T h e V i s u a l A r t s : A History
-
Hugh Honour & John Fleming INTRODUCTION
Pg 12.
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.
.
Pg 19
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.
Pg 25
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.
Pg 36
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.
Pg 36
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.
.....
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. .....
Pg 41
.... 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.
Pg 43
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.
Pg 50
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. ....
Pg 642
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. ....
.....
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.....
Pg 740
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.
Pg 772
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.
Pg 786
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.
Pg 789
Braque
and Picasso on Cubism
........
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.
Pg 803
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.
Pg 804
.....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.
Pg 806
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,...
Pg 813
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.'....
Pg 818
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.
Pg 836
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)
Pg 845
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.
Pg 846
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.
Pg 850
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....
Pg 863
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.
.
Chapter
One
Pg 34
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
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