completely abstract work of art. Artists then found themselves confronted by an insoluble dilemma as they oscillated frantically between the cult of pure form and the e cult of inner truth - though the dilemma was more apparent than real.

The search for new ways of looking at the world, combined with an urge to break down all accepted conventions and preconceptions, is characteristic generally of the period around the turn of the century. Quite close parallels between innovations in the arts and in philosophy and thought - notably in Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) and theories which were to have the profoundest effect on Europeans and others generally were those of the Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856 -1939) whose revolutionary theories about the role of the subconscious, especially the sexual urge transformed early twentieth-century attitudes and values.


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Cubism

The word Cubism is a misnomer and hinders rather than helps the understanding of a subject, which has always resisted precise definition. Neither Picasso nor Braque would every say what they meant or intended in inventing Cubism - no doubt for much the same reason that t. S. Eliot always refused to explain The Waste Land. It has no meaning beyond or outside itself....

If Picasso and Braque held themselves aloof from the movement they ad initiated, they were probably better aware than any of their contemporaries of its implications; for it raised the question of figuration as against abstraction as a conscious and serious issue. On this matter Picasso’s views are known. 'There is no such thing as abstract art', he is reported to have said. 'You must always start with something.' So whatever later abstract artists were to derive from Cubism - and it became the immediate source of a stream of abstract movements such as Orphism, De Stijl, Constructivism, etc. - it was certainly never intended by its creators to be non - representational.


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Braque and Picasso on Cubism

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In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. to find, is the thing....We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies....They speak of Naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not......

Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all.....Many think that Cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results. Those who think that way have not understood it, Cubism is not either a seed or a fetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms and when a form is realized it is there to live its own life.


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Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the younger brother of sculptor Duchamp - Villon, was perhaps the most stimulating intellectual to be concerned with the visual arts in the twentieth century - ironic, witty and penetrating. He was also a born anarchist. Like his brother, he began with a dynamic Futurist version of Cubism, of which his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is the best-known example. It caused a scandal at the famous Armory Show of modern art in New York in 1913. Duchamp's ready-mades are everyday manufactured objects converted into works of art simply by the artist's act of choosing them. Duchamp did othing to them except present them for contemplation as 'art'. They represent in many ways the most iconoclastic gesture that any artist has ever made - a gesture of total rejection and revolt against accepted artistic canons. For by reducing the creative act simply to one of choice 'ready-mades' discredit the 'work of art' and the taste, skill, craftsmanship - not to mention any higher artistic values - that it traditionally embodies. Duchamp insisted again and again that his 'choice of these ready-mades was never dictated by an aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste, in fact a complete anesthesia.’...

..... He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object.' In other words, the significance of ready-mades as 'art' lies not in any aesthetic qualities that may or may not be discovered in them, but in the aesthetic questions they force one to contemplate.


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.....Lenin's commissar for education and the arts, Lunacharsky, is reported as saying: ‘the Surrealists have rightly understood that the task of all revolutionary intellectuals in a capitalist regime is to denounce bourgeois values. This effort deserves to be encourage.' However, the alliance did not last long. After four years those Surrealists who had joined the party left it.


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America and the Precisionist View

....In relation to the dominant movements of the time - Abstraction, Realism and Surrealism - they would naturally fall into the second, but neither would have accepted such a classification. Nor did they allow themselves to be associated with any contemporary realist groups in the USA, whether that of the American Scene painters or that of the Regionalist painters of the New Deal era,...


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Dali, Magritte and Miro'

.....Dali proposed a state of mind that would be permanently disoriented. The only difference between himself and a madman, he said, was that he wasn't mad! ' I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of actve paranoiac thought it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.'....


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Photography and Modern Movements

During the inter war period the relationship between photographic and other visual images became more complex than before. Some ninetenth-century painters had taken photographs and many had used them as aids, while photographers had been strongly influenced by paintings in their choice of subject matter, angles of vision and indeed in their whole conception of the photographic image. But despite the reiterated claim that photographs could be works of art, they were still generally regarded as belonging to a distinct and inferior category, lacking the unique hand made quality and artistic prestige of a painting, drawing or evn an etching which was usually one of a strictly limited number of 'pulls' or prints. They were also, as a result of the mass-production of easily manipulated cameras and the automatic processing of prints, taken by literally millions of men and women, mostly amateurs, fwe of whom were aware of, and still fewer in sympathy with, the changes that had transformed art since the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, while self -consciously 'artistic' photographers clung to traditional ideas of composition in softly focused images, the main technical developments in teh medium, facilitating greater sharpness of definition and instantaaneity of vision were eaually out of phase with those in the other arts.

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Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting differed from other phases of modern art because, as Harold Rosenberg put it, it had a different 'motive for extinguishing the object.'
The new American painting is not 'pure' art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic. The applies weren't brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to go so that nothin would get in the way of the act of painting. In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated. Form, color, composition drawing are auxiliaries, anyone of which - or practicallyl all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvas - can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.

('The American Action Painters', 1952,
repr. in The Tradition of the New, 1959)


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Concepts - Modernism and Formalism

The terms Modernism and Modern Art - as in the name of the New York museum founded in 1939 - have come to signifu the innovatory arts of the late nineteenth century and the frist three quarters of the twentieth. The concept of Modernism was most clearly embodied in the International Modern architecture of Gropius and Le Corbusier in the 1920s. This went far beyond the demands made ever since the 1820s for a distinctive style of its own time, to a complete negation of the concept of style itself. Their buildings were purged of ornament and all nostalgic references to th epast, emphasized function, exploited new technology and, in urban developments, proposed solutions appropriate to the social condition of the twentieth century. The past and all pasts styles were rejected also by avant-garde painters and sculptors with results ranging from Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and abstract or non-objective art to Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.....

The need felt by artists to be 'of their own time' led to an approach that stressed innovation above all, an impulse to seek new solutions to pictorial and sculptural problems. Engagement with contemporary themes and with the norms of contemporary culture was felt to be essential for a 'modern' artist as was acknowledgement of the fundamental chnages marking the history of the West in the last 150 to 200 years - changes including political developments both in practie and theory (especially Marxism), industrialization and scientific advances of all kinds..... Some of their paintings could, however, be understood - if not misconstued - in another way as abstract surfaces devoid of content; and the possibilities inherent in this duality led artists eventually to Formalism and the exploration of pure form in an art that is completely autonomous, concerned only with itself.


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Pop Art

Pop Art - defined as 'making impersonality a style' by using the imagery of commercial art and other mass media souces - emerged simultaneously but quite independently in Britain and the United States.


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Minimal and Conceptual Art

The most self -consciulsy Maerican of all post - war artistic movements was Minimalism, which aimed at complete purity and integrity, the reduction of art to that which is intrinsic to its mediym and the elimination of all which is intrinsic to its medium and the elimination of all that is not. By reducing the artist's means to an apparent minimum, it was hoped that ab absolutely unitary activity would result - as well as a unitary experience for the spectator....


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Towards the Third Millennium

Distinctions formerly drawn between the 'fine' arts, 'primitive' art, vernacular or 'folk' art, also between painting, sculpture adn the crafts, have been blurred and then eliminated. The idea of 'progress' in art and related concepts of a 'mainstream', an 'avant-garde' and of forward-looking 'movements' have all been questioned together with the desirability of permanence, not to mention 'quality' and 'taste'. The prestige of the unique art object and of the artist's individual creatvitiy has been challenged.

Art made against this background of revaluation in the light of late twentieth-century thought and theory has been called Post-Modern, a slippery term that gained currency in the 1970s first of all for architecture and then for painting and sculpture that could no longer be covered by the word 'modern' as used in the title of New York's Museum of Modern Aret, founded in 1929 to exhibit work that was modern at that date but is now termed Modernist.

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Chapter One

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Before History

The Visual arts

c. 30,000-25,000 BC Woman from Willendorf, Man from Brno
c. 25,000-20,000 BC Mammoth from Vogelherd
c. 25,000-17,000 BC Chauvet cave
c. 22,000 BC Woman's head from Brassempouy
c. 16,000-14,000 BC Chauvet cave
c. 16,000-14,000 BC Lascaux paintings
      after 15,000 BC Bison from Tuc d' Audoubert
c. 12,000 BC Spear-thrower from Montastruc
c. 10,000 BC Coyote head from Tequixquiac
c. 8,000 BC Addaura rock engravings
c. 8000-5000 BC Fezzan rock engravings
c. 7000-6000 BC Plastered skull from Jericho
c. 5800 BC Painting from Catal Huyuk
c. 4500-4000 BC Head from Predionica
c. 4000-3500 BC Man from Cernavoda
c. 2100-2000 BC Stonehenge